Elon Musk Invites Alex Jones to Explain That “Whole Sandy Hook Thing”

Alex Jones says he was just playing “devil’s advocate” when he spent all those years claiming the Sandy Hook shooting was a false flag operation.

Elon Musk spoke with the far-right conspiracy theorist during a livestream on X, formerly Twitter, on Sunday. When Musk asked Jones about “the whole Sandy Hook thing,” Jones tried to shirk responsibility.

The livestream, co-hosted by Musk and influencer Mario Nawfal, occurred shortly after Musk restored the X account of the disgraced InfoWars host. On Saturday, Musk had posted an X poll asking users whether he should “reinstate” Jones on the platform. About 70 percent of users voted “Yes.” Jones and his InfoWars account were initially banned from Twitter in 2018 for “abusive behavior.”

As part of replatforming the conspiracy theorist, Musk gave Jones the space to explain away his misinformation campaign, in which he tried to convince the public that the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, which killed 20 children and six teachers and staff, was staged. Sandy Hook families secured a $1.5 billion judgment against the InfoWars host after winning a lawsuit over his conspiracy theories.

“Obviously, it would be heartless and cruel to deny a school shooting of children or attack the parents or anyone who was involved,” Musk said, before giving Jones the opportunity to lie about having done that very thing.

“Thank you for allowing me back into the public square so that I can actually tell the world what really happened,” Jones said.

Jones proceeded to make several excuses for his actions, explaining that he’d never gone to college and was not professionally trained. “I had a very small operation and did not even understand how powerful I was,” Jones said.

When the shooting at Sandy Hook elementary happened, “the internet exploded,” Jones said. “It was the top story off and on for years, with all these professors and former school safety people and all of them saying they believed it was a drill, and I simply covered them covering that.”

Jones added that he has already apologized many times and is sorry if he hurt anyone’s feelings.

“I apologize on every show. And I’ll say it again, I apologize that I just gave my commentary because I’m really just a guy … talk radio host. So I do that on the internet. I just take calls, and interview guests, and that I play devil’s advocate,” Jones explained. “And if that hurt people’s feelings, I apologize. But I did not send people to your houses. I did not pee on graves. I don’t know any of the stuff that went on.”

Jones’s return to X is just another of the many ways that Musk has allowed the platform to embrace and empower alt-right voices, making it increasingly less usable for any sane person.

Even Donald Trump’s own legal team can’t predict his next moves.

On Sunday, the former president announced that he actually will not be testifying in his civil fraud trial as planned on Monday.

Trump’s decision was quite a departure from what his attorney Alina Habba said just two days earlier.

“He is so firmly against what is happening in this court and so firmly for the old America that we know, not this America, that he will take that stand on Monday,” Habba assured the press. “He will open himself up to whatever they want because he’s not afraid. People that are afraid cower. President Trump doesn’t cower.”

On Truth Social, however, Trump wrote that he already testified and has nothing more to say.

“THIS IS A COMPLETE & TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE (BIDEN CAMPAIGN!) WITCH HUNT, THAT WILL DO NOTHING BUT KEEP BUSINESSES OUT OF NEW YORK,” the 2024 Republican candidate wrote Sunday. “I WILL NOT BE TESTIFYING ON MONDAY.”

The civil fraud trial comes from New York Attorney General Letitia James who filed a lawsuit accusing top Trump Organization executives of misleading insurers and banks with inflated financial statements.

In previous testimony in the trial, Trump essentially admitted to fraud—claiming it was the responsibility of lenders to fact-check his organization’s financial documents. During his last testimony on November 6, Trump was scolded by Justice Arthur Engoron.

“No speeches,” Engoron said. “This is not a political rally.”

This week’s GOP-led impeachment effort against the President is so extreme that even a Fox & Friends host had a hard time getting on board.

Fox anchor Steve Doocy appeared taken aback and apprehensive to participate in a Monday morning segment on the show in which his co-hosts misrepresented outdated polling data to allege that Hunter Biden’s dealings were shady “enough” to warrant unseating his father from the presidency.

“The Republicans at this point don’t have—they’ve got a lot of ledgers and spreadsheets—but they have not connected the dots,” Doocy said while his co-hosts squirmed.

“They’ve connected the dots, the Department of Justice did, on Hunter, but they have not shown where Joe Biden, you know, did anything illegally,” he added.

The segment reached back to a September poll by CNN that found the majority of Americans—61 percent—felt that the president was involved in his son’s business dealings, while 38 percent felt that Biden didn’t have any involvement in his son’s business during his vice presidency.

But a lot has happened since September, including a shallow House impeachment inquiry—the first in U.S. history to move forward without a vote—that failed to present solid evidence of corruption or bribery and included witnesses and members publicly admitting that they did not have any evidence that rose to the level of impeaching Biden, reported Mediaite.

Doocy then redirected attention toward Hunter Biden’s closed-door deposition scheduled for Wednesday, announcing that Republicans are threatening contempt of Congress if the president’s son is a no-show.

“Ultimately, on this show, we’ve been calling for Hunter to go and sit in a chair on Capitol Hill in front of the TV cameras for the last year,” Doocy said. “Now Hunter’s lawyer, Abbe Lowell, says he will do that, but Comer and Jim Jordan say, no, it’s not negotiable, he’s got to be in private. According to Hunter Biden’s team, they don’t want to do it because of leaks and stuff like that.”

The organizers behind the December charity pub crawl lovingly dubbed SantaCon appear to be a little heavier on the con than the spirit of giving.

Over the last decade, the group’s organizers claim to have raised more than $1 million for charitable causes, according to their website, but not much of that money seems to have gone to charity. Instead, they blew more than a third of the funds on bad crypto investments and groups tied to Burning Man, ultimately giving less than a fifth of that money to actual nonprofits, according to a Gothamist analysis of the group’s financial documents.

The group’s biggest act of giving—more than $66,000—went to a for-profit film production crew called Spectaculum Productions, which made the medical fraud documentary At Your Cervix.

The lion’s share of the money raised by SantaCon—$832,000, or 59 percent—goes to maintenance, according to the group’s founder and director, Stefan Pildes, who told Gothamist that the bills add up for the single-day event, citing expenditures like temporary staff, street permits, and D.J.s.

“It’s not a small undertaking,” Pildes said.

SantaCon falls under the helm of a tax-exempt nonprofit, Participatory Safety. And while anybody can join the citywide bar hop for free, they also offer participants a $15 “Santa Badge” that comes with additional benefits. That has helped the outfit grow tremendously, though the money is specifically described as set aside for “Santa’s charity drive,” according to SantaCon’s website.

“Regardless of what they want to label it, throwing the party is not a charitable activity,” Lloyd Mayer, a Notre Dame University Law School professor, told the outlet. “It’s great to go to this party, right? But don’t pat yourself on the back that you’re helping out the Girl Scouts.” SantaCon organizers and participants regularly tout their group’s charitable side as a shield against allegations that it is a drunken free-for-all that leaves parts of New York City filthy. Even without any waste—and there seems to be quite a bit of it—it’s a lackluster charitable organization, raising barely more than $100,000 a year.

Russia resumed its cruise missile attack on Kyiv after an 80-day hiatus early Friday morning, an action that critics say is the direct result of Republicans blocking a foreign aid package to help Ukraine.

The two-hour barrage was impeded by air defenses that thwarted all missiles headed for the Ukrainian capital, according to the Kyiv city military administration. Other missiles resulted in casualties, including one that struck the city of Pavlohrad, which killed one and injured four others, and another that landed in the eastern Kharkiv region and killed one person and injured another seven, according to CNN.

The missile barrage comes just two days after Senate Republicans voted to block a $110.5 billion emergency spending bill for Ukraine and Israel. Putin allies celebrated America’s right-wing party for what they interpreted as the first step in the total withdrawal of U.S. support from Ukraine.

“Well done, Republicans! They’re standing firm! That’s good for us,” said propagandist Olga Skabeeva on Russian state TV, grinning.

“This will be a great revelation to other countries. It is even more dangerous to be a friend of the United States than its enemy. In the end, they will abandon you, leaving nothing but the scorched earth on your territory,” said Golovanov Time host Roman Golovanov, according to The Daily Beast.

And Putin loyalists made it clear they had another reason to celebrate, predicting that the failed aid package would lend itself to the downfall of President Joe Biden and the subsequent return of Donald Trump.

“The downfall of Ukraine means the downfall of Biden! Two birds with one stone,” said America analyst Dmitry Drobnitsky, the Beast reported.

The foreign aid package is tied up in a pseudo hostage situation as Republicans hound Democrats for an extreme border security package that includes Trump-tried policies—something that the White House has said it’s open to.

Republicans have been unable to prove that President Joe Biden is guilty of wrongdoing, and on Friday, even Fox News was forced to admit it.

The House is expected to vote next week on whether to formally open an impeachment inquiry into Biden. Republicans have for months accused Biden of corruption and of benefiting from his son Hunter’s overseas business, but they have yet to produce any actual proof.

“The House Oversight Committee has been at this for years, and they have so far not been able to provide any concrete evidence that Joe Biden personally profited from his son Hunter’s overseas business,” Fox reporter Peter Doocy said Friday, clearly physically struggling to say the word “not.”

“But they are going to try again with this impeachment inquiry that’s set to start next week.”

This isn’t the first time that Fox has acknowledged Republicans have no proof of Biden’s alleged criminal behavior. In May, Fox & Friends host Steve Doocy, who is Peter Doocy’s father, pressed Representative James Comer about the investigation. Comer, who has spearheaded the investigation, has been one of the most vocal lawmakers in pushing the accusations against the Bidens.

“You don’t actually have any facts to that point. You’ve got some circumstantial evidence,” Doocy said. “And the other thing is, of all those names, the one person who didn’t profit is—there’s no evidence that Joe Biden did anything illegally.”

Republicans continue to insist that Biden and his family are guilty of corruption, despite every piece of evidence they produce failing to show that the president was involved. Even the GOP’s own star witnesses have repeatedly refuted the lawmakers’ claims. As a result, Republicans have resorted to the most bonkers logic to back up their own accusations.

Donald Trump is on to his next big, white, election-engineering whale.

The former president and his far-right associates have moved on from targeting Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic and are now attempting to harpoon a system meant to detect and prevent voter fraud, the Electronic Registration Information Center, better known as ERIC.

So far this year, Trump has baselessly claimed that the voting accuracy system is a “terrible Voter Registration System that ‘pumps the rolls’ for Democrats and does nothing to clean them up,” and has openly speculated how he might make the system “illegal” across the country should he regain the White House, reports Rolling Stone.

Making a political hooplah out of a system designed by a nonpartisan group in 2012 holds a bounty of possibilities for Trump in 2024, including seeding more chaos in the aftermath of Election Day than he did in 2020.

Trump and his allies’ efforts to discredit the system include attempting to get a swath of GOP-led states to depart from the platform. Louisiana led the bunch, removing itself from ERIC in 2022. Since then, Alabama, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Ohio, Virginia, and West Virginia have done so too—dropping its membership to 25 states plus Washington, D.C.—though more resignations are anticipated, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

ERIC, in truth, is nothing short of a software engineering marvel that allows states to compare their voter rolls against other states’. Operated by a staff of three with no philanthropic funding, ERIC provides election officials with reports on potential inaccuracies in voter lists and identifies people who are registered to vote in more than one state, or inaccurately registered multiple times in a single state, from data collected from state records like change of address records, DMV data, and Social Security Administration death records.

If we lived in a world where Trump was motivated by more than an unimpeded ascent to power, you might be fooled into thinking that this is exactly the kind of system he cried out for after losing the last election. Without it, experts say that voting systems in those states are “likely to be significantly less accurate” and have the potential to “fuel false claims of potential voter fraud.”

“Faulty voter files create long lines on Election Day, delays in getting mail-in ballots, an increase in provisional ballots, and delays in determining a winner,” ERIC co-founder David Becker, who resigned from his role as executive director of the program following a right-wing pressure campaign, told Rolling Stone.

“The bigger potential damage here is that election losers—people who have lost an election or perceive themselves to be about to lose an election—will have more time and more space to create false narratives about an election being stolen,” Becker added. “The more problems at the polls, the more lines, the more provisional ballots, the longer it takes to count overall ballots and get an unofficial winner, those all feed into the potential for chaos and even incitement to violence by election losers.”

A new study found that the number of people who travel out of their home state for an abortion has doubled since the nationwide right to the procedure was rolled back.

Nearly one in five patients traveled out of state for abortion care in the first six months of the year, according to a study released Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute. In comparison, during the same period in 2020 (two years before Roe v. Wade was overturned), just one in 10 patients had to travel for care.

“We knew that more people have been traveling across state lines for abortion since the end of Roe, but these findings are stunning nonetheless, and powerfully illustrate just how disruptive the overturning of Roe has been for tens of thousands of abortion patients,” Isaac Maddow-Zimet, a Guttmacher data scientists and the study lead, said in the press release.

The study found that people who have to travel tend to be from states with total abortion bans or short windows when abortions are allowed. The patients then travel to neighboring states with more open abortion rules. Some of the most popular states for abortion seekers in the first half of 2023 include Florida, Illinois, Kansas, Colorado, and North Carolina.

Researchers also noted that their study does not “capture the experiences of people for whom abortion bans or increased restrictions have proven impossible to navigate.” This includes people who can’t afford to travel or are unable to due to disability. People of color tend to be hit hardest by abortion bans because of “persistent racial and economic oppression.”

Within a month of Roe being overturned, Colorado abortion clinics reported that wait times had doubled due to the surge in out-of-state patients. In 2023, though, Illinois saw the largest increase in out-of-state patients because it borders Indiana, Kentucky, and Missouri, all of which have completely banned abortion.

The most popular states for abortion seekers has likely changed, though, after North Carolina Republicans in May successfully forced through a law banning abortion after 12 weeks. In Florida, the state’s 15-week abortion ban went before the state Supreme Court in September. If the court upholds the law, then an even more restrictive measure banning abortion at six weeks—before most people know they are pregnant—will go into effect. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed the hugely unpopular bill in April.

Abortion travel may also be affected by the growing “brain drain” out of Republican-led states. Young professionals such as ob-gyns have begun leaving red states due to restrictive GOP laws and threats of repercussions for simply doing their job. If someone needs an abortion and lives in a state where the procedure is technically legal, they may still need to travel out of state because there just isn’t anywhere to get an abortion nearby.

The White House’s involvement in Congress’s border talks appears to be taking a hard-right turn.

Immigration officials in the Biden administration have signaled to Senate Republicans that they’re open to a swath of Democrat-opposed border policies, including some that were previously tried by Donald Trump, reported The Wall Street Journal.

Those include alterations to the asylum process that would make it harder for migrants to get full asylum, by tightening the initial screening procedure, and expanding a fast-track deportation program for use across the country instead of just at the border. The administration has also said it’s open to designating other countries as “safe third countries” as possible deportation zones.

It also appears to be in favor of adding 12,000 beds to detention centers, raising the total to 46,500 beds, in an apparent attempt to compromise on a Republican proposal to detain asylum-seekers instead of releasing them with a court date, according to the outlet.

At stake for the administration is a contentious foreign aid package to Israel and Ukraine that the GOP has effectively held hostage in exchange for bigger changes at the border—though it also comes as the latest in a series of blows that Biden has made against his own voting base, particularly young voters and people of color, making it harder for the president to turn to their linchpin support again in the upcoming election.

“Extreme Republicans are playing chicken with our national security, holding Ukraine’s funding hostage to their extreme partisan border policies,” Biden told Congress in a speech on Wednesday. “And I’m willing to do significantly more. But in terms of changes to policy and to provide resources that we need at the border, I’m willing to change policy as well.”

“I’ve asked for billions of dollars for more border agents, more immigration judges, more asylum officers,” he added. “Republicans have to decide if they want a political issue or if they want a solution at the border. Do they really want a solution?”

Young voters have also come out in droves against Biden’s unwavering support of Israel, a move that could radically depress voter turnout for the incumbent.

A November survey by The New York Times/Siena College showed that the president was neck and neck with Trump among voters younger than 30, with Biden pulling at 30 percentage points and Trump at 29 percent. Meanwhile, conspiracy-touting independent Robert F. Kennedy Jr. inspired 34 percent of the surveyed young voters.

“We write to you to issue a very stark and unmistakable warning: you and your Administration’s stance on Gaza risks millions of young voters staying home or voting third party next year,” read an open letter to Biden penned by March for Our Lives, GenZ for Change, and the Sunrise Movement.

House Republicans have launched an investigation into antisemitism at MIT, Harvard, and the University of Pennsylvania, following a hearing with those colleges’ presidents that highlights the GOP’s hypocrisy when it comes to free speech.

Harvard president Claudine Gay, MIT president Sally Kornbluth, and University of Pennsylvania president Elizabeth Magill testified before the House Education and Workforce Committee on Tuesday about their responses to incidents of antisemitism on their campuses. All three women have been criticized for saying that responses to alleged antisemitic instances—including the content of chants popular at pro-Palestinian marches—need to be context-specific.

“After this week’s pathetic and morally bankrupt testimony by university presidents … the Education and Workforce committee is launching an official Congressional investigation with the full force of subpoena power into Penn, MIT, & Harvard and others,” committee Chair Elise Stefanik said in a statement Thursday.

“We will use our full Congressional authority to hold these schools accountable for their failure on the global stage.”

Stefanik had asked the university presidents whether students chanting “Intifada” violated the schools’ codes of conduct. Each president said it would depend on the context, with Gay pointing out that chants she finds “personally abhorrent” could still be protected under freedom of speech. Stefanik then insisted that this chant was calling for “genocide of the Jews,” a contested and subjective interpretation at best. A clip of her questioning that omitted the context—that the line of questioning was rooted on “Intifada” and not calls for genocide—then went viral, creating a firestorm.

Magill explained her stance further in a video on Wednesday, saying that “speech alone is not punishable,” but calls for genocide would be “harassment or intimidation.”

It does not seem to have occurred to Republicans, who regularly pride themselves on being the protectors of free speech, that they have launched a project to essentially police free speech on college campuses. The GOP seems to have no problem upholding free speech when, say, Donald Trump is threatening his political opponents.

Representative Jerry Nadler slammed his Republican colleagues on Tuesday for moves that “weaponize Jewish lives for political gains” while in reality doing nothing to “genuinely counter” antisemitism.

Republicans also don’t seem to have an issue upholding free speech when it relates to Islamophobia. Although they have taken many steps to supposedly address rising antisemitism, they have made no mention of the sharp rise in Islamophobia in recent months.

In fact, many Republicans are actually suppressing the free speech of groups trying to combat Islamophobia. In November, the University of Florida chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine sued state Governor Ron DeSantis, university chancellor Ray Rodrigues, and university president Ben Sasse for barring the group from campus.

The students, backed by the ACLU, accused them of “violating their [First] Amendment rights.”