Donald Trump and Republican oligarchy will exploit immigrants to create a permanent labor class like slavery

Although this opinion is a little difficult to understand, I fully appreciate and support the premise, in short, the anti-immigration movement is, in truth, being manipulated by oligarchs to create a permanent low cost labor pool, akin to slavery. 

Actually, I have been thinking about this exploitation for quite a while and now the concept is explained, if you can grasp it, in this essay, by Jean Guerrero, in the The New York Times.

This spring, 2026, the prominent white nationalist Nick Fuentes decided that the war on immigrants was a lost cause. “Country’s over,” he said on his Rumble show. “We’re already a nonwhite country.” Earlier this year, he declared immigration a “dead issue,” arguing that President Trump “blew it” by linking arms with oligarchs and waging war on Iran.

“Immigration is becoming one of these issues that is used almost exclusively just to trick white people,” he said, a rare display of clarity for a man whose many bigotries tend to orient him toward confusion. In an anti-semitic post on X/, he argued that anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim talk was a distraction. “Probably the best way to prevent Muslim immigrants from coming here or attacking us is to stop killing them and destroying their countries for Israel,” he wrote. And last month, he wrote on X: “The populist Left has all the energy now. Trump’s broken promises over immigration, Iran & Epstein have completely deflated any enthusiasm on the Right.”

Fuentes is just one of the influential figures in the anti-immigrant movement who are criticizing Trump’s foreign policy, which has set in motion a refugee crisis within Iran as his interventions in Latin America create the conditions for a long-term increase in mass migration to the United States from that region.

The discontent among immigration restrictionists emerged despite Trump’s crackdown on immigrants living in the United States. The administration muted the performative cruelty of its mass deportations after its deadly, unpopular actions in Minneapolis; however, arrests by Immigration and Customs Enforcement surged to nearly 50,000 in July, the highest single monthly arrest total of Trump’s second term. Pundits and provocateurs who dread demographic change have spotlighted the contradiction with his foreign policy.

Disillusionment among immigration restrictionists can be traced to late last year when Trump began illegally blowing up boats in the Pacific Ocean and the Caribbean, a performance of cartel warfare that was a prelude to his capture of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. (Maine Writer: By the way, where is that Venezuelan oil❓)

Trump endorsed a Honduran candidate whose party has been tied to cartels, protecting a start-up city there for tech billionaires. “Efforts to transform other societies end up remaking our own,” warned Mark Krikorian, an immigration restrictionist, in an article for Compact magazine, “Intervention Leads to Immigration.” Mr. Krikorian is executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that appeared to have influenced Trump’s first-term immigration policies. He cited examples such as the Vietnam War and years of U.S. interference in Central America that drove a million people to leave.

The anxiety from leaders in the anti-immigrant movement has received less attention than the outcry from Trump’s isolationist voters. But it could be more consequential because immigration is the president’s signature issue — the one he relies on to divide and conquer. The disillusionment reveals an extraordinary, if uneasy, window of possibility: Working-class white Americans who are anxious about immigration could awaken to the fact that their interests are aligned with those of people of color across the world who want to stay in their homelands. They share an enemy: corporate and political elites who extract, exploit and expel across borders.

There have been moments in American political history when working-class solidarity briefly cut across racial and national lines. There was the Rainbow Coalition, a class-based multiracial alliance that the Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton created in Chicago in 1969, the year he was assassinated. It included white Appalachian migrants and other white workers from the Young Patriot Organization, who renounced racism to unite with Black and Latino activists in opposition to shared economic oppression and who wore Confederate flag patches with Black power symbols.

In the late 1970s, labor organizers in Arizona split with the United Farm Workers union over its attacks on undocumented immigrants and established a more radical, transnational model of labor organizing that refused to distinguish between documented and undocumented farmworkers and built solidarity across the U.S.-Mexico border. “We are all subject to the same underlying disease: the inhumane and ethereal transnational corporation that has regard only for profit,” wrote union organizers in 1981.

People like Mr. Fuentes are too racist to embrace cross-border or multiracial organizing. But his declaration that immigration is a “dead issue” is a sign that Trump’s most powerful spell could be breaking. If working-class white Americans can be persuaded that their real enemies are the oligarchs and warmongers enriching themselves at everyone’s expense, not the migrants fleeing the chaos those oligarchs create, a different kind of politics could become possible. And Fuentes, like others on the right, is beginning to point the finger at the transnational tech billionaires behind Trump and Vice President JD Vance, like Peter Thiel. In fact, Fuentes often uses the term “globalist” to advance anti-semitic, racist and false propaganda about Jewish people controlling everything and replacing white populations with immigrants of color. In fact, transnational oligarchy benefits from race-based divisions that distract everyone from the oligarchs’ exploitation of all people. Americans all along the political spectrum are beginning to turn against parts of that oligarchy. In an era of extreme polarization, opposition to A.I. and protests against data centers are strongly bipartisan.

If anything can heal the rupturing body politic, it may be opposition to what the journalist Gil Durán details in his new book, “The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy.” He writes: “All around the world, Silicon Valley oligarchs are scheming to acquire land, resources and power. They see a world in decline and seek to profit by hastening its collapse — and remaking it in their own image.”

The Trump administration already revealed that the goal is not a strong American work force, but a forever exploitable one in service of transnational elites — which requires unregulated expansion of extractive technologies like artificial intelligence and locking immigrant laborers into a vulnerable state. Trump’s Labor Department has quietly restructured the H-2A guest worker program to make foreign farmworkers cheaper to hire, cutting hourly wages by up to $7 and allowing employers to count housing in their compensation. The United Farm Workers has sued, arguing the rule will depress wages for American farmworkers and push them out of the labor pool. Last week, a federal judge ruled that the changes were illegal, and ordered the Labor Department to redraft them.

Congress has also tried to expand this architecture of exploitation. 

A bipartisan bill would broaden H-2A eligibility to year-round employers currently excluded, like dairy farms. Other policies reveal the shift: Trump’s effort to revoke birthright citizenship would help create a hereditary underclass with fewer constitutional protections.

Trump’s immigration policies are not intended to eliminate immigrant labor; they are intended to strip that labor of bargaining power and rights. Trump’s foreign policy is perniciously symbiotic with that system. As he deports immigrants with jobs, with homes and with children who are American citizens, he is laying the foundation for the long-term displacement of newly marginalized people who will be more exploitable because they have no roots here.

What began as a push to expel and exclude dark-skinned immigrants from the United States has become something more sprawling and sinister: a transnational project of population control in service of elites. Call it transnational oligarchy — the strategic use of immigration policy and foreign interventions to manufacture and maintain an exploitable labor force. This is not compatible with white nationalism or any nationalism. It does not believe in borders. It believes in constraining the political and economic power of an ever-expanding category of undesirables.

“Various societies have tried sourcing cheap labor from non-functioning states,” wrote Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of his most powerful advisers, in February on X. “The West is the first to import failed-state labor with full political rights: welfare, voting, and citizenship for the migrants and their families. When citizenship is global, self-rule is impossible.” It was one of his most revealing posts to date; the main problem, according to Mr. Miller, isn’t the sourcing of cheap labor. It’s the extension of rights to that labor.

Why would Miller defend Trump’s machinery of cross-border displacement❓ Miller is arguably the most radical anti-immigrant ideologue in U.S. history, but he has also been passionately defending Trump’s destruction overseas. “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” he told Jake Tapper of CNN in January.

As I documented in “Hatemonger,” my 2020, biography of Miller, he has long worked to strangle legal pathways into this country for nonwhite people. He is one of the main reasons federal agents are rounding up people of color with no criminal records, and it is his aggressive enforcement strategy that has led to anti-ICE protesters being shot in the streets. He is a longtime ally of Krikorian’s center, which influenced his views. For years, he has argued that mass migration hurts American workers, while benefiting corporate elites. Now his boss is embracing a foreign policy that is the fondest wish of those elites.

The administration’s war on immigrants is a Trojan horse for the eradication of equal protection under the law to create a permanent caste of laborers without rights.

Both Democratic and Republican leaders have pursued transnational oligarchy at the expense of immigrants and working-class Americans; it is not a one-sided evil. But Mr. Trump and Mr. Miller have mastered it in one of the most perverse acts of political gaslighting, convincing working-class Americans to see them as the opposite of wh“Mass migration is a wealth (and political power) transfer from the American working class to migrants and to corporations,” Miller said in a post on X/ last year, conflating immigrant rights and corporate profits, as he often does, when in fact the inverse is true: corporations increase profits by offering low wages. It’s the war on immigrant rights, which Miller has pursued with zeal, that harms working-class Americans and entrenches inequality.

When the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated in 1968, he was organizing his Poor People’s Campaign and fighting for an economic bill of rights, which sought to amend the Constitution to establish a natural human right to be free from poverty and involuntary servitude. He wrote that it would help poor whites, whom he called “derivative” victims of slavery. “As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the Black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth,” he wrote. “It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market.”

Now, the subjugation of immigrants has taken the place of slavery in depressing the base of the labor market. Miller wants us to blame immigrants and those who advocate a pathway to citizenship — as if slavery were the fault of the enslaved and abolitionists.

It is time for a political movement that rebuilds economic dignity across borders — one that unites the white worker in Appalachia and the Indigenous land defender in Honduras, and exposes the war on immigrants for what it is: a war on labor here and across the world.at they are.

Birthright Citizenship affirms what is common sense: Innocent babies have no control over where they are born.

Opinion: Birthright citizenship is not a wartime exception
‘I was born behind barbed wire to parents the U.S. classified as “enemy aliens.” … Because of the Constitution’s assurance of birthright citizenship, I was born an American citizen.’

Echo report published in The Mercury News by Larry Oda.

I was born behind barbed wire to parents the United States classified as “enemy aliens” during World War II. Yet, because of the Constitution’s assurance of birthright citizenship, I was born an American citizen.

That fact is a lesson in American law and character — one that should matter now as Donald Trump attempts to evade June’s Supreme Court ruling upholding birthright citizenship through new executive orders.

One order purports to bar the children of “alien enemies” from acquiring birthright citizenship. It is wrong on multiple levels. It misapplies a wartime concept for lands seized by foreign armies. More fundamentally, it again would strip children of their right to citizenship based on their parents’ actions — exactly what the Supreme Court rejected.

Since the War of 1812, and through two world wars, children born in the United States to parents classified as alien enemies have been recognized as American citizens.

This history is personal, because I was born at the Crystal City WWII Department of Justice Family Internment Camp in Texas, alongside many other children of German, Italian and Japanese descent. Their parents had been swept up in a period of wartime hysteria and the deliberate imprisonment of Japanese community leaders. They had done nothing against the United States.

Yet, even in that dark period, the United States recognized something fundamental: the circumstances or ancestry of a child’s parents did not determine the child’s citizenship.

Because we were born on American soil, we were afforded the right to belong. And we exercised that right. Many of the children with whom I grew up in camp went on to make significant contributions to this country. We served in the military. We built successful careers and businesses. We became educators, community leaders, civil rights advocates and public servants. We demonstrated, in countless ways, that citizenship is not merely a legal status — it is an opportunity to participate fully in the American experiment.

I have tried to do my part as well. I am a veteran. During the Vietnam War, I served in the U.S. Navy aboard the aircraft carrier USS Ranger, working in the Integrated Operational Intelligence Center with a top secret security clearance. 

After the war, I returned to college and earned a master’s degree and enjoyed a career in public service. I have also had the privilege of serving four terms as president of the Japanese American Citizens League, the nation’s oldest and largest Asian American civil rights organization.

I share this history because it demonstrates something essential about America: children should not inherit the political status, fears, or accusations directed at their parents. The current executive order is part of a years-long effort to retreat from that principle. It invokes the language of wartime “alien enemies” in a time of peace and attempts to impose a restriction on citizenship that, historically, only applied when an enemy captured and took control of land during a war.

The lessons of Japanese American incarceration should make us especially wary when our government once again suggests that the children of immigrants should be treated as less
American because of who their parents are. We have seen where that thinking can lead.

I have confidence that the courts will continue to uphold the constitutional principle of birthright citizenship and reject efforts to circumvent those protections through executive action.

But courts cannot be the only line of defense. The American people must draw the line as well. We must reject the notion that citizenship can be conditioned on ancestry, the nationality of one’s parents or the government’s judgment about whether a family belongs here. We must remember that the strength of American citizenship comes precisely from the fact that it is not inherited from one’s parents’ nationality or withheld because of their circumstances.

As the Supreme Court concluded, “Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’” That promise extended to me. No president has the power to decide that children born in America today belong any less than I did*.

Author Larry Oda is one of a small number of Japanese Americans still living who were born to incarcerated parents during the World War II incarceration carried out under Executive Order 9066 and related wartime authorities.

*In other words, babies have no control over where they are born and must be exempt from discriminatory political actions created by racists like Stephen Miller, Donald Trump, and their cult.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans intend to destroy the equal protection clause provided in the 14th Amendment

Echo opinion published in the New York Times by Jamelle Bouie 

Stephen Miller’s 🤢Latest Low: Nazism 101: 
"You can’t change the masses. They will always be the same: dumb, gluttonous and forgetful.”― Joseph Goebbels

The latest front in evil 👹Stephen Miller’s personal and political war on the 14th Amendment, which began last January with Donald Trump’s executive order targeting birthright citizenship, centers on the equal protection clause.

In 1982, in Plyler v. Doe, a 5-to-4 majority of the Supreme Court held that it was a violation of the equal protection clause for states to deny to undocumented children the free public education they provide to legal immigrants’ children, who are themselves citizens. As Justice William Brennan wrote in his opinion for the court, “The 14th Amendment to the Constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens.”

Miller, whose crusade against immigration knows no bounds, wants Republican-led states to test the court’s commitment to its precedent. My newsroom colleague Lauren McGaughy has the report:


Stephen Miller raised the idea of ending public education funding for undocumented children in a closed-door meeting with Texas lawmakers in Washington last week, a move that would challenge a decades-old U.S. Supreme Court precedent, according to two people who were in the meeting.

Steven Miller doppelganger: Joseph Goebbels (1897-1945) Hitler's Nazi Minister of Propaganda.

Miller, who is Trump’s hard-line immigration terror adviser, and a Joseph Goebbels doppelganger, cited gridlock in Congress as he encouraged the state lawmakers to pass conservative legislation on immigration and other issues that are crucial to Republicans, hoping such action would spur on other red states and federal lawmakers.

The effect of this change, if it were to become law, would be to mark about a million children as members of a subordinate class — a lower caste excluded from mainstream society. Here, again, is Brennan: “By denying these children a basic education, we deny them the ability to live within the structure of our civic institutions, and foreclose any realistic possibility that they will contribute in even the smallest way to the progress of our Nation.”

Miller’s push to weaken the equal protection clause raises an important question: Why is he, and the "maga" right more generally, so intent on whittling down the 14th Amendment to essentially nothing❓

To answer this, we can’t just look at the origins of the amendment — we have to see it in its larger political context. Before the 14th Amendment was a question of law and legal interpretation, it was a political text meant to bring about a particular vision of American society.

It seems obvious to say, but it’s worth emphasizing anyway: The 14th Amendment is tied directly to the 13th. The 13th Amendment states that “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” It then adds, in section 2, that “Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.”

Today, as a matter of legal interpretation, we read the 13th quite narrowly; it simply ends slavery. But the authors and ratifiers of the 13th Amendment saw it more expansively. To them, it was the foundation for the society they hoped to build. 

Like Senator Henry Wilson of Massachusetts said in a March 1864, floor speech in support of the amendment:

"Every word spoken, every line written, every act performed, that keeps the breath of life in slavery for a moment, is against the existence of democratic institutions, against the dignity of the toiling millions, against the liberty, the peace, the honor, the renown and the life of the nation. In the lights of to-day that flash upon us from camp and battlefield, the loyal eye, heart, and brain of America sees and feels and realizes that the death of slavery is the life of the nation❗ The loyal voice of patriotism pronounces, in clear accents, that American slavery must die that the American Republic may live❗"​​​​​​​​​​​​​

To that end, the 13th Amendment was meant to outlaw hereditary caste as much as it was meant to end chattel slavery.

The anti-subordination aims of the 13th Amendment are why, almost immediately after ratifying it, Republicans in Congress leveraged their newfound authority under Section 2 to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1866, which established birthright citizenship, guaranteed equal rights, nullified the “Black Codes” — laws passed by the former rebel states to reimpose the conditions of slavery — and empowered the federal government to prosecute violations of civil rights.


President Andrew Johnson, a Tennessee unionist whose contempt for slaveholders was outweighed only by his hostility to Black Americans, vetoed the bill as both undesirable and beyond the scope of federal power. “In all our history, in all our experience as a people living under Federal and State law, no such system as that contemplated by the details of this bill has ever before been proposed or adopted,” Johnson wrote. “They establish for the security of the colored race safeguards which go infinitely beyond any that the General Government has ever provided for the white race.”

The Republican-led Congress overrode Johnson’s veto. It then began work on a new amendment, meant to embed in the Constitution the provisions and protections of the 1866 law, as well as write its vision of a free and equal society into the Constitution itself.

The resulting 14th Amendment, properly understood, is additive to the 13th. It flows from the vision of Gettysburg and Appomattox, of the Republican Party before, during and after the war: a society of equals, entitled to a broad set of rights and able to pursue their own visions of the good as far as their capabilities would take them.

A straightforward reading of the most important part of the amendment, Section 1, makes this clear. It says, in short: "There will be a national American citizenship. That this citizenship will, except in very select cases, be established by birth. That all such citizens will be entitled to the 'privileges and immunities' of American citizenship, and that — citizen or no — everybody on American soil is to receive the due process of law and the equal protection of the laws."

As Representative John Bingham of Ohio, one of the chief architects of the amendment, would write soon after ratification, Let it be “borne in mind that this is the government of men representing every people and kindred and tongue under the whole heavens, and that in the inception of our national struggle for representative government, in 1776, the declaration of the people was not that all white men are created equal, but that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with the rights of life and liberty.”

The Supreme Court would eventually trim and limit this vision, eventually going, in Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896, as far as to permit the kind of subordination that the 14th Amendment was explicitly written to forbid. Indeed, this was part of the transformation of this amendment into a merely legal document — of removing its political content and treating it as a bare set of narrow requirements. The court would do the same to both the 13th and 15th Amendments, robbing them of their power to transform the American republic. And it did so as part of a larger political project: to reconcile the white citizens of the United States, to give the white South the power to manage its own “affairs,” and to support a national project of imperial domination. As a promise of equality for all who live under the flag, the 14th Amendment had to be written out of the constitutional order.

Both Miller and the "maga" right are engaged in the same kind of work as their political forebears. It is no wonder, then, that they want to gut the 14th Amendment, which was revitalized by the struggles of Black Americans and other groups throughout the 20th century. Theirs is a project of subordination at home and abroad; of the re-inscription of caste and the recreation of tiered citizenship based on race and nationality. And now, as then, the 14th Amendment stands in the way.

In other words, their project of constitutional change is in the service of a distinct political vision. Opponents should take note. It is not enough, as important as it is, to attack the legal basis of Miller’s efforts or debunk "maga’s" historical arguments. One must also bring a positive political vision to bear against their fantasy of reimposing rigid lines of caste, class and hierarchy.

The good news is that the 14th Amendment, and the larger Reconstruction story, is an important resource about an alternative vision — about an egalitarian society for all who claim this nation as their own.

What I Wrote: In this column,  Jamelle Bouie argued that whether at home or abroad, Donald Trump's pathological narcissism leaves him unable to see that his opponents have agency. As the aphorism goes, the enemy gets a vote, too.

Every presidential administration takes on the character of its principal, and this one is no different. Like Trump, the White House does not in fact seem to understand that other people have agency, too. It sees itself the same way the president sees himself: as the protagonist of the universe, with everyone else acting either as a supporting character or a nonplayable one — extras with no will of their own.

Donald Trump and his maga Republican cabinet live in a culture of lies

Trump Has Overwhelmed Himself New York Times opinion by Ezra

Last February, a year ago, I wrote an essay about the Trump administration’s strategy of “muzzle velocity.” Muzzle velocity, in its literal sense, describes the ferocious speed of a bullet at the moment it exits the front end of a gun. The term came from an interview that Steve Bannon, Donald Trump’s former chief strategist, gave in 2019. “All we have to do is flood the zone,” Bannon said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

Trump world has an affection for analogies that🤢 glorify the combination of violence and speed. 

After Trump’s second Inaugural Address, Taylor Budowich, then one of the White House’s deputy chiefs of staff, tweeted, “Now, comes SHOCK AND AWE.” “Shock and awe” refers to the bombing campaign that launched America’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. It was an awesome demonstration of initial force that belied a catastrophic absence of information, planning and wisdom. It was the belief that an immediate show of dominance would lead to a society’s submission rather than its revolt. Both Bannon and Budowich’s metaphors have proved more grimly apt than they intended.


The strategy of the Trump administration over the last year has been to move so fast, to do so much, that the opposition could never find its footing. This was Bannon’s insight, and it was real: Attention is limited. The media, the opposition, the electorate — they can only focus on so much. Overwhelm their capacity for attention and you overwhelm their capacity to think, organize and oppose.

But what you are doing to the opposition you are also doing to yourself. “It is a strategy that forces you into overreach,” I wrote last year. “To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself.” And that is what happened. Clearly, the Trump administration is overwhelmed — by its own violence, its own cruelty, its own lies, its own chaos.

There is nothing unusual about a presidency being overwhelmed by crises. What is unusual about the Trump administration is that it has created those crises itself. The Trump administration chose to create a regime of ever-shifting tariffs; it chose to threaten to take Greenland through force or through tariffs; it chose to investigate its political enemies, leading up to its effort to intimidate Jerome Powell, the chair of the Federal Reserve; it chose to alienate our closest allies, encouraging both Canada and Britain to seek closer ties with China; it chose to stage quasi-invasions of blue cities, setting the scene for the horrifying killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. And that’s just a partial accounting of the disasters and diminishments of the last few weeks and months.
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Muzzle velocity was built on the idea that the Trump administration had reserves of attention and focus that the rest of us did not. The reality is just the opposite. The White House has demands on its attention and focus that the rest of us do not. We are not responsible for managing or controlling everything from the labor market to A.I. policy to immigration enforcement and vaccine approvals. We will not be blamed for a measles outbreak or a recession. But the president will.

That is why most White Houses pay such close attention to policy processes and chain of command: These are all ways of filtering the torrent of information and decisions in order to conserve the focus and attention of the president and his top aides. Well-managed White Houses — and personally disciplined presidents — are ruthless in their pursuit of prioritization. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” President Barack Obama told Vanity Fair in 2012. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.”

But this White House — and this president — have treated freneticism as a virtue and discipline as a vice. Instead of seeking to limit the number of crises and conflicts that they need to remain on top of, members of the Trump administration, from their first day, sought to multiply them. They spent their initial months in office ripping the wiring out of the federal government, including gutting internal teams, like the National Security Council, that are meant to help process information on behalf of the president. They have treated caution and restraint as an admission of weakness.

In January Stephen Miller, the deputy chief of staff who, in practice, acts as Trump’s prime minister, delivered a message to ICE agents: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties, and anybody who lays a hand on you or tries to stop you or tries to obstruct you is committing a felony,” he said. That message was part of a broader effort to change the culture at ICE and the Border Patrol, Caitlin Dickerson, a journalist at The Atlantic who covers immigration, told me:

I was talking to one former ICE official who told me that you would always fear discharging your weapon in an interaction, even a potentially violent and dangerous one. 

Usually, the (reasonable) concern was that officers would be too unwilling to use their gun, because they worried about potential repercussions. And there were all these layers of investigation that would take place after a shooting. His fear when he was in ICE for 30 years was that he wouldn’t use his gun in a moment when he needed to.

And now it’s almost as if the opposite fear is true. We’ve seen in ICE people losing their jobs, high-level officials losing their jobs because they’re not delivering enough deportations, they’re not being aggressive enough. I think Miller is just underscoring that argument that you’re not going to get in trouble for being too aggressive and, in fact, the only thing you will get in trouble for is not being aggressive enough.

It is hard not to see a straight line from that change in culture to the tragic killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti, on the streets of Minneapolis.

Every organization comes to resemble its leader. Trump himself is easily distracted, desirous of flattery rather than counsel, impressed by crude displays of dominance and violence and obsessed with social media and cable news — and so too is his White House. The sycophancy among Trump’s aides is so crude as to be indistinguishable from mockery. 

(Evil Nazi) Stephen Miller, speaking to a New York magazine reporter about Trump’s health, said, “The headline of your story should be ‘The Superhuman President.’” When Miller says this, does he realize he is making his boss look ridiculous❓ Does he intend it❓

But it’s not just (evil Nazi) Miller. Trump’s cabinet meetings take the form of totalitarian kitsch. Here is Lee Zeldin, head of the Environmental Protection Agency, wrapping up remarks in December:  (My personal observation about Donald Trump's farcical cabinet meetings is to call them seances.) If you were to ask me what I’m grateful for, whether it’s a Thanksgiving, it’s a Christmas, a Hanukkah, a New Year’s, anytime of year the fact that this president, after four years serving in office, he could have just left it in the rearview mirror and went on to really enjoy retirement, but he is willing to take a bullet for all of you tuning in at home, because he believes in his flag, our freedom, our liberties and to save the greatest country in the history of the world. So I’m grateful this holiday season for you, Mr. President. 🤢

The joke of Trump’s cabinet meetings is that no one is joking. These meetings are not just a performance; they are a culture. Trump’s favor is won through demonstrations of loyalty rather than competence. The president wants parades, not process, and that is what he gets.

The irony of Trump’s second term is that he was much better served by the advisers in his first term, who understood that part of their job was to protect him — and the rest of us — from his worst impulses. In 2020, when Trump reportedly responded to the George Floyd protesters by asking the military to “just shoot them, just shoot them in the legs or something,” his advisers weren’t protecting only us when they refused. They were also protecting him.

Trump’s second White House was built to ensure that no one would ever tell Trump no again. He wanted a culture of lies and sycophancy, and he got one. “I hear stories from my predecessors,” Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, told Vanity Fair in December, “about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or cost lives. I don’t have that.”

Trump’s aides flatter him and lie to us. They indulge his constant distraction and so they too are constantly distracted. They are dominated by him and so they seek to dominate us. What they believe to be their strengths are their weaknesses. You can see it in their metaphors. The shock and awe bombing campaign was the prelude to catastrophe, not to victory. And so it is here.

This is a presidency that is, by any measure, failing. Trump is unpopular; his brutality and his tariffs have turned immigration and affordability, once among of his strongest issues, into liabilities. Trump’s opposition is increasingly united and mobilized; Democrats are besting Republicans in elections all across the country and disciplined, brave, beautiful protest movements have emerged in the cities ICE has sought to occupy. I cannot do better here than to quote Adam Serwer’s dispatch from Minnesota:


Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs.

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive — because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

We are watching an administration that is not only retreating in key areas — dropping its demand for all of Greenland, sending Greg Bovino back to Border Patrol’s El Centro region, meekly backing off its trade war with China — but finding itself cornered by its own cruelty and lies. Miller’s slander of Pretti as a “domestic terrorist” and an “assassin” could not stand even the barest contact with the video of Pretti trying to protect a nearby woman or the quiet heroism of his daily life.

Trump appears to be trying to course correct, but he has neither the discipline nor the personnel to truly change his presidency’s direction. This administration is a reflection of who the president is and what he wants. This White House is not beset by crises. This White House is the crisis.

Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. He is the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show” 

Nazism and Trumpziism are both rooted in Fascism- an echo opinion published in The Guardian

Echo opinion published in The Guardian, "History teaches us that authoritarians use any excuse to seize power", by Judith Levine

Nazis used the 1933 Reichstag blaze to justify snuffing out civil liberties. In the US, the Trumpzi calls for crackdowns have already begun.

On the night of 27 February 1933, six days before a national elections, the German Reichstag (in Berlin, Germany) was set on fire. 

Firefighters and police discovered a Dutch communist named Marinus van der Lubbe at the scene, who confessed to being the arsonist. The Nazi Reichstag president, Hermann Göring, soon arrived, followed by the future propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler, who had been dining together.

Two competing, still unresolved, conspiracy theories would circulate about the real culprit: the Nazis, with van der Lubbe as front; or a communist cabal. But the three men had no doubts. Göring pronounced the crime a communist plot. Hitler called it “a God-given signal”, adding: “If this fire, as I believe, is the work of the communists, then we must crush out this murderous pest with an iron fist.”

On 10 September 2025, within minutes of the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk, before a suspect or a motive had been identified, a cacophony of voices – from neo-Nazi influencers to Republican members of Congress – were blaming the left for the murder of the hugely effective far-right political organizer. (Maine Writer note here: But, before Kirk's tragic killings, frankly, I and many thousands of others had never heard of him or his "free speech" ideologies.)

Donald Trump amplified the indictments. “Radical left … rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now,” he said, in a televised address from the Oval Office that night, pointedly omitting examples of violence against progressives or Democrats.

Is Kirk’s assassination Trump’s Reichstag fire?

There are major differences between Germany in 1933 and the US in 2025. Germany’s democracy was but 14 years old at the time. Created amid the privation of the postwar depression and attended by popular ressentiment at the country’s defeat, the Weimar Republic was unstable from the start. And simultaneously, out of those same conditions, the Nazi movement was born and gained strength.

Hitler’s attempted coup d’etat of 1923 – the beer hall putsch – failed but brought him national attention. 

During what the Nazis called the “time of struggle” between 1925 and 1932, stormtroopers and assorted thugs committed nearly continual acts of terrorism and violence toward political foes. Jews, and other minorities. The conflagration of 27 February 1933 burst from tinder ready to combust.

The Nazis in the German government fomented the Kristallnacht riots on November 9-10, 1938. SA storm troopers forced Jews to march through the streets carrying a Star of David. Hugh Greene reported in the Daily Telegraph on November 11, 1938, that "mob law ruled in Berlin throughout the afternoon and evening and hordes of hooligans indulged in an orgy of destruction.

Today, by contrast, US democracy is nearly a quarter of a millennium old. It has weathered division, corruption, and violence – and, in many instances, stood stronger, better governed, and more just in their aftermath. Today – despite attacks on the press, boldly partisan gerrymandering, police brutality against peaceful protests, and the rightward lurch of the judiciary – Americans still have civil liberties, however frayed and endangered. That is more than Germans had after the Reichstag fire. But it is becoming clearer that, without widespread popular resistance, it will not stay that way.

Important differences notwithstanding, this moment in the US contains many parallels with what happened in Germany over 90 years ago. American history is full of injustice and repression – from the dispossession of Indigenous people’s lands to the permanently heightened surveillance of everyday life since the 9/11 terrorist attacks. But the scale and scope of Trump’s assaults on democracy are unprecedented. We need to learn from the past to recognize how dangerous a moment we are in, and where we might be going.

Within hours of the Reichstag fire, German president Paul von Hindenburg signed an emergency decree “for the protection of people and state” that snuffed out civil liberties, including the freedoms of speech, association, and the press and the rights of due process. A massive repression ensued, including thousands of arrests of communists and Social Democrats, trade unionists, and intellectuals on a list compiled by the paramilitary Sturmabteilung (stormtroopers or SA). The first night, 4,000 people were taken to SA barracks and tortured. The violence did not let up.

On 23 March 1933, with almost all opposition members prevented from taking their seats, the Reichstag passed the statutory partner of the 28 February decree, the Enabling Act, which permanently suspended civil liberties and assigned all legislative power to Hitler and his ministers. Just weeks later, the first concentration camp, Dachau, opened. Accelerated by the blaze in Berlin, German democracy was reduced to ashes.

Now the Trump administration is using Kirk’s assassination, as the Nazis used the fire in Berlin, to instigate its own massive repression. Trump has not blocked Democrats from taking their seats in Congress nor arrested opposition members en masse yet. But he is using the instruments of government to bring to heel anyone who speaks the mildest ill of him or his friends.

In just the last few days, the FCC chair threatened Disney, ABC and its affiliates with punitive action if they did not cancel Jimmy Kimmel Live after the host made a joke in which he implied that Kirk’s killer was one of the “Maga gang”. The companies caved and Kimmel’s show was indefinitely suspended. Autocrats are not known for gracefully taking a joke.

Assigning blame for Kirk’s murder on the entire American political left came not just from extreme-right podcasters, influencers and militia leaders. Republican representatives, administration officials, and White House advisers loudly, almost triumphantly, joined the fray.

“The Democrats own this,” congresswoman Nancy Mace, of South Carolina, told NBC News, calling Kirk’s then-unknown killer a “raging left lunatic”.

“EVERY DAMN ONE OF YOU WHO CALLED US FASCISTS DID THIS,” Florida congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna posted on X. “You were too busy doping up kids, cutting off their genitals, inciting racial violence by supporting orgs that exploit minorities, protecting criminals … Your words caused this. Your hate caused this.”

Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s closest allies, chimed in: “Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” she wrote. “I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.” (Maine Writer:  This is bullshit❗💩💩💩)

Of course, the bully at the bully pulpit spoke loudest. “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity & to other political violence,” Trump promised, “including the organizations who 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.”

Taking over as host on Kirk’s radio show Monday, JD Vance vowed to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence” – which he also called “left-wing lunatics”. Of these, he named the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, the latter run by George Soros, the progressive, pro-democracy philanthropist and Jewish Holocaust survivor, who has long been the subject of neo-Nazi vitriol. Vance also threatened to investigate the non-profit status of the venerable leftwing publication the Nation.

Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff , also on the show, added: “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, homeland security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these [radical left] networks and make America safe again for the American people.”

Stephen Miller is the reincarnation of the Nazi Joseph Goebbels

After Trump was confronted by protesters who chanted “Free DC! Free Palestine! Trump is the Hitler of our time!” in a Washington DC restaurant, deputy attorney general Todd Blanche said on CNN that he might investigate them as “part of an organized effort to inflict harm and terror and damage to the United States”.

The president more recently told reporters he conferred with US attorney general Pam Bondi about bringing federal racketeering charges against these “agitators” and would support designating “antifa” as terrorists.

In many senses, the crackdown on dissent has been under way for months. Trump began his second term implementing the Heritage Foundation’s Project Esther, punishing professors, students, whole college departments, and anyone accused of “antisemitism”– defined as criticism of Israel – with names supplied by Zionist informants. The witch-hunt is expanding.

All of this, along with Trump’s earlier moves, recall senator Joseph McCarthy’s crusade against communists and other alleged subversives in the 1950s. McCarthy instituted loyalty oaths for government workers, and many states followed suit. Failure to sign meant resignation or firing. In June, a plan to test potential federal employees for fidelity to Trump’s mission was dropped after criticism, but employees and higher officials have since then been regularly fired for failure to demonstrate it, or just for telling a truth inconvenient to the president. The FBI director, Kash Patel, published a list of traitorous “deep state” figures and has already punished a third of them. He denies it is an “enemies list”, referring to the list McCarthy claimed to have.

Donald Trump has toyed with invoking the Insurrection Act amid protests against immigrant roundups. He has declared a spectral “crime emergency” as a pretext to send troops into Washington DC and other cities, and ordered the formation of a federal “quick response force” for “quelling civil disturbances”. He has deputized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) to terrorize and brutalize brown, Spanish-speaking people its agents assume to be undocumented immigrants, a policy of racial profiling and a violation of the fourth amendment against illegal search and seizure, which the US supreme court has allowed.

Before the National Socialists became Germany’s one, murderous ruling party, Nazism was a popular movement. But movements and parties are not separate entities, and governments need to mobilize consent – or squash opposition – to survive. Our lawless government supports and is supported by a lawless movement. “It is shocking how day after day, naked acts of violence, breaches of the law, barbaric opinions appeal quite undisguised as official decree,” the German Jewish philologist and diarist Victor Klemperer wrote on 17 March 1933. The same could describe the US under Trump.

The criminal president has criminals at his back. One of the provisions of the Enabling Act was a grant of amnesty to anyone who had committed a crime “for the good of the Reich during the Weimar Republic”.

“He who saves his country does not violate the law,” Trump posted, quoting Napoleon a few weeks after pardoning all the January 6 rioters, including those who had assaulted and killed police officers. “Proud Boys, stand back and stand by,” he said in a 2016 presidential debate. He is now hinting that it’s time for them to act.

The challenges are enormous. But in addition to the resilience and longevity of US democracy, there are reasons to hope that a resistance movement can survive and win this time around.

Repression is quickly metastasizing. But the same social media that polarize opinion, spread disinformation, and abet government surveillance enable political organizing, foil censorship and substantiate truth, and link global networks to elude repressive laws, such as the feminist cells distributing abortion pills into red states.

The country seems hopelessly divided. Yet the same federalism that gives the states the right to gerrymander and enact undemocratic legislation is useful to states that are intent on governing well, providing for their residents and sheltering them from the abuses of Washington.

The Democrats in Washington are clueless, but local progressive candidates are winning elections. Law firms and major media companies are surrendering to Trump’s extortion without a fight. But the ACLU still exists, as do independent news outlets.

And try as Trump may to erase America’s histories of oppression and of the liberation movements against it, they are not forgotten. We know what capitulation and passivity lead to and what the struggles for peace and justice can ultimately achieve. It is easy to feel defeated, but we cannot give up now.

Judith Levine is Brooklyn-based journalist, essayist and author of five books. Her Substack is Today in Fascism

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.