Good morning. I’m Thom Hartmann. If you’re watching this on Substack, help us out by taking a few seconds to click the ❤️ and tap the restack icon. That’s what makes sure these stories get in front of the most people.
Republicans running for reelection in competitive races say Donald Trump is becoming a distraction for them on the campaign trail. CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss reportedly instructed the network to link Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. A former federal prosecutor argues that Congress could impeach Trump for murder over his boat strikes in the Caribbean that have killed hundreds of people. And Meta — the parent company of Facebook and Instagram — is now being accused of suppressing protest after it locked out administrators of the “No Kings” Instagram account on Saturday’s day of protests.
**One more thing before getting to the news: the billionaires are pulling out all the stops to maintain their grip on power, and we need your help to fight back. **This weekend was a prime example of how harmful billionaire ownership of the media really is: David Ellison’s handpicked editor-in-chief of CBS is going out of her way to smear a Democratic candidate in a swing state Senate race. Mark Zuckerberg’s company is trying to stop images of mass protests against the Trump regime from spreading online.
There are only two weeks to go before the midterms, and Republican candidates are now saying Donald Trump keeps distracting them from their message. GOP candidates were hoping to spend the final stretch of the election cycle talking about things like the One Big Beautiful Bill, lower drug prices and the Trump accounts for kids.
Instead, candidates have had to field questions about a planned livestream of a firing squad execution (which has since been scuttled over public backlash), taxpayer-funded propaganda ads on TV and a controversial deal to import Russian diesel from Vladimir Putin’s regime. Even Republican Senator Darline Graham of South Carolina has criticized Trump for exempting Russia from a sanctions law written by her late brother, Senator Lindsey Graham.
Trump also can’t help himself from hounding members of his own party, including Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar of Florida, Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas, th outgoing Senator John Cornyn of Texas and longtime Republican strategist Karl Rove. One unnamed senior Republican operative anonymously confided to Politico that candidates are often learning about Trump’s moves at the same time as voters, meaning they’re “caught flat-footed a lot of the time.”
Voters are paying attention to Trump’s actions. A recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found 86 percent of respondents, including 80 percent of Republicans, thought it was inappropriate for the administration to use taxpayer funds to promote the president. Republicans are openly worried about the possibility of losing reliably red Senate seats in Alaska, Iowa, Kansas and Texas. Many are also pessimistic about keeping the House of Representatives in Republican hands as voters vent their frustration about the ongoing war with Iran and its impact on gas prices.
Allies of the president maintain his presence is necessary to drive up GOP turnout. Former George W. Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said Democrats are “pouring out to the polls no matter what Trump does,” meaning Republicans have nothing to lose by putting him on the stump. A recent Pew Research survey found Democrats were 17 percentage points more likely than Republicans to say they’re “extremely motivated” to vote on November 3.
Congress passed the Hatch Act back in 1939 because Americans were united against the prospect of a federal government spending their tax money to promote the man at the top. When even 80 percent of Republicans agree with that viewpoint, the problem is no longer with campaign messaging, but with the president who thinks the U.S. Treasury is his own personal bank account.
This next one is a great example of why billionaire ownership of the media is so toxic for democracy. Semafor is now reporting that CBS News Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss — the right-wing opinion columnist handpicked by billionaire owner David Ellison to run one of the biggest newsrooms in the world — has repeatedly urged reporters to find anything that may link Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. Apparently the whole thing traces back to a 2012 tweet from his half-sister about their mother’s Egyptian activism in the early 1970s.
Weiss reportedly brought it up on several editorial calls and even assigned the network’s investigative team comb through El-Sayed’s background. It’s still not clear whether anything new will be revealed in stories to come. Some CBS staffers accuse Weiss of routinely chasing down conspiracy theories about Democratic candidates that proliferate on social media or that originate in far-right outlets. This includes a widely debunked rumor that Texas Senate candidate James Talarico was in a mental health facility in Ohio when he was actually just recovering from the flu at his home in Texas.
El-Sayed has continued to deny having any ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. His supporters liken the talking point to a thinly disguised form of Islamophobia. El-Sayed — ** who Raw America interviewed in April** — told Semafor his parents divorced when he was three and that he didn’t see his mother for years. He’s asking Michiganders to judge him by his long body of work as a doctor and public health advocate rather than because he “might pray differently than anybody who’s ever held this office.”
Article VI of the Constitution makes it clear that there will never be any religious test required for any candidate running for office. The men who authored it had just lived through centuries of Europe ripping itself to pieces over religious feuds. When the head of a newsroom whose reporting regularly reaches tens of millions of people uses the network’s resources to put a Muslim candidate’s mother’s politics from 50 years ago under the microscope, she’s conducting the exact kind of religious test the founders wanted to eliminate.
Former federal prosecutor Frank Bowman spent over six years pursuing drug smugglers in Miami. He’s now arguing in a new essay for Slate that the Trump administration’s boat strikes in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific are acts of murder that Congress should view as impeachable offenses.
Since September of last year, the U.S. military has carried out strikes against 70 suspected drug boats, killing 234 people as of September 2026. There was never any attempt to stop the boats and search them for drugs or to arrest the people on board. In one infamous strike, the military conducted a subsequent strike to kill survivors of the first strike who were clinging to floating debris.
Bowman wrote that throughout his career, he’s watched infrared footage nearly identical to the boat strikes — except the videos he watched ended with arrests and trials. The clips that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is sharing on social media end in explosions. Bowman didn’t hold back, calling them “official snuff films.”
Both federal law and the Uniform Code of Military Justice make it clear that unlawful killings on the high seas qualify as murder. Just as police can’t use deadly force on a suspect who isn’t posing a threat, neither can the military blow up boats that don’t appear to be threatening anyone. A United Nations report also alleged the strikes could be viewed as crimes against humanity.
The Trump administration is claiming the boats carry fentanyl, even though most of the fentanyl in America comes from Mexico, while these boats come from South America. And Trump bombing the boats over alleged drug activity is undermined by his pardon of former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, who had been convicted of helping to traffic roughly 400 tons of cocaine into the United States.
Because the Supreme Court’s 2024 Trump v. United States ruling grants Trump criminal immunity from all official acts, impeachment may be the only measure of accountability that’s still on the table. But because roughly half of the American public supports the strikes, Bowman is suggesting that a new Congress first conduct a public investigation and only add the impeachment charge if public opinion turns against the administration.
During the Nuremberg Trials, American prosecutors established that killing people who pose no threat and could have instead been captured is a crime, and that simply following orders isn’t a valid excuse for murder. Back then, we hanged the men who did it. But 80 years later, an American president is not only directly ordering killings, but posting the footage of it for social media clout. The question remaining is whether America still believes in the rules it once wrote for the rest of the world.
Our last story this morning: Meta is being accused of deliberately suspending the No Kings movement’s Instagram account during Saturday’s national day of action. There were protests and rallies in roughly 3,000 cities and towns across the country to urge Americans to vote early. Administrators were aiming to post images and videos of the protests to spread the word. Instead, they were locked out for the better part of the day.
Meta first attributed the outage to an automated error. But later, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said Instagram’s internal security systems flagged an AI tool apparently reading profiles, posts and hashtags at roughly four times the usual rate, which it interpreted as bot activity. While the account itself was back online about an hour after the outage, restoring administrators’ access took longer, and Stone apologized for the confusion and inconvenience.
No Kings organizers didn’t buy it, and said Meta’s suspension of the account was “uncceptable.” The group said the suspension was tantamount to a massive corporation suppressing efforts to get the word out about early voting ahead of a major election. Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut brought up the possibility of an official investigation, calling the account suspension a “total indictment” of Meta’s enormous influence on our political system, regardless of whether or not it was an honest mistake.
Louis Brandeis warned a century ago that democracy is in peril when a small number of private men own the channels through which citizens speak to one another. Back then he was talking about railroads and banks, but today a single company is capable of silencing a movement of millions just weeks before a nationwide election. The fact that this was likely a mere accident is the entire point, because no single entity should have so much power that a mistake could have that much of an impact.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media. Once again, please be sure to click the ❤️ and restack this post so we can reach the people who really need these stories.
