FCC Chair Revels as MAGA TV Conglomerate Refuses to Air Jimmy Kimmel

With Jimmy Kimmel Live! returning to the air Tuesday evening, the Federal Communications Commission chair who jawboned ABC and companies that own its stations into censoring Jimmy Kimmel can’t keep himself from weighing in on the affair.

While ABC on Monday reversed its decision to cancel the show, Sinclair Broadcast Group, followed by Nexstar Media Group, announced that they will not air the show on the roughly 70 ABC affiliates owned across the country between them.

The companies first pulled Kimmel’s show last week, after FCC Chair Brendan Carr threatened those who platform the comedian following a joke he made about Trump and MAGA’s response to the death of Charlie Kirk. Both companies have business before the FCC, which helps explain their swift and ongoing capitulation to Carr. (Nexstar is pursuing a multibillion-dollar merger that would expand its reach to 80 percent of TV households in the country—a number so large that it would require the FCC to lift the existing 39-percent cap limiting companies’ reach.)

Carr, who has spent the past week trying to paint the incident as anything other than a patent instance of a government official applying pressure to influence private decision-making, was delighted by the news that Sinclair and Nexstar won’t change their stance.

Carr took to X to lash out against Democratic state Senator Scott Wiener, who reacted to the news of Sinclair’s decision to keep Kimmel censored despite ABC’s reversal by proposing breaking up the massive conglomerate. “Corporate media consolidation doesn’t jibe with democracy,” Wiener wrote, in a post published before Nexstar followed in Sinclair’s footsteps.

Carr argued that Wiener’s statement showed that it’s Democrats—not Republicans—who are the censorial ones. Nexstar and Sinclair, he claimed, had decided independently that suspending Kimmel “made sense.”

Wiener responded in disbelief at the FCC chair’s hypocrisy: “Do you people hear yourselves?? BREAK UP SINCLAIR.”

Carr fired off another tweet, in which he attempted to describe the incident—in which two of the country’s largest, and ever consolidating, media conglomerates, are truckling to an agency whose approval they need—as a heartwarming underdog story. Democrats, he said, “simply can’t stand that local TV stations—for the first time in years—stood up to a national programmer” in ABC.

President Trump repeatedly blamed the United Nations for his teleprompter issues and a malfunctioning escalator in a spiteful Tuesday speech to the General Assembly. But it seems that both issues were caused directly by his own team.

“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” Trump said after claiming to have brought so much peace and prosperity to the world without any international assistance. “If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen. But she’s in great shape … and then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter. Thank you very much.”

But according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri, an anonymous U.N. official said the escalator in question was actually stopped prematurely by someone from Trump’s group, who ran ahead of the group and accidentally triggered a stop mechanism. The official added that the teleprompter that Trump was so upset about was also being operated by his White House.

Trump’s churlish speech—and his faulty finger-pointing—only further display how isolating his presidency has been on an international level. Trump’s constant hammering of the U.N. may cause countries that once depended on us as allies to go elsewhere, or strengthen their relationships without us.

A Guatemalan family says immigration enforcement agents held their autistic 5-year-old daughter outside their home in Leominster, Massachusetts, last week in order to induce her father to surrender to them.

As Telemundo reported Monday, the father—a man named Edward Hip, who has lived in the country for more than two decades and has an active asylum application—was reportedly driving with his daughter when he called his wife at home and said someone seemed to be following them. When they got home, Hip “managed to run back into the parking lot of my house,” his wife said, but agents got hold of the child.

Video footage obtained by Telemundo shows the father and mother pleading with several men, apparently federal agents, surrounding the girl in a driveway. “They took my daughter, she’s 5 years old. She has autism spectrum,” the woman can be heard shouting in the recording.

“We didn’t take your daughter,” one of the agents said, to which the mother replied, “OK, give me my daughter back.”

In another portion of the video, agents can be seen gesturing for the parents to come over. “Is that your daughter? Come here so I can see those IDs,” one asked. Hip responds that he can “give it through the door,” but the agent, pointing in front of him, says, “You can do it right here.”

The local police department apparently intervened, rescuing the girl from the federal agents. Arriving at the scene, NBC Boston reports, “Leominster police recovered the child and returned her to the family.” Two days later, though, federal agents returned, arresting Hip out of his car.

Department of Homeland Security official Tricia McLaughlin called the story “a disgusting smear,” on X, alleging that Hip had prior arrests, “ignored law enforcement emergency lights to pull over,” and “abandoned” his daughter in the car as he fled inside. 

“Officers helped rescue the child and called local police to report the abandonment,” McLaughlin wrote.  

A statue depicting President Donald Trump and deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein frolicking hand in hand appeared on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday.

The 12-foot-tall statue—made mostly of foam and wire, but painted bronze—is accompanied by three plaques. The middle plaque reads “In Honor of Friendship Month: We celebrate the long-lasting bond between President Donald J. Trump and his ‘closest friend’ Jeffrey Epstein.” It then directly references the introduction to the strange letter Trump allegedly wrote to Epstein for the pedophile financier’s 50th birthday book: “Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.”

The other two plaques have Epstein’s name and the corresponding lines of the poem, and vice versa for Trump’s.

This statue represents the ongoing public fascination and outrage over the Trump administration’s repeated attempts to suppress further investigation into the Epstein files given his close friendship with the notorious sex predator.

The statues seemed to have struck a nerve within the Trump administration, as they responded almost as quickly as the statues were erected.

“Liberals are free to waste their money however they see fit—but it’s not news that Epstein knew Donald Trump, because Donald Trump kicked Epstein out of his club for being a creep,” a White House spokesperson told TMZ. “Democrats, the media, and the organization that’s wasting their money on this statue knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents.”

This response is pretty insufficient. Trump has recently said he kicked Epstein out because he “stole” workers from him. There have also been reports that they fell out over a real estate deal. Either way, this story that Trump was some white knight who defended the honor of the women of Mar-a-Lago doesn’t hold up with his own words.

Additionally, the Trump administration has not been transparent. The overwhelming majority of thee “thousands of pages of documents” the Justice Department released on Epstein were already mostly public information. It’s clear that these paltry excuses from the president aren’t going to make any of this go away.

President Donald Trump isn’t willing to say he distrusts Russian President Vladimir Putin, amid escalating tensions over drone incursions in Europe.

Speaking to the press Tuesday during a meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy, the U.S. president provided paltry answers when pressed on whether he still trusted Putin.

“I’ll let you know in about a month from now, OK?” Trump said.

Trump has repeatedly extended a limp “two-week” deadline for Moscow to make progress on talks with Kyiv to end its deadly incursion into Ukrainian territory. Still, the U.S. president seems unwilling to apply any pressure on Putin, and now it seems his autocratic ally has earned himself yet another month.

Trump also appeared to play dumb about a drone sighting Monday that shut down the airport in Copenhagen. “Have you been briefed on the latest alleged drone incursions in Denmark? What do you think of that?” asked one reporter.

“Where? Where are they?” Trump asked.

“Denmark, Copenhagen,” the reporter clarified, asking for a response to the incident that the Danish government suspected was “possibly Russian sabotage.”

“Well, I have no response until I find out exactly what happened. I know about it. But they don’t know what happened. But we’re gonna find out very soon,” Trump said.

Earlier this month, Trump acted completely clueless about the more than a dozen Russian drones that entered Polish airspace. A spokesperson from the Kremlin has denied the “unfounded accusations” of drone incursions, and said such allegations were “no longer taken into account.”

Since then, there have also been incursions by what are believed to be Russian drones in Estonian and Norwegian airspace.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said it was “too early to say” who exactly had been behind the latest drone sighting, but Trump had been present at the U.N. General Assembly in New York earlier that day as NATO leaders condemned the Kremlin for the series of “escalatory” incidents involving drone and fighter jet incursions across allied airspace. NATO warned that it would use “all necessary military and non-military tools” to defend itself.

The Justice Department is going to bat for Alex Jones, the Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist who still has yet to pay the $1.3 billion he owes the victims’ families.

A DOJ letter, signed by U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin and shared publicly by Jones, pledges the agency’s intent to investigate retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, who testified in the Sandy Hook families’ joint defamation case against the InfoWars host. Aldenberg was one of the first responders to the elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012.

Martin accuses Aldenberg of “acting for personal benefit” by participating in the trial, which effectively bankrupted Jones and awarded Aldenberg $90 million.

“As you may know, there are criminal laws protecting the citizens from actions by government employees who may be acting for personal benefit. I encourage you to review those,” Martin wrote to Aldenberg’s attorney.

The specific requests made by the DOJ pertaining Aldenberg’s participation refer to his employment at the FBI, whether he made clear that his testimony was made in a “personal capacity,” whether he recused himself from certain cases due to a potential conflict of interest, and whether Aldenberg had a relationship with communications firm Berlin Rosen for purposes related to “newsjacking,” which the letter did not define.

Jones also shared an image of himself with Martin, the two gleefully posing next to each other.

In his own statement, Jones claimed that the “DOJ’s task force on government weaponization against the American people has launched an investigation into the democrat party / FBI directing illegal law-fare against Alex Jones and InfoWars.”

Jones made his name and living by labeling the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people, a “hoax.” His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

Jones reported $9 million in personal assets in a 2024 bankruptcy filing, while InfoWars’ parent company Free Speech Systems held $6 million in cash, with roughly $1.2 million worth of inventory, according to the Associated Press. The company was later auctioned off, with the satirical newspaper The Onion temporarily coming out on top as its next potential owner.

Jones filed for bankruptcy in 2022 after losing his case against the victims of the tragedy. Jones himself filed earlier this month to liquidate all of his assets so that he could begin to put a dent in paying off the massive debt. Days later, the judge overseeing the personal bankruptcy case, Judge Christopher Lopez, approved the switch from reorganization to liquidation. Lopez also dismissed the company’s bankruptcy filing, noting that InfoWars had failed to reach an agreement with the victims’ families that would have allowed Jones to keep the business in operation while paying them millions of dollars per year.

The former Senate aide who accused Joe Biden of sexual assault has just received Russian citizenship.

Tara Reade blew up national headlines in 2019 when she condemned the culture of Biden’s Senate office and further accused Biden of inappropriately touching her while she worked on his staff in 1993. Numerous major U.S. media outlets reported Reade’s story but backtracked once discrepancies and inconsistencies in her narrative began to appear.

After Biden was nominated as the official Democratic candidate in the 2020 election, Reade’s story shifted into one of sexual assault. She accused Biden of pushing her against a wall, putting his hands under her clothes, and penetrating her with his fingers. Biden vehemently denied the allegations, and former Senate office staff members did not recall or corroborate Reade’s account.

Some of Reade’s other accusations also lacked credibility: Reade claimed she was fired for retaliation, but a PBS investigation that interviewed more than 70 former Biden staffers found that wasn’t the case. Instead, her colleagues recalled that she was fired for poor performance.

Some of Reade’s fiercest critics speculated that she was a Russian asset, in part fueled by since-deleted Medium posts and tweets in which she publicly praised Russian President Vladimir Putin. Five years on, that theory has earned a bit more credibility.

“This was a very special day,” Reade posted on X Monday, resharing a clip of her on RT, a Russian state-controlled television station. “I am now a Russian citizen! What an honor. Thank you to President Putin for this amazing honor of signing a decree making me a citizen and keeping me safe when I applied for asylum.”

Reade also gave a pointed shout-out to Maria Butina, a Russian parliamentarian and self-admitted Kremlin agent who was convicted in 2018 for conspiring to act as a clandestine foreign agent on behalf of Russia in the 2016 U.S. election. Butina leveraged her ties at the National Rifle Association, including her boyfriend—longtime Republican fundraiser Paul Erickson—to develop back channels between Moscow and Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. Butina first attempted to get face time with Trump as early as July 2015.

Reade first announced her intention to defect to Russia in 2023, when she claimed she no longer felt safe in the United States. Around the same time, Moscow had announced its intention to build a migrant village for American conservatives to take refuge from “liberal gender norms.” However, the project has since collapsed due to low demand, Russian outlet Vot Tak reported in July.

“I am a lucky girl,” Reade concluded.

President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to squash acts of resistance to its authoritarian policies—including its extrajudicial immigration crackdown—by tying all opposition to the supposedly nefarious work of antifa, a group that doesn’t actually exist.

Trump signed an executive order Monday illegally designating antifa, short for anti-fascist, a domestic terror organization. “Antifa is a militarist, anarchist enterprise that explicitly calls for the overthrow of the United States Government, law enforcement authorities, and our system of law,” the order states.

But antifa is a movement, not a so-called organization. It lacks a central structure, and is instead a loose network of individuals and groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism.

The order also lists activities the Trump administration claims are the work of the shadowy group, including “armed standoffs with law enforcement, organized riots, violent assaults on Immigration and Customs Enforcement and other law enforcement officers, and routine doxing of and other threats against political figures and activists.”

Some critics have argued that this language opens the door toward a law enforcement crackdown on protesters and activists who have nothing to do with actual political extremism or violence.

“Trump’s Executive Order on Antifa is written such that someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist,’” wrote Zeteo’s Prem Thakker on X.

Across the country, Trump’s Department of Justice has repeatedly struggled to secure indictments against protesters accused of assaulting immigration officials. The Department of Homeland Security has vastly overstated claims of widespread violence against ICE officers, claims that crumble under the slightest scrutiny.

Using Trump’s executive order, law enforcement officers and prosecutors could potentially tie protesters they wish to punish to antifa. Proving affiliation to a group with no actual members is impossible, so assigning membership to antifa becomes arbitrary and easily weaponized. It’s not surprising that Trump’s efforts to punish the anti-fascists green-lights a furtherance of, well … do I even need to say it?

Trump’s targeting of antifa is a grave misdirect committed in the backlash of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s death. The actual rate of political violence motivated by left-wing ideologies is dwarfed by the rate of right-wing violence, but the Trump administration has made fast work removing any evidence that doesn’t support its narrative.

President Trump stood before a room full of the most esteemed leaders in the world on Tuesday and decided to tout his (incorrect) poll numbers and plug his merch.

“The American public agrees … I was very proud to see this morning I have the highest poll numbers I ever had,” Trump said, in the midst of a meandering, hour-long speech that attacked climate change, immigrants, and more. “Part of it is because of what we’ve done on the border. I guess the other part is what we’ve done on the economy.” 

What polls is the president referring to? He had the worst first 100 days’ approval rating of any president in the last 80 years. As of Tuesday, just over half of Americans disapprove of the overall job Trump is doing. And he’s doing even worse than ever with women, as they disapprove of him at 61 percent. You’d be hard-pressed to find any poll that confirms Trump’s claim, which raises the question: Where is he getting this stuff from? Is his inner circle just lying to keep him happy?

Trump then moved on to the grifting. 

“I’m really good at predicting things, ya know? They actually said during the campaign that a hat, the bestselling hat: ‘Trump Was Right About Everything’—and I don’t say that in a braggadocious way,” he said, referring to the hats he often gleefully displays in gift shops and online. “But it’s true. I’ve been right about everything. Everything. And I’m telling you that if you don’t get away from the green energy scam, your country is going to fail.” 

It’s a sad state of affairs when the U.S. president is talking about his own $40 hats at the U.N. General Assembly. And the more he speaks about how great and respected America is again, the harder it is to take seriously.