In the last month, Popular Information has uncovered a network of fake news sites run by GOP operatives, revealed the dangers of Elon Musk’s votesafe.org, and caught Trump’s nominee for Labor Secretary selling access to American welfare to Chinese nationals. That’s our mission: we investigate, uncover new facts, and reshape the national debate. Right now, we are doing a paid membership drive to fund even more ambitious journalism in the run-up to the midterm elections. We set a goal of 150 new paid subscribers — and we need 31 more to hit it. As a special incentive we are offering a 20% discount that expires today. That means you can support independent journalism that rattles the cages of the powerful for just $40 per year or $4.80 per month. Elon Musk, the world’s richest person, is funding an aggressive advertising campaign encouraging people in key states to check their registration status on votesafe.org. Musk’s website collects extensive personal information from users, profiles them and tracks their internet use. It then shares this data with X, Meta, Google, and other online advertising companies.
This week, in the lead-up to the 25th anniversary of 9/11, President Trump pushed a false personal narrative of the attack. Most notably, he claimed to have sent 100 of his own construction workers to Ground Zero to help clear rubble. However, the Trump Organization had only around a dozen employees at the time, and Trump’s construction projects were being run by contractors.
American workers are taking home a historically low share of the value they produce, according to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). In the second quarter of 2026, the labor share of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) hit its lowest level since the BLS first began tracking it in 1947. But while labor’s share of GDP is plummeting, U.S. corporate profits are ballooning. Actions by the Trump administration could drop the labor share even further.
Updated informationIn July, Popular Information reported that the New York Post ran a cover claiming that “Thousands of 9/11 families demand Mamdani be banned from 25th-anniversary.” The story was about a Change.org petition started by Giovanni Galante, whose wife was among the victims of the 9/11 attacks. The New York Post article contradicted the cover, reporting that the petition had “collected over 1,100 signatures in a little over a week, including from at least 300 victims’ families.” In an interview with Popular Information, Galante admitted that there was no actual list of family members who had signed the petition. Galante explained that he did not “go through the list and look at the names” and that the 300 figure shared with the New York Post was just his estimate. Nevertheless, multiple media outlets repeated the claim. On September 9, Maya Sulkin, a reporter for the Free Press, promoted an interview with former New York Governor George Pataki. In a post on X, Sulkin claimed that there was a “petition against [Mamdani’s] attendance that over 100,000 victims’ families have signed.” The best of the restAn analysis by ProPublica found that more women in the U.S. are dying after ectopic pregnancies. Nearly “200 women with the condition died from 2020 to 2025, compared with about 100 in the previous six years.” The increase “has been much steeper in states that banned abortion after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022.” (ProPublica) A New York Times analysis found that Senator Roger Marshall (R-KS) “filed lawsuits against more than 700 patients with outstanding bills during his decades-long career as an obstetrician-gynecologist.” Some of those patients were new mothers sued over unpaid bills for their deliveries. (New York Times) On Wednesday, Hunter Biden launched a memecoin, $LAPTOP, which briefly surged to around $222, but then dropped to less than $2 by the end of the day, losing 95% of its value. Biden follows in the footsteps of other political figures, such as Donald and Melania Trump, who have launched memecoins that rapidly declined in value. (The Hill) Numerical information Over $100 billion: The amount of extra money that U.S. consumers have spent on gasoline and diesel since the start of the Iran War, according to the Iran War Energy Cost Tracker by Brown University. $5,000: On Wednesday, Trump promised to send every American adult a “Trump dividend” if Republicans win both the House and Senate. $45,000: Trump gave his executive assistant Natalie Harp and two other White House aides large gifts amounting to nearly a third of their regular salaries of $150,000 each. Quote of the week“I am asking you to pretend I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. I’m on the ballot. Just one more time.”– Donald Trump, 9/9/26 Photo of the week
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