Right-Wingers Already Have a Wild Conspiracy Theory About Senator Menendez

Right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on Friday accused the Department of Justice of trying to cover up its biases by indicting a Democratic senator.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez was indicted on federal bribery charges Friday. The indictment accuses Menendez and his wife of accepting hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and “luxury vehicle and home furnishings.”

But rather than accept the indictment shows that the Justice Department is actually a neutral entity, Kirk unveiled some convoluted logic to supposedly prove his original belief.

“The way that the fourth branch of government operates is with intentionality. There are no mistakes,” he said on his podcast.

“They’re doing this to create the appearance of impartiality so that they can continue their jihad against Donald Trump.”

Republicans have repeatedly argued that the Justice Department has been weaponized against Trump, as evidenced by the many, many indictments against him. Kirk’s new conspiracy theory shows just how many mental hoops they will jump through to continue believing that the government is out to get them.

This isn’t the first time that conservatives have moved the goalposts. In August, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed U.S. Attorney David Weiss as special counsel to investigate Hunter Biden. Weiss was already overseeing the investigation and had negotiated a plea deal that the GOP hated. Republicans alleged that the Justice Department impeded Weiss’s investigation into Hunter Biden by refusing to give him special counsel status.

But in response to Garland giving a Trump-appointed attorney independent operating power, Republicans then began to argue that the whole thing was a cover-up.

Ron DeSantis’s struggles on the campaign trail have eroded his influence back home in Florida, and even once-close allies are revolting against his control.

DeSantis was crowned early on as the natural successor to Donald Trump: A demagogic culture warrior, but younger and more disciplined—he was a figure who could appeal, in theory, both to MAGA diehards and Trump skeptics. When he launched his campaign, he was fresh off a series of victories at home. The Republican-controlled Florida state legislature had helped him pass multiple draconian measures limiting LGBTQ rights, educational freedom, and abortion access. While candidates backed by Trump struggled in the 2022 midterms, DeSantis romped to victory, winning by nearly 20 points.

But he has plummeted dramatically in the polls recently, and Florida Republicans are ready to move on, Politico reported Friday.

“You don’t get the assumption they are measuring drapes anymore,” a Republican consultant in Tallahassee told Politico, speaking anonymously. “They are waiting for him to drop out.”

And even if DeSantis does drop out and return to his gubernatorial duties, he may find his power in the Sunshine State has been dramatically curbed.

Republican state Representative Daniel Perez told his colleagues this week to be careful going forward, warning that the “problem with wielding the power of government like a hammer is that the people start looking like nails.”

Perez has denied that he was indirectly speaking to DeSantis, but another Tallahassee lobbyist said it was a signal to the governor that the legislature would no longer act as a “conveyor belt” for whatever laws he wants.

Meanwhile, the state Republican Party revoked a DeSantis-backed pledge to endorse whoever the Republican presidential nominee is. Front-runner Donald Trump’s supporters have been calling for such a reversal.

At Pasco-Hernando State College, the board of trustees—stacked with DeSantis allies—passed over a DeSantis official for the college president.

Even one of DeSantis’s former biggest donors, billionaire Ken Griffin, has yet to back DeSantis for president. Griffin cited the governor’s weird feud with Disney and said he doesn’t know who DeSantis is trying to win over.

“There’s no love lost between the legislature and DeSantis,” a third Tallahassee lobbyist told Politico. “They are waiting long enough to see the king drained of all his power. It’s a slow-motion coup.”

Medical implant company Neuralink killed at least a dozen monkeys through animal testing, after first subjecting the primates to horrifying conditions, despite founder Elon Musk’s claims otherwise, according to a new WIRED report.

Musk announced Wednesday that Neuralink was ready to start human trials, despite widespread concerns about the effects of the implant and the company’s animal testing methods. But Musk had assured his followers 10 days earlier that no monkey test subjects died due to the implant. Instead, Musk insisted that the company had conducted its early tests on monkeys that were already close to death.

Except, it turns out that wasn’t the case. That same day, WIRED published a report that blew Musk’s claim to bits.

Musk’s statement is “ridiculous” and even a “straight fabrication,” a former Neuralink employee told WIRED, speaking anonymously. “We had these monkeys for a year or so before any surgery was performed.”

Neuralink’s monkeys were also fairly young, according to a doctoral candidate who is working at the California National Primate Research Center, which helped Neuralink conduct its tests. The candidate, also speaking anonymously, told WIRED that “it’s hard to imagine these monkeys, who were not adults, were terminal for some reason.”

Veterinary records show that as many as a dozen monkeys had to be euthanized after they were implanted with Neuralink devices because they developed agonizing complications, WIRED reported Wednesday. The monkeys’ issues included bloody diarrhea, partial paralysis, and cerebral edema, or “brain swelling.”

One monkey dislodged an implant connector because it kept yanking on the device. When veterinarians conducted surgery to repair the device, they found the implant area had become infected—and couldn’t be healed because the device was blocking their access.

Another monkey kept picking at her implant until it bled, and would repeatedly press her head to the floor in a sign of pain or discomfort. She became lethargic, opting to lie on the floor of her cage and hold hands with her roommate, until she saw lab workers. Then she would start to shake uncontrollably. After she was euthanized, a necropsy revealed the implant had severely damaged her brain.

Yet another monkey had to be euthanized after his implant screws became so loose that the whole device could “easily be lifted out,” according to the necropsy report. The report also said that “the failure of this implant can be considered purely mechanical.”

Neuralink is already under two federal investigations over its animal testing practices. The Department of Agriculture opened an investigation in December 2022. At the time, Reuters reported that Neuralink had killed about 1,500 animals during testing since 2018.

The Department of Transportation opened another investigation in 2023 over allegations that Neuralink was transporting antibiotic-resistant pathogens in an unsafe manner.

New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez has been indicted on federal bribery charges, the Department of Justice announced Friday.

The indictment alleges that Menendez, who is the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and his wife, Nadine Menendez, received hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, gold bars, and “luxury vehicle and home furnishings,” from three New Jersey businessmen.

In return for the bribes, Menendez reportedly used his office to send aid to the Egyptian military, “to pressure the Department of Agriculture to protect a business monopoly [one] contact had from Egypt,” per CNN, and to help other alleged bribers’ businesses. The “corrupt relationship” detailed in the indictment spanned from 2018 to 2022.

Menendez and his wife did little to hide their allegedly ill-begotten gains, despite the fact that the New Jersey senator had previously been indicted on similar charges in 2015—although Menendez was let off the hook after the jury failed to return a verdict. “Over $480,000 in cash—much of it stuffed into envelopes and hidden in clothing, closets and a safe—was discovered in the home,” according to the indictment.

Envelopes of cash were allegedly discovered hidden inside jackets that literally had Menendez’s name on them. Additionally, the gold bars that were discovered at Menendez’s home had serial numbers, making them traceable.

Another $70,000 in cash was allegedly found in an envelope in Nadine Menendez’s safety deposit box. According to the indictment, the envelope containing the cash had fingerprints from Fred Daibes, one of the three businessmen implicated in the indictment, or his driver. Menendez didn’t even bother to switch the envelope after he received the payment.

Menendez has been under investigation for a year led by the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, Damian Williams.

The charges are significant. They also undercut numerous allegations made by Donald Trump and others that the numerous federal charges he is currently facing are a heinous plot meant to undermine his surging presidential campaign.

Clarence Thomas has secretly participated in events for the Koch donor network for at least a decade, despite the fact that the group has brought cases before the Supreme Court, according to a bombshell new ProPublica report.

“I can’t imagine—it takes my breath away, frankly—that he would go to a Koch network event for donors,” John E. Jones III, a retired federal judge appointed by George W. Bush, told ProPublica. “What you’re seeing is a slow creep toward unethical behavior. Do it if you can get away with it.”

The Koch network is one of the biggest and most influential political organizations in the United States. Over the past 50 years, brothers Charles and David Koch have helped bring about the rise of the Tea Party and sought to slash government regulatory agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency.

The first mention of Thomas in connection with the Koch network, recently rebranded as Stand Together, was in 2010, when donors received an event invitation that said the Supreme Court justice had spoken at a previous summit.

He also spoke at an event in 2018, when he was flown in on a private jet. In now classic Thomas fashion, he revealed none of these connections on his financial disclosure forms. It is unclear who paid for the private jet that took him to the 2018 fundraising event. But all of his appearances were arranged with the help of dark-money king Leonard Leo.

Aside from appearing at Koch network events as a draw to donors, Thomas has also interacted more personally with the Koch brothers for a long time at the Bohemian Grove, which ProPublica describes as a “secretive all-men’s retreat in Northern California” that attracts major corporate and political players.

Thomas has attended Bohemian Grove retreats for more than two decades as a guest of his longtime, increasingly problematic friend Harlan Crow. It costs thousands of dollars for a member to bring a guest to the Grove, but witnesses told ProPublica that Thomas was there almost every year. He did not disclose many of those trips.

Crow, a Republican billionaire megadonor and Nazi memorabilia collector, has repeatedly lavished Thomas with expensive gifts. These include island-hopping yacht vacations, private school tuition for Thomas’s nephew, and buying and renovating a Thomas family property, where Thomas’s mother still lives.

During the period when Thomas has been documented spending time with the Koch network, his position on government regulation has shifted dramatically. The most significant example is the 1984 case of Chevron v. NRDC, which found that government agencies are responsible for determining the rules that put laws into effect.

The Koch network has repeatedly challenged this precedent over the years. Thomas wrote the majority opinion in a 2005 case that expanded the protections from Chevron. By 2020, he had rejected his own opinion as unconstitutional.

In the upcoming Supreme Court term, the justices will hear a case that could overturn the Chevron precedent. Thomas’s shocking switch could help deliver the Koch network a major victory.

“What we’re seeing emerge is someone who is living his professional life in a way that’s seeing these extrajudicial opportunities as a perk of the office,” Charles Geyh, a judicial ethics expert at Indiana University law school, said to ProPublica about Thomas. “There’s a culture of impartiality that’s really at risk here.”

Donald Trump staunchly refused to wear a mask during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, and a big reason why is that he didn’t want to smudge his makeup, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson has revealed.

Hutchinson worked as the top assistant to Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, and she eventually became a star witness for the House January 6 investigative committee. She reveals Trump’s turning point on masks in her new book Enough, The Guardian reported Thursday.

Trump toured a Honeywell mask-making factory in May 2020, and he sparked criticism for not wearing a mask during the tour. He told reporters he chose not to after the Honeywell chief executive gave him the go-ahead.

But Hutchinson writes that Trump initially chose to wear a white mask, and then asked staffers what they thought.

“I slowly shook my head,” Hutchinson says. “The president pulled the mask off and asked why I thought he should not wear it.”

“I pointed at the straps of the N95 I was holding. When he looked at the straps of his mask, he saw they were covered in bronzer.”

Trump immediately decided to forgo the mask, according to Hutchinson, who wrote, “‘Why did no one else tell me that?” he snapped. “I’m not wearing this thing.”

Trump has regularly been mocked for his distinct orange complexion. People often speculate whether he uses makeup or fake tan to get his skin to that particular shade.

Trump’s refusal to wear a mask backfired spectacularly, and he tested positive for Covid on September 26, 2020. He and Meadows hid his diagnosis for several days and didn’t announce it publicly until October 2. Those six days were just enough time for Trump to infect Chris Christie.

Christie said in December 2021 that it was “undeniable” Trump had given him Covid. He also blasted Meadows for not warning anyone that Trump was sick.

“I would have worn a mask if I knew that,” Christie told PBS. “[Meadows] didn’t tell us.”

“I went into the hospital in the intensive care unit. He didn’t call and tell me. So I think that’s inexcusable.”

David Brooks is getting absolutely roasted over a picture of a burger. It all began on Wednesday evening when Brooks, a political columnist for The New York Times, shared a photo of his meal at Newark Airport on X, formerly known as Twitter:

Brooks claimed that the burger, fries, and liquor cost him $78—a clear sign of why “Americans think the economy is terrible.” It didn’t take long, however, for the internet to pounce on Brooks for the sheer impossibility of the price that he’d suggested.

Author and minor Twitter celebrity Joyce Carol Oates was one of many to jump on Brooks’s claim.

Like Oates, users mostly wanted to know what exactly was in Brooks’s glass… 

… and how many of those he’d ordered before he decided to begin posting his astute economic analysis.

Soon, the Newark Airport restaurant was identified—and a small disclaimer appeared beneath Brooks’s original post with a link to the menu from the restaurant. The reader context noted: “Based on the similar table, glass, chair, sheet and cut of fries, this is the Smokehouse Restaurant in Newark Airport Terminal A. The burger and fries cost $17.”

(The additional reader context then briefly disappeared, despite being very helpful.)

Even the restaurant responded to Brooks’s post, confirming the insanity of his claim. “Looks like someone was knocking back drinks,” the restaurant posted on Facebook. “Bar tab was almost 80% and he’s complaining about the cost of the meal.”

Americans don’t think the economy is terrible because of inflated prices at the airport. But they might be swayed by commentators like Brooks who alternate between touting how great American capitalism is and cherry-picking details from their own upper-class lifestyle as proof that we’re nearing the end.

Airport food is expensive—but it’s not that expensive. Maybe Brooks could use this opportunity to pivot into speculative fiction, but in the meantime, if he ever wants to comment on economic news, he may want to lay off the whiskey first.

Democratic Representative Angie Craig is taking aim at House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the looming Republican-prompted government shutdown with an excellently named bill.

Craig introduced the “My Constituents Cannot Afford Rebellious Tantrums, Handle Your Shutdown Act,” or the “MCCARTHY Shutdown Act,” Wednesday afternoon. The bill would temporarily block the paychecks of Congress members during a government shutdown. Currently, shutdowns do not affect pay for lawmakers, but they stop pay for all other federal employees.

“It’s ridiculous that we still get paid while folks like TSA workers are asked to work without a paycheck,” Craig said in a statement announcing the bill.

The bill is unlikely to pass (or even make it to a floor vote in) the Republican-controlled House, but it makes a major point as the shutdown looms ever closer.

Congress is just days away from its September 30 deadline—and House Republicans can’t even begin debate on the Defense Department appropriations bill. The House failed yet again to pass the bill on Thursday, when five Republicans broke from their party to block a procedural rule to begin debating the appropriations measure.

The Republican Party is in full shambles, and they have begun to turn on each other over government spending. Tim Burchett called his party “very dysfunctional,” while Mike Lawler said it was “pathetic” that Republicans are “throwing a temper tantrum.”

But the farthest-right wing of the House is insisting that they will force a government shutdown unless federal spending is cut dramatically. Part of the reason they don’t fear a shutdown is that it has no consequences for them. As Craig pointed out, they still get paid.

House Republicans failed Thursday to pass a Defense Department budget bill, a sign of how much internal chaos the party is struggling with.

The House rejected a procedural rule to begin debate on the bill by a vote of 212–216. Far-right Republicans Marjorie Taylor Greene, Dan Bishop, Andy Biggs, Eli Crane, and Matthew Rosendale broke from their party to kill the measure.

It was the second failed rules vote in a week on defense appropriations. It is incredibly rare for rules votes like this to fail, an indication of the fact that Republicans are in full disarray.

Mike Lawler, a moderate Republican, slammed his fellow party members. “They have to come to a realization: If they are unable or unwilling to govern, others will. And in a divided government where you have Democrats controlling the Senate, a Democrat controlling the White House, there needs to be a realization that you’re not going to get everything you want,” he said.

“Just throwing a temper tantrum and stomping your feet, frankly, not only is it wrong—it’s pathetic.”

Tim Burchett criticized Republicans for being “very dysfunctional right now.” He then made a rare and shocking admission: “Speaker Pelosi, love her or hate her, she put something out there and they’d rally around it.”

The farthest-right wing of the House has insisted it will block all appropriations bills unless funding is cut dramatically. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy was confident Wednesday night that he had the votes to pass the defense bill, which would have been a major step forward in the stalemate. But he failed to convince the last five holdouts, even after a two-and-a-half-hour party meeting.

The danger now is that the House will not reach a resolution by the September 30 deadline. McCarthy has insisted on passing bills with just Republican votes, but given his razor-thin majority, that clearly isn’t always possible.

Even if House Republicans do manage to pass a bill, if it isn’t a clean bill, it will likely fail in the Democratic-controlled Senate. The risk of a government shutdown after the September 30 deadline is looming ever larger.

And Republicans, rather than trying to come together, are turning on each other instead. Most of the Republican holdouts are members of the Freedom Caucus, which was largely responsible for the 15 agonizing rounds of voting for House speaker in January.

McCarthy ultimately won, but only after making multiple concessions to the caucus. One concession was agreeing to restore the motion to vacate, which would allow any single member of the House to call for a vote to remove him. Some lawmakers are threatening to strip McCarthy of the gavel over the spending bills.

There’s a new boss in town: Lachlan Murdoch will take the reins at News Corp and Fox Corp, after his father Rupert Murdoch announced Thursday he was stepping down.

Although he previously fled from both his father’s business and the spotlight, Lachlan Murdoch has slowly made his way back up the ranks over the past nearly two decades. In that time, he has ceased to shy away from making his positions clear.

And if anything, he’s even farther right than his father. Here are five things to know about the new head honcho.

1. He defended the “great replacement theory.”

In 2021, then–Fox star Tucker Carlson did a segment promoting the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.”

Murdoch defended Carlson against criticism from the Anti-Defamation League, brushing off concerns that Carlson was promoting the theory. Murdoch argued that Carlson had said, “White replacement theory? No, no, this is a voting rights question.” But considering the racist nature of the conspiracy, it’s hard to see how framing it as “people of color voting” is any better.

2. He doesn’t see an issue with Fox’s programming strategy.

After Carlson was unceremoniously fired in April, Murdoch assured investors that the network’s approach to programming wouldn’t change.

“There’s no change to our programming strategy at Fox News,” he said in a May earnings call. “It’s obviously a successful strategy.”

If by “successful,” he means, “resulting in a slew of defamation lawsuits for spreading lies,” then sure. But Murdoch appears to have stayed true to his word, as host Jesse Watters took over Carlson’s coveted prime-time slot.

3. He helped push 2020 election conspiracy theories.

After the 2020 election, Murdoch said that Fox’s coverage should be “a huge celebration” of Donald Trump. During a pro-Trump rally, Murdoch criticized the Fox reporter for covering it in a way that was “smug and obnoxious.” That reporter was later fired.

In its defamation lawsuit against Fox, Dominion Voting Systems specifically named Lachlan as a key figure in spreading election falsehoods. Dominion said he had “direct” involvement in broadcasting the lies about election fraud.

Rupert Murdoch and other Fox executives have since admitted they knew that the election fraud conspiracies were false, but they continued to allow Trump’s allies to push the theories on air.

4. He used the Ukraine War to attack The 1619 Project.

During a March 2022 speech in Sydney, Murdoch discussed the importance of defending democracy and sovereignty, for instance in Ukraine. He said he was “shocked” to see a poll that found that a “bare majority” of Americans would defend the United States against an invasion.

Murdoch blamed The 1619 Project, Nikole Hannah-Jones’s seminal work on slavery and its legacy in the U.S. He said the piece “recast American exceptionalism as racist from inception.”

“It has done great damage,” Murdoch said.

5. He said Fox is the “loyal opposition” to the Biden administration.

A few months after Joe Biden took office, Lachlan Murdoch abandoned all pretense of Fox being a reasonable news outlet. Speaking at a Morgan Stanley investor conference in March 2021, Murdoch said Fox News would act as “the loyal opposition” to the Biden administration.

He reasoned it would be good for the company’s bottom line. “The main beneficiary of the Trump administration from a ratings point of view was MSNBC … and that’s because they were the loyal opposition,” he said. “That’s what our job is now with the Biden administration, and you’ll see our ratings really improve from here.”