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Free Speech is in the Felon's Crosshairs

Most conscious observers have likely discerned that the Felon - a malignant narcissist in the estimation of large numbers of mental health experts - is a huge fan of dictators and authoritarian rulers and appears envious of their ability to stamp out critics and censor the news and trample on the right to free speech.  Indeed, as Politico is reporting, the Felon has said there is no right to free speech: 

President Donald Trump [the Felon] Friday reiterated his claim that critical television coverage of him is “illegal” and pushed back on criticisms that his administration was taking actions that chill free speech.

“When 97 percent of the stories are bad about a person, it’s no longer free speech,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office, complaining about an apparent asymmetry between his victory in the 2024 election and his treatment by media organizations. It was not immediately clear what statistics or laws he was referencing.

Trump’s comments came days after Disney indefinitely suspended the late night host Jimmy Kimmel after Federal Communications Commissioner Brendan Carr suggested on a podcast that his agency may take regulatory action against ABC, which Disney owns. . . . After Kimmel was suspended, Carr said “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop” and suggested the FCC — an agency, overseen by Congress, designed to act independently from the president — may target other shows, including ABC’s “The View.”

The Kimmel saga caused Democrats and some free speech hawks to protest. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer demanded Carr’s resignation.

One notable Republican also weighed in: Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, who on a podcast released Friday called Carr’s actions “dangerous as hell” and “right out of ‘Goodfellas.’”

The Felon's touchiness about criticism is in keeping with his malignant narcissist diagnosis as noted by one mental health professional: 

Despite the fact that people with narcissistic personality disorder often act boastful and overconfident, their self-esteem can actually be pretty fragile. They have a tendency to be preoccupied with how they are perceived by other people and feel shocked or disappointed when people don’t lay on the flattery.

The big question is one of how far will the Felon push the effort to end freedom of speech in order to stop well deserved criticism and mockery.   While Ted Cruz - hardly one of my favorite individuals - has spoken out strongly against the Felon's Mafia like threats to CBS and now Disney/ABC, many within the GOP continue to try to claim the effort to crush free speech is something other than what it obviously is.  Sadly, it may come down to the courts and regular Americans boycotting those who give in to dictatorship to protect this constitutional right.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the gyrations some in the GOP are going through rather than admit reality:

Minutes after news broke that ABC had bowed to the Trump administration’s threats and indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, Ari Fleischer, the former Bush-administration press secretary, tried to explain why the thing that just happened was not actually what happened. “Liberals want to make this firing about ‘free speech,’” he wrote on X, “Did it ever occur to them the issue might be accuracy?

These are glorious, heady days for the Republican Party’s unselfconsciously authoritarian wing. Every day President Donald Trump tramples on the rights of their enemies, and the natcons rejoice, This is what I voted for.

But we should spare a thought for the party’s more conflicted wing, the anti-anti-Trump conservatives such as Fleischer. They profess support for free speech, democracy, and the rule of law while attempting to remain Republicans in good standing. They resolve this tension by focusing on the hypocrisy and foibles of their old liberal foes and ignoring the actions of the world’s most powerful person.

It is a survival strategy, and not a pleasant way to spend four years. That which causes the natcons unremitted joy forces the anti-anti-Trumpers into painful mental contortions. No event to date has given them more anguish than Trump’s gleeful defenestration of Kimmel.

As the story developed, a slightly more complicated explanation than Fleischer’s hasty effort took shape. The anti-anti-Trumpers conceded that the sequence of events looked bad. Yes, the Federal Communications Commission chair, Brendan Carr, threatened to revoke broadcast licenses from ABC stations, warning, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Rolling Stone reported that “multiple execs” at ABC and Disney considered Kimmel’s comments to be minor, but “the threat of Trump administration retaliation” forced their hand.

The conservative commentator Mike Solana insisted that, despite the perception that Trump ordered Kimmel off the air, “this didn’t happen.” Rather, Solana elaborated on X, “jimmy’s ratings were abysmal. he spread a conspiracy theory about kirk. two major affiliates refused to carry his show. ABC fired him.”

Ilya Shapiro, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, argued on X that Kimmel was fired because his show “was losing money”—“there was thus no govt coercion here.”

Trump’s FCC chair threatened to destroy ABC’s business, and the network just so happened to then do something Trump very much wanted it to do, but only paranoid leftists would presume these two things were somehow related. Sure, the threat was “unhelpful” for the way it might seem like coercion to the uninitiated. But if anybody was the victim here, it was Trump, who was unfairly blamed for the blunders of a subordinate.

Alas, as often happens when his friends attempt to devise a tortured alibi, Trump promptly blurted out his intentions the following afternoon.

“I have read someplace that the networks were 97 percent against me again, 97 percent negative, and yet I won, and easily,” Trump said about the 2024 election to reporters on Air Force One on Thursday. He added: “I would think maybe their license should be taken away. It will be up to Brendan Carr.”

Indeed, the idea that Trump would threaten the networks because he wants them to stop criticizing him was floated by Trump himself last month: “Despite a very high popularity and, according to many, among the greatest 8 months in Presidential History, ABC & NBC FAKE NEWS, two of the worst and most biased networks in history, give me 97% BAD STORIES. IF THAT IS THE CASE, THEY ARE SIMPLY AN ARM OF THE DEMOCRAT PARTY AND SHOULD, ACCORDING TO MANY, HAVE THEIR LICENSES REVOKED BY THE FCC.”

Awkwardly, these comments do make it seem like Trump may very well be extorting the networks by threatening their broadcast licenses so they’ll remove his critics from the airwaves. 

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The MAGA Campaign to Suppress Dissent

With each passing day of the Felon's regime I feel as if I am watching a re-run of Hitler's rise to power or the measures to crush dissent in Putin's Russia, Xi's China or Orbán Hungary.  Anyone who criticizes the corrupt authoritarian agenda or believes in the rights guaranteed to citizens under the Bill of Rights, especially the right to free speech, is increasing the potential target of revenge and/or violence. All of the repression and violation of constitutional rights is couched in the guise of fighting crime or "leftist extremists."  Never mind that the vast majority of political violence comes from the political right and its supporters or that lawless corruption is most rampant in the White House and the Felon's cabinet of oligarchs or ideologues. Frighteningly, Charlie Kirk's murder is being used by the Felon's and vicious members of his regime as an excuse to ramp of repression and crush or intimidate dissent.  Just as frightening is the seeming effort on the right to link Kirk's shooter to gays and transgender influences - indeed, some LGBT activist I know are openly discussing the potential need at some point to emigrate from the USA, something I may yet consider depending how threatening things become, although with children and grandchildren in this country, the decision is much more complicated.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at the Felon/MAGA campaign to crush dissent:

The horrific murder of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk inspired politicians on all sides to call for calm. “The time for unity, the time for peace, it is now,” Republican Senator Katie Britt of Alabama said. Fellow Republican Senators James Lankford, Thom Tillis, and John Curtis offered similar bromides, and Utah Governor Spencer Cox urged every American to “always forgive your enemies”  . . . . . This is the sort of rhetoric that American politicians typically resort to in the aftermath of political violence. But when it came from Republicans, they were promptly attacked from the right.

“If You’re Not Focused on Fighting Left-Wing Violence, Step Aside,” a Federalist headline demanded. “If I hear an elected Republican say the phrase ‘political violence’ or ‘both sides’ I’m going to scream,” wrote Shashank Tripathi, a co-host of the Ruthless podcast.

Such criticism is in line with the [Felon’s] president’s. [The Felon] Donald Trump, who granted clemency to nearly 1,600 people associated with the January 6, 2021, riots, has made it plain that he is not opposed to political violence. The only threat worth combatting, he insists, is left-wing violence. . . . . Trump did not call for unity. Instead, he exploited plausible concerns about left-wing extremism by accusing the “radical left” of stoking the kind of rage that leads a young man to commit murder.

But blaming the left exclusively for violence is not just a rhetorical flourish from a pugilistic president. Instead, it is a pretext, a justification for what appears to be coming next. Trump and his supporters are promising to exploit the tragedy of Kirk’s assassination to undertake a sweeping government crackdown on the left. His targets include civil society, opposing politicians, the news media, and even late-night comics such as Jimmy Kimmel, a special fixation for the television-addled president, whom ABC just yanked off the air for comments he made about Kirk’s suspected killer on his show.

The idea of using government power to harass and break up the American left has been floating around right-wing circles for years. The national conservatives, a growing faction of Republicans who favor illiberal use of state power to crush their enemies, have been longing to turn the government into a weapon of vengeance. But these ambitions had been on the fringe of the party. Now they are in the White House.

In his first term, Trump’s authoritarian impulses were curbed by the conservative institutionalists in his administration. This time, he has no such constraints. . . . . Kirk’s murder has provided the party’s extremists with a galvanizing event that could tamp down internal opposition to suppressing the left, at least temporarily.

The administration claims that its proposed crackdown is about public safety, about disrupting a domestic terrorist network for the sake of public order and the preservation of the republic. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” Stephen Miller vowed in an appearance on Kirk’s livestream show on Monday. . . . . But Miller’s desire to delegitimize the political opposition preceded the assassination. Weeks before Kirk was killed, Miller said on Fox News, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.”

Likewise, while Trump and his supporters have defended Kimmel’s suspension as a response to his comments about the Kirk shooting, Trump seemed to predict this turn of events on Truth Social in July: “The word is, and it’s a strong word at that, Jimmy Kimmel is NEXT to go in the untalented Late Night Sweepstakes and, shortly thereafter, Fallon will be gone.”

To escape the ire of Trump and the far right, elected Republicans needn’t directly endorse right-wing violence; they just can’t criticize it. (Regarding January 6, for instance, support and silence are the two acceptable Republican postures.) The administration has also made it clear that conservative lawmakers must refrain from holding all Americans to the same standard of conduct.

Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s most influential advisers, summed up the administration’s ambitions. “I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is,” she wrote on X, “and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”

The emotional pinnacle of Vance’s sermon came when he decried a column in The Nation criticizing Kirk’s ideological legacy. . . . . The Nation column did not call for Kirk’s murder. To the contrary, its author, Elizabeth Spiers, wrote, “I won’t celebrate his death, but I’m not obligated to celebrate his life, either.” But that hardly seemed to matter to Vance, who went on to claim that The Nation receives funding from two well-known progressive foundations: “Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation, the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie’s death, do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer.”

There was something sinister in Vance’s charge that these foundations enjoy a special subsidy. Donations to nonprofit organizations are generally not taxed—an exclusion that applies to all nonprofit organizations. Vance seems to be using the pretext of terrorism to float the possibility that the federal government will selectively target nonprofits on the left.

Note that Miller reserved the final punishment, imprisonment, for those targets who have broken the law. Other targets, apparently, will lose their “money” and “power” regardless. Miller is someone who speaks deliberately and with some precision, a trait that makes his regular bouts of autocratic fury all the more unnerving. The administration and the movement that he represents are describing a far-reaching campaign against the political left, coupled with an effort to suppress dissent on their own side. If Miller is saying he will punish targets who have broken no law, he likely means to do just that. Unity, or even calm, is the last thing this administration seeks.

 

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The Trump Economic Fantasy Is Unraveling

The Felon continues to claim that the USA's economy is doing well now that he and his regime of mediocrity and sycophants are in charge.  The actual economic data suggests otherwise - job creation is down, unemployment is up, inflation is up and the tourism, agriculture and construction industries are hurting due to the ICE raids driving away migrant workers and farmers are in many cases on the verge of bankruptcy as the Felon's tariffs have cause crop purchasers to make purchases from other, more friendly countries. Worse yet, with the regime's efforts to censor anyone saying things not to the Trumpenfuhrer's liking the regime is demanding that all of us engage in an "the emperor has no clothes" fantasy that all is not only well, but that the Felon's leadership is nothing short of brilliant. The big question is one of how bad does the economy have to get before MAGA world realizes that it was pitched a fantasy that simply does not exist. Meanwhile, others who have not drunk the MAGA Kool-Aid (yours truly included) are questioning how much longer it will be safe to remain in the USA.  A column in the New York Times looks at how the Felon's economic fantasy world is unraveling.  Here are column highlights:

The essence of President Trump’s pitch to the American people last year was simple: They could have it both ways.

They could have a powerful, revitalized economy and “mass deportations now.” They could build new factories and take manufacturing jobs back from foreign competitors as well as expel every person who, in their view, didn’t belong in the United States. They could live in a “golden age” of plenty — and seal it away from others outside the country with a closed, hardened border.

Trump told Americans that there were no trade-offs. As the saying goes, they could have their cake and eat it, too.

In reality, this was a fantasy. Americans could have a strong, growing economy, which requires immigration to bring in new people and fill demand for labor, or they could finance a deportation force and close the border to everyone but a small, select few. It was a binary choice. Theirs could be an open society or a closed one, but there was no way to get the benefits of the former with the methods of the latter.

Millions of Americans embraced the fantasy. Now, about eight months into Trump’s second term, the reality of the situation is inescapable. As promised, Trump launched a campaign of mass deportation. Our cities are crawling with masked federal agents, snatching anyone who looks “illegal” to them — a bit of racial profiling that has, for now, been sanctioned by the Supreme Court. The jobs, however, haven’t arrived. There are fewer manufacturing jobs than there were in 2024, thanks in part to the president’s tariffs and, well, his immigration policies.

We got a vivid glimpse of what it looks like for harsh immigration policies to undermine growth and investment earlier this month, in Georgia, when immigration officials detained hundreds of South Korean nationals working at a battery plant in a small town outside Savannah. On Sept. 4, a large detachment of federal, state and local law enforcement descended on an electric vehicle battery plant operated by Hyundai and LG Electronics. The raid, which the administration described as one of the largest-ever single-location enforcement operations conducted by the Department of Homeland Security, was aimed at just four people. Officials detained nearly 500, the large majority of whom were South Korean workers brought to the plant to assist with its construction. The workers, who were held for more than a week, described terrible conditions.

“Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink,” The Hankyoreh, a daily newspaper in South Korea reported. “The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours.”

The consequences of this raid go beyond the trauma inflicted on the workers. The South Korean public is furious, not the least because this raid came just weeks after the country’s government promised to pour billions of dollars into new investments in the United States. “If U.S. authorities detain hundreds of Koreans in this manner, almost like a military operation, how can South Korean companies investing in the U.S. continue to invest properly in the future?” Cho Jeongsik, a lawmaker from the liberal governing Democratic Party, asked. . . . . One assumes that other countries are taking note and may adjust their plans in response to Trump’s immigration crackdown.

Beyond this raid, we can see the economic consequences of the president’s immigration policies on workforces across the country. In states with large numbers of undocumented immigrants, the construction, agricultural and hospitality sectors have seen a decline in growth this year, according to a recent report from the Economic Insights and Research Consulting group. The Congressional Budget Office warned last week that the U.S. population is projected to grow slower than expected — and potentially even contract — as a result of deportations and other anti-immigration policies. The result could be higher inflation and lower economic growth in the near future.

We could also discuss the way that the president’s singular focus on intimidating, harassing and removing immigrants has threatened the livelihoods of countless thousands of America’s farmers, many of whom backed the president in the last election. “People don’t understand that if we don’t get more labor, our cows don’t get milked and our crops don’t get picked,” one Pennsylvania dairy farmer and three-time Trump supporter told Politico.

When you combine the president’s immigration policies with his large and unpredictable tariffs on imported goods — a move that has choked off an important avenue for economic growth — you have an approach almost guaranteed to induce stagflation. Some experts see exactly that on the horizon.

None of this comes as a surprise. It is what you should expect from an agenda that simultaneously seeks to close the doors to newcomers, toss out a large number of productive workers and impose a new mercantilist order on the world. Trump told voters that they could indulge their resentments and still walk away richer and more prosperous. But they can’t. To embrace nativism in a global, connected economic world is to sacrifice prosperity for the sake of exclusion, just as the main effect of racial segregation in the American South was to leave the region impoverished and underdeveloped.

It’s hard to imagine that Trump cares much whether or not his promises work out for the people who believed them, to say nothing of the nation at large. He already has what he wants: freedom from accountability for a lifetime of lawbreaking and an easy way to line his pockets. The American people may not profit from his presidency, but he will. Indeed, he already has.

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Pam Bondi Proves She's In Over Her Head

Like many of the Felon's appointees, current U. S. attorney general Pam Bondi continues to demonstrate that she is either (i) totally unqualified for her job or (ii) is so eager to prostitute herself to the Felon and weaponize the U.S. Department of Justice to do the Felon's bidding that she cares nothing about the U.S, Constitution, particularly rights to due process and the freedom of speech guaranteed by the First Amendment.  In the wake of Charlie Kirk's assassination last week, the Felon, Bondi and much of the Felon's regime are obsessed with stamping out any criticism of Kirk that they are poised to erase First Amendment rights, labeling any criticism of Kirk as "hate speech" worthy of criminal prosecution.  Never mind that much of what Kirk said likewise constituted "hate speech" in the eyes of many of his targets than spanned the gamut from gays, transgender individuals, blacks, immigrants, to "liberals."  Thankfully even some on the political right (even the always, in my view, despicable Ted Cruz) have called Bondi out about her erroneous attempt to limit free speech rights. A piece in Politico looks at those calling Bondi out:

Attorney General Pam Bondi on Tuesday appeared to walk back comments promising to target broadly defined “hate speech” following the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, after facing significant backlash from both conservative and liberal circles over her threat to curb free speech.

In a statement posted to X, the attorney general clarified remarks she made Monday suggesting that hate speech was distinct from free speech protected under the First Amendment.

“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,” Bondi wrote, adding that “free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.” President Donald Trump [the Felon] didn’t appear to take issue with Bondi’s comments.

Asked by reporters about the attorney general’s remarks Tuesday, Trump returned to a suggestion he has previously floated — that members of the media should be targeted for their coverage of his administration — which he claimed was “hate.”

“We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart,” Trump said, responding to a question from ABC’s Jonathan Karl.

Stephen Miller promised to crack down on “radical left lunatics” and vowed to unleash the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security on unspecified liberal networks they claimed were stoking political violence.

Bondi’s statement, which adds the notable caveat of violent threats, comes after she faced blowback for her comments on free speech the day prior — as well as a vow she made to throw the weight of the Justice Department against people who engaged in what she described as “hate speech” against Kirk.

But many conservative commentators drew a distinction between the public “name and shame” campaign and the attorney general’s threats to prosecute, saying that Bondi’s claims were a misinterpretation of the First Amendment, which does not distinguish between forms of speech.

“Our Attorney General is apparently a moron. ‘There’s free speech and then there is hate speech,’” conservative radio host Erick Erickson wrote on X, quoting Bondi. “No ma’am. That is not the law.”

Other conservative voices argued that while free speech was legally protected under the First Amendment, people could still face “social consequences” for making certain statements.

This week’s free speech debacle isn’t the first time Bondi has been the target of ire from within MAGA circles. The embattled attorney general faced significant backlash from conservative voices this summer over the DOJ’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, with many calling for more transparency from the department.

Some Democrats — who have warned that the Trump administration will use Kirk’s assassination as a pretense to launch a crackdown on their political opponents — also sharply criticized Bondi’s comments to Miller.

“So now @JDVance your Administration is prosecuting hate speech even though you ran on standing for the First Amendment & lectured Europe about not censoring hate speech?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Cali.) wrote on X.

The irony, of course, is that Kirk used his First Amendment rights to free speech to make all kinds of statements against blacks, gays, the transgender and anyone who disagreed with his white "Christian" nationalist views.  Applying Bondi's standard, arguably Kirk should have been prosecuted.  The reality is that the far right wants unfettered rights to malign and call for outright harm to political opponents while censoring the speech of everyone else. It's a pattern that has long been visible among Christofascists who want rights not afforded to others. A Piece in The Atlantic looks at the hypocrisy and dangerousness of what the Felon, Bondi and other would be censors are pushing:

A strange thing happens when a notable public figure is killed: Their rough edges are sanded down, and a multidimensional person is flattened into the simplicity of a myth.

This has happened with jarring speed to Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer murdered last week in Utah. . . . In the rush to canonize Kirk, people are transforming him into someone he might not recognize—and highlighting an extreme tension within the MAGA movement.

Kirk’s commitment to debate was inextricable from his political views; he wasn’t a value-neutral advocate for free speech. Kirk arose as a countercultural figure and deployed the First Amendment as a crucial tool for spreading his ideas: In an environment where they were not welcome, he pointed out that they were protected. Now that Kirk’s political allies hold power, however, many appear eager to suppress ideas they dislike. The Trump administration is vowing to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to crack down on dissent even as it lionizes him for defending it.

Kirk began his career planting Turning Point USA chapters on college campuses. As many conservatives were writing off academia, Kirk was evangelizing, creating a beachhead for right-wing views in traditionally liberal environments. Free speech was an important shield for him, because some of his ideas were bigoted, or articulated abrasively.

Some people now praising Kirk are conflating a commitment to argument with a devotion to civility. Kirk succeeded, in part, by eschewing civility in favor of conflict. He said, for example, that “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled—Alzheimer’s—corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

Kirk railed against transgender and gay rights. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” declared the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake,” and claimed that many influential Black figures were in their roles only because of affirmative action.

Free speech protects an airing of these ideas, some of which have since come to dominate the Republican Party and help carry it to electoral success. But free speech is always a danger to power, and now that the GOP has control of the White House and both houses of Congress, and has a friendly Supreme Court—as well as a growing number of cultural and corporate institutions—Kirk’s allies are rattled by it.

In some cases, they have called for the punishment of speech about Kirk’s death. . . . . Yet Kirk himself criticized this kind of use of government power in 2020, when he was locked out of Twitter. “We are seeing right now that Big Tech has become the enforcement and the communication arm of the Biden campaign and the Democrat Party,” Kirk said. “It is undemocratic, it is anti-American, and every single person that believes in a free society should be outraged and quite honestly compelled to action against what these tech companies have been able to do to our country.”

The limited calls for social-media bans have quickly transformed—as free-speech hard-liners warn that it does—into a broader call for censorship. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on the former Trump aide Katie Miller’s podcast yesterday.

The Trump administration is reportedly now planning a sweeping crackdown on the Democratic Party and on progressive politics as a whole. Yesterday, the president filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, several of its reporters, and a major publisher for writing things he didn’t like. . . . Trump’s son has suggested going beyond lodging defamation claims, bluntly advocating the abridgment of the First Amendment.

Rejecting the horrors of political violence is indeed essential to a functional democratic society, but that is why free speech is so important. A Kirk quote has been circulated widely in the past few days: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” The MAGA embrace of censorship is not a bid to win a battle of ideas. It’s to force people to shut up. Kirk warned why this was dangerous.

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The Right's New Thought Police

White "Christian" nationalists - i.e., like those behind Project 2025 - have long sought to impose their beliefs on all of American society and to attack and demonize those who oppose their agenda.  With the murder of Charlie Kirk, the Felon and political prostitutes within today's GOP and a host of far right talking heads and "influencers" are taking that silencing of opponents to new extremes and are pushing to police the thoughts and free speech anyone they depict as would be domestic "terrorists."  True to form, criticism of and accurate descriptions of ugly messages coming from the far right are labeled "hate speech" while the often vile screeds from right wing operatives and some Republican office holders gets a free pass or is described as exercising free speech rights. Similarly, the reality that  political violence against deemed adversaries is far more prevalent on the political right is utterly ignored. Indeed, the Felon has stated he "could care less" about violence by right wing extremists.  Now, Kirk's death appears to be being utilized as an excuse to justify a quasi-police state where voicing thoughts could cost one their job, if not their physical safety. In some ways it's yet another example of the Felon's and his sycophants' use of manufactured emergencies to justify ignore the law and/or civil rights of others.  A piece in the New York Times looks at this dangerous effort:

[The Felon] President Trump and his allies are capitalizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk to open up fresh attacks on liberal institutions, donors and foundations. They seek to portray many on the left as traitors.

Appearing on Kirk’s podcast on Monday, less than a week after Kirks death, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, denounced The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

Trump and his allies has long exploited “emergencies” to push divisive measures. Now he claims that left-wing terrorism is a greater threat than terror perpetrated by the right, a demonstrably false assertion.

Over the last three years, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Cato Institute and the International Center for Counter Terrorism, have amassed evidence showing that right-wing violence is more prevalent than violence from the left.

Within hours of the Sept. 10 assassination of Kirk, Trump placed the blame for political violence squarely on “the radical left” in televised remarks that night . . . On Sept. 12, Trump went beyond dismissing the threat posed by right-wing political violence to arguing that right-wing extremists are in fact justified. Asked about violence perpetrated by those on the right, Trump didn’t hold back during an appearance on the Fox and Friends television show: I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.

Trump and his MAGA followers have not just turned Kirk’s murder into a political weapon; they are trying, with some success, to use it to build a national movement to publicly out everyone who criticized Kirk on social media after his death. They are also trying to persuade their employers to fire them.

“A campaign by public officials and others on the right has led just days after the conservative activist’s death to the firing or punishment of teachers, government workers, a TV pundit and the expectation of more dismissals coming,” The Associated Press reported on Sept. 14.

In their article “Trump Escalates Attacks on Political Opponents After Charlie Kirk’s Killing,” my Times colleagues Tyler Pager and Nick Corasaniti reported that Trump and his supporters have initiated “a broad crackdown on critics and left-leaning institutions.”

Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, Pager and Corasaniti wrote, warned “that his agency was closely tracking any military personnel who celebrated or mocked Mr. Kirk’s death, and Christopher Landau, the deputy secretary of state, suggested the administration would strip visas from individuals who celebrated Mr. Kirk’s death.”

On Capitol Hill, Pager and Corasaniti continued, Representative Clay Higgins, Republican of Louisiana, said he would use his congressional authority to seek immediate bans for life from social media platforms for anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” adding in a posting on X “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked out from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’m starting that today.”

Trump and Miller have claimed that the Ford Foundation and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations are financing violence on the left.

Sam Jackson, a professor of Emergency Management and Homeland Security at SUNY-Albany, emailed a response to my questions: Trump, Loomer and many others are using this event to justify crackdowns on political opponents, broadly described as “the left.” The political right in the United States has long tried to argue that the political left is responsible for more violence than the political right. That simply hasn’t been true for decades.

In recent years, the study found: Violent far-right extremist have been responsible for 94 of the 108 terrorism fatalities (87 percent) in the United States in the past five years. This included 2022, when 18 of the 19 fatalities occurred during far-right terrorist attacks.

Since the early 1990s, Kleinfeld continued, “actual violence has risen, largely from the right. While it has grown somewhat from the left . . . . the numbers are just not comparable.”

The response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Kleinfeld argued, poses significant risks: “What is most dangerous is when violence starts to get framed as defensive — because that is when more normal people start engaging. The concern with Charlie Kirk’s murder is that it may push the United States over that edge.”

At 7 p.m. on Sept. 10, the day Kirk was killed, Laura Loomer posted on X: Charlie Kirk’s death will not be in vain. I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.

If Trump, Vance, Miller and Loomer have their way, America will take another step toward becoming a McCarthyite state with the ever-present danger that your colleagues and friends will report your offhand quick-reaction social media posts to government authorities.

As terrible as the killing of Charlie Kirk was, this way of honoring it is repellent.

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The World No Longer Takes Trump Seriously

I bookmarked a piece in The Atlantic ten days ago that seems relevant now as America is adrift with a faltering economy, higher inflation, a potential government shutdown looming, and congressional Republicans more fixated on punishing critics of the late Charlie Kirk than engaging in meaningful governance of the nation. On top of all this, we have the buffoon and vulgarian in chief in the White House who appears more distracted by efforts to either blame Kirk's assassination on the "far left" or changing the news cycle to keep the Epstein scandal out of the headlines.  It's little wonder much of the world shakes its collective head at America's destruction from within and np longer takes the Felon seriously.  Yes, the Felon can create chaos at home and abroad and still commands one of the most powerful armies in the world, but serious policies not motivated by petulance and whims are lacking as are competent and serious individuals within the Felon's cabinet and other high regime posts.   The article in The Atlantic looks at the problem facing the nation on the foreign affairs front thanks to the Felon's lake of seriousness and competence. Here are excerpts:

The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.

Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. . . . . Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.

But the parade was worse than a mere snub. Putin, Xi, and Kim stood in solidarity while reviewing China’s military might only weeks after Putin came to Alaska and refused Trump’s pleas to end Russia’s war against Ukraine. The White House tried to spin that ill-advised summit into at least a draw between Putin and Trump, but when the Kremlin’s dictator shows up with no interest in negotiation, speaks first at a press conference, and then caps the day by declining a carefully planned lunch and flying home, that’s a humiliation, not an exchange of views.

Nor has Trump fared very well with the other two members of this cheery 21st-century incarnation of SPECTRE. In the midst of Trumpian chaos, Xi is adroitly positioning China as the new face of international stability and responsibility. He has even made a show of offering partnership to China’s rival and former enemy India

Likewise, the North Koreans, after playing to Trump’s ego and his ignorance of international affairs during meetings in the president’s first term, have continued their march to a nuclear arsenal that within years could grow to be larger than the United Kingdom’s. Trump was certain that he could negotiate with Kim, but the perfumed days of “love letters” between Trump and Kim are long over. Pyongyang’s leadership seems to know that it costs them little to humor Trump politely, but that they should reserve serious discussion for the leaders of serious countries.

Trump responded to his exclusion from the gala in Beijing by acting exactly like the third-tier leader that Xi, Putin, and Kim seem to think he is. As the event was taking place, Trump took to his social-media site—of course—to express his hurt feelings with a cringe-inducing attempt at a zinger. “May President Xi and the wonderful people of China have a great and lasting day of celebration. Please give my warmest regards to Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong Un, as you conspire against The United States of America.” . . . Trump continued his unseemly carping with a demand that China recognize the valor of the Americans who died in the Pacific . . .

This message does not exactly project confidence and leadership; instead, it sounds like the grousing of a man beset by insecurities. A more self-assured commander in chief would have ignored the parade and, if asked about it, would have said something to the effect that the United States has always respected the sacrifices of our allies in World War II. But not Trump: He petulantly declared that he would not have attended even if the cool kids had invited him.

Authoritarians are unfortunately in good company in treating Trump as an incompetent leader. Even America’s allies have recognized that Trump may be their formal partner, but that they mostly get things done with the American president by soothing his ego and working around him.

Trump’s damage to American power and prestige would be less severe if the president had a foreign policy and a team to execute it. He has neither: Trump ran for president mostly for personal reasons, including to stay out of prison, and his foreign policy, such as it is, is merely an extension of his personal interests. He holds summits, issues social-media pronouncements, and engages in photo ops mostly, it seems, either to burnish his claim to a Nobel Prize or to change the news cycle when issues such as the economy (or the Jeffrey Epstein files) get too much traction.

Worse, Trump is no longer surrounded by people who care about foreign affairs or can competently step in and create consistent policy. . . . . at the Pentagon, Trump has Pete Hegseth, who shows little apparent inclination or ability to think about complexities.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was supposed to be one of the new “adults in the room,” but he has instead become a man in a Velcro suit, with the president sticking jobs and responsibilities onto him without any further guidance. He has been reduced to sitting glumly in White House press sprays with foreign leaders while Trump embarrasses himself and his guests. Meanwhile, the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, is spending her time trying to root out the spies she thinks hate the president. Unfortunately, the agents she’s hunting are Americans, which must bring a smile to Xi’s face and perhaps even produce a belly laugh from former KGB officer Putin.

America is adrift. It has no coherent foreign policy, no team of senior professionals managing its national defense and diplomacy, and a president who has little interest in the world beyond what it can offer him. Little wonder that the men who gathered in Beijing—three autocrats whose nations are collectively pointing many hundreds of nuclear weapons at the United States—feel free to act as if they don’t even think twice about Trump or the country he leads.

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We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself

The Felon's regime is steadily implementing Project 2025 which was drafted by white "Christian" nationalist who want to return America to 1950, make open racial discrimination and homophobia socially acceptable again, and to silence knowledge and scientific endeavors that challenge the 12th century religious beliefs of the political right.  Hence the attacks on universities under the concocted excuse they they have nor reined in antisemitism - even though MAGA world is largely antisemitic - , the slashing of funding for scientific and medical research and the erasure of any whisper in favor of diversity, equity and inclusion. Project 2025 authors hold a zero sum world view: if any gays or non-whites improve their lot, it's claimed to be at the expense of whites, particularly white heterosexual males. In this quest to embrace ignorance and wipe away knowledge and science that shows the errors of Christofascist beliefs, severe damage is being done to America's position as a scientific super power.  Already, China has made huge strides to surpass America as a scientific leader and this self-destruction of America's scientific prowess will only accelerate America's decline.   Throw in the efforts of red state governors and legislatures to end vaccine mandates, and America will be a far sicker and less prosperous nation.  A piece the New York Times looks at the immense damage being done:

The Trump administration’s assault on America’s universities by cutting billions of dollars of federal support for scientific and medical research has called up from somewhere deep in my memory the phrase “duck and cover.” These were words drilled into American schoolchildren in the 1950s. . . . Though even in elementary school most of us intuited that there was something futile in these attempts to shield ourselves from destruction, we dutifully went through the motions. How else could we deal with the anxiety caused by the menace?

The anxiety greatly increased in October 1957, when Americans learned of the Soviet Union’s successful launch of the world’s first satellite, Sputnik 1. The vivid evidence of the technological superiority in rocketry of our Cold War enemy provoked a remarkably rapid response. In 1958, by a bipartisan vote, Congress passed and President Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most consequential federal interventions in education in the nation’s history. Together with the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, it made America into the world’s undisputed leader in science and technology.

Nearly 70 years later, that leadership is in peril. According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals, the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard, in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10. Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China. If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

But if America’s response to Sputnik reflected a nation united in its commitment to science and determined to invest in the country’s intellectual potential, we see in our response to China today a bitterly divided, disoriented America. We are currently governed by a leader indifferent to scientific consensus if it contradicts his political or economic interests, hostile to immigrants and intent on crippling the research universities that embody our collective hope for the future. The menace now is within. And with very few exceptions, the leaders of American universities have done little more than duck and cover.

The N.D.E.A. reflected the widespread realization that something had to be done in schools and universities besides teaching students to hide under their desks. The country urgently needed more trained physicists, chemists, mathematicians, aerospace engineers, electrical engineers, material scientists and a host of other experts in STEM fields, and the government grasped that to get them would take a massive infusion of money pumped into schools and universities: roughly $1 billion, the equivalent of more than $11 billion today.

From the start, this government investment in education wasn’t free of ideological interest. It was fueled by fear — fear of the Russians, fear of the atomic bomb, fear of falling behind in the “space race” — and intended to influence curricula. . . . . Until 1962, recipients of N.D.E.A. funds had to sign an affidavit affirming that they did not support any organization that sought to overthrow the U.S. government. But in one of those moments in which the right policy is chosen for the wrong reason, Southern segregationists in Congress, worried that some of the funds might be used to further desegregation efforts, added a provision stipulating that no part of the act would allow the federal government to dictate school curriculum, instruction, administration or personnel.

The act also played a significant role in diversifying the nation’s campuses by providing low-interest loans to applicants in need, incidentally challenging policies that had restricted admission for disfavored groups, such as Jewish, Asian, Black, Polish and Italian students.

What began as a project of national security blossomed into a generator for limitless curiosity, creativity and critique. A seemingly unending succession of inventions and discoveries emerged with the support of the laboratories and research institutes of American universities: the internet, the M.R.I., recombinant DNA, human embryonic stem cells, CRISPR genome editing, the contributions to mRNA technology that made a new generation of vaccines (including for Covid-19) possible, and on and on, along with epochal breakthroughs in our understanding of matter and the origin of the universe.

The result of the huge influx of tax dollars was institutions that not only trained scientists, medical researchers and weapons engineers but also cultivated sociologists, historians, philosophers and poets.  . . . .By the 1990s, American universities had become global cultural icons — envied for their intellectual breadth, celebrated for their academic freedom and eagerly sought after by international students who viewed them as the apex of open inquiry and prestige.

And now, notwithstanding its triumphs, the whole enterprise is in serious trouble. The Trump administration began its assault by using the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on many campuses to charge elite universities with antisemitism. The rationale has largely shifted to complaints about affirmative action, diversity initiatives, liberal bias and the like. Scientific research has been curtailed; postdoctoral fellowships have been abruptly canceled; laboratories have been shuttered and visas denied. The damage to scientific enterprise extends beyond our borders, whether it’s from the cancellation of nearly $500 million in funding for mRNA research under the health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a kind of Lysenko lite — or the purging of data on which climate researchers around the world depend. We will never know what diseases might have been cured or what advances in technology might have been invented had the lights not gone out in the labs.

Why on earth would we abandon institutions that have genuinely made America great? Why would we squander the world’s admiration for this magnificent achievement of ours? Why would we put at risk laboratories that are working to cure cancers or perfecting artificial limbs or exploring deep space or testing the limits of artificial intelligence?

We need to get up from under our desks and persuade our fellow citizens that the institutions that they have helped create with their tax dollars are incredibly precious and important.

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