Trump comes in hot as Charlie Kirk's widow preaches forgiveness
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
This assault isn't about Charlie Kirk
Telling the truth about a propagandist and liar has been deemed a radical act worthy of punishment. I use the case of novelist Stephen King to illustrate.
King had said Charlie Kirk, who was murdered this month, “advocated for stoning gays to death.” King was speaking the spirit of the truth, if not the precise letter of it, but was nevertheless hounded and harassed into apologizing by right-wingers who not only want to police speech but compel it. You shall honor the saintly demagogue or pay a price.
Unsurprisingly, the dragnet is widening. Last week, late-night television host Jimmy Kimmel was “suspended indefinitely.” (That probably means his show is canceled.) According to the AP, it’s because comments he “made about Charlie Kirk’s killing led a group of ABC-affiliated stations to say it would not air the show and provoked some ominous comments from a top federal regulator.”
What comments?
Before I tell you what Jimmy Kimmel said, it’s important to tell you what other people are saying he said. Why? Because it’s like a sinister game of telephone, and the farther we get from the facts of what he said, the more chances there are for the totalitarians among us to replace reality with lies, making us all liars (not to mention insane).
First, a voice from the right, Piers Morgan: “Jimmy Kimmel lied about Charlie Kirk’s assassin being MAGA. This caused understandable outrage all over America, prompted TV station owners to say they wouldn’t air him, and he’s now been suspended by his employers. Why is he being heralded as some kind of free speech martyr?”
Second, a voice from the left, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes: The ABC affiliates said they would refuse “to air Kimmel’s show, they say, because the comments the late night host made on Monday night relating to the motives of the man who shot and killed Charlie Kirk wrongly suggest[ed] the killer was part of the MAGA movement. He was not.”
Morgan is wrong. Kimmel didn’t lie. Hayes is wrong, too. Jimmy Kimmel did not suggest “the killer was part of the MAGA movement.”
Here’s what he said, per the AP:
“The MAGA Gang [is] desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving.”
Also: “Many in MAGA land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
See anything wrong here? I don’t.
Indeed, neither did “multiple executives” at ABC, who, according to Rolling Stone, “felt that Kimmel had not actually said anything over the line.” What they did feel, however, was fear of an unfavorable interpretation of Kimmel’s words. Rolling Stone reported that two sources said “the threat of Trump administration retaliation loomed.”
What retaliation? Hayes reported on it, as did the AP. Just before the Kimmel news broke, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, issued an open threat to ABC, which is owned by the Walt Disney Company: get rid of Jimmy Kimmel or else.
“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” Brendan Carr told maga propagandist Benny Johnson. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
And with that, it’s clear this is no longer about a dead demagogue. It’s about exploiting the memory of a dead demagogue to advance the totalitarian project: to not only police speech but compel it. I expect Kimmel to follow Stephen King’s lead and apologize in time for doing something he did not do, affirming the lie and undermining the truth.
I think the union representing Kimmel’s musicians is right.
“This is not complicated,” said Tino Gagliardi, the president of the American Federation of Musicians. “Trump’s FCC identified speech it did not like and threatened ABC with extreme reprisals. This is state censorship. It’s now happening in the United States of America, not some far-off country. … This act by the Trump Administration represents a direct attack on free speech and artistic expression. These are fundamental rights that we must protect in a free society.”
But I think it’s wrong too. This is complicated.
What’s happening is not just a consequence of government thugs attacking free speech and artistic expression. It’s also the consequences of three decades of corporate consolidation and the near-total lack of antitrust law enforcement. A handful of companies now own media outlets tens of millions use. In the case of the ABC affiliates, two firms — Nexstar and Sinclair — own nearly all of them.
This results in not only an artificially narrow range of information and views, but also a vulnerability on the part of media owners faced with a belligerent government such as the current one. They can stand on free press and free speech grounds and risk the wrath of a criminal FCC, or they can play along. ABC could have chosen to interpret Kimmel’s words in his favor — he didn’t say what critics said he said. Instead, it chose to interpret his words in maga’s favor. It sacrificed Kimmel in the misbegotten hope that doing so will appease them.
It won’t.
I don’t mean ABC won’t get something for failing to take its own side in a fight. (I have no idea what it might gain.) I mean surrendering in advance won’t end well, as we have seen in countries like Hungary and Turkey, where “autocratic carrots and sticks,” as Brian Stelter put it, have led to their respective governments having near-total control of the media. No one in Hungary mocks Viktor Orbán. No one in Turkey jokes about Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. And that’s what Donald Trump wants.
Jimmy Kimmel isn’t just a comedian. To the president and MAGA faithful, he represents “the left,” which is to say, anyone who has enough independence of mind to laugh. Indeed, that might be the biggest obstacle to their hostile takeover attempt. If you have the courage to laugh at the reality of the human condition, you don’t need a strongman like Donald Trump to save you from the truth about it.
But courage, like the enforcement of antitrust law, is lacking. It’s one thing for the state to bully private enterprise. It’s another for private enterprise to roll over, because it believes rolling over is its interest.
I’ll end by quoting Dan Le Batard.
“Once you’re a coward who is extorted, the bully’s gonna keep extorting” you, the sportswriter and podcaster said. “When [ABC] gave Trump $16 million on something that [ABC News anchor George] Stephanopoulos said, they opened the doors now to all of media feeling like it needs to capitulate to a threat — and now you get dangerously close to state-run media.”
He added: “I’ve never seen, in my lifetime, America in the position it’s presently in where the media is running this kind of scared from power, as if we’re not a place where one of the chief principles is free speech.”
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Our leaders are zombies and wimps — but there's a stronger force fighting Trump
As Trump and his goons strip Americans of our constitutional rights, the silence of the nation’s leadership class is deafening.
I’m old enough to remember when, during the Vietnam War, university presidents utilized their bully pulpits to remind America of its moral center.
Today, university presidents are cowed. One college president recently told me point blank that “university presidents have no business speaking out on public issues.”
The chancellor of my own university, the University of California at Berkeley — the very place where the “free speech movement” began in 1965 — still hasn’t explained why Berkeley last week handed over to the regime the names of 160 students, lecturers, and faculty members who took part in pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Some are here on visas and terribly vulnerable. Others lack tenure and are vulnerable in different ways.
It’s not just university presidents who have become silent or complicit. Whatever happened to America’s religious leaders?
During prior crises of conscience, such as the struggle for civil rights, the voices of the nation’s religious leaders were loud and confident. They brimmed with moral authority. Today, we hear only the strident voices of the religious right.
What happened to America’s business leaders? They’ve never been especially reluctant to speak out on public issues.
For years Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorganChase, has acted as a self-appointed spokesperson for American business, sometimes reminding CEOs of their social responsibilities. This time? Utter silence.
Other CEOs have gone over to the dark side, competing to suck up to the tyrant-in-chief, eager to lavish him with praise, gush over his accomplishments, even hand him gifts of solid gold bullion.
The leaders of America’s legal community? “I want to keep my head down,” the senior partner of a large firm told me. “We have too much to lose.”
The leaders of the media? They’re busy consolidating their ownership over ever more of the nation’s media and dare not upset Trump’s FCC and toady Brendan Carr.
What of their responsibility to protect free speech? They’re far more interested in maximizing the value of their shares of stock.
And whatever happened to the nation’s political leaders? Where are their voices in this time of democratic crisis?
Most Republicans are zombies and most Democrats, wimps.
Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, won’t even endorse Zohran Mamdani for New York mayor — even though Mamdani is among the most popular young politicians with young voters.
We have to wait for Ted Cruz — Ted Cruz! — to sound the alarm about the FCC’s attack on freedom of speech?
The sad fact is that, like so much else Trump’s reign of terror has revealed, America’s leadership class no longer leads. It hides.
It has relinquished its obligations to the common good — to freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom from government arrest and imprisonment without due process, freedom to vote and participate in our democracy, freedom from arbitrary and capricious government decisions.
Instead, people in positions of significant responsibility have succumbed to greed, small-mindedness, insularity, and cowardice.
During a crisis like the one we’re now in, these so-called leaders have abdicated their moral responsibility.
It’s not all bad that America no longer has a leadership class.
True leadership doesn’t necessarily require high office. It doesn’t require a fancy title. Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and countless others who have moved the world held no formal positions of power. They had moral power to tell the truth and mobilize others.
The disappearance of America’s leadership class at a time like this means that the rest of us have to be leaders.
We can no longer wait to be led by those with the power and authority to lead. You must lead, I must lead, all of us must lead. We are the leaders we’ve been waiting for.
- Robert Reich is an emeritus professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/
- Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org.
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Two looming contests will tell if America still lives or if Trump has doomed us all
When I was a young man, I never figured that well into my seventh decade on this green and fading earth, I’d need to reiterate that I was a proud anti-fascist, and a veteran who served his country to defend it from violent, lawless convicted felons.
Like the one who has somehow scraped his way back into our White House …
It would have been completly inconceivable — a thing of fiction. When I was discharged from the Navy in 1980, America was an imperfect place, but tied together with the imperfect notion that if we stood together we could work our way out of nearly any self-inflicted mess.
Today, I am typing to you that Republicans have declared war on America, and as grotesque as that is, it is nonetheless a terrible reality we must come to grips with.
Maybe they are finishing what they started with Nixon and Reagan, but I’m here to tell you they have never been this sinister.
Donald J. Trump is a homegrown terrorist who hates America. After violently attacking our country once, he again has his fat little foot on the gas pedal, and this time means to run us over for good.
Instead of spending my golden years writing another damn book, and squeezing out every ounce of good that might be due to me, I am furiously banging out these three chilling words:
Authoritarianism is here.
Look, Trump will stop at nothing to protect himself, and continue to endanger this country. There are no lines he won’t cross, or laws he won’t incinerate. He’s a wholy dishonest man, who is good at exactly one thing: breaking things.
Like our economy, for instance ...
Since he slithered his way into our White House and spray-painted it tacky-gold, prices are rising, inflation is rising, unemployment is rising, and jobs are on the decrease. And that peace he promised to deliver on Day One? Well, things are escalating quickly in the Mideast, and along the frontlines of democracy in Eastern Europe.
Trump has predictably been a complete and utter failure, because history tells us that is all he has ever been. He was a rotten kid, a rotten businessman, a rotten husband, a rotten father, and is a poor damn excuse of a man.
His approval ratings are tanking, and everywhere he goes, which lately was an appalling stop in Great Britain, he is met with hate and derision.
His health is failing, and he looks even more hideous than usual. All the spray tan, and stringy stuff he tapes to his head each day are doing nothing to hide the fact he is quickly approaching the point where he is almost as dead on the outside as he is on the inside.
Instead of doing what every other president has done before him, and reassessing what has taken us down, he is steadfastly dragging along his dead right leg, and limping forward without looking back. He is climbing over the dead bodies toward the higher ground in his bunker where he can blame somebody else for his deep and never-ending failures.
It’s what losers do, and what he has always done.
- If what’s left of our media is reporting on his ongoing failures, they are the problem, and need to be silenced.
- If comedians are making light of his never-ending moronic tendencies, they need to be squashed.
- If economic data comes out that doesn't put a shine to his dark failures, he needs to manufacture his own numbers that will.
- If proven science doesn't align with his hair-brain thinking on things like vaccines and clean air and water, scientists need to be silenced, and crushed by the morally bankrupt billionaires who keep him in office, so their profits will soar.
- If some inconvenient law is getting in the way of his march against the truth he can just ignore it, because he knows his bought-off, reprehensible conservative Supreme Court has already decided their lopsided, orange lout is fit to be king.
- If none of that works, it was Obama or Biden’s fault.
And while ALL of this was inconceivable even 15 years ago, none of it comes as any surprise to those of us who have been doing nothing but paying close attention since the initial blast on Nov. 8, 2016.
If only everybody cared even half as much, we might not be in this terrible mess. Sadly, most don’t.
I’ll be spending the next couple of months typing to you from the coast of the Battleground State of North Carolina, and inside the Tidewater, Virginia, media market, as that state girds for crucial elections Nov. 4, that will decide which party holds power there.
Those elections, and similar contests in my home state, New Jersey, will be the first signs of whether our slide deep into fascism continues, or if we are interested in climbing out of the abyss.
For now, I’ll exit at the same place I left my last couple of columns by reiterating WE must be the truth-tellers going forward. We can no longer rely on our corporate media to tell us what is going on, because too many have pathetically surrendered to authoritarianism. We must turn to independent journalists to provide the truth, and confirm what is right in front of our eyes.
You … we … must all light the way ahead.
I’ll be very honest with you: I don’t need this shit, and know many of you don’t either. I think I speak for many of my generation when I say this is not how our retirement was supposed to go. We were planning to toss our flashlights and keys to the younger folks to guide the way. It was finally our turn to get the hell out of our own way, collect our social security, lean carefully on our savings, and make the most of whatever remained of our short lives.
I figured I’d find time at the nearest beach, and write about soft, pretty things of absolutely no consequence. I’d ride bliss, until it tossed me off and into some grave.
That’s when war came, and I made the decision not to ignore it.
It has been left to us to be true patriots and rescue America from the bruised grip of a maniac and his morally busted political cheap-shots, and misogynystic racists who mean to end us.
We must speak up, and stand against the latest Republican attack against our Democracy. There are no magic potions, or thoughts and prayers that will get us out of this mess. There is nobody coming to rescue us.
Once our Democracy is gone, we won’t get it back. Not in this lifetime.
At one point, America was the land of the free and the home of the brave.
I believe we are here to prove it still can be …
- (D. Earl Stephens is the author of “Toxic Tales: A Caustic Collection of Donald J. Trump’s Very Important Letters” and finished up a 30-year career in journalism as the Managing Editor of Stars and Stripes. You can find all his work here.)
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These groups can beat Trump — does he want to be embarrassed?
Beth Gazley, Professor of Nonprofit Management and Policy, Indiana University.
Following the Sept. 10, 2025, death of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in Utah, the Trump administration signaled that it intends to expand investigations into “leftist groups” for possible links to the suspect.
Kirk, who was 31 when he died, founded and led Turning Point USA, a conservative nonprofit that counted hundreds of thousands of young Americans among its members. Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah man, is accused of killing Kirk with a single bullet at a crowded outdoor debate. Robinson was, according to many accounts, raised by Republican parents in a conservative community. Although Robinson reportedly had recently adopted different political views, his precise motives remain unclear.
The Conversation U.S. asked Beth Gazley, an Indiana University scholar of nonprofits, local governance and civil society, to explain the significance of the Trump administration’s response to Kirk’s death in terms of free speech and nonprofit norms.
What are the Trump administration’s allegations?
High-ranking members of the Trump administration, including Vice President JD Vance and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, are accusing certain progressive organizations of encouraging violence against right-wing public figures and suggesting they played a role in Kirk’s death.
Miller, for example, has likened those groups to “a vast domestic terror movement.”
Vance has said the government will “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” in a reference to nonprofits he alleges are supporting illegal activities.
President Donald Trump has blamed Kirk’s death on “a radical left group of lunatics” that doesn’t “play fair.” He has stated that they are “already under major investigation,” although no such probe has been disclosed to date.
Trump has raised the possibility of criminal charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as the RICO statute, which is typically used to prosecute gangs and organized crime rings.
But, to be clear, the Trump administration has not yet produced evidence to support any of its allegations of wrongdoing by nonprofits and their funders.
What organizations are being targeted?
Some conservative media outlets and Trump administration members have singled out specific nonprofits and funders.
Their targets include billionaire George Soros, whose Open Society Foundations are among the country’s largest philanthropies, and the Ford Foundation, another of the nation’s top grantmakers. The outlets and officials claim that both foundations allegedly provided money to as-of-yet unnamed groups that “radicalized” Tyler Robinson and led to what the White House has called “organized agitation.”
Another target is the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights organization that regularly reported comments Kirk made disparaging Black, LGBTQ+ and other people.
The Ford Foundation is among more than 100 funders that signed onto an open letter posted to the Medium platform on Sept. 17, in which they objected to these Trump administration’s attacks. Open Society Foundations also signed the letter, and, in a post on the X platform, it denied the specific allegations directed at it by the Trump administration. The Southern Poverty Law Center has posted its own denial on Facebook.
Most but not all of the organizations Trump and his officials have accused of wrongdoing are charitable nonprofits and foundations. These organizations operate in accordance with the rules spelled out in Section 501(c)(3) of the U.S. tax code.
What can count as a charitable activity is defined very broadly due to the language that Congress approved over a century ago. It includes public policy advocacy, a limited amount of direct lobbying, social services and a broad range of other activities that include running nonprofit hospitals, theaters and universities. Churches and other houses of worship count as U.S. charities too.
The rights of nonprofits are also protected under the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which entitles them to freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to assemble and “petition the government for a redress of grievances” – which cements their right to participate in public policy advocacy.
Obviously, institutions – including nonprofits – and the people who lead them can’t promote criminal activity or incite political violence without breaking the law. U.S. Supreme Court precedents have set the bar very high on what counts as an incitement to violence.
Are there any precedents for this?
The Republican Party has previously attempted, and failed, several times in the past few years to expand the executive branch’s power to deregister charities for partisan purposes.
Most recently, GOP House members drafted an amendment that was cut from the final version of the big tax-and-spending bill Trump signed on July 4.
But many nonprofit advocates remain concerned about the possibility of the Trump administration using other means to limit nonprofit political rights.
Under the Bill of Rights, the U.S. has strong protections in place that shield nonprofits from partisan attacks. Still, there are some precedents for attempts to repress them.
The Johnson Amendment to a tax bill passed in 1954 is a well-known example. This law ended the ability of 501(c)(3) charities, private foundations and religious organizations to interfere in political campaigns.
Despite strong support from the public and the nonprofit sector for keeping it in place, the Trump administration has attempted to repeal the Johnson Amendment. What is largely forgotten is that Lyndon B. Johnson, then a member of Congress, introduced the measure to silence two conservative charities in his Texas district that supported his political opponent.
The Republican Party has also claimed in recent years that conservatives have been victims of efforts to suppress their freedom to establish and operate charitable nonprofits. A notable case was the GOP’s accusation during the Obama administration that the Internal Revenue Service was unfairly targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny. Following years of outrage over that alleged partisanship, however, it later turned out that the IRS had applied extra scrutiny to progressive groups as well.
Some political observers have suggested that the Trump administration’s inspiration for targeting certain nonprofits and their funders comes from what’s going on in other countries. Hungary, Russia, Turkey and other countries have punished the activities of their political opponents and nongovernmental organizations as crimes.
What do you think could ultimately be at stake?
The economic and political freedoms that are the bedrock of a true democracy rely on a diversity of ideas. The mechanism for implementing that ideal in the U.S. relies heavily on a long-standing Supreme Court doctrine that extends constitutional rights to individuals and organizations alike. Nonprofits, in other words, have constitutional rights.
What this means for American society is a much greater proliferation of nonprofit activity than you see in many other countries, with the inevitable result that many organizations espouse unpopular opinions or views that clash with public opinion or the goals of a major political party.
That situation does not make their activities illegal.
Even Americans who disagree with the missions of Turning Point USA or the Southern Poverty Law Center should be able to agree that both institutions contribute to what Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas once called the “market place of ideas” necessary for an open democracy.
Is it easy to see what donors fund and what nonprofits do with their money?
This situation leaves open the question of whether the public has a right to know who is bankrolling a nonprofit’s activity.
Following the money can be frustrating. Federal law is somewhat contradictory in how far it will go to apply democratic ideals of openness and transparency to nonprofit activity. A key example is the long-standing protection of donor privacy in U.S. law, a principle that conservatives generally favor.
The courts have established that making a charitable gift is a protected free speech activity that entitles donors to certain privacy rights. In fact, the most recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling related to charitable giving, handed down in 2021, upheld a conservative nonprofit’s right to strip donors’ names from reporting documents.
This privacy right extends to foundations: They can decide whether to disclose the names of their grant recipients. Still, all nonprofits except churches need to make some disclosures regarding their finances on a mandatory form filed annually.
Looking forward, organizations that advocate for the charitable sector as a whole, such as the National Council of Nonprofits, are closely following the efforts of the Trump administration. Their role is to remind the public that nonprofits on both the right and left side of the political spectrum have strong advocacy rights that don’t disappear when bad things happen.
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Jimmy Kimmel's suspension is not the biggest threat to freedom of speech — this is
The suspension of Jimmy Kimmel and the cancelling of his long-running eponymous late-night TV show by Disney-owned ABC is certainly disturbing from the perspective of anyone who defends the First Amendment in the US — myself included.
It’s quite clear that the Trump administration saw an opportunity to take down a thorn in its side and used Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr’s influence over Nexstar, a media conglomerate that owns many ABC affiliate stations, to swiftly and successfully pressure the network to do its bidding.
Meaning that, right-wing protestations to the contrary, the incident definitely passes the censorship smell test.
But it should be understood that major corporate-owned media like ABC has only rarely truly championed the First Amendment, because programming that is critical of the capitalism that makes ABC possible has generally never been allowed to air on its channels.
And there are other blind spots besides … the most obvious being Gaza-shaped. So, if Kimmel was an open socialist like me or had a history of taking potentially career-damaging stands like protesting the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinians of Gaza, he would never have been given a show in the first place.
Because the thing that speaks most loudly to the owners of conglomerates like Disney that own media companies like ABC is money. As long as a talent like Kimmel brought in plenty of cash and didn’t really rock powerful boats too far beyond what was widely considered fair game for a comedian, he was safe. But the moment he pissed off top conservatives with an iron-clad grip on the federal government enough to threaten ABC’s, and therefore Disney’s, bottom line, he was forced out.
And that’s what happened when Kimmel, frankly, overconfidently stated that Charlie Kirk’s assassin was a right-winger (which does not now appear to be the case) on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the Trump administration smelled blood in the water; Carr immediately announced that the FCC would have to look over the licenses of TV stations that continued to air his show; and Nexstar, a company with a big deal in the works that required FCC approval, immediately ordered its local TV stations to stop airing Kimmel. As did Sinclair, another company that owns ABC-affiliate stations.
Which is why I encourage readers to consider that if you want to defend the First Amendment and the free press that it has historically allowed to flower (more in better times, less in this era), your time and money would go a lot farther toward that goal if you support independent news organizations like the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism (BINJ). Because the less frequently that our freedom of the press is used, the more likely we are to lose it … and the First Amendment with it.
Regrettably, as I’ve often written, the news industry and journalism itself are already on the rocks in this country. And the freest of the free press, independent press like BINJ, is far closer to perdition than major media combines at present due to the economic and technological forces arrayed against us. Possibly compounded by the looming threat of the Trump administration deciding to crush us outright at some unfortunate future point. Eliminating one of the most important remaining checks on unbridled political and economic power in our society in the process.
Jimmy Kimmel is a rich and very connected man. He’ll be fine. He’ll likely bounce back with a new show in record time. BINJ and the diminishing numbers of fellow indy news outlets around the country are not in any way fine. Both talk show hosts and journalists play important roles in America’s fragmented information ecology, true. But journalists provide the fodder for the hosts to riff on day in and day out, not so much the other way around.
So, if you expect to continue to have access to news and views on critical issues of the day that are free of the malign and debate-limiting influence that compromises media interests owned by vast corporations from Comcast NBCUniversal to Disney to Warner Bros. Discovery to Paramount Global to AT&T to Fox Corporation to Alphabet to Meta, then you could put your money and energy into helping us survive.
Most of the independent press at the local and regional level like BINJ do our big annual fundraisers every November and December these days. In fact, we’re celebrating BINJ’s 10th anniversary with a big fundraiser on Nov. 8 (details forthcoming).
If you want to help keep the free press free and help us continue our role as guardians of the First Amendment, support us. Support our many sibling publications in the Alliance of Nonprofit News Outlets. Support entertainers and artists that join us in speaking truth to power. And sure, put in a good word for Jimmy, his main flaw in my estimation being letting the Democrats off the hook too often. Just give your money and your sweat equity to the grassroots media and arts crews. The more the merrier. And the better for reinvigorating our failing democracy.
- This editorial was originally produced for HorizonMass, the independent, student-driven news outlet of the Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism, and is syndicated by BINJ’s MassWire news service.
- Jason Pramas is executive editor and associate publisher at DigBoston. Executive director of Boston Institute for Nonprofit Journalism. Former founder and editor/publisher of Open Media Boston. 2018 & 2019 Association of Alternative Newsmedia Political Column Award Winner.
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We're in danger of forgetting Trump's worst crime of all
Donald Trump’s ultimate presidential legacy will be one of the most shameful in US history. It will no doubt include his attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election, inciting the first violent attack on the Capitol since 1814, responding irresponsibly to the COVID-19 pandemic, dividing the country profoundly, creating a political climate that fosters violence, and disgracing the office of the presidency with his dishonesty and corruption.
One thing that may get lost in his abysmal legacy, however, could arguably have the most dire and long-term consequences: Trump’s record as an environmental criminal.
Trump is a climate-change denier at a time when man-made climate change is wreaking havoc across the globe.
Climate change is driven by global warming responsible for melting glaciers and ice caps, rising sea levels, abnormally high temperatures, and changes in wind and precipitation patterns.
The effects of climate change can be seen in more frequent and powerful hurricanes, unprecedented coastal flooding, longer, more frequent droughts, massive wildfires, and unprecedented heat waves.
The resulting harm caused by man-made climate change is devastating. In 2023, a record 2,300 Americans died from heat-related deaths. Since 2020, 400 Americans have died per year as a result of extreme weather events such as hurricanes, tornadoes, and floods.
In 2024, 4.3 million Americans were displaced by hurricanes, flooding, tornadoes, and wildfires. In 2024, there were 27 confirmed climate disaster events with losses exceeding $1 billion each. In the 44 years from 1980 to 2024, 41 percent of the extreme climate events occurred during the last five years.
Water-dependent industries are the most affected by climate change. Agriculture is the hardest hit, as a result of water depletion in the western states caused by severe droughts, hotter temperatures and excessive drilling. Climate change’s impact on agriculture includes greater water scarcity, reduced productivity, the spread of insects, invasive weeds, and diseases affecting crop yields, reduced incomes for farmers, and greater health problems for agricultural workers.
There is no question among scientists that the handprint of man-made climate change is evident in the greater frequency and destructiveness of extreme climate disasters. There is also no question that the emission of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere, chief among them CO2, is responsible for global warming and climate change.
Global reduction in greenhouse gas emissions is essential for reversing global warming and preventing the world from reaching the internationally agreed upon tipping point of 1.5 degrees Celsius. According to scientists, to prevent worsening and potentially irreversible effects of climate change, the world’s average temperature should not exceed that of preindustrial times by more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Being the second largest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, the US plays a major role in reducing emissions and at the very least, preventing the devastation of climate change from growing worse. However, not only is Trump doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, he is increasing their output.
By gutting federal regulations to reduce industrial emissions, creating greater US dependence on fossil fuel industries that are the largest CO2 emitters, and ending federal funding for alternative clean-energy development and electric vehicle-purchase rebates, Trump is doing everything possible to increase the US’s carbon footprint while the vast majority of countries are working to reduce theirs.
By ignoring climate change, Trump is complicit in every American life lost to climate change, the displacement of millions of Americans by extreme climate events, the billions of dollars of economic loss, and the increasingly unlivable conditions caused by severe heat in many regions, with lower income Americans the most severely affected.
Trump doesn’t care about the thousands of Americans dying from climate change, or being displaced from their homes, or in financial ruin. He is indifferent to the severe ecological degradation that is occurring globally. Trump has made his devil’s pact with Big Oil.
Trump was bought and paid for by millions of dollars of campaign contributions from the oil industry. His end of the devil’s deal was to repeal all emission-reduction regulations, support increased oil production, and impede the production of clean, less expensive energy sources that cut into Big Oil’s profits.
While Trump ignores climate change, 23 Blue states and Louisiana have established 100 percent clean energy goals with aggressive programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Trump and Big Oil aren’t happy.
Trump’s Department of Justice has sued New York and Vermont for laws making fossil fuel companies liable for costs dealing with climate change. It is suing Hawaii and Michigan over their climate-related lawsuits against fossil fuel companies. Trump is working to end California’s stringent motor vehicle emissions standards and its cap-and-trade program.
These states’ climate-change programs are keeping the US from having among the worst CO2-emissions’ record in the world, and Trump is doing all that he can to stifle theirs and America's progress.
In ignoring climate change, Trump is willing to risk leaving future generations with an apocalyptic environment and worldwide human suffering at an unimaginable level, all for the sake of political gain. That is far beyond irresponsible. That is far beyond criminal. That is pure evil.
- Tom Tyner is a freelance editorialist, satirist, political analyst, blogger, author and retired English instructor
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Jimmy Kimmel's rights weren't violated — but ABC could sue Trump and win
By Wayne Unger, Associate Professor of Law, Quinnipiac University.
The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk has sparked a wave of political commentary.
There were the respectful and sincere comments condemning the killing.
Former President Barack Obama said, “What happened was a tragedy and … I mourn for him and his family.” Former Vice President Mike Pence said, “I’m heartsick about what happened to him.”
But Kirk’s killing also elicited what many saw as inappropriate comments. MSNBC terminated commentator Matthew Dowd after he said, “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” American Airlines grounded pilots accused of celebrating Kirk’s death.
Perhaps the most notable reaction to remarks seen as controversial about the Kirk killing hit ABC comedian Jimmy Kimmel. His network suspended him indefinitely after comments that he made about the alleged shooter in Kirk’s death.
Countless defenders of Kimmel quickly responded to his indefinite suspension as an attack on the First Amendment. MSNBC host Chris Hayes posted the following on X: “This is the most straightforward attack on free speech from state actors I’ve ever seen in my life and it’s not even close.”
But is it?
Free speech? It depends
The First Amendment limits government officials from infringing one’s right to free speech and expression.
For example, the government cannot force someone to recite the Pledge of Allegiance or salute the American flag, because the First Amendment, as one Supreme Court justice wrote, “includes both the right to speak freely and the right to refrain from speaking at all.”
And government cannot limit speech that it finds disagreeable while permitting other speech that it favors.
However, the First Amendment does not apply to private employers. With the exception of the 13th Amendment, which generally prohibits slavery, the Constitution applies only to government and those acting on its behalf.
So, as a general rule, employers are free to discipline employees for their speech — even the employees’ speech outside of the workplace. In this way, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) correctly said on X, “Free speech doesn’t prevent you from being fired if you’re stupid and have poor judgment.”
This is why Amy Cooper’s employer, an investment firm, was free to terminate her following her 2020 verbal dispute in New York’s Central Park with a bird-watcher over her unleashed dog. She called the police, falsely claiming that the bird-watcher, a Black man, was threatening her life. The incident, captured on video, went viral and Cooper was fired, with her employer saying, “We do not condone racism of any kind.”
This is also why ABC was able to fire Roseanne Barr from the revival of her show, Roseanne, after she posted a tweet about Valerie Jarrett, a Black woman who had been a top aide to President Obama, that many viewed as racist.
But as a scholar of constitutional law, I believe Kimmel’s situation is not as straightforward.
Threat complicates things
Neither Cooper’s employer nor Barr’s employer faced any government pressure to terminate them.
Kimmel’s indefinite suspension followed a vague threat from the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr. As complaints about Kimmel’s statement exploded in conservative media, Carr suggested in a podcast interview that Kimmel’s statements could lead to the FCC revoking ABC affiliate stations’ licenses.
“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said.
But the Supreme Court has been crystal clear. Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties in order to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors.
In a 2024 case, National Rifle Association v. Vullo, a unanimous Supreme Court plainly said that the government’s threat of invoking legal sanctions and other coercion to suppress speech it doesn’t like violates the First Amendment. That principle is so profound and fundamental that it got support from every member of an often bitterly divided court.
A threat to revoke broadcast licenses would almost certainly be seen in a court of law as a government action tantamount to coercion. And Carr’s public comments undoubtedly connect that threat to Kimmel’s disfavored comments.
If the FCC had indeed moved to strip ABC affiliates of their licenses to broadcast because of what Kimmel said, ABC and its parent company, Disney, could have sued the FCC to block the license revocations on First Amendment grounds, citing NRA v. Vullo.
But the network seemingly caved to the coercive threat instead of fighting for Kimmel. This is why so many are decrying the Kimmel suspension as an attack on free speech and the First Amendment — even though they might not fully understand the law they’re citing.
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This shocking ruling put the racism of Trump's Supreme Court on public display
In what may be its most reactionary ruling since Plessy v. Ferguson, the Supreme Court decided on Sept. 8 to allow the Trump administration and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to resume overt racial profiling in immigration raids in Los Angeles. The raids, which began in June under the title of Operation At Large, have resulted in some 5,000 arrests.
The order was handed down in the case of Noem v. Perdomo on the court’s emergency, or “shadow,” docket, which consists of cases decided on an expedited basis — without comprehensive briefing and without oral arguments — outside of the normal “merits docket.” The order lifts a lower-court injunction that had barred the administration from detaining suspected undocumented immigrants based solely on their ethnicity, language, geographic location, and occupations.
Like most shadow docket rulings, the Perdomo order is bare-bones, comprising a single paragraph that fails to explain the court’s rationale for its decision. Nonetheless, it sends a clear message: If you are Latino, you’d better start carrying your identification papers with you — and they had better be in order. Otherwise, you will be subject to detention, and you might just find yourself on a deportation flight to El Salvador, South Sudan, or Uganda.
The Perdomo litigation originated with a lawsuit filed on behalf of a group of immigration advocacy organizations and five individuals, including two US citizens who contend they were detained by ICE during Operation At Large in violation of their Fourth Amendment rights to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures.
On July 11, Los Angeles District Court Judge Maame E. Frimpong issued a temporary restraining order against the administration, finding that a “mountain of evidence” supported the plaintiffs’ claims that “roving patrols” of masked federal agents were conducting indiscriminate and sometimes violent dragnet-style immigration raids of workplaces and communities.
The court’s quick overturning of Frimpong’s TRO comes as no surprise. Although the court has a long history of entertaining emergency appeals that bypass the normal appeals process — such as last-minute requests for stays of execution in death penalty cases — no president has relied on the shadow docket more than Donald Trump.
According to Georgetown University law professor and shadow docket scholar Steve Vladeck, the first Trump administration sought emergency relief 41 times. By comparison, the George W. Bush and Obama administrations filed a combined total of eight emergency relief requests over a 16-year period while the Biden administration filed 19 applications across four years.
During its recently completed 2024-25 term, the court’s shadow docket exploded to more than 100 cases, fueled by the second Trump administration’s authoritarian power grab.
In addition to Perdomo, the court has issued pro-Trump shadow docket orders permitting noncitizens to be deported to third-party countries with histories of egregious human rights violations; barring transgender people from serving in the military; withholding $65 million in teacher training grants to states that include diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in their operations and curriculums; and endorsing the Department of Government Efficiency’s access to Social Security Administration records, to cite just a few instances.
And while shadow docket decisions are technically “interim” in nature — operating to remand cases to the lower courts for additional proceedings and leaving space for a possible return to the Supreme Court — they have enduring practical consequences. Unless and until the Supreme Court takes up the Perdomo case again, ICE will be free to ramp up its roving masked raids in Los Angeles and other cities like Chicago, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. There are no longer any safe zones.
Of the high court’s six Republican ideologues, only Brett Kavanaugh explained his reasoning in Perdomo.
In a poorly crafted opinion filled with misstatements of fact and law, Kavanaugh cited provisions in the Immigration and Nationality Act and a 1975 Supreme Court case (United States v. Brignoni-Ponce) that authorize immigration agents to briefly detain and question individuals if they have a “reasonable suspicion” (less than probable cause but more than a hunch) that the person being questioned is an alien illegally in the country.
From there, however, Kavanaugh dropped the proverbial ball by remarking, without any citations to the trial court’s evidentiary record:
The Government estimates that at least 15 million people are in the United States illegally. Many millions illegally entered (or illegally overstayed) just in the last few years.
Illegal immigration is especially pronounced in the Los Angeles area, among other locales in the United States. About 10% of the people in the Los Angeles region are illegally in the United States — meaning about 2 million illegal immigrants out of a total population of 20 million.
Not surprisingly given those extraordinary numbers, US immigration officers have prioritized immigration enforcement in the Los Angeles area. The Government sometimes makes brief investigative stops to check the immigration status of those who gather in locations where people are hired for day jobs; who work or appear to work in jobs such as construction, landscaping, agriculture, or car washes that often do not require paperwork and are therefore attractive to illegal immigrants; and who do not speak much if any English. If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a US citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go. If the individual is illegally in the United States, the officers may arrest the individual and initiate the process for removal.
Given what he took for granted as the outsized illegal alien population in greater Los Angeles, Kavanaugh reasoned that it is “common sense” (his words, trust me) for ICE agents to detain any Latinos who fit the government’s criteria of suspicion based on their race, language, or employment in low wage jobs.
In a blistering 21-page dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, joined by fellow Democrats Elena Kaga and Ketanji Brown Jackson, took Kavanaugh to school, instructing the former Yale frat boy that the reasonable suspicion standard requires:
“… an individualized suspicion that a particular citizen was engaged in a particular crime” beyond just a “demographic profile...”
The Fourth Amendment thus prohibits exactly what the Government is attempting to do here: seize individuals based solely on a set of facts that ‘describe[s] a very large category of presumably innocent’ people… As the District Court correctly held, the four factors [the administration relies on] — apparent race or ethnicity, speaking Spanish or English with an accent, location, and type of work — are no more indicative of illegal presence in the country than of legal presence.
Sotomayor also educated Kavanaugh on the harsh on-the-ground realities of Operation At Large, noting several examples from the trial court record of violence and intimidation. In the LA suburb of Glendale, for instance:
…nearly a dozen masked agents with guns “jumped out of… cars” at a Home Depot, and began “chasing and tackl[ing] Latino day laborers without “identify[ing] themselves as ICE or police, ask[ing] questions, or say[ing] anything else… In downtown Los Angeles, agents “jumped out of a van, rushed up to [a tamale vendor], surrounded him, and handled him violently,” all “[w]ithout asking… any questions.
In still another Home Depot encounter drawn from the evidentiary record, masked agents wearing bulletproof vests got out of a car and tear-gassed a crowd that had gathered to witness a raid. Far from being polite and respectful, Sotomayor continued, Operation At Large has sparked “panic and fear” across Los Angeles and its surrounding areas.
“Countless people in the Los Angeles area,” she observed, “have been grabbed, thrown to the ground, and handcuffed simply because of their looks, their accents, and the fact they make a living by doing manual labor.”
The Fourth Amendment, she reminded her Republican colleagues, “protects every individual’s constitutional right to be free from arbitrary interference by law officers.” Sadly, she concluded, after the Perdomo ruling, “that may no longer be true for those who happen to look a certain way, speak a certain way, and appear to work a certain type of legitimate job that pays very little.”
As a Supreme Court justice constrained by the need for collegiality on the bench, Sotomayor stopped short of denouncing Kavanaugh and the court’s Republicans as enablers of racism. There is no reason for the rest of us to feel so reserved.
- Bill Blum is a former California administrative law judge. As an attorney prior to becoming a judge, he was one of the state's best-known death-penalty litigators. He is also an award-winning writer and legal journalist, and the author of three popular legal thrillers published by Penguin/Putnam as well as scores of features and book reviews published in a broad array of magazines and newspapers. His non-fiction work has appeared in a wide variety of publications, ranging from Common Dreams and The Nation to the Los Angeles Times, the L.A. Weekly and Los Angeles Magazine.
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Trump has finally made the move that will tip us all over the cliff
This is a threshold moment, this stifling of Jimmy Kimmel. It’s the last laugh before the silence.
The attack on him is something everyone can understand.
People didn’t know what it meant that Donald Trump was getting billions for his bitcoin company or a jet airplane in exchange for essentially giving favors to other countries. They didn’t understand how inappropriate, illegal, and unconstitutional that is unless they understand the word “emoluments,” and few do; they didn’t get it.
His hustling Teslas from the White House in violation of the Hatch Act (that would put a normal person in jail for two years) didn’t seem a big deal to most Americans because they’d never seen it before.
They had no idea how bad it was. Only former presidents and people who’d read the Constitution and the law knew.
And that’s a very small percentage of people. Meaningless.
So along comes Jimmy Kimmel, who everybody knows. He’s even more popular than Stephen Colbert, or at least at that level. Everybody knows who he is. And Trump takes aim at him for things he said — his First Amendment-protected free speech — and is explicit and public about it.
Then comes his toady FCC Chairman Brendan Carr — the guy who wrote the part of Project 2025 about how the FCC should be run — threatening to go after the licenses of stations that are trying to merge with Nexstar for what may well be a billion-dollar payout for everybody involved.
They’re referencing a comment Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk‘s killer as an excuse for censoring him, but that doesn’t make any sense. It’s apparently really because Trump is offended by comedians making fun of him. You can’t make fun of the Dear Leader in Russia, Hungary, Turkey, China, Saudi Arabia, North Korea, or any other country where the men Trump admires rule.
And Kimmel was relentless in making fun of Trump.
Here’s what Carr — a government regulator — said, doing his best imitation of a mafia bone-breaker:
“This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney. We can do this the easy way or the hard way. … These companies can find ways to take action on Kimmel, or there is going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
The station owners freaked out, because some may get even richer through the merger with TV giant billionaire-owned Nexstar (ABC), and threatened to take Kimmel off their stations. The merger would’ve been profitable for the people at Nexstar (ABC), as well.
And that merger requires Carr’s approval because it requires breaking or changing the anti-monopoly rules that forbid any company to own stations that reach more than 39% of Americans.
So, here’s how it looks to the average person: Trump and Carr threatened the Nexstar (ABC) deal if they didn’t shut up Kimmel, and the company (ABC) said, “OK,” and took him off the air “indefinitely.”
And everybody gets it. It’s not anywhere near as complicated as shady cryptocurrency deals or golf courses or Trump Towers in foreign lands.
This is a classic example of how mob-like corruption works; we’ve all seen it in movies like The Godfather or shows like The Sopranos. We don’t need law or business degrees. We have TVs.
The average person totally gets where Trump’s leverage is and why he’s using it to shut up people who irritate him; this is relatable to the life of anybody who’s ever been bullied or shaken down.
“Nice little TV network you’ve got there, we’d hate to see something happen to it.”
They get how bad the crime is. And it’s all happening to a guy — Jimmy Kimmel — who everybody knows and most people like!
Remember when Mark Twain said, “Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel”? This is the same thing: “Never pick a fight with a popular figure who can created a press conference with a quip.” It’s why Vladimir Putin outlawed comedians (and puppets) who ridiculed him.
The reason we’re only now realizing that we’re at a pivotal moment in America is because most people didn’t know how to answer this question:
“How do you know when you’re really and truly no longer living in a democracy?”
How do you know when you’re definitely no longer living in a free nation?
Most people think it’s when the tanks are rolling down the streets, and, while people in Washington DC are seeing that right now, it’s not most people‘s lived experience. They haven’t confronted a tank, been asked for their papers, or been locked up in an ICE detention center.
But everybody knows Jimmy Kimmel. So the new understanding is:
“You know you don’t live in a free country any more when comedians can no longer criticize the president.”
That’s a criteria for the end of freedom that everybody understands.
Up until the last few days, most Americans didn’t think we’d lost our freedoms or are about to. Didn’t think that we’d become a tyranny or are on the verge, where the King will come against you no matter who you are, no matter what political party you vote for (just ask registered Republicans like James Comey, Mark Milley, or Tim Miller), or how obscure you may be (just ask the Columbia students).
Don’t get me wrong: many Americans, perhaps a majority, thought things were bad. They hated inflation and the joblessness going up and all that stuff from the tariffs and Trump’s erratic foreign policy and his constant sucking up to or deferring to Putin.
They didn’t like all their hard-earned tax dollars going into the pockets of the morbidly rich like Trump and his friends and the 13 billionaires in his cabinet. People in America generally realize that pretty much everything Trump has done is either for himself, the billionaire class, or to punish people of color and queer people. They’re generally unhappy about it and pretty much every metric of every study shows it.
But they didn’t realize that we had lost what makes this country great: our personal freedom of speech. Our ability to speak our minds. Our freedom to have multiple viewpoints, and multiple voices and news sources to listen to or watch.
But when this happened to Jimmy Kimmel, everybody suddenly understood. That’s why this is an earthquake moment for the United States.
If the Democrats fail to seize on this opportunity, they are completely incompetent. This has to be the number one issue going forward. Every American understands what it means to be told to, “Shut up!“
And no Americans like it. We didn’t like it as kids; we don’t like it as adults.
In fact, Trump‘s suppression of free speech is already starting, in a small way, to “hit the regular people.” Folks are getting fired, doxed, and even having their lives and homes threatened with violence for things they said online about Charlie Kirk and his shooter. We’re starting to bleed into that “civil war” bottom of the pyramid that I wrote about yesterday.
So, the moment is urgent.
Let your elected representatives know your thoughts on this. That Brendan Carr must go. That the president must stop talking like this. That Pam Bondi must stop talking like this. That they should take the masks off the monsters in the streets so they’re once again human.
To stop making America unfree.
It’s time to stand up and speak out. Because if we don’t now, like Jimmy Kimmel, we may not be able to speak out at all in the near future.
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Trump's TikTok dealings should've set this GOP toady roaring. His silence speaks volumes
You're not going to believe this, but it appears the cat’s got Josh Hawley’s tongue.
The junior senator from Missouri — known for his unwavering ability to detect Communist infiltration in American tech companies from eight area codes away — has suddenly gone quiet.
Interesting timing, too.
Because on Friday, President Donald Trump announced progress on a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping to block any U.S. sale or ban of TikTok in exchange for vague “national security commitments” that sound suspiciously like business as usual.
That would be the same TikTok that Hawley has passionately demanded be banned, or at least completely removed from Chinese involvement.
“TikTok — and its parent company ByteDance — are threats to American national security,” Hawley wrote in 2023, to then Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen. He’s repeated that theme dozens if not hundreds of times as a senator.
So, you can imagine Hawley’s indignation when the Washington Post reported this:
“A ByteDance spokesperson in a statement Friday thanked Trump and Xi and said the company would work 'to ensure TikTok remains available to American users through TikTok U.S.'”
Shockingly, you could hear a pin drop. Hawley — arguably second to none among U.S. politicians in garnering attention and air time on every subject imaginable — has gone dark. No tweets, no press releases, no rushing to Fox News, no nothing.
So in the spirit of filling the void, let’s revisit what Josh Hawley has been screaming from the mountaintops for several years about TikTok — before it became a Trump-friendly enterprise. Here are just a few of his greatest hits:
“TikTok is digital fentanyl that’s addicting our kids and stealing their data!”
— Hawley, 2023
“TikTok is a surveillance tool for the Chinese Communist Party.”
— Hawley, 2022
“Every time you use TikTok, you're giving your information to Beijing.”
— Hawley, 2021
“We are literally subsidizing the destruction of our children’s mental health.”
— Hawley, 2023
“This is mind control by a foreign adversary — and Democrats won’t act.”
— Hawley, 2024
But now that Trump has personally intervened to compromise on TikTok’s Chinese ownership, Hawley apparently no longer thinks it’s all that big a deal, after all.
Just because he authored the No TikTok on Government Devices Act, which was successfully signed into law, and a broader No TikTok on United States Devices Act, doesn’t mean Hawley cannot mind “some TikTok.”
This is the same senator who once told Fox News that Democrats were “kneeling before Chairman Xi” for not banning the app. So what is that Trump’s doing?
Let’s put it this way. If President Joe Biden had done this, Hawley would have demanded a vote by this afternoon on Articles of Impeachment. He would have hosted a special tonight on Fox News.
Now, maybe not so much.
It turns out, according to the Post, sources are saying the deal Trump is working on with Xi would be hugely beneficial to Trump BFF Larry Ellison, “the billionaire co-founder of Oracle, a tech giant that will own a stake in the U.S. spin-off and provide it cloud-computing and technical services.”
Just can’t get wait to see Hawley teeing off in the Senate about this one.
In 2020, an Esquire writer aptly said, “The most dangerous place to stand in Washington D.C. is any place between Senator Josh Hawley and a live microphone.”
That was before we had a dictator.
- Ray Hartmann writes on Substack at Ray Hartmann's Soapbox.
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There's still time to oppose these shameless grabs for power
Ohio politicians pressured by an openly corrupt president look to be doubling down on blatantly partisan gerrymandering to help them in the 2026 midterms by manipulating congressional district boundaries in 2025, to silence the voices of opposition.
That’s not normal. Neither is armed troops and tanks in American streets. Neither are unidentifiable, masked federal agents seizing people off the streets because they fit a racial profile.
None of this is normal. Not in a functioning constitutional republic.
But without effective, sustained pushback from fearless pro-democracy leaders and a resolute citizenry determined to keep its inalienable rights, the takeover happening now in Ohio and the country will become the accepted norm by default.
We are not there yet.
There is still time to dissent — loudly — about political dictates from the Ohio Statehouse and the Trump regime.
But the window of opportunity is short.
Ohio House Speaker Matt Huffman, the mastermind behind Ohio’s unconstitutionally gerrymandered legislative and congressional maps — who called the rule of law on redistricting reform in the state “aspirational” and basically ignored it — is already signaling that new congressional districts will be drawn by GOP fiat without buy-in from the minority party.
Even before the new joint committee on congressional redistricting was announced by Republican legislative leaders, Huffman judged that chances for a bipartisan deal — on GOP plans to grab at least two more congressional districts through gerrymandering — are “not looking good” for passing a map with Democratic support by Sept. 30.
That means the congressional map that gives unfair advantage to one party over the other (which the Ohio Constitution explicitly prohibits) will go the Republican-majority Ohio Redistricting Commission.
If the panel can’t convince the two Democratic commissioners to bless the GOP power grab for more U.S. House seats by the end of October, the process returns to the legislature where Huffman and the Republican supermajority can easily pass their congressional map with a simple majority.
The Speaker — who in 2022 thumbed his nose at the constitutional amendment Ohioans overwhelmingly approved to end congressional gerrymandering — figures he can screw voters again and get away with it by dispensing normalizing assurances to follow the “process voters approved” and “stick to the Constitution and make decisions based on that.”
Huffman presents as conventional and law-abiding as he takes gerrymandering to new extremes in Ohio — like Texas and other red states considering similar steps. But make no mistake: He is razor-focused on undermining the will of Ohio voters so his party can stay in power in Congress regardless of majority opinion.
Gerrymandering disconnects political power from the will of voters by letting the powerful choose their voters instead of voters choosing their politicians. The result is skewed, unrepresentative district maps where electoral outcomes are virtually guaranteed.
That is what Huffman has orchestrated repeatedly with Ohio’s congressional redistricting, but he frames it as good faith map-making in accordance with the law to put a sheen on stealing voter power at the ballot box — as if that were normal.
It is only normal in governments who do not answer to the people they claim to represent.
Same goes for the unprovoked, unwarranted military deployment of troops and armaments in a free society to police its citizens.
It is only normal under regimes flexing muscle at the expense of the constitution and the rule of law.
It is a show of force to intimidate the governed into submission. It is also illegal, ruled a federal judge recently in California about Donald Trump’s use of federal troops for domestic policing in Los Angeles this summer.
Yet the president plans to escalate his use of troops in U.S. cities saying he’ll deploy to Memphis next — one of several blue cities run by Black mayors Trump has targeted to “fix like we did in Washington.”
Nearly 2,300 National Guard troops were deployed to patrol the nation’s capital a month ago after Trump declared a “crime emergency” in D.C. — even though violent crime in the federal district was at its lowest level in 30 years.
Trump falsely claimed the city was the most unsafe in the U.S “and perhaps the world” to justify his militarized policing of Washingtonians.
Six red-state governors, including Ohio’s Gov. Mike DeWine, rushed hundreds of extra Guard troops to D.C. to sightsee with tourists and score points with Trump.
Bored soldiers, used as political props, were relegated to picking up trash, raking leaves, laying mulch, and taking selfies with onlookers startled to see soldiers with rifles and armored vehicles loitering outside Union Station.
DeWine could have declined to be complicit in the dress rehearsal of military used against his fellow citizens; others from his party did. But he chose to put more boots on the ground in an American city to support a bogus “emergency” and call it the “right thing to do.”
The governor said his decision to send troops against the wishes of D.C. officials was consistent with past deployments. How on Earth could it be?
Truth is DeWine just wanted Ohioans to think his armed reinforcements to appease a dangerous megalomaniac was normal.
It was not and can never be as long as democracy has breath in America.
- Marilou Johanek is a veteran Ohio print and broadcast journalist who has covered state and national politics as a longtime newspaper editorial writer and columnist
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What do real voters want? Don't ask these Dem squishes
Talk tough on crime and immigration, don’t say trans, and sit back and let Trump’s economy make voters mad.
That’s the way to Make Democrats Great Again, or so say the roughly eleventy-nine Democratic-allied centrist political action committees and think tanks, some old, many new, who promise they know how to right (pun intended) the ship and rebrand the Democratic Party.
Nevada U.S. Senator Catherine Cortez Masto is heading up one of those groups, the Moderate Democrats PAC. That’s appropriate because she’s a one-time chair of the official PAC of Senate Democrats so she’s experienced at raising money. And when it comes to blind faith in moderation, you could say she’s a radical extremist.
Cortez Masto was momentarily and uncharacteristically trending this summer when she sparred with her Democratic colleague Cory Booker while working to pass a pair of “Police Week” crime bills supported by the entire Senate (including Booker; the whole thing was kind of dopey).
Alas, Cortez Masto’s long-held tendency to back all things cop notwithstanding, the Democratic Senate candidates her Moderate Democrats PAC is raising money for are still going to be called “soft on crime” or whatever in Republican attack ads. That’s just how it works.
And sorry, Nevada Democratic Rep. Susie Lee. Marching in lockstep with Fox alumnus celebrity and D.C. U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro and being one of only eight House Democrats voting with Republicans to allow 14-year-olds to be tried as adults in Washington D.C. courts may have seemed like a politically prudent thing to do at the time. But it’s not going to stop Republicans from calling you a radical leftist criminal coddler, or words to that effect. In ads.
Cortez Masto and Lee, along with the rest of Nevada’s Democrats in Congress — Sen. Jacky Rosen and Reps. Dina Titus and Steven Horsford — have also voted for things like a fearmongering Trump bill to deprive immigrants of due process under the law. But Republicans are still going to say Nevada’s congressional Democrats “love open borders” because that’s how Republicans roll.
The newest entry in the organizational race to persuade Democrats to tack right and party like it’s 1989 is a think tank formed by Adam Jentleson, a former staffer to the late Harry Reid. Jentleson tells the New York Times that the “folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” on contentious issues, especially LGBTQ+ ones.
Every Democratic politician in the country could stop talking about trans people this very minute. In fact, most of them already have. If they ever did. But guess what? Republicans are still going to squeal and scream that Democrats want, as Trump bizarrely puts it, “transgender for everybody.”
There may be some Democratic politicians who sincerely share Trump’s fever dream that “transgender for everybody,” whatever that is, is just around the corner. (Titus and Horsford don’t, by the way).
There are probably also some Democratic politicians who share Trump’s desire to create a shoot first-ask-questions-later-if-ever police state. Or who applaud Trump’s zeal for wrecking not only lives but the economy by indiscriminately deporting people whose only crime was doing what it took to escape poverty and/or oppression.
But if Democrats believe refraining from opposing Trump on divisive socio-cultural issues will make people vote for them instead of Republicans, that seems problematic. It’s not like Republicans are going to stop hammering Democrats on those issues just because Democrats don’t talk about them.
Given a choice between a Democrat who has officially cried “uncle” in fear of Republican red meat attack ads and a Republican who keeps launching those ads anyway, people who are moved by those issues can still be expected to vote for the Republican.
Ye olde thought leaders
The centrist groups vying for Democratic thought leadership are defined almost exclusively by what they want Democrats not to do.
As to what Democrats should do, the centrist group growth industry is fuzzy, collectively mumbling something about “kitchen table issues” and “common-sense.”
Policies and positions reflecting such phrases and concepts were used again and again by Democrats on the campaign trail last year (as they are every campaign year). And they were voiced far, far more often than support for LGBTQ+ rights or sensible immigration reforms. The policy pitch by the centrist groups sounds a lot like the same old.
Which brings us to perhaps the one strategy in the moderate Democratic agenda, (in as much as there is either a strategy or an agenda) that might be loosely termed proactive: Reaffirm support for popular policies, especially health care policies, and hope that voters get sick of Trump’s economic shenanigans.
As rebrandings go, it’s sad-trombone soft and tiresomely derivative.
And it fails to address perhaps the biggest questions about next year’s elections: What exactly is the electorate anymore, and what does it want?
In polling both before and after the 2024 election, voters said their top concern was the economy.
A Fox News poll released last week found 52 percent of those surveyed said Trump is making the economy worse, compared to only 30 percent who said he’s making it better (let alone great again). Numerous other surveys also find Trump underwater on the economy.
So maybe all Democrats need to do is vow to “fight” to protect health care provisions and programs, and then sit back while Republicans sink under the weight of Trump’s economic blundering. And then Democrats might at least take back the House in 2026 (assuming there will be an election), which is the first step toward overturning Trumpism in 2028.
But voter responses to pollsters about the economy notwithstanding, something other than the cost of things — and something other than immigration, and even something other than video of Kamala Harris saying “transgender” out loud, for that matter — was going on with voters last year.
A sizable percentage of Nevada voters told pollsters they wanted to “tear down the system completely.”
Could the tear it down vote be potent enough to neutralize voters’ economic frustration next year? Especially if the economy merely limps along (as per some projections) instead of dropping into recession (as per others)?
Normally that would be unthinkable. But “normally” doesn’t exist anymore.
The evangelizers who swear that centrism will solve everything and the Nevada politicians who love them promise they’ll save the nation by embracing “mainstream positions” and “common sense.”
The last time voters in the nation and Nevada had a chance to express themselves, they elected Trump president. In other words, it’s anybody’s guess if Nevada’s congressional Democrats, and groups like Jentleson’s, have the foggiest idea what, if anything, passes for mainstream common sense anymore.
What’s equally disturbing is how blithely they assume they do.
- Hugh Jackson is editor of the Nevada Current
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