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.