Transphobia and AI Abound

With Election Day less than a month out, it seemed like a good time to check in on some of the weirdest and worst campaign ads of the 2026 cycle. There are already some doozies out there. Some make gratuitous use of AI, and a good number involve rampant transphobia, which I guess shouldn’t be surprising. Per the Washington Post, the GOP is leaning particularly hard into AI ads, with Republican candidates and groups behind 80% of the 164 AI spots tracked by the Wesleyan Media Project this cycle. The party plans to spend a whopping $1 billion on ads in the final lead-up to the election, much of it coming from the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc., though it’s unclear how much of a difference that river of cash will make in improving the GOP’s grim electoral prospects.

The campaign spots highlighted below are just a small sampling of what’s out there. If there are other goofy or off-putting ads we should know about in your area, drop us a line at talk@talkingpointsmemo.com 

‘Tough Mountain’ Values Involve Shooting People

Chuck Edwards abruptly dropped his reelection bid to represent North Carolina’s 11th Congressional District in August after the House Ethics Committee found that he gave uniquely creepy gifts and poems to young female staffers. So the GOPer tapped to replace him, state lawmaker Jennifer Balkcom, had a narrow window to introduce herself to voters. The vibe she’s going for, apparently, is “tough mountain wom[a]n.”

An ad put out by the National Republican Congressional Committee shows Balkcom sitting beside her mother, identified on screen as “Momma.” “Mom raised us on her own. She taught us to be strong. And when someone broke into our house, she shot ‘em!” “You break into my house, you’re going to get shot,” her mom agrees, smiling. 

This is apparently proof that the Balkcom women are fighters, and that the candidate will champion Hurricane Helene recovery funds and lower healthcare costs. 

Forced Trans Teen Surgery in Texas

The GOP is pulling out the tired “X Dem candidate is for they/them” line again. In the Lone Star state, Texas PAC, a super PAC linked to Senate Republican leadership, is going after Democrat James Talarico by falsely claiming that he supports “using taxpayer dollars for sex change surgeries on young children.” They’re apparently getting this from Talarico’s vote, as a member of the Texas House of Representatives, against a measure that prohibited gender-reassignment surgeries for children, which is not the same thing as voting to approve the use of taxpayer funds for such procedures. 

The ad is misleading and its transphobic message is played out. But at least the AI is amusingly bad. As the Houston Chronicle’s Gwen Howerton describes it, “a Latino boy gets hit with a Transgenderification Beam and turns into a beautiful woman.” The kid ages a good 10 years via the special Animorphs-like transition. 

The spot is one of several that seeks to boost Attorney General Ken Paxton’s Senate bid without actually mentioning Paxton at all, which makes sense given how little people like the man. Paxton’s estranged wife, state senator Angela Paxton, who had filed for divorce on “biblical grounds,” alleging that her husband cheated on her, put out an ad urging voters to close their eyes and support the whole GOP ticket. “In a general election, it’s not as much about the individual players on the team; it’s about getting the whole team across the finish line,” she says.

Trump Threatens Us in a Hallway Again

In another 2024 throwback, Trump is literally just releasing a presidential campaign ad he ran that year again — this time with funding from the U.S. government. The black-and-white spot, titled “The Final Battle,” shows a somber Trump walking down a hallway, glowering into the camera. “We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists,” he says in voiceover. “We will throw off the sick political class that hates our country.” Trump’s pledge to get rid of the “warmongers” in our government hits a little differently seven months into the war he personally launched in Iran. 

Though the White House insisted this and other pro-Trump spots funded by the government are simply “public service announcements,” not midterms ads, he reluctantly agreed to have his super PAC pay for the rest of them. That of course doesn’t mean he’ll reimburse the government for the $10 million the admin has already spent on these ads, though.

Steve Hilton Manages to be Both Confusing and Horny 

Steve Hilton appears to be going for the “all press is good press” strategy in his long-shot bid to become California’s governor. The Republican candidate put out an innuendo-filled ad that confusingly suggests two progressive, lesbian Gen Zers are going to “just try” voting for Hilton. 

It depicts two girls with dyed hair and piercings sitting on a bed in front of an LGBTQ flag on the wall, as indie music plays softly in the background. One says “I’ve never done anything like this before. What if my dad finds out?” And the other encourages her to give it a try anyway. As the camera pans to their laps, it turns out that “it” is actually casting a mail-in ballot for the Republican nominee. The ad ends with the music abruptly cutting out and the second girl urging the first to “lick”…the envelope closed. California Republicans and Democrats were quick to denounce the ad as uncomfortable and “weird.” The YouTube comments alternate between calling Hilton a creep and saying he’s made his sexual proclivities clear. My personal fave: “So be gay and vote by mail. Got it.”

Senate Republicans Just Make Stuff Up to Target Sherrod Brown

The Senate Leadership Fund is out with a different anti-trans spot in Ohio, and this one happens to be fully based on lies. As the Cleveland ABC affiliate puts it in the headline: “Woman accusing Sherrod Brown of forcing transgender surgeries isn’t from Ohio, didn’t have procedure as minor.” The ad features social media influencer Soren Aldaco, who blames Brown for forcing minors “like her” to undergo “childhood sex change surgery.” The ABC reporter found that Aldaco is actually from Texas, where she sought a double mastectomy at age 19. 

It’s illegal to perform gender-affirming care procedures on minors in Ohio, and Brown has simply said that he thinks families and doctors — not government officials — should be allowed to make medical decisions about their healthcare. 

The Classic Crazy Woman Trope, But Make it AI 

AI ads are cheap, so candidates in state legislative races, which have less money sloshing around, have embraced them. Take Sen. Michael Lee, who is running to represent North Carolina Senate District 7. His ad, “Bonkers Bichler,” features an AI deepfake version of his opponent, Jessica Bichler, who is a yoga instructor and studio owner, doing yoga poses, meditating, and banging a gong. Because doing yoga means you’re a dang kooky hippie.

The bulk of the YouTube comments criticize Lee for pushing AI “slop,” being weird about a woman’s appearance, and mocking an extremely common form of exercise. “I wish he would spend more timing fixing our water issues and less time making fun of people who do yoga,” one reads.

The Darth Vader of Politics

For nearly two years now, I have been extensively covering the various — some outright illegal, some legally questionable — ways the Trump administration has been trampling Congress’ power of the purse. Underneath all the technicalities and legal analysis lies the power dynamic it creates for Congress, specifically for the upper chamber, where most of the deal-making around appropriations and government funding happens. 

As the Trump administration undermines Congress’ constitutional power, it’s also fueling the partisan polarization that is already at near historic highs. Bipartisanship has been dropping for some time, and the underlying trust issues between the two sides are growing.

At the core of all it, right now, is President Donald Trump.

Sources and congressional Democrats blame Trump and his admin for eroding the ability of lawmakers to work together on basic legislation, especially when it comes to government funding negotiations. How do you make a deal with someone who will shake your hand, then turn around and break that deal?

If you like pop culture references like me, Bobby Kogan, senior director of federal budget policy at the Center for American Progress, put it this way:

“In Star Wars Episode V, Lando Calrissian makes a deal with Darth Vader but Vader breaks the deal,” Kogan told TPM. “In response, Lando says, ‘You said they would be left in the city.’ Then Vader turns to Lando and says, ‘I’m altering the deal. Pray, I don’t alter it any further.’ That’s exactly what Trump does.”

Kogan continued: “He turns around and he says, ‘I know we had a deal. I know it took months and months and months and months to make that deal. I know I looked you in the face and I said, you got a deal. I shook your hand and then I signed it into law. But I’m just going to break it. I’m just going to do whatever I want.’”

Creative License

This was just sent to me.

The photo was taken at a DMV today in New York City.

Why does the credit card machine at the DMV in Mamdnai’s NYC have the Palestinian flag as the screensaver on October 7th? @ZohranKMamdani disgraceful.

Deliberate and intentional. pic.twitter.com/UZDHOqgnU1

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) October 7, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which former speaker of the House of Representatives died last weekend? 
2. What new gig did former White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt land? 
3. Retiring Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) says the biggest regret of his career in politics is voting to confirm this Trump Cabinet nominee.

Answers below

Allegra Is Having a Baby

I’m heading out on maternity leave until February! Will be having my second kid. Please send any TV and podcast recs, tips on navigating sibling dynamics, and specific advice on raising two boys to have good politics and emotional intelligence in This Environment to allegra.kirkland@gmail.com 

And thanks to Derick and the rest of the team for holding things down at The Weekender until I’m back!

Priorities!

“Look, $4 gas, $6 diesel is unacceptable. I think we all agree on that, but it’s still not enough to vote for a communist.” – House Majority Whip Tom Emmer

The Free Press Pushes Rage Bait on the Cornell Case

Bari Weiss’s The Free Press is nothing if not predictable. Launching in the wake of the #MeToo movement and during the rise of what is now, unfortunately, referred to as “Woke 1,” The Free Press (née Common Sense 🙄) assigned itself the mission of protecting free speech. Never particularly subtle that they were really only interested in protecting the speech of the rich and powerful, Bari Weiss and co. quickly developed a formula of inverting reporting on alleged sexual abuse or bigotry by powerful figures to instead cast doubt on the victims. Under the pretense of “just asking questions,” The Free Press recast victims as political actors, either in cahoots with the mainstream media or using the media’s gullibility and/or commitment to wokeness to advance their agenda. This victims’ agenda, per their narrative, was inevitably to punish and silence the powerful, who they hated because the powerful were (here you can play a game of FP Mad Libs): white, rich, capitalists, men, successful, cisgender, conservative, good looking, etc. In the view of the Free Press, these victims weren’t victims at all, but collectively a censorious mob of college students, minorities, and feminists who would gleefully — and had the power to — scratch the First Amendment from the Constitution. Luckily, the “Honest. Independent. Fearless.” journalists at the Free Press weren’t going to let that happen. If, in the pursuit of this mission, they just so happen to become the publication of choice for the billionaire class, well that’s capitalism baby!

It comes as no surprise then that the Free Press is all over the Cornell fraternity rape story. In a classic victim-blame narrative inversion, FP writer Caitlin Flanagan wonders if “Jane Doe” might have been “looking for” something at the Chi Phi fraternity house. More egregious, the publication paid to promote the story on Facebook with the framing that women know that fraternities are bad places but go to them anyway. In other words: there is no fixing fraternities, we should focus on fixing the women. The fact that the Free Press paid to promote this ad suggests they know it’s rage bait. They know how our current media ecosystem works, how to game it for attention, and how to win favor and money from the powerbrokers. Just don’t get fooled about how they work. The words honest, independent, and fearless don’t come to mind.

Meanwhile, in Europe

Danish artist Jens Galschiøt unveiled a sculpture depicting a naked US President Donald Trump surrounded by golf equipment. It was unveiled on the grounds of the European Parliament building in Strasbourg.

— CNN (@cnn.com) 2026-10-07T11:00:28.964949945Z

Trivia answers: 1) Dennis Hastert 2) Fox News contributor, of course 3) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

The Slopaganda Midterms

This election cycle is rife with “slopaganda” — that is, AI-generated “slop” used for political propaganda. In a fascinating recent piece in the Washington Post, TPM alum Matt Shuham noted that roughly 164 of these ads have appeared on TV or online, mostly in service of Republican candidates. As Matt points out, the ads are bizarre: “Political spinmeisters have used AI to dress candidates in superhero costumes, show a rifle-wielding Donald Trump in a foxhole, depict entire societies as Lego figurines, and also to put words in opponents’ mouths.” 

I encountered one of these ads in the wild last month featuring a familiar face: Marshall Rawson, the subject of my first big investigation as a reporter here at TPM. Rawson is the GOP nominee for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives and, our investigation found, a pretty extreme guy — perhaps the most extreme candidate on the ballot this November. A quick refresher: 

• Rawson was actively involved with a white supremacist group called League of the South that advocates for the southern states to secede from the U.S.
• He appeared at the infamous Unite The Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia back in 2017, and could be seen in a photo standing near James Alex Fields Jr., a neo-Nazi who drove his car into counter-protesters, killing Heather Heyer
• He has condoned slavery and called for the execution of queer people 
• A lot of his campaign donors were white supremacists.

He’s running for the state House seat in a deeply conservative part of north central Florida and is widely expected to win in the general election. Rawson hasn’t denied any of my reporting, or distanced himself from his white supremacist activism. I tried my best to find a Republican who would denounce him, but came up empty. 

What I’ve seen instead over the past couple weeks is Rawson receiving public messages of support, including from his likely future colleagues in the Florida state House. Perhaps the most excitable support he’s received, however, has come from the University of Florida College Republicans. The group was only reinstated by the university last month, having been disbanded back in March following a photograph showing two of its members giving Nazi salutes. 

One of its first orders of business after being reinstated? Producing this deeply bizarre piece of slopaganda: a video featuring an AI-generated Rawson walking through an adoring crowd of Red Hats in sunglasses and a trench coat; coasting along a Florida waterway in a fanboat; and standing in a field, clad in all white, his arms outstretched, Christ-like. 

Vote @MarshallRawson for Florida House District 10 pic.twitter.com/qZC7wIjcVy

— UF College Republicans (@UFCR) September 25, 2026

The video is set to the rap song “Already” by Kodak Black — a musical selection that upset at least one of Rawson’s biggest fans. Chandler Langevin is a city councilman in Palm Bay, Florida and the executive director of the American Restoration Coalition, which a Raw Story investigation earlier this week revealed as a “Republican group with white power ties openly plots infiltration of Florida government.” Langevin and his ARC cohorts knocked on doors for Rawson during his primary campaign. 

“Video is great, music is awful. Play our music to it,” Langevin replied on X (emphasis mine), seeming to state that he didn’t like the use of a Black musician’s song. “An edit to Dixieland would go hard… Freebird goes hard in right wing edits too.” 

“You right,” the UF College Republicans account replied. 

Back in 2017, one week after I covered the “Unite The Right” rally, writer Alex Pareene penned a prescient blog in Jezebel titled “Charlottesville Was a Preview of the Future of the Republican Party.” His thesis — that the extremism of the “alt-right” would go mainstream, taking over the GOP — would become my own over the next nine years. Still, I feel like my head is spinning, staring at this little interaction on X, reflecting on just how radical the party has become. To attempt a summary: 

The GOP nominated Rawson, an unrepentant white supremacist who marched in Charlottesville, for a seat in the Florida House of Representatives. A recently re-instated college Republican group, disbanded after its members gave Nazi salutes, posted an AI slop video on X — rebranded from Twitter by a trillionaire and GOP megadonor who gave two Nazi salutes during Trump’s inauguration — in support of Rawson. The video used a song by a Black man, which upset a local Republican activist, himself part of a GOP group with white nationalist ties that is trying to put more Rawson-like extremists into Florida government positions. Despite all of this, Rawson is all but assured to be a state legislator in Tallahassee next year. 

I really did expect our politics to become this extreme. I’m just not sure I anticipated how bizarre it would be too. 

Ignore Women’s Basketball at Your Own Peril!

With every new detail, Sen. Eric Schmitt’s (R-MO) mortifying attempt to make former Special Counsel Jack Smith perjure himself seems more and more bumbling. 

As everyone with an internet connection knows by now, the junior senator from Missouri had whipped up a grand plan to prove that Smith was in Atlanta the day after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) admitted to having a relationship with one of her prosecutors amid the investigation into President Donald Trump’s election interference in Georgia. That’s it. That’s the big smoking gun he was looking for: that Smith and Willis were in the same giant city for one night as proof (?) that the two were colluding in trying to take Trump down. 

But he couldn’t even muster that. When he revealed the explosive texts supposedly revealing that Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game (in Atlanta!! Where Willis is!!), Smith was befuddled. Eventually, he offered that he’d attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game against the hosting Maryland Terrapins (a game, notably, much closer to Washington D.C.) around that same date to see now-Indiana Fever guard Caitlin Clark in action. 

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, suggested that Schmitt had mixed up “Hawks” with “Hawkeyes,” explaining the error. That turned out to be too generous a guess.  

The efforts of Schmitt and his staff to vet the texts — which reportedly did not include the names of the teams, but did include coordination over seat number and location — went only as far as googling which NBA games started at the time mentioned in the messages. 

“Well, we had text messages from [Smith’s] team that he was at a basketball game, and the only game at 7:30 tip-off in the NBA was in Atlanta,” Schmitt told Politico, adding, “I didn’t know he was a Caitlin Clark fan. Now we know.”

Schmitt simply forgot that women’s sports exist. It didn’t occur to him that Smith might be more interested in watching Clark rain down 38 points on the Terps’ heads amid her team’s run to the title game than to witness the dazzling spectacle of the 36-46, playoff-missing, 2024 Atlanta Hawks.

Let this be a reminder to Republicans: Everyone watches women’s sports. 

That’s the Stuff

you ok, babe? you’ve barely touched your Mr. Beast’s Feastables Liquid Death Peanut Butter Cup Soda-Flavored Sparkling Water pic.twitter.com/E7UzFvhRsP

— Josh Billinson (@jbillinson) September 28, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Name two states where the Senate seats look increasingly out of reach for Republicans, causing the party to pull back on funding and ad buys. 
2. This vulnerable Republican announced he’d break with Donald Trump on key issues, criticizing the admin’s withholding of infrastructure funds for blue states like his.
3. Which two basketball teams did Republican Sen. Eric Schmitt (MO) confuse while spectacularly failing to frame former special counsel Jack Smith with perjury?

Answers below

Tell Us How You Really Feel

“If you’re evil you are at least competent. If you’re evil, you’re not bad. You’re actually maybe kind of good. You’re at least getting something done.” – Palantir cofounder Peter Thiel

Ken Paxton Got Ridiculed for Nothing

The blows just keep coming for Texas Senate nominee Ken Paxton. In new audio leaked to the New York Times, the state’s Republican attorney general admitted that President Trump’s weird September midterms convention in Dallas actually hurt his campaign. “When we did that convention — it dropped our numbers. Everybody’s numbers dropped,” Paxton said at a private event with conservative lobbyists and donors. It is perhaps a bit rich for Paxton to be pointing fingers at Trump, since he’s done a great job at making voters dislike him all on his own. The guy was already unpopular in Texas, where state lawmakers from his own party voted to impeach him over allegations of bribery and unfitness for office. While he survived that effort, the stink of corruption didn’t go away; a focus group of Texas swing voters recently used the words “crook,” “crooked,” “amoral” and “disgusting” to describe him to the New York Times. Paxton only won the primary because of a last-minute endorsement from Trump, and has been languishing in the polls against Democrat James Talarico. The president has lately taken to kicking the AG while he’s down, mocking him at the Dallas convention as not “the best-looking guy I’ve ever seen” and following up with these recent remarks at the White House: “Ken Paxton, you might not like the way he dresses. And I say this — it’s so insulting to him, but I might as well say it — you might not like the way he looks. You might not love his look. You might not love his television interviews, but he was the best attorney general in the country.” Hope it’s all been worth it, Ken!

Sure, Sounds Chill

The Trump administration has spent months trying to put its thumb on the scale in the midterms, from igniting a nationwide redistricting war to trying to seize detailed voter records from the states. Admin officials have also repeatedly threatened to post federal troops at polling places just, you know, in case. All of this flies in the face of plain constitutional language mandating that the states have primary oversight over election administration.

Mike Collins, the Republican Senate nominee in Georgia, totally gets that. He is, he said this week, “a firm believer in local elections are state and local level.” He’s such a believer in local elections, in fact, that he thinks it would be “fine” to have federal troops at polling places in order to ensure that people “have confidence in their elections.” Got it!  

The Influencer Grifters Working Hand in Glove With Trump + Co.

Josh Kovensky joined the excellent Posting Through It podcast to talk through some of the “content creators for the authoritarian state.” We’re talking Nick Shirley, Tyler Oliveira, Savanah Hernandez, Nick Sortor and some of the other online influencers who push out propaganda for the Trump administration, particularly on immigration. (Some have even embedded with ICE on ride-alongs and toured detention facilities). 

“You can see them giving and taking. You can see the symbiosis, right?” Josh says. “[They’re] with administration officials telling them what they think is happening and the officials are responding in real time, responding with what they’re going to do in terms of federal policy.”

Department of False Equivalencies

This summer’s wave of progressive primary victories was met with a flood of articles fretting over whether Democrats were seeing the rise of a “Tea Party of the left.” University of Pittsburgh associate professor Paul Elliott Johnson explained why those comparisons don’t hold up to scrutiny. 

Tea Partiers were motivated by an anti-systemic energy that had deeper roots than the current ire of Democratic voters, and the demographics of the GOP meant the party ultimately embraced a “burn it down” approach to governance. The insurgent left within the Democratic coalition remains focused on conventional liberal issues like human rights, affordability, and taxing the wealthy. 

why does the WaPo print headline on the botched TN execution read like The Onion

— Chris Ingraham (@cingraham.bsky.social) 2026-10-02T12:43:47.565Z

Trivia answers: 1) North Carolina, Georgia 2) Rep. Tom Kean (R-NJ) 3) The Atlanta Hawks and the University of Iowa Hawkeyes

Breaking Down the Different Flavors of GOP Midterms Cope

It’s never a good sign when the Senate Majority Leader suggests the election prospects for his own party look grim. Sen. John Thune (R-SD) admitted in a recent interview that he believes even losing Senate control in the midterms to be a real possibility for the GOP, saying, “I worry about that, for sure.” 

Donald Trump is largely responsible for this situation. He’s fully leaned into unpopular policies (building AI data centers, going to war in Iran, launching trade wars with allies, etc.) that have driven up prices, and, despite his dismal approval rating, is insisting there’s no daylight between himself and the rest of the party. As he said at his weird fake midterms convention in Dallas, “Pretend that I am on the ballot.” 

Even accounting for all the usual caveats about poll margins, it does seem like the Democrats are on track to have a strong midterms cycle. So Republican candidates are experimenting with different flavors of cope as they look towards Election Day. Nicole and John have tracked some of this in Where Things Stand and The Brief, respectively, so we tried to come up with some handy categorizations. Here’s what we’ve got.

All Aboard the Islamophobia and Red Scare Express

Some red state MAGA loyalists are playing the culture war hits, trying to keep the focus on nonexistent crises rather than any of the issues actually affecting their voters. We’re talking Sharia takeovers, communist creep, and stolen elections. As Josh Kovensky reported earlier this year, Texas Republicans Gov. Greg Abbott, who is running for reelection, and Attorney General Ken Paxton, the Senate nominee, pioneered the strategy of targeting the local Muslim community in their midterms messaging. Abbott spent the summer fighting “a proposed mosque-anchored housing development outside Dallas” and “campaigning against what he calls the imposition of Islamic law,” per The Guardian.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, the gubernatorial nominee in Alabama, has taken it upon himself to become a foremost critic of Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, calling him a “TERRORIST” and “RADICAL ISLAMIST” who would “do everything he can to destroy America.” 

Other Republicans are red-baiting their hearts out, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-FL) claiming that Medicare for All is a “communist” policy and Rep. John McGuire (R-VA) labeling Democratic immigration policies “crazy communism.” 

Self-proclaimed “MAGA warrior” Mike Collins is going for an “all of the above” approach in his Georgia Senate race, promoting xenophobia; pushing 2020 Big Lie conspiracies; and advocating to compensate some people prosecuted for Jan. 6. (Meanwhile, he’s doing little to distance himself from the many racist extremists in his orbit — including in his family.)

Flirting With Criticism

Republicans in swing states and seats are trying to toe the line, breaking with Trump on specific issues, particularly ones germane to their states or districts. They’re leveling targeted criticism and trying to display independence.

So you’ve got midwestern Senate nominees Mike Rogers in Michigan and Rep. Ashley Hinson in Iowa calling for an end to the Iran War, saying soaring gas and grocery prices are harming their voters. Both previously supported the war. Last week, Iowa Reps. Zach Nunn and Mariannette Miller-Meeks even voted to support removing U.S. forces from Iran.

Rogers has also bucked Trump’s AI boosterism, calling for a “national security framework” on the technology and for a one-year moratorium on new construction in Michigan. Sen. Jon Husted (R-OH) has gone further in his reelection campaign, sponsoring legislation to make data centers pay their own utility bills.

In Florida, Rep. María Elvira Salazar used her first TV ad of the general election to warn that Trump will lose Latino voters thanks to his overly aggressive immigration enforcement and mass deportation policies. Salazar, who serves as assistant whip, claims that she risks losing her seat in a district Trump won by 15 points. 

Trump Will Always Be Daddy

While most vulnerable Republicans are trying to distance themselves from Trump, a brave few are hugging him tight. Take Eric Flores, who is running in a South Texas district currently represented by a Democrat, and where Latino voters will determine the result. Praising Trump’s immigration policies, Flores told Fox, “When people say that folks are running away from President Trump, I’ll tell you, I’m certainly not doing that. And let me tell you why: Because he has made promises to South Texas, and he has kept them, especially when we look at border security.” 

We Don’t Know Him

Probably the funniest genre of response comes from Republicans pretending that Trump straight-up doesn’t exist. As John noted in the Brief this week, several Republicans have stripped mentions of Trump from their campaign websites, including Florida congressional candidate Mike Beltran, Iowa congressional candidate Joe Mitchell, and, most recently and notably, Florida gubernatorial nominee Byron Daniels. 

Team ‘We’ll Defy Expectations!’ 

Despite all indications that Democrats seem likely to take back the House, Speaker Mike Johnson insists Republicans are going to defy history and “grow the majority.” 

“It’s a contrast election, and people are making a contrast between common-sense solutions and candidates, and really crazy, which is represented by the other side,” Johnson told Fox News Digital in September. “I am very bullish about the outcome on election night.”

Rep. Ryan McKenzie (R-PA), who spoke at the GOP convention, also predicted Republicans are “actually going to defy the historic trends. Why is that? Because the Democrats are so far left they are totally out of touch.”

GOPers Blame Americans’ Data Center Opposition on China

Watching the Super Bowl last winter, I saw a commercial from my local electricity company that seemed a little… political.

Baltimore Gas & Electric (BGE) was trying to convey something to me that seemed tangentially related to bipartisan data center opposition that has been rising nationwide and is especially poignant in the D.C., Maryland, Virginia corridor also known as “Data Center Alley.” 

“Private power plant companies that control our power supply are failing to meet demand,” the ad said, with PRIVATE POWER PLANT and CONTROL OUR SUPPLY in capital, neon letters. “When there’s a shortage, prices go up.”

The ad was indirect but — and without speaking to the merit of its intentions — the vibe was pretty obviously trying to leverage public outrage about skyrocketing electricity bills related to energy demands from AI data centers. I was struck by the idea that my electric company would wade in any way into such a charged political issue — a self-interested energy corporation joining hands with riled-up townspeople and climate activists against a common enemy.

If you ask Reps. Jason Smith (R-MO) and John Moolenaar (R-MI), that enemy is the Chinese Communist Party.

Smith, chair of the House Ways and Means committee, and Moolenaar, chair of the House Select Committee on China, sent a letter Tuesday to Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and IRS CEO Frank Bisignano blaming American data center opposition on an orchestrated disinformation campaign supported by the Chinese government. Yes, you did read that right.

“This is not an organic grassroots movement,” Smith said of data center opposition. Instead, Chinese-backed nonprofits are being used to “manipulate public discourse surrounding the technological infrastructure necessary to win the AI race.”

Smith and Moolenaar’s proof? An OpenAI report which found Chinese-linked influence over social media content “claiming that data center construction was raising electricity prices.” (It is.) And a report that X, owned by AI mogul Elon Musk, identified 200 bots posting anti-AI stuff on the site. OpenAI found no evidence that the campaign it uncovered influenced public opinion.

Instead, data shows that 58% of registered voters believe data center construction by big companies will do more harm than good, according to a September NPR/PBS News/Marist poll released Wednesday. 

Data centers are even more unattractive when they’re local, with 60% of Americans, including 54% of Republicans, responding that they would not be comfortable with a data center in their communities, according to a Pew Research survey published Tuesday. And Pew’s survey also found negative sentiment about data centers increased by 16 points among Republicans between January and August.

This feels like an issue uniting Americans across party lines in grassroots opposition, driven not only by NIMBYism, or even by the documented harms to climate posed by energy-sucking super computers, but also by the desire of the everyman to stand up against entities they believe pose a direct risk to their immediate communities and their pockets.

In attempting to blame anti-AI sentiment on a foreign adversary, Smith and Moolenaar have opted to follow their leader, President Donald Trump, off the “AI opposition is a hoax” cliff. 

Trump has said opposing data center construction will make communities “backwards and poor”; tried to prohibit states from regulating AI; included expanded tax benefits for data center construction in his “Big, Beautiful Bill”; and called disconcerting warnings from AI company CEOs about the risks AI pose to humanity a “hoax.” This week, he’s trying to rebrand the tech from artificial intelligence to superintelligence, a move which may conjure unintended connotations.

The president’s contrary positions on AI and data center construction have pushed Republican politicians, especially those facing competitive midterms, to split from Trump.

While Smith and Moolenaar are both up for reelection, they’re in uncompetitive districts ranked by Cook Political Report as solidly Republican. But Ohio Republican Jon Husted is facing backlash to his once-strong support for data centers as he’s locked in a dead heat with former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH). Other Senate Republicans are pushing to support Husted’s bill focused on shielding people’s electricity bills from data center energy usage hikes. In Texas, Democrats are hoping their early opposition to data centers can help them win statewide office for the first time in more than two decades. And at least 27 states have passed legislation that datacentertracker.com categorizes as “favorable for communities.”

For what it’s worth, Twitter’s former head of corporate communications told Axios all evidence points to data center gripes being authentic, not the product of a “Chinese psyop.”

“If you can get both Greg Abbott and Kathy Hochul agreeing on something,” communications consultant Jim Prosser told Axios, “it’s probably not a Chinese psyop. It’s probably not a mass delusion people are having on these issues.”

5 Year Plans

no dad, owning a successful lesbian covid conscious bar in western mass was YOUR dream. I’M going to clown school

— leah (@kmewisfc) September 23, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Who was the anonymous White House source cited in the Politico story Trump is using to justify denying the publication access because the reporting “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods”?
2. After effectively shutting down the Kennedy Center when he wasn’t allowed to put his name on it, which culturally significant national landmark is Trump apparently trying to slap his name on next? 
3. Which musician was scheduled to headline a MAGA music festival that ended up getting canceled because it failed to sell more than a handful of VIP tickets?

Answers below

Anti-Vax or Pro Rock?

Campaigning for state auditor in Minnesota, failed gubernatorial candidate and real-life doctor Scott Jensen wants to know why western medicine keeps ignoring the science — from hundreds of years ago. Jensen’s medical license has been challenged for spreading COVID-19 misinformation and he has admitted to “quietly” being a member of America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLDS/AFD), known for its anti-vaccine activism and for its founder, Simone Gold, being involved in Jan. 6. As Jensen told an interviewer, “The notion of electromagnetic powers, of minerals, and rocks, and things like that, that could have curative capabilities, we’ve ignored.” 

Given the widespread use of magnetic resonance imaging machines and the countless rock and mineral-derived chemicals used in modern medicine, we’re uncertain who the “we” is here. But sure, Dr. Jensen, go on. “We” would recommend a bong hit first, but know that your views on legalized weed have changed, despite co-authoring a bill supporting legalization in 2019. Not sure what you have against plants, but good luck with your rocks.

Knowing Where You Live is the Robot’s Job Now

“There are a lot of skills that don’t matter. My first confession, I actually don’t know my address.” — Jensen Huang, CEO of Nvidia, the world’s most valuable company

Maybe This Should Have Been the Strategy All Along

Trivia answers: 1) JD Vance 2) The Ford Theatre 3) Kid Rock, of course

A Far-Right Meltdown

It usually doesn’t take a lot, but Erick Erickson managed to do it this week: cause the far-right to melt down online. 

He published an article on his Substack called “The Midwestern Führerbunker Driving the Right Off the Cliff.” It’s Claude-assisted writing, but it gets at something that we at TPM have been covering for a while: the effort, out in the open and behind closed doors, to steer the Republican Party as far to the right as it can go, even if means breaking the steering wheel and crashing the car in the process. 

For the last month, I've been working on tying together the white nationalists, Christian nationalists, and neo-Nazis rising on the right. They not only have common sources of funding, but they are taking over portions of the conservative movement. Finally hitting "publish" in…

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 16, 2026

Erickson built the piece around an Indiana shampoo magnate named Charles Haywood. In retirement, Haywood has become an online book reviewer and the proprietor of a website in which he calls himself “Maximum Leader.” He’s also gotten involved in politics: he contributes money to the Claremont Institute, and promotes a vision of a future, shattered America in which he can become a “warlord.” 

Haywood was a founding member of the Society for American Civil Renewal (SACR), as Erickson notes in the piece. SACR is a men’s only, Christian-only group with members that include the head of the Claremont Institute, venture capitalists, and GOP donors. It describes itself as aiming to place its members in influential positions in government and business, per internal documents I obtained in 2024. 

This goes to the core of the argument that Erickson is making: that a group of white men, some of whom orbit Vice President JD Vance, are covertly inserting themselves into the conservative movement in order to propagate their white nationalist, antisemitic, and Nazi sympathies. 

Erickson’s piece got attention. The Free Press republished a version of it; more moderate conservatives like Jonah Goldberg boosted it. 

Perhaps predictably, this caused a blowup on the online right (many SACR members are extremely online, a fact that’s perhaps not unrelated to their politics). Many of them immediately saw Erickson’s article as part of a broader conspiracy by anti-Trump forces within the Republican Party. Nate Fischer, a venture capitalist and SACR member, described it as an indirect attempt to “smear Vance supporters, and line up behind a Vance opponent to try to wrest back control of the party.”

Andrew Beck, a SACR member and communications strategist, similarly described it to me as an attempt to sully a pro-MAGA Trump successor — he named Vance, Marco Rubio, or Pete Hegseth — by association to SACR and other notables like Nick Fuentes that Erickson describes as one large network in his piece. On X, he noted that while Haywood had provided the “seed money” for SACR, he wasn’t the entire group.

“This was and is a local thing of Christian men building relationships with each other and participating in civic duties in order to effect broader change from the ground up,” Beck told me. “For it [to] be framed any other way is either bad faith or an AI hallucination.”

You may think a men’s-only, Christian-only group, whose membership remains secret but whose identified members are all white, with ambitions to shape society by filling the ranks of a future (or current) government constitutes something more than grassroots organizing. Who am I to decide. 

But the SACR guys are on to something: as Trump declines in popularity and the consequences of far-right government seep into everyone’s daily lives, they may not like how people react. 

A Fool Determined to Believe a Lie

Last week, I somewhat inexplicably assigned myself the task of listening to a two-and-a-half-hour conversation between right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley and Twitch streamer ConorEatsPants (i.e. Charlie Rose for Gen Z. Just kidding, but also, maybe). The breakout clip from the conversation, particularly for critics of Shirley, was a trivia segment where Shirley badly misspelled the word “discipline”; didn’t even attempt to spell “colonel” (though he did recognize it as a homophone without identifying it as such); and guessed that mixing the colors blue and yellow might make orange. 

In his viral video purporting to expose Somali fraud in Minneapolis —  a key part of DHS’s justification for amplifying Operation Metro Surge, which led to the killing of Renee Good and Alex Pretti —  Shirley took particular delight in the fact that one of the daycare centers he was accusing of fraud had misspelled “learning.” His own struggle with spelling, then, was an irony too delicious for his critics to ignore. The clip added fuel to critics’ charge that Shirley isn’t particularly bright, thus making him an easy mark for the Trump administration to enlist in helping spread their propaganda. It didn’t hurt that it was circulating the same week Shirley was scheduled to speak at both Harvard and Yale University.

For a 24-year-old YouTuber who literally can’t spell “discipline,” Shirley has already managed to have quite an impact on American politics. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, he is best known for making videos where he confronts members of immigrant communities in blue cities with various fraud accusations, almost inevitably resulting in DHS taking action against these communities (TPM’s Josh Kovensky explained the symbiotic relationship of right-wing influencers like Shirley and DHS back in April). In his speech to the Harvard Republican Club, Shirley spent a good deal of his introduction listing out his accomplishments, primarily as a rebuke to criticism that he doesn’t belong at a storied institution like Harvard. Cited among these accomplishments were the claims that he “helped save America billions of dollars from fraudsters”; “created the most legislatively impactful video in American history (30+ bills related to fraud since MN)”; grew “one of the largest independent journalist platforms on the internet”; sued “California for violating the First Amendment and creating a law directed to stop [Shirley] from exposing their corruption”; and got “a sitting governor who was almost VP to drop out of politics.” 

Whether you view these as accomplishments or specious boasts from a wannabe journalist is almost immaterial to the reality that Shirley’s videos are having an effect, and that his role (witting or not) in the Trump administration continues to grow. In less than a year, Shirley has participated in a White House roundtable on antifa hosted by President Trump; been awarded Citizen Journalist of the Year at an event held at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago; has met with and been endorsed by JD Vance, who is leading the newly established “Task Force to Eliminate Fraud”; has met with and been commended by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick; and this summer worked with CMS Administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz in an attempt to find fraud in New York City senior daycare centers. Meanwhile, his YouTube subscribers have swelled to over 2 million. In concluding his list of feats, Shirley acknowledged that he may misspell a word from time to time before smugly questioning what his critics have accomplished.  

Well, I, for one, have watched all two and half hours of a video where Shirley and ConorEatsPants play Fortnite and engage in desultory conversation that hits on topics like girlfriends (i.e. lack thereof), favorite episodes of “The Office”, and whether Lutnick is a pedophile. If you are, like I was, in the dark about ConorEatPants (real name: Conor; full name: unknown), his basic deal is that people watch him play video games on the streaming service Twitch (where he has over 700,000 followers) and he hosts a talk show of sorts called Fortnite Fridays. He’s 27 years old, originally from Atlanta, and while his politics are left-leaning, he has an apolitical online cool that makes him popular on Elon Musk’s X (where he has over 1 million followers). When the Democratic Party’s consulting class talks about politicians needing to appear on podcasts that appeal to young men, people like Conor are who they are talking about (Naturally, California Gov. Gavin Newsom has been Conor’s guest on Fortnite Friday).

It’s clear early in Shirley’s appearance that he’s there because he thinks Conor’s cool and that he would rather find common ground outside of politics than defend his position on subjects like immigration. He’s most engaged when the conversation veers into topics related to content creation, such as their mutual appreciation for the Paul brothers (one of Shirley’s early videos was a stunt where he broke into Jake Paul’s wedding) and the most live viewers Conor has had on one of his streams (6 million — Shirley is impressed). Shirley, who is apparently not a gamer and doesn’t understand why people would watch someone play a video game when they can’t even see the gamer’s face, seems genuinely curious to find out how Conor got so popular. 

When the conversation turns to politics, however, Shirley becomes unconvincing. At one point, Conor advises him to abandon the fraud stuff and go back to making stunt videos. When Conor suggests to Shirley that important members of the Trump administration are using him, Shirley pauses for a long time before saying that he doesn’t see it that way. This followed an earlier admission that despite not being a gun person, Shirley owns an AR-15 thanks to a gift from a (presumably right-wing) podcaster.

One reason people continue to question why Shirley is doing what he is doing is that the story he tells in public, and repeats to Conor, doesn’t seem to add up. The gist is that he was on a Mormon mission in Santiago, Chile; learned from Venezuelans about the Darién Gap and migrants coming to America; went to the southern border upon returning to America (now fluent in Spanish) where he claims to have witnessed some combination of government and non-profit fraud involving transporting migrants to New York City; and from there developed and sustained interest in both fraud and illegal immigration. By his own account, he was close to the people he met in South America and had empathy for the plight of migrants. That he would subsequently adopt such an extreme anti-immigrant stance seems odd. Unless he did so because he knew it would make for good content.

During his Harvard speech, Shirley shared a picture from an old notebook outlining a five-year plan for his YouTube channel. In it are a list of goals focused on benchmarks like yearly subscriber and revenue growth. Signs of journalistic ambition are scarce, but he does identify that good types of content might include “interviews/investigations on current subjects or on popular/strong topics” and lists going “undercover in Compton” as a potential idea for a video. He told the audience that every one of those goals had come true, and said of his Minneapolis video that, “no video has ever created so much impact in the history of America!” That would appear to be a wild and erroneous claim if it were not clear that the primary metric Shirley is using to gauge “impact” is the 4 billion views he claims the video has received.

Unfortunately, ConorEatPants was unable to nail down what motivates Nick Shirley, and I can’t claim to know either. Regardless of whether he is sincere in wanting to be an independent journalist, it’s unquestionable that his work is being used to further the political objectives of the Trump administration. Perhaps he shares those objectives. Or maybe what Shirley really wants is to become a YouTube star, and he understands the platform incentives well enough to know that embracing a radical political agenda will help achieve those ends. In this way, he is the one using the likes of Musk, Vance, Lutnick et al. to boost his reach. Whatever is motivating him, the non platform-based metric of his impact in the real world is that people are getting hurt.

Shirley ended his Harvard address by reciting what he said was his favorite quote: “The truth has no defense against a fool determined to believe a lie.” The quote has been apocryphally attributed to Mark Twain, but nobody knows where it really came from, or if anybody actually said it. One day it just appeared on the internet, and then it went viral.

A New Entry in the Unqualified Ambassadors Hall of Fame 

Sorry to the people of Barbados. President Trump announced this week that he was nominating the wife of Lee Greenwood — yes, the “God Bless the USA” guy — as ambassador to Barbados and six other small Caribbean nations including Saint Kitts and Nevis, Dominica, and Grenada. 

This is par for the course for Trump, who has largely chosen an assortment of pals and hangers-on to serve as ambassadors in his second administration, eschewing career diplomats or anyone with anything resembling a qualification. As I wrote in a previous Weekender, we’re talking about nominating failed candidate and Big Lie advocate Doug Mastriano as ambassador to Slovakia and fellow failed candidate and Big Lie advocate Kari Lake as ambassador to Jamaica. 

Per CBS, Kimberly Greenwood, a former Miss Tennessee, has long known Trump through the Miss Universe pageant, and she has also directed the Miss Tennessee, Miss Mississippi and Miss Georgia competitions. Famously, Trump can’t get through a public appearance without playing “God Bless the USA,” and Lee Greenwood is one of the only artists Trump can reliably get to show up to his events.

It’s only a matter of time before Kid Rock’s kid is nominated as the ambassador to somewhere. 

It’s Spooky Season!

the witch at spirit halloween waiting for me to step on her mat pic.twitter.com/EKVBygo4US

— Sydney Battle (@SydneyBattle) September 15, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. In a typically infuriating move, this former Democratic senator endorsed Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) in her reelection campaign. 
2. Three-part question: This NFL team owner booted this rapper from this major pop star’s tour over the rapper’s comments supporting Palestine.
3. Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) submitted a resolution to impeach this Trump Cabinet secretary for “high crimes and misdemeanors” this week.

Answers below

I’m the Problem, It’s Me

“Nobody knows there’s a B in dumb. They think it’s D-U-M.” – The President of the United States

The Bestiality Situation at the FBI

Well, that got weird fast. During a Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, FBI director Kash Patel was grilled about his eyebrow-raising choice to reverse a policy that automatically disqualified people who acknowledged engaging in prostitution or bestiality from joining the bureau. Sen. John Kennedy (R-LA) pressed Patel to explain the change, asking the very fair question, “Why would you even get into bestiality?” 

According to Patel, his decision was intended to protect trafficking victims who were disqualified for jobs with the FBI because they were forced into bestiality. “We are not into bestiality,” Patel clarified. 

Good to see everything is going normally over at the Federal Bureau of Investigations!

The Dude Just Loves a Monument, Okay?

Marshall Rawson may have gone to the Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally, but he says it’s not what it looks like. The Republican nominee for Florida’s House District 10 keeps insisting he’s not mad about TPM reporter Christopher Mathias’ exclusive story detailing his attendance at the event and the donations he’s received from some of the country’s most infamous white nationalists. 

“I’ll continue to defend historical monuments,” Rawson said in a Facebook post about the article that also referenced his “long-standing efforts to preserve southern military monuments.” He’d made similar comments to Chris in his statement for the story, saying “Over the entire span of my adult life, I’ve been very active defending historical monuments from destruction or removal, and I feel that way about almost all monuments, not just those associated with southern history.”

The guy just loves monuments, okay? 

As Chris points out, Rawson has not responded to some of the other details in the piece that are perhaps a bit more pertinent than his stance on statues, like whether he condones slavery and lynching, thinks gay people should be executed, or acknowledges that some of his allies at Charlottesville committed brutal acts of violence that day. 

Charlottesville’s Long Shadow and the American Right’s WNBA Obsession

Florida Dems Picked Up Chris’ Reporting on Unite the Right

The Florida Democratic Party is demanding that the local GOP denounce their nominee for Florida House District 10, Marshall Rawson, after TPM reporter Chris Mathias revealed that Rawson marched at the 2017 “Unite the Right” rally with the League of the South. Chris’ reporting made a big national splash, too, getting picked up by The New Republic, Washington Post, The Guardian, MS Now, The Independent, The Handbasket the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, Politico’s Florida Playbook, and local outlets including the Tampa Bay Times, Miami Herald, and Gainesville Sun

Kate Goes Deep on the Right’s WNBA Fixation

We are happy to report that Kate is continuing to live her dream by moonlighting as a sports reporter. She joined the Title IX podcast this week to talk about right-wing outrage about the WNBA, and how it relates to Christian nationalism and traditional gender roles.

“What could be a bigger threat in that landscape than the WNBA, a league of professional women athletes who at least — you know, recently, are starting to be paid you know, a lot of money for what they do, and it’s a league made up of predominantly Black women and many, many gay women, right?” she said. “And then add on top of that that it’s becoming massively popular. The threat is growing, right? Like other people are kind of joining this bandwagon, and all of that has been scary to them for a long time.”

Macklemore Makes International News

Trivia answers: 1) Former Sen. Joe Manchin 2) Robert Kraft, Macklemore, and Ed Sheeran 3) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth

We Carry the Flame

You can hear it in the viral and almost certainly AI generated refrain: “We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.”

That bit of digital slop has never proved more true than over the past week when our total Kirkification was on display in the beating heart of the American empire. 

For a brief moment this week, New York City’s Times Square played host to a misshapen monument to Charlie Kirk. The statue was part of a half-baked plan to raise a million-dollar sum that was cooked up by Sergio Furnari, an eccentric artist and self-described scientist. The statue’s unveiling was a gaudy display of scams, attention seeking, and hatred that was truly in keeping with Kirk’s real legacy. 

And, when I sought out the spectacle, it was clear the grift and grotesqueries were not confined to the makeshift memorial. 

Thursday marked one year since Kirk was shot while doing the thing that made him famous: Trying to draw college students into the far-right culture war. Kirk was a walking internet comments section who became rich and loud thanks to a dark money war chest. Among other things, Kirk pulled in clicks and dollars by staging live versions of the angry, misinformed, and pithy sparring that has defined our digital discourse. He was arguably shot down by the very forces he riled up: his alleged shooter was an extremist with apparent left-wing leanings who was enraged by Kirk’s trolling and took the fury offline with scrawled references to memes on the bullets. 

Since that moment, President Donald Trump and others on the right have tried to use the awful circumstances of Kirk’s death to turn him into a martyr and talismanic proof their movement, which has taken over national politics for the better part of a decade, is somehow entitled to victimhood. As we have already chronicled in this newsletter, the disingenuous veneration of Kirk has spawned a wave of AI slop souvenirs and songs. It also inspired a purge in which dozens of people who dared to point out that Kirk was a hatemonger who almost certainly encouraged violence were doxxed and fired from their jobs. 

Online, young people have responded to the awkwardly forced (and painfully enforced) efforts to sanctify Kirk by turning him into something else: a meme. They’ve made their own avalanche of AI slop with bizarre caricatures, inserting exaggerated versions of Kirk and his prodigious forehead into other scenarios and celebrity bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed “Kirkification.”

Sergio Furnari’s sculpture reveal in Times Square was ostensibly a more earnest tribute to the slain right wing activist. It proved no less absurd. 

Furnari calls himself a “master in sculpture and painting.” Based on his website, his signature projects include ornately painted swimming pools. Furnari also has some kind of vision to help Elon Musk get us to Mars based on his supposed expertise as a “scientist of thermal tile surfacing.”

Furnari’s Times Square event was apparently part of a broader effort to bring in cash. According to an online fundraising page, Furnari hopes to raise $1 million to erect a “colossal monument” to Kirk. 

“Sadly none of the politicians/entrepreneurs/supporters have contacted him,” the page says. “Sergio has sold his own apartment to fund this project.”

Faced with these issues, Furnari seems to have downsized. His fundraiser has currently set a more modest $150,000 goal and the statue, that he showed off in Times Square on the anniversary of Kirk’s death is a smaller version of his dream Kirklossus. 

That prototype features Kirk sitting at his debate table as he was in the moments before his death. While the setting is clear, the attempted likeness evokes the warped memes of Kirk’s face more than it does the man himself. As of this writing, the distorted Kirk and its associated fundraiser have only raised $12,950.

At the event, Furnari was joined by Jake Lang, a far right influencer, Jan. 6er and erstwhile Republican candidate with a fondness for giving Sieg Heil salutes who has spent the past couple years staging theatrical demonstrations targeting Muslims and Jews. Based on his own social media, Lang and the band of “crusaders” at Furnari’s Kirk event were in the Big Apple for a Sept. 11 march to “stop Zohran Mamdani from going to Ground Zero.”

Lang provided a vivid example of the types of people who see Kirk as a fellow traveler and icon for their cause. He also showed how much Kirk and the supposedly more respectable, official side of MAGA share an agenda with extremists. The blatantly Islamophobic push to exclude Mamdani from the annual commemoration 9/11 Memorial was also amplified by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump associate, and a slew of MAGA media outlets.

TPM’s invitation to the event was lost in the mail. I tried calling Furnari a few times right after the event as clips were spreading online. It didn’t exactly yield a coherent conversation. First, he told me the statue was in Rockefeller Center, adjacent to Times Square. I rushed there to see the Kirk for myself. Upon arrival, I called Furnari again. He couldn’t tell me where he was but promised to share his location. About a half hour later, he called back and said he didn’t know where he was. 

At that point, I gave up. 

During that fruitless wander through midtown Manhattan, the streets were filled with heinous AI merch. Walking through the Diamond District, I overheard dubious entrepreneurs taping podcasts. As I passed through the center of Times Square, it was clogged with passersby taking pictures of themselves. Vendors hawked more elaborate photo opportunities with vintage cameras and polaroids. Dingy costumed characters including superheroes and at least one Labubu ambled around offering to join the shots for a price. 

Everyone wants to be part of the feed. America’s heroes have been reduced to shoddy renditions of themselves. Our world has been Kirkified. 

Like it or not, now, we are all Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame. And everything is on fire. 

Making the Falklands Great Again

Argentina’s wild-haired “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, has in recent months been getting a lot of help from Donald Trump. His effort to conduct a full overhaul of his country’s government and economy — think DOGE, but ongoing for years, not months — has hit some rough patches. His current approval ratings are similar to, but not quite as bad as, Trump’s. Perhaps their experiences of governance have prompted some fellow feelings between the two men, with Trump doing Milei such favors as importing tons of Argentinian beef, pissing off American cattle farmers in the process. 

They’ve also decided to restart the Falklands War. I’m joking — or, rather, they’re joking … but also maybe not.

The Falklands War began in 1982 when Argentina, then under a military dictatorship, invaded the Falklands, an archipelago in the Atlantic 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and 750 miles north of Antarctica. The islands have been a territory of the UK since the mid-1800s. The war ended after 74 days in a humiliating defeat for the Argentines, a key factor in the collapse of its autocratic government and the return of democracy to the country. 

Now, Milei, whose administration has winked and nodded in various ways to last century’s junta, is stirring the pot again. The islands are ”Argentine, by history and by right, there is no debate about it,” he said last week. His government then barred oil companies that operate in the Falklands from also drilling in Argentina, and sued at least one. 

But, oddly, Trump is also getting in on the action — seemingly not because of any true interest in the Falklands dispute and more out of a desire to troll the UK, and liberal governments in Europe more generally. Last week, he complained to a British news outlet that the UK and NATO were “not there to help me” when he declared war on Iran, and suggested he likewise would not help the UK were Argentina to invade. The U.S. then sold Argentina some Black Hawk helicopters. 

The whole thing feels a little bit like a weird joke sustained by the two eccentric right wing leaders, reminiscent of Trump’s Greenland news cycle. But the line between trolling and official policy can be thin in the U.S. in 2026 — a fact the British, perhaps, recognize, as they are taking this all very seriously. Milei’s position “tells us more about domestic politics in Argentina than it does about the Falkland Islands,” the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence said on X. “The Falklands are British because Falkland Islanders choose to be British. Our commitment to the Falklands is absolute and unshakeable.”

The RNC Midterm Convention in One Word

“ruuuuuUUUUUP” — RFK Jr.

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Rep. Chris Pappas (D), who this week won the New Hampshire Senate Democratic Primary, hails from Manchester where his family owns the Puritan Backroom restaurant. Which popular pub food does the Puritan claim to have invented?
2. When he was working as a doctor, Kansas senator Roger Marshall (R), took what action against more than 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests?
3. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” decided to place its interview with this Senate candidate on YouTube instead of airing it during the broadcast — the latest sign of a network muzzling itself in the face of FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s pressure campaign to punish networks that broadcast things Trump doesn’t like.

Answers below

The (Pet) GOAT

When President George W. Bush was first informed of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he was famously sitting in an elementary classroom in Florida. The president listened and followed along as the children read aloud from “The Pet Goat.” When White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered into Bush’s ear that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, Bush stared like a deer in headlights and waited a full seven minutes for the children to finish reading before taking action. Whatever he was thinking in those seven minutes, the moment would become an indelible image of his presidency, and his subsequent actions would lead Americans on a disastrous course of war, surveillance and xenophobia. 

Now, 25 years later and having retired from public life to pursue his passion for painting, W. is unveiling a new collection of paintings reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11. In one of the paintings, he depicts that moment in the classroom with Card leaning over him. It’s a faithful enough depiction, but no more a window into what he is thinking in this moment than the original imagery was to what he was thinking in that moment. Maybe W. painting one of his more embarrassing moments is a sign that he is doing some soul searching; perhaps he is contrite, sees the role he played in leading us to this current moment and wishing he could go back and do things differently. However, if we learned anything from his presidency it’s that “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.'”

The Other Post Warning That AI Will Be Humanity’s Ruin

Frank took us on a real roller coaster here pic.twitter.com/jIJlrRs26O

— Vince Mancini (@VinceMancini) September 10, 2026

WNBA Culture Wars and the Overblown Panic About Leftists

Kate Explains Why the Right Is Pretending to Care About Women’s Sports

Kate joined the excellent Cancel Me, Daddy podcast to talk about the intersection of her two main interests: reporting on the far right and obsessing over the WNBA. As a five-year season ticket holder for the Washington Mystics, Kate has been closely tracking the bad-faith anti-Black and anti-trans crusade that right-wing media is waging against the W. 

“I think these ‘culture war’ kind of issues are necessary to keep their base in marching formation with a party that has always primarily sought to enrich the wealthiest Americans,” Kate points out. “You’ve always kind of needed the bigotry to keep these camps together.”

Hunter Wishes Everyone Would Chill About Hasan Piker

Hunter joined MS Now’s The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi to talk about the New Hampshire primaries and how the two parties are faring in the final countdown before the midterm elections. He expressed frustration with the ongoing media obsession over podcaster Hasan Piker’s support for a handful of progressive candidates, pointing out that, “the top donor in the GOP, Elon Musk, is a man who is basically spewing white nationalism every other day on Twitter.”  

@huntersfeed

Last night’s New Hampshire primary showed the panic over the DSA and @Hasanabi is overblown. #newhampshire #politics #democrats #washington #washingtondc

♬ original sound – Hunter Walker

25 Years Later

Trivia answers: 1) Chicken tenders 2) Sued for outstanding bills 3) James Talarico

Get Ready for Peak Trump II

It’s all happening. Next week, the hollow moral rot of the Trump II era will be on full display in a string of convergent events: the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and the RNC’s first-ever midterms convention in Texas, headlined by President Trump. 

On Sept. 10, the Turning Points USA crew will descend on Utah Valley University’s campus for “Freedom Built to Last,” a memorial event honoring Kirk. Then they’ll embark on their “America: Love It or Leave It” tour of college campuses, in which students will be challenged to “discuss why America remains the greatest country on Earth,” and, if they disagree with this premise, explain why they don’t move elsewhere. In a testament to the thrumming xenophobia undergirding this tour, one of the speakers will be anti-immigrant YouTuber Nick Shirley, whose racist videos about Somali immigrants spurred the deadly ICE crackdown on Minneapolis. 

These themes will carry over to the RNC’s first-of-its-kind midterms convention, too. Vice President JD Vance is slated to give a speech on Wednesday, Sept. 9, while Trump himself will speak on Sept. 10. Anonymous Republicans have grumbled that the “Trump-a-palooza” is perhaps ill-advised at a moment when the president’s approval ratings are underwater. But Trump himself seems to have no qualms about pulling candidates off the campaign trail and forcing House members to shell out $25,000 to attend this event in the final weeks before the election. Some 45 congressional Republicans and candidates told Politico they’re not bothering to show up. The convention is slated to take place in Texas because of the must-win Senate race there, but the location is fitting since the Lone Star State was the launching pad for the GOP’s Islamophobia-centric midterms strategy. The party can’t run on affordability since Trump’s trade war in Canada and bombing war in Iran have driven up prices, so they’ve opted to fall back on classic fearmongering about creeping Sharia. 

Anti-Muslim hysteria has been similarly unavoidable in coverage leading up to the 9/11 anniversary, which will take place next Friday. The New York Post has spent months pumping out stories about 9/11 families supposedly pushing for New York City’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, not to attend the memorial events because of his “anti-American agenda” and association with “terrorist sympathizers.” CBS New York soon joined in. (Popular Information has reported that the number of families cited in the Post and CBS’ coverage is wildly inflated, and that another group of 9/11 families is publicly pushing for Mamdani’s attendance.) These same outlets are also going after Abdul El-Sayed, with CBS publishing a bizarre article claiming that Michigan’s Muslim Democratic Senate nominee is “facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” in light of the anniversary. (We’re all trying to find the guy doing this scrutinizing and attacking!) At issue are two old tweets in which El-Sayed compares the loss of life on Sept. 11 to that from the pandemic, and laments that more was not done to address the catastrophe of COVID. Meanwhile, Trump opted to skip the Ground Zero memorial that Mamdani is attending because organizers are maintaining their existing policy prohibiting political speeches at these events; instead, he’ll go to the Pentagon service, where he’ll be able to make an address. 

So expect to return from Labor Day to a week-long, flag-draped orgy of casual racism and chest-thumping nationalism, with Trump at the very center.

MAGA Is Mourning Charlie Kirk With Ridiculous AI Slop Merch

Charlie Kirk is gone, but, in the world of MAGA politics and the related field of incredibly tacky merch and souvenirs, he is not forgotten. 

Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of Kirk’s death at the hands of an apparently politically motivated gunman. Ironically, those dark circumstances have played into the disingenuous schtick that Kirk made his life’s work. Kirk presented himself as someone who just cared about free speech and dialogue. His main bit involved showing up at college campuses to “debate” young students and package viral clips. This conceit meant that, in death, Kirk’s far right allies could cast him as an open minded martyr whose efforts to foster dialogue led a killer to silence him. 

All of this obscured Kirk’s role as a purveyor of hate with a massive platform. Kirk’s Turning Point USA focuses on radicalizing young people and deploying massive sums for the MAGA agenda of mass deportation, transphobia, and white rage. Away from his more polished clips, Kirk mainstreamed some of the same ideas espoused by white nationalists, declaring that “America was founded by Anglo-Saxons and based upon Anglo-Saxon laws and traditions.” In one 2023 tweet, Kirk managed to simultaneously defend South Africa’s apartheid regime, the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and even the internet code for “Heil Hitler.” 

“Multiculturalism is un-American,” Kirk wrote in another screed, adding, “If you don’t assimilate you are disgracing this country and you can kindly leave.”

Another lowlight was this bit of anti-trans paranoia that feels like a bigoted fever dream take on the “Ghost In The Shell” anime franchise.  

“The Trans Agenda is being used to condition people to eventually merge with machine and abandon their humanity,” Kirk wrote. 

Political violence is simply abhorrent. However, the awful facts of his death don’t erase his hateful words. All of which make the post-assassination canonization of Kirk, which will once again take center stage next week, especially ridiculous. That absurdity is particularly apparent when you peruse the aisles of internet retailers and their offerings for Kirk’s MAGA mourners. 

There are multiple t-shirts and other souvenirs casting Kirk as some type of Civil Rights icon. One shop is even selling “FREEDOM” shirts for $33.27 with a portrait of Kirk alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.. It doesn’t seem like a comparison that even the grandiose Kirk would have made. In his life, he referred to King as “disliked” and the leader’s legacy as a “myth” with “flaws” that needed to be exposed. 

Over on TikTok, sellers have made a bizarre blanket featuring likenesses of Kirk and George Floyd, the man whose death inspired the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as angels looking down from heaven. Here in the real world, Kirk called for the officers who were later convicted of federal civil rights violations for Floyd’s death to be “released immediately.” 

Following his death, due to some mix of his own grossness and pure brainrot irony, Kirk became a Gen Z and Alpha internet meme. It can be difficult to parse some of the weirder pro-Kirk merch available online from the items meant to mock him. For example, there’s this “CHARLIE KNIRCK” shirt that evokes pop star Taylor Swift’s attention-seeking New York Knicks NBA Finals merch. That seems like an item that could appeal to Kirk fans and haters alike. 

For the purposes of this story, we have tried our best to stick to the seemingly earnest pro-Kirk stuff. It’s all pretty weird and much of it seems to have been churned out with AI. 

The worst of the Kirkslop includes another blanket featuring Kirk as an angel clutching American and Israeli flags. Kirk was indeed a staunch advocate for Israel, a position which separated him from the more blatant neo-Nazis who might otherwise have been his fellow travelers. However, in this case, the angel’s face looks more like a stock photo model than Kirk. This coloring book from Etsy that purports to tell the story of Kirk’s life and share the “Positive Reflections and Inspirations of a Great American” also seems to feature generic AI art that looks nothing like Kirk. 

Prayer candles, which were a staple of cringey Trump Resistance activism, are now being lit for Kirk. You can also bake bread with a Kirk-themed mold or fill the cupholders of your car with coasters that seem to replicate the scene of Kirk’s killing. 

One common thread through much of the Kirkslop is word art. There’s so much word art like this mug featuring FBI Director Kash Patel’s over the top remarks. The pro-Kirk word art also includes even more questionable quotes like this t-shirt that falsely attributes a line from the fantasy author George R.R. Martin to Kirk.  

Much of the merch relies on familiar right-wing iconography. One particularly special piece is this hat, which basically combines three types of patriotic MAGA imagery in one hectic package. You have red, white, and blue flames, a gothic script Constitutional “We The People,” and, of course, a hint of Kirk word art. 

Despite his efforts to sow hate and division, Kirk presented himself as a devout Christian. Religious elements are a major Kirkslop theme. While Kirk arguably did little to embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ, there are countless fantasy art pieces that picture him physically embracing the Christian savior, like this commemorative coin. Along with Jesus, it features Kirk alongside a somewhat disembodied fist and set of praying hands on the reverse side. 

Not all of the Kirk memorial merch seems like mass-produced AI slop. Some of it is decidedly homespun, like this crochet pattern designed to help knitters make dolls of Kirk and Christ to sit side by side. The description for that item includes a note that could be read as offering an unintentional commentary on how the supposedly Christian MAGA base may be putting their various cults of personality before religion.

“You will get the patterns for both dolls,” the description says. “The Charlie Kirk doll is slightly larger than the Jesus.”

Amen. 

Party All the Time

Hold on a second. Don’t you all party all night on your birthday? https://t.co/dpsOdNkFt1

— Eric Adams (@ericadamsfornyc) September 2, 2026

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which former congressman was permanently banned from prediction market Kalshi over evidence he engaged in insider trading?
2. This Trump Cabinet member vehemently dismissed recent reports that he’s considering a 2028 presidential run.
3. Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) was censured by his House colleagues this week. Describe the conduct that led to this.

Answers below

Why Retire When You Can Boost the GDP?

“If we could just get the average American to feel so healthy, so with it, so vibrant that they want to work just one extra year, that’s worth $1 trillion to our GDP every year.” – Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz

Jan. 6 Never Ends 

Hunter Explains How We’re Still Living in the Shadow of Jan. 6 

Pardoned Capitol rioters are terrorizing anti-ICE protesters. A former federal prosecutor who marched with the crowd on Jan. 6 is now running Trump’s DOJ task force to root out supposed left-wing political violence. Others who attended Jan. 6 are running for Congress. 

As Hunter Walker told Ali Velshi on MS Now’s The 11th Hour, “Something that we’re adamant about at Talking Points Memo is that January 6 never stopped.” Hunter shared more about the roots of the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy and how it’s loomed over every federal election since Trump first emerged on the scene in 2016. “The [Jan 6] conspirators never really left the Hill, and now we’re bringing them back,” he said. 

@talkingpointsmemo

TPM’s @Hunter Walker joined @Alivelshi on MS Now’s @The 11th Hour to talk about the attacks on our elections. #politics #washington #msnbc #elections #vote

♬ original sound – Talking Points Memo

We Can’t Rename Lake Ontario ‘Cause of…Hamas

Former Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy — best known for leading the House Select Committee on Benghazi and Alan Cumming-esque array of hairstyles — surprised the hosts of Fox News’ The Five last week when he announced that he was on the fence about Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario. Gowdy’s particular concern is not that renaming the lake is pointless, pathetic, demonstrates a complete lack of historical understanding of the names “Ontario” and “America,” and can have no effect other than to inflame an already tense situation, no; Gowdy is worried about Hamas. In a segment titled “Syrup Slap,” he told the hosts of The Five:

Here’s what troubles me. So, it took me 12 years to remember that acronym to learn the great lakes, it’s HOMES, right. Alright, the “O” changes to “A,” that’s close to HAMAS. That’s what bothers me about changing the name from Ontario to America is how close that acronym is to Hamas. It’s going to confuse a lot of kids. That’s why I haven’t made up my mind on it yet.

HOMES → HAMES → HAMAS (?) 🤯. If you’re looking for more delightful wordplay and logic-be-damned plotting, Gowdy has a new novel out titled, “The Sound of Regret” (seriously). 

Markey’s Win Proves You Can’t Run on Generational Change AND Transphobia

Trivia answers: 1) Rep. George Santos (R-NY) 2) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 3) Sexually harassed two young women staffers (by reciting them poetry, buying them lavish gifts including personalized handguns, and inviting them to social outings, including an Adam Sandler show).