The man who attempted to ambush the Democratic Senate candidate
Abdul El-Sayed with a question about his supposed allegiance to the Muslim Brotherhood
– which El-Sayed parlayed into a viral clip for his campaign
– is the son of a political operator who recently received $250,000 for
“canvassing and influencer marketing” against El-Sayed, the Guardian has learned.

In the now-famous exchange, a man
– first identified by the Handbasket as Thomas “Tommy” Teepell
– asked El-Sayed if he would “disavow” the Muslim Brotherhood.
El-Sayed said he would, but then asked:
“What are you implying?
Do you assume that I wouldn’t?”

What followed was a five-minute exchange that has drawn over 50m views across several social media platforms,
in which El-Sayed queries the man about the guarantees of religious freedom in the constitution.

Teepell is the son of Timothy “Timmy” Teepell,
a longtime strategist for the Missouri Republican senator Josh Hawley
as well as former Republican Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal.

Timmy Teepell’s firm, Breakthrough LLC,
was paid $250,000 on 29 September by America Next,
a 501(c)(4) non-profit with which it shares a Baton Rouge office suite,
according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission (FEC).

The filing says the money would fund the canvassing and influencer marketing
in opposition to
El-Sayed.

America Next has been trying to gin up “organic” town hall opposition to El-Sayed,
as the Handbasket report noted.

On 1 October, a member of the University of Michigan College Republicans,
saying he was acting for America Next,
reportedly offered students $200 to boo and question El-Sayed at a town hall in Flint.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/oct/20/abdul-el-sayed-heckler?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

@Alice
Being weird is its own reward, in my opinion, Alice, I, for one, say.

@cwebber i think what we'll actually see is these folk decomps etc becoming a real source of widespread malware and other exploits, and that will act as an excuse to pass laws that make it effectively illegal to sell CPUs/microcontrollers that can run arbitrary user-supplied code

Oh! l'apk de Tuts per Android descarregada 54 vegades des de https://tuts.cat/android 😲

I shared a link from NPR Tiny Desk but there was no image preview or video embed. After investigating this I learned that when you do that, each instance picks up the link and individually retrieves the link preview nearly simultaneously. For gargantuan sites like YT or Reddit, this is a trivial amount of traffic and not a problem, but for smaller sites like NPR this results in a sort of botnet DDOS attack on the site’s servers. More here. Another example here . For that reason, NPR has blocked Fediverse servers like Mastodon.

I have experienced this on my personal server as well (DDOS), but at the time didn’t know why, exactly.

This isn’t the end of the world, but certainly is not great and hurts engagement with the content. Is there a solution for this? Perhaps using some sort of webtorrent service like PeerTube where they just fetch the information from another fediverse server instead of the source server? Maybe fetching embeds client-side? At least that would stagger the requests.

@amy yay, I'm glad I could share that with you! ❤️

To clarify, this post is pro-trashiness. I encourage you all to lie about your birthdays to steal free desserts from corporate chain restaurants.

Could we decentralize #LiveNation? Allow everybody hosting an event to use their own system but as long as it supports the same protocol, we manage the tickets in any app we choose? And sort all those events as we choose in any calendar and mapping apps we choose.

I could imagine people going out more if it was easy to see all this info in one place and know which of your friends were interested or going etc.

Saying "nobody should be forced to use LLMs" is like saying "if you don't like tobacco, don't smoke it" on airplane where people are smoking tobacco.

Yeah, thats how it should be: one download, everyone else downloads from that server, not the original source.

Seems abusable though

Dog in fog / dog above fog

If you want to:

FINANCIALLY SUPPORT
THE
DOLLS

, you can!

The Dolls is a collective in Berlin that does education on (DIY) HRT, essential information for trans people in need of healthcare.

Last Sunday they got raided by the police. Everyone got ID'ed, and detained. HRT, supplies and money (yes cops love theft as long as its the cops doing it) were confiscated.

But, The Dolls have a fundraiser. And they could really use the money, also for potential legal expenses. So if you can spare an euro or two, or more, that'd be really nice and cool.

https://www.gofundme.com/f/the-dolls-berlin

@Mrfunkedude And with your spirit.