Kids Under Fire in Gaza

When Dr. Mimi Syed returned from her first volunteer trip to Gaza in the summer of 2024, she started flipping through her notes and came to a shocking conclusion: In one month, the ER physician had treated at least 18 children with gunshots to the head or chest. And that’s only the patients she had time to make a note of.

“They were children under the age of 12,” she says. “That’s something I saw every single day, multiple times a day, for the whole four weeks that I was there.”

Syed’s not the only one. Other physicians who’ve worked in Gaza report seeing similar cases on a regular basis, suggesting a disturbing pattern. The doctors allege that members of the Israeli military may be deliberately targeting children.

This week on Reveal, in partnership with Al Jazeera’s Fault Lines, we follow Syed from Gaza to the halls of Congress and the United Nations, as she joins a movement of doctors appealing to US and international policymakers to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in May 2025.

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Report: Two-Thirds of Heat Deaths in Europe This Year Were the Result of Climate Change

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Human-made global heating caused two in every three heat deaths in Europe during this year’s scorching summer, an early analysis of mortality in 854 big cities has found.

Epidemiologists and climate scientists attributed 16,500 out of 24,400 heat deaths from June to August to the extra hot weather brought on by greenhouse gases.

The rapid analysis, which relies on established methods but has not yet been submitted for peer review, found climate breakdown made the cities 2.2C hotter on average, greatly increasing the death toll from dangerously warm weather.

“The causal chain from fossil fuel burning to rising heat and increased mortality is undeniable,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the report. “If we had not continued to burn fossil fuels over the last decades, most of the estimated 24,400 people in Europe wouldn’t have died this summer.”

“No one would expect someone to risk their life working in torrential rain or hurricane winds, but dangerous heat is still treated too casually.”

The scientists used local relationships between temperature and death to model excess mortality during the hottest months of the year, and compared their results—which cover cities where almost one-third of the European population lives—with a hypothetical world without any climate change.

They found the extra heat was responsible for about 68 percent of the estimated deaths. Older people were hit hardest by punishing temperatures, the study found, with 85 percent of the dead over the age of 65, and 41 percent over the age of 85.

“The vast majority of heat deaths happen in homes and hospitals, where people with existing health conditions are pushed to their limits,” said Garyfallos Konstantinoudis, an epidemiologist at Imperial College London and co-author of the study. “But heat is rarely mentioned on death certificates.”

A handful of victims who died outside were named by local newspapers. Manuel Ariza Serrano, a 77-year-old former councillor in La Rambla, Spain, died after collapsing during a walk in August, according to the town council and former colleagues in the Córdoba region, which had highs of 113F that weekend.

Brahim Ait El Hajjam, a 47-year-old father of four who ran a flooring company in northern Italy, died while laying the concrete of a school building near Bologna, where temperatures exceeded 100F that day. He died two days before a regional order to stop outdoor construction work in the early afternoon was set to take effect.

“He called my mother to tell her that he’d come home to prepare lunch,” his 19-year-old son, Salah, told the Italian TV station Antena 3 after his death. “That he’d be home by noon.”

Konstantinoudis said the public health risk from heat was still being underestimated, despite the dangers. “No one would expect someone to risk their life working in torrential rain or hurricane winds,” he said. “But dangerous heat is still treated too casually.”

Europe’s cities are better prepared to deal with extreme heat than in 2003, when a devastating heatwave killed 70,000 people, but emergency services are struggling to keep pace with rising temperatures and an aging population.

Doctors have called for local action plans when heatwaves hit, more green space in cities—which are hotter than their rural surroundings—and air-conditioning for vulnerable groups, such as residents of retirement homes.

Madeleine Thomson, an adaptation expert at Wellcome, a nonprofit health group, who was not involved in the study, said the new data showed that “no city in Europe is immune” to deaths from extreme heat. “If we don’t act now, the toll will rise,” she said. “We must urgently phase out fossil fuels and implement policies that protect those most at risk from increasingly deadly heatwaves.”

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The Forgotten History of Disabled Children under Nazism

From The Devil’s Castle: Nazi Eugenics, Euthanasia, and How Psychiatry’s Troubled History Reverberates Today, Counterpoint Press.

The prosecutor at the Treblinka trials, Alfred Spiess, described his defendants to filmmaker Claude Lanzmann this way: “They weren’t SS men; they came from the euthanasia project, became accustomed to killing, were kept together during the winter of the war 1941/42 in order to be brought into the extermination camps. That was the long-term plan of the Nazi regime…And this circle of people became accustomed to killing within the scope of the euthanasia project.” Treblinka had the second highest death count among the Nazi camps, at least eight hundred thousand and as many as nine hundred and twenty-five thousand, second to Auschwitz’s approximate count of 1.1 million.

We should collectively want to understand the euthanasia program that enabled so many ordinary German workers and doctors to kill so many. For far too long, we’ve barely looked—especially now, in the wake of historic antisemitism.

The official euthanasia program began with an order from Adolf Hitler, the only genocide order Hitler himself signed. The brief note, written in October of 1939, was backdated to September to tie it to the start of the war. Many institutions already had practiced ad-hoc euthanasia. Hitler’s phrasing suggests little of what they were about to do, little of what they were already doing. The euthanasia order went to the Führer’s traveling physician Karl Brandt, and to Philipp Bouhler, the head of Hitler’s private Chancellery. Hitler instructed Brandt and Bouhler to “broaden the authority of certain doctors to the extent that persons suffering from illnesses judged to be incurable may, after a humane, most careful assessment of their condition, be granted a mercy death.”

The words that matter here are “doctors” and “death”: “humane,” “careful assessment,” and “mercy” give pointless ornamentation, scrollwork on the death certificate. In 1935, Hitler told the Reich health leader that he intended to use the war as cover to rid Germany of the mentally ill. He’d considered putting euthanasia for mental illness into an earlier law, though he dropped the idea as likely to cause “too great a sensation.” At the time Hitler gave the order, mental patients were being killed in Poland, mostly by gun, but a few by gas.

Hitler’s note still exists, a few sentences of blotchy type on private stationery—just his name with a swastika and Nazi eagle. Euthanasia actions would take the lives of about two hundred thousand within the Reich, three hundred thousand including occupied territories. The figure includes between five and ten thousand children. Euthanasia would kill mostly non-Jews but initiate and make routine the practice of targeting Jews for death. At least one child was euthanized even during the Allied occupation.

In the words of a historian, before the Final Solution, “Himmler outsourced mass killings to the euthanasia department.”

“Himmler outsourced mass killings to the euthanasia department.”

I make a point here first made to me by historian Cameron Munro, head of the Tiergarten 4 Association in Berlin: there are no terms that fully capture the evolving sphere that was Nazi euthanasia. It began with children, then became the much larger, adult Aktion T4. T4 refers primarily to the killings that happened in gas chambers built into six asylums across Germany and Austria in 1939. After T4 came wild euthanasia, and in the midst of it all, sub-action 14f13, which brought T4 “assessing” doctors to the concentration camps. Ongoing psychiatric murders happened in occupied countries by Nazi roving military forces called Einsatzgruppen. In 1944, came Aktion Brandt, which murdered, among others, shellshocked German women after the bombings.

The children’s action launched with an infant known as Baby K. Baby K was born blind, with one leg and part of an arm missing. His parents called him “the monster.” In 1939, the parents of K petitioned Hitler to allow them to have the child killed. Hitler sent his own physician, Karl Brandt, to examine the boy. With Brandt’s blessing, Baby K died at five months of a lethal overdose.

Baby K’s death started a program of murdering children born with physical disabilities. By August of 1939, doctors and midwives were required to report “deformed” infants, the reporters often compensated. Most would die as Baby K did, in a hospital. The means were drugs and starvation. Hospitals in the program set up killing units, called by a euphemism like “special wards” or “children’s wards.” The word “special” haunts Nazi killing programs, in which Sonderbehandlung or “special handling” meant death, Sonderkost or “special diet” starvation. Frequently, nurses, sometimes members of a religious order, administered the drugs. Often, doctors gave drugs like barbiturates slowly, so the cause of death would be pneumonia, which sets in when the lungs slow.

The Nazi government officially kept the programs secret. But it barraged the population with propaganda about the “inferior” and the value of euthanizing them. Films, posters, and news reports focused on the high cost of hospitalization and even the desire of the disabled to die. Institutions gave tours. One propaganda film, Dasein Ohne Leben or “Existence Without Life,” was filmed at Sonnenstein, though never released, as soon after the program shifted to the camps. Narrated by Paul Nitsche, among others, the film concluded, “The face of an unfortunate being, distorted and tormented by incurable mental illness and inhuman existence, is smoothed by the peace of a gentle death, which finally brought help, the redemption.”

School textbooks offered children problems like these: “The construction of a mental asylum required 6 million Reichsmarks. How many settlement houses at 15,000 Reichsmarks each could have been built for this?” Or “A mentally ill person costs 4 RM a day, a cripple 5.5 RM, a criminal 3.5 RM. In how many cases does a civil servant only have around 4 RM [in salary] per day…Visualize these numbers.”

A touring SS officer at Eglfing said the institution should set up a machine gun at the entrance, a joke that amused director Hermann Pfannmüller. Pfannmüller was a psychiatrist and neurologist, an aloof man with thick, round glasses. If I showed you his photo and called him an early twentieth-century German psychiatrist, you’d probably guess a follower of Freud. Actually, he was a fanatical National Socialist and a strong believer in child euthanasia. A teacher named Ludwig Lehner toured Eglfing and testified later that Pfannmüller bragged about using the “natural” means of starvation to kill his patients, lifting a skeletal child “like a hare” and predicting the child would die in another two to three days. Lehner described his disgust at “this fat and smirking man with the whimpering skeleton in his fleshy hand.” Later, hearing this statement at trial, Pfannmüller responded that he “never grinned” at such moments, and that he’d never had fleshy hands.

Pfrannmüller caused the deaths of several hundred children and exported more than two thousand patients to be killed at asylum death centers. He was tried in 1951 and served four years. In the end, the court agreed with the doctor’s logic, declaring that, as he used starvation, he was not a murderer “in the classical sense.”

Euthanasia quickly expanded to Aktion T4 and adults. Its leaders set the goal of ending 70,000 disabled, mostly neuropsychiatric, lives within Germany’s borders, probably a rough estimate of the number of people institutionalized. This goal would take more than discrete hospital wards. Aktion T4 set up offices at 4 Tiergartenstrasse, in a home stolen from a Jewish family named Liebermann—a city villa in an elegant neighborhood of Berlin. Number 4 Tiergartenstrasse no longer exists. In photos, it looks a bit eerily like my Victorian house, upright, with bay windows and much trim.

But to separate German euthanasia from the Holocaust is false. The latter was not a switch but a terrible evolution.

Eugenic euthanasia had the international support that future Nazi killing programs would not. But to separate German euthanasia from the Holocaust is false. The latter was not a switch but a terrible evolution. T4 was the first Nazi program targeting a specific “undesirable” group. Even within the careless T4 selection process, Jews had a special status—not spared by ability to work, frequently not examined at all. By the summer of 1940, all Jewish psychiatric patients were killed. Their deaths didn’t even warrant one of T4’s fake condolence letters.

The scripts and rationale for the Holocaust came from this first wave of mechanized killing. So did the technology and the personnel. The majority of T4 doctors left the program for the Holocaust.

In fall of 1941, T4 ended as an official program, and attention shifted to the Holocaust. The Wannsee conference that determined “the final solution to the Jewish question” convened in January 1942. Then, a program called Aktion Reinhardt launched the death camps, the first camps built only for killing. The first three of these—Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka—went up in Poland. These camps would take the lives of one and a half million people. The largest number died at Treblinka.

T4 provided personnel for the death camps—doctors, builders, operations staff, and directors. All these workers had to find death camps tolerable, or more than tolerable, workplaces. Of course, a larger operation drew in more workers; much camp business was conducted by the Nazi Schutzstaffel or SS. But T4 brought the medical and gas chamber expertise and much of the camp leadership. Many T4 doctors also transferred to camps like Auschwitz, a concentration camp that evolved into a death camp.

It’s a natural assumption that pre-war Nazi medicine was cruel and crude, given where it led. But it was not. In the 1920s and 1930s, Germany had the world’s largest number of Nobel laureates and led the world in many areas of science and medicine: cancer research, technology, aircraft development, to name a few. German medicine first recognized and tried to prevent the dangers of substances like asbestos. It moved into areas that feel contemporary, like eating whole grains and using plant-based medicines. Dachau held a concentration camp and also a field of medicinal botanicals. Germany had an unusually large number of female doctors, one of whom would be tried at Nuremberg.

In some ways, German success set up German evils. Public awareness of issues like cancer and asbestos poisoning made the language of tiny and undetectable toxins infiltrating the body frightening. Jews and the Roma and Sinti became the virus, the bacillus, the poison in the flesh. To paraphrase historian Robert Jay Lifton, essential to euthanasia and the Holocaust was the idea that killing could represent not destruction, but a supreme expression of healing—by killing the individual, doctors cleansed the state. The extremes were new and unspeakable. The ideas were not.

Germany also had laws governing medical ethics, ethics courses at medical schools, and ethics discussions in medical textbooks. Their ethical standards were among the strictest in the West. A 1900 law banned medical experimentation without consent, on minors, or on anyone incapable of giving consent. A 1931 law, passed two years before the Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases, tightened up sanctions against experimenting on children. Some aspects of these laws exceed the standards of the Nuremberg Code. No one I’ve found in my extensive reading about Nazi medicine came out during the euthanasia period and said the rules should be suspended. They were simply flattened under the wheels of ambition, greed, and the idea that service to the state trumped all.

T4’s influence was also psychological. German historian Götz Aly writes, “I am convinced that even limited protests against the euthanasia murders in 1940 would have hindered the development of systematic genocide in 1941…If people did not protest even when their own relatives were murdered, they could hardly be expected to object to the murder of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles.”

Alfred Spiess, chief prosecutor of the Treblinka trials, spent months with the men who ran Germany’s second most lethal camp. He left certain that euthanasia programs formed a strategy not just to eliminate the “sick” but to get doctors and other personnel used to mass murder. Kurt Franz, who rose from working as a cook at Sonnenstein to the deputy head of Treblinka, put it more bluntly in a letter: T4 showed that ordinary people could be persuaded to do terrible things, “without scruples.”

“I am convinced that even limited protests against the euthanasia murders in 1940 would have hindered the development of systematic genocide in 1941…If people did not protest even when their own relatives were murdered, they could hardly be expected to object to the murder of Jews, Gypsies, Russians, and Poles.”

Most euthanasia doctors rose through party channels, joining the NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers’ Party, the Nazi party’s official name), and often, the SS. Medicine was the most Nazified profession in Germany; half of all German doctors joined the NSDAP during the 1920s. Doctors were seven times more likely to belong to the SS than other professionals. Illness became a language of the Reich; Hitler “the country’s doctor.” Nazi propaganda also created a mission for psychiatry, associating Jews with mental illness, building on the theories of men like German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin that Jews were mentally unstable and prone to psychopathy.

Before the NSDAP came to power, Berlin had Germany’s highest concentration of Jewish doctors—about half of all doctors practicing there. But Jewish doctors worked throughout Germany. The heavily Nazified German medical association and Nazi race laws drove them out of their practices, a large-scale process but not an overnight one. Hitler began his relationship with mistress Eva Braun around 1931, and by 1936, he’d ensconced Eva in his mountain retreat, the Berghof. Braun’s sister Ilse worked for a Jewish doctor named Marx in Munich until 1938. Ilse and her boss were friends, and Ilse stayed with Marx’s practice until he had to flee. The doctor vacuum created upward mobility for Aryan doctors, along with higher salaries. Many doctors in the NSDAP, at least in urban practices, actively or complicitly threw former colleagues and former teachers out of their jobs.

Karl Brandt, who started T4 and would later oversee medical experiments at the camps, was an exception to the rule of doctors rising through the ranks. Still in his late twenties, Brandt got Hitler’s attention when he treated Hitler’s adjutant, Wilhelm Bruckner, after a car crash. Some sources also place Geli Raubal at the scene of the accident. Geli Raubal was the daughter of Hitler’s half-sister, nineteen years his junior. Hitler adored her with an intensity he never had for another woman, including long-term mistress Braun. In 1929, Hitler moved twenty-one-year-old Raubal into his Munich apartment. Almost certainly, the relationship was consummated. Raubal died in the apartment at twenty-three, by gunshot—either a suicide, because she wanted to get away from Hitler’s obsessive attention, or a murder, perhaps because he knew she wanted to leave. In the meantime, Brandt impressed Hitler so much that Hitler invited him to be his escort doctor, accompanying the leader when he traveled.

Brandt was handsome, courtly, and popular at Nazi gatherings. Though devoted to party and Führer, he remained in his own mind a doctor who acted medically, whether opting for treatment or death. Brandt admired Nobel Peace Prize winner Albert Schweitzer, and at one time thought of joining Schweitzer as a medical missionary. At first, Brandt objected to gas, because he believed a euthanasia “treatment” should be medical, as in an injection.

Philipp Bouhler, the other recipient of Hitler’s “Führer order,” wasn’t a doctor but a high-ranking functionary. Bouhler had round glasses and looked bookish and boyish, like a person inclined to study philosophy, which he had. He’d written a flattering biography of Napoleon, maybe why Hitler tapped him to write his own hagiography, Adolf Hitler: A Short Sketch of His Life. The booklet was meant for international consumption and filled with phrases like “broadminded and big-hearted and just.”

Brandt and Bouhler brought in Viktor Brack, another bureaucrat (German has the useful term Schreibtischtäter, which can be loosely translated as “desk murderer”) who worked with Bouhler at the Chancellery. Brack had had a run of jobs before rising in the party, from farming to racing BMWs to the source of his upward mobility–he served Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler, who ran Germany’s genocidal operations, as chauffeur. Like many others, Brack would “graduate” from the T4 program to help build the death camps, bringing his expertise with gas chambers. He also experimented with sterilization, proposing to Himmler the creation of an enslaved workforce of three million sterilized Jews.

These men assigned medical leadership to psychiatrists Werner Heyde and Paul Nitsche, director of Sonnenstein. Heyde, who would be charged with one hundred thousand deaths by a very unpopular Jewish prosecutor, was bisexual or gay. Nazis targeted men like him; between ten and fifteen thousand gay men died in the camps. In photos, Heyde’s face is unexpressive: the face of a man with no secrets or with many. Other than that, Heyde resembled many other men committed to the Reich, once described by another doctor as “a real Nazi who had no inhibitions.” Despite his past, Heyde lived and practiced openly in Germany for decades after the war, using a flimsy and winked-at pseudonym.

Twice, the SS investigated Heyde’s sexuality, tipped off by a man who claimed Heyde tried to seduce him. The first investigation didn’t go anywhere, due to the bungled handling of the files and Heyde’s powerful friends. One such friend was an SS officer and former patient of Heyde’s named Theodor Eicke. Heinrich Himmler had known Eicke, whose motto was “tolerance is a sign of weakness,” since the foundation of the SS. Himmler wanted Eicke to take over the Dachau concentration camp, which at the time held mostly political prisoners. Standing in the way was Eicke’s psychiatric hospitalization. Eicke got into a power struggle with a senior Nazi official, who declared him a “lunatic” and got him locked up. Those who knew him described Eicke as violent and disruptive, qualities that made him lunatic in one context and the right person for the state in another. Only Heyde accepted Eicke’s sanity. Eicke shared his gratitude with Himmler, saying he “could have hugged” Heyde.

Himmler was so pleased by Heyde’s approval that he sent the doctor a cash tip. The pre-Eicke Dachau released many of its prisoners. It could be a brutal place, but not the hell that would characterize later concentration camps. Eicke’s so-called “Dachau spirit”—meting out violent punishments and death for the slightest infractions—impressed Himmler so much he put Eicke in charge of the entire Nazi camp system. The camps’ daily brutality owed more to Eicke, and indirectly to Heyde, than to anyone else.

T4 launched with paper: so much paper. The centralized review process at 4 Tiergartenstrasse was more complex than that of the children’s action. In 1939 questionnaires went from Berlin to institutions across Germany and Austria and poured back in, where they were copied and distributed. T4 had a bureaucracy’s letters, memos, and personnel paperwork, along with its questionnaires, transport lists, requests for drugs and gas cannisters, victim photos and medical charts.

T4 sites had secretarial staff and rooms of files. A document found at Hartheim after the war included calculations like the costs of euthanizing seventy thousand people as opposed to ten years of feeding them. Perhaps another math problem for the children’s textbooks.

For the questionnaires, called Meldebogen, medical staff had to report anyone hospitalized for five years or longer, with schizophrenia or another “hopeless” mental condition, syphilitic mental disease, epilepsy, “feeblemindedness,” or dementia. Doctors could and did report outside of these suggested categories. They reported the patients’ citizenship, along with yes or no on “German blood.” By far the most crucial category, in keeping with Binding and Hoche, was the ability to work. “Useless eaters” were generally destroyed.

T4 headquarters employed about thirty reviewers. Three doctors responded to each form with a symbolic double-speak: a blue minus sign for life, a red plus sign for death. These marks got scribbled in a black box on the side of the form, along with initials. The speed of each reviewer mattered; they were paid piecework per form, rather than by salary. One reviewer did fifteen hundred forms in a month. Head doctors like Nitsche also scanned the forms. Death required the agreement of two of the three reviewers, though the review process always tended toward death. Doctors elsewhere did assessments, fitting in Meldebogen while working long hours at another job. Hermann Pfannmüller at Eglfing-Haar sometimes processed over a hundred forms a day.

In the beginning, most workers at health care facilities didn’t know the reason for reporting. Some responders exaggerated patients’ symptoms, thinking the program aimed to remove the healthier for war labor.

T4 set its goal of seventy thousand dead with no obvious means of getting there. Karl Brandt tried injections, but death was slow and could take multiple shots. Himmler had become interested in gas as a quick, cheap method of killing, one less stressful for soldiers, who often broke down psychologically when killing so many by gun. In 1939, Nazi troops received orders to empty asylums in the East, getting rid of “useless eaters” in occupied lands. At first, patients were shot, standing in front of a large pit—some fell forward still in their straitjackets. Reports went to Himmler about badly shaken troops. Guns also used up valuable ammunition.

And so the first gas chamber for the purpose of mass death was built and tested in January of 1940 near Berlin. Attached to the site was the first oven built to dispose of quantities of bodies and bespoke stretchers to convey those bodies without too much handling. These were built in Viktor Brack’s office. The site was an old prison in Brandenburg. T4 administrator Christian Wirth, a cooper’s son, managed the actual construction. Wirth would move on to help run T4 site Grafeneck and then head death camps Sobibor and Treblinka—a man in the Eicke mold whose nickname was “savage Christian.”

Philipp Bouhler had the idea of disguising the room as a shower, possibly with Brandt and Reich chemist Albert Widmann’s input. Patients going in groups, nude, into a large shower would seem plausible to victims. So did the sealed-up room. Workers tiled the chamber with bathroom tile and built in shower benches. Victims were handed towels on the way in. An unobtrusive opening let in carbon monoxide through a pipe, again coming from a car. Between eighteen and twenty patients were brought from a nearby asylum for the test. Observers watched through small viewing windows. The shower ruse worked. Victims went in willingly and died quietly, their bodies discreetly burned.

Brandt’s scruples were overcome. He called the results a “major advance” in medicine. Brandt predicted that countries around the world would adopt the technology, as Ernst Rüdin predicted that after Nazism’s success, the world would euthanize.

Most people have become so used—so terribly used—to the story of the Holocaust that it’s hard to teeter at this moment: the men at the viewing windows, waiting to see if a gas chamber would work. Much detail is lost; many of these men were dead by the war’s end or soon after. Some, like Brack, had already decided on using gas in some form, even if Brandt had not. Still, if patients had balked badly, or if Bouhler hadn’t come up with the shower idea. Or if someone had talked him out of it. If enough went wrong, Brandt’s skepticism might have prevailed. Brandt later discussed the successful test gassing with his Führer.

With Brandenburg came a profound pivot, a moment in which a long, long future, still with us, began to unfold.

Another pivot, another future, opened at Brandenburg. For T4 to establish killing sites, Germans would have to consent to the killing of Germans. Or at least, not mind too much. While T4 killed Jewish patients disproportionately, victims were still mostly Aryan. That many deaths couldn’t be disguised forever. Most Germans made a keen distinction between killing their own citizens and killing non-Germans. I doubt anyone felt certain that the stigma of disability and neurodivergence would overcome qualms about killing Aryan citizens.

If the public tolerated this killing, its qualms about killing non-Aryan non-citizens couldn’t be very great. Late in the war, a guard at the death camp Treblinka, who must have been used to almost anything, expressed disbelief that Operation Brandt killed adult, Aryan Germans in Germany. Apparently, Hitler’s “great sensation” of resistance to mass death could be overcome.

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Where’s Black MAGA while Trump Wipes Black History?

Last summer, vying for the White House, Trump hailed himself as “the best president for the Black population.” A little more than a year later, this claim has become downright unbelievable, precisely because of what he’s done.

In this video, I highlight this week’s Washington Post report on the Trump administration’s decision to remove Black historical images and markers from national parks and museums. As someone who has covered the rise of Black support for MAGA extensively, it hit me hard: Where are those voters now Trump is wiping this history from the books?

Watch:

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Late-Night Rallies Around Jimmy Kimmel

From Jon Stewart to Stephen Colbert, late-night hosts sounded off on the sudden suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! after ABC executives caved under pressure from the Trump administration.

“With an autocrat, you cannot give an inch,” Colbert said in his opening monologue on Thursday. “If ABC thinks that this is going to satisfy the regime, they are woefully naive. Clearly, they’ve never read the children’s book If You Give a Mouse a Kimmel.”

In a more satirical bent, Stewart went full state media, projecting pictures of the White House’s gaudy interiors onto the background of his set while sarcastically shivering in fear. “We have another fun, hilarious, administration-compliant show,” said Stewart. He then showered President Trump with fake flattery that included praise for Trump’s “undeniable sexual charisma.”

Over at NBC, Seth Meyers and Jimmy Fallon similarly nodded to state media.
“I just want to say, before we get started here, that I’ve always admired and respected Mr. Trump,” Meyers said.

He added, “And if you’ve ever seen me say anything negative about him, that’s just AI.”

Together, the hosts deployed their usual blend of mockery and sobering commentary to condemn Kimmel’s suspension. The message was clear: ABC’s shocking move is yet another canary in the coal mine, a warning of the Trump administration’s autocratic rule.

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This Republican Attempt to Scuttle Federal Land Plans Could Cause Great Upheaval

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the spring of 1996, lawmakers quietly buried a rider in a humdrum bill meant to make life easier for small businesses. That addition, the Congressional Review Act, granted Congress the power to kill new federal regulations with a simple majority vote. Thirty years later, Republican lawmakers are wielding it to quietly upend how the country manages public lands.

One of the act’s sponsors was Ted Stevens, an irascible Republican from Alaska. Known on Capitol Hill for his temper and the Incredible Hulk tie he sometimes wore, Stevens framed the measure, known as the CRA, as a way to reclaim legislative authority from an overreaching executive branch. Stevens soon collided with scandal: He and other Alaska politicians proudly dubbed themselves the “Corrupt Bastards Club,” after a federal investigation uncovered cash bribes and secret tapes of debauchery with oil executives. The saga exposed the sway that extractive industries hold over political decision-making—a grip soon to tighten as lawmakers use Stevens’ law to wipe out federal land-use plans nationwide.

The Congressional Review Act allows Congress to overturn rules finalized in the previous 60 legislative days with a simple majority. This prevents federal agencies from ever creating similar regulations. In its first two decades, the oversight law was used just once. But when Donald Trump took office in 2017, a Republican-led Congress swiftly used the CRA to repeal 16 Obama-era regulations, ranging from environmental protections to labor and financial rules. (Congress also used it three times during President Joe Biden’s first term.)

The new legal precedent “should be scary to oil and gas companies, to anybody who farms, grazes, or uses timber on public lands.”

Now, conservatives want to use it to advance President Trump’s extraction agenda in a way that tests the bounds of the law. In July, Alaska Representative Nick Begich proposed a bill to overturn the federal management plan for 13 million acres—an area four times the size of New York—across his state’s northwest flank. The region includes land near the proposed Ambler road, which would cross 211 miles and through Gates of the Arctic National Park to mineral deposits. The plan provides environmental protections for important salmon spawning grounds, where runs have recently dwindled, and critical caribou habitat.

The move comes amid an ongoing campaign by the Trump administration to radically remake how the nation’s resources are managed. The Bureau of Land Management (BLM), for example, just announced plans to rescind a Biden-era rule that placed conservation on equal footing with other uses of federal land. It also follows nationwide outcry over a proposed giveaway of public lands; Representative Ryan Zinke, who opposed the transfer of Western lands this summer, nevertheless voted in favor of the Central Yukon’s resource management plan. (Zinke did not respond to requests for comment.)

Begich made clear that he intends to streamline development of the region. “It is federal overreach that is ensuring that Alaska’s wealth stays in the ground, unavailable to the people of one of America’s most impoverished regions,” he said on the House floor.

Critics of a Republican plan to roll back protections for the Central Yukon region of Alaska worry it will, among other things, disrupt caribou migration. Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty via Grist

The BLM finalized Central Yukon’s latest resource management plan last year after more than a decade of extensive public engagement involving tribes, local communities, and state and federal agencies. It concluded that over 3 million acres should be considered areas of critical environmental concern, and protected. Contrary to Begich’s claims, Alaskans largely supported this decision. The process cost the federal government $6.7 million. Ignoring it, said Mollie Busby, who lives in the affected area in the small town of Wiseman, ignores the voices of those directly impacted by the plan. She worries that without the plan’s protections, the natural resources her family and neighbors depend upon will disappear. “This plan should not be overturned on a whim by Congress,” she said.

Should the legislation—which passed the House on September 3 and is now before the Senate—become law, resource management plans nationwide could be at risk. Republican lawmakers have introduced bills to upend plans regulating fossil fuel and mining in the Powder River Basin in Montana, and swaths of North Dakota. “We are in uncharted territory here,” Representative Sarah Elfreth, a Democrat from Maryland, said during a House Rules Committee hearing in July. “Congress has never used the Congressional Review Act to overturn a resource management plan, or any other similar land use plan in our history.”

“We’re seeing the CRA being applied much, much more broadly than we ever have before.”

Because the Department of the Interior has never considered these plans eligible for review under the CRA, it never submitted them to Congress. The CRA requires that before a “rule” can take effect and the 60-day look-back period begins. After the Government Accountability Office, or GAO, determined in June that the Central Yukon resource management plan qualifies as a “rule,” Congress may now rescind it.

This precedent may unravel decades of land policy. “Hundreds of resource management plans that have been finalized since 1996 will never have technically taken effect,” says Justin Meuse, government relations director for The Wilderness Society. That, he said, calls into question everything built on them—“oil and gas leases, drilling permits, rights of way, timber allotments.”

The likely result, he argued, is a cascade of uncertainty for the industries Republicans champion. “It should be scary to oil and gas companies, to anybody who farms, grazes, or uses timber on public lands,” Meuse said. A letter sent to Congress by 31 law professors concludes the move “threatens to paralyze public land management nationwide.”

This summer, the GAO also determined that the Biden’s administration’s 2022 decision to close 11 million acres of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve to oil leases was subject to the CRA, opening it up to repeal. By pushing the CRA beyond its customary look-back window, lawmakers could begin unraveling hard-won protections long after they were thought secure.

Meuse called these determinations a dangerous expansion of the Congressional Review Act’s scope, one that may have sweeping implications beyond conservation. “We’re seeing the CRA being applied much, much more broadly than we ever have before,” he said. Other federal agencies—such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the Department of Transportation—could face challenges to long-standing regulations never previously treated as “rules,” potentially sparking litigation and halting years of carefully planned programs.

As the House passed Begich’s bill to repeal the Central Yukon plan in early September, Jack Reakoff watched in disbelief. A longtime Wiseman resident, he fears scuttling the plan will open the door to a transfer of federal land to the state.

The lands at stake are not empty wilderness, as they are often portrayed, but a vibrant network of rivers, migration corridors, and food for residents. They are managed for a variety of uses under federal rules that prioritize rural food security, and give those communities a voice through the Federal Subsistence Board. The 2024 Central Yukon plan maintained federal oversight over millions of acres, including federal subsistence protections for residents like Reakoff that are not allowed under the state constitution.

The use of the CRA is just one of many avenues the state is pursuing to seize control of millions of acres of federal land to benefit extractive industries. Bruce Westerman, a forester and the chair of the House Committee on Natural Resources, explicitly cited the Ambler Industrial Access road as a reason to overturn the management plan. The unpopular road, which the Biden administration scuttled, would threaten North America’s largest protected region, disrupt caribou migration, and pollute waterways—while using state funds to subsidize a road that would primarily benefit mining companies.

“It is not all about Ambler and the utility corridor, but the entire district,” Reakoff says, adding that using the CRA “throws the baby out with the bathwater.” Reakoff says the state doesn’t have the resources to appropriately manage the lands it already controls, and he fears the state will open the area to ATVs that tear up fragile tundra and non-resident rifle hunting that could decimate wildlife already threatened by climate change. He’s also concerned about additional industrial traffic, and whether the state will have the budget to maintain the road.

The Busbys, meanwhile, say using the CRA ignores the voices of many small businesses that currently have federal permits to access Gates of The Arctic and surrounding BLM land, plunging their operations into limbo.

Legal experts remain uncertain about the broader implications of this unprecedented move. If the bill passes the Senate, where a vote is expected this week, it’s still unclear what will replace the 2024 plan. It could potentially revert to resource management plans approved in 1986 and 1991, over the objections of six tribal councils. It’s also uncertain what the CRA’s restriction on issuing a “substantially similar” plan may mean and could make crafting a modern replacement might never be possible.

This legal ambiguity carries serious consequences for communities across Alaska. Karma Ulvi, chief of the Native Village of Eagle, said the repeal threatens the ability of tribes to have a meaningful voice in managing the lands they rely on. “It’s going to have an impact on our culture, our food sovereignty,” she said. The central Yukon salmon populations have already crashed, she says, and mining or additional infrastructure could harm their chances of recovery. “Our Congressmen need to consult with the tribes, and ask how this could impact us,” she says. “I’m really afraid that the priorities now are just extraction and money.”

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The Global Far-Right Is Making Charlie Kirk a Martyr

After last week’s murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, hundreds of people gathered in front of Berlin’s American embassy to honor him with a candlelight vigil, at least one of them in a red MAGA hat. The group included several members of Germany’s far-right AfD party, including Beatrix von Storch, its deputy parliamentary leader. Von Storch told the crowd that Kirk’s “compass was God,” and that it was on them to carry his work forward. On Facebook, she shared a photograph of Kirk, overlaid with the words, in German, “The death of Charlie Kirk is a turning point in our fight for civilization.” Afterwards, the AfD uploaded video of the rally to YouTube, helpfully dubbed into English, which offered praise for Kirk’s fight against “mass migration” and “left-wing ideology.”

“The death of Charlie Kirk is a turning point in our fight for civilization.”

Across the world, and especially in the European Union, far-right parties are using the murder of Kirk as a recruitment tool, a rallying cry, and a symbol of everything they claim to be fighting against. As the Guardian pointed out, few far-right leaders outside the United State had ever used Kirk’s name before his death; but now he’s on all of their lips, memorialized as a martyr—and used as a potent and highly effective way to unite their bases. Far-right leaders like Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán have expressed mourning and outrage over the killing, with Orbán explicitly blaming “the hate-mongering left.” As the week continued, the news site Euractiv noted that ultra-nationalist parties across the EU were using Kirk’s murder as a central messaging strategy, “piling pressure on the centre-right parties that dominate national governments.”

Many of those nationalist parties were gathered in Madrid over the past weekend for Europe Viva 2025, a conference of so-called “patriots” groups; there, André Ventura, the leader of Portugal’s far-right Chega party, told the New York Times that Kirk’s murder is “mobilizing.” In London this past weekend, Elon Musk was among those participating in a huge far-right rally where Kirk was honored, telling the crowd in a virtual address that “the left” is “the party of murder, and celebrating murder.” He later added that “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.” In Bordeaux, France, Kirk was memorialized with a standing ovation at an event supporting the right-wing National Rally party. In Paris, members of a conservative student group wheat-pasted a photo of Kirk raising his fist onto a wall, below the word, in English, “FIGHT.”

Outside of Europe, conservative and far-right groups have also found ways to graft Kirk’s murder to their country’s politics, even where it may be an awkward fit. In Orania, South Africa, often described as a whites-only Afrikaner enclave, the town council flew their flag at half-mast to pay respect to Kirk and to draw attention to what they described in a Facebook video as “the plight of Christians worldwide.” The same video drew attention to the murder of Iryna Zarutska, a white Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death in North Carolina in August in an unprovoked attack by Decarlos Brown Jr., who is Black. Her killing, too, has been held up by ultra-nationalist and white supremacists worldwide as a symbol of what they see as an attack on white people.

Yet as columnist Rebecca Davis of South Africa’s Daily Maverickpointed out, many of the issues that Kirk focused on have no real relevance in that country. “How could the exhausting debate about trans people in male and female bathrooms even get off the ground in a country where there are still 141 schools with only pit toilets?,” she wrote. “How could the ‘war on woke’ have any possible meaning in a country where elderly women with dementia are beaten to death on suspicion of being witches?”

The irony here is hard to ignore: ultra-nationalist groups that often decry globalization are adopting an international message based on American politics. Yet Kirk, too, had begun to see the international potential of his efforts. Days before his murder, he had been working to build relationships in other countries by attending conservative gatherings in Tokyo and Seoul. In Seoul, he cheered “the phenomenon of young people, especially men, turning conservative” which he said “is occurring simultaneously across multiple continents.” In Tokyo, he spoke at an event hosted by the Sanseito party, a far-right anti-immigrant grouping that has promised to fight a “silent invasion of foreigners.” After his death, Sanseito leader Sohei Kamiya, who has promoted Covid and vaccine skepticism and anti-LGBT rhetoric among other inflammatory ideas, called Kirk a “comrade committed to building the future with us” in a Twitte​​r/X post that portrayed him as a budding collaborator: “We had promised to meet again at his year-end event and had begun to imagine the work we would take on together.”

“Charlie left us with a wealth of vital messages,” Kamiya continued. “Though his life was taken, no one can take his convictions or silence the message he carried.”

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Gov. Spencer Cox Has Been Preaching Calm in a Violent Moment—But There’s Something Missing

Since the murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk last week in Utah, the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has won plaudits for his general moderation. In his press conferences and TV appearances, he was perhaps the lone member of his party to remind Americans that the person most responsible for killing Kirk was the young man who shot him.

“We can return violence with violence. We can return hate with hate, and that’s the problem with political violence—is it metastasizes,” he said in a Friday press conference after Kirk’s alleged shooter was apprehended. “Because we can always point the finger at the other side. And at some point, we have to find an off-ramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”

Stepping into the role of national mediator has been a natural fit for Cox. He has spent the past couple of years trying to get Americans to find common ground through his “Disagree Better” initiative at the National Governors’ Association. He toured the country touting volunteering as an antidote to our social and political polarization while promoting conflict resolution tools for people to use around the dinner table and in political conversations. And he helped organize events with ideological opposites like Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor and Amy Coney Barrett to model respectful disagreement as a defense against political violence.

Cox sees in the aftermath of the Kirk shooting a chance for his Mormon-dominated state to lead the country away from the brink. “Maybe, just maybe, there’s a path forward for our country that comes through the great people of Utah,” he told the Atlantic’s McKay Coppins over the weekend.

Showing the country how to pull back from the brink, however, will require more concrete action than just calling on people to put down their phones and “touch grass,” as he said on Friday. “Interventions to reduce affective polarization will be ineffective if they operate only at the individual, emotional level,” wrote Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, in a September 2023 essay reviewing the existing studies on the subject. She explains that the country’s current divisions often stem less from individual polarization than from structural issues and “partisan incentive structures to win at all costs in order to win ultimate power.”

“Political violence is not random,” Barbara Walter, international affairs professor at UC San Diego and the author of How Civil Wars Start and How to Stop Them, told Politico recently. “Research shows it becomes far more likely under four conditions: when democracy is declining rapidly, when societies are divided by race, religion or ethnicity, when political leaders tolerate or encourage violence, and when citizens have easy access to guns.”

Like much of the country, Utah, with an increasingly diverse population and its famously lax gun laws, checks all of those boxes.And while Cox neither tolerates nor encourages violence, he has helped undermine democracy through one of the state’s most divisive political controversies: partisan gerrymandering.

Starting with Texas, Republicans across the country have recently launched an arms race of mid-cycle partisan redistricting to respond to President Donald Trump’s request to further suppress Democratic representation in Congress. Utah, however, doesn’t need to take such drastic measures because Republicans have already spent 25 years crushing the ability of Democrats and independents to have a meaningful voice in state politics.

“The American political process at its ugliest, meanest, and most selfish, where legislators are picking their voters, instead of having the voters pick the legislators.”

Former state Rep. Jim Dabakis, who was chair of the Utah Democratic Party during the 2011 redistricting, once described it as “the American political process at its ugliest, meanest, and most selfish, where legislators are picking their voters, instead of having the voters pick the legislators.”

Republicans make up about half of all 2 million registered voters in Utah. The last time the state elected a Democratic governor was in 1980. But nearly 600,000 voters aren’t affiliated with either party. Many of them vote like the state’s 280,000 registered Democrats. In 2024, while only about 15 percent of voters were registered as Democrats, nearly 40 percent of statewide voters pulled the lever for Kamala Harris for president. Most of those liberals are concentrated in Salt Lake County, where Harris actually beat Trump, winning 53 percent of the vote.

Yet those numbers aren’t reflected in the state’s congressional representation, which is solidly Republican (and male). The state legislature draws electoral boundaries and, for more than two decades, Republicans have maintained a veto-proof supermajority. The legislature is 80 percent Republican and 98 percent white in a state that’s now nearly 17 percent Hispanic. Nine out of every ten seats are also held by Mormons, even though only 60 percent of Utah residents today are LDS.

Cox served briefly in the state legislature before being appointed lieutenant governor in 2013, and then elected governor in 2020. He seems to understand why people in his state are unhappy about gerrymandering. “There is nothing in the history of our country that makes people angrier and makes them lose trust than when they feel like the government is not being responsive to them,” he said at an event recently. That doesn’t mean he’s done anything to change the situation. In fact, he’s supported it.

The case of Rep. Jim Matheson is instructive. Back in 2000, he was Utah’s sole Democrat in Congress, and his district consisted entirely of Salt Lake County. But the following year, Republicans who couldn’t beat him at the ballot box tried to get rid of him by redrawing his district. The new district’s configuration predicted that a generic Republican should be able to win it by at least 15 points. But Matheson was a Blue Dog and the popular son of the state’s last Democratic governor, Scott Matheson. He continued to get reelected.

Because of its rapid population growth, Utah earned a fourth congressional seat after the 2010 census. So, in 2011, the legislature once again tried to redistrict Matheson out of office, this time changing his district boundaries to cover even less of Salt Lake County and more rural areas. In 2012, Matheson switched to the new district, which was heavily Republican but covered more of Salt Lake City. He narrowly won that race, too.

Matheson retired in 2014, and the seat passed to the late Republican Mia Love. But the district proved remarkably competitive, and in 2018, Democrat Ben McAdams bumped off Love. He was defeated in 2020 by the current office holder, former NFL player Burgess Owens.

After all these GOP efforts to consolidate their power, many Utah voters were fed up. In 2018, they narrowly passed a ballot initiative that banned partisan gerrymandering and created an independent redistricting commission charged with drawing up nonpartisan election districts. The state legislature, however, quickly repealed the new law in 2020. The following year, after only 90 minutes of floor debate, they passed an egregious new congressional map that cracked the Salt Lake area into four districts, ensuring that Democratic voters didn’t make up more than about 22 percent of any of them.

By this time, Cox was governor, and state residents protested at the Capitol and called on him to veto the map. He approved it anyway, arguing that the legislature would simply overrule him if he did otherwise. “I’m a very practical person. I’m not a bomb-thrower, and I believe in good governance,” he said at the time. “I’ve been told that a veto just for the sake of a veto is something that I should do. I just think that that’s a mistake.”

Cox’s failure to defy his party for the sake of democracy is one reason why many state voters saw his “Disagree Better” campaign as disingenuous at best. After all, it’s hard to disagree better when you’re not even allowed a seat at the table.

But that could soon change.

Good government groups who’d help pass the 2018 ballot initiative sued over the new maps in 2022, arguing that the legislature had violated Utahns’ rights to participate in free elections. The state legislature asked the Utah Supreme Court to block the lawsuit. Cox filed an amicus brief supporting the GOP-led legislature. In 2024, the court ruled that the legislature had overstepped its authority in thwarting the will of the people expressed in the 2018 ballot initiative and allowed the case to move forward.

On August 25, 2025, 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson, who was appointed by Cox’s predecessor, Republican Gary Herbert, threw out partisan redistricting maps and ordered legislators to come up with fair, nonpartisan redistricting in keeping with the 2018 ballot initiative. The legislators have until September 25 to comply so that fair maps are in place for the 2026 midterm elections.

After Gibson issued her August order, furious Republican legislators began looking for any way to avoid following the order, up to and including threats to remove Gibson from the bench. Even Trump weighed in on the decision.

“Monday’s Court Order in Utah is absolutely Unconstitutional,” he wrote on Truth Social. “How did such a wonderful Republican State like Utah, which I won in every Election, end up with so many Radical Left Judges? All Citizens of Utah should be outraged at their activist Judiciary, which wants to take away our Congressional advantage, and will do everything possible to do so. This incredible State sent four great Republicans to Congress, and we want to keep it that way. The Utah GOP has to STAY UNITED, and make sure their four terrific Republican Congressmen stay right where they are!”

Cox also opposed the judge’s decision to throw out the partisan maps, suggesting that it was now Democrats who wanted to win an unfair advantage. “Democrats in our state desperately want a district, even though Republicans outnumber them three to one in the state,” he said. “The only way to get a Democratic district in the state is to gerrymander.”

In fact, nonpartisan maps proposed by an independent commission would give Democrats a much better shot at winning a single congressional seat, but mostly the new maps would make all the districts more competitive, which democracy advocates say is the preferred way to force partisans to compromise for the public good.

“Utah is a special place. I am optimistic that the legislature and governor will show the country that the ‘Utah way’ still exists in such a polarized world by finally enacting the fair maps that Utahns voted for.”

Late Monday, the Utah Supreme Court ruled against the legislators and upheld Gibson’s order, raising the possibility that after the long fight for better democracy, Utah voters might prevail. Elizabeth Rasmussen, executive director of Better Boundaries, one of the groups that helped pass the ballot initiative, thinks it’s possible. “Utah is a special place,” she told me. “I am optimistic that the legislature and governor will show the country that the ‘Utah way’ still exists in such a polarized world by finally enacting the fair maps that Utahns voted for.”

Given its history, though, the state GOP is clearly not going to give up without a fight. Like many places, Utah has a vocal minority of GOP extremists and conflict entrepreneurs who have steadily been pushing the state to the right. They have been a persistent problem for more moderate Republicans like Cox.

When he appeared at Utah’s GOP nominating convention in the spring of 2024, Cox was booed by the state’s radical, MAGA diehards who made up most of the delegates. He lost the vote to Phil Lyman, a Republican state representative who was pardoned by former President Donald Trump for a trespassing charge he picked up for driving an ATV in an illegal protest on public lands in 2014. Cox had to get on the ballot through statewide signature collections the same way Mitt Romney did in 2018.

He was reelected last year with only 53 percent of the statewide vote, underperforming Trump by 7 points. Going so far as to buck his own party to support fair redistricting may be even more fraught for Cox than pushing back on the president, which he has also refused to do.

Yet, in a sign of the volatility of the current situation, even Cox’s mild calls for calm over the past week have been met with outrage from the far right nationally. “Cox represents the dead Republican Party that is just too gutless to engage here and wants to look the other way,” MAGA luminary Steve Bannon fumed on his War Room podcast Monday. He accused Cox of upstaging FBI director Kash Patel and harboring too much sympathy for LGBTQ people. “Cox is part of the problem.”

Facing down such criticism isn’t for the faint of heart. But conflict researchers say such leadership is critical to de-escalating a highly polarized situation, and that even changing the language of the debate, as Cox seems to be trying to do, is an important step.

Robert Pape is director of the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST) at the University of Chicago. “Political violence is like a wildfire,” he told me last year. “You need both combustible mass material—dry wood—and you also need a trigger, like a lightning strike or a cigar butt.” The Kirk murder certainly qualifies as a trigger. But Pape said violence isn’t inevitable. The outcome depends heavily on what political leaders do. “Leaders can act either as a trigger or a damper.”

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Justice Department Aims to Kill State Laws That Compel Major Polluters to Pay for Climate Harm

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Donald Trump’s justice department has asked a judge to shut down a Vermont law which holds major polluters financially responsible for climate damages.

In a brief filed on Monday in a federal court in Burlington, the administration said the policy was “unlawful on its face” and pushed the court to “end Vermont’s lawless experiment.”

“The Court should deny the motions to dismiss, grant the United States’ motion for summary judgment, declare the Superfund Act unconstitutional and unenforceable, and permanently enjoin Defendants from taking any actions to implement or enforce it,” Riley Walters, counsel to an acting assistant attorney general, wrote in the motion.

Passed in 2024, the Vermont polic—known as the Climate Superfund Act—requires major polluters to pay for their carbon emissions, which have warmed the planet and increased the intensity and frequency of extreme weather events, such as the floods which wreaked $1 billion in damage on the state last year. New York passed a similar measure in December.

“This is Vermont using its legal right to raise revenue and protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of its residents.”

“This law is about holding Big Oil accountable for a portion of the damage it has already brought to Vermont’s farms, businesses, homeowners and communities,” said Paul Burns, executive director of the Vermont Public Interest Research Group, one of the organizations that helped to pass Vermont’s Climate Superfund law. “Vermont is well within its rights to protect its people in this way.”

The filing comes four months after the Department of Justice and Environmental Protection Agency sued Vermont and New York over the laws. In August, the state and two nonprofits who were granted intervenor status, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Northeast Organic Farming Association of Vermont, asked the judge to dismiss the lawsuit.

Kate Sinding Daly, senior vice-president for law and policy at the Conservation Law Foundation, said her organization would “continue to defend the state’s climate superfund law meant to protect the wallets of Vermont’s families and businesses.

“Let’s be clear: this law is not a sweeping effort to regulate global greenhouse gas emissions, punish fossil fuel companies, or set federal policy on climate change,” she said. “This is Vermont using its legal right to raise revenue and protect the health, safety, and wellbeing of its residents from the ruinous, inescapable consequences of climate change.”

The motion is the latest attempt by the Trump administration to quash climate accountability efforts and environmental regulations. In an April executive order, Trump instructed the justice department to “stop the enforcement” of climate superfund policies.

In July, the administration proposed undoing the 2009 “endangerment finding”, which says planet-warming emissions endanger public health and should therefore be regulated under the Clean Air Act—the most audacious of more than 150 environmental rollbacks launched since Trump retook office in January.

Jamie Henn, director of the anti-fossil fuel non-profit Fossil Free Media, which backs the superfund laws, said Trump’s assault would not deter efforts to bring about financial accountability for global warming. Legislators in at least a dozen states are looking to introduce or reintroduce climate superfund bills in 2026, he said.

“The latest polling shows that 74 percent of voters, including a majority of Republicans, support making oil and gas companies pay their fair share for climate damages,” he said. “No wonder the Trump administration and their big oil donors see climate superfund laws as such a threat: These are popular, commonsense policies that will help cities, states, and families offset the costs of extreme weather and other climate impacts.”

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The Trump Administration’s Latest Power Grab: Your Voter Data

As the Trump administration vows to undertake a sweeping crackdown on liberal organizations following last week’smurder of MAGA influencerCharlie Kirk, the Justice Department on Tuesday sued two blue states, Maine and Oregon, to attempt to gain access to their full, unredacted voter registration lists, intensifying President Trump’s anti-voting efforts.

The DOJ has demanded voter registration databases, which include sensitive personal information like driver’s license and Social Security numbers, from at least 27 states. The department has never done this before. They have been rebuffed by red and blue states alike, who are reluctant to share this information with the Trump administration**.** But on Tuesday, the DOJsingled out Maine and Oregon with legal action, claiming the states both violated the National Voter Registration Act, Help America Vote Act, and the Civil Rights Act of 1960.

Both states vowed to fight back.

“It is absurd that the Department of Justice is targeting our state when Republican and Democratic secretaries all across the country are fighting back against this federal abuse of power just like we are,” Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows, a Democrat, said in response.

“If the President wants to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections, I look forward to seeing them in court.”

“If the President wants to use the DOJ to go after his political opponents and undermine our elections, I look forward to seeing them in court,” added Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read, who is also a Democrat.

President DonaldTrump tried this tactic in his first term, when he formed an “election integrity” commission after falsely claiming that he lost the popular vote in 2016 onlybecause three million people voted illegally in California. The commission demanded sensitive voter data from all 50 states, but the requestwas met with stiff resistance from both Republicans and Democrats; the Republican Secretary of State of Mississippi told the administration to “go jump in the Gulf of Mexico.”

But now Trump is using the Justice Department, whose Attorney General Pam Bondi has not been shy about retaliating against the president’s political opponents, to try again.

The administration is reportedly attempting to compile a national voter database, which could be weaponized to fuel the president’s false claims of widespread voter fraud. As the Brennan Center for Justice noted in a recent report:

The DOJ’s demands for the voter files are one element of the attempted federal takeover of federal elections. If its requests succeed, the department could amass a federal database of personal information about every registered voter in the country. The Trump administration may use such a database to further promote false claims about election fraud, target political opponents, or attempt to force states to remove voters from the rolls based on incomplete information. This vast collection of personal information could also easily be disclosed or misused by unauthorized individuals and become a prime target for hackers.

In particular, the DOJ appears eager to share state voter data with the Department of Homeland Security, in orderto comb through federal immigration databases to search for cases of ineligible voting or noncitizens on the voter rolls. Such databases are not designed for those purposes and will likely produce inaccurate results, especially becausesuch fraud is also exceedingly rare. Nonetheless, this will give them an opportunity to trumpet fake claims of fraud in order to advance Trump’s lies about the voting process.

“My guess is they want the voter files to be able to say we have the voter files and we know there are x or y fraudulent people on it,” says Justin Levitt, who served as the Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division under President Obama. “It will be fiction, but now they’ll say it because they have them. Even if they find an infinitesimal number of wrong people on the rolls, they will lie about the numbers. This administration cannot be trusted. They have an enormous problem with credibility and an even bigger problem with data.”

The DOJ has already taken steps to retaliate against Trump’s enemies, as I reported in my recent cover story for Mother Jones, including indicting Democratic officeholders and investigating Democratic-aligned organizations. There are widespread fears that such tactics will intensify following the administration’s pledge to target progressive groups following Kirk’s assassination.

As I wrote, it’s not hard to imagine the administration “ramping up plans to expand investigations into groups they view as a threat, including pro-democracy organizations, voter registration efforts, and get-out-the-vote initiatives.”

Such actions are straight out of the authoritarian playbook, and Trump is using the DOJ as his willing foot soldiers.

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Name the One Political Party Led by Those Who Call for Violence

The below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land_. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial._

After the past few days of jabbering about which political party is to blame for political violence, consider this:

Joe Biden, September 10, 2025: “There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.”

There is no place in our country for this kind of violence. It must end now. Jill and I are praying for Charlie Kirk’s family and loved ones.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) September 10, 2025

Charlie Kirk, July 24, 2023: “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.”

"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."-Charlie Kirk (07/24/23)

— Matt Novak (@paleofuture.bsky.social) 2025-09-14T14:49:14.176Z

In recent days, MAGA warriors, Republican officials, and conservative bellowers—led by their bellower-in-chief—have repeatedly proclaimed that harsh rhetoric from the left is the main source of political violence in the United States and led to the murder of Kirk. Some MAGA blowhards have gone so far as to call for a civil war to avenge Kirk’s death.

Even when someRepublicans dare to note that it’s time to dial down the fear and loathing, they refuse to recognize how much has come from Trump and his cult, trying to both-sides the issue.

The charging document for the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, indicates that he might have developed a left-of-center perspective before this horrific murder, but there’s more to learn about him and his motivation. Regardless of how that pans out, Donald Trump and his legions are hell-bent on gaslighting the nation into believing they are the only victims of the polarization that plagues the nation. And even when someRepublicans dare to note that it’s time to dial down the fear and loathing, they refuse to recognize how much has come from Trump and his cult, trying to both-sides the issue. Look at what House Speaker Mike Johnson said on Fox on Sunday:

People have got to stop framing simple policy disagreements in terms of existential threats to our democracy…You can’t call the other side fascists and enemies of the state and not understand that there are some deranged people in our society who will take that as cues to act and do crazy and dangerous things…So members of Congress and all public officials have an obligation to speak clearly into this and calm the waters. We can have vigorous disputes. Charlie Kirk was an expert at that. He loved debate. But Charlie also advanced another really important idea: that is that he loved the people on the other side of that table. He was never motivated by hate. He was motivated by truth and love.

Mike Johnson: "People have got to stop framing simple policy disagreements in terms of existential threats to our democracy. You can't call the other side fascists and enemies of the state and not understand that there are some deranged people in our society who will take that as cues to act."

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-09-14T13:24:02.388Z

How does being motivated by truth and love propel a person to call for killing a political opponent? And where’s the truth and love in assailing, as Kirk did, four Black women—former First Lady Michelle Obama, commentator Joy Reid, the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson—by saying they “do not have brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”

I could spew thousands of words merely quoting the hateful and racist comments Kirk has uttered over the years—no doubt, you’ve seen many of the clips on social media. And let’s not forget he was a prominent supporter, like Johnson, of a man who has for years baselessly claimed the Democrats are evil miscreants, communists, and radicals who stole an election from him and who are literally scheming to destroy the United States. There are no leading Democrats who have ever incited with lies thousands to assault the Capitol and beat the hell out of cops.

Show me a single speaker at a Democratic convention who called for putting a Republican to death. Kirk was a featured speaker at the GOP’s 2024 shindig.

Show me a single Democratic White House strategist or Democratic member of Congress or Democrat-appointed FBI director who has boosted an explicit call for killing a political opponent.

Kirk is hardly the only example of a MAGA star who has gone this far. In 2020, Steve Bannon called for beheading Dr. Anthony Fauci and then-FBI director Christopher Wray. Before she was elected to the House, Marjorie Taylor Greene endorsed social media posts that urged murdering Rep. Nancy Pelosi and FBI agents, and she expressed support for hanging Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. The current FBI director, Kash Patel, reposted a video of himself taking a chainsaw to Trump’s political enemies, including former GOP Rep. Liz Cheney and Democratic Sen. Adam Schiff. (When he was asked about this hideous social media post at his confirmation hearing, Patel replied, “Senator, I had nothing to do with the creation of that meme”—a weaselly statement that did not address his amplification of the violent imagery.) In 2023, Trump suggested that Mark Milley, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, deserved to be executed. GOP Rep. Paul Gosar did the same.

Show me a single Democratic White House strategist or Democratic member of Congress or Democrat-appointed FBI director who has boosted an explicit call for killing a political opponent.

What’s crazy is that a movement led by an autocratic purveyor of hatred, paranoia, and bonkers conspiracy theories has not been held to account for its perversion of American politics. There certainly will be violent extremists on both sides of the spectrum. But far too many commentators and politicians relish both-sides-ing this issue, insisting the problem reaches across the partisan divide. Yet it’s not even-Steven. The leader of the Republican Party has expressed, embraced, and encouraged violent rhetoric and with his J6 pardons he has promoted acceptance of violent action—violent action on his behalf. There is nothing remotely comparable to this within the Democratic Party.

By not fixating on the brazen hypocrisy, Democrats and the mainstream media permit those whose politics have been based on demonizing Democrats to escape accountability.

It’s a failure of the commentariat and the Democratic Party that Trump and the Republicans have been able to get away with it. Elon Musk and Stephen Miller incessantly try to brand the left as the party of violence and murder, and they face little opprobrium for that. Democrats and progressives have the better (and a truthful) case that Trump and the MAGA right fuel extremism and hate. But they generally have not found an effective way to land that argument.

By failing to constantly highlight and slam the extremist rhetoric of the right, they have created space for it and allowed it to become normalized. And now, by not fixating on the brazen hypocrisy of GOP cries of both-sides-do-it, Democrats and the mainstream media permit those whose politics have been based on demonizing Democrats to escape accountability, and this also helps wily Trumpists limit a potent and necessary tactic for Democrats: calling out Trump as a fascist threat to America.Such talk, Trump and his crew contend, is reckless and causes violence and could be criminal. Their goal is to stifle criticism and perhaps impose a clampdown on opposition to Trump.

Countering the GOP exploitation and embrace of extremism is not easy. For decades, stretching back to McCarthyism, vilifying Democrats and liberals as anti-God, anti-family, anti-America has been an essential part of Republican strategy. It’s how the party has been able to convince millions of Americans to vote for candidates who oppose raising wages for workers, providing health coverage to those without, strengthening social welfare programs, enhancing environmental protections, restraining corporate power, and limiting tax cuts for the wealthy. Newt Gingrich advised his Republican comrades to deride Democrats as “traitors” and perilous for children. Sarah Palin called Barack Obama a pal of terrorists and a dangerous socialist. Glenn Beck said Obama planned to wreck the economy so he could become a dictator. Trump came along and turned the volume up to 11. (See my American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy.)

The best way to address the sickness of political violence is not with anodyne blather. The remedy must be based on a clear vision of the cause.

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His Book on Charlie Kirk Was About to Come Out. Then His Subject Was Murdered.

For the past several years, Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, has been working on a book about the Christian nationalist aims of the conservative powerhouse group Turning Point USA and its late founder, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk. In his forthcoming book, The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy, Boedy argues that Kirk modeled Turning Point on the seven-mountain mandate, the idea that Christians are called to take over each of seven spheres of influence—from government to education to media and beyond.

Popularized by Texas business strategist and evangelical leader Lance Wallnau, the idea of the seven-mountain mandate has become especially influential in the New Apostolic Reformation, a loose network of charismatic, Christian nationalist churches that follow prophets and apostles who claim to receive divine messages from God. NAR leaders and ideas have become deeply entwined with American politics, both on the national and local levels. As I wrote last year:

They believe that Christians are called to wage a spiritual battle for control of the United States. In the vanguard of an ascendant Christian nationalist movement, they are seeking an explicitly Christian command of public schools, social policy, and all levels of the government, including the courts. Some scholars claim NAR is the fastest-growing spiritual movement in the United States. Evangelical writer C. Peter Wagner described it as the most significant shake-up in Protestantism since the Reformation. Its laser focus on starting a spiritual war to Christianize America has led the Southern Poverty Law Center to call NAR “the greatest threat to US democracy that you have never heard of.”

Boedy’s publication day was three weeks away when Kirk was assassinated in Utah—and what was initially going to be a book with a somewhat niche readership now has a national audience for its insights into Kirk’s rise to prominence and the people and ideas influencing the movement he built. In seven chapters, one for each of the mountains, Boedy describes an organization that touches almost every aspect of American life. “By each of its arms at the same time,” he writes, “Turning Point is fulfilling the mandate.”

Boedy unpacked some of that backstory for Mother Jones, and discussed what he believes is next for Turning Point USA (which didn’t respond to a request for comment). The conversation has been edited for clarity.

On hearing the news that Kirk had been shot: This was supposed to be a student conference week. A couple of them didn’t show up on Wednesday, so when I got the text from my wife, I went straight online, and sadly, just for a moment, caught the video. Shortly thereafter, got notified that he had died. I’m still sad in many ways, just knowing the horrible way in which he died, and having felt like I knew him really well. I never actually looked him in the eye or shook his hand, but we’ve been in several rooms together, and I certainly did not consider him my enemy or any type of negative thing. I thought about his children, because I have two small children. And as a person who’s been advocating against gun violence, I certainly know the lifelong impacts of having a family member die from that. Obviously, the impact on those children and his wife will not just be this week.

On his introduction to Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA: Back in 2016, when I didn’t know what Turning Point was—I think very few people at all did—they came out with this professor watch list. Early on, Turning Point was kind of limited to Second Amendment support and anti-higher-education messages; these were most of the reasons people got on the initial list. I was put on it for writing an op-ed about a bill—now a law—that allows concealed firearms on college campuses. They created a profile of me on their web page. So I ended up on this list, one of the first people, and it has grown substantially to hundreds of people. I’ve been targeted by them for years for being on that list and also for writing about them. [This resulted in] a few bad emails over the years, but certainly nothing like some female and Black colleagues around the nation.

On deciding to write the book: I was familiar with Christian nationalism before Charlie Kirk and Turning Point turned into that lane, so when they did, I recognized it pretty quickly. They now have an arm of Turning Point for each of the seven “mountains,” the seven cultural institutions that they want to take over and take back for Jesus. Obviously, the mountain of government is electing people to office. There’s not a specific mountain of family, but they run Young Women’s leadership summits, and they have men’s summits, and they do a lot of gender ideology work. They have their own news organization called Frontlines, and they have a White House correspondent, so that’s the mountain of media. It is a wide-ranging operation—the people who think Turning Point is a mere college-student organization—they’re missing the big picture.

“It is a wide-ranging operation—the people who think Turning Point is a mere college-student organization—they’re missing the big picture.”

On how Charlie Kirk first learned about the seven mountains from California pastor Rob McCoy: [McCoy] was a retired pastor of a mega church in California called Godspeak Calvary Chapel. It’s in Thousand Oaks, and he was a pastor there for decades. He ran for state assembly in California and lost. He also ran and won as a city council member in Thousand Oaks, and resigned when Covid hit. But really, what is most interesting about Rob McCoy is that he is a disciple of a guy named David Lane. David Lane has spent his entire career trying to get pastors to run for office. He is a Christian dominionist, which is another way of saying seven mountains. [Lane] has traveled around the United States training pastors to run for office at the state and local level, and Rob McCoy was one of his biggest disciples. Rob McCoy then went and found a person to take on the mantle of seven mountains who was in the demographic of millennials—he found Charlie Kirk.

On Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA’s connections to the Christian nationalist New Apostolic Reformation movement: The NAR is a sprawling network of different people, some more prominent than others. [Texas business strategist and NAR leader] Lance Wallnau [described] Charlie Kirk as the new face of Christian nationalism. Many of the people connected to the NAR have spoken at Turning Point events. Ché Ahn, the global megachurch leader from California, has spoken at a Turning Point pastor summit. He is a key figure in the NAR. He spoke at a January 5 prayer rally. Sean Feucht, the singer and the musical voice of the NAR, has done Turning Point events. You don’t really get inducted to the NAR with a badge and a plaque, but many of the churches that Charlie spoke at have connections to the seven mountains mandate. He kind of slyly introduced these NAR people at his pastors’ summits to a larger, broader audience who have no idea about this person. That’s how Charlie was really successful at taking the NAR language and translating it into a more mainstream audience. He specifically did not mention the seven mountains mandate because he understood the baggage that would havecome with that. He’s used similar language, but he did it in a way that made it more palatable to the audience that he was talking to.

On where Turning Point USA is headed: I don’t want to come across as negative at all toward [Charlie Kirk’s widow] Erica’s statement, but it was clear that she believes that Charlie Kirk’s agenda is the emotional center of everything now—doubling down on taking back the culture, doubling down on releasing an army of people to do that. They’re selling T-shirts that say, “I am Charlie Kirk.” That is referring to all the people who are going to replace Charlie Kirk. There isn’t going to be one person. They may name a CEO or whatever, but there are thousands or millions of Charlie Kirks now.

Turning Point now is built to last. It has these seven arms and all of these areas, and now it has followers in all these areas that have influenced those areas. So it will become even more of an indispensable organization, not just for the seven-mountain mandate and not just for Christian nationalism, but for the larger conservative movement. It was really overtaking the Republican Party to begin with, in terms of political organizing and campaigning, and now it has a much broader focus, and all these people who want to start chapters. Remember, these chapters are not just in high school and college. They have chapters in churches because of Turning Point Faith. You could have chapters in Christian businesses if you want, or you could have any type of things that would fit the other mountains.

On the “martyrdom” of Charlie Kirk: The “martyrdom” rhetoric, obviously, is energizing. It is really setting up a way in which we could be headed down a darker road. You add the president’s response—I do think [Trump] wants to seek retribution for this loss of his personal friend. So, it just gives divine approval to all the things that they want to do, and they won’t stop. They’re going to have to find specific ways in which to channel this energy, or we could see a lot of misplaced anger at different people or different groups of people, and we have seen that in the past. I don’t know where Turning Point goes from here specifically, but it is built to last, and it now has a martyr to honor.

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Senate Committee Seeks Intel on Polluters’ Efforts to Kill Critical EPA Rule

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

In the wake of the Trump administration’s announcement that it will overturn the rule which underpins virtually all US climate regulations, a Senate committee has launched an investigation into a suspected lobbying push that led to the move.

On Tuesday, the Senate environment and public works committee sent letters to two dozen corporations, including oil giants, think tanks, law firms, and trade associations. The missives request each company to turn over documents regarding the 2009 declaration, known as the endangerment finding, which the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) said in July that it will unmake.

The finding enshrined that carbon dioxide and five other greenhouse gases harm the health of Americans. “Rescinding the endangerment finding at the behest of industry is irresponsible, legally dubious, and deeply out of step with the EPA’s core mission of protecting human health and the environment, and the American public deserves to understand your role in advancing EPA’s dangerous decision,” wrote Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I,), the ranking member of the committee. “I am concerned about the role that fossil fuel companies, certain manufacturers, trade associations, polluter-backed groups, and others with much to benefit from the repeal of the endangerment finding—including your organization—played in drafting, preparing, promoting, and lobbying on the proposal.”

Fossil fuel companies and their allies are threatened by the endangerment finding because it confirms in law that carbon dioxide, which their products produce, are dangerous, Whitehouse told the Guardian. It also gives the EPA the authority to regulate those emissions under the Clean Air Act.

The letter, which asks for all relevant private communications between the day Trump was re-elected in November to the day the EPA announced plans to rescind the endangerment finding in July, was sent to oil giants ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and BP, as well as coal producers, a rail giant, and two auto manufacturers whose business plans rely on fossil fuels.

“The only interests that benefit from undoing the endangerment finding are polluter interests, and specifically fossil fuel polluter interests,” Whitehouse said.

“The fossil fuel industry owns and controls the Trump administration on all matters that relate to their industry.”

The letter was also sent to trade associations and law firms representing big oil and auto companies. And it was sent to far-right, pro-fossil fuel think tanks Competitive Enterprise Institute, New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Heartland Institute, America First Policy Institute, and the Heritage Foundation, each of which challenge the authority of federal agencies, and some of which have directly praised the proposed endangerment finding rollback.

The Guardian has contacted each recipient for comment.

Because Republicans control the Senate, Democrats on the environment and public works committee lack the power to subpoena the documents. But the Senate committee still expects the companies to comply with their request.

The letter could send a signal to polluting sectors and right-wing firms that they are being watched and could set the stage for continued investigation if Democrats win back a congressional chamber in next November’s midterm elections.

Fossil fuel interests pushed back on the endangerment finding when it was first written, yet little is known about more recent advocacy to overturn it. Immediately following the EPA’s announcement of the rollback, the New York Times reported that groups have not “been clamoring in recent years for its reversal.” But Whitehouse believes that has changed since Trump was re-elected in November.

When Joe Biden was president and Democrats controlled at least one chamber of Congress, Whitehouse said “a request to rescind the endangerment finding would have just looked like useless, pointless, madness.”

“But now that they can actually do it in their desperation and with the mask of moderation pulled off, I think it’s very clear that they were directing this happen,” he said.

Under Trump, former lobbyists and lawyers for polluting industries such as oil, gas and petrochemicals have entered leadership positions at the EPA. “The fossil fuel industry owns and controls the Trump administration on all matters that relate to their industry, and they have subservient Republicans controlling both the House and the Senate,” said Whitehouse. “The change in power has allowed a change in tactics and attitude.”

Two environmental nonprofits have sued the Trump administration for “secretly” convening a group of climate contrarians to bolster its effort to topple the endangerment finding.

The EPA’s proposed undoing of the crucial legal conclusion comes as part of a larger war on the environment by the Trump administration, which has killed dozens of climate rules since re-entering the White House in January.

“The motive is to help fossil fuels survive,” said Whitehouse.

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Charlie Kirk and Trump’s Looming Political Crackdown

The shocking assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk last week was part of a wider, horrific trend: the rise of political violence in America. But Kirk’s murder also seemed to reveal something even darker. Before a suspect was found—when facts were scarce—the race for political retribution was already well underway.

On Tuesday, Utah prosecutors charged 22-year-old Tyler Robinson with seven counts related to Kirk’s death, including aggravated murder. The charging documents say Robinson described Kirk as someone who “spreads too much hate.” According to prosecutors, Robinson’s mother told investigators her son had started to lean to the left politically and that he was “becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented.” She said her son was in a relationship with his roommate, and that the roommate was transitioning. Prosecutors also released a text exchange between Robinson and that roommate shortly after Kirk’s death, in which Robinson confesses to the crime.

Earlier this week, President Donald Trump and other top White House officials threatened to crack down on what they describe as a coordinated movement of left-wing organizations that are inciting violence against conservatives. So far, there is no evidence that Robinson was part of a larger plot targeting right-wing activists. But the political rhetoric coming from the White House is part of a scenario that experts have long warned about: using public tragedy to accelerate political division.

Trump “is immediately casting blame on his political opponents, demonizing and turning the heat up,” Mother Jones National Affairs Editor Mark Follman tells More To The Story host Al Letson. “And that is a recipe for more violence. The very top of our political leadership is stoking a political and cultural war.”

Reveal listeners might be familiar with Follman’s reporting from the episode “Lessons From a Mass Shooter’s Mother,” where he re-investigates a 2014 mass shooting in Isla Vista, Calif., through conversations with the shooter’s mother. On this week’s episode of More To The Story, Follman examines America’s spiraling political discourse, why early explanations of motive in gun violence incidents are almost always misguided, and why the Trump administration is cutting federal funding for programs meant to prevent violent incidents like Kirk’s assassination.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

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Charlie Kirk’s Murder Fuels New Attacks on Higher Education

In the days following the murder of MAGA influencer Charlie Kirk, his friends and allies have called for revenge against all kinds of groups, including trans people and the so-called radical left, even as the motivations of the alleged shooter, who was reportedly raised in a Republican household, remain far from clear. Now, some of those same rightwing figures are homing in on another target: colleges and universities, which they blame for radicalizing both the alleged shooter and, more broadly, people they accuse of celebrating Kirk’s death.

“These universities should not receive a single American tax dollar.”

Tyler Robinson, the 22-year-old Utah man who is accused of shooting Kirk, reportedly attended just one semester of college at Utah State University in 2021. He later enrolled at a technical college, where he was a third-year electrical apprentice. Those facts make it clear that traditional higher education factually could not have played a meaningful role in what led him to allegedly shoot Kirk. But that logic hasn’t mattered to figures like MAGA activist and Trump confidante Laura Loomer, who tweeted on Sunday that it was “time to defund American universities. You don’t need to go to college. Charlie Kirk didn’t go to college.” (At 18, Kirk dropped out of an Illinois community college after one semester to dedicate his time to activism, with funding from Turning Point co-founder Bill Montgomery; after high school, Kirk unsuccessfully applied to West Point.)

In her tweet, Loomer tagged Harmeet Dhillon, an Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights at the Department of Justice, who responded, “I’m on it. And all the other haters at our American funded schools.”

Dhillon is one of the Trump-appointed officials who has been deeply involved in the push to try to expose, embarrass, or fire anyone speaking ill of Kirk or seeming to celebrate his murder. She praised actions taken against faculty members at Clemson University, where one person has been fired and two instructors suspended after making what the university called “inappropriate” remarks about Kirk following his death.

Dhillon called Clemson’s actions “a good start,” adding, “Federal funding for higher education is a privilege, NOT a right. The government is not obligated to fund vile garbage with our tax dollars.”

This general line of argument—that federal funding should be pulled from universities whose employees say things Trump and his allies don’t like—has animated the administration’s long-standing attacks on higher education. But since Kirk’s death, it’s been widely repeated in a new context. Take Representative Nancy Mace (R-S.C.), who issued a press release on Monday calling on the Department of Education to cut off “every dime of federal funding to any elementary, secondary, or post-secondary school who refuses to remove or discipline staff who glorify or justify political violence.”

“This is why these universities should not receive a single American tax dollar,” tweeted Lara Logan, a former CBS journalist turned conspiracy theorist, while reposting a report about a University of Michigan professor accused of celebrating Kirk’s death. “They preach hatred of this country, which is Marxist doctrine. It is helping to destroy this country from within—wake up.”

Other figures, like Federalist editor-in-chief Molly Hemingway, called for what could credibly be described as affirmative action to make schools more conservative. “All public universities should be required to have minimum 50% of their staff be conservative professors by spring 2026,” she tweeted. “In each department.” When a journalist on the site asked if she supported affirmative action, Hemingway responded, “No, I want to remove the left-wing oppression that has destroyed American universities.”

Beyond calls to defund colleges and universities, other figures have said that such institutions need more surveillance and campus activism from conservative students. The group includes longtime sting video maker James O’Keefe, who said his company O’Keefe Media Group “will be distributing hidden cameras nationwide to those who are witness to abuse in their school and who are willing to expose it.” O’Keefe added that he would host a livestream this week “where we will put campus corruption on blast and issuing a clear call to action: it’s time to rip the rot out of America’s education system.”

American higher education has long been depicted on the right as a hotbed of Marxism. Yet Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA itself could not have been created without institutes of higher learning; it was explicitly created to promote conservative views in high school, college, and university campuses—and it has thrived on many. Kirk himself said earlier this year that he thought his messaging was working, tweeting that he felt college students were becoming more conservative, even if the institutions themselves remained more liberal.

The right’s renewed pledge to attack universities is just one piece of what the White House has said will be a government-wide push to dismantle “radical” organizations following Kirk’s murder, which Trump has repeatedly blamed on the “radical left.” In practice, this appears to mean threatening left-leaning organizations with defunding and investigation. Speaking on Monday as a guest host of Kirk’s podcast, Vice President JD Vance also threatened to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”

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North America’s First Battery-Grade Cobalt Refinery Is Proposed—in Canada

This story was originally published by Canada’s National Observer and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Ontario is backing a $100-million investment to build North America’s first battery-grade cobalt refinery, aimed at supporting the country’s electric vehicle production at a time when the industry is struggling with slowing sales and a deepening trade war with the US.

Led by Toronto-based Electra Battery Materials, the plan is to build the refinery in Temiskaming Shores about 250 kilometers northeast of Sudbury.

The Ontario government says it will contribute $17.5 million through the Invest Ontario Fund to help fast-track construction. Once completed, the facility would produce 6,500 tonnes of cobalt sulphate a year—enough to support production of up to one million EVs.

The province did not provide details on when construction would begin or be completed.

Ontario Economic Development Minister Vic Fedeli said the project will link northern Ontario’s mineral wealth with southern Ontario’s manufacturing base. “Electra’s investment in Temiskaming Shores will establish an integral link in the province’s critical mineral processing supply chains and fuel the next stages of Ontario’s leadership in electric vehicle battery manufacturing,” said Fedeli in a statement.

The province says the refinery will create local jobs and become North America’s only cobalt sulphate processor—a critical material for lithium-ion batteries—marking a major step “towards the province’s goal of building a complete, made-in-Ontario, critical mineral supply chain.”

Electra CEO Trent Mell said the project is essential to reducing reliance on offshore suppliers, particularly China, which currently refines more than 90 per cent of the world’s cobalt. It will also help safeguard economic and energy security, and ensure Canada plays a leading role in the global energy transition, he added.

“Unless Volkswagen or another automaker is lined up, there’s no customer.”

Canada’s $100 billion EV-sector development strategy faces turbulence. Sales growth has slowed, federal EV mandates are being revised and auto-sector investments are under strain from US tariffs. Earlier this year, Swedish battery-maker Northvolt collapsed, underscoring risks in the sector.

Both Ontario and Ottawa have pledged billions to secure critical mineral projects as a counter to US trade threats, arguing it will create jobs and strengthen economic sovereignty.

The province has promised $500 million for mineral processing, while Ottawa has invested $3.8 billion in exploration, refining and recycling. Early this year, German tech giant Siemens announced a $150-million EV battery research hub in Ontario.

Still, a report from the Canadian Climate Institute warned Canada could lose out on a $12 billion-a-year critical minerals market by 2040 without at least $30 billion in new mining investment. Global demand for copper, nickel, lithium, graphite, cobalt, and rare earths is expected to hit $770 billion by that year.

Experts welcomed the cobalt announcement but raised concerns about execution and market realities.

Ian London, executive director of the Canadian Critical Minerals and Materials Alliance, an industry advocacy group, said the project sounds positive but questioned whether there are buyers lined up given the struggling EV market. “Where is the customer? Who has committed to buying the cobalt and at what price?” he asked. “Otherwise, this feels like a supply-push model rather than demand-pull. You can say the refinery will support EV battery plants, but unless Volkswagen or another automaker is lined up, there’s no customer.”

London said $100 million is likely not enough to build a refinery of this scale and Ontario’s $17.5-million contribution is only a term sheet—a nonbinding agreement that sets out intentions but does not guarantee funding. He cautioned while the plan sounds positive, the real question is whether the plant will actually be built.

He added the refinery could make sense if Ontario secured markets abroad, such as European battery plants, which would reduce dependence on US buyers.

London also stressed that critical mineral investments should be tied to real industrial demand. He pointed to the federal government’s “nation-building” projects, such as high-speed rail, nuclear power and energy infrastructure, that will require large amounts of copper, steel and aluminum, as areas where investment may be more urgently needed.

A recent report from the Financial Accountability Office warns Ontario’s auto industry, a key pillar of the province’s economy, could lose thousands of jobs this year because of the US trade war. The sector makes up $36 billion of Ontario’s $220.5 billion in exports, with 85 per cent of goods headed to the US and most of the 1.54 million vehicles built last year sold to American consumers.

Sheldon Williamson, a professor at Ontario Tech University who focuses on EV battery systems, said the refinery is a strategically important step. The project could strengthen Ontario’s role in the global EV supply chain by making the province more attractive to battery-makers, recycling plants and automakers looking for reliable local suppliers.

Williamson says most cobalt refining currently takes place in Asia, mainly China, leaving North American supply chains exposed to trade risks. “Building North America’s first battery-grade cobalt sulfate refinery on Ontario soil fills a clear gap in the battery supply chain,” he said.

The project shows Ontario is serious about building a domestic battery supply chain, but its success will depend on customers, partnerships and how fast the EV market evolves, he added.

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Can We Feed 10 Billion People Without Destroying the Planet in the Process?

This story was originally published by Grist in partnership with the Chicago public radio station WBEZ. It is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. .

When veteran journalist Michael Grunwald set out to write his third book, he was determined not to produce a “Debbie Downer.” And he hasn’t. That’s surprising considering his latest book, We’re Eating the Earth: The Race to Fix Our Food System, wrestles with an increasingly thorny question: Can the world’s food systems be transformed in time to feed everyone without destroying the ecosystems that sustain us?

The math is brutal. With the global population projected to hit 10 billion by 2050, experts warn we will need to produce at least 50 percent more calories than we did in 2010. That surge in demand, he writes, is the equivalent of handing a dozen extra Olive Garden breadsticks to everyone alive—every single day.

“I’m an idealistic enough optimist to think that these smart people are going to figure out some cool shit and bring it to scale at some point.”

But the food systems that produce, process, package, and distribute crops and meat will need to accommodate the staggering demand and are already a primary driver of the climate crisis. The industry is currently responsible for about a third of all greenhouse gas emissions. That footprint includes everything from methane in cows’ burps and decomposing food in landfills to nitrous oxide released by fertilizers.

To that end, Grunwald’s new book is a sustained search for the ideas that could kick off the next Green Revolution and provide new, climate-friendly ways of producing food. Many of these solutions, including using farmland to grow crops for biofuels instead of food, regenerative agriculture practices that restore carbon in soil, and replacing meat with fermented fungi, have fallen short, failed, or gone bankrupt. Still, Grunwald makes the case that it’s far too early to call it quits.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

The book starts with your protagonist, Tim Searchinger, a longtime environmental lawyer on a crusade against ethanol, the biofuel made from crops like corn. What is it about ethanol that so effectively drives home agriculture’s climate problem?

The sort of punch line is that ethanol and other biofuels are eating an area about the size of Texas, and agriculture is eating about 75 Texases worth of the Earth. But what Tim discovered was that the climate analysis of ethanol was ignoring land use. The problem is that when you grow fuel instead of food, you are going to have to replace the food by growing more somewhere else, and it’s probably not going to be a parking lot. It’s going to be a forest, or a wetland, or some other carbon-storing piece of nature. That had been forgotten because the climate analysis just treated land as if it were free. The real message of the book is that land is not free—there’s a lot of it on Earth, but not an infinite amount.

So this gets to your idea that to feed our growing population, we’ll need to increase the yields of the farmland already in production or otherwise risk increasing our agricultural footprint. What does the drive to increase agricultural yield mean for the natural lands we have left?

Two out of every five acres of the planet are cropped or grazed, while only 1 out of every 100 acres is covered by cities or suburbs. Our natural planet has become an agricultural planet, and we’re going to need 50 percent more food by 2050. We’re on track to eat a lot more meat, which is the most land-intensive form of food. So we are on track to deforest another dozen Californias’ worth of land by 2050, and we don’t have another dozen Californias’ worth of forest to spare.

It’s a very simple idea—this notion that we need to make more food with less land—but it’s a really hard thing to do. We’re going to have to reduce our agricultural emissions 75 to 80 percent over the next 25 years, even as we produce more food. That means that we can’t keep doing the same thing and expecting different results.

So far, the Trump administration has increased the renewable fuel mandate—a 20-year-old rule, which requires gasoline sold in the US to be blended with renewable fuels like ethanol—and worked to make it harder to put wind and solar on farmland. Are we digging the hole deeper?

The first thing the Trump administration has done is call for a massive expansion of soy biodiesel, as well as an expansion of sustainable aviation fuel, which is mostly made from corn and soybeans. Meanwhile, the Department of Agriculture is on a campaign against the use of farmland for wind and solar. It’s incredibly short-sighted, because even though it is true that there is a cost to using land to make electricity rather than making food, it’s extraordinarily efficient compared to other forms of land use for energy, such as biofuels.

Because we are so far away from figuring out the food and climate problem, one of the things we really need to do is accelerate the parts of the energy and climate problem that we have figured out—particularly solar, and wind as well. Those are really efficient and quite cheap ways of solving our energy and climate problems. Obviously, Trump’s going the opposite direction.

You seem to have a real appreciation for the kind of output industrial agriculture can crank out. Where does Big Ag fit into the future of our food system?

Look, they treat people badly. They treat animals horribly. They often make a really big mess. They’re responsible for a lot of water pollution and air pollution. They use too many antibiotics. They’re always fighting climate action. Their politics really suck, right?

People hate factory farms, I get it. But factories are good at manufacturing a lot of stuff, and factory farms are good at manufacturing a lot of food, and agriculture’s number one job over the next 25 years is going to be manufacturing even more food than we’ve made over the last 12,000.

I don’t say that these industrial approaches are necessarily the only way to get high yields. I went to Brazil, and I saw how some ranches there are using some regenerative practices that are helping them get really kick-ass yields—and if they’re five times as productive as a degraded ranch, then they’re using only one-fifth as much of the Amazon. We’re going to need to make even more food with even less land and hopefully less mess as well.

You explore lots of big climate solutions, everything from plans to grow food indoors in vertical farms to meat alternatives made from fermented fungi. Each has hit a wall. Do you see this as a failure of political will or that people’s food preferences and personal diets are harder to change than previously imagined?

I wrote about two dozen really promising solutions, and none of them has panned out yet. That is a bummer. I say that kind of laughing; I do believe that human beings kind of suck at making sacrifices for the good of the planet, but we’re really good at inventing stuff. And some of these solutions, whether it’s alternative fertilizers made from gene-edited microbes, [using] alternative pesticides made from using the mRNA technology behind the COVID-19 vaccine to constipate beetles to death, or these guys who are trying to use artificial intelligence and supercomputers and genomics to reinvent photosynthesis, there are really smart people working on this stuff.

One thing you could also say is that a lot of government money went into helping to solve the energy problem, and you don’t see that right now in food. But these are solvable problems, and there are a lot of people smarter than me who think that there are technological solutions that can really move the needle. I’m an honest enough reporter to have to point out that none of these really has any traction yet, but I’m an idealistic enough optimist to think that these smart people are going to figure out some cool shit and bring it to scale at some point.

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That Fox Anchor’s Long History Of Having to Apologize For Awful Remarks

In yet another example of right-wingers calling for violence, a Fox News anchor this week suggested homeless people with mental illnesses should be killed. And while the anchor, Fox and Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade, has already apologized, a closer look at his history makes clear this is just of his many past incendiary—and often racist—remarks he has later walked back.

Kilmeade made the comments on air Wednesday morning, when the Fox and Friends anchors were talking about how to respond to homeless people with mental illnesses. The topic came up in a discussion about the killing of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, on a train in North Carolina last month. The Trump administration and other Republicans have alleged Democrats are to blame for the killing, claiming that it was directly connected to the party for being what they describe as too “soft on crime.” The killer, who had a lengthy criminal history, is facing federal charges. His mother has told local media that he was diagnosed with schizophrenia and that he had been homeless.

Kilmeade made the comments after co-host Lawrence Jones said those homeless people should either “take the resources we’re gonna give you, or—you decide—that you’re gonna be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.”

Kilmeade then cut in: “Or, involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them.”

Brian Kilmeade endorses euthanizing homeless people: "Involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill them." pic.twitter.com/on5NMereZQ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2025

Kilmeade’s comments did not appear to go viral online until Saturday, when journalist Aaron Rupar shared the clip on X; by Sunday afternoon, it had 21 million views. By the time Rupar shared the clip, right-wingers, including members of the Trump administration, were deep into trying to punish those on the left who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s Wednesday killing or merely refused to “conform to the hagiography” of him, as my colleague Anna Merlan wrote.

So when Kilmeade’s comments started circulating, they prompted widespread outrage about the lack of consequences for right-wing calls to violence. Gun violence prevention advocate and Moms Demand Action founder Shannon Watts pointed to the fact that Kilmeade remained on air while MSNBC legal analyst Matthew Dowd was fired for saying Kirk promoted hate speech. Watts added: “This moral asymmetry in the media and online is destroying democracy.”

On Sunday, Kilmeade apologized on air “for that extremely callous remark.” He added: “I’m obviously aware that not all mentally ill homeless people act as the perpetrator did in North Carolina, and that so many mentally ill homeless people deserve our empathy and compassion.”

Indeed, research has shown that people experiencing homelessness, including those with severe mental illnesses, are more likely to be victims of crime than those who have stable housing. And with the Supreme Court essentially greenlighting the criminalization of homelessness last year, plus the Trump administration cutting mental health research and support and pushing for “long-term” involuntary institutionalization for mentally ill homeless people, the landscape is likely to get even worse.

But what has received less attention in recent days is Kilmeade’s history of inflammatory speech that has prompted subsequent apologies. And given the vast right-wing effort currently underway to unearth what they see as hateful speech, Kilmeade’s prior comments seem worth revisiting. Let’s take a walk down memory lane:

• Kilmeade apologized in 2009 after making comments in which he complained about Americans marrying people from different cultures, as opposed to Swedish people, who he said have “pure genes.” Kilmede subsequently said he recognized his comments were “inappropriate,” adding, “America [is a] huge melting pot, and that is what makes us such a great country.”
• In 2010, Kilmeade said, “not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslim,” in response to a clip of Bill O’Reilly claiming on The View, “Muslims killed us on 9/11.” Kilmeade later said he “misspoke,” adding, “I don’t believe all terrorists are Muslims. I’m sorry about that if I offended or hurt anybody’s feelings.”
• When the Trump administration was separating immigrant families during his first term, Kilmeade said: “Like it or not, these aren’t our kids. Show them compassion, but it’s not like [Trump] is doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country.” He later claimed: “Of course I didn’t mean to make it seem like children coming into the U.S. illegally are less important because they live in another country. I have compassion for all children, especially for all the kids separated from their parents right now.”

.@kilmeade on children who have been split from their parents as a result of Trump administration policy: "Like it or not, these are not our kids. Show them compassion, but it's not like he's doing this to the people of Idaho or Texas. These are people from another country." pic.twitter.com/s24zwyDfNc

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 22, 2018

• While Kilmeade was filling in for then Fox host Tucker Carlson in 2022, the network put up a photoshopped image of convicted sex offender and Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell giving a foot massage to the judge who approved the search warrant at Donald Trump’s Palm Beach residence, as my colleague Inae Oh covered at the time. Kilmeade later clarified in a post on X that the image was “a meme pulled from Twitter & wasn’t real. This depiction never took place & we wanted to make clear that we were showing a meme in jest.”

Spokespeople for Fox News did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Mother Jones on Sunday afternoon.

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Elon Musk Urges Brits to “Fight Back” Against Their Political Enemies

Just days after the killing of Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk joined other right-wingers in ratcheting up his rhetoric. In a bizarre, downright dystopian, and often factually inaccurate virtual speech to a massive far-right anti-immigrant rally in London on Saturday, Musk urged attendees to “fight back” against their political enemies.

Despite American officials’ bipartisan condemnations of political violence in the wake of Kirk’s killing, Musk and others on the right, including President Donald Trump, have baselessly blamed “the left” for the killing, even calling for “retribution” and “civil war.” Musk continued to stoke tensions in his virtual appearance Saturday, again claiming, “the left is the party of murder, and celebrating murder.” He later added, “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back, or you die.”

ELON MUSK: “See how much violence there is on the left, with our friend Charlie Kirk getting murdered in cold blood this week and people on the left celebrating it openly, the left is the party of murder and celebrating murder.” pic.twitter.com/gzN7EgYpE7

— America (@america) September 13, 2025

Musk’s broad pronouncements were generally lacking in specifics or evidence, and he seemed to be throwing out a word-salad of right-wing paranoia to see what stuck. (Consider, for example: “A lot of the woke stuff is actually super racist, it’s super sexist, and often it’s anti-religion but only anti-Christian.”)

But his main gripe seemed to be with immigration, which is the main concern of the rally’s organizer, Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigrant,Islamophobic activist who has served multiple terms in prison. Musk said he was drawn to speak at the event due to what he sees as “a destruction of Britain—initially a slow erosion, but a rapidly increasing erosion of Britain, with massive uncontrolled migration, a failure by the government to protect innocent people, including children who are getting gang-raped.” With that, Musk seemed to be reviving arguments he has previously made, including some false accusations he made about the British government’s response to a real child sex abuse scandal, as my colleague Anna Merlan explained earlier this year:

Musk has also promoted virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric from the UK, reposting a British Twitter user’s complaint about a sprawling child sexual abuse scandal in which gangs of men in the north of England and the Midlands sexually exploited children for at least a decade. Sometimes referred to as the Rotherham scandal, the perpetrators were overwhelmingly British-Pakistani men who exploited white girls; Andrew Norfolk, the journalist who uncovered the scandal in 2011, told the BBC recently that the case “was a dream story for the far-right,” adding, “They had no interest in solutions, they were interested in exploiting the situation.”

At the Saturday rally, Musk painted a picture of London as a hellscape that’s “filled with crime” and “often doesn’t feel like Britain at all.” While some crimes, like rape and drug trafficking, have been on the rise in London, several others, including knife crimes and burglaries, have recently fallen, the BBC reported last month. Overall crime in London has increased by more than 30 percent over the past decade, according to the BBC.

Musk also repeated the false claims he has made about Democrats in the United States, claiming that the UK’s center-left Labour government is importing voters through illegal immigration. All this, he said, requires the dissolution of Parliament and a vote to install a new government. Otherwise, he claimed earnestly, “there’s risk of this genuine risk of rape and murder and the destruction of the country and and dissolution of the entire way of life.”

The fact of the matter is that net migration to the UK decreased almost 50 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to official statistics, and Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer is seeking to further reduce immigration to the UK.

Adding to the irony is that so much much of what Musk warned about is a problem on the right itself. Despite his condemnation of “so many on the left that are just trying to crush debate, and put people in prison just for talking,” that’s exactly what right-wingers, including members of the Trump administration, have been doing after Kirk’s killing, as Merlan chronicled this week. On top of that, some in the crowd Musk was speaking to turned out to be violent themselves: London’s Metropolitan Police said in a statement that more than two dozen people were arrested and twenty-six officers injured, including four seriously. The police called the event “a very challenging day that saw disorder [and] violence directed at officers.”

In a post on X Sunday, Starmer said that while officials welcome peaceful protest, “we will not stand for assaults on police officers doing their job or for people feeling intimidated on our streets because of their background or the colour of their skin.” All this is coming just days before Trump is due to visit the UK.

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The Data Center Building Boom Is Running Into Local Resistance

This story was originally published by the High Country News in partnership with the Puente News Collaborative and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Sunland Park, New Mexico, is not a notably online community. Retirees have settled in mobile homes around the small border town, just over the state line from El Paso. Some don’t own computers—they make their way to the air-conditioned public library when they need to look something up.

Soon, though, their county’s economy could center around the internet. An Austin-based tech company, BorderPlex Digital Assets, plans to build a sprawling campus of data centers just down the road.

The firm’s “Project Jupiter” is the latest in a tidal wave of such projects popping up across the country. Once built, the giant buildings full of computer hardware work 24/7 to power artificial intelligence and web searches for companies like Amazon and Meta. BorderPlex Digital Assets declined to say whether there’s a client lined up to use this campus, but they’re planning to invest up to $165 billion in the effort—a figure that dwarfs spending for most similar projects.

In the meantime, they’re framing Project Jupiter as an industry model of sustainability and economic promise: Developers have pledged tens of millions of dollars towards local infrastructure improvements and said they’ll create 2,500 construction jobs and more than 750 permanent ones.

That would be a big deal for Doña Ana County. Here, where the Rio Grande peels away from the Mexican border, a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line. Sunland Park’s most prominent business is a racetrack and casino complex that looks out on a long string of strip malls leading into the desert below Mount Cristo Rey. To the west, the small town of Santa Teresa—the proposed home for Project Jupiter—has worked for decades to court development around its port of entry to rural Chihuahua.

Still, like the residents of dozens of other US communities facing the arrival of a data center, many in the county are wary. A large data center can require millions of gallons of drinking water a day to keep its equipment cool, and the industry already accounts for more than 4% of total U.S. electricity consumption in a given year.

BorderPlex Digital and a partner data center company, STACK Infrastructure, have promised to build their own microgrid and said they’ll use a small fraction of that water, but residents are urging caution.

Residents of Sunland Park, New Mexico, gathered in August at the local library to discuss the effects that a proposed $165 billion data center might have on their community.Alberto Silva Fernandez/Puente News Collaborative & High Country News

On a recent morning, about 15 people from Sunland Park met at the library to discuss the proposal, along with organizers from the local nonprofit Empowerment Congress. “I don’t understand much of the technology,” said one attendee, Alma Márquez, in Spanish. “But we have a lot of basic needs here in Sunland Park.”

“I don’t understand much of the technology. But we have a lot of basic needs here in Sunland Park.”

The city started as a group of colonias—unplanned settlements that emerged along the border in the 1980s and ’90s when developers sold off plots for low prices, often without ensuring that residents would have basic services. Decades later, people here and in Santa Teresa are still struggling to access clean water.

“This thing that’s coming consumes a lot of power, a lot of water,” Márquez said. “What’s going to happen with us, with that water we need clean?” Looking around the room, she asked, “And why here?”

Santa Teresa has long harbored dreams of becoming a hub for cross-border industry. BorderPlex Digital says its location on the edge of two states and two countries makes it a particularly attractive place to invest. “We firmly believe that the next wave of frontier tech belongs on the American frontier,” the company’s CEO said in a press release.

County officials seem poised to back the project: Last month, they voted to advance the proposal for an industrial revenue bond that would allow BorderPlex Digital to avoid paying property taxes on Project Jupiter for 30 years. In lieu of taxes, the company is pledging $300 million in payments to the county over that period.

But the county’s colonia residents aren’t convinced. And as a final vote on the deal approaches, they’re joining a growing number of communities around the country who see data centers as a threat, not a boon.

The proposed site for Project Jupiter is a flat stretch of scrub along the highway just north of the port of entry. Its closest neighbors include a set of industrial parks built to complement the maquiladoras across the border, and a new solar plant with thousands of panels pointing skyward.

As data centers proliferate, many are landing in rural or exurban areas like this, where open space abounds. And local leaders are often eager to welcome them. When Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham first announced a partnership with BorderPlex Digital in February, she called it an opportunity to “position New Mexico as a leader in digital infrastructure.” In the same press release, Davin Lopez, president of the Mesilla Valley Economic Development Alliance, wrote that Project Jupiter is “precisely the type of development we’ve been working to attract—one that leverages innovation to strengthen our position as a key player in global trade.”

In the earliest phases of the AI boom, such developments were often quietly approved, with limited public input or outcry. But that’s changing. Data Center Watch, an industry research firm, has counted $64 billion of data center projects that have been delayed or paused amid local opposition in just two years.

Protests started in Virginia, now the data center capital of the world. But as the industry moves west, it’s facing increasing backlash in states from Texas to Oregon to California. In Cascade Locks, Oregon, voters recalled two local officials for supporting a $100 million data center. In Mesa, Arizona, the city government just passed new regulations restricting data center construction. The California legislature is currently considering multiple bills focused on the developments’ energy use.

Paulina Reyna speaks during the gathering of Doña Ana County residents at a library in Sunland Park.Alberto Silva Fernandez/Puente News Collaborative & High Country News

As Data Center Watch notes, opposition cuts across party lines, with frustrated neighbors criticizing everything from tax breaks and rising utility costs to noise pollution and decreasing property values. In the arid Borderlands, water use tops the list of concerns. This summer, when Amazon attempted to quietly push through a massive data center near Tucson, hundreds of people showed up to city council meetings, bearing pamphlets that said, “Protect our water future.”

In Doña Ana County, the opposition has been led by colonia residents focused on an already too-dry present. In early 2024, after residents reported slimy water coming from their taps, a state investigation found dozens of violations by the local water utility—including evidence that it had been bypassing arsenic treatment for over a year, selling contaminated water to more than 19,000 customers.

“I don’t want a PowerPoint presentation that just says, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to use that much water.’ ”

The county has since ended its relationship with the utility, and the state has sued the organization over a decade of mismanagement. But residents cite continued issues with their water: yellow discoloration, sediment in the stream, taps that barely drip despite escalating bills.

At the community meeting in Sunland Park, Joe Anthony Martinez, 76, pointed to scars on his neck, where a surgeon removed skin cancer that he believes was caused by the water. Unwilling to trust the tap, he and his wife have spent years paying for filtered water. Now, as the county and city work towards establishing a new utility system, they worry that even if the water improves, it will go to the data center.

“We don’t want any of that,” Martinez said in Spanish. “What we want is quality water.”

As concerns about data centers’ resource use gain traction, the industry is working quickly to demonstrate its environmental consciousness. BorderPlex Digital says its campus will minimize water use by employing a cooling system that recycles water, rather than the more traditional system that evaporates it. A company spokesperson said in an email that their partner firm, STACK, currently operates data centers in Oregon using the same technology.

“The closed-loop cooling system requires only a one-time fill up and will therefore limit ongoing water use to domestic needs of employees (similar to an office building with 750 employees),” he wrote. The water source for the project is still being determined, he added, but the company is considering “non-potable or brackish wells (where suitable and approved), reclaimed water from the wastewater treatment facility or trucked water from alternate sources.”

In a public meeting this past week, developers reportedly said the initial fill would require about 10 million gallons of water, and that the system would use 7.2 million gallons annually. Daily water use for the campus would average around 20,000 gallons a day, capped at 60,000.

Daisy Maldonado, the director of Empowerment Congress, remains skeptical. “I want scientific reports about how a closed-loop system works and what is the level of water evaporation and recharge needed every year,” she said. “I don’t want a PowerPoint presentation that just says, ‘Don’t worry, we’re not going to use that much water.’ And I think the community deserves to know.”

In late August, Doña Ana’s commissioners voted 4-1 to advance the bond proposal for the project, setting a September 19 date for a final vote. Commissioners tried to alleviate residents’ concerns.

“One of the things that we insist on as part of this discussion is that…this data center is not going to have a negative impact on the water situation down in Santa Teresa and in Sunland Park,” County Commissioner Shannon Reynolds said, according to El Paso Matters. “If it does, then I promise you, we will be on top of it.”

In the weeks since, however, local tensions around the project have risen. On September 5, Reynolds posted the names of dozens of people who submitted public comments in opposition to the project on Facebook.

Empowerment Congress director, Daisy Maldonado, director of local nonprofit Empowerment Congress, is concerned that the massive infrastructure complex will cause more issues with the local water supply.Alberto Silva Fernandez/Puente News Collaborative & High Country News

In a press release, the New Mexico Environmental Law Center called the post “an act of intimidation intended to deter participation and silence community members exercising their right to participate in public and government processes.” Reynolds did not respond to a request for comment, but said on Facebook that he was naming the residents to thank them publicly.

Ahead of the September 19 hearing, BorderPlex Digital has hosted a series of community meetings around the county for residents to learn more about the project, and launched a website outlining their pitch.

Empowerment Congress organizers and colonia residents, meanwhile, are using this time to push the county to ask more questions about the kinds of development it seeks. Driving down McNutt Road, the main thoroughfare through Sunland Park, Maldonado pointed out more than a dozen cannabis dispensaries. A total of 43 have filled vacant storefronts and warehouses in the city since New Mexico legalized the drug in 2021, catering to customers from across the state line.

“You know how many grocery stores are in the city of Sunland Park, in Santa Teresa?” she asked. “It might be one. For a community of almost 20,000 people.”

She sighed.

“So how is New Mexico taking care of its residents? They’re failing the people in Sunland Park, in Santa Teresa, because all they can see is the dollar signs.”

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Trump’s Immigration Police State Is Growing at Warp Speed

When it passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in June, Congress handed nearly $75 billion to Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Some $30 billion of that money will be spent on enforcement and deportation—hiring spree incoming—and another $45 billion will go toward new detention centers, including 50 by the end of the year.

The OBBB immediately supercharged President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which already had been terrorizing immigrant communities and sending asylum seekers to a hellish prison in El Salvador. But an important part of the detention state ramp-up has flown under the radar: ICE’s increased cooperation with local law enforcement agencies.

At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.

On Friday, ICE hit a new milestone: The agency has now signed more than 1,000 so-called 287(g) agreements nationwide. These agreements, which deputize local police and jails to perform certain immigration enforcement functions, have exploded under Trump. At the end of the Biden presidency, ICE had just 135 287(g) deals in place; now there are 1,001—a 641 percent increase.

About half of these agreements are what ICE calls task force agreements, which allow state and local cops to essentially act as immigration agents while fulfilling their regular police duties. If these sound familiar—and familiarly problematic—it’s because they were discontinued in 2012, following a Department of Justice investigation the year before that found widespread racial profiling by Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, then led by the notorious Joe Arpaio. The Trump administration brought task forces back this year, and ICE has signed more than 500 of these particular agreements across 33 states.

As my colleague Laura C. Morel wrote in July, Florida has led the way in signing 287(g) agreements, as part of its larger push to be a leader in Trump’s deportation efforts (see also: the Alligator Alcatraz tent city). In fact, state legislators even passed into law a bill that requires county jails and the sheriff’s offices running those facilities to participate in 287(g). Local advocates told Laura they were worried about what all this would mean for immigrant communities across Florida:

Growing cooperation between ICE and police in Florida will affect the day-to-day lives of immigrant families. “It’s not just about [an immigrant asking]: ‘What happens if I have to have an interaction with a police officer in some sort of criminal context?’” Greer says. “Living your life and existing in this community is now an extreme risk to being able to come home and see your kids, being able to come home and see your family. It is incredibly frightening.”

State cooperation with federal immigration authorities can lead to “rippling harm” on the communities that police are meant to serve and protect, says Shayna Kessler, director of the Advancing Universal Representation Initiative at the Vera Institute of Justice. “It increases distrust in law enforcement. It increases fear in immigrant communities, it decreases the ability of immigrants to take care of their families, to support the economy, and to be strong and stable members of their communities.”

The federal government is already pumping billions of dollars into Trump’s anti-immigration crackdown, unleashing masked agents all across America. But in many places, undocumented immigrants will now also have to worry that any encounter with a police officer could lead to their deportation.

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Stephen Miller Pours Fuel on the Fire, Again

Subtlety is not one of Stephen Miller’s strong suits. Donald Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, who alternately has been called the administration’s “attack dog” and “the president’s id,” has a well-known penchant for the kind of breathless, overheated language that would make the hackiest of hacks blush. Scroll through his X feed and you’ll find some real doozies, everything from “The entire Democrat party is now operating in service of a single issue and objective: unlimited mass third world migration” to “We are living under a judicial tyranny” to “The days of China pillaging America are over.”

So it came as no surprise that he went The Full Miller in the wake of the killing of MAGA activist Charlie Kirk earlier this week. As conservative leaders, right-wing influencers, and even the federal government promised retribution on the left for its supposed complicity in and celebration of Kirk’s shooting, Miller ratcheted up the rhetoric in his own uniquely toxic way.

On Thursday morning, the day after the shooting at Utah Valley University, Miller tweeted:

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved. It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth. Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul. It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence — violence against those uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world. It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.

We see the workings of this ideology in every posting online cheering the evil assassination that cruelly robbed this nation of one of its greatest men. Postings from those in positions of institutional authority — educators, healthcare workers, therapists, government employees — reveling in the vile and the sinister with the most chilling glee.

The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.

Now we devote ourselves, with love and unyielding determination, to finishing the indispensable work to which Charlie bravely devoted his life and gave his last measure of devotion.

We’ve come to take this sort of demonization and incendiary language for granted. But: It is not, in any way, normal. As Current Affairs wrote in a June piece titled, “The Brainless Propaganda of Stephen Miller,” “Even by the standards of right-wing rhetoric, Miller’s public statements are uncommonly shameless. He treats his audience as stupid and gullible.”

Miller’s tweet, though, was just a warm-up. Appearing on Fox News on Friday night, he threatened “all the domestic terrorists in this country spreading this evil hate”:

Stephen Miller: "The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me … we are… pic.twitter.com/j0Gumd9V5i

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 13, 2025

The message here is clear: No matter the motives and political leanings of the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, Miller and the White House see Kirk’s death as an opportunity to go on the offensive against their perceived enemies.

How wide a net will they cast? For now, it’s still unclear. But a tweet on Saturday morning suggests Miller sees foes in every corner of American society:

In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized. The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.

— Stephen Miller (@StephenM) September 13, 2025

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Given the Benefits of This California Solar Project, It’s Amazing How Rare It Is

This story was originally published by Canary Media and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

A novel solar power project just went online in California’s Central Valley, with panels that span across canals in the vast agricultural region.

The 1.6-megawatt installation, called Project Nexus, was fully completed late last month. The $20 million state-funded pilot has turned stretches of the Turlock Irrigation District’s canals into hubs of clean electricity generation in a remote area where cotton, tomatoes, almonds, and hundreds of other crops are grown.

Project Nexus is only the second canal-based solar array to operate in the United States—and one of just a handful in the world. America’s first solar-canal project started producing power in October 2024 for the Pima and Maricopa tribes, known together as the Gila River Indian Community, on their reservation near Phoenix, Arizona. Two more canal-top arrays are already in the works there.

In California, the solar-canal system was built in two phases, with a 20-foot-wide stretch completed in March and a roughly 110-foot-wide portion finished at the end of August. Researchers will study the project’s performance over time, while a new initiative led by California universities and the company Solar Aquagrid will push to fast-track the deployment of solar canals across the state.

Proponents of this emerging approach say it can provide overlapping benefits. Early research suggests that, along with producing power in land-constrained areas, putting solar arrays above water can help keep panels cool, in turn improving their efficiency and electricity output. Shade from the panels can also prevent water loss through evaporation in drought-prone regions and can limit algae growth in waterways.

Plus, solar canals could offer a faster path to clean energy development than utility-scale solar farms, especially in rural parts of the US where big renewables projects increasingly face community opposition. Placing solar panels atop existing infrastructure doesn’t require altering the landscape, and the relatively small installations can be plugged into nearby distribution lines, avoiding the cumbersome process of connecting to the higher-voltage wires required for bigger undertakings.

The 20-foot-wide section of Project Nexus came online in March 2025.Turlock Irrigation District

“Why disturb land that has sacred value when we could just put the solar panels over a canal and generate more efficient power?” said David DeJong, director of the Pima-Maricopa Irrigation Project, which is developing a water-delivery system for the Gila River Indian Community.

The purpose of these early arrays is primarily to power on-site canal equipment like pumps and gates. But such projects could eventually help clean up the larger grid, too. A coalition of US environmental groups previously estimated that putting panels over 8,000 miles of federally owned canals and aqueducts could generate over 25 gigawatts of renewable energy—enough to power nearly 20 million homes—and reduce water evaporation by possibly tens of billions of gallons.

Still, the technology isn’t an obvious choice for many canal operators.

Elevating solar panels over canals is more expensive and technically complex than installing conventional ground-mounted solar arrays on trackers, and it can involve using more concrete and steel. Wider canals may also require support structures for panels within the waterway, which can disrupt the flow of water.

Earlier this year, a senior engineer at Arizona’s Salt River Project recommended that the power and water utility not pursue a solar-canal pilot ​“based on cost estimates and project concerns,” after comparing the unique design to both rooftop and utility-scale solar alternatives.

Solar-canal developers are hoping they can still gain a toehold in irrigation districts that are grappling with high electricity costs and have limited options for generating cheap power, said Ben Lepley, the founder of engineering firm Tectonicus, which designed the Gila River Indian Community’s 1.3-MW system south of Phoenix.

The initial costs are ​“definitely higher…but it can actually be really fast as a project,” Lepley said. ​“By the next year, you can have really cheap electricity, and that gives [irrigation districts] stability over the 30-year life of the project.”

For its part, the Gila River Indian Community is building solar-canal projects as part of its broader mission to ​“generate enough renewable energy to completely offset the electrical use by the irrigation district,” said DeJong. He noted the district pays about $3 million a year for the 27 million kilowatt-hours of electricity it needs to pump, move, and store water.

The community built its first solar-canal project over the Casa Blanca Canal with a nearly $5.7 million grant provided by the Inflation Reduction Act—part of a $25 million provision that supplied funding for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation to design, study, and deploy projects that put panels over waterways. Irrigation districts in California, Oregon, and Utah received the remaining funds to develop their own installations.

The Trump administration is unlikely to support future programs, given its focus on gutting clean energy incentives, but a handful of projects are already moving forward without such grants.

DeJong said that construction is 90 percent complete on the tribal community’s second solar-canal project, a nearly 0.9-MW array built in partnership with the US Army Corps of Engineers, which is slated to go online later this year. The community is self-funding a similar-sized project over the Santan Canal and is developing a floating solar array on one of its reservoirs, with both systems set to be up and running by early 2026. All told, the installations will provide 4 MW in local clean energy generation, he said.

“We have become really familiar with the economics of building these [canal] projects,” said Lepley, whose firm also worked on the Gila River Indian Community’s second and third solar-canal systems. ​“We have a pretty good playbook of how to continue these projects going forward, even without any grant funding from the federal government.”

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It’s Never Too Soon For the Right to Blame Trans People

When Utah authorities announced on Friday morning that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson had been apprehended in connection with the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, they quelleda storm of rumors and inaccurate reporting about the gender identity and motivations of Kirk’s shooter.

Almost immediately after Kirk was shot on Wednesday, right-wing social media accounts began speculating that his killer was transgender.

The next morning, unvettedclaims spreadbyright-wing political commentator Steven Crowder werequickly followed by a Wall Street Journal article claiming—based on an unquoted bulletin “circulated widely” by law enforcement officials—that expressions of “transgender ideology” wereengraved on the shooter’s ammo. An hour later, Rep. Nancy Mace, a South Carolina Republican who frequently promotes anti-trans legislation, was hurling slurs on camera.

For years, if not decades, voices demanding gun reform have been accused of “politicizing” violence—and of casting blame “too soon” in the wake of tragedy. When it wasn’t gun rights but trans people on the line, that rhetoric went out the window—for media outlets, public figures, and government representatives alike. Here’s how quickly the claims made their way from far-right speculation to the Wall Street Journal and a member of Congress.

September 10, 12:23 p.m.: Charlie Kirk is shot during an event at Utah Valley University after taking a question about transgender people and mass shootings. Right-wing accounts on X immediately begin speculating, without evidence, that the shooter is transgender. An online witch-hunt ensues.

September 10, 4:40 p.m.: President Donald Trump announces on Truth Social that Kirk has died from his injuries.

September 11, 8:35 a.m.: Right-wing commentator Steven Crowder posts a screenshot on X of a supposed “internal message” leaked from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives alleging that law enforcement officials found gun cartridges at the scene engraved with unspecified “wording…expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.” Crowder’s post is viewed more than 25 million times.

September 11, 10:23 a.m.: The Wall Street Journal posts a link on X to a news story captioned: “Breaking: Ammunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology was found inside the rifle authorities believe was used in Kirk’s shooting, sources say.”

The article cites “an internal law enforcement bulletin and a person familiar with the investigation.” The post receives more than 11 million impressions. At 10:51 a.m., the Daily Beast publishes a story repeating the claims. At 11:20 a.m., the New York Post publishes a similar story.

September 11, 11:29 a.m.: Right-wing news outlet the Daily Caller posts a video of GOP Rep. Nancy Mace, an outspoken opponent of transgender rights.

“It sounds like the shooter was a tranny, or pro-tranny,” she tells the reporter. “And just because I want to protect women, that I’m worried about getting murdered? Are you fucking kidding me? It’s out of control, and enough is enough, and I’m going to double down on this.”

September 11, 1:18 p.m.: The New York Times reports that the internal bulletin has not been verified by ATF analysts and does not match other summaries of the evidence. According to a “senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation,” such reports are usually not made public due to potentially inaccurate information.

September 11, 1:34 p.m.: The Trans Journalists’ Association “urges caution” in a statement urging outlets to reporting about the investigation, pushing outlets to “prioritize direct quotes and, to the greatest degree possible, identify the source and evidence” and emphasizingthat “transgender ideology” is “a term coined for and used in anti-trans political messaging.”

September 11, 3:28 p.m.: Citing “reporting in multiple outlets,” conservative talk show host Megyn Kelly uses Kirk’s death as an opportunity to attack trans people.

“Charlie Kirk’s killer engraved the ammunition used to murder him with pro-transgender ideology, according to reporting in multiple outlets—to the surprise of literally no one,” she said. “There’s one particular group that’s been running around killing Americans in the name of transgender ideology lately and it’s transgender activists or individuals or those who proclaim that they are.”

In an interview on Kelly’s show, Donald Trump Jr. says, “I can’t name, including probably, like, Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, a group that is more violent per capita than the radical trans moment.”

September 11, 4:43 p.m.: The UK-based Telegraph asserts that the killer’s ammunition was “engraved with pro-trans messages.”

September 11, 5:00 p.m., CNN reports that, according to two law enforcement sources, at least one cartridge was marked with arrows, which could have been misinterpreted by ATF analysts to be connected to the transgender community. By the following morning, the Wall Street Journal alters its story to include the New York Times and CNN reporting, adding “Some Sources Urge Caution” to its headline.

September 12, 10:10 a.m.: At a press conference, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox identifies the suspect in custody as 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson, whom neither Cox nor law enforcement claim is transgender. Cox reads the inscriptions from the recovered bullet casings, none of which reference transgender people in any way.

September 12, 10:36 a.m.: Rep. Mace calls for prayers for Robinson. “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual,” she writes.

Shortly after the revelations at Cox’s Friday press conference, Human Rights Campaign launched a petition demanding the Wall Street Journal retract and apologize for its article on the shell casings.

“Jumping to those conclusions was reckless, irresponsible, and led to a wave of threats against the trans community…Many online who peddled rumors with incomplete and untrue details did not care about the facts,” HRC press secretary Brandon Wolf said in a statement.

At 2:46 p.m. ET on Friday, the_Wall Street Journal_ posted on X that it had appended an editor’s note to its original article acknowledging that Cox “gave no indication that the ammunition included any transgender references.” (The newspaper laid off five members of its standards and ethics team last year; its current deputy editor for standards did not reply to a request for comment.)

The phrase “transgender ideology” has “increasingly become a shorthand for everything that threatens the MAGA-preferred vision of the nation, of the people, of the family,” says Joanna Wuest, assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University. Trump has led a policy crusade against transgender people since his first day in office, starting with an executive order against “gender ideology”—a move that has been used to limit trans people’s access to bathrooms, identification documents, and medical care, as well as their protections from discrimination in education and employment.

Those who use the phrase “gender ideology” are generally referring to the idea that someone can have a gender identity—a deeply felt, internal sense of gender—that differs from their sex assigned at birth. “There’s been this movement on the right, but also just in general, to frame that as an ideology,” says Saskia Brechenmacher, a senior fellow researching gender, civil society, and democratic governance at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “Other people would say, ‘No, that’s just the way the world is.’”

Laurie Marhoefer, a professor of LGBTQ history and Nazi Germany at the University of Washington, says his transgender friends reacted with alarm as soon as news broke of the shooting. But the panic increased when the false statements about the shell casings came out. Friends began to check in with him, asking how worried they should be about retaliation.

“People are just terrified,” Marhoefer says. “I think we’re getting used to being terrified.”

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Shoulder-Checks and Smoking Weed: The Petty Crimes Being Prosecuted Under Trump’s DC Crackdown

“Good afternoon,” is how Magistrate Judge Heide Herrmann welcomed detainees into DC Superior Court room C-10 when it was their turn to stand in front of the bench on Monday.

But at 8:37 p.m., it was hardly “afternoon” anymore. Nor was it a good day for most of the inmates. They had been brought over from DC’s central cellblock, where accommodations consist of metal “beds” without mattresses. Some of the detainees were still in the pajamas they were wearing when they were first arrested. All were shackled at the wrists and ankles.

“MPD knows how to do this. The other law enforcement mentioned who are out making arrests apparently do not.”

Judge Herrmann was responsible for deciding whether they would continue to be held or released on the promise to appear at their next court date. The constitution requires defendants see a judge within 48 hours of arrest, but because superior court is closed on Sundays, Mondays consist of two days’ worth of criminal misdemeanor arraignments and felony presentments. It’s often the courtroom’s busiest day.

Several of the 105 cases Herrmann considered involved serious allegations: one defendant allegedly shot someone, requiring the victim to undergo bladder surgery, and there were also a litany of domestic violence charges. But since President Donald Trump has unleashed scores of federal law enforcement officers to help police DC’s modest population of 702,000, the caseload has been especially long—and often frivolous. Just a couple Mondays ago, it took a judge until almost 1:30 a.m. to get through what lawyers call the “lock-up list.” (A lawyer who sometimes represents defendants in C-10 says that before Trump’s crackdown, ending between 7-8 p.m. would have been considered an especially late Monday. )

The recent liveliness of C-10 should concern DC locals as well as the residents of blue cities that Trump has alluded to targeting next. But not because the room’s fullness proves Trump’s bold thesis that the entire city has been “overtaken by violent gangs and bloodthirsty criminals.” Rather, experts say, the surging volume of charges and the allegations therein indicates a different problem: overzealous and ineffectual prosecuting.

“We are in the in the DC Superior Court pretty much every day and have seen
enormous changes under Trump,” says Abbe Smith, the director of a Georgetown Law School clinic that provides criminal defense assistance to people who can’t afford other representation. “None of them good.”

The aggressive posturing is no doubt putting a tremendous strain on judges and public defenders.

“Aye yai yai,” grumbled one of about five public defenders in the room on Monday when she learned she had more than a dozen clients left to represent after 6 p.m.

At one point, even the stoic judge bemoaned the contents of some of the arrest affidavits. She attributed this to federal agents who, unlike members of the Metropolitan Police Department, are not accustomed to street patrol duty.

In this case, federal agents had helped apprehend a young man arrested for smoking weed in a park. Possession of marijuana is legal in DC, but public consumption of it is not (though it’s rarely prosecuted). After he was arrested, MPD and federal agents performed a subsequent search that led them to conclude the young man was storing THC wax—a more concentrated form of weed that isn’t legal in DC—in a backpack. Law enforcement tacked on a possession charge, but the affidavit said nothing about how agents knew the backpack (and the THC wax) belonged to the defendant.

“MPD knows how to do this,” the magistrate judge said of the incomplete affidavit. “The other law enforcement mentioned who are out making arrests apparently do not.”

In early September, another man was approached by law enforcement because DEA agents “observed a bulge consistent with a bag of marijuana coming from the pants pocket” of the individual, the affidavit says. He willingly showed the agents the bag of marijuana (which, again, is legal in DC). They then patted him down and noticed an “abnormal bulge” in his sock. It was a small bag containing what the agents described as five Oxycodone pills. They arrested the man for possession of a controlled substance.

This case was recently dismissed, but normally, such cases wouldn’t have been prosecuted in the first place. Instead, they are usually “no-papered,” meaning the prosecutor would opt against filing formal charges after the arrest. Smith says it was previously common for as many as a quarter or a third of cases to be no-papered misdemeanors because the allegations lack sufficient evidence to convict, or because there are questions about whether the defendant’s constitutional rights were violated. But now in DC, she says, “nearly every single misdemeanor is being papered.”

Anecdotally, law enforcement seem to be more aggressively pursuing searches that may not be legally justified. In one instance, federal agents approached a man in a lawn chair merely for being close to a miniature bottle of wine—the kind you can buy on an airplane. Moments later, he was thoroughly searched and then charged for drug possession and for carrying a handgun without a permit.

Less that two blocks from the superior court sits DC’s federal district court. Here, convictions are generally accompanied by stricter sentences. Yet, the federal charges defendants have faced in recent weeks haven’t necessarily been any more serious than those judged in local court.

In between a sprinkling of serious child pornography and narcotics hearings were more negligible matters, such as shoving and vague threats. A man who allegedly shoulder-checked a National Guard member and said “I’ll kill you” was initially charged with assault and threatening to kidnap or injure a person, which carries a penalty of up to 20 years in prison. (On Tuesday, a grand jury declined to indict him. Subsequently, DC US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office charged him with two misdemeanor counts instead.)

There was also a woman arrested for assault while protesting ICE agents in July. Amid efforts to restrain her, an FBI agent’s hand was allegedly scraped against a cement wall. Extraordinarily, a grand jury opted against indicting her for felony assault three times. She’s since been charged with a misdemeanor and awaits from home a trial in October.

Pirro’s office also won’t give up on convicting the infamous former Justice Department paralegal, Sean Dunn, accused of assault for tossing a wrapped Subway sandwich at the chest of a Customs and Border Patrol agent in August. A grand jury opted against indicting him, too. (He’s since been charged with misdemeanor assault; jury selection for the trial is slated to begin November 3.)

Shootings have continued amid the crime crackdown, but Trump and Pirro can count at least one win: Nobody in DC has thrown a sandwich at an officer since prosecutors tried to throw the book at Dunn. Our long national nightmare is over.

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The Saga of RFK Jr. and an Estonian Vaccine Skeptics Conference

Last week, organizers for the “European Conference of Health and Human Rights” announced a change: Their keynote speaker, US Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., had withdrawn after Estonian politicians reportedly called Kennedy a “quack” and “cuckoo.”

It was the end of an odd saga. A month earlier, organizers announced Kennedy was set to appear remotely as the keynote speaker at the conference hosted by the Estonian chapter of the World Council for Health (WCH), a group that promotes vaccine skepticism and bogus claims about the effectiveness of both ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine to treat Covid. Kennedy had featured prominently in promotion and in social media posts for the event, which began on Thursday.

But, earlier this month, the conference ran into trouble. According to a report from Estonian Public Broadcasting, the World Council for Health Estonia event was organized to be held at the Riigikogu, Estonia’s parliamentary building. Two Members of Parliament from the Estonian Conservative People’s Party (EKRE)—which has been described as “ultranationalist”—planned to attend. And the EPB report even described one EKRE MP, Martin Helme, as an organizer of the conference. (EKRE is known for its hardline stances against gay marriage, feminism, and immigration.)

This mixing of Estonian government resources with pseudoscience and Kennedy caused outrage. According to EPB, the country’s Minister of Social Affairs, Karmen Joller, objected strongly to the conference being held in the Riigikogu. She called the conference organizers a “bunch [who are] spreading pseudoscience” and said having the conference there would cause reputational damage. “Such an event would undoubtedly affect the reputation of Estonia as a state,” she reportedly wrote. The World Council for Health claimed that Social Minister Joller also publicly called Kennedy “cuckoo in the head.” (Joller did not respond to several requests for comment.)

On September 1, the WCH announced in a press release both Kennedy’s withdrawal and that the conference would also no longer be held in the Estonian parliamentary building.

Designed to look like a legitimate health organization with an anodyne name and bland logo, the WCH, which first appeared in 2022, was set up to serve as an international umbrella organization for groups that promote vaccine skepticism and Covid misinformation. WCH’s subgroups include the Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance, which promoted ivermectin use in the US (and which has since changed its name to the Independent Medical Alliance), and the BIRD Group, which pursues a similar agenda in Britain.

The schedule for the conference that Kennedy dropped out of shows the group’s focus on anti-vaccine material and medical freedom claims. The speakers include Dr. Peter McCullough, an American cardiologist whose board certifications were revoked after he spent years promoting Covid and vaccine misinformation. (His address is titled “Conseqences [sic] of Heart Damage after COVID-19 Vaccination.”).

Dr. Mark Trozzi, a Canadian doctor who has also been accused of promoting vaccine misinformation, is giving a speech about Covid vaccine injury.

A spokesperson for HHS did not answer questions about why Kennedy agreed to appear at the conference, whether he considers WCH legitimate, or why he withdrew, confirming only that he was not participating in the conference.

“[D]ue to political and personal attacks directed at Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has withdrawn his video participation,” the release read, in part. “It is deeply concerning that in today’s Estonia, open dialogue on health-related matters is being suppressed, and fundamental freedoms, including freedom of speech, are increasingly disregarded at official levels.”

The conference is now taking place at a Radisson hotel in downtown Tallinn, a slightly less impressive venue than a parliamentary building.

Helme, the current EKRE member who was listed as an organizer of the conference, wrote on Facebook that Estonian politicians had been “beyond disrespectful” towards Kennedy, accusing them of referring to him as a “quack.” Helme also praised Kennedy as someone who “has stood firm against the corruption in the medical system for years and stepped up to protect children in the attempts of super powerful lobby groups to make money at the expense of children’s health.” (Helme’s statement also appears to refer to Kennedy as “a scientist,” which he is not.)

The planned content of Kennedy’s speech suggests that his health policy ambitions may go beyond the United States. In it, he speaks of his goal of further “collaboration” between the US and Europe.

A press release—still available on WCH Estonia’s website—gave extensive detail about what Kennedy hoped to discuss, saying he would focus on “key areas of international and regional relevance including the WHO Pandemic Treaty and the International Health Regulations (IHR). He will also likely discuss his perspective on why European countries should consider not ratifying the proposed WHO Pandemic Treaty, noting that the deadline for IHR amendments has already passed for most European nations.” (The WHO Pandemic Treaty was signed by member countries in May and is an agreement to work together to help prevent and respond to future pandemics; the United States did not sign it after President Trump announced the country’s withdrawal from the WHO in January.)

Additionally, the press release added, “[Kennedy] is anticipated to address the major issues shaping healthcare policy, including transparency, accountability and public trust, and explore opportunities to strengthen collaboration between Europe and the United States, particularly in areas of health sovereignty, policymaking, and the protection of human rights.”

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Mass Deportations Ensnare Immigrant Service Members and Veterans

In the months leading up to the 2024 presidential election, US Army veteran Sae Joon Park kept in mind a warning from an immigration officer: If Donald Trump were elected, Park would likely be at risk for deportation.

Park was just 7 when he came to the US from Seoul, South Korea. A green card holder, he joined the Army at 19 “to serve the country that I believed in,” he said. He received a Purple Heart after being shot twice while deployed in Panama, but after leaving the military, he lived with PTSD. That led to an addiction to crack cocaine and, ultimately, trouble with the law.

In 2009, he was arrested for drug possession. After he jumped bail, afraid he would fail a drug test, he served time in prison and was told he would be deported. However, because he was a veteran, he was granted deferred action upon his release, which allowed him to remain in the US as long as he checked in with immigration officials annually.

Sae Joon Park joined the Army at 19 “to serve the country that I believed in,” he said. After living in the US for almost 50 years, he self-deported in June back to South Korea after learning the Trump administration planned to deport him.Sae Joon Park/News21

US Army veteran Sae Joon Park, pictured during Operation Just Cause in Panama, received a Purple Heart after being shot while deployed there. Park self-deported in June, after learning the Trump administration planned to deport him. Sae Joon Park/News21

For 14 years, he did just that while raising children and building a new life in Honolulu. In June, everything changed.

When Park went in for his regular appointment, he was told he had a removal order against him. After talking things over with his family and lawyer, he decided to self-deport because, he said, he worried he could not survive extended time in detention while fighting deportation.

“I could have ended up in ‘Alligator Alcatraz,’” Park said, referring to the Florida detention center that has come under fire for alleged inhumane conditions. “I was a legal resident. They allowed me to join, serve the country—front line, taking bullets for this country. That should mean something.”

Instead, he said, “This is how veterans are being treated.”

During his first term in office, Trump enacted immigration policies aimed at a group normally safe from scrutiny: noncitizens who serve in the US military. His administration sought to restrict typical avenues for immigrant service members to obtain citizenship and make it harder for green card holders to enlist—actions that ultimately were unsuccessful.

Now, as the second Trump administration engages in a campaign to detain and deport immigrants living in the US, military experts and veterans say service members are once again targets.

“President Trump campaigned on a promise of mass deportations, and he didn’t exempt military members, veterans and their families,” said retired Lt. Col. Margaret Stock, a lawyer who helps veterans facing deportation. “It harms military recruiting, military readiness and the national security of our country.”

Under the Biden administration, Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued a policy stating a noncitizen’s prior military service was a “significant mitigating factor” that must be considered in enforcement decisions, including deportation orders. The policy also offered protection to noncitizen family members of veterans or those on active duty.

In April, under the Trump administration, that policy was rescinded and replaced with one saying that while “ICE values the contributions of all those who have served in the US military … military service alone does not automatically exempt” one from enforcement actions.

The new policy directs agents to ask about military service during intake interviews and to document service. However, local ICE leaders have the authority to proceed with deportations of those who have served, though they may consider factors such as community ties and employment history.

Both policies barred enforcement actions against active-duty service members, absent significant aggravating factors. Under the new policy, noncitizen relatives of service members are not addressed at all.

In the wake of all of this, some service members, like Park, are choosing to self-deport. In other instances, immigrant family members of soldiers or veterans have been detained; those include Narciso Barranco, a father of three US Marines who was arrested in Santa Ana, California, while working the landscaping job he had held for three decades.

“Thousands of families like ours are being ripped apart,” Barranco’s son, veteran Alejandro Barranco, testified in July to a US Senate subcommittee on border security. “I want this committee to understand the human impact of the immigration policies of this administration. I want them to know that the people being ripped from our communities are hardworking, honest, patriotic people who are raising America’s teachers, nurses and Marines.

“Deporting them doesn’t just hurt my family,” he added. “It hurts all of us.”

There is no publicly available data on how many veterans are being affected, though ICE is supposed to track removals of service members and veterans and the Department of Homeland Security is typically required to share that information with Congress.

A 2019 federal report found at least 250 veterans had been placed in removal proceedings between 2013 and 2018, with at least 92 ultimately deported. The report said that while ICE had policies for handling cases of noncitizen veterans, it did not consistently identify and track actions against those individuals.

News21 could find only two DHS reports tracking removals of veterans. One, covering the first six months of 2022, said five veterans had been deported; another, for calendar year 2019, said three veterans had been deported.

In June, US Rep. Yassamin Ansari, an Arizona Democrat, and nine other members of Congress wrote to the secretaries of defense, veterans affairs and homeland security seeking the number of veterans currently facing deportation—noting “some estimates” put the overall number of deported veterans at 10,000.

In a news release, Ansari said all veterans “deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, not abandoned by an administration that turns their backs on their sacrifice.” Her office did not return messages from News21. DHS and ICE also did not respond to questions.

In past years, bills to do more to protect immigrant service members and their relatives have been introduced in Congress. One measure, introduced in May, would give green cards to parents of service members and allow those already deported to apply for a visa from abroad. It’s still in committee.

US Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and Army veteran, has proposed several measures related to immigrant service members, but those bills have gone nowhere. Last year, for example, she reintroduced a bill to allow deported veterans who have completed the preliminary naturalization process to attend citizenship interviews at a port of entry, embassy or consulate instead of having to obtain parole to come back into the US. It died in committee.

For Duckworth, deported veterans are not a partisan issue.

“This is about the men and women who wore the uniform of our great nation, many of whom were promised a chance at citizenship by our government in exchange for their service,” she told News21. “It’s about doing the right thing and keeping our nation’s promise.”

‘I wanted to serve this country, this beautiful country’

As of February 2024, more than 40,000 foreign nationals were serving in active and reserve components of the Armed Forces, according to the Congressional Research Service. Another 115,000 were veterans living in the US.

Credit: News21

Serving in the military has long been a pathway to citizenship, with provisions providing expedited naturalization for noncitizen service members dating back to the Civil War.

During World War I, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, foreign-born soldiers made up 18% of the Army. Some units even became known for their immigrant members; for example, the 77th Infantry Division was nicknamed the “Melting Pot Division.”

Since the end of World War I, more than 800,000 people have gained citizenship through military service, according to the CRS report. Since fiscal year 2020, service members from the

Philippines, Jamaica, Mexico, Nigeria and Ghana accounted for over 38% of service member naturalizations.

Generally, noncitizens who are permanent legal residents and who speak, read and write English fluently may join the armed forces. And during designated periods of hostility, noncitizens who serve honorably for any period of time—even one day—are eligible to apply for naturalization if they meet all criteria. The US is still considered to be in a period of hostility because of the post-9/11 war on terrorism.

National Archives

Foreign-born soldiers are pictured at a 1918 naturalization ceremony in Washington, D.C. Countries represented include Armenia, Austria, Italy, Greece and Germany. National Archives/Courtesy of News21

Despite that longstanding policy, the Department of Defense, during Trump’s first term in office, tried to make it harder for service members to naturalize by forcing them to complete six months—rather than one day—before obtaining the “certification of honorable service” required to apply for citizenship. Naturalization applications subsequently plummeted by 72% from fiscal year 2017 to fiscal year 2018.

The American Civil Liberties Union sued, and in 2020, a federal judge struck down the change.

Plaintiffs, including then-Army Pfc. Ange Samma, celebrated. Samma, originally from Burkina Faso, had lived in the US on a green card since he was a teenager. In 2018, he enlisted in the Army.

“I wanted to serve this country, this beautiful country,” Samma told News21.

Over 14 months, even after he’d been assigned to Camp Humphreys in South Korea, Samma tried over and over to obtain certification of his honorable service—to no avail. He finally became naturalized not long after the 2020 court ruling.

This year, Samma earned his bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering. He’s living in Statesboro, Georgia, while hunting for jobs. Because he now has citizenship, “There are many more opportunities that are open for me,” he said. “It’s very rewarding to have it. You feel proud.”

The Biden administration wound up rescinding the six-month policy, according to ACLU attorney Scarlet Kim. As of now, military members can once again apply for naturalization as soon as their service begins.

However, Kim notes, “If you don’t get your citizenship while you’re serving and then you’re discharged, what has happened is that you can potentially become vulnerable to deportation … despite having served our country in the military for however long.”

That’s exactly the situation facing Army veteran Marlon Parris.

Parris, who was born in Trinidad, has been in the US with a green card since the 1990s. He served in the Army for six years, including two tours in Iraq, and received the Army Commendation Medal three times, according to records filed in federal court.

Army veteran Marlon Parris, seen here in Iraq, was detained by immigration agents in January. Originally from Trinidad, he has lived in the US since the 1990s. As the second Trump administration engages in its campaign of mass deportations, military experts and veterans say immigrant troops and their relatives are not immune. Tanisha Hartwell-Parris/Courtesy of News21

Before his discharge in 2007, he was diagnosed with acute post-traumatic stress disorder, which was cited when Parris pleaded guilty in 2011 to conspiracy to distribute cocaine and was sentenced to federal prison.

Upon his release in 2016, he received a letter from the government stating he would not be deported, according to the group Black Deported Veterans of America. But on Jan. 22, just two days after Trump’s inauguration, agents detained Parris near his home in Laveen, outside of Phoenix. In May, a judge ruled that he was eligible for deportation.

His wife, Tanisha Hartwell-Parris, told News21 the couple plan to self-deport and bring along some of the seven children, ranging in age from 8 to 26, who are part of their blended family.

“I’m not going to put my husband in a situation to where he’s going to be a constant target, especially in the country that he fought for,” she said, adding that most people have no idea what immigrant service members face.

Army veteran Marlon Parris and his wife Tanisha Hartwell-Parris pose for a photograph at a friend’s wedding in 2022. Originally from Trinidad, Parris has lived in the US since the 1990s, but he was detained by immigration agents in January. Tanisha Hartwell-Parris/Courtesy of News21

“People think that just because you’re a veteran … you should automatically have gotten status as a United States citizen,” she said. But the military, she added, “is different for immigrants. …. You’re fighting the same fight, but it’s not the same battle.”

A report published last year by the Veterans Law Practicum at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law noted the connections between PTSD, criminal behavior and the deportation of noncitizen veterans.

More than 20% of veterans with PTSD also have a substance use disorder, the report found, which can result in more exposure to the criminal justice system.

That situation is “the most common scenario in terms of how deportation is triggered,” said Rose Carmen Goldberg, an expert in veterans law who oversaw completion of the report and now teaches in the Veterans Legal Services Clinic at Yale Law School.

The report also noted that even though deportation does not disqualify veterans from health care and other benefits earned through service, “Geographic and bureaucratic barriers may ultimately stand in the way.”

In 2021, the Biden administration launched the Immigrant Military Members and Veterans Initiative (IMMVI) to ensure deported veterans could access Veterans Affairs benefits. The program offered parole on a case-by-case basis to those needing to return to the US for legal counsel or to access care, and it sought to facilitate naturalization services for immigrant service members.

Jose Francisco Lopez holds his military uniform at the Deported Veterans Support House on Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Lopez opened the home in 2017 to help veterans removed from the US, despite their service to the country. Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

In the program’s first year, 143 veterans living outside of the US reached out to IMMVI staff, according to congressional testimony. A 2022 story by the nonprofit newsroom The War Horse said 102 veterans had been allowed back to the US via the IMMVI parole program, and “over 30” had obtained citizenship.

In response to questions about the status of the IMMVI program, USCIS directed News21 to its website about the program.

Jennie Pasquarella, a lawyer with the Seattle Clemency Project, said the biggest flaw of the IMMVI program is that parole into the US is temporary – a “dead end” if a veteran doesn’t have a legal claim to restore legal residency or to naturalize.

“We had asked the Biden administration to do more to ensure that there was a further path towards restoring people’s lawful status beyond parole,” she said. “Basically, we didn’t succeed.”

A ‘lifeline’ for deported vets

In the absence of aid in the US, more and more veterans are turning to help elsewhere.

After serving in the Vietnam War with the Army, José Francisco Lopez, a native of Torreón, Mexico, experienced PTSD and struggled with addiction. He eventually went to prison for a drug-related crime and in 2003 was deported back to his home country.

For years, Lopez thought he was the only deported veteran in Mexico—until he met Hector Barajas, a deported Army veteran who in 2013 founded the Deported Veterans Support House in Tijuana.

Inspired, Lopez opened his own Deported Veterans Support House in Ciudad Juárez, across the border from El Paso.

Michael Evans, left, and Pedro Chagoya stand outside of the Deported Veterans Support House on Saturday, June 28, 2025, in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2017, an Army veteran opened the home to help veterans removed from the US, despite their service to the country. Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

Today, Lopez, 80, is a legal resident of the US but splits his time between El Paso and Juárez, providing deported veterans housing, food and advice about how to apply for VA benefits. Since opening the support house in 2017, he’s helped about 20 people.

On a Saturday in June, four veterans stopped by to visit Lopez at the place they call “the bunker.” The gathering felt like a family reunion, with laughter filling the house as they shared memories of holidays spent together and other moments, both good and bad.

Said Ricardo Munoz, who came across Lopez and the bunker in 2019: “It’s kind of like being out in the ocean and someone throws a lifeline at you.”

Army veteran Ricardo Muñoz poses for a portrait on Saturday, June 28, 2025, at the Deported Veterans Support House in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. Muñoz was deported in 2007 after serving time for marijuana possession. He has humanitarian parole to access health care in the US.Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

Air Force veteran Alfonso poses for a portrait on Monday, June 30, 2025, in El Paso, Texas. After being deported over two decades and living in Mexico, Alfonso obtained a green card and is now back in the US. He asked that his last name not be used because he is trying to naturalize and fears publicity could hurt those efforts.Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

Marine veteran Michael Evans poses for a portrait on Saturday, June 28, 2025, at the Deported Veterans Support House in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He was deported to his native Mexico in 2009 after a drug-related arrest. Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

Army veteran Jose Francisco Lopez poses for a portrait on Saturday, June 28, 2025, at the Deported Veterans Support House in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. In 2017, Lopez opened the home to help veterans deported from the US, despite their service to the country. Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

Navy veteran Ruben Chagoya Talamantes poses for a portrait on Saturday, June 28, 2025, at the Deported Veterans Support House in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico. He was deported in 2014 after serving time in prison on a drug-related charge.Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

Army veteran Jose Bustillo Chavez poses for a portrait on Monday, June 30, 2025, in El Paso, Texas. Deported in 1999, Chavez is in the US on humanitarian parole but worries it won’t be extended under the Trump administration. Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

US Air Force veteran Alfonso, who enlisted in 1976, said he was shocked when he was deported in 2001 after being charged with driving under the influence in El Paso. He said he mistakenly thought he had automatically earned citizenship for serving. Alfonso asked that his last name not be used because he is now trying to naturalize and fears publicity could hurt those efforts.

After living and working in Juarez for decades, Alfonso, with Lopez’s support, obtained parole back to the US in 2024 via the IMMVI program. He got his green card and now lives in El Paso, near his daughter.

For Alfonso, military service was a family affair. His brother served in Vietnam, his niece has done multiple tours in the Middle East, one nephew is in the Coast Guard and another is a Marine.

Citizenship or not, he said, “I was an American already, because I was willing to give my life for it.”

He added, “When you’re willing to give your life for something that, you don’t know, in one second you might be dead—it’s something. It’s important.”

‘It’s a whole new world’

Army veteran Sae Joon Park poses for a photo with his daughter in December 2024 in Las Vegas. Park self-deported in June, after learning the Trump administration planned to deport him.Sae Joon Park/News21

Back in Seoul, Park, 56, is adjusting to life in a country he hadn’t even visited in 30 years. When he first arrived, he said, he cried every morning for hours.

“I just couldn’t stop,” he said. “It’s a whole new world. I speak the language, but I don’t read or write, so I’m trying to really relearn everything.”

For now, he’s staying with his father, but he worries about his family back in the US. His daughter works for the state of California. His son—also a military veteran—lives in Hawaii, where he works in cybersecurity and helps care for Park’s 85-year-old mother.

“I don’t know how many more years she’s got,” Park said. “My daughter, if she ever gets married, I won’t be there for a wedding.”

Park’s attorney started a petition to urge prosecutors to dismiss his criminal convictions, part of an attempt to cancel his deportation order and allow him to return to the United States. More than 10,000 people have signed.

Army veteran Sae Joon Park and his son pose for a photo earlier this year at Waimea Canyon State Park in Kauai, Hawaii. Park self-deported in June, after learning the Trump administration planned to deport him.Sae Joon Park/Courtesy of News21

Park said he’s grateful for the support but has little faith that the country he fought for will ever allow him to come back.

“I’m not blaming the military or VA – it’s literally the Trump administration,” he said. “What they’re doing is crazy.

“This is not the country that I volunteered and fought for,” he added. “This is just really wrong.”

News21 reporters Tristan E.M. Leach, Sydney Lovan and Gracyn Thatcher contributed to this story. This report is part of “Upheaval Across America,” an examination of immigration enforcement under the second Trump administration produced by Carnegie-Knight News21. For more stories, visit https://upheaval.news21.com/.

The border wall, seen from El Paso, Texas, separates that city from Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, on Friday, June 27, 2025. In 2017, an Army veteran opened the Deported Veteran Support House in Juárez to help veterans removed from the US, despite their service to the country. Sydney Lovan/News21/News21

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Study Links Oil Giants’ Emissions Directly to Dozens of Deadly Heatwaves

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Carbon emissions from the world’s biggest fossil fuel companies have been directly linked to dozens of deadly heatwaves for the first time, according to a new analysis. The research has been hailed as a “leap forward” in the legal battle to hold big oil accountable for the damages being caused by the climate crisis.

The research found that the emissions from any one of the 14 biggest companies were by themselves enough to cause more than 50 heatwaves that would otherwise have been virtually impossible. The study shows, in effect, that those emissions caused the heatwaves.

The carbon pollution from ExxonMobil’s fossil fuels, for example, made 51 heatwaves at least 10,000 times more likely than in an unheated world, the researchers found, as did the emissions from Saudi Aramco.

“ We can now point to specific heatwaves and say, ‘Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.’ “

Global heating is making heatwaves more frequent and more intense across the globe, contributing to at least 500,000 heat-related deaths a year. The searing heatwave that struck the Pacific Northwest in 2021 was made almost 3C hotter, for example.

The new research found that the total emissions from the 180 “carbon major” companies included in the analysis were responsible for about half the increase in intensity, with emissions due to forest destruction making up most of the rest. It also found that the 213 heatwaves studied became 200 times more likely on average from 2010 to 2019 owing to the climate crisis.

“Being able to trace back the contribution of these single [carbon major] emitters and quantify their contribution could be very useful for establishing potential liability,” said Prof Sonia Seneviratne, at ETH Zurich university in Switzerland, a senior author of the report.

Dr Davide Faranda, a research director at the French National Centre for Scientific Research and not part of the study team, said: “This study adds a crucial new step: it connects the dots between specific climate disasters and the companies whose emissions made them possible. This bridge could become a cornerstone for legal and policy action to hold polluters accountable.”

Cassidy DiPaola, a spokesperson for the Make Polluters Pay campaign, said: “We can now point to specific heatwaves and say, ‘Saudi Aramco did this. ExxonMobil did this.’ When their emissions alone are triggering heatwaves that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, we’re talking about real people who died, real crops that failed, and real communities that suffered, all because of decisions made in corporate boardrooms.”

The world’s highest court, the International Court of Justice, ruled in July that failing to prevent climate harm could result in having to pay compensation, while a German high court set a legal precedent in May that fossil fuel companies could be held liable for their contribution. “Here’s the evidence the courts have been waiting for,” said DiPaola. “The bill is coming due, and it’s time these polluters pay for the damage they’ve done.”

The research, published in the journal Nature, used a type of analysis called attribution. This compares the hotter world today with the world before mass burning of fossil fuels to assess how emissions have driven up temperatures, using weather data and computer models.

The results are “a reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away.”

The scientists first worked out how much each carbon major’s emissions had pushed up temperatures and then how much these higher temperatures increased the likelihood of heatwaves. Previous research has linked hundreds of individual events to global heating, but this study is the first to systematically analyse a series of events.skip past newsletter promotion

“Climate change has made each of the 213 heatwaves more likely and more intense, and the situation has worsened over time,” said Dr Yann Quilcaille of ETH Zurich, the lead author of the study.

The research found the increase in average intensity of the heatwaves rose from 1.4C in 2000-09 to 2.2C in 2020-23. The 213 major heatwaves assessed happened from 2000 to 2023 and spanned every continent. The data on them was taken from the biggest disaster database, EM-DAT, but Africa and South America were significantly underrepresented due to lack of reporting and suitable weather data.

“The study’s findings likely underestimate the true scale of these events, and the real consequences are probably far greater,” said Dr Friederike Otto, at Imperial College London.

Even the emissions from the fossil fuel companies at the bottom of the list of carbon majors had a significant impact on heatwaves. The carbon pollution from each of these caused 16 heatwaves to become at least 10,000 times more likely than before the climate crisis.

“This study is a leap forward that could be used to support future climate lawsuits,” said Dr Karsten Haustein, at the University of Leipzig in Germany, and not part of the study team. “It is also a reminder that denial and anti-science rhetoric will not make climate liability go away.”

Carbon emissions are emitted when people use oil, gas or coal to heat their homes or power their transport, but Quilcaille said fossil fuel companies had a particular responsibility—they had pursued profit through disinformation and lobbying, despite having known since the 1980s that burning fossil fuels would lead to global heating.

However, no polluter had yet been held accountable in court and challenges remained, said Prof Michael Gerrard and Dr Jessica Wentz, of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University.

“The problem is the various legal issues that must be resolved before scientists can take the witness stand,” they said in a commentary in Nature. The issues included which courts should hear the cases, whether fossil-fuel producers should be liable for their customers’ emissions, and if long campaigns of deception by some fossil fuel companies were relevant, Gerrard and Wentz said.

“The new study is one more building block, and a useful one, but the road to actual liability for the carbon majors is still littered with legal and evidentiary potholes,” they said.

ExxonMobil and Saudi Aramco did not respond to requests for comment.

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Pardoned Insurrectionists Are Using Charlie Kirk’s Death to Call for Civil War

In the aftermath of Wednesday’s assassination of right-wing youth leader Charlie Kirk, in the midst of more sober calls for mourning and moderation, many far-right influencers quickly began to call for revenge against the left—whom they blamed for Kirk’s death. They did so even though the shooter still has not been identified, nor their motivations revealed.

But it’s not just random individuals circulating such violent fantasies—leaders of prominent extremist groups and pardoned insurrectionists have issued calls to their networks to seek revenge. In an email to Mother Jones, Devin Burghart, executive director of the extremism research group Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, expressed his concern that reactions to Kirk’s death could “energize the far-right to intensify political violence, from street clashes and armed paramilitarism to calls for racist terror.”

Consider the message from Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers militia group, who was convicted to 18 years in prison for his role in leading the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, before being pardoned by President Donald Trump in January—along with nearly 1,600 others. On Wednesday, he said on Alex Jones’ Infowars podcast that he would be restarting his organization in the wake of Kirk’s killing. “I’m going to be rebuilding Oath Keepers,” Rhodes said, “and we will be doing protection again.” The group never formally disbanded but had receded from the spotlight after their leader’s conviction.

“One thing we will be doing is public protection of patriots again, like we used to—it’s incredibly necessary,” Rhodes added. “I’m sure the Proud Boys will agree—if we have to, we’ll go and ride the train again, just like the Guardian Angels did.” He was referring to the New York City vigilante group Republican mayoral candidate Curtis Sliwa started in 1979.

If his security team had been at Kirk’s event, Rhodes said, the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA would still be alive. He also urged men to “step up…do your tour of duty” and start their own vigilante groups. “It’s not just the responsibility of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to protect Americans in this environment,” he continued, “it’s the responsibility of all American men.”

“It’s not just the responsibility of Oath Keepers and Proud Boys to protect Americans in this environment, it’s the responsibility of all American men.”

He then suggested that they should “start a neighborhood watch,” and should they find “someone who doesn’t belong, let ‘em know you’re watching them.” Threats weren’t even necessary, “but you can let ‘em know you’re watching,” Rhodes said. “Usually, that’s a deterrent.”

Several other convicted insurrectionists also said they plan to avenge Kirk’s death, noting that he had strenuously encouraged that they be freed from prison. “Charlie was a HUGE advocate for our unconditional release…He helped restore the lives of 1,600 of us,” wrote Enrique Tarrio, leader of the militia-like group theProud Boys, who was sentenced to 22 years in prison for his role in coordinating the attack on the Capitol. He, too, was pardoned by President Trump. “I think I can speak for ALL J6ers when I say THANK YOU…We carry the torch.”

Jake Lang, who was accused of beating officers at the Capitol but avoided going to trial before being pardonedand is currently running for US Senate in Florida, called for “a MILLION MAN MARCH on DC to show solidarity” with bothKirk and Iryna Zarutsk, a Ukrainian refugee who was killed on a train in North Carolina last month. The Trump administration and other Republicans have blamed Zarutsk’s murder on Democrats, alleging that the killing was directly connected to the party for being what they describe as too “soft on crime.” The killer, who had a lengthy criminal history, is facing federal charges. “THE TIME TO RISE IS NOW,” Lang wrote.

Chris Worrell, a member of the Proud Boys, was convicted of assaulting a group of police officers on January 6 and sparked a six-week-long manhunt while he tried to evade authorities. “The POLITICAL ASSASSINATION of [Kirk] MUST see RETRIBUTION!!” he wrote on X. Another convicted insurrectionist and Oath Keeper, Jessica Watkins, said, “Charlie Kirk’s assassination pulled me out of retirement. More work must be done.” Just twelve hours earlier, Watkins had writtento fellow Kirk fans who were upset about the shooting, “talks about Civil War are counterproductive. Please Stop. It’s not helping.”

The neo-Nazis weighed in with a post on X from Nationalist Network leader Ryan Sanchez: “Charlie Kirk must be avenged. We must destroy the Left once and for all!” In another tweet, he wrote, “WHITE MAN FIGHT BACK!” On his website, Sanchez says he is “fighting for J6 prisoners.”

WHITE MAN FIGHT BACK! pic.twitter.com/V3HQAWHEGg

— R. Augustine Sánchez (@ryanasanchez) September 11, 2025

As incendiary as these posts may appear, some experts do not believe the former insurrectionists pose as legitimate a threat as they did in 2021. “These people cry civil war when Cracker Barrel changes their logo,” said Jon Lewis, a research fellow at the Program on Extremism at George Washington University. He sees some of the loudest voices calling for retribution, like Rhodes and Tarrio, as mere “grifters,” adding, “I’m not worried about, like, the Oath Keepers bringing 1,000 guys to DC tomorrow.”

Lewis pointed to Tarrio’s recent announcement that he would not attend a DC court hearing scheduled for Thursday, where he was supposed to appear in connection with a lawsuit that the Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Church filed (and won) against the Proud Boys for vandalizing its Washington, DC, church building in 2020.“They want me to travel to totally unsafe DC in a time where conservative voices are under threat,” Tarrio posted.

John Rennie Short, professor emeritus of public policy at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and author of Insurrection: What the January 6 Assault on the Capitol Reveals About America and Democracy, sees the insurrectionists’ calls for retribution as an effort to “raise that anger level again” after losing their relevance with Trump’s return to office. “It’s a great business model for them,” he added.

What these experts are concerned about, though, is how these messages from influencers with such a wide onlinereach could inspire lone actors to inflict violence. “They’re now being told that the same people who tried to steal this country away from you just killed Charlie Kirk,” Lewis said, “and someone has to do something about that.”

“They’re now being told that the same people who tried to steal this country away from you just killed Charlie Kirk, and someone has to do something about that.”

There’s also concern that the Trump administration may use the insurrectionists’ sense of grievance to, as Burghart put it, “further [their] authoritarian plans.” After all, Attorney General Pam Bondi already fired multiple prosecutors who pursued cases against the insurrectionists, and both FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have promoted conspiracy theories about the attack.

In an address to the nation Wednesday night, President Trump explicitly blamed his political opponents for Kirk’s death: “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”

"For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murders and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now." pic.twitter.com/q25tSplWQW

— CSPAN (@cspan) September 11, 2025

Rennie Short sees Trump’s baseless politicization of the tragedy as serving to distract from some of his own troubling political failures. “It takes attention away from the Epstein files,” he said, “from Israel bombing allies, or Putin continuing to savagely attack Ukraine.”

Nonetheless, this messaging from the insurrectionists and echoed by the highest officials in government could still have serious consequences. “Especially for people who already assaulted law enforcement on January 6 and were pardoned,” Lewis said, “there is certainly going to be an expectation that, if they answer the call again, they could have the same outcome.”

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No, Charlie Kirk Was Not Practicing Politics the Right Way

Tragedy is a powerful shaper of narratives. In the aftermath of the horrific assassination of MAGA champion Charlie Kirk, a husband and father of two, it was natural that his allies, including President Trump, lionized him as a patriot, free-speech advocate, and activist. And political opponents somberly denounced the terrible killing, as they should, with some hailing Kirk’s devotion to public debate. There’s a tendency in such a moment to look for the best in people or, at least, to not dwell on the negatives. That can be a good thing. Yet as Kirk is quickly canonized by Trump and his movement—on Thursday Trump announced he would bestow upon Kirk a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom—a full depiction of his impact on American politics is largely being sidestepped.

In promoting a story on the murder of Kirk—headlined “Charlie Kirk killing deepens America’s violent spiral”—Axios described him as a “fierce champion of the right to free expression” whose “voice was silenced by an assassin’s bullet.” New York Times opinion columnist Ezra Klein, wrote, “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Klein added that he “envied” the political movement Kirk built and praised “his moxie and fearlessness.”

Kirk’s advocacy of vigorous debate ought not be separated from what he said while jousting in the public square.

Here’s the problem: Kirk built that movement with falsehoods. And his advocacy was laced with racist and bigoted statements. Recognizing this does not diminish the awfulness of this act of violence. Nor does it lessen our outrage or diminish our sympathy for his family, friends, and colleagues. Yet if this is an appropriate moment to assess Kirk and issue bold statements about his participation in America’s political life, there ought to be room for a true discussion.

Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded and led Turning Point USA, an organization of young conservatives, was a promoter of Trump’s destructive and baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Two days before the January 6 riot, Kirk boasted in a tweet that Students for Trump and Turning Point Action were “Sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president.”

After the attack, Kirk deleted the tweet, and he claimed that the people his group transported to DC participated only in the rally that occurred before the assault on Congress—where Trump whipped up the crowd and encouraged it to march on the Capitol. The New York Times subsequently reported that Turning Point Action sent only seven buses to the event. Turning Point also paid the $60,000 speaking fee to Kimberly Guilfoyle, a MAGA personality, for the brief remarks she made at the rally. “We will not allow the liberals and the Democrats to steal our dream or steal our elections,” Guilfoyle told the crowd. (Kirk took the Fifth when he was deposed by the House January 6 committee.)

Even prior to the election, Kirk helped set the stage for Trump’s attempt to subvert the republic. In September 2020, the Washington Post reported that Turning Point Action was running a “sprawling yet secretive campaign” to disseminate pro-Trump propaganda “that experts say evades the guardrails put in place by social media companies to limit online disinformation of the sort used by Russia during the 2016 campaign.” The messages Turning Point generated spread the charge that Democrats were using mail balloting to steal the election and downplayed the threat from Covid. (Kirk’s group called the story a “gross mischaracterization.”)

Whatever Kirk’s group and supporters did on January 6, he was part of the MAGA crusade that largely broke US politics. Trump’s refusal to accept his 2020 loss, his conniving to stay in power, and his encouragement of a lie that led to massive political violence greatly undermined American democracy and exacerbated the already deep divide in the nation. Kirk was a part of that. Yet Klein overlooks that in praising Kirk. And a New York Times piece on Kirk’s political career made no mention of this, though it did report that he had been “accused” of “antisemitism, homophobia and racism, having blamed Jewish communities for fomenting hatred against white people, criticized gay rights on religious grounds and questioned the qualifications of Black airline pilots.”

Kirk’s advocacy of vigorous debate ought not be separated from what he said while jousting in the public square. He hosted white nationalists on his podcast. He posted racist comments on his X account, including this remark: “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.'” He endorsed the white “replacement” conspiracy theory. After the October 7 attack on Israel, he compared Black Lives Matter to Hamas. He called for preserving “white demographics in America.” He asserted that Islam was not compatible with Western culture. He derided women who supported Kamala Harris 2024 for wanting “careerism, consumerism, and loneliness.” Or, as he also put it, “Democratic women want to die alone without children.” When Paul Pelosi, the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi, was brutally attacked in 2022, Kirk spread a conspiracy theory about the crime and called for an “amazing patriot” to bail out the assailant. He routinely deployed extreme rhetoric to demonize his political foes.

Kirk did enjoy debating others. He visited campuses and held events in which he took on all comers, arguing over a variety of contentious issues. He was a showman, and his commitment to verbal duking was admirable. He appeared proud of the harsh opinions he robustly shared. Which means there’s no reason now to be shy about them while pondering his legacy.

Moreover, as a movement strategist, he relied upon and advanced lies and bigotry—including falsehoods that fueled violence and an assault on our national foundation. That was not a side gig for Kirk. It was a core component of his organizing. He did not practice politics the right way. He used deceit to develop his movement and to weaken the United States. His assassination is heinous and frightening and warrants widespread condemnation. It should prompt reflection on what is happening within the nation and what needs to be done to prevent further political violence. It should not protect him or others who engage in such politics of extremism from critical review.

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