Shocker! Trump’s Garbage Defense Pick Spread January 6 Conspiracies

Critics of Pete Hegseth have slammed the defense secretary nominee as many things: a vitriolic television host, an alleged drunk, and an accused sexual abuser. But he’s also, apparently, a January 6 “truther.”

In the wake of the Capitol riot, Hegseth appeared on Newt’s World, a podcast hosted by former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, espousing baseless allegations that the mob that delayed the certification of the 2020 presidential election results was actually coordinated by leftists, CNN’s K-File reported Tuesday.

“There are reports, you know, in the New York Post and elsewhere. And just from, you know, common sense, that Antifa folks took advantage of this to try to get to the front and try to agitate and create openings for themselves,” Hegseth said on the show.

“They want chaos, ultimately,” Hegseth continued, referring to the decentralized, nonviolent antifascist group. “I could even spot it. You can see the helmets where there’s a Donald Trump bumper sticker on the back, quickly put on it so they could look like they wanted to stop the steal. But what they really wanted to do was further the narrative.”

The articles that Hegseth was citing at the time have since been debunked, according to CNN. The FBI found no evidence that antifa was connected to the events that took place on January 6, 2021, with Trump’s own appointee, FBI Director Christopher Wray, repeatedly rebutting the conspiracy.

Hegseth, a 44-year-old former infantry officer, has been under fire since Trump tapped him to lead the Pentagon. The heat has primarily stemmed from a shocking 2017 police report that revealed the Army veteran was accused of raping an attendee at a Republican women’s conference in Monterey, California. Hegseth has also admitted to several other scandals, including five affairs that he had during his first marriage.

Some of Hegseth’s former Fox colleagues have accused him of being “handsy” and groping them. Nearly a dozen of his former co-workers have spoken to various media outlets to warn that his drinking habits are “concerning,” and some noted that they had smelled alcohol on Hegseth as recently as last month.

Hegseth has also come under fire for supporting a return of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” anti-LGBTQ policy, and has attempted to walk back comments he made disparaging female U.S. soldiers.

Republicans at the forefront of the Senate confirmation process initially bristled at Hegseth’s nomination, with some taking particular note of his drinking problem, before eventually bending to Trump’s will. Earlier this month, Republican Senator Kevin Cramer specified that Hegseth needed to stay away from the bottle and offer a promise of sobriety before taking the reins of the country’s military intelligence.

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.