Donald Trump and maga Republicans are pointing at the wrong root cause for who caused the gun violence murder in Utah

The Kirk Crackdown Is Underway.

Right wing propaganda is now unleashed.

Echo opinion published in The New York Times by Thomas E. Edsall, who contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Donald Trump and his right wing maga allies are capitalizing (IMO, "exploiting") on the horrible assassination of Charlie Kirk. They are now opening up fresh attacks on liberal institutions, donors and foundations. They seek to portray many on the left as traitors.

Appearing on Kirk’s podcast on Monday, less than a week after Kirk’s death, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, denounced. "We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name."

Miller is totally brain washed by Trumpziism.  He invented this scenario: The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.

“With God as my witness,” Miller then declared,

We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

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

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

“The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that (lies❗🤥 ) erases right-wing violence, including January 6th, and blames the increased political violence on only one side,” Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.

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

“The current administration is perpetuating a narrative that erases right-wing violence, including Jan. 6, and blames the increased political violence on only one side,” Jay Childers, a professor of political communication at the University of Kansas, wrote by email in response to my queries.

Within hours of the assassination of Kirk on September 10, Trump placed the blame, without any evidence, for political gun violence squarely on “the radical left” in televised remarks:

A tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.

This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.

On September 12, Trump went beyond dismissing the threat posed by right-wing political violence to arguing that right-wing extremists are in fact justified. 

Asked about violence perpetrated by those on the right, Trump didn’t hold back during an appearance on “Fox and Friends” (aka "Fake❗ Fox and Them"):  I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, “We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”

The radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone. They want open borders.

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

They are also trying to persuade employers to fire Kirk’s critics❗

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

Sean Duffy, the secretary of transportation, the wire service noted, “posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s assassination. ‘This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,’” Duffy wrote on X.

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

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

The center analyzed 831 terrorist attacks in this country from January 1994 to December 2022. In recent years, the study found:

• Violent far-right extremist have been responsible for 94 of the 108 terrorism fatalities (87 percent) in the United States in the past five years. This included 2022, when 18 of the 19 fatalities occurred during far-right terrorist attacks.
• Of the 71 terrorist attacks in 2022, 69 percent were perpetrated by those on the violent far right, 20 percent by the violent far left, 3 percent by Salafi-jihadists and 8 percent by ethnonationalists.

The most recent study of political violence is the Sept. 11, 2025, report, “Politically Motivated Violence Is Rare in the United States, by Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.

“Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on U.S. soil since 1975,” he writes. “Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.”

Because the 9/11 attacks “obscure other trends and are plausibly distinct,” Nowrasteh recalculated the data excluding the attacks. Doing so “reduces the number of murders to 620 from 3,599.”

The exclusion raises the right-wing share of murders in terrorist attacks “from 11 percent to 63 percent (391), the left-wing share from about 2 percent to 10 percent (65), and the unknown/other share to 1 percent.”

Terrorism since 2020, Nowrasteh wrote, paints a slightly different picture. Since January 1, 2020 (total 81), terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on U.S. soil. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders (44), Islamists for 21 percent (27), left-wingers for 22 percent (18), and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations.

Nowrasteh did not include the deaths associated with the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for the following reasons:

• Ashli Babbitt was an attacker/terrorist. I didn’t include her because I only count those who murder victims.
• One attacker/terrorist from a drug overdose. He wasn’t a victim.
• One police officer died of a stroke the day after. The official report was that his death wasn’t a homicide. 
• Four police officers died by suicide afterward. I didn’t count them.

Katarzyna Jasko, a professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland, and lead author of a 2022 study, “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World,” emailed her reply to my questions.

She contended that the claims about left-wing violence by Trump and his allies “are not justifiable.” In recent years, she added, “far-right extremists have been responsible for more cases of political violence than far-left extremists. As our research shows, their attacks are more violent than those by left-wing extremists.”

The study found that:  Among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals. By contrast, we found no such difference between Islamist and right-wing individuals.

In terms of violent behavior, those supporting an Islamist ideology were significantly more violent than the left-wing perpetrators both in the United States and in the worldwide analysis. For the U.S. sample, we found no significant difference in the propensity to use violence for those professing Islamist or right-wing ideologies.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow in the Carnegie Endowment’s program on democracy, conflict and governance, pointed out in an email that over the past six decades there has been a reversal in the ideological character of political violence:

In the 1950s and early 1960s, civil rights activists and leaders were murdered by far-right racists. The murders discredited those in the center who worked within the system to get civil rights legislation and who preached nonviolence, and it helped activists who said that self-defense was the only way communities could protect themselves. So in the late 1960s, violence moved to the extreme left and spread to a variety of causes.

Since the early 1990s, Kleinfeld continued, “actual violence has risen, largely from the right. While it has grown somewhat from the left — especially with regards to violence against property such as business harm from protests and attacks on Tesla dealerships — the numbers are just not comparable.”

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

Gary LaFree, director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland and an author of the Jasko paper cited above, wrote in an email:

Kirk’s death was obviously a very sad and worrying development. On the other hand, the administration seemed far less concerned about the recent deaths of the two Democratic legislators and their spouses from Minnesota. I cannot imagine how lionizing Kirk is going to reduce the growing polarization in the United States.

In fact, Trump and his allies are determined to intensify partisan hostility.

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

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

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

Speaker McCarthy sold his political soul and now the devil is claiming the spoils

Echo opinion published in the Boston Globe by Renée Graham is a Globe columnist.

Speaker Kevin McCarthy finally meets the demons who stole his political soul- i.e., the right wing freedom caucus wants their due.

After starting 2023, with an ugly five-day, 15-round cage match with the House Republicans’ “Chaos Caucus,” Kevin McCarthy bartered away the desiccated remains of his soul to become House speaker. Nine months later, he’s a speaker without a voice — except to parrot whatever partisan tantrum his party’s extremists have scripted for him. McCarthy isn’t a leader. He’s a stooge who’s down for anything because he has the shiny toy he always wanted even if he holds nothing more than a hollowed out title in his undeserving hands.

It’s time to reject McCarthyism. Again.

That now includes an impeachment inquiry of President Biden. Never mind that there’s no evidence whatsoever that there’s any reason for an impeachment inquiry of the president. But guided by Donald Trump, his Mar-a-Lago puppet master, as well as constant threats of being ousted from the speakership by extremists, McCarthy unilaterally announced Tuesday an investigation that he knows has no merit beyond temporarily staving off the GOP’s insatiable wolves by tossing them the red meat they crave.

This is the same McCarthy who, in 2019, tweeted that then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi couldn’t “decide on impeachment unilaterally. It requires a full vote of the House of Representatives.” At the time, Pelosi was considering an impeachment inquiry into Donald Trump after he pressured President Volodymyr Zelensky of the Ukraine during an infamous phone call to launch a phony investigation linking Biden, then a Democratic presidential candidate, to his son Hunter’s business dealings abroad.

In that case, there was clear evidence of wrongdoing by Trump. McCarthy has none against Biden. 

But, (the coward McCarthy!) facing Republican threats of a government shutdown and a warning from extremist ringleader Republican Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida who chastised the speaker for “being out of compliance with the agreement that allowed you to assume this role,” McCarthy did what he claimed less than two weeks ago that he wouldn’t do — order an impeachment inquiry without a floor vote. 

Even some Republicans are openly grousing about an investigation that still doesn’t have any factual basis to justify it.

On the site formerly known as Twitter, Democratic Representative Adam Schiff of California summed it up this way in a post: “McCarthy’s reading of the Impeachment Clause: The President shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or … when the Speaker, lacking moral authority or control over his members, can’t remain speaker or fund the government without it.”

Of course, McCarthy also lacks the moral authority to defy Trump, who’s been working the phones and pushing Republicans to impeach Biden. “They did it to us,” Trump posted on his little social media site last month. (“Us” means him, as in he was impeached. Twice. With lots of evidence.)

So as the nation faces serious issues, like the destructive impact of human-driven climate catastrophes, we’ll have to endure this rightwing-driven dog and pony show to slake Trump’s need for vengeance and McCarthy’s selfish ambitions.

Don’t call McCarthy a hostage. Hostages are unwilling captives who want to be free. To become speaker, McCarthy negotiated with his party’s terrorists, surrendered his autonomy, walked into a cell shaped like the speaker’s chair, and tossed the only key to those who now control him. Instead, call this craven man what he is — a servile accomplice in this nation’s relentless unmooring from democracy.

Journalism in history - investigating "truth" in the age of social media

Excerpt from the book Enemy of the People: Trump's War on the Press, the New McCarthyism and the Threat to American Democracy by Marvin Kalb published in History News Network

In the context of the press’s struggle to cover the world of Trump and beyond, it’s important to recall that Murrow, in his memorable 1954 See It Now broadcast about Senator McCarthy, helped bring an end to a political crusade that was frightening the American people and undermining American democracy. He exposed McCarthy as a lying charlatan who deserved the Senate censure he was to suffer a few months later. 

Although many other reporters covered the same story, only Murrow will likely be remembered as the one who had the courage to take on a senator widely considered to be a danger to the republic. In American history, few other reporters have played so prominent a role in ending a national nightmare.

Cronkite, Stalemate, and the Vietnam War 

Walter Cronkite, another of CBS’s twinkling stars, whose even- handed anchoring of the CBS Evening News won him the title “the most trusted man in America,” did a commentary about the Vietnam War in February 1968 that helped persuade a president not to run for reelection and a nation to change its war policy and, ultimately, begin to withdraw.

A month earlier, the North Vietnamese had launched their consequential Tet Offensive. From one end of South Vietnam to the other, they attacked South Vietnamese and American troops and bases, even invading the once- hallowed grounds of the U.S. embassy in Saigon. To say President Lyndon Johnson was stunned by the news would be a glaring understatement. His intelligence chiefs had assured him that the communists were losing the war. General William Westmoreland, U.S. commanding general in Vietnam, had told Congress a few months earlier that he saw “the light at the end of the tunnel.” When, after Tet, Westmoreland approached Johnson with a request for an additional 206,000 troops, Johnson, who had always said yes to his commanding general, now snapped “no,” not only to the request but to his own plans for reelection. The war proved to be too much, even for this rugged Texan, and he decided on the spot to end all political games— he would not run! Behind his fateful decision was the amazing story of a Cronkite commentary and the impact it had on a president.

It could be said that Cronkite was “disillusioned” with the war from the very beginning. “Disillusioned” was the word he used in his memoir, published years later. But, on air, when he anchored the top-rated CBS Evening News, he was always meticulously fair, the impartial newscaster, never an editorial grimace or nod of approval, never a word suggesting an opinion. Eric Sevareid did the commentary. “Uncle Walter” did the news. “And that’s the way it is,” was Cronkite’s closing signature every evening. That was what many viewers had come to expect.

With the Tet Offensive still hot news, splashed all over the front pages, Cronkite asked CBS president Richard Salant if he could go to Vietnam and do an “assessment” of the war as someone who had not “previously taken a public position.” Salant nodded, and Cronkite left that night. This was not his first war; Cronkite had covered World War II. In Vietnam, after talking to American and South Vietnamese generals and to the troops, he found he could reach only one conclusion: “There was no way that this war could be justified any longer,” he said.

After a few days, Cronkite flew back to New York, where he anchored a special report, aired on February 27, 1968, about the effect of the Tet Offensive on the war. He was gloomy, clearly disturbed by what he had seen, and he closed his report with a commentary, so labeled. Only twice before had he done a commentary, and the anchorman justified both by saying they focused on a defense of a free press. This one was different. This was Cronkite giving his personal opinion about one of the most controversial issues of the day— the war in Vietnam. 

Salant warned America’s “most trusted man” that he could be jeopardizing his reputation, CBS’s as well, and, given the public’s sharply divided opinion about the war, he could also be risking the loss of many viewers, thereby hurting CBS’s bottom line. (Murrow had considered the same possibilities when he did his McCarthy broadcast fourteen years earlier.) Cronkite listened carefully to Salant but decided he had to go forward and express his opinion about the war. It was his journalistic obligation, he felt.

Cronkite explained on air that he was doing a “commentary” on the war. He wrote it himself. “To say that we are closer to victory today,” he said solemnly, “is to believe, in the face of the evidence, the optimists who have been wrong in the past. To suggest we are on the edge of defeat is to yield to unreasonable pessimism. To say that we are mired in stalemate seems the only realistic, yet unsatisfactory, conclusion.” Cronkite paused, looked into the camera lens, and, in an uncharacteristically soft voice, concluded, “It is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out, then, will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.” Cronkite clearly implied that if a stalemate was the “best” we could hope for, after having lost so many troops, spent so much money, and torn the country apart, then it took no special insight to believe that the United States could not possibly win this war, and therefore we ought to pull out of it.

The public reaction to Cronkite’s extraordinary broadcast was amazingly unenthusiastic. Those who supported Johnson and the war were critical of Cronkite, but not overly so. Those who opposed the war applauded Cronkite, but again not overly so. It seemed as if the public was simply tired of the war, and Cronkite’s commentary did not move the needle decisively one way or the other. He didn’t call for an immediate withdrawal of American forces or for a dramatic escalation of the war. His instincts as a network anchor kept him close to the middle rail— a call to negotiate in the face of a stalemate. In this respect, even someone as revered as Cronkite probably came through as just another voice in the crowd.

But, at the White House, Cronkite’s voice, always special, carried a powerful message. Johnson listened intently; what he heard stunned him. George Christian, his news secretary, and Bill Moyers, his personal assistant, were present when a shaken Johnson watched the program. “The President flipped off the set,” Moyers later recalled, “and said, ‘If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost middle America.’ ” Five weeks later, Johnson went on television in prime time to announce that he would not run for reelection and would begin to negotiate an end to the war— if possible on America’s terms. But Hanoi had other plans. Journalist David Halberstam, thinking about the impact of Cronkite’s commentary, later wrote that it was probably the first time in history that a network anchor declared a war to be over. But the war would not be over until 1975. Johnson did not live to see the end. He died in 1973.

Woodward and Bernstein—and Watergate
On June 17, 1972, a team of burglars was arrested for breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee at the Watergate complex in Washington. Two young reporters at the Washington Post, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, soon began covering the story that led, in August 1974, to the first resignation of an American president and to profound changes in the nation’s politics. Would Richard Nixon have resigned anyway, even if Woodward and Bernstein had not applied their considerable investigative skills to breaking the Watergate story? I doubt it. Their remarkable run of one exclusive story after another kept a steady spotlight on the puzzling break- in: Who were the burglars? Who paid them? Why the Democratic headquarters? Was the Nixon White House involved? What was Nixon’s role? These questions framed the Watergate scandal, which will always be associated with the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein.

Within a matter of weeks, the reporters learned that the grand jury investigating the break- in had sought testimony from two men who had worked in the White House— former CIA officer E. Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy—thus linking the break- in to the White House. Soon Bernstein discovered in Miami that a $25,000 check for Nixon’s reelection had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars, suggesting the White House paid the burglar. How else would he have obtained the check? A White House lawyer, John Dean, observing the illegal shenanigans around him, privately told Nixon that, in his judgment, there was “a cancer on the presidency.” At first Nixon did not believe him. When he finally did believe Dean, it was too late to save his presidency.

Watergate had quickly become a hot story, and, with Woodward and Bernstein, the Post had struck gold. Their diligent, carefully researched stories, leading to journalistic prizes and a Hollywood movie, touched off a series of investigations involving Congress, special prosecutors, federal judges, the FBI, and the CIA that, by the summer of 1974, led to the inescapable conclusion that the president had lied in attempting to obstruct justice, and, if he wanted to escape impeachment, he would be wise to resign, which is what Nixon did on August 9, 1974.

The possibility must be acknowledged that the Nixon administration might have been toppled even without the reporting of Woodward and Bernstein. Too many loose ends were being investigated. Too many insiders were talking. Perhaps more important, the Democrats controlled Congress, and they did not like Nixon. Other news organizations, including the New York Times and CBS, were also digging into the Watergate scandal and producing their own exclusives. “What did the president know and when did he know it?” was a question for discussion on Capitol Hill and across the country. Everyone was into Watergate. Everyone had an opinion. Well before Nixon announced his resignation, his days seemed to be numbered.

Woodward and Bernstein deserve their pages in the history of American journalism. Their reporting contributed to the unraveling of the Watergate scandal, but, for the sake of argument, what if there had been a Fox News channel in the early 1970s? Dan Shelley, executive director of the Radio Television Digital News Association, has wondered whether Nixon, protected by a chattering conservative cable news channel, might have survived the scandal. Every evening, a Sean Hannity would have been arguing the president’s case. A Laura Ingraham would have been challenging the Post’s patriotism and criticizing Woodward and Bernstein as “liberal puppets of the anti- Nixon Democratic cabal.” GOP senators would have had a soapbox of their own to question press and TV coverage of Nixon. 

Fox would happily have joined with Breitbart and Limbaugh to create a dark Wagnerian opera of right-wing commentary that likely would have changed the political conversation and softened the impact of front-page Woodward- and- Bernstein stories. The embattled president would have enjoyed a measure of support from conservative media that in 1974, he surely did not have. And the result of the Watergate scandal might have been different. We’ll never know.

Trump Capitalizes on Media Revolution

What we do know is that much has changed in American journalism and politics since Murrow’s anti-McCarthy broadcast in 1954 (that’s sixty-four years ago), Cronkite’s broadcast in 1968 (fifty years ago), and Woodward and Bernstein’s reporting of the Watergate scandal from 1972 to 1974. In the intervening years, we have experienced at least two major revolutions that have transformed the practice of journalism— one on the business side and the other in technology.

Since the 1980s, local newspapers and radio and TV stations, once owned by local businessmen and their families, have been snapped up by national media corporations far more interested in short-term profits than in public service. In the past, broadcast news was not expected to make much money, and it rarely did. Today’s economics, however, requires profitability, and this fundamentally changes the dynamics of the news business. Now it must make money or be discarded as a rusty wreck. Ratings (and profits or losses) now dominate conversation in and about the news business. CNN popped onto the scene in the early 1980s, disparaged in those days as the Chicken Noodle Network. It didn’t make money then; it does now— an estimated $1 billion in 2016. Fox and MSNBC joined the cable hit parade in the mid- 1990s. Within ten years, they too began to make money; within twenty years, lots of money. Since Trump arrived on the political scene, they’ve made tons of money. He has been their meal ticket— they knew it, and he knew it. Money, not quality, became the measure of journalistic success. Even journalists who knew better bent to the pressure. They had no choice.

The other revolution, in technology, changed everything, so much so that now the broadcast networks have yielded to cable for most political news and commentary, especially in the evening, and newspapers have had to face the real prospect of soon terminating their print editions and then surviving, if possible, as websites in the new and highly competitive internet worlds of web and social media. Who would have imagined, even a few years ago, that a president would discuss vital issues of war and peace on his Twitter account? A president who would watch cable news four to eight hours a day? A president who would see a day at the White House as a reality TV show? A president who would turn a State of the Union address into a television show? Or a president who would attack the press as an “enemy of the American people”?

Not Murrow, nor Cronkite, nor Woodward and Bernstein could possibly be re-created to cover the political wars of the Trump era. In one lifetime we have lived through lightning changes in standards and morality, affecting our journalism and our politics; and if we are all left a bit bewildered, that can be excused. In many respects, I add most reluctantly, journalism has become a form of entertainment, especially on television. Murrow could not survive today— probably not Cronkite either. There are many investigative reporters, maybe not as good as Woodward and Bernstein, but very accomplished nonetheless. Those who work for the New York Times and the Washington Post now perform the role Murrow played in the early 1950s. Other news organizations, such as Politico, McClatchy, MSNBC, CNN, and occasionally the Wall Street Journal, also come up with their exclusives, but they often follow the two print leaders. Murrow took on McCarthy, and won the day. Now, the Times and the Post take on Trump, though their editors deny that is what they are doing. “Just covering the news,” they say. In any case, the battle for truth is far from won, partly because journalism as an ongoing enterprise is so fragile (and yet so essential to American democracy) and partly because the story focuses on the most important yet most erratic politician in the country and perhaps the world.

Moreover, adding complexity to the coverage is the eruption of social media websites that convey, among other things, information as “news” or something vaguely resembling news— sites such as Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and the like. These sites do not provide all of the news people need and use, but more people now depend on these sites for their news than on more traditional mainstream sources, such as local TV, national newspapers, and cable and broadcast news networks. 

It is unclear whether people who depend for their news on, say, Facebook are as well read and informed as those who depend on the Times and the Post, but, for the people who set the national agenda, whether politicians or journalists, the Times or the Post—or both—still are must reading. It is a safe bet that both the strategist who sits on the National Security Council and the editor of BuzzFeed or even Breitbart starts his or her day by reading the Times, the Post, or both.

Root cause analysis of the modern political "witch hunt"~ Echo opinion

Rigged Witch Hunt!

Echo opinion by Jay Michaelson published in The Daily Beast

Senator Joseph McCarthy (1908-1957) with Roy Cohn (1927-1986) Senator McCarthy died from complications associated with heroin addiction and alcoholism and his Attorney Cohn died from complications with Acquired Immune Deficiency (AIDS). These two men were the root causes of modern political "witch hunts". 

Wait! Does Donald Trump want us to think the Russia investigation is a witch hunt? I’m starting to get that impression.

Indeed, the (MaineWriter ~ "failed") leader of the free world has tweeted the term “witch hunt” 106 times in 2018 alone—which, I’d like to propose, is a poor choice of metaphor.

If this were an actual witch hunt, Mr. Trump would be on the side of the hunters.

Estimates vary widely, but it is thought that between the 14th and 17th centuries around 60,000 people were executed for witchcraft (in Europe and America), and 75 to 90 percent of them were women.

Actual witch hunts were largely gendered affairs, with women being targeted because they were sexualized and literally demonized: one common theme was that Satan grabbed witches by the you-know-what. Another was that women were “weak.” Does any of this sound familiar?

Moreover, women accused of witchcraft were disproportionately those who did not conform to gender expectations. Outcast women (“sluts”), single women (including widows), women who disobeyed their husbands. Nasty women.

Once again, methinks the president doth protest too much.

He learned that stuff from (Roy) Cohn ~ ?perhaps reincarnated in Stephen Miller? (How Donald Trump and Roy Cohn's Ruthless symbiosis changed America), who before becoming Trump’s mentor, was Senator McCarthy’s henchman. 

It was Cohn, not Robert Mueller, who helped orchestrate the actual “greatest witch hunt in political history,” now known as McCarthyism.

Careers were ruined, lives destroyed, and anyone who ever supported a union or protested a politician was regarded as guilty until proven innocent.

All of this woman-hating rhetoric, of course, was holy and wholesome and good, because religion. Seventeenth century Puritans believed women to be particularly susceptible to evil. Puritan women themselves believed this. Thus women had to be exceptionally pious and saintly, and also kept close at hand.

Mike Pence calls his wife “Mother.”

But it’s not only women that were targeted by witch-hunts, as by the president’s schemes of seduction: it was sexuality itself. 

Women outside the control of men and the church were seen to be dangerously sexual. The witch hunts of Europe and America were in part sexual inquisitions, often snaring those we might call LGBT today: perceived sexual deviants, ‘mannish’ women, ‘effeminate’ men.

Needless to say, all these impulses, too, are abundant within the current administration: sexual puritanism, the need to control women’s bodies, and the denial of dignity to those who are gender-nonconforming, transgender, or queer.

Indeed, the conservative evangelicals so lately enamored of our philandering president are the spiritual and sometimes literal descendants of those same Puritans: the extremely conservative theology, the bizarre belief that all of us are born sinners, the active roles Satan and Jesus take in human lives, the sex-phobia, the inability to let people live and let live, the rigid gender hierarchy.

Moreover, to the extent there really was witchcraft in the 16th to 18th centuries—most likely folk traditions and holdovers from the pre-Christian past—they share their Christian ancestors’ religious intolerance as well.

Even the notion, now prevalent on the Christian Right, that Donald Trump’s manifest unsuitability to be president only proves that he is an instrument of Divine Providence, is part of the same worldview that regards people as puppets of greater forces, whether benevolent or malevolent. Some people are instruments of Christ, others of Beelzebub.

Well, you might say, Trump doesn’t mean actual witch hunts—he means figurative ones, like McCarthyism. After all, that’s where the term entered common usage: the Red Scare was the inspiration for Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which forever linked the two phenomena in American culture.

Here again, though, Trump is on the side of the hunters: namely, his loathsome political mentor, Roy Cohn.

People forget sometimes that Trump didn’t burst out of the womb with his pugilistic rhetorical style and reactionary political views intact.

It’s a short stone’s throw indeed from Cohn’s imprecations against all those he deemed Un-American to Trump’s evil claims that the free press is the enemy of the people—and, more recently, his stripping of security clearance from his critics such as former CIA Director John Brennan.

More broadly, McCarthyism was a burst of populist conservative paranoia, just like “Make America Great Again.” Both claimed that America was both the best nation in the world and threatened with imminent destruction by anti-patriotic elites and unpopular minorities “opposed to our way of life” (then: communists, African Americans, Jews; now: Muslims, immigrants, Jews).

Both movements are radically anti-rational, anti-education, anti-science. Both are fervently particularistic, placing America First and defining America as narrowly as possible (white, suburban/rural, conservative, Christian).

Trumpism is, itself, a great witch hunt, desperately in search of an enemy.

Really, it’s quite an irony: the flaxen-haired prodigy of America’s foremost witch-hunter now declaring himself the victim of a witch-hunt—no doubt an irony that Cohn himself would have admired, and been all too familiar with.

Remember, Cohn focused his attacks on people disproportionately like him, especially Jews and closeted queers (and, it turned out, he was among the queers! Hypocrite!).

Cohn, with the assistance of the closet queen J. Edgar Hoover, relentlessly persecuted gays in what became known as the “Lavender Scare,” associating homosexuality with ‘subversives’ and communism. That led to President Eisenhower’s order banning gay people from serving in government, which led to the firing of over 5,000 people.

This is what self-hatred looks like, and Cohn and Trump can’t help but show it off: the preening, the vulgarity, the tacky taste for the gaudiest luxuries imaginable, the constant need for validation. (If Roy Cohn could’ve hosted demagogic pep rallies in the 1950s, he would’ve done that too.)

In other words, whenever Trump tweets against contemporary witch-hunters, he’s attacking his own reflection in the mirror.

Gold Star family exposes Donald Trump cruelty

"...what kind of barbarian would attack the parents of a fallen soldier?"- Meghan McCain

Certainly ironic, to say the least. When Donald Trump opened his unqualified attempt to become leader of the free world, he began with an attack on immigrants. Now, an immigrant Muslim family is ripping the mask off of Donald Trump's dangerously flawed stereotypes of brave and patriotic immigrants.

The Hill
Trump's McCarthy moment? By Gregory J. Wallance, contributor

Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Muslim-Americans

In 1954, an incandescent moral spotlight finlly revelaed the evils of McCarthyism- an era known for the Senate witch hunts led by Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy (1908-1957).

In fact, the blinders finally came off the eyes of millions of American who had approved, or at least not objected, to McCarthy's demagogic witch hunt against communists that ruined countless innocent lives. McCarthy did not look like an anticommunist crusader protecting America from its enemies. Rather, he looked like a thug and a bully. And that was the end of Joe McCarthy. His popularity sank and he was censored by the Senate.

He died three years later in disgrace, and has been a reviled figure ever since.

Republican nominee Donald Trump had his McCarthy moment at the Democratic National Convention (DNC) in Philadelphia.

His attack on a Gold Star mother was a moral blasphemy that cannot be defended, explained or forgiven. Of course, that's also true for his other attacks, such as on Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona for having been captured during the Vietnam War, on a federal judge because of his Mexican heritage and on a reporter for being disabled, among others far too numerous to list here.

But Gold Star mothers have a unique place in American history because membership comes at such an unimaginably painful price; being a Gold Star mother is akin to sainthood.

One Gold Star mother was Alleta Sullivan of Waterloo, Iowa, whose five sons, Joseph, Francis, Albert, Madison and George, had received special permission to serve together on the USS Juneau in World War II. On Nov. 13, 1943, the USS Juneau was sunk by the Japanese Navy during the Battle of Guadalcanal.

On the morning of Jan. 12, 1943, naval officers came to the Sullivan house and told the family — still wearing bathrobes and slippers in their living room — that all five sons had been lost.

Alleta Sullivan later wrote that, "In my first blind grief, it seemed like everything I had lived for was gone. I couldn't eat or sleep and I cried a lot." She and her husband later spoke at defense plants around the country.

In 2004, like thousands of other Gold Star families in the Iraq War, Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Muslim-Americans, were notified that their son, Army Capt. Humayun Khan, had died in Iraq.

Khizr spoke last week at the Democratic National Convention with Ghazala standing on the platform by his side. Trump suggested that Ghazala remained silent during her husband's speech because she was a subservient Muslim wife. "If you look at his wife," Trump said on ABC, "she was standing there. She had nothing to say. She probably — maybe she wasn't allowed to have anything to say. You tell me."

No, Ghazala Khan replied in an op-ed in The Washington Post, she didn't speak because, with her son's portrait looming above her, "What mother could? Donald Trump has children whom he loves. Does he really need to wonder why I did not speak?"

This was our era's McCarthy moment of moral clarity.

Henceforth, the issue isn't who Trump is or what he stands for, because it's crystal clear.

As Meghan McCain, Sen. McCain's daughter, put it, "I would ask what kind of barbarian would attack the parents of a fallen soldier?" The only issue now is whether the American people will finally gauge the recklessness and cruelty of Donald Trump.

(Contributor Gregory Wallance is a writer and lawyer in New York City, and a former federal prosecutor, is the author most recently of "America's Soul in the Balance: The Holocaust, FDR's State Department, and the Moral Disgrace of an American Aristocracy.")

Republicans are branded by Trumponianism

McCarthyism, a label coined in 1950, was created in reference to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents. Soon, Americans will have yet another Republican inspired "ism", labeled Trumponianism.

Senator Joe McCarthy, Republican- 1908-1957

McCarthyism was a label rooted in extremism, led by former Senator Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy (November 14, 1908 – May 2, 1957), who was an American Republican politician. 

McCarthy served as a Republican U.S. Senator from Wisconsin from 1947, until his death in 1957. 

Beginning in 1950, McCarthy was the most visible public face of a period in which Cold War tensions between the Western nations and Russia, fueled fears of widespread Communist subversion. 

McCarthy was noted for making claims about large numbers of Communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers inside the United States federal government and elsewhere. Ultimately, his tactics and inability to substantiate his claims led him to be censured by the United States Senate.

The term McCarthyism, coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today the term is used more generally in reference to demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.,

So, now Americans are confronted with Trumponiasm, a reinvention of right wing McCarthyism.  

Of course, right wing extremism never disappears. Even when Senator McCarthy died, his dangerous movement changed into unwarrented suspicions associated with racism and the anti-immigration movement.  

Not surprisingly, Trumponian paranoia is casting a dark political shadow on the entire Republican party. Instead of the "Grand Old Party", Trumponiainisms are creating a Grotesque Old Party. This branding will serve no purpose except to act like a "wrecking ball" for the entier Republican party, said Senator Lindsey Graham, the Republican presidential candidate, when he was telephone- interviewed on the MSNBC- TV, "Morning Joe". 

If Americans embraced Muslim groups, the people currently being unjustly marginalized by Trumponianisms, it's entirely possible the effect would be to assimilate the religious groups in the culture, so they would, possibly, be indistiguishable from other citizens.  

Unfortunately, the Republican establishment allowed the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump to go on for too long.  Most candidates expected the self funded Trump to crash and burn by now. In fact, Jeb Bush made a terrible mistake when he didn't attack Donald Trump for taking such a caustic stand against Mexican immigrants, because his wife is Mexican-American and he met her in Mexico. Bush didn't stand up to Trump, when he made those disparaging ethnic remarks about Mexicans. In my opinion, if "Jeb!" had challenged Trump, the Bush campaign would be competitive, instead of on "life support".  

In some respects, the rise of Trumponianism is the Republican party "reaping what it has sown".  

Now, the Republican establishment has waited too long to put the evil genie back into the political cauldron.  

Therefore, it's time to create another conservative political party, before American voters find an alernative.