The Devil’s Advocates

There’s a scene in the classic 1997 horror film “The Devil’s Advocate” where Charlize Theron finds herself in a changing room with the other wives at the high-powered law firm that just hired her husband. A darkness lurks behind all of the luxury and hospitality since the founding partner of the company is actually Satan in the form of Al Pacino. As the women try on couture and sip champagne, they reveal themselves as demon hellspawn when their faces begin to morph and twist into distorted grimaces. 

It’s truly a fantastic movie, and I have thought of the shopping scene many times over the years when attending various Trumpworld parties in Washington and New York. There is, of course, a darkness lurking among the very ‘90s rococo, dated, black tie fetes popular with President Donald Trump and his cronies. It is beyond disturbing to find yourself clinking glasses and sharing hors d’oeuvres with the people who are dropping bombs, disappearing families, persecuting their political enemies, and looting the public coffers on a daily basis. The prevalence of “Mar-a-Lago face” and garish pancake makeup among the women (and men) at these ghastly events only makes the resemblance to Pacino’s demonic hordes hit harder. 

In today’s Washington, these types of hellish scenes seem to be playing out at one of the capital’s most terrifying places: the home of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie. 

Earlier this month, Vanity Fair published a fascinating look into how Katie is “becoming MAGA DC’s premier hostess” at the couple’s home. The story noted their parties have featured Cabinet secretaries, law enforcement officers, and other White House staffers. Recent bashes included a celebration of the confirmation of ethically challenged Attorney General Todd Blanche and a birthday-slash-farewell party for outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt before she dipped out through the administration’s revolving door into Fox News. Leavitt’s grand goodbye at the Miller manse featured cookies decorated in icing that spelled out MAGAworld’s aversion to transparency, reading “No More Questions.” 

Katie Miller has refashioned herself as a podcast momfluencer after stints working for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security — which oversees ICE — and for race-obsessed billionaire Elon Musk. She has also seemingly used her party-planning cachet to land guests and distribution for her show despite its middling traffic numbers. The spectacle of all the dealmaking and schmoozing against the backdrop of rampant corruption and cruelty that has defined Trump’s second term is made all the more grotesque since the Millers are two of the most extreme figures in the president’s orbit. 

Stephen Miller has long been known as the mastermind of many of the sickest aspects of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. He is also one of the White House advisers who most frequently and openly engages in borderline white nationalist rhetoric with bromides about the supposed cultural supremacy of native-born Americans. Just this week on X, Miller posted that low school test scores in the Golden State were due to children who were not “California kids.” That type of comment suggesting there is some population inside America that is inferior and un-American is something of a MAGA and Miller specialty. It is almost certainly an attack on minorities and immigrants that’s stated just indirectly enough to offer the thinnest degree of plausible deniability. 

Since stepping into her new role as an influencer, Katie Miller has  gotten far more explicitly racist. Along with dabbling in the debunked New Age conspiracies that have become a staple of the MAHA wing of the Trumpian right (Vanity Fair pointed out the Millers’ parties have featured chefs that cater to the pro-raw milk and anti-seed oil preferences of the RFK Jr. set), Katie has used her platform to espouse blatantly white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric.

“In America, foreign-born women … they’re having 25% of the births in the United States. Foreign born have more children than that of native born,” Miller said in one appearance this week where she railed against the “rape of Europe” and “unfettered migration” both here and abroad. 

“That is what happens when you have this replacement of civilization,” Miller added. “For societies to grow and societies to flourish and for there to be bonds to be between you and I … it has to have this common culture and, unfortunately we’ve lost that.”

The accounts of the festivities at the Millers’ home shows how common and accepted these racist views are  in the upper echelons of the Trump administration. 

To add to the dystopian vibe, Vanity Fair noted the Millers are among the Trump officials who have taken to living on military bases around Washington, D.C. These moves have been made to avoid public anger, protests, and the threats that come along with them. As a result, all of the crudites, Hibachi chefs and pizza trucks being enjoyed at Katie and Stephen’s parties are being shared behind barbed wire. 

In the article about the scene, Vanity Fair noted Trumpworld has operated under a sense of victimization and siege mentality, particularly in the diverse and largely liberal confines of Washington. These are people who see one of their own being turned away at a fancy restaurant as an outrage far worse than inhumane immigration detention camps. 

“It’s hard for anyone in the Trump administration,” Leavitt somehow told the magazine with a straight face. “So why not just create our own parties with our own friends?”

This article exposed the sick world of extremist parties taking place under high security in America’s center of power. Even some of the old elite seem turned off by the scene. Whenever there is a discussion of Washington society, reporters tend to seek out a quote from the quintessential Georgetown doyenne Sally Quinn. In this story, the famed hostess once again espoused the perhaps mythical idea of a bygone bipartisan party scene in the city. 

“When the five o’clock bell rang on the Hill, in the old days, that’s when they’d get out the bottles of bourbon and start drinking together,” Quinn said. 

Even Quinn, whose desire to paint the ancient political class as a bastion of civility has always seemed out of touch, recognizes things have changed now. 

“When Trump got elected the first time, that’s when the whole thing fell apart,” Quinn told Vanity Fair. “That’s when people stopped talking to each other.”

Things are different at the Miller home. It’s spooky season. The people sipping champagne are demons. Their faces are morphing and distorting before our eyes. 

The Rise of Rationalist Media

The day after federal agents raided Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence, I received an email from the prediction market Polymarket with the subject line: “World War Eleven.” If your brain hasn’t been fizzled by X fumes, “World War Eleven” is a reference to Omar’s misreading of the roman numeral in World War II while promoting the “Neighbors Not Enemies Act.” Naturally, it became a right-wing meme and then, of course, the Trump admin’s nickname for its operation targeting Omar’s immigration status. That Polymarket would use provocative right-wing framing for its daily newsletter was hardly surprising. The previous day, their newsletter’s subject line was: “The Texas Flu” — a reference to the MAGA conspiracy that Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail because he was in a mental hospital in Ohio after a nervous breakdown (in fact, he had the flu). The body of the email featured a post from a user named Gaetan Dugas (not even going to attempt to unpack that one) who claims to be a top 1% trader on the prediction market Kalshi and whose tweet jokingly promoted the mental hospital conspiracy. To the extent that Polymarket editorialized the issue, it was to explain that regardless of whether Talarico had the flu or had suffered a mental breakdown, the big news was that a few points had been shaved off his lead in the Texas Senate race.

For months now I have been receiving Polymarket’s newsletter, Polygraph, and the examples above are far from outliers. Likewise, on X, Polymarket has been semi-secretly running accounts like NewsWire which often features headlines designed to excite a right-leaning audience. While it’s tempting to dismiss Polymarket as part of the online right’s milieu of gambling apps, crypto schemes, conspiracy culture, and try-hard transgressive politics, it might not be that simple.

As with gambling and crypto, prediction markets depend on a certain amount of what writer Max Read calls “suckerification,” where young men who hang out in right-wing spaces like X aren’t just the target audience, but the mark. What makes prediction markets, and particularly Polymarket, different from gambling and crypto is that they appear to have an objective beyond merely separating (primarily) young men from their money. As many before me have noted, and Katie Knibbs reported recently in Wired, Polymarket has clear ambitions to expand into a media company. And although they regularly post right-coded headlines to drive engagement to their markets, the push into media isn’t about promoting right-wing ideology, but rather the new ideological bogeyman on the block: rationalism.

By now you’re probably tired of hearing about the rationalists — the Silicon Valley pseudo cult best known for its embrace of polyamory, Harry Potter fan fiction, and believing that AI is a sentient God that may end humanity yet spending billions of dollars to be the first to build it anyway. That much of the recent discourse has focused on their weirdness (an understandable impulse when a group of people keep telling you they are building a doomsday machine) unfortunately misses the more salient point that a large and growing part of the population has already adopted the rationalists’ core concept of making decisions based on probabilities. While few of us are likely to think that software could have a soul or that effective altruism is the best way to deliver live-saving aid, many of us are comfortable making choices probabilistically. This may seem natural, and in some cases, it is. Statistical analysis has obvious social benefits, and plenty of industries and services couldn’t function without it. But we also need to draw a line between acting instinctively or according to internal values and/or judgement and opting to outsource our decisions to applied mathematics. Rationalists want us to keep blurring that line, and that’s where the prediction markets come in. 

It’s not a coincidence that prediction markets align with rationalists’ values. While the rationalists didn’t invent them, they’ve played a central role in building and popularizing modern iterations. Each year, the rationalists hold the Manifest conference at their Lighthaven headquarters in Berkeley, where they discuss the state of prediction markets and debate things like whether sports should have any place in them. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has deep ties to the rationalist community and describes the prediction market as a “truth machine” that uses a wisdom-of-the-crowd mentality to overcome personal or media biases (a big no-no among rationalists). He has also cited as inspiration the rationalist-endorsed concept of “futarchy,” in which the government essentially operates on the precepts of prediction markets. But in order for prediction markets to be useful at the scale necessary to run something as big as the government, you need considerable engagement from the populace.  

One way the prediction markets looked to drive engagement was to take a page out of the gambling industry’s capture of sports media and partner with legacy news outlets desperate for new funding to replace the ad revenue gobbled up by the tech industry. This may have worked to mainstream the prediction markets, but the portion of the population most likely to speculate on essentially a new form of gambling has mostly tuned out traditional news media. To reach this demographic, as John Herrman at New York mag explained, prediction markets filled the news and information vacuum created when traditional media left X. Using provocative right-coded headlines to garner attention, Polymarket then pushed the idea that prediction markets were a method of news consumption where you could have “skin in the game.” In practice, this meant that you could bet money on the outcome of a news event like whether the Strait of Hormuz would open by the end of the year. At a deeper level, it appealed to a desire prominent among young, alienated men on the internet not to be a passive observer or non-player character (NPC) in events they mostly engage with by scrolling on their phone. The darkest interpretation is that it teaches people to only care about news that can be understood, and bet on, through probabilities. And while consumers of traditional news media dwindle, adoption of prediction markets is increasing rapidly. 

As with most things coming out of the rationalist community, it’s hard to know how much true belief there is in the promise of prediction markets and how much is motivated by good old-fashioned profit motive. But considering that the primary obsession of the rationalists is aligning AI with human interests, it’s not crazy to think that if the rationalists can’t figure out a way to make the machines think like humans, they might try to get humans to think like the machines instead.

Kacey, 1. Kristi, 0.

I don’t think you have a dog in this fight but if you did you would have shot it. https://t.co/bI50bahJZu

— K A C E Y (@KaceyMusgraves) October 12, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which Trump ambassador was forced to resign this week after a series of damning reports in the Wall Street Journal?
2. How many days did White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia last? a) 5 b) 4 c) 3
3. Which single individual has spent the most money on the 2026 midterms elections, and how much has this person spent?

Answers below

We’re Begging You to Stop Mainstreaming Christopher Rufo

From Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets to the Great Replacement theory, there’s hardly a far-right anti-immigrant talking point that conservative operative Christopher Rufo won’t contemplate. Yet he’s welcomed on New York Times podcasts and given Big Serious Profiles as a conservative thinker — someone whose ideas should be given real consideration. 

TPM’s Chris Mathias doesn’t see it that way. In an appearance on On the Media, Chris said, “I don’t believe that you can do a polite sitdown interview with someone like Rufo without him really advancing his agenda, and I would argue that that agenda is a white nationalist agenda — and that he is someone who deserves, I think, a lot more of our disdain and scorn than he does our respectability.” 

Listen to the full interview below and check out Chris’ recent coverage of Rufo’s fretting over the so-called “Indian question,” i.e. whether Indians can ever really assimilate to American society.

Beware the Witches of TikTok

I guess he’s hoping no one watches the clip. Ty Masterson, president of the Kansas State Senate and Republican nominee for Kansas governor, accused his Democratic opponent of engaging in “witchcraft” in her bid to win the election. “They’re doing witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship,” Masterson said of Sen. Cindy Holscher (D) at an event at Praise Chapel Wichita. “It’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing. Just in your face that way.” 

He was apparently referring to a TikTok video in which Holscher’s smiling 21-year-old daughter waves her hands around to a trending audio clip talking about “brujas” while her mom looks on indulgently. The text on the screen reads “Summoning a spell so my mom wins the governorship.” According to Masterson, this is evidence that the race is a “spiritual battle” in which “evil is maturing.” Think he’s onto something.

When Even Trump Thinks You’ve Gone Too Far

It’s hard to stand out as particularly ghoulish in the second Trump administration, but Pete Hegseth is doing his damndest. The defense secretary championed the idea of livestreaming the execution of the Army officer convicted for the 2009 Fort Hood shootings. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview promoting the broadcast of Maj. Nadal Halik Hasan’s execution. The proposal was met with bipartisan disgust, and even vice president JD Vance expressed skepticism. President Trump eventually intervened to cancel Hegseth’s gruesome Pentagon ceremony, saying, “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

A Hideous Precedent

Donald Trump’s ability to jail millions of people without even a bond hearing depends on what the Supreme Court thinks about one man’s case. TPM alum Matt Shuham returns to explain the Trump admin’s ghoulish mass detention policy, and how it goes beyond even the Japanese internment camps and 19th-century law requiring hard labor from Chinese immigrants found to be in the U.S. illegally.

Caption This…

Now that is quite a photo.(Credit: Doug Mills / New York Times)

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2026-10-14T16:25:20.230Z

This category is called No Words, but c’mon…what a rich visual! Weekender readers, send us your best caption ideas.

Trivia answers: 1) Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece 2) a. 5 days 3) Elon Musk, of course. He’s shelled out some $366 million so far.

Update: In “The Rise of Rationalist Media,” the mention of “furry conventions” as something rationalists are “best known for” has been replaced with “Happy Potter fan fiction” after we received some helpful insight from a reader.

Transphobia and AI Abound

With Election Day less than a month out, it seemed like a good time to check in on some of the weirdest and worst campaign ads of the 2026 cycle. There are already some doozies out there. Some make gratuitous use of AI, and a good number involve rampant transphobia, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising. Per the Washington Post, the GOP is leaning particularly hard into AI ads, with Republican candidates and groups behind 80% of the 164 AI spots tracked by the Wesleyan Media Project this cycle. The party plans to spend a whopping $1 billion on ads in the final lead-up to the election, much of it coming from the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc., though it’s unclear how much of a difference that river of cash will make in improving the GOP’s grim electoral prospects.

The campaign spots highlighted below are just a small sampling of what’s out there. If there are other goofy or off-putting ads we should know about in your area, drop us a line at talk@talkingpointsmemo.com 

‘Tough Mountain’ Values Involve Shooting People

Chuck Edwards abruptly dropped his reelection bid to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in August after the House Ethics Committee found that he gave uniquely creepy gifts and poems to young female staffers. So the GOPer tapped to replace him, state lawmaker Jennifer Balkcom, had a narrow window to introduce herself to voters. The vibe she’s going for, apparently, is “tough mountain wom[a]n.”

An ad put out by the National Republican Congressional Committee shows Balkcom sitting beside her mother, identified on screen as “Momma.” “Mom raised us on her own. She taught us to be strong. And when someone broke into our house, she shot ‘em!” “You break into my house, you’re going to get shot,” her mom agrees, smiling. 

This is apparently proof that the Balkcom women are fighters, and that the candidate will champion Hurricane Helene recovery funds and lower healthcare costs. 

Forced Trans Teen Surgery in Texas

The GOP is pulling out the tired “X Dem candidate is for they/them” line again. In the Lone Star state, Texas PAC, a super PAC linked to Senate Republican leadership, is going after Democrat James Talarico by falsely claiming that he supports “using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” They’re apparently getting this from Talarico’s vote, as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, against a measure that prohibited gender-reassignment surgeries for children, which is not the same thing as voting to approve the use of taxpayer funds for such procedures. 

The ad is misleading and its transphobic message is played out. But at least the AI is amusingly bad. As the Houston Chronicle’s Gwen Howerton describes it, “a Latino boy gets hit with a Transgenderification Beam and turns into a beautiful woman.” The kid ages a good 10 years via the special Animorphs-like transition. 

The spot is one of several that seeks to boost Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid without actually mentioning Paxton at all, which makes sense given how little people like the man. Paxton’s estranged wife, state senator Angela Paxton, who had filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” alleging that her husband cheated on her, put out an ad urging voters to close their eyes and support the whole GOP ticket. “In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team; it’s about getting the whole team across the finish line,” she says.

Trump Threatens Us in a Hallway Again

In another 2024 throwback, Trump is literally just releasing a presidential campaign ad he ran that year again — this time with funding from the U.S. government. The black-and-white spot, titled “The Final Battle,” shows a somber Trump walking down a hallway, glowering into the camera. “We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists,” he says in voiceover. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” Trump’s pledge to get rid of the “warmongers” in our government hits a little differently seven months into the war he personally launched in Iran. 

Though the White House insisted this and other pro-Trump spots funded by the government are simply “public service announcements,” not midterms ads, he reluctantly agreed to have his super PAC pay for the rest of them. That of course doesn’t mean he’ll reimburse the government for the $10 million the admin has already spent on these ads, though.

Steve Hilton Manages to be Both Confusing and Horny 

Steve Hilton appears to be going for the “all press is good press” strategy in his long-shot bid to become California’s governor. The Republican candidate put out an innuendo-filled ad that confusingly suggests two progressive, lesbian Gen Zers are going to “just try” voting for Hilton. 

It depicts two girls with dyed hair and piercings sitting on a bed in front of an LGBTQ flag on the wall, as indie music plays softly in the background. One says “I’ve never done anything like this before. What if my dad finds out?” And the other encourages her to give it a try anyway. As the camera pans to their laps, it turns out that “it” is actually casting a mail-in ballot for the Republican nominee. The ad ends with the music abruptly cutting out and the second girl urging the first to “lick”…the envelope closed. California Republicans and Democrats were quick to denounce the ad as uncomfortable and “weird.” The YouTube comments alternate between calling Hilton a creep and saying he’s made his sexual proclivities clear. My personal fave: “So be gay and vote by mail. Got it.”

Senate Republicans Just Make Stuff Up to Target Sherrod Brown

The Senate Leadership Fund is out with a different anti-trans spot in Ohio, and this one happens to be fully based on lies. As the Cleveland ABC affiliate puts it in the headline: “Woman accusing Sherrod Brown of forcing transgender surgeries isn’t from Ohio, didn’t have procedure as minor.” The ad features social media influencer Soren Aldaco, who blames Brown for forcing minors “like her” to undergo “childhood sex change surgery.” The ABC reporter found that Aldaco is actually from Texas, where she sought a double mastectomy at age 19. 

It’s illegal to perform gender-affirming care procedures on minors in Ohio, and Brown has simply said that he thinks families and doctors — not government officials — should be allowed to make medical decisions about their healthcare. 

The Classic Crazy Woman Trope, But Make it AI 

AI ads are cheap, so candidates in state legislative races, which have less money sloshing around, have embraced them. Take Sen. Michael Lee, who is running to represent North Carolina Senate District 7. His ad, “Bonkers Bichler,” features an AI deepfake version of his opponent, Jessica Bichler, who is a yoga instructor and studio owner, doing yoga poses, meditating, and banging a gong. Because doing yoga means you’re a dang kooky hippie.

The bulk of the YouTube comments criticize Lee for pushing AI “slop,” being weird about a woman’s appearance, and mocking an extremely common form of exercise. “I wish he would spend more timing fixing our water issues and less time making fun of people who do yoga,” one reads.

The Darth Vader of Politics

For nearly two years now, I have been extensively covering the various — some outright illegal, some legally questionable — ways the Trump administration has been trampling Congress’ power of the purse. Underneath all the technicalities and legal analysis lies the power dynamic it creates for Congress, specifically for the upper chamber, where most of the deal-making around appropriations and government funding happens. 

As the Trump administration undermines Congress’ constitutional power, it’s also fueling the partisan polarization that is already at near historic highs. Bipartisanship has been dropping for some time, and the underlying trust issues between the two sides are growing.

At the core of all it, right now, is President Donald Trump.

Sources and congressional Democrats blame Trump and his admin for eroding the ability of lawmakers to work together on basic legislation, especially when it comes to government funding negotiations. How do you make a deal with someone who will shake your hand, then turn around and break that deal?

If you like pop culture references like me, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, put it this way:

“In Star Wars Episode V, Lando Calrissian makes a deal with Darth Vader but Vader breaks the deal,” Kogan told TPM. “In response, Lando says, ‘You said they would be left in the city.’ Then Vader turns to Lando and says, ‘I’m altering the deal. Pray, I don’t alter it any further.’ That’s exactly what Trump does.”

Kogan continued: “He turns around and he says, ‘I know we had a deal. I know it took months and months and months and months to make that deal. I know I looked you in the face and I said, you got a deal. I shook your hand and then I signed it into law. But I’m just going to break it. I’m just going to do whatever I want.’”

Creative License

This was just sent to me.

The photo was taken at a DMV today in New York City.

Why does the credit card machine at the DMV in Mamdnai’s NYC have the Palestinian flag as the screensaver on October 7th? @ZohranKMamdani disgraceful.

Deliberate and intentional. pic.twitter.com/UZDHOqgnU1

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 7, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which former speaker of the House of Representatives died last weekend? 
2. What new gig did former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt land? 
3. Retiring Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) says the biggest regret of his career in politics is voting to confirm this Trump Cabinet nominee.

Answers below

Allegra Is Having a Baby

I’m heading out on maternity leave until February! Will be having my second kid. Please send any TV and podcast recs, tips on navigating sibling dynamics, and specific advice on raising two boys to have good politics and emotional intelligence in This Environment to allegra.kirkland@gmail.com 

And thanks to Derick and the rest of the team for holding things down at The Weekender until I’m back!

Priorities!

“Look, $4 gas, $6 diesel is unacceptable. I think we all agree on that, but it’s still not enough to vote for a communist.” – House Majority Whip Tom Emmer

The Free Press Pushes Rage Bait on the Cornell Case

Bari Weiss’s The Free Press is nothing if not predictable. Launching in the wake of the #MeToo movement and during the rise of what is now, unfortunately, referred to as “Woke 1,” The Free Press (née Common Sense 🙄) assigned itself the mission of protecting free speech. Never particularly subtle that they were really only interested in protecting the speech of the rich and powerful, Bari Weiss and co. quickly developed a formula of inverting reporting on alleged sexual abuse or bigotry by powerful figures to instead cast doubt on the victims. Under the pretense of “just asking questions,” The Free Press recast victims as political actors, either in cahoots with the mainstream media or using the media’s gullibility and/or commitment to wokeness to advance their agenda. This victims’ agenda, per their narrative, was inevitably to punish and silence the powerful, who they hated because the powerful were (here you can play a game of FP Mad Libs): white, rich, capitalists, men, successful, cisgender, conservative, good looking, etc. In the view of the Free Press, these victims weren’t victims at all, but collectively a censorious mob of college students, minorities, and feminists who would gleefully — and had the power to — scratch the First Amendment from the Constitution. Luckily, the “Honest. Independent. Fearless.” journalists at the Free Press weren’t going to let that happen. If, in the pursuit of this mission, they just so happen to become the publication of choice for the billionaire class, well that’s capitalism baby!

It comes as no surprise then that the Free Press is all over the Cornell fraternity rape story. In a classic victim-blame narrative inversion, FP writer Caitlin Flanagan wonders if “Jane Doe” might have been “looking for” something at the Chi Phi fraternity house. More egregious, the publication paid to promote the story on Facebook with the framing that women know that fraternities are bad places but go to them anyway. In other words: there is no fixing fraternities, we should focus on fixing the women. The fact that the Free Press paid to promote this ad suggests they know it’s rage bait. They know how our current media ecosystem works, how to game it for attention, and how to win favor and money from the powerbrokers. Just don’t get fooled about how they work. The words honest, independent, and fearless don’t come to mind.

Meanwhile, in Europe

Danish artist Jens Galschiøt unveiled a sculpture depicting a naked US President Donald Trump surrounded by golf equipment. It was unveiled on the grounds of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg.

— CNN (@cnn.com) 2026-10-07T11:00:28.964949945Z

Trivia answers: 1) Dennis Hastert 2) Fox News contributor, of course 3) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

The Slopaganda Midterms

This election cycle is rife with “slopaganda” — that is, AI-generated “slop” used for political propaganda. In a fascinating recent piece in the Washington Post, TPM alum Matt Shuham noted that roughly 164 of these ads have appeared on TV or online, mostly in service of Republican candidates. As Matt points out, the ads are bizarre: “Political spinmeisters have used AI to dress candidates in superhero costumes, show a rifle-wielding Donald Trump in a foxhole, depict entire societies as Lego figurines, and also to put words in opponents’ mouths.” 

I encountered one of these ads in the wild last month featuring a familiar face: Marshall Rawson, the subject of my first big investigation as a reporter here at TPM. Rawson is the GOP nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives and, our investigation found, a pretty extreme guy — perhaps the most extreme candidate on the ballot this November. A quick refresher: 

• Rawson was actively involved with a white supremacist group called League of the South that advocates for the southern states to secede from the U.S.
• He appeared at the infamous Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017, and could be seen in a photo standing near James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi who drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer
• He has condoned slavery and called for the execution of queer people 
• A lot of his campaign donors were white supremacists.

He’s running for the state House seat in a deeply conservative part of north central Florida and is widely expected to win in the general election. Rawson hasn’t denied any of my reporting, or distanced himself from his white supremacist activism. I tried my best to find a Republican who would denounce him, but came up empty. 

What I’ve seen instead over the past couple weeks is Rawson receiving public messages of support, including from his likely future colleagues in the Florida state House. Perhaps the most excitable support he’s received, however, has come from the University of Florida College Republicans. The group was only reinstated by the university last month, having been disbanded back in March following a photograph showing two of its members giving Nazi salutes. 

One of its first orders of business after being reinstated? Producing this deeply bizarre piece of slopaganda: a video featuring an AI-generated Rawson walking through an adoring crowd of Red Hats in sunglasses and a trench coat; coasting along a Florida waterway in a fanboat; and standing in a field, clad in all white, his arms outstretched, Christ-like. 

Vote @MarshallRawson for Florida House District 10 pic.twitter.com/qZC7wIjcVy

— UF College Republicans (@UFCR) September 25, 2026

The video is set to the rap song “Already” by Kodak Black — a musical selection that upset at least one of Rawson’s biggest fans. Chandler Langevin is a city councilman in Palm Bay, Florida and the executive director of the American Restoration Coalition, which a Raw Story investigation earlier this week revealed as a “Republican group with white power ties openly plots infiltration of Florida government.” Langevin and his ARC cohorts knocked on doors for Rawson during his primary campaign. 

“Video is great, music is awful. Play our music to it,” Langevin replied on X (emphasis mine), seeming to state that he didn’t like the use of a Black musician’s song. “An edit to Dixieland would go hard… Freebird goes hard in right wing edits too.” 

“You right,” the UF College Republicans account replied. 

Back in 2017, one week after I covered the “Unite The Right” rally, writer Alex Pareene penned a prescient blog in Jezebel titled “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party.” His thesis — that the extremism of the “alt-right” would go mainstream, taking over the GOP — would become my own over the next nine years. Still, I feel like my head is spinning, staring at this little interaction on X, reflecting on just how radical the party has become. To attempt a summary: 

The GOP nominated Rawson, an unrepentant white supremacist who marched in Charlottesville, for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. A recently re-instated college Republican group, disbanded after its members gave Nazi salutes, posted an AI slop video on X — rebranded from Twitter by a trillionaire and GOP megadonor who gave two Nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration — in support of Rawson. The video used a song by a Black man, which upset a local Republican activist, himself part of a GOP group with white nationalist ties that is trying to put more Rawson-like extremists into Florida government positions. Despite all of this, Rawson is all but assured to be a state legislator in Tallahassee next year. 

I really did expect our politics to become this extreme. I’m just not sure I anticipated how bizarre it would be too. 

Ignore Women’s Basketball at Your Own Peril!

With every new detail, Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) mortifying attempt to make former Special Counsel Jack Smith perjure himself seems more and more bumbling. 

As everyone with an internet connection knows by now, the junior senator from Missouri had whipped up a grand plan to prove that Smith was in Atlanta the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) admitted to having a relationship with one of her prosecutors amid the investigation into President Donald Trump’s election interference in Georgia. That’s it. That’s the big smoking gun he was looking for: that Smith and Willis were in the same giant city for one night as proof (?) that the two were colluding in trying to take Trump down. 

But he couldn’t even muster that. When he revealed the explosive texts supposedly revealing that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game (in Atlanta!! Where Willis is!!), Smith was befuddled. Eventually, he offered that he’d attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game against the hosting Maryland Terrapins (a game, notably, much closer to Washington D.C.) around that same date to see now-Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark in action. 

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Schmitt had mixed up “Hawks” with “Hawkeyes,” explaining the error. That turned out to be too generous a guess.  

The efforts of Schmitt and his staff to vet the texts — which reportedly did not include the names of the teams, but did include coordination over seat number and location — went only as far as googling which NBA games started at the time mentioned in the messages. 

“Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”

Schmitt simply forgot that women’s sports exist. It didn’t occur to him that Smith might be more interested in watching Clark rain down 38 points on the Terps’ heads amid her team’s run to the title game than to witness the dazzling spectacle of the 36-46, playoff-missing, 2024 Atlanta Hawks.

Let this be a reminder to Republicans: Everyone watches women’s sports. 

That’s the Stuff

you ok, babe? you’ve barely touched your Mr. Beast’s Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda-Flavored Sparkling Water pic.twitter.com/E7UzFvhRsP

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) September 28, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Name two states where the Senate seats look increasingly out of reach for Republicans, causing the party to pull back on funding and ad buys. 
2. This vulnerable Republican announced he’d break with Donald Trump on key issues, criticizing the admin’s withholding of infrastructure funds for blue states like his.
3. Which two basketball teams did Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt (MO) confuse while spectacularly failing to frame former special counsel Jack Smith with perjury?

Answers below

Tell Us How You Really Feel

“If you’re evil you are at least competent. If you’re evil, you’re not bad. You’re actually maybe kind of good. You’re at least getting something done.” – Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel

Ken Paxton Got Ridiculed for Nothing

The blows just keep coming for Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton. In new audio leaked to the New York Times, the state’s Republican attorney general admitted that President Trump’s weird September midterms convention in Dallas actually hurt his campaign. “When we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped,” Paxton said at a private event with conservative lobbyists and donors. It is perhaps a bit rich for Paxton to be pointing fingers at Trump, since he’s done a great job at making voters dislike him all on his own. The guy was already unpopular in Texas, where state lawmakers from his own party voted to impeach him over allegations of bribery and unfitness for office. While he survived that effort, the stink of corruption didn’t go away; a focus group of Texas swing voters recently used the words “crook,” “crooked,” “amoral” and “disgusting” to describe him to the New York Times. Paxton only won the primary because of a last-minute endorsement from Trump, and has been languishing in the polls against Democrat James Talarico. The president has lately taken to kicking the AG while he’s down, mocking him at the Dallas convention as not “the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen” and following up with these recent remarks at the White House: “Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this — it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it — you might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country.” Hope it’s all been worth it, Ken!

Sure, Sounds Chill

The Trump administration has spent months trying to put its thumb on the scale in the midterms, from igniting a nationwide redistricting war to trying to seize detailed voter records from the states. Admin officials have also repeatedly threatened to post federal troops at polling places just, you know, in case. All of this flies in the face of plain constitutional language mandating that the states have primary oversight over election administration.

Mike Collins, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, totally gets that. He is, he said this week, “a firm believer in local elections are state and local level.” He’s such a believer in local elections, in fact, that he thinks it would be “fine” to have federal troops at polling places in order to ensure that people “have confidence in their elections.” Got it!  

The Influencer Grifters Working Hand in Glove With Trump + Co.

Josh Kovensky joined the excellent Posting Through It podcast to talk through some of the “content creators for the authoritarian state.” We’re talking Nick Shirley, Tyler Oliveira, Savanah Hernandez, Nick Sortor and some of the other online influencers who push out propaganda for the Trump administration, particularly on immigration. (Some have even embedded with ICE on ride-alongs and toured detention facilities). 

“You can see them giving and taking. You can see the symbiosis, right?” Josh says. “[They’re] with administration officials telling them what they think is happening and the officials are responding in real time, responding with what they’re going to do in terms of federal policy.”

Department of False Equivalencies

This summer’s wave of progressive primary victories was met with a flood of articles fretting over whether Democrats were seeing the rise of a “Tea Party of the left.” University of Pittsburgh associate professor Paul Elliott Johnson explained why those comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny. 

Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy. 

why does the WaPo print headline on the botched TN execution read like The Onion

— Chris Ingraham (@cingraham.bsky.social) 2026-10-02T12:43:47.565Z

Trivia answers: 1) North Carolina, Georgia 2) Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) 3) The Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes

Breaking Down the Different Flavors of GOP Midterms Cope

It’s never a good sign when the Senate Majority Leader suggests the election prospects for his own party look grim. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) admitted in a recent interview that he believes even losing Senate control in the midterms to be a real possibility for the GOP, saying, “I worry about that, for sure.” 

Donald Trump is largely responsible for this situation. He’s fully leaned into unpopular policies (building AI data centers, going to war in Iran, launching trade wars with allies, etc.) that have driven up prices, and, despite his dismal approval rating, is insisting there’s no daylight between himself and the rest of the party. As he said at his weird fake midterms convention in Dallas, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.” 

Even accounting for all the usual caveats about poll margins, it does seem like the Democrats are on track to have a strong midterms cycle. So Republican candidates are experimenting with different flavors of cope as they look towards Election Day. Nicole and John have tracked some of this in Where Things Stand and The Brief, respectively, so we tried to come up with some handy categorizations. Here’s what we’ve got.

All Aboard the Islamophobia and Red Scare Express

Some red state MAGA loyalists are playing the culture war hits, trying to keep the focus on nonexistent crises rather than any of the issues actually affecting their voters. We’re talking Sharia takeovers, communist creep, and stolen elections. As Josh Kovensky reported earlier this year, Texas Republicans Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Senate nominee, pioneered the strategy of targeting the local Muslim community in their midterms messaging. Abbott spent the summer fighting “a proposed mosque-anchored housing development outside Dallas” and “campaigning against what he calls the imposition of Islamic law,” per The Guardian.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the gubernatorial nominee in Alabama, has taken it upon himself to become a foremost critic of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, calling him a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America.” 

Other Republicans are red-baiting their hearts out, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) claiming that Medicare for All is a “communist” policy and Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) labeling Democratic immigration policies “crazy communism.” 

Self-proclaimed “MAGA warrior” Mike Collins is going for an “all of the above” approach in his Georgia Senate race, promoting xenophobia; pushing 2020 Big Lie conspiracies; and advocating to compensate some people prosecuted for Jan. 6. (Meanwhile, he’s doing little to distance himself from the many racist extremists in his orbit — including in his family.)

Flirting With Criticism

Republicans in swing states and seats are trying to toe the line, breaking with Trump on specific issues, particularly ones germane to their states or districts. They’re leveling targeted criticism and trying to display independence.

So you’ve got midwestern Senate nominees Mike Rogers in Michigan and Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa calling for an end to the Iran War, saying soaring gas and grocery prices are harming their voters. Both previously supported the war. Last week, Iowa Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks even voted to support removing U.S. forces from Iran.

Rogers has also bucked Trump’s AI boosterism, calling for a “national security framework” on the technology and for a one-year moratorium on new construction in Michigan. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) has gone further in his reelection campaign, sponsoring legislation to make data centers pay their own utility bills.

In Florida, Rep. María Elvira Salazar used her first TV ad of the general election to warn that Trump will lose Latino voters thanks to his overly aggressive immigration enforcement and mass deportation policies. Salazar, who serves as assistant whip, claims that she risks losing her seat in a district Trump won by 15 points. 

Trump Will Always Be Daddy

While most vulnerable Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump, a brave few are hugging him tight. Take Eric Flores, who is running in a South Texas district currently represented by a Democrat, and where Latino voters will determine the result. Praising Trump’s immigration policies, Flores told Fox, “When people say that folks are running away from President Trump, I’ll tell you, I’m certainly not doing that. And let me tell you why: Because he has made promises to South Texas, and he has kept them, especially when we look at border security.” 

We Don’t Know Him

Probably the funniest genre of response comes from Republicans pretending that Trump straight-up doesn’t exist. As John noted in the Brief this week, several Republicans have stripped mentions of Trump from their campaign websites, including Florida congressional candidate Mike Beltran, Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell, and, most recently and notably, Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Daniels. 

Team ‘We’ll Defy Expectations!’ 

Despite all indications that Democrats seem likely to take back the House, Speaker Mike Johnson insists Republicans are going to defy history and “grow the majority.” 

“It’s a contrast election, and people are making a contrast between common-sense solutions and candidates, and really crazy, which is represented by the other side,” Johnson told Fox News Digital in September. “I am very bullish about the outcome on election night.”

Rep. Ryan McKenzie (R-PA), who spoke at the GOP convention, also predicted Republicans are “actually going to defy the historic trends. Why is that? Because the Democrats are so far left they are totally out of touch.”

GOPers Blame Americans’ Data Center Opposition on China

Watching the Super Bowl last winter, I saw a commercial from my local electricity company that seemed a little… political.

Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) was trying to convey something to me that seemed tangentially related to bipartisan data center opposition that has been rising nationwide and is especially poignant in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia corridor also known as “Data Center Alley.” 

“Private power plant companies that control our power supply are failing to meet demand,” the ad said, with PRIVATE POWER PLANT and CONTROL OUR SUPPLY in capital, neon letters. “When there’s a shortage, prices go up.”

The ad was indirect but — and without speaking to the merit of its intentions — the vibe was pretty obviously trying to leverage public outrage about skyrocketing electricity bills related to energy demands from AI data centers. I was struck by the idea that my electric company would wade in any way into such a charged political issue — a self-interested energy corporation joining hands with riled-up townspeople and climate activists against a common enemy.

If you ask Reps. Jason Smith (R-MO) and John Moolenaar (R-MI), that enemy is the Chinese Communist Party.

Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means committee, and Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, sent a letter Tuesday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano blaming American data center opposition on an orchestrated disinformation campaign supported by the Chinese government. Yes, you did read that right.

“This is not an organic grassroots movement,” Smith said of data center opposition. Instead, Chinese-backed nonprofits are being used to “manipulate public discourse surrounding the technological infrastructure necessary to win the AI race.”

Smith and Moolenaar’s proof? An OpenAI report which found Chinese-linked influence over social media content “claiming that data center construction was raising electricity prices.” (It is.) And a report that X, owned by AI mogul Elon Musk, identified 200 bots posting anti-AI stuff on the site. OpenAI found no evidence that the campaign it uncovered influenced public opinion.

Instead, data shows that 58% of registered voters believe data center construction by big companies will do more harm than good, according to a September NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Wednesday. 

Data centers are even more unattractive when they’re local, with 60% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans, responding that they would not be comfortable with a data center in their communities, according to a Pew Research survey published Tuesday. And Pew’s survey also found negative sentiment about data centers increased by 16 points among Republicans between January and August.

This feels like an issue uniting Americans across party lines in grassroots opposition, driven not only by NIMBYism, or even by the documented harms to climate posed by energy-sucking super computers, but also by the desire of the everyman to stand up against entities they believe pose a direct risk to their immediate communities and their pockets.

In attempting to blame anti-AI sentiment on a foreign adversary, Smith and Moolenaar have opted to follow their leader, President Donald Trump, off the “AI opposition is a hoax” cliff. 

Trump has said opposing data center construction will make communities “backwards and poor”; tried to prohibit states from regulating AI; included expanded tax benefits for data center construction in his “Big, Beautiful Bill”; and called disconcerting warnings from AI company CEOs about the risks AI pose to humanity a “hoax.” This week, he’s trying to rebrand the tech from artificial intelligence to superintelligence, a move which may conjure unintended connotations.

The president’s contrary positions on AI and data center construction have pushed Republican politicians, especially those facing competitive midterms, to split from Trump.

While Smith and Moolenaar are both up for reelection, they’re in uncompetitive districts ranked by Cook Political Report as solidly Republican. But Ohio Republican Jon Husted is facing backlash to his once-strong support for data centers as he’s locked in a dead heat with former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Other Senate Republicans are pushing to support Husted’s bill focused on shielding people’s electricity bills from data center energy usage hikes. In Texas, Democrats are hoping their early opposition to data centers can help them win statewide office for the first time in more than two decades. And at least 27 states have passed legislation that datacentertracker.com categorizes as “favorable for communities.”

For what it’s worth, Twitter’s former head of corporate communications told Axios all evidence points to data center gripes being authentic, not the product of a “Chinese psyop.”

“If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something,” communications consultant Jim Prosser told Axios, “it’s probably not a Chinese psyop. It’s probably not a mass delusion people are having on these issues.”

5 Year Plans

no dad, owning a successful lesbian covid conscious bar in western mass was YOUR dream. I’M going to clown school

— leah (@kmewisfc) September 23, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Who was the anonymous White House source cited in the Politico story Trump is using to justify denying the publication access because the reporting “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods”?
2. After effectively shutting down the Kennedy Center when he wasn’t allowed to put his name on it, which culturally significant national landmark is Trump apparently trying to slap his name on next? 
3. Which musician was scheduled to headline a MAGA music festival that ended up getting canceled because it failed to sell more than a handful of VIP tickets?

Answers below

Anti-Vax or Pro Rock?

Campaigning for state auditor in Minnesota, failed gubernatorial candidate and real-life doctor Scott Jensen wants to know why western medicine keeps ignoring the science — from hundreds of years ago. Jensen’s medical license has been challenged for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and he has admitted to “quietly” being a member of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS/AFD), known for its anti-vaccine activism and for its founder, Simone Gold, being involved in Jan. 6. As Jensen told an interviewer, “The notion of electromagnetic powers, of minerals, and rocks, and things like that, that could have curative capabilities, we’ve ignored.” 

Given the widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging machines and the countless rock and mineral-derived chemicals used in modern medicine, we’re uncertain who the “we” is here. But sure, Dr. Jensen, go on. “We” would recommend a bong hit first, but know that your views on legalized weed have changed, despite co-authoring a bill supporting legalization in 2019. Not sure what you have against plants, but good luck with your rocks.

Knowing Where You Live is the Robot’s Job Now

“There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company

Maybe This Should Have Been the Strategy All Along

Trivia answers: 1) JD Vance 2) The Ford Theatre 3) Kid Rock, of course

A Far-Right Meltdown

It usually doesn’t take a lot, but Erick Erickson managed to do it this week: cause the far-right to melt down online. 

He published an article on his Substack called “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff.” It’s Claude-assisted writing, but it gets at something that we at TPM have been covering for a while: the effort, out in the open and behind closed doors, to steer the Republican Party as far to the right as it can go, even if means breaking the steering wheel and crashing the car in the process. 

For the last month, I've been working on tying together the white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and neo-Nazis rising on the right. They not only have common sources of funding, but they are taking over portions of the conservative movement. Finally hitting "publish" in…

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 16, 2026

Erickson built the piece around an Indiana shampoo magnate named Charles Haywood. In retirement, Haywood has become an online book reviewer and the proprietor of a website in which he calls himself “Maximum Leader.” He’s also gotten involved in politics: he contributes money to the Claremont Institute, and promotes a vision of a future, shattered America in which he can become a “warlord.” 

Haywood was a founding member of the Society for American Civil Renewal (SACR), as Erickson notes in the piece. SACR is a men’s only, Christian-only group with members that include the head of the Claremont Institute, venture capitalists, and GOP donors. It describes itself as aiming to place its members in influential positions in government and business, per internal documents I obtained in 2024. 

This goes to the core of the argument that Erickson is making: that a group of white men, some of whom orbit Vice President JD Vance, are covertly inserting themselves into the conservative movement in order to propagate their white nationalist, antisemitic, and Nazi sympathies. 

Erickson’s piece got attention. The Free Press republished a version of it; more moderate conservatives like Jonah Goldberg boosted it. 

Perhaps predictably, this caused a blowup on the online right (many SACR members are extremely online, a fact that’s perhaps not unrelated to their politics). Many of them immediately saw Erickson’s article as part of a broader conspiracy by anti-Trump forces within the Republican Party. Nate Fischer, a venture capitalist and SACR member, described it as an indirect attempt to “smear Vance supporters, and line up behind a Vance opponent to try to wrest back control of the party.”

Andrew Beck, a SACR member and communications strategist, similarly described it to me as an attempt to sully a pro-MAGA Trump successor — he named Vance, Marco Rubio, or Pete Hegseth — by association to SACR and other notables like Nick Fuentes that Erickson describes as one large network in his piece. On X, he noted that while Haywood had provided the “seed money” for SACR, he wasn’t the entire group.

“This was and is a local thing of Christian men building relationships with each other and participating in civic duties in order to effect broader change from the ground up,” Beck told me. “For it [to] be framed any other way is either bad faith or an AI hallucination.”

You may think a men’s-only, Christian-only group, whose membership remains secret but whose identified members are all white, with ambitions to shape society by filling the ranks of a future (or current) government constitutes something more than grassroots organizing. Who am I to decide. 

But the SACR guys are on to something: as Trump declines in popularity and the consequences of far-right government seep into everyone’s daily lives, they may not like how people react. 

A Fool Determined to Believe a Lie

Last week, I somewhat inexplicably assigned myself the task of listening to a two-and-a-half-hour conversation between right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley and Twitch streamer ConorEatsPants (i.e. Charlie Rose for Gen Z. Just kidding, but also, maybe). The breakout clip from the conversation, particularly for critics of Shirley, was a trivia segment where Shirley badly misspelled the word “discipline”; didn’t even attempt to spell “colonel” (though he did recognize it as a homophone without identifying it as such); and guessed that mixing the colors blue and yellow might make orange. 

In his viral video purporting to expose Somali fraud in Minneapolis —  a key part of DHS’s justification for amplifying Operation Metro Surge, which led to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti —  Shirley took particular delight in the fact that one of the daycare centers he was accusing of fraud had misspelled “learning.” His own struggle with spelling, then, was an irony too delicious for his critics to ignore. The clip added fuel to critics’ charge that Shirley isn’t particularly bright, thus making him an easy mark for the Trump administration to enlist in helping spread their propaganda. It didn’t hurt that it was circulating the same week Shirley was scheduled to speak at both Harvard and Yale University.

For a 24-year-old YouTuber who literally can’t spell “discipline,” Shirley has already managed to have quite an impact on American politics. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he is best known for making videos where he confronts members of immigrant communities in blue cities with various fraud accusations, almost inevitably resulting in DHS taking action against these communities (TPM’s Josh Kovensky explained the symbiotic relationship of right-wing influencers like Shirley and DHS back in April). In his speech to the Harvard Republican Club, Shirley spent a good deal of his introduction listing out his accomplishments, primarily as a rebuke to criticism that he doesn’t belong at a storied institution like Harvard. Cited among these accomplishments were the claims that he “helped save America billions of dollars from fraudsters”; “created the most legislatively impactful video in American history (30+ bills related to fraud since MN)”; grew “one of the largest independent journalist platforms on the internet”; sued “California for violating the First Amendment and creating a law directed to stop [Shirley] from exposing their corruption”; and got “a sitting governor who was almost VP to drop out of politics.” 

Whether you view these as accomplishments or specious boasts from a wannabe journalist is almost immaterial to the reality that Shirley’s videos are having an effect, and that his role (witting or not) in the Trump administration continues to grow. In less than a year, Shirley has participated in a White House roundtable on antifa hosted by President Trump; been awarded Citizen Journalist of the Year at an event held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago; has met with and been endorsed by JD Vance, who is leading the newly established “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud”; has met with and been commended by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; and this summer worked with CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in an attempt to find fraud in New York City senior daycare centers. Meanwhile, his YouTube subscribers have swelled to over 2 million. In concluding his list of feats, Shirley acknowledged that he may misspell a word from time to time before smugly questioning what his critics have accomplished.  

Well, I, for one, have watched all two and half hours of a video where Shirley and ConorEatsPants play Fortnite and engage in desultory conversation that hits on topics like girlfriends (i.e. lack thereof), favorite episodes of “The Office”, and whether Lutnick is a pedophile. If you are, like I was, in the dark about ConorEatPants (real name: Conor; full name: unknown), his basic deal is that people watch him play video games on the streaming service Twitch (where he has over 700,000 followers) and he hosts a talk show of sorts called Fortnite Fridays. He’s 27 years old, originally from Atlanta, and while his politics are left-leaning, he has an apolitical online cool that makes him popular on Elon Musk’s X (where he has over 1 million followers). When the Democratic Party’s consulting class talks about politicians needing to appear on podcasts that appeal to young men, people like Conor are who they are talking about (Naturally, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been Conor’s guest on Fortnite Friday).

It’s clear early in Shirley’s appearance that he’s there because he thinks Conor’s cool and that he would rather find common ground outside of politics than defend his position on subjects like immigration. He’s most engaged when the conversation veers into topics related to content creation, such as their mutual appreciation for the Paul brothers (one of Shirley’s early videos was a stunt where he broke into Jake Paul’s wedding) and the most live viewers Conor has had on one of his streams (6 million — Shirley is impressed). Shirley, who is apparently not a gamer and doesn’t understand why people would watch someone play a video game when they can’t even see the gamer’s face, seems genuinely curious to find out how Conor got so popular. 

When the conversation turns to politics, however, Shirley becomes unconvincing. At one point, Conor advises him to abandon the fraud stuff and go back to making stunt videos. When Conor suggests to Shirley that important members of the Trump administration are using him, Shirley pauses for a long time before saying that he doesn’t see it that way. This followed an earlier admission that despite not being a gun person, Shirley owns an AR-15 thanks to a gift from a (presumably right-wing) podcaster.

One reason people continue to question why Shirley is doing what he is doing is that the story he tells in public, and repeats to Conor, doesn’t seem to add up. The gist is that he was on a Mormon mission in Santiago, Chile; learned from Venezuelans about the Darién Gap and migrants coming to America; went to the southern border upon returning to America (now fluent in Spanish) where he claims to have witnessed some combination of government and non-profit fraud involving transporting migrants to New York City; and from there developed and sustained interest in both fraud and illegal immigration. By his own account, he was close to the people he met in South America and had empathy for the plight of migrants. That he would subsequently adopt such an extreme anti-immigrant stance seems odd. Unless he did so because he knew it would make for good content.

During his Harvard speech, Shirley shared a picture from an old notebook outlining a five-year plan for his YouTube channel. In it are a list of goals focused on benchmarks like yearly subscriber and revenue growth. Signs of journalistic ambition are scarce, but he does identify that good types of content might include “interviews/investigations on current subjects or on popular/strong topics” and lists going “undercover in Compton” as a potential idea for a video. He told the audience that every one of those goals had come true, and said of his Minneapolis video that, “no video has ever created so much impact in the history of America!” That would appear to be a wild and erroneous claim if it were not clear that the primary metric Shirley is using to gauge “impact” is the 4 billion views he claims the video has received.

Unfortunately, ConorEatPants was unable to nail down what motivates Nick Shirley, and I can’t claim to know either. Regardless of whether he is sincere in wanting to be an independent journalist, it’s unquestionable that his work is being used to further the political objectives of the Trump administration. Perhaps he shares those objectives. Or maybe what Shirley really wants is to become a YouTube star, and he understands the platform incentives well enough to know that embracing a radical political agenda will help achieve those ends. In this way, he is the one using the likes of Musk, Vance, Lutnick et al. to boost his reach. Whatever is motivating him, the non platform-based metric of his impact in the real world is that people are getting hurt.

Shirley ended his Harvard address by reciting what he said was his favorite quote: “The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.” The quote has been apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, but nobody knows where it really came from, or if anybody actually said it. One day it just appeared on the internet, and then it went viral.

A New Entry in the Unqualified Ambassadors Hall of Fame 

Sorry to the people of Barbados. President Trump announced this week that he was nominating the wife of Lee Greenwood — yes, the “God Bless the USA” guy — as ambassador to Barbados and six other small Caribbean nations including Saint Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Grenada. 

This is par for the course for Trump, who has largely chosen an assortment of pals and hangers-on to serve as ambassadors in his second administration, eschewing career diplomats or anyone with anything resembling a qualification. As I wrote in a previous Weekender, we’re talking about nominating failed candidate and Big Lie advocate Doug Mastriano as ambassador to Slovakia and fellow failed candidate and Big Lie advocate Kari Lake as ambassador to Jamaica. 

Per CBS, Kimberly Greenwood, a former Miss Tennessee, has long known Trump through the Miss Universe pageant, and she has also directed the Miss Tennessee, Miss Mississippi and Miss Georgia competitions. Famously, Trump can’t get through a public appearance without playing “God Bless the USA,” and Lee Greenwood is one of the only artists Trump can reliably get to show up to his events.

It’s only a matter of time before Kid Rock’s kid is nominated as the ambassador to somewhere. 

It’s Spooky Season!

the witch at spirit halloween waiting for me to step on her mat pic.twitter.com/EKVBygo4US

— Sydney Battle (@SydneyBattle) September 15, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. In a typically infuriating move, this former Democratic senator endorsed Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in her reelection campaign. 
2. Three-part question: This NFL team owner booted this rapper from this major pop star’s tour over the rapper’s comments supporting Palestine.
3. Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) submitted a resolution to impeach this Trump Cabinet secretary for “high crimes and misdemeanors” this week.

Answers below

I’m the Problem, It’s Me

“Nobody knows there’s a B in dumb. They think it’s D-U-M.” – The President of the United States

The Bestiality Situation at the FBI

Well, that got weird fast. During a Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI director Kash Patel was grilled about his eyebrow-raising choice to reverse a policy that automatically disqualified people who acknowledged engaging in prostitution or bestiality from joining the bureau. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) pressed Patel to explain the change, asking the very fair question, “Why would you even get into bestiality?” 

According to Patel, his decision was intended to protect trafficking victims who were disqualified for jobs with the FBI because they were forced into bestiality. “We are not into bestiality,” Patel clarified. 

Good to see everything is going normally over at the Federal Bureau of Investigations!

The Dude Just Loves a Monument, Okay?

Marshall Rawson may have gone to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, but he says it’s not what it looks like. The Republican nominee for Florida’s House District 10 keeps insisting he’s not mad about TPM reporter Christopher Mathias’ exclusive story detailing his attendance at the event and the donations he’s received from some of the country’s most infamous white nationalists. 

“I’ll continue to defend historical monuments,” Rawson said in a Facebook post about the article that also referenced his “long-standing efforts to preserve southern military monuments.” He’d made similar comments to Chris in his statement for the story, saying “Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history.”

The guy just loves monuments, okay? 

As Chris points out, Rawson has not responded to some of the other details in the piece that are perhaps a bit more pertinent than his stance on statues, like whether he condones slavery and lynching, thinks gay people should be executed, or acknowledges that some of his allies at Charlottesville committed brutal acts of violence that day. 

Charlottesville’s Long Shadow and the American Right’s WNBA Obsession

Florida Dems Picked Up Chris’ Reporting on Unite the Right

The Florida Democratic Party is demanding that the local GOP denounce their nominee for Florida House District 10, Marshall Rawson, after TPM reporter Chris Mathias revealed that Rawson marched at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally with the League of the South. Chris’ reporting made a big national splash, too, getting picked up by The New Republic, Washington Post, The Guardian, MS Now, The Independent, The Handbasket the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, Politico’s Florida Playbook, and local outlets including the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald, and Gainesville Sun

Kate Goes Deep on the Right’s WNBA Fixation

We are happy to report that Kate is continuing to live her dream by moonlighting as a sports reporter. She joined the Title IX podcast this week to talk about right-wing outrage about the WNBA, and how it relates to Christian nationalism and traditional gender roles.

“What could be a bigger threat in that landscape than the WNBA, a league of professional women athletes who at least — you know, recently, are starting to be paid you know, a lot of money for what they do, and it’s a league made up of predominantly Black women and many, many gay women, right?” she said. “And then add on top of that that it’s becoming massively popular. The threat is growing, right? Like other people are kind of joining this bandwagon, and all of that has been scary to them for a long time.”

Macklemore Makes International News

Trivia answers: 1) Former Sen. Joe Manchin 2) Robert Kraft, Macklemore, and Ed Sheeran 3) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth