Voters Beware: FBI Issues Warning on Fake Viral Videos on Election Day

Fake FBI videos are circulating containing misinformation about Election Day.

The bureau on Tuesday warned about two videos that make false claims about terror threats and voter fraud. One fake video claiming to be from the FBI said that there is a high terror threat and urged people to “vote remotely,” while a different video included a fake FBI press release claiming a rigged voting process in five prisons in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Arizona.

In a statement, the FBI said that both videos are “not authentic.”

“Attempts to deceive the public with false content about FBI threat assessments and activities aim to undermine our democratic process and erode trust in the electoral system,” the FBI’s statement read. 

Tuesday’s FBI warning follows a statement from the FBI and two other intelligence agencies Monday that they expect foreign actors to “intensify” influence operations “through election day and in the coming weeks,” particularly in the contested states of Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. The agencies warned about threats from Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran.

Misinformation and conspiracies have been rife during this election, often helped along by influential personalities who should know better. Just a few days ago, Elon Musk spread a fake election video that purportedly showed a Haitian immigrant claiming to have voted multiple times in Georgia and encouraging others to do the same—drawing a rebuke from Georgia’s Republican secretary of state.

Last week, Trump spread a false claim about fake voter registrations in York County, Pennsylvania, and has already tried to sow doubt in the electoral process with a lawsuit over alleged voter intimidation in the state. Earlier this month, Musk recycled debunked claims about fake voting machines at a rally in the Keystone State.

Even after polls close on Tuesday, final vote counts and certifications are likely to continue for days and possibly weeks afterward, creating opportunities for bad actors to spread rumors and conspiracies. The question is whether this misinformation will persuade people to act rashly and commit crimes, or if the results are accepted by the majority of the public to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

A mysterious text banker has been targeting progressive voters in swing states with messages about Kamala Harris’s policies on Israel.

According to reporting by the Forward, Pennsylvania voters have been receiving anonymous text messages promising that Vice President Harris “will always stand with Israel.” The texts, which came from a number with a Virginia area code, appear to be targeting pro-Palestinian voters in the state.

“The Kamala Harris campaign has been running conflicting ads about where she stands on Israel,” one of the messages sent on Sunday read. “It is just what she has to do to be able to win.”

The text included a screenshot of a CNN article about how the Democrat would “amplify different parts of her message on Gaza and Israel in Michigan and Pennsylvania.” Another included a link to a Times of Israel article describing how Harris plans to keep arming Israel.

Voters in Michigan received similar texts last week. Former Axios reporter Sam Robinson obtained messages sent to Detroit voters encouraging them to “stand up against Hamas and all radical terrorists in Gaza.”

Though it is not entirely clear if the efforts are connected, as all the messages are anonymous and not tied to any particular organization, the Michigan and Pennsylvania texts included strikingly similar language.

Moreover, voters in both states reported receiving texts from someone named “Max,” and many messages shared a link to the same story: an NBC news article from August on Harris telling pro-Palestinian protesters “I am speaking now.”

As the Forward noted, the messages overall bear a resemblance to ads targeting Michigan and Pennsylvania voters put forth by the Future Coalition PAC funded by Elon Musk and Mitch McConnell. That super PAC is running digital ads portraying Harris as a hawk for Israel in areas in Michigan with large Arab and Muslim voters, while attacking Harris on her anti-Israel policies in ads to Jewish voters in Pennsylvania.

The Verge reported Tuesday that the texts most likely came from a company called Wonder Cave based in North Carolina, which works with digital advocacy and fundraising group Twenty Manor. Over the past year, Twenty Manor has received $33,000 from the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) for text messaging and more than $12,000 from former Representative Tulsi Gabbard’s leadership PAC, Defend Freedom, for “digital consulting.”

This story has been updated.

In his final rally before Election Day, Donald Trump brought out a KKK sympathizer to hype up his Grand Rapids, Michigan, crowd.

Just after 1 a.m. EST Tuesday morning, Trump invited Brian Pannebecker, the founder of Auto Workers for Trump, onstage to speak. Pannebecker, a longtime Trump supporter, was outed by Politico in 2015 for praising David Duke’s My Awakening: A Path to Racial Understanding in a 2001 Amazon review, and for calling President Barack Obama “a race hustler” who was “trying to benefit from racial tension and animosity,” in a 2015 Facebook post.

Pannebecker praised Trump at his last campaign rally and predicted that 65 percent of United Auto Workers members in Michigan would vote for Trump and he would carry suburban Macomb County. The county was key to Trump’s victory in the state in 2016, and Pannebecker said, shouting, “We’re gonna carry Michigan again!”

Trump and Pannebecker’s relationship goes back to that 2016 campaign, with Trump meeting with the Michigan native back then even after the news of his David Duke praise was revealed. Pennebecker has been an active campaigner for Trump during this election, making regular appearances at Trump’s rallies in Michigan and being dubbed Trump’s “go-to Michigan auto worker” by the The Detroit News.

But Pannebecker is exaggerating how much support Trump is getting from autoworkers. The UAW endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris, in July, drawing the ire of Trump. On one of JD Vance’s visits to Michigan earlier this month, several people in the crowd for his speech wore “Auto Workers for Trump” T-shirts but weren’t autoworkers at all. On October 15, Trump even belittled autoworkers, saying their jobs were so easy children could replace them.

As a battleground state, Michigan’s election results are expected to be very close and could be a bellwether for who wins the presidency. The question is whether autoworkers in the state, a key voting constituency, will vote based on the UAW’s endorsement and Democrats’ pro-labor record or go with glib promises from Trump and Pannebecker.

Republicans have scored another ballot box victory in a crucial swing state.

The Georgia Supreme Court sided with the Republican National Committee and the state’s Republican Party in a decision that overturned efforts to extend the absentee ballot deadline in Cobb County.

Last week, Cobb Elections announced that more than 3,000 absentee ballots had been mailed out after the state required deadline. Three residents filed suit to get their ballot acceptance deadline extended, as there was no other choice.

Cobb Superior Court Senior Judge Robert Flournoy found this to be sensible, extending the deadline for votes to be counted until Friday, November 8, so long as ballots were postmarked by Election Day. But the Georgia Supreme Court overruled him on Thursday, ruling that county election officials can only count ballots received by 7 p.m. on Election Day.

The decision puts nearly 3,000 ballots at risk of going uncounted. Ballots received late will be separated and kept, “until further order of the Court.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center and American Civil Liberties Union, which represented the voters impacted, are urging Cobb residents to vote in person if they can. “Only as a last resort, should voters simply mail their ballots. Unfortunately, there are voters who will not be able to access the remaining options and will not have their voices heard in this election as a result of this ruling,” the SPLC wrote.

Billionaire Elon Musk made his final pitch to voters: Donald Trump’s campaign is going full QAnon. 

The world’s richest man posted a dizzying nostalgic “Trump hype video” Monday night that begins with a threat: “If you do something bad to us, we are going to do things that have never been done before.” The audio, originally ripped from an October 2020 Rush Limbaugh interview about Iran, is probably the most normal part of the supercut. 

As “Jump” by Van Halen plays, vaporwave and ’80s and ’50s revival aesthetics pour over the screen, and Trump declares that “2024 is our final battle.” Mark and Patricia McCloskey, the couple who waved their guns in front of their St. Louis mansion to threaten Black Lives Matter protesters in 2020, also make an appearance in the video. 

Then, as Trump declares that “the future does not belong to globalists, the future belongs to patriots,” the O in the word “patriot” transforms into a Q. The rest of the letters quickly fall away, leaving only the Q, for QAnon as the audio trumpets “activation word: Ronald McDonald.” 

Earlier in the day, Musk shared another QAnon favorite: rumors about Pizzagate. He wrote, “The hammer of justice is coming” and shared  a misleading story about the conspiracy theory from last year. 

The Trump hype video appears to have been made by an account called “National Revival” which describes itself as “✞ Immortal Knight of Aryamehr ♛ Imperial State of Iranshahr Minister of Propaganda.” The account posts similar video edits of Iranian politicians, and the pinned video is a tribute to Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last monarch of Iran. 

Musk tweeted out the video at the same time that he failed for an hour to host an “X town hall,” eventually giving up and asking people to just watch his episode with Joe Rogan.

Just before Election Day, Donald Trump decided to take a shot at one of his least favorite people: Nancy Pelosi.

At a rally just after midnight EST Tuesday in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Donald Trump, his face plastered orange with bronzer, called the representative and former speaker of the House a “crooked person.”

“She’s a bad person. Evil! She’s an evil, sick crazy b— oh no,” Trump said, raising his finger and miming a b sound with his mouth. “It starts with a b, but I won’t say it. I wanna say it!”

Perhaps it’s not the most conventional closing message for a presidential candidate, but for Trump, it’s what one would expect. After all, he has been calling his political opponents the “enemy within” for the home stretch of his campaign, mentioning Pelosi in particular as among the people he would like to use the military against.

Trump has resorted to profanity before, so it’s funny to see him exercise restraint. Perhaps he didn’t want his last sound bite before the election to be an expletive. In the past, Trump hasn’t hesitated to drop some four-letter words, even to a room full of priests at the Al Smith dinner for Catholic charities last month. It’s quite different from another closing message the Trump campaign sent Monday: memorializing a pet squirrel euthanized by New York state wildlife officials over the weekend.

The campaign felt compelled to jump on the conservative cause of the day, the beloved pet Peanut, after Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins tied the squirrel’s death to their baseless conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are eating their neighbors’ pets. It just goes to show where the campaign’s priorities are on Election Day: taking shots at Trump ’s favorite enemies, and finding some kind of wild conspiracy to stir up the MAGA base.

The king of the manosphere has spoken. Celebrity podcast host Joe Rogan officially endorsed Donald Trump in a lengthy post Monday evening on X. Receipts immediately followed.

“The great and powerful @elonmusk,” Rogan wrote over a video of him interviewing the billionaire Trump fanboy. “If it wasn’t for him we’d be fucked.  He makes what I think is the most compelling case for Trump you’ll hear, and I agree with him every step of the way. For the record, yes, that’s an endorsement of Trump. Enjoy the podcast.”

Fans were quick to point to the many times Rogan has criticized Trump. In regard to January 6, Rogan called the former president “so fucking dangerous … a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid.” In another clip from 2022, Rogan outright called Trump a “man baby.”

A more than two-minute long montage of Rogan making very solidly liberal and leftist points also began to circulate. He heaps praise on the Obamas, calling Barack the best president of his lifetime. He says he wants universal health care, says he’s voting for Bernie Sanders, says he wants to spend more on low-income communities, says he’s very “pro-choice, women’s rights, civil rights, gay rights, trans rights.” Rogan even says that “not all Trump supporters are racist, but all racists are Trump supporters.”

The podcaster has a laundry list of opinions that Trump and his campaign are diametrically opposed to, and yet he threw in his endorsement the night before Election Day.

In the final hours of the presidential race, the leaders of the far right are “fired up” about one issue that’s sure to resonate with voters across the country: the death of Peanut the squirrel.

Peanut was a social media–famous rodent who was euthanized by New York state wildlife officials over the weekend during a test for rabies after the squirrel bit a person. State law prohibits keeping wild animals as pets, but that didn’t stop conservatives from latching onto the issue.

Peanut reemerged as a topic of concern at a rally in Georgia, where Republican Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Mike Collins tied the squirrel’s death into an unfounded conspiracy that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating their neighbors’ pets.

“Trump’s running against a socialistic, big-government, control-everything-about-you, woke regime,” Collins told the crowd. “This thing’s gotten so bad that they’re killing the pets, they’re killing the squirrels, they’re killing the raccoons.”

Greene took the lie a little further, claiming that “Democrats in New York City went in and raided a home to kill a squirrel.” Peanut was actually euthanized in Pine City, according to the report—not the Big Apple. And police did not raid Peanut’s owner’s home.

“They did—to kill a squirrel,” the 50-year-old insisted.

Republican vice presidential pick JD Vance also took the time to memorialize Peanut, claiming Monday in North Carolina that he had spoken to Donald Trump about the dead squirrel, with the Republican presidential nominee allegedly describing the bushy-tailed critter as the “Elon Musk of squirrels.”

Meanwhile, conservatives have spent years ardently advocating for the expansion of the death penalty. At a rally in Aurora, Colorado, last month, Trump escalated his own language on capital punishment, promising to make immigrants—whom he referred to as the “enemy from within” and “animals”—face harsher punishments for potential wrongdoing.

“Think of that!” he said. “We have to live with these animals. But we won’t live with them for long!”

To which someone in the crowd shouted back, “Kill them!”

A senior Democrat called bullshit on House Speaker Mike Johnson’s weak excuse for saying he planned to repeal the lucrative CHIPS Act.

Arizona Senator Mark Kelly appeared on Fox News Sunday to urge Americans to believe Johnson and Donald Trump when they voiced their intention to repeal the CHIPS Act, a program that created subsidies for semiconductor manufacturing in the United States.

“Donald Trump last week said he was going to kill the CHIPS Act, which is bringing all these semiconductor manufacturing jobs, and just this week the speaker of the House Mike Johnson confirmed that if Donald Trump is president, they’re going to end this program. We’re talking about tens of thousands of good paying jobs,” Kelly said.

During an appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast two weeks ago, Trump called the CHIPS Act a “bad deal.” When Johnson was asked Friday whether he and Trump planned to repeal that program, the House speaker said that he expected they “probably will” try to repeal it, even though it wasn’t currently on their agenda.

During Sunday’s interview, host Shannon Bream interrupted Kelly, saying that Johnson has since walked back his statement, claiming that he “misheard” the question.

“Yeah, Shannon, I went back and listened multiple times to what he said and the question. It’s very clear to me that he didn’t misunderstand what was said there; he actually repeated part of the question in the answer,” Kelly responded, unconvinced.

Kelly went on to say that the CHIPS Act was probably “the biggest foreign investment in our country,” bringing $100 billion in investments from private companies to Arizona alone.

“You heard it one way. He says he didn’t hear the question,” Bream insisted.

That excuse didn’t come from Johnson but instead from Republican Representative Brandon Williams, who was attending the same event with Johnson in Syracuse, New York.

Williams was quick to clean up Johnson’s mistake, calling the CHIPS Act “hugely impactful.”

Micron Technology plans to break ground on a $100 billion chip-making factory in central New York next year, providing billions of dollars and thousands of jobs to the area, according to Syracuse.com. The CHIPS Act is providing $20 billion to Micron, which has said that without CHIPS Act subsidies, it would not build in the U.S.

“I will remind [Johnson] night and day how important the CHIPS Act is, and that we break ground on Micron,” Williams said in a statement released Friday. Johnson voted against the CHIPS Act, and Williams, who was not in office when it was passed, criticized the measure on the campaign trail in 2022.

“I spoke privately with the speaker immediately after the event. He apologized profusely, saying he misheard the question,” Williams said.

A photograph posted by Luke Radal, the journalist who asked a question, revealed that he was standing inches away from Johnson when the House speaker “misheard” his question.

Later that day, Johnson released a statement of his own. “As I have further explained and clarified, I fully support Micron coming to Central NY, and the CHIPS Act is not on the agenda for repeal,” Johnson said. “To the contrary, there could be legislation to further streamline and improve the primary purpose of the bill—to eliminate its costly regulations and Green New Deal requirements.”

As Johnson had originally said when he answered the question, the CHIPS Act isn’t on the agenda—but it “probably” will be.

In a preelection interview with Steve Bannon Monday, Tucker Carlson decided to broach the very pertinent topic of how nuclear technology has demonic origins.

Talking on Bannon’s show War Room on Real America’s Voice, Carlson and Bannon discussed how America seemed to take a turn for the worse after the development and use of the atomic bomb in World War II. But then, Carlson went on to say it was “obviously” not “human forces” who created the nuclear bomb.

“I’ve never met a person who can isolate the moment where nuclear technology became known to man. And so where did it come from, exactly? Oh, German scientists in the ’30s. Really? When, name the date. And I’ve never heard anybody do that,” Carlson said.

“It’s very clear to me that these are demonic, I mean these are evil. Their only purpose is to destroy the innocent,” the conservative pundit told Bannon.

There’s a lot to unpack in Carlson’s words, but at the very least, we do know when “nuclear technology” became known to man. A simple Google search would tell Carlson, or anyone else, that English physicist John Cockroft and the Irish physicist Ernest Walton first produced nuclear transformations in 1932 and that in the next few years, scientists Irene Curie, Frederic Joliot, and Enrico Fermi progressed the science further.

Nuclear fission itself was discovered by Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in Berlin, working under Niels Bohr, in late 1938, which would spark massive developments in nuclear science in the next year. In a matter of minutes, it’s pretty easy to find a timeline disproving Carlson’s contention that people don’t know when nuclear technology was discovered.

Carlson did not acquit himself well in the rest of the interview, claiming that increased hurricanes were not the result of global warming but were “probably abortion, actually.”

“People are like, ‘Oh, well, we had another hurricane, it must be global warming.’ No! It’s probably abortion, actually. Just being honest. You can’t kill children on purpose, knowing that you’re doing that in exchange for power, or freedom, or happiness. Whatever you think you’re getting in return, you can’t participate in human sacrifice without consequences,” Carlson said.

While some far-right Republicans, led by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, came up with a left-wing, antisemitic conspiracy theory that the government controls the weather when hurricanes struck the southeastern U.S. last month, Carlson’s comments have broached a weird brand of theology. It’s a window into how some on the right see apocalyptic, earth-ending machinations in today’s politics and also begs the question of why pundits like Carlson are ever taken seriously.