What on Earth Was CNN Thinking Inviting a Project 2025 Adviser on Air?

A conservative panelist has been banned from CNN the night after he said that he hoped another commentator’s “beeper wouldn’t go off,” after they expressed support for Palestinians.

A panel on CNN’s Newsnight with Abby Phillip descended into chaos Monday as conservative political consultant Ryan Girdusky made an offensive comment to Zeteo’s Mehdi Hasan, who is Muslim.* Girdusky is on the board of advisers for American Moment, one of many advisory groups for Project 2025, the fascist playbook for a second Trump administration.

The panel was discussing the racist remarks at Donald Trump’s rally in New York City on Sunday, when Hasan argued, “If you don’t want to be called Nazis, stop doing things [associated with Nazis].”

“You’ve been called an antisemite more than anyone else at this table,” Girdusky replied, referring to Hasan’s outspoken criticism of Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

“Yeah, yeah. By you?” Hasan asked.

“By me? No, I never called you an antisemite,” Girdusky said.

“I’m a supporter of the Palestinians, so I’m used to it,” Hasan said, shrugging.

“Yeah, well I hope your beeper doesn’t go off,” Girdusky replied. His comment was a clear reference to Israel’s attack in Lebanon, which Israel claimed only targeted beepers held by Hezbollah but actually killed at least 12 people, including two children, and injured 2,800 others.

“Did you just say I should die? Did you just say I should be killed?” Hasan responded incredulously.

As Phillip and Hasan challenged Girdusky, the right-winger backpedaled desperately, claiming that he thought Hasan had said he was a supporter of Hamas, suggesting he thinks showing support for Palestinian civilians is tantamount to terrorism. But no one was buying it.

“Are you?” Girdusky asked.

“No, of course I’m not a supporter of Hamas. Are you a racist, violent person inciting violence against me?” Hasan responded.

After the panel, CNN released a statement on Phillip’s social media saying that Girdusky would not be invited back as a guest. “There is zero room for racism or bigotry at CNN or on our air,” the statement said.

“We aim to foster thoughtful conversations and debate between people who profoundly disagree with each other in order to explore important issues and promote mutual understanding.”

But how did Girdusky end up on air in the first place?

Notably, Girdusky isn’t just a conservative; he’s far right. Girdusky previously wrote for notorious neo-Nazi Richard Spencer, according to posts on Spencer’s X accounts. Girdusky also once laughed about being Islamophobic with Gavin McInnes, the founder of the Proud Boys, a far-right neofascist group.

Girdusky is a former staffer of Trump’s running mate, JD Vance. Before that, he started the 1776 Project PAC, which mobilized opposition to “critical race theory” being taught in public schools. Girdusky had no children at the time.

Girdusky didn’t take being banned well at all. “You can stay on CNN if you falsely call every Republican a Nazi and have taken money from Qatar-funded media. Apparently you can’t go on CNN if you make a joke. I’m glad America gets to see what CNN stands for,” he wrote on X.

Earlier Monday, Girdusky had been whining about the “humor police” on X, who criticized comedian Tony Hinchcliffe’s jokes at Trump’s rally. Clearly he didn’t heed his own warnings, as only hours later, he landed in hot water for a disgusting “joke” of his own.

* This story has been updated.

Donald Trump and his TruthSocial posts have again proven that a hit dog will indeed holler.

The former president took to his personal social media platform on Monday to express his disgust with former first lady Michelle Obama after her scathing warning two days prior on his catastrophic record.

“FoxNews spends far too much time promoting the Democrats, their surrogates, and their agenda. Today I watched, over and over again, an angry and totally out of control Michelle Obama trying to save the dying Campaign of Comrade Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote, bizarrely taking out his anger on his favorite news channel.

Obama did lob some serious shots at the former president in a speech in Kalamazoo, Michigan, on Saturday. She pointed to Trump’s “obvious mental decline,” his history of sexual abuse allegations, and the warning from his former chief of staff John Kelly that he is “fascist to the core.” She also warned about Trump’s dire threat to women in America and expressed her frustration that some voters are “choosing to ignore Donald Trump’s gross incompetence while asking Kamala to dazzle us at every turn.”

But Trump’s beef with Fox News suggests that he may not have actually listened to the network’s rally coverage, as it was mostly negative toward Obama’s speech. He went on to accuse his most sympathetic media outlet of showing more pro-Democrat commercials than Republican ones and obscuring the polls that prove that he is winning Michigan “by so much.” He is not. Expect more rambling Truth Social posts and nonsensical allegations as we draw closer and closer to Election Day.

Republicans have been dealt a setback in how mail-in ballots are counted in the battleground state of Nevada.

The Nevada Supreme Court ruled Monday that absentee ballots without a postmark can be counted for up to three days after Election Day on November 5, rejecting a challenge from the Republican Party to have them thrown out. A majority of the court found that Nevada law allowing the counting of ballots if the postmark date “cannot be determined” also applied to envelopes without a postmark.

It’s not known how many ballots will be affected by the decision. Republicans cited one county receiving 24 such ballots during the primary election earlier this year. In their opinion, the court justices said that the GOP failed to provide any evidence that ballots without a postmark indicated fraud, that such ballots were more likely to come from a particular political party, or that the state can’t properly address concerns about the ballots’ security. 

“Rejecting timely mail ballots because of postal service omissions cuts against the strong public interest in exercising the right to vote,” the justices in the main opinion wrote. Twenty-two states and territories count late-arriving ballots, but Nevada is the only battleground state to accept ballots so late.

In August, the Republican National Committee tried to get a lower Nevada court to block the counting of ballots without a postmark, but the judge in that case said the RNC lacked standing to sue. The RNC then appealed to the state’s highest court, which put the case on a fast track and heard arguments on October 8. Republicans also tried to sue the state in federal court over postmarks and were unsuccessful. The GOP has appealed, but a decision isn’t likely to come before November 5.

The state of Nevada went to Joe Biden in 2020 by fewer than 34,000 votes, a 2.4 percent margin, and news agencies didn’t call the race until three days later. Last time, Republicans also tried to use a fake elector scheme and legal challenges to overturn the race. This time, at least one of their election-meddling plans has been stopped.

Donald Trump’s former aide has been cooking up an executive order for Trump to turn the military on the American people.

Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025 who is reportedly in line to be chief of staff for Donald Trump, has bragged about laying out the legal rationale to allow Trump to deploy the military against protesters, according to recordings of private speeches obtained by Documented and ProPublica.

In a speech earlier this year, Vought, who worked as Trump’s director of the Office of Management and Budget, explained that he would use the Insurrection Act to allow the president to use the military to quell political protest. Vought, who also leads the pro-Trump think tank the Center for Renewing America, proudly announced that the organization is working tirelessly to find legal avenues to allow Trump to invoke the act and deploy the military on day one.

“We have detailed agency plans,” said Vought at an event for the think tank. “We are writing the actual executive orders. We are writing the actual regulations now, and we are sorting out the legal authorities for all of what President Trump is running on.”

Vought also stated that he believes that this brute force is the Republicans’ only hope against their “adversaries,” using rhetoric similar to Trump’s recent threats about “the enemy within.”

“The stark reality in America is that we are in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover of the country in which our adversaries already hold the weapons of the government apparatus, and they have aimed it at us,” said Vought. “We are here in the year of 2024, a year that very well [could]—and I believe it will—rival 1776 and 1860 for the complexity and the uncertainty of the forces arrayed against us.”

In another 2023 speech, Vought also vowed to make government workers miserable by defunding their organizations, making them political enemies, and putting them “in trauma.”

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” said Vought in 2023. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down so that the EPA can’t do all of the rules against our energy industry because they have no bandwidth financially to do so.”

If this all sounds familiar, it’s because Vought was also caught by undercover reporters in August declaring his love of “Christian nation-ism.” Despite Trump’s lies that he knows nothing about Project 2025, Vought told reporters that the Republican candidate is “very supportive of what we do.”

Ballot drop boxes in two states were set on fire Monday, potentially damaging dozens of ballots.

In Vancouver, Washington, first responders pulled flaming ballots out of a ballot box at Fisher’s Landing Transit Center in the early morning, according to KATU News.

Clark County auditor Greg Kimsey said that “hundreds” of ballots were potentially damaged and added that anyone who placed their ballot in the receptacle after 11 a.m. on Saturday should contact his office to confirm whether their ballot had been received.

Vancouver is located in Washington’s 3rd congressional district, where Democratic Representative Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is seeking to keep hold of the seat she won two years ago, a major upset in a district that was long held by a Republican.

While losing her House seat could weaken Democratic hopes of regaining control, for her part, Gluesenkamp Perez has set herself apart from her Democratic colleagues by regularly voting against her own party. She voted against Joe Biden’s student debt relief plan and in favor of Republicans’ SAVE Act, and refused to endorse Kamala Harris.

Biden won Clark County, where Vancouver is located, in 2020, and in 2016, Hillary Clinton narrowly beat Donald Trump there by only 107 votes.

In Portland, Oregon, a ballot box was lit on fire Monday by what Portland police described as an “incendiary device.” The Multnomah County election office said that “fire suppressant inside the ballot box protected virtually all the ballots” and only three were damaged, according to NBC News.

It’s unclear whether the two incidents were related, but the FBI is investigating them both.

In Phoenix, a United States Postal Service mailbox also was lit on fire Monday, damaging a small number of mail-in ballots, according to The Guardian.

This series of burning ballots follows a nearly two-week-old warning from the Department of Homeland Security to law agencies across the country. Online chatter suggested that election deniers were plotting to bomb ballot boxes ahead of the general election, according to the department.

One of Donald Trump’s campaign employees has been fired after complaining about money being wasted and sent to firms overcharging the campaign.

The Daily Beast reports that a campaign worker wrote an email calling out Trump’s campaign co-chairs, Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, alleging that they are funneling millions of dollars to companies she accuses of overcharging the former president, including one run by a major donor to Kamala Harris.

“The grift and greed I’ve witnessed makes me sick and I think leadership has been bad stewards of generous donors money,” the worker wrote in an email to a former colleague after she was fired October 18. “I’m 100% on Team Trump—I want the very best for this campaign, but what I’ve witnessed is greedy and wrong.”

In her email, the worker, who has requested anonymity, also alleged that she and other campaign employees believed that their bosses put “a listening device in a cut out hole” in a conference room at the campaign’s south Florida headquarters. She wrote that the campaign’s chief financial officer, Sean Dollman, was worried enough to search the conference room to try and find such a device.

The worker wrote that Dollman “has alluded to the fact that he can’t say things for fear of retaliation. There are napkins stuffed in all the gaps in the conference room now. It seems like they’re willing to go to extremes.”

Dollman has denied the worker’s allegations.

“This is nothing more than fanciful lies and fabrications from a disgruntled former employee of a vendor, and this person apparently was a terrible teammate who also disclosed private, internal information to outside individuals,” a senior campaign official told The Daily Beast.

The worker was responsible for making sure Trump’s campaign ads were posted on platforms including YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, and was employed by Launchpad Strategies, an ad firm owned by Dollman, and not the campaign directly. In her email, she said Dollman fired her at the behest of LaCivita.

While the worker did not go into detail about the “grift and greed,” The Daily Beast reported that other sources said she had raised concerns for months about how ad money was being spent by LaCivita and Wiles. Earlier this month, The Daily Beast revealed that LaCivita has raked in more than $22 million in just two years as Trump’s adviser, thanks to his consulting firm making money on Trump campaign ads. The campaign worker was fired three days after that.

Trump’s campaign, much like its candidate, has had multiple issues with transparency regarding money. It has failed to identify who received millions of dollars in ad spending, and millions of campaign dollars have been funneled into the former president’s businesses. One of the latest super PACs to support him is skirting campaign disclosure laws. It seems that a businessman notorious for grift can’t help bringing it into politics as well.

When Hurricane Milton hit Florida nearly three weeks ago, the Category 3 storm ravaged the coastline and created a record number of tornadoes—at least 41—inside the Sunshine State. At least 24 people died from the storm, and more than three million people were left without power.

But the hurricane also devastated things even far outside of its reach: namely, Donald Trump’s legal defense in his January 6 case.

On Monday, Judge Tanya Chutkan granted a motion to extend deadlines in his January 6 trial by several weeks after Trump attorneys Todd Blanche, Emil Bove, John Lauro, and Gregory Singer claimed that Milton had “severely” affected their ability to stick to the previous schedule. The legal team did not specify exactly how they were affected by the southern storm but wrote in a footnote that they would elaborate under seal if required by the judge, claiming that the “personal details” of the reasoning were irrelevant to the public.

“Specifically, the impacts of the hurricane, which remain ongoing for certain counsel, have substantially slowed progress on the Response,” the filing said. “This, in turn, has limited counsel’s ability to thoroughly consider the Court’s extensive classified and unclassified discovery order and prepare an appropriate Motion to Compel.”

Chutkan noted that special counsel Jack Smith’s office did not oppose the request.

The decision moves the Trump team’s November 7 deadline to submit several legal filings, including a motion to strip “immunity-related discovery” from Smith as well as an argument that Smith was unlawfully appointed, to November 21. It also moves briefings on the immunity issue from December 5 to December 19, apparently also based on Hurricane Milton’s disruption.

Earlier this month, Smith’s team released an eye-opening report that included revelations about Trump’s behavior ahead of and on January 6, outlining what Smith described in the redacted document as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the massive motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The motion was broken into four separate sections: The first section outlined Smith’s case against Trump, while the second offered a road map to aid Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” in light of a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion tied in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section featured a conclusion requesting Chutkan rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The Supreme Court handed Trump one of the biggest wins of his career in July, when they ruled 6–3 to expand a president’s immunity and redefine what constitutes an “official act,” effectively deciding that Trump could not be held accountable for some of his behavior with regard to attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Sonia Sotomayor feared for the future of a country that legally permits the executive branch authority to commit crimes under the cloak of the office, arguing that the court’s decision made a “mockery” of the constitutional principle that “no man is above the law.” She warned that the court’s “own misguided wisdom” gave Trump “all the immunity he asked for and more.”

Trump has been charged with four crimes in the election interference case: two related to the disruption of Congress’s certification of votes, one for Trump’s alleged scheme to defraud the U.S. via disrupting the collection and certification of votes, and a fourth for the conspiracy to deprive citizens of their right to vote.

Donald Trump’s stock is surging, but don’t be fooled: It’s still absolutely worthless.

Trump Media & Technology Group’s stock value surged Monday following his rally in New York City. After increasing by 32 percent over the last week, Trump’s stock bumped up 16 percent on Monday morning, according to CNN.

But according to one financial expert, that isn’t enough to save Trump’s terrible stock.

David Bahnsen, the managing partner of the Bahnsen Group, told Fox Business Monday that he struggled to speak about Trump’s DJT stock without laughing.

“There’s not even a fundamental connection to Trump winning the election with it. It’s just a company that sets hundreds of millions of dollars on fire, and there’s no path to changing that,” said Bahnsen.

There was no real product behind the DJT stock, Bahnsen explained. “If Trump wins, Twitter is still the big social media app for this.”

In reality, Trump’s Truth Social has very little market value. George Kailas, CEO of Prospero.ai, told CNN that the latest surge has left Trump Media trading at more than 1,600 times its enterprise value, which is a measure of a company’s market capitalization and any debts.

Kailas called DJT’s valuation “crazy.”

Still, following Trump’s racist rally at Madison Square Garden, there appears to be a surge in support for the stock, as people may feel more confident about his chances of winning. However, Trump’s odds in betting markets should be taken with a grain of salt.

Trump’s stock has fluctuated wildly in the past three months. Its value operates like a meme stock and appears to be based on social sentiment for the Republican presidential nominee. It fell significantly after he was found guilty of 34 felony charges and continued to plummet after Kamala Harris joined the presidential race. It briefly peaked after his failed assassination attempt in July before cratering.

The stock hit an all-time low in late September when it was valued at nearly $12 per share. As of Monday, the stock has been valued at just over $46 per share, its highest value since May, rising nearly 200 percent.

It seems that Trump’s Sunday rally at Madison Square Garden, which has been compared to a full-on Nazi rally, has sparked enthusiasm among investors. The people on Wall Street must have been really impressed by the racist jokes and overt threats to democracy.

However, there is reason to believe that there could be some influencing behind pro-Trump surges in the election market. The boost could also be the product of shifting favor on other betting sites, such as Polymarket, which revealed last week that what appeared to be four large bets placed on Trump’s victory, totaling $45 million, were actually all placed by the same person.

Noncitizens voting isn’t a statistical issue in the 2024 election—but that doesn’t mean that Donald Trump’s allies have given up the ghost.

Eight days out from Election Day, a legal effort by Virginia’s election leadership to slash their voter rolls has reached the Supreme Court’s shadow docket via an emergency application for a stay.

The filing, submitted Monday by several members of the state election board, Virginia Commissioner of Elections Susan Beale, and Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares asks the Supreme Court to uphold a recent regulation that systematically purged 1,600 names from the state’s voter roll. Virginia argued that it believes the voters did not provide adequate evidence of citizenship to the Department of Motor Vehicles.

In separate cases, the Department of Justice and several organizations of Virginia voters sued Old Dominion for the regulation, arguing that the change was illegal and plainly flouted the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, which bars states from changing their voting rules within 90 days of an election.

On Friday, a federal judge in Virginia ordered that the state reinstate the voters, but MAGA Republican Governor Glenn Youngkin quickly appealed the ruling. On Sunday, the Fourth Circuit unanimously refused to grant a stay, writing in a six-page opinion that the state’s arguments were “weak” and that there were several other options available to Virginia to cull the roll outside of the overreaching regulation.

“My own best guess is that the Supreme Court will deny Virginia’s request for a stay,” wrote Georgetown University law professor Steve Vladeck Monday in his newsletter One First. “Of course, whether or not 1600 voters will be restored to the rolls may not seem like a big deal in a state in which the presidential race isn’t likely to be that close, but this is the same Virginia in which a state legislative race—and control of the House of Delegates—was settled by a drawing after a literal tie in 2017.”

As part of Trump’s election conspiracymongering, the former president has campaigned on the notion that noncitizen voters are upending the presidential election results and, by extension, American democracy in favor of the Democratic Party. But an audit at the epicenter of Trump’s conspiracy—Georgia—uncovered just 20 noncitizens out of the Peach State’s 8.2 million voter roll, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger shared on Wednesday. Those cracks in the system accounted for just 0.00024390243902439 percent of the state’s voting population.

Nine out of the 20 noncitizen registrations had participated in elections years ago, before ID was required as a part of the voter verification process. The other 11 individuals were registered but never actually voted, reported The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Election officials canceled the registrations and subsequently reported the individuals to law enforcement.

At Donald Trump’s rally in New York’s Madison Square Garden Sunday, one speaker took a bigoted swipe at Muslims—and he holds an important position in the Trump campaign.

Howard Lutnick, the CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald and a co-chair of the Trump campaign’s transition team, told the crowd why they should vote for the former president and, raising a fist, invoked Islamophobia.

“So, the first thing: We must elect Donald J. Trump president because we must crush jihad,” Lutnick shouted to cheers.

Lutnick’s use of the word “jihad” in this context is an allusion to bigoted views about Islam. The term is widely mistranslated as “holy war,” when the literal Arabic translation is “to strive” or “to struggle.” In a religious context, the word is used to describe a person’s internal or external struggle to do good deeds.

The comments undermine the Trump campaign’s recent efforts to woo Arab American and Muslim voters, particularly in the battleground state of Michigan. Trump has a narrow lead among Arab American voters over Kamala Harris, and has found an opening due to the Harris campaign’s neglect of the community.

Harris has campaigned in Michigan with former Representative Liz Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, drawing the ire of the state’s Arab American community, which includes 90,000 Iraqi Americans who remember the elder Cheney’s support for the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well as his daughter’s reputation for supporting torture and anti-Muslim bigotry.

The state also boasts large Lebanese and Palestinian communities who are seeing the Biden administration’s staunch support for Israel’s brutal bombing campaign in Gaza and Lebanon as the Biden administration continues to make no progress on a cease-fire or arms embargo. At the Democratic National Convention in August, Harris’s campaign neglected to highlight Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim voices on the stage.

But Harris has some good news in Arizona, where last week more than 100 Palestinian, Arab, Muslim, and progressive Democrats and community leaders in the southwestern battleground state signed a letter supporting her campaign. The vice president’s campaign will have to hope that statements like Lutnick’s, as well as Trump’s own bigoted record on Islam and Muslims, will help her win over more of the crucial vote.