Joni Ernst Stoops to Shocking Low When Told Medicaid Cuts Will Kill

Republican Senator Joni Ernst had a particularly unhinged response to questions from her constituents at a town hall in Parkersburg, Iowa, on Friday.

Ernst was asked about the GOP’s budget bill kicking people off of Medicaid, and her condescending answer quickly became callous and flippant as the Iowa politician smirked at the audience.

“When you are arguing about illegals that are receiving Medicaid, 1.4 million, they’re not eligible, so they will be coming off, so—” Ernst began, before an audience member shouted, “People are going to die!”

“People are not—well, we all are going to die,” Ernst responded, as the audience drowned her in loud protests.

What was Ernst thinking with that answer? Almost every Republican town hall this year has gone badly for the politician holding it, thanks to President Trump upending the federal government, and Ernst surely knew that choosing death over Medicaid wouldn’t go over well with the crowd. Earlier this week in Nebraska, Representative Mike Flood was heckled after he admitted that he didn’t read the budget bill.

Ersnt’s town hall wasn’t even the first one in Iowa to go badly for a Republican. On Wednesday, Representative Ashley Hinson was met with jeers and boos, with audience members in Decorah, Iowa calling her a fraud and a liar. But at least Hinson had the good sense not to seemingly embrace death over a vital, lifesaving government program.

Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson thinks the Supreme Court “botched” a decision to allow the Trump administration to revoke the Temporary Protected Status protections of about 500,000 Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan immigrants.

Jackson and fellow liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor were the only two dissenters.

“The Court has plainly botched this assessment today. It requires next to nothing from the Government with respect to irreparable harm,” Jackson wrote in the dissent. “And it undervalues the devastating consequences of allowing the Government to precipitously upend the lives of and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”

TPS is a long-standing program that allowed those 500,000 immigrants to stay in the U.S. after they fled violence and risk in their home countries. After the Supreme Court’s ruling, all of them are at high risk of sudden deportation.

“It is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage,” Jackson wrote.

Read the full dissent here.

Artificial intelligence researchers claim there’s “definitive” proof that Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his team used AI to write his “Make America Healthy Again” report.

Kennedy’s report projected a new vision for America’s health policy that would take aim at childhood vaccines, ultraprocessed foods, and pesticides. But a NOTUS investigation published Thursday found seven studies referenced in Kennedy’s 68-page report that the listed study authors said were either wildly misinterpreted or never occurred at all—and researchers believe that AI could be partly to blame.

Some of the 522 scientific references in the report include the phrase “OAIcite” in their URLs—a marker indicating the use of OpenAI.

“This is not an evidence-based report, and for all practical purposes, it should be junked at this point,” Georges C. Benjamin, executive director of the American Public Health Association, told The Washington Post. “It cannot be used for any policymaking. It cannot even be used for any serious discussion, because you can’t believe what’s in it.”

AI researcher Oren Etzioni, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington, felt similarly, referring to the report as “shoddy work.”

“We deserve better,” Etzioni told the Post.

During a White House press briefing Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt dodged direct questioning as to whether Kennedy’s department had leaned on AI to draft the report.

“I can’t speak to that, I’d defer you to the Department of Health and Human Services,” Leavitt said while lauding the Kennedy report as one of the most “transformative reports ever released by the federal government.” Leavitt added that the “MAHA report” was backed by “good science” that had “never been recognized” at the national level.

But what the administration will likely brush off as a temporary flub actually sets a horrifically dangerous precedent for the government, as it starts the slow encroachment of unvetted and unverified AI usage to form the basis of America’s public health policy.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem celebrated the arrest of a Mexican man she claims made a threat against Donald Trump’s life—but law enforcement thinks he’s been framed, according to a CNN exclusive report.

In a post on X Wednesday, Noem lauded the arrest of 54-year-old Ramon Morales Reyes, alleging that he’d sent a letter to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, as well as several other federal agencies, threatening to “shoot your precious president in the head.”

“All politicians and members of the media should take notice of these repeated attempts on President Trump’s life and tone down their rhetoric,” Noem wrote in her post.

But a high-level law enforcement official briefed on the matter told CNN that after speaking to Reyes, law enforcement officials had determined he wasn’t the letter’s author. A handwriting sample Reyes provided didn’t match that of the handwritten letter.

Further, investigators suspect that Reyes was set up by someone hoping to see him deported before a separate robbery case, in which Reyes was a victim, could go to trial.

One person suspected of playing a role in the letters had made jail calls inquiring about specific addresses, including one that received the menacing note.

In a press release, the Department of Homeland Security asserted that Reyes had written the letter. The agency also claimed that Reyes had “entered the U.S. illegally at least nine times between 1998-2005.”

“His criminal record includes arrests for felony hit and run, criminal damage to property and disorderly conduct with a domestic abuse modifier,” the DHS said.

The Milwaukee Police Department told CNN on Thursday that the case was still ongoing and that it was “investigating an identity theft and victim intimidation incident related to this incident.” Police added that no one had been charged at this time.

Earlier this week, Noem and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller announced that they intended for ICE to ramp up arrests even more, aiming to detain a minimum of 3,000 people every day.

President Trump is making remigration, a racist plan popular among the European far right, a reality, according to Reuters.

The State Department on Thursday announced its plans to establish an “Office of Remigration,” assuming it is approved by Congress, on July 1. The term “remigration” is a white supremacist concept pushed by Austrian neo-Nazi Martin Sellner that posits that all immigrants and “non-assimilated citizens” be forcibly removed, with the goal of establishing a white ethnostate.

“The Office of Remigration will serve as the [Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration]’s hub for immigration issues and repatriation tracking,” the plan the State Department submitted to Congress reads. “It will provide a policy platform for interagency coordination with DHS and other agencies on removals/repatriations, and for intra-agency policy work to advance the President’s immigration agenda.”

This isn’t the first time Trump has floated remigration.

“As President I will immediately end the migrant invasion of America,” he wrote on X in September. “We will stop all migrant flights, end all illegal entries, terminate the Kamala phone app for smuggling illegals (CBP One App), revoke deportation immunity, suspend refugee resettlement, and return Kamala’s illegal migrants to their home countries (also known as remigration).”

His deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, another proponent of right-wing white supremacist policy, backed him up.

“THE TRUMP PLAN TO END THE INVASION OF SMALL TOWN AMERICA: REMIGRATION!” he wrote at the time.

While remigration isn’t a household term in the U.S., it’s taken off in certain European political circles. The first “Remigration Summit” took place earlier this month in Milan featuring multiple far-right leaders and chants of “Save our nation, remigration.”

“It’s outrageous,” Wendy Via, CEO and president of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Wired. “There is no hiding from the fact that the ultimate goal of ‘remigration’ is purely about ethnic cleansing. It is a terrible day for our country when ‘remigration’ proponents are crediting the US and Trump’s administration for normalizing the term.”

Those on the far right, particularly Sellner himself, think that the U.S. has been well on its way toward establishing remigration for some time now.

“There are differences between Europe and the USA, but the common line is the same: preserving the cultural continuity by stopping replacement migration. Reversing the flows with border security, mass repatriations, and incentives to leave,” Sellner told Wired.

Trump’s immigration crackdown, his extrajudicial disappearances of students based on their beliefs, and his invocation of the 1798 Alien Enemies Act—which asserts that the country is being invaded by immigrants—are all obvious indicators of remigration already occurring here.

“Remigration is in fact already taking place in the US,” white nationalist author Cyan Quinn, who attended the Remigration Summit, told Wired. “The first flight of 64 self-deportees following President Trump’s stipend announcement have already arrived home safely in Honduras and Columbia.”