#political-influence

#political-influence

It's President Trump's party, and he'll exact revenge if he wants to. That's really the main takeaway from last night's Indiana Republican primaries, Bash said on Inside Politics on Wednesday.

Musk is not just building a rocket company or a satellite company - but what we see is a vertically integrated ideological stack where he can kind of build an echo chamber from low Earth orbit all the way back to Earth and create a kind of closed loop for the ideology that he wants to push out.

"We saw what happened with Susan," Debra Houry, CDC's former chief medical officer who resigned in protest of Kennedy's political interference, told Stat News. "She couldn't make staffing or policy decisions. What has changed? Kennedy hasn't changed."

"I think the people that have run CNN for the last long period of time are a disgrace. I think it's imperative that CNN be sold."

I had no choice. I had to do what I had to do. The directive raised concerns far beyond shelving decisions, reflecting a growing effort to transform libraries into arenas for ideological enforcement.

Hegseth's actions reflect a broader agenda to reshape the military's leadership, prioritizing loyalty to his political beliefs over military experience and competence.

O'Reilly said Miller does not seem to fit that suck-up mold, though, and is more militant about everything than Trump is, including deporting illegal immigrants.

Jesse Armstrong's series about media mogul Logan Roy and his warring children, thought to be based on the Murdochs, was a gripping smash hit, and this documentary is soon excitedly matching the eldest Murdoch siblings—independent Prudence from Rupert's first marriage, dutiful favourite Lachlan, problem child James and brilliant but overlooked Elisabeth—to their Succession counterparts.

He is a GOAT when it comes to Republican primaries. He's a Tom Brady. He is a Babe Ruth. Trump-backed candidates winning 98% of GOP primaries in 2020, 95% in 2022 and 96% in 2024 across congressional and gubernatorial contests. Even when Trump backs challengers running against incumbents, the analyst added, typically a difficult path in party primaries, those candidates win a majority of the time.

Barron Trump is listed as a director of Sollos Yerba Mate Inc., a startup set to launch in April. Business filings show the company is registered to a $16 million, five-bedroom home near Mar-a-Lago owned by Jay Weitzman, a businessman who has donated to Trump and whose parking company has received federal contracts for years.

We've been told to aim our reporting at a particular part of the political spectrum. Honestly, I don't know how to do that. The memo comes a day after CBS News owner Paramount Skydance emerged as the likely victor in a takeover fight for Warner Bros Discovery, owner of CNN. CBS is now headed by Bari Weiss, a conservative commentator turned media entrepreneur, whose appointment was seen as a fillip to the Trump administration.

A terrifying moment. We appeal for your support. The need for truthful, grassroots reporting is urgent at this cataclysmic historical moment. Yet, Trump-aligned billionaires and other allies have taken over many legacy media outlets - the culmination of a decades-long campaign to place control of the narrative into the hands of the political right. We refuse to let Trump's blatant propaganda machine go unchecked.

The contrast is striking: In Europe, some people whose names come up in the Epstein files are facing consequences but in the U.S., not so much. European royals, government officials, politicians and others are losing jobs and titles over their connection to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. European law enforcement agencies are opening investigations based on recent troves of documents released by the U.S. government.

Last year, the Super Bowl emanated from the eye of the vibe shift. Donald Trump had just scored his first popular-vote victory, remaking American consensus, and brands far and wide scrambled to meet the tastes of a newly MAGAfied polity. In practice, that mostly resulted in a revival of obnoxious early 2000s machismo-girls in bikinis, Shane Gillis, dewy-eyed tributes to the heartland, and so on. It was a bleak enterprise.

More than three-quarters of Germans reject the idea of buying an electric car from the US manufacturer Tesla, according to a recent survey by the German Economic Institute (IW). Some 60% of respondents said buying a Tesla was "completely out of the question," while another 16% said they would "probably not" purchase a car from US tech billionaire Elon Musk's company, which saw sales fall by 13% worldwide in the first quarter of 2025, by 45% in Europe, and by 62% in Germany.

The grants continue the Trump administration's funding of university programs labeled as civics, civil discourse, Western civilization, great books and other topics that many conservatives back. Earlier this month, the administration announced it awarded nearly $38 million in other grants to civil discourse efforts at universities. Now the NEH, which the Trump administration overhauled last year, says it's further fueling the spread of such initiatives.

Indeed, Meta says that various legal cases in this area have " selectively cited Meta's internal documents to construct a misleading narrative," which suggests that Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp have harmed teens, and that Meta has prioritized growth over their well-being.

The vote formalized plans announced last year to wind down operations [for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting] after lawmakers voted to strip more than $500 million in annual funding from the organization. Executives have been emptying the corporation's coffers in recent months by making grants to public media organizations. After the federal funding ended, executives at the corporation discussed putting the organization into hibernation, keeping it alive in case Congress eventually voted to restore its federal appropriation.

A Brooklyn power-broker threw another wrench into a multimillion-dollar court case now on its fifth judge - by personally phoning the latest jurist, the judge revealed Tuesday. Former borough Democratic Party Chair Frank Seddio - who has been ripped in a federal lawsuit tied to a state case involving more than $2 million in missing investor money - recently called the judge handling the state case, Francios Rivera, on his personal cell phone, the jurist said in court. An exasperated Rivera said Seddio called him to tell him a lawyer who used to work for the judge as a legal secretary was being made an acting supreme court judge.

For a while last year, scientists offered a glimmer of hope that artificial intelligence would make a positive contribution to democracy. They showed that chatbots could address conspiracy theories racing across social media, challenging misinformation around beliefs in issues such as chemtrails and the flat Earth with a stream of reasonable facts in conversation. But two new studies suggest a disturbing flipside: The latest AI models are getting even better at persuading people at the expense of the truth.