Even Fox News Thinks New Orleans Conspiracies Are Getting Out of Hand

Fox News is pulling the plug on the right’s conspiracies about the New Orleans terrorist attack.

Fox & Friends co-host Lawrence Jones pressed Louisiana Governor Jeff Landry on Thursday, asking the MAGA state leader to explain how the American people can have confidence in how the investigation is being handled when conservative leadership is spreading so much misinformation about the attack.

“I hate to jump on you, but there’s conflicting information,” Jones said. “On one hand you’re telling the people that it is safe, but then you have co-conspirators that are out there. And then to layer on that of getting all the information, we just had your attorney general—your chief law enforcement officer—she says she hasn’t even been briefed about those people they brought into custody.

“So, if your chief law enforcement officer is not being briefed about the people that are out there, how can the people have confidence?” Jones continued.

“Well look I can tell you this, I am in the city right now, I’m going to attend the Sugar Bowl this afternoon, I will be around. We are going to be briefing the media, hopefully, about mid-morning. I don’t know about the comments the attorney general made. Again, that’s part of why we try not to engage in speculation,” Landry said.

The harsh critique was leveled after Landry told the network he was “convinced” the city was safe, despite reports from the FBI that the suspect, U.S. Army veteran Shamsud-Din Jabbar, did not act alone.

“Look, I think one of the most important things is to make sure that each one of those victims did not die in vain,” Landry said on-air. “All of them had come to the city in order to enjoy the city, in order to enjoy some entertainment and bring in the new year.

“Y’all had a guest earlier who was an eyewitness who said the same thing, is that we can’t live in fear,” he added.

The governor is also facing backlash for a tone-deaf social media post he made in the wake of the attack, sharing a photo of himself giving a thumbs-up at a local steakhouse just 10 minutes away from the scene of the crime.

Elon Musk might be about to start suing any news outlet that fails to clarify that the Tesla Cybertruck that exploded in front of Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas this week did not simply explode, but rather contained exploding fireworks.

The billionaire technocrat was quick to clarify Wednesday that the car had not suffered a catastrophic malfunction.

“We have now confirmed that the explosion was caused by very large fireworks and/or a bomb carried in the bed of the rented Cybertruck and is unrelated to the vehicle itself,” Musk wrote on X. “All vehicle telemetry was positive at the time of the explosion.”

A few hours later, he weighed in on the media’s characterization of the so-called Cybertruck explosion, which documented, for all intents and purposes, a smoldering Cybertruck that had clearly experienced an explosion.

Anti-trans filmmaker Robby Starbuck posted on X lamenting the press’s coverage of the incident, suggesting that Musk ought to take legal action over headlines for simply using phrases such as “Tesla Cybertruck explosion,” without clarifying that the truck itself had not spontaneously exploded.

“Honestly @elonmusk should consider suing outlets who framed the story like this. These headlines are sabotaging @Tesla’s brand by making people think it caught on fire. There’s about 1 Tesla fire for every 130 million miles traveled. Other cars have 1 every 18 million miles,” Starbuck wrote, including a screen shot of a headline from Business Insider.

Musk reposted Starbuck, writing, “Maybe it is time to do so.”

The technocrat seems to be mulling whether to pick up a trick from his buddy Donald Trump, who has decided that he will sue any news outlet that says something he doesn’t like.

Starbuck and Musk are part of the same postliterate internet ecosystem built on reactionary responses to the headlines of articles users don’t actually bother to read. Lawsuits over the dispassionate, often 60-character, abbreviated versions of events that are later expanded upon in the body of the article simply suggest poor reading comprehension more than anything else.

Apparently nothing is above politics for Louisiana Senator John Kennedy, who chose a terrorism press conference for the deaths of 15 people as an opportune platform to make some jabs at his political foes.

The MAGA lawmaker took a swipe at the media during a Wednesday press conference on the New Year’s Eve attack in New Orleans, quickly reminding Louisianians—in the midst of a national tragedy—of the news media’s assumed political bent. While identifying which outlets the attending reporters were with, Kennedy referred to NBC’s placement “on the right” of the podium.

“That’s an unusual position,” Kennedy said.

When the reporter said they didn’t understand the comment, Kennedy added, “You wouldn’t.”

Kennedy’s comments, which detracted from local and federal authorities sharing details on the attack, were roundly criticized as tone-deaf. The ongoing investigation is rushing to identify the perpetrators of a multipronged domestic terrorism scheme that involved a pickup truck mowing down a crowd of people on New Orleans’s Bourbon Street. But the off-color remarks didn’t just frustrate members of the media working to share developments in the case—Kennedy’s comments also angered some on the right, including the X account Republicans Against Trump, which lambasted the senator as a “disgrace.”

“For these asses it’s only and always about the politics,” wrote former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele. “An attack on the citizens of his community and Sen. Kennedy think it’s cute to take a political jab at the press.”

Early on Thursday, Donald Trump pushed an obviously incorrect theory that the attack was the result of the nation’s “open borders” policy. The FBI’s suspect for the attack, 42-year-old Shamsud-Din Jabbar, is a U.S. citizen born in Texas.

Elon Musk’s foray into politics is going global. The billionaire has announced that he’ll be hosting a live conversation on his social media platform X with Alice Weidel, co-chair of the far-right, anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany (AfD) Party. While the discussion has no official date yet, an AfD spokesperson stated that it would “definitely” be before the country’s election on February 23. This event will likely be very similar to the sit-down that Musk had with Donald Trump on the app in August, an affair that was riddled with technical difficulties.

This announcement comes as Musk was accused of election interference on Monday by the German government after writing a pro-AfD opinion column for a German newspaper, in which he stated, “Portraying the AfD as far-right is clearly false, considering that Alice Weidel, the party’s leader, has a same-sex partner from Sri Lanka! Does that sound like Hitler to you? Come on!” He also proclaimed, “Only the AfD can save Germany” on X in December.

Musk has also been commenting on U.K. politics, posting “Free Tommy Robinson!” on X on New Year’s Day. Robinson is a popular far-right, Islamaphobic activist and founding member of the British National Party. He was imprisoned for breaching an injunction regarding his repeated racially charged libel of a 15-year old Syrian boy via social media posts. Musk has had his eye on the U.K. for about a year now, calling it a state where “civil war is inevitable.”

The world’s richest man seems to have his sights set on becoming its most powerful unelected official too.

Technocrat billionaire Elon Musk finally owned up Wednesday to restricting his critics’ X accounts. But the self-described “free speech absolutist” doesn’t see anything wrong with it.

Last week, Musk began stripping the verifications from far-right accounts run by people who challenged his support for H-1B visas, after he and his co–DOGE czar Vivek Ramaswamy went to war arguing that Asian workers were far better than American ones. Obviously, the pro-white American far right didn’t take too kindly to that messaging.

Among those who received disciplinary actions were Laura Loomer, the far-right activist and self-described “proud Islamophobe” whom Donald Trump ferried around during his presidential campaign, and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes, whom Musk had invited back onto the platform just over six months ago.

By taking away their verifications and knocking them out of X Pro, it seems that Musk has rendered several large accounts unable to receive ad revenue from X. Verification makes an account more visible too, so he has curbed their potential audiences.

Musk also suspended some smaller accounts, according to Mediaite. He defended his decision Wednesday via his favorite medium: replies on X.

“People getting demonetized for their inexcusable behavior then complaining about free speech is hilarious to me,” wrote Nicole Behnam, a journalist. “You can say whatever you want. You just can’t get paid for it. Hope this helps.”

“Exactly,” replied Musk. “The first amendment is protection for ‘free speech’, not ‘paid speech’ ffs.”

In response to a post from Fuentes claiming, “Twitter censorship is back,” Musk replied, “Claiming censorship while simultaneously getting millions of views is the clearest possible evidence that Fuentes has 💩 for brains.”

This kind of logic must be new to Musk, who, if memory serves, spent several months last year fundraising and pamphleteering on behalf of Trump and JD Vance—both of whom ceaselessly whine about censorship while also having the biggest platforms in the country.

Of course, it’s not the users’ racism or hate speech that Musk is opposing—the technocrat billionaire recently backed Germany’s ethnonationalist party and has been known to elevate hate speech at the cost of shareholder value—but, rather, it’s punishing dissent within the party he intends to take over.