Oath Keepers Founder Abandons MAGA After Iran War

The founder of the far-right Oath Keepers said Monday that he is no longer part of the MAGA movement because of President Trump’s war in Iran.

While guest-hosting for conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show, Stewart Rhodes lamented “the obvious role of the influence of Zionism in our government, of the Israeli people, intelligence services, Mossad, and others in our government.

“So that’s why I no longer call myself MAGA. I am an America-only patriot. I’m a Christian nationalist, an American Christian nationalist. I have to open my eyes to the reality in front of my face, and it’s caused a division inside of MAGA, and it’s caused a division on the political right. But so be it,” Rhodes said.

Rhodes’s 18-year sentence for seditious conspiracy on January 6, 2021, was commuted, not pardoned by Trump last year, and he plans to visit Mar-a-Lago on Friday at the invitation of the Republican Party chair of Palm Beach in the hopes of getting a pardon from the president.*

“I can’t let that shut me up about calling out what I see happening in our country,” Rhodes said. “And so if I lose my pardon because of that, then so be it. That’s where my mind’s at. And I think I owe that to everybody who ever swore the oath like I did.”

It’s quite a revelation to see a January 6 insurrectionist break ranks with Trump. It goes to show that many of the president’s closest supporters believed his campaign pledge of no new wars, and aren’t willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt over Iran. Before Trump made the decision to bomb Iran, some on the right begged him to hold off, including commentators on Fox News. Now Rhodes and others on the right are abandoning MAGA.

* This article previously misstated the length of Rhodes’s sentence.

A trio of Oklahoma teenagers are suing Elon Musk’s xAI, accusing the company’s artificial intelligence program of stealing images of them off the internet to create child pornography.

The lawsuit, filed Monday, accuses a single perpetrator of compiling images and videos of at least 18 girls, and digitally altering their appearances with tools such as Grok to create nude images of underage girls.

The suit cites a police arrest that occurred in December, documenting an instance in which the individual used Grok to strip a blue bikini from a photo that a girl posted to her Instagram account in order to “depict her without any clothes.”

It is the first instance in which underage victims of such an act have taken legal action against the offender, reported The Washington Post.

The mother of one of the teens told the Post that the violating incident had “crushed” her daughter, who previously was an outgoing student-athlete.

“It definitely put her into a little bit of a shell, which we had never seen before,” the mother told the newspaper.

The proliferation of AI-generated media has conjured new legal quandaries in recent months, particularly as some of the major chatbot programs—especially Grok—have made their image-generating capabilities more accessible to the general public.

A December review by the content analysis firm Copyleaks found that Grok had—at the time—been generating “roughly one nonconsensual sexualized image per minute,” each of which was directly posted to X for public consumption. Some of the images circulated by the chatbot included sexually explicit deepfakes of children, reported The 19th.

Musk, nonetheless, vehemently defended his AI creation, writing on X in January that he was “not aware of any naked underage images generated by Grok” at the time. “Literally zero,” he said.

There is little recourse available for those whose images and likeness have been stolen to fuel the nonconsensual AI recreations. The Senate passed the bipartisan DEFIANCE Act in January, in an attempt to create a pathway for civil action against those who produce, distribute, receive, or possess digitally generated porn that uses the face or likeness of an individual without their permission. That bill is still waiting for the House to take action on it, though it is unclear exactly when that could happen.

Tech experts argue that the production of deepfakes is doubling every six months, in part due to the widespread availability of AI. While much reporting has focused on the influence of deepfakes and artificially generated imagery on electoral integrity, coverage has practically glossed over the worst victims of the practice. The vast majority of deepfakes—some 90 percent—are nonconsensually generated porn of women, reported Context News in 2024.

“These young people—these children—are facing a lifetime of having these … sexualized images of what appears to be a child’s body out there on the internet,” the teens’ lawyer, Vanessa Baehr-Jones, told the Post. “It wouldn’t have been possible but for this tool that xAI released knowing full well that this material could be generated.”

The Trump administration is rolling out a new task force, led by Vice President JD Vance, to go after claims of benefits fraud in majority-blue states.

Vance accompanied President Donald Trump in the Oval Office on Monday as the latter signed an executive order to create an official benefits fraud task force. Before doing so, Trump admitted that the task force would focus mostly on Democratic states.

“It seems that it’s usually in blue states. If it’s in red states, we’re going there too, but it seems that it’s heavily, heavily Democrat,” Trump said, before taking time to disparage Somali American Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar.

“What we’ve found since President Trump came into office is that the Democrats have set up the system to funnel hundreds of billions and ultimately trillions of dollars to migrants that are in our country, oftentimes from places like Somalia,” White House adviser Stephen Miller added.

Trump had previously assigned Vance to investigate fraud in Minnesota. A document obtained by the New York Post says the order is necessary due to “similar vulnerabilities [in] California, Illinois, New York, Maine, and Colorado, where insufficient safeguards and weak oversight increase the risk of large-scale fraud.”

While talking on Monday about the war he started with Iran, President Trump claimed that he predicted 9/11 “a long time ago.”

“I knew about the Strait [of Hormuz], that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago, I predicted all of this stuff. You guys were very generous in that I predicted all of it,” he said, during a press conference at the Trump-Kennedy Center. “I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center, I made that prediction a year before he did it. I said ‘You better get him, he’s a bad guy.’ … One year before exactly, I wrote it in a book. You can even check. About a year before the World Trade Center came down. President Clinton actually had a shot at him, and he didn’t take it.”

Trump has made this claim countless times over the years. It is false. In his 2000 book, Trump wrote, “One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.”

Recognizing bin Laden as a “shadowy figure” is nowhere close to predicting that he would order hijackers to fly planes into the Twin Towers.

Former Border Patrol chief Gregory Bovino, who presided over the Trump administration’s violent operations in Chicago and Minneapolis, will retire at the end of March, two unnamed sources told CBS News.

Bovino was reassigned back to his home office in southern California in January after his disastrous tenure in Minnesota, which set off mass protests against ICE and Border Patrol agents and led to two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, being killed by federal agents. Afterward, Bovino had the audacity to claim that Pretti planned to “massacre” federal agents.

Before that, Bovino lied in court about using excessive force and tear gas against protesters in Chicago. The Trump administration also deployed Bovino to Los Angeles, Charlotte, and New Orleans, and he wore out his welcome with the locals each time. Agents under his command in each city were seen making arbitrary stops and profiling people based on their accents and race. 

Now Bovino’s time in the federal government is at an end, as is his role as the Trump administration’s  scapegoat for Minneapolis. But he may not escape accountability: Local Minnesota authorities are launching an investigation into “Operation Metro Surge.” Bovino and his underlings (and possibly superiors in the Trump administration) could face charges.