Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, speculation that Bari Weiss’s role will be scaled back has reached a fever pitch. So, who could lead a combined CNN-CBS if not Bari? Also, Fox’s coverage of the San Diego mosque shooting sparks internal criticism, and Jeff Bezos has thoughts on ‘Melania.’

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Is Weiss About to be Bari-ed?

In just seven short months at the helm of CBS News, Bari Weiss is already hearing the rumors rumbling in the background that she could see her role significantly scaled back just as Paramount is readying itself to add CNN to the mix.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, Bari Weiss defers to Bibi and allows him to choose who interviews him, major changes are coming to CBS’s storied newsmagazine ‘60 Minutes,’ and the New York Times actually stands up to a pro-Israel pressure campaign.

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Major Problems for ‘60 Minutes’

“Thank you, Bari Weiss.”

That was the message delivered by Michael Oren, the former Israeli ambassador to the United States, following CBS News’s mostly deferential interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Oren was positively thrilled that the network, which is led by the self-avowed “Zionist fanatic” Weiss, appropriated Israeli talking points throughout the interview.

Meanwhile, we have since learned that Major Garrett – the veteran reporter who was tapped to conduct the exclusive sitdown – was Netanyahu’s preferred choice, and drew the assignment after a “negotiation” between Weiss and the prime minister.

As for Garrett, this was the second time in the past couple of months that the CBS News editor-in-chief chose him to handle a high-profile interview that would air on ‘60 Minutes,’ even though Garrett isn’t a correspondent for the iconic newsmagazine.

The decision to fly Garrett, the network’s chief Washington correspondent, to Israel late last week to sit down with Netanyahu is not sitting well with the staff of the Sunday night program.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, I devote the bulk of the newsletter to a ‘CBS News Sunday Morning’ story about the West Bank that sparked outrage from one of its interview subjects – and how Bari Weiss fits in all of this. Also, Donald Trump weighs in on the passing of Ted Turner – and gets everything wrong.

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Has Bari Weiss Found Another CBS News Institution to Meddle With?

“I am deeply troubled by my portrayal and the omission of key facts in the segment in which I participated in good faith,” Zaid Azhari, in a message reviewed by Zeteo, wrote to CBS News producer Sari Aviv last month.

A cultural heritage researcher and leader of the “Save Sebastia Campaign,” Azhari was upset over a ‘CBS News Sunday Morning’ story that aired on April 5 and centered on the political turmoil surrounding Israeli archeological digs in the occupied West Bank, asserting that his interview for the piece was “selectively edited to falsely portray me as someone who erases Jewish history.”

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According to four sources, the report was subjected to last-minute edits and script changes by self-avowed “Zionist fanatic” Bari Weiss, the CBS editor-in-chief who has made sweeping changes at the network since her hiring last fall. The story had been in the works for months, and prior to Weiss joining CBS.

“We aim to inform audiences, not satisfy story subjects. That’s what this piece did. We encourage everyone to watch it and judge for themselves,” a CBS News spokesperson said in a statement.

“Oh yeah, she definitely meddled,” one CBS News senior staffer told me, while other sources noted that this represented a new front in Weiss’s editorial “interference” at the network.

“Bari found out about the story and made changes to the script. She has never jumped in editorially on a ‘Sunday Morning’ story until this one,” one CBS insider said, while a network reporter noted that “this piece is the first time she’s pulled like a CECOT on the show.”

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we take a behind-the-scenes look at how Bari Weiss blew up CBS News’ international news coverage. Plus, another prominent news outlet is telling its staffers to love Israel or leave. Also, is Disney showing some backbone during Kimmelgate 2.0, and where does Trump’s America rank in terms of press freedom?

On top of that, if you haven’t already, please check out my deep-dive profile on the face of Bari’s CBS – Tony Dokoupil. I spoke to a lot of people for it!

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Blindsided by Bari

Earlier this week, CBS News staffers were shocked to learn that well-respected London bureau chief Claire Day – who has spent nearly 25 years with the network – was leaving the company at the end of the month amid a broad editorial restructuring of CBS’s international coverage.

While network president Tom Cibrowski claimed in a memo to staff that Day’s departure had been a mutual decision, both the New York Post and Status quickly reported that she had effectively been “ousted” from her role following simmering tensions with editor-in-chief Bari Weiss over the bureau’s Middle East coverage.

The Post, specifically, noted that an unnamed freelance cameraman and editor had accused Day of running the bureau like a “Hamas cell,” while Status reported that Weiss – a self-avowed “Zionist fanatic” – at one point griped that London was so biased against Israel that “they might as well be Hamas.”

Speaking to several CBS sources, I’ve since learned that Weiss may have gained some of her perception about Day’s supposed anti-Israel bias from her conversations with Cameron Stewart, a freelance cameraman who has been working out of CBS News’ London bureau since late 2019.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex. In tonight’s edition, we take a deep dive into Tucker Carlson’s mea culpa for “misleading people” into voting for Trump – and why progressives shouldn’t just take it at face value. Plus, we ask: with Trump’s approval numbers sinking to new lows, is it just a matter of time before Fox abandons him?

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Should the Left Embrace Tucker the ‘Tormented’?

You do not, under any circumstances, got to hand it to Tucker Carlson.

The former Fox star has increasingly drawn plaudits from progressives for his “credible anti-war voice” and outspoken criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, resulting in Donald Trump unceremoniously excommunicating his one-time close ally and adviser from MAGA.

With Democratic lawmakers talking up a potential bipartisan alliance that would feature Carlson, the far-right pundit sparked even more applause from the left when he issued an apology for “misleading people” with his past advocacy for Trump.

“You know, we’ll be tormented by it for a long time – I will be… It was not intentional,” Carlson declared at the tail-end of a two-plus-hour podcast conversation with his brother, former Trump speechwriter Buckley Carlson, whom he colloquially referred to as “Uncle Buck.”

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“You and I and everyone else who supported him – you wrote speeches for him, I campaigned for him – I mean, we’re implicated in this for sure,” Tucker Carlson said. “It’s not enough to say, ‘Well, I changed my mind’ – or like, ‘Oh, this is bad – I’m out.’”

To be certain, Tucker’s explicit condemnation of Trump’s illegal war against Iran and Israel’s genocidal violence against Palestinians should be commended. It is clearly a good thing, and we can only hope that more on the right follow his lead on these particular issues.

However, I watched the entire two-plus-hour conversation, and it was readily apparent that the two had become disenchanted with Trump precisely because they believed he wasn’t extreme and fascistic enough, and they felt the president didn’t make good on his vows of retribution against liberals and Democrats.

Besides drawing copious headlines that hyped his mea culpa for helping Trump get elected, prominent left-wing personalities praised Carlson. Even Mehdi – who also complimented Carlson recently for challenging an interviewer to define the phrase “Israel’s right to exist” – briefly gave Carlson some kudos. That is, until he listened to the rest of the conversation that took place between the two ultra-conservative brothers.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex. In tonight’s edition, we take an inside look at how the MAGA grifting class truly operates – and what they really worship, a scandal in the world of media newsletters, and the violent racism directed towards a progressive congressional candidate because he had the audacity to speak another language.

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Inside the Cult of MAGA Grifters

For one brief moment this week, it seemed that Donald Trump’s deranged behavior had finally reached a point where even his most diehard loyalists in the MAGA media ecosystem couldn’t stand behind him.

That blowback, of course, was short-lived and quickly replaced by praise for the president. And with the conservative attention economy showing the need for pro-Trump grifters to stay in their MAGA lane to keep the dollars flowing, we have someone who was deep inside that bubble spilling the tea on how this exactly works.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we take issue with the establishment press delivering a collective shrug at the president’s increasingly deranged threats towards free speech – while they simultaneously prepare to “honor” him. Plus, we look into who Bari Weiss is wining and dining, and share the world’s worst history lesson delivered by Trump’s Fox brain trust.

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Trump Ramps Up His War on the Press

Within the span of roughly 30 hours, Donald Trump threatened to jail journalists if they didn’t burn their confidential sources and accused a news network of criminal conduct for publishing an accurate public statement. And in both cases, he called for the feds to criminally investigate media outlets.

Yet, despite the media-bashing president ramping up his already white-hot incitement towards the fourth estate to new levels, the White House press corps tasked to cover him has delivered a collective shrug.

And all the while, the elite political media class is prepping to spend a night publicly feting this man during a lavish party. But don’t worry, because in an act of unparalleled bravery, they’ll make sure to show the president their defiant support for the First Amendment by wearing matching accessories.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we dig into how Jake Tapper taking on Hasan Piker is making many wonder if the CNN anchor is pandering to his soon-to-be new bosses. Plus, Donald Trump thinks a Bush-era neocon is “Brilliant” and CBS News is doing all white.

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Tapper ‘Auditioning to be CNN’s Dokoupil’

Three weeks after drawing the ire of progressives for targeting Zohran Mamdani and his wife for hosting pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, CNN star Jake Tapper is once again under fire for taking aim at a left-wing critic of Israel and painting that person as antisemitic.

In this instance, Tapper’s target is popular progressive streamer Hasan Piker, who has suddenly found himself the focus of a cancellation campaign by centrist groups and right-wing Jewish publications looking to marginalize his influence in upcoming Democratic primaries.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest dispatches from Bari World and the right-wing industrial outrage complex. In today’s edition, I cover how Pete Hegseth has a new favorite network – and it’s not his old stomping grounds, the influence Fox has had on the growing acceptance of a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory, an “idiot” trying to stop the latest Serial podcast, and independent journalism stepping up to the plate on long-form reporting.

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Hegseth’s New Favorite Channel

Ever since news outlets – including Fox and Newsmax – were nearly unanimous in rejecting the Pentagon’s loyalty pledge last fall, which prompted dozens of journalists to walk out en masse, these organizations have refused to bring on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for interviews.

All but one, that is.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest dispatches from Bari World and the right-wing industrial outrage complex. In tonight’s edition, I’ve got a scoop on Paramount axing a panel discussion about Gaza from the perspective of Arab Americans. Plus, we look at how the New York Times is “sanewashing” the president’s unhinged ramblings – again; and the ridiculous spin that CBS News is giving Tony Dokoupil’s ratings crash.

Let’s jump in.

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Paramount Canceled Arab-American Gaza Panel at the Last Minute

CBS owner Paramount squashed an internal panel discussion on the Arab-American experience amid the Gaza war that featured designer and prominent pro-Palestine activist Alana Hadid – all while holding multiple pro-Israel sessions, Ragebait has learned.

Among the three separate sessions Paramount held at its annual global Inclusion Week in October 2024 that focused on antisemitism was an in-depth panel by Israeli-flag-waving CBS reporter Jonah Kaplan and featuring pro-Israel self-proclaimed “MAGA lefty” provocateur Batya Ungar-Sargon.

This all occurred just two weeks after Paramount’s owner rallied to the defense of Tony Dokoupil for outrageously painting Ta-Nehisi Coates as a terror-sympathizing extremist over the celebrated author’s sympathetic stance towards Palestine.

Based on my conversations with five former and current Paramount employees, as well as a review of communications and documents that I obtained, I’ve learned that the company’s Office of Global Inclusion (OGI) – which has since been disbanded as part of Paramount’s anti-DEI pledge to the Trump administration – nixed the Arab-American discussion on Gaza less than two days before it was scheduled to take place.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest media dispatches from the right-wing industrial outrage complex and Bari World. In tonight’s edition, we dig into how Sean Hannity and the “Fox News cabinet” helped push the United States into another Middle Eastern quagmire, whether Jake Tapper is already giving future CNN owners the Ellisons what they want, and Bari Weiss losing yet another high-profile journalist from CBS.

Before we hop in, I have one small request! Today is the last day we’re sending ‘Ragebait’ to all Zeteo subscribers. To ensure you get my media scoops every week, make sure you’re signed up to get ‘Ragebait’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in your Substack account, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘Ragebait’ on. And ensure you’re a paid subscriber to get past the paywall!

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Hannity, Trump’s Shadow Chief of Staff, Gets His War

Eight months after Donald Trump boasted that he had “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capabilities, the president launched an illegal war of aggression to “ensure that Iran does not obtain a nuclear weapon.”

With much of the president’s “America First” base warning him against setting off another Middle Eastern conflict, who exactly convinced Trump to take action? Who did Trump turn to in order to justify jumping into this deeply unpopular decision?

Well, look no further than the president’s “Fox News cabinet” and his White House shadow chief of staff – Sean Hannity.

One of cable news’s biggest Iraq War hawks, who has since spent the past few years cheerleading Israel’s war on Gaza, Hannity recently devoted much of his energy to laying the groundwork for a full-scale attack on Iran.

“It’s not surprising that Hannity, who was the network’s biggest cheerleader for the Iraq war, is bloodthirsty for another pointless, disastrous war,” one Fox insider told me. “This is a man who praised waterboarding and volunteered to do it for the troops, only to never follow through on it.”

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A longtime proponent of military action against Iran, the shameless Trump sycophant began making the case for regime change weeks before the president ordered strikes on Iran – insisting it was necessary to stop the country’s nuclear program that Trump had supposedly already destroyed.

While Hannity had previously parroted Trump’s claims that Iran’s nuclear ambitions “are officially dead” and that the regime “has been totally defanged” back in June, he told Iran’s leaders last month that the “clock is now ticking” because they refused to give up their nuclear program.

“I do have a little advice for the radical leaders in Iran,” Hannity declared on his Feb. 18 broadcast. “You may want to get on that plane to Russia sooner than you think – sooner than later. Now would be a good time.”

The full-court press that Hannity and his Fox cohorts were delivering on air obviously had its intended effect on our cable news-obsessed president, based on what Zeteo’s senior political correspondent Asawin “Swin” Suebsaeng has heard from his well-placed Trumpland sources. Let me turn it over to Swin real quick:

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest dispatches from Bari World and the right-wing industrial outrage complex. In tonight’s edition, we take a look at how CBS News is covering the Iran war under the direction of Bari Weiss. Plus, CNN’s resident MAGA defender Scott Jennings is driving his colleagues nuts while kissing up to his future boss; Fox is manufacturing consent for another Middle East war; and Gayle King is going “all in” on Bari.

We’re still sending ‘Ragebait’ to all Zeteo subscribers, but we won’t do so for long. To ensure you get my media scoops every week, make sure you’re signed up to get ‘Ragebait’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in your Substack account, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘Ragebait’ on. And ensure you’re a paid subscriber to get past the paywall! Let’s jump in.

‘Bari’s Hardline Zionist Wet Dream’

“Buckle up. Propaganda-palooza,” one CBS News staffer told me after the network announced that it had deployed Tony Dokoupil to the Middle East this week to anchor ‘CBS Evening News’ as Donald Trump’s aggressive war of choice with Iran escalated.

The fact of the matter, though, is that editor-in-chief Bari Weiss had made sure that would be the case well before Dokoupil – the pro-Israeli talking head she installed to lead the network’s flagship nightly news broadcast – made his way to Tel Aviv.

“This is Bari’s hardline Zionist wet dream come true,” a CBS News insider snarked to Zeteo.

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Justin Baragona here, bringing you the latest dispatches from Bari World and the right-wing industrial outrage complex. In tonight’s edition, we profile the newest CBS News correspondent and what he has in common with Bari Weiss, Sean Hannity’s engagement with a bit of stolen valor, Fox doing its level best to spin Trump’s long and boring State of the Union, and what CBS staffers think about the Peter Attia saga.

For the next couple of weeks, we’ll be sending ‘Ragebait’ to all Zeteo subscribers. But to ensure you get my media scoops every week, make sure you’re signed up to get ‘Ragebait’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in your Substack account, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘Ragebait’ on. And ensure you’re a paid subscriber to get past the paywall! Let’s jump in.

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The ‘We Love Israel’ Network

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I am delighted to welcome Justin Baragona and his ‘Ragebait’ media newsletter back to Zeteo, and to your inboxes, this time on a weekly basis. For those who aren’t familiar, Justin was with Zeteo before decamping for The Independent, where he was a scoop machine on all sorts of media stories - but especially CBS and Bari Weiss and Donald Trump stories. Justin’s back with us now, and you can catch his exclusive reporting and analysis every Wednesday evening.

For the next few weeks, we’ll be sending ‘Ragebait’ to all Zeteo subscribers. But to ensure you get Justin’s media scoops every week, make sure you’re signed up to get ‘Ragebait’ by going to ‘manage subscription’ in your Substack account, scrolling down, and toggling the button for ‘Ragebait’ on. Oh, and please make sure you’re a paid Zeteo subscriber so you can read past the paywall and support independent journalism!

-Mehdi

Behind the Scenes of Bari Weiss’s Blunder

Months after Bari Weiss desperately courted Anderson Cooper to be the face of ‘CBS Evening News,’ Cooper essentially gave the anti-woke CBS News editor-in-chief the middle finger as he decided to ditch his 20-year run as a ‘60 Minutes’ correspondent.

“It really has to sting for Bari,” a senior CBS News staffer told ‘Ragebait.’ “The person she wanted for the Evening News anchor chair is choosing to leave CBS altogether because of her.”

In fact, according to the same staffer, Cooper’s decision not to return to ‘60 Minutes’ after this season ends was akin to “a ‘fuck you’ to Bari.”

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A CNN mainstay who recently re-upped his contract with the cable news network, Cooper declined to accept CBS News’s latest renewal offer to continue serving as a correspondent for the network’s venerable newsmagazine, as first reported by Breaker’s Lachlan Cartwright.

Though both CBS News and Cooper said all the right things in their official statements on his departure, with the anchor citing his work-life balance and commitments to CNN as the driving force behind his decision while CBS said “60 Minutes will be here if he ever wants to return,” it was clear that something else was at play to cause him to tell the Tiffany Network sayonara.

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Republicans and right-wing media, which had grown increasingly confident of a Donald Trump victory in recent weeks, found themselves back on their heels following a series of stunningly racist “jokes” made by their MAGA cohorts. Making matters worse for the right, these purposely offensive and dehumanizing swipes have only served to strengthen the accusations that Trump and his allies are embracing fascism.

In the wake of right-wing podcaster Tony Hinchcliffe’s much-denounced warm-up speech at Trump’s Madison Square Garden (MSG), which featured the “Kill Tony” star calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” Mehdi found himself face-to-face with conservative provocateur Ryan Girdusky on Monday night. 

Sharing a panel on CNN’s ‘NewsNight,’ Mehdi and Girdusky were presented the opportunity to talk about the MSG rally, which has been widely condemned over its dark tone and incendiary rhetoric towards women, minorities, and immigrants. Noting the intense backlash to the rally, Mehdi began to point out that conservatives shouldn’t act like Nazis if they didn’t want to be called that.

Gidursky reacted by asserting that Mehdi had been “called an antisemite more than anyone at this table,” prompting the Zeteo founder to say he'd grown used to that because he’s “a supporter of the Palestinians.” At that point, things went completely off the rails in the worst possible way.

“Well, I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” Girdusky sneered, making an obvious reference to the Israeli operation that killed dozens, including children, when hundreds of pagers belonging to Hezbollah exploded. “Did you just say I should die?” Mehdi reacted. “Did you just say I should be killed live on CNN?!”

Needless to say, Girdusky’s remarks caused others at the table to denounce him – especially when he offered up an insincere apology, claiming he thought Mehdi was expressing his support for Hamas. “Ryan, that is completely out of pocket,” host Abby Phillip exclaimed while Girdusky whined that he “apologized” already.

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During the commercial break, Girdusky was removed from the panel, and Mehdi left on his own accord. “Never, in my 25 years as a journalist and 15 years of doing live TV, have I been so stunned by what was said to me that I had to walk off set in the middle of a live show, as I did on Monday night,” Mehdi said in a video response on Wednesday, adding that Girdusky’s line “wasn’t a joke, and that he almost certainly came pre-prepared with, thinking he could get away with it on live national television. That’s how bold these MAGA Republicans have become with their racism…with the help of some in our media who have just happily platformed it.”

Phillip, on the night, later told viewers that “there is a line that was crossed there, and it’s not acceptable to me.” The network also quickly released a statement saying that Girdusky would no longer be booked on CNN programming.

“There is zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air,” the network stated Monday night. “Ryan Girdusky will not be welcomed back at our network.”

Girdusky, who had become a semi-regular fixture on Phillip’s panels in recent weeks, took to social media to complain that he was kicked to the curb by CNN for merely joking. “Apparently you can’t go on CNN if you make a joke. I’m glad America gets to see what CNN stands for,” he tweeted.

He also wrote a lengthy screed on his Substack on Tuesday, portraying his CNN ban as the end result of cancel culture and liberal bias pushed by the mainstream media. His blog also included this howler of a line: “Within minutes of leaving the set, everyone I knew, including plenty of liberals, reached out to see if I was okay.” Remember, this is the man who implied his fellow panelist was a terrorist who deserved to be blown up.

Additionally, Girdusky misrepresented how the exchange between him and Mehdi went, chalking his “beeper” comment as a “quick joke,” all while insisting he had no idea who Mehdi was until this week. (This is obviously not true since he’s regularly tweeted at or about Mehdi over the years.)

“I’m not a victim: I said what I said. I own it,” Girdusky wrote at the end of his post protraying himself as a victim. 

MAGA Media Unsurprisingly Downplays Racist ‘Jokes’

Getting beyond Girdusky’s self-pitying for a minute, the thing that really stands out here is his continued insistence that he is merely guilty of telling an innocent little joke, and the outrage over his remarks is misplaced. And many of Girdusky’s far-right compatriots have echoed that line, claiming it represents a double standard.

This is similar to how the right has reacted to Hinchcliffe’s remarks amid the firestorm of backlash they’ve caused and the possibility it could turn out more Puerto Rican voters against Trump. While Republicans have sought to distance themselves from the comic, with Trump himself asserting he doesn’t know who he is, conservatives have also defended the comments and even praised them as educational. 

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“Now people know about Puerto Rico having a huge trash problem,” Fox News’ resident “comedian” Greg Gutfeld declared. Hinchliffe himself has also defended his remarks, claiming that his “joke was taken out of context” by Democrats. 

While it is utterly predictable that MAGA media would go out of their way to downplay this racist and violent rhetoric as just attempts at humor, especially with the GOP looking to peel off Latino and Arab-American voters, it does beg another question: why is CNN even platforming someone like Girdusky in the first place?

Not the First Time

CNN clearly hasn't learned its lesson from previous incidents of inviting MAGA flamethrowers on air, only to have to cut ties with them over their unhinged rhetoric.

In 2017, the network severed ties with Jeffrey Lord after he tweeted “Sieg Heil!” at a liberal activist. The following year, the network fired Ed Martin, who was essentially brought on to be Lord’s replacement as CNN’s resident Trump backer. And in 2021, Rick Santorum was let go over incendiary remarks he made about Native Americans. 

On the surface, Girdusky was likely invited by CNN because he is friends with GOP vice presidential candidate JD Vance and worked on a super PAC to get Vance elected to the Senate in 2022. Girdusky even said this was the key factor in his Substack piece. 

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He also founded the 1776 Project PAC, which has devoted itself to pushing school boards to the right. Therefore, the network likely saw him as someone who could present a pro-Trump perspective and seemed plugged into the campaign – especially with CNN primetime leaning more toward partisan panel discussions as the election approaches.

Meanwhile, as independent journalist Amanda Moore reported on Tuesday, Girdusky isn’t just a run-of-the-mill Republican. Besides his 1776 Project having ties to white nationalists, Girdusky himself once wrote for Alternative Right, a now-defunct website run by notorious white supremacist Richard Spencer, per Moore. At the time of Girdusky’s contributions, Alternative Right also listed Peter Brimelow as a contributing editor, who would later found the white nationalist group VDARE. 

Furthermore, as The Washington Post noted, Girdusky has also contributed to The American Conservative, which was founded by ‘paleoconservative’ Pat Buchanan. In a 2020 piece for the magazine, Girdusky criticized Trump acolyte Stephen Miller – who was once associated with Spencer and has long promoted white nationalist talking points – for not doing more to implement Trump’s Muslim ban.

But hey, don't you dare suggest they sound like Nazis.

Was the LA Times Non-Endorsement of Harris Really About Gaza?

The fallout continues over the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times stepping in and deciding that their newspapers’ editorial boards would not endorse a presidential candidate.

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After he sparked a full-blown crisis at CBS News with his explosive interview of acclaimed author Ta-Nehisi Coates, anchor Tony Dokoupil has spent the past few days reaching out to network colleagues on what some are describing as an “apology tour,” three sources familiar with the matter told me.

Specifically, CBS insiders said, Dokoupil has been speaking to people across the foreign news division who have taken part in the network’s coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza and growing tensions in the Middle East. While the ‘CBS Mornings’ host’s outreach may not represent a full mea culpa on Dokoupil’s part, sources noted, he has been making a concerted effort to engage with his colleagues on this issue. 

“It seems to be dawning on him that maybe he has taken this too far. That it has caused a lot of damage and hurt a lot of people and that he maybe has even hurt his own career, because who's going to see him as an objective observer of anything ever again,” one CBS employee said.

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Noting that the anchor has gotten a list of people involved in coverage of the region, another insider said that some of the folks Dokoupil has reached out to “have not been biting their tongues” and are “confronting him directly” about his biased editorializing. Two sources also pointed out that during one of these conversations, Dokoupil was directly told that he basically sounds “like an IDF spokesperson” during his segments. An additional staffer said that Dokoupil had called to apologize to some foreign correspondents for potentially putting them in danger with his pro-Israel rhetoric while they were reporting from the front lines of the war. 

Of course, this has all come in the aftermath of Dokoupil’s aggressive Sept. 30 sitdown with Coates that sparked controversy after the CBS host all but accused The Message author of being an antisemitic terrorist. CBS News chief Wendy McMahon and head of news gathering Adrienne Roark eventually addressed the matter a week later, finding that Dokoupil had violated the network’s editorial standards with the way he conducted the interview. (Dokoupil himself admitted to defying standards and practices while defending his tone and “tough” questions.) 

CBS News declined to comment. 

Execs In Trouble?

Meanwhile, McMahon – who has been in the job for barely a year – has suddenly found herself under fire over her handling of this whole affair, especially amid the groundswell of criticism from both the right-wing press and legacy media folks who are largely supportive of Israel. (The recent kerfuffle over ‘60 Minutes’ editing part of an answer from Kamala Harris hasn’t helped matters.)

Shari Redstone, head of CBS parent Paramount Global, publicly sided with Dokoupil last week, saying he did a “great job” by “asking tough questions” and didn’t violate editorial standards. She claimed CBS News management “made a mistake” in handling matters. She also privately called Dokoupil to praise him and had dinner with him this week, according to The Wall Street Journal. But following Redstone’s complaints, Paramount Global co-CEO and CBS President George Cheeks made a point of backing the news leadership team. Skydance did not respond to a request for comment.

Redstone’s fiery defense of Dokoupil and Paramount’s pending sale to Skydance, which is run by movie producer David Ellison, has led to speculation that McMahon and other CBS News executives could be in trouble. A CBS insider, meanwhile, noted that many within the CBS newsroom are perturbed by recent reports that Redstone – a fervent philanthropic supporter of pro-Israeli causes – has pushed for a more conservative and pro-Israeli bent in the network’s news coverage.

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The New York Post, for instance, reported that Ellison’s dad Larry, a pal of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, is extremely unhappy. “They’re thinking about blowing the place up,” according to one of the Post’s sources. Our sources, however, noted that Redstone is selling her stake while Cheeks will probably stay as head of CBS, adding that it’s highly likely Cheeks ran his statement of support for McMahon and Roark by his soon-to-be Skydance bosses before releasing it. 

According to Puck, McMahon is set to meet with her soon-to-be boss, David Ellison (along with RedBird’s Jeff Shell), later this week. Two network sources told me that not only is there broad support for McMahon throughout CBS News, but within Paramount and Skydance as well. 

Though McMahon has been receiving a lot of external flack over the way this has all gone down, multiple sources told me that she continues to draw quite a bit of support from the rank-and-file in the CBS newsroom. While Dokoupil has a small but vocal group of defenders and acolytes at the network, notably justice correspondent Jan Crawford, most staffers back McMahon and Roark for addressing the situation.

Early Complaints Ignored 

One question that has gone unanswered is why McMahon didn’t address this situation with Dokoupil earlier.

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Elon Musk is, for lack of a better term, full of shit.

When the conspiratorial tech mogul purchased X (then Twitter) in 2022, he promised to run the social media site as a “free speech absolutist.” Musk, who was highly critical at the time of the platform’s temporary restriction of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story just ahead of the 2020 election, suggested similar acts wouldn’t happen under his leadership. 

“Suspending the Twitter account of a major news organization for publishing a truthful story was obviously incredibly inappropriate,” he fumed at the time.

Musk even launched the so-called Twitter Files to prove that the suppression of the laptop report was part of a government effort to help the Biden campaign. While the investigation never revealed evidence of government interference, his followers were still left with the impression that censorship on behalf of a political candidate or party would be verboten on Musk’s X. 

Well, the joke’s on them.

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Hours after sharing his newsletter that contained the Trump campaign’s purported vetting document of JD Vance, investigative journalist Ken Klippenstein was banned from X. The 271-page dossier is apparently the same one that an anonymous source provided to several mainstream media outlets – which all passed on it – and is supposedly connected to Iran’s hack of the Trump campaign. (We won’t even get into the whole double standard of refusing to report on these hacked materials after the feeding frenzy we witnessed in 2016 after WikiLeaks released stolen emails from Hillary Clinton’s team.)

In a rare press statement, an X spokesperson told me that Klippenstein was only “temporarily suspended for violating our rules on posting unredacted private personal information,” including Vance's home address and partial Social Security number. The spokesperson added Klippenstein wasn’t punished for posting the document “as a whole” since the company ultimately got rid of its “hacked materials” policy following blowback from its handling of the laptop story.

“Two-Step Dance”

A full-throated Trump supporter, Musk called the publication of the document “one of the most egregious, evil doxxing actions we’ve ever seen,” while suggesting Klippenstein had put Vance’s children’s lives in danger. In reality, anyone can easily find Vance’s home address and contact information online, and the dossier was compiled from “readily available and relevant electronic and online records,” according to the document’s authors.

Klippenstein soon revealed on his Substack that, despite what X’s spokespeople were saying, the suspension wasn’t temporary, and his 500,000-follower account had been nuked forever.

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It feels as if Elon Musk, the hopelessly redpilled billionaire with a messiah complex, has been going through a slow-motion mental breakdown for years now. Still, just when you thought he couldn’t stoop any lower, the soon-to-be trillionaire has found new lines to cross, underscoring how dangerous and treacherous he’s become.

Hours after the Secret Service thwarted an apparent attempt on former President Donald Trump’s life, Musk took to his social media site to ponder why “no one is even trying to assassinate” President Joe Biden or Vice President Kamala Harris.

The post immediately sparked outrage as many interpreted it as a call to murder Harris and Biden, prompting the edgelord to eventually delete the incendiary post while indicating it was all just a misunderstood joke. Of course, by the time Musk took down the tweet, it had already been viewed over 30 million times and racked up tens of thousands of retweets.

This is no mere isolated incident. Musk, who bought Twitter (now X) in 2022, has transformed the social media platform into his own personal megaphone to inject accelerationist and reactionary rhetoric into the public discourse, all in service of Trump and the MAGA agenda. (Musk has become a close ally of Trump, who wants his “friend” to lead a “government efficiency commission” should he win re-election, and is aggressively backing the former president’s campaign.) 

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Just in the past few weeks, for instance, Musk declared “civil war is inevitable” in the United Kingdom amid anti-Muslim riots in that country that were incited by literal fake news, promoted a “very interesting” Tucker Carlson interview with a pro-Hitler historian who whitewashed the Holocaust, offered to impregnate Taylor Swift after the pop superstar endorsed Harris, and jumped on board the Haitian pet-eating hoax.

National Security Risk

Unlike other right-wing provocateurs and influencers, however, Musk is deeply ingrained in America’s national security apparatus. Besides being the “Chief Twit,” Musk holds significant defense contracts through his other tech companies – SpaceX and Starlink – suggesting that the US government may make him privy to confidential information – even as he’s potentially threatening the current president and the possible next commander-in-chief.

That could increasingly make him a national security risk, experts warn.

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In a recent campaign speech, one of the two presidential nominees babbled incoherently about how “some people don’t eat bacon anymore” because of the “horrible energy” created by wind. “They want wind all over the place. When it doesn't blow, we have a problem,” the candidate added.

The day before, the same candidate lost his train of thought while ranting about his opponent having “destroyed” San Francisco, bizarrely rambling about how much money he had lost and how he had been treated worse than Abraham Lincoln. At no point was there even a hint of a cogent thought.

In the midst of these ever-increasing moments of garbled nonsense, the New York Times published a piece parroting the candidate’s latest excuse for repeatedly “meandering” through his speeches and bouncing from topic to topic with no sense of rhyme or reason.

“In its disjointed way, it did all sort of seem to wend back to why he thinks he should be president again,” the Times reported. A week prior, the paper covered a series of the nominee’s unhinged remarks by merely noting the candidate’s “carefully scripted week kept veering off script.”

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While it was just six weeks ago that another presumptive nominee was forced out of the race due to concerns about his advanced age and declining mental acuity, the mainstream media no longer seems all that interested in the other party’s 78-year-old candidate sundowning before our very eyes.

As has been the case since he first rode down that golden escalator nearly a decade ago, Donald Trump continues to be graded on a curve by our national media. And it hasn’t been lost on media critics and progressive journalists that now that Joe Biden, who is just three years older than Trump, has dropped out of the race, the press is seemingly looking the other way when it comes to the Republican nominee’s obvious struggles.

“Historians will scratch their heads about 2024, in which 1 candidate was forced to quit the race for being old & having a bad debate while the other candidate said mad, rambling stuff like this & not only stayed in the race but didn’t get pressured to step aside by the media,” Mehdi tweeted last week, referencing Trump’s “bacon” remarks. 

Outsized Coverage

Needless to say, when it was an 81-year-old Biden going head-to-head against Trump, the mainstream media couldn’t stop fixating on the Democrat’s age and cognitive decline. Even before Biden’s disastrous debate performance, five of the top US newspapers had published 10 times as many articles focusing just on Biden’s age as opposed to those solely about Trump’s. 

Of course, after Biden’s feeble showing at the June 27 debate, the floodgates fully opened. Several major papers’ editorial boards, including the New York Times, called on Biden to drop out. By one count, the Times published an eye-popping 192 news and opinion pieces about Biden’s age in the first week after the debate, compared to just 92 stories about Trump in general. 

This included a four-bylined investigation on how Biden’s “lapses appear to have grown more frequent” and how he “is not the same today as he was even when he took office 3½ years ago.” The authors of that piece, White House reporters Peter Baker, David Sanger, Zolan Kanno-Youngs, and Katie Rogers, have not contributed to any similar articles about Trump’s age-related issues or cognitive decline. (This July 2 piece did briefly note that Trump “has also shown signs of slipping over the years,” adding that “voters have expressed concern about his age as well, but not to the same degree as Mr. Biden’s.”)

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The Washington Post followed the Times’ story into Biden’s frailty with a gargantuan report of its own, this one featuring five different reporters. The July 5 article noted how the president’s lapses had become “more common” and that “he seemed slower and more often loses his train of thought.” The piece also included a brief disclaimer about Trump facing “questions about his acuity” while reiterating that voters were more concerned about Biden’s age than the former president’s.

Additionally, the five authors of the Post’s deep-dive – reporters Yasmeen Abutaleb, Josh Dawsey, Maria Sacchetti, John Hudson, and Dan Diamond – have not collaborated on any comparable pieces about Trump’s age. 

The Wall Street Journal, meanwhile, published a notorious deep-dive into Biden’s “slipping” performance behind closed doors in early June. Annie Linskey and Siobhan Hughes, the two authors of the Journal story, have also not written any related articles about Trump’s struggles, though they have written several others about Biden’s age-related issues. Linskey is a White House reporter and Hughes covers Congress for the Journal’s Washington Bureau. 

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To be fair, reporters generally have specific beats, and editors also tend to assign stories. For instance, all of the Times reporters on the Biden age story are assigned to the White House beat and specifically cover the Biden administration.

But these newsrooms have yet to give the same deep-dive coverage of Trump's “slipping” as they did on Biden’s decline. The few stories they have published about Trump's age, meanwhile, have largely soft-peddled concerns about the former president’s mental fitness or framed his struggles as going “off-script.” One WaPo column last month, in fact, described Trump as “surprisingly robust” for his age. “There’s no escaping the fact that Trump still seems a good deal younger than Biden. He appears to be nourished by a bottomless wellspring of rage,” columnist Matt Bai noted.

I asked editors of the Times, Post, Axios, the New Yorker, and the Wall Street Journal – major outlets that provided outsized coverage of Biden's age issue – whether they felt they should focus a similar amount of attention on Trump’s cognitive decline, especially since he’s now facing off against a healthier and younger candidate.

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The scourge of bothsidesism that ushered in President Donald Trump in 2016 continues to plague the mainstream media, if this week is any indication. Addicted to horse-race election coverage, the political press just can’t stop looking for ways to give Trump every single benefit of the doubt, all in an effort to create some supposed level playing field.

Case in point – check out the so-called fact-checkers.

The Washington Post issued a correction on Tuesday after resident fact-checker Glenn Kessler drew a deluge of backlash for insisting there was “no evidence that Trump sent” so-called “love letters” to foreign dictators. Tasked with fact-checking Day 1 of the Democratic National Convention, Kessler’s initial claim came in response to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s speech in which she said Vice President Kamala Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators.”

Clinton’s remarks were an obvious nod to Trump’s repeated boasts about his friendship with North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, which included him saying, “We fell in love,” and that Kim “wrote me beautiful letters.” Kessler, however, initially wrote that Clinton was “making a bit of a leap to suggest that Trump has written ‘love letters’ to dictators,” adding that we “do not know what Trump wrote to Kim” or other leaders.

Critics soon took issue with Kessler’s fact-check, calling it “embarrassing” since it is absolutely known what Trump wrote to the brutal North Korean ruler. In fact, Kessler’s own Washington Post colleague, Bob Woodward, gained access to the Trump-Kim letters and wrote about them in his 2020 book. Foreign Policy further reported on the letters in 2021. 

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Amid the continued outcry, WaPo amended Kessler’s article on Tuesday afternoon and added the following editor’s note:

“A previous version of this article incorrectly said that the contents of Donald Trump’s letters to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un were not known. Parts of the letters were revealed in a 2020 book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward, after Trump permitted him to read the letters into his tape recorder at the White House. This article has been corrected.”

Still, it wasn’t the only fact-check from a Post journalist that drew heavy criticism. Reporter Amy Gardner, who worked on the Post’s Pulitzer-winning Jan. 6 reporting, took issue with President Joe Biden noting at the DNC that Trump “says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.” According to Gardner, this is “not true” because the former president “just hasn’t said that he would accept” while adding that “the only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.” 

Media critic Parker Molloy called it “the worst” type of fact-check, noting that it “does a disservice to readers by obscuring the more significant truth behind a veneer of technical accuracy.”

Political science professor Mark Copelovitch added on social media: “It is not healthy for our democracy that a large swathe of our political media has totally, completely, & utterly lost the plot.”

The Post isn’t the only one whose fact-checkers have found ways to apply this double standard, which provides Trump a wide berth to mislead and lie while pedantically dinging Democrats for taking the truth-averse former president at his word.

During Biden’s speech on Monday night, PolitiFact re-upped a fact-check saying it was “mostly false” that Trump wants to cut Medicare, even though the site outright admitted that Trump repeatedly proposed annual budgets as president to do that very thing. “[I'm] not one to bemoan fact checkers. truly. but what are we doing here?” the Bulwark’s Sam Stein posted on social media in response.

What indeed.

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She Can’t Help Herself

Another day, another nutty Maria Bartiromo conspiracy theory that shows yet again Fox’s willingness to tolerate her dangerous rhetoric in service of Trump, 

Over the weekend, the MAGA-boosting Fox Business anchor once again accepted a third-hand claim in order to accuse Democrats of engaging in a vast election fraud scheme. This time around, rather than entrust a woman who believes she’s a “ghost,” Bartiromo instead turned to the spouse of a friend of a friend to assert that massive swaths of immigrants are illegally registering to vote in Texas.

In a Sunday morning tweet that’s racked up more than 2 million views, Bartiromo wrote:

“From a friend ...

Friend of mine’s wife had to take her 16 yr old son to the DMV this week for a new license. Couldn’t get an online appointment(all full) so went in person and had to go to 3 DMV’s to get something done. First DMV was in Weatherford. Had a massive line of immigrants getting licenses and had a tent and table outside the front door of the DMV registering them to vote! Second one was in Fort Worth with same lines and same Dems out front. Third one was in North Fort Worth had no lines but had same voter registration drive.”

Bartiromo went on to repeatedly mention it on Fox airwaves during interviews with GOP lawmakers, including Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Roger Marshall of Kansas, and law enforcement officers this week. During these on-air segments, the Fox star expanded on the story, claiming that these weren’t just “immigrants” but also “illegals,” playing directly into the racist “great replacement” theory that the GOP has embraced in recent years.

Besides changing the details of the text to include illegal immigrants, Bartiromo also claimed on air in an interview with Johnson on Monday that it was her friend who had personally seen this, rather than the “wife of a friend” relaying the story to her pal.

“So, what is going on in terms of illegals voting in this election?” Bartiromo asked Johnson, who said, “Democrats want to make it easy to cheat” because “they want to change the electorate.” 

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Though Bartiromo made no apparent effort to confirm whether the story was true or not, a local GOP chair and newspaper both investigated the claim and found it to be completely bogus. “None of it is true,” Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Sgt. William Lockridge told The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, adding that the suggestion that non-white Texans obtaining their licenses at the DMV are illegal immigrants is itself “kind of racist.” 

Additionally, Parker County GOP chairman Brady Gray tweeted on Monday night that Bartiromo's allegations were “erroneous.” He added that there had been only two instances of ineligible voters registering in the county in the past 15 years.

As of now, Bartiromo has yet to issue any corrections or updates. It’s also been indicated that the host was merely citing a source and that she never said the story had been confirmed. Additionally, Bartiromo’s tip from her friend’s friend’s wife comes as Republicans have become increasingly focused on the issue of noncitizens voting in recent months, and the New York Times recently published a story about how immigrants are becoming US citizens at the fastest rate in years.

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Needless to say, Bartiromo didn’t address her “kind of racist” thirdhand gossip being debunked on Wednesday morning’s broadcast of ‘Mornings with Maria.’

The right-wing network shrugging off Bartiromo’s irresponsible and shoddy journalism in the service of MAGA propaganda shouldn’t come across as all that surprising. I mean, her 2020 election lies are a large reason why the Murdochs had to shell out nearly a billion dollars to settle Dominion’s defamation case, and she’s directly named in another hefty lawsuit, yet she is still employed as a morning host. 

In fact, she’s faced no repercussions for costing Fox both money and reputational damage, and has seen her standing with the network remain firm. If anything, the message Bartiromo is receiving from Fox is clear – go ahead and do what you want. Even, or especially, if that means helping Trump try to overthrow another election. 

Meanwhile, it appears that Republicans are already taking action based on Bartiromo’s already-debunked claim. On Wednesday afternoon, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton – a chief purveyor of the “Great Replacement” theory – announced he is “launching an investigation into reports that organizations in Texas are illegally registering non-citizens to vote.”

Trolling the Troll

Professional MAGA antagonist Jack Posobiec got more than he bargained for when he tried to go undercover during a rally outside the DNC on Monday. Prior to thousands of protesters taking to the streets to call for the end of the war in Gaza, Posobiec donned a Palestinian keffiyeh and walked through Union Park with a camera crew hoping to troll leftists for his alt-right ‘Human Events’ show.

In the end, though, it was the troll who was trolled.

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