FTC Chairman Ferguson’s “warning letter” to Apple CEO Tim Cook on February 12, 2026, threatening enforcement action over Apple News allegedly boosting “left-wing sources,” is state coercion of editorial decisions.

It follows a documented historical pattern with precision.

Ferguson sent an almost identical letter to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai in August 2025, accusing Gmail of “partisan filtering” in its spam detection.

Same three-pronged legal threat, same “consumers’ reasonable expectations” language, same implicit enforcement action. He’s clearly pumping a template. Each letter builds momentum for the next target.

The three-pronged fraud Ferguson engages in has been designed to be impossible to satisfy:

• Prong one says curation “inconsistent with terms of service” violates the FTC Act. But every platform’s ToS grants broad editorial discretion — so this prong only activates when Ferguson decides the discretion was exercised in the wrong ideological direction.
• Prong two says curation violating “consumers’ reasonable expectations” is a material omission. But “reasonable expectations” of ideological balance in a news aggregator is completely undefined. Ferguson defines what balance looks like. By assertion.
• Prong three says curation causing “substantial injury” violates the Act. But the alleged “injury” is that consumers received news from sources Ferguson considers left-wing. That’s editorial disagreement reframed as regulatory violation.

This is the state telling a private news aggregator which sources to elevate and which to suppress, under nothing other than his personal threat of federal investigation.

It’s Un-Constitutional

The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in NRA v. Vullo (2024) that “government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.” The test: whether conduct “viewed in context, could be reasonably understood to convey a threat of adverse government action in order to punish or suppress speech.” Ferguson’s letter meets every element. He holds enforcement authority over Apple. The letter explicitly references potential enforcement action. And it targets editorial curation decisions based on their perceived ideological orientation.

The irony, oh the irony.

The entire Murthy v. Missouri case was brought by Republicans arguing that the Biden administration’s communications with social media companies about misinformation constituted unconstitutional government coercion of private speech. Justice Alito warned in dissent that such pressure campaigns could “stand as an attractive model for future officials who want to control what the people say, hear, and think.” Ferguson is now executing exactly what Alito described — using regulatory authority to pressure platforms into changing editorial decisions based on ideological grievance — except he’s doing it with signed letters on FTC letterhead, which is considerably more explicit than anything alleged in Murthy.

What a Historian Knows

Ferguson’s approach maps precisely onto the early phases of Nazi press consolidation.

The mechanism is not analogy.

This is the structural repetition of Nazism.

Mechanism	Nazi Germany (1933-1935)	FTC Under Ferguson (2025-2026)
Framing	Goebbels introduced the Schriftleitergesetz calling himself the “warm-hearted protector of the German press”	Ferguson frames letters as “consumer protection” — reminding companies of “obligations to customers”
Impossible standard	Editors required to omit anything that “tends to weaken the strength of the German Reich” or is “misleading to the public by mixing selfish interests with community interests” — undefined, subjectively enforced	Platforms must not violate “consumers’ reasonable expectations” of ideological balance or cause “substantial injury” — undefined, subjectively enforced
Regulatory chokepoint	Journalists required to register with the Reich Press Chamber to work; the Propaganda Ministry could remove any editor “for pressing reasons of public welfare”	Platforms operate under FTC jurisdiction; Ferguson can initiate investigation and enforcement action against any company whose curation he deems ideologically imbalanced
Economic coercion	Amann Ordinances (1935) imposed ownership requirements publishers couldn’t meet, forcing sales to the Nazi publishing combine at distressed prices	Threat of FTC investigation imposes compliance costs (discovery, legal fees, stock impact) that make algorithmic adjustment cheaper than resistance
Editorial control mechanism	Twice-daily Tagesparole from the Propaganda Ministry specified content “down to the headlines and the required epithets”	Warning letters specify which editorial outcomes are acceptable; compliance is verified by whether curation outcomes match the regime’s ideological preferences
Personnel capture	Editors became de facto civil servants “directly subordinate to the Ministry of Propaganda” rather than their publishers	FTC Director of Public Affairs is Joe Simonson, hired directly from the Washington Free Beacon; Bureau of Competition director chosen to target companies that “censor conservative voices”
Escalation sequence	1933: Editor’s Law (content control) → 1935: Amann Ordinances (ownership control) → ongoing acquisitions of non-compliant publishers	Aug 2025: Gmail spam filtering letter → Feb 2026: Apple News curation letter → next: search ranking? social media feeds?
Projection	Regime accused opposition press of being “Jewish-controlled” and acting against the national interest while systematically capturing the press for party purposes	Administration accuses platforms of “censoring conservative voices” while using regulatory authority to coerce platforms into suppressing non-conservative editorial judgment
Compliance effect	Hitler complained: “It is no great pleasure to read 15 newspapers all having nearly the same textual content”	If platforms adjust algorithms to satisfy Ferguson’s undefined “balance” standard, the result is identical: editorial homogeneity dictated by state preference
The quiet part	Amann testified at Nuremberg: “the basic purpose of the Nazi press program was to eliminate all press in opposition to the party”	Ferguson’s own pre-appointment materials cite the “removal and demonetization of users who challenge the Silicon Valley political consensus” as a core grievance to be addressed through FTC power

The critical structural parallel is not the end state. We know ICE has been bidding to convert huge warehouses into concentration camps for housing political prisoners, which presumably includes journalists. Already Don Lemon was very publicly attacked and arrested for doing what journalists do.

The parallel is the mechanism: a government official with enforcement authority using vaguely defined legal standards to pressure private editorial operations into compliance with ideological preferences, where the cost of resistance (investigation, enforcement action and potential jail) exceeds the cost of compliance (adjust the algorithm).

Even before the Schriftleitergesetz was formally enacted, German journalists had already become dependent on the regime’s goodwill. The formal law came after the informal pressure had already done its work.

Ferguson’s letters operate the same. He doesn’t need to follow through on enforcement. Apple’s lawyers are meant to calculate the cost of an FTC investigation driven by Trump loyalty and adjust the algorithm. The letter is the initial enforcement.

Trump Asset Architecture

Ferguson clerked for Clarence Thomas. He served as chief counsel to Mitch McConnell, functioning as “judicial confirmation strategist.” He was Republican counsel on the Senate Judiciary Committee. His entire professional life has been spent in the infrastructure of conservative legal movement-building.

His stated purpose, documented in his own pre-appointment materials, is using regulatory power to control perceived ideological imbalances in private media.

His communications director came from the Washington Free Beacon. His Bureau of Competition director was selected specifically to target companies accused of suppressing conservative speech. The FTC’s enforcement apparatus has been staffed for a political mission.

This is what competent complicity looks like at institutional scale: skilled legal professionals who understand exactly what they’re doing, executing a program of editorial coercion through regulatory authority, using consumer protection language as cover for viewpoint-based government pressure on private publishers.

The Weimar Republic had a free press. The architecture of its elimination was not secret. It was documented, prosecuted at Nuremberg, and taught in every competent history program for eighty years.

The Nazi warning signs were the warning letters. So too with Trump.

The technology changes. The architecture doesn’t.

First of all, let’s just admit that the British love the spectacle of suffering and gore. London is littered with “museums” glorifying the worst chapters in human history, almost as joyful interpretations of others’ suffering.

Perhaps you could call it the “keep calm and carry on” being a deeper cultural pun about “keep calm and carrion”? Or perhaps I spent too much time in the dank, dark corridors of the London Dungeon.

Notably, a compelling new Samurai exhibit is being held away from Japan.

…some of the country’s most formidable warriors were a group of female samurai called the Onna-bugeisha.

They were every bit as deadly and powerful as their male counterparts and were trained using the same self-defense and offensive maneuvers. They used a special weapon called a naginata…

Eeeeeek. Nails on chalkboard?

This weapon analysis is bullshit. The naginata polearm was used by samurai, foot soldiers, and warrior monks from the Heian period onward.

It was a primary weapon during the Genpei War (1180–1185) and Nanboku-chō period (1336–1392). When it became associated with women, it was centuries later during the Edo period’s long peace (1603–1868). The weapon was dated, as they always are, and lost battlefield relevance. Women of the samurai class carried it when it had been repurposed as a status symbol and for self-defense. The association therefore was a Tokugawa-era development, not an origin story.

Dare I say this exhibit’s source material retrojects a gendered identity onto a weapon that spent centuries as a general-purpose military tool primarily used by men, because a fraudulent “designed for women” framing creates modern narrative more useful than the actual history?

So, second of all, this exhibit sees ideology in the past but not in its own mirror. It tells us why it deconstructs Meiji myth-making, while it is performing 2026 myth-making.

This British exhibit could have led with the insight that the West fundamentally misunderstands what being a “samurai” meant. It could have used the women’s history to blow open that misunderstanding for everyone, male and female. Instead it drives deeper into a narrow definition and pushes women into it. That makes it representation without revision.

Notice the reporters who focus on fierceness and brutality of woman, which I’m not sure is the correct path towards redeeming women in history.

“It’s a surprise that comes from a narrow use or a narrow understanding of the word samurai, because samurai doesn’t mean warrior,” Dr Rosina Buckland, Asahi Shimbun curator of Japanese Collections, told The Independent.

According to the exhibition, the most celebrated female samurai was Tomoe Gozen who died in 1247, and whose exploits are the subject of The Tale of the Heike. She was reported to have ripped off the head of the samurai Uchida Saburo leyoshi who tried to capture her for ransom.

The curator literally says “samurai doesn’t mean warrior”, an arguably radical claim because it reframes everything, and then the exhibit’s marquee story becomes a woman warrior ripping someone’s head off. I’m only left wondering if she also shit down his neck?

The corrective gets completely swallowed by the very framework it’s supposedly correcting.

The exhibit claims “women made up half of the samurai class” by expanding “samurai” to mean social class rather than warrior caste, then promotes the exhibit with gorified stories that rely on a narrow warrior definition. It’s using both definitions simultaneously depending on which one serves the current sentence.

That’s not scholarship, it’s rhetoric.

Third, something smells off about this whole thing. The Huo Family Foundation sponsorship is a buried detail. A China-based foundation sponsoring an exhibit in Britain to re-frame Japan’s martial identity raises, well, red flags. The funding source may be the context.

Others have pointed out the curation within context is problematic. The object selection gives us a tsuba with a world map (exceedingly rare) cherry-picked to suggest Edo-period global consciousness that wasn’t representative. It offers ornate ceremonial armor that the Japanese don’t consider authentic to samurai identity. Neither curator is a weapon or armor specialist, a fact I find almost impossible to believe given the British adoration of weapons and armor in their exhibits. They seem to have set up evidence which coincidentally fits a Chinese thesis about Japan, rather than building from evidence.

To be fair, Broderick and Buckland clearly agree that the samurai meant more than warrior. The failure becomes that their exhibit couldn’t commit to this story without also promoting gratuitous violence to seek attention in the British market.

Fourth, and finally, this is a familiar pattern: women are admitted to the canon by demonstrating they can meet criteria, not by challenging whether those criteria are correct. The Onna-bugeisha become legible to a museum audience not because samurai culture encompassed governance, education, estate management, arts, and social organization — important recognition of the proper definition and all things women were deeply embedded in — but because a woman ripped the head off someone. The entry ticket to historical recognition is unnecessarily reset to brutality.

It reminds me how Hillary Clinton worked for Goldwater. She didn’t enter politics by articulating an alternative vision; she entered by proving she could operate within the most aggressive, unfit for rule, existing framework available, then spent decades unable to fully shed her origin story. The price of admission shaped the thing it would allow her to be.

The DSM-5 criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder are behavioral. They describe observable patterns of action, speech, and relational behavior. And the clinical personality disorder can be diagnosed remotely.

They don’t require an fMRI or a therapeutic relationship to identify. All you need is someone to publicly, repeatedly, across decades and thousands of documented instances, demonstrate grandiosity, entitlement, exploitative behavior, lack of empathy, and demand for admiration. Narcissistic Personality Disorder in the DSM-5 requires only five of nine.

That’s not ambiguous.

A new bridge story hits nearly all the criteria in a single news cycle.

Guess who

Canada spent $4.7 billion building a bridge to America. Trump’s non-sequitur response has been only: I did nothing but I deserve half of what you built, you must compensate me even when I spent nothing, and you cannot open it until you give me something, I’m stopping this until it’s mine.

Trade policy? No. Negotiation? No. That’s just pathological entitlement response to someone else’s accomplishment.

Trump endorsed this exact bridge in 2017. He issued a joint statement with Trudeau calling it a “vital economic link between our two countries.” The same bridge he’s now threatening to block, he previously took credit for supporting.

That’s textbook NPD pattern because the object hasn’t changed, the narcissistic supply calculation has. When endorsing it served him, it was vital. When Canada has an independent relationship with China, the same bridge becomes a grievance instrument. The bridge is just a prop for the mental disorder.

Also note that the Moroun family, who owns the Ambassador Bridge and wants to protect their toll monopoly, has been pulling Trump’s coin-operated strings. All that “compensation” heat that Trump references is his private financial interest, which maps to the exploitative criterion even more directly.

Now run the latest Trump statements about the bridge against all the DSM-5 criteria:

DSM-5 Criterion	Trump Statements on Gordie Howe Bridge
Grandiose sense of self-importance	The bridge exists, therefore I deserve ownership of it.
Sense of entitlement	Demanding compensation when the US contributed nothing to construction costs.
Interpersonally exploitative	Threatening to block the opening to extract concessions Canada doesn’t owe.
Requires excessive admiration	The explicit demand that Canada treat him with “fairness and respect” as a precondition for allowing infrastructure to function.
Lacks empathy	Zero consideration for the communities on both sides who need the bridge.
Preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited power	Claiming authority to block a bridge Canada paid for on land that includes Michigan state jurisdiction.
Arrogant behaviors	The public ultimatum format itself, “We will start negotiations, IMMEDIATELY.”

Seven of nine criteria, one news story, one Tuesday morning before I’ve even had my tea.

And then the hockey claim that China will “terminate” hockey in Canada? No. That’s confabulation in service of narcissistic narrative. It doesn’t need to be true, and it’s not true. It artificially makes Canada’s safe and independent relationships look threatening instead, in order for the narcissist to position their baseless demand for submission as somehow justified.

NPD specifically involves exploiting others and lacking empathy. If the disorder works for Trump because it gets him power illegitimately, then the absence of personal distress isn’t evidence of absence of the disorder. It’s evidence he externalized all cost. The distress and impairment are experienced by everyone else. Or to be more precise, it’s externalized as the rage, retaliation, and hateful policies.

Goldwater was Trump

In 1964, FACT magazine polled 12,356 psychiatrists on whether Goldwater was psychologically fit for the presidency. 1,189 said he was unfit.

And he was, in fact, unfit.

Goldwater had openly discussed using tactical nuclear weapons in Vietnam, voted against the Civil Rights Act, and represented a radical rightward shift that alarmed professionals who understood authoritarian personality structures. The psychiatrists who responded were applying professional expertise to observable danger signals.

As they should have then, and they should continue to do.

The problem was not the diagnosis. The problem was that FACT magazine’s editor, Ralph Ginzburg, was a systematic disinformation agent, not a scientist. He predetermined his conclusion before polling a single psychiatrist, fabricated attributions, selectively edited professional responses to remove anything favorable to Goldwater, and ignored explicit warnings from the American Psychiatric Association that his methodology was invalid. The 1,189 psychiatrists who said Goldwater was unfit may well have been right. Ginzburg’s presentation of their work was fraud.

In a very American twist, Goldwater sued FACT for defamation and won. The court found systematic editorial misconduct. But in the same ruling, the court explicitly affirmed that a candidate’s mental fitness is “not only relevant but indeed crucial” for voters to evaluate. The ruling said: this work matters, and Ginzburg did it dishonestly. The obvious lesson was that qualified professionals should do it properly.

The APA drew the opposite conclusion. It adopted Section 7.3 in 1973, prohibiting all professional psychiatric commentary on public figures. To be clear the APA was not responding to a clinical ethics crisis. It was making a political move that contradicted what the court actually ruled. The conservatives in America are terrified by mental health science and professionalism.

Ronald Reagan campaigned on the concept that there’s no need for mental health, only more prisons. While he backed ruthless dictators and removed solar panels from the White House to declare dirty coal and oil the future, he signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1981 to repeal Carter’s Mental Health Systems Act.

The institutional response, with no rational or legal basis, suddenly prevented professional assessments of politicians. The rule didn’t emerge from a principled debate about diagnostic methodology. It emerged because psychiatric evaluation of a right-wing extremist politician had democratic consequences that powerful people wanted to prevent, and a stupid propagandist’s sloppy misconduct gave them an easy pretext to manipulate.

Actual malice

Goldwater used the “actual malice” standard from a case called New York Times v. Sullivan. To understand how the APA weaponized and inverted this case to silence professionals politically, you have to look at what the case actually was.

Ginzburg was not a journalist and he was not conducting science. He was running a propaganda operation. On July 16, 1964, the day Goldwater was nominated, before a single psychiatrist was polled or any research conducted, Ginzburg’s managing editor wrote a letter:

…say, basically, that Goldwater is so belligerent, suspicious, hot-tempered, and rigid because he has deep-seated doubts about his masculinity.

The conclusion existed before the evidence. Everything that followed was reverse-engineered to support it.

The research was deliberately selective. Derogatory statements in source materials were marked for use; complimentary statements in the same paragraphs were ignored. Ginzburg took his editor’s draft, deleted the careful references to “authoritarian personality,” and unilaterally escalated to “paranoia” and “mentally ill,” a clinical conclusion his own editor hadn’t reached and that no psychiatrist reviewed before publication.

His qualifications? Nothing. Two college psychology courses.

The poll sent to 12,356 psychiatrists was loaded. The covering letter referenced Goldwater’s alleged “two nervous breakdowns” based on a single magazine interview where Mrs. Goldwater used a lay term for exhaustion from overwork. Ginzburg knew that Goldwater, Mrs. Goldwater, their personal physician, and a lifelong friend all denied any nervous breakdown in the medical sense. He published it anyway without interviewing or attempting to interview any of them.

Then editing made it worse. Ginzburg deleted statements favorable to Goldwater from psychiatrists’ responses. He added phrases, sentences, and whole paragraphs, some he wrote himself, some he claimed came from other letters he couldn’t identify. He combined multiple letters into single “responses.” He published 31 anonymous letters as “name withheld, M.D.” to make it appear doctors had signed but requested anonymity, when they hadn’t signed at all. One signed letter critical of the poll was published as “anonymous.”

When some editorial omissions were accidentally indicated by ellipses, Ginzburg testified those had “crept in by error,” meaning his policy was to hide the cuts. The American Psychiatric Association itself warned him before publication that the poll was invalid. He published anyway.

When asked under oath to identify the “many people around Goldwater” who thought he needed a psychiatrist, Ginzburg couldn’t name one. When asked about “European reporters” reminded of 1930s Germany, he said “I don’t recall who I had in mind.” When asked about his claim that armed guards around a candidate were unprecedented in American history, his source was his own “lifetime of reading.” Armed guards had been posted around Governor Scranton at the same convention, same hotel.

The court found actual malice. Goldwater was awarded one dollar in compensatory damages, meaning he suffered essentially no provable harm, along with $75,000 in punitive damages.

And now here is what matters most, the part the APA buried.

The same court, in the same opinion, wrote:

His mental and physical health were proper targets for investigation and for adverse comment. We live in an age of powerful nuclear, chemical and biological weapons capable of massive destruction. These weapons are under the ultimate control of the President, and knowledge of the mental stability of the men who seek to be President is not only relevant but indeed crucial if the electorate is to choose intelligently.

The court said that assessing presidential candidates’ mental fitness is crucial to political discourse.

Read that twice.

It said Ginzburg’s work was fraud, not assessment. The obvious institutional response was: this must be done properly, by qualified professionals, with honest methodology.

Justice Black’s dissent went even further. He wrote:

…the public has an unqualified right to have the character and fitness of anyone who aspires to the Presidency held up for the closest scrutiny [and that] extravagant, reckless statements and even claims which may not be true seem to me an inevitable and perhaps essential part of the process by which the voting public informs itself.

He predicted correctly the ruling would undermine necessary political debate by:

…making fearful and timid those who should under our Constitution feel totally free openly to criticize Presidential candidates.

Black noted that a professional article written no different from how “many campaign articles unquestionably are” would be silenced without cause, while the campaign articles would not be. That’s an unequal and unjust outcome that promotes unprofessional speech and silences professionals.

So the sequence is:

• A propagandist commits systematic editorial fraud while impersonating psychiatric authority.
• The court rules the work was fraudulent, while explicitly affirming that assessing candidates’ mental fitness is “not only relevant but indeed crucial.”
• Goldwater suffers no provable harm but collects $75,000 in punitive damages.
• The Supreme Court declines to hear the appeal.
• The APA adopts a blanket rule prohibiting all professional psychiatric commentary on public figures, the exact opposite of what the court said was needed.

The court said a fraud was a fraud and real assessment is crucial. The APA banned real assessment.

The rule doesn’t follow from the case. It contradicts the case.

The court called for qualified professionals to do this work properly. The APA instead rushed to prohibit them from doing it at all.

That’s not an ethical inference from a legal ruling. It’s a political inversion to do harm.

The APA “Do harm” principle

Look at what the rule actually accomplishes structurally. It doesn’t prevent bad diagnoses, since any crank can say whatever they want publicly. What it prevents is credentialed professionals applying their expertise to publicly observable behavior when that behavior has massive, dangerous political implications. It specifically disarms the people most qualified to identify the worst pathology in the people likely to cause the most harm.

That’s a “do harm” design, an intended function.

The rule treats political leaders as a protected class whose psychological fitness cannot be professionally evaluated, while simultaneously those same leaders make decisions affecting millions of lives. A corporate board can require psychological evaluation of a CEO. The military screens for personality disorders. But the person given nuclear launch authority gets shielded from the same scrutiny by a bullshit “professional ethics” rule that originated in corrupt right-wing political coverups.

Let’s be honest, 1973 wasn’t just post-Goldwater, it was Nixon. It was Reagan. The white nationalist institutional project was consolidating into a “war” against non-whites. The last thing that project needed was a professional framework for identifying authoritarian pathology in political leaders. The Goldwater Rule gave protection to the criminal mind.

The result is exactly what you’d design if you wanted to enable harm: the people who can identify the pathology are professionally prohibited from naming it, the people who can’t identify it are free to speculate irresponsibly, and the public gets neither competent assessment nor protection.

The rule doesn’t serve patients, since there is no patient. It doesn’t serve the public, since the public is actively harmed by an enforced silence. It ONLY serves the political interests of people who promote a particular form of unfitness for leadership.

Duty to warn

Political action and accurate diagnosis aren’t competing approaches. Accurate diagnosis by professionals informs political action. Telling voters their president has a clinically recognizable personality disorder that makes his behavior predictable, and dangerously unresponsive to normal representation pressure, is politically necessary information.

Bandy Lee and the “Duty to Warn” (PDF) professionals made exactly this argument.

What I am saying is, I think that if we, psychiatrists with experience in assessing dangerousness and working with dangerous people, if we remain silent, I would say we give passive support to people who would make the extremely dangerous and naive mistake of assuming that Trump is a normal politician. Or that he’s a normal president. He’s no more normal than Hitler was. Again, that doesn’t mean he is Hitler. I’m not saying he’s Mussolini. He is Trump. But dangerousness sometimes is so obvious, any layman can recognize it from all across the street even if they have never sat down and talked to the violent criminal. So, my point is that for us to remain silent here is a sign either of incompetence on our part, or our inability to recognize dangerousness when it is staring us in the face blatantly and egregiously. Or, it is sheer irresponsibility on our part to remain passive in the face of such an obvious danger.

The Goldwater Rule has been abused and misunderstood, to politically block legitimate public safety discussion.

Read it.

Because the American courts say professionals should be doing exactly this.