Lauren Boebert Is Now on Cameo—and About to Get in Legal Trouble

Representative Lauren Boebert apparently sees the need to supplement her income from Congress—she’s now taking fees to make videos on Cameo.

The far-right Colorado congresswoman and live theater enthusiast joins her former colleagues George Santos and Matt Gaetz on the platform, charging $250 for personal advice or a “pep talk.” She posted a welcome video outlining the services that she would offer through the celebrity video service.

“Hey, Cameo, it’s your girl from Colorado, Lauren Boebert,” she said in the video. “Whether you or someone you know needs an America First pep talk, if you want to surprise friends or family with a message for a special day, or if you just want to know my thoughts on whatever’s on your mind, Cameo is the place to connect with me.”

But there’s a reason why she only has former colleagues on Cameo: She could be breaking the rules for members of the House of Representatives. First, there’s an outside income limit of $31,815, so she’d have to watch how much money she makes, and second, under House rules, members are prohibited from receiving honoraria, defined as a “payment of money or thing of value for an appearance, speech, or article.”

Now, if Boebert was having her Cameo proceeds go to her campaign account, that would probably be in line with House rules, but that is prohibited by the video platform. So it would seem that Boebert should have some questions to answer from the House Ethics Committee, which has another crisis to worry about after Gaetz’s alleged sexual misconduct.

Santos also was under investigation from the House Ethics Committee due to multiple allegations of corruption while he was in Congress, and now that Boebert has joined Santos and Gaetz on Cameo, she’s created an association that she could have easily avoided. If she continues down a similarly corrupt path, Cameo could end up being her sole source of income.

Right-wing provocateur Christopher Rufo could help shape President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for higher education, according to a new report from The Wall Street Journal.

Rufo—a leading actor in right-wing culture wars, from the moral panic surrounding “critical race theory” to the hoax about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio—reportedly “has an invitation to Mar-a-Lago, where he will present the president-elect’s team with a plan to geld American universities by withholding money if they don’t pull back on diversity measures.”

A spokesperson for JD Vance told the Journal that the vice president-elect sees Rufo as “a leading voice in the movement to restore merit and excellence” to higher education, who “recognizes schools and universities exist to equip American students to face tomorrow’s challenges, not to indoctrinate them with the fringe beliefs of the far left.”

To see such lofty aims in action, one can look at how the New College of Florida has transformed since Governor Ron DeSantis appointed Rufo and other conservative activists to the school’s board of trustees in 2023 in his “war on woke.”

Under its new leadership, New College has undergone significant changes, most recently hiring a number of “ideologically aligned rightwing faculty and staff for a range of positions,” per The Guardian, including conservative commentator and comedian Andrew Doyle, who will teach a course on “wokeness.”

The overhaul of New College and Rufo’s actions as trustee have been met with resistance and sharp criticism from students and faculty. One such critic, a visiting history professor, was threatened by Rufo and later dismissed after co-writing an op-ed against the new administration, in what the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression called “a clear violation of the public college’s First Amendment obligations.”

According to the Journal, Rufo’s top concerns include ending race-based affirmative action at universities “with which the federal government does business” and defunding colleges “that continue to engage in DEI practices” in an effort to “recapture” them from the left—stances that resonate with president-elect’s thinking on higher ed.

Donald Trump’s pick for defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, once wrote about how Israel is key to a necessary “American crusade”—and the Geneva Conventions should be thrown out the window.

The Guardian has reported that in his most recent work, The War on Warriors, Hegseth wrote that the U.S. military should completely disregard the international human rights treaties, which outline rules for how to treat civilians during war time.

“The key question of our generation—of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—is way more complicated: what do you do if your enemy does not honor the Geneva conventions. We never got an answer. Only more war. More casualties,” Hegseth wrote. “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! … Who cares what other countries think?”

In his 2024 book, American Crusade: Our Fight to Stay Free, he wrote, “If you love America, you should love Israel.”

He goes on to liken his support for Israel to the Crusades, writing, “Our present moment is much like the 11th Century. We don’t want to fight, but, like our fellow Christians one thousand years ago, we must.… Arm yourself—metaphorically, intellectually, physically. Our fight is not with guns. Yet.”

Hegseth’s nomination aligns perfectly with President-elect Trump’s right-wing makeover of the federal government. And it doesn’t hurt that, like Trump, Hegseth has a serious allegation of sexual assault from 2017 hanging over his head.

Elon Musk admitted that X (formerly Twitter) is throttling link-based posts, essentially stifling news articles on the social media platform.

In a reply to a post Sunday from technology investor and writer Paul Graham, Musk confirmed that X’s algorithm deprioritizes links, telling him to “just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”

Graham was not convinced, replying, “If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that’s ‘lazy linking,’ but if I tweet that I’ve written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that’s somehow better?”

Musk didn’t reply to Graham, and later retweeted a post from user DogeDesigner explaining the change. A host of replies from other users to Musk’s reply, as well as Graham’s post, showed that this change is disliked by many X users, particularly in the technology and programming fields that Musk and Graham are a part of.

The fact that Musk replied at all is due to Graham’s standing in the venture capital and tech world (and probably his 1.2 million followers). Musk routinely ignores journalists, particularly critics, on X in favor of his fans and other right-wing accounts. He has frequently disparaged mainstream or “legacy” media outlets in favor of unverified accounts on X, and proudly spreads misinformation on the platform as long as it serves his worldview and political ends.

At times, Musk has shown favoritism on the platform and banned journalists on X when they run afoul of his beliefs, making his claims of being a free speech advocate look hypocritical. Several news outlets, such as NPR, The Guardian, and Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia have all quit X amid increased criticism from European officials.

Whether it’s due to Musk’s disdain for media outlets that criticize him or an attempt to keep users from browsing away from X, the tech CEO’s deprioritization of links has not only ruined the utility of a platform once prized for making it easy to follow news sources but has also increased the spreading of false information. It’s little wonder that competitors such as Bluesky, itself created by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, have grown exponentially since Donald Trump’s election.

In recent days, Republican politicians have taken to the airwaves, threatening blue states that fail to comply with the Trump administration’s draconian immigration policies with the withdrawal of federal funding.

Fox News’s Mark Levin suggested Sunday to Donald Trump’s prospective “border czar” Tom Homan that “federal funding” would be a “very, very powerful weapon” for the incoming administration.

“If you have a governor who says, ‘I’m not gonna cooperate, I’m gonna block you,’ well then, federal funds should be slashed to that state, and I mean hugely so,” Levin said. “These states, much like the Confederacy, they want to go on their own, they want to do their own thing. To me, you got a powerful weapon among others, which is, OK, no federal funds. Boom.”

“And that’s going to happen. I guarantee … President Trump will do that,” Homan replied.

Also on Sunday, Fox host Maria Bartiromo asked Representative Marjorie Taylor Green if “sanctuary states and sanctuary cities will lose their federal funding” under Trump. Greene replied, “If they use their police officers and their resources to harbor and protect illegal criminal aliens, then absolutely. Those sanctuary states and cities are in danger of losing their federal funding.”

And just a few days earlier, Senator Lindsey Graham told Fox News’s Hannity, “Sanctuary cities, you’re on notice, we should cut all your money off.”

Per Mother Jones’s Isabela Dias, law enforcement agencies and Democratic officials nationwide are increasingly “speaking out about their plans to thwart” Trump’s plans for mass deportation, which he intends to conduct via a national emergency and the deployment of the military.

In anticipation of the new administration’s immigration agenda, Democratic attorneys general “are preparing briefs and analyses and even identifying courts in which to file their lawsuits,” as well as “preparing to fight Trump over withholding federal funding from local law enforcement agencies in an attempt to induce them into carrying out deportations,” according to Politico.

The threats from members of the supposed party of “states’ rights” echo Trump’s first-term vow to defund sanctuary cities, which Politifact deems a broken promise as his efforts were “limited to Justice Department funds, and even those attempts [were] thwarted by courts.”