Why the Hell Is Hulk Hogan Speaking at the RNC?

Let me tell you something, brother: For some reason, one of the scheduled speakers for the Republican National Convention Thursday night is retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan.

Hogan doesn’t have a long history of political activism, unless you count his “run” for president as a publicity stunt two decades ago, making his appearance all the more puzzling. His peak days of being the top star in the wrestling world and starring in B and C movies are well behind him.

It’s only recently that Mr. America managed to overcome the 2015 scandal of uttering a racial slur in a leaked sex tape that resurfaced, after which he returned to making appearances in the pro wrestling world. The fallout from that tape might have gotten him into right-wing politics too.

Also in 2015, Hogan would sue Gawker Media, the company behind the publication of that video, with tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a conservative with a vendetta against Gawker for outing him in 2007, funding the lawsuit. Hogan would win the suit and be awarded $115 million, bankrupting Gawker.

Last month, Hogan appeared on Fox and Friends and said, “If you need a president or vice president, I’ll volunteer and take this country over, and I’ll rule with an iron fist.” Since Senator J.D. Vance has since been named the Republican vice presidential nominee (also with Thiel’s support), it looks like Trump wasn’t looking for Hogan’s version of an iron fist or even his signature leg drop on the ticket.

But maybe that’s what Republicans are looking for on the last night of the RNC: a celebrity has-been wrapped in the flag, with allegations of racism in his past, whose career includes an infamous heel turn to give the convention some social media attention. Doesn’t that describe Donald Trump in 2016 too? Just like the Hulkster, Trump even has ties to pro wrestling. And like any MAGA Republican, the two call themselves “real Americans” but refuse to fight for the rights of every man.

Kevin McCarthy is not wishing Matt Gaetz well.

“He looks very unhinged,” the former speaker said Thursday about Gaetz’s appearance at the Republican National Convention. “A lot of people have concerns about him.”

McCarthy wasn’t the only Republican looking to tear Gaetz down. Representative Derrick Van Orden of Wisconsin called Matt Gaetz an “AI powered inflatable sex doll” while tweeting out a photo of Gaetz speaking at the convention. 

Though it does certainly look like Gaetz got his face retouched, McCarthy threw out the idea that Gaetz is unwell in some way. “I’m not sure if he was on something. But I do hope that he gets the help that he needs.”

McCarthy’s concern about Gaetz’s appearance and demeanor didn’t come out of nowhere but is a sign of the escalating feud between the two.

In the CNN interview Thursday, McCarthy accused Gaetz of “wanting to leverage” McCarthy’s fight to remain House speaker in order to stop the Ethics Committee investigation into his alleged sexual misconduct and illicit drug use.

McCarthy said that after he refused, Gaetz sought revenge. “That’s what the whole motion to vacate was about.” This is a theory McCarthy has floated before. 

Gaetz is accused of having sex with a teenage girl while he was serving in Congress, and the House Ethics Committee announced last month that it is expanding its investigation against the Florida representative.

“I hope the young women get the justice they deserve when it comes to him,” said McCarthy.

Elon Musk recently came out with a public endorsement of Donald Trump for president, but Republicans haven’t fully embraced him, according to a report from The New York Times.

The tech billionaire CEO of Twitter, Tesla, and SpaceX has been highly sought after by GOP fundraisers and Trump associates for years, who see him both as a meal ticket and a potential inspiration for the party. But Musk doesn’t have a solid record for political involvement.

For example, he has promised to spend money on “free speech” lawsuits to support conservatives who claim that they are the victims of social media censorship but hasn’t followed through. Musk has also been a no-show at public appearances, such as a 2023 event to support Kevin McCarthy, then the newly elected speaker of the House. In San Francisco, he promised to donate $100,000 to the centrist group GrowSF to defeat progressives, but again didn’t follow through.

“Some conservative activists said they wished that Mr. Musk had followed through more on promises,” the Times reported.

Musk’s public endorsement of Trump only came after a gunman tried to assassinate the former president and convicted felon on Saturday. Previously, the tech magnate, while privately urging friends not to vote for Biden, was waiting until the president had secured the Democratic nomination, according to the Times.

Musk’s confidants in the tech world, such as Joe Lonsdale, a co-founder of data analytics firm Palantir, reportedly discuss politics with him and have urged him to play a more active role. Lonsdale founded AmericaPAC to help Trump return to the White House, with Musk reportedly pledging a monthly donation of $45 million, according to The Wall Street Journal. Musk denied the report, leaving those involved with the PAC to wonder how much he plans to donate, or if he will at all.

Alongside fellow tech CEOs Peter Thiel and David Sacks, Musk is a member of the “PayPal mafia,” the group of early supporters and founders of the payment service. All three have embraced conservative ideas and supported J.D. Vance as Trump’s running mate, with Musk and Sacks openly lobbying Trump on behalf of the Ohio senator. If Trump wins in November, the trio will have an administration friendly to their whims and those of Silicon Valley’s right wing.

Donald Trump’s campaign is still working to distance itself from the Heritage Foundation’s extremist blueprint to uproot American democracy, Project 2025.

Speaking at the CNN-Politico Grill on Thursday, senior Trump adviser and co-campaign manager Chris LaCivita suggested that any reported link between Project 2025 and Trump’s plans for a potential second administration would be “complete and utter bullshit.”

“The president has made it clear, these people do not speak for him, they do not speak for the campaign,” LaCivita told Politico’s politics bureau chief, Jonathan Martin, calling the project a “pain in the ass.”

LaCivita added that it’s “pure speculation” to suggest that the former Trump staffers currently building Project 2025 have a future in Trump’s potential next presidency.

Trump’s campaign has grown increasingly frustrated by reporting on the affiliation between the campaign and Project 2025’s agenda, despite their apparent ties, and the program’s intention to serve as a de facto policy agenda for the Trump campaign. Project 2025 includes policies ranging from the dismantling of government agencies, such as the Department of Education, to the implementation of national abortion bans and contraception restrictions.

The campaign and the project share political philosophies and key allies, including former Trump advisers Stephen Miller and John McEntee. Project 2025 employs more than 100 people who previously worked under Trump. And, as much as Trump wants to distance himself from the apparatus, Project 2025 has been thoroughly involved in staffing a future Trump presidency: Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts has claimed the project has already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees should the presumptive GOP presidential candidate win in November.

But they may have more on the way—in November 2023, Trump allies claimed they were looking to install as many as 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists to the executive branch via a “Schedule F” executive order.

Trump only recently began to drive a wedge between himself and the plan he once called a “colossal mandate to save America.” Earlier this month, Trump wrote on Truth Social that Project 2025 had “nothing to do” with his run for president.

“I know nothing about Project 2025,” Trump posted. “I have no idea who is behind it. I disagree with some of the things they’re saying and some of the things they’re saying are absolutely ridiculous and abysmal. Anything they do, I wish them luck, but I have nothing to do with them.”

The public split came two days after Roberts issued an ominous warning for leftists ahead of what he called a “second American Revolution.”

“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts said on Steve Bannon’s podcast War Room, celebrating the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.

But Trump’s sudden pushback didn’t rattle people involved with Project 2025—instead, they felt confident that his turn of favor wouldn’t stand in the way of their ability to implement the far-right agenda come Inauguration Day.

“The general sense is this is a P.R. gesture for him to provide himself maximum room to maneuver and avoid making any commitments at this point,” one source on Project 2025’s advisory board told NBC News. “He wants to avoid having to answer questions about anything he doesn’t want to answer questions about. Most people I know who are involved with it don’t seem overly worried that this actually constitutes a repudiation and is going to mean anything on Jan. 20.”

Team Trump seems to be growing increasingly nervous about the likelihood that they will have to face off against a different candidate in November, with a top Trump adviser calling the push to replace Joe Biden on the ballot “a coup.”

Sitting down with Politico reporter Jonathan Martin at a CNN-Politico event at the Republican National Convention on Thursday, Trump campaign senior adviser and Republican strategist Chris LaCivita was asked how he’d feel about the replacement of Joe Biden. “Wouldn’t you like to know,” LaCivita quipped.

“This is nothing more than an attempted coup by the Democratic Party,” he quickly relented.

LaCivita accused Democrats of actively “deposing the president of the United States” and argued that Biden “can’t step down as a candidate for president because you’re cognitively impaired while still being president.”

“It’s literally a coup,” said LaCivita. “For everything they accuse Republicans of, they’re actually doing it on national TV every single day.”

The adviser later said he would “love” Vice President Kamala Harris to take Biden’s place, calling her “gaslighter-in-chief.”

Also on Thursday, the disgraced Matt Schlapp of the Conservative Political Action Conference accused the Democrats of trying to switch their nominee in “a tofu-filled room,” according to Semafors Dave Weigel. Weird joke aside, it’s clear Republicans are worried about the possibility of a new Democratic candidate on the ballot.Months ago, top conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation began scheming ways to insure Biden remains on the ballot.

“We would make it extraordinarily difficult” for Democrats to change their candidate, a Heritage Foundation leader told NOTUS, “We definitely want the dementia patient.”

Senator J.D. Vance’s public Venmo account shines a light into the many corners of the Republican vice presidential nominee’s inner circle, illuminating his long-standing ties with right-wing fascists, shadowy elites, and federal employees, according to a new report from WIRED.

Vance’s public account on Venmo, a mobile payment app, was first discovered by a law enforcement and extremism researcher, who asked to remain anonymous. WIRED was able to verify that the account belonged to Vance.

It’s worth noting that when setting up a Venmo account, the app offers users the opportunity to sync their phone contacts into their friends list. So some people included on the list of Vance’s Venmo friends could have been automatically added when he made his account in 2016, and may have never made a transaction with the senator or contacted him recently.

Still, the list presents a trove of powerful right-wing voices and some surprising names, too, who could be splitting meals and trips with the Ohio Republican.

Among the more than 200 accounts listed on Vance’s Venmo friends list is that of Amelia Halikias, the government relations director at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025.

Donald Trump and Paul Dans, the project’s leader, have attempted to create the illusion that the former president is not affiliated with the fascist plan to oust civil servants and replace them with Trump sycophants. But they can’t outrun all of the evidence demonstrating that Trump had his hands all over the project.

Despite all that posturing, Vance has long-standing public links to the Heritage Foundation, and the group’s president even said he had been rooting for Vance to get the V.P. nomination. Halikias also gave a nod to Vance Monday, retweeting Elon Musk’s comment on Trump’s “excellent” pick of running mate.

Also present on Vance’s friends list is Gladden Pappin, a conservative political theorist who serves as the president of the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs. Pappin is part of the same “new right” vanguard as Vance, which has turned to Hungary’s authoritarian populist regime for inspiration on how to install Christian nationalist policies nationwide.

Pappin also co-founded an online publication called the Journal of American Greatness, which attempted to make scholarly arguments out of Trump’s talking points but shut down before the 2016 election. Alongside collaborator Julius Krein, Pappin later co-founded American Affairs, a Trumpist magazine that still exists.

A Yale alum, Vance has previously criticized elite universities as “expensive day care centers for coddled children,” but he had plenty of connections with many attorneys from expensive law schools, including (predictably) his alma mater.

Several of these lawyers are employed by the Department of Justice and would therefore be considered Trump’s so-called “deep state” enemies. One friend was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, which once launched an investigation into Michael Cohen’s claims about the Trump Organization’s business dealings.

Vance also had links to outright Trump critics, such as former Arizona Governor Jeff Flake and Lanny Davis, Michael Cohen’s former lawyer. Davis denied being Vance’s friend on Venmo.

Others on Vance’s list include intellectual dark web doyenne Bari Weiss, hapless conservative news pundit Tucker Carlson, as well as lobbyists from conservative think tanks such as the Hoover Institution and American Enterprise Institute. None of these people responded to WIRED’s requests for comment.

While Vance’s Venmo presents a window into his inner world, it also presents a security threat, by exposing his connections to those who would seek to influence a potentially powerful person.

“What you guys need to realize is that Vance is influenceable,” wrote Andrew Torba, a right-wing social media CEO who has promoted antisemitic content, in a post on X. “We have plenty of people in his orbit. Plenty of our guys can be put into positions of power because he’s there. Our focus should be on pulling him as far right as possible by 2028. Long game. Honey, not vinegar.”

It turns out that the right-wing boycott of Bud Light in 2023 was helped along by funding from a conservative with a history of dark-money spending: Leonard Leo.

The Guardian obtained 2022 tax filings showing that a group linked to Leo, the Concord Fund, donated $350,000 to Consumers Defense, part of Consumers’ Research, shortly before the latter group played a big role in the beer boycott.

The boycott started over Bud Light’s use of transgender influencer Dylan Mulvaney in an advertising campaign, resulting in threats to Mulvaney and Anheuser-Busch, as well as a drop in profits. The company abandoned and eventually dropped Mulvaney.

Consumers’ Research, after having been dormant for decades, has surfaced in recent years as a right-wing organization dedicated to leading “the fight against ESG,” or environmental, social, and governance policies, by corporations in America. When companies put “progressive activists and their dangerous agendas ahead of customers” in its view, Consumers’ Research releases “woke alerts.”

This wasn’t the first time a donor group connected to Leo helped out Consumers’ Research. In 2021 and 2022, it received $15 million from right-wing philanthropic organization Donors Trust, also linked to the billionaire Republican megadonor. Consumers’ Research is also a client of Leo’s for-profit firm CRC Advisors, according to The Guardian.

Leo is infamous for helping to engineer the conservative takeover of the Supreme Court and the right-wing influx of judges into lower federal courts. Through those efforts, he has in effect become a power broker in conservative circles, throwing his money in unexpected places, such as blocking AIDS relief, in addition to funding brand boycotts. He’s dodged Democratic attempts to hold him accountable or even to have him just answer questions about his activities.

The Bud Light boycott Leo fueled might have caused an ethics violation by one of the justices he helped get on the Supreme Court, Samuel Alito. During the height of the boycott, Alito dumped between $1,000 and $15,000 of Anheuser-Busch stock, possibly showing his own support of the boycott his patron helped to fund.

Former President Barack Obama has reportedly joined the slate of high-ranking Democrats who think that President Joe Biden ought to reconsider his candidacy in the presidential race.

Obama has reportedly told his allies that he believes Biden’s path to victory in November has significantly narrowed and that his former running mate needs to start seriously considering the feasibility of his candidacy in 2024, multiple people familiar with the former president’s opinion told The Washington Post Thursday.

In his conversations with allies, Obama has said he wants to protect Biden and his legacy, according to the Post. Should the president mount an unsuccessful bid that costs Democrats the White House and control of both the House and Senate, that legacy could be in serious jeopardy.

News of Obama’s wavering confidence comes on the heels of three brutal leaks on Wednesday, which revealed that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi had all privately urged the president to withdraw from the race for the sake of the Democratic Party.

Still, their calls for him to step aside in the race come only as leaks and not public calls to withdraw, signaling a reticence to go against Biden entirely. These high-ranking Democrats have resorted to soft power to protect the president, and likely their own skins, should things go another way. The result is a third week of total chaos within the party, while Republicans rally around Donald Trump in Milwaukee and Biden continues to drop in the polls.

Obama’s concerns about Biden’s candidacy have only deepened in the weeks since the president’s disastrous debate performance, people familiar with the matter told the Post.

In all that time, the two have only spoken once, in the immediate aftermath of the debate, and Obama has kept relatively silent. It was reported that George Clooney had consulted with the former president ahead of the actor’s decision to publish an op-ed urging Biden to withdraw from the race.

In recent days, ring-wing social media users have been sniffing out, doxxing, and hounding those who cracked offensive jokes or comments about last week’s attempted assassination of Donald Trump.

Namely, Chaya Raichik, who runs the prominent far-right X account Libs of TikTok, has spent the week doggedly pursuing everyday retail workers, teachers, and public safety personnel who made insensitive remarks in the wake of the incident.

For example, after one social media user posted a video confronting a Home Depot cashier for making a Facebook comment that read, “To bad they weren’t a better shooter!!!!!,” Raichik’s account shared the footage with the caption, “Hi @HomeDepot! Are you aware that you employ people who call for political violence and the ass*ss*nat*on of Presidents? Any comment?” On Tuesday, Home Depot’s official X account announced that the woman “no longer works at” the home improvement store.

Also on Tuesday, after Raichik’s account put the name and workplace of an Oklahoma schoolteacher who made a similar remark on blast, it caught the attention of Ryan Walters, Oklahoma’s Republican Superintendent of Public Instruction. Walters vowed to investigate and, later that evening, posted, “I will be taking her teaching certificate. She will no longer be teaching in Oklahoma.” (Walters, it should be noted, recently appointed Raichik to a position where she can advise school libraries in Oklahoma.)

On Sunday, a Pennsylvania firefighter found himself in the crosshairs of Libs of TikTok after posting, “Too bad it didn’t hit him square.” The following day, according to NorthcentralPA.com, a bomb threat was made on the fire house where he was captain, which “may have been connected to [the] viral social media post.” On Tuesday, the man announced his resignation in a statement online, writing, “I have been threatened. My family has been threatened. My friends have been threatened. I have never felt so unsafe in my life.”

To think it was once a purported consensus on the right that upending the livelihoods of ordinary people for making unsavory remarks is a vile feature of cancel culture.

Texas’s border battle with the Biden administration is apparently not going to end anytime soon, at least according to its governor.

Speaking at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday, Governor Greg Abbott bragged about the contentious back-and-forth he had with federal border agents earlier this year. That spat ended with the Supreme Court siding in favor of the Biden administration. In a 5–4 decision, the high court ruled that Texas had overstepped its authority by placing razor wire along the Rio Grande section of the U.S.-Mexico border. It also gave the green light to the federal government to snip and move sections of the wire that had prevented federal border agents from doing their job.

But all of that was in the rearview mirror for Abbott, who insisted Wednesday that not only had he brought the “border crisis” to President Joe Biden but that the job was far from over.

“We have continued busing migrants to sanctuary cities all across the country,” Abbott said, accusing the undocumented immigrants of being “rapists,” “murderers,” and “terrorists” while attendees waved signs calling for “mass deportations now.”

“Those buses will continue to roll until we finally secure our border,” he added.

Before the Supreme Court ruling, Abbott’s signature Operation Lone Star had bused more than 100,000 migrants from Texas detention centers to cities across the country. That included sending more than 37,000 undocumented people to New York, 30,000 people to Chicago, and 12,500 people to Washington, D.C., according to the governor’s office.

But continuing the highly controversial and extraordinarily cruel program could prove to be legally dubious, economically unsound, and possibly ineffective. In a May report, the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas found that the state had spent $11 billion on increased border security funding, including the busing program, with the intent to “detect and repel illegal crossings, arrest human smugglers and cartel gang members, and stop the flow of deadly drugs like fentanyl.”

But the massive expenditure doesn’t seem to have paid off. The majority (43 percent) of those caught and arrested were charged with misdemeanors, while less than 3 percent of the individuals arrested actually went before a judge for drug offenses. Even fewer (2 percent) went to court on weapons charges.

“Texas has no business trying to run its own immigration enforcement program,” Sarah Cruz, policy and advocacy strategist for border and immigrants’ rights at the ACLU of Texas, told Texas Public Radio at the time. “Governor Abbott and other state politicians conflating immigration with drugs and crime is as false as it is inflammatory and dangerous to our communities.”

To top it off, some political operatives have accused Abbott—and Governor Ron DeSantis, who operated a similar program in Florida—of engaging in human trafficking, while legal experts have roundly criticized the program as unconstitutional.