Systemic Error Podcast

What happened RawStory reports that Sen. Eric Schmitt presented a false claim during a Tuesday Senate Judiciary Committee hearing: that former special counsel Jack Smith had attended an Atlanta Hawks game in 2024 as cover for a secret meeting with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis. Smith had actually attended an Iowa Hawkeyes game in Maryland. An unnamed senior Republican senator told Ra...

What happened RawStory reports that Fox Business host Larry Kudlow dismissed the inflationary risk posed by diesel prices during his Wednesday program, only for fellow Fox Business personality Dagen McDowell to challenge him. McDowell said diesel costs would flow through goods and services, raising consumer prices in the coming months; she described the issue not as hypothetical, but as a question...

What happened RawStory reports that President Donald Trump narrated three taxpayer-funded television ads resembling campaign material. The latest, aired during major weekend programming, attacks the “deep state,” “globalists,” “communists,” and news media before promising to “liberate America.” Each ad identifies the U.S. government as the payer. Several Republican senators objected to the financi...

What happened AlterNet reports that Republican strategist Matthew Bartlett warned a midterm “wipeout could be coming,” arguing that President Donald Trump has given Republican candidates neither governing results to promote nor an agenda to offer voters. Bartlett said GOP officials fear support could deteriorate further before Election Day. That warning rests partly on two polls: a Wall Street Jou...

What happened Paul Krugman’s “really, really bad news” for Donald Trump and Republicans is the widening gap between the administration’s economic sales pitch and voters’ reported experience one month before the midterms. As AlterNet reports, Krugman pointed to worsening economic sentiment, perceptions of a weaker job market, and a sharp rise in mortgage rates. In an AP-NORC survey of 2,140 adults...

What happened Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick told The Washington Sun that he considers himself “an independent who is registered Republican.” He said he would formally leave the GOP if Pennsylvania allowed independents to participate in party primaries, describing himself as politically “homeless.” AlterNet reports that Fitzpatrick is defending his seat in Pennsylvania’s competitive 1st Congressional Dist...

What happened AlterNet argues that the Kennedy Center’s reported financial collapse followed President Donald Trump’s takeover, not a preexisting fiscal catastrophe. Citing Washington Post reporting based on 15 years of confidential board records and tax filings, it says the center was solvent before Trump removed professional staff, asserted control over programming, and watched revenue, donation...

What happened RawStory, citing Politico, reports that President Donald Trump rolled out major infrastructure proposals in Alaska, Iowa and Alabama shortly before the midterm elections. Republican strategists described the move as “too little, too late” because early voting was already underway, Election Day was four weeks away, and none of the projects was expected to become operational before 203...

What happened AlterNet reports that CNN’s John King said some Trump voters reacted with disbelief to reporting about President Donald Trump’s cryptocurrency ventures. One voter called Trump “out of his mind,” then asked whether the story was legitimate. CNN’s Anderson Cooper cited financial filings that he said show the ventures putting more than $1 billion a year in Trump’s pocket. King also desc...

What happened RawStory, citing The PunchUp and federal procurement records, reports that the Department of Homeland Security replaced Salus Worldwide Solutions as the contractor running Project Homecoming. DHS awarded Virginia-based Response AI Solutions the program’s next phase—worth up to $2.062 billion over three years—after Secretary Markwayne Mullin reopened the contract to competition. DHS h...

What happened RawStory reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth used a Wednesday “State of the Force” speech to declare that the Pentagon was no longer “woke” or “weak,” while deriding categories of people he considered physically or culturally unacceptable. On Friday, MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough and Willie Geist mocked the presentation as insecure and “really weird,” answering the headline’s teas...

What happened AlterNet reports that Sen. Eric Schmitt accused former special counsel Jack Smith of coordinating with Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, relying on the false claim that Smith attended an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024. Smith denied it, and Schmitt escalated by accusing him of perjury. The game was actually an Iowa Hawkeyes women’s college basketball game. A local news...

What happened RawStory reports that the FBI demoted two veteran counterterrorism supervisors in its Washington Field Office after a dispute over an investigation into alleged harassing phone calls to Katie Miller, the wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller. The FBI confirmed the personnel moves, but the report does not establish who ordered them or whether formal disciplinary pro...

What happened RawStory reports that President Donald Trump pressed Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas to support legislation making daylight saving time permanent, casting the bill as a political victory Republicans needed ahead of the midterms. Cotton said he would oppose it because Arkansans did not want children traveling to school “in the pitch dark.” Trump answered by attacking Cotton’s ego and elec...

What happened RawStory reports that President Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that his administration would “immediately” send checks of nearly $100 to more than 20 million seniors to help cover Medicare Part B premiums. The report, published five weeks before the midterm elections, says Trump did not explain who would qualify or when payments would arrive. Trump said the money would come f...

What happened AlterNet reports that Mary Lou, a Trump supporter who appears with her children Chad Kultgen and Hailey Pop on The Necessary Conversation podcast, said during a Friday MS NOW segment that she might not vote for Trump again. Asked about a hypothetical future election, she answered that she would first have to see his opponent—a response that visibly surprised her children. Pop called...

What happened AlterNet’s headline overstates the evidence: the Fox Business segment did not identify a “Trump debt bomb.” Host Liz Claman and Empower strategist Marta Norton discussed rising corporate borrowing for artificial-intelligence infrastructure. Norton warned that heavy capital spending had depleted cash flow at major technology companies and could require still more debt. AlterNet also c...

What happened Hundreds of residents and University of South Alabama students protested President Donald Trump’s Friday appearance at the school’s Mitchell Center, according to AlterNet’s account of AL.com reporting. The protest challenged both Trump and the university’s decision to welcome him; supporters and demonstrators traded angry shouts as protesters marched across campus. The headline’s “co...

What happened RawStory reports that a late-September and early-October 2026 New York Times/Siena poll put Democratic challenger Gina Hinojosa four points ahead of Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. Abbott had led by six points in June, making Texas the largest of several Democratic shifts across five Republican-leaning states. The same comparison showed Democrats improving in Alaska’s Senate race, Iowa’s gub...

What happened RawStory reports that the Supreme Court was set to hear a petition by Suncor and ExxonMobil seeking to stop Colorado state-law claims brought by Boulder County and the City of Boulder. The local governments sued in 2018, seeking compensation for climate-related damage; in May 2025, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that federal law did not preempt their claims. According to the report...

What happened RawStory reports that Federal Election Commission staff sent three letters to U.S. Sen. Eric Schmitt’s campaign committee seeking corrections or explanations for apparent campaign-finance reporting problems. Thirteen out-of-state donors appeared nearly 5,700 times in Schmitt’s reports, producing a net $85,672 in contributions; reported totals for each donor ranged from just over the...

What happened RawStory argues that Republicans may be damaging their own midterm prospects, but it provides no evidence of a coordinated plot to lose. Its case rests on two reported decisions shortly before the elections: Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley called former special counsel Jack Smith to testify, reviving attention to January 6, while the Trump administration canceled a...

What happened RawStory reports that MS NOW host Jen Psaki argued Donald Trump’s support was fading because his Friday rally in Mobile, Alabama, appeared to leave more than half of a 10,000-seat venue empty. Psaki called the turnout a visual sign of political decline and contrasted it with Trump’s much larger rally in Mobile during his 2015 campaign. The article provides no official attendance figu...

What happened RawStory reports that former Alabama Sen. Doug Jones said President Donald Trump’s rally in deep-red Alabama was not primarily about the midterms. Jones argued that its timing—on the day of a major bridge project’s groundbreaking—showed Trump was campaigning to have the bridge named after him. Jones, now the Democratic nominee for Alabama governor, told Jen Psaki that Trump had “virt...

What happened RawStory reports that biographer Michael Wolff alleged Donald Trump’s team threatened unspecified action against the University of Pennsylvania during the 2016 presidential campaign if it did not keep Trump’s academic transcripts private. Wolff made the claim on a Saturday episode of his podcast, but the article supplies no response from Trump’s representatives or the university and...