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White House insiders are now saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could be fired as soon as Thanksgiving if Republicans fail to keep their majorities after the midterms. Bari Weiss’ CBS News is under fire for a social media post that implies a link between Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and the 9/11 attacks. New reporting shows Republican Senator Susan Collins of Maine has raked in millions of dollars from donors with ties to Jeffrey Epstein as she battles for another six-year term. And Donald Trump insists that any American community that doesn’t want a massive data center in its backyard is doomed to be “backwards and poor.”
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Multiple people close to the Trump White House are saying Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s head will be the first to roll after the midterms, and that he could be out of a job before Thanksgiving if Republicans lose badly in November.
Former Obama aide Christopher Hale — who appeared on Raw America in April — has said his sources in and around the West Wing are confiding to him that Hegseth could be the president’s scapegoat given that the Iran war is driving Trump’s approval ratings into the gutter.
This comes after a bombshell report from the Washington Post found that Hegseth’s Pentagon has been quietly paying conservative influencers to defend him online. These are retired veteran officers with significant social media followings who started cheerleading for Hegseth once they got their Pentagon assignments. The DoD won’t even say what those influencers are officially doing.
Hale says that report almost assures that Hegseth will be sent packing this fall.
It’s not hard to see why the pressure is mountinf for the the part-time weekend Fox News host-turned-defense secretary. Hegseth has already caused significant alarm inside the Pentagon by purging top generals. And he’s since become the face of Trump’s deeply unpopular war in Iran.
His own top military brass has warned him earlier this month that Trump’s war is no longer sustainable without an exit plan. Hegseth keeps insisting otherwise.
Even Republicans have had enough of the Pentagon chief. In May, outgoing Senator Thom Tillis of North Carolina told Politico he hoped Trump would fire his defense secretary before the next Congress gavels into session. Tillis made sure to blame Hegseth specifically for the chaotic messaging around the initial strikes on Iran and said the defense secretary completely misled the president on the entire operation.
Keep an eye on this story. Republicans are already looking for someone to blame for a bad midterm night, meaning they not only know that it likely won’t go their way, but that they’ll need a scapegoat to save face.
Sponsored Kalshi Question: Will members of Congress be banned from trading stocks?
CBS News’ official X account 𝕏published a post on Monday that seemed to connect Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the September 11th attacks.
The post framed El-Sayed as someone who “may be facing renewed scrutiny” over comments he made back in 2020, when he was executive director of the Detroit Health Department during the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic. At the time, El-Sayed called for Americans to show the same united national resolve against the pandemic that the country showed after 9/11. In a separate post, he pointed out that because more Americans died from Covid than from 9/11, he expressed hope that meant the country would spend the next decade fighting poverty and disease with the same energy spent fighting terrorism.
That’s it. That’s the entire controversy. If you can even call it that.
The backlash to the post was swift. Economist Dean Baker said the post looked like straight-up “anti-Muslim bigotry.” Journalist Parker Molloy of The Present Age Substack called the post “an insane tweet with an insane headline.” NPR Marketplace editor Steve Mullis wrote on Bluesky that the way CBS was framing stories made it look indistinguishable from right-wing outlets like Fox News and Breitbart.
Researcher Jared Holt, who Raw America interviewed in May, pointed out that this is a familiar genre of news story. He explained that whenever an outlet claims someone is facing scrutiny from a vague, unnamed source, the outlet itself is almost always the one intentionally manufacturing the scrutiny.
Leftist Twitch streamer Hasan Piker connected the post straight back to CBS’ ownership, saying this is exactly why MAGA billionaire David Ellison bought the network and installed Bari Weiss as editor-in-chief. Democratic Congresswoman Yassamin Ansari of Arizona called the post “blatantly racist.”
It’s worth remembering here that Weiss had exactly zero television news experience before Ellison put her in charge of one of the biggest and most influential newsrooms in the world. She’s even bragged in the past about not owning a television. It’s almost like she was put in her role for ideological reasons rather than for actual merit.
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Maine GOP Senator Susan Collins is facing new questions about where her campaign donations are really coming from.
Federal filings show Collins and her associated PACs have spent years collecting checks from oligarchs with extensive ties to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. That includes Jay Lefkowitz, the lawyer who negotiated Epstein’s 2008 sweetheart plea deal that was widely criticized as a slap on the wrist, and billionaire Leon Black, who once paid Epstein a whopping $158 million for financial planning services despite Epstein having no formal certification as an accountant, tax attorney or financial planner.
Other prominent names on Collins’ donor list with documented links to Epstein include Bill Gates, sports mogul Casey Wasserman, and Palantir co-founder Peter Thiel, who has also funded the controversial Flock cameras that are on virtually every street corner.
Maine Democratic Party spokesperson Misha Linnehan argued that after spending three decades in Washington, Collins has clearly taken the side of billionaire class and the Epstein class. He also pointed out that Susan Collins voted against releasing the Epstein files.
Casey Wasserman, who reportedly flew on Epstein’s plane, gave Collins roughly $10,000. Bill Gates, who testified to Congress in June that Epstein tried to blackmail him, gave over $24,000. Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman gave $3 million to a pro-Collins super PAC.
So far, none of these donors have been charged with any crimes relating to Epstein. But the optics are bad for Collins, who is running against former Maine Senate President Troy Jackson. A recent Fox News poll actually has Jackson ahead, by a slim margin of 48 to 46.
Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesperson Maddy McDaniel said Mainers are taking note of Collins prioritizing wealthy special interests and billionaires over working-class Maine voters, and predicted they’ll vote her out this fall.
Trump is continuing to double down on the buildout of massive AI data centers across the country, while hurling insults at anyone who objects to them.
In a Monday post to his Truth Social account, Trump wrote that the only reason a community wouldn’t want a data center is if it wants to end be “backwards and poor.” He added that killing what he called the golden goose would be on the communities themselves, many of which are rural and in deep-red states.
But data centers have become politically toxic according to the latest polls, with the vast majority of Americans saying they don’t want to live anywhere near a data center. Lawmakers from both parties of the political aisle have criticized data centers for overloading power grids, causing severe strain on water systems and churning out nonstop industrial noise.
Even Republicans know that data centers are reviled by most Americans. Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who is in a tight reelection race of his own, just imposed new regulations on data centers after spending the last year celebrating them. Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers and Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Stacy Garrity have each called for a temporary halt on some data center construction projects.
Vice President JD Vance acknowledged that many Americans associate data center construction with higher utility bills. He supported their ongoing construction but with a requirement that companies who are building them should pledge to put power back into the grid rather than draining it dry.
Trump continues to argue that data centers are essential to beating China in the AI race, and claimed China is thrilled every time an American community pushes back against one. The president immediately criticized New York after it became the first state to pause new data center infrastructure back in July. It remains to be seen whether Trump’s support of data centers will last should voters blame his party for them in the midterms, as appears to be the case in Ohio.
Today’s edition showed you why the billionaire-owned legacy outlets can’t be counted on to give you the full picture. David Ellison’s handpicked editor at CBS is trafficking in blatant Islamophobia and exploiting one of the worst tragedies in American history all to smear a Democratic candidate. And we all know none of the MAGA oligarchs devouring media outlets one newsroom at a time would ever call out a sitting Republican senator for taking money from Epstein’s rich friends. But Raw America has no wealthy backer demanding we pull stories that offend them. We answer only to you.
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I’m British Chris with Raw America. Thank you again for reading and for supporting independent media. And if you haven’t yet, click the ❤️ and restack this post so we can break through to more feeds.
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