"The vice president's justifications for this ideological abuse of government power are obviously false"

 

On Monday, Vice President JD Vance hosted the Charlie Kirk show, ostensibly to pay tribute to his fallen friend. But that was not Vance’s sole purpose for assuming Kirk’s mic. Indeed, the vice president used the occasion to launch an unhinged broadside against his perceived political opponents, threatening the free speech rights of civil society.

Vance knew what he was doing. Before introducing White House aide Stephen Miller as a guest, Vance protested that “the crazies on the far left” are saying, “Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech.” Vance insisted this was not his intent: “No, no, no.”

The vice president doth protest too much. In his next breath, Vance made his agenda clear. “We're going to go after the NGO [non-governmental organization] network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” He did not cite a single piece of evidence connecting Kirk’s assassin to any NGO. Nor have law enforcement officials alleged that Kirk’s killer had any accomplices. Nevertheless, Vance explained the “whole administration has been working” toward the goal of quashing NGOs.

Miller wholeheartedly endorsed Vance’s threat to non-profit groups. Miller insisted—again, without providing a shred of evidence—that an “organized campaign” led to Kirk’s murder. Miller claimed, conveniently and perhaps apocryphally, that the “last message” Kirk sent him concerned the need “to have an organized strategy to go after the leftwing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” 

The Trump adviser vowed to “channel all of the anger” generated by Kirk’s death “to uproot and dismantle these ‘terrorist’ networks.” Again, no one other than a 22-year-old man is currently charged with the crime and, so far at least, there has been no indication that anybody else helped.

Miller’s choice of words, echoing the 9/11 era, was no accident. A “vast domestic terror movement” exists, Miller claimed, and the Trump administration would unleash the power of the federal government, including the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, “to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks.” Al Qaeda, a real international terrorist network, attacked America on Sept. 11, 2001.

What terror “networks” were responsible for Kirk’s horrific murder? Vance and Miller did not and could not say. Vance’s justifications for this ideological abuse of government power are obviously false. For example, the vice president claimed that political violence is “not a both sides problem,” but instead a “much bigger and malignant problem” on the left. The “data is clear,” Vance argued, “people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence.”

In fact, while political violence in the United States is still relatively rare, the American right—not the left—is more inclined to commit such acts. For example, the CATO Institute has produced a study of politically motivated terrorism inside the United States over the past half-century. 

CATO found that 3,599 people were killed in politically motivated terror attacks from Jan. 1, 1975, through Sept. 10, 2025. Subtracting the death toll from 9/11, the single largest terror attack in American history, this figure drops to 620 people. Right-wing terrorists were responsible for the majority of these murders: 391 deaths, or 63% of the total. Meanwhile, left-wing terrorists accounted for 65 murders, or about 10.5% of the total.

This finding has been confirmed in other studies as well. For instance, the Anti-Defamation League reports that all the extremist-related murders from 2022 through 2024 were committed by right-wing extremists. “One of the reasons extremist murder totals have been down in recent years has been a decrease in deadly incidents connected to domestic Islamist extremists and far-left extremists,” the ADL found. 

That has already changed in 2025, as an ISIS-inspired terrorist killed 14 people in an attack in New Orleans on New Year’s Day. But the point remains: In general, right-wing extremists, including white supremacists, are more deadly than other types of extremists.

The Trump administration knows what the data shows—and is trying to hide it from the public. Still another study, published by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) in 2024, found that “the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.” 

The NIJ’s analysis shows that “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists” since 1990. The NIJ’s study was previously hosted on the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) website. But according to 404 Media, the DOJ quietly deleted it in recent days. An archived version can still be found online. So, the data is clear. But it shows exactly the opposite of what Vance wants people to believe.

In making his case, Vance ignored the data on actual political violence in America. Instead, he cited a single online poll conducted by YouGov to support his argument. But even here he was cherry-picking. The vice president ignored a series of other polls showing that the American right is more likely to support political violence.

For example, polling by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) shows that Republicans are more likely than Democrats and independents to agree that “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save the country.” Fortunately, only a minority of Republicans (18%) and Democrats (11%) agreed with this statement during polling earlier this year. 

However, the American right has repeatedly demonstrated greater support for political violence, as shown in PRRI’s polling. In August 2021, for instance, Republicans’ support for political violence peaked at 35%, whereas Democrats have never exceeded 13% approval. Similarly, an analysis of polling data conducted by researchers at the University of California Davis found that MAGA Republicans “are more likely than others to endorse political violence.”

All of which is to say that Vance is dishonest. While trying to point the finger at the left, he whitewashed political violence from his own side, even though it is far more common.

Indeed, the vice president said nothing about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband in June. Hortman was a Democratic politician who previously served as the speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives. Nor did Vance mention the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol—an act of political violence that was instigated by his boss and resulted in approximately 140 police officers being assaulted by right-wing rioters and extremists.

Of course, Vance did mention the July 14, 2024, assassination attempt on President Donald Trump in Butler, Pa., falsely insinuating that the would-be assassin was part of a left-wing trend, even though the shooter had known mental health issues and no political motive or accomplices have been found. As should be clear by now, Vance has no interest in a sober reflection on political violence in America or on solutions. He is using the heinous murder of Kirk as a cudgel against his political foes.

There was much more wrong with the Vance speech, including claims he made about the funding of The Nation, a magazine that published a story he disliked about Charlie Kirk. A deputy editor for The Nation quickly pointed out on social media that Vance’s claim was not true. But that fact, like so many others, does not matter to Vance.

Since the murder of Charlie Kirk last week, Vance and others have honored the conservative activist as a champion for free speech. Kirk did not deserve to die for his speech. Hs death was a tragedy—a negation of the right to free speech each American enjoys. But if the Trump administration truly wants to honor Americans’ First Amendment rights, then it should not cynically exploit Kirk’s assassination to target the speech of its critics.

Tom Joscelyn is a senior fellow at Just Security Susan Corke is the executive director of Democracy Defenders Action and Democracy Defenders Fund. Norm Eisen is publisher of The Contrarian.

 

Kimmel Gone

 

ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel Live! off the air “indefinitely” on Wednesday, citing comments the comedian made during his Monday night monologue about the killing of Charlie Kirk. Nexstar Media Group—which is seeking Federal Communications Commission approval for a pending $6.2 billion merger with Tegna—said its ABC-affiliated stations would not run the show “for the foreseeable future.” 

Sinclair Broadcast Group, another large ABC affiliate owner, also suspended the show, demanding that Kimmel apologize to Kirk’s family and make a “meaningful personal donation” to them and his right-wing student activist group Turning Point USA. 

FCC Chair Brendan Carr appeared on political commentator Benny Johnson’s podcast earlier Wednesday, saying Kimmel’s remarks were “truly sick” and that there was a “strong case” for action against ABC and its parent company Disney. Trump celebrated the news on Truth Social, saying “That leaves Jimmy [Fallon] and Seth [Meyers], two total losers, on Fake News NBC.”

-The Morning Dispatch

Trump's Administration Is Slashing Healthcare

Why would a government defund cancer research, dismantle vaccine programs, and hollow out public health infrastructure? These are not peripheral services. They are the scaffolding that allows people to survive longer, live better, and remain part of civic life.

Yet under Trump’s administration, funding for NIH cancer trials has been slashed, CDC vaccine development undermined, and chronic disease surveillance quietly defunded. These are not budgetary accidents. They reflect a governing logic in which care is rationed, and survival is triaged according to economic utility.

At 80, I live simply. I walk desert trails with my dog, write, and play guitar in the evening. My wife is amazing—at 85, she still rock climbs. We’re in relatively good health, but I’m under no illusion: without healthcare insurance, that could change quickly.

A fall, a diagnosis, a sudden hospitalization—and the cost of survival becomes a negotiation. Under current policy, that negotiation is growing more brutal. Premiums are rising, benefits shrinking, and for many aging Americans, coverage is slipping out of reach. What was once a safety net is now a sieve.

This goes beyond austerity. It is necro-politics—the use of policy to decide who lives and who is left to manage their own decline. Medicaid is being restructured to include work requirements and eligibility audits designed to disqualify.

Medicare’s hospital trust fund faces automatic reimbursement cuts that will force providers to drop patients. Cancer research has been targeted not because it fails, but because it extends lives of populations deemed fiscally inconvenient. The logic is explicit: longevity is expensive, and aging is a problem to be contained.

Healthcare becomes the sorting mechanism. High-deductible plans function as debt traps. Algorithmic triage systems ration care by zip code, employment status, and credit history. Those who can pay, survive. Those who can’t, wait—or disappear. This isn’t a malfunction; it is a deliberate architecture designed to offload risk and privatize consequence.

Debt itself has become a gatekeeper of survival. In the U.S., medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy, and credit scores increasingly determine whether patients gain access to care or are turned away. Illness is transformed into leverage: the ability to pay becomes indistinguishable from the right to live.

We are witnessing a shift from public health to actuarial governance. The question is no longer what people need, but what they cost. Preventive care, chronic disease management, and long-term treatment are increasingly reserved for those who remain economically legible. The rest are managed through delay, denial, and disappearance.

This burden does not fall evenly. Life expectancy is already stratified by race, class, and geography, with Black, Indigenous, and poor Americans facing shortened lives not because of biology but because of accumulated neglect. In this system, inequality is not incidental; it is the mechanism through which necro-politics is enacted.

This logic extends beyond insurance. Hospitals are consolidating, rural clinics are closing, and elder care facilities are underfunded or shuttered. The infrastructure that once sustained aging populations is being dismantled, not because it failed, but because it no longer aligns with the priorities of a system that rewards short-term margins over long-term survival.

The language used to justify these shifts is familiar: personal responsibility, innovation, market discipline. But the outcomes are unmistakable. Those deemed unproductive—the elderly, the chronically ill, the disabled, and the poor—are increasingly portrayed as burdensome, politically obsolete, or economically inert. The narrative of demographic crisis is used to rationalize austerity, while the language of fairness is weaponized to pit generations and classes against each other.

This is not a cultural misunderstanding. It is a deliberate reframing of aging as pathology. In this worldview, to live longer is to become a liability. The more care one requires, the more one is seen as a threat to fiscal stability. In practice, survival itself is tolerated only when it is silent, self-funded, and non-disruptive.

The consequences are not abstract. They are visible in the lives of those who skip medications, delay screenings, or avoid hospitals altogether. They are felt in the quiet calculations families make when deciding whether to seek care or absorb the cost.

This is not a failure of governance. It is a redefinition of it. The state is not retreating—it is reallocating. It is shifting responsibility from public institutions to private markets, from collective obligation to individual risk. And in doing so, it is redrawing the boundaries of who counts, and under what conditions.

But survival could be treated differently. It could be recognized as a civic achievement—a sign that public health, infrastructure, and social cohesion have done their job. Lives extended by care are not liabilities but anchors of continuity, resilience, and possibility. That would require a different kind of politics—one that values survival not as a private accomplishment, but as a public good.

We needn’t be passive witnesses to this logic, or silent casualties of it. If we choose, we can be its undoers. The triage we see does not flow from scarcity; it is a political decision, made in boardrooms and budget committees, reinforced by policy and narrative. To challenge it requires more than critique. It demands refusal and the rebuilding of care as infrastructure—the kind that asks not what a life is worth, but whether it is protected. That is the work ahead. And it will not wait.

-James Greenberg

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BHfMV9Yp9/

 

 

Martial Law

 

A secret hidden in plain sight

…Trump has sought to undermine every stabilizing institution of American political or civil society: Congress, the courts, federal agencies, universities, law and medicine. Were his goals not so corrupt and self-aggrandizing, we might call him a revolutionary.  Instead, he is simply a greedy bastard who has for reasons unfathomable, hoodwinked a significant minority of Americans into believing he will make them rich or redress their grievances. 

They are discovering the con, though far too slowly for it to matter. But just in case there’s a major erosion of popular support, or congressional opposition arises, Trump has a back-up plan – so well broadcast it might be called a “front-up” plan:  a presidential proclamation of national emergency and declaration of martial law. 

National Guard troops and ICE agents, the latter a veritable Gestapo, are already pre-positioned in Los Angles and Washington. They may be sent soon to Chicago, New York, Boston and Baltimore, though public opposition is growing and there is a chance Trump will hold-off for now. What will be the pretext for a declaration of martial law, followed by postponement of midterm elections? What will martial law look like? Can it be stopped? Here’s a brief primer on martial law and its prospects in the U.S.A. 

Definition

Martial law is mentioned nowhere in the U.S. Constitution. The nearest reference is Article I, Section 8, Clause 15: “The Congress shall have power . . . to provide for calling forth the Militia to execute the Laws of the Union, suppress Insurrection and repel Invasions.” There’s also Article IV, Section 4: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government and shall protect each of them against Invasion; and on Application of the Legislature, or of the Executive (when the Legislature cannot be convened), against domestic Violence.” 

In each case, the coercive power of a militia is proposed as remedy to invasion, insurrection, or violence serious enough to threaten the central government or federated states. Only in extremis, in other words, may national armies be deployed within the nation, and then usually by congress. That prohibition was later codified in the marvelously named (shades of Wyatt Erp) Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 which forbids the use of the federal military to enforce laws within the U.S. 

Constitutional caution about the use of martial law is reflected in the subsequent body of Supreme Court decisions. In Ex parte Milligan (1866), the court forbade use of military courts while civilian ones were still functioning. In a concurring opinion, Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase wrote that martial law could only be asserted “in time of invasion or insurrection within the limits of the United States…when the public danger requires its exercise.” A decade later, in U.S. v Dielkelman (1876), the Court again declared: “Martial law is the law of military necessity in the actual presence of war.”  

Since that time, there have been further limitations upon the power of the executive to suspend habeas corpus (the right to challenge unlawful arrest) and declare martial law, plus one significant expansion, the notorious Korematsu v. United States (1944) which allowed the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Though the case was wrongly decided – an injustice that will forever stain the nation — the underlying rationale of the decision was the same as with previous cited cases: Suspension of due process and imposition of martial law is only permissible when danger from war, invasion or insurrection is extreme. 

If the internment of Japanese American is tragedy, the current dispatch of National Guard troops to halt a “migrant invasion” is farce. Far from representing a threat, immigrants have brought the U.S. prosperity. They take the hardest, lowest paying jobs that American citizens don’t want, pay federal and state taxes without receiving benefits in return, and stabilize population numbers at a time of very low birth-rates.  

Immigrants exert little if any downward pressure on wages and contribute significantly to GDP growth. Nevertheless, President Trump has declared illegal immigration a national emergency and commanded the armed forces and national guard to prevent crossings at the Mexican border and apprehend “illegals” everywhere else. 

As always with Trump, motives are murky. It’s not clear if the declaration of emergency was pretextual for the expansion of ICE and increased deportations, or if it was an excuse for the nationwide deployment of non-civilian police forces and the eventual imposition of martial law. The result is the same either way: fascist authoritarianism. 

“That’s some catch, that Catch-22….”

In a recent column in Counterpunch, John Feffer wrote persuasively about what he called “slow-motion authoritarianism,” the idea that some elected leaders “gradually undermine democratic institutions and accumulate more executive power”, until they become full-blown autocrats, like Putin in Russia and Urban in Hungary. That may be the situation with Trump, Feffer argues, but I want to offer a cavil: authoritarianism can also happen, to quote Hemingway on bankruptcy, “gradually and then suddenly.”

Right now, the U.S. is speeding toward martial law.  The fuel is Trump’s narcissism and hunger for power, and congressional Republicans’ will to gratify both. Congress even provided enabling legislation in the form of the One Big Beautiful Bill and Recission Act. 

The first lowered taxes on the rich, paying for them with reductions in Medicaid and Food Stamps. The second cut 80% of funding for USAID, which mostly supports poor, hungry, and sick people abroad. The politics of both bills is transparent: further accrual of power and the crushing of potential political opposition. Hunger provokes activism and resistance; starvation prevents it. 

That martial law will be proclaimed sometime in the next year seems pre-ordained. ICE agents, assisted by state National Guard troops in Los Angeles, Washington, and other Democrat-led cities and states, will round up and arrest undocumented immigrants, dark-skinned and Spanish-speaking legal residents and citizens, and anyone who tries to hinder them. (Suspects may also include anyone holding a submarine sandwich.) 

If protests grow large or unruly, more troops will be sent, including U.S. Army forces, in direct contravention of the Posse Comitatus Act. In that situation, a national emergency will be proclaimed by executive order, and martial law declared in affected cities, and perhaps nationwide. In other words, absent resistance, city after city will be slowly, gradually governed by military force, as Feffer described. 

If urban populations offer significant resistance to ICE raids and federal policing, more military forces will quickly be called in, and martial law declared. That’s the national catch-22: Don’t resist and martial law will happen slowly; resist and it will occur quickly.

There’s another circumstance in which martial law may be pronounced, and it too presents itself as a catch 22. If congressional Democrats filibuster the stopgap budget bill to fund the federal government, Trump may declare a national emergency and instruct the treasury pay the nation’s bills anyway. 

The exercise of spending prerogatives, outside of congressional mandate, would constitute a coup, a de facto “state of emergency,” facilitated by the imposition of martial law.  If on the other hand, Democrats join Republicans in passing the budget – one containing recissions and impoundments — they will be complicit in their own disempowerment. 

They will have created de facto, a government ruled by executive decree. Any public protest will quickly be answered by troops and a declaration of national emergency or state of martial law. Administration officials are no doubt gaming out various scenarios to maximize the chance to postpone or cancel the 2026 midterm elections. If they do, 2028 will also be up for grabs.

And there’s one more situation in which martial law might be declared: political violence targeted against the right. The murder of conservative influencer and Trump-whisperer Charlie Kirk inspired a 4-minute verbal presidential fusillade against the “radical left.” 

Even in advance of the apprehension of any suspect in the killing, Trump vowed retribution against “each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and… the organizations that fund it and support it.” It is easy to imagine this shooting, or similar events (regardless of the predominance of far right political violence in the U.S.) triggering what may be called a “Reichstag moment.”  

That’s when an arson fire at the German parliament in February 1933 was used by the Chancellor, Adolf Hitler as a pretext for an attack upon the political left and a presidential decree suspending civil liberties, in effect a declaration of martial law.

Can martial law be resisted? 

The short answer is yes. Despite extraordinary improvements in electronic eavesdropping, video surveillance, facial recognition software, and online tracking, a genuine mass movement to arrest the descent into fascism can succeed. There simply aren’t enough hounds to catch the vast number of foxes who will seek to challenge or undermine a nascent, fascist polity. 

No state, not even a police state, can govern without a population willing to do the millions of jobs required to keep it operating. No nation, not even one locked down under martial law, can coerce millions of its citizens to manufacture, trade, buy, repair, heal, teach, travel, or entertain if they don’t want to. A nation of consumers under martial law will slow their buying; a land of tourists will see travel grind to a halt. A country of investors and entrepreneurs will see profit levels plumet. In those circumstances, the government must fall.  

The only prophylaxis against fascism therefore, is an engaged and motivated mass. But for that to exist, there needs to be smart leaders as well as energized followers. To call the current Democratic Party leadership sclerotic is to say the least. 

But there are Democrats, including 84-year-old Bernie Sanders and 35-year-old A.O.C., who will help the new leaders that will inevitably emerge from the hundreds of thousands of people who are currently engaged in grassroots activism in support of environmental justice, union organizing, prison reform or abolition, gender rights, animal protection, and community health. All of those endeavors have been threatened or undermined by the Trump regime. A declaration of martial law will coalesce that opposition and loose a whirlwind. I hope Stephen Miller is reading this.

Stephen F. Eisenman is emeritus professor at Northwestern University and Honorary Research Fellow at the University of East Anglia. His latest book, with Sue Coe, is titled “The Young Person’s Illustrated Guide to American Fascism,” (OR Books). He is also co-founder and Director of Strategy at Anthropocene Alliance. He can be reached at s-eisenman@northwestern.edu

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"Trump’s refusal to condemn political violence on the right underscores his inability to act as president for the entire country"

 

We are grateful that Charlie Kirk’s suspected assassin is in custody. We unreservedly denounce political violence and underscore that speakers, no matter their viewpoint, should never fear for their lives. 

Nevertheless, we refuse to pull our punches when it comes to Donald Trump, MAGA rhetoric, and the billionaire-owned media’s coverage of both.

Too many journalists seem to find it impossible to acknowledge that Kirks’s extremist views, conspiratorial rhetoric, overt racism, and election denial undermined democracy and that his assassination is abhorrent. (Creating a “watch list” to target certain professors hardly provides a model for civil debate.)

We should not be cowed into silence about Kirk’s views and reprehensible comments because we fear MAGA provocateurs’ retribution or mischaracterization. Our democracy requires we defend all speakers, not that we ignore the difference between admirable and malignant messages.

The inclination to whitewash Kirk’s views and lionize his politics—whether stemming from a well-meaning effort “not to speak ill of the dead” or from cowardly avoidance of MAGA blowback—reflects corporate media’s fixation with moral equivalence and its intellectual confusion. Its determination to downplay the MAGA Republican Party’s conspiracy-based extremism and to treat it as a normal political party inevitably enables authoritarianism.

Likewise, we must reject Trump’s groundless, premature, reprehensible remarks about Kirk’s assassin. Before we knew anything about him, Trump blamed millions of left-leaning Americans, thereby inciting his followers against their countrymen. (If nothing else, Trump is consistent in this regard: Trump also blamed the Pennsylvania assassination attempt on his opponents, although the shooter had no discernible political bent.)

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans, like Charlie, to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump declared from the Oval Office. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” Such vile demagoguery is pure Trump.

Currently, we cannot describe with certainty whether the assassin’s views are right- or left-wing or some incoherent jumble. We should not exclude the possibility that, as the Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel explains, we are dealing with someone enmeshed in “a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls… [who] perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder.”

Baselessly indicting a whole segment of the population for a lone assassin’s crime is an odious, dangerous, and all-too familiar authoritarian tactic. Trump’s insidious habit of inciting violence under the banner of victimhood has not changed since January 6.

Trump’s refusal to condemn political violence on the right underscores his inability to act as president for the entire country. He insisted on Fox News that radicals on the right are just concerned about crime, whereas “radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.” For him, right-wing violence is a non-issue or worse, excusable—and he “couldn’t care less” that his admission horrifies people.

Let’s not forget he joked about the near-murder of Paul Pelosi and refused to call the governor after the assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband (taking the moment instead to insult Gov. Tim Walz).

He called January 6 a “day of love” and pardoned those involved in a violent insurrection, which injured and killed police officers. He failed to condemn the firebombing of Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Passover sedar. We heard nothing from him in the aftermath of the CDC shooting that killed DeKalb County Police Officer David Rose.

Shapiro condemned Trump’s selective outrage. “I think it is dangerous when the president cherry picks which political violence he's going to condemn and which he's going to allow to just simply pass,” he said. “I think we need to be universal in condemning all political violence.”

Several MAGA congressmen and more voices online, without a shred of proof, jumped on the anti-left vendetta bandwagon. At least Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.), who announced his retirement this year, spoke responsibly.

“What I was really disgusted by… is a couple of talking heads that sees this as an opportunity to say we’re at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this,” Tillis said. “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you’re a leader of a conservative movement.”

Nebraska Rep. Don Bacon, another retiring Republican, pleaded, “I have to remind people, we had Democrats killed in Minnesota too, right?”

Two voices outside D.C., from opposite ends of the political spectrum, modeled responsible leadership. “It cannot be a question of political agreement or alignment that allows us to mourn. It must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all,” New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani said to a group of Jewish voters, continuing:

That humanity, it reminds us that this news is not just that of the murder of a prominent political figure, but also the news of a wife who grieves her husband, of a 1-year-old and a 3-year-old who will grow up without a father, and the fact that there are families feeling that same anguish right now in Colorado, as they wait for their children, also shot at a school.

Meanwhile, Utah Republican Governor Spencer Cox’s remarks contrasted with FBI leadership’s inflammatory and contradictory statements. “This is our moment. Do we escalate or do we find an off-ramp?” Cox asked. “I hear all the time that ‘words are violence.’” He added, “Words are not violence. Violence is violence, and there is one person responsible for what happened here, and that person is now in custody and will be charged soon and will be held accountable.”

Americans must hold on to our moral bearings and democratic values if we are to get through this period. We can condemn Kirk’s murder without celebrating the views or perpetrating the falsehood that the parties treat violence in the same way.

We must denounce Trump’s pathological quest to demonize and persecute opponents. And more than ever, we must enlist decent, truth-telling allies regardless of ideology to defend pluralistic democracy. Otherwise, violence will escalate, and authoritarianism will prevail.

-Jennifer Rubin, The Contrarian is reader-supported. To receive new posts and help our work in the court of law and court of public opinion, join our community as a free or paid subscriber.

 

Divisive America

 

Since a gunman murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, both social media circles and the political sphere have been alighted with accusations that “the Left” was responsible for the shooting. 

Prominent right-wing social media accounts called the Democratic Party “a domestic terror organization” and declared “WAR.” Billionaire Elon Musk posted: “The Left is the party of murder.”

From the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Without any information about the shooter, the media got in on the game, with the Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that “[a]mmunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology was found inside the rifle authorities believe was used in Kirk’s shooting.” Bomb threats targeted Democratic politicians—primarily Black politicians—and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).

Meanwhile, it was not clear the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was up to the task of finding the killer. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino were both MAGA influencers without law enforcement experience when Trump put them in charge of the agency. Once there, they focused on purging the agency of those they considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or “DEI hires.” In early August, they forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City, Utah, field office, Mehtab Syed, a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent.

Meanwhile, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute reported that one in five FBI agents have been diverted from their jobs to conduct immigration raids with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and just hours before the shooting, three former top officials at the FBI filed a lawsuit against Patel, the FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, and the president accusing them of unlawfully politicizing the FBI, purging it of anyone who had ever worked on a criminal investigation of Trump. The lawsuit suggests Bongino had an “intense focus on [using] his social media profiles to change his followers’ perceptions of the FBI.”

As Quinta Jurecic reported today in The Atlantic, hours after the shooting, Patel’s personal social media account posted a picture of himself and Kirk; minutes later, Patel’s official FBI account posted that the shooter was already in custody and then, an hour and a half later, said the suspect had been released. Both Patel and Bongino appeared to be focused more on posting than on doing the work to find the shooter.

This morning, Trump announced on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends that he had just heard “they have the person that they wanted.” That person turned out to be 22-year-old Utah native Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in to authorities after his father urged him to. 

Robinson’s parents are registered Republicans; he was not affiliated with a political party and was an inactive voter. Over the past years, Robinson’s mother posted a number of pictures of him and his brothers posing with guns.

Robinson had recently had a conversation with a family member about why they didn’t like Kirk’s viewpoints. Robinson appears to have admired the “Groypers,” led by Nick Fuentes, who complain that more mainstream organizations like Kirk’s Turning Point USA are not “pro-white” enough and have publicly harassed Kirk in the past.

Allison Gill of The Breakdown explained that the rumors the shooter had engraved anti-fascist rhetoric on some of the bullet casings found at the scene turned out to be a misunderstanding of terms from the video game Helldivers2. The claim that he had used “transgender ideology” was apparently a misreading of the headstamp “TRN” that marks ammunition as the product of Turkish manufacturer Turan.

Almost as soon as Robinson was identified, the tone of MAGA leader’s conversation about the shooting changed. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC), who had used a slur to refer to the shooter as pro-transgender, posted on social media: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”

For his part, Trump seemed to have lost interest in Kirk even earlier. Yesterday evening, a reporter offered the president his condolences on the loss of his friend Kirk and asked Trump how he was holding up.

The president answered, in full: “I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it's going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure. And I just see all the trucks. We just started so it'll get done very nicely and it'll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually. Thank you very much.”

The day of Kirk’s murder, Russia sent 19 drones into Poland—some armed and some unarmed—testing the strength of the neighboring country. With the help of allies, Poland shot down four of them. Poland belongs to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), with whom the U.S. shares a mutual defense agreement meaning that if it is attacked, we will come to its aid. After the attack, Poland called an emergency meeting of the North Atlantic Council, the primary political decision-making body within NATO. U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker apparently did not attend.

Although Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, called the violation “intentional, not accidental,” Trump told reporters that Russia’s sending of drones into Poland “could’ve been a mistake.” Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo reported on Tuesday that on August 27, the Trump administration returned a plane full of Russian dissidents seeking asylum in the U.S. to Moscow, where at least some of them went directly from the plane into custody.

NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and Supreme Allied Commander Europe General Alexus G. Grynkewich announced that NATO is launching “Eastern Sentry,” an operation to bolster NATO’s defense against Russian incursions along NATO’s eastern flank. 

In what appeared to be an attempt to calm NATO allies’ concerns about Trump’s "mistake" comment, acting U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Dorothy Shea told the United Nations Security Council today the U.S. will “defend every inch of NATO territory.” “The United States stands by our NATO allies in the face of these alarming airspace violations,” she said.

If the U.S. is weakening ties to traditional defensive alliances, it is attempting to flex its muscles by going after alleged drug dealers with a newly dubbed “Department of War.” On September 2, Trump announced the U.S. had struck a boat he claimed was carrying drugs to the U.S., killing 11 civilians he claimed were “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists.” The administration posted a video of the operation online.

Legal specialists noted that the U.S. made the strike without legal authority. Trump simply claimed the power to kill men he claimed were a danger to the U.S., advancing the argument that drug smuggling is the same thing as an imminent military attack on the U.S. and thus the laws of war are in force. 

That argument got even weaker when Charlie Savage and Helene Cooper of the New York Times reported that the men on the boat appeared to have been spooked by the military hardware over them and turned back to shore. “If someone is retreating, where’s the ‘imminent threat’ then?” Rear Admiral Donald J. Guter, a retired top judge advocate general for the Navy from 2000 to 2002, said to the reporters.

Yesterday, Trump announced he was sending the National Guard not into Chicago, Illinois, where Mayor Brandon Johnson and Governor J.B. Pritzker have mounted strong opposition, but to Memphis, Tennessee. The Memphis Police Department noted: “Overall crime is at a 25-year low, with robbery, burglary, and larceny also reaching 25-year lows. Murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low, and sexual assault at a twenty-year low" in the city.

Although Trump said he had the support of the mayor and the governor, Shelby County mayor Lee Harris asked Republican governor Bill Lee to “please reconsider, if this is on the table.” He said local government would welcome more state troopers to help fight crime, but “to have individuals with military fatigues, semi-automatic weapons and armored vehicles patrolling our streets is way too far, anti-democratic and anti-American.”

Lee released a statement saying he was set to speak with Trump about a “strategic mission” to use state law enforcement more effectively with an already established FBI mission in Memphis.

Meanwhile, yesterday four out of five justices on a panel of the Brazilian Supreme Court found former president Jair Bolsonaro, a close ally of Donald Trump, guilty of plotting a coup, attempting to overturn the country’s 2022 election, and committing violent acts against state institutions. They sentenced him to 27 years and three months in prison.

—Heather Cox Richardson

 

"They took a vote": Remembering 9/11

 

Twenty-four years ago, terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, crashing two of them into the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City and a third into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia.

Four years ago, George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of the fourth flight, United Airlines Flight 93, who on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.  
 
Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”
 
Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know”: “On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”
 
Bush celebrated the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.
 
That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy the terrorists attacked. America had seemed to drift since the end of the Cold War twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, they thought, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity, which had been dropping, soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced. He and his loyalists attacked any opposition to their measures as an attack on “the homeland.”

They tarred those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American—either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks—and set out to make sure such people could not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions.

In 2010 the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013 it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021 it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional. In that year, a former Republican president claimed he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.

Former president Bush mused that "[a] malign force seems at work in our common life that turns every disagreement into an argument, and every argument into a clash of cultures. So much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment." He said: "There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home. But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such a mentality means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they took a vote. 

-Heather Cox Richardson