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MAGA Rep.’s Campaign Website Is Littered With Fake Endorsements

It seems Representative Mike Collins isn’t as popular as he’d like people to think.

Representative Mike Collins speaks at a podium during a campaign event
Jason Allen/Getty Images

A MAGA Senate candidate who wants to challenge Georgia Democrat Jon Ossoff was caught lying about who actually endorses him.

Representative Mike Collins, who is facing former football coach Derek Dooley in a heated GOP primary runoff, published endorsements from several local officials. Except, they say they haven’t actually backed him at all, according to the Daily Caller, a conservative blog.

“I wouldn’t vote for [Collins] if he’s the only one running,” Wayne County Sheriff Chuck Moseley told the Caller, after his name was included among a list of supporters on Collins’s website.

Other officials seemed to have no clue that Collins was claiming they’d backed him. GOP Grady County Chair Jeff Jolly told the Caller he asked County Sheriff Earl Prince and County Commissioner Sam Kines about their apparent support for Collins after seeing their endorsements posted on social media.

“I talked to each of them in private, and I said, ‘Look, you do what you want to do, but for my own sake, I need to know why you endorsed Mike Collins,’” Jolly said. “Both of them looked at me funny, like, ‘What are you talking about?’ They didn’t know anything about it.’”

Kines told the Caller he’d only ever offered a “generic reply” to Collins’s campaign, and even had a sign for Dooley in his yard.

Prince told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that he’d “never spoken” to Collins or his campaign. “My name was used without my permission, and I have no use for anybody that does business that way,” Prince said.

Earlier this week, former Donald Trump 2024 adviser Tony Fabrizio joined Collins’s campaign as a pollster and senior strategist, indicating that the president may be leaning toward endorsing Collins.

Trump’s Great American State Fair Is Already Going Sideways

Almost all the musical performers have dropped out.

Musician Bret Michaels plays the guitar and sings
Emilee Chinn/Getty Images

Donald Trump’s “Great American State Fair” is on the verge of having no live music at all.

As of Friday, six of the nine original headliners have dropped out of the concert series intended to celebrate America’s 250th anniversary. Martina McBride, Young MC, Milli Vanilli, The Commodores, Morris Day & The Time, and Bret Michaels have all withdrawn their names.

Their absence leaves just three booked artists on the widely advertised docket: Vanilla Ice, Flo Rida, and C+C Music Factory. But even the dwindled remainders seem on rocky ground.

Robert Clivillés, one of the co-founders of C+C Music Factory, revealed on Thursday that the group’s potential participation in the event was highly contentious and possibly illegal.

Clivillés claimed that Freedom Williams—who provided rap vocals on the hit track “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” and whose picture appears on the Freedom 250 event page—had no right to use the group’s name for his own tour, since he was only ever a featured guest artist and never a contractual component of the band.

“C&C Music Factory in-fact means Clivlles [sic] & Cole Music Factory,” Clivillés posted on his Facebook page. “Freedom Williams should not be using it to tour, nor represent what this group stands for in anyway! He should address himself as Freedom Williams formerly a guest featured artist on C&C Music Factory.

“Any comment that Freedom Williams makes or any event that he participates in regarding any Political or Religious views or opinions, he makes as Freedom Williams an individual solely, it has nothing to do with C&C Music Factories music or viewpoints in anyway,” Clivillés added, urging fans to go haunt Williams’s social media pages in order to change his mind.

Other artists on the original advert for the Great American State Fair claimed that the booking process was misleading and that they were not previously made aware of the event’s highly partisan flair.

“I asked lots of questions and was assured this was a nonpartisan event that was meant to celebrate ALL 50 states,” wrote McBride, a multi-platinum country music singer, on her Instagram page Thursday night. “Yesterday things started changing and what we were told is, in fact, not what is happening.”

McBride added that she has spent her “entire career singing songs about real people with real issues,” and was “greatly upset” by the prospect that her fans might think she’s “abandoning the meaning behind those songs” by way of her participation in the Trump-backed event.

“I assure you, that is not the case,” McBride wrote.

Trump Is Spending Millions to Cover Four Horse Statues in Gold

Donald Trump is rushing to cover Washington, D.C., in gold before America’s 250th anniversary.

Lincoln Memorial Bridge
Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Lincoln Memorial Bridge

President Trump thinks that covering ornamental horses on the National Mall in thick 23.75 karat gold leaf is a good use of taxpayer funds.

NOTUS reports that the Trump administration is spending $5 million to cover four bronze horses, known as the Arts of War and Arts of Peace, on the roads around the Lincoln Memorial with the gold by July 4, thanks to a no-bid contract awarded to a Maryland studio through the National Park Service.

According to federal documents, the Gilders’ Studio will use gold paint that is very thick, heavier and purer than the gold paint job the same studio made on the Wyoming state Capitol dome seven years ago.

Trump’s Department of the Interior is spending $95 million on beautification projects in Washington, D.C., according to NOTUS, all initiated between December 2025 and April of this year. The horses haven’t been restored since the 1970s, and their gold coating looks patchy with their stone bases showing cracks and dirt. But the administration’s aesthetic spending raises eyebrows, especially relating to how contracts have been awarded.

Trump’s decision to repaint the National Mall’s reflecting pool blue, for example, is expected to cost $13.1 million, thanks to contractor Atlantic Industrial Coatings overcharging the government to the tune of a 20 percent profit margin. That’s seven times what Trump promised the job would cost. The president is also spending millions to repaint the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, a historic building next to the White House, drawing lawsuits from historic preservation groups.

All of these projects are being rushed so that they are completed before the July 4 America 250th anniversary. The lack of a bidding process means that the government, and by extension, taxpayers, could easily be overcharged by contractors, and the rushed projects mean that the work could be shoddy and cause permanent damage to important landmarks in the nation’s capital. In Trump’s eyes, though, these projects take precedence over improving Americans’ lives.

Republican Backtracks on Bill That Legalizes Murder to Stop Abortions

Shockingly, the North Carolina lawmaker suddenly didn’t want his name associated with the measure.

A person holds a sign that says, "Keep abortion legal" during a protest
SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images

A North Carolina Republican is suddenly walking back his support for an anti-abortion bill that could cost patients and health care providers their lives.

State Representative Ben Moss removed his name from House Bill 1232, which, if passed, would let North Carolinians vote to change the state constitution’s definition of “life” to beginning at the moment of conception or fertilization, a concept more broadly known as “fetal personhood.”

The one-page document is unequivocal in its language, proposing that any person who seeks to terminate a fetus “shall be held accountable for attempted murder for first degree murder,” and further proposing that such a crime be “punishable by death.” The text of the bill grants no special permissions for cases of rape or incest.

Moss’s reversal came in the wake of enormous public backlash to the measure, reported NC Newsline. In a statement published to his social media accounts Tuesday night, Moss said that he would no longer sponsor the bill, and claimed that the bill’s phrasing had been “broadly misinterpreted.”

“The purpose behind this legislation was to affirm the value and dignity of unborn life—not to suggest that women should face capital punishment or to create uncertainty surrounding difficult medical situations,” Moss said. “Unfortunately, portions of the bill’s current language have led to significant misunderstandings and differing misinterpretations that distract from the core pro-life message and intent.”

Moss, nonetheless, stated that he remains “firmly pro-life.” His retraction leaves state Representative Keith Kidwell as the bill’s sole sponsor.

The issue gained more attention after Jen Hamilton, a labor and delivery nurse, posted a video to Instagram earlier this week claiming that the bill’s broad language would effectively allow people to kill anyone using contraceptives to prevent pregnancy, such as IUDs.

“We can’t feed kids in school, and we won’t give health care to people, but we will make it legal to murder women who use birth control,” Hamilton said.

By the time of publication, Hamilton’s video had garnered more than 209,000 likes.

The bill’s broad language means that doctors and nurses could also be considered accountable and therefore eligible to be put to death.

Pro-abortion activists have long warned that fetal personhood, an ideology that calls for providing equal human rights to a fetus (even if it’s just a cluster of cells), grants embryos rights while stripping them away from pregnant people.

But the concept is not unique to North Carolina: The language of “fetal personhood” is a MAGA policy point, and has already reached the national stage by way of sneakily drafted executive orders. One of dozens of executive orders Donald Trump signed the evening of his inauguration cemented language at the executive level to delegitimize transgender identities. But within the fold of that order, titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” the Trump administration also decided to legally brand a person’s gender identity as beginning “at conception.”

“‘Female’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell,” the order read in part. “‘Male’ means a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”

Treasury Sec. Swears They’re This Close to Finding Something on Antifa

Scott Bessent said there would be news coming in the next “weeks and months.”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent stands during a press briefing
Nathan Posner/Anadolu/Getty Images

The Trump administration says it’s reeeeeally close to figuring out who’s funding antifa. Who’s gonna tell ’em? 

During a White House press briefing Thursday, the Daily Caller’s Reagan Reese asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent for an update on the Department of Justice’s ongoing investigation into antifa. “How close are you guys to figuring out who’s funding it?” she said.

“It is ongoing. We’ve made substantial progress. And I think in the weeks and months ahead, we’re gonna have a lot to report,” Bessent said. 

There’s just one problem for Bessent’s loose timeline to deliver results: Antifa doesn’t formally exist. Antifa, which is short for “anti-fascist,” is a movement, not a group. The so-called organization lacks a central structure and instead functions as a loose network of individuals and small groups who act separately under the banner of opposing facism. Still, the Trump administration has insisted this so-called group is a major domestic terror threat.

On that front, Bessent claimed he could announce some slight progress: He said the IRS was now providing new guidance on 990 forms, requiring nonprofits to report the recipients of funding following the government’s (spurious) claims about the Southern Poverty Law Center. 

“And we are going to encourage, or demand, that nonprofits know their grant recipients. So, if a grant recipient is violent, if they are suppressing people’s rights, then you are responsible for that,” Bessent said. 

It was a particularly ironic answer from the secretary, who had, moments earlier, defended the creation of a $1.8 billion slush fund that could award funding to some of Donald Trump’s most dangerous allies, including the leader of a violent hate group.  

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