'This will not end here': how political violence comes in waves

The fatal shooting of prominent conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 10, 2025, has brought renewed attention to the climate of political violence in America. Kirk’s death reflects a sizable increase in threats against officeholders and politicians at the local and federal level.

Alfonso Serrano, a politics editor at The Conversation, spoke with University of Massachusetts Lowell scholar Arie Perliger after Kirk’s shooting. Perliger studies political violence and assassinations and spoke bluntly about political polarization in the United States.

Serrano: What were your initial thoughts after Charlie Kirk’s fatal shooting?

Perliger: It was a bit unusual that the attack was not against an elected official. Rarely have we seen political assassinations that are aimed at the nonprofit political landscape. Usually those people are not deemed important enough.

Secondly, and it’s something I see a lot in my research, political assassinations come in waves. We see that not only in the United States but other countries.

I’ve looked at political assassinations in many democracies, and one of the things I see in a fairly consistent manner is that political assassinations create a process of escalation that encourages others on the extreme political spectrum to feel the need to retaliate. And that is my main concern. That this process creates legitimization and acceptance, that it provides the sense that this is an acceptable form of political action. This will not end here.

In 2024, there were two attempts to assassinate Donald Trump. Then, in early 2025, the residence of Gov. Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania was firebombed on Passover, and within months the U.S. witnessed the killing of Minnesota state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, among other acts of political violence. The U.S., of course, is not immune to political violence, as we saw in the 1960s. But what stands out about this latest wave?

The data shows that there’s a substantial increase in the level of threats against officeholders at the local and federal level. What’s different now is we see an increased support in political violence from both sides of the political spectrum. Consistently, almost a quarter of the public is willing to support political violence in some form, or see that as a legitimate form of political action.

And as we see an increased political polarization, and the increased demonization of political rivals, we see the decline and disappearance of political discourse and policymaking. The bipartisan political process in Congress in the past few years has been almost nonexistent. And that spills over to the public, where the other (political) side is seen as a one-dimensional figure that is a threat.

We’ve had political polarization in the U.S. in the past, but usually it was around a specific issue like civil rights in the 1960s and the Vietnam War. But this time there is no specific issue that we can say, “If we solve this, we solve the political polarization.” The problem is that there’s no space for convergence from both sides where they can work together, so there’s no bridges they can rely on to come together.

Does it strike you that Kirk’s assassination occurred on a college campus? It seems as if college campuses have become a flash point of violence in the U.S.

Campuses are becoming more and more contentious spaces. They were always intellectual hubs where political views were debated intensively. Activism was always part of campus life. But what we’ve seen in the past year is that campus life has become in some cases more violent. And the fact that Kirk was killed on a campus is, I think, heartbreaking because campuses symbolize a place where you can engage in political debate in a way that encourages intellectual exploration.

What’s happened in the past year is that campuses are not those spaces anymore. Yes, we still see political activism, but it’s the activism that doesn’t leave any room for actual debate. It’s just two sides that are completely hostile to each other and unwilling to hear each other.

Trump on Wednesday night blamed the media and the “radical left” for language used to describe people like Kirk. He said this rhetoric is “responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” Any thoughts?

I agree that language and rhetoric impact people’s behavior. I’ve seen that again and again in my studies, that the discourse of political figures impacts the way people think of the legitimacy of violence. Of course, we need to understand the context here, which is that Trump himself was willing to pardon thousands of people who engaged in political violence.

So, on the one hand, I agree with him that political leaders should be responsible for how they discuss political issues. It’s important for them to convey that political discourse can be constructive. However, we need to acknowledge that our own government, in many cases, sends signals that provide encouragement and support that legitimize violence. I think it’s important for politicians on both sides to be consistent in understanding that the way they discuss their political rivals is important.

You’re an expert on the history of political assassinations. How do countries untangle themselves from waves of political violence?

Political leaders need to insist on working together. There are lots of policy areas where politicians can work together. When we see that people can work together within the political system, that sends an important message, that there is a space where we can work together. The second thing is trying to think about how the U.S. can restructure part of the political process to ensure that there is a real competition of ideas, to incentivize a constructive, productive approach that will legitimize those who are willing to engage in constructive policymaking.

Any last thoughts?

As part of my work, I track the most extremist online social media accounts, and what we see right now is a strong sense that this assassination is being celebrated by parts of the left. And that has created an escalation of language from those in the extreme right social media ecosystem. There is much more willingness to discuss issues of retaliation, an actual civil war.

And that’s my biggest worry. If you look at social media, what we see is that both sides embrace this kind of rhetoric that really concerns me. More than ever, I’ve seen calls for retaliation and a strong sense that the other side is unwilling to show any sympathy to what happened. Emotions are running very high, and I’m very worried about what may happen in the next few weeks.

Washington's warning about America's doom is finally coming true

By Robert A. Strong, Washington and Lee University and University of Virginia.

The United States will celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, the country’s founding document, in 2026. Twenty years later, America will celebrate the 250th anniversary of President George Washington’s Farewell Address, which was published on Sept. 19, 1796.

The two documents are the bookends of the American Revolution. That revolution began with the inspirational language of Thomas Jefferson, who wrote much of the Declaration of Independence; it ended with somber warnings from Washington, the nation’s first president.

After chairing the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and serving eight years as president, Washington announced in a newspaper essay that he would not seek another term and would return to his home in Mount Vernon. The essay was later known as the “Farewell Address.”

Washington began his essay by observing that “choice and prudence invite me to quit the political scene” while “patriotism does not forbid it.” The new nation would be fine without his continued service.

But Washington’s confidence in the general health of the union was tempered by his worries about dangers that lay ahead — worries that seem startlingly contemporary and relevant 229 years later.

Focus on the domestic

Washington’s Farewell Address is famous for the admonitions “to steer clear of permanent alliances” and to resist the temptation to “entangle our peace and prosperity in the toils of European ambition.”

Important as those warnings are, they are not the main topic of Washington’s message.

During the four decades that I have taught the Farewell Address in classes on American government, I have urged my students to set aside the familiar issues of foreign policy and isolationism and to read the address for what it says about the domestic challenges confronting America.

Those challenges included partisanship, parochialism, excessive public debt, ambitious leaders who could come to power playing off our differences, and a poorly informed public who might sacrifice their own liberties to find relief from divisive politics.

Washington’s address lacks Jefferson’s idealism about equality and inalienable rights. Instead, it offers the realistic assessment that Americans are sometimes foolish and make costly political mistakes.

Rule by ‘ambitious, and unprincipled men’

Partisanship is the primary problem for the American republic, according to Washington.

“It serves always to distract the public councils and enfeeble the public administration,” he wrote. Partisanship “agitates the community with ill founded jealousies and false alarms, kindles the animosity of one part against another, foments occasionally riot and insurrection” and can open “the door to foreign influence and corruption.”

Though political parties, Washington observes, “may now and then answer popular ends,” they can also become “potent engines by which cunning, ambitious, and unprincipled men will be enabled to subvert the power of the people and to usurp for themselves the reins of government, destroying afterwards the very engines which have lifted them to unjust dominion.”

Washington’s fear that partisanship could lead to destruction of the Constitution and to the rule of “ambitious, and unprincipled men” was so important to him that he felt compelled to repeat the warning more than once in the Farewell Address.

Politicians’ ‘elevation on the ruins of public liberty’

The second time Washington takes it up, he says that “the disorders and miseries” of partisanship may “gradually incline the minds of men to seek security and repose in the absolute power of an individual.”

Sooner or later, he writes, “the chief of some prevailing faction, more able or more fortunate than his competitors, turns this disposition to the purposes of his own elevation on the ruins of public liberty.”

So why not outlaw parties and rein in the dangers of partisanship?

Washington observes that this is not possible. The spirit of party “is inseparable from our nature, having its root in the strongest passions of the human mind.”

Americans naturally collect themselves into groups, factions, interests and parties because that’s what human beings do. It’s easier to be connected to local communities, states or regions of the country than to a large and diverse nation; even though that large and diverse nation is, by Washington’s assessment, essential to the security and success of all.

The central problem in American politics is not a matter of devious leaders, foreign intrigue or sectional rivalries — things that will always exist.

The problem, Washington warned, lies with the people.

Excesses of partisanship

By their nature, people divide themselves into groups and then, if not careful, find those divisions used and abused by individual leaders, foreign interests and “artful and enterprising” minorities.

Political parties are dangerous, but can’t be eliminated. According to some people, Washington observes, the competition between parties might serve as a check on the powers of government.

“Within certain limits,” Washington acknowledges, “this is probably true.” But even if the battles between political parties sometimes have a useful purpose, Washington worried about the excesses of partisanship.

Partisanship is like “a fire not to be quenched, it demands a uniform vigilance to prevent its bursting into a flame, lest instead of warming it should consume.”

Where is America today? Warmed by the fires of partisanship or consumed by the bursting of flames? George Washington suggested that provocative question more than two centuries ago on Sept. 19, 1796. It’s still worth asking.

  • Robert A. Strong is an Emeritus Professor of Politics at Washington and Lee University and is a Senior Fellow at the Miller Institute. He has published work in American foreign policy, national security issues and the presidency, including books on Henry Kissinger, Jimmy Carter and modern American foreign policy decisions. He has published articles and op-eds on a variety of contemporary political and international topics.

The GOP CDC assault began long before RFK's Senate car crash

By Jordan Miller, Teaching Professor of Public Health, Arizona State University.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), long considered the nation’s — if not the world’s — premier public health organization, is mired in a crisis that not only threatens Americans’ health but also its very survival as a leading public health institution.

The degree of this crisis was on full display during Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Sept. 4, 2025, testimony before the U.S. Senate.

In the hearing, Kennedy openly criticized CDC professionals’ response to the COVID-19 pandemic, saying “the people at CDC who oversaw that process, who put masks on our children, who closed our schools, are the people who will be leaving.”

Kennedy’s hearing came on the heels of a contentious week in which Kennedy fired the CDC director, Susan Monarez, spurring 12 members of the Senate Finance Committee — 11 Democrats and independent Bernie Sanders — to call on Kennedy to resign from his position.

At least four top CDC leaders resigned following Monarez’s ouster, citing pressure from Kennedy to depart from recommendations based on sound scientific evidence.

I am a teaching professor and public health professional. Like many of my colleagues, the disruption happening at the CDC in recent months has left me scrambling to find alternate credible sources of health information and feeling deeply concerned for the future of public health.

The CDC’s unraveling

These leadership shakeups come on the heels of months of targeted actions aimed at unraveling the CDC’s structure, function and leadership as it has existed for decades.

The turmoil began almost as soon as President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, when his administration enacted sweeping cuts to the CDC’s workforce that health experts broadly agree jeopardized its ability to respond to emerging health threats.

Trump used executive orders to limit CDC employees’ communication with the public and other external agencies, like the World Health Organization.

Within weeks, he ordered as much as 10 percent of the overall workforce to be cut.

Soon after, Kennedy — who was newly appointed by Trump — began undoing long-standing CDC institutions, like the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, replacing all 17 of its members in a move that was widely denounced by health experts.

Critics pointed to a lack of qualifications for the new committee members, with more than half never having published research on vaccinations and many having predetermined hostility toward vaccines.

In June, more than 20 authoritative organizations, including the National Medical Association and American Academy of Pediatrics, expressed serious concerns for the health impacts of overhauling the advisory committee.

Monarez’s removal

Public health leaders had cheered the July confirmation of Monarez as the CDC’s new director, seeing her nomination as a welcome relief to those who value evidence-based practice in public health. Monarez is an accomplished scientist and career public servant.

Many viewed her as a potential voice of scientific wisdom amid untrained officials appointed by Trump, who has a track record of policies that undermine public health and science.

In her role as acting director, to which she was appointed in January, Monarez had quietly presided over the wave of cuts to the CDC workforce and other moves that drastically reshaped the agency and weakened the country’s capacity to steward the nation’s health.

Yet Monarez had “red lines” that she would not cross: She would not fire CDC leadership, and she would not endorse vaccine policies that ran contrary to scientifically supported recommendations.

According to Monarez, Kennedy asked her to do both in an Aug. 27 meeting. When she refused, he asked her to resign.

Her lawyers pushed back, arguing that only the president had the authority to remove her, stating: “When CDC Director Susan Monarez refused to rubber-stamp unscientific, reckless directives and fire dedicated health experts, she chose protecting the public over serving a political agenda. For that, she has been targeted.”

Ultimately, the White House made her dismissal official later that evening.

Agency in turmoil

Further exemplifying and deepening the crisis at the agency, on Aug. 8, a gunman who had expressed anger over COVID-19 vaccinations opened fire on CDC headquarters, killing a police officer.

Many health workers attributed this directly to misinformation spread by Kennedy. The shooting amplified tensions and made tangible the sense of threat under which the CDC has been operating over the tumultuous months since Trump’s second term began. One employee stated that “the CDC is crumbling.”

Public health experts, including former CDC directors, are sounding the alarm, speaking out about the precariousness of the agency’s position. Some are questioning whether the CDC can even survive.

Crisis of trust

Even before the most recent shock waves, Americans said they were losing trust and confidence in CDC guidance: In April, 44 percent of U.S. adults polled said that they will place less trust in CDC recommendations under the new leadership. This would undoubtedly undermine the U.S. response if the country faces another public health challenge requiring a rapid, coordinated response, like COVID-19.

In addition to installing new members on the vaccine advisory committee, Kennedy abruptly changed the recommendations for flu and COVID-19 vaccines without input from the CDC or the vaccine advisory committee, and contrary to data presented by CDC scientists.

Public health professionals and advocates are now warning the public that vaccine recommendations coming from the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices may not be trustworthy. They point to the lack of credibility in the review process for the new committee, the fact that members have made statements contrary to scientific evidence in the past, and failure to apply an evidence-to-recommendations framework as compromising factors. Critics of the committee even describe a lack of basic understanding of the science behind vaccines.

Health impacts are being felt in real time, with health care providers reporting confusion among parents as a result of the conflicting vaccine recommendations. Now, those who want to be vaccinated are facing barriers to access, with major retailers placing new limits on vaccine access in the face of federal pressure. This as vaccination rates were already declining, largely due to misinformation.

The end result is an environment in which the credibility of the CDC is in question because people are unsure whether recommendations made in the CDC’s name are coming from the science and scientists or from the politicians who are in charge.

Filling the gaps

Reputable organizations are working to fill the void created by the CDC’s precariousness and the fact that recommendations are now being made based on political will, rather than scientific evidence.

The American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Gynecology have both released recommended vaccination schedules that, for the first time, diverge from CDC recommendations.

And medical organizations are discussing strategies that include giving more weight to their recommendations than the CDC’s and creating pathways for clinicians to obtain vaccines directly from manufacturers. These measures would create workarounds to compensate for CDC leadership voids.

Some states, including California, Oregon, Washington and New Mexico, are establishing their own guidance regarding vaccinations. Public health scientists and physicians are attempting to preserve data and surveillance systems that the Trump administration has been removing. But independent organizations may not be able to sustain this work without federal funding.

What’s at stake

As part of its crucial work in every facet of public health, the CDC oversees larger-scale operations, both nationally and globally, that cannot simply be handed off to states or individual organizations. Some public health responses — such as to infectious diseases and foodborne illnesses — must be coordinated at the national level in order to be effective, since health risks are shared across state borders.

In a health information space that is awash with misinformation, having accurate, reliable health statistics and evidence-based guidelines is essential for public health educators like me to know what information to share and how to design effective health programs. Doctors and other clinicians rely on disease tracking to know how best to approach treating patients presenting with infections. The COVID-19 pandemic made clear the importance of laboratory science, a unified emergency response and rapid distribution of effective vaccines to the public.

One of the strengths of the American system of governance is its ability to approach challenges – including public health – in a coordinated way, having a federal level of cooperation that unifies state-level efforts.

The CDC has been the nation’s preeminent public health institution for more than eight decades as a result of its vast reach and unparalleled expertise. Right now, it’s all sitting at a precarious edge.

This ruthless rightwing group will control the Supreme Court for years to come

By Paul M. Collins Jr. and Tim Komatsu, UMass Amherst.

During the 2016 presidential election campaign, candidate Donald Trump took the unprecedented move of releasing a list of his potential Supreme Court nominees.

But Trump didn’t assemble this list himself. Instead, he outsourced the selection of his judicial appointments to leaders of the Federalist Society, an organization in the conservative legal movement.

As Trump explained in a 2016 interview, “We’re going to have great judges, conservative, all picked by the Federalist Society.”

This was a strategic decision by Trump. By turning to the Federalist Society, he was able to court conservative and evangelical voters who may have been otherwise uneasy with supporting the former New York City real estate mogul.

In his first presidential term, Trump appointed three justices affiliated with the Federalist Society – Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett – in addition to hundreds of lower federal court judges. Federalist Society affiliates are current or former members of the organization, as well as individuals who interact with the group, such as by attending Federalist Society events, but who may not claim membership.

We are political science scholars who recently published research in a peer-reviewed journal showing that Supreme Court justices affiliated with the Federalist Society are more conservative and more consistently conservative than other justices, meaning they seldom deviate from their conservative voting behavior.

Our research suggests that, despite Trump’s recent criticism of the organization and its leadership, justices affiliated with the Federalist Society will advance the conservative legal agenda decades into the future. But this won’t always involve supporting Trump’s agenda.

Here’s what you should know, and why it matters.

The Federalist Society

The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies was founded in 1982 with the goal of providing intellectual spaces for conservative law students who felt their views were dismissed by the legal field. It has grown tremendously over the past 40 years. Today, it boasts more than 200 chapters and over 70,000 members.

Unlike other conservative public interest groups, it does not advocate for specific issue positions. Instead, it promotes its goals primarily through education and networking.

The Federalist Society’s educational mission is pursued chiefly in law schools. That’s where it trains the next generation of lawyers in the approaches and goals of the conservative legal movement. This includes promoting the judicial philosophy of originalism — the idea that the best way to interpret the U.S. Constitution is according to how it was understood at the time of its adoption.

Originalism is often used to justify conservative outcomes.

For example, Justice Clarence Thomas, a prominent member of the Federalist Society, has called for using originalism to reconsider Supreme Court precedents involving the right to contraception, same-sex marriage and same-sex consensual relations.

The Federalist Society network also connects junior members with more senior members, helping young lawyers obtain prestigious clerkships and positions in government and the legal profession. These lawyers tend to associate with the Federalist Society throughout their careers.

Federalist Society affiliates learn that promoting the group’s interest is also a way of promoting their self-interests as they move up in the legal world.

For Supreme Court justices, this networking has tangible benefits. For instance, Justice Samuel Alito accepted a luxury fishing vacation in 2008 organized by Leonard Leo, the former executive vice president and current co-chair of the Federalist Society. The estimated cost of the fishing trip was more than $100,000.

And Thomas was treated to decades of high-end vacations and private school tuition for his grandnephew — whom he raised as a son — by billionaire businessman Harlan Crow, a Federalist Society donor.

In short, the Federalist Society is a network of lawyers and judges who share a conservative outlook on the world and aspire to etch the conservative agenda into law through judicial decisions.

Our research

Our research sought to answer two interrelated questions. Are justices affiliated with the Federalist Society more conservative than nonaffiliated justices, and are they more consistently conservative?

To illustrate this, consider former Justice David Souter, whom President George H.W. Bush appointed in 1990 and who had no connections to the Federalist Society. Despite being a Republican appointee, Souter often voted with the court’s liberal members, such as upholding abortion rights in 1992. In 2005, he wrote the majority opinion in a ruling that prevented the Ten Commandments from being displayed in courthouses and public schools.

To determine whether justices affiliated with the Federalist Society are different from even other judges appointed by Republican presidents, we examined almost 25,000 votes cast by Supreme Court justices between 1986 and 2023. We started with 1986 because that’s when the first justice affiliated with the Federalist Society – Antonin Scalia – joined the high court.

We classified votes as conservative or liberal according to a well-established methodology. For example, conservative votes support the restriction of reproductive freedom, are anti-business regulation and generally disfavor policies that promote the rights of vulnerable populations, such as the LGBTQ+ community. Liberal votes do the opposite.

We found that justices connected to the Federalist Society are about 10 percentage points more likely to cast a conservative vote than other justices, even other justices appointed by Republican presidents. And they are more consistent in their voting behavior, seldom casting votes that go against their conservative values.

Lasting impact

These findings have important implications. Justices on the modern Supreme Court serve for about a quarter-century on average. And every current Republican-appointed member of the court is affiliated with the Federalist Society.

This means that Americans are likely to see justices affiliated with the Federalist Society advance the agenda of the conservative legal movement for decades to come. This has already happened in recent decisions that curtailed reproductive freedom, eliminated affirmative action in college admissions and expanded the powers of the president, including immunizing the president from criminal prosecution.

President Trump has recently had a high-profile breakup with the Federalist Society, calling Leo a “sleazebag” and expressing his disappointment with the organization.

Trump’s outburst followed a ruling by the U.S. Court of International Trade that blocked his sweeping tariff program against China and other nations. This happened despite one of Trump’s first-term judicial appointees sitting on the panel.

Notwithstanding this acrimony, this term will give justices affiliated with the Federalist Society the opportunity to further solidify the conservative agenda. Cases involving LGBTQ+ rights and federal elections are on the docket. And the court will be adding other important issue areas as it fills out its caseload for the 2025-26 term, which starts on the first Monday in October.

These men's fitness groups are hives of white supremacist rage

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

Small local organizations called Active Clubs have spread widely across the U.S. and internationally, using fitness as a cover for a much more alarming mission. These groups are a new and harder-to-detect form of white supremacist organizing that merges extremist ideology with fitness and combat sports culture.

Active Clubs frame themselves as innocuous workout groups on digital platforms and decentralized networks to recruit, radicalize and prepare members for racist violence. The clubs commonly use encrypted messaging apps such as Telegram, Wire and Matrix to coordinate internally.

For broader propaganda and outreach they rely on alternative social media platforms such as Gab, Odysee, VK and sometimes BitChute. They also selectively use mainstream sites such as Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, until those sites ban the clubs.

Active Club members have been implicated in orchestrating and distributing neo-Nazi recruitment videos and manifestos. In late 2023, for instance, two Ontario men, Kristoffer Nippak and Matthew Althorpe, were arrested and charged with distributing materials for the neo-Nazi group Atomwaffen Division and the transnational terrorist group Terrorgram.

Following their arrests, Active Club Canada’s public network went dark, Telegram pages were deleted or rebranded, and the club went virtually silent. Nippak was granted bail under strict conditions, while Althorpe remains in custody.

As a sociologist studying extremism and white supremacy since 1993, I have watched the movement shift from formal organizations to small, decentralized cells — a change embodied most clearly by Active Clubs.

White nationalism 3.0

According to private analysts who track far-right extremist activities, the Active Club network has a core membership of 400 to 1,200 white men globally, plus sympathizers, online supporters and passive members. The clubs mainly target young white men in their late teens and twenties.

Since 2020, Active Clubs have expanded rapidly across the United States, Canada and Europe, including the U.K., France, Sweden and Finland. Precise numbers are hard to verify, but the clubs appear to be spreading, according to The Counter Extremism Project, the Anti-Defamation League, the Southern Poverty Law Center and my own research.

The clubs reportedly operate in at least 25 U.S. states, and potentially as many as 34. Active U.S. chapters reportedly increased from 49 in 2023 to 78 in 2025.

The clubs’ rise reflects a broader shift in white supremacist strategy, away from formal organizations and social movements. In 2020, American neo-Nazi Robert Rundo introduced the concept of “White Nationalism 3.0” — a decentralized, branded and fitness-based approach to extremist organizing.

Rundo previously founded the Rise Above Movement, which was a violent, far-right extremist group in the U.S. known for promoting white nationalist ideology, organizing street fights and coordinating through social media. The organization carried out attacks at protests and rallies from 2016 through 2018.

Active Clubs embed their ideology within apolitical activities such as martial arts and weightlifting. This model allows them to blend in with mainstream fitness communities. However, their deeper purpose is to prepare members for racial conflict.

'You need to learn how to fight’

Active Club messaging glorifies discipline, masculinity and strength — a “warrior identity” designed to attract young men.

“The active club is not so much a structural organization as it is a lifestyle for those willing to work, risk and sweat to embody our ideals for themselves and to promote them to others,” Rundo explained via his Telegram channel.

“They never were like, ‘You need to learn how to fight so you can beat up people of color.’ It was like, ‘You need to learn how to fight because people want to kill you in the future,’” a former Active Club member told Vice News in 2023.

These cells are deliberately small — often under a dozen members — and self-contained, which gives them greater operational security and flexibility. Each club operates semi-autonomously while remaining connected to the broader ideology and digital network.

Expanding globally and deepening ties

Active Clubs maintain strategic and ideological connections with formal white supremacist groups, including Patriot Front, a white nationalist and neofascist group founded in 2017 by Thomas Rousseau after the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Active Clubs share extremist beliefs with these organizations, including racial hierarchy and the “Great Replacement” theory, which claims white populations are being deliberately replaced by nonwhite immigrants. While publicly presenting as fitness groups, they may collaborate with white supremacist groups on recruitment, training, propaganda or public events.

Figures connected to accelerationist groups — organizations that seek to create social chaos and societal collapse that they believe will lead to a race war and the destruction of liberal democracy — played a role in founding the Active Club network. Along with the Rise Above Movement, they include Atomwaffen Division and another neo-Nazi group, The Base — organizations that repackage violent fascism to appeal to disaffected young white men in the U.S.

Brotherhood as a cover

By downplaying explicit hate symbols and emphasizing strength and preparedness, Active Clubs appeal to a new generation of recruits who may not initially identify with overt racism but are drawn to a culture of hypermasculinity and self-improvement.

Anyone can start a local Active Club chapter with minimal oversight. This autonomy makes it hard for law enforcement agencies to monitor the groups and helps the network grow rapidly.

Shared branding and digital propaganda maintain ideological consistency. Through this approach, Active Clubs have built a transnational network of echo chambers, recruitment pipelines and paramilitary-style training in parks and gyms.

Club members engage in activities such as combat sports training, propaganda dissemination and ideological conditioning. Fight sessions are often recorded and shared online as recruitment tools.

Members distribute flyers, stickers and online content to spread white supremacist messages. Active Clubs embed themselves in local communities by hosting events, promoting physical fitness, staging public actions and sharing propaganda.

Potential members first see propaganda on encrypted apps such as Telegram or on social media. The clubs recruit in person at gyms, protests and local events, vetting new members to ensure they share the group’s beliefs and can be trusted to maintain secrecy.

From fringe to functioning network

Based on current information from the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, there are 187 active chapters within the Active Club Network across 27 countries — a 25 percent increase from late 2023. The Crowd Counting Consortium documented 27 protest events involving Active Clubs in 2022-23.

However, precise membership numbers remain difficult to ascertain. Some groups call themselves “youth clubs” but share similar ideas and aesthetics and engage in similar activities.

Active Club members view themselves as defenders of Western civilization and masculine virtue. From their perspective, their activities represent noble resistance rather than hate. Members are encouraged to stay secretive, prepare for societal collapse and build a network of committed, fit men ready to act through infiltration, activism or violence.

Hiding in plain sight

Law enforcement agencies, researchers and civil society now face a new kind of domestic threat that wears workout clothes instead of uniforms.

Active Clubs work across international borders, bound by shared ideas and tactics and a common purpose. This is the new white nationalism: decentralized, modernized, more agile and disguised as self-improvement. What appears to be a harmless workout group may be a gateway to violent extremism, one pushup at a time.

This stunning finding shows Trump is destroying his own support

By Tatishe Nteta, Adam Eichen, Alexander Theodoridis, Jesse Rhodes, and Raymond La Raja, UMass Amherst.

Has President Donald Trump survived the latest and most serious firestorm of controversy over the Jeffrey Epstein scandal? Or has the Trump administration’s handling of the release of information concerning the prosecution of a convicted child sex trafficker, Trump’s former friend, hurt the president?

A number of journalists, pointing to recent public opinion polls, have claimed that the scandal has hurt Trump. Others have argued that the public has largely moved on and the Epstein controversy no longer presents a political liability for Trump.

But both of these conclusions are based on limited polling about the Epstein controversy and thus may be premature.

Our recent University of Massachusetts Amherst national poll includes particularly detailed questions about the Epstein controversy and attitudes toward Trump, and thus provides fresh insights on how the controversy has affected public support for Trump.

We find that Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy has done significant damage to his standing, particularly among his core supporters.

'Fumbling the matter’

Americans are paying close attention to the prolonged Epstein controversy. Our polling finds that three in four respondents have heard, read or seen “a lot” or “some” about Epstein.

Moreover, most believe that Trump is fumbling the matter.

Seven in 10 Americans believe that Trump is handling the matter “not well.” This includes pluralities of Trump’s most loyal supporters: 43 percent of Republicans, 43 percent of conservatives, and 47 percent of those who voted for him in 2024.

When we drill down on the 47 percent of 2024 Trump voters who disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Epstein controversy, we find significant cracks in the MAGA facade. Among members of this group, 28 percent now disapprove of Trump as president.

When we take demographics, ideology, partisanship and assessments of the economy into account, disapproval of Trump’s handling of the release of the Epstein files is still associated with an increase in disapproval of Trump.

Voter regret

Even more significantly, we find that among 2024 Trump voters, negative views of Trump’s handling of the Epstein files are associated with an increased desire to make a different choice if the 2024 election could be rerun.

More specifically, among Trump voters who believe that the president has mishandled the release of the Epstein files, more than one quarter – 26 percent – indicate that they would not vote for Trump if they had the opportunity to vote again in the 2024 election.

While there are no election do-overs, it is clear that the Epstein scandal has hurt Trump among his base of voters.

Much can happen between now and the midterm elections in November 2026, of course.

But if Trump fails to satisfy his political base, perceptions among Trump voters that he has mishandled the controversy could reduce enthusiasm and participation in the elections. Even if the share of Republicans alienated by the Epstein controversy is relatively small, this could hurt Republicans in close contests.

With over a year to go, the facts on the ground will likely change. But as of today, the controversy over the release of the Epstein files remains relevant. Whether the president responds in a manner that satisfies his voters is a question that could have important political consequences.

It's a complicated time to be a white Southerner

By James M. Thomas, University of Mississippi

Historian Nell Painter remarked in 2011, “Being white these days isn’t what it used to be.”

For the past decade, wave upon wave of protests against police violence and mass incarceration have drawn the public’s attention toward the continued significance of America’s color line, the set of formal and informal rules that maintain white Americans’ elevated social and economic advantages.

Meanwhile, an explosion of popular literature scrutinizes those rules and places white people’s elevated status in sharp relief.

How are white people making sense of these tensions?

In his 1935 publication “Black Reconstruction in America,” sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois described the “public and psychological wage” paid to white workers in the post-Reconstruction era on account of their being white. Today those “wages of whiteness” remain durable as ever. Nearly 60 years removed from the high water mark of the Civil Rights movement, its aims have not been met.

White people still enjoy better jobs, health care, housing, schooling and more.

I’m a sociologist of race and racism. My team of graduate student researchers and I have spent the past four years interviewing white people to understand how they make sense of their white racial status today. We concentrated our efforts among white people living in the U.S. South because that region is seen as more responsible for shaping what it means to be white, and the social and economic advantages of being white, than any other.

There is not much research on how white people think about what it means to be white. Meanwhile, popular and scholarly treatments of white Southerners as overwhelmingly conservative and racially regressive abound.

Some white Southerners we spoke with fit those tropes. Many others do not. Overall, we found white Southerners across the political spectrum actively grappling with their white racial status.

As Walter, 38, from Clarksdale, Mississippi, told us, “It’s a complicated time to be a white Southerner.” We use pseudonyms to protect anonymity.

Crises cast a long shadow

The Italian political theorist Antonio Gramsci defined a crisis as a historical period in which “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.” Within this space between, Gramsci argued, “morbid phenomena of the most varied kind come to pass.”

Many people we spoke with lived through the defining ruptures of the 20th century that forever changed the South, and America too: the formal demise of Jim Crow rule, violent and bloody struggles over integration, and the slow, uneven march toward equal rights for all Americans.

Still others came of age against the backdrop of the defining shocks of this new century: 9/11 and the war on terrorism, Hurricane Katrina, the racial backlash to the election of Barack Obama, and the Black Lives Matter movement.

For some, the political rise of Donald Trump and his willingness to traffic in racist rhetoric constituted a crisis, too. “He embodies everything that is immoral,” said Ned, 45, from Vardaman, Mississippi. The town Ned is from is named for James K. Vardaman, former governor of Mississippi who once declared that “if it is necessary every Negro in the state will be lynched; it will be done to maintain white supremacy.”

Taken together, these crises cast a long shadow of uncertainty over white people’s elevated social position and anchor how white Southerners understand their white racial status.

Resistance to desegregation

Miriam, 61, from Natchez, Mississippi, grew up under the last gasps of Jim Crow. She recalled her parents pulling her from public school and sending her to a nearby private school shortly after the Supreme Court’s 1969 Alexander v. Holmes ruling, which ordered the immediate desegregation of Southern schools.

Her new school was one of hundreds of “segregation academies” founded across the South in the aftermath of the court’s ruling.

“You didn’t go over there, by the Black school,” Miriam recalled. “You stayed over by the white school. … I remember as a kid that made quite an impression.”

Reflecting on what it means to be a white Southerner today, Miriam drew from these experiences living under the region’s long shadow of segregation.

“There’s been so much hatred and so much unpleasantness. I want to do everything I can to make relations better,” she said. “I think that is part of being white in the South.”

Daryl, 42, a self-described conservative, lived in several Southern communities as a child, including Charlotte, North Carolina, in the mid-1980s as the city wrestled with its court-ordered school busing program. Daryl recalled his parents and other white people complaining about the poor quality of newly integrated schools, including telling him “stories of things like needles on the playground.”

Daryl rarely, if ever, talked with his own parents about race, but he broaches these topics with his own children today.

A self-described “childhood racist,” Daryl draws from his experiences to frame his conversations with his own children. “I remind them that there used to be this day where this was OK, and this is how things were thought of,” he says.

‘Good reason to be mad’

The region’s history also includes more contemporary crises.

Lorna, 34, is a registered Republican from Marion, Arkansas. She described how recent protests against police violence are affecting her understanding of America’s color line.

“I feel like Black people are mad or angry. They’re tired of violence and, you know, profiling,” she said. “And I don’t think it’s just in the South. I think it’s all over the United States. And they have a good reason to be mad.”

Kenneth, 35, lives in Memphis. Like Lorna and others, Kenneth’s sense of what it means to be white has been shaped by more recent crises, including the racial backlash to Obama’s elections in 2008 and 2012 that motivated Trump’s election in 2016.

Reflecting on these episodes, Kenneth believes he has an obligation as a white Southerner to become more informed about “the legacy of racism in the South and the impact that it still has today.”

Becoming more informed, Kenneth says, “will cause me to reflect on how I should think about that, and what, if anything, I should do differently now.”

Uncovering what’s minimized or ignored

Our interviews reveal a range of beliefs and attitudes among white Southerners often discounted or dismissed altogether by more popular and scholarly treatments of the region.

Contrary to research that finds white people minimizing or ignoring their elevated social status, the white Southerners we spoke with showed a profound awareness of the advantages their white racial status affords them.

“I have to admit I’m glad I’m white,” said Luke, 75, from Melber, Kentucky. “Because in the United States you probably have a little advantage.”

Our research also shows that how white people make sense of who they are is also a matter of where they are.

Places – and not just Southern ones – are imbued with ideas and beliefs that give meaning and significance to the people within them. The region’s history of racial conflict, meanwhile, renders the “wages of whiteness” more plain to see for white Southerners in ways we are only beginning to understand.

Put plainly: Place matters for how race matters.

Emphasizing this more complicated understanding of race and place allows for a more complete account of the South, including how the unfolding racial dramas of the past several decades continue to shape the region and its people.The Conversation

James M. Thomas, Professor of Sociology, University of Mississippi

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Trump thinks this issue is a vote winner — 25 states disagree

By Hilary Lustick, Associate Professor of Education, UMass Lowell.

It’s been about six months since the U.S. Department of Education sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to all schools that receive federal funding, warning them that they could risk losing this money if they promote what the department calls “pervasive and repugnant” racial preferences.

The letter, among other things, reversed previous presidents’ positions on how diversity, equity and inclusion influences schools’ disciplinary measures. It advised schools to, within two weeks, begin to eliminate all discipline protocols rooted in DEI, on the grounds that this work is discriminatory against white students.

Trump also issued an executive order, “Reinstating Commonsense School Discipline Policy,” in April 2025, doubling down on the letter.

Trump’s letter and executive order exert an unusual level of influence over how schools can decide the best way to teach and, when necessary, discipline students. It also cuts against recognized research that Black, Latino and Native American students are disciplined more frequently and harshly than white and Asian students.

I am an educational scholar who has spent the past 13 years analyzing school discipline policy. While previous administrations have issued “Dear Colleague” letters to schools, Trump’s is the first that frames itself as though it were law — setting a potential new precedent for the executive branch to issue educational mandates without the approval of the judicial or congressional branches of government.

While all but two states have responded to Trump’s letter, about half of them have said they are not going to comply with its terms — despite the administration’s threat of cutting funding if they do not follow the guidance.

Understanding DEI in education

Equity-oriented education, or diversity, equity and inclusion, refers to an ideology and programming that intend to ameliorate patterns of racial inequality. In the context of discipline in schools, DEI strategies could include teachers having conversations with children about their behavior, rather than immediately suspending them.

Research shows that these techniques can help reduce racial discipline gaps in academic achievement and disciplinary outcomes.

The Obama administration in 2014 recognized this research in its own “Dear Colleague” letter to schools. The administration advised schools to either reform their discipline practices toward nonpunitive alternatives to suspension or risk being investigated for discrimination.

The first Trump administration rescinded this letter in 2018.

Then, in 2023, the Biden administration released a document along the same lines as Obama’s letter.

Trump’s February 2025 letter grouped all of these recommendations under the banner of “DEI” and argued that such practices are discriminatory, privileging students of color over white and Asian students.

In his April executive order, Trump reiterated that if schools did not eliminate DEI, they would be out of compliance with Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This act prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color or national origin,

Public school districts regularly have to issue a certificate of compliance to the government showing that their work is in line with Title VI.

While the Trump administration characterizes DEI as “smuggling racial stereotypes and explicit race-consciousness into everyday training, programming, and discipline,” it does not define exactly what constitutes DEI programming.

This puts school districts at risk of losing funding if they maintain any initiatives related to racial equality.

Legal concerns

The executive office and members of Congress typically issue “Dear Colleague” letters, which are not legally binding, to advise schools and others on policy.

Yet Trump’s letter was written like a mandate and reinforced by an executive order, which is legally binding.

Some scholars are calling the letter an “overreach” of legal authority.

In the spring of 2025, I analyzed states’ responses to Trump’s letter and executive order.

Two states, Iowa and Tennessee, had not yet provided public responses.

Twenty-three states complied with the administration’s directive by signing the letter as of May 30. Some, like Oklahoma, not only certified the letter but also passed state laws banning DEI policies and programs.

The remaining 25 states refused to certify the letter, asserting that they already complied with Title VI and that their policies are not discriminatory.

In addition, 19 of those 25 states sued the Trump administration over the letter in April, culminating in a court injunction later that month that temporarily released states from having to comply with its demands.

I noticed that many states that refuted Trump’s letter used the same exact words in their responses, signaling a concerted effort to resist Trump’s directives. States that did not sign on to the letter but objected to its intent generally resisted on legal grounds, ethics or both.

Most states that rejected it grounded their refusal to sign Trump’s letter in federal law. They cited the Civil Rights Act and the Paperwork Reduction Act, which protects states from having to file redundant paperwork. Because these states already certified compliance with Title VI, this argument goes, they should not have to do so again under Trump’s directive.

Education commissioners from a few states, including Illinois and Minnesota, also cited specific language used by Betsy DeVos, Trump’s former education secretary in his first term, who supported DEI policies.

Charlene Russell-Tucker, the education commissioner for Connecticut, also pointed out that in order for the federal government to cancel DEI programming, it would have to first legally change the definition of Title VI.

Resisting on other grounds

Some education officials also argued that their DEI work is ideologically necessary for providing supportive learning environments for all students.

Patrick Tutwiler, Massachusetts’ interim education commissioner, wrote in an April 16 letter, for example, that “Massachusetts will continue to promote diversity in our schools because we know it improves outcomes for all of our kids.”

Other officials displayed more subtle resistance. Randy Watson, Kansas’ education commissioner, for example, affirmed the state’s “commitment to comply with all Federal statutes,” including Title VI — but did not explicitly address Trump’s “Dear Colleague” letter.

Similarly, Kentucky informed the Department of Education of its compliance with federal law, while simultaneously encouraging local districts to continue diversity, equity and inclusion work.

Mississippi’s state department of education pointed out that school districts operate independently, so the state cannot force policies on them. However, Mississippi signaled compliance by citing a new state law banning DEI and confirmed that each of its individual school districts have already certified compliance with federal laws.

More pushback

It is not yet clear what might follow the April court injunction, which largely prevented the Department of Education from cutting federal funding to schools that continued their DEI-related programs and policies.

While the Trump administration has made major cuts to the Department of Education, it has not announced that states refusing to certify the letter will lose funding.

This is the first time an administration is issuing such a direct threat to withhold K-12 funding, placing schools in an unknown place, without a clear blueprint of how to move forward.

Here's why Trump can't stop the shift to electric cars

By Alan Jenn, Associate Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Davis.

The U.S. government is in full retreat from its efforts to make vehicles more fuel-efficient, which it has been waging, along with state governments, since the 1970s.

The latest move came on July 29, when the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said it planned to rescind its landmark 2009 decision, known as the “endangerment finding,” that greenhouse gases pose a threat to public health and welfare.

If that stands up in court and is not overruled by Congress, it would undo a key part of the long-standing effort to limit greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles.

As a scholar of how vehicle emissions contribute to climate change, I know that the science behind the endangerment finding hasn’t changed. If anything, the evidence has grown that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet and threatening people’s health and safety. Heat waves, flooding, sea-level rise and wildfires have only worsened in the decade and a half since the EPA’s ruling.

Regulations over the years have cut emissions from power generation, leaving transportation as the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.

The scientific community agrees that vehicle emissions are harmful and should be regulated. The public also agrees, and has indicated strong preferences for cars that pollute less, including both more efficient gas-burning vehicles and electric-powered ones. Consumers have also been drawn to electric vehicles thanks to other benefits such as performance, operation cost and innovative technologies.

That is why I believe the EPA’s move will not stop the public and commercial transition to electric vehicles, but it will make that shift harder, slower and more expensive for everyone.

Putting carmakers in a bind

The most recent EPA rule about vehicle emissions was finalized in 2024. It set emissions limits that can realistically only be met by a large-scale shift to electric vehicles.

Over the past decade and a half, automakers have been building up their capability to produce electric vehicles to meet these fleet requirements, and a combination of regulations such as California’s zero-emission-vehicle requirements have worked together to ensure customers can get their hands on EVs.

The zero-emission-vehicle rules require automakers to produce EVs for the California market, which in turn make it easier for the companies to meet their efficiency and emissions targets from the federal government. These collectively pressure automakers to provide a steady supply of electric vehicles to consumers.

The new EPA move would undo the 2024 EPA vehicle-emissions rule and other federal regulations that also limit emissions from vehicles, such as the heavy-duty vehicle emissions rule.

The possibility of a regulatory reversal puts automakers into a state of uncertainty. Legal challenges to the EPA’s shift are all but guaranteed, and the court process could take years.

For companies making decade-long investment decisions, regulatory stability matters more than short-term politics. Disrupting that stability undermines business planning, erodes investor confidence and sends conflicting signals to consumers and suppliers alike.

A slower roll

The Trump administration has taken other steps to make electric vehicles less attractive to carmakers and consumers.

The White House has already suspended key provisions of the Inflation Reduction Act that provided tax credits for purchasing EVs and halted a US$5 billion investment in a nationwide network of charging stations.

And Congress has retracted the federal waiver that allowed California to set its own, stricter emissions limits. In combination, these policies make it hard to buy and drive electric vehicles: Fewer, or no, financial incentives for consumers make the purchases more expensive, and fewer charging stations make travel planning more challenging.

Overturning the EPA’s 2009 endangerment finding would remove the legal basis for regulating climate pollution from vehicles altogether.

But U.S. consumer interest in electric vehicles has been growing, and automakers have already made massive investments to produce electric vehicles and their associated components in the U.S. — such as Hyundai’s EV factory in Georgia and Volkswagen’s Battery Engineering Lab in Tennessee.

Global markets, especially in Europe and China, are also moving decisively toward electrifying large proportions of the vehicles on the road. This move is helped in no small part due to aggressive regulation by their respective governments. The results speak for themselves: Sales of EVs in both the European Union and China have been growing rapidly.

But the pace of change matters. A slower rollout of clean vehicles means more cumulative emissions, more climate damage and more harm to public health.

The EPA’s proposal seeks to slow the shift to electric vehicles, removing incentives and raising costs — even though the market has shown that cleaner vehicles are viable, the public has shown interest, and the science has never been clearer. But even such a major policy change can’t stop the momentum of those trends.

If Trump wins this court case it's game over for free speech

By Stephanie A. (Sam) Martin, Boise State University.

President Donald Trump is again attacking the American press – this time not with fiery rally speeches or by calling the media “the enemy of the people,” but through the courts.

Since the heat of the November 2024 election, and continuing into July, Trump has filed defamation lawsuits against 60 Minutes broadcaster CBS News and the Wall Street Journal. He has also sued the Des Moines Register for publishing a poll just before the 2024 election that Trump alleges exaggerated support for Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and thus constituted election interference and fraud.

These are in addition to other lawsuits Trump filed against the news media during his first term and during his years out of office between 2021 and 2025.

At the heart of Trump’s complaints is a familiar refrain: The media is not only biased, but dishonest, corrupt and dangerous.

The president isn’t just upset about reporting on him he thinks is unfair. He wants to redefine what counts as libel and make it easier for public officials to sue for damages. A libel suit is a civil tort claim seeking damages when a person believes something false has been printed or broadcast about them and so harmed their reputation.

Redefining libel in this way would require overturning the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, one of the most important First Amendment legal rulings in American constitutional history

Trump made overturning Sullivan a talking point during his first campaign for president; his lawsuits now put that threat into action. And they raise the question: What happened in Sullivan, and why does it still matter?

What Sullivan was about

As chair of a public policy institute devoted to strengthening deliberative democracy, I have written two books about the media and the presidency, and another about media ethics. My research traces how news institutions shape civic life and why healthy democracies rely on free expression.

In 1960, the New York Times published a full-page advertisement titled “Heed Their Rising Voices”. The ad, which included an appeal for readers to send money in support of Martin Luther King Jr. and the movement against Jim Crow, described brutal and unjust treatment of Black students and protesters in Montgomery, Alabama. It also emphasized episodes of police violence against peaceful demonstrations.

The ad was not entirely accurate in its description of the behavior of either protesters or the police.

It claimed, for instance, that activists had sung “My Country ’Tis of Thee” on the steps of the state capitol during a rally, when they actually had sung the national anthem. It said that “truckloads of police armed with shotguns and tear-gas” had “ringed” a college campus, when the police had only been deployed nearby. And it asserted that King had been arrested seven times in Alabama, when the real number was four.

Though the ad did not identify any individual public officials by name, it disparaged the behavior of Montgomery police.

That’s where L.B. Sullivan came in.

As Montgomery’s police commissioner, he oversaw the police department. Sullivan claimed that because the ad maligned the conduct of law enforcement, it had implicitly defamed him. In 1960 in Alabama, a primary defense against libel was truth. But since there were mistakes in the ad, a truth defense could not be raised. Sullivan sued for damages, and an Alabama jury awarded him $500,000, equivalent to $5,450,000 in 2025.

The message to the press was clear: criticize Southern officials and risk being sued out of existence.

In fact, the Sullivan lawsuit was not an isolated incident, but part of a broader strategy. In addition to Sullivan, four other Montgomery officials filed suits against the Times.

In Birmingham, public officials filed seven libel lawsuits over Times reporter Harrison Salisbury’s trenchant reporting about racism in that city. The lawsuits helped push the Times to the edge of bankruptcy. Salisbury was even indicted for seditious libel and faced up to 21 years in prison.

Alabama officials also sued CBS, the Associated Press, the Saturday Evening Post and Ladies’ Home Journal – all for reporting on civil rights and the South’s brutal response.

Supreme Court decision

The jury’s verdict in favor of Sullivan was unanimously overturned by the Supreme Court in 1964.

Writing for the court, Justice William Brennan held that public officials cannot prevail in defamation lawsuits merely by showing that statements are false. Instead, they must prove such statements are made with “actual malice”. Actual malice means a reporter or press outlet knew their story was false or else acted with reckless disregard for the truth.

The decision set a high bar.

Before the ruling, the First Amendment’s protections for speech and the press didn’t offer much help to the press in libel cases.

After it, public officials who wanted to sue the press would have to prove “actual malice” — real, purposeful untruths that caused harm. Honest mistakes weren’t enough to prevail in such lawsuits. The court held that errors are inevitable in public debate and that protecting those mistakes is essential to keeping debate open and free.

In essence, the court ruling blocked government officials from suing for libel with ulterior motives.

King and other civil rights leaders relied on a strategy of nonviolent protest to expose injustice through public, visible actions.

When protesters were arrested, beaten or hosed in the streets, their goal was not chaos — it was clarity. They wanted the nation to see what Southern oppression looked like. For that, they needed press coverage.

If Sullivan’s lawsuit had succeeded, it could have bullied the press away from covering civil rights altogether. The Supreme Court recognized this danger.

Another key element of the court’s reasoning was its distinction between public officials and private citizens.

Elected leaders, the court said, can use mass media to defend themselves in ways ordinary people cannot.

“The public official certainly has equal if not greater access than most private citizens to media of communication,” Justice Brennan wrote in the Sullivan ruling.

Trump is a perfect example of this dynamic. He masterfully uses social media, rallies, televised interviews and impromptu remarks to push back. He doesn’t need the courts.

Giving public officials the power to sue over news stories they dislike could well create a chilling effect on the media that undermines government accountability and distorts public discourse.

“The theory of our Constitution is that every citizen may speak his mind and every newspaper express its view on matters of public concern and may not be barred from speaking or publishing because those in control of government think that what is said or written is unwise,” Brennan wrote.

“In a democratic society, one who assumes to act for the citizens in an executive, legislative, or judicial capacity must expect that his official acts will be commented upon and criticized.”

Why Sullivan still matters

The Sullivan ruling is more than a legal doctrine. It is a shared agreement about the kind of democracy Americans aspire to. It affirms a press duty to hold power to account, and a public right to hear facts and information that those in power want to suppress.

The ruling protects the right to criticize those in power and affirms that the press is not a nuisance, but an essential part of a functioning democracy. It ensures that political leaders cannot insulate themselves from scrutiny by silencing their critics through intimidation or litigation.

Trump’s lawsuits seek to undo these press protections. He presents himself as the victim of a dishonest press and hopes to use the legal system to punish those he perceives to be his detractors.

The decision in the Sullivan case reminds Americans that democracy doesn’t depend on leaders who feel comfortable. It depends on a public that is free to speak.

  • Sam Martin, Ph.D. is the Frank and Bethine Church Endowed Chair of Public Affairs and Associate Professor at Boise State University. Her research focuses on political storytelling and civic identity. Martin has produced four books about American democracy including "Columns to Character: The Presidency and the Press in the Digital Age (2018) and "Decoding the Digital Church: Evangelical Storytelling and the Election of Donald J. Trump" (2021).

This decadent Roman emperor's fall holds lessons for Trump

By Kirk Freudenburg, Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor of Classics, Yale University.

President Donald Trump’s first term saw a record-high rate of turnover among his cabinet members and chief advisers. Trump’s second term has, to date, seen far fewer cabinet departures.

But some political commentators have observed that the president this time around has primarily appointed loyal advisers who will not challenge him.

As Thomas Friedman pointed out in The New York Times on June 3, “In Trump I, the president surrounded himself with some people of weight who could act as buffers. In Trump II, he has surrounded himself only with sycophants who act like amplifiers.”

As a scholar of Greco-Roman antiquity, I have spent many years studying the demise of truth-telling in periods of political upheaval. Spanning the period from 27 B.C.E. to 476 C.E., the Roman Empire still offers insights into what happens to political leaders when they interpret possibly helpful advice as dissent.

Particularly telling is the case of Nero, Rome’s emperor from 54 to 68 C.E., who responded to a disastrous fire in 64 with extreme cruelty and self-worship that did nothing to help desperate citizens.

Suppressing honest advice

Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, established a handpicked circle of advisers — called the consilium principis in Latin, meaning emperor’s council — to give a republican look to his autocratic regime. Augustus became emperor in 27 B.C.E. and ruled over the empire, which stretched from Europe and North Africa to the Middle East at its peak, until his death in 14 C.E.

Augustus wanted to hear what others thought about the empire’s needs and his policies. At least some of Augustus’ advisers were bold enough to assert themselves and risk incurring his displeasure. Some, such as Cornelius Gallus, paid for their boldness with their lives, while others, such as Cilnius Maecenas, managed to push their political agendas in softer ways that allowed them to maintain their influence.

But the Roman emperors who came after Augustus were either less skilled at maintaining a republican facade, or less interested in doing so.

Nero was the last of the emperors from the noble Julio-Claudian dynasty in ancient Rome at its peak of power. Historians who describe Nero’s rise and fall from power describe the first five years of his reign, or the quinquennium neronis in Latin, as a period of relative calm and prosperity.

Because Nero was just 16 years old when he acceded to power, he was assigned advisers to guide his policies. Their opinions carried significant weight.

But five years into his reign, chafing at their continued oversight, Nero began to purge these advisers from his life, via execution, forced suicide and exile.

Nero instead collected a small cadre of self-interested enablers who derived power for themselves by encouraging their leader’s delusions, such as his desire to project himself as the incarnation of the sun god, Apollo.

The single most unspeakably corrupt and nefarious of these preferred advisers was Ofonius Tigellinus. Tigellinus had caught Nero’s eye early in 62 by urging the senate to convict a Roman magistrate of treason for having composed poems that he deemed insulting to the emperor. Later that year, Tigellinus was appointed the head of the emperor’s personal army.

As praetorian prefect, Tigellinus was charged not only with protecting Nero from physical harm, but also with crafting and guarding the leader’s public image. Tigellinus urged Nero to stage an ongoing series of public spectacles — like theatrical performances and athletic competitions — that featured him as a divine ruler and a god on Earth.

Up in flames

It was likely at Tigellinus’ urging that, in the aftermath of the great fire of 64 that raged for six days in Rome, Nero staged an exorbitant garden party where Christians were soaked in flammable oils and lit as human torches to illuminate a decadent late-night feast.

But, try as he might, Nero couldn’t outrun the fire and its aftermath by indulging in clever cruelties. Huge swathes of the city had been razed by the fire. Thousands of citizens lacked clothing. They were hungry, displaced and homeless.

For answers, the fire’s countless victims looked to Nero, their earthly Apollo, for help. But they did not encounter a sympathetic leader sweeping in to address their needs. Instead, they found a man desperate to place blame on others — in this case, foreigners from the east.

In order to squelch rumors that Nero had lit the fire, Tigellinus’ army unit rounded up Christians, falsely blamed them for starting the fire and executed them.

But this move just showcased Nero’s failure to focus on the dire needs of the poor, the very people who worshipped him. Instead, he sought to rise above the ashes by doubling down on his divine pretensions.

Once the rubble left by the fire was cleared away, Nero built a magnificent new home for himself. This palace, called the domus aurea in Latin, meaning house of gold, covered more than 120 acres in the heart of Rome. It featured spectacular water fountains, elaborate works of art and, standing tall in the entryway, a 120-foot bronze statue of Nero as the sun god, Apollo.

No truth-teller was there to tell Nero that maybe he shouldn’t rub his people’s noses in their suffering.

Nero’s delusional response to the fire did not put an end to his career, but it did much to hasten its end.

Less than four years later, with armies bearing down on the city, Nero committed suicide. Rome tumbled into civil war.

Self-worship

Trump has long expressed a desire to have his face carved on Mount Rushmore, a national memorial in South Dakota that features the likenesses of legendary American presidents George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore Roosevelt.

This dream became a bit closer to reality when Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles in July 2025 urged the Department of the Interior to explore adding Trump’s image to Mount Rushmore — even though such an addition might not be possible because of geological issues.

Trump’s critics have long noted the president’s propensity to focus on himself and his own greatness and power, rather than the needs of citizens.

As far away as the Roman Empire might seem, Nero’s rise and fall offers a lesson in what can happen when honest criticism of a political leader is sidelined in favor of idolatry.

Instead of honest solutions to real problems, what Romans got was a colossal statue that portrayed their leader as a god on Earth.

It can happen here, to Zohran

By James N. Gregory, Professor of History, University of Washington.

It has happened before: an upset victory by a democratic socialist in an important primary election after an extraordinary grassroots campaign.

In the summer of 1934, Upton Sinclair earned the kind of headlines that greeted Zohran Mamdani’s primary victory on June 24, 2025, in the New York City mayoral election.

Mamdani’s win surprised nearly everyone. Not just because he beat the heavily favored former governor Andrew Cuomo, but because he did so by a large margin. Because he did so with a unique coalition, and because his Muslim identity and membership in the Democratic Socialists of America should have, in conventional political thinking, made victory impossible.

This sounds familiar, at least to historians like me. Upton Sinclair, the famous author and a socialist for most of his life, ran for governor in California in 1934 and won the Democratic primary election with a radical plan that he called End Poverty in California, or EPIC.

The news traveled the globe and set off intense speculation about the future of California, where Sinclair was then expected to win the general election. His primary victory also generated theories about the future of the Democratic Party, where this turn toward radicalism might complicate the policies of the Democratic administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

What happened next may concern Mamdani supporters. Business and media elites mounted a campaign of fear that put Sinclair on the defensive. Meanwhile, conservative Democrats defected, and a third candidate split progressive votes.

In the November election, Sinclair lost decisively to incumbent Gov. Frank Merriam, who would have stood less chance against a conventional Democrat.

As a historian of American radicalism, I have written extensively about Sinclair’s EPIC movement, and I direct an online project that includes detailed accounts of the campaign and copies of campaign materials.

Upton’s 1934 campaign initiated the on-again, off-again influence of radicals in the Democratic Party and illustrates some of the potential dynamics of that relationship, which, almost 100 years later, may be relevant to Mamdani in the coming months.

California, 1934

Sinclair launched his gubernatorial campaign in late 1933, hoping to make a difference but not expecting to win. California remained mired in the Great Depression. The unemployment rate had been estimated at 29% when Roosevelt took office in March and had improved only slightly since then.

Sinclair’s Socialist Party had failed badly in the 1932 presidential election as Democrat Roosevelt swept to victory. Those poor results included California, where the Democratic Party had been an afterthought for more than three decades.

Sinclair decided that it was time to see what could be accomplished by radicals working within that party.

Reregistering as a Democrat, he dashed off a 64-page pamphlet with the futuristic title I, Governor of California and How I Ended Poverty. It detailed his plan to solve California’s massive unemployment crisis by having the state take over idle farms and factories and turn them into cooperatives dedicated to “production for use” instead of “production for profit.”

Sinclair soon found himself presiding over an explosively popular campaign, as thousands of volunteers across the state set up EPIC clubs — numbering more than 800 by election time — and sold the weekly EPIC News to raise campaign funds.

Mainstream Democrats waited too long to worry about Sinclair and then failed to unite behind an alternative candidate. But it would not have mattered. Sinclair celebrated a massive primary victory, gaining more votes than all of his opponents combined.

Newspapers around the world told the story.

“What is the matter with California?” The Boston Globe asked, according to author Greg Mitchell. “That is the farthest shift to the left ever made by voters of a major party in this country.”

Building fear

Primaries are one thing. But in 1934, the November general election turned in a different direction.

Terrified by Sinclair’s plan, business leaders mobilized to defeat EPIC, forming the kind of cross-party coalition that is rare in America except when radicals pose an electoral threat. Sinclair described the effort in a book he wrote shortly after the November election: “I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked.”

Nearly every major newspaper in the state, including the five Democratic-leaning Hearst papers, joined the effort to stop Sinclair. Meanwhile, a high-priced advertising agency set up bipartisan groups with names like California League Against Sinclairism and Democrats for Merriam, trumpeting the names of prominent Democrats who refused to support Sinclair.

Few people of any party were enthusiastic about Merriam, who had recently angered many Californians by sending the National Guard to break a longshore strike in San Francisco, only to trigger a general strike that shut down the city.

The campaign against Sinclair attacked him with billboards, radio and newsreel programming, and relentless newspaper stories about his radical past and supposedly dangerous plans for California.

EPIC faced another challenge, candidate Raymond Haight, running on the Progressive Party label. Haight threatened to divide left-leaning voters.

Sinclair tried to defend himself, energetically denouncing what he called the “Lie Factory” and offering revised, more moderate versions of some elements of the EPIC plan. But the Red Scare campaign worked. Merriam easily outdistanced Sinclair, winning by a plurality in the three-way race.

New York, 2025

Will a Democratic Socialist running for mayor in New York face anything similar in the months ahead?

A movement to stop Mamdani is coming together, and some of what they are saying resonates with the 1934 campaign to stop Sinclair.

The Guardian newspaper has quoted “loquacious billionaire hedge funder Bill Ackman, who said he and others in the finance industry are ready to commit ‘hundreds of millions of dollars’ into an opposing campaign.”

In 1934, newspapers publicized threats by major companies, most famously Hollywood studios, to leave California in the event of a Sinclair victory. The Wall Street Journal, Fortune magazine and other media outlets have recently warned of similar threats.

And there may be something similar about the political dynamics.

Sinclair’s opponents could offer only a weak alternative candidate. Merriam had few friends and many critics.

In 2025, New York City Mayor Eric Adams, who abandoned the primary when he was running as a Democrat and is now running as an independent, is arguably weaker still, having been rescued by President Donald Trump from a corruption indictment that might have sent him to prison. If he is the best hope to stop Mamdani, the campaign strategy will likely parallel 1934. All attack ads – little effort to promote Adams.

But there is an important difference in the way the New York contest is setting up. Andrew Cuomo remains on the ballot as an independent, and his name could draw votes that might otherwise go to Adams.

Curtis Sliwa, the Republican candidate, will also be on the ballot. Whereas in 1934 two candidates divided progressive votes, in 2025 three candidates are going to divide the stop-Mamdani votes.

Religion also looms large in the campaign ahead. The New York City metro area’s U.S. Muslim population is said to be at least 600,000, compared to an estimated 1.6 million Jewish residents. Adams has announced that the threat of antisemitism will be the major theme of his campaign.

The stop-Sinclair campaign also relied on religion, focusing on his professed atheism and pulling quotations from books he had written denouncing organized religion. However, a statistical analysis of voting demographics suggests that this effort proved unimportant.

Trump knows one man has the strength to finish him off

By Andrew Dodd, Professor of Journalism, The University of Melbourne and Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University.

If Rupert Murdoch becomes a white knight standing up to a rampantly bullying US president, the world has moved into the upside-down.

This is, after all, the media mogul whose US television network, Fox News, actively supported Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 presidential election result and paid out a $787 million lawsuit for doing so.

It is also the network that supplied several members of Trump’s inner circle, including former Fox host, now controversial Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth.

But that is where we are after Trump filed a writ on July 18 after Murdoch’s financial newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, published an article about a hand-drawn card Trump is alleged to have sent to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. The newspaper reported:

A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.

The Journal said it has seen the letter but did not republish it. The letter allegedly concluded:

Happy Birthday – and may every day be another wonderful secret.

The card was apparently Trump’s contribution to a birthday album compiled for Epstein by the latter’s partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence after being found guilty of sex trafficking in 2021.

Trump was furious. He told his Truth Social audience he had warned Murdoch the letter was fake. He wrote, “Mr Murdoch stated that he would take care of it but obviously did not have the power to do so,” referring to Murdoch handing leadership of News Corporation to his eldest son Lachlan in 2023.

Trump is being pincered. On one side, The Wall Street Journal is a respected newspaper that speaks to literate, wealthy Americans who remain deeply sceptical about Trump’s radical initiative on tariffs, which it described in an editorial as “the dumbest trade war in history.”

On the other side is the conspiracy theory-thirsty MAGA base who have been told for years that there was a massive conspiracy around Epstein’s apparent suicide in 2019 that included the so-called deep state, Democrat elites and, no doubt, the Clintons.

Trump, who loves pro wrestling as well as adopting its garish theatrics, might characterize his lawsuit against Murdoch as a smackdown to rival Hulk Hogan vs Andre the Giant in the 1980s.

To adopt wrestling argot, though, it is a rare battle between two heels.

Friendship of powerful convenience

Murdoch and Trump’s relationship is longstanding but convoluted. The key to understanding it is that both men are ruthlessly transactional.

Exposure in Murdoch’s New York Post in the 1980s and ‘90s was crucial to building Trump’s reputation.

Not that Murdoch particularly likes Trump. Yes, Murdoch attended his second inauguration, albeit in a back row behind the newly favoured big tech media moguls. He was also seen sitting in the Oval Office a few days later looking quite at home.

But this was pure power-display politics, not the behaviour of a friend.

Remember Murdoch’s derision on hearing Trump was considering standing for office before the 2016 election, and his promotion of Ron DeSantis in the primaries before Trump’s second term. Murdoch’s political hero has always been Ronald Reagan. Trump has laid waste to the Republican Party of Reagan.

Murdoch knows what the rest of sane America knows: Trump is downright weird, if not dangerous. This, of course, only makes Murdoch’s complicity in Trump’s rise to power, and Fox News’ continued boosterism of Trump, all the more appalling.

But, in keeping with Murdoch’s relationship to power throughout his career, what he helps make, he also helps destroy. Perhaps now it’s Trump’s turn to be unmade. As a former Murdoch lieutenant told The Financial Times:

He’s testing out: Is Trump losing his base? And where do I need to be to stay in the heart of the base?

And here is Murdoch’s great advantage, and his looming threat.

Double-edged sword

The advantage comes with the scope of Murdoch’s media empire, which operates like a federation of different mastheads, each with their own market and aspirations. While Fox News panders to the MAGA base, and The New York Post juices its New York audience, The Wall Street Journal speaks, and listens, to business. Each audience has different needs, meaning they’re often presented with the same news in very different ways, or sometimes different news entirely.

Like a federation, though, News Corp uses its various operations to drive the type of change that affects all its markets.

It might work like this. The Wall Street Journal breaks a story that’s so shocking it begins to chip away at MAGA’s unquestioning loyalty of Trump. This process is, of course, willingly aided by the rest of the media. The resulting groundswell eventually allows Fox News and the Post to tentatively follow their audiences into questioning, and then perhaps criticising, Trump.

The threat is that before that groundswell builds, Murdoch is seriously vulnerable to criticism from a still dominant Trump, who can turn conspiracy-prone audiences away from Fox News with just a social media post. Trump has already been busy doing just that, saying he is looking forward to getting Murdoch onto the witness stand for his lawsuit.

If the Fox audience decides it’s the proprietor who’s behind this denigration of Trump, they may decide to boycott their own favoured media channel, even though Fox’s programming hasn’t yet started questioning Trump.

The Murdochs’ fear of audience backlash was a major factor in Fox’s promulgation of the Big Lie after Trump’s defeat in 2020. The fear their audience might defect to Newsmax or some other right-wing media outfit is just as real today.

History littered with fakery

We also need to consider that Trump might be right. What if the letter is a fake?

Murdoch has form when it comes to high-profile exposés that turn out to be fiction. Who can forget the Hitler Diaries in 1983, which we now know Murdoch knew were fake before he published.

Think also of the Pauline Hanson photos, allegedly of her posing in lingerie, all of which were quickly proved to be fake after they were published by Murdoch’s Australian tabloids in 2009.

There was also The Sun’s despicable and wilfully wrong campaign against Elton John in 1987 and the same paper’s continued denigration of the people of Liverpool following the Hillsborough stadium disaster in 1989.

But while Murdoch’s News Corp has a history of confection and fakery, the Wall Street Journal has a reputation for straight reportage, albeit through a conservative lens. Since Murdoch bought it in 2007, it has been engaged in its own internal battle for editorial standards.

Media rolling over

What Trump won’t get from Murdoch is the same acquiescence he’s enjoyed from ABC and CBS, which have handed over tens of millions of dollars in defamation settlements following dubious claims by Trump about the nature of their coverage.

In December 2024, ABC’s owner Disney settled and agreed to pay $15 million to Trump’s presidential library. The president sued after a presenter said Trump was found guilty of raping E. Jean Carroll.

Trump had actually been found guilty by a jury in a civil trial of sexually abusing and defaming Carroll and was ordered to pay her $5 million.

CBS’ parent company, Paramount, did similarly after being sued by the president, agreeing in early July to settle and pay $16 million to Trump’s library. This was despite earlier saying the case was “completely without merit”.

Beware the legal microscope

From Trump’s viewpoint, two prominent media companies have been cowed. But his campaign against critical media doesn’t stop there.

Last week, Congress passed a bill cancelling federal funding for the country’s two public-service media outlets, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) and National Public Radio (NPR).

Also last week, CBS announced the cancellation of Stephen Colbert’s stridently critical comedy show, although CBS claims this is just a cost-cutting exercise and not about appeasing a bully in the White House.

Presuming the reported birthday letter is real, Murdoch will not bend so easily. And that’s when it will be important to pay attention, because at some point Trump’s lawyers will advise him about the dangers of depositions and discovery: the legal processes that force parties to a dispute to reveal what they have and what they know.

If the Epstein files do implicate Trump, the legal fight won’t last long and the media campaign against him will only intensify.

Right now we have the spectre of Murdoch joining that other disaffected mogul, Elon Musk, in a moral crusade against Trump, the man they both helped make. The implications are head-spinning.

As global bullies, the three of them probably deserve each other. But we, the public, surely deserve better than any of them.

One key right is older than America — but still under threat from Trump

By Ray Brescia, Associate Dean for Research and Intellectual Life, Albany Law School.

As the United States edges up to the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 2026, one of the core principles the founders sought to advance — that the government must act with accountability and in accordance with the rule of law — is being strongly tested.

In their deliberations leading up to the declaration, the founders would not just raise deep concerns that the government of King George III was violating the Colonists’ rights, which they described in the Declaration. They would also enshrine these principles in the U.S. Constitution over a decade later, through the concept of “due process.”

What did the framers likely mean when they did so? That’s no longer simply an academic question for legal scholars like me. The meaning and application of due process has become a crucial issue in the U.S., most often with respect to the Trump administration’s migrant deportation efforts.

Over the past several months, the U.S. Supreme Court has made several rulings in deportation-related cases with respect to what’s called the due process clause of the Constitution.

In April 2025, in the case Trump v. J.G.G., the court seemed to state quite clearly that deportations could not take place without due process. More recently, however, in D.H.S. v. D.V.D., the Supreme Court prevented a lower court from providing due process protections to a group of men the administration wanted to deport to South Sudan, where they are at risk of facing torture and even death.

These seemingly contradictory rulings not only make it unclear when due process applies but probably leave many asking what the term “due process of law” even means and how it works.

Origins of due process

The American concept of due process can be traced from medieval England to its modern formulation by the U.S. Supreme Court. Doing so allows the meaning of due process to come into focus. It also calls into question the court’s most recent ruling on this issue.

The concepts of due process and the rule of law largely emerged in the 13th century in the Magna Carta, a formal, written agreement between King John and the rebel aristocracy that effectively established legal constraints on government.

One key passage from the Magna Carta provided that “No Freeman shall be taken, or any otherwise imprisoned, or be disseised of his Freehold, or Liberties, or free Customs, or be outlawed, or exiled, or destroyed; nor we will not pass upon him, nor condemn him, but by lawful Judgment of his Peers, or by the Law of the Land.”

This accord established formal constraints on a previously unrestrained regent, setting English law on the course that would prioritize rule of law over the whims of the monarch.

Over a century later, Parliament passed the statute of 1354 that said “That no Man of what Estate or Condition that he be, shall he put out of Land or Tenement, nor taken nor imprisoned, nor disinherited, nor put to death, without being brought in Answer by due Process of the Law.”

These principles evolved over time in British law and then informed the emerging revolutionary spirit in the American Colonies.

Released in January 1776, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet Common Sense helped galvanize and steel many Colonists for the revolutionary conflict to come. The work shifted the focus of Colonists’ anger from trying to force the king to treat them better to more radical change: independence and a country governed by the rule of law.

What the Colonists wanted, Paine wrote, was not a monarch: “So far as we approve of monarchy, that in America THE LAW IS KING. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

Defining due process

After independence, many of the original 13 states adopted their own constitutions that enshrined principles akin to due process to protect their constituents from government overreach, such as that government was to be bound, as in Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776, by “the law of the land.”

But it was not until the nation adopted the Bill of Rights — the first 10 amendments to the Constitution — in 1791 that the federal government could not act in a way that deprived the populace of life, liberty or property without due process of law. After the Civil War, the 14th Amendment applied these same protections to all government action, state and federal.

The contemporary and most comprehensive formulation of what due process requires can be found in the Supreme Court’s ruling in the 1970 case Goldberg v. Kelly, brought by welfare recipients challenging their loss of such benefits without a hearing.

The court determined that when governments attempt to deprive someone of their life, liberty or property, the target of those attempts must receive fair notice of the charges or claims against them that would justify that loss; be given an opportunity to defend against those claims; and possess the right to have such defenses considered by an impartial adjudicator.

The Supreme Court in 1976 accepted that due process protections in different settings will vary based on a number of variables. Those include what is at stake in the case, the likelihood that government might make a mistake in a particular setting, and the benefits and burdens of providing certain forms of process in a given situation.

When someone’s life is literally on the line, for example, more exacting procedures are required. At the same time, regardless of how important the interest that is subject to due process — whether it is one’s life, one’s home, one’s liberty, or something else — the components of fair notice, an opportunity to be heard, and to have one’s case decided by an impartial adjudicator must be meaningful.

As the court said in Mullane vs. Central Hanover Bank & Trust Co. in 1950: “Process which is a mere gesture is not due process.”

Four presidents have tried Trump's favorite hardline tactic. It doesn't work

By Kevin Johnson, Dean and Professor of Public Interest Law and Chicana/o Studies, University of California, Davis.

All modern U.S. presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have attempted to reduce the population of millions of undocumented immigrants. But their various strategies have not had significant results, with the population hovering around 11 million from 2005 to 2022.

President Donald Trump seeks to change that.

With harsh rhetoric that has sowed fear in immigrant communities, and policies that ignore immigrants’ due process rights, Trump has pursued deportation tactics that differ dramatically from those of any other modern U.S. president.

As a scholar who examines the history of U.S. immigration law and enforcement, I believe that it remains far from clear whether the Trump White House will significantly reduce the undocumented population. But even if the administration’s efforts fail, the fear and damage to the U.S. immigrant community will remain.

Bush and Obama

To increase deportations, in 2006 President George W. Bush began using workplace raids. Among these sweeps was the then-largest immigration workplace operation in U.S. history at a meat processing plant in Postville, Iowa in 2008.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) deployed 900 agents in Postville and arrested 398 employees, 98% of whom were Latino. They were chained together and arraigned in groups of 10 for felony criminal charges of aggravated identity theft, document fraud and use of stolen Social Security numbers. Some 300 were convicted, and 297 of them served jail sentences before being deported.

In 2008, Bush also initiated Secure Communities, a policy that sought to deport noncitizens — both lawful permanent residents as well as undocumented immigrants — who had been arrested for crimes. Some 2 million immigrants were deported during Bush’s two terms in office.

The Obama administration limited Secure Communities to focus on the removal of noncitizens convicted of felonies. It deported a record 400,000 noncitizens in fiscal year 2013, which led detractors to refer to President Barack Obama as the “Deporter in Chief.”

Obama also targeted recent entrants and national security threats and pursued criminal prosecutions for illegal reentry to the U.S. Almost all of these policies built on Bush’s, although Obama virtually abandoned workplace raids.

Despite these enforcement measures, Obama also initiated Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, in 2012. The policy provided relief from deportation and gave work authorization to more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children.

Obama deported about 3 million noncitizens, but the size of the undocumented population did not decrease dramatically.

Trump and Biden

Trump’s first administration broke new immigration enforcement ground in several ways.

He began his presidency by issuing what was called a “Muslim ban” to restrict the entry into the U.S. of noncitizens from predominantly Muslim nations.

Early in Trump’s first administration, federal agents expanded immigration operations to include raids at courthouses, which previously had been off-limits.

In 2017, Trump tried to rescind DACA, but the Supreme Court rejected Trump’s effort in 2020.

In 2019, Trump implemented the Remain in Mexico policy that for the first time forced noncitizens who came to the U.S. border seeking asylum to wait in Mexico while their claims were being decided. He also invoked Title 42 in 2020 to close U.S. borders during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Trump succeeded in reducing legal immigration numbers during his first term. However, there is no evidence that his enforcement policies reduced the size of the overall undocumented population.

President Joe Biden sought to relax — although not abandon — some immigration enforcement measures implemented during Trump’s first term.

His administration slowed construction of the border wall championed by Trump. Biden also stopped workplace raids in 2021, and in 2023, he ended Title 42.

In 2023, Biden sought to respond to migration surges in a measured fashion, by temporarily closing ports of entry and increasing arrests.

In attempting to enforce the borders, his administration at times pursued tough measures. Biden continued deportation efforts directed at criminal noncitizens. Immigrant rights groups criticized his administration when armed Border Patrol officers on horseback were videotaped chasing Haitian migrants on the U.S.-Mexico border.

As of 2022, the middle of the Biden’s term, an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants lived in the U.S.

Trump's second chance

Since his second inauguration, Trump has pursued a mass deportation campaign through executive orders that are unprecedented in their scope.

In January 2025, he announced an expanded, expedited removal process for any noncitizen apprehended anywhere in the country — not just the border region, as had been U.S. practice since 1996.

In March, Trump issued a presidential proclamation to deport Venezuelan nationals who were members of the Tren de Aragua gang, designated a foreign terrorist organization by the State Department. In doing so, he invoked the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, an act used three times in U.S. history during declared wars that empowers presidents to remove foreign nationals from countries at war with the U.S.

Declaring an “invasion” of migrants into the U.S. in June, Trump deployed the military to assist in immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.

Trump also sought to dramatically upend birthright citizenship, the Constitutional provision that guarantees citizenship to any person born in the U.S. He issued an executive order in January that would bar citizenship to people born in the U.S. to undocumented parents.

The birthright executive order has been challenged in federal court and is mostly likely working its way up to the Supreme Court.

Under the second Trump administration, immigration arrests are up, but actual deportation numbers are in flux.

ICE in June arrested the most people in a month in at least five years, roughly 30,000 immigrants. But deportations of noncitizens — roughly 18,000 — lagged behind those during the Obama administration’s record-setting year of 2013 in which more than 400,000 noncitizens were deported.

The gap between arrests and deportations shows the challenges the Trump administration faces in making good on his promised mass deportation campaign.

Undocumented immigrants often come to the U.S. to work or seek safety from natural disasters and mass violence.

These issues have not been seriously addressed by any modern U.S. president. Until it is, we can expect the undocumented population to remain in the millions.

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