Tag: Donald Trump

Google Maps Now Shows ‘Lake America’ Instead of Lake Ontario

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Lake Ontario is no more on Google Maps in the US. Google changed the name of the easternmost of the Great Lakes to “Lake America” late Saturday, days after President Donald Trump ordered its rebranding in official government databases.

Trump issued the executive order on Thursday as part of an ongoing feud over tariffs with Canada, whose province of Ontario borders the lake. It followed a similar order he issued in January 2025 to rename the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America as part of a fight with the US trading partner to the south.

Google, Apple, Microsoft, and other maps providers adopted the Gulf of America naming as soon as the US Department of the Interior updated its records, which came a couple of weeks after Trump’s order. So it was no surprise that when those records—which are used to determine names on roadway signs and in government literature—reflected Lake America, digital maps from Google also quickly took on the new name.

Apple Maps and Bing Maps have not yet reflected the change but are expected to. In fact, the map for the federal government’s Geographic Names Information System database, which informs these changes, still showed Lake Ontario as of Sunday morning, with a note that the maps are “in the process of being updated to reflect this name change.”

While Google and other private organizations that provide maps are not bound by law to use official names, they generally follow government databases like GNIS. The location names a user sees depends on their own geography.

“People using Maps in the US will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the US and Canada will see both names,” Google said in an unsigned statement. “These updates follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country, and are starting to roll out now.”

Trump’s efforts to rewrite maps have generated considerable public debate in open-source mapping communities such as OpenStreetMap, whose technology is used by companies such as Uber and Lyft. Ultimately, OpenStreetMap recognizes both the US and foreign names and gives organizations using its maps the choice over which to show.

One map provider that has so far declined to make the change is MapQuest, which said in a social media post in response to Trump’s order, “We’re not changing it.”

Google Caves to Trump Again, Renames Lake Ontario

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Google has caved to Trump’s whims again. Less than two years after controversially relabeling the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America,” Trump has now attempted to formally rename Lake Ontario “Lake America” by executive order following a trade standoff with Canada. Google quickly followed suit with the changes

Over the weekend, Google officially began displaying the lake on its Maps as “Lake America” for users in the U.S. and as “Lake Ontario (Lake America)” for users abroad. Canadians will still view the lake on Maps as “Lake Ontario.”

Google made a similar concession when Trump renamed the Gulf of Mexico. The decision drew ire from many people around the world, including the Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum, who said that the United States did not have the authority to change the naming convention of an international sea. The decision led to so many users leaving negative reviews on the “Gulf of America” that Google Maps felt the need to disable the feature.

The tech giant said it always updates Google Maps “to reflect name changes in official government sources.” For the United States, that government source is the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, which recently formally changed the name to “Lake America.” Google Maps indeed displays naming conventions and even some borders differently based on users’ geographic locations. For example, last year, the company drew significant criticism for not displaying the disputed border separating Western Sahara from Morocco but only for Moroccan users.

But notably, Google is deciding to heed Trump’s orders even while other American government figures are choosing not to. New York Governor Kathy Hochul, aka the governor of the only U.S. state that actually borders Lake Ontario, said in a post on X that she would not be calling it Lake America.

Apple Maps, which changed the Gulf of Mexico’s name, has not yet renamed Lake Ontario on its platform.

Ever since he took office, Trump and the rest of his administration have been making clear jabs against Canada and specifically its autonomy by calling the country the 51st State. The one-sided renaming came as Trump upped the ante on his trade war against the neighboring country. Once strong allies not that long ago, the relationship between the two countries has quickly declined under the Trump administration, at times even pushing Canada closer to China. Last week, the trade issue took a turn for the worse when Washington announced 50% tariffs on Canadian goods worth billions of dollars after trade talks broke down. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney promised to match the tariffs “dollar for dollar” and announced similar up to 50% tariffs on about $20 billion of U.S. imports earlier this week.

Then on Thursday, Trump signed the executive order renaming Lake Ontario. At an Oval Office press conference unveiling the renaming, Trump blamed the trade talks for his decision, claiming that Canada is “the worst to deal with on trade.”

He also seemed to (jokingly, but you never truly know with him) entertain the idea of renaming the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Far-right MAGA trolls on the internet have suggested that Trump should rename the Atlantic Ocean to “East American Ocean” and the Pacific Ocean as “West American Ocean.”

“We have a gulf, and we have a lake, now all we need is an ocean,” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “So, maybe, we’ll have to change the name of the Atlantic and/or the Pacific. Maybe we’ll change them both.”

Eager to see what Google Maps would do if Trump ever goes through with that bizarre claim.

The Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Is a Step Toward Chaos in the Midterms

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“This would create a parallel federal eligibility infrastructure on top of existing state voter rolls,” Issue One, a nonprofit seeking to reduce the role of money in politics, wrote shortly after the order was issued.

The second provision targets election officials by demanding that the US attorney general “prioritize the investigation and, as appropriate, the prosecution of State and local officials … who issue Federal ballots to individuals not eligible to vote in a Federal election.”

The final provision in the order directs the USPS to create new rules for absentee and mail-in ballots. Under the rules, states would need to provide the USPS with a list of voters they intend to send ballots to. The order prevents the USPS from sending ballots to anyone not on the list. This rule would require the printing of millions of new ballot envelopes with trackable barcodes.

Last week, before the Supreme Court ruling was issued, the USPS issued a 95-page final rule explaining how it plans to enforce Trump’s proposed changes to mail-in voting in order to “reduce the risk of fraud, and help protect the integrity of federal elections.” The rule compares mail-in ballots to fake bombs or cremated animal remains. The New York Times reported on Monday that Trump is seeking to take control over the USPS board by stacking it with members who have questioned the outcome of the 2020 election.

The provisions of the executive order were mostly blocked by federal courts before the Trump administration appealed the rulings to the Supreme Court in July. Earlier this month, the administration pushed the court to issue a ruling quickly, claiming that failing to do so would cause “irreparable harm to the federal government, the public, and election integrity.”

While the states are likely to file another lawsuit once the USPS rule goes into effect on Wednesday, the Supreme Court decision will still likely cause disruption, given how close the general election is.

“The Court seemed to create complete chaos leading up to the midterm elections, waiting weeks after an administration filing, and just days before mail ballots go out, to completely rewrite the rules of the election,” David Becker, the head of the Center for Election Innovation and Research and a former Justice Department lawyer, wrote in an emailed statement.

That chaos will hit election officials the hardest.

“From a strictly practical perspective, there simply is just not enough time to implement the proposed requirements for the 2026 general election,” Stuart Holmes, director of elections in Washington state, tells WIRED.

Holmes said that county election offices already have ballot packet mailing materials printed and ready to mail, and that destroying and reprinting them is not realistic, financially or otherwise. The USPS rules would also require new envelope designs, which would in turn need to be reviewed and approved by the USPS to ensure compliance with their automation equipment.

“Even if new designs could be developed and approved in time, it is unrealistic to expect the limited number of printing vendors serving Washington’s counties to produce entirely new supplies of ballot envelopes for every county before the general election without significant disruption,” Holmes adds.

Finally, Holmes flagged that the demands of maintaining the USPS lists required under the order would be virtually impossible. “Voter registration data does not remain static. Voters continually update their registrations, ineligible voters are removed from the rolls, and newly eligible voters are added,” he says. “Meeting the proposed reporting requirements would require the Office of the Secretary of State to dedicate staff to provide updated information to USPS while those same staff are already responsible for other essential list maintenance and election preparation activities.”

Trump Admin Lets the Cyber Pirates Loose

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The White House will give cybersecurity firms permission to conduct “offensive cyber operations aimed at disrupting criminal organizations,” Bloomberg reported on Thursday.

Trump’s administration has spent months waffling on the idea, which is substantially similar to the centuries-old practice of issuing letters of marque. That’s a type of document from the Age of Sail which extended official protections to private vessels to attack pirates and enemy vessels, a legal (depending on who you ask) and regulated form of piracy known as privateering.

A fact sheet on the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM) states the interagency National Coordination Center will split oversight of the program between two executive directors from the departments of Homeland Security and Justice. The order encourages security firms to voluntarily enter intelligence-sharing agreements with government agencies from the local to federal level, and propose and help carry out “cyber operations that address those threats.”

Currently, most “offensive” cyber operations are undertaken by profit-minded criminals, military units like U.S. Cyber Command, or intelligence agencies and their various proxies. That’s because they’re potentially both illegal and interpretable as acts of aggression, not to mention that they can invite revenge. Private companies, fearing liability issues, have tended to draw the line at what’s called active defense, a somewhat ambiguous term that covers tactics like seeking court orders to take down hacker infrastructure or setting up honeypots.

The NSPM fact sheet states the program’s overseers will develop “rigorous procedures for the review and conduct” of offensive cyber operations. Curiously, cybersecurity firms which want to participate will be required to hold $1 million in bond/escrow, which may be forfeited in the case of a contract violation.

The idea of hacking back isn’t new. In 2019, CyberScoop noted it had attracted the moniker of “worst idea in cybersecurity” among cyber policy types, with experts pointing out that it is hard to accurately identify perpetrators and could result in damaging crossfire between governments and private actors. Even Trump’s own officials have, at times, denied even considering it.

In March 2026, CyberScoop reported then-Office of the National Cyber Director senior adviser Thomas Lind had shot down growing speculation the White House would embrace private offensive operations, stating at a conference the administration is “not interested in fighting pirates with pirates.” National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross told attendees at a security summit in D.C. around the same time that private offensive cyber operations are “not what we’re talking about” when asking for more help from industry.

There’s good reason for hesitation. Obfuscation is an ubiquitous element of cyber attacks, as attackers go to great lengths to prevent detection (at least until the commencement of the attack) and are happy to exploit information asymmetry in any way possible. Threat actors are also often less coherent entities than overlapping, temporary associations between cybercriminals, further complicated by the emergence of a huge cybercrime-as-a-service economy and the formation of supergroups like “Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters”.

Then there’s the possibility of tit-for-tat retaliatory cycles such as those witnessed in the ongoing physical and cyber war between Ukraine and Russia. It’s worth noting that Trump’s White House has a grudge against the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) for not taking his side while he was trying to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election. Back in office, his White House has aggressively slashed CISA’s budget and personnel—keep in mind this is the agency that is supposed to help coordinate threat intel sharing and defenses in the event something in cyberspace goes hot.

The EU Is Going Through a Trump-Fueled Breakup With Big Tech

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As tensions between President Donald Trump and Europe continue to simmer, the continent is accelerating its moves to reduce its addiction to US technology. Cities and governments are ditching Microsoft Office for open-source alternatives, shifting to European cloud hosting for local AI, and moving defense data to systems without American involvement. Nowhere has this been more clear than in France.

Over the last few months, the French government has sped up its efforts to develop and deploy its own technology for government officials. The country has, arguably, emerged at the head of Europe’s growing digital sovereignty push, which aims to cut some reliance on US-based technology over concerns around data security, the Trump administration’s unpredictability, and changing prices. French budget minister David Amiel recently called for the state to “break free” from American systems and use those it can control.

“We are not just explaining what we want to do,” Stéphanie Schaer, the head of DINUM, France’s digital transformation ministry, tells WIRED over a call on the nation’s video-calling platform Visio. “We already did it in a few matters.” So far, more than 40,000 French government staff have started using the home-grown video platform, while the rest will move away from Zoom, Microsoft Teams, and others by 2027. “We are confident enough to use it every day and we are not dependent on just one actor that will tell us you have to use my video conference,” Schaer says.

Across France’s central government agencies and vast civil service, officials plan to shift to as many French, European, and open source technology alternatives as possible in the coming years. Schaer says it is important for the French government to be in control of the technology that it is using, with data being stored locally in the country, not abroad.

As part of this, DINUM has been developing a set of productivity tools, collectively called “LaSuite,” since at least 2023. As well as Visio, it includes instant messaging app Tchap, Messagerie instead of Gmail or Outlook, Fichiers for documents and file sharing, plus text editing software Docs, and Grist for spreadsheets. Some of the software is still in beta and has not been fully rolled out to French officials yet. However, Tchap already has 420,000 active users, Schaer says, with 20,000 civil servants adopting it each month.

“We are based on open source software. So we don’t develop all the code,” Schaer says. There are public plans for new features, although code is published on Microsoft-owned Github. All data handled by the alternatives has to be processed in France and stored with providers who have approval from the country’s cybersecurity agency ANSSI. Earlier this month, the Dutch government moved its open-source code off of GitHub and onto a Forgejo instance hosted on government-owned servers.

While open source is key, the French government is also working with other countries and private firms on the development of its tools. “We can reuse what has been developed by the community and we contribute to this community,” Schaer says. For instance, Visio, which can host calls of up to 150 people and has AI transcription of calls, is built on technology from French firms Outscale and Pyannote.

While Schaer’s department is aiming to lead by example, all of France’s central government agencies have to come up with plans to move away from US tech—across office software, antivirus, AI, databases, and more—by this fall. On April 23, French officials also announced the country will move its health data platform away from Microsoft to local cloud provider Scaleway, after a years-long decision process.

US Special Forces Soldier Arrested for Polymarket Bets on Maduro Raid

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The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an enlisted member of the US Army’s special forces, for allegedly using “classified, nonpublic” information about the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro to notch more than $400,000 in profits on Polymarket trades. A grand jury indicted him on five counts, including multiple violations of the Commodity Exchange Act.

Van Dyke is the first person to be charged with insider trading on a prediction market in the United States. Lawmakers have been voicing concerns for months about the high likelihood that politicians and public servants could use nonpublic information to profit from trades on leading industry platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi, which have exploded in popularity over the past year.

The arrest comes just weeks after Department of Justice prosecutors met with Polymarket about potential insider tradition violations. In February, Israeli authorities arrested two citizens, an army reservist and a civilian, for allegedly leaking classified information by making wagers on Polymarket related to military operations. Kalshi, Polymarket’s primary rival in the United States, recently fined three politicians for breaking its insider trading rules, but it did not flag the violations for further enforcement to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal agency that oversees prediction markets.

After Van Dyke’s arrest was made public, Polymarket posted a statement to social media noting that it had “identified a user trading on classified government information” and “referred the matter to the DOJ & cooperated with their investigation.” The company declined to comment further.

According to court documents, Van Dyke has been an active duty US soldier since September 2008 and rose to the level of master sergeant in 2023. At the time of the alleged trading activity, he was stationed at Fort Bragg in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and assigned to the Army’s Special Operations Command Western Hemisphere Operations.

“I have been crystal clear that anyone who engages in fraud, manipulation, or insider trading in any of our markets will face the full force of the law,” CFTC chair Michael Selig said in a statement. “The defendant was entrusted with confidential information about US operations and yet took action that endangered US national security and put the lives of American service members in harm’s way.”

The complaint alleges that Van Dyke was involved in the planning and execution of Maduro’s arrest and that he was aware that he wasn’t authorized to share nonpublic information about US military operations. The complaint says that Van Dyke signed a nondisclosure agreement that forbade him from revealing sensitive or classified government information “by writing, word, conduct, or otherwise.” The complaint also alleges Van Dyke saved a screenshot to his Google account “displaying the results of an artificial intelligence query” outlining how the US Special Forces maintains many classified files including “operational details that are not available to the public.”

On December 26, Van Dyke allegedly opened an account on Polymarket and took out around $35,000 from his bank account before transferring it to a cryptocurrency exchange.

The following day, Van Dyke allegedly made his first Venezuela-related trade on Polymarket, putting a little less than $100 on a “YES” contract that US forces would be in Venezuela by January 31, 2026. Prosecutors accuse him of ultimately making 13 Venezuela-related transactions on the platform, seven of those—totaling hundreds of thousands of shares—on a “YES” contract for “Maduro out by … January 31, 2026.” In other words, Van Dyke allegedly stood to make an enormous profit if the Venezuelan leader wound up out of power by the end of the month.

Iran-Linked Hackers Are Sabotaging US Energy and Water Infrastructure

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As US President Donald Trump threatens wholesale demolition of Iran’s infrastructure in the midst of an escalating war, Iran now appears to have already reciprocated with its own form of infrastructure sabotage: A hacking campaign hitting industrial control systems across the United States, including energy and water utilities, that US agencies say has had disruptive and costly effects.

In a joint advisory published Tuesday, a group of US agencies including the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Department of Energy, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency warned that a group of hackers affiliated with the Iranian government has targeted industrial control devices used in a series of critical infrastructure targets including in the energy sector, water and wastewater utilities, and unspecified “government facilities.” According to the agencies, the hackers have targeted programmable logic controllers (PLCs)—a type of device designed to allow digital control of physical machinery—in those facilities, including those sold by industrial tech firm Rockwell Automation, with the apparent intention of sabotaging their systems.

By compromising those PLCs, the advisory warns, the hackers sought to change information on the displays of industrial control systems, which can in some scenarios cause system downtime, damage, or even dangerous conditions. “In a few cases, this activity has resulted in operational disruption and financial loss,” it reads.

When WIRED reached out to Rockwell Automation, a company spokesperson responded in a statement that it “takes seriously the security of its products and solutions and has been closely coordinating with government agencies in connection with” Tuesday’s advisory, and pointed to documents it has published for customers on how to better secure their PLCs.

Though the advisory doesn’t specify a particular group responsible for the hacking campaign, it notes that the attacks are similar to those carried out in by the Iran-linked group known as CyberAv3ngers, or the Shahid Kaveh Group, starting in late 2023. That team of hackers, believed to work in the service of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, inflicted several waves of attacks against Israeli and US targets in recent years, including gaining access to more than a hundred devices sold by industrial control system technology firm Unitronics and most commonly used in water and wastewater utilities.

This is a developing story, please check back for updates.

Unmasking the Paramilitary Agents Behind Trump’s Violent Immigration Crackdown

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In the early morning last September 30, hundreds of federal agents swarmed the South Shore Apartments, a beige brick building on Chicago’s South Side. As feds in body armor rappelled down from a Black Hawk helicopter overhead, others crashed through the building’s doors with battering rams, rounding up residents at gunpoint.

A group of burly, masked agents wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and toting suppressor-equipped M4 rifles, moved through the hallways in a rapid, tightly organized file. Padraic Daniel Berlin, a 34-year-old Michigan native and son of a Detroit firefighter, held Yoda, his Belgian Malinois, on a leash. David Dubar Jr., a 53-year-old onetime construction worker, followed closely behind him. Their team leader, Corey Myers, a Marine veteran from the Border Patrol’s Tucson sector, checked apartment doors. Paul Delgado Jr., a standout cross-country runner in high school, was the final member of the entry team.

The four men are members of the Border Patrol Tactical Unit, or BORTAC. Based mainly out of Fort Bliss, with at least 11 detachments stationed around the United States, BORTAC and its sister unit, Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue, or BORSTAR, were once reserved for desert rescues, executing high-risk warrants, conflicts with armed drug cartels, and manhunts.

Under Donald Trump, however, they have been sent into the streets of major US cities. The result is the largest known deployment of BORTAC and BORSTAR agents in US history, a fact made difficult to pin down due to the government’s secrecy around their operations. Many of the agents’ identities have remained hidden from the public. The decision to use an offensive, heavily armed paramilitary units for street-level immigration sweeps in American cities is a first—a bellwether of the Trump administration’s project to militarize domestic law enforcement operations.

Myers, Berlin, Dubar, Delgado, and their teammates seemed keyed up. The intelligence briefing they received claimed the building was controlled by Tren de Aragua, a Venezuelan street gang the Trump administration categorized—despite contrary evidence amassed by its own intelligence services—as a foreign terrorist organization. Gang members were supposedly occupying the building and storing grenades, handguns, and rifles on the second floor, where a suspect with an open warrant for firearms possession lived. This intelligence was never released or substantiated, and Illinois later launched an investigation into whether the property owner had sent baseless claims to the feds. But at that moment, it didn’t matter.

At every door approached by his team, Berlin yelled, “Police! Speak to me now or I’ll send the dog!” In a second-floor unit, the BORTAC team detained one man. Further down the hall, Myers noticed “signs of forced entry” and smashed open the door. Tolulope Akinsulie, an undocumented immigrant from Nigeria, happened to be hiding in the bedroom. Without issuing a warning or verbal command, Berlin let go of Yoda’s leash and the Malinois pounced, sinking its teeth into Akinsulie’s leg as he screamed in agony. Yoda bit Akinsulie repeatedly in the leg, hip, and hands before Berlin called the dog off and his team placed the man in cuffs. Akinsulie, who was not a target of the raid and has no known history of violent crime or gang affiliation, was treated for his injuries and taken to the Broadview Processing Center to face removal proceedings.

Berlin’s actions that morning were not isolated. He was involved in at least five uses of force during Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s 2025 surge of hundreds of immigration agents into Chicago and surrounding communities. Nor were the actions of his team, according to a WIRED analysis of US government records, which appeared to escalate tensions with civilian onlookers rather than quell them. Since last year, BORTAC and BORSTAR have fronted several of the US government’s invasions of its own cities, often engaging in almost theatrical uses of force that litter newscasts and social feeds, adding a new salience to US Border Patrol Special Operations Group’s self-proclaimed status as the “tip of the spear.”



Elon Musk’s X Appears to Be Violating US Sanctions by Selling Premium Accounts to Iranian Leaders

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In recent weeks, Elon Musk has followed president Donald Trump’s lead, slamming Iranian government officials and supporting the thousands of protesters railing against the regime. He even provided free access to his Starlink satellites in the midst of a nationwide internet blackout.

But while publicly proclaiming his support of the protesters, Musk’s company X appears to be profiting from the very same government officials he railed against, potentially violating US sanctions in the process, according to a new report from the Tech Transparency Project (TTP) shared exclusively with WIRED.

TTP identified more than two dozen X accounts allegedly run by Iranian government officials, state agencies, and state-run news outlets which display a blue checkmark, indicating they have access to X’s premium service. These accounts were sharing state-sponsored propaganda at a time when ordinary Iranians had no access to the internet, and their messages appeared to be artificially boosted to increase reach and engagement, which is a key aspect of X’s premium service. An X Premium subscription, which is the only way to receive a blue checkmark, costs $8 a month, while a Premium+ subscription, which removes ads and boosts reach even further, costs $40 a month.

At a time when the Trump administration is threatening Iran with possible military action if it does not meet demands related to nuclear enrichment and ballistic missiles, X appears to be undermining those efforts by providing a social media bullhorn for the Iranian government to spread its message.

“The fact that Elon Musk is not just platforming these individuals, but taking their money to boost their content through these premium subscriptions and give them extra features also means he’s undermining the sanctions that the US and the Trump administration are actually applying,” Katie Paul, the director of the TTP, tells WIRED.

X did not respond to a request for comment, but within hours of WIRED flagging several X accounts belonging to Iranian officials, their blue checkmarks were removed. The rest of the accounts identified by TTP but not shared with X continue to display a blue checkmark.

The White House directed WIRED to the Treasury when asked for comment. A Treasury spokesperson said they do not comment on specific allegations but “we take allegations of sanctionable conduct extremely seriously.”

At the end of last year, protests broke out in the Iranian capital of Tehran on December 28 over the continuing devaluation of the Iranian rial against the dollar and a widespread economic crisis in the country. Over the following days, tens of thousands of protesters poured onto the streets in cities across the country, calling for regime change and the end of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s 37-year reign.

In response, the regime brutally cracked down on protesters, arresting tens of thousands of people and killing thousands more. The true death toll is still unknown but could be much higher than currently reported.

Trump signaled his support for the protesters in a post on Truth Social on January 2, promising to come to their rescue. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” he wrote. Musk quickly followed Trump, calling Khamenei “delusional.”

On January 5, Gholamhossein Mohseni-Ejei, the head of Iran’s judiciary, who had a blue checkmark at the time, wrote in a post on X, “This time, we will show no mercy to the rioters.” Ejei was among the accounts whose blue checkmarks were removed on Wednesday after WIRED contacted the company.

A few days later, X changed the Iranian flag emoji on the platform to one used before the 1979 revolution, featuring a lion and sun. On January 14, Musk announced that anyone with a Starlink device would be free to access the internet in Iran without a subscription. At the time, Starlink devices were the only viable way of getting online after the government imposed a near total internet blackout.

RFK Jr. Says He’s Ending the War on Protein. It Doesn’t Exist

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In a somewhat baffling directive, US Health Secretary RFK Jr. claims he’s “ending the war on protein.”

The announcement, posted to White House’s X account on January 11 alongside an ominously lit photo of Kennedy, came as part of the federal government’s 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines, which now prioritize protein “at every meal.” Some of the advice—particularly the avoidance of ultra-processed foods and added sugars—has been well received by dietary experts and health organizations like the American Heart Association. But other aspects of it represent shake-ups that defy scientific consensus. For example, the recommendation of consuming saturated fats found in full-fat milk, butter, and beef tallow contradicts previous nutritional guidance, which generally advised limiting saturated fats.

But one of the biggest takeaways from the new food guide—which will influence everything from SNAP to school lunches—is that Americans should be consuming more protein, ideally from animals.

“Today the lies stop,” Kennedy, leader of MAGA’s brawnier and crunchier offshoot, the “Make America Healthy Again” movement, said in an announcement about the new guidance on January 7. “ Protein and healthy fats are essential and were wrongly discouraged in prior dietary guidelines.”

The thing is, there is no war on protein. If ever there was one, it was lost long ago. Americans have quite literally never been as obsessed with protein as they are today, with consumption levels in the United States reaching record highs, even as protein deficiency is nearly nonexistent.

Still, Kennedy’s screed makes sense in the context of a MAGA movement that has made body image, fitness, and masculinity central tenets.

“They’re trying to tie it into the war on masculinity, the war on warrior culture. All of this stuff is connected,” said Colin Davis, a personal trainer and political commentator who has been critical of MAGA’s encroachment into the fitness space.

In August, Kennedy and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted videos online of themselves doing push-ups and pull-ups as part of what they called the “Pete and Bobby Fitness Challenge.” Hegseth also convened an unprecedented meeting of US generals in Quantico, Virginia, in September to accost them over the military’s fitness and grooming standards. “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon,” Hegseth said to the hundreds of generals in attendance.

President Trump himself has connected his movement to fitness through his friendship with UFC CEO Dana White, orchestrating a number of campaign appearances at UFC events in 2024. These de facto rallies put the then-presidential candidate in close proximity to young, physically fit men who would sometimes launch into post-fight rants supporting him; Trump would go on to flip the young male vote by a nearly 30-point margin in his favor during the 2024 election. In June, the White House is hosting a UFC cage fight as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebrations, Trump has said.

Some experts say Kennedy’s reworking of the dietary guidelines is a continuation of that project, in particular the emphasis on animal proteins, projecting a form of idealized masculinity by playing into long-held and well-researched cultural perceptions around food and gender.

“ There’s a long-standing association of men with meat, fire, cooking outdoors,” said Charlotte Biltekoff, professor of food, wine and culture at the University of California, Davis. “And women with lighter food, dieting for weight loss, vegetables, fruits and salads.”

All of this serves to put the president and his broader political movement into the proximity of a kind of aspirational masculinity that is high agency, strong, physically attractive, and neatly situated within traditional gender roles.