MTG Threatens PBS for Accurately Describing Elon Musk’s Salute

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is threatening to bring news outlets that accurately report on Elon Musk’s horrific Sieg Heil before Congress.

PBS News shared an unedited clip on X Monday of the billionaire technocrat speaking at a post-inauguration event for Donald Trump, when he did “what appeared to be a fascist salute,” the outlet wrote.

Musk “[put] his hand on his chest and then [raised] it in a salute that appeared similar to the ‘Sieg Heil’ used by Nazis at their victory rallies,” PBS wrote.

And Musk didn’t just do it once; he did it twice in a row.

But PBS’s reporting includes the essential word “appeared,” which is typically used by journalists to indicate that while describing something cannot necessarily determine its nature, one can understand something’s nature through describing it.

One might write that it was a Sieg Heil because that’s clearly what it was. But many outlets are declining to do so, for a slate of reasons that range from an abundance of caution to blatant cowardice. Fox News, for example, suggested that Musk—who previously voiced his support for Germany’s far-right party and a British neo-Nazi—had simply made a “questionable salute.”

Greene, who has pushed her own antisemitic conspiracy theories from time to time, came to Musk’s rescue from the dastardly American public broadcaster.

“As the Chairwoman of the Oversight Subcommittee on DOGE, I look forward to PBS @NewsHour coming before my committee and explaining why lying and spreading propaganda to serve the Democrat party and attack Republicans is a good use of taxpayer funds. We will be in touch soon,” Greene wrote Monday night.

Greene would have PBS testify to the dispassionate description of Musk’s apparent triumphant fascist salute, as if Congress doesn’t have enough of its own problems right now.

Not only is it not surprising that Greene would defend Musk from allegations of Nazism, it’s also not surprising that a MAGA Republican would target PBS. Trump has previously attacked publicly funded media such as NPR and PBS, and ye olde authoritarian playbook for Trump’s incoming administration, Project 2025, called for the government to strip federal funding and licenses for noncommercial education stations.

Donald Trump on Monday pardoned or commuted the sentences of every single person criminally charged for the January 6 insurrection. Known violent extremists are now walking free.

Trump’s sweeping pardon affects more than 1,500 defendants—including some of the most notorious.

Enrique Tarrio, the former national leader of the Proud Boys who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for seditious conspiracy over his role in planning January 6, is now a free man. So is Guy Reffitt, a Three Percenter who touted a gun and helped lead the rioters to the Capitol. The baseball bat–wielding Jake Lang is also free after continuing his alt-right activities from prison. Julian Khater, who pepper-sprayed Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick in the face, was similarly freed. Sicknick died the day after the attack.

Proud Boy Dominic Pezzola, who stormed through a shattered window in the Senate building, was pardoned of his 10-year sentence. Fellow Proud Boys Ethan Nordean and Joe Biggs, who coordinated breaches of police lines, were also pardoned.  

A notable commutation was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes, whom a federal judge described as “frightening.” 

Trump delivered quickly on a core campaign promise, issuing the pardons within hours of his swearing in. This is a massive level of vindication for a group who viewed themselves as the victims the entire time. 

Donald Trump has been in office for less than 24 hours, but his administration is already working overtime to strip personnel from the executive branch who “are not aligned” with Trump’s “vision to Make America Great Again.”

In a late-night post to Truth Social, the forty-seventh president promised that his Presidential Personnel Office is “actively in the process of identifying and removing over a thousand Presidential Appointees from the previous Administration.” That staggering number includes four people whom Trump felt compelled to call out by name: José Andrés from the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition; Mark Milley from the National Infrastructure Advisory Council; Brian Hook from the Wilson Center for Scholars; and Keisha Lance Bottoms from the President’s Export Council.

“YOU’RE FIRED!” Trump wrote.

On Monday, Trump effectively reinstated Schedule F by an executive order under a different name, streamlining the process of ridding the executive branch of employees that he considers disloyal. And if Project 2025—the presidential transition blueprint that Trump and his allies have since fessed up is more or less the plan—are anything to go by, that could ultimately involve replacing tens of thousands of career employees with 54,000 pre-vetted Trump loyalists. In July, Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts promised the project had already “trained and vetted” more than 10,000 people to replace executive branch employees.

Minutes after Trump was sworn in, a portrait hanging in the Pentagon of former Joint Chiefs Chairman General Mark Milley—who refused Trump’s orders to send the military to crush protesters in Washington in the wake of George Floyd’s death, and who has since referred to Trump as a “fascist” and a “wannabe dictator”—was suddenly stripped from the wall. (Former President Joe Biden preemptively pardoned Milley on Monday, saving him from the Trump administration’s litigious ire.)

But the forced exit didn’t seem to bother everyone on the receiving end of it. The first person named in Trump’s post, Andrés, wrote later on X that he had already submitted his resignation last week, since his two-year term had expired.

“I was honored to serve as co-chair of the President’s Council on Sports, Fitness, and Nutrition. My fellow council members—unpaid volunteers like me—were hardworking, talented people who inspired me every day,” Andres wrote. “May God give you the wisdom, Mr. President, to put politics and name calling aside … and instead lift up the everyday people working to bring America together. Let’s build longer tables.”

Bottoms similarly quit weeks before Trump supposedly ousted her. On Tuesday, the former Atlanta mayor shared her resignation notice to the Biden administration, dated January 4.

Trump has repeatedly promised to enact revenge on individuals he deemed to be “enemies of the state.” In the weeks leading up to the election, former Trump White House Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews warned that the ex-reality TV star had morphed from someone with a vision for America into a vindictive far-right ideologue “hellbent on revenge and retribution.”

This story has been updated.

On Monday evening, just hours after Donald Trump’s inauguration, the Senate passed the Laken Riley Act, an extreme bill that would allow for the deportation and detention of any undocumented immigrant merely suspected of a nonviolent crime. And they did it with the help of 12 Democrats.

The bill passed 64-35 with only 35 Democrats, including independents Bernie Sanders and Angus King, voting against it. Democrats Ruben Gallego and John Fetterman co-sponsored the bill along with Republican Katie Britt.

The bill, which is likely to be signed into law by Trump, would only require an arrest, not a conviction or charge, to target an undocumented immigrant for federal detention and possible deportation. The bill does not include protections for children or DACA recipients.

Many Democrats sought to enact changes to the bill, hoping to strip out some of its worst features, like the lack of protection for minors. Ultimately, the only amendments to the bill came from Republicans: One from Senator John Cornyn that requires ICE to detain undocumented immigrants who attack law enforcement, and another from Joni Ernst, which expands the bill to include undocumented immigrants who commit violent crimes.

The following Democrats voted to enact the Laken Riley Act:

1. Catherine Cortez Masto—Nevada
2. John Fetterman—Pennsylvania (co-sponsor)
3. Ruben Gallego—Arizona (co-sponsor)
4. Maggie Hassan—New Hampshire
5. Mark Kelly—Arizona
6. Jon Ossoff—Georgia
7. Gary Peters—Michigan
8. Jacky Rosen—Nevada
9. Jeanne Shaheen—New Hampshire
10. Elissa Slotkin—Michigan
11. Mark Warner—Virginia
12. Raphael Warnock—Georgia
    

Donald Trump is already failing the implicit geography test that is taking office as the president of the United States.

Just hours after being sworn in Monday, a reporter asked Trump about his demand that NATO member states spend at least five percent of their GDP on defense, citing Spain’s defense spending level. The president responded completely incorrectly.

“Spain is very low. And yet, are they a BRICS nation?” Trump asked.

“What?” the reporter replied.

“They’re a BRICS nation, Spain. You know what a BRICS nation is? You’ll figure it out,” Trump said, managing to be both snide and wrong.

“But uh, and if the BRICS nations want to do that, that’s OK, but we’re gonna put at least 100 percent tariff on the business they do with the United States,” Trump said.

The ‘S’ in BRICS does not stand for Spain at all.

The countries in BRICS are Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa, and new member states Egypt, Ethiopia, Indonesia, UAE, and Iran. No state in the entire European Union is a member of BRICS. Here’s hoping that the president of the United States will eventually “figure it out.”

Mehdi Hasan, the editor-and-chief of Zeteo News, shared a video of Trump’s gaffe on X late Monday, writing, “We need to talk about the president’s age and memory and mental health.”

“If Biden had said this, it would be on a 24/7 loop on cable, and all over TikTok,” Hasan wrote in a separate post on X.