Elon Musk’s “Free” Internet for Hurricane Victims Has a Major Catch

It turns out, Elon Musk’s gracious offer of “free” Starlink high-speed internet services for those affected by Hurricane Helene isn’t free at all, and may be a ploy to trap new customers.

Last week, Starlink posted a link on X to a website explaining its offer to those seeking Hurricane Helene relief. “For those impacted by Hurricane Helene, or looking to support response and recovery efforts in affected areas, Starlink is now free for 30 days,” the post read.

Musk reshared the post, adding, “Starlink terminals will now work automatically without need for payment in the areas affected by Hurricane Helene.”

A closer look at the website, though, shows that the offer comes with a few caveats.

“Please note: A Starlink kit is required to access this free service. If you do not already have a Starlink kit, you will need to purchase one,” the site explains.

So how much exactly does a Starlink kit cost? New customers will still have to pay close to $400 for a Starlink kit, including shipping and tax, according to Gizmodo. Starlink has also warned of significant delays that may prevent orders from arriving for weeks, and encouraged those seeking its services to buy a kit from retailers such as Best Buy or Home Depot. There, the kit will cost more like $350 not including tax.

But that’s not all users will have to pay. “After 30 days, we will move you to a paid Residential subscription,” the SpaceX site reads. A paid residential subscription costs $120 per month, a significant upcharge from a typical internet service, which could cost around $40 per month.

So Musk’s offer isn’t much different from a typical free trial for his expensive internet service.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump patted himself on the back for getting Musk to provide Starlink services to the areas affected by Hurricane Helene, noting that he wasn’t actually sure “what the hell it is.”

Last week, SpaceX sent more than 10,000 Starlink terminals to North Carolina and other areas affected by Helene, according to The Hill. One Starlink terminal was planned to be deployed in each county.

In response to Hurricane Milton, Musk announced Wednesday that SpaceX and T-Mobile had accelerated the rollout of their direct-to-cell services, which will be “provided free of charge” to those “affected by hurricanes.”

Like Trump, Musk has been smearing federal hurricane relief efforts, claiming on X last week that FEMA employees were “actively blocking” Starlink terminals from being deployed.

A new poll shows that Kamala Harris has taken the lead among suburban and middle-class voters over Donald Trump.

Reuters/Ipsos polling shows 47 percent of suburban voters supporting Harris versus 41 percent supporting Trump, a nine-point improvement for Harris over President Biden, who was behind Trump by a 43 to 40 percent margin. Harris also now leads Trump by a 45 to 43 percent margin among middle-class voters (people earning between $50,000 and $100,000 per year), a reversal of Trump’s seven-point lead over Biden.

In 2020, Trump won middle-class voters by 52 percent to 47 percent, while Biden won in the suburbs by six points. Trump still leads Harris on who is better on the economy by 8 points, 46 percent to Harris’s 38 percent, according to Reuters. But gains in the suburbs are definitely a positive sign for the vice president, on top of other polls showing that she’s gaining support from working-class voters.

Overall, among registered voters, Reuters’s poll has Harris with a narrow 46 to 43 percent lead. Harris is also ahead of Trump in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, and she’s even making inroads among people who describe themselves as Republicans. The Reuters poll follows The New York Times/Siena College poll released earlier this week, which shows a similarly narrow 49 to 46 percent lead for Harris.

Harris has a long way to go to ensure victory, with the election less than a month away. The polls don’t count everyone who will be showing up to vote in November, especially people who didn’t vote in 2020. Despite the record turnout four years ago, one-third of eligible voters didn’t vote back then. Polls show that Harris could make significant inroads with them if she pushes harder for a cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo against Israel.

Donald Trump played a strange video at his rally Wednesday meant to criticize Kamala Harris’s plan to increase taxes for the middle class. But a closer look at the video finds that none of the clips included advocated for increasing taxes on the middle class.

“She’s the taxing queen. She’s going to raise your taxes, where you’re going to be at least paying at least three thousand dollars a year more. Take a look,” Trump said before referring to the screen behind him.

Behind him, Trump played a video that edited together different times Harris had announced her plan to “get rid of that tax bill” and “get rid of that tax cut,” referring to the corporate tax rate cuts Trump had installed during his time in office. In fact, two of the included clips are of Harris explicitly talking about corporate tax rates.

Originally, the Trump administration had claimed that the corporate tax rate cuts at the center of his 2017 tax bill would boost household income by a “very conservative” estimate of $4,000 per household, according to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities.

In reality, workers who earned below an average of $114,000 saw no change in their earnings as a result of the corporate tax rate cut, while wealthy business owners and top executives reaped the benefits. Harris plans to increase the corporate tax rate from 21 percent to 28 percent.

The video also contained footage of Harris saying that estate taxes “are going to have to go up.” Harris has proposed a plan to lower housing costs that would be funded primarily through changes to the federal estate tax law and an increase to the corporate tax rate.

Harris has yet to publish a proposal for increasing the yield from estate taxes, whether it would mean upping the rate or lowering the exemptions. Currently, only 0.2 percent of U.S. adults are subject to the federal estate tax, according to IRS data.

The video also contained footage of Harris’s campaign co-chair, Chris Coons, defending her plan for a 25 percent tax on unrealized capital gains. It contains another clip of Bharat Ramamurti, President Joe Biden’s former National Economic Council deputy director, explaining that the plan would only affect those with a net worth of more than $100 million, or less than 1 percent of taxpayers—a fact that Trump’s video carefully elides.

The video also contained footage of Harris advocating for a carbon tax, which would penalize big polluters. While this could potentially increase energy costs for consumers, it is not a tax on the middle class.

Democrats won’t be able to prevent recently altered election rules designed to benefit Donald Trump, per a Wednesday ruling dismissing an effort by private citizens to force Georgia Governor Brian Kemp to open an investigation into the committee that crafted the regulations.

“It would seem to me, that for formal charges, there’s some investigation comes in before that,” Superior Court Judge Ural Glanville said, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “There needs to be some investigation ... then trigger the governor to do something in that respect, not just a letter from the citizens.”

Three Democrats, including state Senator Nabilah Islam Parkes, sued Kemp after he refused to act on their concerns regarding the Georgia State Election Board, which in August voted to make it easier for county election officials to delay or refuse certification of election results. Democrats argued that letters they had obtained constituted “formal charges” worthy of spurring an investigation.

“They’re going rogue, and there’s no accountability,” Islam Parkes told the Journal-Constitution. “They need to be held accountable because we need to have fair elections.”

Internal emails obtained by Rolling Stone and American Doom after the 3–2 election board vote along MAGA lines revealed that the board’s actions were fueled by a “wishlist” of documents from conservative county election officials.

“As an American and native Georgian, I’m outraged Governor Brian Kemp is allowing law-violating, last minute election rule changes,” wrote one of the co-plaintiffs, former Fulton County Board of Registration and Elections Chair Cathy Woolard, in an op-ed for Newsweek on Monday, decrying Kemp’s inaction as “foul play.”

Kemp’s attorneys argued that complaints by private citizens could not compel the governor to open an ethics investigation.

“That is an extraordinary position to take,” Deputy Attorney General Logan Winkles said. “The court can imagine the chaos that would cause.”

The plaintiffs told the Journal-Constitution that they intend to appeal the decision.

The new election certification rules set the stage for bedlam come November, especially considering that at least 70 election officials across 16 counties in key swing states, including Georgia, have been identified as pro-Trump election deniers.

Trump praised the MAGA members of Georgia’s board days before the August vote, describing Janice Johnston, Rick Jeffares, and Janelle King as “pit bulls fighting for victory.”

According to the State Election Board’s website, the body is “entrusted with a variety of responsibilities and authority to protect all Georgians’ right to cast a ballot.”

Georgia has had the largest number of certification refusals since 2020 of anywhere in the country. The five-person board has been accused of other ethics violations, including one instance in which its Trump-friendly majority failed to give proper notice to their Democratic colleagues about a meeting that they used to advance changes to state election rules.

House Republicans are threatening to punish colleges and universities that allow pro-Palestine protests.

The Guardian reported Wednesday that House Majority Leader Steve Scalise met with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying group, on October 1 and declared he plans to take action against higher education institutions by revoking their accreditation if Donald Trump wins in November, jeopardizing their federal funding.

“Your accreditation is on the line,” Scalise said. “You’re not playing games any more, or else you’re not a school any more.”

The publication obtained video of the meeting, which was also attended by Republican Representative Pat Fallon from Texas. It began as a discussion about antisemitism spreading in the U.S. after Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7 last year. But the topic quickly changed to squashing criticism of Israel’s war, which has killed nearly 42,000 Palestinians in Gaza, including more than 16,000 children.

Fallon applauded AIPAC’s targeting of progressive critics of Israel, praising the organization for spending $23 million to intervene in congressional primaries.

“I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for firing Jamaal Bowman, and even more so, Miss Cori Bush. Great work,” Fallon said.

Scalise concurred and invoked an antisemitic trope, commending the organization for having “tentacles throughout the Republican and Democrat circles in 435 districts. You can see how people are voting—just put the pressure on those who are voting the wrong way.”

Scalise promised that a second Trump administration would use federal funding to target schools that don’t crush pro-Palestinian protests.

“We’re looking at federal money, the federal grants that go through the science committee, student loans. You have a lot of jurisdiction as president, with all of these different agencies that are involving billions of dollars, some cases a billion alone going to one school,” said Scalise. He singled out Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, and Columbia University as examples.

Scalise then criticized Jewish students who participate in the protests, saying they “just feel guilty that they’re alive. I don’t know how you’re brought up to where you feel, ‘I’m a Jewish student, and I’m on the side with terrorists who want to kill me.’”

Scalise, along with other politicians in both the GOP and the Democratic Party, are going against constitutional principles of free speech to demonize protesters who are opposed to Israel’s widespread killing and destruction of Gaza the past year. They see their job as supporting Israel’s actions with no limits, regardless of the humanitarian toll and the prospects of the U.S. being drawn into a wide and deadly war.

Vice President Kamala Harris has raised a record-breaking $1 billion in cash in less than 80 days on the campaign trail, according to three people familiar with the matter who spoke with The New York Times.

That total includes fundraising from both her campaign and party committees such as the Democratic National Committee, and does not include money donated to aligned super PACs.

The record $1 billion figure is far more than what Trump has raised in a whole year of campaigning. Trump has raised around $853 million in 2024 according to public statements tabulated by the Times.

Harris also outpaced Trump threefold in cash over the summer, raising $361 million in August to his $130 million. Three-quarters of the more than one million new donors to Harris in August did not contribute in the previous presidential election, according to her campaign.

Failed businessman Trump has reason to be scared. No candidate has ever raised more than $1 billion in less than three months.

In the meantime, as the donations to Harris keep coming in, Trump will keep shilling watches, Bibles, or NFTs, in a desperate attempt to try to keep pace.

President Biden on Wednesday called out the “onslaught of lies” from the right regarding relief efforts over Hurricane Helene and Hurricane Milton, particularly from Donald Trump and Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene.

“Assertions have been made that property was being confiscated. That’s simply not true. They’re saying people impacted by these storms will receive $750 in cash and no more. That’s simply not true. They’re saying the money needed for this crisis is being diverted to migrants. What a ridiculous thing to say; it’s not true,” an outraged Biden said in a briefing from the White House.

Biden also addressed Greene’s wild claim that the federal government controls the weather and is sending hurricanes to Republican areas, calling it “beyond ridiculous,” and urging Republicans to put politics aside for relief efforts.

“It’s got to stop. In moments like this, there are no red or blue states. There’s one United States of America, where neighbors are helping neighbors,” Biden said. “Volunteers and first responders are risking everything, including their own lives, to help their fellow Americans.”

Later in the briefing, Biden thanked the Republican governors who have addressed disinformation about hurricane relief efforts, and further expressed his incredulity over the wild conspiracies.

“This stuff is off the wall. It’s like out of a comic book,” Biden said.

Meanwhile, Hurricane Milton is predicted to cause immense damage when it makes landfall in Florida, shaking the composure of even one of the state’s most experienced meteorologists. While some Republican politicians are dismissing the conspiracies and trying to do their jobs, others are demanding federal aid that they voted against or are missing in action. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis doesn’t even see the point in speaking to Kamala Harris, even as the vice president pledges to protect hurricane victims from illegal fraud and price gouging.

As a whole, Republicans still are refusing to acknowledge the role of climate change in the increased frequency and severity of these storms, and their attempt to politicize them hurts their constituents. Perhaps these hurricanes need to be politicized in a different way to make sure that people are actually helped instead of being used by their leaders.

As Election Day looms, Donald Trump is finalizing his speaking schedule for the next several weeks. One surprising stop, according to sources familiar with the Republican candidate’s schedule, is a hometown visit to New York City.

The New York Post first reported that Trump will hold a rally at Madison Square Garden later this month. New York State Senator Brad Hoylman-Sigal, who represents the district, confirmed that the event will be held October 27 at 3 p.m.

In a solidly blue New York City, one might ask why Trump is bothering to campaign so close to the election in the city at all.

Online critics were quick to point out that the event bears a striking resemblance to a Nazi rally that took place in Madison Square Garden in 1939 during the reign of Adolf Hitler. At the time, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia was criticized for allowing the event to take place, but it proceeded anyway. Many also questioned the motivations of a Trump rally in a state that hasn’t voted for a Republican candidate for president since Ronald Reagan.

Hoylman-Sigal called the rally a “disastrous decision” by the venue “that will endanger the public safety of New Yorkers and has the potential to incite widespread violence.” Like many, he also called upon Madison Square Garden to cancel the event.

Donald Trump’s underlying reasons for supporting the state of Israel might have something to do with lining his own pockets.

The Trump Organization is reportedly looking to reopen talks about a lucrative hotel deal in Jerusalem, a discussion that began in earnest before the October 7 attack last year, The New York Times reported Wednesday. The organization was in talks to build a luxury property on the former site of Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, according to sources and documents reviewed by the Times.

But that’s not the only Trumpian real estate project in the works in Israel. In Tel Aviv, the Trump Organization eyed a rising skyscraper as a possible location for another Trump-branded hotel, a project that would create the most hotel rooms in a single building just steps away from the headquarters of the Israel Defense Forces.

“The deal absolutely would have gotten done if not for Oct. 7,” Eric Trump, who oversaw the deal, told the Times, adding that the real estate group would “definitely” finalize a deal with the country “when the current situation that we’re all witnessing on TV every day is resolved.”

Trump has been anything but shy about his unequivocal support for Israel. One of his biggest donors—and the recipient of one of Trump’s Presidential Medals of Freedom—Miriam Adelson, is also the richest Israeli in the world, and has worked for years to influence and lobby U.S. politicians to make decisions that benefit the Israeli state.

Speaking earlier this week with New York radio show Sid & Friends, Trump claimed that “nobody’s done more for the Jewish people than I have.” And in an interview with Hugh Hewitt, Trump insisted that the state of Israel—not necessarily Jewish Americans—needed to “get smart” about supporting his candidacy while speculating about the potential “waterfront property” real estate development possibilities in Gaza.

“I think that Israel has to do one thing,” Trump said. “They have to get smart about Trump, because they don’t back me. I did more for Israel than anybody. I did more for the Jewish people than anybody. And it’s not reciprocal.”

The Democratic ticket is working overtime to bury Minnesota Governor Tim Walz’s hot take on the Electoral College.

On Tuesday, the number two on the Democratic presidential ticket told a group of donors in Sacramento, California, that he no longer supported the Electoral College’s continued existence.

“I think all of us know, the Electoral College needs to go. We need a national popular vote,” Walz said to applause. “But that’s not the world we live in.”

“So we need to win Beaver County, Pennsylvania,” Walz continued. “We need to be able to go into York, Pennsylvania, and win. We need to be in western Wisconsin and win. We need to be in Reno, Nevada, and win. And the help that you give here today helps make that happen.”

But by Wednesday, Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign was already working to distance her from Walz’s perspective, telling USA Today that ridding the nation of the Electoral College is not an official position.

The controversial institution has been a matter of contention in the United States since its inception at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Critics have argued that the system—which almost singularly determines the outcome of presidential elections regardless of the popular vote—is wholly undemocratic, while offering outsize national influence to smaller, less densely populated, traditionally conservative regions of the country.

There have been at least two episodes in the last couple of decades in which Democratic candidates won the national popular vote but failed to win the White House due to the Electoral College: Al Gore in 2000 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.

“Governor Walz believes that every vote matters in the Electoral College and he is honored to be traveling the country and battleground states working to earn support for the Harris-Walz ticket,” a Harris campaign spokesperson said in a statement to USA Today. “He was commenting to a crowd of strong supporters about how the campaign is built to win 270 electoral votes. And, he was thanking them for their support that is helping fund those efforts.”