Of Course Elon Musk’s Twitter Suspended Alexei Navalny’s Wife

The widow of Russian opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, on Tuesday was temporarily banned from X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, for reasons still not clear.

On Monday, Yulia Navalnaya shared a powerful, nine-minute video accusing Russian President Vladimir Putin of killing her husband and of hiding the body in an effort to wait for the poison to disappear. Navalnaya pledged to continue her husband’s fight.

“They are cowardly and meanly hiding his body, refusing to give it to his mother and lying miserably while waiting for the trace of” poison to disappear, Navalnaya said, according to a translation by SkyNews.

But less than 24 hours later, she was booted off the platform. X did not cite a reason for her dismissal other than “violating the X rules,” though her dismissal came after the company’s private owner, Elon Musk, spent a year aggressively insisting the platform be a bastion of free speech, to the point of allowing white supremacists and antisemites to run freely.

By Tuesday morning, and after pressure from her political allies, Navalnaya was back online.

Navalnaya has long skirted the political spotlight that came with being the family of one of Putin’s greatest dissidents, but her husband’s death four days ago inside the country’s notoriously brutal Arctic Polar Wolf penal colony has suddenly rocked that reality. In a video posted to the platform, Navalnaya urged other Russians to join her and continue to fight back against the Russian government.

“In killing Aleksei, Putin killed half of me, half of my heart, and half of my soul,” Navalnaya said. “But I have another half left—and it is telling me I have no right to give up.”

“I will continue the work of Alexei Navalny.”

Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for Putin, called Navalnaya’s accusations “unfounded” and “insolent.”

Gun control advocate David Hogg has found a clever way to capitalize on Donald Trump’s newly launched sneakers.

Trump unveiled the garish kicks, which his fans can find at GetTrumpSneakers.com, on Saturday at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia. If the website name seems a bit awkward, it may be because Hogg quickly snapped up the more obvious choice: ShopTrumpSneakers.com.

Hogg, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland school shooting and a co-founder of the gun control advocacy group March for Our Lives, announced his purchase on Saturday. The URL leads to a page called The Shotline, which Hogg explained allows people to send an automated call to their member of Congress urging gun law reform.

“The twist is the person who makes the call is a victim of gun violence,” Hogg said. The website uses A.I. technology to recreate the victims’ voices for the automated call.

As of Tuesday, almost 72,000 calls have been sent through The Shotline.

“Thank you to team trump for being dumb enough to not pay the $12 for the website,” Hogg tweeted Monday night, celebrating his website’s success. “I’ll give it to you for a small donation of $1 million to March For Our Lives.”

Trump launched his sneaker line the day after he was hit with a $354 million ruling for committing real estate–related financial fraud in New York state. Before he can appeal the ruling, Trump would first have to pay the entire amount plus interest, which could add as much as an additional $100 million.

Not to mention the fact that Trump owes $88.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault and defamation, $400,000 to The New York Times, and thousands of dollars in other legal fees and fines. That’s a lot of sneakers.

Trump has positioned himself as staunchly anti–gun control. Just two weeks ago, he spoke at an event organized by the National Rifle Association. The NRA was a major supporter of Trump during his first term, and the group appears ready for a second act.

The former president swore that if he is elected, he will immediately undo all of the Biden administration’s gun regulations.

“Every single Biden attack on gun owners and manufacturers will be terminated my very first week back in office, perhaps my first day,” Trump told the crowd, promising that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”

The former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin has admitted that he was a fake elector for Donald Trump in the 2020 presidential election—but that he only did so out of fear of retribution by the former president and his sycophantic followers.

Andrew Hitt, an attorney and former chairman of the state Republican Party, was one of several fake electors for Trump out of Wisconsin—one of the only states that hasn’t charged people who participated in the illegal scheme to misrepresent the popular vote. But on Sunday, Hitt claimed he was “tricked” into signing documents claiming Trump had won the state in the general election and that the campaign’s attempt to throw out more than 200,000 absentee ballots—which Hitt described as his preferred method of voting—“wasn’t something that [he] was comfortable with,” according to an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes.

Days before Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers certified Joe Biden’s victory in the state, Hitt says he received a “suspicious” call from the Republican National Committee asking for a “list of the Wisconsin Republican electors.”

“I was already concerned that they were gonna try to say that the Democratic electors were not proper in Wisconsin because of fraud,” Hitt told Anderson Cooper, adding that he was very involved in the election and did not believe there to be any fraud.

The new plan was in: Under the eye of Trump campaign attorney Kenneth Chesebro (whom special counsel Jack Smith has dubbed the “architect” of the fake elector scheme), Hitt and other electors from the state were expected to meet at noon at the Wisconsin Capitol on December 14 to sign a document that would insist Trump won—on the basis that the documents would only be used in a contingency in the event that the Trump campaign’s legal case succeeded.

“If I knew what I knew now, I wouldn’t have done it,” he continued. “It was kept from us that there was this alternate scheme, alternate motive.”

But that same day, the Wisconsin Supreme Court threw out the Trump campaign suit. So why did Hitt go forward with signing the documents?

“Can you imagine the repercussions on myself, my family, if it was me, Andrew Hitt, who prevented Donald Trump from winning Wisconsin?” Hitt said, pondering his fate if the Supreme Court ultimately chose to throw out the votes.

When Cooper asked if he feared for his safety from other Trump supporters, Hitt responded that it was “not a safe time.”

“If my lawyer is right, and the whole reason Trump loses Wisconsin is because of me, I would be scared to death,” he said.

The Republican-controlled West Virginia House of Delegates has passed a bill that could see librarians facing jail time.

House Bill 4654 passed the chamber Friday by a vote of 85–12, along party lines. The bill would remove criminal exemptions for schools, public libraries, and museums that distribute or display “obscene matter” to a minor, even if the minor’s parent or guardian is present. Any employees of those institutions found guilty of giving minors obscene matter can face fines of up to $25,000, up to five years in prison, or both.

The incredibly short piece of legislation gives no indication of how the new rules would affect paintings or sculptures that feature nude figures, or books that include descriptions or definitions of sexual conduct. Obscenity laws are incredibly hard to enforce, because definitions of obscenity still largely come down to individual interpretation.

As a result, there will likely be more reports of obscenity, made by people who are either more conservative or just nervous about accidentally breaking the law. And since libraries and public schools often operate on very tight budgets, they are unlikely to have the budget to fight a surge in lawsuits.

“It is going to cost our counties and our librarians when these matters go to the court system,” House Minority Leader Sean Hornbuckle told The Parkersburg News and Sentinel. “Because this is still vague, I’m scared.”

“This is a very dangerous bill.”

House Minority Whip Shawn Fluharty warned that the legislation could inspire many lawsuits over books that staff members don’t even realize are problematic. “The librarians on staff might not know if a book has obscene matter in it or may or may not have shown it to someone, but because it was in the facility and it was sitting on a shelf, it could still be prosecuted,” he said.

The bill has now been sent to the state Senate, which the GOP also controls (along with the governor’s office).

Republicans across the country have increasingly sought to ban books, claiming they are protecting minors from seeing inappropriately sexual content. But most of the books being pulled from shelves tend to discuss race, gender, and sexuality.

Seemingly innocuous texts have also gotten caught up in the fray. School districts in Florida have pulled the dictionary from library shelves for including definitions of sexual conduct and have drawn over children’s picture books.

Nobody likes Representative Matt Gaetz, and he wants everyone to know it!

The Florida Republican took to social media to snag credit for the recent GOP exodus from Congress, bragging about how much his own party hates him.

“I love this @cnn article. The fundamental premise is that I’ve made congress so miserable for so many members that they are leaving. Wonderful!” Gaetz wrote on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, sharing a CNN article that only mentioned him twice.

“We can’t save America with the current Republican team. We have to get tougher and smarter. We need newer, bolder voices in the House,” he continued. “If you want to be a Paul Ryan/Kevin McCarthy Republican—THEY DON’T WORK HERE ANYMORE!”

“The next phase of our plan is to REPLACE the droves of retiring members with America First Patriots,” he added, urging Republican primary voters to “do their part” and send him “more backup.”

So far, 45 representatives in both parties have announced their retirements, with an additional six expected to be replaced before the general election (seven if you include George Santos’s replacement just last week).

That includes several legacy Republican policymakers, including Representatives Kevin McCarthy, Bill Johnson, Ken Buck, and Debbie Lesko, who are hanging up their hats and resigning early in a bid to escape seemingly endless grandstanding, gridlock, and complete dysfunction from House Republicans.

The beef between the Republican establishment and Gaetz hit an apex in October, when the MAGA lawmaker led a coup, dubbed the “Gaetz Eight,” to strip McCarthy of the gavel over a renewed House Ethics Committee probe into Gaetz’s alleged payments to a minor for sex.

“It’s unfortunate because you think of the brain trust you are losing. I blame a lot of the ‘crazy eights’ led by Gaetz. They want to make this place dysfunctional to try to wear people out,” McCarthy told reporters outside the Capitol. “It’s very sad.… It makes it more difficult for getting people to run in the current climate.”

Donald Trump decided to weigh in on Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny’s mysterious death, taking to Truth Social to memorialize … himself?

“The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country,” Trump posted to Truth Social on Monday, three days after Navalny’s death was first reported. “It is a slow, steady progression, with CROOKED, Radical Left Politicians, Prosecutors, and Judges leading us down a path to destruction. Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION! MAGA2024.”

Somehow, in his chaos of word vomit, Trump omitted a key figure at the center of the Russian political dissenter’s curious disappearance: Russian President Vladimir Putin.

After Tucker Carlson’s paltry Putin interview, Trump’s comments are yet another example of a startling shift for far-right members of the conservative party, which somehow straddles the razor wire between condemning former leaders of the Soviet Union while kowtowing to the proto-dictatorship that exists under Putin in modern Russia.

Hours later, Trump continued to make the moment about himself, deriding the nearly $355 million judgment he received on Friday for committing real estate–related bank fraud in New York.

“ALL POLITICAL PROSECUTIONS OF YOUR FAVORITE PRESIDENT, ME, MUST STOP IMMEDIATELY,” Trump wrote. “THIS IS ELECTION INTERFERENCE, AND MUST BE IMMEDIATELY STOPPED. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO GO THROUGH ANY FAKE PROSECUTIONS BEFORE THE ELECTION. THIS IS COMMUNISM, AND A THREAT TO DEMOCRACY. OUR COUNTRY WILL NOT STAND FOR IT. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

In another post, Trump likened the ruling—which he has just 30 days to come up with the money to appeal—to a “Stalinist nightmare.”

Representative Lauren Boebert is struggling to gain traction in her new district’s primary election, as nearly every Republican voter and lawmaker seems to loathe her intensely.

Boebert, who currently represents Colorado’s 3rd district, announced in December that she would run for election in the 4th district in 2024, instead. But if she expected to cruise to victory in the Republican stronghold, then she couldn’t have been more wrong.

At a recent event in Elbert County, southeast of Denver, Republican voters were deeply skeptical of Boebert’s candidacy, The Wall Street Journal reported Monday. While some people said they still supported Boebert, others said they had grown tired of all the drama she courts.

“I don’t appreciate, as a Christian, people saying they’re Christian to get your vote and then turning out to be a lowlife, and now I just kind of think of her as a lowlife,” Judy Scofield, a retired university employee, told the Journal.

Many people highlighted the fact that Boebert had switched districts, making them trust her less.

“On Facebook, she’s not been well received by Republicans,” said GOP voter Tammi Flemming. “It’s the shenanigans and the drama and moving districts.”

Retired medical contractor Chris Ware was more blunt: “I will not vote for her. Period. She’s not one of us,” he said.

Boebert decided to switch districts after she was reelected in 2022 by such a narrow margin that the election nearly went to a recount. Her public image has taken a massive battering in recent months, as well, after she and a date received national backlash when they were caught on security cameras talking, using their phones, vaping, and groping each other while seeing a performance of Beetlejuice.

Her fellow primary competitors have continually accused her of carpetbagging, and the Elbert County event was no different. “You don’t need someone who’s going to go from district to district because they can’t win,” Weld County Councilman Trent Leisy told the crowd.

Boebert comes to the 11-person race with $1.3 million in campaign funds and plenty of name recognition, which could help her stand out from the crowd. But that fame has yet to help her out. During the first primary debate in January, Boebert ranked fifth out of eight candidates in an informal straw poll. While on stage, none of her opponents said they would support her if they ended up dropping out.

“The idea that because [the district is] a Republican stronghold, that they’re going to nominate a fringe conservative like a Boebert in the primary is a wrong notion—this thing is a horse race,” Republican strategist Josh Penry told the Journal.

A new ruling out of Alabama may spell the beginning of the end of the third-party fertility industry—and its reasoning partially relies on a verse from the Bible.

On Friday, the Alabama Supreme Court decided that embryos created through in-vitro fertilization would be protected under the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act, effectively classifying single-celled, fertilized eggs as children. 

The case, known as LePage v. Mobile Infirmary Clinic, Inc, rested upon an argument by several intended parents that their “embryonic children” had been victims of a wrongful death when an intruder broke into the IVF clinic, dropping trays containing some of the embryos and ultimately destroying them.

In a 7–2 decision, Alabama’s highest court ruled that the clinic had been negligent, allowing the parents to proceed with a wrongful death lawsuit. The court also ruled that it is “the public policy of this state to recognize and support the sanctity of unborn life and the rights of unborn children, including the right to life,” referring to the Alabama Constitution’s Sanctity of Life Amendment, ratified in 2018.

“Here, the text of the Wrongful Death of a Minor Act is sweeping and unqualified,” wrote Alabama Supreme Court Associate Justice Jay Mitchell in the majority’s opinion. “It applies to all children, born and unborn, without limitation. It is not the role of this Court to craft a new limitation based on our own view of what is or is not wise public policy. That is especially true where, as here, the People of this State have adopted a Constitutional amendment directly aimed at stopping courts from excluding ‘unborn life’ from legal protection.”

But the opinion also quotes the Bible as reasoning for functionally killing IVF access within the aggressively pro-life state, turning to an eyebrow-raising verse from Jeremiah 1:5 for guidance before deciding to make it harder for Alabamans to have a family.

“We believe that each human being, from the moment of conception, is made in the image of God, created by Him to reflect His likeness. It is as if the People of Alabama took what was spoken of the prophet Jeremiah and applied it to every unborn person in this state: ‘Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, Before you were born I sanctified you.’ Jeremiah 1:5 (NKJV 1982),” the opinion read.

It’s a devastating hit to the third-party fertility industry, which is comprised of large networks of agencies, clinics, and egg banks around the nation.

“Alabama’s Supreme Court ruling is a terrifying development for the 1 in 6 people impacted by infertility who need in-vitro fertilization to build their families,” said Barb Collura, president and CEO of Resolve: The National Infertility Association. “This anti-family ruling will likely have devastating consequences, including impacting the standard of care provided by the state’s five fertility clinics. This new legal framework may make it impossible to offer services like IVF, a standard medical treatment for infertility. It also remains unclear what this decision means for families who currently have embryos stored at these clinics.”

This article has been updated.

Wisconsin’s Democratic Governor Tony Evers on Monday signed new legislative maps into law, which could help Democrats retake the state legislature in the fall.

The new maps, which go into effect immediately, will replace ones that were widely recognized as some of the most gerrymandered in the country. Despite Democrats winning 14 of the last 17 statewide elections, Republicans have carried the majority of the districts—and thus controlled the state legislature—for the past decade.

“This is an important day and historic day for our state and for every person who calls Wisconsin home,” Evers said before signing the maps into law. “This will be the first time in over 50 years that Wisconsin will have fair legislative maps enacted through the legislative process rather than through the courts.”

“When I promised I wanted fair maps, not maps that are better for one party or the other, including my own, I damn well meant it,” he said. “Wisconsin is not a red state. It is not a blue state. Wisconsin is a purple state, and I believe our maps should reflect that basic fact.”

“The people should get to choose their elected officials, not the other way around.”

State Democrats have tried to challenge the legislative maps for more than a decade, but they hadn’t been successful until Wisconsinites overwhelmingly elected state Supreme Court Justice Janet Protasiewicz last year. The day after Protasiewicz was sworn in, in August, lawmakers filed a lawsuit against the maps.

The high court ruled in December that the legislative maps were unconstitutional, with Protasiewicz providing the tie-breaking fourth vote. The justices ordered the state legislature to adopt new maps and warned they would draw up new lines if the lawmakers could not pass maps that Evers would sign.

Evers, lawmakers from both parties, and three independent groups submitted map options to the court for review. Independent consultants hired by the court found that the maps submitted by legislature Republicans and a conservative law firm were “partisan gerrymanders,” leaving only Democratic-drawn maps left to choose from.

The legislature passed Evers’s maps last week, to avoid having the high court draw the new district lines.

Under the new maps, Democrats are widely expected to gain seats in both the state Assembly and state Senate. They could even take control of the legislature, which Democrats have not done since 2010, giving them a trifecta with Evers in office until the end of 2026.

If Donald Trump needs to raise money to pay off his legal dues, he needs to step up his game. And no, that doesn’t mean selling $399 sneakers.

The former president launched a line of self-branded sneakers at Sneaker Con in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on Saturday. The gold “Never Surrender High-Top Sneaker” retails for $399, and features an American flag on the back and a “T” on the side.

Fashionados can also buy a gold-and-white low-top sneaker for $199, or a red pair also for $199. Trump also launched branded fragrance, the “Victory 47” cologne and perfume, for $99, presumably so his fans don’t get too smelly when working out in their new running shoes.

Although Trump was booed off the stage at Sneaker Con, that reaction belied the true popularity of the shoes. All 1,000 pairs of the high-tops sold out within hours of Trump unveiling them.

Unfortunately for Trump, that amounts to just $399,000—barely a drop in the bucket of his hundreds of millions of dollars in legal dues.

Trump was hit Friday with a $354 million ruling for committing real estate-related financial fraud in New York state. In order to pay that off, he would need to sell 1,127,820 pairs of the high-top sneakers. That’s a lot of kicks.

The former president can appeal the ruling, but he would first have to pay the entire amount plus interest, which could add as much as an additional $100 million.

And that’s not to mention the fact that Trump also owes writer E. Jean Carroll $88.3 million for sexually assaulting her in the mid-1990s and then defaming her twice when denying it. That’s an additional 471,929 sneakers that Trump would have to sell. And this still excludes all the fines Trump racked up during the trials for attacking courtroom staff, and the $400,000 he owes The New York Times.

One of Trump’s supporters launched a GoFundMe over the weekend, but that has so far raised just $452,000—again, not nearly enough to put a dent in the total amount he now owes.