Latest news with #Trump-friendly
New York Post
an hour ago
- Business
- New York Post
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg horrified staffers with Joe Rogan chat, transformation into ‘MAGA Mark': report
Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg's public embrace of President Trump and his apparent transformation into 'MAGA Mark' has horrified staffers and executives at the social media giant, according to a report. Zuckerberg triggered a wave of internal backlash at the Facebook and Instagram parent company following a controversial appearance on the 'Joe Rogan Experience' podcast in January — in which the burgeoning MMA competitor said Corporate America had been 'culturally neutered' and workplaces needed more 'masculine energy,' according to the Financial Times. Just days after the controversial comments, a handful of executives worked up the courage to speak out at a leadership meeting at the company's Menlo Park, Calif., headquarters, the FT reported. Advertisement 5 Mark Zuckerberg's public embrace of masculinity reportedly triggered a wave of internal backlash at Meta, according to a report. PowerfulJRE/YouTube 5 Zuckerberg made the comments during a January 2025 appearance on the 'Joe Rogan Experience' podcast. PowerfulJRE/YouTube 5 Zuckerberg's conversation with Rogan reportedly left Meta staffers in 'horror' and 'grieving.' PowerfulJRE/YouTube Advertisement 'He basically said: 'If you don't like it, tough sh-t',' one person with knowledge of the conversation told FT. Zuckerberg, who as of Friday had the world's second highest net worth with a fortune valued by Bloomberg Billionaires Index at $245 billion, had also praised mixed-martial arts as a means of male bonding and asserted that aggression in men can be a force for good. 'There's this crazy thing about wrestling,' he told Rogan, a former MMA commentator. 'It's like, if you get into a fight with someone at work, you're probably going to get fired. But if you train in MMA, you can roll hard with someone and you're both better friends afterward.' Advertisement 'In a lot of the corporate world, I think there's this bias where you think that aggression or intensity is inherently bad,' Zuckerberg went on. 'But it's not. I actually think it's useful. You want to be able to channel that energy.' Zuckerberg's transformation from Silicon Valley liberal to a Trump-friendly public figure has become a defining narrative of his leadership. Once viewed as a quiet, hoodie-wearing technocrat, he began to appear shirtless in MMA training videos, sported gold chains, flaunted expensive watches and made regular appearances on podcasts with predominantly male, anti-woke audiences. Advertisement The Rogan interview added to a growing list of moves that critics view as aligning Zuckerberg — and the company — with right-wing politics. His public praise for Trump and the rollback of content moderation teams have only fueled those concerns, according to the report. 5 Zuckerberg has transformed his public image from tech nerd to an MMA-loving alpha male. Mark Zuckerberg/Instagram But those who know Zuckerberg intimately told FT that the Meta boss is simply showing the public a side of him that they have long been familiar with only in private. 'When he was 19 years old, I think he had an idea in his head of what a CEO was supposed to be like and he was trying to be that, especially in public,' Meta's chief technology officer Andrew Bosworth, told FT, adding that people are now seeing the 'authentic' Zuckerberg. 'The public is seeing him more how we have, internally, since the beginning,' Bosworth said. A Meta spokesperson declined to comment. Zuckerberg's newly revealed persona is gaining attention at a time when he has set his company on a war footing in the ultra-competitive race to gain market share in artificial intelligence. Last week, Meta acquired the start-up Scale AI for $14.3 billion — a deal that gives Zuckerberg's company a 49% non-voting stake as part of its push to close the gap with OpenAI and Google in the AI arms race. Advertisement 5 Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley bigwigs including Jeff Bezos (third from left), Google CEO Sundar Pichai (second from left) and Tesla CEO Elon Musk (far left) have sought to curry favor with President Trump. AP The deal secures Meta access to Scale's infrastructure and talent, including its founder Alexandr Wang, who now leads Meta's new 'superintelligence' unit. This move has triggered backlash from rivals, with OpenAI and Google cutting ties with Scale over conflict-of-interest concerns. While Meta is betting big — planning to spend $65 billion annually on AI by 2025 — the strategy carries risks including mounting costs, regulatory scrutiny and difficulty retaining top engineers.
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fired ABC News journalist stands by his post criticizing Trump and adviser
A journalist who lost his job at ABC News after describing top White House aide Stephen Miller as someone 'richly endowed with the capacity for hatred' has said he published that remark on social media because he felt it was 'true'. 'It was something that was in my heart and mind,' the network's former senior national correspondent Terry Moran said Monday on The Bulwark political podcast. 'And I would say I used very strong language deliberately.' Moran's comments to Bulwark host Tim Miller about standing by his statements came a little more than a week after he wrote on X that Stephen Miller – the architect of Donald Trump's hardline immigration policies – 'eats his hate'. 'His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,' Moran's post read, in part. He added that the president 'is a world-class hater. But his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification'. Related: Reporter says she was fired from Trump-friendly outlet after criticizing Hegseth Moran subsequently deleted the post, which had been published shortly after midnight on 8 June. ABC News initially suspended Moran pending an investigation, citing a policy against 'subjective attacks on others'. But then the network announced it would not be renewing his employment contract, effectively dismissing him. Among the polarizing reactions which stemmed from Moran's deleted post was one from Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, which read: 'The most important fact about Terry's full meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist's pose. Terry pulled off his mask.' But Moran on Monday maintained that he is 'a proud centrist' who opposes 'the viciousness and the intolerance that you feel when we argue politics'. Tim Miller asked Moran whether he was drunk at the time of the post. Moran replied that it had actually been 'a normal family night' that culminated with him putting his children to bed before he wrote out his thoughts about Stephen Miller. 'I typed it out and I looked at it and I thought 'that's true',' said Moran, who had been at ABC since 1997. 'And I hit send. 'I thought that's a description of the public man that I'm describing.' Some of Trump's most high-profile allies took verbal aim at Moran before his departure from ABC News was announced. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on Fox News and said Moran's post was 'unacceptable and unhinged', and JD Vance said it was a 'vile smear'. Nearly six months earlier, ABC News had agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum to settle a defamation case that he brought after the network's anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly asserted that Trump had been found 'liable for rape' in a lawsuit filed by columnist E Jean Carroll. Trump had actually been found liable for sexually abusing Carroll. Moran by Monday had joined the Substack publishing platform as an independent journalist. He told Tim Miller that he was hoping to interview members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio. Members of that community were politically villainized after Trump boosted debunked stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets ahead of his victory in November's presidential election. Moran alluded to how the vast majority of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were there legally through a temporary protected status that had been allocated to them due to violent unrest in their home country. They generally arrived in Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories whose owners were experiencing a labor shortage after the Covid-19 pandemic. And many are facing the prospect of being forced to leave the US by 3 August after the Trump administration decided to end legal visa programs for Haitians such as humanitarian parole and temporary protected status. 'The town had come to depend on them,' Moran said. 'That town was falling flat and now had risen.'
Yahoo
7 days ago
- Politics
- Yahoo
ICE says Club World Cup attendees should carry proof of citizenship, sparking concerns
The Trump administration's anti-immigrant crackdown is casting a pall over the FIFA Club World Cup soccer tournament kicking off in Florida this weekend. The Club World Cup is an international tournament that features some of the world's top professional soccer clubs. The United States is hosting it this year, with the first game scheduled for Saturday in Miami Gardens. On Tuesday, U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweeted that it will be 'suited and booted and ready to provide security for the first round of games.' It later deleted the tweet without explanation. And ICE told NBC News 6 in Miami that all non-American citizens will need to carry proof of their legal status. When asked to clarify that comment, an ICE spokesperson told The Miami Herald in a statement: 'As is customary for an event of this magnitude with national security implications, ICE will be working alongside our Department of Homeland Security and Department of Justice partners to help ensure the safety and security of the event.' As the Herald noted, CBP's presence at major sporting events is not uncommon. For instance, the agency promoted its participation during the Super Bowl in New Orleans earlier this year. But the remark from ICE about proving legal status and the now-deleted CBP tweet against the backdrop of Trump administration's anti-immigration crackdown have raised concerns among some soccer fans. It's as if the government is warning attendees to keep their 'freedom papers' on hand to avoid harassment from Trump's immigration officials, whose crackdown has already ensnared American citizens and produced disturbing images, like that of ICE agents chasing farmworkers through a California field. Some people in heavily-Latino, Trump-friendly Miami-Dade County may indeed choose to forgo this event — no matter their citizenship status — rather than potentially subject themselves to the administration's xenophobic scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal recently reported, citing people familiar with the matter, on efforts by Trump White House adviser Stephen Miller to have federal agents 'just go out there and arrest illegal aliens' at places like 7-Eleven and The Home Depot, where undocumented laborers have, at times, looked for work. 'Keeping President Trump's promise to deport illegal aliens is something the administration takes seriously,' a White House spokesperson told the Journal. The apparent plan to confirm attendees' legal status at a soccer match seems like a similar attempt by the Trump administration to cast a net in a place where immigrants are likely to be. And creating uncertainty around the event surely won't help with reports on slow-moving ticket sales for the tournament. In a recent discussion on 'The Dan Le Batard Show' podcast hosted by sports journalist Dan Le Batard, soccer reporter Tom Bogert talked about the fear among some attendees. The discussion begins around the 3:20 mark below: This article was originally published on
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Fetterman: Democrats must condemn violence in protests
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) again urged fellow Democrats on Tuesday to condemn violence as mass demonstrations continue to rock Los Angeles — a day after he slammed his party for not doing more to respond to growing unrest at protests over the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. 'All I said was, when people are setting cars on fire and damaging buildings and going after law enforcement, that's not free speech, that's not protesting,' he told NewsNation's Joe Khalil at the Capitol. 'That's illegal behavior and we can never be quiet or defend that.' 'It's incumbent on our party to condemn it,' he added. Fetterman posted on the social platform X on Monday that the growing California protests had devolved into 'anarchy and true chaos.' 'My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement,' he wrote. 'I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration — but this is not that.' Democratic leaders from California, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have stressed that protestors should remain peaceful and condemned violent acts as images of burning cars and other destruction began to emerge. Fetterman told Khalil that he wasn't directly speaking to their responses in his X post. 'All I'm saying for me, with what has happened, the optics that have emerged, for the vast majority of people, it's way beyond free speech or protesting,' Fetterman said. President Trump has sent thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to protect federal buildings and workers during the demonstrations. Trump and Fetterman have developed an apparently cordial relationship since the start of Trump's second presidency, after Fetterman defeated Trump ally Dr. Mehmet Oz (R) for the coveted Pennsylvania senate seat in 2022. Reports emerged Tuesday that Pennsylvania's junior senator met with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon Monday evening at the Trump-friendly restaurant Butterworth's on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, some Democrats have highlighted Fetterman's alleged erratic behavior since openly seeking mental health treatment in 2023. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
The Hill
10-06-2025
- Politics
- The Hill
Fetterman: Democrats must condemn violence in protests
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) again urged fellow Democrats on Tuesday to condemn violence as mass demonstrations continue to rock Los Angeles — a day after he slammed his party for not doing more to respond to growing unrest at protests over the Trump administration's immigration crackdown. 'All I said was, when people are setting cars on fire and damaging buildings and going after law enforcement, that's not free speech, that's not protesting,' he told NewsNation's Joe Khalil at the Capitol. 'That's illegal behavior and we can never be quiet or defend that.' 'It's incumbent on our party to condemn it,' he added. Fetterman posted on the social platform X on Monday that the growing California protests had devolved into 'anarchy and true chaos.' 'My party loses the moral high ground when we refuse to condemn setting cars on fire, destroying buildings, and assaulting law enforcement,' he wrote. 'I unapologetically stand for free speech, peaceful demonstrations, and immigration — but this is not that.' Democratic leaders from California, including Gov. Gavin Newsom and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, have stressed that protestors should remain peaceful and condemned violent acts as images of burning cars and other destruction began to emerge. Fetterman told Khalil that he wasn't directly speaking to their responses in his X post. 'All I'm saying for me, with what has happened, the optics that have emerged, for the vast majority of people, it's way beyond free speech or protesting,' Fetterman said. President Trump has sent thousands of National Guard troops and Marines to protect federal buildings and workers during the demonstrations. Trump and Fetterman have developed an apparently cordial relationship since the start of Trump's second presidency, after Fetterman defeated Trump ally Dr. Mehmet Oz (R) for the coveted Pennsylvania senate seat in 2022. Reports emerged Tuesday that Pennsylvania's junior senator met with former Trump strategist Steve Bannon Monday evening at the Trump-friendly restaurant Butterworth's on Capitol Hill. Meanwhile, some Democrats have highlighted Fetterman's alleged erratic behavior since openly seeking mental health treatment in 2023.
