Brazil’s Lula Warns U.N. About Rising Fascism Just Before Trump Speaks

Left-wing Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, or Lula, used his Tuesday speech at the United Nations to openly rebuke Trump’s retaliatory pro-Bolsonaro tariffs, his brazen attack on the sovereignty of Brazil and other South American states, and his entire strongman authoritarian ideology—all without saying his name. 

Lula’s speech was right before Trump’s and it’s very likely that Trump heard every word. 

“Attacks on sovereignty, arbitrary sanctions, and unilateral interventions are becoming the rule. There is a clear parallel between the multilateralism crisis and the weakening of democracy,” Lula said. “Authoritarianism is strengthened when we fail to act in the face of arbitrary acts.  When the international society falters in defending peace, sovereignty and the rule of law. The consequences are tragic.”

Lula then turned to Trump’s support for Javier Bolsonaro, who Trump viewed as an understudy of sorts. Earlier this month, Brazil’s Supreme Court sentenced the far-right leader to 27 years in prison for plotting a military coup resembling January 6, sending his supporters to raid Brazil’s presidential palace, the Supreme Court, and Congress after his election loss to Lula. Trump has heavily tariffed Brazil and sanctioned top officials over the “witch hunt” against Bolsonaro.

“There is no justification for unilateral and arbitrary measures against our institutions and our economy. The aggression against the independence of the judiciary branch of power is unacceptable,” Lula continued. “Peace cannot be achieved with impunity. A few days ago … a former head of state was convicted of attacking the democratic rule of law. He was investigated, indicted, trialed and held accountable for his actions in a meticulous process.... Brazil sent a message to all aspiring autocrats and those who support them: our democracy, our sovereignty, are non-negotiable.” 

Lula went on to call for the end to inequality and food insecurity, equal rights and protections for women, a reduction in arms spending, and more taxes on the wealthiest, noting that “poverty is as much an enemy of democracy as extremism.”

He also criticized the Trump administration’s unilateral, extrajudicial bombing of boats in the Caribbean sea that they believe to be Venezuelan drug boats. 

“The comparison between crime and terrorism is worrying. The most effective way to combat drug trafficking is to cooperate to suppress money laundering and limit arms trade,” Lula said. “Using lethal force in situations that do not constitute armed conflict is tantamount to executing people without trial.... The path to dialogue must not be closed in Venezuela.” 

He also stated that while Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel was “indefensible,” there was “nothing, absolutely nothing,” that justified the “ongoing genocide in Gaza.” 

Trump seemed to have taken little from Lula’s impassioned, principled speech, as he vamped, blamed the previous administration for everything, and essentially told everyone they were going to hell. 

Jimmy Kimmel is headed back to late-night—and MAGA isn’t happy.

The late-night host was indefinitely suspended last week for a comment he made criticizing the response of President Donald Trump’s political base to Charlie Kirk’s death, noting their desperation to “characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

In fact, Republicans started doing that the same day Kirk was shot, casting blame on the left and the transgender community before the shooter was even identified. Kimmel’s remark about MAGA comments wasn’t a claim about the identity of the shooter; it was a well-documented fact.

Now MAGA is fuming at the news that he’ll return to his desk so soon.

“Must be nice to be a leftist. ‘Cancellation’ lasts 5 nights and you’re right back under klieg lights. On the right you’re underground,” Megyn Kelly wrote on X.

NBC permanently canceled Kelly’s show in 2018 after she made remarks defending the use of blackface in Halloween costumes. Now she’s been banished to the underground: a daily radio show on SiriusXM.

“Worst fascism ever,” right-wing commentator Stephen L. Miller wrote on X.

RawStory reported that several MAGA commenters were angry at the left’s outrage over Kimmel’s apparently temporary cancellation.

“Jimmy Kimmel is going back on air tomorrow night. Is fascism over? LOL,” wrote Chris Barron, president of Right Turn Strategies, on X.

“Trump isn’t fascisting that well. But the left would have you believe Kimmel has been thrown in prison,” wrote an account called Liju Kurian on X.

But Kimmel’s censorship isn’t over.

Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns 38 ABC-affiliate stations, wasn’t too pleased either. The company said it would replace Kimmel’s show with news programming until “formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network’s commitment to professionalism and accountability.”

Sinclair had demanded that Kimmel make a sizable donation to Turning Point USA. David Smith, the company’s executive chairman, donated $250,000 to the right-wing organization last year, according to independent journalist Judd Legum.

Liberals across America suddenly found themselves agreeing with Donald Trump Monday evening.

“We have a lot of stupid people in this country running things,” Trump said during a press conference.

The comment came as a dig at pharmaceutical companies and economists across the country, who Trump claimed were abetting a scheme in which the United States is “subsidizing” the cheaper cost of drugs in other nations. (Fact check: That’s not true.)

But the president’s words nonetheless rattled and surprised Democratic commentators, who were shocked by Trump’s sudden—if limited—self-awareness. Across social media, they applauded Trump for so very nearly chastising his own administration.

“Every so often, like a stuck clock, he says something accurate,” said attorney George Conway, the ex-husband of first-term Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

“Such self-awareness is commendable,” wrote author Maxwell Black.

“Truer words were never spoken,” commented California State University Fullerton philosophy Professor Amy Coplan. “And irony is now on its third death.

Incredibly, Trump’s verbiage also derides his own appointments, considering that he was the one who instated the people who are currently running things in the U.S. Some X users pointed out that Trump would be the last in line to receive his own backhand, since he’s atop the pyramid of—in his words—“stupid people in this country running things.”

“DONALD BLAMES EVERYTHING ON STUPID PEOPLE RUNNING THIS COUNTRY,” posted a parody account of California Governor Gavin Newsom’s office. “WE DON’T KNOW WHY HE’S TALKING IN THIRD PERSON AND IN PLURAL, BUT THE FIRST STEP IS ADMITTING THAT YOU ARE THE PROBLEM. BRAVO.”

The rest of Trump’s press conference was a hodgepodge of lies and half-truths in which Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. attempted to connect (without providing any evidence) pregnant women’s Tylenol use to rising autism rates, advised that children stop receiving the medical marvel that is the combo MMR vaccine, and claimed that babies should not receive multiple vaccines at the same time on the basis that it’s “too much liquid.”

White House border czar Tom Homan did everything but deny reports that he accepted a Cava bag full of $50,000 cash from federal undercover agents.

“[MSNBC] said you took 50,000 dollars in cash in a bag from an undercover FBI agent to help them win government contracts in Trump’s second term,” Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked Homan Monday evening. “The DOJ said they concluded there was no criminal wrongdoing, but nevertheless that story is out there, and I imagine you wanna respond to that.” 

“Look I did nothing criminal, I did nothing illegal. And ya know there’s hit piece after hit piece after hit piece. And I’m glad the FBI and DOJ said that nothing illegal happened, no criminal activity,” Homan replied, not actually confirming or denying what he was reportedly caught on camera doing. 

“I left a very successful business that I ran to come back and work for our government again, I’m back on a government paycheck. Not only did I sacrifice, my family sacrifices. I make sacrifices every day, I get more death threats than anybody.… But guess what? My kids don’t. My wife don’t. I haven’t lived with my wife in months, because I don’t want her to be here right now with all the threats,” Homan continued. “So after all the sacrifices … from all these years, they wanna come out and dirty me up.… But keep coming, because Tom Homan isn’t going anywhere.” 

Ingraham could have interrupted Homan’s sob story with one simple question: “Where’s the $50,000?” At no point in this appearance did Homan deny accepting the money, he only said that he didn’t do anything illegal, as the DOJ confirmed. And of course they would—the agents who caught Homan with the bribe last September were reportedly waiting to see if Homan would act on the bribe as a member of the administration, but Trump’s DOJ closed the case. 

What’s the truth here? If the Trump administration was as transparent as it likes to say it is, it would release the FBI files related to the bribe. But it isn’t, and it won’t. We can only wonder what someone like Homan does with $50,000.  

As southern Arizona voters in the state’s 7th congressional district head to the polls Tuesday to fill a vacancy in the U.S. House, they are poised to revive a major headache for House Speaker Mike Johnson and the Trump administration.

Both the Democratic front-runner, Adelita Grijalva, and her Republican challenger, Daniel Butierez, have publicly expressed their intent to provide the deciding signature on the discharge petition to circumvent Johnson and force a House vote on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

“The days of turning a blind eye to Trump must end,” Grijalva told Politico. The government’s lack of transparency surrounding the late notorious sex criminal “has definitely come up” during the campaign, she told CNN, as voters say “they believe the survivors deserve justice, and Congress must fulfill its duty to check the executive branch and hold Trump accountable.”

Butierez would “absolutely” sign on to the petition too, he said earlier this month in the Arizona Daily Star, which first reported Grijalva’s commitment as well.

With the House’s current makeup, Representatives Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, are just one signature shy on their bid to force a vote—which would likely go to the House floor and pass with Grijalva’s or Butierez’s signature. While Johnson can try to block it via the House Rules Committee, he and the committee chair, Virginia Foxx, have both reportedly said they wouldn’t do so.

Acetaminophen—better known by the brand name Tylenol—was first approved by the Food and Drug Administration in 1951. But on Monday, the White House turned its back on that science-backed recommendation.

“Taking Tylenol is uh, not good,” Donald Trump said during a press conference, tying taking Tylenol during pregnancy to increased autism rates, despite a lack of evidence.

The president appeared to suggest that all Americans no longer consume Tylenol, though he emphasized that children and pregnant women should be especially wary of consuming the popular pain relief drug.

“If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’re going to have to do,” Trump said, implying that pregnant women are more likely to have autistic babies if they can’t handle the pain of pregnancy—or even if they experience non–pregnancy related pain or fever while pregnant.

“You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly. Can be something that’s very dangerous to the woman’s health, in other words a fever that’s very, very dangerous and ideally a doctor’s decision because I think you shouldn’t take it.

“And you shouldn’t take it during the entire pregnancy,” he continued. “And you shouldn’t give the child a Tylenol every time … he goes and has a shot, you shouldn’t give a Tylenol to that child.”

At one point, Trump struggled to actually pronounce the word “acetaminophen,” the generic name for the drug in Tylenol.

More than any other over-the-counter drug, doctors have recommended Tylenol for pregnant women due to its wide availability and its researched safety. It is considered to be the safest fever reducer and painkiller on the market for pregnant women. Because of this, it’s also one of the few pain medications that pregnant women are allowed to consume, and they do consume it: Studies have found that two-thirds of pregnant women in the U.S. consume Tylenol during their pregnancies.

Dr. Zeyan Liew, an associate professor of epidemiology at Yale University, underscored that recent doubts have been cast on Tylenol’s reputation due to what appear to be rising autism rates across the nation.

Combating autism is the cornerstone of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s public health policy. Kennedy is a part of a growing movement of anti-vax parents who refuse to provide their children with the same public health advantages that they received in their youth, mostly in fear of thoroughly debunked conspiracy theories that, at one point, linked autism to the jab.

The researcher who 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 vaccines, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.

But confusion persists regarding the basic figures. A study published by the Autism Society of Texas found that one in 31 people is estimated to have autism—a disturbingly sharp uptick from figures released in 2006 that found about one in every 110 children was diagnosed with autism by age 8.

But behind those numbers is a different story, according to Liew, who noted that the definition of autism was broadened in that same time span. Increased research, social destigmatization, and improved mental health screening have also contributed to the inflated numbers.

But Trump chose to fearmonger about perfectly safe medications. “Nothing bad can happen, it can only good happen,” he insisted Monday afternoon regarding America’s mass withdrawal from the pain reliever.

In the same presser, Trump claimed that doctors have been “pumping” babies—like a “horse”—with a “vat” of 80-something vaccines.

He also advised that instead of the MMR combo vaccine, children receive individual vaccines to ward off measles, mumps, and rubella separately, claiming that the scientifically safe combination was also contributing to autism rates. Later, the president said that children should not be given too many vaccines at once on the basis that it’s “too much liquid.”

“Too many different things are going into that baby at too big a number,” Trump said. “The size of this thing when you look at it. It’s like 80 different vaccines and beyond vaccines.”

This story has been updated.

Karoline Leavitt is performing mental gymnastics to justify President Trump’s crackdown on free speech.

“Going back to the president’s social media posts from over the weekend regarding the DOJ and his seeming frustration that they hadn’t taken action quickly enough,” a reporter raised during Leavitt’s Monday press briefing, “I wanna point to something the president said during his inaugural address: ‘Never again will the immense power of the state be weaponized to persecute political opponents. We will not allow that to happen.’ Is the president going back on his promise?”

“No. In fact the president is fulfilling his promise to restore a Department of Justice that demands accountability. It is not weaponizing the Department of Justice to demand accountability for those who weaponized the Department of Justice,” Leavitt replied, employing some weak verbal trickery to coat the lie she was telling.

Then she brought out the therapy language. “We are not going to tolerate gaslighting from anyone in the media from anyone on the other side who is trying to say that it’s the president who is weaponizing the DOJ.... You look at people like Adam Schiff, and like James Comey, and like Letitia James, who the president is rightfully frustrated [with]. He wants accountability for these corrupt fraudsters who abused their power, who abused their oath of office to target the former president.”

So according to Leavitt, anyone who was involved in trying to hold Trump accountable for anything in his past—Letitia James, who successfully sued him for fraud, James Comey, who didn’t drop an investigation Trump wanted him to as FBI director, Adam Schiff, who was a key figure in both of Trump’s impeachments—was just wrong. Trump, who in MAGA’s mind has never done anything to deserve that kind of legal scrutiny, should now have free rein to target them.

Leavitt is once again lying through her teeth. The president is weaponizing state power to politically persecute his opponents, and it isn’t just at the DOJ. He sicced FCC Chair Brendan Carr on ABC and Jimmy Kimmel last week, and made it clear that any negative reporting of him should be illegal.

“Ninety-seven, 94, 95, 96 percent of the people are against me in the sense of the newscasts, are against me.… They’ll take a great story, and they’ll make it bad,” Trump said on Friday. “See, I think that’s really illegal, personally.”

It’s clear that if anyone is doing the gaslighting here it’s Trump and Leavitt.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt crumbled Monday when pressed about President Trump’s lawfare against New York Attorney General Letitia James.

Trump last week forced Erik Siebert out of his post as U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia for failing to find (read: concoct) evidence of James’s criminality during a five-month-long investigation.

James previously filed a civil case against Trump, in which he was ultimately found liable for business fraud in September 2023. (An appeals court last month tossed a $500 million penalty—but not the verdict.) Now, like several other Trump foes, James faces a thinly veiled retribution campaign, in which she’s accused by the administration of mortgage fraud.

ABC White House correspondent Selina Wang laid these facts before Leavitt at a Monday press conference. Considering that a monthslong investigation into James by Siebert (a Trump appointee) yielded no evidence, she asked, “Is the president saying here it doesn’t matter if there’s a crime, he just wants his political enemies to be charged?”

Leavitt launched into a tirade against James, who, she said, “completely abused her oath of office” and “was actively and openly engaged in lawfare.” The press secretary also falsely claimed that last month’s removal of Trump’s half-billion-dollar civil fraud penalty meant the president was “exonerated” of James’s “witch hunt”—when, in reality, the appeals court upheld the lower court’s verdict that Trump is indeed liable for fraud.

“Why won’t the president accept the conclusions of his Justice Department to not bring charges against Letitia James?” Wang followed up, observing that Siebert’s ouster was reportedly privately opposed by Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.

“I just answered that question for you,” Leavitt shot back—though she very much hadn’t. Trump, she added, “wants to see accountability for those who abuse their office and abuse their power, and Letitia James absolutely did that whether you want to admit it or not.”

“Is that not retribution, though?” Wang asked, to which Leavitt replied, “It’s accountability,” before brusquely taking another question.

Doctors are warning that the Trump administration’s move to force companies to pay $100,000 for employees on H-1B visas may very well cripple the country’s medical apparatus and make it even harder for Americans to get lifesaving care in a timely manner.

“Raising the H-1B visa fee to $100,000 risks shutting off the pipeline of highly trained physicians, especially in rural and underserved communities,” the American Medical Association said in a statement Monday.

“The H-1B nonimmigrant visa program was created to bring temporary workers into the United States to perform additive, high-skilled functions, but it has been deliberately exploited to replace, rather than supplement, American workers with lower-paid, lower-skilled labor,” the administration said in a statement announcing the new visa restriction on Friday. “The large-scale replacement of American workers through systemic abuse of the program has undermined both our economic and national security.”

International medical students and residents make up a huge portion of health care employment. Making their companies pay $100,000 in order to employ them would simply wipe many of them out, and rob their patients in the process.

“When you’re putting a doctor in the middle of rural Ohio or rural Indiana, and they have to serve the underserved—that kind of a price tag is going to wipe out a lot of health care for a lot of people across the country who really need it,” attorney David Leopold, who represents H-1B visa doctors serving in health care deserts, told Bloomberg. “If that visa’s not available, then we’re not able to place physicians in these areas.”

Scientist and former H-1B visa holder M.E. Siddall warned that this kind of tax on foreign professionals will lead to a reverse brain drain, as the world’s medical talent may look elsewhere for work.

“The history of the United States is attracting the best minds of the world,” he said. “Princeton would have to pay $100,000 for Einstein?”

The federal government is nixing its most prominent research program designed to track national food insecurity.

The Agriculture Department ended its Household Food Security Report over the weekend, referring to the 30-year study as “redundant.”

“These redundant, costly, politicized, and extraneous studies do nothing more than fear monger,” the USDA said in a press release Saturday, further deriding the research as “liberal fodder.”

“Trends in the prevalence of food insecurity have remained virtually unchanged, regardless of an over 87 percent increase in SNAP spending between 2019-2023,” the release noted, referring to ​​​​the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program.

But there is about to be a dramatic uptick in the number of Americans struggling to eat. Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act expanded the work requirements to qualify for SNAP earlier this year, a rescission that’s expected to leave at least 2.4 million Americans without food aid, according to NPR.

Further still, experts say the Agriculture Department’s claim that food insecurity has remained “unchanged” is patently untrue. Kyle Ross, a policy analyst with the progressive research group the Center for American Progress, told NPR that there was an uptick in food insecurity as recently as 2023. That year, the rate of food-insecure children in the United States grew by 3.2 percent over the year prior, according to data from the Food Research and Action Center.

“At that point, it has been the largest rate of food insecurity that the country has seen since 2014 and substantially larger than just two years prior,” Ross told the radio network.

The last iteration of the Household Food Security Report, published in 2024, found that 13.5 percent of American households were food insecure “at least some time during” 2023, which the report noted was “statistically significantly higher than the 12.8 percent in 2022.”

Anti-hunger researchers described the data provided by the national food insecurity survey as “critical.”

“Without that data, we are flying blind, and we don’t know the impact,” Crystal FitzSimons, president of the Food Research and Action Center told NPR.