Elon Musk Unleashes His Followers on Ilhan Omar—Over a Fake Video

Elon Musk is sending his digital minions after Representative Ilhan Omar, all based on a fake video posted by the pitiable right-wing shill Ian Miles Cheong.

On Tuesday, Cheong posted an obviously edited video in which he claimed the progressive congresswoman was “conducting seminars for Somalians who are living illegally in the U.S. without documentation, providing guidance on how to evade deportation.”

The video shows a random room full of unidentified people of seemingly East African descent, then cuts to Omar being interviewed in a completely different room.

The richest man in the world shared the video, clutching at his pearls. “She is breaking the law. Literally. Outright,” he wrote on X of Omar allegedly telling immigrants that they were not required to answer questions if detained by ICE. And that didn’t even happen.

Hundreds of Musk’s fans began flocking to Omar’s page, so much so that she had to clear the air herself.

“Hey Elon, every single person in this country deserves to know their rights. That’s legal. Maybe you should brush up on our laws given the fact you’re breaking them to steal American’s sensitive data,” Omar wrote, in reference to Musk’s aggressive takeover of the Treasury’s payment system. “PS. This video is manipulated, and I wasn’t even at the event shown.”

It’s ironic that a man who spends all day moaning about left-wing misinformation and suppression is using his massive platform to spread his own. And he’s just getting started.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune is playing dumb when it comes to Donald Trump’s significant efforts to shutter USAID.

Since taking office, Trump has made several major moves to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development: He signed an executive order pausing all foreign aid, issued a stop-work order sending staff and contractors home, and sent agents from the Department of Government Efficiency to raid USAID’s offices for personnel and payment files. But, supposedly, his main guy in the Senate has no idea what’s going on.

Benjamin Weiss of Courthouse News asked Tuesday whether Thune believed Trump had the authority to “unilaterally close” a federal agency without congressional approval. The South Dakota Republican acted like he had no idea what he was being asked about.

“It was my understanding, I don’t think they’re closing an agency, but I do think they have the right to review funding and how those decisions are made and what priorities are being funded,” Thune replied, according to Fox News’s Chad Pergram.

“I think that’s probably true of any administration when they come in … we’re trying to determine again, how the the various programs are authorized and funded under USAID, how those dollars are being spent, whether they’re being spent wisely and well and consistent with the purpose for which they are, are intended,” Thune said.

“It’s in need of reform. It’s in need of transparency and greater accountability. And I think that’s what the administration’s trying to achieve,” Thune said.

Yes, transparency—but that’s not what a group of Democratic leaders got when they marched down to USAID headquarters on Monday and were denied entry from the offices.

Thune’s statement seems particularly divorced from reality, considering that Elon Musk announced Trump’s intention to shutter the agency and Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s plan to absorb some parts of the organization and abolish the rest.

FBI agents who worked on cases related to the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection are suing to prevent Donald Trump’s new leaders at the Justice Department from retaliating against them.

Agents at the intelligence bureau filed two separate lawsuits on Tuesday against the Justice Department. The first class action lawsuit was filed in federal court anonymously and accuses the DOJ’s Trump-appointed leadership of putting together lists of agents who worked on cases seeking future punitive action for January 6, citing a survey being circulated in the bureau. The agents fear that Trump’s DOJ will make the lists public, or use them to punish agents they think are disloyal.

“Plaintiffs legitimately fear that the information being compiled will be accessed by persons who are not authorized to have access to it,” the lawsuit states. “Plaintiffs further assert that even if they are not targeted for termination, they may face other retaliatory acts such as demotion, denial of job opportunities or denial of promotions in the future.”

The lawsuit claims that the agents’ First Amendment rights were violated, as was the federal Privacy Act. It seeks to prevent the DOJ from collecting and circulating the identities of the FBI agents and other bureau employees in ways that could tie them to the January 6 cases, or to the case on Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents.

The FBI Agents Association, representing several other agents at the bureau, is also suing the DOJ over fears of retaliation for work relating to the January 6 attacks, fearing that their personal information will be exposed. In both lawsuits, agents fear that even if Trump doesn’t take direct action against them, his DOJ loyalists would be giving a hit list to the MAGA right, including the more than 1,500 January 6 defendants he pardoned.

Trump has targeted the bureau for revenge and tried to fire six senior agents last week. His nominee to run the law enforcement agency, Kash Patel, has already compiled an enemies list and refuses to answer questions about it. If Patel is confirmed, Trump will not only be able to take his revenge against those who investigated him and his supporters, but also protect his loyalists from prosecution when they break the law.

Trump is preparing an executive order to abolish the Department of Education—a move that will undoubtedly hurt teachers, students, and parents in red states the most.

The draft order will direct the department to slash spending and slash staff, according to The Washington Post. Such an aggressive decision on such a large scale would have sweeping consequences.

“The Dept of Education provides crucial funding for low-income public schools—eliminating it would result in the loss of 6% of teachers’ jobs nationwide,” former adviser for Barack Obama, Steven Rattner, wrote on X.

Rattner shared a chart based on data from the Center for American Progress on states’ K-12 education funding under Title I, the Education Department’s main federal program to help low-income students. Louisiana, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Nevada, and Arizona—states that all went for Trump—are the most reliant on that funding, and the most likely to lose hundreds of teachers under Trump’s proposals. Many other red states are not far behind. This will likely lead to a devastating domino effect of educational instability in states that need it the most.

Donald Trump’s administration has removed thousands of pages of information from the U.S. government’s websites as part of its sweeping effort to remove references to diversity, gender, and environmental justice.

As part of the de-wokeification process, Trump’s administration has eviscerated more than 8,000 pages of materials just since Friday about a range of topics, from census methodology to resources about postpartum depression, according to an analysis from The New York Times.

The biggest targets have been the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Census Bureau, which each lost more than 3,000 pages.

In the past week, the CDC’s website saw the removal of resources about HIV and STI treatment guidelines, as well as a guide for young people seeking gender-affirming care.

Other information struck from the record included warning signs for Alzheimer’s disease, materials for overdose prevention training, and vaccine guidelines for pregnant people. The Times noted that the use of the phrase “pregnant people,” as opposed to “women,” may have contributed to the guidelines’ removal.

The CDC’s Social Vulnerability Index, which uses census data to determine how at risk someone is to experience a natural disaster through the lenses of geography, race, income level, and education, was also removed, according to The Guardian.

The National Institutes of Health removed a portal with information about maternal morbidity and mortality.

Some CDC files, not included in the Times’ analysis, were removed and then restored with information missing. The agency’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey data briefly disappeared, but then was restored with one of its gender columns missing and its data documentation deleted, the Associated Press reported.

Of the more than 3,000 articles removed from the Census Bureau site, most were filed under research and methodology, but other areas with missing pages included data stewardship and documentation for several data sets. On Monday, users hoping to retrieve data on certain topics from the census were greeted by a response that said the area was “unavailable due to maintenance,” according to the AP.

But that wasn’t all.

More than 1,000 pages were removed from the website for the Office of Justice Programs, a research and grant-making organization that works to provide local and state law enforcement with resources and training. All state-level data on hate crimes was removed from the Justice Department’s website (the months after Trump’s first election saw a significant spike in hate crimes, according to FBI data).

The Food and Drug administration removed nearly 100 pages, including 60 that mentioned expanding diversity in drug trials. The Department of the Interior deleted several pages mentioning “environmental justice.” Head Start, the IRS, and several other agencies also saw hundreds of pages scrubbed out of existence. There are links to archived versions of some of these pages here.