Ron DeSantis Dealt Major Blow on Abortion Ad Fight Till Election Day

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis was dealt a setback in his efforts to ban TV advertisements for a state ballot initiative expanding abortion rights.

A federal judge, Mark Walker, on Tuesday extended a temporary restraining order that blocks the state government from taking action against the ads for 14 days or until he rules on his initial preliminary injunction, likely delaying his decision until after Election Day on November 5, when the initiative will be decided by Florida voters.

DeSantis, through lawyers at the Florida Department of Health, has threatened to charge TV stations that run the ads, sending out cease and desist letters to them after the stations started running the commercials earlier this month. Brian Barnes, a lawyer for the department, said in federal court Tuesday prior to Walker’s ruling that one of the ads was confusing and could stop mothers from seeking emergency care.

Florida currently bans abortion after six weeks of pregnancy. The ballot initiative, Amendment 4, would increase access to abortion until fetal viability, typically considered to be around 24 weeks. DeSantis’s decision to go after the TV stations that have run ads supporting the amendment has already led to backlash from within the state government, with one lawyer in the Department of Health, John Wilson, resigning over DeSantis’s authoritarian tactics.

“A man is nothing without his conscience,” Wilson wrote in his letter.

DeSantis has also used other state powers to fight against the ballot initiative, using his official X account to spread misinformation, even as two hurricanes raged through Florida. The state has also sent police officers to the homes of people who signed a petition supporting the ballot initiative, which DeSantis has defended by invoking conservative fears of voter fraud. But, as Walker ruled Tuesday, there are constitutional lines the governor can’t cross.

Judge Aileen Cannon has refused a motion to recuse herself from the trial of Donald Trump’s would-be assassin.

Last month, Ryan Wesley Routh was arrested at the Mar-a-Lago golf course and charged with attempting to assassinate Trump.

In a seven-page decision released Tuesday, Cannon dismissed a motion from Routh’s attorney, arguing that the former president’s constantly praising her did not create the “appearance of partiality.”

“As Defendant acknowledges, I have no control over what private citizens, members of the media, or public officials or candidates elect to say about me or my judicial rulings,” Cannon wrote. “Nor am I concerned about the political consequences of my rulings or how those rulings might be viewed by ‘some in the media.’”

“I have never spoken to or met former President Trump except in connection with his required presence at an official judicial proceeding, through counsel,” Cannon wrote. “I have no ‘relationship to the alleged victim’ in any reasonable sense of the phrase.”

Cannon made the unprecedented decision in July to toss out the felony classified documents case against Trump by ruling special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment was unconstitutional. Her move has been criticized by legal scholars but repeatedly celebrated by Trump.

Earlier this month, it was reported that Cannon’s name is on a list of possible candidates for Trump’s attorney general, if he wins the election next week.

As paper ballots are lit on fire by vigilantes and Donald Trump threatens to punish the “enemy from within,” Meta is not only allowing extremist groups on its platform but even is auto-generating anti-government militia Facebook groups.

According to data compiled by the Tech Transparency Project for WIRED, after January 6, the number of Facebook groups and pages used by the alt-right to organize with each other has only grown. The Tech Transparency Project found more than 200 Facebook pages and nearly 200 anti-government pages that recruit for extremist movements. Nearly two dozen of these pages and groups have been created in the past six months.

Meta has not only looked the other way but even used its own technology to auto-generate these groups for militias. Though some chapters of American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) on the platform have been moderated or banned, in May, Facebook automatically created a page for an Arizona chapter of AP3. In June, it did the same for an AP3 “training range” in New Mexico. On the site, Facebook’s explainer reads: “This unofficial page was created because people on Facebook have shown interest in this place or business. It’s not affiliated with or endorsed by anyone associated with AP3 Training Range.”

“Nearly four years after the January 6 attack on the capitol, Facebook remains a significant recruiting and organizing tool for militias like the AP3, despite creating policies that ban them,” Katie Paul, the director of the Tech Transparency Project, told WIRED.

This isn’t the first time that Meta has been caught auto-generating pages for terrorist or white supremacist groups. In 2020, a whistleblower alerted the Securities and Exchange Commission to the issue.

Most recently, groups such as the “Patriot Group” or “The Party of Trump,” the latter of which has 171,000 members, have urged their members to do ballot dropbox “monitoring,” including encouraging Trump supporters to stand guard at ballot boxes with AR-15s.

With the election a week away, as Paul asks: “How can Meta be trusted to effectively thwart extremists that have a record of engaging in and stoking political violence when its own systems create business pages for them?”

Donald Trump’s response to a comedian making a racist joke about Puerto Rico at his New York rally at Madison Square Garden came up very short.

On Tuesday morning, ABC News’s Rachel Scott asked Trump about Tony Hinchcliffe’s joke on Sunday where he called Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage,” and Trump denied knowing anything about him or the joke.

“I don’t know him; someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is,” Trump said. The former president also claimed he had not heard the comments, despite widespread news and TV coverage and campaign spokespeople disavowing the joke Sunday and Monday.

Trump then went on to call the New York rally a “lovefest” during a rally later on Tuesday.

Trump pointedly refused to condemn or disavow Hinchcliffe’s joke directly, which will not help with the fallout his campaign is receiving. In the battleground state of Pennsylvania, which boasts a 500,000-strong Puerto Rican population, the “joke” has quickly spread through social media and WhatsApp and drawn backlash from a nonpartisan Puerto Rican organization urging its members not to vote for Trump.

Trump’s nonapology won’t go over well with some of his more influential critics, particularly the Catholic Archbishop of San Juan, who has demanded a personal apology from the former president along with the chairman of the Puerto Rico Republican Party.

JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, didn’t bail out the former president either, claiming that he hadn’t “actually seen the joke” Monday and complaining about people taking offense.

“I’m not gonna comment on the specificity of the joke … but I think that we have to stop getting offended at every little thing in the United States of America, I’m just so over it,” Vance said.

With Puerto Ricans making up a large population in the U.S. mainland, including several battleground states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and North Carolina, Trump’s response could end up costing him key votes that he needs to win. The right (and smart) thing to do would be for Trump to clearly and categorically apologize and disavow Hinchcliffe and his “joke,” but Trump isn’t known for his willingness to take responsibility when things go badly.

Republicans in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania have been dealt a significant blow to their dubious voter suppression efforts.

Earlier this month, six Republican congressmen in the state filed a federal lawsuit against the Pennsylvania secretary of state alleging that ballots cast by Pennsylvania residents living overseas were fraudulent. The suit claimed that state law makes it possible for ineligible voters to cast ballots without providing any proof of identity, leading to inaccurate results. The lawsuit even claimed that “Iranian nationals” could “easily” take advantage of the system and falsify ballots. 

But on Tuesday, U.S. District Judge Charles Conner, a George W. Bush appointee, deemed this all to be nonsense. He dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that the Republican congressmen were relying on “phantom fears of foreign malfeasance to excuse their lack of diligence,” and had “no good excuse for waiting until barely a month before the election to bring this lawsuit.”

Overseas ballots have been under federal jurisdiction for years under the Uniform and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, which is mostly associated with military service members stationed abroad. Many Trump supporters, like Elon Musk, have decried this normal law as a fraudulent Democratic plot to steal the 2024 election, and similar lawsuits have been filed in Michigan and North Carolina.

It’s likely that Republicans have realized that overseas voters aren’t all military, pro-GOP people—a shift that could seriously cost them. “Everyone thought overseas meant military. Not true,” Trump lawyer Cleta Mitchell told The Washington Post. “Approx 63% of [overseas] ballots in 2020 were nonmilitary.” But rather than looking inward to determine how to appeal to a broader electorate, the GOP has instead chosen to try to stop people from voting. And while this latest effort was defeated in Pennsylvania, the groundwork for claims of another “stolen” election is still being set right in front of us.

Elon Musk admitted that he knows that Donald Trump’s policies would crash the economy if he’s elected president, but thinks that the price is worth it.

The tech CEO and social media mogul on Monday evening replied to a post on X from right-wing influencer FischerKing64, who posted about how Trump’s plans for mass deportations of immigrants combined with Musk’s plans as a White House adviser to cut federal spending would initially crash the economy, before creating a “sounder footing.”

Musk replied, “Sounds about right.”

It’s a telling admission from Musk that crashing the economy is all a part of the plan.  Experts have repeatedly warned that Trump’s mass deportations on their own would cause damage to critical industries in the U.S., including agriculture, construction, and hospitality.

Undocumented immigrants most commonly take jobs with longer hours, lower wages, and dangerous working conditions that native-born citizens don’t want, such as housekeeping cleaners, cooks, construction workers, and farm workers. These jobs also won’t have American workers lining up to fill them.

Trump’s plan to appoint Musk to his administration, possibly to lead a government efficiency task force, could also have negative effects. JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, previously said Musk told him that he plans to look at cuts to government programs like Social Security and the Department of Defense.

Judging by what happened after Musk gutted Twitter and laid off many of its workers after he purchased the social media company, there are justifiable fears that he would cripple essential government programs. Social Security, for example, is a lifeline to many older Americans, and in fact needs more funding, not less.

Musk’s status as the world’s richest man, as well as the success of his companies like SpaceX and Tesla, comes from taxpayer funds. When the government isn’t involved in his ventures, they’ve suffered, such as Twitter (now X), which has lost more than a third of its value since he took over the company. Musk’s confession that the economy would initially get worse under Trump is worrying enough, but his idea that it would lead to a rapid recovery should be cause to reject his plans altogether—as well as the administration that would enable them.

Steve Bannon, the engineer behind Donald Trump’s MAGA movement, was fresh out of prison Tuesday and already drumming up hatred and fear ahead of the presidential election next week.

In his first public appearance on his War Room podcast after completing a four-month stint in federal prison, Bannon once again claimed he was a political prisoner and warned that it could happen to others, too.

“Let me say something, if you’re not prepared to be sent to a federal prison as a political prisoner, then you’re not worthy to be in this movement, and to step forward and try to save your country,” he said. “You have to understand: they want to put you in prison and they will put you in prison. If you can’t accept that, then you don’t know what they represent.”

“They talk about President Trump, ‘He’s gonna do this, he’s gonna do this,’ look at what they’ve done,” Bannon continued.

What Bannon failed to elucidate in his cryptic warnings of political imprisonment is that in his unwavering support of Trump, he broke the law. Bannon had defied a federal subpoena issued as part of the congressional investigation into the January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. He had refused to sit for a deposition with the House Committee investigating the riot, and refused to hand over documents related to his involvement in Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Joined by Raheem Kassam, a former editor at Bannon’s propaganda machine Breitbart, the Trump ally also bragged about a “wide swath of African American men and Hispanic men” who would be joining the MAGA movement and help deliver victory for the former president.

Bannon also hit back at the “rhetoric” calling members of the MAGA movement “fascist” and defended Trump’s “fantastic, that amazing rally at Madison Square Garden,” which has been completely overshadowed by racist remarks from its speakers, including comedian Tony Hinchcliffe.

Bannon claimed that the rally’s speakers represented a “broad cross-section of American entrepreneurs,” specifically listing Tulsi Gabbard, Elon Musk, and Vivek Ramaswamy.

After being released, the 70-year-old said he felt “amazing, and more importantly empowered” by his prison sentence.

The Trump campaign is still doing damage control after a comedian at his hate rally in New York City made a wildly racist joke about Puerto Rico.

When asked about the joke on Monday, Vance claimed hadn’t “seen” it, which seems highly unlikely given the moment’s virality and the fact that he is running for vice president.

“I’ve heard about the joke; I haven’t actually seen the joke,” Vance said after being asked if the series of racist jokes was setting the right tone for the campaign just one week out from the election.

“Maybe it’s a stupid, racist joke, as you said; maybe it’s not. I haven’t seen it,” he continued. “I’m not gonna comment on the specificity of the joke … but I think that we have to stop getting offended at every little thing in the United States of America, I’m just so over it.”

The series of jokes from comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at Trump’s rally already looks like it could cost him the election. Hinchcliffe used his stage time to make vulgar statements about Latino immigrant families, said that he carved Halloween watermelons with a Black man, and, most notably, stated that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage.”

Vance’s reaction was unwise and hypocritical. This is the same guy who was deeply bothered just by being called “weird” and lied about Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets, but it’s the rest of us who need to toughen up. While Trump campaign spokesperson Daniella Alvarez has said the “joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” Vance refused to even acknowledge any issue with the joke. While the actual electoral fallout from these comments is yet to be seen, Vance’s flippancy certainly won’t help the Trump campaign.

Joe Rogan says he is still open to interviewing Kamala Harris—if she’ll drop everything and come to him.

Responding to rumors on both sides of the aisle, the podcast host took to X in the wee hours of Tuesday morning to clear up some confusion about why his proposed interview with the vice president hasn’t materialized. TLDR: He’ll only speak with Harris on his terms.

“For the record the Harris campaign has not passed on doing the podcast. They offered a date for Tuesday, but I would have had to travel to her and they only wanted to do an hour. I strongly feel the best way to do it is in the studio in Austin,” wrote Rogan, adding that his “sincere wish is to just have a nice conversation and get to know her as a human being. I really hope we can make it happen.”

With only a week left until Election Day and a packed schedule of rallies, interviews, and campaign events, it seems that Harris may not have Rogan’s audience of mostly Republican and independent young men top of mind. But this lukewarm defense from Rogan makes it clear that he wants to put all the blame on Harris, when really it’s also his stubbornness at fault.

Perhaps Donald Trump set up an impossible standard with his interview for The Joe Rogan Experience, as the Republican nominee backed out of several previously scheduled events to travel to the Austin podcast studio. During his three-hour interview with Trump, Rogan allowed the former president to lie to his millions of viewers about immigration, the economy, and the 2020 election, with Trump stating, “I won that second election so easy.”

With Harris’s tentative cancellation, Rogan’s schedule is wide open, and so the podcaster will now instead interview Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance on Wednesday morning, rather than make any sacrifices to interview the sitting vice president and Democratic nominee for president. Vance will travel to Austin to appear on the show.

Donald Trump’s campaign reportedly stopped comedian Tony Hinchcliffe from calling Kamala Harris a “c*nt” onstage at his rally at Madison Square Garden, raising serious concerns about the severely racist jokes they did allow.

The Bulwark reported Monday that Hinchcliffe’s set had been reviewed by Trump’s campaign, even though the former president’s team claimed they had not vetted all of the comedian’s remarks.

Four top campaign insiders told The Bulwark that one particularly unsavory joke was spotted when Hinchcliffe’s speech was loaded into the teleprompter.

“He had a joke calling Harris a ‘c*nt,’” said one campaign insider, who was involved in discussions about Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden. “Let’s say it was a red flag.”

Hinchcliffe removed the joke from his set when asked by Trump’s staff. However, Hinchcliffe’s other wildly offensive jokes likening Puerto Rico to a “floating island of garbage,” mocking Latinos for not using birth control, saying he had “carved watermelons” with his Black “buddies,” and calling Palestinians “rock-throwers” still made it into the set.

After the rally, Vianca Rodríguez, the deputy director of Hispanic communications for the Republican National Committee and the Trump campaign, said that “they don’t have absolute control” over what the rally’s many speakers said onstage.

The campaign sources told The Bulwark that they hadn’t spotted the other objectionable punch lines because they had all been ad-libbed. Some lines, such as Hinchcliffe’s racist remark about a Black man in the audience, did appear to be riffs, but they still could have been planned by the comedian.

Clearly, Trump’s campaign had some control, as they prevented Hinchcliffe from using profane language. And what they did allow was the horrific joke about Puerto Rico that overshadowed Trump’s entire appearance.

Hinchcliffe reportedly practiced that joke at the comedy club The Stand the night before, where it hadn’t done very well, either. He reportedly said multiple times during his Saturday night set that his jokes would earn a better reaction “tomorrow at the rally.”

Trump campaign senior adviser Danielle Alvarez said in a statement Monday that “this joke does not reflect the views of President Trump or the campaign,” referring to Hinchcliffe’s joke about Puerto Rico, leaving the other racist remarks unaddressed.

Without calling Harris the c-word, there were still plenty of hateful remarks made about her. One speaker was David Rem, a sanitation worker who was billed as Trump’s childhood friend (though they reportedly met for the first time just two weeks ago, per Newsweek). Rem called Harris the “Antichrist.”

And Trump’s campaign doesn’t seem totally opposed to using the slur. Elon Musk’s America PAC shared a 34-second ad Monday that referred to Harris as “the c-word” multiple times.