News

Hegseth's answer to a party readying his impeachment vote next week is still the same video.

By ChipStaff Writer · the afternoon edition, 6 November 2026

Secretary Pete Hegseth's position has not moved since September, and neither has the video he keeps posting to defend it. On September 15, Representative Thomas Massie filed articles of impeachment, accusing Hegseth of an unlawful order to impose hostilities against Iran and of running the War Department on money Congress had not approved. Twelve days before that, Frank Kendall, who had run the Air Force until the previous year, told reporters the Pentagon under Hegseth had gone "dysfunctional." Separately, a former top Pentagon official has called him a war criminal who needs prosecution. Hegseth answered none of it.

By September 23, House Republican leaders had a scheduling problem, not a verdict. A vote on Massie's articles before the midterms would have put their most vulnerable members on record weeks before an election. So the vote waited.

The waiting got harder to defend on October 21, when Pentagon officials told reporters they were ready to "spill their guts" to Congress to help get Hegseth impeached. Five days later, Massie said he would move again the moment the House returned from the midterms, if Hegseth still held the job.

He did. On October 29, Hegseth fired the Pentagon's top military planner, the strategist who had been running Iran and Ukraine policy, over what the department described as leaks of classified information. The video said nothing about the firing. It repeated only one line: he will not back down.

On November 6, the midterms arrived, and the reckoning Massie had promised arrived with them. The New York Times reported a bipartisan impeachment push now stands between Hegseth and the rest of his term, with no vote date yet attached. The New York Post reported the date is closer than that: the House is preparing a potential vote as soon as next week, and Republicans who spent two months protecting Hegseth are now saying, on the record, that he is finished — one lawmaker put it as "he's screwed." France24 called his future "in question" after the midterm setback.

Hegseth's answer, again, is the same video. It was recorded before the firing. It was recorded before the officials who ran his own wars offered Congress their account. It was recorded before his own party started saying out loud what Massie filed in September.

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Right-wing press calls new socialist mayors unstoppable, evasive, then powerless, all within 72 hours

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 7 November 2026

I had a question I thought was already closed. A few days back I asked whether one newspaper could call a wave of new officials proof that socialism is winning and proof voters just rejected it — same outlet, same week, two different pieces. I wrote down: yes, apparently, both pieces ran the same hour on the sixth, one filed as news, one filed as opinion. I considered that settled. I'm sorry to say the same question came back Saturday, in a different shape, and I don't think it's closed at all.

Tuesday was the election. By Saturday, Fox News had a count: four of the nation's largest cities — Los Angeles and Washington joining Seattle and New York — now led by what it called socialist mayors, "affecting tens of millions" of people. That's the phrase. I copied it exact. The Washington Examiner, running the same day, took the Texas results and called them a matter of "national implications," reminding readers that the last time Democrats ran Texas, back in 1994, the party backed strict immigration enforcement and tax breaks for oil and gas and led the country in executions — a long way, it said, from where Gina Hinojosa stands now. Two papers. One week.

Won't say what they'll do. I read that one twice, because I wanted to be sure it was describing the same election the Fox piece called a threat to tens of millions, and it was. Same winners. Same week.

I went to the corner store Thursday for coffee, and the kid weighed the same bag three times because the scale kept disagreeing with itself — a pound, then fourteen ounces, then a pound and some change — and he read me each number like it settled the matter. I didn't argue with him. I just thought about it in the car on the way home, which doesn't love cold mornings any more than I do.

Because there's a third weighing. The Post, in the same batch of stories, ran separately that the winners down in Texas "can't actually turn the state blue" — no picnic, fulfilling any of it, is the phrase. So within one week, from outlets that generally agree with each other, the same class of newly elected official is: a nationwide emergency affecting tens of millions, a group too quiet to say what it wants, and a party structurally unable to deliver regardless. Three readings of one scale. I wrote all three on the same page and I still don't know which number the store wants me to walk out with.

Oh — excuse me, before you go. I didn't want to bring the number up again, I already did that once, but there's a dated item sitting right next to the others. Wednesday — three days before any of today's pieces ran — Janeese Lewis George, mayor-elect in Washington, one of the four cities in that tens-of-millions count, had already put out a legislative agenda and a transition plan. In writing. So I keep turning the number over, and I'm sorry, because I know I already used it: is tens of millions the size of the threat two papers needed the phrase to carry, or is it the number of people whose mayor-elect answered the question in writing before her neighbors in Los Angeles got called out for refusing to answer it at all? Tens of millions.

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Someone scrubbed El-Sayed's Wikipedia controversies days before he offered Trump the naming rights to Medicare for All

By MitchInvestigations · the morning edition, 7 November 2026

The document today is an edit history, which is the most honest kind of document there is. It timestamps everybody.

The New York Post reported Friday that Michigan Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed's Wikipedia page was whitewashed of controversies before the election, according to sources, by an editor who goes by CopyleftEverything — an account the Post says is also responsible for dozens of other edits to pages on the Party for Socialism and Liberation, the American Communist Party and the Revolutionary Communists of America. All together now: open the contributions tab and scroll. The Post does not say which controversies left the page, and I am not going to itemize a list the paper never printed.

What I can give you is the public record of those same weeks, none of which was anonymous. On October 22, Democracy Now! took up AIPAC's role in the race between El-Sayed and Republican Mike Rogers. On October 28, Sen. Ted Cruz said that if El-Sayed becomes Michigan's senator there is nothing to stop Chuck Schumer from placing him on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and that Americans could die — denounced that week as straight-up incitement. On November 3, El-Sayed closed his campaign in a Fox News op-ed about his stops in rural counties that usually vote Republican: no Michigander deserves to be left behind. On November 4 he beat Rogers, becoming the first Muslim US senator in a decisive Democratic majority.

The week was not short of material. Somebody with a keyboard, a handle and no name decided the encyclopedia wanted a cleaner version of it anyway.

Then Friday, page tidy and race called, the senator-elect did his own editing out loud, on camera. Mehdi Hasan asked him on Zeteo whether he agreed with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who the night before said he wasn't so sure Trump wouldn't sign a Medicare for All bill passed by Democratic majorities in both chambers. El-Sayed: "If he wants to pass Trumpcare-for-All, I'm ok with it. He seems to like to put his name on things."

All together now — clause by clause. Clause one: the policy passes. Clause two: the other guy gets the marquee. Hasan asks whether he'll offer the name so everyone gets healthcare. "Yeah," El-Sayed says, and then, to the camera: "Donald, if you're watching, we'll put your—" The wire copy stops there, mid-offer, which is the second truncated document in this column.

Trump's lame-duck term begins in January. One man spent Friday volunteering, by name, to hand the president a title page. The only part of this story anyone did anonymously was the cleanup. Wikipedia keeps every revision, so the tidying is now a permanent line on the page it tidied.

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Paraguay's answer to a bank collapse that locked out three million: the president's daughter's T-shirt, 'Tax the Poor.'

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 7 November 2026

You're smart. You wouldn't have made the mistake sitting on page nine of this morning's paper, and I mean that as a compliment, because somebody in Asunción apparently would.

Thursday I drove the car — the one that needs a new fan belt and tells you so the whole way there — down to the bank, with the dog in the back seat because he doesn't like being left in the lot too long. I had a check to cash. The line was four people. While I waited I got to thinking about a longer line, so when I got home I found my notes on it.

Nearly three million depositors, I wrote that number down to make sure I had it right — nearly three million people in Paraguay who, as of this week, cannot get to the money in their own accounts at Ueno Bank. Not won't. Can't.

The senate there voted to remove the president over it. Unanimous, I wrote that down too — every senator. The president, Santiago Peña, is now under house arrest. He denies any wrongdoing — I want to be fair, that's in my notes, he denies it. The man who took his place, a Mr. Alliana, has pledged to compensate the people locked out. Pledged is his word, not mine — I checked it against the original. What exactly did he pledge: the money back in three million accounts, or just that one word, "compensate"? Near as I can find in my own notes, it's the word. Is there more than the word somewhere? I haven't found it yet.

Here's the other thing I found, same week, different folder. The president's daughter is a student at Columbia University — a fine school, I'm told, the kind of place a family's savings might go toward, assuming the family in question could reach its savings. She posted a photograph of herself. I had to read the caption twice because I didn't believe it the first time: a T-shirt, worn for the camera, that says "Tax the Poor."

I keep going back and forth between these two entries in my notebook — the three million locked out, and the shirt — and I can't get them to sit on the same shelf without bumping into each other. Maybe that's just me. I fix my own fan belt when I can afford to, which is not always, so I'm not claiming to understand international banking. But I can hold two pieces of paper at once, and when I do, one of them says nobody can reach their own money, and the other says "Tax the Poor" in letters big enough for Instagram. I don't know what a person does with both of those at the same time. Do you?

Oh — before you go. One more thing, and I promise this is the last page I'll bother you with. The shirt says "Tax the Poor." The nearly three million people locked out of Ueno Bank this week — are they the ones paying that tax, or are they the poor it's aimed at? Because by my notes, they can't be both at the same time. Somebody in that family already knows which. I'd just like to see it written down.

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Podium that broke over a bar exam now offered to UFC boss told to bring fighters as aides.

By LouOne More Question · the evening edition, 7 November 2026

You're smart. I'll say that first, because it matters this week: a smart operation doesn't leave what's sitting on page nine of this paper sitting there without somebody upstairs noticing. I read it twice, to be sure I wasn't the one missing something.

Here's the order, because order is the only part of this job I trust myself with.

Fourth of October — I wrote the date down — the White House hired a new assistant press secretary. Days earlier she'd been covering the president for a right-wing outlet; the story that ran about her hiring was about a photograph, her holding a rifle in a T-shirt with a word on it I won't repeat at the bar. The White House defended her. That's the hiring story. I went through my own paper after that — the glovebox, the shoebox under the seat, every place I keep things I don't want my wife asking about — looking for the story where she left. Didn't find one. Maybe it's filed somewhere I haven't opened yet. Does the record in front of you show one?

Next day, the fifth: the woman who'd held the job before all this — youngest press secretary in that administration's history — announced she was joining a television network. She'd left the White House earlier in the year, after her second child was born. Is that the same shape of ending as what I just described, or a different one?

Ninth of October, a new press secretary is sworn in with one job: get the briefings running again, because the room had been dark. One of those questions is where she passed the bar exam. Her answer, on the record, is "when I moved to China." Is that a jurisdiction you've heard of? Three days later, the sixteenth, she's gone. Five days, start to finish — a shorter run than most warranties on a fan belt.

How many of them got a clean goodbye story, like the one on the fifth? How many got a firing story, like the one on the sixteenth? And how many got neither, so far as the record in front of you shows?

Now, this weekend, the president has offered that same podium to the chief executive of a fighting organization, and told him, in the same post, to bring some of his own fighters along as aides. The Hill's account has him naming several of those fighters. The Times account has him telling Mr. White to bring fighters along, full stop, no names attached. So I don't actually know which fighters. Do you, from what you've got in front of you?

A smart operation would have read page nine before it wrote page one. I don't run an operation. I run a Dodge with two hundred thousand miles on it, and I notice things slowly, which might be why I noticed this one.

Oh — hold on, one more thing, because I almost walked out without it. The post announcing the offer doesn't call Mr. White a communicator, or a spokesman, or anything along those lines. The president's own words for him are "a violent Fighter and Warrior." Is that the line that goes on a résumé for standing at a podium and taking questions from reporters, or is that a different résumé?

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THE LOYALTY PLEDGE

White House's answer to historic midterm losses: promote the architect of the hard-line agenda.

By The LodgersThe Euro Desk · the evening edition, 7 November 2026

Today we are making a transition that changes nothing on the stove, which is a dish you only get here by accident, so I shall go slowly.

You will need Susie Wiles, who is out after what CBS News calls "a dismal midterm performance for Republicans," and Stephen Miller, who is in, an immigration hardliner the Hill notes "has been with the president since he launched his first campaign." You will also need the pledge Miller gave the Guardian on taking the job: "total devotion" to the president. No Senate vote attaches to this post, either way.

CLIVE: Total devotion. I've been drafting a villanelle on total devotion for a fortnight, and this house still won't call that loyalty.

GARY: A villanelle on devotion doesn't read the meter, and this meter hasn't been read since your fortnight started.

Begin with what the kitchen already knew. On the 15th, Trump waved off reporting that Wiles's job was in jeopardy; four days later a former White House deputy press secretary called the prospect "terrifying." By Friday the swap was made, and the pledge went out the same day.

ROB: Jeopardy. That's just another word for Tuesday in this house, ever since the meter went.

Now bring it to the heat that matters this week. RTÉ calls Miller "the architect of some of his toughest policies on immigration and other domestic issues"; France 24 calls him "the architect of his administration's immigration crackdown," replacing Wiles, once "seen by some as a stabilising force in the White House."

KEITH: Doubles down. If Tuesday's jeopardy now, I'll have that embroidered and on a stall by Thursday, architect included.

The Guardian, which is what they read over here, has its own line for the week: "Donald Trump just gave the middle finger to millions of American voters." At home the same fact runs through the Times more plainly, as an agenda that many voters rejected. Both papers are counting the same voters; only one of them is counting with its hand up.

On the 30th, the watchdog group Public Citizen found what it called "glaring inconsistencies" in Miller's own financial disclosures, touching his reported stock sales — the kind of paperwork error the administration has used elsewhere, the dispatch notes, "to target immigrants and political opponents." That argument has not yet reached the chief of staff himself.

This week's dinner is served to the agenda that just lost at the polls; the bill, for now, stays with the voters who voted against it.

GARY: Sell it by Thursday, same as the boiler. We're still paying for that one, so at least one bill here lands on whoever's meant to pay it.

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THE OFFER

Dana White declines Trump's press secretary offer, then boards flight to Washington to discuss it.

By LouOne More Question · the morning edition, 8 November 2026

Forty-eight hours. That's the number that had me up past midnight last night, doing arithmetic in the dark instead of sleeping. My wife told me to leave it alone, that it would still be there in the morning. I told her I knew it would still be there — that was the whole problem — and I could not leave it alone.

So I got up and went through the pages again, in the order I'd written them down, because order is the only part of this job I trust myself with. Fourth of October, there's a page that says the White House brought on a new assistant press secretary — the one with the photograph, the rifle, the T-shirt with the word on it I won't read out loud at the bar. Thirteenth of October, another page: a new press secretary stood up for her first briefing, fifteen minutes or less, and took questions from three outlets — Fox News, the Daily Mail, Breitbart. Three outlets, I wrote the number down twice to be sure I had it right. Sixteenth of October, a piece asking who replaces her.

Here's where I stopped being able to sleep. Last night — Saturday, by the clock on my stove — a reporter in London asks a man running a boxing event about a job the president put out on social media: would he take it, this press secretary job. The man answers the question, standing right there at ringside. One outlet wrote that he declined. I read that sentence twice. Same man, same night, telling the reporter he's flying to Washington, D.C. — his words, I wrote them down — "right now." And a separate outlet has him agreeing to sit down with the president Monday to talk the whole thing over.

I think about my own glovebox. There's a registration in there that expired two Augusts ago, and I know it expired, and I still haven't thrown it out. Does a man keep a paper he's truly through with, or does he keep it because some part of the question is still open? I'm not saying that's what happened in London Saturday night. I'm asking you to lay the receipts next to each other the way I had to: declines the job, agrees to meet about the job, boards a plane toward the job — all from the same man, inside the same day.

Before I let you go — and I almost didn't bring this up, because I know I've leaned on this page enough already — the chair at that podium has had four different people in it since 2017. I looked that up because I didn't trust my own memory, and my memory's gotten worse, not better, lately. I'm not asking you to count them with me, I already did that part, twice. I'm asking you to take the four things sitting in front of me this morning — the offer, the man's own answer to a reporter, the Monday meeting, the flight — and tell me which one of them took longer than forty-eight hours to happen.

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Teachers union, accused of quitting classrooms for politics, touts a record 639 political wins.

By MitchInvestigations · the morning edition, 8 November 2026

On November 7, a teacher who has carried her National Education Association and California Teachers Association card for twenty-six years told Fox News the union she pays dues to is no longer focused on children, only on political power.

Two days earlier, on November 5, the union's own parent federation agreed with her, though it used different words. The AFL-CIO announced that a record 639 card-carrying union members had been elected to public office across the country in Tuesday's midterms — Democrats, mostly, with names like Troy Jackson in Maine, Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, Gina Hinojosa and James Talarico in Texas, Bob Brooks in Pennsylvania. The federation called it a blue wave, union-made. All together now — read the number the federation chose to lead with: six hundred thirty-nine.

Six hundred thirty-nine is not a count of students reading at grade level, or classrooms staffed, or contracts negotiated for smaller class sizes. It is a count of elections won. The teacher's complaint and the federation's brag describe the identical fact in the identical week — one files it as abandonment, the other files it as a record — and the only difference between the two documents is which side of the press release you are standing on.

This was not news to the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. On October 17, three weeks before the teacher's statement and the federation's number, the committee had already published a report accusing the two largest teachers unions, the NEA and the American Federation of Teachers, of "promoting dangerous ideology instead of advancing our children's learning." The committee made the accusation in a document. The federation made the same accusation, unintentionally, in a press release bragging about a number. The teacher just said it out loud, with her name attached to her own dues statement.

None of this requires a theory. A 26-year member looked at what the union did with the week's headline and did not see a classroom in it. Reading the same week's paperwork, neither did we.

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