State Department Prepares to Punish Another Country for Elon Musk

The U.S. Department of State is going to bat against the United Kingdom so Elon Musk can keep getting rich off of AI porn.

In an interview Tuesday, Sarah B. Rogers, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, threatened to fight back against the British government’s mounting efforts to combat the prevalence of sexually explicit computer-generated images on social media.

“With respect to a potential ban of X, Keir Starmer has said that nothing is off the table,” said Rogers, referring to the British prime minister. “I would say from America’s perspective, nothing is off the table when it comes to free speech.”

She also stressed that President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance were “huge champions” of free speech—though nothing could be further from the truth. Since entering office, both Trump and Vance have devoted countless hours to undermining the press over its unfavorable coverage of their authoritarian bumbling, and their administration has repeatedly sought to punish its critics for their speech.

The British Labour Party announced Monday that it planned to criminalize the creation of nonconsensual sexualized images, placing legal culpability not only on the creators but on the platforms supplying tools for the images’ creation, such as Musk’s X. British Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said that platforms needed to take measures to become safer for women and girls. “If they do not, I am prepared to go further,” she warned.

Britain’s Office of Communications, the country’s independent regulator for communications, also announced that it had launched an investigation into X over thousands of pornographic images generated by Grok, Musk’s racist AI chatbot that recently admitted to making explicit images of infants.

The Trump administration’s effort to save Musk comes shortly after it sought help from the deposed DOGE czar to reestablish internet access in Iran, to help protesters there circumvent the government-imposed media blackout.

This isn’t the first time that the U.S. State Department has defended Musk’s financial interests. The agency reportedly pressured at least one foreign government to approve a license for Starlink, which is owned and operated by SpaceX, of which Musk owns a $150 billion stake.

While Musk’s short stint in the White House may be over, his friendship with the president is still paying dividends. It’s no secret that Musk spent his time as DOGE czar working to dismantle the very agencies that regulate his companies, and used his proximity to Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries.

Financial leaders from Switzerland, Brazil, Korea, the United Kingdom, and more are rallying around U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell after the Department of Justice served him with a grand jury subpoena.

“We stand in full solidarity with the Federal Reserve System and its Chair Jerome H. Powell. The independence of central banks is a cornerstone of price, financial and economic stability in the interest of the citizens that we serve. It is therefore critical to preserve that independence, with full respect for the rule of law and democratic accountability,” the letter read. It was signed by presidents and governors of central banks in the U.K., Sweden, Switzerland, Norway, Australia, Canada, Korea, and Brazil.

President Trump has long attempted to pressure Powell’s decisions on interest rates, and the DOJ over the weekend announced a criminal investigation into the Federal Reserve chair. It’s a thinly veiled attack on Powell, so that Trump can have minimal resistance to whatever Federal Reserve nominations he wants to make and whatever economic numbers he wants (or doesn’t want) to put out.

“JUST OUT: Great (LOW!) Inflation numbers for the USA. That means that Jerome ‘Too Late’ Powell should cut interest rates, MEANINGFULLY!!!” Trump claimed Tuesday morning on Truth Social. “If he doesn’t he will just continue to be, ‘TOO LATE!’ ALSO OUT, GREAT GROWTH NUMBERS. Thank you MISTER TARIFF! President DJT.”

The international alarm this has caused only underscores the real dangers of a completely partisan Federal Reserve, and is perhaps the most dramatic development in Trump’s long mission to destroy any regulatory independence the Fed still has.

“Chair Powell has served with integrity, focused on his mandate and an unwavering commitment to the public interest,” the letter from the international central bankers concluded. “To us, he is a respected colleague who is held in the highest regard by all who have worked with him.”

Former special counsel Jack Smith is going to get the chance to testify to Congress in the full view of the public.

On January 22, Smith will testify before the House Judiciary Committee as part of its investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, said its chair, Representative Jim Jordan, on Monday. In December, Smith testified for eight hours in a closed-door hearing before the committee.

Smith, who was appointed to oversee Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, has long sought to testify in a public hearing, but was rebuffed by Republicans in favor of one behind closed doors. In that hearing, Smith said that he stood by his prosecution of Trump.

“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat,” Smith said in his opening statement.

In next week’s public hearing, Republicans will likely try to attack Smith’s credibility and accuse him of a political witch hunt against the president, while Democrats will hope to highlight the evidence that Smith collected against Trump and his inner circle. Smith has said that he wants to share the results of his election investigation but was prohibited by the Department of Justice, which is keeping parts of the case sealed.

The hearing will be a good chance for Smith to share information that he hasn’t before directly to the American people, which would not be received well by Republicans or by Trump. They won’t be able to control what the seasoned prosecutor says to the live TV cameras, reporters, and the public, and it could very well be damaging to the White House.

President Donald Trump says he won’t meet with Iranian government officials until they stop murdering their own people.

In a post on Truth Social Tuesday, Trump urged the millions of protesters who have taken to the streets to oppose the Islamic Republic to “KEEP PROTESTING—TAKE OVER YOUR INSTITUTIONS.”

“Save the names of the killers and abusers. They will pay a big price,” Trump wrote. “I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY!”

Trump was scheduled to discuss options to support protesters and weaken the regime in Iran Tuesday morning, and had previously indicated a preference toward conducting a military strike, a White House official with direct knowledge told Axios Monday. 

Trump had sent some dangerously mixed messages on how exactly he planned to intervene in Iran’s crackdown on antigovernment protesters. The president previously claimed he was willing to use military force against Iran if the government continued to kill protesters, but also said that he was open to negotiation. 

It seems that Trump hopes to signal that the time to negotiate has come and gone, as his latest message seems to indicate that a military strike could be imminent. The president’s instruction for protesters to start taking names suggests he anticipates a sudden regime change.  

The U.S.-based Human Rights Activists News Agency, which has spent years documenting protests in Iran, estimates that more than 10,000 people have been arrested in the last two weeks, and at least 500 have been killed. The Narges Foundation, dedicated to currently imprisoned Nobel Peace laureate Narges Mohammadi, estimates more than 2,000 people have been killed.

President Donald Trump issued a chilling threat of reckoning and retribution to the people of Minnesota Tuesday after state and city leaders sued the administration over its deadly “federal invasion.”

Following the news that Minnesota and the Twin Cities were suing to stop the Trump administration’s “Operation Metro Surge,” the president took to Truth Social to air his frustration with his besieged constituents.

“Do the people of Minnesota really want to live in a community in which there are thousands of already convicted murderers, drug dealers and addicts, rapists, violent released and escaped prisoners, dangerous people from foreign mental institutions and insane asylums, and other deadly criminals too dangerous to even mention,” Trump wrote.

He claimed that all the “patriots of ICE” wanted was to “remove” these individuals. But last week, the residents of Minneapolis saw something entirely different: an ICE agent senselessly killed a U.S. citizen, Renee Good, and was then defended by every level of government.

Good’s death sparked civil unrest in Minneapolis (and nationwide), as well as requests for federal immigration forces to take their leave. But the Trump administration has doubled down on its occupation, deploying roughly 1,000 more U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers.

“Minnesota Democrats love the unrest that anarchists and professional agitators are causing because it gets the spotlight off of the 19 Billion Dollars that was stolen by really bad and deranged people,” Trump wrote, referring to the federal fraud investigations into the state’s childcare system.

“FEAR NOT, GREAT PEOPLE OF MINNESOTA, THE DAY OF RECKONING & RETRIBUTION IS COMING!” Trump warned.

Already, Minnesota residents are seeing what this looks like: ICE agents have been emboldened toward violence against protesters and civilians—with Good as their rallying cry.