MAGA Official Makes the Dumbest Claim About the Drones Yet

Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano became the latest MAGA Republican to launch into hysterics about recent drone sightings over the United States, and as evidence for his claim, he shared a photo of an iconic movie prop from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away …

In the post on X Monday, Mastriano included a screenshot of a familiar-looking large metal object sitting on a trailer in the back of a car, captioned, “Breaking News: Crashed drone in Orange Beach retrieved from water, and taken to undisclosed location for further investigation.”

“It is inconceivable that the federal government has no answers nor has taken any action to get to the bottom of the unidentified drones,” Mastriano wrote.

Of course, the object wasn’t recognizable as one of the mass of drones. In reality, it was a TIE fighter, the iconic symbol of the Imperial fleet in the classic space opera movie series Star Wars.

“The fecklessness of this administration was on display last year when a Chinese surveillance balloon was allowed to fly over the entire continental United States before being shot down,” Mastrinao continued.

“Such should be viewed as a threat to our nation and citizens and action is long overdue. We have recourses [sic] and assets in our arsenal to get answers, but I suppose Ukraine is more important to the White House. January 20th can’t come soon enough.”

Online, some found Mastriano’s lack of movie knowledge disturbing.

CNN’s Jake Tapper pointed out that these were not the drones that Mastriano was looking for. “I take the actual drone story seriously but re the below, I’m pretty sure Red Leader Garven Dreis shot down that TIE fighter in ep IV A New Hope,” he wrote in a post on X.

The Texas Observer’s Steven Monacelli lamented that “our nation is facing a crisis of information literacy.”

Mastriano isn’t the first Republican to post drone drivel. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene claimed that the government was behind the drones, while former Maryland Governor Larry Hogan begged the government to do something about the lights he’d seen floating in the sky, which a meteorologist quickly pointed out was a constellation.

National Security Council spokesperson John Kirby told CNN Monday that the drones spotted over New Jersey and other states on the eastern seaboard “represent lawful, legal, commercial [and] hobbyist drones—even law enforcement drones,” and were not a threat to public safety.

Lina Khan’s FTC has passed a sorely needed ban on junk fees. But it won’t come into effect until she—and President Biden—is long gone.

On Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission announced a rule that will require companies to show full prices for things like a hotel room, concert ticket, or sporting event at the beginning of a purchase rather than hiding it until the very last step of the checkout process.

“People deserve to know up front what they’re being asked to pay—without worrying that they’ll later be saddled with mysterious fees that they haven’t budgeted for and can’t avoid,” the Biden-appointed FTC chair said in a statement. “The FTC’s rule will put an end to junk fees around live event tickets, hotels, and vacation rentals, saving Americans billions of dollars and millions of hours in wasted time.”

Junk fees came into the light particularly after Taylor Swift’s Eras tour in 2022, when thousands of fans were enraged by hidden or unknown service fees from Live Nation and Ticketmaster.

“Wherever big corporations try to sneak fees onto bills, my administration has been fighting on behalf of American families to ban them,” Biden said in a statement Tuesday.

There’s just one problem: The regulation will only take effect in April, well into Donald Trump’s term, allowing him to claim credit in the minds of most consumers.

The only FTC member to reject the regulations was Republican Andrew Ferguson, who is expected to take over the FTC for Trump. The impact of his leadership on this current set of regulations remains to be seen. 

Ferguson said in a statement that he didn’t actually disagree with the rules on principle, he just didn’t want it to happen while Khan and Biden were in charge.  

“I dissent only on the ground that the time for rule-making by the Biden-Harris FTC is over,” he said.

President-elect Donald Trump’s press conference Monday was riddled with inaccuracies, but one repeated lie about vaccines and autism stood out as the “most dangerous” to at least one network fact-checker.

“I think the most dangerous part was an equivocation,” CNN fact-checking reporter Daniel Dale said on air Monday evening. “It wasn’t really a claim, but he was asked whether he thought there was a link between vaccines and autism and he equivocated. He said, ‘Well, we have some brilliant people looking at this,’ and he talked about the increased prevalence of autism diagnoses.”

Trump opined about the false link while defending his choice to tap Robert F. Kennedy Jr.—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist—for secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services. While highlighting rising autism numbers (that researchers attribute to changing diagnostic criteria), Trump claimed to reporters at Mar-a-Lago that “something’s wrong.”

“There’s something wrong. And we’re going to find out about it,” Trump said.

Kennedy is currently courting lawmakers on Capitol Hill ahead of what will likely be a difficult Senate confirmation process, given his raucous lifestyle that included dumping a dead bear cub in Central Park, unscientific beliefs that include theories that AIDS is not caused by HIV, a vaccine misinformation campaign sparked by his nonprofit that sent Samoa’s vaccination rate plummeting amid a measles outbreak, and claims that he allegedly groped his children’s babysitter in the late 1990s.

Last week, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates.

The researcher that sparked that myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and the jab, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

“The idea that there is some connection came from a thoroughly discredited, in fact scandalous, fraudulently altered study in the 1990s that should just be ignored, dismissed, again, because it was fraudulent, and so the idea that, ‘Well, we’re just going to look into this,’ I think is dangerous to consider because the idea is simply wrong,” Dale told CNN.

Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.

Donald Trump has suggested yet again that Canada should be absorbed by the United States as the northern country grapples with the MAGA leader’s forthcoming trade plan.

The president-elect’s proposed trade tariffs on the Great White North (which include a 25 percent tariff on goods) have launched the country into a political and economic crisis. On Monday, Canada’s deputy prime minister and minister of finance, Chrystia Freeland, resigned just hours before releasing the nation’s first economic plan in response to Trump’s “America First” policies. In a stinging resignation letter, Freeland openly questioned Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s ability to deal with the tariffs, prompting Trudeau to discuss his own resignation with his Cabinet, according to Canadian broadcaster CTV News.

Trump, of course, had a diplomatic and delicate reply at the ready.

“The Great State of Canada is stunned as the Finance Minister resigns, or was fired, from her position by Governor Justin Trudeau,” Trump wrote on Truth Social late Monday. “Her behavior was totally toxic, and not at all conducive to making deals which are good for the very unhappy citizens of Canada. She will not be missed!!!”

Freeland was a key figure in negotiating the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, or USMCA, in 2018 after Trump dissolved NAFTA. Now that Trump apparently sees the USMCA as less than favorable to the U.S., it’s no wonder he’s glad to see Freeland go.

Trump also made the biting state joke last week, when he falsely claimed during an interview with MSNBC’s Meet the Press that Mexico and Canada’s trade deficits with the United States were “subsidies,” rather than indicators that America’s neighbors are purchasing more of its goods than they were selling in return. In 2023, that differential—or deficit—was nearly $41 billion with Canada and $162 billion with Mexico, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

The president-elect also vastly overinflated the reality of the deficits, wrongly asserting that the U.S. is “subsidizing” its neighbors to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars each. Turning Canada—and Mexico, for that matter—into a state, was the obvious solution.

Trump has, apparently, been mocking Trudeau with the flagrant suggestion for years, long before the Canadian prime minister was wrestling with historically low approval ratings and nationalistic trade policies from one of its strongest trade partners.

“Trump used this 51st-state line all the time with Trudeau in his first term,” Trudeau’s former principal secretary Gerald Butts wrote on BlueSky earlier this month. “He’s doing it to rattle Canadian cages.”

The president-elect’s ex-allies also don’t believe there’s any underlying meaning to Trump’s bully behavior. In an interview with CBC News on Thursday, Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton suggested that the comments about turning Canada into a state were little more than a public humiliation ritual for the president-elect.

“I think he’s poking at Justin Trudeau and trying to humiliate him, and I think Trump gets a laugh from it,” Bolton told CBC News.

When asked specifically about Trump’s quips targeted at Trudeau, Bolton told the outlet that he “wouldn’t over-intellectualize it.”

“I think he’s just mean,” Bolton said.

CNN reported Monday evening that it had wrongly identified a man who appeared in a video report claiming to be a long-term prisoner of former President Bashar Al Assad’s regime.

In reality, the man is a former Syrian intelligence officer. 

In a CNN story published last week, chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward and her crew were led by Syrian rebels into a Syrian air force headquarters in Damascus to look for Austin Tice, a missing American who they believed might have been held in a secret prison there. Instead, they discovered a locked cell where a man was hiding under a blanket. 

The man identified himself as Adel Gharbal from Homs, and claimed that he had been in solitary confinement for three months. He appeared surprised and overwhelmed to learn that Assad’s regime had fallen. The footage, if verifiable, would have been astounding. 

However, reports online suggested that the man might be lying about his identity. He appeared well-groomed and uninjured, and a website called Verify-Sy, which states that it fact-checks stories about Syria, said that it could not find any such “Adel Gharbal.”

Verify-Sy reported that residents of a neighborhood called Al Bayyada in Homs had identified the man as Salama Mohammad Salama, or “Abu Hamza,” a first lieutenant in Syrian air force intelligence.

On Monday, CNN was able to confirm that it was Salama.

“We can confirm the real identity of the man from our story last Wednesday as Salama Mohammed Salama,” Ward posted on X Monday evening. 

A resident of Al Bayyada provided CNN with a photograph of the same man, who appeared to be on duty in a government office. CNN was able to use facial recognition software to provide a match of more than 99 percent with the man who’d appeared in their report. 

While Verify-Sy also said that Salama had been jailed for less than a month for a dispute over “profit-sharing from extorted funds with a high-ranking officer,” CNN was not able to verify this claim.  

Multiple residents have accused Salama of having a reputation for extortion and harassment. More than a few journalists voiced their outrage at CNN’s reporting. 

“Amazing that she just drops this like a further development to the story and not an embarrassing piece of misinformation and poor reporting,” wrote Christin El-Kholy, an editor for New Lines Magazine, in a post on X.

Journalist Tariq Kenney-Shawa slammed Ward’s response. “No retraction, no apologies. The style of journalism that reporters like Clarissa Ward engage in is more about promoting themselves, their brand, & emotional narratives they believe will bolster their ratings, rather than reporting accurately & conscientiously,” he wrote.

And others were just disturbed by just how ridiculous it was to falsely portray the jailer as the prisoner. “You got played by a corrupt intelligence officer from a dead dictatorship,” journalist Jacob Silverman wrote in a post on X, responding to Ward. 

Hundreds of drones are reportedly descending over northern New Jersey. Residents have filmed them, mayors have complained about them, and an appallingly quiet federal response has led Americans across the country to offer wild speculations about their origins, with everyone from leftists to military contractors and conservative lawmakers chiming in on the issue.

A TikTok video by John Ferguson, the CEO of drone manufacturer Saxon Aerospace, was amplified by Joe Rogan on Sunday, with the podcaster remarking that it was the first conspiracy about the aerial machines that had him “genuinely concerned.”

Ferguson didn’t believe that the “small-car sized” drones indicated any “nefarious intent” but suggested that “the only reason why they would be flying, and flying that low, is because they’re trying to smell something on the ground,” suggesting that the drones could be looking for gas or radioactive material.

“Now drones, they have no reason to be in the air at night. Unless you’re doing some type of ISR work—intelligence surveillance reconnaissance you know, looking for bad guys or a search and rescue victim,” Ferguson continued. “The only reason why you would ever fly an unmanned aircraft at night is if you’re looking for something, whether it be a person, or trying to smell gas.”

Commercial-grade drones were first spotted lingering over sections of northern New Jersey in mid-November, sparking an FBI investigation into the aerial gathering. At a Wednesday briefing between the office of New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy and the Department of Homeland Security, mayors from the region lamented that no one from state or federal agencies had been able to tell them exactly how many drones were flying over the state, with estimates ranging from 400 to thousands, according to NBC News.

Nick Ribaudo, a self-described “leftist Ben Shapiro” and media critic, also joined in on the conspiracy conversation on TikTok, posting a skit on Sunday that highlighted the spontaneous rise in drone activity around the same time that UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s assassination was bringing Americans together across party lines.

“Sure seems like we could be doing a lot more if we were a unified working class,” Thompson joked in a video that drew more than 1.6 million views and nearly 300,000 likes.

The drone sightings have also breathed fresh air into some of the most outlandish conspiracies from the last several decades, including the so-called Project Blue Beam, a theory invented in the 1990s by Canadian Serge Monast that claimed a cabal of the world’s most powerful people were projecting images into the sky to induce fear and confusion among the masses. Images could include alien invasions, religious figures, or, in this case, hundreds of drones inexplicably patrolling New Jersey.

Politicians also joined the chorus on the drones, with some stoking fears that the sky gathering was a visitation from a foreign adversary.

New Jersey Republican Representative Jeff Van Drew suggested to Fox News on Wednesday that the drones were coming from an Iranian “mothership”—a claim that the Pentagon quickly shot down.

“There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called mothership launching drones towards the United States,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh said the same day.

Other Republicans also, perhaps a little overzealously, pointed to foreign actors as the reason behind the New Jersey drone takeover.

“The elusive maneuvering of these drones suggests a major military power sophistication that begs the question whether they have been deployed to test our defense capabilities—or worse—by violent dictatorships, perhaps maybe Russia, or China, or Iran, or North Korea,” Republican Representative Chris Smith told reporters on Saturday.

Georgia Republican Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene also got in on the drone action last week, claiming in a video rant on her X account that the government’s continued inability to ID the strange lights hovering over the Garden State was “total bullshit” that put every American “in danger.” She has since claimed that the federal government is controlling the drones.

Elon Musk’s favorite Democrat is one of Donald Trump’s top choices to head the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA.

CNN reported that Florida Representative Jared Moskowitz, who served as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s “Covid czar” during the pandemic, had his name floated for FEMA head. It’s not yet clear if Trump and Moskowitz have spoken about the role, but three sources with knowledge of Trump’s thinking confirmed to CNN that the Florida Democrat is definitely a contender for the role.

While the addition of a Democrat to Trump’s Cabinet may be surprising, Moskowitz has historically aligned himself with House Republicans on many issues and is familiar with many people within the Trump campaign.

Moskowitz was also the first Democrat to join the congressional caucus for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE. He has advocated for crippling federal government cuts, supports Israel’s bombardment on Gaza, is one of the top recipients of AIPAC funding in the House, and was one of just 15 House Democrats to vote to give Trump the power to revoke nonprofits’ tax-exempt status.

These decisions make Moskowitz’s rumored FEMA nomination much less surprising. If Moskowitz does leave to join Trump’s Cabinet, however, his absence would make Democrats’ position in the House even more precarious. DeSantis is known to delay special elections for Democrats so that their seats may remain vacant for as long as possible.

A group of Senate Democrats introduced a bill Monday to abolish the Electoral College.

U.S. Senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii, Dick Durbin of Illinois, and Peter Welch of Vermont introduced a constitutional amendment to install a nationwide popular vote in presidential elections. Currently, a network of 538 electors represent the 50 states, and whichever candidate secures at least 270 electors is declared the winner.

The Senate Judiciary Committee posted on X Monday that the bill advocated “restoring democracy by allowing the direct election of presidents through popular vote alone.”

A press release from the group said that 17 states and the District of Columbia had agreed to bypass the Electoral College and allocate their electoral votes to the winner of a nationwide popular vote.

“In an election, the person who gets the most votes should win. It’s that simple. No one’s vote should count for more based on where they live. The Electoral College is outdated and it’s undemocratic. It’s time to end it,” Schatz said in a separate tweet.

But attempting to get rid of the Electoral College via constitutional amendment may prove to be a massive boondoggle for Democrats. Far easier than ratifying an amendment to abolish the Electoral College, the Democrats might be better off simply passing legislation to increase the number of House representatives, as the number of electors is determined by the number of senators and representatives.

The Founding Fathers intended for the House to continue expanding in proportion to the population of each state, but the number of representatives has been frozen at 435 since 1910. In 1910, each district had 211,000 constituents. In 2020, each district had an average of 762,000 constituents, a dramatic 360 percent increase.

Trump wants to kill the United States Postal Service.

The president-elect was asked about the USPS losing money during a press conference in Palm Beach on Monday.

“Well there is talk about the Postal Service being taken private, you do know that. Not the worst idea I’ve ever heard, it really isn’t,” Trump said. “You know it’s a lot different today … between Amazon and UPS and FedEx and all the things that you didn’t have. But there is talk about that, it’s an idea that a lot of people have liked for a long time. We’re looking at it.”

The comments confirm a Washington Post report from over the weekend that Trump is considering plans to privatize the entire Postal Service due to its financial losses. He has reportedly spoken about the idea to Howard Lutnick, his commerce secretary pick and head of his transition team.

USPS privatization has been in the works for some time now. Trump-appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy has been doing his best to corrode one of the oldest, constitutionally ensured institutions in this country.

On-time delivery rates fell when DeJoy was appointed in 2020, particularly in communities of color. He facilitated the removal and destruction of mail sorting machines that were crucial to allowing USPS to function smoothly. And he has multiple questionable investments. Last week, he even covered his ears while being grilled by congressional Republicans for dismantling USPS from the inside out.

“Louis DeJoy is the perfect example of a Trump nominee. After Trump appointed him, he ran USPS into the ground. Now, he claims it doesn’t work & will propose privatizing it,” one X commentator wrote. “Then, he, Trump & their cronies will steal the business, charge exorbitant amounts & rape the public.”

“The Postal Service is literally in the Constitution. It’s an essential PUBLIC service, and it should never be privatized. This would hurt millions of Americans, especially those in the most rural places,” Minnesota Senator Tina Smith said.

President-elect Donald Trump confirmed Monday that he spoke with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently, and warned that “all hell is gonna break out” if Israelis held hostage by Hamas aren’t returned by January 20, the day he reenters the White House.

“We had a very good talk. We discussed what will happen.… As you know, I gave warning that if these hostages aren’t back home by that date, all hell’s gonna break out,” Trump said, doubling down on threats he made earlier this month.

Netanyahu on Sunday said he had a phone call with Trump over the weekend, during which the two spoke about Israel’s next steps in Gaza and Syria.

“It was a very friendly, very warm, and very important conversation,” the Israeli prime minister said in a video on Sunday. “We discussed the need to complete Israel’s victory, and we also spoke at length about the efforts we are making to free our hostages.

“We will continue to act relentlessly to return home all of our hostages, the living and the deceased,” he added.

Around 250 Israelis were abducted and 1,200 killed by Hamas during their attack on October 7, 2023. At least 154 have been released, rescued by the Israel Defense Forces, or recovered dead. In the last year, Israel has responded by killing more than 45,000 Palestinian adults, children, journalists, and aid workers in the Gaza Strip, doing irreversible damage to the region.