Fox News Suffers Blow as Billionaire Joins Lawsuit Against Network

One of the founders of LinkedIn, billionaire Reid Hoffman, is backing a voting technology company that is suing Fox News and Newsmax for defamation.

The Washington Post reports that Hoffman has invested millions of dollars into the company partly to help it finance the lawsuits. Smartmatic says that the two conservative news outlets hurt the company’s image with their claims of electoral and vote-counting fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

“Smartmatic built a global business by using technology to better engage citizens, regardless of party or ideology, by making voting simple and trustworthy,” Hoffman said in a statement. “After Donald Trump lost in 2020, however, Smartmatic became a target of the defamatory campaign to overturn his defeat.”

Smartmatic CEO Antonio Mugica issued a statement refuting the right-wing attacks against it.

“Smartmatic’s technology has counted seven billion votes on six continents with zero security breaches,” Mugica said. “Voters, candidates, and election officials in all of those elections are watching to see if we still stand up for the truth against lies. Rest assured, we do.”

Billionaires have attempted to aid lawsuits for ideological reasons in the past. Right-wing tech mogul Peter Thiel infamously backed a series of lawsuits against Gawker Media after it published a story outing him. This isn’t the first lawsuit that Hoffman has backed against conservative figures, either: He also helped fund E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit accusing Trump of rape and defamation.

There’s no trial date as of yet for Smartmatic’s lawsuit against Fox. The media network settled a defamation lawsuit with Dominion Voting Systems in April 2023 to the tune of $787.5 million, nipping what would have been an unprecedented trial process in the bud. Will Hoffman want Smartmatic to seek a settlement, or will he want to get his money’s worth and force Fox News to trial?

While the world was digesting examples of President Joe Biden’s faltering health, Donald Trump was quietly having his own terrible, no-good, very bad week.

The former president had a relatively bonkers week on the campaign trail, thoroughly illustrating in his own right that he’s just another candidate unfit to retake the White House. In the span of a matter of days, the 78-year-old demonstrated poor impulse control, a thirst for revenge, an unwavering God complex, and his affinity for dangerous QAnon conspiracy theories that stroke his ego.

On Truth Social, Trump shared an image of himself and Melania Trump at the White House, superimposed with the QAnon catchphrase, “Where We Go One We Go All.” Trump has for years shared messages and iconography from the cultlike, fringe group that heralds him as a messiah against the pedophilic evils of the Democratic Party, including wearing pins and badges prominently featuring the letter “Q,” and elevating other phrases that originated in the group, such as “The storm is coming.”

Trump also used his social media platform to amplify an attack against billionaire financier George Soros and his family, vaguely accusing the investor and his connections of being “treasonous traitors.”

Trump extended that moniker to former Wyoming GOP Representative Liz Cheney,  baselessly claiming she was “guilty of treason” and deserved a “televised military tribunal.” Cheney was one of just a small handful of Republicans who criticized Trump’s tenure as U.S. leader following the events of January 6.

“Donald—This is the type of thing that demonstrates yet again that you are not a stable adult—and are not fit for office,” Cheney wrote in response on X.

Trump also shared an image of several other prominent lawmakers that he believed should be headed to prison instead of his far-right ally Steve Bannon, who began his federal sentence last week for defying a congressional subpoena. Those politicians include former Vice President Mike Pence, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who all committed the egregious crime—according to Trump—of hiding “the January 6 footage.”

The former president was riding such a high after the debate that he went so far as to claim that his candidacy was divine ordainment, resharing a post by another user that claimed “God has chosen him.”

Donald Trump helped draft a 2024 Republican Party platform that was adopted Monday, effectively cementing his extreme views as the de facto stance of the party.  According to Maggie Haberman with The New York Times, the policy platform was “overwhelmingly” adopted on Monday, despite initially scheduled meetings on Tuesday.

According to The Washington Post, Trump’s policy platform makes mass deportations the party’s official platform, calls to “deport pro-Hamas radicals,” seeks to build a “great Iron Dome” over the United States, and calls to “end the weaponization of the Department of Justice”—by which Trump likely means preventing the DOJ from prosecuting him and instead converting it into his personal attack dog.

The platform also targets transgender people, who make up less than 1 percent of the U.S. adult population, promising to “keep men out of women’s sports, ban taxpayer funding for sex change surgeries, [stop] taxpayer-funded schools from promoting gender transition, reverse Biden’s radical rewrite of Title IX education regulations, and restore protections for women and girls.” As the Post notes, the proposal doesn’t seek to ban gender-affirming care for minors. However, the threats toward schools “promoting gender transition” and “protections for women and girls” hint at policies akin to Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” ban on classroom discussions of LGBTQ issues and appears to promise a reversal of the Biden administration rule that prohibits transphobic bathroom bans in schools.

The platform takes a much less extreme approach to abortion than Trump’s anti-abortion supporters would like, opting instead to support access to IVF and birth control while opposing late-term abortion and leaving abortion access up to the states. It also avoids taking a stance on same-sex marriage, which the Post notes scales back the party’s 2016 platform, which condemned the legalization of same-sex marriage and endorsed conversion therapy.

“Republicans will promote a culture that values the sanctity of marriage, the blessings of childhood, and the foundational role of families, and supports working parents,” the proposed platform says instead. “We will end policies that punish families.”

The 16-page platform was allegedly largely written by Vincent Haley, anonymous sources told the Post, with revisions and some portions written by Trump himself, according to Politico. Haley is a Trump campaign speechwriter who worked under Stephen Miller during Trump’s presidency and was Newt Gingrich’s policy director and campaign manager during his 2012 presidential campaign, according to Axios. The draft proposal circulated on Monday and was intended to be discussed on Tuesday night by members of the RNC’s platform committee, all of whom were handpicked by Trump, according to The Washington Post. According to Haberman, the policy “passed overwhelmingly.” It’s unclear whether any amendments or revisions were made.

Donald Trump doesn’t think Fox News is doing enough to help him.

The former president and convicted felon raged against the conservative news network on Truth Social on Monday, demanding that Fox “STOP PUTTING ON THE ENEMY!”

The post follows two posts on Sunday, where Trump gave more detailed complaints. It’s odd that Trump would take shots at Fox, especially just hours before Sean Hannity is set to air a major interview with him. The network has gone to great lengths to help Trump’s presidency and candidacy, even boosting his false claims of 2020 election fraud and having to pay a hefty legal settlement as a result. But Trump is apparently upset at Fox’s guests, whom he feels aren’t defending him or his claims strongly enough.

For example, he complained on Saturday about Wall Street Journal editor John Bussey, claiming that the journalist “refuses to say, even though he knows it to be true, that everything I got accused of is a Biden inspired HOAX for purposes of Election Interference.” Late last month, Trump was angry that a Fox poll showed Biden narrowly leading him by two points.

In short, Trump demands total loyalty from everyone around him, no matter what they’ve done for him in the past. Fox has a long record of going above and beyond to support Trump, whether it’s editing interviews to make him look better, pushing his blatant lie about the FBI plotting to kill him, and covering up whatever makes him look bad. The network has always pushed Republican goals and messages, throwing its weight behind Trump once he captured the GOP electorate, and is putting its thumb on the scale for Trump in this election.

Trump can continue to take shots at Fox without worrying about their support, as the network doesn’t want to risk angering his supporters. But ultimately, the voters he has to convince may not be hanging on the network’s every word.

France’s New Popular Front Coalition pulled off a stunning parliamentary election victory on Sunday, blocking Marine Le Pen’s far-right ultranationalist party, the National Rally, from overtaking the country’s government.

After a strong showing from a coalition made up of the Republican right-wing party and the National Rally in the first round of voting last week, France’s Prime Minister Gabriel Attal called upon candidates from President Emmanuel Macron’s party who were caught in three-way races to begin dropping out—and, quite amazingly, they did.

As a result, the New Popular Front, a four-party left-green alliance, came in first with 192 seats. Macron’s center-right alliance came in second, winning 163 seats, and Le Pen’s far-right movement came in third, winning only 143 seats. While the New Popular Front did not achieve an absolute majority, and the way forward for the government remains unclear, the surprise victory marked a rare instance of the traditional democratic alliance winning against fascism.

Across France, members of the far-right coalition were left dumbfounded as the results of the election rolled in.

A video posted to X by France 3 Rhône-Alpes showed a crowd at the National Rally headquarters in Rhône, where onlookers eagerly counted down to the results—and then couldn’t hide their abject disappointment when they realized they had lost. In the murmur of the crowd, a word favored by the French, “impossible!” can be heard.

At an election-night party in Bois de Vincennes, journalist Alison Tassin captured far-right activists who looked more than a little displeased to see the shocking election results.

Meanwhile, at the headquarters of the far-left La France Insoumise party in Paris’s Place Stalingrad, journalist Maxime Dubernet captured the inverse of far-right distress: leftist triumph.

French television network BMFTV put reactions from the two camps side by side: the overjoyed La France Insoumise on the left and the dejected National Rally on the right.

Online, far-right conservatives have decried the election results as the death of France. But many are rejoicing that the National Rally, with its history of antisemitism and Holocaust denialism and vehemently racist, anti-immigration rhetoric and platform, has been kept out of power for now.