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Reporter Elle Reeve, known for her deep dive into issues of white supremacy for Vice and CNN, wrote in a new article Monday that her childhood experience with a stalker armed her to handle fascists in today's political climate.

Reeve's article for Slate detailed how she learned to handle "evil" after years of dealing with her next-door neighbor, an angry man who stalked and harassed her family for years.

"I spent my entire teenage years at war," she wrote. "Not a real war, but a psychological war, followed by a legal one. It did not have a happy ending. At the time, when explaining it to my high school friends, I referred to the situation as “my evil neighbor.” Decades later, I understand what happened: My family had a stalker."

When her family reported how the neighbor burned obscenities into their lawn with weed killer or stared her down as she walked to the school bus each day, the police advised them, “If you don’t get it on video, we can’t do nothing about it.”

That tip, plus learning how to remain calm and cool in the face of cruelty, served her reporting well, she said.

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Reeve said she's able to interview such figures as white nationalist Richard Spencer not because her blonde hair appealed to their racist predilections.

"After my reporting in Charlottesville in 2017, I heard one comment over and over," she wrote. "The only reason I had gotten interviews with white nationalists was because I was a blond woman and those guys wanted to make Aryan babies with me. I know that’s not what everyone thinks, but I heard it a lot, and it p---ed me off, so I wanted to tell the story my way.

"The reason I was able to do it was not my hair. It was because I was forced to learn at a very young age that most bullies are cowards, that confrontation is necessary, that you must get it all on tape," Reeve wrote.

"When I was surrounded by hostile armed lunatics in Charlottesville — and Oregon, and Michigan, and the United States Capitol — I didn’t tap into my years of experience with shampoo and conditioner. What got me into those crowds, and what got me through them, was spending my adolescence preparing for confrontation with this kind of man."

Read the Slate article here

A new report has come to a disturbing conclusion for Elon Musk's Tesla Cybertruck — the model is far more dangerous than even the infamously "explosive" Ford Pintos of the 1970s.

Automotive site FuelArc compiled the report after gathering "a full year of data for the Cybertruck" and pitting it against a decade worth of statistics for the Pinto, which was produced from 1970-1980.

FuelArc found that the fatality rate per 100,000 units was 14.52 for the Cybertruck and 0.85 for the Pinto, concluding that the Tesla model was "17 times more likely to have a fire fatality than a Ford Pinto."

The Ford Pinto had a troubled safety record. Its rear-mounted fuel tank design made it prone to fires in collisions, resulting in numerous fatalities. The company was accused of prioritizing cost-cutting over safety and faced billions in lawsuits. The Pinto recall and its impact on automotive safety regulations became a landmark case in consumer protection.

The site considered two Cybertruck crashes and one "incident" that happened "in their first full year on American roads." A crash in Piedmont CA killed 3 people, while a crash in Baytown TX killed one person.

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"The authors of the Cybertruck analysis openly acknowledge caveats in their methodology," reported Mother Jones. "First off, Tesla— the car’s manufacturer and one of Musk’s companies — has not confirmed how many Cybertrucks it has sold. FuelArc puts its best guess at 34,438, based on 'a variety of means, including piecing together public reporting.'

"Secondly, the five Cybertruck fatalities include the one that occurred in Las Vegas ... outside Trump International Hotel, when an Army soldier fatally shot himself before the car, packed with fireworks, exploded. Musk claimed in a post on X that the explosion was “unrelated to the vehicle itself.” Thus, the FuelArc analysis acknowledges that this fatality is 'controversial' since the driver’s cause of death was reportedly a self-inflicted gunshot wound, and the burns occurred after his death."

Musk threatened to sue reporters who implied the vehicle's design contributed to the explosion and fire in the Las Vegas incident.

Despite the "caveats," Mother Jones reported that "There are other reasons, beyond the latest analysis, to be skeptical" of the Cybertruck's safety.

For one, "It has reportedly not been crash-tested by the NHTSA or the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, nor has Tesla released its own safety data on the Cybertruck."

Mother Jones concluded, "Musk bragged around the time of its release that it would “be much safer per mile than other trucks.” But his claims of superiority were quickly disproven, given that Tesla recalled the truck seven times last year alone — an astonishingly high amount — including once over a trapped accelerator pedal that could increase the risk of a crash, estimated to affect more than 3,800 units, according to the NHTSA."

Read the Mother Jones article here and the FuelArc report here.

Former Donald Trump staffer Alyssa Farah Griffin thinks that the reelected president is hurting himself by welcoming racist staff into the administration.

Speaking on "The View" Monday, the panel of co-hosts attacked a 25-year-old Elon Musk staffer who admitted in past social media posts that he was racist. However, another person who was fired during the previous Trump administration for attending a white nationalist event — Darren Beattie — was brought back to be acting undersecretary for public diplomacy and public affairs, she pointed out.

Ana Navarro, a Republican communications strategist and Never Trumper, rattled off a list of Trump's recent targets.

"What they're signaling is this," she said. "FBI agents who worked on January 6th, bad. DEI employees, bad. DOJ Civil Rights employee, bad. USAID employees who help the poor and sick all over the world, bad.

"But racists are welcome in the Trump administration."

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Griffin said that Vice President J.D. Vance's statements are what struck her because she, too, doesn't "believe in cancel culture. I believe in consequence culture."

"This is different," Griffin continued. "We're trying to gauge if this Trump administration is the same as the first. In the first, somebody who attended a white nationalist rally — and that came to light, he was fired. In this Trump administration, he's a spokesperson for the United States State Department."

She recalled the 2024 election, in which Trump "built a multiracial coalition" of supporters from Black and Latino voters.

"Doubling his numbers with young black men, five points higher with Asian Americans. He seeks to understand those gains he made by having people espousing these hateful, bigoted views associated with him," said Griffin.

See the conversation below or at the link here.

U.S. District Judge John McConnell issued an order directing the Trump administration to immediately obey a previous restraining order halting a funding freeze for the National Institutes of Health and two Biden-era laws.

In a Friday filing, 22 state attorneys general accused the administration of not obeying McConnell's order to unfreeze federal spending for grants and loans. The White House's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) claimed that the order did not apply to specific federal programs.

On Monday, McConnell sided with the state attorneys general.

"The broad categorical and sweeping freeze of federal funds is, as the Court found, likely unconstitutional and has caused and continues to cause irreparable harm to a vast portion of this country," McConnell wrote in a five-page order.

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McConnell's order instructed the OMB to "take every step necessary" to restore funding for the Inflation Reduction Act, the Infrastructure Improvement and Jobs Act, the National Institutes of Health, and other agencies covered by the restraining order.

Donald Trump intends to exclude Palestinians from the "beautiful" development he envisions after the U.S. occupation of Gaza.

The president announced last week that the U.S. should take control of the region after nearly a year and a half of Israeli bombardment, and he told Fox News host Brett Baier in an interview that aired Monday morning that displaced Palestinians would not have a right to return.

"We'll build beautiful communities for the 1.9 million people," Trump said. "We'll build beautiful communities, safe communities. Could be five, six, could be two, but we'll build safe communities a little bit away from where they are, where all of this danger is. In the meantime, I would own this. Think of it as a real estate development for the future. It would be a beautiful piece of land, no big money spent."

Baier asked specifically whether the Palestinian people would be allowed to return to their homeland.

"No, they wouldn’t," Trump said. "Because they’re going to have much better housing, much better – in other words, I’m talking about building a permanent place for them because if they have to return now it would be years before you could ever – it's not habitable. It'll be years before it can happen. I'm talking about starting to build, and I think I could make a deal with Jordan. I think I could make a deal with Egypt. We give them billions and billions of dollars a year."

Trump has mused about developing beachfront property in Gaza for years, and he said Tuesday afternoon during a joint news conference with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that he would turn the devastated area into the "Riviera of the Middle East."

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MAGA activist Steve Bannon pressed President Donald Trump to have the so-called J6 Choir of formerly imprisoned Jan. 6 rioters perform at the Kennedy Center after the commander-in-chief installed himself as chairman of the performing arts institution.

"That's the high church of the administrative state deep state," Bannon opined during his Monday War Room broadcast. "He's appointed himself chairman. The J6 Choir should come and have it. We should have a special program there."

"They're crushed over there," he continued. "President Trump, now as chairman, ought to fire them all and ... just reprogram the whole thing."

"I strongly believe you start off with the J6 Choir having them in the evening's entertainment and invite all the first guests that should be invited — should be the J6 prisoners. Invite them and their families," he continued. "Just watch the meltdown of the Washington elite. Watch the meltdown."

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"Oh, by the way that, the premium ticket holders down front, you're giving up your seats for the J6 families. Think that [would] get their attention? That culturally, you'd break them."

This week's Kennedy Center schedule was set to begin with a "Dance for Parkinson’s Disease" program.

Watch the video below from Real America's Voice.