Dictators and kings build monumental architecture to buttress their egos. Sound familiar?

By R. Grant Gilmore III, Director, Historic Preservation and Community Planning Program, College of Charleston

From ancient Egypt to Washington, D.C., rulers have long used architecture and associated stories to project power, control memory and shape national identity. As 17th-century French statesman Jean-Baptiste Colbert observed:

“In the absence of brilliant deeds of war, nothing proclaims the greatness and spirit of princes more than building works.”

Today, the Trump administration is mobilizing heritage and architecture as tools of ideology and control. In U.S. historic preservation, “heritage” is the shared, living inheritance of places, objects, practices and stories — often plural and contested — that communities value and preserve. America’s architectural heritage is as diverse as the people who created, inhabited and continue to care for it.

As an archaeologist with three decades of practice, I read environments designed by humans. Enduring modifications to these places, especially to buildings and monuments, carry power and speak across generations.

In his first term as president, and even more so today, Donald Trump has pushed to an extreme legacy-building through architecture and heritage policy. He is remaking the White House physically and metaphorically in his image, consistent with his long record of putting his name on buildings as a developer.

In December 2020, Trump issued an executive order declaring classical and traditional architectural styles the “preferred” design for new federal buildings. The order derided Brutalist and modernist structures as inconsistent with national values.

Now, Trump is seeking to roll back inclusive historical narratives at U.S. parks and monuments. And he is reviving sanitized myths about America’s history of slavery, misogyny and Manifest Destiny, for use in museums, textbooks and public schools.

Yet artifacts don’t lie. And it is the archaeologist’s task to recover these legacies as truthfully as possible, since how the past is remembered shapes the choices a nation makes about its future.

Architecture as political power and legacy

Dictators, tyrants and kings build monumental architecture to buttress their own egos, which is called authoritarian monumentalism. They also seek to build the national ego — another word for nationalism.

Social psychologists have found that the awe we experience when we encounter something vast diminishes the “individual self,” making viewers feel respect and attachment to creators of awesome architecture. Authoritarian monumentalism often exploits this phenomenon. For example, in France, King Louis XIV expanded the Palace of Versailles and renovated its gardens in the mid-1600s to evoke perceptions of royal grandeur and territorial power in visitors.

Many leaders throughout history have built “temples to power” while erasing or overshadowing the memory of their predecessors — a practice known as damnatio memoriae, or condemnation to oblivion.

In the ancient world, the Sumerians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Romans, Chinese dynasties, Mayans and Incas all left behind architecture that still commands awe in the form of monuments to gods, rulers and communities. These monuments conveyed power and often served as instruments of physical and psychological control.

In the 19th century, Napoleon fused conquest with heritage. Expeditions to Egypt and Rome, and the building of Parisian monuments — the Arc de Triomphe and the Vendôme Column, both modeled on Roman precedents — reinforced his legitimacy.

Albert Speer’s and Hermann Giesler’s monumental neoclassical designs in Nazi Germany, such as the party rally grounds in Nuremberg, were intended to overwhelm the individual and glorify the regime. And Josef Stalin’s Soviet Union suppressed avant-garde experimentation in favor of monumental “socialist realist” architecture, projecting permanence and centralized power.

Now, Trump has proposed building his own triumphal arch in Arlington, Virginia, just across the Potomac River from the Lincoln Memorial, as a symbol to mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

An American alternative

Born of Enlightenment ideals of John Locke, Voltaire and Adam Smith, the American Revolution rejected the European idea of monarchs as semi-divine rulers. Instead, leaders were expected to serve the citizenry.

That philosophy took architectural form in the Federal style, which was dominant from about 1785 to 1830. This clear, democratic architectural language was distinct from Europe’s ornate traditions, and recognizably American.

Its key features were Palladian proportions — measurements rooted in classical Roman architecture — and an emphasis on balance, simplicity and patriotic motifs.

James Hoban’s White House and Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello embodied this style. Interiors featured lighter construction, symmetrical lines, and motifs such as eagles, urns and bellflowers. They rejected the opulent rococo styles associated with monarchy.

Americans also recognized preservation’s political force. In 1816, the city of Philadelphia bought Independence Hall, which was constructed in 1753 and was where the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were debated and signed, to keep it from being demolished. Today the building is a U.S. National Park and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

Early preservationists saved George Washington’s home, Mount Vernon, Jefferson’s Monticello, and other landmarks, tying democracy’s endurance to the built environment.

Architecture, memory and Trump

In remaking the White House and prescribing the style and content of many federal sites, Trump is targeting not just buildings but the stories they tell.

By challenging narratives that depart from white, Anglo-Saxon origin myths, Trump is using his power to roll back decades of work toward creating a more inclusive national history.

- YouTube www.youtube.com

These actions ignore the fact that America’s strength lies in its identity as a nation of immigrants. The Trump administration has singled out the Smithsonian Institution — the world’s largest museum, founded “for the increase and diffusion of knowledge — for ideological reshaping. Trump also is pushing to restore recently removed Confederate monuments, helping to revive "Lost Cause” mythology about the Civil War.

Trump’s 2020 order declaring classical and traditional architectural styles the preferred design for government buildings echoed authoritarian leaders like Adolf Hitler and Stalin, whose governments sought to dictate aesthetics as expressions of ideology. The American Institute of Architects publicly opposed the order, warning that it imposed ideological restrictions on design.

Trump’s second administration has advanced this agenda by adopting many recommendations in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint. Notably, Project 2025 calls for repealing the 1906 Antiquities Act — which empowers presidents to quickly designate national monuments on federal land — and for shrinking many existing monuments. Such rollbacks would undercut the framework that has safeguarded places like Devils Tower in Wyoming and Muir Woods in California for over a century.

Trump’s new ballroom is a distinct departure from the core values embodied in the White House’s Federal style. Although many commentators have described it as rococo, it is more aligned with the overwrought and opulent styles of the Gilded Age — a time in American history, from about 1875 through 1895, with many parallels to the present.

In ordering its construction, Trump has ignored long-standing consultation and review procedures that are central to historic preservation. The demolition of the East Wing may have ignored processes required by law at one of the most important U.S. historic sites. It’s the latest illustration of his unilateral and unaccountable methods for getting what he wants.

Instruments of memory and identity

When leaders push selective histories and undercut inclusive ones, they turn heritage into a tool for controlling public memory. This collective understanding and interpretation of the past underpins a healthy democracy. It sustains a shared civic identity, ensures accountability for past wrongs and supports rights and participation.

Heritage politics in the Trump era seeks to redefine America’s story and determine who gets to speak. Attacks on so-called “woke” history seek to erase complex truths about slavery, inequality and exclusion that are essential to democratic accountability.

Architecture and heritage are never just bricks and mortar. They are instruments of memory, identity and power.

Here's why Comey will struggle to have case dismissed despite Trump's clear abuse of power

By Peter A. Joy, Professor of law, Washington University in St. Louis.

Soon after President Donald Trump demanded in a social media post that the Department of Justice prosecute his perceived enemy, former FBI director James Comey, Comey was indicted on Sept. 25, 2025, for lying to a Congressional committee in 2020.

Comey’s lawyers have responded, filing a motion on Oct. 20, 2025, to dismiss the charges against him with prejudice — the “prejudice” being legal jargon for barring a refiling of the charges. Comey’s lawyers allege that the Justice Department’s prosecution is both selective and vindictive.

Despite the existence of a long string of Trump attacks specifically urging that Comey be prosecuted, getting the case dismissed as a prosecution that is selective, vindictive or both will require Comey to overcome a very strong presumption that the charging decision was lawful.

Selective prosecution

For a court to find that there is a selective prosecution, Comey has two hurdles.

First, he has to demonstrate that he was singled out for prosecution for something others have done without being prosecuted.

Second, Comey will have to prove that the government discriminated against him for his constitutionally protected speech of criticizing Trump.

Clearing both of these hurdles seems unlikely. Others, including former Trump fixer Michael Cohen and former Reagan administration Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, have been prosecuted for the same type of crimes — allegedly making false statements to Congress or unlawfully seeking to influence or obstruct a Senate investigation.

Vindictive prosecution

Due to Trump’s repeated statements and social media posts that Comey should be charged, proving a vindictive prosecution may be easier.

Indeed, the motion to dismiss starts by laying out the argument for a vindictive prosecution, signaling that Comey’s lawyers think this is the stronger argument by leading with it.

Still, if Comey’s lawyers are to convince the judge, they will have to overcome a heavy burden that the prosecution has exceeded the broad discretion of the prosecutor.

The legal standard requires a court to first find that the prosecutor had animus, hostility, toward Comey, and second, that the charges would not have been brought if there was no animus.

The motion to dismiss based on vindictive prosecution makes a very strong showing of animus, relying on Trump’s several statements and social media posts that Comey should be prosecuted and that Comey was a “Dirty Cop” and “a total SLIMEBALL!”

Further evidence involves the fact that no other prosecutor other than Trump’s former personal lawyer, Lindsey Halligan, would seek charges against Comey.

Still, the grand jury found probable cause for the two charges against Comey and issued the indictment. The government will likely argue that demonstrates that the charges could have been brought even if there was animus.

Fallback position

Comey’s lawyers are leaning heavily on arguments for a dismissal of the charges with prejudice, but they also have a fallback position.

If the judge determines that they have not proved a selective or vindictive prosecution, they are asking for the opportunity to obtain discovery — the record — of the government’s decision to seek charges from the grand jury, and a hearing on their motion to dismiss the indictment.

Given Trump’s public statements and social media posts, and the legal authority on this issue, as a longtime practitioner and teacher of criminal law, I believe the judge is very likely to choose this course of action.

No matter how the trial judge rules on the motion to dismiss, the losing side is certain to appeal. No matter how the federal appeals court rules, the losing side is likely to seek Supreme Court review. Whether the court would take such a case is impossible to predict with any certainty.

This Supreme Court case could dynamite Dems' hopes of ever returning to power

By Sam D. Hayes, Assistant professor of politics and policy, Simmons University.

On Oct. 15, 2025, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in one of the most anticipated cases of the 2025-2026 term, Louisiana v. Callais, with major implications for the Voting Rights Act, racial representation and Democratic Party power in congress.

The central question in the case is to what extent race can, or must, be used when congressional districts are redrawn. Plaintiffs are challenging whether the longstanding interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires protection of minority voting power in redistricting, violates the Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees that individuals should be treated the same by the law.

In short, the plaintiffs argue that the state of Louisiana’s use of race to make a second Black-majority district is forbidden by the U.S. Constitution.

This is the second time that the court will hear oral arguments in Louisiana v. Callais after no decision was reached last term. From my perspective as a scholar of U.S. federal courts and electoral systems, this case represents the collision of decades of Supreme Court decisions on race, redistricting and the Voting Rights Act.

Long legal battle

To understand the stakes of the current case, it’s important to know what the Voting Rights Act does. Initially passed in 1965, the act helped end decades of racially discriminatory voting laws by providing federal enforcement of voting rights.

Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act forbids discrimination by states in relation to voting rights and has been used for decades to challenge redistricting plans.

The current case has its roots in the redistricting of Louisiana’s congressional districts following the 2020 Census. States are required to redraw districts each decade based on new population data. Louisiana lawmakers redrew the state’s six congressional districts without major changes in 2022.

Soon after the state redistricted, a group of Black voters challenged the map in federal court as a violation of the Voting Rights Act. The plaintiffs argued that the new map was discriminatory because the voting power of Black citizens in the state was being illegally diluted. The state’s population was 31 percent Black, but only one of the six districts featured a majority-Black population.

The federal courts in 2022 sided with the plaintiffs’ claim that the plan did violate the Voting Rights Act and ordered the state legislature to redraw the congressional plan with a second Black-majority district.

The judges relied on an interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act from a 1986 Supreme Court decision in the case known as Thornburg v. Gingles. Under this interpretation, Section 2’s nondiscrimination requirement means that congressional districts must be drawn in a way that allows large, politically cohesive and compact racial minorities to be able to elect representatives of their choice.

In 2023, the Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in a similar racial gerrymandering case in Alabama.

Louisiana lawmakers redraw districts

Following the court order, the Louisiana state legislature passed Senate Bill 8 in January 2024, redrawing the congressional map and creating two districts where Black voters composed a substantial portion of the electorate in compliance with the Gingles ruling. This map was used in the 2024 congressional election and both Black-majority districts elected Democrats, while the other four districts elected Republicans.

These new congressional districts from Senate Bill 8 were challenged by a group of white voters in 2024 in a set of cases that became Louisiana v. Callais.

The plaintiffs argued that the Louisiana legislature’s drawing of districts based on race in Senate Bill 8 was in violation of the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause, which requires equal treatment of individuals by the government, and the 15th Amendment, which forbids denying the right to vote based on race.

Essentially, the plaintiffs claimed that the courts’ interpretation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional and that the use of race to create a majority-minority district is itself discriminatory. Similar arguments about the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause were also the basis of the Supreme Court’s recent decisions striking down race-based affirmative action in college admissions.

In 2024, a three-judge district court sided with the white plaintiffs in Louisiana v. Callais, with a 2-1 decision. The Black plaintiffs from the original case, and the state of Louisiana, appealed the case to the Supreme Court. The court originally heard the case at the end of the 2024-2025 term before ordering the case re-argued for 2025-2026.

High stakes and significant precedent

If the Supreme Court ultimately upholds the lower court decision in Louisiana v. Callais, deciding that Louisiana’s congressional districts are unconstitutional racial gerrymanders, it will have substantial impacts on minority representation. The decision would upend decades of precedent for Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

For 39 years, Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act has required redistricting institutions to consider racial and ethnic minority representation when devising congressional districts. Majority-minority districting is required when a state has large, compact and cohesive minority communities. Historically, some states have redistricted minority communities in ways that dilute their voting power, such as “cracking” a community into multiple districts where they compose a small percentage of the electorate.

Section 2 also provides voters and residents with a legal tool that has been used to challenge districts as discriminatory. Many voters and groups have used Section 2 successfully to challenge redistricting plans.

Section 2 has been the main legal tool for challenging racial discrimination in redistricting for the past decade. In 2013, the Supreme Court effectively ended the other major component of the Voting Rights Act, the preclearance provision, which required certain states to have changes to their elections laws approved by the federal government, including redistricting.

If the court overrules the current interpretation of Section 2, it would limit the legality of using race in redistricting, end requirements for majority-minority districts and eliminate the most common way to challenge discriminatory districting.

Additionally, because of the strong relationship between many minority communities and the Democratic party, the court’s decision has major implications for partisan control of the House of Representatives.

If Section 2 no longer required majority-minority districts, then Republicans could use the ruling to redraw congressional districts across the country to benefit their party. Politico reported that Democrats could lose as many as 19 House seats if the Supreme Court sides with the lower court.

Recent Supreme Court precedent gives conflicting signals as to how it will decide this case.

In 2023, the court rejected a challenge to Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act related to Alabama’s congressional districts. In 2024, the court overruled a lower court’s finding of racial vote dilution in South Carolina.

This job is key to all government shutdowns — and the crunch is coming sooner this time

Airports across the United States have been experiencing significant flight delays recently because of a shortage of air traffic controllers, who have been required to work without pay since a government shutdown began on Oct. 1, 2025.

Reports suggest employees have been calling in sick in increased numbers. And since there was already a shortage of controllers before the shutdown, the impact has been severe, with thousands of flights delayed or canceled since the shutdown began.

The Conversation U.S. asked Brian Strzempkowski and Melanie Dickman, aviation experts at The Ohio State University, to explain how the shutdown is affecting air travel, what that means for passengers and air safety, as well as the air traffic controller shortage that has been plaguing U.S. airports for years.

How is the shutdown affecting air traffic controllers?

Air traffic controllers are deemed essential workers, meaning they are still required to work while not receiving compensation – which they would typically then receive in a lump sum after the shutdown ends. President Donald Trump created some uncertainty around this by suggesting workers may not get their back pay without explicit authorization from Congress, despite having signed a law in his first term that makes it a legal requirement.

Working without regular pay, combined with the possibility that they won’t get paid at all, is resulting in real financial stress for air traffic controllers, who perform one of the most stressful jobs there is.

As a result, there have been reports of air traffic controllers calling in sick in large numbers. This happened in previous shutdowns as well. During the 2018-19 shutdown, for example, sickouts started to happen around the two-week mark, roughly when the first paycheck was missed. Controllers, airport security employees, and other essential workers were calling in sick often so they could work another part-time job to pay their bills.

In the current shutdown, this appears to be happening sooner, less than a week after it began. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said around 10 percent of the controller workforce is engaging in this practice and threatened to fire these “problem children.”

What does this mean for people about to take a flight?

Before the shutdown, there was already a critical shortage of air traffic controllers. Coupled with workers calling in sick in recent days, this has led to severe travel delays at many major airports, such as those in Atlanta and Denver, and regional ones, like those serving Burbank, California, and Daytona Beach, Florida.

A big question on travelers’ minds is whether this will affect air safety.

The air traffic control system is multi-layered and has redundancies built into it to ensure an incredibly safe environment. While controller shortages do begin to erode some of those redundancies, contingency plans are in place to help protect the system. For example, air traffic can be diverted away from affected locations or delayed, or the flight may even be be canceled before the plane leaves the gate.

As an example, Newark Liberty International Airport can accommodate approximately 80 aircraft departing or arriving per hour when the airport and airspace is fully operational. However, due to technical failures, staffing shortages and construction at the airport, capacity was limited to between 28 and 34 aircraft per hour in June 2025. Due to technology upgrades and procedural changes, that number was recently increased to between 68 and 72 aircraft per hour. By regulating the amount of traffic, the system can be protected to ensure the safety of every aircraft.

This was an example of high-level oversight in which the secretary of transportation was personally involved in seeking a solution to ensure air travel remained safe while trying to increase capacity.

How does the US keep air travel safe?

On a more day-to-day level, the Federal Aviation Administration relies on the Air Traffic Control System Command Center, located about 40 miles away from Washington, D.C. This facility oversees the entire national airspace system and essentially “controls” the controllers. Air traffic professionals monitor staffing at air traffic facilities, weather conditions, equipment failures and unexpected disruptions to the system.

When an incident arises, such as Burbank Airport recently reporting that no controllers were available, the command center issues an alert stating that any aircraft inbound to Burbank must divert to an alternate airport, and any aircraft that has not yet taken off will be held on the ground.

Staffing shortages at other air traffic control facilities may require alternate plans, such as transitioning workloads from one facility with fewer controllers, to another that is appropriately staffed. There is a wide range of tools that the Air Traffic Control System Command Center can utilize to protect the system, but it all stems from the idea of managing the capacity. Flight delays and cancellations, while disruptive to individual travelers, are actually good from a system perspective, because they prevent congestion in the airspace.

Why was there an air traffic controller shortage in the first place?

There has been a systemic problem with hiring of air traffic controllers for more than a decade.

Over the years, the FAA has fallen behind on training enough controllers to replace those who retire each year. In May 2025, we wrote about the FAA’s plan to utilize colleges across the country to provide the professional training for this career field. While it will take a little time for the students to matriculate through college and into the workforce, this plan will be a significant contributor to solving the controller shortage problem.

Meanwhile, the FAA Academy, which trains U.S. air traffic controllers, only has limited funding from the previous federal budget for current students. The shutdown means no new students can begin training. Depending on the length of the shutdown, the funding may run out as additional employees are furloughed. The ripple effects of a shutdown can remain for many months after the government reopens.

What’s the government doing to end the shortage?

In July, Congress authorized more than US$12 billion in funding to help modernize the air traffic control system.

Secretary Duffy is currently leading an effort to identify a contractor to implement the technology upgrades needed to modernize the system and make it more robust. Duffy has said an additional $19 billion investment will be needed to complete the task.

Trump saw this rival indicted — he almost certainly won't get a conviction

By Jay L. Zagorsky, Associate Professor, Questrom School of Business, Boston University.

With the indictment on Oct. 9, 2025, of New York Attorney General — and longtime Donald Trump adversary — Letitia James on two criminal counts related to loans for a home purchase, mortgage fraud is back in the news.

Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve governor, is also being investigated by the Department of Justice for allegedly making false statements when applying for a mortgage. Members of Trump’s Cabinet are accused of similar wrongdoings. Could any of these people go to prison?

Mortgage fraud is not a new problem. Subprime mortgage fraud fueled the 2008 financial meltdown, when large numbers of very risky mortgages defaulted. Mortgage fraud was also a key feature of the savings and loan crisis in the 1980s.

Mortgage applications are very long, so there’s plenty of opportunity to make mistakes. Plus, they require borrowers to declare that everything is “true, accurate, and complete.” Misrepresentation can trigger potentially large civil and criminal penalties.

As a business school professor, I was curious how many people are convicted of mortgage fraud today. After all, relatively few people went to jail for fraudulent loans back in 2008.

Since most mortgage fraud violates federal law, I looked at more than a decade of federal conviction data.

What I found was clear: Almost no one has gone to federal prison recently for lying on a mortgage application.

What is mortgage fraud?

Mortgage fraud is when someone intentionally misrepresents facts in order to obtain a property loan. People can lie about many things on a mortgage application, such as their income, assets or employment status, or whether they will occupy the home being purchased or rent it out.

Being caught lying to get a mortgage can be costly. The maximum federal sentence is 30 years, with fines of up to $1 million. Because more than a quarter of all mortgages are guaranteed by federal agencies, and many are acquired by quasi-government organizations like Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, most mortgage fraud is a federal crime.

However, just because there are laws on the books doesn’t mean they’re enforced. For example, I work in Boston, where for years jaywalking has been illegal — but as any visitor quickly notices, no one pays any attention to this rule.

How many people are convicted?

The U.S. Sentencing Commission provides detailed data on every person convicted of federal crimes since 2013. The database is large, since federal courts convict almost 70,000 people each year.

However, very few people are convicted of federal mortgage fraud. Just 38 people in the country were sentenced for such crimes in 2024, and among that small group, four of the convicted got no prison time. A year earlier, just 34 people were convicted and seven avoided prison.

Over the past dozen years, fewer than 3,000 people were convicted of federal mortgage fraud, and the number of people sentenced fell steadily each year.

Three thousand people are a tiny fraction of mortgages issued. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau estimates that almost 100 million new mortgage loans were written to purchase or refinance a home over the past 12 years. For those who like precision, 3,000 is only 0.003 percent.

The Sentencing Commission’s files also offer insight into who gets convicted of mortgage fraud. Three-quarters were men. More than 90 percent were U.S. citizens. The typical person convicted of mortgage fraud is a man in his late 40s with an associate degree, the data suggests.

The real penalty

While the maximum penalty is 30 years, almost no one serves that long a sentence. In 2024, the maximum sentence handed out was just 10 years. Since 2013, 15 percent of those convicted got no jail time. The average sentence for people who did get jail time was 21 months, which is less than two years behind bars.

Fines are also much lighter in practice than the maximum $1 million penalty. In 2024, the maximum fine passed down was a quarter-million dollars. Since 2013, the average person convicted of mortgage fraud paid a fine of less than $6,000, with over half of all those convicted paying no fine at all.

Now not paying a fine or only paying a small one doesn’t mean there’s no financial penalty. The courts required most of those convicted to make restitution. In 2024, half of all people convicted had to pay at least a half-million dollars to reimburse their victims, such as lending companies. Over the dozen years I looked at, the average person convicted paid $2 million in restitution for their misdeeds.

More lightning strikes than convictions

It’s impossible to know how common mortgage fraud really is. Some mortgage applications are rechecked in a “post-closing audit.” However, these audits happen within 90 days after the mortgage money is disbursed. Beyond that window, if a loan is paid back on time and without problems, there’s little incentive for a bank or mortgage service provider to recheck an applicant’s information.

What is clear is that while millions of mortgages are written each year, only a tiny fraction of mortgage recipients go to jail for fraud. One way to put this tiny fraction into perspective is to compare it with the National Weather Service estimates of the approximately 270 people hit by lightning yearly. Last year, lightning hit over seven times more people than the federal government convicted of mortgage fraud.

Years ago, I filled in a mortgage application to buy a home. I was consumed with dread wondering if any application mistake would result in my being sent to jail. After looking at the mortgage fraud conviction data, I should have been more worried about being hit by lightning.

How Trump's Supreme Court lackeys pushed us to the brink of one-man rule

By Graham G. Dodds, Professor of Political Science, Concordia University.

President Donald Trump set the tone for his second term by issuing 26 executive orders, four proclamations and 12 memorandums on his first day back in office. The barrage of unilateral presidential actions has not yet let up.

These have included Trump’s efforts to remove thousands of government workers and fire several prominent officials, such as members of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the chair of the Commission on Civil Rights. He has also attempted to shut down entire agencies, such as the Department of Education and the U.S. Agency for International Development.

For some scholars, these actions appear rooted in the psychology of an unrestrained politician with an overdeveloped ego.

But it’s more than that.

As a political science scholar who studies presidential power, I believe Trump’s recent actions mark the culmination of the unitary executive theory, which is perhaps the most contentious and consequential constitutional theory of the past several decades.

Potent presidency

In 2017, Trump complained that the scope of his power as president was limited: “You know, the saddest thing is that because I’m the president of the United States, I am not supposed to be involved with the Justice Department. I am not supposed to be involved with the FBI, I’m not supposed to be doing the kind of things that I would love to be doing. And I’m very frustrated by it.”

The unitary executive theory suggests that such limits wrongly curtail the powers of the chief executive.

Formed by conservative legal theorists in the 1980s to help President Ronald Reagan roll back liberal policies, the unitary executive theory promises to radically expand presidential power.

There is no widely agreed upon definition of the theory. And even its proponents disagree about what it says and what it might justify. But in its most basic version, the unitary executive theory claims that whatever the federal government does that is executive in nature — from implementing and enforcing laws to managing most of what the federal government does — the president alone should personally control it.

This means the president should have total control over the entire executive branch, with its dozens of major governmental institutions and millions of employees. Put simply, the theory says the president should be able to issue orders to subordinates and to fire them at will.

The president could boss around the FBI or order the U.S. attorney general to investigate his political opponents, as Trump has done. The president could issue signing statements — a written pronouncement — that reinterpret or ignore parts of the laws, like George W. Bush did in 2006 to circumvent a ban on torture.

The president could control independent agencies such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Consumer Product Safety Commission. The president might be able to force the Federal Reserve to change interest rates, as Trump has suggested. And the president might possess inherent power to wage war as he sees fit without a formal authorization from Congress, as officials argued during Bush’s presidency.

Constitutionally questionable

A theory is one thing. But if it gains the official endorsement of the Supreme Court, it can become governing orthodoxy. It appears to many observers and scholars that Trump’s actions have intentionally invited court cases by which he hopes the judiciary will embrace the theory and thus permit him to do even more. And the current Supreme Court appears ready to grant that wish.

Until recently, the judiciary tended to indirectly address the claims that now appear more formally as the unitary executive theory.

During the country’s first two centuries, courts touched on aspects of the theory in cases such as Kendall v. U.S. in 1838, which limited presidential control of the postmaster general, and Myers v. U.S. in 1926, which held that the president could remove a postmaster in Oregon.

In 1935, in Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the high court unanimously held that Congress could limit the president’s ability to fire a commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission. And in Morrison v. Olson the court in 1988 upheld the ability of Congress to limit the president’s ability to fire an independent counsel.

Some of those decisions aligned with some unitary executive claims, but others directly repudiated them.

Warming up

In a series of cases over the past 15 years, the Supreme Court has moved in an unambiguously unitarian, pro-presidential direction. In these cases, the court has struck down statutory limits on the president’s ability to remove federal officials, enabling much greater presidential control.

These decisions clearly suggest that long-standing, anti-unitarian landmark decisions such as Humphrey’s are on increasingly thin ice. In fact, in Justice Clarence Thomas’ 2019 concurring opinion in Seila Law LLC v. CFPB, where the court ruled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s leadership structure was unconstitutional, he articulated his desire to “repudiate” the “erroneous precedent” of Humphrey’s.

Several cases from the court’s emergency docket, or shadow docket, in recent months indicate that other justices share that desire. Such cases do not require full arguments but can indicate where the court is headed.

In Trump v. Wilcox, Trump v. Boyle and Trump v. Slaughter, all from 2025, the court upheld Trump’s firing of officials from the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board, the Consumer Product Safety Commission and the Federal Trade Commission.

Previously, these officials had appeared to be protected from political interference.

Total control

Remarks by conservative justices in those cases indicated that the court will soon reassess anti-unitary precedents.

In Trump v. Boyle, Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote, “whether this Court will narrow or overrule a precedent … there is at least a fair prospect (not certainty, but at least a reasonable prospect) that we will do so.” And in her dissent in Trump v. Slaughter, Justice Elena Kagan said the conservative majority was “raring” to overturn Humphrey’s and finally officially embrace the unitary executive.

In short, the writing is on the wall, and Humphrey’s may soon go the way of Roe v. Wade and other landmark decisions that guided American life for decades.

As for what judicial endorsement of the unitary executive theory could mean in practice, Trump seems to hope it will mean total control and hence the ability to eradicate the so-called “deep state.” Other conservatives hope it will diminish the government’s regulatory role.

Kagan recently warned it could mean the end of administrative governance — the ways that the federal government provides services, oversees businesses and enforces the law — as we know it:

“Humphrey’s undergirds a significant feature of American governance: bipartisan administrative bodies carrying out expertise-based functions with a measure of independence from presidential control. Congress created them … out of one basic vision. It thought that in certain spheres of government, a group of knowledgeable people from both parties – none of whom a President could remove without cause – would make decisions likely to advance the long-term public good.”

If the Supreme Court officially makes the chief executive a unitary executive, the advancement of the public good may depend on little more than the whims of the president, a state of affairs normally more characteristic of dictatorship than democracy.

This utter Trump toady hasn't reached the depth of his most notorious predecessor — yet

By Douglas M. Charles, Professor of History, Penn State.

Three converging events in the 1970s — the Watergate scandal, the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from the Vietnam War and revelations that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had abused his power to persecute people and organizations he viewed as political enemies — destroyed what formerly had been near-automatic trust in the presidency and the FBI.

In response, Congress enacted reforms designed to ensure that legal actions by the Department of Justice and the FBI, the department’s main investigative arm, would be insulated from politics. These included stronger congressional oversight, a 10-year term limit for FBI directors and investigative guidelines issued by the attorney general.

Some of these measures, however, were tenuous. For example, Justice Department leaders could alter FBI investigative guidelines at any time.

Donald Trump’s first presidential term seriously tested DOJ and FBI independence, notably, when Trump fired FBI Director James Comey in May 2017. Trump claimed Comey mishandled a 2016 probe into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s private email server, but Comey also refused to pledge loyalty to the president.

Now, in Trump’s second term, prior guardrails have vanished. The president has installed loyalists at the DOJ and FBI who are dedicated to implementing his political interests.

As a historian of the FBI, I recognize the FBI has had only one other overtly political director in the past 50 years: L. Patrick Gray, who served for a year under President Richard Nixon. Gray was held accountable after he tried to help Nixon end the FBI’s Watergate investigation. Whether Trump’s current director, Kash Patel, has more staying power is unclear.

After Hoover

Ever since Hoover’s death in 1972, presidents have typically nominated independent candidates with bipartisan support and law enforcement roots to run the FBI. Most nominees have been judges, senior prosecutors or former FBI or Justice Department officials.

While Hoover publicly proclaimed his FBI independent of politics, he sometimes did the bidding of presidents, including Nixon. Still, Nixon felt that Hoover had not been compliant enough, so in 1972 he selected Gray, a longtime friend and assistant attorney general, to be Hoover’s successor.

Gray took steps to move the bureau out of Hoover’s shadow. He relaxed strict dress codes for agents, recruited female agents and pointedly hired people from outside the agency — who were not indoctrinated in the Hoover culture — for administrative posts.

Gray asserted his authority with blunt force. FBI agents at field offices and at headquarters who resisted Gray’s power were censured, fired or transferred. Other senior officials opted to leave, including the bureau’s top fraud expert, cryptanalyst and skyjacking expert, and the head of its Crime Information Center.

Agents regarded these moves as a purge, and press reports claimed that bureau morale was at an all-time low, charges that Gray denied. According to FBI Associate Director Mark Felt, who became Gray’s second in command, 10 of 16 top FBI officials chose to retire, most of them notable Hoover men.

Gray surrounded himself with what journalist Jack Anderson called “sharp, but inexperienced, modish, young aides.” FBI insiders called these new hires the “Mod Squad,” a reference to the counterculture TV police series.

Gray helps Nixon

In contrast to Hoover, who had rarely left FBI headquarters and publicly avoided politics, Gray openly stumped for Nixon in the 1972 campaign. He was so rarely spotted at FBI headquarters that bureau insiders dubbed him “Two-Day Gray.” At the request of Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, Gray told field offices to help Nixon campaign surrogates by providing local crime information.

Gray cooperated with Nixon to stymie the FBI’s investigation of the 1972 Watergate break-in and the ensuing cover-up. He provided raw FBI investigative documents to the White House and burned documents from Watergate conspirator E. Howard Hunt’s White House safe.

When Nixon had CIA Deputy Director Vernon Walters ask Gray, in the name of national security, to halt the FBI’s investigation, Felt and other agency insiders demanded that Gray get this order in writing. The White House backed down, but Nixon’s directive had been recorded. That tape became the so-called “smoking gun” evidence of a Watergate cover-up.

Felt, in classic Hoover fashion, then leaked information to discredit Gray, hoping to replace him. Gray resigned in disgrace.

While Felt never got the top job, he is now remembered as the prized anonymous source “Deep Throat,” who helped Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in their Pulitzer Prize-winning Watergate investigation. But it was internal FBI resistance, from Felt and agents at lower levels, that led to Gray’s departure.

Political from the start

Campaigning in 2024, Donald Trump vowed to “root out” his political opponents from government. Realizing he was a target because of his investigation of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, FBI director Christopher Wray, whom Trump nominated in 2017, resigned in December 2024 before Trump could fire him.

In Wray’s place Trump nominated loyalist Kash Patel, a lawyer who worked as a low-level federal prosecutor from 2013 to 2016 and then as a deputy national security appointee during Trump’s first term.

Patel publicly supported Trump’s vow to purge enemies and claimed the FBI was part of a “deep state” that was resistant to Trump. Patel promised to help dismantle this disloyal core and to “rebuild public trust” in the FBI.

Even before Patel was confirmed on Feb. 20, 2025, in an historically close 51-49 vote, the Justice Department began transferring thousands of agents away from national security matters to immigration duty, which was not a traditional FBI focus.

Hours after taking office, Patel shifted 1,500 agents and staff from FBI headquarters to field offices, claiming that he was streamlining operations.

Patel installed outsider Dan Bongino as deputy director. Bongino, another Trump loyalist, was a former New York City policeman and Secret Service agent who had become a full-time political commentator. He embraced a conspiracy theory positing the FBI was “irredeemably corrupt” and advocated “an absolute housecleaning.”

In February, New York City Special Agent in Charge James Dennehy told FBI staff “to dig in” and oppose expected and unprecedented political intrusions. He was forced out by March.

Patel then used lie-detector tests and carried out a string of high-profile firings of agents who had investigated either Trump or the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Some agents who were fired had been photographed kneeling during a 2020 racial justice protest in Washington, D.C. — an action they said they took to defuse tensions with protesters.

In response, three fired agents are suing Patel for what they call a political retribution campaign. Ex-NFL football player Charles Tillman, who became an FBI agent in 2017, resigned in September 2025 in protest of Trump policies. Once again, there are assertions of a purge.

Will Patel be held accountable?

Patel’s actions as director so far illustrate that he is willing to use his position to implement the president’s political designs. When Gray tried to do this in the 1970s, accountability still held force, and Gray left office in disgrace. Gray participated in a cover-up of illegal behavior that became the subject of an impeachment proceeding. What Patel has done to date, at least what we know about, is not the equivalent — so far.

Today, Patel’s tenure rests solely upon pleasing the president. If formal accountability — a key element of a democracy — is to survive, it will have to come from Congress, whose Republican majority has so far not exercised its power to hold Trump or his administration accountable. Short of that, perhaps internal resistance within the administration or pressure from the public and the media might serve the oversight function that Congress, over the past eight months, has abrogated.

Our greatest hero would have no place in Hegseth's army (though he was with him on beards)

By Maurizio Valsania, Professor of American History, Università di Torino.

As he paced across a stage at a military base in Quantico, Virginia, on Sept. 30, 2025, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told the hundreds of U.S. generals and admirals he had summoned from around the world that he aimed to reshape the military’s culture.

Ten new directives, he said, would strip away what he called “woke garbage” and restore what he termed a “warrior ethos.”

The phrase “warrior ethos” — a mix of combativeness, toughness and dominance — has become central to Hegseth’s political identity. In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, he insisted that the inclusion of women in combat roles had drained that ethos, leaving the U.S. military less lethal.

In his address, Hegseth outlined what he sees as the qualities and virtues the American soldier — and especially senior officers — should embody.

On physical fitness and appearance, he was blunt: “It’s completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals in the halls of the Pentagon and leading commands around the country and the world.”

He then turned from body shape to grooming.

“No more beardos,” Hegseth declared. “The era of rampant and ridiculous shaving profiles is done.”

As a historian of George Washington, I can say that the commander in chief of the Continental Army, the nation’s first military leader, would have agreed with some of Secretary Hegseth’s directives — but only some.

Washington’s overall vision of a military leader could not be further from Hegseth’s vision of the tough warrior.

280 pounds – and trusted

For starters, Washington would have found the concern with “fat generals” irrelevant. Some of the most capable officers in the Continental Army were famously overweight.

His trusted chief of artillery, Gen. Henry Knox, weighed around 280 pounds. The French officer Marquis de Chastellux described Knox as “a man of thirty-five, very fat, but very active, and of a gay and amiable character.”

Others were not far behind. Chastellux also described Gen. William Heath as having “a noble and open countenance.” His bald head and “corpulence,” he added, gave him “a striking resemblance to Lord Granby,” the celebrated British hero of the Seven Years’ War. Granby was admired for his courage, generosity and devotion to his men.

Washington never saw girth as disqualifying. He repeatedly entrusted Knox with the most demanding assignments: designing fortifications, commanding artillery and orchestrating the legendary “noble train of artillery” that brought cannon from Fort Ticonderoga to Boston.

When he became president, after the Revolution, Washington appointed Knox the first secretary of war — a sign of enduring confidence in his judgment and integrity.

Beards: Outward appearance reflects inner discipline

As for beards, Washington would have shared Hegseth’s concern – though for very different reasons.

He disliked facial hair on himself and on others, including his soldiers. To Washington, a beard made a man look unkempt and slovenly, masking the higher emotions that civility required.

Beards were not signs of virility but of disorder. In his words, they made a man “unsoldierlike.” Every soldier, he insisted, must appear in public “as decent as his circumstances will permit.” Each was required to have “his beard shaved — hair combed — face washed — and cloaths put on in the best manner in his power.”

For Washington, this was no trivial matter. Outward appearance reflected inner discipline. He believed that a well-ordered body produced a well-ordered mind.

To him, neatness was the visible expression of self-command, the foundation of every other virtue a soldier and leader should possess.

That is why he equated beards and other forms of unkemptness with “indecency.” His lifelong battle was against indecency in all its forms. “Indecency,” he once wrote, was “utterly inconsistent with that delicacy of character, which an officer ought under every circumstance to preserve.”

More statesman than warrior

By “delicacy,” Washington meant modesty, tact and self-awareness — the poise that set genuine leaders apart from individuals governed by passions.

For him, a soldier’s first victory was always over himself.

“A man attentive to his duty,” he wrote, “feels something within him that tells him the first measure is dictated by that prudence which ought to govern all men who commits a trust to another.”

In other words, Washington became a soldier not because he was hotheaded or drawn to the thrill of combat, but because he saw soldiering as the highest exercise of discipline, patience and composure. His “warrior ethos” was moral before it was martial.

Washington’s ideal military leader was more statesman than warrior. He believed that military power must be exercised under moral constraint, within the bounds of public accountability, and always with an eye to preserving liberty rather than winning personal glory.

In his mind, the army was not a caste apart but an instrument of the republic — an arena in which self-command and civic virtue were tested. Later generations would call him the model of the “republican general”: a commander whose authority rested not on bluster or bravado but on composure, prudence and restraint.

That vision was the opposite of the one Pete Hegseth performed at Quantico.

Discipline and steadiness, not fury and bravado

The “warrior ethos” Hegseth celebrates — loud, performative — was precisely what Washington believed a soldier must overcome.

In March 1778, after Marquis de Lafayette abandoned an impossible winter expedition to Canada, Washington praised caution over juvenile bravado.

“Every one will applaud your prudence in renouncing a project in which you would vainly have attempted physical impossibilities,” he wrote from the snows of Valley Forge.

For Washington, valor was never the same as recklessness. Success, he believed, depended on foresight, not fury, and certainly not bravado.

The first commander in chief cared little for waistlines or whiskers, in the end; what concerned him was discipline of the mind. What counted was not the cut of a man’s figure but the steadiness of his judgment.

Washington’s own “warrior ethos” was grounded in decency, temperance and the capacity to act with courage without surrendering to rage. That ideal built an army — and in time, a republic.

How a purple gender unicorn summoned the ghost of Joe McCarthy

By Laura Gail Miller, Ed.D. Candidate in Educational Organizational Learning and Leadership, Seattle University.

Texas A&M University announced the resignation of its president, Mark A. Welsh III, on Sept. 18, 2025, following a controversial decision earlier in the month to fire a professor over a classroom exchange with a student about gender identity.

The university — a public school in College Station, Texas — fired Melissa McCoul, a children’s literature professor, on Sept. 9. McCoul’s dismissal happened after a student secretly filmed video as the professor taught a class and discussed a children’s book that includes the image of a purple “gender unicorn,” a cartoon image that is sometimes used to teach about gender identity.

The student questioned whether it was “legal” to be teaching about gender identity, given President Donald Trump’s January 2025 executive order — which is not legally binding — that said there are only two genders, male and female.

The video went viral, triggering backlash from Republican lawmakers who called for McCoul to be fired and praised the fact that the school also demoted the College of Arts and Science’s dean and revoked administrative duties from a department head.

Texas A&M officials have said McCoul was fired because her course content was not consistent with the published course description. McCoul is appealing her firing and is considering legal action against the school.

Academic freedom advocates have condemned McCoul’s firing and say it raises questions about whether professors should be fired for addressing politically charged topics.

As a history educator researching curriculum design, civics education and generational dynamics, I study how classroom discussions often mirror larger cultural and political conflicts.

The Texas A&M case is far from unprecedented. The Cold War offers an example of another politically contentious time in American history when people questioned if and how politics should influence what gets taught in the classroom — and tried to restrict what teachers say.

Educators under suspicion

During the Cold War — a period of geopolitical tension between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that came after World War II and lasted until 1991 — fears of communist infiltration spread widely across American society, including the country’s schools.

One particularly contentious period was in the late 1940s and 1950s, during what is often referred to as the McCarthy era. The era is named after Wisconsin Sen. Joseph McCarthy, a Republican who led the charge on accusing government employees and others — often without evidence — of being communists.

Beginning in the late 1940s, local school boards, state legislatures and Congress launched investigations into teachers and professors across the country accused of harboring communist sympathies. This often led to the teachers being blacklisted and fired.

More than 20 states passed loyalty oath laws requiring public employees, including educators, to swear that they were not members of the Communist Party or affiliated groups.

In California, for example, the 1950 Levering Act mandated a loyalty oath for all state employees, including professors at public universities. Some employees refused to sign the oath, and 31 University of California professors were fired.

And in New York, the Feinberg Law, approved in 1949, authorized school districts to fire teachers who were members of “subversive organizations.” More than 250 educators were fired or forced to resign under the Feinberg Law and related anti-subversion policies between 1948 and 1953.

These laws had a chilling impact on academic life and learning.

Faculty, including those who were not under investigation, and students alike avoided discussing controversial topics, such as labor organizing and civil rights, in the classroom.

This pervasive climate of censorship also made it challenging for educators to fully engage students in critical, meaningful learning.

Supreme Court steps in

By the mid-1950s, questions about the constitutionality of these laws — and the extent of professors’ academic freedom and First Amendment right to freedom of speech — reached the Supreme Court.

In one such case, 1957’s Sweezy v. New Hampshire, Louis C. Weyman, the New Hampshire attorney general, questioned Paul Sweezy, a Marxist economist, about the content of a university lecture he delivered at the University of New Hampshire.

Weyman wanted to determine whether Sweezy had advocated for Marxism or said that socialism was inevitable in the country. Sweezy refused to answer Weyman’s questions, citing his constitutional rights. The Supreme Court ruled in Sweezy’s favor, emphasizing the importance of academic freedom and the constitutional limits on state interference in university teaching.

The Supreme Court considered another case, Keyishian v. Board of Regents, in 1967. With the Cold War still ongoing, this case challenged New York’s Feinberg Law, which required educators to disavow membership in communist organizations.

In striking down the law, the court declared that academic freedom is “a special concern of the First Amendment.” The ruling emphasized that vague or broad restrictions on what teachers can say or believe create an unconstitutional, “chilling effect” on the classroom.

While these cases did not remove all political pressures on what teachers could discuss in class, they set significant constitutional limits on state efforts to regulate classroom speech, particularly at public institutions.

Recurring tensions

There are several important differences between the McCarthy era and current times.

For starters, conservative concern centered primarily on the spread of communism during the McCarthy era. Today, debates often involve conservative critiques of how topics such as gender identity, race and other cultural issues — sometimes grouped under the term “woke” — are addressed in schools and society.

Second, in the 1950s and 60s, external pressures on academic freedom often came in the form of legal mandates.

Today, the political landscape in academia is more complex and fast-paced, with pressures emanating from both the public and federal government.

Viral outrage, administrative investigations and threats to cut state or federal funding to schools can all contribute to an intensifying climate of fear of retribution that constrains educators’ ability to teach freely.

Despite these differences, the underlying dynamic between the two time periods is similar — in both cases, political polarization intensifies public scrutiny of educators.

Like loyalty oaths in the 1950s, today’s political controversies create a climate in which many teachers feel pressure to avoid contentious topics altogether. Even when no laws are passed, the possibility of complaints, investigations or firings can shape classroom choices.

Just as Sweezy and Keyishian defined the boundaries of state power in the 1950s and 60s, potential legal challenges like the appeal from the fired Texas A&M professor may eventually lead to court rulings that clarify how people’s First Amendment protections apply in today’s disputes over curriculum and teaching.

Whether these foundational protections will endure under the Supreme Court’s current and future makeup remains an open question.

AI Charlie Kirk tributes are a new version of this old response to violent American deaths

By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton.

An AI-generated image of Charlie Kirk embracing Jesus. Another of Kirk posing with angel wings and halo. Then there’s the one of Kirk standing with George Floyd at the gates of heaven.

When prominent political or cultural figures die in the U.S., the remembrance of their life often veers into hagiography. And that’s what’s been happening since the gruesome killing of conservative activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk.

The word hagiography comes from the Christian tradition of writing about saints’ lives, but the practice often spills into secular politics and media, falling under the umbrella of what’s called, in sociology, the “sacralization of politics.” Assassinations and violent deaths, in particular, tend to be interpreted in sacred terms: The person becomes a secular martyr who made a heroic sacrifice. They are portrayed as morally righteous and spiritually pure.

This is, to some degree, a natural part of mourning. But taking a closer look at why this happens – and how the internet accelerates it – offers some important insights into politics in the U.S. today.

From presidents to protest leaders

The construction of Ronald Reagan’s post-presidential image is a prime example of this process.

After his presidency, Republican leaders steadily polished his memory into a symbol of conservative triumph, downplaying scandals such as Iran-Contra or Reagan’s early skepticism of civil rights. Today, Reagan is remembered less as a complex politician and more as a saint of free markets and patriotism.

Among liberals, Martin Luther King Jr. experienced a comparable transformation, though it took a different form. King’s critiques of capitalism, militarism and structural racism are often downplayed in most mainstream remembrances, leaving behind a softer image of peaceful dreamer. The annual holiday, scores of street re-namings and public murals honor him, but they also tame his legacy into a universally palatable story of unity.

Even more contested figures such as John F. Kennedy or Abraham Lincoln show the same pattern. Their assassinations were followed by waves of mourning that elevated them into near-mythic status.

Decades after Kennedy’s death, his portrait hung in the homes of many American Catholics, often adjacent to religious iconography such as Virgin Mary statuettes. Lincoln, meanwhile, became a kind of civic saint: His memorial in Washington, D.C., looks like a temple, with words from his speeches etched into the walls.

Why it happens, what it means

The hagiography of public figures serves several purposes. It taps into deep human needs, helping grieving communities manage loss by providing moral clarity in the face of chaos.

It also allows political movements to consolidate power by sanctifying their leaders and discouraging dissent. And it reassures followers that their cause is righteous – even cosmic.

In a polarized environment, the elevation of a figure into a saint does more than honor the individual. It turns a political struggle into a sacred one. If you see someone as a martyr, then opposition to their movement is not merely disagreement, it is desecration. In this sense, hagiography is not simply about remembering the dead: It mobilizes the living.

But there are risks. Once someone is framed as a saint, criticism becomes taboo. The more sacralized a figure, the harder it becomes to discuss their flaws, mistakes or controversial actions. Hagiography flattens history and narrows democratic debate.

After Queen Elizabeth II’s death in 2022, for example, public mourning in the U.K. and abroad quickly elevated her legacy into a symbol of stability and continuity, with mass tributes, viral imagery and global ceremonies transforming a complex reign into a simplified story of devotion and service.

It also fuels polarization. If one side’s leader is a martyr, then the other side must be villainous. The framing is simple but powerful.

In Kirk’s case, many of his supporters described him as a truth seeker whose death underscored a deeper moral message. At Kirk’s memorial service in Arizona, President Donald Trump called him a “martyr for American freedom.” On social media, Turning Point USA and Kirk’s official X account described him as “America’s greatest martyr to free speech.”

In doing so, they elevated his death as symbolic of larger battles over censorship. By emphasizing the fact that he died while simply speaking, they also reinforced the idea that liberals and the left are more likely to resort to violence to silence their ideological enemies, even as evidence shows otherwise.

Digital supercharge

Treating public figures like saints is not new, but the speed and scale of the process is. Over the past two decades, social media has turned hagiography from a slow cultural drift into a rapid-fire production cycle.

Memes, livestreams and hashtags now allow anyone to canonize someone they admire. When NBA Hall-of-Famer Kobe Bryant died in 2020, social media was flooded within hours with devotional images, murals and video compilations that cast him as more than an athlete: He became a spiritual icon of perseverance.

Similarly, after Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, the “Notorious RBG” meme ecosystem instantly expanded to include digital portraits and merchandise that cast her as a saintly defender of justice.

The same dynamics surrounded Charlie Kirk. Within hours of his assassination, memes appeared of Kirk draped in an American flag, being carried by Jesus.

In the days after his death, AI-generated audio clips of Kirk styled as “sermons” began circulating online, while supporters shared Bible verses that they claimed matched the exact timing of his passing. Together, these acts cast his death in religious terms: It wasn’t just a political assassination — it was a moment of spiritual significance.

Such clips and verses spread effortlessly across social media, where narratives about public figures can solidify within hours, often before facts are confirmed, leaving little room for nuance or investigation.

Easy-to-create memes and videos also enable ordinary users to participate in a sacralization process, making it more of a grassroots effort than something that’s imposed from the top down.

In other words, digital culture transforms what was once the slow work of monuments and textbooks into a living, flexible folk religion of culture and politics.

Toward clearer politics

Hagiography will not disappear. It meets emotional and political needs too effectively. But acknowledging its patterns helps citizens and journalists resist its distortions. The task is not to deny grief or admiration but to preserve space for nuance and accountability.

In the U.S., where religion, culture and politics frequently intertwine, recognizing that sainthood in politics is always constructed — and often strategic — can better allow people to honor loss without letting mythmaking dictate the terms of public life.

  • Arthur “Art” Jipson is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work at the University of Dayton. For 11 years he was the Director of the Criminal Justice Studies program.

This Trump move should terrify us — because it's been done before

By Betty Medsger, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, San Francisco State University.

As a candidate last year, Donald Trump promised retribution against his perceived enemies. As president, he is doing that.

At the Department of Justice, a “Weaponization Working Group” has a long list of Trump’s perceived enemies to investigate. At the FBI, Director Kash Patel has conducted a political purge, firing the highest officials at the bureau and thousands of FBI agents who investigated alleged crimes by Trump as well as investigated participants in the Jan. 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riots.

It marks the first time since J. Edgar Hoover’s 48-year reign as FBI director that the FBI has targeted massive numbers of people perceived to be political enemies.

Trump’s recent fury showed how much he expects top officials in federal law enforcement to carry out his retribution.

He was enraged when Erik S. Siebert, the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, decided there was insufficient evidence to charge two people Trump regards as enemies: former FBI director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.

“I want him out,” Trump angrily told reporters on Sept. 19, 2025. Siebert resigned, although Trump claimed he had fired him.

Trump’s most recent demands for retribution came soon after top adviser Stephen Miller’s vow to prosecute leftists in the “vast domestic terror movement” — that the administration blames, without evidence, for Charlie Kirk’s assassination — using “every resource we have.”

As director of the FBI, Patel will likely be in charge of the investigations of perceived enemies generated by the DoJ and the White House. He already has sacrificed the bureau’s independence, making it essentially an arm of the White House.

This isn’t the first time an FBI director has been driven by a desire to suppress the rights of people perceived to be political enemies. Hoover, director until his death in 1972, operated a secret FBI within the FBI that he used to destroy people and organizations whose political opinions he opposed.

A burglary’s revelations

Hoover’s secret FBI was revealed, beginning in 1971, when a group of people called the Citizens Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into an FBI office and removed files.

This group suspected Hoover’s FBI was illegally suppressing dissent. Given Hoover’s enormous power, they thought it was unlikely any government agency would investigate the FBI. They decided documentary evidence was needed to convince the public that suppression of dissent — what they considered a crime against democracy — was taking place.

In my book The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover’s Secret FBI, I describe how these eight people decided to risk imprisonment and break into the FBI’s office in Media, Pennsylvania.

The files they stole and made public confirmed the FBI was suppressing dissent. But they revealed much more: Hoover’s secret FBI and the startling crimes he had committed. These secret operations had become so extensive that they eventually diminished the bureau’s capacity to carry out its core mission: law enforcement.

Hoover, one of the most admired and powerful officials in the country, had secretly conducted a wide array of operations directed against people whose political opinions he opposed.

The files revealed that agents were instructed to “enhance paranoia” and make activists think there was an FBI agent “behind every mailbox.” Questioning Vietnam war policy could cause anyone, even a U.S. senator, Democrat J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, to be placed under FBI surveillance.

It was the revelation of Hoover’s worst operations, COINTELPRO — what Hoover called the Counter Intelligence Program — that made Americans demand investigation and reform of the FBI. Until the mid-1970s, there had never been oversight of the FBI and little coverage of the FBI by journalists, except for laudatory stories.

‘Almost beyond belief’

The COINTELPRO operations ranged from crude to cruel to murderous.

Antiwar activists were given oranges injected with powerful laxatives. Agents hired prostitutes known to have venereal disease to infect campus antiwar leaders.

Many of the COINTELPRO operations were almost beyond belief:

  • The project conducted against the entire University of California system lasted more than 30 years. Hundreds of agents and informants were assigned in 1960 to spy on each of Berkeley’s 5,365 faculty members by reading their mail, observing them and searching for derogatory information — “illicit love affairs, homosexuality, sexual perversion, excessive drinking, other instances of conduct reflecting mental instability.”
  • An informant trained to give perjured testimony led to the murder conviction of Black Panther Geronimo Pratt, a decorated Vietnam War veteran. He served 27 years in prison for a murder he did not commit. He was exonerated in 1997 when a judge found that the FBI concealed evidence that would have proved Pratt’s innocence.
  • The bureau spied for years on Martin Luther King Jr. After it was announced King would receive the 1964 Nobel Peace Prize, Hoover approved a particularly sinister plan that was designed to cause King to commit suicide.
  • What one historian called Hoover’s “savage hatred” of Black people led to the FBI’s worst operation, a collaboration with the Chicago police that resulted in the killing of Chicago Black Panther Fred Hampton, shot dead by police as he slept. An FBI informant had been hired to ingratiate himself with Hampton. He came to know Hampton and the apartment very well. He drew a map of the apartment for the police on which he located “Fred’s bed.” After the killing, Hoover thanked the informant for his role in this successful operation. Enclosed in his letter was a cash bonus.
  • Actress Jean Seberg was the victim of a 1970 COINTELPRO operation. In a memo, Hoover wrote that she had donated to the Panthers and “should be neutralized.” Seberg was pregnant, and the plot, approved personally by Hoover — as many COINTELPRO plots were — called for the FBI to tell a gossip columnist that a Black Panther was the father. Agents gave the false rumor to a Los Angeles Times gossip columnist. Without using Seberg’s name, the columnist’s story made it unmistakable that she was writing about Seberg. Three days later, Seberg gave birth prematurely to a stillborn white baby girl. Every year on the anniversary of her dead baby’s birth, Seberg attempted suicide. She succeeded in August 1979.

There was wide public interest in these revelations about COINTELPRO, many of which emerged in 1975 during hearings conducted by the Church Committee, the Senate committee chaired by Sen. Frank Church, an Idaho Democrat.

At this first-ever congressional investigation of the FBI and other intelligence agencies, former FBI officials testified under oath about bureau policies under Hoover.

One of them, William Sullivan, who had helped carry out the plots against King, was asked whether officials considered the legal and ethical issues involved in their operations. He responded:

“Never once did I hear anybody, including myself, raise the questions: ‘Is this course of action which we have agreed upon lawful? Is it legal? Is it ethical or moral?’ We never gave any thought to that line of questioning because we were just pragmatic. The one thing we were concerned about: will this course of action work, will it get us what we want.”

Ethical? Legal?

The future of the new FBI under Patel and Trump is unclear, especially in light of the president’s known tolerance for lawlessness, even violence. His gifts of clemency and pardons to Jan. 6 rioters are evidence of that.

As for Patel, fired FBI officials stated in their recent lawsuit over those dismissals that Patel had told one of them it was “likely illegal” to fire agents because of the cases they had worked on, but that he was powerless to resist Trump’s demands.

The recent statements from both Trump and top aide Miller suggest the FBI’s independence, and broader constitutional requirements that the administration remain faithful to the law, are meaningless to them. They suggest that, like Hoover, they would criminalize dissent.

What will happen at the FBI after the internal purge ends? Will retribution fever wane? Will Patel refocus on the bureau’s chief mission, law enforcement? And will the questions asked in Congress in 1975, as the bureau was being forced to reject Hoover’s worst practices, be asked now: Is what we are doing ethical? Is it legal?

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.

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.

How we know the right is more deadly than the left

By Art Jipson, Associate Professor of Sociology, and Paul J. Becker, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Dayton.

After the Sept. 10, 2025, assassination of conservative political activist Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump claimed that radical leftist groups foment political violence in the U.S., and “they should be put in jail.”

“The radical left causes tremendous violence,” he said, asserting that “they seem to do it in a bigger way” than groups on the right.

Top presidential adviser Stephen Miller also weighed in, saying left-wing political organizations constitute “a vast domestic terror movement.”

“We are going to use every resource we have … throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again,” Miller said.

But policymakers and the public need reliable evidence and actual data to understand the reality of politically motivated violence. From our research on extremism, it’s clear that the president’s and Miller’s assertions about political violence from the left are not based on facts.

Based on our own research and a review of related work, we can confidently say that most domestic terrorists in the U.S. are politically on the right, and right-wing attacks account for the vast majority of fatalities from domestic terrorism.

Political violence rising

The understanding of political violence is complicated by differences in definitions and the recent Department of Justice removal of an important government-sponsored study of domestic terrorists.

Political violence in the U.S. has risen in recent months and takes forms that go unrecognized. During the 2024 election cycle, nearly half of all states reported threats against election workers, including social media death threats, intimidation and doxing.

Kirk’s assassination illustrates the growing threat. The man charged with the murder, Tyler Robinson, allegedly planned the attack in writing and online.

This follows other politically motivated killings, including the June assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. and former House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband.

These incidents reflect a normalization of political violence. Threats and violence are increasingly treated as acceptable for achieving political goals, posing serious risks to democracy and society.

Defining ‘political violence’

This article relies on some of our research on extremism, other academic research, federal reports, academic datasets and other monitoring to assess what is known about political violence.

Support for political violence in the U.S. is spreading from extremist fringes into the mainstream, making violent actions seem normal. Threats can move from online rhetoric to actual violence, posing serious risks to democratic practices.

But different agencies and researchers use different definitions of political violence, making comparisons difficult.

The FBI and Department of Homeland Security define domestic violent extremism as threats involving actual violence. They do not investigate people in the U.S. for constitutionally protected speech, activism or ideological beliefs.

Domestic violent extremism is defined by the FBI and DHS as violence or credible threats of violence intended to influence government policy or intimidate civilians for political or ideological purposes. This general framing, which includes diverse activities under a single category, guides investigations and prosecutions.

Datasets compiled by academic researchers use narrower and more operational definitions. The Global Terrorism Database counts incidents that involve intentional violence with political, social or religious motivation.

These differences mean that the same incident may or may not appear in a dataset, depending on the rules applied.

The FBI and DHS emphasize that these distinctions are not merely academic. Labeling an event “terrorism” rather than a “hate crime” can change who is responsible for investigating an incident and how many resources they have to investigate it.

For example, a politically motivated shooting might be coded as terrorism in federal reporting, cataloged as political violence by the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data Project, and prosecuted as homicide or a hate crime at the state level.

Patterns in incidents and fatalities

Despite differences in definitions, several consistent patterns emerge from available evidence.

Politically motivated violence is a small fraction of total violent crime, but its impact is magnified by symbolic targets, timing and media coverage.

In the first half of 2025, 35 percent of violent events tracked by University of Maryland researchers targeted U.S. government personnel or facilities — more than twice the rate in 2024.

Right-wing extremist violence has been deadlier than left-wing violence in recent years.

Based on government and independent analyses, right-wing extremist violence has been responsible for the overwhelming majority of fatalities, amounting to approximately 75 percent to 80 percent of U.S. domestic terrorism deaths since 2001.

Illustrative cases include:

The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, an earlier but still notable example, killed 168 in the deadliest domestic terrorist attack in U.S. history.

By contrast, left-wing extremist incidents, including those tied to anarchist or environmental movements, have made up about 10 percent to 15 percent of incidents and less than 5 percent of fatalities.

Examples include the Animal Liberation Front and Earth Liberation Front arson and vandalism campaigns in the 1990s and 2000s, which were more likely to target property rather than people.

Violence occurred during Seattle May Day protests in 2016, with anarchist groups and other demonstrators clashing with police. The clashes resulted in multiple injuries and arrests. Also in 2016, five Dallas police officers were murdered by a heavily armed sniper who was targeting white police officers.

Hard to count

There’s another reason it’s hard to account for and characterize certain kinds of political violence and those who perpetrate it.

The U.S. focuses on prosecuting criminal acts rather than formally designating organizations as terrorist, relying on existing statutes such as conspiracy, weapons violations, RICO provisions and hate crime laws to pursue individuals for specific acts of violence.

Unlike foreign terrorism, the federal government does not have a mechanism to formally charge an individual with domestic terrorism. That makes it difficult to characterize someone as a domestic terrorist.

The State Department’s Foreign Terrorist Organization list applies only to groups outside of the United States. By contrast, U.S. law bars the government from labeling domestic political organizations as terrorist entities because of First Amendment free speech protections.

Rhetoric is not evidence

Without harmonized reporting and uniform definitions, the data will not provide an accurate overview of political violence in the U.S.

But we can make some important conclusions.

Politically motivated violence in the U.S. is rare compared with overall violent crime. Political violence has a disproportionate impact because even rare incidents can amplify fear, influence policy and deepen societal polarization.

Right-wing extremist violence has been more frequent and more lethal than left-wing violence. The number of extremist groups is substantial and skewed toward the right, although a count of organizations does not necessarily reflect incidents of violence.

High-profile political violence often brings heightened rhetoric and pressure for sweeping responses. Yet the empirical record shows that political violence remains concentrated within specific movements and networks rather than spread evenly across the ideological spectrum. Distinguishing between rhetoric and evidence is essential for democracy.

Trump and members of his administration are threatening to target whole organizations and movements and the people who work in them with aggressive legal measures — to jail them or scrutinize their favorable tax status. But research shows that the majority of political violence comes from people following right-wing ideologies.

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.

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