Elon Musk Pushes Idiotic Conspiracy About New York Ballot and Mamdani

Non–New Yorker Elon Musk peddled the stupidest conspiracy about the New York City mayoral election Tuesday morning.

“The New York City ballot form is a scam!” Musk posted on X. “No ID is required. Other mayoral candidates appear twice. Cuomo’s name is last in bottom right.”

Musk’s tweet seemingly implies the ballot is somehow rigged against Andrew Cuomo, who lost the Democratic nomination to Zohran Mamdani in June.

All of Musk’s ramblings have easy explanations, which, if he or his rabid retweeters lived in New York City, they’d probably already know.

First, city election law doesn’t require voters to bring an ID to the polls—instead, you have to include a driver’s license or Social Security number when you register, so when you show up to actually vote, all you need is your name and address.

Second, you can run with multiple parties in NYC. Mamdani, and other progressive candidates, are running on the Working Families Party line in addition to the Democratic line. Candidates can also run on a ballot line detached from an organized party: Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, is listed a second time as well on the “Protect Animals” line.

Cuomo, an independent, chose to run on the “Fight and Deliver” line. If he wanted to be listed more than once, perhaps he should’ve considered winning a major party nomination.

And lastly, the ballot order is determined by how many votes a party received in the last gubernatorial election, with unaffiliated candidates (like Cuomo) appearing after the partisan ones.* Elon, you’re reaching.

This explanation is simple and clear—but that doesn’t matter, because Musk, like Donald Trump, couldn’t care less about whether his fearmongering is based in fact. As one X user in response put it, “When you’re a moron everything looks like a conspiracy.”

* This story has been updated to clarify the order in which New York candidates appear on the general ballot.

Former vice president and architect of the war on terror Dick Cheney passed away Monday at the age of 84 from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease.

According to a statement from his family, Cheney “was a great and good man who taught his children and grandchildren to love our country, and to live lives of courage, honor, love, kindness, and fly fishing.”

The rest of the country, however, knows him for being one of the most powerful vice presidents in U.S. history, helping to lead the United States after the 9/11 attacks into a myriad of military campaigns, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and having the U.S. commit torture and extrajudicial assassinations across the world.

Cheney was unapologetic about his actions during his tenure as vice president, saying in an interview in 2014, “Torture, to me … is an American citizen on his cellphone making a last call to his four young daughters shortly before he burns to death in the upper levels of the Trade Center in New York on 9/11.”

When pressed about the CIA’s interrogation program from those days, which included waterboarding, prisoners shackled in stress positions, and people of mistaken identity tortured, Cheney said, “I’d do it again in a minute.”

Cheney also expressed no regrets over leading the U.S. into the Iraq War, calling it “the right thing to do” more than a decade later, even after it plunged the U.S. into debt, killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis at a minimum, and destabilized the country so much that the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, was later able to gain a foothold.

Later in life, Cheney was critical of the Republican Party, breaking with Donald Trump along with his daughter, former Representative Liz Cheney, and later endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. But he died without facing any accountability for his earlier actions.

This story has been updated.

Did Kash Patel make up a terrorist plot? The lawyer for one of the accused seems to think so.

The FBI director announced Friday that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had thwarted a potential terror plot in Dearborn, Michigan. Patel said that multiple young men had been arrested in a raid for plotting a “violent attack” on “pumpkin day,” which investigators believed referred to Halloween.  

But Amir Makled, an attorney representing Mohmed Ali, one of the men facing criminal charges in connection to the plot, claimed that after reviewing the case, he believed there had never been a terror plot to begin with, the Associated Press reported Monday.

“If these young men were on forums that they should not have been on or things of that nature, then we’ll have to wait and see,” Makled said. “But I don’t believe that there’s anything illegal about any of the activity they were doing.

“I don’t know where this hysteria and this fearmongering came from,” Makled said. 

“We are confident that, once the facts are reviewed objectively, it will be clear there was never any planned ‘mass-casualty’ event or coordinated terror plot of any kind,” he told CNN Sunday. He said that three men had been arrested, and two were taken in for questioning. 

Hussein Bazzi, an attorney representing another suspect arrested in the raid, told CNN that “pumpkin day” may have referred to “online gamer chat that was misinterpreted.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi released a criminal complaint Monday alleging that two men, Ali and Majed Mahmoud, had planned a “major ISIS-linked terror plot.” The pair face charges of “receiving and transferring, and attempting and conspiring to transfer, firearms and ammunition knowing and having reasonable cause to believe that the firearms and ammunition would be used to commit a Federal crime of terrorism,” according to the complaint. 

Makled pointed out that the firearms were all legally bought and registered. “The reality here involves a small group … with a lawful interest in recreational firearms, not a terrorist cell or organized attack,” he told CNN. 

After the arrests were first made public Friday, MSNBC’s Ken Dilanian reported that something had been off about the timing of the announcement. “There seems to be consternation within the FBI that the director announced these arrests prematurely,” he wrote on X.

The timing of Patel’s seemingly heroic feat was quite convenient, as it landed amid a firestorm of backlash after he reportedly used a government-funded jet to visit his girlfriend.

Neo-Nazi livestreamer Nick Fuentes is tearing the Heritage Foundation apart.

Ryan Neuhaus, the Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts’s chief of staff, has walked away from the conservative think tank. Neuhaus’s departure comes during an internal maelstrom sparked by Roberts’s defense of Tucker Carlson and the ex–Fox News host’s decision to interview Fuentes, a known white supremacist and Hitler fan.

“Ryan was not fired. He offered his resignation, which was accepted,” a Heritage spokesperson confirmed to The Hill Monday. “Ryan is a good man, we appreciate his service, and we have no doubt he will serve the movement in another capacity.”

Carlson extended his national platform to Fuentes last week, offering the fringe influencer a chance to swim in the MAGA mainstream. The interview has since come under fire from several corners of the Republican Party, highlighting that the former primetime TV host threw the antisemite a string of softball questions while failing to challenge Fuentes’s radical and violent beliefs.

Neuhaus’s critical error was in resharing a number of social media posts backing his boss’s defense of Carlson, including one that appeared to attack his Heritage Foundation co-workers by arguing that those “virtue signaling” over the Fuentes interview should “resign if so outraged” and that it would be an “addition by subtraction for the institution.”

Roberts released a video on X Thursday in support of Carlson and Fuentes, noting that while he disagreed with Fuentes’s beliefs, he did not believe that “canceling” the Christian nationalist Holocaust-denier was an appropriate reaction to the interview.

A handful of Heritage staffers, including Jason Bedrick, Jay Greene, and John Peluso, have since retweeted criticism of Roberts’s message. Conservatives outside of the institution also condemned Roberts’s perspective, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz, prompting a follow-up statement by Roberts in which he clarified that he did not condone Fuentes’s antisemitic views.

“Our task is to confront and challenge those poisonous ideas at every turn to prevent them from taking America to a very dark place. Join us—not to cancel—but to guide, challenge, and strengthen the conversation, and be confident as I am that our best ideas at the heart of western civilization will prevail,” Roberts wrote in a social media post.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries had some tough words for Republicans in a press conference Monday about the government shutdown.

When asked by a reporter about working with someone who has been obstructing the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files, Jeffries said that “the Trump administration and Mike Johnson are running a pedophile protection program.”

“That’s what they’ve been doing. And that’s the reason why they refuse to swear in Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva, for weeks now,” Jeffries added, referring to the congresswoman who won a special election on September 23 to replace her late father, Representative Raúl Grijalva. “She was elected in late September decisively.”

Jeffries said that Grijalva hasn’t been sworn in by House Speaker Johnson because she would be the deciding vote on legislation requiring the Department of Justice to release the Epstein files.

“Week after week after week have gone by, and Representative-elect Adelita Grijalva is unable to serve 800,000 people in the state of Arizona all because of the pedophile protection program being run by Mike Johnson and House Republicans at the direction of their boss, Donald J. Trump,” Jeffries added.

Jeffries has faced criticism, along with other Democratic leaders like Senator Chuck Schumer, for failing to mount an effective opposition to President Trump and the Republican Party, so taking a tougher tack against the GOP makes political sense. During the month-long government shutdown, the polls have consistently shown that Americans are more upset with Trump and Republicans than with Democrats, and Senator Bernie Sanders, among others, is urging the party not to back down.

Johnson has set a record by how long he is taking to swear in Grijalva and is refusing to do so until the government reopens. Meanwhile, Trump is trying his best to dismiss the files’ importance, likely because he’s mentioned in them, and the GOP continues to cover for him.