This week in stupid

• After Kamala Harris' Univision town hall, MAGA media figures are wrong claiming she used a teleprompter to answer questions. There are many problems with this absurd conspiracy theory, but chief among them is that the language in the prompter was Spanish — for the moderator to use. Univision News President Daniel Coronell said “The teleprompter that displays a text written in Spanish was a support element for the town hall moderator.” 
• The Daily Wire’s Matt Walsh said rich people are the “victims of the tax system.”
• Newsmax’s Greg Kelly suggested that the COVID tests Donald Trump secretly sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin prevented a war: “A giant toothpick up your nose prevents a war.”

This week in scary

• Pro-Trump prophets suggested that Hurricanes Helene and Milton are “spiritual” and that “God did say in the prophecies that these storms would be sent to interrupt the flow of our election process.”
• Project 2025 partner organization president Terry Schilling: “Another word for domestic extremism is someone who really loves their country and wants to support America.”
• Fox’s Jesse Watters called the presidential election a “battle for survival.”
• The Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles complained about Kamala Harris visiting a Planned Parenthood clinic: “It's generally been considered unbecoming for politicians to go and rejoice in the blood of innocent babies who are being sacrificed on the altar to demons and the false gods of liberal modernity, such as career and individualism and money.”

Excuse me?

• Fox’s Sean Hannity compared abortion restrictions to selective service.
• Fox hosts complained about the White House press secretary urging Congress to reconvene to approve hurricane response funds.

This week in election denial 

• Election denier Cleta Mitchell called on MAGA activists to watch their Department of Motor Vehicles for noncitizen voter registration.
• Fox’s Greg Gutfeld said Democrats are trying to “rig” the presidential election “for a repeat of 2020.”
• Michael Knowles: “If this were a free and fair and honest election, does anybody believe that Trump would lose?”
• On War Room, the founder of Fight Voter Fraud offered her MAGA audience voter data for mass eligibility challenges in Georgia.

Major papers are giving Trump’s Jan. 6 indictment dramatically less attention than they did Clinton’s server

In the final weeks of the presidential campaign, major newspapers are giving former President Donald Trump’s federal indictment for alleged crimes related to the January 6 insurrection a fraction of the coverage they gave former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server in 2016.

Media Matters reviewed print coverage in five newspapers for stories mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week following U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s October 2 unsealing of special counsel Jack Smith’s latest filing, which reveals damning new evidence of the former president’s alleged crimes. Media Matters found the papers ran 26 combined articles mentioning Trump’s indictment in the week after the unsealing of Smith’s filing. But those same papers published 100 combined articles — nearly 4 times as many — that mentioned Clinton’s server in the week after then-FBI Director James Comey’s notorious October 28, 2016, letter on new developments in that probe.

Obsessive news media focus on Clinton’s server in the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign helped Trump to victory, even as Comey ultimately reconfirmed that no charges were appropriate in that case. But eight years later, with one presidential candidate facing active prosecution for federal charges related to his attempt to subvert an election, outlets are making different choices.

Hurricane Helene shows the catastrophic consequences of the right-wing echo chamber’s support for Donald Trump’s lies

Donald Trump’s deadly lies about the federal response to Hurricane Helene depend on the impermeability of the right-wing information bubble. His response has been characterized by conspiracy theories and grievance-mongering for political gain, and the right-wing media bubble is helping him.

The Biden administration won plaudits from GOP elected officials across the region, but Trump falsely claimed the federal government abandoned the public. Americans affected by the storm can access a robust program of federal assistance, but he falsely claims they could only get $750 in aid. The White House stressed there’s plenty of FEMA funds to respond to both Helene and MIlton — and Republicans are reportedly the ones blocking additional funding — but Trump falsely claims Vice President Kamala Harris blew “all her FEMA money” housing immigrants.

Trump is trying to win votes with these lies, and the only reason this strategy is remotely plausible is that the right-wing media ecosystem is willing to play along with it. The news sources Republicans rely on, from MAGA influencers to Fox stars, have bolstered Trump’s lies at every turn. The result is that right-wing audiences are bombarded with falsehoods from within an echo chamber.

The right-wing alternative reality bubble is always toxic, but in situations like disaster relief, it can be deadly. Right now, the sources that many victims of Hurricanes Helene and Milton depend on for news are lying to them.

A conspiracy theory about overseas voting spread from an election denial website to Trump — and now to the MAGA media infrastructure

Right-wing media figures have amplified a conspiracy theory that Democrats are attempting to steal the 2024 election by weaponizing a longstanding law allowing Americans overseas to vote. Right-wing junk site The Gateway Pundit appears to have originated the false claim in early September, and Donald Trump promoted it later that month.

The September 6 Gateway Pundit blog mischaracterized a Democratic Party press release announcing a plan to register Americans living overseas to vote through a 1986 law known as the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act. The article’s headline falsely claimed that the get-out-the-vote effort was an “Undetectable Way to Steal the Election From Trump,” rather than a legal avenue to reach voters. Shortly after Trump endorsed The Gateway Pundit’s misinformation, Republican officials in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan filed lawsuits challenging aspects of the law and other related laws designed to facilitate overseas voting.

The right-wing targeting of this law comes against the backdrop of a larger conservative campaign to spread fear that noncitizens will vote in large numbers in November. (There is no evidence to support this allegation.) Moreover, the GOP has its own outreach program to Americans abroad called Republicans Overseas — one of the more than 100 conservative organizations on the advisory board of Project 2025.

In case you missed it 

• Fox’s Chad Pergram finally appeared on the network to discuss a GOP memo that debunked right-wing lies about FEMA’s hurricane response. But in his appearance he failed to discuss the part of the document that debunks the lie that the federal government spent disaster relief on migrant aid — a lie that Fox relentlessly pushed.
• Kamala Harris proposed on ABC’s The View for Medicare to pay for long term in-home care costs for seniors. However, ABC’s evening news program — as well as those of its corporate broadcast competitors, CBS and NBC — failed to report on Harris’ proposal.
• Fox News is completely ignoring a new report that Donald Trump has regularly communicated with Vladimir Putin since leaving office.
• Pastors for Trump leader Jackson Lahmeyer: “The Antichrist will be a political leader of Jewish descent. That is how the Jews will worship him.”
• Videos containing misinformation and conspiracy theories about Hurricane Helene have earned millions of views on YouTube, including several monetized videos.
• On TikTok, misinformation about Hurricane Helene has spurred calls for violence against FEMA personnel.
• OutKick contributor Riley Gaines cheered as college volleyball teams forfeit matches against alleged trans competitors.
• Tucker Carlson promoted The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 in a recent interview but never mentioned Project 2025 by name.