Politics

In October of 2023, when Grace Carter was an 18-year-old freshman at North Carolina State University, she received a message on Instagram from the business account of the conservative dating app The Right Stuff. It was reaching out to ask if she wanted some merchandise.

Carter didn’t know much about the app but was interested in a free hoodie. And as it turned out, she wasn’t just corresponding with a brand manager but with John McEntee—the app’s cofounder, a former official in the Donald Trump administration, and at one point, a senior adviser to Project 2025.

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Donald Trump’s youngest son, and his only child shared with Melania Trump, has largely remained out of the public eye to the degree any former president’s child could. Well, until recently. Newly 18, Barron Trump is now a freshman at NYU and a burgeoning political adviser to his father.

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From political fundraisers to the presidential debate to a September 11 commemoration, far-right influencer Laura Loomer has become a staple in former president Donald Trump’s political entourage. WIRED’s David Gilbert and Tim Marchman join Leah to discuss Loomer’s history of conspiracies and Islamophobia, and how she ended up in Trump’s orbit.

On Tuesday morning, celebrities like Stephen Curry, Olivia Rodrigo, and Kerry Washington used their social media platforms to mark National Voter Registration Day, a nonpartisan effort to get Americans to sign up to vote in November’s election.

But at the same time, a group of MAGA influencers were rolling out a very different message about voting to their followers.

“Millions of illegals have been crossing our southern border, many of them who are coming are drug traffickers and sex traffickers. But what I’m worried about is the illegal voting,” Danielle D’Souza Gill said in an Instagram video she shared to her 255,000 followers, alongside the hashtag #OnlyCitizensVote. D’Souza Gill is the daughter of election conspiracist and right-wing pundit Dinesh D’Souza and wife to Brandon Gill, a Trump-endorsed election denier who recently won the GOP nomination to run for Congress in Texas’ 26th district.

Top officials from Google, Apple, and Meta testified Wednesday before the United States Senate Intelligence Committee about each of their company’s ongoing efforts to identify and disrupt foreign influence campaigns ahead of the country’s November elections.

The hearing, chaired by Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, served largely to impress upon the companies the need for more extensive safeguards against the disinformation campaigns being funded by foreign entities with an eye on influencing US politics.

Late on a warm June evening in New York’s Central Park, a crowd was enjoying a production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in 2017 when Laura Loomer stormed onto the stage and disrupted the show, shouting: “Do you want Trump to be assassinated?”

Loomer was a relatively unknown conservative activist at the time, and was upset by the theater company’s decision to re-create Caesar as a Donald Trump–like figure who was then, in line with the original play, bloodily knifed to death. “Stop the normalization of political violence against the right,” she yelled on stage. “This is violence against Donald Trump.”

Over the past few years, the United States has become the go-to location for companies seeking to suck carbon dioxide out of the sky. There are a handful of demonstration-scale direct air capture (DAC) plants dotted across the globe, but the facilities planned in Louisiana and Texas are of a different scale: They aim to capture millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year, rather than the dozens of tons or less captured by existing systems.

Ryan Wesley Routh, the suspected gunman involved in an apparent assassination attempt on former president Donald Trump at the Trump International Golf Club in Florida on Sunday, was charged with possession of a weapon of mass destruction more than 20 years ago.

“I figured he was either dead or in prison by now,” Tracy Fulk, the charging officer in the case, tells WIRED. “I had no clue that he had moved on and was continuing his escapades.”

An election denial group is planning to create what one of its founders calls “a dropbox surveillance reality show” by donating “AI-driven” cameras to sheriffs in Wisconsin and other states to livestream drop boxes and remotely monitor people voting.

While WIRED found no evidence that the group has been able to recruit sheriffs or others to implement their scheme, local officials in charge of running elections in Wisconsin are concerned that round-the-clock surveillance could spur potential voter intimidation.

A federal judge has cleared the way for betting on election results in the US for the first time in the modern era, overturning a prohibition imposed on gambling companies by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission, a financial regulator.

In November, the CFTC was sued in the District of Columbia by New York-based Kalshi, which operates a predictions market that allows users to bet on the outcome of various events, from the volume of recorded bird flu cases to the number of cars produced by Tesla. Kalshi filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn a CFTC decision preventing it from offering bets on whether the Democratic or Republican party would control the two chambers of Congress.