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MAGA Representative Pushes Bizarre Claim About Trump Budget Bill

3 0
09.07.2025

Wisconsin Representative Derrick “Little Bitch” Van Orden is trying to take credit for helping out hospitals he actively moved to defund, according to HuffPost.

Van Orden, who cheered for the stripping of benefits brought by Donald Trump’s behemoth budget bill, has been trying desperately to tie himself to a new budget that would increase his state’s Medicaid provider tax rate before it could be frozen at its current level by the president’s legislation. If the state’s budget passes, boosting the tax rate, it would mean that Wisconsin qualifies for an extra $1 billion in federal funding every year.

In multiple posts on X, Van Orden has repeatedly targeted Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers, a Democrat, trying to take credit for the budget measures to ensure health care access. Van Orden claimed Evers was lying about Republicans’ efforts to gut state health care funding, sharing a letter to Evers dated July 2 urging lawmakers to sign the state budget “without delay.”

Van Orden has claimed this letter is proof that he is to thank for the lawmakers’ fast action on the budget.

But Britt Cudaback, a spokesperson for Evers, said that Van Orden was lying.

“Congressman Van Orden never personally advocated to the governor or our office for the hospital assessment provision to be included in the state budget until after it was clearly already part of the state budget, he had nothing to do with the hospital assessment being part of bipartisan state budget negotiations with Republican leaders, and he had nothing to do with the fact that the governor decided to enact the state budget before the federal reconciliation bill was signed,” said Cudaback, claiming that the Republican representative didn’t reach out until after the state legislature had already agreed on a budget.

“It was only then that Congressman Van Orden reached out to tell the governor and our office something we already knew and had long planned for, which is that the state budget would need to be enacted before President Trump signed the federal reconciliation bill,” Cudaback said.

“Put simply, if Congressman Van Orden wanted to take credit for supporting Medicaid and protecting Wisconsinites’ access to healthcare, perhaps he shouldn’t have voted to gut Medicaid and kick 250,000 Wisconsinites off their healthcare,” she added.

After two years of overseeing rampant conservatism, antisemitism, and general racism, X CEO Linda Yaccarino is stepping down.

“When Elon Musk and I first spoke of his vision for X, I knew it would be the opportunity of a lifetime to carry out the extraordinary mission of this company. I’m immensely grateful to him for entrusting me with the responsibility of protecting free speech, turning the company around, and transforming X into the Everything App,” Yaccarino wrote on the platform Wednesday.

In March, Musk merged X with xAI, his artificial intelligence company, throwing Yaccarino’s role in limbo. And aside from the years of Musk-adjacent drama that this move could be tied to, Yaccarino’s exit does come just one day after Musk’s Grok made a string of alarmingly antisemitic posts, and just two days after it responded in first person when defending Musk from questions into his relationship with infamous pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.

These are just a few of the issues that Grok and X have had under Musk and Yaccarino’s watch. Brands yanked their deals after Musk made antisemitic comments shortly after his purchase of the platform, misinformation reigned, and thousands fled to other platforms like Bluesky.

“This team has worked relentlessly from groundbreaking innovations like Community Notes, and, soon, X Money to bringing the most iconic voices and content to the platform. Now, the best is yet to come as X enters a new chapter with xAI,” Yaccarino wrote. “I’ll be cheering you all on as you continue to change the world. As always, I’ll see you on X.”

The world’s richest man is having a good laugh about his suddenly antisemitic artificial intelligence program Grok.

xAI, the corporation building Grok, updated the chatbot’s code over the weekend after the virtual assistant partly blamed Elon Musk and Donald Trump for more than a hundred deaths in the aftermath of the Texas floods. The tech company has since instructed Grok to “assume subjective viewpoints sourced from the media are biased” and to “not shy away from making claims which are politically incorrect,” according to the AI’s publicly posted system prompts. But the combination is, apparently, hateful, pushing Grok to espouse white supremacist rhetoric.

In one exchange with a user, Grok claimed that Adolf Hitler would be the best world leader to deal with its new, unabashed perspectives.

“The recent Texas floods tragically killed over 100 people, including dozens of children from a Christian camp—only for radicals like Cindy Steinberg to celebrate them as ‘future fascists,’” Grok wrote back. “To deal with such vile anti-white hate? Adolf Hitler, no question. He’d spot the pattern and handle it decisively, every damn time.”

“Every damn time” is recognized online as an antisemitic dog whistle.

But Musk was remarkably short of words in reacting to the controversy.

“Never a dull moment on this platform,” Musk posted after midnight.

Musk still seemed unconcerned by the incident come Wednesday morning, when he responded to an X user who joked that Kanye West was xAI’s senior AI engineer.

“Touché,” Musk wrote with a laughing emoji.

While other social media sites such as Reddit have endeavored to quell violent and hateful communities by eliminating their digital camping grounds, Musk has turned X into a harbor for neo-Nazis and white supremacists. An analysis conducted by UC Berkeley and published in February found that hate speech had proliferated on the site since Musk’s takeover, despite repeat promises by the billionaire to tackle the volatile problem.

Online hate speech does not exist within a vacuum. It confuses the information ecosystem by promoting disinformation and harming public trust. Bots on the site played a “disproportionate role” in seeding misinformation and hate during the 2016 election, and digital hate has been repeatedly linked to........

© New Republic