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      ‘Expect war’: leaked chats reveal influence of rightwing media on militia group

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      Leaked and public chats from Arizona-based “poll watching” activists aligned with a far-right militia group show how their election paranoia has been fueled by a steady drumbeat of conspiracy theories and disinformation from rightwing media outlets and influencers, including Elon Musk.The materials come from two overlapping election-denial groups whose activists are mostly based in Arizona, one of seven key swing states that will decide the US election and possibly end up at the center of any disputed results in the post-election period.Chat records from a public-facing channel for the America First Polling Project (AFPP) were made available to reporters by transparency group Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDOSecrets). The activist who leaked those materials to DDOSecrets provided the Guardian directly with an archive of the Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch (A22) chat channel.The materials offer a window into the way in which the rightwing information environment – and the unverified, distorted or false information it proffers – erode faith in elections, and encourage those who would violently disrupt them.From the media to far-right conspiracyThe materials underline previously reported links between poll watching groups and the American Patriots Three Percent (AP3) militia, such that the militia provided “paramilitary heft to ballot box monitoring operations”.At least half a dozen pseudonymous activist accounts are present across all of the chats, and early posts in the AFPP chat show activists at “tailgate parties” that brought together election denial groups and militia members ahead of the 2022 midterms election.They also show the broad cooperative effort among a range of election denial groups, whose activities were fueled by disinformation from high-profile conservative activists.On 6 October 2022, in one of the first archived messages on the semi-private A22 chat, a user with the same name as the channel (Arizona 2022 Mid-Term Election Watch) announced to the group that they had “heard back from the cleanelectionsusa.org so I might try to coordinate between the two efforts”. They added: “In any case I will schedule a couple of zoom calls so we can connect.”Two days later, the same account updated: “There are 13 drop box only locations in Maricopa county of which only 2 are 24 hour locations,” adding: “We will need help with getting these watched. I have also been able to connect with cleanelectionsusa and am coordinating with those folks.”View image in fullscreenClean Elections USA, founded by Oklahoman Melody Jennings, is one of a number of election denial groups that sprang up in the wake of the 2020 election, after Trump and his allies mounted a campaign to reverse that year’s election result on the basis of false claims that the vote was stolen.During the 2022 election season, the organization was slapped with a restraining order over its ballot monitoring – some of it carried out by armed activists – that the federal Department of Justice described in its filing as “vigilante ballot security efforts” that may have violated the Voting Rights Act. That lawsuit was settled in 2023.The organization’s website has shuttered; however, archived snapshots indicate that the organizers were motivated by discredited information from long-running election denial organization True the Vote and 2000 Mules, the title of a conspiracy-minded book and accompanying documentary by rightwing provocateur Dinesh D’Souza.The book and film repeated True the Vote’s allegations that paid “mules” had carried illegal ballots to drop boxes in swing states in 2020. D’Souza’s publisher in June withdrew the book and film from distribution and apologized to a man whom D’Souza falsely accused of criminal election fraud.The “mules” falsehoods were treated as baseline reality in the A22 chat. On 9 November, a user named “trooper” sought to account for Republicans’ unexpectedly poor showing with the claim “275k drop-off ballots – meaning the mules flooded the system on election day while the disaster distraction was in play”, adding that “they swarmed the election day drop boxes like fucking locusts”.The pro-democracy Bridging Divides Initiative (BDI) at Princeton University recently published research indicating elevated worries about harassment on the part of local officials, including election officials. BDI’s research backed up findings from the Brennan Center indicating that 70% of election officials said that threats had increased in 2024, and 38% had personally experienced threats, up from 30% last year.Shannon Hiller, BDI’s executive director, said: “We continue to face elevated threats and risk to local officials across the board,” however in 2024, “there’s been a lot more preparation and there’s a clearer understanding about how to address those threats now.”Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism (GPAHE) said that talk of election fraud using drop boxes had returned in 2024. “I can’t think of an election-denying organization, whether it’s Mike Lindell, True the Vote or more local outfits in various states that aren’t talking about patrolling drop boxes and watching voters while they’re voting,” she said.From disinformation to violent threatsBeirich’s warnings are reflected in ongoing AFPP Telegram chats, where any prospect of a Harris victory is met with conspiracy theories, apocalyptic narratives, and sometimes threats.The Guardian’s review of the materials found many instances in which disinformation or exaggerated claims in the media or from rightwing public figures led directly to violent rhetoric from members of the chat.On 13 March, a user linked to a story in the Federalist which uncritically covered a claim by the Mississippi secretary of state, Michael Watson, that the Department of Justice was “using taxpayer dollars to have jails and the US Marshals Service encourage incarcerated felons and noncitizens to register to vote” on the basis of Joe Biden’s March 2021 executive order aimed at expanding access to voting.A user, “@Wilbo17AZ”, replied: “If we don’t fight this with our every waking breath, we are done. Expect war.”On 24 June, a user posted an article from conspiracy-minded, Falun Gong-linked news website Epoch Times, which reported on the supreme court’s rejection of appeals from a Robert F Kennedy-founded anti-vaccine non-profit.The court declined to hear the appeals over lower court’s determinations that the non-profit had no standing to sue the Food and Drug Administration over its emergency authorization of Covid-19 vaccines during the pandemic.In response, another user, “cybercav”, wrote: “I do not see any path forward for our Republic that doesn’t include ‘Purge and Eradicate’ being the general orders for both sides of the next civil war.”In January, the @AFPP_US account posted a link to an opinion column on the Gateway Pundit by conspiracy theorist Wayne Allyn Root. Root characterized cross-border immigration as an invasion in the piece, and concluded by telling readers to “Pray to God. Pray for a miracle. Pray for the election in November of President Donald J Trump.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFueling paranoiaOver the summer, overseas events fueled the paranoia of chat members.On 6 August the @AFPP_US account posted a link to Guardian reporting on anti-immigrant riots that took place in the UK over the summer.The article described the riots as “far-right violence”; @AFPP_US captioned the link “‘Far Right’ = ‘Stop raping women and stabbing children’”.The next day, the same account apparently attempted to link the riots to UK gun laws, which are more restrictive than the US.The stimulus was a story on the riots by conspiracy broadcaster Owen Shroyer, an employee of Alex Jones who was sentenced to two months in prison for entering a restricted area at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.View image in fullscreen@AFPP_US wrote: “UK is a failed state and possession of the Calaphite [sic]. The imperialists have become the Imperiled. This is what just a few generations of disarmament and pussification hath wrought.”One major vector of bad information in the A22 chats is the Gateway Pundit, a pro-Maga website operated by Jim Hoft. That website has been a noted source of election disinformation for years. Earlier this month Hoft’s organization settled a defamation suit with two election workers that it had falsely accused of election fraud. Accountability non-profit Advance Democracy Inc reported in August that in the first nine months of 2024 Hoft had published at least 128 articles referencing election fraud and election workers.Gateway Pundit articles were shared many times in the chat.On 21 January, the @AFPP_US account shared a Gateway Pundit story by Hoft in which he claimed that liberal philanthropist and chair of the Open Society Foundation, Alexander Soros, had posted a coded message advocating the assassination of a re-elected President Trump.The basis was that Soros’s post carried a picture of a bullet hole and a hand holding $47. But those pictures came from a story in the Atlantic, about falling crime rates, that Soros was linking to in the post.‘Millions of illegals’On at least one occasion, the Gateway Pundit was quoted in the group because it was amplifying the claims of another major source of disinformation for A22: Elon Musk.The Gateway Pundit article posted to the chat in January was titled “JUST IN … Elon Musk Rips Mark Zuckerberg for Funding Illegal Voting Vans in 2020 Election”. It highlighted Musk’s false claim that Zuckerberg’s funding of county-level voting apparatuses in 2020 was illegal.As elections approached, AFPP members added more of Musk’s pronouncements into the stew of disinformation on the site, with a particular emphasis on anti-immigrant material.On 7 September, as rightwing actors stoked panic about Haitian immigrants, @AFPP_US posted a link to a Musk post quote-posting a video of Harris addressing the need to support Haitian migrants with the comment: “Vote for Kamala if you want this to happen to your neighborhood!”On 29 September, the AFPP lead account linked to a Musk post that claimed “Millions of illegals being provided by the government with money for housing using your tax dollars is a major part of what’s driving up costs”.On 1 October, the @AFPP_US account shared an X post in which Musk asserted that “if Trump is NOT elected, this will be the last election”, and wove that claim into a narrative resembling the “great replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that “Democrats are expediting” the conversion of “illegals” to citizens in an attempt to make America a “one-party state”.The Guardian reported in 2021 that a separate AP3 website leak, which exposed the paramilitary organization’s membership list, showed that at that time members included serving military and law enforcement officers.In August, ProPublica reported on an earlier leak of AP3 materials from the same source, showing that AP3 had carried out vigilante operations on the Texas border, and had forged close ties with law enforcement officers around the country.Beirich said that chatter monitored by the organization has obsessively focused on the narrative of illegal immigrants voting in a “rigged” election. “Non-citizens voting is the big fraud that they’re talking up,” she said.Earlier this month, Wired reported that the current leak showed evidence of plans to carry out operations “coordinated with election denial groups as part of a plan to conduct paramilitary surveillance of ballot boxes during the midterm elections in 2022”. More

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      Elon Musk worked in US illegally in 1995 after quitting school – report

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      Elon Musk briefly worked illegally in the US after abandoning a graduate studies program in California, according to a Washington Post report that contrasted the episode with the South African multibillionaire’s anti-immigration views.The boss of Tesla and SpaceX, who has in recent weeks supported Donald Trump’s campaign for a second presidency while promoting the Republican White House nominee’s opposition to “open borders” on his X social media site, has previously maintained that his transition from student to entrepreneur was a “legal grey area”.But the Washington Post reported Saturday that the world’s wealthiest individual was almost certainly working in the US without correct authorization for a period in 1995 after he dropped out of Stanford University to work on his debut company, Zip2, which sold for about $300m four years later.Legal experts said foreign students cannot drop out of school to build a company even if they are not getting paid. The Post also noted that – prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks agains the US in 2001 – regulation for student visas was more lax.“If you do anything that helps to facilitate revenue creation, such as design code or try to make sales in furtherance of revenue creation, then you’re in trouble,” Leon Fresco, a former US justice department immigration litigator, told the outlet.But the Post also acknowledged: “While overstaying a student visa is somewhat common and officials have at times turned a blind eye to it, it remains illegal.”Musk has previously said: “I was legally there, but I was meant to be doing student work. I was allowed to do work sort of supporting whatever.”Musk employs 121,000 people at Tesla, about 13,000 at SpaceX and nearly 3,000 at X. The scrutiny of his immigration status after dropping out of Stanford comes after Trump has touted his desire for Musk to play a high-profile role focused on government efficiency in a second Trump administration if voters return him to office at the expense of Kamala Harris in the 5 November election.Musk in turn has accused the vice-president and her fellow Democrats of “importing voters” through illegal and temporary protected status immigration. During a recent Trump campaign appearance, he compared the US-Mexico border to a “zombie apocalypse” – even as he had also previously described himself as “extremely pro immigrant, being one myself”.Bloomberg News recently published an analysis of more than 53,000 posts sent from Musk’s X account, finding that the entrepreneur’s output turned increasingly political this election year.“In 2024, immigration and voter fraud has become Musk’s most frequently posted and engaged with policy topic, garnering about 10bn views,” the outlet said. “Musk posted more than 1,300 times about the topic overall, with more than 330 posts in the past 2 months alone.”Bloomberg described Musk – who paid $44bn for X, then Twitter, in 2022 – as the platform’s single most important influencer and has reportedly ordered site engineers to push his posts into users’ feeds. That makes Musk “the most widely read person on the site today”, Bloomberg said. More

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      US warns Musk’s Super Pac $1m-a-day giveaways may be illegal, reports say

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      The US justice department has sent a letter to Elon Musk’s Super Pac warning that the billionaire Tesla CEO’s $1m-a-day giveaways may violate federal law, according to multiple reports.A letter from the department’s public integrity section, which investigates potential election-related law violations, went to the Pac, reports in CNN and the New York Times said. The justice department and Musk’s America Pac did not immediately respond to a request for comment.South African-born Musk, who has thrown his support behind Donald Trump in advance of the 5 November election, announced on Saturday while speaking before a crowd in Pennsylvania that he was giving away $1m each day until election day to someone who signs his online petition supporting the US constitution.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionHe handed $1m checks to two separate people over the weekend: one to a man in Harrisburg on Saturday and another to a women in Pittsburgh on Sunday. Another voter in North Carolina has won $1m. Between in-person campaign events in support of the Republican presidential candidate, Musk has tweeted his congratulations to the winners and urged other registered voters in swing states to sign his petition and enter the lottery.Election law experts had called the sweepstakes potentially illegal. The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, had called on law enforcement to investigate.Musk, ranked by Forbes as the world’s richest person, so far has supplied at least $75m to America Pac, according to federal disclosures, making the group a crucial part of Trump’s bid to regain the White House. More

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      Obama and Walz excoriate Trump at Wisconsin rally in early voting push

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      On the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, Tim Walz called Elon Musk a “dipshit” while Barack Obama said of Donald Trump: “You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this.”Both were speaking at a rally in Madison, a growing Democratic party stronghold, to encourage early voting and warn of the perils of a second Trump presidency. Obama went on to campaign for Kamala Harris in Detroit on Tuesday evening, alongside rapper Eminem, in an effort to drum up support in Michigan where polls suggest Harris and Trump are in a virtual deadlock.The Democratic vice-presidential candidate ripped into Trump ally and Silicon Valley billionaire Musk, warning that he could be charged with regulating his own businesses if Trump were elected. Musk has also promised the chance to win $1m to voters in swing states who sign a petition linked to efforts to return Trump to power.Walz also slammed Trump, who this week served meals at a McDonald’s in Pennsylvania, accusing him of “cosplaying” as a working-class person and noting that the restaurant had closed to accommodate the presidential candidate. “It was a stunt,” said Walz. “Fake orders for fake customers.”“He is not the 2016 Donald Trump,” said Walz, describing Trump’s promise to prosecute his political enemies. “He’s talking about sending the military against people who don’t support him. He’s naming names.”Obama, who won in Wisconsin in 2008 and 2012, urged his Madison audience to get to the polls and spent much of his speech attacking Trump.“I wouldn’t be offended if you just walk out right now and go vote,” he said.“When he’s not complaining, he’s trying to sell you stuff,” he added, referring to Trump, who has raised funds by selling gold-colored sneakers, bibles and $100,000 watches. “Who does that? You’re running for president, and you’re hawking merchandise.”He compared Trump’s meandering rhetorical style with that of Fidel Castro, the former Cuban head of state who was known to deliver hours-long speeches.“He calls himself the father of IVF. I have no idea what that means – you don’t either,” said Obama, casting Trump’s rambling speeches and sometimes confounding remarks as a sign of mental deterioration.“You’d be worried if Grandpa was acting like this,” said Obama. “But this is coming from someone who wants unchecked power.”Obama also acknowledged that while his signature healthcare bill, the Affordable Care Act, did not fix American healthcare, its passage meant people with pre-existing conditions are more able to access health insurance.He spoke about efforts by his administration to implement a pandemic-preparedness plan and accused Trump of abandoning the effort, resulting in more Covid-19 deaths.“Most of you know somebody whose life was touched,” said Obama, urging voters who are fed up with politics to participate in the November election anyway.Before Walz and Obama spoke, Madison mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway, Representative Mark Pocan, Governor Tony Evers and Senator Tammy Baldwin – herself up for re-election on 5 November – encouraged voters to return their absentee ballots or vote absentee in person.“Don’t take the risk of forgetting to vote– vote early,” said Pocan. “With the Packers game on the Sunday afternoon before the election, you can have a two-day hangover and not worry about missing the vote.”More than 18 million people in the US have voted early so far in the 2024 election, with a little more than 326,000 of those coming from Wisconsin as of 21 October, according to the University of Florida’s Election Lab. Those numbers will increase dramatically now that Wisconsin’s early voting period has begun.Since the 2020 election, when Trump cast doubts on the integrity of absentee voting amid the Covid-19 pandemic, early voting has been a source of consternation in the Republican party. After Trump lost the 2020 election and Republicans failed to generate a red wave during the 2022 midterm elections, GOP leaders have sought to encourage their base to cast ballots before election day.Trump, who discouraged absentee voting before the 2020 election, has struggled to stay on message about early voting, alternately urging supporters to vote early and casting aspersions on the voting method – sometimes during the same speech.With polls showing Harris and Trump in a dead heat across the swing states, including Wisconsin, the last-minute push to turn out voters could determine the outcome of the election. In 2020, Joe Biden won in Wisconsin by about 20,000 votes; in 2016, Trump beat Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin with a similarly slim majority. With 10 votes in the electoral college, Wisconsin will play a critical role in determining the outcome of the 2024 presidential election.Deb and Rod Merritt, a retired couple from Sauk county, Wisconsin, who attended the rally on Tuesday, said the pressure of Wisconsin’s close margins and the extra time afforded by retirement drove them to volunteer for the Harris campaign.“I’m definitely nervous,” said Deb Merritt, who said knocking on doors in the bellwether county – Sauk county voters have aligned with the winner repeatedly in presidential elections – was gratifying.“We saw a few [undecided voters], mostly leaning Democrat,” said Rod Merritt. “Some people would say: ‘I’m voting for Kamala and my husband was for Trump, but he’s not going to vote.”In both 2016 and 2020, Trump performed better in Wisconsin than polling suggested.“We don’t know if that’s going to happen again this time, or which direction it’ll be or how big the error will be, but we have to expect that we need to overshoot to be able to win by a hair,” Ben Wikler, the Wisconsin Democratic party chair, told the Guardian. “For anyone who’s knocking on doors, if you think for a second you’ve got it in the bag, then go and sign up for another volunteer shift to drive it even higher.”In Detroit, an energetic Obama performed part of an Eminem rap when he took the stage and then praised Harris as “a leader who has spent her life fighting on behalf of people who need a voice, need a champion – somebody who was raised in the middle class”. Reviving earlier jabs against Trump, he noted Harris “did not pretend to work at McDonald’s when it was closed”, but actually held a fast-food job in college to help with her expenses.For his Michigan audience, Obama recounted the chaos Trump helped cause in the state after the 2020 election: “Because Donald Trump was willing to spread lies about voter fraud in Michigan, protesters came down, banged on the windows, shouting, ‘Let us in. Stop the count.’ Poll workers inside being intimidated … all because Donald Trump couldn’t accept losing.” More

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      Is it wrong for Elon Musk to offer voters $1m a day to get Trump elected? That’s a tough one | Marina Hyde

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      For a guy who has spent his entire life making “I am very rich” the keystone of his personal brand, there is something quite poignant about watching Donald Trump get financially cucked by Elon Musk on stage every night. Musk is much younger, much richer, and has had a much more successful series of hair transplants. But needs must, it seems.As you might be aware, Musk has recently decided to update the tired dystopian fiction trope in which impoverished citizens are forced to compete in deadly gameshows where the winner gets a life-changingly glittering prize, and the losers are killed for sport. In Elon’s rebooted version, the richest man in the world is giving struggling voters the chance to win a million dollars if they sign a “petition” in favour of free speech and the right to bear arms.You get $47 (£36) just for signing up – $100 in Pennsylvania, for some reason! – and only registered voters can apply. As long as they leave their names – and addresses, for some reason! – they’re all good to enter the lottery pit. Also, it’s not fictional but real, and it’s happening in swing states every single day from now until the election in two weeks’ time. On Saturday, Musk presented his first state-of-the-art cardboard cheque for $1m to a man at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. On Sunday, it was the turn of a woman at a town hall in Pittsburgh. On Monday, his Pac (political action committee) launched a drive against election interference, because hey – above all, he’s an ironist.Like so many of the previous new lows of this campaign, once this tactic manifests itself you immediately find yourself thinking: of course. Of course, of course. Of course Musk, 53, would become a dark mirror version of MrBeast, and use the YouTube giveaway playbook to go viral in the election endgame. It’s at once completely shocking, and also an October not-even-a-surprise. Perhaps the only mirthless smile it can raise is when you consider the utter yesteryearing it represents for Hollywood.It felt quaint even at the time, but do recall George Clooney spouting off last year about how indispensable Hollywood could be to political campaigns. “I always just say,” George just said, “look, everybody keeps coming into Hollywood for cash, and they don’t come to us for the one thing we do better than anybody, which is tell stories.” Mm. And yet here we are, with the dark stars of the election bypassing the gold-standard magic of a movie industry everyone can see is in crisis, and taking their inspo from YouTube, which isn’t.Anyway, in scenes also some-way-past familiar: the old good-chap structures of political life are revealed as simply unable to cope with bad chaps who decline to play by the unwritten rules. In fact, even the written rules seem to be in doubt. Is Musk’s stunt legal? Those scrambling to respond to this question are once again falling back on the old “uncharted territory” descriptor. Alas, if you were hoping we could get a couple of cartographers out of bed for this one – like, yesterday? – then prepare for disappointment. What we have instead are leisurely headlines such as “Elon Musk’s pledge for daily $1 million giveaways draw legal questions”.The Pennsylvania governor, Josh Shapiro, opined on Monday of the giveaways that “I think it’s something that law enforcement could take a look at”. “Could take a look at”, questions being “drawn” – I can’t help feeling the vocabulary choices here indicate the sort of mid-tier to-do list priority that no doubt the relevant cops/jurisprudence professors will get around to solving in a few weeks’ time. No particular reason you’d want to rush this one. Is there?In the meantime, seemingly nightly, we have the world’s richest man on stage in service of Donald Trump. Or will it turn out to be the other way round? Only time will show, but given Musk is being touted for some kind of anti-regulation role at the same time as his businesses are involved in multiple anti-regulation lawsuits … let’s just say this could go either way. In some ways, both parties could use a hand.And yet, neither is an underdog. However many years we are through the looking-glass now, I still boggle at the utter WTF-ery of Trump and Musk being able to present themselves as rank outsiders oppressed by the elites. “One of the challenges we’re having is, how do we get the public to know about this petition because the legacy media won’t report on it,” whined Musk at the weekend, in comments promptly reported by the legacy media. Also: you own a media platform, shithead – please don’t try to “my struggle” this one. Other looking-glass lunacies include Musk’s regular assertions that Kamala Harris will end democracy, which he makes while appearing to buy votes in support of a man who has already sparked one insurrection and has explicitly promised to be “a dictator” on day one of his presidency.They say democracy dies in darkness, but it currently appears to be suffering serious breathing issues under full stage lights. In fact, watching Musk go all-out for Trump, it’s hard not to get ominous circle-of-life vibes, and feel like you’re watching the simultaneous live birth of an American oligarchy. There have been vested interests as long as there has been US politics, of course. But no robber baron of the Gilded Age was ever this relatively rich, or as artlessly open about what – and whom – a relatively tiny amount of money can buy.

      Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist

      A year in Westminster: John Crace, Marina Hyde and Pippa Crerar. On Tuesday 3 December, join Crace, Hyde and Crerar as they look back at a political year like no other, live at the Barbican in London and livestreamed globally. Book tickets here or at guardian.live More

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      Walz says Musk’s $1m voter giveaway reflects that Trump has ‘no plan’

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      Tim Walz, the Minnesota governor and Democratic vice-presidential candidate, said Elon Musk’s plan to give away $1m a day in support of Donald Trump is a reflection of a ticket with “no plan”.Musk offered registered voters in swing states a chance to enter a $1m a day giveaway if they sign his Super Pac’s petitions, “in favor of free speech and the right to bear arms”. Experts have questioned whether the plan is legal or, in effect, buying votes.“Well, I think that’s what you do when you have no plan for the public,” said Walz, when asked about the giveaway on ABC’s The View, a daytime talkshow.“When you have no economic plan that’s going to benefit the middle class, when you have no plan to protect reproductive rights, when you have no plan to address climate change and produce American energy – you go to these types of tactics,” said Walz.As to whether Musk’s strategy was legal, Walz said: “I’ll let the lawyers decide.”This is the second time the Democratic presidential ticket has appeared on The View talkshow in recent weeks. Kamala Harris announced a new “Medicare at home” plan on the show, which she said would help seniors pay for home health aides without driving themselves into destitution.Walz, known to be chatty in such interviews, also quipped that “one nice thing” about Trump is that “he will not be president again.” He advised JD Vance, the Republican vice-presidential candidate, to “just go in and order the chocolate doughnut”, referring to an awkward campaign stop.This is one of several recent TV outings for Walz, including an upcoming appearance on The Daily Show and recent appearances on Fox News Sunday. The governor appeared ebullient on The View – akin to the television appearances that helped land him the job as second on the Harris ticket.In the abbreviated time that Harris had to pick a running mate, and in which Walz has had to introduce himself to the country, he briefly took a more conservative approach to campaigning. Most notably, Walz was panned during the vice-presidential debate.Walz appeared more confident on Monday, telling voters watching The View: “Choose a future where you’re the center of it not Donald Trump.”

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      Conspiracy theories and a $1m check: a night at Elon Musk’s surreal election giveaway

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      Standing before a large US flag, which spanned the breadth of a vast stage, the world’s richest man told an assembled audience that he loved them.“This kind of energy lights a fire in my soul,” he said, having just made one of the crowd a millionaire after everyone chanted his name.His love – and that $1m – of course, was contingent on them all doing exactly as Elon Musk wanted: signing a petition tied to his political action committee (Pac) , which is dedicated to sending Donald Trump back to the White House.The spectacle was both surreal and potentially illegal. But no one here, not least Musk himself, seemed to care in the slightest.The billionaire was in Pittsburgh on his final stop across the vital swing state of Pennsylvania, having donated $75m to help get Trump re-elected, and seemingly willing to accept a job offer in Trump’s government should he win.Musk’s latest ploy to assist Trump to attain more political power, has been to give away $1m every day to a member of the public, provided they also live in a swing state and are registered to vote.The stunt is prohibited and akin to buying votes, in the view of some experts, as it violates federal election law preventing payments for registering to vote. The state’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro, on Sunday described it as “deeply concerning” and encouraged law enforcement to “take a look at”. Musk’s America Pac did not respond to a list of questions from the Guardian after the Pittsburgh town hall.Sunday’s winner was a woman named Kristine Fishell, who walked down from the theater’s balcony wearing a red Trump T-shirt as Musk waited awkwardly on stage. She thanked him, not only for the money, but also for the “wealth and responsibility, you are using to save [free] speech”. She did not return to her seat after accepting the giant check, and organizers did not make her available for an interview. Hours later a video of Fishell was posted on Musk’s X platform, where she espoused the virtues of signing his petition to an overlay of soft piano music.Many of the attendees at the Roxian theatre said they had signed up to attend the event before he announced the $1m giveaway.Most said they were not concerned by the idea of the world’s richest man taking on a job in Trump’s administration, despite the myriad conflicts of interest that would pose. (Musk’s businesses hold several multi-billion dollar contracts with the US government and Trump has suggested making him a “secretary of cost-cutting” a murky new position within the executive branch.)

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      “I don’t think it’s a conflict of interest,” said one woman who did not give her name. “I think he is fighting for many Americans who feel their rights are being taken away, especially free speech.”Evan Huber was unfazed by the argument that Musk’s entry into government would mark the establishment of a new era of American oligarchy.“At that point all you can get is power,” he said, shrugging. “You already have all the money.”Lauren Stephenson, 40, who described herself as a political independent, arrived at the venue at 8.30am, so set was she to secure a seat.“We need more entrepreneurs,” she said when asked what Elon Musk had ever done for her personally. “I don’t understand why we condemn success. We used to celebrate success.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionStephenson, who was sad not to have won the $1m but said she was planning to buy her first Tesla nonetheless, was frustrated she had been unable to ask a question during the rest of the town hall, which lasted around two hours.Throughout the event, Musk reiterated a litany of falsehoods tied to Trump’s campaign. He argued that the “constitution is literally under attack”, spread false claims about voting machines and said that a Trump loss in November could ultimately end American democracy. “I fear if Trump does not win, we are going to have a single-party state that is going to be like California, but actually worse,” he said.Many in the audience asked questions about Musk’s businesses; his views on the future of AI; even if they should be starting their own families. One asked if he would consider running for president himself in 2028. He could not, he explained, due to the natural born citizen clause of the US constitution, and he did not want the job either.“I hate politics,” he said. “I just like building stuff. And making products that people love.”At one point, when he was asked a question about the future of nuclear power and began extolling the virtues of the sun, an attendee shouted: “Yes! Go the sun!” Later on a man began attempting to get the crowd to spontaneously sing the national anthem but no one joined in. Another attendee was removed by security after trying to shout a question out of line.But others asked more conspiracy themed questions, including whether Musk would consider financing the viewing of documentaries about child sex trafficking at the US border, or if he would consider creating a Hollywood studio to finance conservative film projects. He offered no firm commitments for any investment opportunities.Some began to trickle out before the event had finished, and Musk wrapped up with empty seats visible throughout the auditorium. He exited the venue behind a privacy curtain, in a blacked out SUV as the sun began to set over the Ohio river.The motorcade did not stop as the Guardian asked from the roadside: “Why will you not take questions from journalists, too?” More