Good afternoon. I’m Ryan Rose, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
Trump is asking an appeals court to erase his 34 felony convictions. Pete Hegseth’s wife is under fire for taking a huge payment from one of Lockheed Martin’s firms. Trump’s State Department is giving $1 million to a controversial South African group that advocates for white people. And the administration has taken more than 500 actions to weaken protections against cancer-causing chemicals.
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If paying hush money to a porn star counts as an official act of the presidency, we all owe Bill Clinton an apology.
A New York appeals court Thursday heard arguments on whether to overturn Trump’s 34 felony convictions of falsifying business records. The case concerns a $130,000 payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels that was arranged by Trump’s former lawyer, Michael Cohen, to silence her about an alleged sexual encounter before the 2016 election.
In court filings, Trump’s lawyers argue the entire prosecution was the result of political pressure on a Democratic district attorney. They call the legal theory behind the charges a house of cards, relying on a shaky mix of state and federal crimes.
The appeal also questions whether jurors should have been allowed to hear testimony about conversations and social media posts from Trump’s first term in the White House. His lawyers said evidence should have been excluded under presidential immunity because a president responding to allegations of personal misconduct is supposedly carrying out his constitutional duties.
The Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office pushed back, saying the legal theory was legitimate and the White House evidence fair game. In a July filing, Bragg’s appeals chief wrote that a president’s discussions of a purely private matter do not become official acts merely because they take place in the Oval Office.
Most married couples fight about who will do the dishes, not about who’s getting defense contract money.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s wife Jennifer was paid last year by a consulting firm that has Lockheed Martin as a client, financial disclosures show. Lockheed Martin received more than $66 billion from the U.S. government in fiscal year 2025, with 63 percent of the company’s sales going to the Pentagon.
The firm, Watchtower Strategy, is chaired by former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and was launched days after Hegseth was sworn in as defense secretary in January 2025. A spokesperson told Politico Jennifer helped the firm navigate conservative TV media and had no client contact or involvement in defense matters.
Jennifer has faced ongoing scrutiny for her role at the Pentagon, where she attended meetings with foreign defense officials and was included in a private Signal group chat in which Hegseth shared details about planned U.S. airstrikes in Yemen. The Pentagon has not confirmed if she has security clearance.
Hegseth’s future at the Pentagon is already uncertain for other reasons. Trump has asked advisers whether he should keep his job after Republican losses in the midterms, while Republican Representative Thomas Massie has filed articles of impeachment against him over the Iran war.
The State Department used to spend this money fighting child exploitation in Afghanistan, but apparently that hit a little too close to home.
Trump’s State Department is redirecting nearly $1 million to AfriForum, a South African nonprofit that lobbies on behalf of white Afrikaners. The money will be used for research into what the group describes as targeted violence against white South Africans, a claim that has been repeatedly disputed by independent researchers and the South African government.
Independent researchers, official government statistics and two formal inquiries have found no pattern of targeted violence against Afrikaners. The killings that do happen are a small fraction of murders in a country where victims are disproportionately black people in poor urban areas.
Trump has brushed aside those findings and repeatedly said white farmers are the target of genocide. He signed an executive order in February 2025 that cut off hundreds of millions of dollars in aid to South Africa and opened the door for Afrikaners to come to the United States as refugees.
The administration has taken in more than 16,000 white South Africans as refugees, while halting virtually all other immigration. Officials have told Congress they intend to invite up to 17,500 Afrikaner refugees to the U.S. in 2027.
In the fight between Americans and cancer, the Trump administration picked cancer.
The Trump administration has taken more than 500 steps across the federal government to weaken protections against cancer-causing chemicals, the Natural Resources Defense Council reported recently. Almost every agency involved in safeguarding public health has been affected by the rollbacks, including the EPA, the CDC, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and OSHA.
For decades, the EPA has worked on the principle that no level of exposure to a carcinogen is safe. The Trump EPA, however, treats some exposure as acceptable. The shift has already weakened protections against formaldehyde, and is shaping how the agency regulates hexavalent chromium in drinking water.
The agency has issued presidential waivers to polluters to release carcinogens into the air and delayed deadlines for chemical companies to provide cancer data on benzene and vinyl chloride. It also has started allowing short-term computer models in place of the long-term human and animal studies that scientists say are the only reliable way to measure cancer risk.
Anonymous EPA staff say the changes are coming from the top of the agency, where former industry officials now hold sway. One employee described the process as methodical, and said it’s exactly what the chemical industry has been looking for years.
Yesterday happened because millions of people refused to be told what to think by billionaires trying to buy an election. Independent media played a role in that. We told you about the Epstein coverup, the deportation abuses, and the corruption that the mainstream media tried to bury.
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** Top Justice Department Official Resigns in First Post-Election Departure.** Harmeet Dhillon, the former assistant attorney general for civil rights, resigned Thursday, becoming the first senior Trump administration official to leave office after the midterm losses. Dhillon overhauled her division to gut civil rights protections, boasted that the office would end diversity initiatives, and packed the civil rights office with lawyers with criminal records and misconduct allegations. In September, she said that the DOJ had dropped more than 50 desegregation cases, most of them in states in the South with Jim Crow histories. Her departure could signal a wave of departures from an administration losing its grip on Washington.
Elon Musk Quietly Deletes Posts After Spending Nearly $500 Million on Midterms. Elon Musk quietly deleted his Election Day post telling people to vote Republican after results showed Democrats sweeping the midterms. His own AI chatbot, Grok, helpfully confirmed to users who asked that it was gone. Musk spent around $474 million on Super PACs and individual contributions this cycle, including an estimated $224 million in Texas alone to defeat Senate candidate James Talarico. Talarico won by 13 points, becoming the first Democrat to win a Texas Senate seat since 1988.
** Massie Forces House Vote on Releasing Complete Epstein Files.** Outgoing Representative Thomas Massie has filed a new discharge petition to force a vote in the House on his Epstein Files Transparency Act II. The legislation would give state attorneys general access to federal investigative files on Jeffrey Epstein, filling a gap in the original law that left prosecution authority with the Justice Department. Massie and California Democrat Ro Khanna spearheaded the original push that led to Trump signing the first Epstein Files Transparency Act, but both lawmakers slammed former Attorney General Pam Bondi for holding back key documents from the first release.
** Stanford Scientists Discover Method to Reverse Coral Bleaching.** Stanford University researchers have documented the first known case of bleached corals recovering fully through brief physical contact with healthy genetic clones, in as little as seven weeks under laboratory conditions. The discovery was partly accidental when study co-author Steve Palumbi noticed that a healthy coral fragment and a bleached fragment had toppled over in a tank and were touching, and the bleaching had started to reverse. The healthy coral introduced beneficial algae by direct contact with the bleached tissue, returning the organism to full health. Now the team is trying to work out how to extract the algae and grow it in a laboratory.
