Black MAGA Influencer Says She Was Thrown Out of Ken Paxton Rally

A Black MAGA influencer says she was booted from a Ken Paxton rally in Texas on Sunday.

Thelma Louise runs a large TikTok account in which she makes pro-Trump content, particularly from her perspective as a Black female conservative. On Sunday, she was excitedly documenting her experience at Paxton’s rally for his upcoming Senate race—before she was asked to leave without cause.

“And there’s no one that I can talk to about this?” Louise asks as she appears to be escorted out. “Wow. Oh my gosh. I cannot believe this.… Someone just came up to me and said that Ken Paxton’s campaign manager wanted me to leave. I am just—my mouth is wide open right now. I really can’t believe this.”

“I was just asked to leave this event, and I did nothing wrong,” she continued. “I was told that Paxton’s campaign manager didn’t want me here. I’m not making any of this up.… I have done nothing but support everyone on the Republican side, and this is how I get treated? I cannot believe the disrespect that I was just given. I left the Democratic Party two years ago, I have volunteered for President Trump’s campaign, and I have worked very hard promoting members of the Republican Party. I’m not quite sure what’s going on, but to be walked out of a room full of people and isolated as if I’d done something wrong—I cannot believe it.”

Louise noted that she drove two hours to get to the rally, and even showed her press credentials for Republicans’ midterm convention in Dallas over the summer.

Some online mused that the color of Louise’s skin may have had something to do with her unexplained removal—and noted that it might not have happened at a James Talarico rally because there would likely be more Black people there.

“‘Being MAGA while Black’ chapter 293,” Democratic strategist Ameshia Cross wrote.

“Conservative whites excluding black people? I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said another.

“Was I mistaken for someone else? I don’t know what it was. And I don’t blame any of this on the Republican Party. Because they have loved me, and they have welcomed me with open arms. But Ken Paxton’s campaign manager, that person is 100 percent responsible for the disrespect that I received this evening.”

President Donald Trump’s border czar, Todd Homan, seemed to suggest that the FBI was mounting its own investigation into Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar.

During an appearance on Fox News’s The Big Weekend Show Sunday, Homan was asked whether the Trump administration was investigating any other alleged misconduct by the congresswoman, in addition to immigration fraud allegations.

“I’m not gonna go there,” Homan said.

“Not even a little bit?” asked host Rich Edson.

“Not even a little bit. We’ll leave that up to—that’s a question for the FBI. I know things, but that’s a question for the FBI,” Homan said, smiling.

It was not immediately clear what the FBI would be investigating, or whether it was the same case being mounted by the Department of Homeland Security.

Homeland Security Investigations conducted a raid last week on Omar’s Washington, D.C., home as part of a racist campaign to get her denaturalized and deported. The probe ostensibly centers on whether Omar’s father put her age as 17 rather than 18 on her citizenship application to allow her to qualify immediately for citizenship alongside his own application. Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin suggested that the government was building a RICO case against her and her family. It’s still unclear what, if any, evidence DHS has found to support its case.

In a letter to the Department of Justice Friday, Omar’s attorney asked for the return of her belongings seized in the raid, including a phone, and argued that there was “no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” Fox News 9 reported.

The apparently multiplying probes into Omar represent a lawless campaign by the Trump administration against one of the president’s most outspoken critics. The DOJ manual prohibits federal prosecutors from timing any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of undermining a candidate in an upcoming election. Early voting in Minnesota began last week.

President Trump doesn’t want former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in a deposition as part of Trump’s $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the British Broadcasting Company.

The BBC has subpoenaed Smith to defend itself from Trump’s accusations that the network defamed him with deceptive editing in a 2024 documentary about the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection. In a court filing Friday, Trump’s lawyers tried to fight the subpoena by claiming that “Smith lacks any personal knowledge regarding the issues in this matter.

“He was not present when President Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech (the ‘Speech’) was made, nor did he participate in its preparation. Smith does not have any personal knowledge regarding President Trump’s state of mind at the time the Speech was given. Any evidence that Smith gathered during his investigation consists of secondhand knowledge based on materials that he and other third parties collected from various sources,” Trump’s lawyers wrote in their complaint.

In response, the BBC’s attorneys wrote, “None of [Trump]’s arguments for blocking the deposition of Mr. Smith can withstand scrutiny,” pointing out that Smith himself doesn’t object to testifying in the deposition and that Trump still has to prove that “he did not foment or incite the January 6 Capitol riot,” as he claims the BBC’s documentary falsely implied.

“No one forced Plaintiff to file this lawsuit and to dispute that his speech on January 6 incited the violence that followed at the Capitol. But as long as he chooses to maintain the case, he cannot commit the fundamental injustice of preventing the BBC from obtaining the evidence it needs to robustly defend itself on every element of his claim, including Plaintiff’s burden to prove falsity,” the BBC’s lawyers wrote.

This is only Trump’s latest attempt to dodge actually having to prove that the BBC defamed him. His attorneys are also fighting attempts to have Trump himself testify, to subpoena his children to testify, and to dive into his finances. Trump can’t force the BBC to pay a hefty settlement or back off of the coverage, as it is funded by the British taxpayer. Now he either has to give in to the BBC’s lawyers and drop the case or actually try to prove his point and deal with the consequences.

Meta offered a weak excuse for shutting down the No Kings movement’s official Instagram account for several hours during the group’s nationwide action over the weekend to mobilize early voting.

During a major day of activations Saturday, Meta suspended the No Kings account without providing any explanation, the activist group said. Meta eventually restored the account’s visibility, but the administrators did not regain access for hours.

Meta spokesperson Andy Stone provided an updated explanation for the official account’s hourslong suspension: There was a high volume of activity on the page.

“Our engineering team discovered that the spike that triggered the incorrect enforcement was primarily in the account’s ‘reading’ behavior. Specifically, our network security systems detected the use of a Claude tool reading profiles, posts, and hashtags, the rate of which sharply increased (~4x volume) in intense bursts on October 17,” Stone wrote on X Sunday.

“These abrupt, high-volume, sequential requests in a short period resembled automated bot traffic rather than an ordinary human browsing our systems. This activity caused our automated protections to incorrectly take the No Kings Instagram account offline.

“An automated re-review of the removal action an hour later recognized that shouldn’t have happened and restored the account. It unfortunately took additional time for us to straighten out the situation with admin access to the IG account,” he continued. “We want to reiterate our sincere apology for the error.”

The No Kings coalition claimed that Meta’s explanation still didn’t make sense.

“In the 24 hours before our account was shut down, we posted only a handful of times and livestreamed to thousands. Meta’s ‘high frequency’ excuse doesn’t add up,” the group wrote on Bluesky Sunday.

“Beyond shutting down our Instagram, we’ve received reports that #NoKings and early voting content was inaccessible, restricted or seemed suppressed across Meta platforms,” the group wrote in a separate post.

Connecticut Senator Chris Murphy responded to Stone’s statement, calling on X for an investigation into the No Kings account’s sudden suspension. “Let’s assume this is true. It’s still a total indictment of Meta’s outsized influence on our culture and politics,” he wrote.

“An investigation is warranted, at the very least, to understand why Meta (which effectively functions these days as a private government) was unable to protect protest against Trump, while it spends so much time trying to get close to Trump,” he added.

By cozying up to the Trump administration, Meta stands to make billions in hefty government contracts and data center handouts. Now it appears that the company may be doubling down on its allegiances by outright silencing the president’s critics.

The Supreme Court just signed off on President Trump’s firing of a member of the National Labor Relations Board despite laws against at-will dismissals, further cementing his power over independent agencies.

On Monday, the high court decided not to review a ruling from the lower U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia allowing the firing of Gwynne Wilcox, who Trump decided to axe just after his inauguration last year. Wilcox was the first Black woman member of the NLRB, and had been appointed to a second five-year term on the board by President Biden in 2023.

The Supreme Court’s decision is in line with its earlier ruling in June allowing Trump to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. The D.C. circuit decision in Wilcox’s case came before the Supreme Court’s decision in Slaughter’s case.

The NLRB and the FTC, along with other federal regulatory bodies, are supposed to be independent from the president’s control, with bipartisan boards. But in his second term as president, Trump has ignored rules protecting agency members from being fired without cause, pushing out members simply because they were appointed by Democrats.

While the Supreme Court has enabled Trump in the cases of Slaughter and now Wilcox, it has drawn the line with Lisa Cook, a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, and prevented the president from firing her. That hasn’t stopped Trump from attempting to smear Cook with a cooked-up investigation over alleged mortgage fraud. Cook has not been charged with any crimes, but Trump isn’t interested in sniffing out wrongdoing: He wants to assert total control over regulatory agencies.