As wildfires continue to burn all around Los Angeles, influencers have emerged to promote sales of their own, highly specific solutions to the crisis. With smoke filling the air of many neighborhoods, the wellness machine has sprung into action, promoting tinctures, detox products, essential oils, parasite cleanses, and even raw milk as “treatments” for its effects.

The fires began in earnest on Tuesday, January 7. By that Thursday, Mallory DeMille, a correspondent for the Conspirituality podcast, says she noted an “immediate influx” of people promoting products on Instagram and TikTok by trying to tie them to the fires. The situation, DeMille says, is “heartbreaking and really irresponsible.”

“How do you know you can trust them… if they’re financially driven to sell products and services?”

In a recent Instagram video, DeMille outlined the ways that wellness influencers are, as she put it, “trying to capitalize” on the wildfires and their potential negative health effects. Many focus on the impact of wildfire smoke on people’s lungs, and suggest potential “treatments,” including supplements, powders, and essential oils, alongside often-cited “detox” tools like drinking apple cider vinegar or taking activated charcoal.

While activated charcoal is used in emergency settings to mitigate swallowed poisons, there is no evidence it can “detox” lungs or any other body part. It can also decrease the effectiveness of medication. In general, bodily organs do not need to be “detoxed” or “supported” with supplements, some of which can cause additional harm.

One particularly impassioned detox influencer, Ginger DeClue—who offers online detoxing seminars and describes herself as a “master healer”—suggested on Instagram that Los Angeles deserved its fate. “Everything that’s burning needs to burn,” she said in a video post that pushed the notion the city is suffused with toxic mold.

“Los Angeles has been a den of evil, SA [sexual assault] and child abuse, moldy overpriced apartments and buildings, with no HVAC maintenance. crappy store fronts and hollyWEIRD since 1920,” she wrote. “God don’t like ugly in the span of a night he promises to destroy evil: but RESTORE the RIGHTEOUS.”

Some of the advice promoted by influencers and doctors who use social media have included commonsense, low-risk strategies that public health departments also recommend: using an air purifier at home, a saline nasal spray to help with irritation and congestion, and wearing high-quality masks outdoors.

But many are promoting products they have financial incentives to recommend, DeMille says, offering discount codes for products they already sold before the fires. “How do you know you can trust them with your health and wellness,” she asks, “if they’re financially driven to sell products and services?”

What’s happening with the wildfires is similar to the bogus cures and “detoxes” that have been offered throughout the Covid pandemic. Essential oils have been promoted as “immune support” for people trying to prevent Covid, along with a huge body of evidence-less products have sprung up for people who want to “detox” from the effects of Covid vaccines or being near people who have been vaccinated. (Vaccine detox was promoted by some in the alt-wellness world even before Covid.) 

“Wellness influencers are always leveraging tragedies,” DeMille points out, “but typically they’re personal tragedies”—say, telling sick people to try their products while undergoing cancer treatments or chronic illness.

“Leveraging a community tragedy isn’t that a long of a walk,” she adds.

As climate disasters continue to happen more frequently—and the world faces a new potential pandemic in the form of bird flu—business looks extremely good for wellness influencers adept at turning disease and disasters into marketing hooks.

For the last two mornings, I’ve woken up from broken sleep in my house on Los Angeles’ east side in a blind panic, the smell of smoke permeating the air. The light slanting in is a horrible, eerie orange, illuminating the white kitchen cabinets like a nightmare projection screen. When I climb onto the roof, the air in every direction is full of dark, low, menacing clouds fed by smoke, blocking out the mountains and trees even just a few miles away.

Every wildfire is accused of not being a wildfire, but a planned attack to further sinister ends.

Our car is packed. Our important documents are in a tote bag by the back door. Every ping from the Watch Duty app, which sends out real-time fire alerts, sends me scrambling for my phone. I’m anxiously scrutinizing the perimeter of the Eaton fire, which has destroyed the homes of friends and community landmarks I love, willing it not to jump the 134 highway, praying today will be the day that helitankers will be able to slow the spread. I watch helplessly as the other fires across town engulf homes, businesses, send pets and livestock fleeing alone, reduce lives and memories to ash. I pray the death toll doesn’t mount higher. I watch friends and acquaintances on Instagram reporting from where they’ve evacuated, haggard and blank-faced with shock in hotel rooms and packed cars. I don’t know what kind of city we’ll have waiting for us on the other side of this. 

Naturally, then, as a journalist who’s covered conspiracy theories and disinformation for many years, it’s been reassuring to learn that the disaster threatening my safety can be blamed on false flag attacks, Democrat plotting, the evils of diversity, and—say it with me—the Jews. A disaster is a ripe moment for conspiracy peddlers to ply their wares, and a historic series of fires threatening a major city—especially one filled with Democrats, non-white people and wealthy celebrities—has sent the machine into overdrive. The theories being spread about the Los Angeles fires, as Nitish Pahwa wrote yesterday, are a mix of climate change denialism and attempts to pin the disasters on their usual and preferred villains. Perhaps most disturbing of all, they also contain an ugly dose of celebration and schadenfreude. “The Hollywood Hills are on fire,” are burning, tweeted an account associated with the network of Stew Peters, a far-right and deeply antisemitic podcaster. “It’s almost poetic.”  

Some of the themes emerging are consistent: pretty much every wildfire is accused of not being a wildfire at all, but a planned attack meant to further some sinister end. This serves two purposes: casting doubt on the established science of climate change, and finding a more politically useful target to pin a disaster on. Conspiracy peddlers blamed the devastating 2018 wildfires in Northern California on “directed energy weapons,” a tidy mix of climate change skepticism blended with endless paranoia about what the government is capable of perpetrating on its own citizens. Typically, proponents’ “evidence” for this will be claiming that the fire is displaying unusual or suspicious behavior, unlike a “normal” fire. Those ideas quickly surfaced this week: Stew Peters, for instance, claimed that in some firestruck areas “none of the bushes and trees were disturbed at all” and the “lawns are still green,” adding, “the government wants to kill you and then they want to steal your land.” (This is, needless to say, simple bullshit: landscaping, brush, hedges and lawns have all been very much “disturbed” in fire-damaged areas.)  

“[O]ur Government who is working hand in glove with the WEF and Blackrock, is PURPOSELY setting fires using Military grade DEWs in these areas to initiate a MASSIVE LAND GRAB,” read another post representative of the theory, made on X by someone calling himself The Patriot Voice. Their account is verified, meaning that the user pays for Twitter and thus has the visibility of their posts and replies boosted on the site. The post has so far been viewed 180,000 times.  

The other common target from far-right conspiracists has been “DEI initiatives,” as a way of pushing the idea that Los Angeles’ fire and emergency services are somehow too woke to effectively fight fires, with characters like Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok devoting endless tweets to the fact that the Los Angeles Fire Department chief Kristin M. Crowley is a lesbian. 

As with a lot of conspiracy theories, the particular line of attack has been repeated by other more mainstream sources, including the Daily Wire, ex-Fox host Megyn Kelly, and the Federalist, who proclaimed that the LAFD is “DEI-crazed” and thus “made the fires worse.” Blogger Beth Brelje objected to the fact that the LAFD’s strategic plan didn’t use the word “hydrant” but talked about diversity and sustainability. While the plan doesn’t use that particular word and does include such projects, it discusses a wide range of goals in the sprawling department, including wildfire fighting preparedness. Fire hydrants near the Pacific Palisades fire didn’t run dry because of diversity; they ran dry because of an enormous demand for water to fight fires.

Infowars and a variety of other conspiracy sites also claimed that the LAFD was flat-footed because “most of their supplies were sent to Ukraine,” a claim repeated by Donald Trump Jr. In fact, the LAFD sent surplus equipment to Ukraine three years ago, part of a national effort by fire departments to send aid. The “hoses, nozzles, turnouts, helmets, body armor, and other associated personal protective equipment” scrounged up, per the release, was packed up into just five pallets of gear, per a news story at the time—an amount irrelevant to what’s been needed to battle the current, devastating blazes.  

Some longtime conspiracy peddlers opted to take a more blanket approach, throwing out a list of buzzwords rather than pin responsibility for the fires on any one source. “Communist China sabotage teams?,” tweeted far-right personality and Pizzagate promoter Mike Cernovich. “Druggies? Random criminals doing arson? In Soros County LA, you can never know who is lighting these fires.”

Despite the ugliness that I see every time I look at my phone for too long, out in the real world, there have been moments of beauty and solidarity. I’m on a text chain with my closest neighbors, which has been full of advice, gentle check-ins, and moments of delirious celebration: when work crews got our power turned back on we joked about who’d be the first outside to meet them with a bottle of tequila. (They vanished before I could dig out the good stuff, sadly.)

Astonishingly, we’ve gotten regular mail deliveries; our mask-wearing mail carrier cheerfully greeted me with some letters, and told me, “I’m just pretending like it’s snow,” gesturing at the ash falling on our heads. Friends and acquaintances and family and total strangers have checked in, some offering their addresses as places to go.  My brother-in-law offered to get in the car and drive to me. In the midst of a disaster, there are always moments of genuine warmth and solidarity. But none of them come from the people who are in the business of peddling fear and panic.   

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a specific shoutout.

In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” 

Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.” 

“If you can say it on TV, you can say on the floor of Congress,” Kaplan said, “you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.” 

Since the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic abated, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop policing disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its Covid misinformation policy in 2022, and then followed up by establishing a laissez faire attitude towards both general disinformation and hate speech. Meta conducted mass layoffs in May of 2023 that gutted the teams responsible for stemming disinformation and hate speech. Trump himself was, of course, banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his accounts were reinstated in 2023, with the company promising “new guardrails to deter repeat offenses.” 

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.

As Big Tech scrambles to placate Donald Trump before he reassumes office, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced Tuesday that his company would replace their fact-checkers with user-generated Community Notes, beginning in the United States and then rolling out globally. Zuckerberg said in a video and in an announcement on Threads that the shift—largely the same system that Twitter/X uses—represented a return to the company’s roots and way of “restoring free speech.” He acknowledged, however, that the change “means that we’re going to catch less bad stuff,” adding, “but we’ll also reduce the number of innocent people’s posts and accounts that we accidentally take down.”

Even as the incoming president threatens news outlets, Zuckerberg gave Trump a specific shoutout.

In his pre-recorded video and in his Threads post, Zuckerberg said the company planned to “simplify our content policies and remove restrictions on topics like immigration and gender that are out of touch with mainstream discourse.” He pledged to “remove the vast majority of censorship mistakes by focusing our filters on tackling illegal and high-severity violations and requiring higher confidence for our filters to take action.” In a particularly curious detail, he also announced plans to “move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.” 

Zuckerberg also gave Trump a specific shoutout in his Threads announcement, writing that the company will “work with President Trump to push back against foreign governments going after American companies to censor more.” Even as the incoming president and his allies threaten news outlets, the United States, Zuckerberg argued, “has the strongest constitutional protections for free expression in the world and the best way to defend against the trend of government overreach on censorship is with the support of the US government.”

The New York Times reported Tuesday that incoming Trump administration officials were given a heads-up about the new policies before they were announced. As they were being rolled out, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, Joel Kaplan, sat for an exclusive interview on Fox and Friends. Kaplan called the new setup “a great opportunity for us to reset the balance in favor of free expression.” The third-party fact-checking system, Kaplan told the beaming Fox hosts, “had too much political bias in what they choose to fact-check, and how.” Kaplan added that people want to “discuss and debate” topics like “ immigration, trans issues [and] gender.” 

“If you can say it on TV, you can say on the floor of Congress,” Kaplan said, “you certainly ought to be able to say it on Facebook and Instagram without fear of censorship.” 

Since the emergency phase of the Covid pandemic abated, social media companies have shown a strong desire to stop policing disinformation on their platforms. Under Elon Musk, Twitter rolled back its Covid misinformation policy in 2022, and then followed up by establishing a laissez faire attitude towards both general disinformation and hate speech. Meta conducted mass layoffs in May of 2023 that gutted the teams responsible for stemming disinformation and hate speech. Trump himself was, of course, banned from Facebook and Instagram for two years following the insurrection attempt at the Capitol on January 6, 2021; his accounts were reinstated in 2023, with the company promising “new guardrails to deter repeat offenses.” 

Zuckerberg’s announcement comes shortly after Meta announced that it would donate $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee, part of a round of Big Tech companies who are doing the same.

Axios reported on Friday that Apple CEO Tim Cook will donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, the latest tech company figure to do so. These donations—which aren’t covered by campaign finance law and can be unlimited—signal a clear willingness to work with the Trump administration and a desire to curry favor with the once and future president. 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up.

In December, Meta and Amazon donated $1 million to the inauguration committee, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he planned to do the same. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have both donated $1 million apiece (even as the company’s chief legal officer Tony West is vice president Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law). The donations to Trump’s inauguaral committee total about $150 million so far, a record-breaking sum, with more expected to flow in. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos also dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump just before Christmas, joined by Elon Musk.

It’s common, of course, for companies to make donations to inaugural committees to signal that they intend to work with the new administration; President Biden’s inaugural committee ultimately raised $62 million, including from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pfizer, and Bank of America. Amazon donated $267,000—a significantly lower sum than they’re now giving Trump— while Google gave $337,000. (Google has not announced any donations to Trump’s second inauguration.) 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up to Trump now, as they seek policies favorable to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. (Crypto companies have donated especially lavishly to the inaugural committee; the largest single donation comes from Ripple, which announced a $5 million contribution in XRP, its own crypto token.) Parts of the sector are also clearly hoping to avoid backlash from people like Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, who has said he will use his perch to fight “censorship” of conservative viewpoints from Big Tech and, of course, go after “wokeness.” Trump and many others in his incoming administration are unusually obsessed with tech companies, seeing them as architects of conservative suppression, and have made clear that balancing the scales is one of their first priorities. 

“Big Tech should be accountable for years of censorship and deplatforming,” tweeted venture capitalist David Sacks on Twitter, in a reply to Elon Musk and far-right figure Laura Loomer. “It’s got to stop.” Trump has announced that Sacks will serve as an AI and cryptocurrency “czar” in his new administration, and also lead a council of science and tech advisers. 

The money flowing into Trump’s various coffers also isn’t limited to donations from the tech sector. The New York Times reported Saturday that post-election donations to Trump-affiliated entities—benefitting the inauguration, his eventual presidential library, and the Make America Great Again Inc. super-PAC—have totaled $200 million. 

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump posted on TruthSocial, shortly after the dinner with Bezos. For once, what he’s saying appears to be completely true.

Axios reported on Friday that Apple CEO Tim Cook will donate $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration, the latest tech company figure to do so. These donations—which aren’t covered by campaign finance law and can be unlimited—signal a clear willingness to work with the Trump administration and a desire to curry favor with the once and future president. 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up.

In December, Meta and Amazon donated $1 million to the inauguration committee, and OpenAI’s Sam Altman said he planned to do the same. Uber and its CEO Dara Khosrowshahi have both donated $1 million apiece (even as the company’s chief legal officer Tony West is vice president Kamala Harris’ brother-in-law). The donations to Trump’s inauguaral committee total about $150 million so far, a record-breaking sum, with more expected to flow in. Amazon’s Jeff Bezos also dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump just before Christmas, joined by Elon Musk.

It’s common, of course, for companies to make donations to inaugural committees to signal that they intend to work with the new administration; President Biden’s inaugural committee ultimately raised $62 million, including from Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Pfizer, and Bank of America. Amazon donated $267,000—a significantly lower sum than they’re now giving Trump— while Google gave $337,000. (Google has not announced any donations to Trump’s second inauguration.) 

The tech sector is particularly eager to suck up to Trump now, as they seek policies favorable to artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency. (Crypto companies have donated especially lavishly to the inaugural committee; the largest single donation comes from Ripple, which announced a $5 million contribution in XRP, its own crypto token.) Parts of the sector are also clearly hoping to avoid backlash from people like Andrew Ferguson, Trump’s pick to chair the Federal Trade Commission, who has said he will use his perch to fight “censorship” of conservative viewpoints from Big Tech and, of course, go after “wokeness.” Trump and many others in his incoming administration are unusually obsessed with tech companies, seeing them as architects of conservative suppression, and have made clear that balancing the scales is one of their first priorities. 

“Big Tech should be accountable for years of censorship and deplatforming,” tweeted venture capitalist David Sacks on Twitter, in a reply to Elon Musk and far-right figure Laura Loomer. “It’s got to stop.” Trump has announced that Sacks will serve as an AI and cryptocurrency “czar” in his new administration, and also lead a council of science and tech advisers. 

The money flowing into Trump’s various coffers also isn’t limited to donations from the tech sector. The New York Times reported Saturday that post-election donations to Trump-affiliated entities—benefitting the inauguration, his eventual presidential library, and the Make America Great Again Inc. super-PAC—have totaled $200 million. 

“EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!” Trump posted on TruthSocial, shortly after the dinner with Bezos. For once, what he’s saying appears to be completely true.

Elon Musk has spent the last few days on X expressing his support for Reform UK, a far-right populist party founded by Brexit booster Nigel Farage. This is the second time in recent weeks Musk has used X to try to whip up support for far-right politicians outside the United States; he’s also spent a good deal of time championing Germany’s AfD party, claiming on X and in a German newspaper op-ed that the ultra-nationalist party is that country’s “only hope”—wording he also used when praising Reform. 

Musk has also promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the UK.

In both cases, Musk’s opposition to immigration—despite being an immigrant to the United State himself—seems to play a key role in his support for the ultra-nationalist parties. Reform bills itself as offering “common sense policies on immigration, the cost of living, energy and national sovereignty.” In practice, that’s meant calling for a freeze on “non-essential” immigration, a message that seems to have resonated with some older white voters in Britain. 

Musk has also promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the UK, reposting a British Twitter user’s complaint about a sprawling child sexual abuse scandal in which gangs of men in the north of England and the Midlands sexually exploited children for at least a decade. Sometimes referred to as the Rotherham scandal, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly British-Pakistani men who exploited white girls; Andrew Norfolk, the journalist who uncovered the scandal in 2011, told the BBC recently that the case “was a dream story for the far-right,” adding, “They had no interest in solutions, they were interested in exploiting the situation.”

“Vote Reform,” Musk’s tweet added in his repost. “It’s the only hope.” 

Farage claimed in December that Musk was in talks to make a donation to Reform after the two men and Reform’s treasurer Nick Candy met at Mar-a-Lago. (Musk could legally donate through X because the company has a UK office, but the news that he’s considering doing so has spurred calls for campaign finance reform.) Candy said in an interview that “a number of billionaires” were considering donating to the party  

Amid his warm missives about ultra-nationalist leaders, Musk also posted approvingly about English far-right activist Tommy Robinson, who has been jailed for contempt of court after repeatedly making false claims about Jamal Hijazi, a teenage Syrian refugee who was subjected to violent bullying and attacked on a school playground in West Yorkshire. Robinson was found to have libeled Hijazi in 2021 and ordered to pay him 100,000 pounds; instead, Robinson made a documentary falsely claiming Hijazi was the aggressor, and depicting himself as a martyr for free speech for discussing the case. (Robinson’s lawyer told a judge that the film was “effectively commissioned” by Infowars, which is owned by American conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, explaining it funded production and provided equipment.) 

“Free Tommy Robinson!” Musk wrote. He also shared Robinson’s documentary; that tweet has been viewed two million times. 

Musk is far from the only figure on the American right to recently indulge in foreign far-right politics and their attendant controversies. Chaya Raichik, the conservative activist behind Libs of TikTok, has also posted about the Rotherham scandal, as has tech billionaire and Trump backer Bill Ackman, who criticized UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and King Charles, for some reason, for not taking action. American figures posting about the scandal give the appearance of having learned about it quite recently, and seem unaware of the long history of criminal and civil investigations launched since the scandal came to light, and that dozens of men have been convicted related charges. While the UK’s Conservative party has called for a new national investigation into the case, the Rotherham Metropolitan Borough Council released an independent report in 2014.

Besides the UK and Germany, there are clear signs that Musk may yet involve himself in Italian politics. He’s formed a very public friendship with Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, who has a long history in ultra-nationalist politics. Meloni has dubbed the rocket- and satellite-magnate “a genius,” but promised political leaders that she wouldn’t be influenced by him when regulating “private activity in space.”    

In his litany of complaints about the federal government, Elon Musk has reserved special ire for the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates SpaceX, one of his companies. With Donald Trump on the way back into the White House, FAA head Michael Whitaker announced on Thursday that he’ll step down in January, despite having years left on his term. His decision to quit represents a tremendous potential gift to Musk, who has maintained that the agency treats his companies unfairly, and who has tried in the past to limit its power.  

Musk has complained the FAA is keeping “humanity… confined to Earth.”

Whitaker announced in a note to his staff that he’d step down on January 20, which will clear the path for Donald Trump to make his own pick for FAA head. Whitaker began work in October 2023 and FAA heads generally serve five-year terms. Much of his term has been dominated by responding to Boeing’s safety woes, including by stepping up monitoring and inspection of the company’s facilities after a door plug on a Boeing plane infamously blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. 

Musk, who is set to co-lead a purported Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, has not yet commented on Whitaker’s move. But he’s complained many times about the FAA, lashing out at the agency in September after it fined SpaceX and delayed a license for a launch on safety grounds.

Whitaker said at the time that SpaceX wasn’t following safety and permitting regulations, and sought to fine the company $633,000 in civil penalties. The agency had previously fined Starlink, the satellite internet company that is a SpaceX subsidiary, $175,000 for failing to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022. In a House Transportation and Infrastructure hearing, Whitaker explained that the FAA’s civil penalties were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

Musk, meanwhile, complained on X that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing,” before adding a call for “resignations from the FAA leadership.”  

Musk also complained that the FAA was interfering with his grander visions: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” He also vowed to file a lawsuit against the agency for “regulatory overreach,” adding, “I am highly confident that discovery will show improper, politically-motivated behavior by the FAA.”

SpaceX did not ultimately sue the FAA. But instead, in his DOGE role, Musk could soon be empowered to shape its future. Whatever his designs on the FAA, Musk has at least signaled that he understands its role in making commercial air travel safer, tweeting in April of last year that “flying on an airliner in America is super safe” because of the agency’s creation.

In his litany of complaints about the federal government, Elon Musk has reserved special ire for the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates SpaceX, one of his companies. With Donald Trump on the way back into the White House, FAA head Michael Whitaker announced on Thursday that he’ll step down in January, despite having years left on his term. His decision to quit represents a tremendous potential gift to Musk, who has maintained that the agency treats his companies unfairly, and who has tried in the past to limit its power.  

Musk has complained the FAA is keeping “humanity… confined to Earth.”

Whitaker announced in a note to his staff that he’d step down on January 20, which will clear the path for Donald Trump to make his own pick for FAA head. Whitaker began work in October 2023 and FAA heads generally serve five-year terms. Much of his term has been dominated by responding to Boeing’s safety woes, including by stepping up monitoring and inspection of the company’s facilities after a door plug on a Boeing plane infamously blew out during an Alaska Airlines flight in January. 

Musk, who is set to co-lead a purported Department of Government Efficiency alongside Vivek Ramaswamy, has not yet commented on Whitaker’s move. But he’s complained many times about the FAA, lashing out at the agency in September after it fined SpaceX and delayed a license for a launch on safety grounds.

Whitaker said at the time that SpaceX wasn’t following safety and permitting regulations, and sought to fine the company $633,000 in civil penalties. The agency had previously fined Starlink, the satellite internet company that is a SpaceX subsidiary, $175,000 for failing to submit safety data before launching satellites in 2022. In a House Transportation and Infrastructure hearing, Whitaker explained that the FAA’s civil penalties were “the only tool we have to get compliance on safety matters.”

Musk, meanwhile, complained on X that the FAA was “harassing SpaceX about nonsense that doesn’t affect safety while giving a free pass to Boeing,” before adding a call for “resignations from the FAA leadership.”  

Musk also complained that the FAA was interfering with his grander visions: “The fundamental problem is that humanity will forever be confined to Earth unless there is radical reform at the FAA!” He also vowed to file a lawsuit against the agency for “regulatory overreach,” adding, “I am highly confident that discovery will show improper, politically-motivated behavior by the FAA.”

SpaceX did not ultimately sue the FAA. But instead, in his DOGE role, Musk could soon be empowered to shape its future. Whatever his designs on the FAA, Musk has at least signaled that he understands its role in making commercial air travel safer, tweeting in April of last year that “flying on an airliner in America is super safe” because of the agency’s creation.

In the lead-up to Donald Trump’s second inauguration, professional conspiracy peddlers are hard at work finding ways to gin up panic and paranoia—even if their preferred candidate is about to take office.

The fear mongering is ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—and any vaccine that could fight it.

Some have suggested that the Deep State is already seeking to undermine Trump’s second presidency by plotting a civil war or scheming ways to prevent him from entering the White House. Those ideas, however, have been slightly too vague and lack the urgency of a good and salable conspiracy theory. So many players in the space have settled on something more specific: claiming that “a wave of deadly pandemics,” in the words of one, will strike the United States beginning on January 21. 

As with any conspiracy theory that has a chance of taking root, the notion has the benefit of drawing from real life. Cases of avian flu are mounting; if it continues to spread, how Trump responds to that public health emergency could be a major part of his second presidency. And last week, a mysterious flu-like outbreak was identified after killing dozens of people in Congo, where it is circulating alongside a new strain of mpox that is also spreading elsewhere in eastern and southern Africa.

But the real focus of this latest round of Trump-tied conspiracy-peddling isn’t any genuine viral threat, but a gross distortion of the words of Dr. Peter Hotez, co-director for the Center for Vaccine Development at Texas Children’s Hospital and a recognized expert in the field.

While appearing on MSNBC on December 4 to talk about infectious disease prevention under the upcoming Trump presidency, Hotez said “We have some big picture stuff coming down the pipe,” referring to avian flu, new strains of Covid, and other potential outbreaks. “All that’s going to come crashing down on January 21 on the Trump administration. We need a really really good team to be able to handle this.”

Hotez’s simple quote explaining how Donald Trump and his staff will have to face the prospect of infectious disease outbreaks when he becomes president was instead taken by people with a monetary interest in misunderstanding him as either as a dark prophecy or a threat to deliberately unleash disease.

Alex Jones, for one, immediately seized on the comments, saying on Infowars that Hotez’s statements were “an attempt to terrorize,” as well as to promote “forced shots, lockdowns, tyranny, further global collapse.”

“Do what we say politically or we’re going to release this,” Jones added. “That’s the message.”

The same sentiment was repeated by Mikki Willis, a filmmaker who produced Plandemic, the pseudoscientific, pseudo-documentary series that argued Covid-19 was deliberately created and unleashed as part of a tyrannical global plot. Willis shared a post about Hotez’s comments on Telegram, adding, “Apparently, all we need to do to avoid the next Plandemic is to stay home on Jan 21st. Cool.” Dozens of verified Twitter accounts, whose paid access to the site boosts their posts and replies, also shared videos of Hotez’s comments in ways that cast dark suspicion. Just one such post has been viewed three million times.

The spinning of his remarks led to an immediate wave of harassment targeting Hotez; the conspiratorial and anti-vaccine site Natural News ran an approving roundup collecting online comments bashing the doctor, including one suggesting he should be arrested and jailed so he can be forced to “explain how he knows this.”

Because this strain of conspiracy rests on the notion another pandemic is about to occur, it also created a useful and profitable news peg for people looking to sell bogus pandemic preventatives. The stories about Hotez on Infowars and Natural News are surrounded by ads for various supplements, private-label colloidal silver products, and in the case of Natural News, founder Mike Adams’ nine-hour audiobook on surviving what he calls the “global reset.”

Some of these wares are pricey: the video site Brighteon, which bills itself as a YouTube alternative and mainly hosts conspiratorial content, including Natural News’, is selling a “Next Pandemic Preparedness Survival” package, originally priced at $600. It features interviews with a variety of characters from the medical freedom, anti-vaccine and pseudomedical worlds, including several people who earned notoriety during the earlier days of the Covid pandemic. Among them are Stella Immanuel, the Houston doctor who not only falsely claimed that hydroxychloroquine was a cure for Covid, but that gynecological problems like endometriosis are due to having sex with demons; retired chiropractor Bryan Ardis, who advanced a complicated conspiracy theory about snake venom in vaccines; prominent anti-vaccine attorney Thomas Renz; and Dr. Judy Mikovits, a former biochemistry researcher who advanced misinformation about vaccines for years before appearing as the main character in Plandemic.

All of this fear mongering and scapegoating ultimately serves multiple purposes: ginning up skepticism about the next pandemic—whatever it may be, before it even appears—as well as preemptively creating hostility against any vaccine that might be developed to fight it in order to peddle fake cures.

But there’s more lurking beneath the surface. Hotez is Jewish; he wrote in a Twitter thread that he’s seeing a disturbing increase in the overlap of anti-science and antisemitic content, including flyers in which syringes are drawn in the shape of swastikas mailed repeatedly to his home. His thread also singled out a past claim by Robert Kennedy Jr., the prominent anti-vaccine activist who Trump has tapped to lead the Department of Health and Human Services, suggesting Covid had been engineered to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people.

“Our antivaccine friends appear energized for some reason,” Hotez wrote, sharing a screenshot of another threat. “Doesn’t take much to figure out why. I anticipate a rough few years ahead.”

After a grueling hearing that stretched over two days, a federal bankruptcy judge declined to approve the sale of Infowars to Global Tetrahedron, LLC, the Onion’s parent company late on Tuesday.

The result was precisely what the conspiracy mega-peddler hoped for.

Last month, Infowars was sold at bankruptcy auction to the company; Onion CEO Ben Collins said they planned to relaunch the conspiracist site as a parody of itself. Instead, the ruling by Christopher Lopez, a bankruptcy judge in Texas’ Southern District, means the auction will be overturned and no new auction will be held. The judge ordered the US trustee who oversaw the bankruptcy process and auction to report back to the court in 30 days with a new plan to bring the case to a close.

The result was precisely what conspiracy mega-peddler and Infowars’ founder Alex Jones hoped for, and is yet another roadblock to closure for the Sandy Hook families who were defamed by Jones after the murders of their children.  

Despite a good faith effort by the trustee to maximize profits for the Sandy Hook families, who are Jones’ biggest creditors, in making his ruling Lopez held that “the process fell down.”

After losing his high profile defamation suits by default, Jones owes roughly $1.4 billion to groups of both Connecticut and Texas plaintiffs. The Connecticut Sandy Hook plaintiffs had supported Global Tetrahedron’s bid, saying they would waive some of the money owed to them. The offer made by Global Tetrahedron included $1.75 million in cash and “a distributable proceeds waiver” agreeing to forego some portion of what is owed to the Connecticut families. While that cash offer was substantially lower than the roughly $3.5 million put forward by the only other bidder, First United American Companies, both Global Tetrahedron and the trustee argued that the company’s offer was ultimately more valuable because of the waiver.

But Jones and Infowars immediately contested the November sale, saying the auction’s rules hadn’t been fair or transparent and accusing Christopher Murray, the bankruptcy trustee who oversaw the auction, of colluding with the Sandy Hook families and their attorneys. In late November, Jones sued both the Global Tetrahedron and the Connecticut plaintiffs, accusing them of mounting a “zombie” bid for the company. Jones has also insisted on Infowars that former New York mayor and billionaire Michael Bloomberg was the real person attempting to buy the company. Like many things Jones says, this is a few blocks down from reality: Everytown for Gun Safety has said they plan to be the exclusive advertiser on the satirized version of the site. Bloomberg is Everytown’s main funder.

At the start of the two-day hearing, Joshua Wolfshohl, an attorney for Murray, called for the sale to Global Tetrahedron to be approved, arguing that Infowars’ objections to were “fantastic and imaginative conspiracy theories that have no basis in reality.”

Meanwhile, Ben Broocks, a lawyer for Jones, argued Global Tetrahedron’s bid had been less than the one offered by First United American Companies, whose principal is Charles Cicack. (The New York Times reported last year that Cicack has previously “sold products through Free Speech Systems,” the Jones company that owns Infowars. Jones has made clear on-air that Cicack is an ally, and that his bid was backed by what Jones called “the good guys.”) Broocks called Global Tetrahedron’s offer “smoke and mirrors” and “voodoo economics,” and alleged that “a lot of bad stuff” had taken place during the sale, including improper collusion between Murray and the Connecticut plaintiffs.  

“They have made it crystal clear they intended to not just destroy Alex Jones,” he declared, “but put him in his grave and make sure he would never work again.” 

But an attorney for Global Tetrahedron said the auction had not only been fair, but that the company had suffered “significant additional costs” while waiting for the sale to be approved. Murray himself said that the bid process had been competitive, and that in weighing the bids and factoring “all those different scenarios and permutations, one was better than the other,” referring to Global Tetrahedron’s offer. “Nobody complained until after they lost,” he told a lawyer for First United.

The auctioneer who oversaw the sale, Jeff Tanenbaum, agreed, testifying that the auction had been fair and the outcome had been appropriate, because Global Tetrahedron’s bid offered the best net value for the creditors. 

In a court filing several weeks ago, attorneys for the Connecticut families had also asked the judge to honor the results of the auction. “Unfortunately, it is clear from the pleadings that Jones will do almost anything to avoid giving up control of” Free Speech Systems, they wrote, “including arguing, belatedly, that the Trustee cannot control FSS and making baseless assertions of collusion and other illegitimate actions.”  

Earlier in the case, lawyers for Elon Musk’s company X made an appearance, ostensibly to argue against the sale of Jones’ Twitter accounts as part of the auction. But Jones has made no secret that he hoped X’s entry meant that Musk planned to buy Infowars, an idea he’s repeatedly promoted on air in recent weeks, praising Musk as a brave truth warrior. But on Monday, Caroline Latham, an attorney representing X, told Judge Lopez that the company had “resolved the limited objection that X corp filed.” She was then excused from the hearing, taking Jones’ hopes for a Musk-backed rescue.

“They intended to not just destroy Alex Jones but put him in his grave and make sure he would never work again.”

As the court hearing unfolded, Jones said on Infowars Monday that the trustee had been “coming through” the company’s office every week to make sure none of the assets at issue had disappeared. “That’s how close tyranny is to us,” he declared. “Breathing down our necks.” And on Tuesday evening, Jones began anchoring what he declared, as he has before, could be Infowars’ last broadcast. He reassured his audience that if he was shut down, he’d immediately pick up at his new “Alex Jones Network”—which, for now, broadcasts a mirror of Infowars. But when news of his court victory arrived, he seemed to greet it with a mixture of surprise and elation. “Finally, a judge followed the law,” he declared, before threatening to bring criminal charges against people involved in trying to buy Infowars, and claiming that “the enemy,” having failed to purchase his company, would likely try to assassinate him. “You’re Captain Ahab,” he proclaimed at one point, addressing his many enemies. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m the white whale.” 

On Tuesday night, Global Tetrahedron’ CEO Ben Collins told Mother Jones that they are “deeply disappointed” in the decision, adding, “The Onion will continue to seek a resolution that helps the Sandy Hook families receive a positive outcome for the horror they endured.” Collins also said they’ll continue to seek a path to purchase Infowars, adding, “It is part of our larger mission to make a better, funnier internet, regardless of the outcome of this case.”

Collins added said that the company “appreciate[s] that the court repeatedly recognized The Onion acted in good faith, but are disappointed that everyone was sent back to the drawing board with no winner, and no clear path forward for any bidder.”

He added, “And for all of those as upset about this as we are, please know we will continue to seek moments of hope. We are undeterred in our mission to make a funnier world.”

For the past month, Vice co-founder and CEO Shane Smith has had a remarkable number of questions, which he’s posed in a new interview show titled, appropriately, “Shane Smith Has Questions.”

The show, which airs on YouTube and on Vice’s cable TV channel, is clearly meant to be a return to form for both Smith and the company after its bankruptcy, sale to a hedge fund, the layoff of hundreds of employees, and what Smith has recently described as a regrettable, years-long foray into wokeism.

If Smith has questions, so might viewers, including about his aims and standards of fact-checking.

“Now, more than ever, the truth is unclear,” Smith proclaims in an intro sequence. “What’s real, what’s fake, and who’s manipulating the narratives that have us questioning our facts.” As the podcast’s somewhat garbled YouTube description puts it, the show is “dedicated to getting to the bottom of prominent instances of misinformation and disinformation while revealing the fascinating fundamental truths (if there are any?) of the most interesting and convoluted social and political issues of our time.” 

But in the course of supposedly investigating disinformation, Smith has also promoted it, along with conspiracy theories, questionable sources, and right-wing narratives that are depicted as objective fact.

As The Intercept recently noted, the show has advanced several anti-immigration tropes, titling one video “This is how illegals are sneaking into the USA.” (The word “illegals” was later replaced with “people.”) Another recent show discussed how “droves” of Chinese nationals are coming to the US; the sole interviewee was Todd Bensman, a fellow at the Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration think tank.

Then there are the conspiracy theories: In an episode on the July assassination attempt against Donald Trump, Shane promoted the idea there was something suspicious. “Who’s trying to kill Trump and why?” the show’s title pontificated. Although he took no position on such theories, Smith gave generous air time to the notion that the Deep State or a possible second shooter could have been involved. He also speculated that mysterious forces could have played a role in what he termed “a coverup” of the real sequence of events.

“The more these people talk, the more suspicious it seems,” said one Smith guest, retired Canadian military sniper and YouTuber Dallas Alexander. He speculated to Smith that there had been a “second shooter” targeting Trump, an assertion with no evidence but that was presented with equal weight as other claims.

The show also, inevitably, features suspicion-mongering about Covid vaccines. During a conversation with Twitch streamer Destiny, Smith indicated he feels “duped” by mainstream advice on Covid vaccines and now believes them to have undisclosed side effects that were also covered up by the government.

If Smith has questions, so might anyone viewing the show: about what its aims are, its standards for fact-checking, and why it consistently adopts anti-immigration narratives, despite Smith being a Canadian immigrant himself. (A public relations professional who’s recently spoken on Vice’s behalf did not respond to a request for comment, and an email address for the company’s press office no longer works.)

A number of disclosures are necessary here: I was a reporter at Vice News from October 2019 to February 2024, when the majority of staff were laid off. I’m also one of a small group of remote staffers who filed an unsuccessful National Labor Relations Board complaint arguing Vice should have given us the same 90-day layoff notices as our New York-based colleagues.

Before and during my employment, my colleagues at Vice racked up acclaim and awards for their work on immigration, corporate corruption, and the far right, including a 2017 Peabody for Vice News Tonight’s reporting on the neo-Nazi violence in Charlottesville. When I worked there, Smith was understood to no longer be directly involved in day-to-day operations, having been replaced as CEO in 2018 following a number of unflattering stories about a culture of sexual harassment. At the time, Smith and another co-founder, Suroosh Alvi, apologized in a statement to the New York Times for having failed “to create a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone, especially women, can feel respected and thrive.” (Vice also settled a class action suit in 2019 alleging it underpaid women.) Smith was replaced as CEO by Nancy Dubuc and assumed the title of executive chairman.

But his involvement continued in ways that weren’t always obvious to the newsroom. Vice employees learned from Smith’s divorce filings in 2022 that he was being paid a $1.6 million annual salary, with another $1,400 a month in what were termed “perquisites.” In 2023, New York magazine reported that Smith had a “secret” multimillion-dollar deal with the company.

Smith’s sources and guests don’t always make sense.

Whatever its terms, he wasn’t completely absent. I have never met or spoken with him, but during my time at Vice, he once popped up in a Zoom meeting, generating a quiet round of confusion before he quickly disconnected. During the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, the company launched an interview show called “Shelter in Place” that Smith conducted from his Pacific Palisades mansion, hollering questions over video at guests that included Edward Snowden, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, and George Floyd’s brother Philonise. (During their conversation, Smith professed wholehearted support for the Black Lives Matter movement.) 

After Vice filed for bankruptcy protection in May 2023 and conducted massive layoffs nine months later, Smith was again named as Vice’s CEO in June 2024. At the time, the company also announced that he would return as the newsroom’s editor in chief and host a new “video podcast” set to be titled Vice News: The Truth?, which would feature talk show host and HBO fixture Bill Maher as a recurring guest. On Instagram, Smith promised that he “and the OG @billmaher” would “get deep into the ’24 election cycle.” 

In October, when Smith finally launched his new show, it was under the “Shane Smith Has Questions” title. The third episode consisted of a Maher interview—and was promoted on a flashy Times Square billboard, which says that “Questions” is produced by Vice and Maher’s company Club Random Studios. Maher has yet to return to “Questions,” but Smith did appear separately on Maher’s own Club Random podcast, where he took the opportunity to depict Vice’s heyday as an unfortunate detour, specifically regretting how the company grew tiresomely critical of people like Elon Musk, solely because, as Smith put it, “he’s rich.”  

“We at Vice—and I publicly apologize, Elon—used to shit on him,” Smith told Maher. “And I’d be like, ‘Why are you shitting on the guy? He’s great.’” 

Sometimes, Smith’s wealth and celebrity—along what seems to be a rightward turn—create excellent interview opportunities. In the “Shane Smith Has Questions” episode on the Trump assassination attempt, he interviewed Kurt Schiller, the former head of Donald Trump’s security detail, introducing him as “my friend.” For an episode on protecting Trump, there’s arguably no better source.

But Smith’s sources and guests don’t always make sense: In the assassination episode, he also interviewed a triad of YouTubers whose main qualification seems to be that they have declared themselves to be weapons experts, as well as Gerald Posner, a journalist and author who left the Daily Beast in 2010 after he was found to have plagiarized. (Posner used his appearance to suggest that there were unanswered questions about the Trump shooting, drawing a parallel to JFK’s assassination, which he authored a book about in 2003. But Posner’s book concludes that Oswald likely acted alone and that broader conspiracies are unfounded.)

A November episode interviewing Destiny, the Twitch streamer, featured the two men, neither of whom have any medical training, trying to parse the difference between myocarditis and pericarditis, two types of heart inflammation; both are rare side effects of Covid vaccines mostly seen in young men. 

During that episode, Smith indicated there would be a forthcoming podcast wholly devoted to Covid and vaccines. Unsurprisingly, he voiced questions about those too.  

“I was a pro-vaxxer,” he told Destiny, describing himself as having been “part of the fuckin’ media” that was pushing vaccinations. Now, Smith said, he has concerns about side effects and suggested he has “friends who have had heart attacks” because they had “a certain kind of genetic disorder” that he said was exacerbated by vaccines. 

“We were lied to. We’re now finding out that a lot of that was covered up,” Smith went on. “That’s government testimony, that’s Fauci’s testimony, that’s the Senate, that’s the surgeon general.” (It’s unclear what Smith was referring to, but neither Anthony Fauci nor the surgeon general have indicated that they’ve come to believe Covid vaccines are in any way unsafe.) 

“I feel duped,” Smith added. 

When the promised Covid episode appeared a week later, it was wholly devoted to an interview with Brianne Dressen, a Utah mother who has claimed that she was injured and became disabled during 2020 trials for the AstraZeneca vaccine. (The company’s vaccine was one of the earliest on the market worldwide, but was phased out in most countries when newer mRNA vaccines were introduced. It was discontinued in May 2024 due to low demand.)

Smith can’t seem to decide if he wants to debunk disinformation or embrace it.

After her experience, Dressen sued AstraZeneca for breach of contract, a lawsuit that is ongoing. She also became the founder of React19, a group which says it advocates for patients injured by Covid vaccines. Many of the group’s purported experts have ties with the anti-vaccine movement or previously advocated for pseudomedical Covid treatments. React19 has featured video interviews with Dr. Pierre Kory, who promoted ivermectin as a Covid treatment for years, despite a huge body of evidence that it is ineffective. (Kory eventually lost his board certification with the American Board of Internal Medicine, which his ivermectin-promoting group attributed to his advocacy for “early treatments” and “repurposed medications.”) Another person offering “patient education” at React19 is Josh Guetzkow, an assistant criminology professor at Jerusalem’s Hebrew University who has no apparent medical training; he maintains a Substack devoted to his objections and self-styled reporting into what he believes are the dangers of Covid vaccines.

Dressen has been interviewed by Children’s Health Defense, Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s anti-vaccine organization. The organization’s media arm, The Defender, has positively covered her lawsuit, suggesting it could make it possible to sue vaccine manufacturers in civil court. (Since 1989, a federal compensation program has steered people who believe they were injured by such shots to a specialized court with judges expert in vaccine law.)

React19 clearly has political aims that go beyond vaccines. Along with the conservative think tank the Manhattan Institute, React19 submitted an amicus brief in the Supreme Court case Murthy v. Missouri, in which the plaintiffs claimed that the federal government had pressured social media companies to censor conservative views. (React19 argued it had been censored from discussing vaccine side effects.)

On Smith’s program, however, all of that context is missing; Dressen is simply depicted as a former preschool teacher turned patient advocate, whose eyes were opened to the dangers of vaccines. In her comments to Smith, Dressen merges her own experience with the eventually discontinued AztraZeneca shot with people she claims were injured by later mRNA vaccines and even non-Covid vaccines, claiming there are also risks to HPV and flu shots. While there are rare but real chances of serious side effects from any vaccine, the broad takeaway from Smith’s show is to suggest a vast cover-up, a body of evidence kept hidden from the public about the shots’ purported dangers; in other words, he puts forth a classic conspiracy theory.

This is a viewpoint with which Smith clearly agrees. “We’re limping towards honesty,” Smith told Dressen, seemingly referring to the public conversation about Covid vaccines. “Because people like yourself are forcing us to look honestly and factually at what actually happened.”

The credulity and threadbare context in the Dressen episode showcases some of the strangest features of “Shane Smith Has Questions.” Smith can’t quite seem to decide if he wants to debunk disinformation or embrace it, whether to position himself as a fact-seeking journalist or a reflexive skeptic of the establishment. In his meandering remarks on the show, he reflects a belief that some right-leaning conspiracy theories have been proven true, an overall sense of personal disaffection with liberal ideas, and a desire, above all, to ingratiate himself with a new audience.

Indeed, as Semafor recently reported, Smith’s producers have made overtures to conservative podcasters and what the story called “manosphere personalities,” seeking to have them on the show by convincing them Smith was never as “woke” as Vice appeared to be. “According to his producers,” explains Semafor’s Max Tani, “Smith’s previous relationships with corporate media figures during Vice’s heyday—Disney was a major investor—made him sacrifice his male fans to chase an imaginary audience, in their telling.” Thus far, Tani reported, the figures they’ve approached have responded coolly. 

Whether Smith’s new conservative turn is a business strategy or a sincere philosophical pivot isn’t something that can be answered from the outside.

But watching Smith’s new show, it does seem like the media mogul has questions: wandering, digressive, and some of them already answered if he looked outside his guests. But, it must be admitted, they are questions nonetheless. As Smith voices them in every new episode, he surely provokes questions from his new audience, whoever they may be. 

In 2016, Jarrod Fidden, an Australian entrepreneur living in Ireland, announced that he’d launched a dating app for conspiracy theorists—or, as he put it at the time, for those who engage with “socially inconvenient truths.” The app was written up in dozens of news outlets in multiple languages as a funny curiosity. Fidden himself was described the same way: a jaunty, voluble character who liked to tell reporters how he and his wife had “woken up” together a few years before to the sinister, hidden hands shaping the world, generating the idea for the site.

Elon Musk’s version of X has proven especially helpful for the science-denying account.

While Awake Dating soon vanished from the headlines, the man behind the app seems to have moved on to more impactful pursuits. Less than a decade later, Wide Awake Media, a Twitter account that Fidden appears to operate, has become a major voice for climate denialism. Its more than 500,000 followers on X include former Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone; Craig Kelly, a former member of Australian Parliament and an overt climate change denialist; former General Mike Flynn, who was briefly Trump’s national security adviser before becoming a QAnon promoter; and Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, an opponent of early Covid lockdown measures and a professor of health policy at Stanford, whom Trump has tapped to lead the National Institutes of Health in his second term.

Wide Awake Media is a huge player in a small but exceedingly noisy echo chamber of climate denial accounts on X, which parrot each other’s paranoid assertions that climate change is a “hoax” and that green energy proposals are a pretext to impose global control. With the help of Twitter’s monetized verification system, Wide Awake has grown an exceedingly large audience, mostly on the right; Elon Musk himself recently replied to the account, further raising its visibility.

The fact that a single conspiracy entrepreneur has been able to gain such a large foothold in Twitter’s information ecosystem is concerning to experts who research climate denialism and its dissemination.

Jennie King is the director of climate research and policy for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a UK-based think tank that studies how extremism and disinformation spread online. “The Wide Awake story is indicative of various online trends,” she says, “including the diversity of actors who are piggybacking on the climate crisis as a way to generate both clout and revenue.”  

In its current form, Wide Awake Media began as a Telegram channel promoting primarily anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown content before joining Twitter in 2022 and becoming more active after Musk’s purchase of the site. (The Telegram channel remains, but is less frequently updated.) At the same time, the account also shifted to focus largely on climate denialism.

The Twitter account is verified, meaning its operator pays for a subscription, and in return has its visibility and replies boosted by the site’s algorithm. A verified account also means Wide Awake Media can make money from popular content.

In 2023, the account saw a huge boom in traffic; between April and November of that year, King says, “they had gone from having 322 followers to 250,000 followers. This morning they’re at 577,000. So in the course of 18 months, that is a 1.7 thousand fold increase.”  

The account focuses on several themes, King says, that reliably drive grievance-based engagement, including perceived government overreach during early days of Covid and its tension with “individual liberties,” and “fundamental changes to infrastructure and our lived environment,” like proposals for so-called 15-minute cities.

“There was a diverse community of people with grievances around these themes,” she explains. “Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new, in this case climate action.”

The transition was especially pronounced in 2023, King says. At that time, with the worst days of Covid infections over, you couldn’t “generate the same engagement with pandemic-related content,” she explains. “So you need to expand the business model and think about how you’re going to maintain your relevance, visibility, traction, and profit drivers.” 

Acting in a “mutually reinforcing” echo chamber with other online climate deniers is a huge part of Wide Awake’s strategy, King says. “It’s a tiny minority of accounts, probably less than 50 in the Anglosphere, who are really driving this ecosystem. They are constantly citing each other, appearing in each other’s channels, using each other to provide a veneer of credibility, and doing what disinfo needs to in order to survive: create the impression of critical mass.” 

Wide Awake Media also uses Twitter to promote an online store selling T-shirts with conspiratorial slogans—another way the operator has monetized their presence on the platform. (It also periodically promotes donations through fundraising platforms.) As Media Matters noted in a September 2023 analysis, the account’s “seemingly scrappy operation offering little original content besides t-shirts, proves that becoming a climate denial influencer is easier than ever.” 

A previous email for Fidden is no longer operational, and whoever is behind the Twitter account didn’t respond to several requests for comment—except to post a screenshot of one email I sent, warning that a “hit piece” was imminent. But there are strong indications Fidden is the person behind the Wide Awake Media Twitter account. For one, Wide Awake Media LLC was the name of the company he founded to promote Awake Dating. A previous website, wideawakemedia.ie, which advertised Awake Dating, began redirecting to an identical US-based site, wideawakemedia.us, in 2018. Both the Irish and US sites linked to the Wide Awake Media Twitter account as methods of contact. So does the vendor that sells Wide Awake Media’s T-shirts, suggesting one common operator behind the Irish site, the US site, and the T-shirt seller.

(The Twitter account has claimed to be a “one man operation” based in the UK, uses British spelling, and engages heavily with conspiracy theories about Australian politics, where Fidden is from, and local issues affecting the UK and Ireland.)

“Trauma and anger from the pandemic were then directed towards something new…climate action.”

In the transition from conspiracist dating to climate denial, Fidden seems to have lost at least one ally. Daniel John Sullivan, a Seattle-based software engineer, was previously identified as Awake Dating’s CTO. On one of several blogs he maintains, Sullivan has called Fidden a “shit head” and “a grifter.” In a brief email exchange, Sullivan emphatically stated that he’s no longer involved with Fidden or any of his projects. 

Wide Awake Media could be viewed as what the Pew Research Center, in a recent report, called a “news influencer”—a poster with no journalism background or news outlet affiliation, that nonetheless helps shape how their audience reads and interprets current events.

Musk’s version of X has proved especially helpful for Wide Awake Media as it expands its audience and promotes paranoia, given that under him, the company has dismantled its trust and safety teams and fundamentally ceded the fight against disinformation. That can, King says, “create a culture of permissibility within a platform.” 

“People know they’re likely to be able to act with impunity,” she adds. By removing the safeguards, “You create an enabling environment where certain accounts are suddenly able to accumulate enormous followings overnight.” 

Of course, individual climate disinformation peddlers are always joined by the much more powerful industry lobbyists. At this year’s UN climate summit, known as COP29, oil and gas lobbyists outnumbered “the delegations of almost every country,” the Guardian reported. But responses to the climate denialism industry, and the individuals who spread it, are also starting to take shape. Brazil, the United Nations, and UNESCO recently announced a project to respond to climate disinformation. Their Global Initiative for Information Integrity on Climate Change will, the groups have said, “expand the scope and breadth of research into climate disinformation and its impacts.” (Rhode Island Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse has also announced support for the move.)

Meanwhile, King says, climate disinformation is likely to continue to be a major area of focus for conspiracy peddlers, because of the grim reality that climate change and its harmful impacts are increasingly impossible to ignore. 

“Judging from what we know about the climate crisis, and how its effects are becoming more directly experienced by the general public, this topic is going to have a long shelf life,” she says.

In recent days, an invitation from people affiliated with American Values 2024, a super-PAC that supported Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign, has been sent to people in his sphere offering “cocktails and dinner” with Kennedy at Mar-a-Lago.

The invitation refers to Kennedy as “incoming secretary, Health & Human services,” although Kennedy has not yet been formally nominated, let alone confirmed by the Senate for that position.

“These donors are getting special access to someone who’s trying to serve the public.”

The price of enjoying Kennedy’s company at the fundraiser, set to take place on the Trump-owned club’s Lakeview Terrace, is $25,000 each, or $40,000 for a couple. Experts on federal election law say that such a bald exchange—a large donation in exchange for access to a powerful incoming government official—is technically legal, but ethically ill-advised. 

The invitation, an image of which was shared with Mother Jones, requests RSVPs at an email address associated with American Values 2024. The fundraiser’s listed hosts are Tony Lyons, a co-founder of the PAC and the owner of Skyhorse Publishing, which publishes Kennedy’s books; Robert and Perri Bishop, respectively the founder and chief operating officer of Impala Asset Management, who have donated generously to American Values and various Republican candidates; Candace McDonald, who the PAC’s CEO and also previously headed the anti-vaccine organization Generation Rescue; and Leigh Merinoff. Merinoff has spoken at a conference put on by Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy’s anti-vaccine organization. Her bio for that event described her as the owner of Meadows Bee Farm, “an experimental farm and raw milk dairy” in Vermont. FEC records show she also donated to American Values 2024.

The Washington Post recently described how cabinet contenders and political hangers-on have once again descended on Mar-a-Lago, rubbing shoulders with Trump-allies who will soon be in government. A person who answered the club’s phone confirmed a “Bishop fundraiser” is set for December 10, by invitation only. “They have a headcount,” she added. “Make sure your name is on the list.”

Kedric Payne, the senior director of ethics at the Campaign Legal Center, says that as a technical matter, laws that govern ethical conduct and permitted political activity for federal officials, including the Hatch Act, don’t apply to Kennedy until he takes office. But from an ethics perspective, “it’s important that you avoid not only an actual conflict of interest but the appearance of one,” he says. “There could be an appearance that these donors are getting special access to someone who’s trying to serve the public. I’d advise someone to avoid that situation.”  

Recently, Kennedy’s campaign has recently sent emails to supporters asking for donations to pay off $5.5 million in campaign debt. Exactly how funds taken in at the PAC-hosted, Mar-a-Lago event will be used is not specified on the invitation, but Lyons told Mother Jones that Americas Voice uses the money it raises “to advocate for public policy and initiatives that improve the health of American children and adults.” He added that the organization “has been doing this work for years and we are glad to host an event with RFK Jr whose views we support.”

Kennedy’s campaign didn’t respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for Trump’s transition acknowledged a request for comment, but did not provide a statement before publication. 

During his own campaign, and in his decades as an anti-vaccine activist, Kennedy railed against the influence of money in politics. “Typical candidates rely on big corporate donors + influencers to fund their campaigns,” he tweeted in September 2023. “In return, candidates advance the agenda of their donors.”

“Both Republicans and Democrats have sold out to special interests and their top donors for decades,” he tweeted in March. “I’m not beholden to anyone but you.”

Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free.

“He is entirely unqualified.”

Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. (There are not, and it does.) His book The Real Anthony Fauci heavily quoted the work of Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an infamous first-wave AIDS denialist. Kennedy has also promoted the idea, debunked since the late 1980s, that the party drug poppers might cause AIDS. All of which has led experts to ask a simple question: what will become of the United States’ policies towards HIV/AIDS if Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Donald Trump announced his plans to nominate Kennedy to lead HHS last week, generating immediate concern among scientists and public health experts. Given the extraordinary scope of HHS, one told Mother Jones, him taking charge of the agency would be “a genuine catastrophe.” In the case of HIV/AIDS, the damage could be global, if Kennedy’s previously-stated beliefs about the disease and its treatments still hold true.

Along with the State Department, HHS helps implement the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, which was created by George W. Bush in 2003. The PEPFAR program has been an incredible success, spending about $100 billion to save millions of lives in the developing world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, by helping people access antiretroviral medication, testing, and prevention.

While AIDS denialism and revisionism take many different forms, one of the most common is suggesting that HIV may not be the true cause of AIDS. By that metric, Kennedy has engaged in overt denialism, writing in his Fauci book that he “takes no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. In an video clip unearthed by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, he falsely told an audience that “a hundred percent of” the earliest AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers…people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” He went on to claim that some government scientists involved in early AIDS research believed the disease was environmental, but, RFK explained, “for Tony Fauci it was really important to call it a virus” because it “allowed him to take control of it.” 

The idea that AIDS is “environmental,” rather than being caused by a virus, is a clear reference to the roundly and repeatedly discredited Duesberg hypothesis. Duesberg—who was a biologist, but not an AIDS researcher—claimed that HIV was a harmless “passenger virus” and that the true cause of HIV/AIDS was drug use. In citing Duesberg, Kennedy took part in a small but noticeable resurgence of AIDS denialism, with people like Joe Rogan parroting Duesberg’s ideas, and NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers suggesting that Fauci used the AIDS crisis for personal gain and recklessly promoted the first-wave antiretroviral drug AZT. (Rogers wrongly suggested the drug was “killing people.”)

When I wrote about this resurgence in AIDS denialism earlier this year, Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, expressed relief that nobody in a position of power in the US government had yet taken up the cause. 

Now, he says, “it’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation.” Kalichman predicts the danger of a Kennedy-controlled HHS is not that Kennedy will directly target AIDS studies, but that he’ll preside over a general reduction in science funding which will impact HIV research. Kennedy has already laid out a plan to radically reshape the National Institutes of Health, which is a division of HHS. Cuts to the NIH could mean, Kalichman says, that “the Office of AIDS Research, which is at the forefront of AIDS research globally, could easily go away.” 

“PEPFAR won’t be a priority,” in a new Trump administration, Kalichman adds, explaining that with Marco Rubio as the likely Secretary of State, he predicts “more isolationism” and “a real pulling-in of our resources across the board.”

“All of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

For Kalichman, Trump’s selection of Kennedy brings the United States closer to a “worst-case scenario” akin to what “they had in South Africa, where you now have AIDS denialism at the highest levels.” Thabo Mbeki, who became South Africa’s president in 1999, was persuaded by the denialist arguments of his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, as well as by American AIDS denialists who he hosted while he was in office. Tshabalala-Msimang argued that AIDS could be cured with beetroot and garlic while dismissing antiretroviral medications as toxic; her role was, Kalichman points out, “really the parallel position in government to the secretary of HHS.” 

Major AIDS research and philanthropy groups have made their opposition to a Kennedy nomination clear. The nonprofit amFAR, which has donated some $635 million to AIDS research over the years, released a statement citing “the many controversial and false statements made by RFK Jr in relation to HIV and AIDS.”

“Sadly, he repeats disproven and debunked theories. It is amfAR’s intent to refute these statements and to vigorously oppose his nomination to lead HHS—a position for which he is entirely unqualified,” it adds. (Kennedy could not be reached for comment. An email sent to his campaign press team bounced back; one sent to group set up to promote his Make America Healthy Again movement went unreturned.)

Emory professor of medicine Dr. Carlos del Rio is a widely recognized HIV and infectious disease expert who once chaired PEPFAR’s scientific advisory board. He declined to comment on what Kennedy might do at HHS, other than to say that “all of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

Rio also pointed out that Trump’s first term featured a surprisingly robust focus on AIDS. His 2019 State of the Union address called for more funding to end AIDS in the United States, although congressional Republicans subsequently attacked that allocation. “Say what you want,” del Rio says, “but he did good with PEPFAR.”

As one of the most effective public health interventions ever, del Rio says that Americans “should be very proud of PEPFAR.” If the program were to end, he points out, “30 million people currently in antiretroviral therapy would potentially die. Would you want to be the president who’s responsible for killing 30 million people globally?” 

“The one thing you don’t want to become, is the laughingstock of the world,” del Rio says. “I don’t think anybody in this administration would like that.” 

Of the many absurd things Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said over the years—about vaccines, about 5G technology as a tool of mass surveillance, about Covid being an “ethnically targeted” bioweapon designed to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people—his claims about HIV and AIDS have been some of the most fact-free.

“He is entirely unqualified.”

Kennedy has suggested there are questions about whether HIV causes AIDS. (There are not, and it does.) His book The Real Anthony Fauci heavily quoted the work of Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg, an infamous first-wave AIDS denialist. Kennedy has also promoted the idea, debunked since the late 1980s, that the party drug poppers might cause AIDS. All of which has led experts to ask a simple question: what will become of the United States’ policies towards HIV/AIDS if Kennedy is confirmed as secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services? 

Donald Trump announced his plans to nominate Kennedy to lead HHS last week, generating immediate concern among scientists and public health experts. Given the extraordinary scope of HHS, one told Mother Jones, him taking charge of the agency would be “a genuine catastrophe.” In the case of HIV/AIDS, the damage could be global, if Kennedy’s previously-stated beliefs about the disease and its treatments still hold true.

Along with the State Department, HHS helps implement the President’s Plan for Emergency AIDS Relief, which was created by George W. Bush in 2003. The PEPFAR program has been an incredible success, spending about $100 billion to save millions of lives in the developing world, mostly in sub-Saharan Africa, by helping people access antiretroviral medication, testing, and prevention.

While AIDS denialism and revisionism take many different forms, one of the most common is suggesting that HIV may not be the true cause of AIDS. By that metric, Kennedy has engaged in overt denialism, writing in his Fauci book that he “takes no position” on whether HIV causes AIDS. In an video clip unearthed by the Twitter account Patriot Takes, he falsely told an audience that “a hundred percent of” the earliest AIDS deaths “were people who were addicted to poppers…people who were part of a gay lifestyle where they were burning the candle at both ends.” He went on to claim that some government scientists involved in early AIDS research believed the disease was environmental, but, RFK explained, “for Tony Fauci it was really important to call it a virus” because it “allowed him to take control of it.” 

The idea that AIDS is “environmental,” rather than being caused by a virus, is a clear reference to the roundly and repeatedly discredited Duesberg hypothesis. Duesberg—who was a biologist, but not an AIDS researcher—claimed that HIV was a harmless “passenger virus” and that the true cause of HIV/AIDS was drug use. In citing Duesberg, Kennedy took part in a small but noticeable resurgence of AIDS denialism, with people like Joe Rogan parroting Duesberg’s ideas, and NFL superstar Aaron Rodgers suggesting that Fauci used the AIDS crisis for personal gain and recklessly promoted the first-wave antiretroviral drug AZT. (Rogers wrongly suggested the drug was “killing people.”)

When I wrote about this resurgence in AIDS denialism earlier this year, Seth Kalichman, a professor of psychology at the University of Connecticut and the author of Denying AIDS: Conspiracy Theories, Pseudoscience, and Human Tragedy, expressed relief that nobody in a position of power in the US government had yet taken up the cause. 

Now, he says, “it’s hard to believe we’re having this conversation.” Kalichman predicts the danger of a Kennedy-controlled HHS is not that Kennedy will directly target AIDS studies, but that he’ll preside over a general reduction in science funding which will impact HIV research. Kennedy has already laid out a plan to radically reshape the National Institutes of Health, which is a division of HHS. Cuts to the NIH could mean, Kalichman says, that “the Office of AIDS Research, which is at the forefront of AIDS research globally, could easily go away.” 

“PEPFAR won’t be a priority,” in a new Trump administration, Kalichman adds, explaining that with Marco Rubio as the likely Secretary of State, he predicts “more isolationism” and “a real pulling-in of our resources across the board.”

“All of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

For Kalichman, Trump’s selection of Kennedy brings the United States closer to a “worst-case scenario” akin to what “they had in South Africa, where you now have AIDS denialism at the highest levels.” Thabo Mbeki, who became South Africa’s president in 1999, was persuaded by the denialist arguments of his health minister Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, as well as by American AIDS denialists who he hosted while he was in office. Tshabalala-Msimang argued that AIDS could be cured with beetroot and garlic while dismissing antiretroviral medications as toxic; her role was, Kalichman points out, “really the parallel position in government to the secretary of HHS.” 

Major AIDS research and philanthropy groups have made their opposition to a Kennedy nomination clear. The nonprofit amFAR, which has donated some $635 million to AIDS research over the years, released a statement citing “the many controversial and false statements made by RFK Jr in relation to HIV and AIDS.”

“Sadly, he repeats disproven and debunked theories. It is amfAR’s intent to refute these statements and to vigorously oppose his nomination to lead HHS—a position for which he is entirely unqualified,” it adds. (Kennedy could not be reached for comment. An email sent to his campaign press team bounced back; one sent to group set up to promote his Make America Healthy Again movement went unreturned.)

Emory professor of medicine Dr. Carlos del Rio is a widely recognized HIV and infectious disease expert who once chaired PEPFAR’s scientific advisory board. He declined to comment on what Kennedy might do at HHS, other than to say that “all of us would hope that any nominee will be committed to evidence-based decisionmaking.”

Rio also pointed out that Trump’s first term featured a surprisingly robust focus on AIDS. His 2019 State of the Union address called for more funding to end AIDS in the United States, although congressional Republicans subsequently attacked that allocation. “Say what you want,” del Rio says, “but he did good with PEPFAR.”

As one of the most effective public health interventions ever, del Rio says that Americans “should be very proud of PEPFAR.” If the program were to end, he points out, “30 million people currently in antiretroviral therapy would potentially die. Would you want to be the president who’s responsible for killing 30 million people globally?” 

“The one thing you don’t want to become, is the laughingstock of the world,” del Rio says. “I don’t think anybody in this administration would like that.” 

Weekend Fox News host Pete Hegseth has already been an exceedingly controversial choice as Donald Trump’s pick for his Secretary of Defense. Hegseth and the Trump camp have spent recent days pushing back against two simultaneous controversies: allegations that Hegseth has “extremist” tattoos, as some critics have charged, and news broken by Vanity Fair on Thursday that Hegseth was previously investigated by police in California over a sexual misconduct claim. Hegseth has denied the allegations and no charges were ever filed against him. 

Hegseth is a veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Lately, media scrutiny has focused on his tattoos, one of which depicts a Jerusalem cross, a Christian symbol first popularized during the Crusades, and one that reads “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin), which refers to divine providence. A slogan for Catholics during the First Crusade, this phrase has more recently been chanted by white supremacists and co-opted by the far right. 

Hegseth confirmed in a November interview with a podcaster that he was one of 12 National Guard members removed from working at Joe Biden’s inauguration after vetting by the FBI and U.S. military, adding: “I was deemed an extremist because of a tattoo by my National Guard unit in Washington, D.C., and my orders were revoked to guard the Biden inauguration.” A fellow National Guardsmen, DeRicko Gaither, confirmed to CBS that he’d reported Hegseth as being a possible “insider threat” due to the Deus Vult tattoo.  

The other controversy is fresh: journalist Gabriel Sherman reported on Thursday that Hegseth was investigated by Monterey Park police in 2017 over an allegation of sexual misconduct. He was not arrested or charged with a crime. 

Rather than denying that the investigation took place, Trump campaign spokesperson (and future Trump administration communications director) Steven Cheung told Sherman in a statement that Hegseth “has vigorously denied any and all accusations, and no charges were filed. We look forward to his confirmation as United States Secretary of Defense so he can get started on Day One to Make America Safe and Great Again.” 

On X, Hegseth has retweeted posts expressing support for him, including one that reads, “The fact Pete was banned from duty for expressing his Christian beliefs is exactly why he needs to be SECDEF.” Vice presidential nominee JD Vance called the Associated Press’ coverage of the controversy “disgusting anti-Christian bigotry,” writing, “They’re attacking Pete Hegseth for having a Christian motto tattooed on his arm.”

Hegseth agreed, reposting the tweet and adding, “Amen @JDVance. Anti-Christian bigotry in the media on full display. They can target me—I don’t give a damn—but this type of targeting of Christians, conservatives, patriots and everyday Americans will stop on DAY ONE at DJT’s DoD.”

Hegseth hasn’t responded publicly to Vanity Fair’s story about the sexual misconduct investigation; Sherman reported that Trump’s lawyers and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff, both spoke to him about it on Thursday.  

In his time on Fox News, Hegseth has devoted air time to railing against “woke” policies he claims are harming military readiness, also the subject of a book he published in June titled The War on Warriors. Hegseth said in a podcast appearance with Ben Shapiro that women shouldn’t serve in combat roles, adding that “men in those positions are more capable.” (He also went mildly viral in 2019 for saying on Fox and Friends that he “hasn’t washed [his] hands for ten years,” joking—at least we think—that “germs are not a real thing, I can’t see them.”) 

Hegseth also has deep connections with the so-called TheoBros, a collection of ultra-conservative and extremely online millennial Christian men who follow an Idaho pastor named Douglas Wilson. Some of Wilson’s followers believe that the United States should, as Mother Jones’ Kiera Butler has written, “be subject to Biblical law.” 

On Thursday afternoon, a federal bankruptcy judge in Texas ordered an evidentiary hearing to review the auction process that resulted in Infowars being sold to satire site the Onion, saying he wanted to ensure the “process and transparency” of the sale. Infowars’ founder, the conspiracy mega-entrepreneur Alex Jones, has unsurprisingly declared that the auction process was “rigged” and vowed that the review process will return the site to him, while the Onion’s CEO told Mother Jones and other news outlets that the sale is proceeding. For reasons that no one has yet explained, attorneys for X, formerly known as Twitter, the social media giant now owned by Elon Musk, entered an appearance during the hearing and asked to be included on any future communications about the case.

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said during a live broadcast on X. After Infowars was seized and the site shut down, Jones promptly began operating under the name and branding of a new venture, dubbed the Alex Jones Network, which streams on X. Jones noted that lawyers for X were present at the hearing, adding, somewhat mysteriously, “The cavalry is here. Trump is pissed.” (He later elaborated that “Trump knows I’m one of his biggest defenders.”)

“I was told Elon is going to be very involved in this,” Jones said.

An attorney who entered an appearance for X didn’t respond to a request for comment; nor did X’s press office. Onion CEO Ben Collins, previously a journalist at NBC News covering disinformation, told Mother Jones on Friday morning, “We won the bid. The idea that he was just going to walk away from this gracefully without doing this sort of thing is funny in itself.” In a statement reprinted by Variety and other outlets, Collins said that the sale is “currently underway, pending standard processes.” Collins had said previously that the plan was to relaunch Infowars as a satirized version of itself in January.

As this odd situation played out, however, Infowars’ website came back online on Friday afternoon; soon after, Jones and his staff had also returned to Infowars‘ studios. Throughout Friday and Saturday morning, the site was full of stories preemptively declaring Jones’ victory over the Onion. 

“I told you,” Jones crowed during a Friday night broadcast, back behind his usual desk. “If you want a fight, you got one.”

(After the original publication of this article, Collins responded to the revival of Infowars in a Twitter thread, reiterating that the Onion won the bid and writing that his company “left the hearing with clear next steps to complete the sale. InfoWars’ current management asked to continue operating until then. We always knew the guys who currently run InfoWars were going to take this badly and use a loss to fundraise off of it. They did not disappoint!”)

Jones also vowed that even if Infowars is sold he would sue anyone who “impersonates” him, as well as “the big Democrat gun control group,” involved in the sale. (The New York Times has reported that Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for gun law reform, plans to advertise on the relaunched, satire version of the site.)

Judge Christopher Lopez of Texas’ Southern District has been overseeing the years-long bankruptcy process for Infowars. The company and Jones personally filed for bankruptcy protection amid civil lawsuits brought by the parents of children who died at Sandy Hook. Jones was found liable by default for defaming the Sandy Hook families by repeatedly claiming that the mass shooting was a “hoax” and suggesting some of the parents were actors. In the Thursday hearing, Lopez said, “nobody should feel comfortable with the results of the auction” until the evidentiary hearing was held. Christopher Murray, the court-appointed bankruptcy trustee who declared the Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron LLC, to be the auction’s winner, considered the bids in private. According to Bloomberg, Murray told Lopez that Global Tetrahedron’s bid was a better option because the Sandy Hook families agreed to waive some of the money owed to them in order to pay off Jones’ other creditors. 

“I’ve always thought my goal was to maximize the recovery for unsecured creditors,” Murray said, per Bloomberg. “And under one bid, they’re clearly better than they were under the other.” 

Jones has made it clear that he was working with a group of what he dubbed “good guy” bidders, who he hoped would buy the site and keep him on air. The only other bid besides the Onion’s was $3.5 million from First United American Companies LLC, the company that operates Jones’ online supplement store. 

The evidentiary hearing is expected to be held next week. 

Public health experts, physicians, and scientists responded with fury and disgust to the news that President-elect Donald Trump will nominate anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to be the secretary of health and human services. If Kennedy—who has also promoted dangerous and ludicrous ideas about fluoride, 5G technology, and the causes of HIV/AIDS, among innumerable other pseudoscientific claims—assumes the position, “the damage he could do is near infinite,” warns Dr. Andrea Love, an immunologist and microbiologist.

“He will do great harm—generational harm.”

The scope of the federal Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is immense: It sits over 13 other agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, and the Indian Health Service.

Kennedy, an environmental attorney by training with no background or credentials in medical or public health, is the founder of the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense. He became one of the loudest voices in the anti-vaccine movement when he began falsely claiming nearly 20 years ago that the shots are tied to autism.

Kennedy’s nomination didn’t come as a surprise. After Kennedy abandoned his own independent presidential campaign, he promptly endorsed Trump’s. As they campaigned together, Trump pledged to let him “go wild on health” in a new administration, as he phrased it, as part of Kennedy’s so-called “Make America Healthy Again” agenda—proposals that amount to dismantling and defunding the government health agencies Kennedy has long railed against.

Having Kennedy in such a powerful role, according to University of Alberta law and public health professor Timothy Caulfield, is “horrifying. A genuine catastrophe.”

“This is a person who has spread deadly lies and conspiracy theories,” Caulfield, the author of several books on pseudoscience’s impact on public health, added. “He ignores evidence. He ignores experts. I have no doubt that he will do great harm—generational harm—to public health, trust in science, and biomedical research. Moreover, at the international level, he will platform, normalize, and legitimize pseudoscience and health misinformation, making it more ubiquitous and difficult to fact check.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, a recognized expert on vaccines and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, is also deeply concerned. He told Mother Jones that he’s preparing a paper on “what could happen to our vaccine ecosystem,” he said. 

“It could collapse and we could see polio in the wastewater and the return of regular measles and pertussis outbreaks,” he said. “And, of course, preparedness for H5N1 and other pandemic threats could suffer.”

Love, who tracks health misinformation online and recently faced vitriol from people aligned with the MAHA movement, sees a laundry list of threats to public health under a Kennedy-run department. “Honestly,” Love said, “if you look at the purview of HHS secretary, the damage he could do is near infinite. And none of his long history gives any indication he will actually do anything to improve health, especially for those of lower socioeconomic status.”

“I can honestly say it has never been this bad.”

He could “skew, redirect, and reallocate grant and research funding” toward “fringe research,” Love warns, “cut funding for education and public health initiatives like vaccine campaigns or other public health interventions like fluoridation,” and slow or halt regulatory approval “for vaccines, biologics, immunotherapies, and other critical medical interventions.” Because Kennedy has wrongly demonized Covid vaccines as “gene therapy,” Love suspects that he will be hostile to genuine applications of that science—“the leading edge of our research in cancer, autoimmunity, genetic disease, and latent viral infections. The hit to biotech is sure to be substantial.”

“Conversely, he could also loosen regulatory requirements for less-robust wellness interventions like his ‘peptides’ and ‘chelating’ therapies to get those through regulatory and give them an appearance of legitimacy,” she explained.

“This role would give him a global platform to spread misinformation…He can lie, spread falsehoods, and undermine scientific evidence beyond what he’s already done,” Love says. “I would expect he would spread more lies about causes of cancer, the ‘chronic disease’ epidemic, ‘toxic chemicals,’ and more. He can also delay or withhold communicating actual factual information” during public health crises like epidemics.

In charge of HHS, Kennedy could appoint what Love called “unqualified and ideological individuals” within the department and the agencies it oversees, who could “erode and erase these critical agencies from within. He could replace qualified advisory board members with unqualified people, further dismantling these agencies.” 

Not everyone responded negatively to Kennedy’s nomination. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), himself a physician and former member of a fringe medical group that promoted vaccine suspicion, cheered the news, writing on Twitter/X: “Finally, someone to detox the place after the Fauci era. Get ready for health care freedom and MAHA!” Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis also posted a welcoming message, saying Kennedy “helped us defeat vaccine mandates in Colorado in 2019 and will help make America healthy again by shaking up HHS and FDA.” (A Polis spokesperson later released a statement saying the governor remained “opposed to RFK’s positions on a host of issues, including vaccines and banning fluoridation.”)

Even before Trump tapped him, Kennedy signaled a radical vision to reshape some of the US’ public health agencies to his liking. At an entrepreneurship conference last week, he laid out plans to fire and replace 600 workers at the National Institutes of Health. The NIH declined to comment on the plan, but the Office of Personnel Management, which oversees civil service workers, provided a statement: “OPM and the Biden-Harris Administration have a deep appreciation and respect for our country’s civil servants and the importance of a nonpartisan, merit-based civil service. We cannot comment on the actions of future administrations.” 

Caulfield, the University of Alberta professor, summed up what many medical and public health professionals seem to be feeling as they look toward the prospect of Kennedy taking the job. “As someone who has worked in this space for decades,” he said, “I can honestly say it has never been this bad. It feels like we are stepping toward a new Dark Age.”