COLLINS: Today you pardoned the founded of Binance. Can you explain why you did that?
TRUMP: Which one was that?
COLLINS: The founder of Binance
TRUMP: I believe we're talking about the same person, because I do pardon a lot of people. I don't know. He was recommended by a… pic.twitter.com/yl8WKhfmyt
Q: “You pardoned the founder of Binance…Did it have anything to do with his involvement in your family’s crypto business?”
Trump: “I do pardon a lot of people. I don’t know. He was recommended by a lot of people…A lot of people said he wasn’t guilty of anything.”
He says every day that Biden didn’t know who he was pardoning…
And he knows perfectly well that this man is responsible for boosting his fortune by billions of dollars.
Trump: "I don't think we're necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war, I think we're just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We're going to kill them. They're going to be, like dead." pic.twitter.com/55NQXpZ0jf
Trump: "I look the other night, Saturday night, Portland is burning to the ground and these people are saying it's just friendly stuff. The whole place is burning to the ground. So we'll take care of that one. That's like an insurrection more than it is anything else. Portland is… pic.twitter.com/2EnqqiNCVI
Q: “The same day you established this task force back on January 20th was the same day you pardoned the January 6th defendants.”
Trump: “I’m very proud of that.”
Q: “Just last weekend, one of them was charged with allegedly threatening to kill House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries…Do you worry that your actions back on day one undermine what this task force is trying to accomplish?”
Trump: “No.”
Trump: "Quiet! You're really obnoxious."
Reporter: "I'm not obnoxious, I'm trying to ask a question.”
Perfect adult behavior. Every mother in America must see this great leader as a role model for her children.
Trump: "By the way, a friend of mine called us the other day and he said 'I'd like to contribute any shortfall you have because of the Democrat shutdown. I'd like to contribute any shortfall you have with the military.' Today, he sent us a check for $130 million. It's gonna go… pic.twitter.com/uMC3QItFbA
Trump on No Kings: Even the garbage deal this weekend, which was embarrassing to them, the crowds were not big. Those crowds were not big at all… They are professional agitators, we're finding out who is paying them. pic.twitter.com/elre2aaqzd
The White House is now devoting at least 60 percent of its time shitposting on social media and now on official White House web sites. It gets worse and worse every day.
There have been many tyrants in this world. But I think we may be breaking ground by having the most ignorant and demented lunatic of them all, enabled and supported by a staff of bored, teenage bullies.
This brilliant compilation of Fox News clips came over the transom this week. I’d never heard of comedian Bill Jubran, but he had to work to assemble this.
“Do people really not see they are playing you?” Jubran asks.
No. No, they don’t. They are too busy being played by people who feed their prejudices for profit. Fox is by now a legacy player in the decay of our democratic republic. When its talking heads are not hyping wars on everything, they’re feeding viewers’ perception that the world, the news, and everyone unlike them is biased against them.
Fareed Zakaria considers the differences in how the cultural erosion of trust manifests on the left and on the right:
A 2023 study by Sung In Kim and Peter A. Hall confirms this pattern: When citizens perceive the system as unfair or biased, they shift preference from neutral process to direct, personalized rule. Leaders who present themselves as fighters rather than referees — who attack courts, media outlets and bureaucracies — gain credibility precisely because they reject the system’s pretense of fairness.
Trump’s rise also exposes a deeper divide between left and right populisms. Kim and Hall find that when people see unfairness as personal — my job, my income, my future are unfair — they turn to right-wing populists, whose rhetoric frames their pain as betrayal by elites and outsiders. When they see unfairness as social — society treats others unfairly — they gravitate to left populists, who promise redistribution.
My home, my family, my church, my school, my bank account & my guns, etc. That me-first perspective on the right rejects the social contract that is the very foundation of self-rule. “There is no such thing!” as society, Margaret Thatcher famously declared. You don’t need to tell Donald Trump twice. It’s every man for Donald Trump.
The left (and our nation’s founders) accepts that a peaceful society involves human cooperation. Although unfairness exists, ameliorating it where possible is a worthy goal, as is defense against the aggregation of power. The right sees that as a crime against survival of the fittest, Darwinism fundamentalists otherwise reject. Unless it’s convenient.
Leaked photos from the battle damage assessment. (I kid.)
In sort of pre-weekend wrap-up, Kevin Kruse on Thursday provided a summary — I was going to type “Bluesky summary” and reconsidered — of Donald Trump’s recent crimes against the republic:
Over the past week, the president said the DOJ should pay him a quarter billion dollars, bulldozed half the White House to build himself a gaudy ballroom, bragged about murdering civilians in international waters, pardoned some more criminals, directed federal prosecutors to indict his opponents …
… called several African American politicians “low IQ,” called all Democrats terrorists, insisted the 7 million Americans who protested his regime were all paid, showed a video of him flying a jet and dropping shit all over them, sent $40 billion to Argentina to prop up a fellow dipshit tyrant …
… threatened to invade every state in the US, renewed his conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and vowed his people would prevent it from happening “again,” bragged about illegally slashing programs Democrats like, said he would send disaster relief to a state because it voted for him …
… severed economic aid to Colombia in a tantrum, threatened to crack down on NYC, announced drug prices would be coming down “500 percent,” claimed Pete Buttigieg tried to fix the air traffic system with “glass wire,” and committed probably a dozen other crimes we’ve already forgotten about.
Also this week, North Carolina’s Republican-controlled state legislature on Wednesday passed yet another in along line of heavily gerrymandered congressional maps. (I attended the Democrats’ Tuesday rally against it.) Republicans redrew the map because, as one Republican admitted, Trump asked them to. A court ordered fair map resulted in a 7R-7D split in 2022. Republicans quickly redrew it to 10R-4D once the GOP gained control of the state Supreme Court. This one looks like 11R-3D.
Team autocrat is not done either. Former Trump adviser Steve “Two Shirts” Bannon gave an interview this week to The Economist . Bannon declared that there is a plan for running Trump for a third term in 2028:
Asked if the 22nd amendment could prove to be a hard barrier to remaining in the White House, Bannon expanded: “There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there is a plan, and Trump will be the president in ‘28.”
Don’t rule out a military dictatorship.
Ok this is getting creepy. In #Strongmen, I state that propagandists present autocrats' actions as "sanctioned by a higher power" and the fruit of "divine blessing." https://t.co/Ubbgylx2D0
Trump may have timed his unsanctioned demolition of the East Wing of the White House as a thumb-in-the-eye response to millions of opponents taking to America’s streets last Saturday. But that’s unclear. Nor is the origin of his obsession with building a ballroom over four times the size of the one at his tacky Mar-a-Lago resort. One friend suggested it stems from his visit in 1987 to the Catherine Palace in St. Petersburg, USSR.
As for his wanton destruction of the East Wing with no apparent attempt at preservation of historically significant accoutrements or consultation with preservationists, a friend from New York reminded me Thursday that that is Trump’s style.
The 1929 Bonwit Teller and Co. flagship store that once stood where Trump Tower stands in Manhattan was designed by the same architects who designed Grand Central Terminal. When it reopened in 1930 as Stewart Bonwit Teller, the owners worked with world-famous artists. “Starting in 1936, the Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dalí regularly decorated the windows with spectacular installations.” But when the future president acquired the building, Artnet notes:
This part of the history of art and of New York City appears to have eluded Donald Trump. And that’s not all: the developer wasn’t even willing to save the artworks inside the building from destruction, breaking a promise to the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is nearby, because profit and time were dearer to him than culture.
[…]
Close to the top of the 11-story building there were two limestone relief panels of two nearly naked women brandishing large scarves, as if dancing, in which the Metropolitan Museum of Art had expressed a strong interest for its sculpture collection. The Metropolitan, one of the largest and most important museums in the world, had also wanted to add to its department of applied 20th century art the six-by-nine meter, geometric-patterned bronze latticework that hung over the entrance at Bonwit Teller. By all accounts, Trump had agreed to donate both, if his workers were able to remove them from the walls.
Trump reneged the way he promised his new ballroom would not touch the existing East Wing. As my friend put it, his “goons” ripped down the panels in the middle of the night.
In truth, Trump’s biographer Harry Hurt III confirmed, Trump himself ensured that the workers were told to remove the bronze latticework over the entrance with blowtorches, separate the friezes from the walls with jackhammers and break them off with crowbars, and throw them down into the interior of the building where they shattered into a million pieces.
And on Trump’s “execrable taste,” Paul Krugman replies:
I’ve read uncountably many articles about Trump and his motivations, and I continue to think that one of the most insightful is a piece by Peter York, published early in Trump’s first term, titled “Trump’s Dictator Chic.” York is an authority on the design and décor choices of modern despots, from Saddam Hussein to Ferdinand Marcos to Nicolae Ceausescu. He noted that despite the vast differences in their cultural backgrounds, the palaces of despots all looked very similar: Gigantic rooms confected with massive amounts of gold, glass and marble, clearly in imitation of Versailles.
[…]
So the ballroom is a sign, not just of Trump’s personal vulgarity, but of the collapse of small-r republican norms. Trump is turning the people’s house into a palace fit for a despot partly because that’s his taste, but also to show everyone that he can. L’etat, c’est moi.
He can and he did. Only this time, it was property Trump did not own. You did.
I think we know that but it’s good to see the White House acknowledge it. Recall this on the day after Charlie Kirk died:
Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?
TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get… pic.twitter.com/Jrw4j2fnVZ
Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?
TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.
It’s as close to a temple for God Trump as he can get:
Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday before leaving Israel that he was “insulted” by the Knesset vote on annexing the occupied West Bank, which took place while he was visiting the country this week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has control over the majority in the Knesset and could have stopped the vote by taking it off the agenda or ordering the members of his party to vote against it. He chose not to in order to avoid a confrontation with his ultranationalist coalition partners.
[…]
Speaking with reporters at the airport before departing Israel, Vance was asked about the vote, and he called it “weird.” He said he was confused by it and that he was told it was only “symbolic” and part of a “political stunt with no practical significance.”
“If it was a political stunt, it was a stupid one, and I take some insult to it,” Vance said.He stressed that the Trump administration’s policy is that “the West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday ahead of his trip to Israel that the Trump administration thinks annexation of the West Bank will be “potentially threatening to the peace deal” in Gaza. “So, they’re a democracy, they’re going to have their votes, people are going to take these positions, but at this time, it’s something that especially we think it might be counterproductive. … We’re concerned about anything that threatens to destabilize what we’ve worked on,” he said.
Imagine that. The right wingers of the Knesset don’t do whatever Trump tells them to do? What kind of empire is this?
The Netanyahu government considered annexing large portions of the West Bank in response to the recognition of a Palestinian state by several Western countries in September.
I know this will shock you, but Trump’s buddies in the Arab states aren’t on board with Israeli annexation of the West Bank or Gaza. It’s kind of a problem, wouldn’t you say?
The United Arab Emirates told the Trump administration that Israeli annexations would harm the Abraham Accords.
Trump held a meeting last month with leaders and senior officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan and asked them to support his plan for ending the war in Gaza.
The Arab leaders presented Trump with several conditions for supporting his plan, including a commitment that Israel won’t annex parts of the West Bank or Gaza.
Trump made it clear to the leaders that he’d block such a step. Three days later, he told reporters that he won’t allow Netanyahu to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.
He won’t? Well, ok then. I guess that means he’ll stop arms shipments and use his tariff threats and all that if Netanyahu and his extremists don’t go along. Sure, sure he will.
I will never get over the fact that the U.S. media gave Trump that ecstatic extravaganza in the middle east when it was obvious that whatever cease fire they had was very fragile and the “peace agreement” was little more than a rough outline that hadn’t actually been signed off on by all the parties that are necessary to make it work. But that’s how Trump gets over. He makes some grandiose announcement and everyone runs toward the big, beautiful sound in order to flatter him and make him happy for that day. It’s almost always total bullshit.
MSNBC interviewed a Trump voting rancher and showed him that tweet. He was surprised, saying he agreed with Trump on a lot of things but he disagrees that he could do anything to lower the price of beef because his costs are way up too — because of the tariffs. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it dawned on him that maybe, just maybe, the president is a fucking moron who doesn’t understand anything at all.
It appears that the administration does have a plan to help the ranchers, though. They’re going to force Americans to eat more beef. Which is only right.
Brooke Rollins says the administration is working to "put beef back at the center of the American diet" pic.twitter.com/TZQC4q4SWY
Sarah Palin brought 200 cookies to a Pennsylvania Christian school Tuesday, a hostess gift that would not be notable if Palin had not declared the move a stunt to mock anti-childhood obesity campaigns in public schools.
Fresh on the heels of Rush Limbaugh’s pro-Twinkie tirade against Michelle Obama’s health initiative, Palin explained to the audience, “I wanted these kids to bring home the idea to their parents for discussion. Who should be deciding what I eat? Should it be government or should it be parents? It should be the parents.”
The crowd roared. Palin was reacting to an incorrect report that Pennsylvania was considering banning sweet treats at school parties. She followed up with this tweet: “2 PA school speech; I’ll intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire via serving them cookies amidst school cookie ban debate;Nanny state run amok!” (Is it odd to decry the “Nanny State” to the very people who actually have nannies?)
That was completely different, of course. Michelle Obama is a Black woman and a Democrat. Donald Trump is our King.
Enten: "Trump is doing absolutely awful in the minds of the American people. We're talking about new lows. CNBC, -13 net approval on the economy. It's -19 among Quinnipiac … Trump is at his lowest point ever in either of his terms. He's not just beating himself with record lows… pic.twitter.com/c8dzAaFdGQ
Enten: “Trump is doing absolutely awful in the minds of the American people. We’re talking about new lows. CNBC, -13 net approval on the economy. It’s -19 among Quinnipiac … Trump is at his lowest point ever in either of his terms. He’s not just beating himself with record lows — this is the lowest for any president ever at this point in either a presidency or for a second term.”
He doesn’t know this because he’s living in a bubble and even if he did, he wouldn’t care. Either he’s a demented, old, lame duck who’s just deep into YOLO or he he doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon and figures he can do whatever he wants as long as he’s in power.
Read this and then just think about how they tortured Hillary Clinton for alleged corruption because her husband ran an international charity:
President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.
The president signed the pardon on Wednesday, the people said. Trump recently indicated to advisers that he was sympathetic to arguments of political persecution related to Zhao and others, one of the people said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” She added: “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
Binance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A pardon will likely pave the way for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to return to the U.S. after the company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and was barred from operating in the country.
The company has spent nearly a year pursuing a pardon for Zhao, who left prison in September 2024 after serving a four-month sentence for related charges. Earlier this year, the company hired lobbyist Ches McDowell to help pursue a pardon, the Journal previously reported.
The Justice Department imposed a record $4.3 billion fine and burdensome oversight on Binance, which the department said had become a colossal money-laundering hub through which sanctioned groups and criminal organizations laundered billions of dollars in illicit funds.
The pardon may also prematurely end the Justice Department’s three-year Binance monitorship, set up to ensure the company complies with U.S. financial crime laws. However, it likely won’t end a separate monitorship established by the Treasury Department without the additional approval of Trump or the Treasury secretary.
[…]
Binance first reached out to allies of Trump last year, offering to strike a business deal with the family as part of a plan to return the company to the U.S., the Journal reported earlier this year. Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.
Binance has been one of the main drivers of the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, called USD1. It delivered World Liberty’s first big break this spring when it accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in USD1. Binance has also incentivized trading in USD1 across platforms it controls.
It was just an outright bribe. A massive one. And it’s just a-ok.
I dream of the day when the crypto market implodes and all these assholes get their due. Of course they’re working hard to make it too big to fail so we the taxpayers will have to bail them out. Uday and Qusay will probably end up winners in the end anyway.
I guess the scale of Trump’s corruption in this term is just so overwhelming that we aren’t even gong to talk much about it. Nobody knows what to do since there’s no oversight anywhere and certainly no law enforcement capability in the federal government to hold him accountable.
I don’t know if we even have the tools to set this right. But if we are able to remove these people from power massive reform is going to be required. I wish I was more confident that it will happen. But, first things first. Putting an end to this misbegotten reign is job one.
Most of America first took notice of Marco Rubio when he gave one of the most-cringe prime-time performances of all time, the official Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address. No one who watched is likely to forget Rubio’s awkward stare as he furtively reached for a water bottle, cementing his reputation as the thirstiest man in the U.S. Senate. It’s a testament to his limitless ambition that he came back from that and is now one of the most powerful people in the world.
Rubio rode into national politics on the Tea Party wave in 2010, after having served for a decade in Florida state politics, rising to become majority leader and ultimately speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Although he was a staunch conservative from the beginning, Rubio showed early on an aptitude for sensing which way the wind was blowing. Over the years he held both moderate and conservative positions on most issues. For instance, at first he rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and then, a few years later, decided it was true. He was once one of the Republican Party’s most vocial advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and even sponsored the DREAM Act. Now he energetically supports Donald Trump on the most draconian deportation program in American history. He broke with the GOP on more than one occasion when it came to budget battles, at times striking a pose as populist defender of the little guy, but overall he was a standard-issue right-wing conservative on taxes and spending.
With the exception of the ill-fated “Gang of Eight” attempt to overhaul immigration policy, Rubio has never been much associated with domestic politics. His focus has always been on national security and foreign policy. He was an unreconstructed hawk in the Senate, supporting the war in Iraq and taking a hard line on Iran. But he’s often used the language of human rights in condemning China, Turkey and Venezuela for crimes against minority populations or suppression of dissent.
And in what looks in retrospect like one of Rubio’s most independent moves, as co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., he led a three-year investigation that found clear evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, exactly as Robert Mueller’s investigation had established. Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that the current secretary of state personally validated its findings. (You have to wonder if anyone has ever explained that to Trump; logically, it should have been a deal breaker.)
Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the Mueller investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that Marco Rubio, Trump’s current secretary of state, personally validated its findings.
Then again, Trump also overlooked the fact that as an opposing GOP presidential candidate in 2016, Rubio once said, “He’s like 6’2”, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2″… You know what they say about men with small hands.” That line got back to Trump, creating an infamous primary debate moment when Trump insisted on national TV, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” For a man who carries around grudges like precious offspring, it’s odd that Trump has apparently decided to overlook all that, but Rubio worked hard to abase himself and get into the inner circle.
The political establishment, including many Democrats, were relieved when Rubio was chosen for the State Department job, reassured that a supposedly serious fellow with Senate credentials would keep Trump foreign policy from going off the rails. The hope was that Rubio might stop the president from doing something silly, like bailing out of NATO or invading Greenland. Little did they know that Rubio had happily made a deal with the devil and now seems to relish the idea of ripping up the world order in Trump’s image.
They certainly couldn’t have anticipated how eagerly Rubio would join in the deportation crusade by targeting foreign students for visa violations, as well as for unauthorized opinions about Israel and Charlie Kirk. Considering his years of support for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it came a something of a shock when Rubio cavalierly endorsed the administration’s shutdown of vital medical and food programs, which is likely to mean sickness and death for millions. He even agreed to betray informants under U.S. protection to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in exchange for an agreement to lock up purported Venezuelan gang members in El Salvador’s gruesome gulag.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Rubio was one of the first to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, calling him a killer and suggesting that he was suffering from some kind of mental decline. But it didn’t take long for Rubio to change his tune, voting against military aid early on and adopting the Trump line that a negotiated settlement was the only way out. In the Senate, Rubio backed Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinian civilians, although at one point he voted against more military aid, saying the U.S. needed more money for border enforcement. As secretary of state, Rubio has mostly taken a back seat on those big issues to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and, more recently, to freelance adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. But that has just given him time to pursue his own special interests.
When Trump tapped Rubio as acting national security adviser after a clash with the more establishment oriented Mike Waltz — since banished to Siberia, aka the United Nations — Rubio got some runway to move on his own priorities in Latin America. Coming as he does from the anti-Castro Cuban-American community of South Florida, Rubio has a strong strain of anti-left ideology which has made him especially obsessed with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist authoritarian president.
According to recent reports in the Wall Street Journal, the extrajudicial killings, CIA covert actions and pending war plans against Venezuela are all being driven by Rubio. After some back-and-forth between him and special envoy Richard Grenell, along with oil companies who’d welcome a deal to exploit Venezuela’s enormous reserves, Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller have carried the day with a full-fledged plan to pressure and perhaps depose the Venezuelan leader. Other countries in the region are expected to take notice.
As a former White House official told The New Yorker, “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you… if you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.” And that signal isn’t just directed at other countries. The same official pointed out that this has a domestic dimension as well, by reinforcing the idea that Latino gang members and drug cartels, are enemies of America. “This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities,” the official said. “You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
Marco Rubio almost certainly intends to run for president in 2028 and sees his service in that cause as the best way to fulfill his own agenda and expand both his power and his political profile. He’s certainly not the only person in the Trump administration with that idea, but he stands out in that many observers still view him as an “adult in the room” with establishment credibility. That’s entirely wrong. He’s a fully paid-up MAGA fanatic now, and no one should think otherwise.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed new recruits into its training program before they have completed the agency’s vetting process, an unusual sequence of events as the agency rushes to hire federal immigration officers to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, one current and two former Homeland Security Department officials told NBC News.
ICE officials only later discovered that some of these recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said.
Staff at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course had not submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said
In whose mind are the behaviors we’ve seen representative of professional policing? How many serious law enforcement professionals would welcome these physically, temperamentally, and criminally unfit people on their teams?
I can’t help but wonder how many of these men are pardoned January 6 convicts, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Patriot Front, etc. How convenient that masks make it difficult to identify them by facial recognition.
