<The MAGA movement can “walk back” outrageous statements, and the press hardly asks a follow-up.

For all the justified focus on the second Trump administration’s authoritarian agenda, and the suite of debased governing protocols that go with it, the basic messaging apparatus behind it has received scant attention. As it happens, this past weekend supplied a pair of textbook illustrations showing how the MAGA power elite throttle the mediasphere to serve their purposes.

Exhibit A was House Speaker Mike Johnson’s bizarre declaration to Capitol Hill reporters that President Donald Trump had operated as an FBI informant during his decade-and-a-half friendship with pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. “He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” Johnson confidently asserted, without presenting any evidence.

In all likelihood, Johnson—a reliable MAGA wind sock who famously sought to contrive a constitutional rationale for the failed coup of January 6—let his base-pandering instincts lead him into fanfic-style delusion. But, as is often the case in such episodes, the delusion shored up a key plank of the Q-pilled GOP base’s fantasizing about the Trump-Epstein relationship; for the QAnon faithful, the notion that Trump was an informant rationalizes his long bro-ship with Epstein.

Never mind that Trump himself has disavowed any past civilian dealings with the FBI, even though he did do some informing work to advance his casino interests—something far more on-brand for him than a deep-cover op targeting a notorious sexual predator of underage girls. Never mind as well that if Trump did undertake this covert role, it didn’t stop him from helping Epstein’s allies; in 2017, Trump’s first White House signed on Alexander Acosta, the former Florida prosecutor who oversaw Epstein’s get-out-of-jail agreement there, as its secretary of labor. And never mind that just two months ago, Trump abruptly fired the federal prosecutor who did bring Epstein to justice, without any plausible rationale. But the denizens of the overlapping worlds of QAnon and MAGA are never detained by mundane considerations of evidence.

Even so, Johnson’s contention provoked instant pushback, most significantly from the White House itself, since informants are, in most legal cases, co-perpetrators. In his purblind rounds as Trump sycophant, Johnson wound up drawing the very sort of attention to Trump’s standing in Epstein’s circle that the administration is desperately seeking to short-circuit. So Johnson was forced to issue a clarifying statement, which, as is typical for the genre, clarified nothing whatsoever. “The speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump—who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago—was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator,” the statement read in part.

Johnson was clumsily referencing a remark by Brad Edwards, an attorney for several Epstein victims, suggesting that Trump had cooperated with his efforts to document Epstein’s abuses; but Edwards’s full comments at last week’s press conference held by Epstein victims indicate that after Trump had discussed victims’ complaints with him in 2009, Trump did “an about-face” on holding Epstein accountable; nor had Edwards ever intimated that Trump had worked with federal law enforcement officials. In other words: Johnson was trying to deflect attention from his own wholesale fabrication about the Epstein case with another wholesale fabrication about the Epstein case.

This was not, however, the takeaway from the coverage of the initial gaffe and its aftermath—even The Washington Post’s own story citing Edwards’s comments meekly records that Johnson “backed off” the informant claim, without citing the broader conspiracy-mongering movement on the right that emboldened him to float it in the first place. Newsweek was content to report that Johnson had “clarified” his informant comment—something that occurred in no known universe where words have meaning.

Likewise, no news outlet covering the controversy bothered to supply any context for Johnson’s rushed citation of Epstein’s eviction from the membership rolls of Mar-a-Lago, which comes across in the speaker’s statement as another blow struck on behalf of Epstein’s victims. It’s true that in some of Trump’s explanations of the rupture between the two men, Epstein’s creepy attention to a Mar-a-Lago member’s daughter plays a role. But Trump’s own most recent account suggests that the breach occurred because Epstein “stole” former Mar-a-Lago employee Virginia Giuffre from him—scarcely the language likely to be adopted by a heroic undercover figure exposing Epstein’s career as a sex trafficker....>

<....Instead, the whole news cycle’s coverage of Johnson’s remark followed the standard Beltway template for political leaders briefly tripped up by their own public statements: a formalist exercise whereby a moment of potential scandal is passively “walked back” and all the relevant players are palpably relieved to move on.

The same content-challenged, context-ignoring discourse dominated the weekend’s other MAGA-walkback moment: Trump’s own decision to post a Truth Social meme indicating his White House is preparing to go to war with the city of Chicago under the paper-thin pretext of combating violent crime there. There’s even less room in this case for a Trump-excusing interpretation than there was in Johnson’s aside; Trump said outright that Chicago was about to find out why Trump has renamed the Defense Department as the Department of War, and the meme features an image of Trump decked out as Robert Duvall’s Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore from Apocalypse Now. (Which Trump glossed as, “I love the smell of deportations in the morning.”) Lest any of this somehow land with muffled impact, the meme appeared under the heading “Chipocalypse Now” with an image of the city’s skyline.

Nevertheless, the same mannered and brain-dead media “walk back” proceeded on schedule. The White House’s “border czar” Tom Homan took to CNN’s State of the Union to declare, ludicrously, that Trump’s meme was “taken out of context” and that “criminal cartels” are the object of the country’s militarized wrath. You’d think a follow-up question might have surfaced asking why, if that were in fact the case, the meme didn’t bear the legend “Cartel-pocalypse Now” (which is far more euphonious than the Windy City–baiting one it employed), or stipulate that the cartels, and not the city, was going to get a crash course in the reason behind the Pentagon’s renaming.

Instead, the press obligingly lapped up the MAGA-branded lying about the MAGA-branded lying. Homan’s dissembling act billowed through the Sunday news cycle in exactly the same fashion that Johnson’s did, with interested viewers and readers essentially told there was nothing to see here. Meanwhile, a typically abusive and untruthful Trump exchange with NBC reporter Yamiche Alcindor about the same post yielded this milquetoast headline in The New York Times: “Trump Downplays Post Threatening Chicago, Says He Wants to ‘Clean Up’ City.”

Of course, a functioning political press might have observed that napalm—the substance that charmed the olfactory of Bill Kilgore in Francis Ford Coppola’s film about the deadly folly of the US war against North Vietnam—was also adopted in that conflict under the pretext of cleaning things up: to expose Viet Cong positions and clear vegetation. (The inventor of the incendiary gel also never envisioned it being used against humans but as a means of destroying buildings.) A critically minded press corps might even go further to note that the character of Kilgore in the film represents the very blind jingoist hubris that the Trump administration is tapping into as it launches its war on American cities—and that the Vietnam War, particularly as depicted in Coppola’s film, is as far as you can conceivably get from a narrative of executive-branch heroism. But what am I saying? It’s all been walked back, after all.>

<Texas A&M University's move to fire a faculty member involved in social media controversy over a gender and sexuality lesson is sounding major alarm bells among multiple free speech advocacy organizations, who say the move endangers academic freedom in the state.

State Rep. Brian Harrison, R-Midlothian, posted a video on X, formerly known as Twitter, on Monday showing Melissa McCoul, a former senior lecturer at Texas A&M University, asking a student to leave after they raised objections to their presentation on gender and sexuality in a summer children's literature class.

The viral video sparked significant pushback among Gov. Greg Abbott, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick and other Republican state lawmakers. Within the week, Texas A&M president Mark A Welsh III had fired the professor and removed Mark Zoran, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Emily Johansen, head of the English department, from their administrative positions.

The Texas A&M University System Board of Regents has also ordered an audit of all courses at all 12 schools in the system.

"The precipitous firing of this professor on top of the removal of academic leaders makes clear that academic freedom in Texas is under direct attack," said Jonathan Friedman, Sy Syms Managing Director of U.S. Free Expression Programs at PEN America. "This is a dangerous turning point, with higher education being weaponized for political ends rather than being a forum for open and respectful exchange."

Lindsie Rank, the director of campus rights advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said professors have academic freedom to teach material that is relevant to their expertise. She said she doesn't buy the university's argument that a lesson on representation of transgender individuals in children's literature was irrelevant to McCoul's course.

Public institutions like Texas A&M cannot fire employees for exercising their First Amendment rights, Rank said. She said, to her, "it seems really clear" that Texas A&M fired McCoul because of her instruction and pedagogy, which is not constitutional.

"If I was a professor, especially in certain states like Texas and Florida that have been very outwardly antagonistic toward academic freedom in recent years, I would be scared. ... I'm really worried about the future of higher education and academic freedom generally, when we're seeing cases like this one occur," Rank said.

Texas A&M University has not responded to requests for further comment or information about the incident.

Professor's firing was about ‘academic responsibility'

Texas A&M University Mark A Welsh III said McCoul's course contained content that did not align with "any reasonable expectation" of standard curriculum. Glenn Hegar, the chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, said the faculty member failed to follow instructions to align her course description with the actual content of her class.

"This isn't about academic freedom; it's about academic responsibility," Welsh wrote. "Our degree programs and courses go through extensive approval processes, and we must ensure that what we ultimately deliver to students is consistent with what was approved."

Similarly to other public universities, Texas A&M System policies state that each faculty member is entitled to full academic freedom in the classroom in discussing the subject that they teach but they should not introduce controversial matters that have no relation to the classroom subject.

"I would call upon Texas A&M, if they feel that they are actually in the right in this situation and did not violate this professor's academic freedom, then they need to show their work and show why their decision was not related to a pedagogically relevant lesson, but was instead related to something unprotected by academic freedom," Rank said. "So far, they haven't shown that."

Brian Evans, president of the Texas chapter of the American Association of University Professors, said punishing professors for teaching certain controversial topics diminishes student's ability to learn about the complexity of a topic. It also makes students less prepared to be civically engaged or succeed in the workforce, he said.

"Anyone in a role that involves teaching or research, which is a lot of folks, not just professors, needs the ability to teach research and express the results that they find, and to have uncensored discussions on whatever the topic is related to, especially related to their disciplinary expertise," Evans said....>

<....The decision comes as several Republican state legislators and leaders have moved to assert more influence over the state's public higher education institutions, citing objections to the inclusion of references to diversity, equity, and inclusion and LGBTQ issues in university classrooms and programs.

Harrison has asked Abbott to direct the state-appointed regents at every public university in Texas to "take all necessary action" to remove instruction related to DEI and LGBTQ topics from Texas A&M and all other college classrooms, describing it as "indoctrination." He has also called for Welsh to be fired.

Did McCoul's lesson align with her course description?

The course description in McCoul's publicly listed syllabus for the summer "Literature for Children" course states that the course will tease out the boundaries of children's literature, including what counts as children's literature and what differentiates writing for children between writing for adults.

"Our task is to think critically about what these books can tell us about how we (and others) understand childhood, how those definitions have changed over time, and how these books participate in larger movements of history, culture, and literature," the description says.

The syllabus states that the course readings will include "Jude Saves the World," a children's book by Ronnie Riley about a nonbinary, bisexual 12-year-old who uses they/them pronouns. The required readings also include "Transgender Books in Transgender Packages: The Peritextual Materials of Young Adult Fiction."

"Some of the material in this class might be controversial, and it is likely differing opinions will emerge," the syllabus states. "You are certainly not required to agree with me (or your peers), or to adhere to any particular viewpoints. However, I do insist upon respectful, courteous dialogue, especially in matters where emotions run high."

Welsh said, after an issue was raised about McCoul's course, he made it clear to academic leaders that course content must match the catalog descriptions for each course.

However, he said he later learned that College of Arts and Sciences continued to "teach content that was inconsistent with the published course description for another course" in the fall, leading to the administrative removals and firings.

Amanda Reichek, McCoul's attorney, said in a statement that McCoul's course content was consistent with the catalog and course description, and she was never instructed to change her course content in any way, shape, or form.

"Dr. McCoul taught this course and others like it for many years, successfully and without challenge," Reichek said. "Instead, Dr. McCoul was fired in derogation of her constitutional rights and the academic freedom that was once the hallmark of higher education in Texas."

Leonard Bright, a professor at Texas A&M University's Bush School of Government and Public Service, said he finds it "shameful" that the university has not released evidence of McCoul's alleged wrongdoing.

He said McCoul would have gone through a thorough, bureaucratic process of vetting syllabi and courses, starting with the professor and moving up the chain to the department head and deans. If there were any problems, Bright said he finds it unlikely they would have gone unaddressed.

"This is highly sketchy," Bright said. "(Welsh) did this draconian thing, to say it lightly, an overcorrection."....>

<....Seth Chandler, a professor of law at the University of Houston Law Center, said he's never heard of a faculty member being fired for failure to conform to a course description. He said descriptions are typically short and written broadly, so that regardless of exactly what a professor covers in the class, the material would fall within the scope of the description.

If Texas A&M had been consistently enforcing a requirement for professors not to deviate from their course description, Chandler said it would be within the school's rights to discipline a faculty member for openly violating the rules, although "firing them seems a bit harsh."

However, he said the facts of the situation are still not clear, including if or when the university asked McCoul to modify her course description - or if failure to align with the course description was the actual reason that she was fired.

State, federal laws don't prohibit gender lessons, legal experts say

In Harrison's video, McCoul appears to be showing a slideshow with a graphic titled "The Gender Unicorn." The graphic by Trans Student Educational Resources shows a picture of a unicorn to illustrate the difference between gender identity, gender expression, and other gender-related terms.

The student in the video - who has not been publicly identified - said that they were not sure that the instructor's presentation on gender and sexuality was legal because there are only two genders according to President Donald Trump.

"This also very much goes against not only myself but a lot of people's religious beliefs," the student said. "I am not going to participate in this because it's not legal, and I don't want to promote something that is against our president's laws as well as against my religious beliefs."

Trump signed an executive order in January stating that it is the policy of the U.S. to recognize two sexes - male and female - and federal funds could not be used "to promote gender ideology." However, multiple legal experts, including Rank and Chandler, told the Chronicle that the executive order does not prohibit McCoul from teaching lessons on gender or sexuality.

"The student is wrong," Chandler said. "What the student should have said is, ‘Professor, do you realize that you are jeopardizing federal funding for Texas A&M for saying something that President Trump has argued in an executive order is improper?' ... The student is simply wrong to say that it's illegal to teach gender ideology. That simply is not true."

Abbott said the professor acted contrary to state law, although it's unclear what law he is referring to. Instruction about gender identity also does not violate Senate Bill 17, the state's anti-diversity, equity and inclusion law. The 2024 law exempts research and class instruction from a ban on DEI initiatives at public Texas higher education institutions.

Friedman said Texas A&M's actions send a message to faculty that they should not teach about any concepts politicians disfavor because "Big Brother is watching." He said a chilled campus climate is detrimental to students' education and the purpose of higher education institutions.

"President Walsh should reconsider and reverse course, reinstate the campus leaders he sidelined, and reassure all faculty that their ability to teach will not be sacrificed to political whims," Friedman said in a statement.>

Till now, I have never heard of anyone striking gold and a book not paying off.

<After President Donald Trump threatened Harvard with the loss of $2.2 billion in federal research funds and the exclusion of foreign students to extort the university into granting him control over its key academic functions, U.S. District Judge Allison D. Burroughs granted Harvard summary judgment in its civil action against the Trump administration for violating its rights under the First Amendment and various federal statutes.

The initial threat from the administration sought, among other things, to control who can teach, what subjects can be taught, how they may be taught, and which students can be admitted to Harvard.

In Burroughs’ opinion, the court relied on undisputed facts (as it must to grant summary judgment) that, taken together, would also support a criminal prosecution against Trump for extortion and conspiracy to defraud the government.

The major impediment to such a prosecution, of course, is last year’s unprecedented Supreme Court decision granting immunity.

As an assistant special Watergate prosecutor, I investigated the Nixon administration’s alleged use of “available Federal machinery” against those on his enemies list. As explained in the Watergate Special Prosecution Force Report, the office investigated a “concerted effort to use Government resources for illegitimate and political — perhaps punitive — purposes as a conspiracy to defraud the United States in violation of Title 18, U.S.C. § 371.”

Those investigations never resulted in indictments because of a lack of “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” on the critical element of “corrupt intent.” For example, the office determined not to prosecute tax audits directed at those on Richard Nixon’s enemies list because there was insufficient proof that these audits were initiated as political retribution against the taxpayers in question.

Similarly, Trump used antisemitism allegedly practiced at the university as the justification for demanding control of Harvard. Burroughs, however, held that “a review of the administrative record makes it difficult to conclude anything other than that [the government] used antisemitism as a smokescreen for a targeted, ideologically motivated assault on this country’s premier” university.

The court premised its conclusion of an “ideologically motivated assault” against Harvard, in part, on Trump’s own admissions. The judge, for example, cited Trump’s Truth Social post accusing Harvard of “hiring almost all woke, Radical Left, idiots and ‘birdbrains’ who are only capable of teaching FAILURE to students.”

The court also found that the trigger for the elimination of Harvard’s federal funding was Trump’s retaliation in response to the university exercising its protected right to file a lawsuit against the administration. The judge quoted Trump’s Oval Office statements including his assertion that “every time [Harvard] fight[s], they lose another $250 million.”

Coupled with Trump’s admissions, the court further held that antisemitism was a pretextual smoke screen based on the following undisputed facts:

1) the government’s correspondence “makes no secret of the government’s ideological disagreements with Harvard,”

2) the lack of evidence that the government had any information “about the prevalence of antisemitism at Harvard before” freezing the grants,

3) the absence of “a single document ... that indicates that [the administration] weighed the value of the research funded by a particular grant against the goal of combating antisemitism,” and

4) zero evidence that the government considered Harvard’s prior and ongoing efforts to combat antisemitism....>

<....That antisemitism was nothing more than a pretext was further supported by the undisputed evidence that the administration ignored the legislated requirements of Title VI before freezing Harvard’s federal grants. “The administrative record contains no evidence of a notice of noncompliance, an assessment that compliance could not be achieved by voluntary means, a hearing, a finding on the record, or a report to Congress.”

In short, there is overwhelming undisputed proof of fraudulent intent and “improper purpose,” the key elements to prove extortion and fraud. These undisputed facts show that Trump did not pursue a legitimate government effort against Harvard to combat antisemitism. Instead, Trump was motivated by political retribution and retaliation.

Consistent with the Supreme Court’s grant of absolute presidential immunity for “official” executive actions, Trump’s actions against Harvard are replete with the appearance of “official acts.” Trump issued multiple presidential executive orders, he created a multiagency Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, and he directed various executive offices to take unwarranted actions against Harvard.

The rationale for this absolute presidential immunity, according to Chief Justice John Roberts, is “to ensure that the President can undertake his constitutionally designated functions effectively, free from undue pressures or distortions.” However, as the Harvard case demonstrates, the practical effect of absolute immunity is that a crooked president can undertake criminal acts free from accountability to the criminal justice system.

That was not so in Watergate. Nixon’s obstruction of the Watergate criminal investigation consisted of multiple “official acts” for which he would have been charged but for President Gerald Ford’s pardon. For example, the act that led to Nixon’s resignation was his direction through a subordinate to instruct CIA officials to call the FBI and demand it halt its investigation into the break-in over national security concerns.

Under the current Supreme Court decision, Nixon’s obstructive acts could not have formed the basis for a criminal prosecution. Indeed, Nixon would not have had to insulate himself from the FBI by having someone else call the CIA. He could have just picked up the phone and instructed the FBI to shut down the Watergate investigation, and Nixon would never have had to resign the presidency.>

<Charlie Kirk, the influential right-wing activist, was shot and killed Wednesday on a college campus in Utah. The shooter is still at large, and as of this writing, little is publicly known about the shooter’s identity or the potential ideological motive behind the attack. But instead of waiting for facts of the case to emerge, many conservatives quickly to jumped to conclusions in the immediate aftermath.

Shortly after Kirk was shot, Elon Musk posted on his platform X, “The Left is the party of murder.” Fox News host Jesse Watters said, “They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not. They are at war with us.” And conservative activist Christopher Rufo made a call to crack down on left-wing groups. “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Rufo posted on X. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

Most alarmingly, President Donald Trump, in an Oval Office address later that evening, echoed those sentiments. “Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

Trump also hinted at the kind of crackdown that his administration might impose in the wake of Kirk’s killing, saying they would find “those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

There are two major problems with the right’s rush to blame the incident, and political violence more broadly, on the left. First, even if the shooter turns out to be a left-wing extremist — certainly within the realm of possibility — the urge to immediately blame the left before facts emerge is reckless. As we learned from the assassination attempt on Trump last year on the campaign trail, shooters might not always have clear ideological motives. Second, and more importantly, the attempt to frame political violence as a problem that solely plagues the left is not just irresponsible; it’s factually inaccurate.

What Trump conveniently left out of his speech, for example, is violent right-wing extremism — the very sort of violence that he incited after he lost the 2020 election, culminating in an assault on the US Capitol. But that omission isn’t a one-off. For years, Trump and his allies have tried to paint Democrats and the left as not only extreme but violent. He has called Democrats the “party of crime,” blamed Democrats’ rhetoric for his assassination attempt last year, and warned that if Democrats gain power, they would “violently” assault his agenda. Trump, like many other influential figures on the right, chose to capitalize on Kirk’s killing — even before the facts of the case are known — to shape the story to his own political advantage by solely focusing on left-wing political violence, and to create a dangerous environment of fear that is entirely detached from reality.

Who is to blame for the rise in political violence?

The uncomfortable truth that Trump tried to paper over in his statement is that in recent American history, the most frequent perpetrators of domestic terrorism have been far-right extremists.

According to a 2020 report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, since the 1990s, “far-right terrorism has significantly outpaced terrorism from other types of perpetrators, including from far-left networks.” Since that report, there has been a notable rise in political violence perpetrated by the far left, but far-right extremists still account for most terrorist attacks and plots in the United States.

This should come as no surprise. Rhetoric from conservative leaders — especially since Trump’s rise to power — has grown more and more extreme, often promoting or even embracing violence as an answer to America’s problems....>

<....In his 2016 campaign for president, for example, Trump implied that his opponent, Hillary Clinton, could be prevented from becoming president by getting shot, saying that “Second Amendment people” could do something to stop her. In 2019, he mused about shooting migrants in the legs at the border. In 2020, he struggled to condemn the white supremacist group the Proud Boys. And in 2021, he met with and defended Kyle Rittenhouse, the young right-wing vigilante who shot three people, killing two of them, in demonstrations protesting police shootings in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Trump also incited an insurrection after he lost the 2020 election, unleashing a mob on the US Capitol that included Proud Boys and members of other right-wing paramilitary groups — a marked departure from the peaceful transition of power that Americans had come to take for granted. During his 2024 campaign, he called those who took part in the Capitol siege “patriots,” and when he returned to the White House this year, he pardoned them.

It’s not just Trump. Other prominent Republicans have excused or embraced violence. After Melissa Hortman, a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, was assassinated in her home earlier this year, Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah posted on X, “This is what happens When Marxists don’t get their way.” He also posted a photo of the suspect with the caption “Nightmare on Waltz Street” — seemingly a reference to the Democratic Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Other influential Republicans peddled conspiracy theories and joked about the assault on Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband. Contrast that with how prominent Democrats have responded to Kirk’s assassination — unequivocally condemning the act and calling for nonviolence.

In public polls, while most Americans still oppose political violence, there seems to be a growing acceptance of resorting to violence to achieve political goals. When United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson was killed in December 2024, for example, an Emerson poll found that 22 percent of Democratic respondents said that the killing was at least “somewhat” acceptable, compared to 12 percent of Republicans. The acceptability of the killing was especially pronounced among young people. But when it comes to political violence more broadly — that is, when voters are asked about their general views on political violence rather than a specific case — Republicans were more supportive of the idea than Democrats. ccording to a PBS NewsHour/NPR/Marist poll last year, for example, one in five Americans believe that violence could be the answer to getting the country back on track, though Republican respondents were more than twice as likely to believe that than Democratic respondents.

Political violence is a serious problem that only seems to be getting worse in the United States. But it’s still hard to say that this is a problem that plagues both sides of the political aisle equally. While Democratic leaders have certainly escalated their rhetoric when attacking Republicans, calling the MAGA movement an existential threat to democracy, they haven’t engaged in the kind of rhetoric that routinely flows from Trump and his allies — a rhetoric that winks and nods at resorting to violent tactics and, in some cases, explicitly endorses violence.

So while there is growing concern about the rise of political violence on both the right and left, it’s important to note that Trump’s rhetoric and leadership — bolstered by a supportive party and media apparatus — is the context in which all this is happening. And so far, there is no Democratic counterpart to Trump that could equally share the blame for fanning the flames.

That context is what makes this moment especially worrisome: Despite Trump’s promotion of violence over the years, his framing of political violence as a problem that is solely coming from the left is an implicit admission that some forms of violence don’t count as violence — at least not in his eyes.

At minimum, he does not appear to find violence from his supporters or allies, or against his political opponents, as worthy of condemnation. Doing so, after all, would undermine the narrative he wants to spin: that a violent left-wing is relentlessly attacking his supporters and the entire nation, and only he can protect them. As Trump prepares to crack down on Democrats and leftists, as he indicated he would in his Oval Office address, he’ll continue to ignore far-right extremists. That, alone, might only embolden them.>

<In 2025, state legislators have introduced 148 bills designed to curb direct democracy. At the same time that Congress and the Supreme Court are abdicating their powers to the president, voters’ ability to pass laws via ballot measures is being stripped out from under our noses in state capitols across the country.

Citizen-led ballot measures are voters’ most powerful tool for making change when politicians fail them. As our representative democracy becomes increasingly dysfunctional, ballot measures are more important than ever — and it’s no surprise that politicians intent on consolidating power find direct democracy threatening. But if we shine a light on this power grab and hold our politicians to account, we can still preserve democracy in its purest form.

The Fairness Project, which released a report Tuesday on the way direct democracy is being attacked, is on the front lines of this fight. As the national leader in ballot measures, we have helped win 40 campaigns across 20 states to protect reproductive rights, raise wages, expand health care access, secure paid leave and enact other life-changing policies for more than 23 million people.

We see firsthand that voters regularly check their party affiliation at the door to vote for ballot measures that will improve their lives. We also have learned that the more citizens use their power to advance their interests, the more some lawmakers attack the process.

The 148 bills my organization counted have been filed across 15 states, and each of them, in one way or another, was drafted to break the mechanisms by which voters initiate ballot measures. The 148 bills represent a 95% increase in anti-democratic legislation by state lawmakers since 2023. Put simply, politicians’ attempts to weaken direct democracy have nearly doubled. This assault on ballot measures has no precedent. From 2000 to 2023, there was an average of 16 such bills a year. An increase to 148 isn’t a trickle. It’s a deluge.

These attempts to subvert direct democracy in the states come in several forms, but each of them aims to make it harder for people who aren’t politicians to qualify their issue for the ballot or for citizen-initiated measures to win on Election Day.

The most straightforward attacks are undemocratic supermajority requirements that impose a 60% threshold for a ballot measure to succeed, which essentially empowers a minority of voters to defeat the will of the majority. Florida already has this requirement in place, which is why Florida’s 2024 measure to overturn the state’s abortion ban failed despite being supported by 57% of voters. Now, the Missouri Legislature, at the same time it has convened a special session to gerrymander the state mid-decade, has passed a bill limiting voters’ power to amend their state constitution by ballot measure....>

<....More insidious are the changes to the rules about how ballot measures qualify for a vote. These include requiring more signatures on petitions or requiring that they be collected from more counties in a state and imposing severe limitations on who can collect them. Some states are trying to drown advocates in red tape, requiring every petition to be notarized, every volunteer to pass a background check, every form regulated down to font size — and any mistake subject to hefty fines or criminal penalties. Taken together, these seemingly small changes add prohibitive costs to grassroots campaigns and chill citizen participation.

These seemingly small changes add prohibitive costs to grassroots campaigns and chill citizen participation.

None of these bills are “reforms.” Rather, each represents a cowardly attempt to make it harder for voters to access direct democracy. This intent to exclude citizens from lawmaking is evident in the increasingly open disdain many conservative lawmakers are showing for their own voters. When asked about his vote to repeal the paid sick leave voters had approved, one Missouri lawmaker smugly replied: “Of course the people voted for it. It would be like asking your teenager if he wanted a checkbook. They’re going to vote for it every time.”

The timing of this acceleration in anti-voter legislation is no mystery. It’s a direct response to recent cross-partisan victories in conservative states on progressive issues that voters care about — living wages, reproductive freedom, access to health care — all things that conflict with some legislators’ unpopular agendas.

The lawmakers attempting to undermine citizen-initiated ballot measures are counting on this issue being too esoteric, too weedy, too dull to catch voters’ attention. We must prove them wrong and bring every ounce of our political energy to protecting these voting rights before they’re gone.

This means shining a light on legislative fights, litigating against the unconstitutional laws that pass and voting against attacks on our rights at the ballot box. Most of all, we can’t let new hurdles in the process deter us from participation. If we can’t make change in Washington right now, then we have to get a clipboard and get to work passing changes in our home states while we can.>

<Following the assassination of Charlie Kirk at the hands of yet another young, white, male shooter whose motives are entirely* unclear at this point, Republicans were quick to point fingers at Democrats for creating a hostile atmosphere by calling Donald Trump and his supporters Nazis, fascists, and far-right. This, they proclaimed, must stop… or else.

We gotta be honest, trying to dictate to Americans what they can and can’t say, and threatening them with consequences if they don’t comply, sounds like some real fascist-level stuff.

This is especially true if the people who are supposed to be cowed into silence in this way are the ones pointing out that Trump and his supporters are trying to turn the United States into an authoritarian regime.

As for their resistance to Nazi comparisons, we get it. Nobody likes to be called a Nazi. People who aren’t Nazis (or think they are not) don’t like it because the Nazis were the worst. And people who are Nazis don’t like it because it makes it more difficult for them to do Nazi stuff because nobody likes Nazis.

Although, to be fair, a plurality of GOP voters (41 percent) said before last year’s election that they would vote for somebody who said Adolf Hitler did some good things, which is more than the combined number of Republicans who said this would get them to vote for that candidate’s opponent (19 percent) or who would stay home and not cast a ballot in that race (17 percent).

If you are a regular WhoWhatWhy reader, then you will know that we have written extensively about this topic (and if you are not but want to be, you can sign up to one of our newsletters here).

Earlier this year, we argued that, while Trump’s supporters may not be Nazis (and that the president himself fortunately isn’t like Hitler at all), they would have made good ones, which applies even more to some of the white nationalists who play key roles in his administration.

But we’ll get to Stephen Miller in a moment.

The main takeaway here is that the similarities between the rise of the Nazis in 1930s Germany and of MAGA in today’s United States are striking.

In large part, that’s because both Trump and Hitler used the same authoritarian playbook to seize and cement power.

But there are also ways in which the parallels are simply eerie. The aftermath of Kirk’s tragic death is shaping up to be one of those.

And that brings us to a guy named Horst Wessel (and, to be clear, this is not a comparison between the two men themselves but rather their deaths and what came/comes next).

Wessel was an early supporter of the Nazis. He joined the party in 1926 and was a member of its paramilitary wing. In 1930, he was shot in the head by a Communist and died in the hospital a few days later (as opposed to this week’s assassin, the killer back then actually was a known far-left street thug).

Up to that point, this wasn’t an overly remarkable story. Political violence in the Weimar Republic was off the charts at that time and clashes between Nazis and Communists in the streets of Berlin and elsewhere were a common occurrence.

What happened next, however, was.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s propaganda chief, turned Wessel into a martyr behind whom he wanted the Nazis to rally. “A nation only honors itself when it honors its dead,” Goebbels said in 1933 about Wessel. “One man rises above any movement as a symbol, and that movement then does well to keep this symbol whole and pure.”

And Goebbels certainly did that.

A poem that the deceased had composed became the lyrics for the official fight song of the Nazis (and later the second anthem of the Third Reich); the Berlin district in which he was killed was renamed into Horst Wessel City; monuments were erected in his honor (including in the Dachau concentration camp); and streets, schools, and squares throughout Germany were named after him.

Goebbels added that Wessel was “aware of the bitter taste of death, but he accepted it because it was necessary for Germany and because it was necessary for the German people.”

Now, nearly a century later, another authoritarian movement and a new demagogue are getting ready to turn Charlie Kirk into a martyr behind whom the MAGA movement can rally, and whose death can be used to crack down on those who oppose it.

Which brings us to Stephen Miller.

On Friday night, he went on Fox News to do just that. “I have not shared this before with anybody, but the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven, was, he said, that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” he told Sean Hannity, the face of the propaganda outlet....>

<....Well, that’s convenient, Stephen.

Mind you, while the MAGAverse desperately wants Kirk’s murderer to be a rabid left-winger who was radicalized when Democrats said that Trump and his supporters pose a threat to democracy, there isn’t really any evidence to support that.

But proof is also not required. After all, their movement lives in a reality that the president and Fox News created. That is why a nebulous cabal only known as “they” are being blamed for what happened.

You may recall that “they” were also supposedly trying to kill Trump, even though the would-be assassin from Butler, PA, was another young, white male, and there is still no evidence suggesting that he was radicalized by any left-wing group, ideology, or rhetoric.

Doesn’t matter. To every person on the right, “they” did this — and “they” must pay.

Kirk’s widow Erika also made that clear. “The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done. They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith, and of God’s merciful love,” she said in a televised speech in which she called her husband a “martyr.”

While we will obviously cut a grieving widow a lot of slack, we cannot stress enough that there is no “they” here. “They” didn’t kill her husband; a 22-year-old man, who by all accounts acted alone, confessed to the murder.

However, with him in custody, who else could be made to pay?

To Miller, the answer to that question is clear. “There is a domestic terrorism movement in this country,” he told Hannity.

Who are these “terrorists”? Miller isn’t overly specific, but we can infer that it is “radical left organizations” that call him a Nazi.

“And my message is, to all of the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate: you want us to live in fear, we will not live in fear, but you will live in exile, because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, take away your freedom,” Miller added.

Once again, that sounds awfully fascist. And because it does, we have a pretty good idea what’s going to come next.

First, Republicans will lionize Kirk and castigate anybody who points out that he held some pretty reprehensible views on a wide range of issues.

You can expect the party’s performance artists to come up with all kinds of plans to memorialize Kirk. We’re already seeing this with proposals to have him lie in state or to put a statue of him in the Capitol.

As you may recall, Goebbels calls this “honoring the dead” and finding one man “to rise above the movement as a symbol.”

The more troubling part is what Trump, Miller, and many other rightwing influencers are calling for, which is for the government to target groups they don’t like — even though those have nothing to do with Kirk’s assassination.

But, just like Wessel’s death in 1930, for an authoritarian movement, this is an opportunity that is too good to pass up.

Of course, if we’re wrong and this administration is nothing like the fascists of yesteryear, then Trump, Miller, the talking heads on Fox News, and all those right-wing influencers will surely apologize for their rush to judgment, acknowledge their own role in fomenting political violence with their rhetoric, and urge everybody to take a step back.

If they want to convince us that they’re not a threat to democracy, then they can do that.

Absent that, however, we are going to keep calling a spade a spade… and a fascist a fascist.

*Anybody who claims at this point to know his motive, whether it’s Republicans saying that he was radicalized by left-wing ideas or Democrats suggesting that he was part of a far-right faction of MAGA that felt Kirk didn’t go far enough in his views, is lying and being highly irresponsible.>

<Two House Republicans say they will oppose Speaker Mike Johnson’s plan to pass a “clean” stopgap spending bill this week that would punt a possible government shutdown into November, threatening GOP leaders’ plan to jam Senate Democrats ahead of the Sept. 30 funding deadline.

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who regularly opposes leadership-backed spending bills, said in a brief interview Monday that he would oppose the new expected continuing resolution as well.

“I am a ‘no’ unless it cuts spending, which I do not anticipate,” he said. Massie added that he is likely to support the rule setting up debate on the stopgap “unless it has something funky in it.”

Rep. Victoria Spartz (R-Ind.) said in an X post Sunday night that she was also a “no,” saying she could not “cannot support [a CR] that ends funding right before a major holiday to jam us with an Omnibus.” The Johnson-backed measure is expected to expire on the Friday before Thanksgiving.

Two “no” votes would put House Republicans at risk of losing a party-line vote if one additional GOP member breaks ranks. Spartz, it should be noted, has a long history of delivering ultimatums only to change her mind under pressure from the White House.

Leaders are aiming to unveil text as soon as Monday, though they still need to work out final details of adding enhanced member security funding following the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Two people granted anonymity to candidly describe the private talks said it could end up on a separate package of several full-year funding bills.

Other Republicans, meanwhile, are airing their displeasure with Johnson’s strategy — even though a similar play was credited with forcing a Democratic surrender back in March, the last time lawmakers dealt with a shutdown deadline.

Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) threatened to vote against another stopgap on X Monday, saying he was “out on another CR for the sake of more government” without specifying if that ultimatum applied to the measure Johnson has floated.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) posted Monday that another CR would continue funding levels established under former President Joe Biden, referring to it as “Biden’s budget that FUNDS TRANSGENDER POLICIES, NOT our own Trump policy budget that funds what you voted for.”

She also criticized Johnson for holding “zero meetings” about the stopgap plan and continuing a “charade” of an appropriations process. But she did not say explicitly that she would oppose it.>

<As a guy who regularly gets death threats because of my media presence, I shouldn’t have to say that killing people — or even threatening them — for their politics is wrong. But here it is, for the record: nobody in America should die for their politics.

That said, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination — the guy who downplayed slavery, demonized Black and brown people, promoted the racist antisemitic Great Replacement Theory, attacked queer people, made degrading comments about women, said gun deaths were fine because that’s the price we must pay for the Second Amendment — the media is afraid to say anything about the state of our politics other than “we need to stop violence-provoking political rhetoric on both sides.”

As if there were two sides here.

Here’s the hard truth that the bulls***-embracing “both sides” punditry won’t say out loud: calling for Democrats to “tone it down” has become a permission slip for Republicans to keep stoking hate, flirting with violence, and treating fellow Americans as enemies rather than opponents.

If you actually look at the political science and the public record, the escalation didn’t start with Democrats, and it doesn’t continue because Democrats use accurate words to describe what we’re facing. The political research is clear.

As Rachel Bitecofer points out, Thomas Mann and Norm Ornstein said the quiet part our loud when they wrote that the modern GOP had become “ideologically extreme, scornful of compromise, and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition” in their 2012 Washington Post essay and book-length work on asymmetric polarization.

And this isn’t new: the rhetoric that got us here wasn’t even invented on social media. Lee Atwater explained Nixon’s Southern Strategy out loud in 1981, describing how race-baiting messages were laundered into “abstract” appeals that produced the same results without resorting to the N-word.

Ronald Reagan elevated the “welfare queen” trope into a national morality play that exploited poverty and race for partisan gain. The Willie Horton ad and “Revolving Door” spot baked fear-first politics into a Republican presidential campaign’s core strategy.

Pat Buchanan then said the quiet part with a bullhorn in his 1992 convention speech, declaring a “culture war” against Democrats and anyone who didn’t fit his vision of a Christian white America. Newt Gingrich operationalized it with his GOPAC training memo, a how-to guide that told Republican candidates to brand Democrats with words like “corrupt,” “sick,” and “traitors” while reserving terms like “freedom” and “strength” for themselves.

This wasn’t an internet rumor, it was the Republican party’s official training literature.

When the National Rifle Association mailed a fundraising letter in 1995 calling federal agents “jack-booted thugs,” former President George H. W. Bush resigned from their board in protest, which tells you how far the mainstream right still had to travel to normalize incendiary attacks on law enforcement when it suited their politics.

Fast forward to the past decade and the escalation didn’t slow.

Republicans have long normalized calling Democrats “socialists” or “communists” as a baseline insult rather than an argument. This isn’t a fringe habit, it’s a standard applause line for Republican leaders and conservative media outlets.

The “Second Amendment” wink-and-nod-endorsing-violence politics isn’t new either. Sharron Angle campaigned on “Second Amendment remedies” in 2010 and Donald Trump suggested in 2016 that the “Second Amendment people” might have to step up to stop Hillary Clinton.

With Trump’s 2016 campaign, the glorification of violence moved from innuendo to stagecraft. He urged rallygoers to “knock the crap out of” protesters, then later told police “please don’t be too nice” to suspects during a Long Island speech.

Armed rightwing extremists swarmed the Michigan Capitol in April 2020, a preview of how “we the people” could be recast as a threat display when public health or election results didn’t go the way Republicans wanted.

Republican Congressman Paul Gosar posted an anime video that depicted violence against AOC and President Joe Biden, which isn’t normal in an advanced democracy. Nonetheless, all but two Republicans refused to vote for his censure.

The GOP’s information pipeline supercharged moral panics about identity and belonging; the old birther lie about Barack Obama’s citizenship migrated from fringe to Fox to Trump’s core brand....>

<....Then the “Great Replacement” narrative went from white supremacist fever dream to a standard talking point on the country’s most-watched rightwing channel, and then into the manifestos of mass murderers in El Paso and Buffalo, and into the antisemitic rantings of the Tree of Life shooter who blamed Jews for “bringing invaders” here.

After Florida’s Parental Rights in Education law, the “groomer” slur against queer people exploded by more than 400 percent because political entrepreneurs like Kirk realized how quickly a smear can mobilize fear and clicks in the current media economy.

Republican officials and aligned media also popularized the false frame that gender-affirming care equals “genital mutilation,” a homophobic slur Kirk kept using that’s been rejected on the record by federal judges examining the facts in these cases.

This is the ecosystem that produced a presidential debate moment in which Trump told the racist Proud Boys to “stand back and stand by,” and a January 6 rally where he urged supporters to “fight like hell.” The Republican National Committee later tried to rebrand the attack as “legitimate political discourse,” which was an explicit signal to their base that political violence is just fine with the GOP.

The Department of Justice charged more than 1,500 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol, including hundreds for assaulting police officers (three of whom died): Trump then pardoned them all, explaining again by his action (and the failure of any Republicans to condemn it) that political violence is just fine with today’s GOP.

Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, two election workers falsely smeared by Trump’s lawyer, won a landmark defamation verdict because Republican threats to public servants are real, not rhetorical flourishes.

When critics talk about authoritarian drift, they aren’t making it up for cable hits. Trump created “Schedule F” by executive order in 2020 to strip job protections from large categories of civil servants. President Biden revoked it but now it’s back, leading to a dangerous politicization of the federal bureaucracy that’s now hunting and purging “lefties” the way slave patrolers once tracked down escapees.

Alongside that, Trump has publicly urged defunding or punishing the FBI and DOJ when they investigate him, and even floated “terminating” parts of the Constitution, which is rhetoric that would have ended careers a generation ago and now earns a shrug from most of his party’s elected officials.

And, as Jessica Valenti points out:

“[W]hen a pregnant woman dies of sepsis in a hospital that could have helped her but is legally prevented from doing so, that’s political violence. It’s political violence when a child is shot in their classroom because lawmakers refuse to take action on guns. An abortion provider being assassinated after years of conservatives calling them ‘baby-killers’ is political violence, as is the death of a person who had their medical claim denied by companies more interested in their bottom line than people’s lives.”

And now, in the wake of Kirk’s murder, Republicans are again amping up the violent rhetoric.

Laura Loomer posted, “More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.” Trump referenced “radical left political violence” as if that’s the only source of it. Sean Davis, the CEO of The Federalist, wrote: “When Democrats lose elections they couldn’t steal, they murder the people they were unable to defeat.” Fox host Jesse Watters said, “Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us.”

Mother Jones compiled a more comprehensive list of Republican calls for violence against Democrats.

Trump made jokes about Paul Pelosi’s near-murder, and laughed when a thuggish congressional candidate assaulted a reporter for asking him a question about health care policy. That thug is now governor of Montana.

And let’s not forget Charlie Kirk’s hero, Kyle Rittenhouse, who murdered two people and blew most of the arm off a third. Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago to congratulate him.

Violence is their brand.

And in the wake of all this, Trump pulls the Secret Service security detail from Kamala Harris just as she begins her book tour.

Now put that record next to what Democrats have done.

I realize it makes them sound like wimps, but instead of vilifying their opposition Democrats in Congress have been working across the aisle for the average person, passing healthcare legislation, trying to strengthen voting rights, reduce student debt, clean up the environment, rebuild our infrastructure and kick-start chip manufacturing, and hold corporate criminals to account....>

<....After Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered by a rightwinger with a list of almost 50 other Democrats he planned to kill, and a state senator and his wife were wounded, Trump refused to even call Governor Tim Walz, much less lower flags to half-staff. Democrats, who’d lost a genuine hero, universally called for toning down political rhetoric instead of vengeance or retributive violence.

While the GOP’s brand is “We’re victims!!!,” Democrats are more interested in getting things done for the people. And when they do call out the authoritarianism of this administration, they’re pointing to actual policies like masked secret police, military in the streets, Trump grifting billions in crypto, using the FBI to go after his political opponents, and Republicans on the Supreme Court giving Trump immunity from prosecution for actual crimes.

On top of passing legislation, Democratic leaders have consistently condemned political violence without caveat, from Biden’s 2020 speech spelling out that “rioting is not protesting” to repeated condemnations after attacks on public officials and public servants.

So when commentators ask both parties to “lower the temperature,” we should be honest about what that means in practice.

Too often, it’s a request for Democrats to stop calling out the very real way the modern right has mainstreamed eliminationist rhetoric, moral-panic politics, and procedural hardball.

It is a call to pretend that saying “you’re child-abusing communists who hate America” versus “you’re undermining democracy and endangering people with lies” are mirror images.

They are not.

One is a smear that licenses political violence. The other is a description of a documented pattern of behavior with decades of receipts.

None of that means Democrats are perfect. It means Democrats are operating inside the reality-based world where deals must be made, bills must be passed, and violence is condemned when it appears on your own side.

Former Republican George Conway warns that the GOP is on the verge of turning Kirk into Horst Wessel, the Nazi streetfighter who Hitler made into a martyr when he was killed. Conway posted:

“They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling — and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.”

Jim Stewartson suggests Kirk’s killing could be used by Trump the way Hitler used the Reichstag Fire to change German law and give himself unlimited power.

These are indeed very, very dangerous times. And the political rhetoric coming out of 1500 rightwing hate-radio stations, Republican politicians, and billionaire-funded hard-right-biased-social-media-algorithms is at the center of the crisis.

If Republicans want the volume to come down, the path is simple.

Stop labeling mainstream opponents as “communists” and “groomers.”

Stop flirting with “Second Amendment remedies.”

Stop normalizing threats against election workers.

Stop trying to bend the machinery of government to punish critics and shield allies.

When that happens, Democrats will meet them in the middle, because Democrats already live there when they write bipartisan infrastructure bills, subsidize domestic chip manufacturing, narrow gun loopholes, and harden the legal process for counting electoral votes.

Until then, asking Democrats to “watch their tone” is not a plan for peace: it’s a plan for unilateral disarmament in a fight the other side first chose.

Our media must call the problem what it is, or we’ll never fix it. The people who lit this fire keep tossing gasoline on it. The only way to put it out is to stop pretending the arsonists and the firefighters are the same.>

<Charlie Kirk's allies vowed vengeance against novelist Stephen King for summarizing the slain activist's political views, but social media users pointed out a flaw in their strategy.

The best-selling author reminded his X followers that Kirk, who was fatally shot Wednesday at a speaking event at Utah Valley University, held virulently anti-LGBTQ views, pointing out that "he advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin’."

Kirk often spoke out against what he described as the “LGBTQ agenda" and described the Bible verse Leviticus 20:13, which calls for the execution of homosexuals, as “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters," but the right-wing influencer's supporters, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), demanded retribution.

"Please share if you agree that the estate of Charlie Kirk should sue Stephen King for defamation over this heinously false accusation," the senator posted on his person "Based Mike Lee" account. "He’s crossed a line. It will prove costly."

King ended up deleting the post in question, but legal experts and other social media users questioned the senator's call for accountability for criticizing the late Turning Point USA leader.

"Mike Lee allegedly went to law school and passed the bar," posted the popular Bluesky account "Kept Simple." "Aside from Stephen King's claim being true, a dead person's estate can't sue for defamation, on account of the fact that a dead person can't suffer an injury to their reputation, because they are dead."

"He pinned this tweet over there, too," said legal blogger Chris Geidner. "He’s so proud of his practiced stupidity."

"Mike Lee. Proof morons can pass the bar," agreed Bluesky user Common Sense Metalhead.

"Over on Xitter, the troll account of UT's senior senator has launched a campaign to encourage Charlie Kirk's estate to sue Stephen King for ... describing something Charlie Kirk actually said," added legal analyst Marcy Wheeler.

"Aside from having these two insurmountable defects, how is Kirk damaged by people thinking he's a capital punishment favoring bigot?" wondered Bluesky user J.D., who describes himself as a defamation lawyer. "Doesn't that cover a third of his material? Would anyone who liked Charlie Kirk think differently of him even were it false? Does Mike Lee ever think anything through?"

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) accused King of lying about Kirk's stated views, as well, calling the author "a horrible, evil, twisted liar, and he also faced blowback.

"Kirk’s murder doesn’t change that he said this or the fact Ted Cruz is a lyin’ dick," said Jeff Timmer, a senior adviser to the Lincoln Project.

"Another Ted Cruz fail," added X user Darryl Livingstone. "Why don't you take another trip somewhere and maybe stay there permanently?">

<FBI Director Kash Patel was put in the hot seat Wednesday after past clips of himself accusing the FBI of being complicit in covering up for Jeffrey Epstein were played during an explosive House committee hearing, leading Patel to shift blame to the Biden and Obama administrations.

“Director Patel, before you joined the FBI, you railed against it for covering up Jeffrey Epstein's human trafficking ring; let me refresh your memory with this clip,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

Committee members were then shown past clips of Patel from late 2023 promoting the idea that the FBI was directly complicit in a cover to protect potential co-conspirators of Epstein, who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges and is alleged to have run a blackmail operation targeting powerful figures. One clip saw Patel stating that Epstein’s alleged ‘Black Book’ of contacts was “under direct control of the director of the FBI.”

“You were sworn in as director more than 200 days ago, now the Black Book is under you're direct control, so why haven't you released the names of Epstein's co-conspirators in the rape and sex trafficking of young women and girls?” Raskin pressed Patel.

“The rolodex, which is what everybody colloquially refers to as the 'Black Book,' has been released,” Patel asserted.

Trump’s Justice Department did, in fact, release heavily-redacted portions of Epstein’s Black Book in February. However, much of its content was obscured, and in some cases, more redacted than what journalists had released nearly half a decade prior in 2021.

“No, you're talking about what the journalists got five years ago,” Raskin fired back. “That's not what we're talking about, we're talking about what you were talking about there, the Black Book under the direct control of the FBI director.”

Patel went on to point fingers at former presidents Joe Biden and Barack Obama, arguing that nothing on Epstein had been released under their administrations, and also touted unrelated arrest numbers of child predators achieved under the Trump administration.

“We have released more material than anyone else before,” Patel said.

“Really?” Raskin said. “Have you released all of the stuff that the FBI has seized from Epstein's house? The computers, the emails, the file cabinets, the documents? What about the financial records, have you released all of that? …I want you to follow your own word, Director Patel!”

The FBI currently holds a trove of files related to Epstein that have yet to see release, much of it acquired during its 2019 raid of Epstein’s Manhattan home, where law enforcement seized hundreds of lewd photos and other evidence, including CDs with hand-written labels with phrases such as “Young [Name] + [Name].”

Given the nature of the allegations against Epstein, and his home being riddled with cameras, that evidence has sparked speculation that the FBI is in possession of material that could implicate potential co-conspirators.

Patel went on to, again, to point fingers at Biden and Obama, before blaming his agency’s lack of full disclosure around Epstein on federal courts and a non-prosecution agreement granted to Epstein in 2007.

“Why don't you just release the entire file, as you promised to do?” Raskin pressed.

“I literally just told you,” Patel said.>

<In the days since Charlie Kirk’s shooting, a level of performative concern about limiting speech critical of the slain conservative has spread far and wide. It’s led to normally critical liberal pundits, like Ezra Klein, celebrating Kirk’s life and work, while others have been fired for merely bringing attention to things Kirk has said via direct quote. This hypervigilant policing of speech critical of Kirk reveals hypocrisy on all sides. However, during this fight over cancel culture in reverse, one conservative leader has gone above and beyond in his unabashed weaponizing of the free speech politics of the moment, in direct contrast to his very recent actions to purportedly protect free speech: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Specifically, Abbott in recent days has been mighty busy on X, where he’s been using his platform to spotlight college students who he believes should be punished for their speech during campus memorial services for Kirk. Without identifying any rules or law violations, Abbott suggested that at least one Texas college student should be expelled and celebrated the arrest of another student.

It started last Sunday, when a video posted to X showed 18-year-old Camryn Giselle Booker confronting a group of her classmates at Texas Tech University as they were holding a vigil for Kirk on campus. A male student who appears to have been participating in the vigil filmed the incident and posted it online in a series of clips, the first one showing Booker briefly coming up behind vigil-goers and jumping up and down while shouting expletives seeming to celebrate Kirk’s death. The video segues into a second clip revealing the male student filming. He’s wearing a red Make America Great Again hat and dark sunglasses, and says, “Evil is real, people, and it kind of looks like that,” as he pans the camera to Booker.

The final clip shows the male student calling out to Booker, “Why are you being so hateful?” Booker responds by turning the question back to him, saying “Why are you so hateful?” while beginning to also film the encounter on her own phone. The two of them quickly begin arguing over whether Booker is being aggressive, while a third student enters the conversation to tell Booker that she’s getting emotional. Taking a step back from the group, Booker attempts to defend herself, telling both students, “I’m not being aggressive, my voice is very calm. You’re calling me aggressive because I’m a Black woman.”

The male student filming immediately says “Not at all,” and the video cuts off. A separate clip of the incident shows Booker waving to mourners and pushing a fellow student’s red hat. Sunday night, Abbott posted a screenshot of Booker being handcuffed by police to X. “This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech. FAFO.” That’s slang for “F*** around, find out.” A local Texas news station reported Booker has been expelled by Texas Tech. Again, this is the governor of Texas celebrating a college student being arrested days after an incident, merely for engaging in protected speech.

Then on Tuesday, a separate incident at Texas State University went viral. According to a video posted to X, during a memorial service honoring Kirk that was hosted by the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, a male student forces himself through a thick crowd of students. While white headphones dangle from his ears, the student briefly stops to slap the side of his neck as he yells profanities about how Kirk died. He continues to make his way toward the front of the crowd, climbs atop a statue, slaps the side of his neck again, then slumps down to his hands and knees, an apparent reenactment of Kirk’s death. He gets up, jumps off the statue, spits on the ground, and walks away from the huddled crowd, as students can be heard shouting. Someone says “You’re gonna get expelled, dude.”

By early Tuesday afternoon, Abbott was calling on Texas State to “expel this student immediately.” Within an hour, Texas State University president Kelly Damphousse posted an official statement to X where he confirmed that university officials were attempting to identify the subject of the viral video and promised that if the subject was found to be affiliated with his university, appropriate action would be taken: “Let me be clear: expressions that glorify violence or murder have no place on our campuses.” On Tuesday night, Abbott took it upon himself to update the public: “That student is now expelled.”

<....It’s ironic when you consider that back in 2019, Abbott was concerned about protecting young conservative voices, so he proudly signed a bill enshrining First Amendment rights on Texas college campuses. It classified outdoor areas of college campuses as “public forums”—the very spaces where the incidents at Texas Tech and Texas State occurred—and created disciplinary sanctions for any students who interfered with free speech activities.

And yet, when the political tide shifted last year as pro-Palestine protests roiled college campuses across the country, including at many schools in Texas, Abbott was quick to pull back on those sacred free speech rights. He signed a bill tightening free speech rules on Texas college campuses, placing restrictions on students engaging in peaceful protests, banning encampments and megaphones, and instating a curfew on student protests.

To make matters more transparent, Abbott has made very clear that he views some hateful speech as protected and other similar speech as not. Indeed, in 2021, Abbott signed a law that allowed Texans to sue social media platforms that banned them for hate speech. “We will always defend the freedom of speech in Texas, which is why I am proud to sign House Bill 20 into law to protect First Amendment rights in the Lone Star State,” Abbott said at the time. Last year, Abbott’s law was struck down by a unanimous Supreme Court as a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

In the past week we’ve seen television pundits and journalists publicly lose their jobs over their coverage of Kirk’s death, and Abbott is capitalizing on that momentum for himself at the expense of Texas’ youth. If Abbott had not interfered with the Texas Tech and Texas State students, it seems quite possible that those institutions might have taken disciplinary action while perhaps also allowing those two students to remain enrolled in college. Maybe there was a chance that those institutions would have treated their free speech rights with as much respect as was given to the students publicly mourning Kirk’s death.

On Tuesday, during a press conference, Abbott broadly discussed recent college students’ behavior following Kirk’s death. “We as a society, we as a state, must send a signal that celebrating the assassination of a free speech advocate is wrong in a civil society,” he proclaimed. Abbott failed to mention that Texas seems ready to enforce a double standard: If two Black students exercise their free speech rights, the governor will happily penalize them and even celebrate their arrest.>

<Donald Trump has sued the New York Times for, well, reporting on Trump.

Rather than charging the Times with any specific libelous act, Trump’s lawsuit is just another of his angry bloviations.

The lawsuit says he’s moving against "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” And so on.

At least he sued The Wall Street Journal’s parent company for something specific — reporting Trump’s birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein (which Trump continues to deny even though it showed up in the Epstein files).

Last year, Trump sued ABC and its host George Stephanopoulos for having said that Trump was found liable for rape rather than "sexual abuse" in the civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. The network settled for $16 million

Trump sued CBS for allegedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris on "60 Minutes" to make her sound more coherent. CBS also agreed to pay $16 million.

Defamation lawsuits are a longstanding part of Trump’s repertoire, which he first learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious legal bullies.

In the 1980s, Trump sued the Pulitzer-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp for $500 million, for criticizing Trump’s plan to build the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, a 150-story tower that Gapp called "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”

Trump charged that Gapp had "virtually torpedoed" the project and subjected Trump to "public ridicule and contempt." A judge later dismissed the suit as involving protected opinion.

But such lawsuits are far worse when a president sues. He’s no longer just an individual whose reputation can be harmed. He’s the head of the government of the United States. One of the cardinal responsibilities of the media in our democracy is to report on a president — and often criticize him.

The legal standard for defamation of a public figure, established in a 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, requires that public officials who bring such suits prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.

That case arose from a libel suit filed by L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, against the New York Times for an advertisement in the paper that, despite being mostly true, contained factual errors concerning the mistreatment of civil rights demonstrators.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, finding that the ad was protected speech under the First Amendment and that the higher standard of proof was necessary to protect robust debate on public affairs.

Under this standard, there’s no chance Trump will prevail in his latest lawsuits against the Times or Wall Street Journal. Nor would he have won his lawsuits against ABC and CBS, had they gone to trial.

But Trump hasn’t filed these lawsuits to win in court. He has sought wins in the court of public opinion. These lawsuits are aspects of his performative presidency.

ABC’s and CBS’s settlements are viewed by Trump as vindications of his gripes with the networks.

He’s likewise using his lawsuit against the New York Times to advertise his long standing grievances with the paper.

His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is intended to send a message to the Journal’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, that Trump doesn’t want Murdoch to muck around in the Jeffrey Epstein case.

These lawsuits also put the media on notice that Trump could mess up their businesses.

Not only is it costly to defend against them — requiring attorney’s fees, inordinate time of senior executives, and efforts to defend the media’s brand and reputation.

When a lawsuit comes from the president of the United States who also has the power to damage a business by imposing regulations and prosecuting the corporation for any alleged wrongdoings, the potential costs can be huge.

Which presumably is why CBS caved rather than litigated. Its parent company, Paramount, wanted to be able to sell it for some $8 billion to Skydance, whose CEO is David Ellison (scion of the second-richest person in America, Oracle’s Larry Ellison). But Paramount first needed the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — which held up the sale until the defamation lawsuit was settled.

Here we come to the central danger of Trump’s wanton use of personal defamation law. The mere possibility of its use — coupled with Trump’s other powers of retribution — have a potential chilling effect on media criticism of Trump....>

<....We don’t know how much criticism has been stifled to date, but it’s suggestive that a CBS News president and the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned over CBS’s handling of the lawsuit and settlement, presumably because they felt that management was limiting their ability to fairly and freely cover Trump.

It’s also indicative that CBS ended Stephen Colbert’s contract. Colbert’s show is the highest-rated late night comedy show on television. He’s also one of the most trenchant critics of Trump.

Among the capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration was to hire an “ombudsman” to police the network against so-called bias — and the person they hired was Kenneth R. Weinstein, the former president and chief executive of the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute think tank.

Note also that on Wednesday ABC pulled off the air another popular late-night critic of Trump — Jimmy Kimmel — because Kimmel in a monologue earlier this week charged that Trump’s “MAGA gang” was trying “to score political points” from Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

ABC announced the move after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, appeared to threaten ABC, and its parent company Disney, for airing Kimmel’s monologue —ominously threatening: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”

Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and related businesses, has muzzled the editorial page of the Washington Post — prohibiting it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and imposing a stringent set of criteria on all editorials and opinion columns, which has led to the resignations of its opinion page editor and a slew of its opinion writers.

Trump hasn’t sued the Washington Post for defamation, but Bezos presumably understands Trump’s potential for harming his range of businesses and wants to avoid Trump’s wrath.

Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy.

What can be done? Two important steps are warranted.

First, the New York Times v. Sullivan standard should be far stricter when a president of the United States seeks to use defamation law against a newspaper or media platform that criticizes him.

Instead of requiring that he prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, he should have to prove that the false statement materially impaired his ability to perform his official duties.

Better yet, a president should have no standing to bring defamation suits. He has no need to bring them. Through his office he already possesses sufficient — if not too much — power to suppress criticism.

Second, antitrust authorities should not allow large corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals with many other business interests to buy major newspapers or media platforms. They cannot be trusted to prioritize the public’s right to know over their financial interests in their range of businesses.

The richest person in the world was allowed to buy X, one of the most influential news platforms on earth, and has turned it into a cesspool of rightwing lies and conspiracy theories.

The family of the second-richest person in the world now owns CBS.

The third-richest person now owns the Washington Post.

The Disney corporation — with its wide range of business enterprises — owns ABC.

The problem isn’t concentrated wealth per se. It’s that these business empires are potentially more important to their owners than is the public’s right to know.

If Democrats win back control of Congress next year, they should encode these two initiatives in legislation.

Democracy depends on a fearless press. Trump and the media that have caved in to him are jeopardizing it and thereby undermining our democracy>