Donald Trump was flat out wrong and sinful to call for hating his opponents when his maga cult was memorializing Mr. Charlie Kirk

Echo editorial published in The Guardian:

At Sunday’s (September 20) memorial for the conservative ultra rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump paid a peculiar tribute. Having quoted the tragically assassinated Mr Kirk’s words of forgiveness, he put aside the script. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” he said. “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.” It was a stark and clarifying admission. Trump does not seek to criminalise hate speech so much as to criminalise speech he hates.
The US is being dragged by Donald Trump's "Trumpziism" into a state of (Fake❗) emergency. 

• Speech is framed as terrorism. 
• Satire is rebranded as enemy propaganda. 
• Employers punish workers for personal posts. 

The predictable result is a chilling climate of surveillance and reprisal, in which citizens learn to keep quiet. The assassination is not just being used to police manners; it is being used to recon

struct the public square so that dissent equals disloyalty, and disloyalty is treated as a security threat.

The Guardian view on Donald Trump’s hate for opponents: practising politics the wrong way
Editorial

The (evil) Trump admission about "hating his opponents" is more than bravado. By blurring truth and criminalising dissent, he is dismantling the US’s free-speech order from within.

At Sunday’s memorial for the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, Donald Trump paid a peculiar tribute. 

Having quoted Mr Kirk’s words of forgiveness, he put aside the script. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie,” 💢😡he said🗯️. “I hate my opponents, and I don’t want the best for them.” It was a stark and clarifying admission. Trump does not seek to criminalise hate speech so much as to criminalise speech he hates.

The US is being dragged into a state of emergency. Speech is framed as terrorism. Satire is rebranded as enemy propaganda. Employers punish workers for personal posts. The predictable result is a chilling climate of surveillance and reprisal, in which citizens learn to keep quiet. The assassination is not just being used to police manners; it is being used to reconstruct the public square so that dissent equals disloyalty, and disloyalty is treated as a security threat.

Hannah Arendt warned of the existential peril in blurring the line between truth and lies: then truth doesn’t stand; it becomes optional. rump’s reported falsehoods about paracetamol and autism will harm mothers, stigmatise families and erode trust in medicine. But in Trumpland such costs are outweighed by the political payoff of pitting supporters against the scientific “establishment”.

His assault is twofold. First, speech is being weaponised through partisan media, online influencers and harassment networks that seek to capture attention while corroding the conditions for open dialogue. Second, state power is weaponised by cowing social media platforms, threatening network licences and politicising information. Handing TikTok to rightwing billionaires is a morbid symptom of democratic decline.

“Authority is to be controlled by public opinion, not public opinion by authority,” said the US supreme court. That defines the first amendment: citizens, not the state, decide which ideas survive, with narrow limits like fraud or defamation. By presuming to define “truth”, Mr Trump subverts self-government. Hate rallies thrive in Trump’s America because, since 1969, speech is unprotected only if intended and likely to incite “imminent lawless action”.

The US is a free-speech outlier. Other democracies accept broader, more collective trade‑offs to protect vulnerable groups, maintain public order and prevent incitement and harassment. Each country is different but the bargain is similar. Speech is presumptively free, yet words are considered acts with foreseeable harms. Words can mobilise mobs, direct harassment and orchestrate violence. The point isn’t to shield anyone’s feelings, it’s to make coexistence possible.

Trump has inverted the American model. Rather than robust exchanges under neutral rules, he selectively rewards allies while degrading the conditions of honest debate. All this while the infosphere is saturated with viral lies, making it easier to justify punitive state action “to keep order”. That is how an emergency becomes a system.

The answer is not the censor’s pen nor a free-for-all. It requires resilient democratic plumbing; social media platforms made accountable for publishing harms; and properly defining dangerous conduct. The aim – particularly in the US – must be to preserve free expression as the bedrock of self-government while dismantling the machinery that warps attention toward outrage and partisan mobilisation. Trump’s speech was disgraceful❗ When power learns to hate its opponents, democracy will fail.

Harvard University continues to face criticism about antisemitism

Echo report by Elizabeth Crisp, published in The Hill:

Larry Hogan former Maryland governor

Larry Hogan pulls out of Harvard programs over ‘anti-Semitic vitriol’ on campus.

Former Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan (R) dropped out of two fellowship programs at Harvard amid the fallout after the university’s reaction to Hamas’s deadly attack on Israel earlier this month.

Hogan, who left office earlier this year at the end of his term, had agreed several months ago to take part in leadership fellowships at the John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

In a letter to the university, which Hogan posted publicly online, the moderate Republican said he would no longer participate after more than 30 student groups signed onto a joint statement blaming Israel for the attack.

“I cannot condone the dangerous anti-Semitism that has taken root on your campus,” he wrote. “This horrific terrorist attack was the greatest loss of Jewish life since the Holocaust and it should be universally condemned as exactly what it is: Pure evil.”

The statement, which most of its signers have since disavowed, said they “hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence.”

“Today’s events did not occur in a vacuum,” they wrote the day of the terror attack, which left more than 1,400 dead. “For the last two decades, millions of Palestinians in Gaza have been forced to live in an open-air prison. Israeli officials promise to ‘open the gates of hell,’ and the massacres in Gaza have already commenced.”

The statement drew national backlash, with companies vowing that they would not hire any of the students, who were not individually named, upon graduation.

Harvard didn’t immediately respond to The Hill’s request for comment. In an Oct. 9 statement, school President Claudine Gay condemned Hamas’s violence.

“Let me also state, on this matter as on others, that while our students have the right to speak for themselves, no student group — not even 30 student groups — speaks for Harvard University or its leadership,” she wrote. “We will all be well served in such a difficult moment by rhetoric that aims to illuminate and not inflame.”

Hogan said the students’ statement amounted to “hate speech,” and he didn’t feel like the university had sufficiently denounced “anti-Semitic vitriol” from the students.

“This is not a decision I have taken lightly, but it is my hope that it may help further spur you to take meaningful action to address anti-Semitism and restore the values Harvard should represent to the world,” he wrote in his letter.