RFK takes the wheel of MAGA's new 'Operation Warp Speed'
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Opinion
Trump's bizarre crime blitz is an absurd waste of time — here's clear proof
When Gov. Mike DeWine decided to send Ohio National Guard members to Washington D.C. to participate in President Donald Trump’s militarized crime crackdown, he took a national issue and made it a state issue. Why he decided to do so is perplexing.
Ohio’s violent crime rate has hovered between three and four times the violent crime rate of D.C. over the past four years. So the idea that resources should be sent from Ohio to Washington to quell violent urban crime is a strange one.
But even if DeWine were to deploy National Guard troops in Ohio to quell violent crime, is that the way to do it?
Research out of Brown University finds that military policing is not an effective tool for reducing crime rates.
At best, this sort of approach is a band-aid: long-term military occupation of cities is not a feasible strategy in a democratic country. At worst, it can be a distraction from solutions that actually could reduce crime rates.
So what actually could reduce crime rates in Ohio?
The evidence shows there are strategies that can be used to reduce violent crime.
One is a suite of strategies called “focused deterrence.”
Basically this approach amounts to identifying groups like gangs that are responsible for a large share of violence, calling them in and offering services if people leave the gangs, and delivering swift punishment if further violence takes place.
Meta-analysis of dozens of studies on these techniques show they are effective at reducing crime rates.
Another is “hot-spot policing,” a strategy that concentrates resources towards geographic areas where crime occurs most often.
Cost-benefit analysis by the Washington State Institute for Public Policy shows that deployment of one police officer in a hot spot leads to nearly half a million dollars in net social benefits realized in lower property crime rates.
This amounts to over $5 in social benefits for every $1 in costs.
A third strategy is more mundane but nonetheless effective: street lighting.
A randomized controlled trial that placed lighting in New York City housing developments found areas that received lighting saw reductions in index crimes, felony crimes and, to a lesser degree, assault, homicide, and weapons crimes when compared to places that did not receive them.
Similarly, restoration of vacant lots have been found to lead to reductions in overall crime, gun violence, burglaries, and nuisances.
Another promising program is targeted cognitive behavioral therapy.
Whether this is deployed with at-risk youth in conjunction with summer jobs programs or as a part of correctional programs, cognitive behavioral therapy has been shown to reduce propensity to commit crime among people who undergo it.
By giving people control over their own decision-making, they often opt not to take part in criminal activity.
These are just four approaches that are effective at reducing crime.
If the governor or federal lawmakers wish to make a dent on crime in major cities, deploying these strategies is the way to do it.
But I guess these would probably get fewer headlines than what they are doing now.
- Rob Moore is the principal for Scioto Analysis, a public policy analysis firm based in Columbus. Moore has worked as an analyst in the public and nonprofit sectors and has analyzed diverse issue areas such as economic development, environment, education, and public health. He holds a Master of Public Policy from the University of California Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy and a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from Denison University.
Keep reading...
Show less
These strikes clearly show Trump is a war criminal. Where's the media?
On Sept. 2, the Trump administration shared footage purporting to show a US strike on a Venezuelan fishing boat. Even if we take the incident entirely at face value (and there are a lot of reasons to question the video itself) — the US Navy attacked a fishing boat off Venezuela, killing 11 people. On Monday, another strike was allegedly conducted on a boat, killing three people. The way the media has handled these strikes is an indictment of the state of American neoliberal reporting in a neofascist age.
Why hasn’t the mainstream media pressed the administration on these strikes being illegal and dangerous (and unpopular)?
Why has no one in Washington considered the implications of calling a fishing boat carrying civilians a legitimate military target?
Why isn’t the media calling the Venezuelan boat strike an abhorrent war crime at every turn?
It’s simple: they don’t care about defending the truth or holding the powerful accountable. They have no principles to stand on besides profit and access.
Within hours of these strikes breaking, major outlets were repeating the Trump administration’s line that this was a strike on a “drug boat.” According to this framing, the attacks were justified, necessary, and part of a broader war on drug trafficking.
Virtually none of these outlets even entertained the obvious legal and ethical questions. Instead, they served as stenographers for the administration. This is not what an objective (not neutral) press in an advanced democracy does.
This is reminiscent of the Iraq War era, when corporate media parroted the Bush administration’s ludicrous arguments, paving the way for invasion and occupation that would kill at least 200,000, maim millions, and destroy American democracy further.
Legal experts across the spectrum have already stood up to say the killings were illegal.
Ilya Somin, a professor at George Mason University’s conservative Antonin Scalia Law School, called the strike “unjust and illegal.”
Jeremy Wildeman, an adjunct professor of international Affairs at Carleton University and fellow at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre in Ottawa, described it as “part of the dangerous and ongoing erosion of due process and the very basic principles of how we interact with each other in domestic and foreign affairs, regulated by accepted norms, rules, and laws, that the Trump administration has been pointedly hostile toward following and specifically undermining.”
Wildeman added that “this is definitely about regime change and domination.”
Even the Atlantic Council hedged, acknowledging that the legality was at best murky and in some cases advancing arguments to justify it.
Meanwhile, US Vice President JD Vance bluntly stated that he does not care if the strikes are war crimes at all.
The available evidence does suggest this was an outright criminal massacre. The first boat was, we now know thanks to Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), turning back to shore, not threatening US forces when it was fired upon. Those killed would be civilians. Even if they were transporting drugs, drug couriers are not lawful combatants. They are criminals under domestic law, not combatants in an armed conflict.
Due process was ignored. There was no trial, no arrest, no attempt at interdiction — just summary execution. And the strikes occurred in Venezuelan territorial waters, not in an international conflict zone.
If another country did this, say Russia bombing a fishing boat in the Baltic, or China attacking smugglers near Taiwan, the Western media would have declared it a war crime the same day. Add this to the list of Western double standards in the international arena — we are seeing the destruction of the “liberal order” in real time.
These strikes are not a one-off. They fit into decades of US policy toward Venezuela, including economic sanctions, diplomatic isolation, and repeated regime change attempts.
For 25 years, Washington has tried to topple the governments of Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro through economic sabotage, coups, and support for far-right opposition. The humanitarian toll of those sanctions has been devastating. They have themselves emboldened repression by the Maduro government, which has used America as a scapegoat, with reason, for all its faults.
Now, with this attack, we see a dangerous escalation from economic to military means. If the precedent is set that the US can strike targets inside Venezuela (this was in Venezuela’s national waters) with impunity, it opens the door to a broader military campaign. That is exactly what think tanks like the Center for Strategic and International Studies have been preparing for. One CSIS report, now deleted, explicitly laid out “options for regime change” in Venezuela, against the “Maduro narco-terrorist regime.”
So why is the media so unwilling to call this what it is?
Major outlets fear losing access to government sources if they challenge the official narrative. They also simply don’t want to admit that America is committing crimes, and may not be the moral actors in every major geopolitical event, as they were taught throughout their lives.
Going back to Noam Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent 101, corporate interests are also important, with companies like Exxon and Chevron having billions at stake in Venezuela’s oil fields (and a US-backed government running things in Caracas). US military action that destabilizes or topples Maduro could directly benefit those firms.
Many of the analysts quoted in media coverage are from think tanks funded by the defense industry or oil companies. They have an interest in exaggerating Venezuela’s threat and downplaying US abuses, to make the US intervention seem justified and good. And reporters too often repackage leaks from US intelligence agencies as fact, without independently verifying. A lot of the “analysis” on the strikes in mainstream news has been from the intelligence agencies, who have a direct incentive to lie and manipulate information in favor of regime change.
Even respected outlets have contributed to this dynamic. The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have both amplified the claim that Venezuela is a “narco-terrorist state.” That claim has been debunked by organizations like InSight Crime and the International Crisis Group, which show that while drugs transit Venezuela, it is hardly unique; Colombia and Mexico play a much larger role in global cocaine markets, yet they remain US allies.
Meanwhile, outlets like the Christian Science Monitor are pushing a narrative that “more Latin Americans welcome US intervention,” based on flimsy and cherry-picked anecdotes that, once again, helps the Trump administration lay the groundwork for more meddling and war.
Would the Marines be greeted as liberators in Caracas? The hope is to expand the “War on Drugs” into the “War on Terror,” giving the US military more tools to intervene in Latin America, and then bringing repression to the home front (also called the Imperial Boomerang theory).
In reality, the region is increasingly turning away from Washington’s militaristic and blusterous approach, seeking alternative frameworks to the failed War on Drugs.
- Joseph Bouchard is a journalist and researcher from Québec covering security and democracy in Latin America. His articles have appeared in Responsible Statecraft, Reason, The Diplomat, Le Devoir, and RealClearPolitics, among others. He is a PhD student in Politics at the University of Virginia and a SSHRC doctoral fellow on Latin American Politics.
Keep reading...
Show less
This Trump crypto corruption is simply staggering in scale
In the midst of the Trump regime’s shameful attempt to attack any and all organizations and institutions that oppose it, we must not and will not back down from holding Donald Trump accountable for his corruption and lawlessness.
On Monday, the New York Times — which Trump just sued for $15 billion for allegedly defaming him — reported that Steve Witkoff, Trump’s envoy to the Middle East, apparently made a multi-billion dollar deal with Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, a member of the ultra-rich ruling family of the United Arab Emirates who controls $1.5 trillion of the Emiratis’ sovereign wealth.
In return for Sheikh Tahnoon’s investment firm depositing $2 billion into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency start-up founded by the Witkoffs and Trumps, the White House agreed to give the U.A.E. — in particular, a sprawling technology firm controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon — access to hundreds of thousands of the world’s most advanced and scarce computer chips, despite national security concerns that the chips could be shared with China.
This is just the top of the iceberg of Trump’s crypto corruption.
To understand the full extent of it, you need to go back to four days before early voting started in 2024. That’s when Trump and his sons launched the crypto firm, World Liberty Financial.
As soon as Trump won, money started pouring in.
Then, just days before returning to office, Trump launched a separate crypto scheme, selling TRUMP and MELANIA memecoins. Memecoins are a type of cryptocurrency based on an image or online joke.
Within his first six weeks in office, Trump called for a “Crypto Strategic Reserve”— a government backed stockpile of crypto assets, sort of like our oil reserve, but completely pointless. That announcement made crypto prices soar.
So far, the Trump family has made about $3 billion from crypto — with many purchases by foreign buyers. Forbes now estimates that over half of Trump’s entire net worth is crypto-based.
With Trump acting as both the President of the United States and as his own crypto brand ambassador, it’s hard to tell which job he’s doing at any given moment.
One US company said it explicitly purchased $2 million of Trump’s meme coins to influence trade policy.
The corruption goes further.
Trump’s pro-crypto SEC chair, Paul Atkins is heavily invested in crypto himself. He’s been lifting financial guardrails in ways that will make it easier for crypto firms (like the Trumps’) to spread into new markets, and going easy on crypto fraud.
Chinese billionaire Justin Sun had been charged with crypto-related fraud before Trump was elected. After Trump’s election, Sun invested more than $115 million into various Trump crypto products. What happened next? Trump’s SEC suddenly stopped prosecuting Sun.
Trump’s SEC also abandoned a lawsuit against Binance, a crypto exchange that had previously pled guilty to money laundering.
This happened just days after Binance started listing a Trump cryptocurrency on its marketplace.
The corruption goes even further.
Trump’s Justice Department even scrapped the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team, giving a green-light to all kinds of crypto crime, even though Americans lost $9.3 billion in crypto scams in 2024.
The crypto industry spent big on House and Senate races, on both Republicans and Democrats. Why? So the Senate would pass the so-called GENIUS Act — a regulatory bill that the crypto industry lobbied for. Eighteen Democrats joined with nearly all Republicans to vote yes.
The bill gives a stamp of legitimacy to so-called “stablecoins,” a type of currency that Trump’s World Liberty Financial makes and sells.
Stablecoins claim to be more stable because they’re supposedly tied to the value of other assets that are held as collateral — like the dollar or Treasury securities. But we already saw one collapse just a couple years ago, wiping out some investors’ life savings.
While the bill appropriately bans members of Congress and their families from profiting off stablecoins, it places no such restrictions on the president.
The most dangerous part of the GENIUS Act is how it allows crypto to reach into mainstream financial systems.
All this corruption is bad enough. Worse, it could tank the economy.
The GENIUS Act opens the door to institutions investing more heavily in crypto. It would even let banks and big corporations, like Walmart, Amazon, or Facebook, launch their own digital currencies — potentially thousands of them — all with little oversight.
Trump has also opened the door to letting retirement plan administrators invest 401(k) funds in crypto. That could put your savings at risk even if you never buy any cryptocurrencies.
As we saw during the 2008 financial meltdown, the more the economy becomes entwined with volatile and speculative investments, like crypto, the greater the risk to all of us. The failure of risky bets can have a domino effect.
If a single cryptocurrency began to tank — as crypto has done in the past — investors would likely rush to sell off crypto to get their real money back. This could lead to massive bank runs.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has predicted that under the GENIUS Act, crypto firms could end up holding more than $2 trillion in U.S. treasury bills as collateral. If they had to suddenly liquidate those assets to cover a bank run, the value of U.S. securities could plummet, triggering a global financial crisis.
Crypto has shown no redeeming social value and it poses huge dangers to our economy. Yet Trump is enabling it to worm into the economy because he’s taken huge crypto payoffs that have made him and his family billions of dollars.
What can you do?
For starters, please share this video to help spread the truth.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
- 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.
Keep reading...
Show less
These hate-filled words show liberals must stop fueling the Charlie Kirk myth
What can you say about a 31-year-old hatemonger who died? If you’re a pundit, you have to say something nice because the president took Charlie Kirk’s calls. As the leader of the MAGA youth, Kirk was powerful and, by the rules of Washington, that entitles him to a warm and respectful sendoff.
But what can a nice liberal say about a man who made his fortune peddling gutter racism and vicious conspiracy theories?
They can’t praise Kirk’s wit, which ran towards LaQueesha jokes and cringeworthy impressions of Black women. They can’t lionize him as a worthy intellectual opponent. This was, after all, someone who believed Haiti was infested by demonic voodoo that might be turning people into cats.
With limited raw material to work with, the image-makers have repackaged Kirk as a champion of reason and dialogue. It would have been enough to condemn Kirk’s horrific assassination, denounce political violence, and extend profound sympathy to his family, but leading liberals felt obliged to remake a snarling crank into a martyr for liberal democracy.
California Governor Gavin Newsom kicked off the myth-making. “I knew Charlie, and I admired his passion and commitment to debate. [...] The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”
“Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Ezra Klein wrote in the New York Times, “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”
Here, Klein is contrasting Kirk’s nonviolent approach with that of the terrorist who murdered him. It’s damning Kirk by faint praise to say he was doing politics better than his assassin, but it’s unequivocally true. However, holding Kirk up as a champion of tolerance and dialogue paints him in a false light to millions who might only know him through a Times headline or Newsom’s socials.
Kirk’s commitment to democratic values was situational at best. He bussed insurrectionists to the Capitol on January 6. Free speech was a tool for him, not a universal principle. He got his start as an activist by compiling a McCarthyite list of liberal professors. For years, he and his organization built support for speech bans and laws muzzling academics. Far from valuing respectful dialogue, Kirk often painted his political enemies as less than real Americans. He even called for Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), an American citizen and a sitting member of Congress, to be denaturalized and deported.
Kirk made light of political violence against his adversaries, whether it was the crimes of the J6ers, the attempted murder of Paul Pelosi, or the recent terror spree in Minnesota. Kirk urged his millions of listeners to bail out Pelosi's attacker. The hammer-wielding assailant was trying to kidnap then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi based on the same debunked 2020 election conspiracy theories Kirk broadcast to his audience of millions, but Kirk baselessly insinuated that the attacker was Pelosi’s gay lover. When an antivax Christian nationalist shot two Democratic state legislators and their spouses, Kirk blamed Minnesota governor Tim Walz.
Kirk was a prolific and vituperative racist even by the standards of MAGA influencers.
“Anyone holding a DEl job deserves your scorn,” Kirk tweeted last year, “Next time you meet one, you should ask them: 'You're a stupid person doing a race hustle job, how do you live with yourself?'
So much for comity.
Kirk claimed his Black enemies were incompetents who got their jobs through racial preference. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, former Vice President Kamala Harris, and former Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin were just a few of the leaders he dismissed as diversity hires.
“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” Kirk said of the nation’s newest Supreme Court justice. “You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Kirk’s contempt for Black women ran the gamut from New York Attorney General Tish James, whom he called a “savage,” to customer service reps.
“If I’m dealing with someone in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder: ‘Is she there because of her excellence or is she there because of affirmative action?’” he said.
Insulting Black pilots became part of Kirk’s rancid shtick.
“I’m sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” Kirk said.
Another time, Kirk mimicked an imaginary Black pilot called “LaQueesha James” who he imagined as so incompetent she greeted the passengers with “‘Hi, ladies and gentlemen, pray for me!’”
On yet another broadcast, he did a bit about imaginary dudes “Ramon and Cadillac” getting to fly the plane just because they’re Black.
When a plane crashed, or a natural disaster struck, Kirk liked to pick out a Black, female, or gay officials, label them “DEI hires,” and accuse them of killing innocent people. He was such a deranged racist that he tried to blame Black fire chief of Austin, Texas, for flash flood deaths in Kerr County, 130 miles away. Kirk plastered the man’s name and face across the internet, risking reprisals against him.
“They brought [the chief] in from Atlanta, and his priority was not putting out fires or being prepared for floods. No. His priority was to make sure that the fire department was Blacker,” Kirk claimed. “How many little girls died at Camp Mystic because the Austin Fire Department hired a DEl fire chief?” he tweeted.
Kirk shamelessly exploited the fears of his audience. He claimed that, more and more in America, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” Kirk’s group, Turning Point USA, wrapped itself in the “White Boy Summer” flag and even sold merch with the notorious white supremacist slogan.
We are not going to solve the crisis of political violence by clinging to self-created illusions. Charlie Kirk was a victim, but he was no martyr.
Keep reading...
Show less
These numbers show Charlie Kirk's 'American Comeback' relied on lies of the morbidly rich
When Charlie Kirk was assassinated, he was sitting under a tent that had “The American Comeback Tour” printed in huge letters across all four sides. It was the theme of his tour of college campuses, a tour run by his Turning Point organization that was, according to NBC News, early-funded by 10 morbidly rich right-wingers.
The question is “America Comeback” to what?
In 1981, when Ronald Reagan was sworn into office
- Fully two-thirds of Americans were in the middle class,
- College was so cheap you could pay your tuition with a weekend job,
- Healthcare was inexpensive and widely available,
- Women and minorities had achieved legal (albeit not yet actual) parity with white men,
- And school and mass shootings were largely unknown because weapons of war were mostly outlawed from our streets.
Today, however, as a result of the Reagan Revolution:
- Only around half of us are in the middle class,
- College debt has crushed two generations to the point where they can’t start a family or buy a house,
- A half-million families end up homeless or bankrupt every year because somebody got sick,
- The GOP is leading an effort to make it harder for women and minorities to vote or maintain employment,
- And, with more guns than people, mass shootings are an almost-daily occurrence.
It's easy to see why an appealing pitch to the nation’s young people would be “comeback” or “Make America Great Again.” But what caused that “greatness” that we need to “come back to” and what wrecked it?
The American middle class is a relatively recent phenomenon. In 1900, only about 17 percent of us were in it; by the time of the Republican Great Depression it was about a quarter of us.
When Franklin D. Roosevelt was sworn into office in 1933, he embarked on a radical new campaign to create the world’s first widespread, more-than-half-of-us middle class. It had three main long-term components.
First, he passed the Wagner Act in 1935 that legalized labor unions and forbade employers from bringing in scab workers or refusing to recognize a union. That gave workers democracy in the workplace, and they used that power to demand that as their productivity increased, so would their pay and benefits.
Second, he established a minimum wage to make sure that people who worked full time would never end up in poverty.
Third, he raised the top income tax rate to 90 percent for the morbidly rich and 52 percent for corporations.
That high top tax rate on the rich meant that the average CEO took only about 30 times what the average worker did (because he’d be paying 90 percent or 74 percent after taking the first few millions), leaving far more money in the company to give raises and benefits to workers.
Corporations could get around their top tax rate by investing in their business. Research and development, new product roll-outs, advertising and marketing, and increasing pay and benefits were all tax-deductible, and that high tax rate incentivized them to do these things that built a strong and resilient manufacturing economy (stock buybacks were considered illegal stock manipulation until 1983).
Reagan undid all of that, lowering the top tax rate on the morbidly rich from 74 percent to 27 percent (it’s since gone up to 34 percent), cutting the top corporate tax rate to 34 percent, and legalizing stock buybacks, so now CEOs are taking literally hundreds of billions out of their companies (Musk is set to make a trillion) and wages for workers have been mostly flat even since 1981.
In similar fashion, Reagan declared war on labor unions so effectively that that one-third of us protected by unions in 1981 has collapsed. Today private sector union membership rates are only 5.9 percent, with some states even lower (North Carolina 2.4 percent, South Dakota 2.7 percent, and South Carolina 2.8 percent.
Regarding college, 80 percent of the cost of an education in state-run colleges and universities was paid by government when Reagan came into office, leaving about 20 percent of the cost to be covered by tuition. The Reagan Revolution changed all that, so that today tuition covers the largest percentage and the state is only covering around 20 percent-40 percent (it varies from state to state).
Healthcare was inexpensive when Reagan came into office because most states required both insurance companies and hospitals to run as nonprofits. There weren’t any billionaire insurance industry executives like Dollar Bill McGuire until Republicans changed the rules of the game, letting insurance companies and hospitals run as profit-making operations at the expense of the American public.
Great strides had also been made in opportunity for minorities and women by 1981; just a decade earlier women had gained the right to have a credit card or sign a mortgage without a husband, brother, or father’s signature. Affirmative Action programs were pulling racial and religious minorities into the mainstream of the American economy, kicking off a widespread Black middle class.
So, if Charlie Kirk was all about an “American Comeback,” what were his positions on the issues that created that broad, widespread middle class that Republicans and Trump promise us they’ll restore when they “Make America Great Again”?
On taxes, Kirk wanted to replace the progressive income tax with a 10 percent flat tax, so even the poorest person is paying income taxes on their meager income while the morbidly rich get a massive tax break.
He called unions “cartels” and celebrated teachers losing the right to unionize.
On college tuition, he opposed any plan to reduce student debt or increase federal or state funding to higher education, calling free college a “bribe.”
And on health care, Kirk opposed the kind of universal health care every other developed country in the world has, calling the VA an example of failed “government-run” healthcare.
With regard to the rights of women and minorities Charlie was also outspoken, most notably saying about prominent Black women Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, whom he labeled “affirmative action picks”:
“You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
He added:
“We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.”
Finally, with regard to guns, even though 87 percent of Americans want reasonable gun control, Kirk was all-in with the firearms industry, arguing that “some gun deaths every single year” are worth the cost of the late Justice Antonin Scalia’s interpretation of the Second Amendment. How do we protect our kids? Kirk said, quite simply, more guns was the solution:
“If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”
So, the question: How does doubling down on low taxes for the morbidly rich, keeping our health care for-profit, withholding higher education funding, gutting unions, increasing the number of guns, and trash-talking women and minorities make America “comeback”?
Republicans and their well-paid hustlers (Kirk took in hundreds of millions) have been promoting these positions for forty-four years and the result has been the gutting of the American middle class, now leading to anger, resentment, and political violence.
It’s way past time for America to return to the policies and positions that history proves (both in America and around the world) produce and build a strong middle class, the essential foundation for economic and political stability.
Keep reading...
Show less
This makeshift Confederate army is not about crime. It's about control
This is not about crime. This is about control.
The proposed deployment of the Tennessee National Guard to Memphis is not a response to public safety. It’s a political stunt engineered by a twice-impeached, multi-indicted president exploiting Black suffering and white fear to reclaim political relevance.
It’s a charade rooted in fearmongering, cloaked in the rhetoric of “law and order” but animated by the same authoritarian impulse that called troops to Lafayette Square in Washington, D.C. and cages to the border for immigrants. And Memphis, yet again, finds itself on the night shift of American injustice.
Let’s be clear: according to reports from the Memphis Police Department, violent crime in Memphis is at a 25-year low. That should be headline news. Instead, we’re being sold a spectacle — military trucks rumbling through Black neighborhoods, uniforms in place of understanding and surveillance in place of safety.
This isn’t public protection. It’s political theater.
Manufactured misfortune, misleading metrics
This deployment is not isolated. It’s part of a broader pattern where President Donald Trump and his allies target majority-Black cities, especially those with Black or Democratic mayors, as staging grounds for his white nationalist theatrics.
He’s not sending the National Guard to predominantly white towns with drug epidemics or mass shootings. He’s not showing up where far right groups like Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are organizing. No! He’s only sending troops into the heart of Southern Black communities, where governors like Tennessee’s Bill Lee are all too eager to oblige.
This is a makeshift Confederate army, operating under the guise of public safety, weaponized against the very people it claims to protect.
And when the statistics show that crime was already decreasing before the National Guard landed, Trump will no doubt claim victory for what he didn’t cause. He will take credit for what was already happening. And many will believe him, because authoritarianism always rewrites the facts before it rewrites the laws.
Beware the blowback
Some Memphians, even some Black ones, are applauding the National Guard’s presence. I understand the fatigue. I understand the trauma. But I caution us not to confuse fatigue with clarity, or trauma with truth.
When Latino voters supported Trump in 2024, many assumed his deportation policies would only target “others” — those without papers, those from different countries. But immigration crackdowns don’t ask for green cards before the cuffs come out. Similarly, when some white voters supported anti-DEI policies thinking only Black communities would be impacted, they learned quickly that cruelty rarely stops at the color line.
Memphians who think this military presence will only criminalize “the worst of us” need only look at the ICE detention center in nearby Mason, built on a former prison site and now holding undocumented immigrants caught in the dragnet of “tough on crime” posturing. According to NBC News, 40 percent of the 2,300 people arrested during the National Guard presence in D.C. were undocumented immigrants. This isn’t speculation — it’s precedent.
Hypocrisy in high places
What’s most galling is the hypocrisy of state lawmakers cheering this intervention. The same officials who’ve refused federal aid for healthcare, blocked Medicaid expansion, and lamented “Big Brother” when it suited their politics are now welcoming federal boots on our blocks. They’ve done nothing to stem the flood of guns in Tennessee, passed no meaningful policy to support youth or mental health services, but now demand military muscle as a cure-all?
This is intellectually dishonest at best and unserious at worst.
And those of us who dare to call it out are accused of being anti-police or unpatriotic. But I love Memphis enough to tell it the truth: You cannot incarcerate your way to safety. You cannot militarize your way to peace. You cannot criminalize your children and expect your community to thrive.
We’ve been here before
In my sermon this past Sunday, I reminded my congregation that some of the most liberating work has always been done during the night shift. My mother — Claudia Mae Fisher — worked the literal night shift for decades on a bridge in Michigan. And in the spiritual and political sense, we are on the night shift right now. Just like Jesus encountering the man born blind in John 9, we are being asked who is to blame. But I contend the better question is: What is God trying to reveal through this misfortune?
As I said in that sermon, we are not called to applaud political stunts or submit to scare tactics. We are called to do the work of liberation—day or night, with or without military presence.
We are not blind. We see what’s happening.
A call to action
Now is the time to demand clarity and accountability from our mayors, our state legislators, our governor, and those in the White House. We must push back against political spectacle with principled resistance. The presence of the National Guard is not protection. It’s provocation. It is an occupation of our streets and a betrayal of our dignity.
We deserve policies, not performances.
We demand investments, not intimidation.
We are not pawns in a political war. We are people, and we deserve to be treated as such.
Let this be our charge on the night shift: to shine light, speak truth, and refuse to be silent in the face of spectacle.
- Rev. Earle J. Fisher, Ph.D. is the Senior Pastor of Abyssinian Baptist Church in Memphis, Tennessee – The Blackest Church in Memphis and Shelby County. He’s also the founder of #UPTheVote901, a nonpartisan voter empowerment initiative committed to producing political power and increasing voter turnout in Memphis and Shelby County
Keep reading...
Show less
Ignore the Meghan McCains — far-right voices know something terrible about Kirk's killing
A few hours before law enforcement authorities announced they had taken into custody the suspected killer of Charlie Kirk, Meghan McCain, daughter of the late John McCain, weighed in on “the fundamental difference between the right and the left in this country.”
“It’s that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” she wrote on Twitter. “And it’s not something I think I really have fully faced until Charlie’s assassination. And it’s petrifying.”
I know, I know. But before you say anything more, lemme get back to the press conference where the alleged killer was named.
Turns out the bad guy is 22-year-old Tyler Robinson. He’s white, comfortably middle class and apparently from a respectable conservative Utah family. His mom and dad are registered Republicans. (Their son is unaffiliated.) Tyler was steeped in gun culture (not surprising given that he killed Kirk with one shot at more than 175 yards). And he was, as they say, Extremely Online.
This is clear in the messages he wrote on four shell casings. They were:
- “Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”
- “If you read this, you are gay lmao”
- “Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao”
- “Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols”
The message on the first shell casing, which was fired, alludes to “an internet meme tied to animated videos and furry culture,” according to USA Today.
“OwO references an emoticon, and ‘what’s this?’ denotes cuteness or curiosity. It’s frequently referenced by video game streamers.”
The message on the second casing contains an online taunt. But those on the third and fourth are the most important.
“Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao” are lyrics to “the anthem of the antifascist Italian resistance during World War II,” according to USA Today.
“Hey fascist! Catch! Up arrow symbol, right arrow, three down arrow symbols” refers “to a cooperative shooter video game called Helldivers 2,” the paper said. “The input is the code for an airstrike. It has morphed into a meme and is used to imply a devastating reaction to something that should be destroyed.”
But The Verge revealed something about that video game that is getting little or no attention. First, that it featured “Bella Ciao,” the anti-fascist Italian resistance song, and second, that it was a satire.
The Verge reported that “the world of Helldivers — which evokes Robert Heinlein’s book Starship Troopers and the subsequent movie — concerns fascism thematically” and “developer Arrowhead has characterized it as a satire where players fight for a fascist state.”
Again, with feeling – players fight for the fascist state.
On Friday, Utah Governor Spencer Cox was asked about the significance of the inscriptions on the shell castings, as they might suggest a motive. Cox said he couldn’t speak to all of them, but did say that “Hey fascist! Catch!” seems to speak for itself, adding that the implication is that Robinson’s intention was for Kirk to catch his bullet.
Cox took “Hey fascist! Catch!” out of its video-gaming context, first because he probably was not aware of it, but second, because that fits the narrative that he and others on the right want to tell — that political violence is coming solely from “the left” and that, as Meghan McCain said, anyone who has been critical of Charlie Kirk “glorifies death,” thus justifying the president’s abuses of power to stop them.
But if you put “Hey fascist! Catch!” (and the other inscriptions) in their proper context of Extremely Online culture, a different picture emerges, one where the right is so focused on alleged enemies they’re missing what’s happening among their own, and it’s here that I must beg your pardon if I’m introducing you for the first time to groypers.
In a nutshell, groypers are hardcore, unrepentant racists. They hate everyone, openly and without reservation. (They are also weird about sex and women. They overlap with “incels.”) They are decentralized and defuse, but Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist podcaster, speaks for them. Fuentes didn’t like Kirk. For instance, he thought Kirk was too soft on Israel, which is to say, he wasn’t antisemitic enough. Fuentes used to be on Team Trump but parted ways for reasons I have forgotten. Anyway, he thought Kirk was a sycophant. Kirk backed off from demanding Trump release “the Epstein files.” Meanwhile, Fuentes raged against him, calling for his party to be “hanged in the midterms.”
There are many important (and repugnant) aspects of groypers, but for our purposes here, the main one to remember is they communicate online using an array of obscure images that most people would see as meaningless, if they were not also Extremely Online. One of them is called Pepe the Frog. Basically, if you see it, it means whoever is using it is a white-power nihilist (or, at the very least, a terrible human being.) And guess what? Tyler Robinson knew how to speak groyper.
In 2018, when Robinson was 15, his mother posted a Halloween picture on Facebook in which her son is wearing a black track suit with white stripes. He’s striking a pose similar to one taken by Pepe the Frog in a well-known rendering. Robinson’s mom, Amber Jones Robinson, wrote that Tyler was dressed up like “some guy from a meme,” suggesting she had no idea what he was. (She probably didn’t know “Bella Ciao” is on the “Groyper War” playlist on Spotify either.) In this, I think Jones Robinson has something in common with the entire GOP, which is the near-total lack of awareness of just how close they are to danger.
That seems to have changed. Suddenly (as in, yesterday and today), high-profile rightwing chaos-agents are expressing an awareness of the possibility that if Charlie Kirk can get popped, so could they.
Richard Hanania, the authoritarian apologist, has discovered the virtues of gun control.
“‘The Left’ did not kill Charlie Kirk,” Hanania said. “Talking like this is an attempt to silence critics of the Trump administration. No movement is responsible for crazy people. The only way you get something close to complete safety is strict gun control.”
Christopher Rufo, the “antiwoke” provocateur, was more deceitful. He said FBI Director Kash Patel (who said during Friday's presser that he’d see Kirk “in Valhalla”) didn’t have “the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate and disrupt the violent movements — of whatever ideology — that threaten the peace in the United States.”
Rufo continued, saying the country has two choices: “enter a spiral of violence, which would be a catastrophe” or “federal law enforcement makes a credible plan to restore the civil order, initiates a campaign to disrupt domestic terror networks in all 50 states, and sets them in motion with the goal of preventing further bloodshed, all of which can and must be done in a principled, legal, nonpartisan manner.”
Rufo didn’t say “the left” didn’t kill Kirk but he didn’t say it did either. Like Hanania, law and order, rather than lawlessness and disorder, are suddenly very important to him after an apparent groyper killed Charlie Kirk. Together, they represent a notable departure from rightwing dogma, and not only from the position, articulated by Kirk, that “some gun deaths every single year” are a “rational” price to pay for having “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” It’s also a notable departure from Trump’s current trajectory.
The Republicans, especially at the state level, are not prepared to do anything about the actual means of achieving political violence, which is to say, about guns. (Governor Cox had nothing to say about the fact that it’s easy to buy and legal to openly carry long guns on Utah’s college campuses. Trump, meanwhile, seems to believe political violence doesn’t count if it’s against Democrats). The party will instead follow the president’s lead in criminalizing political speech.
Hanania and Rufo seem to be the canaries in the coal mine. While Trump and the Republicans are busy telling their story – “that the left glorifies death, particularly of adversaries, and the right does not,” according to Meghan McCain – they are not seeing the actual right-on-right white-on-white danger to their lives. And while the attempted assassination of Trump should have been their first sign of trouble, it wasn’t. It took Charlie Kirk getting killed to see that.
Keep reading...
Show less
Sticks and stones may break our bones — but these Trump words can really hurt us
Every president and most members of Congress have known for the past two centuries that having the ability to wield the power of government is a serious responsibility that carries with it real obligations for self-control.
The reason is simple and obvious, although our media appears to not realize it when they act like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller’s rhetoric is normal: Government can legally kill you, imprison you, and take everything you own. Fox “News” and other commentators can’t.
When some bigot on Fox or another rightwing outlet goes off on how Democrats are “left wing extremists,” “terrorists,” or “traitors,” he doesn’t have the power or ability to do anything about it. They’re just words, which is why they’re protected by the First Amendment. Inflammatory words, certainly, but just words.
But when a government official slaps one of those kinds of labels on you because of things you’ve said or political views you hold, you can lose literally everything.
Just ask Mahmoud Khalil or Rümeysa Öztürk, who were imprisoned for expressing their opinions on the genocide Benjamin Netanyahu is carrying out in Israel, or Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who had the bad fortune of being brown-skinned when Miller was on one of his racist jeremiads, even though Garcia had legal permission to stay in the US.
This is why even after 9/11 George W. Bush measured his words, going so far as to emphasize that Islam wasn’t our enemy. So did Abraham Lincoln, for that matter, even as the country he led was under attack by actual traitors committed to ending democracy in America.
In his first inaugural address, on the verge of the Civil War, he said:
“With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds…”
Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, understood that as a government official with the power to kill by firing squad or imprison, it was his obligation to turn down the heat.
“We can return violence with violence; we can return hate with hate. That’s the problem with political violence. It metastasizes,” Cox told the nation when Trent Robinson was arrested on suspicion of killing Charlie Kirk. “We can always point the figure at the other side. At some point we have to find an off ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.”
Trump, Miller, and the GOP more generally haven’t gotten the message.
Trump blamed the “radical left” — as if there actually is any meaningful number of people in America calling for communism — for the killing, and then on Thursday told reporters, “We just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.”
When Matthew Dowd notes on MSNBC that Kirk engaged in hate speech, the worst that happens is the network fires him. Ditto for when Fox’s Brian Kilmead called for America to emulate Hitler’s Aktion T4 program, where physicians killed homeless and disabled people by lethal injection, later moving on to mobile vans that used their exhaust to kill. The worst Kilmead can expect is to be fired, although given how shamefully unprincipled Fox management is, that’s probably unlikely.
But when government officials describe people using language that could lead to any of us being investigated, arrested, or even imprisoned or deported because of our politics, it’s an entirely different thing. It’s a genuine threat to our system of government, our rule of law, and to the safety and security of all of the American people.
Because when they start hauling away Americans for their opinions, when they threaten to pull our citizenship or passports — as Trump and other Republicans have recently done — history tells us it’s not a long trek to using those same tactics against people who thought they were on the “right side.”
Indeed, it’s already started to happen: just ask James Comey, John Brennan, and James Clapper, who are all now facing criminal investigations for speaking out against Trump. All these lifelong Republicans had to lawyer up after Trump publicly called them “criminals.”
When Miller — who the White House wants you to know definitely does not play with porcelain dolls — says the Democratic Party (which he can’t bring himself to say; he instead uses Joe McCarthy’s “Democrat Party” slur) “is not a political party; it is a domestic, extremist organization,” he’s laying a legal foundation for criminal investigations and arrests per the Patriot Act.
When he vows to “dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” promising under Trump’s leadership to use law enforcement to “strip them of money, power, and freedom” and threatening that members of the left who “spread evil hate” will “live in exile” he’s not just a commentator: he’s a man who wields actual power over life and death, imprisonment or freedom.
This rhetoric is particularly troubling since all of the previous 31 politically-motivated violent attacks in America have been committed by rightwingers.
Or consider Elon Musk, the world‘s richest man who created and ran the DOGE program to dismantle our government. He spoke to a crowd in England this weekend and said:
“The violence is going to come to you. You will have no choice. This is a, this is, you're in a fundamental situation here where you, where, whether you choose violence or not. The violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die. You either the fight back or you die. And that's the truth.”
And he wasn’t talking about Osama bin Laden or anybody like that. He was talking about people like you and me:
“[Y]ou see how much violence there’s on the left with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the left celebrating it openly; the left is the party of murder and celebrating murder. I mean let that sink in for a minute. That’s who we’re dealing with here. That is who we're dealing with.”
When Trump is asked how to heal the country and says, “I couldn’t care less” and adds that, “The radicals on the left are the problem,” he’s inciting stochastic lone-wolf terror against Democrats and setting up rationalizations for government actions like Hitler’s Reichstag Fire Decree that ended all free speech protections in Germany in 1933.
And now a member of Congress is introduced legislation to strip the passports of anybody who “supports terrorism.“ The bill’s author is a former soldier in the Israeli military: you know what direction this is going.
The few rational people still left in the GOP need to reach out to this administration and convince them to follow the example of every other president since Andrew Jackson to dial back the rhetoric, acknowledge the fundamental humanity of Democrats and others on the “left,” and their absolute right to advocate for their own, different vision of a better America with fewer guns, more unions, and free healthcare and free college (the actual “radical left” positions).
Because when a government points its finger at you — when it decides you are the enemy — the entire machinery of the state lines up behind that accusation. That’s not hyperbole; it’s the lesson of history, written in blood and exile and mass graves.
Every authoritarian regime began not with tanks in the streets but with leaders who used words like weapons and convinced their followers that fellow citizens were traitors. Every one. Trump and his enablers are replaying that script, right here, right now.
The only question left is whether we’ll recognize it for what it is and slam on the brakes, or whether we’ll watch, paralyzed, as the state’s power to cage, exile, or kill is once again turned inward, but this time, against us all.
Keep reading...
Show less
Charlie Kirk's own tactics fueled political hostility — this is how it ends
By Lee Bebout, Professor of English, Arizona State University.
Shortly following the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, many politicians and pundits were quick to highlight the importance of civil discourse.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox called for an “off-ramp” to political hostilities, while California Gov. Gavin Newsom released a statement condemning political violence. He lauded Kirk’s “commitment to debate,” adding, “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” Political commentator Ezra Klein wrote, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way.”
With so many Americans consuming political content via siloed social media feeds and awash in algorithms that stoke outrage, these ideals may seem quaint, if not impossible.
Clearly, murder is a no-go. But what does it mean to practice politics “the right way?” How can people engage “across ideology” in a “spirited” way?
Well, one way to not practice politics the right way is to limit the other side from having a voice of authority. Since 2016, the organization Kirk co-founded, Turning Point USA, has hosted the Professor Watchlist. The online database generated harassment campaigns against professors, leading to calls for firings, hate mail and death threats. To be sure, the left has not been without its own excesses of harassment in recent years.
Kirk was also known for going to college campuses and speaking to students: entering the lion’s den and affably challenging audiences to “change my mind.”
To me, the impulse to shut down the other side, combined with the “change my mind approach” to debate, has only exacerbated political polarization and entrenchment. Instead, I propose a few different ways of thinking about conversations with people whose views differ from your own.
The fantasy of swiftly changing minds
In my forthcoming book, Rules for Reactionaries: How to Maintain Inequality and Stop Social Justice, I explore the language strategies used to advance white supremacy and anti-feminism across U.S. politics and culture.
Deliberative democracy is the idea that decision-making and governance are arrived at through thoughtful, reasoned and respectful dialogue. This may take the shape of debates in Congress or robust questioning in town halls. But deliberative democracy also shapes the way all neighbors or citizens treat each other, whether on the street or at the dinner table.
I contend that a big stumbling block that prevents the U.S. from tackling its biggest problems is how Americans conceptualize deliberative democracy: There’s a fantasy that people’s minds can be easily changed, if only they’re given certain information or hear certain arguments.
In the 1990s, this was epitomized through former President Bill Clinton’s Initiative on Race, a program that he framed as a vehicle for social and political transformation. Clinton believed that an advisory board of experts could foster a meaningful national dialogue and produce necessary healing.
In response, conservative political figures objected both to the need for a conversation in the first place and to the makeup of the committee leading it.
By the time Clinton’s second term ended, the initiative quietly disappeared, only to be mentioned in passing in Clinton’s memoir. Yet with each subsequent racial flash point, from the arrest of Henry Louis Gates in 2009 to the murder of George Floyd, calls resurfaced for the national conversation. But race remains a politically and culturally salient issue.
Similarly, many Americans view friends, relatives and colleagues as targets for conversion. Because of the nature of my research, I often get a version of this question from my students: “How do you change someone’s mind if they say they’re a socialist?” Or they may frame it as, “I’ve got Thanksgiving with my family coming up, and my Uncle Johnny is so transphobic. How do I convince him to support trans rights?”
Cultural theorist Lauren Berlant would describe these encounters as moments of cruel optimism. There’s the belief that what you’re about to do is good and worthy. But time and again, you’re met with feelings of futility and frustration.
When debating politics, many people crave a chance to engage with someone they disagree with. There’s the hope of changing hearts and minds. But few minds — if any — change that quickly, and approaching these conversations as small windows of opportunity ends up being their downfall.
Opening minds instead of changing them
There are more fruitful approaches to conversation than merely trying to best someone in an argument by deploying buzzwords or “gotcha!” moments.
Rather than trying to immediately change someone’s mind, what if you entered a conversation with the goal of simply planting seeds? This approach transforms the dialogue from an attempted conversion into a legitimate conversation, wherein you’re merely offering your partner something to consider after the fact.
Another strategy involves remembering that conversations often have multiple audiences.
Consider the Thanksgiving dinner with Uncle Johnny. What if, instead of focusing on trying to convert him, the speaker recognized that there were other listeners at the table? Perhaps they could rethink their encounter not as converting an opponent, but as modeling to relatives how to have a conversation about one’s values with a loved one whom they vehemently disagree with. Or perhaps the speaker could recognize that a cousin at the table may be closeted, and take it upon themselves to model how to push back against transphobia.
In both cases, the conversion of Uncle Johnny ceases to be the objective. Civic dialogue and persuasion remain.
Change is slow but never futile
If the U.S. is going to heal its civic life through dialogue, I think it will require Americans to not just speak with those they disagree with, but to listen to them as well.
Krista Ratcliffe, a scholar of rhetoric at Arizona State University, has written about her concept of “rhetorical listening.” Listeners, she argues, must not simply be attuned to the words a speakers says, but also to the life experiences and ideologies that shape those words.
Rhetorical listening means avoiding the urge to one-up the opponent or convert the unwashed masses. Instead, you’re entering into dialogue from a position of curiosity, with a willingness to learn and grow.
Many people believe that the U.S. is at an inflection point. Will families and friendships continue to be torn apart? Will greater political polarization lead to more violence? Often it feels hopeless.
Like Sisyphus, many Americans probably feel like they continue to push a boulder up a hill, only for it to roll down the other side. The error would be for Americans to be surprised when the boulder rolls back down — shocked that there was no progress and that everyone has to start over again.
While the Sisyphean task of deliberative democracy requires that citizens push the boulder day in and day out, they should also recognize that as they push, the weight of the boulder as it’s collectively pushed will gradually and imperceptibly alter the terrain.
Moreover, as the French philosopher Albert Camus once wrote, it’s important to “imagine Sisyphus happy” — to continue to seize what joy can be had as this hard work plods along.
Keep reading...
Show less
How Donald Trump is making America politically violent again
The assassination of ultra-right, racist influencer Charlie Kirk may not have been the “shot heard around the world.” But before the videos of his shooting death were taken down, at least 10 million views had been logged on platforms like X, Facebook, Tik Tok, Instagram, You Tube, and Truth Social.
However, this commentary does not focus on the assassination of the 31-year-old Kirk, who spoke at the Republican National Convention in 2024 and was a highly valued member of Donald Trump’s inner circles. Nor do I talk about his 22-year-old accused killer, Tyler Robinson, or the possible political motivations behind engravings on four bullet casings, suggesting a mixture of “leftish” and “rightist” leanings.
I want to focus on polarized reactions to Kirk’s death by the two major parties, in relation to threats and incidences of political violence that have been surging since the MAGA base violently assaulted the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
What the data tell us
Before October 2020 — with the exception of November 2019, the month before Trump’s first impeachment, when Republican support for violence spiked — support for violence and dehumanization were in single digits with voters of both parties.
Of course, the political elephant in the room is the criminal-instigator-in-chief. To put it unequivocally, Trump hogs the blame for most politically motivated violent behavior plaguing this nation.
As Rachel Kleinfeld, founding CEO of the Truman National Security Project who serves on the National Task Force On Election Crises, notes in a recent article in the Journal of Democracy, as far back as January 2020, one year before Jan. 6, 41 percent of Republicans agreed that “a time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.” After the failed insurrection, 56 percent of Republicans agreed that “if elected leaders will not protect Americans, the people must do it themselves even if it requires taking violent action.”
Moral disengagement or lack of civil discourse has also been spiking. By February 2021, Kleinfeld notes, “more than two-thirds of Republicans (and half of Democrats) saw the other party as ‘downright evil,’ while 12 percent more Republicans believed Democrats were less than human than the other way around.”
Kleinfeld writes:
“The false narrative of a stolen 2020 election clearly increased support for political violence. Those who believed the election was fraudulent were far more likely to endorse coups and armed citizen rebellion; by February 2021, a quarter of Republicans felt that it was as least “a little justified to take over state government buildings with violence to advance their political goals.” This politically driven false narrative points to the role of politicians since 2016 in fueling the difference in violence between the right and left. As has been found in Israel and Germany, domestic terrorists are emboldened by the belief that politicians encourage violence or that authorities will tolerate it.”
In 2022, according to the Institute for Responsive Government and a New York Times review of threats leading to indictments, one third of such threats were made by Republican or pro-Trump individuals against Democrats or Republicans deemed “insufficiently” loyal. One quarter of indicted threats were made by pro-Democrats against Republicans.
More recent data also tells us that high-volume threats against members of Congress, their families, and staff investigated by U.S. Capitol Police rose from 8,008 in 2023 to 9,474 in 2024.
Also, a 2024 poll of nearly 300 former members of Congress found that 49 percent of Republicans and 46 percent of Democrats frequently received threats in office, alongside a higher incidence of threats against female lawmakers and those from racial minorities, with 69 percent of such respondents reporting frequent threats.
According to Mike Jensen, a researcher at the University of Maryland who since 1970 has been tracking this kind of violence, in the first six months of the second Trump administration, the U.S. “experienced about 150 politically-motivated attacks — nearly twice as many as over the same period last year.”
After the assassination of Kirk, Jensen said: “I think we are in a very, very dangerous spot right now that could easily escalate into more widespread civil unrest … This could absolutely serve as a kind of flashpoint that inspires more” racially motivated violence.
Within 24 hours of Kirk’s death, Black students and colleges across the US were targeted “by coordinated racist death threats, forcing at least seven historically Black colleges into emergency lockdowns.”
Meanwhile, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle were voicing what The Hill called “fresh concerns that the polarization of American politics is radicalizing the fringes and fueling extremism.”
Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said: “People are scared to death in this building. I mean, not many of them will say it publicly, but they’re running to the Speaker talking about security — and that’s a lot of Republicans.”
Lack of civil discourse
Both Republicans and Democrats urged, in The Hill’s words, “a national shift in rhetoric – on and off of Capitol Hill – away from the knee-jerk partisan attacks that practically define the country’s political debate.”
Comparatively speaking, however, the partisan social discourse of Republicans, from the top down, was as hateful as it has been since Joe Biden beat Trump in November 2020.
Following the assassination of Kirk, the pot once again called the kettle black. As reported by the New York Times, Trump “released a four-minute video from the Oval Office in which he condemned the killing as ‘the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day’.”
During a Fox News interview, Trump blamed political violence on one of his favorite scapegoats, the ”lunatic” radical left supposedly supported by billionaire social justice philanthropist George Soros. Without missing a beat, absent any conscience, the sociopathic president defended political violence on the “radical right” as a matter of patriotic justice.
As the Times put it, “instead of calling for Americans of all political stripes to lower the temperature,” the fueling agent of chaos and mistrust was as usual rattling off a list of political violence targeting Republicans or perpetrated by those he views as on the left.
These included the two “assassination attempts against him; attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers; the assassination of a health care executive in New York; and the mass shooting of Republicans at a congressional baseball practice that nearly killed Representative Seve Scalise of Louisiana.”
Trump also told reporters on Thursday, “We just have to beat the hell out” of the radical left.
Missing once again from the insurrectionist-in-chief was any reference to violence encouraged by himself and his allies, for example, by Rudy Giuliani, who Trump plans to award the Presidential Medal of Freedom, or by a corrupted Justice Department, targeting Democrats and Republicans because the president does not like them.
Conversely, as the Times reported, Trump “made no mention of the recent killings in Minnesota of a Democratic state lawmaker and her husband, who were on a hit list of dozens of left-wing figures; the arson attack on the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania, while he and his family slept; a shooter’s attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; a hammer assault on the husband of former Speaker Nancy Pelosi; the shootings at an Arizona campaign office of Kamala Harris; or the Jan. 6 pro-Trump mob attack on the Capitol that injured roughly 150 police officers.”
In short, rather than condemning violence on both sides and “calling for unity,” the Atlantic reported, “the president of the United States accused his political opposition of being accessories to murder.”
Here is how Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian summed up what Trump’s cheerleaders are saying:
“'We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,' promised Fox News host Jesse Watters. Elon Musk declared that 'The Left is the party of murder.' A legion of other rightwing influencers have already taken this talk to its logical conclusion, announcing, as one put it, that 'THIS IS WAR.' Could the message being sent to a furious and well-armed support base be any clearer?
During the same period, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) made comments to Mehdi Hasan, expressing both condolences for Charlie Kirk’s family and criticism of his positions. Immediately thereafter, on social media and elsewhere, rightwing influencers and Republican legislators called for Omar’s resignation from Congress and deportation to Somalia.
In response, Omar posted: “Right-wing accounts trying to spin a false story when I condemned [Kirk’s] murder multiple times is fitting for their agenda to villainize the left to hide from the fact that Donald Trump gins up hate on a daily basis.”
Paul Pelosi Nancy Pelosi and Paul Pelosi, seen in 2017. (Shutterstock.com)
As Trump was exploiting and weaponizing the murder of his young friend, some Republicans “seemed preoccupied with proving that ‘the left’ was celebrating the attack,” Jonathan Chait wrote in the Atlantic.
Trump has been doing that since the attack on Paul Pelosi, in December 2022.
‘Fanaticism on the left’?
Unlike Republican leaders or Fox News, Democratic leaders and liberal outlets like MSNBC were united in revulsion and condemnation of the attack on Kirk and political violence. Nor did they call for vengeance.
California Governor Gavin Newsom wrote, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY form.”
New York City mayoral candidate Zorhan Mamdani said: “I’m horrified by the shooting of Charlie Kirk at a college event in Utah. Political violence has no place in our country.”
And yet, as Chait wrote, “the Republican Party’s fanatical devotion to Trump requires an insistence that it is responding to a greater and more insidious form of fanaticism on the left.”
Like Boss Trump, the GOP posits that “a totalitarian and violent left-wing threat is necessary to justify Trump’s” emerging police state and excuse the president’s criminality, past and present — as the MAGA Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling did in Trump v. United States, granting presidents criminal immunity.
Asked about bringing the country together, the Outlaw-in-Chief told Fox News he “couldn’t care less.” Naturally, because he desires more violence, not less. That is why he is sending troops into Democratic-run cities — so he can ratchet up the violence and declare some kind of emergency, in order to suspend elections.
- Gregg Barak is an emeritus professor of criminology and criminal justice at Eastern Michigan University and the author of several award-winning books, including Criminology on Trump (2022) and its sequel, Indicting the 45th President: Boss Trump, the GOP, and What We Can Do About the Threat to American Democracy (2024). The third book in Barak’s trilogy, Regime Change, Authoritarian Treason, and the Outlaw-in-Chief: President Donald Trump’s Struggle to Kill U.S. Democracy & Realign American Global Power, will be published after the 2026 midterm election.
Keep reading...
Show less
MAGA family values, locked and loaded
Nick Anderson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial cartoonist.
Tyrant Trump always says, 'This is only the beginning.' Believe him
The huge Labor Day banner outside the Labor Department building with Trump’s picture and the words “American Workers First” depicts one of Donald’s most disgusting lies.
With multiple factual examples, Steve Greenhouse, former labor reporter for the New York Times, provides proof that Trump is the most brazenly “anti-worker” president in U.S. history. With his Big Vicious and Ugly Bill, barely passed by his fawning GOP in Congress, and dozens of illegal executive orders, he is smashing the American Worker beyond the avarice of the cruelest Plutocrat.
Quoting liberally from Greenhouse's Labor Day article in the Guardian, I urge labor union leaders and rank-and-file union members to absorb its contents. This article could make American labor angry enough to mount an unstoppable movement to tell Trump, “You’re Fired,” and fire up enough convinced or electorally scared lawmakers in Congress to impeach and remove Trump from office.
The aggregated madness from this failed gambling czar, wholly devoid of empathy, compassion, truth, while betraying his own voters and his oath of office, follows:
- Trump put corporate interests first by “often cutting [workers’] pay or making their jobs more dangerous.” This includes gutting regulations that protect miners from a debilitating, often deadly lung disease. He fired the chair of the top labor watchdog – the National Labor Relations Board, whose now stalled mission is to “protect workers from corporations’ illegal anti-union tactics.” Then “Trump stripped one million federal workers of their right to bargain collectively and tore up their union contracts.”
- “Trump has hurt construction workers by shutting down major wind turbine projects and ending Biden-era subsidies that encourage construction of factories that make renewable-energy products.”
- Trump is pressing to end “minimum wage and overtime protections for 3.7 million home-care and domestic workers,” and has already ended a “Biden plan to prevent employers from paying disabled workers less than the $7.25-an-hour federal minimum wage.” Trump adamantly opposes raising this frozen minimum wage for 25 million workers who would benefit from a $15 federal minimum wage. He ended a “requirement that federal contractors pay their workers at least $17.75 an hour.”
- Tariffs and reckless, wholesale deportations are “pushing up prices and slowing economic growth.” His big tax cut for the super-rich is being paid for by “millions of working families by cutting food assistance and causing many to lose health coverage” (from Medicaid). As for deportation, it is “undermining their employers’ businesses,” and I might add closing down some of them and impairing farmers from harvesting their crops.
- “In her annual State of the Unions address, AFL-CIO president [Liz] Schuler said: ‘We want cheaper groceries, and we get tanks on our streets. We want more affordable healthcare, and we get 16 million Americans about to be kicked off their coverage.’”
- Trump is swinging an axe to end worker safety protections, cutting OSHA staff and pushing those still working at OSHA to weaken all kinds of essential safety and health protections, ranging from coal miners to workers under extreme heat, to reducing fines for violating safety rules, and much more. He “froze enforcement of a Biden-era regulation that protects miners from silicosis, a serious lung disease.” “…a major killer among coal miners.”
- The Economic Policy Institute (EPI) “forecasts that Trump’s effort to deport 1 million immigrants a year will result in 5.9 million lost jobs after four years: 3.3 million fewer employed immigrants and 2.6 million fewer employed US-born workers. ‘If you don’t have immigrant roofers and framers, you’re not building houses, and that means electricians and plumbers lose their jobs.’ ‘Plus, you lose the consumer spending from those workers,’” and tens of billions of withheld tax revenues annually, one might add.
The list of anti-worker cruelty goes on. Tyrant Trump always says, “This is only the beginning.” He acts like an imperious dictator because that is what he is, imposing burdens and pain on the American people — in red and blue states alike. The six rogue Supreme Court Injustices, who thus far know no limits, are enabling the madman in the White House. Before his sleazy conversion, JD Vance called Trump “America’s Hitler.”
UNFORTUNATELY, THE WORST IS YET TO COME, MUCH WORSE!
The flip side of Trump’s feverish repression of worker rights, remedies, and existing protections is that there is no chance of reforming anti-union laws, such as the notorious Taft-Hartley Law of 1947, with Trump and his congressional cronies in power.Readers may well ask why all these attacks on workers didn’t lead unions and their allies to launch a COMPACT FOR AMERICAN WORKERS and insist that the feeble, corporate-conflicted Democratic Party adopt it authentically and replace their stagnant leadership with new, vigorous leaders.
That is what they should have done right after their disastrous loss to Trump, the serial law violator, abuser of women, corrupter, daily, delusionary falsehood teller, shredder of the Constitution, greedy, egomaniacal, and seriously dangerous personalityThere is still one Labor Day before the 2026 midterm elections. Can Unions and the Democratic Party save our Republic from the rampaging daily Trump outlawry and viciousness (he is now invading American cities while wrecking our country)? It should be easy, just based on his failed record.
As the economy worsens amidst the chaos, consumer prices rise, unemployment rises, and Trump behaves more like Captain Queeg (the fictional, cruel, and crazy skipper in the film, The Caine Mutiny), voters for Trump are starting to ask, “Did We Vote for This?” Non-voters, in turn, should resolve to head for the polls and reject what Trump is doing. The people who are the sovereign in our Constitution must start acting like they have power.
- Ralph Nader is a consumer advocate and the author of "The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our American Future" (2012). His latest book is, "Wrecking America: How Trump's Lies and Lawbreaking Betray All" (2020, co-authored with Mark Green).
Keep reading...
Show less
Copyright © 2025 Raw Story Media, Inc. PO Box 21050, Washington, D.C. 20009 |
Masthead
|
Privacy Policy
|
Manage Preferences
|
Debug Logs
For corrections contact
corrections@rawstory.com
, for support contact
support@rawstory.com
.