When it comes to smearing Trump administration figures, the rule is simple: there are no rules.
I suppose this should not surprise us, but to be honest, significant ethical violations still do, at least for people like me who are still coming to grips with living in a society where the guardrails are all gone.
Their reporting turned up that Carr was “a stand-up guy,” a “safe respite,” a “victim,” and someone who “would never” do wrong. He drank 10 times in high school and wanted to improve himself. So what are we even doing here? They admit it: Revenge for politics. pic.twitter.com/5NwQ0i8BWa
— Luke Rosiak (@lukerosiak) September 22, 2026
I’ve never been a big fan of The Guardian, but that’s mainly because I find its politics odious, not because I thought they lied or broke the rules more than any other “mainstream” organization. In fact, I would have ranked them as far less disgusting than MS NOW, or as Ed calls it, M-SNOW, which is essentially a video version of a left-wing Reddit thread.
But I guess I was wrong.
The Guardian’s bizarre hit piece on Brendan Carr, the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, crosses a clear ethical line, and it does so for no discernible reason beyond trying to assign guilt by association.
The basics of the story are simple enough: Carr was a drinker in his late teens and decided to join an AA group to deal with his addiction. He was in his late teens, and he has been sober since.
The particular AA group he joined was aimed at helping teens escape addiction and was the default place where parents sent their addicted kids to get cleaned up. It was not a fringe cult; it was AA aimed at teens, although adults also participated in the group.
It was also, apparently, a group where the adults preyed on the teens, and lots of bad things happened there over the years.
But, as The Guardian’s investigation showed, Carr was not involved in any of them, and in fact helped girls who were being abused.
People who knew Carr during his years in Midtown say they do not believe he participated in inappropriate behavior. He was seen as providing a “safe respite” in an environment where some teenage girls and young women bore the brunt of “forced relationships, restrictive diets” and psychological manipulation, one former member said. He was described, too, by that former member, as sensitive and desperate for the approval of others. Another former member said Carr was “never among” the predators, whom she knew well, and that he was a “victim” of Midtown.
If the investigation is to be believed, and I have no evidence to contradict anything, really bad things happened to vulnerable young women there.
And, if the investigation is to be believed, not only was Carr not a participant in any of those bad things, he was a “safe respite” who helped the girls who were victimized. Of his participation in the group, nobody had anything bad to say, although several of the people interviewed clearly disliked his politics and weren’t unhappy to have his association with the group be revealed, despite the fact that they were violating their oath of anonymity.
A woman whom Carr dated, who joined Midtown when she was a teenager, described him as a “safe” person, amid a sea of predatory older men, who had even “snuck” french fries to her once because she was being kept on a very strict diet. It was an act he could have been punished for, she said.
She was among multiple sources who told the Guardian that Midtown was a place where people were “entrenched” in each other’s lives, even though they might not have fully understood at the time that things that were happening were wrong.
“Obviously it was widely known that teenage girls were sleeping with older men, it was such a part of our culture. It took me to my late 20s to understand it was wrong,” she said. “I was 16, sleeping with a 55-year-old. That was just the way things worked there.”
A former Midtown member who was friends with Carr and lived with him in Silver Spring, Maryland, when they were in college acknowledged that members had “drunk the Kool-Aid” when it came to Midtown’s then leader, “Mike Q”. The former roommate, who asked not to be identified, recalled cleaning Quinones’ house for free along with other Midtown members, and doing other chores as so-called acts of service. But he also described it as among the best times of his life, when he forged deep friendships, and said that, while bad things happened, he did not personally believe – as others do – that it was fair to call Midtown a “sex cult”.
However, he says, “What Mike Quinones was able to pull together was more like a cult than an AA group. It was an amazing outlet for young people to get sober. But unfortunately, that outlet included people in their 40s, 50s and 60s. Were there bad actors doing shady stuff? Hell yeah.”
People who spoke to the Guardian – some of them using their names, or partial names, and others asking to remain anonymous – said they believed it was important for the public to understand the trauma they and hundreds of others endured inside the clutches of a group that “masqueraded” as a legitimate recovery program for young people in the late 90s and 2000s. They described years of intense trauma therapy and complicated feelings of being both a victim of Midtown’s coercive control and feeling guilty for remaining in the group, sometimes for years.
Some also believe it is important to reveal Carr’s presence in the group, given the prominent position he has as “Maga’s media watchdog”. In a major departure from past FCC chairs, Carr has threatened to withdraw broadcasters’ licences over news coverage that he has deemed to be unfair to the administration.
The Guardian claims that it is fair game to reveal Carr’s participation in this group (and track down other members) because he is prominent and does things they don’t like — he’s MAGA — but there is no indication from their own reporting that Carr did anything wrong, and plenty of evidence that he was a gentleman. As a kid who joined a group that parents sent their kids to, he had no reason to believe that this wasn’t what AA was supposed to be.
All this story does is provide a headline that implies things the story makes clear aren’t true, and it gives even worse actors a hook to make claims that are simply false. Which, to be sure, was the point.
It’s the equivalent of saying “Trump was one of the most frequently mentioned figures in the Jeffrey Epstein emails,” which sounds awful, without noting that the mentions were all about how much Epstein hated Donald Trump. It’s a great way to enable others to smear somebody: put two dots on a page and ask others to draw a line.
One could argue, and I would even be sympathetic to the argument, that learning that Carr was part of such a group where questionable or bad things happened was a good reason to investigate whether he participated in immoral activities. If Carr was a predator, reporting that is defensible and likely the right thing to do.
But what they discovered was the opposite. He wasn’t a bad guy, so why publish the story at all?
Simple: they want to give a license to people inclined to smear Carr.
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