Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, 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.
We’ve got another special all-positive newsletter for you this morning. House Democrats are planning to investigate Elon Musk if they win the midterms. New Mexico’s attorney general filed a lawsuit against Jeffrey Epstein’s attorney and accountant. Meta must pay $25 billion for lying to Facebook users about the privacy of their data. And the First Lady of Illinois donated $500,000 to Amy Acton after Vivek Ramaswamy’s campaign aired an attack ad featuring Acton’s abusive mother.
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For $276 million you could buy a social media platform. Oh wait, he did that too.
If the Democrats win control of Congress in the November midterms, House Oversight Committee Democrats plan to investigate Elon Musk, Politico reports. The probes will focus on his large political donations to Republicans and his prior role as head of Trump’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency.
Musk has donated more than $276 million to Republican candidates, committees and his own America PAC since July, according to campaign finance filings, making him the biggest known donor of the 2026 midterms. The Senate Leadership Fund, a super PAC supporting Republican Senate candidates, received the largest donation of $158 million, with another $20 million going to the Congressional Leadership Fund.
His own America PAC, which has been spending directly in competitive congressional races, got over $76 million. Recent filings show spending of more than $800,000 on more than a dozen races, with an emphasis on boosting members of committees that oversee work for his companies.
Musk has authorized America PAC to spend as much as $120 million on a field program to turn out conservative voters in at least eight states ahead of November. The PAC spent more than $260 million on Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign, knocking on over 10 million doors.
Their defense is that they were very bad at their jobs
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez on Wednesday sued Jeffrey Epstein’s longtime attorney Darren Indyke and accountant Richard Kahn, accusing them of conspiracy and racketeering in support of the “Epstein Enterprise.” The suit seeks to block both from receiving any further payments from the Epstein estate, believed to be worth more than $100 million.
Indyke and Kahn are accused of arranging payments to survivors to buy their silence, managing expenses related to the abuse, and preparing tax returns for some of Epstein’s victims. Epstein’s accounts paid out more than $3 million directly to girls and women from 2003 to 2013, according to financial documents cited in the lawsuit.
Torrez reopened the state’s investigation into Epstein this year and sued the Justice Department in August for blocking New Mexico from seeing unredacted documents related to the probe. He said his office made 10 separate requests for key information and was ignored or denied each time.
A 119-page report issued in August by a state commission created by lawmakers found that authorities in New Mexico consistently deferred to federal investigations and failed to scrutinize Epstein’s offenses in the state. Epstein was never charged in New Mexico and was not even required to register as a sex offender there, even after pleading guilty in Florida in 2008.
New Mexico is having one hell of a year against billionaires
A New Mexico judge ordered Meta to pay $25 billion on Wednesday after a jury found the company misled consumers about the privacy of their data. The penalty is one of the largest ever levied against a corporation in American history.
The ruling followed a 2021 lawsuit that alleged Meta lied to New Mexico Facebook users about who had access to their data in the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The British political consulting firm, which helped with Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, obtained data on up to 87 million users without their permission.
In September, a jury found the company had made 26 misleading statements about data privacy and hate speech, totaling more than 43 million violations of New Mexico’s consumer protection laws. Judge Francis Mathew found that state law justified a penalty of more than $219 billion, but reduced the amount to $25 billion.
The ruling comes on top of $942 million in penalties Meta already owes New Mexico from two earlier trials this year. Both involved allegations that the company enabled the sexual exploitation of minors on its platforms.
It’s getting difficult to tell whether Vivek Ramaswamy is running a campaign or a sex offender registry.
First Lady of Illinois MK Pritzker announced Wednesday she donated $500,000 to Ohio gubernatorial nominee Amy Acton after Ramaswamy’s campaign aired an attack ad featuring Acton’s abusive mother. Pritzker called Ramaswamy’s behavior a display of cruelty and dishonesty in the name of power.
The ad features Acton’s mother, Donna Arthur, who accused her daughter of lying. According to court records, Acton was taken from her mother’s care at age 12 after years of documented sexual abuse by her stepfather, who was charged and indicted for rape in 1978.
Pritzker said in a statement: “Bad men gain power when we refuse to stand up and fight. Ramaswamy represents everything that is wrong with our politics today: arrogance, cruelty, dishonesty, and the belief that it’s acceptable to say and do anything for power. This race is about standing up to bullies, confronting extremism, and making damn sure that men who thrive on cruelty and division don’t get a free pass to govern.”
Ramaswamy’s campaign was forced last week to re-edit a separate ad after viewers discovered it featured a convicted child sex offender.
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** Protester Confronts JD Vance Over Epstein Files at Ohio Rally.** At a rally in Ohio on Wednesday, a young man standing directly behind Vice President JD Vance interrupted his speech by shouting “You protected pedophiles!” before throwing a MAGA hat on the ground. It was the second time in three days that Vance has been confronted about the Epstein files at a public event, following a protester in North Carolina on Monday shouting “Release the Epstein files!” and “God bless our children!” The administration has not released the full unredacted Epstein files, even after Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November 2025.
** Republicans Have All But Erased Trump From Their Campaign Ads.** Trump appears in just 1 percent of Republican ads in October, down from 47 percent of their ads in May, according to data from advertising analytics firm AdImpact. Democrats have gone the other way, mentioning the president in 21 percent of their broadcast airings this month. Republican political strategist Mike Madrid told Newsweek that GOP candidates can’t get far enough away from the president fast enough, but that the effort might be too late to save their congressional campaigns. A White House spokesperson insisted there is no distance between Trump and the party’s candidates, calling him the “unequivocal leader, best messenger, and unmatched motivator for the Republican Party.”
** Supreme Court Refuses to Let Trump Strip Medical Care From Transgender Inmates.** The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to lift a lower-court order that stopped the Trump administration from immediately implementing new medical restrictions on transgender people in federal prisons. It was a short order that gave no indication of its legal reasoning, opposed only by Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, ordered continued treatment including hormone therapy, noting that if left untreated, gender dysphoria can cause severe side effects including depression, anxiety and suicidal thoughts. Lawyers for some 600 transgender inmates receiving care said the ruling would prevent serious and irreparable harm.
** Arizona’s Chiricahua Is Set to Become America’s 64th National Park.** The Chiricahua National Park Act has passed Congress with bipartisan support and is now on Trump’s desk, awaiting his signature. The legislation converts the 102-year-old Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona into a national park, marking the first new national park since New River Gorge in West Virginia in 2021. Native Americans refer to it as the Land of Standing-Up Rocks and the bill preserves tribal access for traditional ceremonies. The National Park Service has not said whether it will hire new staff to handle the expected influx of visitors as the agency faces deep workforce cuts under Trump.