CENSOR 3
ESTB 3 25 TRUMP ADMIN 3 HEGSETH DEI BS
current Three 3 25
SEE TENN ROOTS BK
SEE FASCISM
SEE WWW MEMORY HOLE
SEE PRESS SUPPRESS //
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TWO HEADERS:
sorta bak disambig 12 22
see censorship main
see CRT parents rights BS desantis brian kemp okla
see homophobe
NO MERRI
see fascism burn filth cleansing fire stew peters
SEE PRESS SUPPRESS KIMMEL DOD
SEE M4L
see public library/ school teacher
see bounty vigilante texas
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AN 10 26 TC
Bruce Severy, a full-bearded, idealistic 26-year-old, moved from Southern California in 1973 to the small town of Drake, North Dakota, where he had accepted a job teaching English at the public high school. He, his small family and their menagerie of pets settled into a large, white frame house across from the school.
Severy’s progressive bent showed in the curriculum he taught. Insisting that his students should learn “how to think, not what to think,” he assigned his sophomore literature class contemporary fiction to read, including Kurt Vonnegut’s
“Slaughterhouse-Five,” a strange and quirky anti-war novel published four years prior.
While Severy chose works that he believed could help his students make sense of the problems confronting society, they clashed with the conservative values of his new home. A parent eventually complained about profanity in “Slaughterhouse-Five.” In November 1976, the Drake school board voted unanimously to remove the book from school premises. School officials told students to turn in their copies, and their lockers were searched if they refused. The district went on to burn 32 copies of the novel in the school furnace.
As a Vonnegut scholar, I’m fascinated by the backlash to “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which is now widely taught in high schools and colleges across the country. Even though the U.S. Supreme Court eventually weighed in on Vonnegut’s novel, there are direct parallels between that controversy and the politics of school censorship cases today, which continue to target “Slaughterhouse-Five,” among countless other works.
Vonnegut responds
News of what happened in Drake spread quickly in the press. Those who objected to the school board’s actions made comparisons to Nazi book burnings. The school district’s cause wasn’t helped by the fact that the superintendent’s last name was Fuhrman – evoking Adolf Hitler’s formal title, Führer – and the school board chairman’s last name was McCarthy, reminding the public of Joseph McCarthy, the disgraced anti-communist senator who sought to purge and censor Americans from all walks of life.
When Kurt Vonnegut learned of the case, he was both angry and saddened.
In a letter to the Drake school board, he insisted his books were “not sexy” and did not argue “in favor of wildness of any kind.” Instead, “they beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are.” He informed the board that he was a decorated World War II veteran who had fought against nations that hate books and burn them. He never received a reply.
The North Dakota incident, while the most egregious attempt to censor Vonnegut, was not the only case of its kind.
As “Slaughterhouse-Five” made its way into high school and college curricula, it faced a backlash by parents and school boards who argued the novel was obscene and immoral. Its irreverent treatment of Christianity was deemed blasphemous, while its unsparing portrayal of the U.S. military’s bombing of Dresden, Germany, was condemned as anti-American.
The book has been challenged as recently as January 2026, when the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Vonnegut’s estate after Utah’s “sensitive materials law” gave school districts a mechanism to ban the novel.
The Supreme Court weighs in
Censorship cases involving “Slaughterhouse-Five” are complex because they have occurred almost entirely in high schools rather than colleges. Schools must balance their responsibility to decide what material is appropriate for younger students with students’ First Amendment rights to receive information and ideas.
One important case dealing with these issues made it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In 1976, several board members from the Island Trees School district in Long Island, New York, reacting to a list of “inappropriate” titles publicized by a conservative activist group, objected to 11 books held in the districts’ school libraries or included in the curriculum.
Seven of the books were written by authors from minority ethnic or religious groups, including titles as seemingly inoffensive as “Best Stories of Negro Writers,” edited by Langston Hughes, and the young adult novel “A Hero Ain’t Nothing but a Sandwich” by Alice Childress.
The 11th book on the list was “Slaughterhouse-Five.” At a press conference, school board member Frank Martin read excerpts from the novel out loud, focusing on a passage where one of Vonnegut’s characters, Kilgore Trout, reimagines the story of Christ’s crucifixion. Trout claims that this revised story actually offered a better moral than the original Gospel story: It teaches people to be kind to everyone, not just the well connected.
Martin, however, declared that even if the rest of the book told the best story in the world, he wouldn’t want it in the school library “with this stuff in it.”
Five high school students, led by 17-year-old Steven Pico, soon filed a lawsuit against the district, claiming the book removal was unconstitutional and that their First Amendment rights to freely receive information had been violated. The case wended its way through the lower courts for years, before it came to the Supreme Court in 1982.
Board of Education v. Pico was a tangled case. The justices wrote seven separate opinions and did not definitively settle the First Amendment issues. But a 5-4 majority did determine in favor of the students who argued that their case should have received a full trial rather than a summary judgment years ago.
As the only Supreme Court case to date involving censorship in school libraries, Pico, while a limited ruling, did set out general guidelines still used today.
The decision affirmed that school districts have the authority to supervise the education of students in their care and may remove materials that are, in the words of Justice William Brennan, “pervasively vulgar” or educationally unsuitable.
But such a decision may not be based on a school district’s objections to the ideas expressed in the books. Books may not be removed on narrowly partisan or political grounds, and removal must comply with the “transcendent imperatives of the First Amendment.”
Book banning today
Despite the fact that the justices ruled that books cannot be banned on partisan or political grounds, book banning has been on the rise in America since 2020.
The literary and free speech advocacy group PEN America documented 2,532 instances of book bans in public schools in 2021–22. That figure rose to 3,362 in 2022–23 and nearly tripled to 10,046 in 2023–24.
Since then, the numbers have dipped somewhat but are still alarmingly high.
Surprisingly, many of the school censorship cases today still focus on the same old issues affecting “Slaughterhouse-Five” over 50 years ago – profanity, sexual content and violence. John Green’s “Looking for Alaska” has been the most frequently banned book in schools since 2021, mostly because of a brief, awkward sexual encounter between two main characters.
But fiction and memoirs focusing on gender identity and LGBTQ+ issues have increasingly become targets of censorship, abetted by right-wing parental rights groups like Moms for Liberty. George M. Johnson’s memoir “All Boys Aren’t Blue” and Maia Kobabe’s autobiographical graphic novel “Gender Queer” are among the most banned books in schools in recent years.
And like the majority of the books banned in the Pico case, books by Black authors remain high on the list of school censorship cases. Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison’s first novel, “The Bluest Eye,” appears among the top 10 banned books since 2021, and her Pulitzer Prize-winning “Beloved” comes in at No. 26. Ironically, “Beloved” was also named the single best work of American fiction since 1980 in a 2006 poll of writers and literary critics.
Kurt Vonnegut believed in and argued for First Amendment rights his whole career. In 1976 he told students at Connecticut College that language and literature were “holy” to him. He thought schools should make a point of exposing children to all sorts of opinions and information to make them better citizens.
But he wasn’t too hopeful. Arguing against book banning, he wearily concluded, was like “attempting to explain America at its bravest and most optimistic to orangutans.”
Susan Farrell, Professor of English, College of Charleston
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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rww
07/29/2026
by
- Ali Alexander wants to "bring back book burning."
- C. Jay Engel is "coalition building" with white nationalist Austin Lee.
- Tim Ballard was fired from his own anti-trafficking organization amid allegations of sexual assault, but didn't stop Heather Schott from having him on her podcast.
- James Fishback is venturing deep into the groyper swamps by doing an interview with Matt Evans, aka Beardson Beardly.
- Finally, Chad Connelly claims that those promoting socialism "are really angry, wealthy elites" who seek to divide society: "It's godless. It's secular. It's anti-American. It's anti-freedom. It's anti-God."
AN 5 26
Trump censorship chief: 'I think everything the president posts is appropriate' - Alternet.org
AN 5 26
Tennessee schools bans Pulitzer Prize-winning book 'Roots' - Alternet.org
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AN 4 26
It’s not enough that the right-wing is still working overtime to ban books, say critics. It’s that they’re letting someone else do their homework.
“Conservative parents’ advocacy groups have been experimenting with using commercially available artificial intelligence tools to help them flag more books they’ve deemed pornographic to be removed from public schools and libraries,” reports 404 Media. “Even though LLMs are notoriously error-prone, and the books in question aren’t pornographic, these groups continue to explore use cases for AI anyway.”
Conservative book-rating sites like BLOCKADE (Blocking Lustful Overzealous Content, Keeping Away Depravity and Extremism), for example, rely on xAI or OpenAI API keys to generate book reports from PDF/ePUB files, says 404 Media. It essentially bases an analysis on a set of parameters that are publicly available through the creator’s Github page.
But AI is no Roger Ebert. It’s not even a critic. It’s just a list haunted by a chatbot, reports 404 Media.
“The program’s script includes a list of roughly 300 words, each assigned a severity score that contributes to an overall appropriateness score based on their own metrics,” said 404 Media. “The script explicitly defines ‘educational inappropriateness’ as ‘content offensive to conservative values,’ while also asking the AI ‘not to include any additional text or explanation’ for its decisions.’”
Jeremy Blackburn, associate professor of computer science and director of the Institute for AI and Society at Binghamton University, tells 404 Media that it is the kind of cheating that would get you drummed out of college.
“If you want to classify content in this kind of context, maybe toxicity with offensive content, troublesome content — whoever it is it finds troublesome — asking for an explanation is super useful,” said Blackburn, who did not hide his disdain for the right’s decision to leave analysis to a chatbot. “There’s just a lot of responsibility being abdicated if you’re abdicating the responsibility with this kind of not sophisticated prompting strategy with no real thought into how to evaluate what comes out of these models.”
It is the dumbest of dumb things used by cheaters to censor others, say intellectual freedom advocates. BLOCKADE interprets conservative values to mean whatever xAI or OpenAI’s LLMs say they mean and then builds a “risk profile” for the book that the right-winger then saves as a PDF to ape legitimate book reviews from organizations like Moms for Liberty. These bot reviews are designed to be submitted as attachments to formal book challenges to school and library districts.
404 Media says other conservative organizations then mass produce the bans “using heat maps to monitor books they don’t like that remain available in school libraries by aggregating data by state, district, school building and the number of books in circulation.”
“Committees are basing their decisions off of that biased information, and so they’re going to be more predisposed to remove books because the only thing they’re seeing is a red flag saying, ‘Hey, this book is p----, you should remove this book,” said Jessica Horton, who oversees Let Davis Read — a watchdog group monitoring local book challenges submitted to her children’s school district.
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AN 3 26
Hundreds of signs, merchandise and presentations by the National Park Service have been flagged by President Donald Trump’s administration for possible removal as part of its war against “ideological indoctrination.”
According to a NOTUS review of the material, an evaluation reveals that "in many instances, park staff acknowledged" the material was factual.
The removal reports were recently published online by an anonymous federal government employee and first reported by the Washington Post.
The removal requests were made to national parks, monuments and other sites. The order targets content that the administration deems “partisan” or “disparaging," according to Trump's executive order. Slavery, climate change and Native American issues were among the subjects to come under scrutiny.
The National Parks Conservation Association sued the Interior Department this month over removal of such content from park sites.
Whether the Interior Department and National Park Service subsequently reviewed each of the content reports isn’t clear. It has also avoided specifics on how much content is being removed or altered.
Molly Blake, a team member at Save Our Signs, told NOTUS the group has tracked hundreds of signs, displays and other material removed since Trump issued the executive order.
“The spreadsheet shows that the message that was sent is that we can’t talk about times in American history where people in power hurt other people. We can’t talk about times in American history where people’s civil rights were violated,” Blake said. “And that’s a really killing and disturbing development.”
A National Park Service spokesperson issued a statement calling such claims false.
The executive order has already had a chilling effect in some cases.
An exhibit at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park that explores how people from different backgrounds can interpret archaeology in different ways was flagged as “factually accurite [sic], but submitting for review out of an abundance of caution,” the report said.
Another report that mentioned how Native American people were removed during development of the Transcontinental Railroad was also flagged, despite also being tagged as accurate by the reporting party.
“We understand a lot of folks are responding under duress, and I think that kind of comes out of some of the comments that have been leaked,” Blake said. “What I think is also just especially insidious is there’s no clear shared understanding of what it means to be quote-unquote ‘disparaging or inappropriate.’ And so then you get into these absurd situations where you’re reporting things that are historically accurate.”
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an
no lnx
New allegations against Bad Bunny are just a decoy
Super Bowl LX - Half-Time Show - New England Patriots v Seattle Seahawks - Levi's Stadium, Santa Clara, California, United States - February 8, 2026 Bad Bunny performs during the halftime show REUTERS/Mike Blake
:{John StoehrFebruary 12, 2026
At this point, you have probably heard enough about the effect of Bad Bunny’s Superbowl halftime show on the president and his coalition. While there are plenty of details to debate, including the ludicrous allegation that the Grammy-winner’s performance was “pure smut,” I think it’s important to keep your eyes fixed on what’s really at stake.
Rightwingers don’t mind “indecent acts,” as their protection of “the Epstein class” should attest. What they mind is a global superstar, whose originates from Puerto Rico and whose native language is Spanish, making affirmative claims about who belongs in America.
Bad Bunny’s halftime show was an extension of remarks he made two weekends ago after winning six Grammys. “Before I say thanks to God, I’m going to say ICE out,” he said. “We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans.”
His argument in favor of kindness and common cause, and in defense of diversity and inclusion, was later immortalized on words written on a football – “Together, we are America” – and it lay beneath a spectacle seen by 135 million, according to the Daily News.
The strength of Bad Bunny’s argument was enhanced by the impotence of its counterpart. The Turning Point USA, the hate group founded by the late Charlie Kirk, organized an alternate musical event. Emceed by Kid Rock, the show’s message was, more or less, America is for “us,” not “them.” And, according to the Daily News, just 6 million people watched it.
That’s their beef.
Donald Trump and his rightwing allies will not believe their vision of America – essentially, a racially exclusive club – is unpopular. And when I say “will not believe,” I am strictly speaking.
They will never accept that America has fallen in love with a man who was born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, who was bagging groceries a decade ago before rising to Spotify’s top global artist, who welcomes everyone and whose life embodies the American Dream.
So they smear him, accusing him of involvement in a criminal conspiracy to somehow force Americans into loving him against their will. That’s the thinking behind a new complaint by US Congressman Andy Ogles. The Tennessee Republican described the Superbowl halftime show as "pure smut" featuring "explicit displays of gay sexual acts, women gyrating provocatively, and Bad Bunny shamelessly grabbing his crotch while dry-humping the air."
Ogles continued, saying Bad Bunny "openly glorified sodomy and countless other unspeakable depravities." Ogles said "these flagrant, indecent acts" break federal law regulating television airwaves. He called for an investigation in a letter to the chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which oversees broadcast regulations.
But such allegations are decoys. Rightwingers do not care about “family values.” If they did, they would not tolerate the incarceration of babies. (The youngest person in the Dilley Detention Center in Texas is 2 months old, according to Univision.) Rightwingers do not care about higher-order things, only whether they can be used to accomplish their goals.
In this case, the goal is discrediting a global superstar who is popularizing a new and dangerous idea of belonging in America. You don’t need to pass a test. You don’t have to know the rules. You don’t even need the correct paperwork. If you’re here, you’re American.
Because “together, we are America.”
“Together, we are America” is new, as it casts immigration in the context of brotherhood, so the burden of government is finding ways of turning a fact of life into a fact of law.
It is dangerous, as it upends a decade of rightwing effort to move public understanding of immigration away from a matter of freedom and opportunity to a matter of crime and punishment. The burden is now entirely on individuals. They’re presumed guilty until proven innocent. “Together, we are America” has the potential of turning that around.
Bad Bunny’s ethic of belonging is dangerous for another reason. It comes as the logical conclusion to ten years of fear-mongering and hate speech is coming into view: families ripped apart, communities shredded, citizens murdered and concentration camps opening.
Even respectable white people, or “independent voters,” are recoiling (mostly because they are shocked to learn that an “immigration crackdown” includes them). Thanks to the horrors the country has witnessed over the last month, they are now open to alternatives, especially alternatives being advanced by the most popular performing artist on the planet.
Right now, the focus is on ICE and its crimes. That, however, is like the allegation that Bad Bunny’s show was “pure smut” – it limits politics to terms favorable to Trump. “Abolish ICE” should be part of a bigger picture so the meaning of belonging is radically redefined.
Immigrants are Americans. They might not speak the language. They might not know the rules. They might not have the right papers. But they are here. That makes them American.
The question is not if they are, but when it becomes official.
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AN 2 26
How MAGA 'book banning' doomed GOP candidate in deep red district
AN 1 26
Military newspaper hires screened for loyalty to Trump's 'policy priorities'
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AN 2 26
SEE GHOSTS OF MISS
Mississippi Today reports that President Donald Trump’s National Park Service (NPS) is replacing visitor brochures from the Medgar & Myrlie Evers Home National Monument, in Jackson, Mississippi.
Among the anticipated changes? No longer calling his murderer a “racist.”
“Edits to the brochure have removed that reference to Byron De La Beckwith, according to NPS officials, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution. Other edits include eliminating the reference to Medgar Evers lying in a pool of blood after being shot,” reports Mississippi Today writer Jerry Mitchell.
In 1963, Beckwith shot civil rights leader Medgar Evers in the back as he stood in the driveway of the Evers family home in northwest Jackson. His children were inside the home awaiting their father at the time of his death, and they saw him bleeding out in the front yard.
The original brochures pulled from the home described Beckwith as “a member of the racist and segregationist White Citizens’ Council.” That council, according to history author Stephanie Rolph, “believed in the natural superiority of the Aryan race.”
“They even went so far as to say that civilizations failed because of racial amalgamation,” Rolph added.
Mississippi Today reports Beckwith also belonged to the nation’s most violent white supremacist group, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, responsible for at least 10 killings in Mississippi.
“You can’t call Beckwith a racist?” said Jeff Steinberg, founder of Sojourn to the Past, which regularly provides civil rights tours to the home. “If you opened a picture dictionary and turned to the definition for ‘racist,’ you’d probably find a picture of Byron De La Beckwith.”
Mississippi Today reports NPS' decision comes in the wake of Trump’s March 2025 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which accused the Biden administration of a “widespread effort to rewrite our Nation’s history, replacing objective facts with a distorted narrative driven by ideology rather than truth.”
Furthermore, the order demanded the Secretary of the Interior “ensure” that all public monuments and properties within its jurisdiction “do not contain descriptions, depictions, or other content that inappropriately disparage Americans past or living.”
This apparently includes race-based assassins.
Mississippi Today adds that Trump initially hailed Evers, a World War II veteran, as a “great American hero” at the opening of the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum in 2017. But after his 2025 executive order, his U.S. Army removed Evers, and the names of other Black heroes, from a section on the Arlington National Cemetery website that honored non-white Americans who fought in the nation’s wars.
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ahmed says we are an ngo, we cannot by def censor anybody, but rubio /govt is using force = censor
PCO
A federal judge on Thursday blocked the Trump administration from deporting a British man who was recently placed on a visa ban after U.S. officials accused him and four other Europeans of online censorship.
Center for Countering Digital Hate CEO Imran Ahmed filed a complaint Thursday against Secretary of State Marco Rubioand Attorney General Pam Bondito prevent “the imminent prospect of unconstitutional arrest,” the lawsuit reads.
“The government’s actions are the latest in a string of escalating and unjustifiable assaults on the First Amendment and other rights, one that cannot stand basic legal scrutiny,” it continues. “Simply put, immigration enforcement—here, immigration detention and threatened deportation — may not be used as a tool to punish noncitizen speakers who express views disfavored by the current administration.”
The suit adds that Ahmed is a lawful permanent resident with a wife and son who are U.S. citizens.
The complaint cites other recent cases where foreign nationals on student visas, including Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, were stripped of their documentation and faced with deportation as “part of a larger pattern of attempted repression of constitutionally protected speech.”
“The government has no power to punish Mr. Ahmed for his research, protected speech, and advocacy, and Defendants cannot evade those constitutional limitations by simply claiming that Mr. Ahmed’s presence or activities have ‘potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States,'” the suit reads.
The administration placed the visa ban on Ahmed, along with French former European Union Commissioner Thierry Breton, Global Disinformation Index CEO Clare Melford and HateAid leaders Anna-Lena von Hodenberg and Josephine Ballon, on Tuesday.
By signing up, I agree to the Terms of Use, have reviewed the Privacy Policy, and to receive personalized offers and communications via email, on-site notifications, and targeted advertising using my email address from The Hill, Nexstar Media Inc., and its affiliates
Breton backed the EU’s Digital Services Act, which compelled online platforms to tackle hate speech and misinformation and remove it from their pages. U.S. officials claim the law unfairly targets American tech companies and citizens, Reuters reported.
On Tuesday, Rubio accused the five of leading “organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose.”
“Today, @StateDept will take steps to bar leading figures of the global censorship-industrial complex from entering the United States,” Rubio posted on social media. “We stand ready and willing to expand this list if others do not reverse course.”
Undersecretary of State Sarah Rogers shared Rubio’s message and warned that “if you spend your career fomenting censorship of American speech, you’re unwelcome on American soil.”
Breton criticized his visa ban, asking in an X post if “[former. Sen. Joe] McCarthy’s witch hunt” was back.
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sadly no paste --> whole page no lnx
Washington
By —
Fatima Hussein, Associated Press
U.S. bars five Europeans it says pressured tech firms to censor American viewpoints online
:{Politics Dec 24, 2025
WASHINGTON (AP) — The State Department announced Tuesday it was barring five Europeans it accused of leading efforts to pressure U.S. tech firms to censor or suppress American viewpoints.
The Europeans, characterized by Secretary of State Marco Rubio as "radical" activists and "weaponized" nongovernmental organizations, fell afoul of a new visa policy announced in May to restrict the entry of foreigners deemed responsible for censorship of protected speech in the United States.
"For far too long, ideologues in Europe have led organized efforts to coerce American platforms to punish American viewpoints they oppose," Rubio posted on X. "The Trump Administration will no longer tolerate these egregious acts of extraterritorial censorship."
The five Europeans were identified by Sarah Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, in a series of posts on social media. They include the leaders of organizations that address digital hate and a former European Union commissioner who clashed with tech billionaire Elon Musk over broadcasting an online interview with Donald Trump.
Rubio's statement said they advanced foreign government censorship campaigns against Americans and U.S. companies, which he said created "potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences" for the U.S.
The action to bar them from the U.S. is part of a Trump administration campaign against foreign influence over online speech, using immigration law rather than platform regulations or sanctions.
The five Europeans named by Rogers are: Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate; Josephine Ballon and Anna-Lena von Hodenberg, leaders of HateAid, a German organization; Clare Melford, who runs the Global Disinformation Index; and former EU Commissioner Thierry Breton, who was responsible for digital affairs.
Rogers in her post on X called Breton, a French business executive and former finance minister, the "mastermind" behind the EU's Digital Services Act, which imposes a set of strict requirements designed to keep internet users safe online. This includes flagging harmful or illegal content like hate speech.
She referred to Breton warning Musk of a possible "amplification of harmful content" by broadcasting his livestream interview with Trump in August 2024 when he was running for president.
Breton responded Tuesday on X by noting that all 27 EU members voted for the Digital Services Act in 2022. "To our American friends: 'Censorship isn't where you think it is,'" he wrote.
French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot said France condemns the visa restrictions on Breton and the four others. Also posting on X, he said the DSA was adopted to ensure that "what is illegal offline is also illegal online." He said it "has absolutely no extraterritorial reach and in no way concerns the United States."
A statement from Ballon and von Hodenberg, the co-CEOs of HateAid, called the move, "an act of repression by a government that is increasingly disregarding the rule of law and trying to silence its critics by any means necessary."
Most Europeans are covered by the Visa Waiver Program, which means they don't necessarily need visas to come into the country. They do, however, need to complete an online application prior to arrival under a system run by the Department of Homeland Security, so it is possible that at least some of these five people have been flagged to DHS, a U.S. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss details not publicly released.
Other visa restriction policies were announced this year, along with bans targeting foreign visitors from certain African and Middle Eastern countries and the Palestinian Authority. Visitors from some countries could be required to post a financial bond when applying for a visa.
Associated Press Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee contributed to this report.
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an 12 25
Once you begin surrendering to Trump, he always wants more. You can’t appease a tyrant.
David Ellison’s CBS — after gutting DEI policies there, appointing right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein to a new “ombudsman” role, and making anti-“woke” opinion journalist Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News (despite her lack of experience in either broadcasting or newsrooms) — yesterday removed a segment from “60 Minutes” featuring stories of Venezuelan men deported by the Trump administration to what the program called a “brutal” prison in El Salvador. Bari Weiss had demanded changes to the segment.
The Ellisons — fils et père — have been seeking Trump’s support for their hostile bid to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, but Trump has been unhappy with recent episodes of “60 Minutes,” even under its new management. Hence, the segment’s removal.
Sharyn Alfonsi, a long-standing “60 Minutes” correspondent who reported the segment that was removed, accused CBS News of pulling it for “political” reasons. “Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices,” she wrote in a note to the CBS News Team. “It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now, after every rigorous internal check has been met, is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.”
Here’s Alfonsi’s note in full:
News Team,
Thank you for the notes and texts. I apologize for not reaching out earlier.
I learned on Saturday that Bari Weiss spiked our story, INSIDE CECOT, which was supposed to air tonight. We (Ori and I) asked for a call to discuss her decision. She did not afford us that courtesy/opportunity.
Our story was screened five times and cleared by both CBS attorneys and Standards and Practices. It is factually correct. In my view, pulling it now-after every rigorous internal check has been met is not an editorial decision, it is a political one.
We requested responses to questions and/or interviews with DHS, the White House, and the State Department. Government silence is a statement, not a VETO. Their refusal to be interviewed is a tactical maneuver designed to kill the story.
If the administration’s refusal to participate becomes a valid reason to spike a story, we have effectively handed them a “kill switch” for any reporting they find inconvenient.
If the standard for airing a story becomes “the government must agree to be interviewed,” then the government effectively gains control over the 60 Minutes broadcast. We go from an investigative powerhouse to a stenographer for the state.
These men risked their lives to speak with us. We have a moral and professional obligation to the sources who entrusted us with their stories. Abandoning them now is a betrayal of the most basic tenet of journalism: giving voice to the voiceless.
CBS spiked the Jeffrey Wigand interview due to legal concerns, nearly destroying the credibility of this broadcast. It took years to recover from that “low point.” By pulling this story to shield an administration, we are repeating that history, but for political optics rather than legal ones.
We have been promoting this story on social media for days. Our viewers are expecting it. When it fails to air without a credible explanation, the public will correctly identify this as corporate censorship. We are trading 50 years of “Gold Standard” reputation for a single week of political quiet.
I care too much about this broadcast to watch it be dismantled without a fight.
Sharyn
Sharyn Alfonsi wins this week’s Joseph N. Welch Award for courage in the face of tyranny (named for the chief counsel for the U.S. Army who confronted Senator Joe McCarthy with the iconic question, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?" which led to McCarthy’s demise).
I’m old enough to remember when CBS News would never have surrendered to a demagogic president. But that was when CBS News — the home of Edward R. Murrow (who also revealed to America the danger of Joe McCarthy) and Walter Cronkite — was independent of the rest of CBS. And when the top management of CBS felt they had independent responsibilities to the American public.
America can survive without a “60 Minutes” it can trust, just as we can survive without trustworthy editorial pages of the Washington Post.But at some point, as Trump continues to repress criticism of him and his regime, American democracy is compromised beyond repair.
We are coming to the end of only the first year of Trump II. He and the lapdogs and sycophants around him have done more damage to this nation in less than a year than I thought possible.
They have not been them alone in their destruction. They’ve had enablers in the form of billionaires such as Larry and David Ellison, along with quisling managers such as Bari Weiss, who confuse having money and power with possessing integrity and fostering the common good.
Here, in sharp contrast to today’s cowardly suck-up CBS News under Bari Weiss and David Ellison, is
, from April 13, 1954.
*Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/.
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an 11 25
Public libraries in Tennessee have begun to shut down as they carry out an order from state officials to remove children’s books containing LGBTQ+ themes or characters.
For Popular Information, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims reported Tuesday that the “book purge” is required to be carried out at all 181 libraries in the Tennessee Regional Library System, which encompasses most of the state, aside from cities like Nashville and Memphis.
It comes after Tennessee’s Republican Secretary of State, Tre Hargettt, sent a pair of letters earlier this fall. The first, sent on September 8, said that in order to receive state and federal grants, which run through his office, libraries needed to comply with a Tennessee law banning diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) offices from agencies, as well as President Donald Trump’s executive order on “gender ideology,” which effectively ended the federal recognition of transgender and nonbinary individuals.
As the report notes, neither of these orders says anything about library books. However, Hargett argued that compliance with the executive order mandated book bans because it states that “federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology.”
Not only do executive orders typically not apply to state and local governments, but the federal funds Tennessee’s libraries receive are not used to purchase books at all. Instead, according to the secretary of state’s website, they “provide all state residents with online access to essential library and information resources, including licensed databases, a statewide library catalog and interlibrary loan system, bibliographic services, and materials for the disadvantaged.”
The Every Library Institute, an advocacy group that supports federal funding for libraries, said that Hargett’s instructions “contain significant errors, likely exceeding the secretary’s authority and reflecting a political agenda rather than a neutral or accurate interpretation of federal or state law.”
“Hargett is setting a dangerous precedent by placing Tennessee’s state and municipal government under the authority of any executive order by any president,” the group continued. “Executive orders are not laws.”
But Crosby and Sims argued: “Even if the executive order did apply to Tennessee local libraries, simply having books with LGBTQ stories and characters does not constitute ‘promoting gender ideology.’ The classic fairytale Little Red Riding Hood involves a wolf eating a little girl, but does not promote violence. Children’s books are stories, not instruction manuals.”
On October 27, Hargett sent another letter, giving libraries 60 days to undertake an “age appropriateness review” of all books in their children’s section to find any books that may be inconsistent either with Tennessee’s age appropriateness law or with Trump’s executive order.
As Ken Paulson, the director of Middle Tennessee University’s Free Speech Center, noted, the age appropriateness law, which was last updated in 2024, “is modeled after obscenity laws and prohibits nudity, excessive violence, and explicit sexuality, hardly the stuff of children’s sections. Further, the law applies to school libraries, not public libraries.”
Though Hargett provided no criteria for how to assess what books would need to be purged, he did provide an example of one he felt violated both orders: Fred Gets Dressed, a 2021 picture book by the New York Times bestselling author Peter Brown. As Popular Information noted:
The book, which was written by a straight, cisgender man, does not feature any LGBTQ characters. Instead it is based on a childhood experience of the author in which he tried on his mother’s clothing and makeup. If a book about a boy trying on his mother’s clothes is the strongest example of “promoting gender ideology” that Hargett could identify, it raises questions about the necessity of the review.
Earlier this month, the state’s Rutherford County Library System, which serves the cities of Smyrna and Murfreesboro, shut down several of its library branches for up to a week to “meet new reporting requirements” from Hargett’s office.
It’s unclear why the Rutherford County system determined it needed to shut down in order to carry out the review, nor has it been made clear whether other library systems will be expected to do the same.
As former librarian Kelly Jensen noted for the blog Book Riot, the Rutherford County system has made its own efforts to ban transgender-friendly books, but backed off from the policy earlier this summer for fear of litigation after a Murfreesboro law branding “homosexuality” as a form of “public indecency” resulted in the city being forced to settle a lawsuit for $500,000.
Kelly wrote that for Rutherford library system’s board, Hargett’s order is “a convenient means of subverting their fears of litigation, which drove them to change their anti-trans book policy earlier this summer. If the directive is from the state, then they ‘have to’ comply. The Tennessee secretary of state is granting permission slips to public library boards to ban away.”
This week, a group of 33 major publishers, library advocacy groups, and free speech and civil rights organizations signed onto a letter to Hargett expressing “profound concern” over its review mandate.
The coalition included PEN America, the American Library Association, the National Coalition Against Censorship, and the transgender rights advocacy organization GLAAD. Major publishing houses also signed on, including Penguin Random House, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster.
“These types of reviews create immense administrative burdens for library systems and often lead to illegal censorship, which raises liability risks for local communities and the state,” the groups said. “Many libraries, uncertain about the legal and procedural basis for the mandate, have had to redirect limited resources, with some temporarily closing branches to complete these reviews, which are implied to be necessary for future funding.”
“The demands in your letter need immediate clarification, as it is not reasonable to expect libraries to follow directives that would risk violating applicable law, including the US Constitution,” they added. “It is illegal to remove books from public libraries because some people do not like them. This is a well-settled legal principle.”
The Rutherford County Library Alliance, which has challenged municipal anti-LGBTQ+ laws as well as the censorship policies of the library’s own board, said that “we have seen firsthand the concrete harm of the Secretary’s directives—library closures during story time, intimidation of professional librarians, and the breakdown of democratic representation in our public library system.”
“We hope Secretary Hargett will fulfill their duty to promote library development by supporting our constitutionally-guaranteed rights and our highly trained librarians,” the alliance added, “rather than enabling censorship from 0.001% of our community for 100% of our community.”
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AN 11 25
HARPERS FERRY, W.Va. — Despite concerns about attempted historical erasure at Harpers Ferry National Historical Park due to new Trump administration policies being unfounded, some historians worry other attempts across the country may have a detrimental impact on historical preservation in the U.S.
ABC 7 News first reported that Harpers Ferry was forced to remove items located in its slavery exhibit due to the Trump Administration’s March 27 executive order, “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.” According to the report, the order would force “the National Park Service [to] remove or cover up signs or displays that have been determined by the Trump administration to disproportionally emphasize negative aspects of American history or historical figures.”
However, Alan Spears, the senior director for cultural resources at the National Parks Conservation Association, said a citizen watchdog group created to protect and enhance America’s national parks found the story to be false. As a historian, Spears’ work in the association is focused on protecting and promoting historic and cultural resources tied to the federal parks department.
According to him and other historians, concern is still being raised about how this order is affecting national parks and important historical exhibits across the country.
According to the order, it intends to “restore Federal sites dedicated to history, including parks and museums, to solemn and uplifting public monuments that remind Americans of our extraordinary heritage, consistent progress toward becoming a more perfect Union, and unmatched record of advancing liberty, prosperity and human flourishing.”
Two months after the initial order was released, on May 20, the Secretary of the Interior released an additional order, SO 3431, which essentially “operationalized” the order for the United States Parks Service, according to Spears.
The order did three things. First, it set up QR codes that allowed parkgoers to enter comments about the location. Spears said he believes that the administration was looking for people to “tattle on the National Park service to say, ‘We don’t really like this interpretation. It’s too liberal, it’s too woke, it’s too DEI, it’s too anti-American.’”
However, what the Secretary of the Interior found instead was that many parkgoers had either positive things to say about the historical interpretation of these sites or that these sites actually needed more work when defining issues like slavery, women’s rights, labor rights, and Native and Indigenous history.
Next, the parks were ordered to submit lists of any interpretive materials that might fall into what SO 3431 is trying to remove. Finally, the Secretary of the Interior sorted through these lists and sent out letters of noncompliance.
According to Spears, not all parks submitted lists for review, and not all parks were sent letters from the Interior. Ultimately, Harpers Ferry was not included in either set.
There are some images that could trigger a letter of noncompliance, according to Spears, such as photographs from their “Protests in America” display of a man being arrested at an AIDS protest, a group protesting the Vietnam War and the National Women’s Party that protested for women’s suffrage, for example. However, the park has not received orders to remove them, and Spears said that as far as he is aware, they do not plan to.
However, he said he does believe that the administration is not running an entirely transparent process. Despite Harpers Ferry not being on the list, several other facilities in the country were told to scrub their historical sites and landmarks.
Signs about climate change at Acadia National Park in Maine have been taken down, an LGBTQ display at a Rosie the Riveter site in Oakland, California, was taken down and then put back after concern was raised, and references to transgender activism at the Stonewall Inn in New York City have been removed.
“The truth of the matter is that nobody really is talking publicly about what’s been on the target list,” Spears said.
The language of the order itself has also caused concern, with the focus framed on “the greatness of the achievements and progress of the American people or, with respect to natural features, the beauty, abundance, and grandeur of the American landscape,” instead of outright saying it will enforce bans on historical knowledge focused on marginalized groups.
Another historian and graduate student, Peter D’Arpa, said he believes the wording is built to give it plausible deniability.
“[The administration] can’t, right now, just do stuff. They have to keep people happy, where we’re at right now.”
He compared this language to fascist states like Nazi Germany, in which Nazis would “build consensus amongst your population of who belongs and who doesn’t,” “get them angry at certain groups,” and only then, once they were used to ostracize members of the group, could they move on to their removal or inflict violence on them.
Spears said what’s happening now is an issue of “whether or not this country wants to come to grips with the lingering effects” of difficult parts of American history, including slavery.
In his perspective, some do and some don’t — and that is one of the crises at the heart of the historical erasure, he said.
“I think it’s important that efforts to soften, sanitize, erase this history is critically important,” Spears said. “If you don’t want to learn about slavery and its lingering impacts on this country, that’s your choice. I think it’s a bad choice, but it’s your choice.”
In the end, he said he does not want that choice to be taken away from those who actively want to seek out these stories and learn from them.
“I do believe that if we… want to bring people together, that we have to see each other and understand a little bit more about where we’ve come from. That means our history — that shared national narrative of ours — has to include the ugly parts as well as the beautiful parts,” Spears said.
D’Arpa has also raised concerns about the order and how it points to division within the country. According to him, the division and historical erasure happening now are a result of citizens being angry and scared that they are being forgotten by those in power.
“They hear that the Democrats say they want to take care of a specific group of people, but they don’t hear the Democrats say they want to take care of all Americans, and that scares people that are in rural America that might like American policies,” he said. “They don’t want to be forgotten, they don’t want to feel like they’re being forced to accept a certain ideology that they don’t agree with.”
Politically, D’Arpa said he believes the order to be anti-American. He said that it points to the president taking power away from the people and the states, using the power of the federal government to force the people and the states “to basically think the way the government wants them to think.”
The historical preservation and documentation that took place during this time also inspired the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, an organization in which volunteers photograph and film different exhibits in the Smithsonian, should anything be removed or changed. The Smithsonian museums located in D.C. have been sent letters of noncompliance, but as of right now, nothing has changed.
Historically, similar censorship has happened in Communist China, according to historian and professor at Georgetown University and co-founder of the citizen historians group Citizens Historians for the Smithsonian James Millward.
After the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, the Chinese Communist Party worked very hard over decades to ensure people didn’t know the full story of what happened.
“They created their own version of what it was, and made it impossible to write about or talk about,” Millward said.
The historical preservation and documentation that took place during this time also inspired the Citizen Historians for the Smithsonian, an organization in which volunteers photograph and film different exhibits in the Smithsonian, should anything be removed or changed. The Smithsonian museums located in D.C. have been sent letters of noncompliance, but as of right now, nothing has changed.
Lizzie Watts, who worked in the National Parks Service for 49 years, said she feels the order makes it harder to tell a complete story. She said she believes people work hard to preserve historical sites like Harpers Ferry because they tell an inclusive story of our history.
“All stories are not happy, all stories don’t end on a good note, but they’re history,” she said. “If we ever want to get back to a moderate world where everyone gets along and understands each other and works for the betterment of the United States, then we have to be inclusive. You can’t leave people out, you can’t avoid the sad things to just “try to save the positive parts of history.”
Ultimately, all these historians say that the order is unique to the United States in this moment, and although it is not clear what the future of it will look like, they worry about the preservation of the nation’s history for future generations.
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no lnx
'Irresponsible': MAGA enraged by new Leonardo DiCaprio film
Cast member Leonardo DiCaprio attends the London premiere for the movie "One Battle After Another" in London, Britain, September 16, 2025. REUTERS/Katie Collins
Thom Hartmann
October 10, 2025
This week has felt like one battle after another. We all watched video after video of ICE agents dropping from helicopters onto a Chicago apartment block, kicking in doors and terrorizing Black and Hispanic American and immigrant families, then trashing and stealing their possessions without ever presenting a warrant signed by a judge.
The GOP pushed the country to the brink again with another government shutdown threat while right-wing legislatures redrew districts to erase the votes of millions. We heard more talk of arresting journalists for doing their jobs, and watched as the military rolled through American cities as if people here are the enemy.
Each day has felt like a slow-motion assault on democracy itself.
Louise and I went to see Leonardo DiCaprio’s new movie, One Battle After Another, last weekend, and I was stunned. It’s a film of rare courage and artistry. From the first scene to the last, Paul Thomas Anderson reminds us that cinema can still tell the truth about power and conscience. It’s a film that demands attention, not permission.
The movie runs about two-and-a-half hours, but it’s so action- and drama-packed that it felt like it flew by in less than an hour. I knew people similar to those characterized in this movie when I was in East Lansing SDS back in 1968-69: seeing them portrayed like this was a hoot! This is truly brilliant film-making.
Predictably, conservatives rushed to condemn it. Some labeled it “irresponsible” or claimed it “glorifies violence.” What they really mean is that it unsettles them. They prefer art that flatters authority and soothes the comfortable. This film refuses to do either.
The world Anderson portrays is not a fantasy. When federal agents execute suspects, when protests are manipulated to justify repression, when truth is distorted by propaganda, that is not simply fiction. It reflects the deep anxiety of a society that’s watched Trump’s executive power become far too concentrated and way too cruel. Anyone paying attention to the news knows how real that danger feels.
The rightwing National Review published a piece titled “There Will Be Bloodlust in ‘One Battle After Another’” that accused Anderson of romanticizing 1960s radicalism. Yet DiCaprio, who stars in the film, called it a “timely satire.” Speaking to Reuters, he said, “It’s not a film where people are imposing any political beliefs on anyone else. It’s satire on both ends.”
That contrast says everything. Conservatives want to see chaos; Anderson and his cast are inviting reflection. The violence in the film is not triumphant; it’s painful, personal, and tragic. It shows what happens when injustice festers until ordinary people begin to break, as I saw in the people I knew in the Weather Underground back in the day.
History reminds us that art has always frightened the powerful. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was banned in the South because it forced them to confront slavery. Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle was smeared by industrialists for revealing the cruelty of unregulated capitalism. Protest music of the 1960s and artists like Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger were condemned as “unpatriotic” by the same crowd that called Dr. King a radical.
When art tells the truth, power always howls.
Today the same pattern repeats. The same rightwing billionaires funding “outrage” over this film are working to silence teachers, censor libraries, and rewrite history to protect privilege. They fear a nation that can still feel empathy; they fear what happens when people start asking why power serves so few.
One Battle After Another is not a call to arms. It is, instead, a warning about what happens when corruption becomes normal and compassion becomes rare. It asks us to look at the machinery of cruelty and decide whether we’ll stand by or resist. That choice is the same one that generations before us have faced.
If this film makes people uncomfortable, that’s its purpose. Democracy doesn’t survive by comforting the powerful. It survives when ordinary people demand justice and truth, even when it stings.
One Battle After Another will be called divisive by those who profit from division. They’re wrong. The real division in this country is between those who believe art should serve power and those who believe art should challenge it.
I stand with the challengers, because when we fall silent, we serve power; when we speak, we hold it to account.
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AHA HE LOOKS FOR THE EDGE OUTLIER MARGINAL AS STARTING PT?
an 9 25 the conv
“If you burn a flag, you get one year in jail. No early exits. No nothing.” This is what US president Donald Trump
in the Oval Office in the last week in August. Ever the master media manipulator, America’s communicator-in-chief issued this as an executive order. VID]
An executive order is issued by the president and doesn’t need to be passed by Congress. They are, however, expected to relate to existing law. Trump so far has signed 196. His latest directive, which aims to restore “respect, pride and sanctity” to the US flag, instructs the Department of Justice to investigate instances of burning the nation’s insignia under particular circumstances.
While the practice of flag burning as protest has a long history in the US, dating back to the US civil war, it is not a regular occurrence, and has been constitutionally permitted for decades.
The issue is already creating divisions among Republicans. There are three broad categories of GOP reaction. First, the Maga faithful are unlikely to complain. Unconditional support for their leader is a key trait of this group. And the executive order includes language with guaranteed appeal to those for whom terms such as “American patriots” and “foreign nationals” are predictable triggers. The president has long excelled at rallying his supporters on flag-related matters.
Beyond red-meat-for-the-base appeal, both the executive order and GOP support for it get a little more complex. Traditional conservatives, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, are a group that may have strongly negative feelings about flag burning, but their adherence to the first amendment and associated freedom of expression would generally override this.
Those who hold constitutional principles in high regard are increasingly concerned about a president demonstrating his desire for expansive power. And, the US Supreme Court has clearly ruled on more than one occasion that the act, however distasteful, is constitutionally permitted.
Antonin Scalia, the late Supreme Court justice and noted constitutional textualist, famously stated that “if it were up to me, I would put in jail every sandal-wearing, scruffy-bearded weirdo who burns the American flag”. But, he added: “I am not king.” Alongside the more centrist Anthony Kennedy, these justices upheld the right to burn the US flag in the 1989 landmark case of Texas v Johnson, despite Scalia’s personal distaste for the act. In his writings, Scalia differentiated between the form of expression that was flag burning, and an act of insurrection, which, he noted, was “something quite different”. The first amendment, as he understood it, allowed for symbolic political protests, regardless of how offensive such expressions might be to patriotic sensibilities.
Already, analysts have highlighted how the president’s efforts to sidestep the constitution are laden with problems. Executive orders cannot override a Supreme Court ruling. Even Donald Trump should know that.
Getting around current law
What the executive order does attempt to do is to get around the law that allows flag burning. To do so, it focuses on associated crime such as property destruction, open burning violations and disorderly conduct. The attorney general, Pam Bondi, was instructed to pursue cases against those who “incite violence or otherwise violate our laws while desecrating this symbol of our country”. So, when someone is (legally) burning a flag, they may be acting illegally at the same time by, for example, committing a hate crime. And this could trigger prosecution.
Donald Trump signs an executive order on flag burning.
Furthermore, the executive order nods to a key flashpoint of the current climate by leveraging immigration law, and potentially facilitating the deportation of non-citizens who engage in flag-burning. Beyond the smoke-filled headlines, what this ruling does is circumvent the core ruling of Texas v Johnson by focusing on the circumstances surrounding any flag burning, rather than the act itself. A further aspect will involve the extent to which the courts could expand existing first amendment exceptions. This can only make for nervous constitutional conservatives.
The third group who mostly reside on the Trumpian side of the partisan fence are libertarians such as Republican senator Rand Paul. In a similar vein to their conservative counterparts, their worldview would sit uncomfortably with the president’s foray into testing constitutional principles, and not standing up for more wide-ranging free speech.
Flags and freedom
Libertarians tend to feel strongly about freedom of expression. And when their president picks a fight with the first amendment for no apparent reason beyond a mention he made of it on the campaign trail, he may end up aggravating more supporters than he pleases.
Writing on Reason.com, libertarian journalist Robby Soave argued that Trump is the “last person who should confuse protected speech with incitement to violence”. He added: “Any administration that purports to care about freedom of speech should easily reach the conclusion that criminalizing provocative yet nonviolent acts of political expression is a violation of this principle.”
For a president who deliberately and controversially appointed “Scalia-like” judges during his first term, his latest executive order seems at odds with this vision. Such inconsistency, for what may involve more Justice Department smoke than actual fire, may not serve the president well if many conservatives remain uncomfortable with the move.
To misquote a famous phrase attributed to Voltaire, the US Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that whatever a majority of the justices think of those who actually want to burn the US flag, they will all but defend to the death your right to burn it.
The waters are further muddied now that a self-described combat veteran has set fire to the flag in response to the executive order. It is unlikely he is a “sandal-wearing weirdo”. Hence, the president’s patriotic script may end up somewhat singed around the edges.
Clodagh Harrington, Lecturer in American Politics, University College Cork
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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an 9 25
National Security Leaders for America, a bipartisan organization comprising former senior military, diplomatic and intelligence officials, has strongly condemned the Pentagon’s recent directive imposing restrictions on journalists. Thenew policymandates that journalists sign a pledge agreeing not to report any information — even if unclassified — unless it has been authorized by a Pentagon official, under the threat of losing their press credentials.
In a statement releasedto the press Monday, the organization's president and founder, Rear Admiral Mike Smith (Ret.) said: “Demanding journalists adhere across the board to state edicts about what may — or may not — be reported to the public does not project strength. To the contrary, it betrays unsettling insecurities about the legality and effectiveness of Pentagon actions, plans and priorities."
“Our membership includes many former senior Department of Defense political appointees, as well as general and flag officers; we know how frustrating it can be when plans get out before they’re ready. We know how crucial it is to protect classified information and material, especially when its release could put sources and methods at risk. But the idea that only state sanctioned information is all that can ever be reported to the public flies in the face of the crucial role journalism plays in ensuring our armed forces are accountable to the American people," Smith added.
Rear Admiral Tom Jurkowsky (Ret.), former Chief of Navy Information, said: “Journalists at the Pentagon play a critical role, and Secretary Hegseth is being shortsighted in demanding journalists make this pledge. The public has a right and a responsibility to understand what the military is doing in their name, and that is not possible without an aggressive, sometimes adversarial press.”
The statement from the organization called for a "healthy relationship between the fourth state and Pentagon officials," which it said was "essential to communicating critical information about American national security to the public and has, in rare circumstances, uncovered unacceptable activities that might have otherwise remained hidden." The group asserted that "unprecedented disregard for the Constitution, absent any national security considerations, undermines law, good order and effectiveness."
Several journalists' groups and press freedom organization have sounded the alarm over the recent policy.
The Society of Professional Journalists called it “alarming” and said the move “reeks of prior restraint — the most egregious violation of press freedom under the First Amendment.”
The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press pointed out ambiguous language in the policy: what counts as “authorized information,” what is “a security or safety risk,” which areas in the Pentagon are covered, etc. The organization warned that such vagueness can lead reporters to self‐censor rather than risk losing access.
Some groups are explicitly calling for the Pentagon to rescind the policy. Others are saying the implementation should at least be paused until the vague terms are clarified and possibly narrowed to avoid overreach.
Meanwhile on Sunday, President Donald Trump was asked by a reporter whether the Pentagon should decide what reporters can report. “No, I don’t think so," he replied.
He added, “Nothing stops reporters.”
Trump's statements appear to express disagreement with the Pentagon policy, but there is no public indication he has ordered it rescinded or formally intervened.
Last week, Trump escalated his rhetoric against media outlets he accused of bias, suggesting that the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) should revoke the broadcast licenses of networks that provide "negative" coverage.
This comment came a day after ABC suspended "Jimmy Kimmel Live!" following remarks by late-night host Jimmy Kimmel about conservative activist Charlie Kirk's murder.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee, had earlier hinted that ABC's broadcast license could be at risk if the network did not take action against Kimmel.
But on Monday, Disney announced that Kimmel would returnto the air on Tuesday, six days after the suspension, citing internal discussions and business considerations. The decision to reinstate the show followed public backlash, including boycotts and protests, and concerns over press freedom and censorship.
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AN 9 25
History’s path is never linear. But its turns can be very sharp.
It is rare to be able to identify the moment when we can say “this is the point at which everything changed”.
So have we reached the point where we can say the United States is in a constitutional crisis? Has American democracy failed? Has the US descended into authoritarianism?
If the answers to those questions weren’t clear already, they are now.
Yes. It is happening. Right now.
Not because of one incident, but a series of moments and choices, events within familiar historical structures, that are pushing the US over the edge.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the choices made by the administration in its aftermath, is one such moment. It was immediately clear the Trump administration would use Kirk’s murder as a pretext for accelerating its authoritarian project, weaponising it to destroy opponents, both real and imagined.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump blamed the “radical left” and promised a crackdown on “organizations” that “contributed” to the crime. His vice president, JD Vance,
, effectively making it a tool of state-sponsored media. VID]
On that show, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller promised “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”.
In the MAGA-verse, terms such as “radical left”, “networks” and “organisations” are code for any form of opposition or dissent – including the Democratic Party and traditional media. It is worth noting here that “radical left” is now shifting to terms as broad as “left-leaning”, progressive or, even more subversive, liberal.
The Trump administration is promising to go after the fundraising architecture of its opposition, broadly defined. And it will. It is already using the agencies of the federal government – including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Internal Revenue Service – to threaten, punish and obliterate those who oppose it.
And the moments keep coming. On Wednesday, Chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, appeared on another far-right podcast. Carr – a Project 2025 contributor – suggested that broadcasters running the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show were risking “the possibility of fines or licensed revocation from the FCC” due to Kimmel’s comments about Kirk’s death.
That night, ABC announced that Kimmel’s show would be suspended indefinitely.
Kimmel’s moment follows Stephen Colbert’s. It follows another moment earlier in the week, when Trump berated senior Australian Broadcasting Commission journalist John Lyons, aggressively telling him he was “hurting” Australia and that he would tell the Australian prime minster as much. The ABC has since been barred from Trump’s UK press conference, ostensibly for “logistical reasons”.
In the firehose of these moments, it can be difficult to see them in context. But they are all connected – part of a deliberate, carefully planned program to destroy anyone or anything that opposes or even questions Republican orthodoxy as defined by Trump.
The Kirk moment, the Kimmel moment, and all the rest, must be understood in that broader framework. This week, too, the Trump administration announced it was deploying the National Guard into Memphis, Tennessee. It will likely also send the National Guard into Chicago, as it has long been threatening. It has already despatched the National Guard into Los Angeles and Washington DC.
Trump and his cronies are openly musing about other “Democrat cities”. The point is to sow fear and suppress dissent. It is working.
This month, in the aftermath of a meeting with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, Trump promised to end mail-in voting. The Trump-aligned Supreme Court is poised to gut a key provision of the Voting Rights Act intended to prevent racial discrimination. The mid-term elections are still over a year away.
Incredibly, we are only eight months into the second Trump administration. But the moments will keep coming, and the speed at which they arrive will likely accelerate.
Taken together, they paint a very grim picture for the future of US democracy, constrained though it already is. The widespread, coordinated suppression of dissent – and the extended chilling effect that suppression has – are ripping apart the fabric of American political life.
It is here. It is happening. History is being made before our eyes.
This is a monumental change. For the United States. For the world.
Emma Shortis, Adjunct Senior Fellow, School of Global, Urban and Social Studies, *RMIT University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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EDIT BD AN 9 25
If it feels like you’re being forced to honor and respect a demagogue and liar under penalty of … some bad thing, well, you’re not wrong.
As Radley Balko said Monday, “we're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing, as has the lack of urgency [or] silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.”
How is this happening? Consider the case of Stephen King.
Yes, that Stephen King.
Last week, on Twitter, the novelist quoted-tweeted remarks by Fox host Jesse Watters. “Charlie Kirk was not a ‘controversial’ or ‘polarizing’ man,” Watters said. “Charlie was a PATRIOT. THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction. Rest in peace, my friend.”
It should be said first of all that this is a lie. Kirk was nothing but controversial and polarizing. That was his entire shtick. And that’s why Stephen King said: “He advocated for stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”
This set off a firestorm of outrage, perhaps the loudest coming from US Senator Mike Lee of Utah: “Please share if you agree that the estate of Charlie Kirk should sue Stephen King for defamation over this heinously false accusation. He crossed a line. It will prove costly.”
Actually, it won’t. You can’t defame the dead. Defamation is about an injury to one’s reputation. You don’t have an injury, and you don’t have a reputation, when you’re dead. Once you’re dead, there’s nothing anyone can say to hurt you. Mike Lee, who is an attorney, knows that.
If litigation wasn’t Lee’s point, what was? Silencing a famous and (nominally) liberal critic of the broader totalitarian project. And he and others succeeded by forcing King to apologize. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays,” King said. “What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.”
But King wasn’t wrong – not exactly. While it’s true that Kirk never said, “I hereby advocate for the stoning of gays to death,” he did say a Bible chapter, which calls for stoning a man who lies with another man, “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” That might not be advocacy, in the word’s strictest sense, but close enough.
The context matters, too. Kirk was criticizing Rachel Anne Accurso, the YouTube children’s video personality who goes by Ms Rachel. In June of last year, she made a biblical case for LGBTQ-plus inclusion. According to Factcheck.org, she said: “In Matthew 22, a religious teacher asked Jesus, what’s the most important commandment? And Jesus says, to love God and to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’
“It doesn’t say love every neighbor except,” Ms Rachel said.
That’s what Kirk was responding to. Ms Rachel made no room for exceptions to God’s greatest law. In reply, Kirk did his own cherry-picking. He reached back to the Old Testament for a chapter that “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” Instead of including LGBTQ-plus people in God’s beloved community, as Jesus Christ might have done, he made the case for excluding them.
Ms Rachel advocated for love.
Kirk advocated for hate.
That Kirk did not explicitly advocate for the stoning of gays to death, in the strictest sense and syntax of those words, is therefore a distinction without a difference – unless, like Kirk, you’re a liar. In that case, the distinction between saying what you’re saying and not saying what you’re saying is important. If that collapses, so does your deception.
As long as the distinction between what is said and what is intended to be understood is in place, it’s possible to bully people into silence.
That’s what happened to Stephen King and others. They spoke the truth about Kirk – not the strict letter of it but the true spirit of it – but did not have the courage to stand by the truth after being accused of slander. And in the process of apologizing, they ended up affirming the lie, making it grow bigger, such that a USA Today story about King’s apology says that he “repeatedly apologized for a false accusation.” (After all, it must have been false if Stephen King apologized for it.)
I dwell on this episode, because it’s a microcosm of a much larger and more pernicious pattern in American politics in which the Republicans and their media allies (not just in the rightwing media) have taken the deceit that resides between what is said and what is intended to be understood, and have made that deceit structural, so such that telling the truth – in this case, saying plainly what Charlie Kirk meant, as opposed to what he said – is a radical act deserving of punishment.
The AP reported Monday that “after years of complaints from the right about ‘cancel culture’ from the left, some conservatives are seeking to upend the lives and careers of those who disparaged Charlie Kirk after his death. They are going after companies, educators, news outlets, political rivals and others they judge as promoting hate speech.”
Or as Radley Balko said, expanding on his first comment, “the extreme, opportunistic, completely disingenuous reaction to Kirk's murder also makes clear that if there's an Oklahoma City or 9/11-level attack in the next few years, this administration will absolutely exploit it to try to end our democracy and permanently entrench itself in power.”
I want to end with a small litmus test that can help determine what demagogues like Kirk really meant, so the courageous can fight back.
Try this: make their statements true.
Jesse Watters said Charlie Kirk was neither “controversial” nor “polarizing.” “Charlie was a PATRIOT,” the Fox host insisted. His death “is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction.”
Kirk was controversial. He was polarizing. As I said, that was his shtick. He advocated for the exclusion (hatred) of racial, sexual and religious minorities. What needs to happen for Watters’ words to be true?
“Patriot” needs to mean loyalty to white power and all that implies – unequal treatment, legal prejudice, exploitation, corruption, and a social order that’s rigidly hierarchical, with rich white men on top.
Only then is Charlie Kirk neither “controversial” nor “polarizing” man. Only then is it clear what Jesse Watters really meant when he said “THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction.”
“THIS” is the end of liberty and justice for all.
And he’ll prove it by trying to silence you for saying so.
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an 9 25
//
An effort by Rep. Nancy Mace (R‑S.C.) to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar (D‑Minn.) failed in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday night.
The resolution, which was introduced in response to Omar reposting a video and making remarks related to right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s murder last week, was tabled by a vote of 214‑213. Four Republicans joined all Democrats in opposing the resolution.
The Republicans who opposed the resolution were Reps. Cory Mills (R-Fla.), Jeff Hurd (R-Colo.), Tom McClintock (R-Calif.) and Mike Flood (R-Neb.)
If passed, the resolution would have formally censured Omar and removed her from some committee assignments.
Following the failure of her censure motion, Mace took to social mediato attack her Republican colleagues who opposed the move.
In a series of post on the social platform X, she wrote: "4 Republicans sold out tonight. They sided with Democrats to protect Ilhan Omar. A woman who mocked the assassination of an innocent American husband and father."
She added: "In 210 Democrats and 4 Republicans (Mike Flood, Jeff Hurd, Tom McClintock, and Cory Mills) just sided with Ilhan Omar over Charlie Kirk. They voted to shield a woman who mocked the cold-blooded assassination of Charlie Kirk… A woman who belittled his grieving family…"
"They showed us exactly who they are. Never forget it," Mace wrote.
Meanwhile, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization in the U.S., welcomed the development.
In a statement released to media, it declared the outcome "a victory against racism and political repression," but added that "the fight is not over."
"Rep. Mace and her allies may seek to bring the measure back to the floor in the future. Earlier today, CAIR sent a formal letter to all members of the House urging them to oppose the resolution, which falsely accused Rep. Omar of celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk - despite her repeatedly condemning his murder and offering sympathy to his family," CAIR stated.
“Instead of targeting Rep. Omar, Republican and Democratic leaders should consider holding accountable bigots like Rep. Randy Fine and Rep. Brian Mast, and even Rep. Mace herself - who in recent days said Rep. Omar should go back to Somalia and told a Jewish colleague they should see a plastic surgeon for their nose," the statement read.
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an 9 25
President Donald Trump has been claiming that the ABC suspended late night host Jimmy Kimmel because of poor ratings, but he shared a different thought on Thursday about what the future of network television might entail.
“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do — if you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative one in years, or something — when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that,” Trump said, according to CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.
The Independent added that President Trump “told reporters on Air Force One as he jets back from his State visit to the U.K. that because he won the election and networks give him ‘wholly bad publicity,’ that ‘I would think maybe their license should be taken away.'”
“It will be up to Brendan Carr. I think Brendan Carr is outstanding. He’s a patriot. He loves our country, and he’s a tough guy,” the president said, referring to the Chairman of the Federal Communications Commission.
Legal expert reveals Trump admin's biggest mistake in pressuring ABC to punish Kimmel - Alternet.org
'Righteous free speech' podcasters who voted for Trump rage against Kimmel suspension - Alternet.org
'Corrupt abuse of power': Dems rip FCC chair over Kimmel suspension - Alternet.org
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NEWSWEEK 9 25
ABC has pulled Jimmy Kimmel's late-night show off the air after comments the comedian made about the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk, and following pressure from the network's affiliates as well as the nation's TV regulator.
"Jimmy Kimmel Live will be preempted indefinitely," a spokesperson for the Disney-owned broadcaster said in a statement shared with various news outlets on Wednesday.
The move has drawn praise from allies and supporters of President Donald Trump, but sparked condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and free expression advocates.
The context of Kimmel's cancellation has led to allegations that business interests—particularly those concerning a delicate merger approval process involving the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and ABC affiliate Nexstar—may have played a role.
Taken together, some have interpreted this as a form of indirect censorship of the political Left by the Trump administration. Similar concerns were raised following the recent cancellation of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert.
"First Colbert, now Kimmel. Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval," said Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren. "Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy."
Newsweek has contacted ABC, Nexstar and the FCC via email for comment.
Why It Matters
In the wake of Kirk's killing, the Trump administration has taken a series of actions critics believe undermine longstanding commitments to free speech in the U.S.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has warned foreign nationals celebrating his death online to "prepare to be deported," Vice President JD Vance has encouraged people to report those who do so to their employers, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has come under fire for urging a crackdown on "hate speech"—a move many believe clashes with First Amendment protections.
Read moreJimmy Kimmel
Russian State TV Floats Theory Trump Planned Charlie Kirk's Killing
The administration of President Joe Biden faced similar criticism and accusations of censorship over the pressure it placed on social media companies to remove accounts and posts relating to the COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 presidential election that were considered misinformation. In June 2024, the Supreme Court rejected cases claiming that these amounted to an unconstitutional violation of free speech.
Why Was Jimmy Kimmel Taken Off the Air?
During his Monday night monologue, Kimmel made remarks about Kirk's death and its aftermath, suggesting that Trump supporters were attempting to capitalize on the murder and distance themselves from the alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson.
"We hit some new lows over the weekend, with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it," Kimmel said.
Kimmel also mocked President Trump's seemingly uninvolved response to a reporter's question on Kirk's death.
In an interview with conservative podcaster Benny Johnson on Wednesday, FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump ally and appointee, called Kimmel's comments "some of the sickest conduct possible," and said that there could be "a path forward for suspension over this."
"This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney," he added. "We can do this the easy way or the hard way."
Carr also urged other media companies and local broadcasters to "push back" and stop airing the show.
:{FCC Chairman Brendan Carr testifies before the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Financial Services and General Government at the Rayburn House Office Building on May 21, 2025 in Washington, DC.
Following Carr's interview, Nexstar Media Group, the owner of several ABC affiliate stations, announced that it would stop airing the show "for the foreseeable future" over Kimmel's remarks.
"Nexstar strongly objects to recent comments made by Mr. Kimmel concerning the killing of Charlie Kirk and will replace the show with other programming in its ABC-affiliated markets," the statement read.
This sequence of events has raised questions about the extent to which this decision was guided by financial motivations rather than genuine outrage over Kimmel's comments.
Nexstar, one of the biggest station owners in the U.S, is currently attempting to complete a merger with fellow TV giant Tegna. The nature of the merger—valued at $6.2 billion—requires the approval of the FCC, and for it to loosen longstanding ownership regulations. These include federal laws barring a single entity from owning TV stations that together reach over 39 percent of American households, and guidelines on the total number of stations that can be owned in a single market.
Sinclair, ABC's largest affiliate group, similarly objected to Kimmel's remarks, and said it would be pulling the late-night show from its stations "indefinitely." Sinclair praised FCC Chairman Carr's comments, and asked Kimmel to issue an apology to Kirk's family, and to make a "meaningful personal donation" to both them and Turning Point USA, the conservative outreach group founded by Kirk.
"Regardless of ABC's plans for the future of the program, Sinclair intends not to return Jimmy Kimmel Live! to our air until we are confident that appropriate steps have been taken to uphold the standards expected of a national broadcast platform," Sinclair said.
According to CNN, Sinclair—like Nexstar—has matters awaiting approval from the Trump administration.
Newsweekhas contacted Sinclair via email for comment.
After ABC followed suit, Johnson boasted that it was his podcast with Carr that led to Kimmel's show being taken off the air.
"It's called soft power. The Left uses it all the time," he wrote on X. "Thanks to President Trump, the Right has learned how to wield power as well."
FCC Chairman Carr, meanwhile, responded to CNN's request for a reaction with a GIF taken from The Office,in which the characters Michael Scott and Dwight Schrute are pumping their hands in the air in celebration.
What People Are Saying
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, in an interview with Sean Hannity on Wednesday evening, said that broadcast licenses carry "a unique obligation to operate in the public interest."
Commenting on the decisions by Nexstar and Sinclair to pull the show, Carr added: "I'm very glad to see that American broadcasters are standing up to serve the interests of our community."
President Donald Trump reacted to the news on Truth Social, writing:"Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done. Kimmel has ZERO talent, and worse ratings than even Colbert, if that's possible. That leaves Jimmy and Seth, two total losers, on Fake News NBC. Their ratings are also horrible. Do it NBC!!! President DJT."
Andrew Alford, President of Nexstar's broadcasting division, said: "Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue."
Anna Gomez, the only Democratic commissioner at the FCC, posted to X: "An inexcusable act of political violence by one disturbed individual must never be exploited as justification for broader censorship and control. This Administration is increasingly using the weight of government power to suppress lawful expression."
The Writers Guild of America (WGA), a Hollywood labor union, said in a statement:"Shame on those in government who forget this founding truth. As for our employers, our words have made you rich. Silencing us impoverishes the whole world. The WGA stands with Jimmy Kimmel and his writers."
California Governor Gavin Newsom posted to X: "Corrupt, despicable, & spineless behavior. A coordinated effort to control the media is happening before our eyes & it needs to be called out."
Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren posted to X:"First Colbert, now Kimmel. Last-minute settlements, secret side deals, multi-billion dollar mergers pending Donald Trump's approval. Trump silencing free speech stifles our democracy. It sure looks like giant media companies are enabling his authoritarianism."
The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) reacted: "The government pressured ABC—and ABC caved. The timing of ABC's decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman's pledge to the network to "do this the easy way or the hard way," tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it."
What Happens Next?
Sinclair said that its ABC stations will air a tribute to this Friday, during Jimmy Kimmel Live's usual time slot.
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an 9 25
see hayes on ellison tiktok fcc etc brendan carr on benny j nextstar
Jimmy Kimmel drew the wrath of Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr in response to the late-night host's comments on the murder of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk and the suspect in his shooting: 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson.
Kimmel argued that the suspect was part of the MAGA movement, not a leftist as President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance and others on the far right are saying. The late-night host never condoned the killing in any way, but rather, argued that the suspect had a MAGA ideology rather than a leftist ideology.
Disney, in response, suspended Kimmel's show indefinitely.
Now, according to Daily Beast reporter Cameron James, "America's largest ABC affiliate group," Sinclair, is saying that Kimmel must make a "meaningful personal donation" to Kirk's family.
"Media giant Sinclair also wants the comedian to 'issue a direct apology' to Kirk's family, claiming his suspension is not enough," James reports in an article published on September 18. "Kimmel has been suspended in a wave of MAGA anger, disguised as grief and decency, over comments made by the TV star about the murdered right-wing activist. Sinclair also announced they will air a tribute to Kirk in Kimmel’s Friday-night timeslot this week, and are offering the special to all ABC affiliates to air over the weekend."
James adds, "Sinclair's Vice Chairman Jason Smith called Kimmel's comments on Kirk 'inappropriate and deeply insensitive at a critical moment for our country.'"
In an official statement released on September 17, Sinclair said it "will not lift the suspension of 'Jimmy Kimmel Live' on our stations until formal discussions are held with ABC regarding the network's commitment to professionalism and accountability."
*Read the full Daily Beast article at this link (subscription required).
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AN 9 25
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration earned condemnation from Amnesty International on Thursday over its leaked plans to downplay human rights violations in countries favored by the American government.
News of the plan was originally reported on Wednesday by The Washington Post, which documented how the administration has been revising State Department reports on human rights in El Salvador, Israel, and Russia to "strike all references to LGBTQ+ individuals or crimes against them." The Post also added that "the descriptions of government abuses that do remain have been softened."
In the case of El Salvador, where the administration earlier this year began lawlessly shipping immigrants deported from the United States, the administration's report stated that were "no credible reports of significant human rights abuses" there, even though a State Department report under former President Joe Biden's administration issued last year documented "significant human rights issues" in the country.
Human rights violations against LGBTQ+ people were deleted from the State Department's report on Russia, while the report on Israel deleted references to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's corruption trial and to his government's threats to the country's independent judiciary.
Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International USA's national director of government relations and advocacy, ripped the administration for selectively whitewashing human rights records of nations favored by the president.
"The leaked chapters of the latest Annual Human Rights Report reveal a disturbing effort by the Trump administration to purposefully fail to fully capture the alarming and growing attacks on human rights in certain countries around the globe," she said. "Alarmingly, we understand that the mandate from Secretary Rubio was... to go back and wipe out portions of the reports that had already been written—to delete stories from survivors of human rights violations."
Klasing went on to accuse the administration of turning the human rights report "into yet another tool to obscure facts to push forward anti-rights policy choices."
She also emphasized that "it would be a travesty and subversion of congressional intent to downplay or ignore human rights violations faced by marginalized populations including refugees and asylum seekers, women and girls, Indigenous people, ethnic and religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people throughout the world."
An unnamed State Department official this week told the Post that the administration was merely simplifying the human rights reports to make them more "readable."
"The 2024 Human Rights report has been restructured in a way that removes redundancies, increases report readability, and is more responsive to the legislative mandate that underpins the report," the official said. "The human rights report focuses on core issues."
NOW READ:DOJ memo reveals Trump’s dark plan for a new Red Scare — and it may be perfectly legal
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AN 9 25
404 Media reports the Department of Justice has taken down a study showing white supremacist and far-right violence outpaces “all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism” in the United States.
The DOJ website hosted the study, conducted by the National Institute of Justice, until September 12, 2025.
In its place is the message: “The Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs is currently reviewing its websites and materials in accordance with recent Executive Orders and related guidance. During this review, some pages and publications will be unavailable. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.”
READ MORE: 'Increasingly senile wackjob': Expert says Trump too broken to destroy democracy on his own
The report What NIJ Research Tells Us About Domestic Terrorism revealed “Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”
The document reports “far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists,” since 1990, “including 227 events that took more than 520 lives.”
In this same period, the report claimed, “far-left extremists committed 42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives.”
“We don’t know why the study about far-right extremist violence was removed recently,” writes 404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg, “but it comes immediately after the assassination of conservative personality Charlie Kirk, accusations from the administration that the left is responsible for most of the political violence in the country, and a renewed commitment from the administration to crack down on the ‘radical left.’”
READ MORE: 'Something is wrong': MAGA pundits say Trump is 'lying to us' about Charlie Kirk shooting
The DOJ did not respond to 404 Media’s request for comment.
Read the 404 Media report at this link.
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an 8 25
The latest casualty of Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism is Eduardo Porter, one of the most thoughtful and intelligent critics of this heinous regime.
On Tuesday, Porter wrote his last column for The Washington Post. In a widely-circulated email, he explained why he was leaving the Post:
“Jeff Bezos and his new head of Opinion are taking the paper down a path I cannot follow, directed toward the relentless promotion of free markets and personal liberties…. I have no idea to what extent this is driven by Mr. Bezos’ fear of what Donald Trump could do to his various business interests, most of which are more valuable to him than The Post.”
Well, I do have an idea. Bezos stopped the Post from endorsing Kamala Harris. He made a huge contribution to Trump’s inauguration. And he stood directly in front of Trump at Trump’s swearing in.
Why? Because Bezos owns a bunch of mega-corporations, including Amazon, that depend on Trump’s goodwill and could be in deep trouble if Trump decided to retaliate against Bezos.
It’s much the same story with Stephen Colbert, longtime host of CBS’s “The Late Show” and the top-rated late-night talk show host in the United States.
On July 14, Colbert openly criticized CBS’s parent company, Paramount, for its $16 million settlement with Trump of his frivolous lawsuit over the routine editing of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris that Trump claimed gave her an unfair advantage in the 2024 election.
Said Colbert in his opening monologue:
“As someone who has always been a proud employee of this network, I am offended. And I don’t know if anything will ever repair my trust in this company…. I believe this kind of complicated financial settlement with a sitting government official has a technical name in legal circles. It’s big fat bribe. Because this all comes as Paramount's owners are trying to get the Trump administration to approve the sale of our network to a new owner, Skydance.”
Three days later, on July 17, Paramount pulled the plug on Colbert’s show, eliciting from Trump a celebratory, “I absolutely love that Colbert was fired.”
(A few days later, Colbert came out swinging, telling Trump to “go f--- yourself,” and joking that it had always been his dream to have a sitting president celebrate the end of his career.)
Yesterday, one week after Colbert’s show was cancelled, Trump’s Federal Communications Commission approved Paramount’s sale to Skydance.
To cinch the deal, Skydance CEO David Ellison promised that he’d eliminate all U.S.-based DEI programs at Paramount and CBS and create a new ombudsman to field complaints of ideological bias in news coverage.
Trump says CBS also agreed to run $20 million worth of public service announcements consistent with his ideological beliefs.
Let’s be clear. Jeff Bezos has silenced any criticism of Trump on the editorial pages of The Washington Post because Bezos fears Trump’s wrath.
CBS and its parent corporation, Paramount, has silenced criticism of Trump on Colbert’s hugely popular “Late Show” because its top corporate brass fears Trump’s wrath.
The new owner of CBS has agreed to some federal interference in the content of what it produces because he fears Trump’s wrath.
The silencing is happening across American media because Trump cannot stand criticism, because he’s vindictive as hell, and because he’s willing and able to use every department and agency of the federal government to punish any media corporations that allow its writers or hosts to criticize him.
It’s the same with American universities, whose professors have often criticized Trump’s illegal and unconstitutional actions and whose research has often yielded conclusions that contradict Trump’s lies (such as that climate change is a “hoax”).
Columbia University, Dartmouth College, and a handful of others have gone out of their way to “cooperate” with the Trump regime in order to avoid Trump’s wrath.
What does “cooperation” entail? Silencing Trump’s potential critics.
Columbia has just agreed to allow the regime to review its admissions and hiring practices in order to receive the federal research grants that the regime had held back.
Friends, this is how democracy dies.
Shame on any media outlet or university that allows Trump to silence it.
Trump is a dangerous despot. America needs its Eduardo Porters, Stephen Colberts, and all others in the media and in academia who have helped the nation understand just how truly dangerous Trump is.
NOW READ:'It is a reckoning': DC insider blasts Baby Boomers — and blames them for Trump
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AN 8 25
Federal employees at the Department of the Interior are reportedly raising alarms over a weekly video series titled “Inside Interior,” which they describe as "propaganda" — a slick, over‑the‑top portrayal of President Donald Trump and agency leadership, complete with staged scenes and breathless narration.
The Daily Beast reportedWednesday that Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, once tagged “Diva Doug” for requesting political appointees to bake chocolate chip cookies and summoning a U.S. Park Police helicopter for his own personal use, now finds himself at the center of growing backlash within his own department.
Staffers deride the Environment and Natural Resources Agency as “The Department of Propaganda,” a moniker born from their mounting frustration with weekly “Inside Interior” videos, widely criticized for their slick, "Dear Leader"-style presentation and unabashed praise of Trump and Burgum to a lesser extent.
READ MORE:'Let me just stop you there': Wallace cuts off guest who calls for 'nuance' on Trump move
The latest installment, according to the report, touts that “Interior made major moves to strengthen America’s energy future, protect taxpayer interests, and keep our nation’s capital city safe.”
But the true inflection point came with a July 4 special that left many shaken. The clip opens with Trump dancing to the Village People’s YMCA, then cuts to him exiting Air Force One, greeted by cheering construction workers, before returning to more footage of Trump, much to the chagrin of those compelled to watch.
The report further noted that the narration heralds the day with a patriotic fervor likened to authoritarian regimes: “Happy Birthday America!” “Today we celebrate 249 years of American liberty, freedom and strength and we’re doing it under the fearless leadership of President Donald J. Trump, who reminds us every day what true patriotism looks like as he works tirelessly to make America great again.”
Critics among the staff have dubbed the presentation “North Korea‑worthy," according to the report.
READ MORE:(Opinion) Trump's reckoning may be right around the corner — here's why
Meanwhile, many already felt demoralized by deep cuts tied to tech billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency initiative and a policy shift prioritizing fossil fuel development over conservation.
A National Park Service employee told The Beast: “I have never seen a more blatant and deplorable display of propaganda on behalf of the Trump administration.”
Adding insult to injury, they note, “They even called for the USA to celebrate the 4th ‘the MAGA way!’”
Click here to read the Daily Beast's report in full (subscription required).
READ MORE:'It's a real gut punch': Rural voters 'stunned' by Trump's damage
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the conv an 8 25
When people use the term “Orwellian,” it’s not a good sign.
It usually characterizes an action, an individual or a society that is suppressing freedom, particularly the freedom of expression. It can also describe something perverted by tyrannical power.
It’s a term used primarily to describe the present, but whose implications inevitably connect to both the future and the past.
In his second term, President Donald Trump has revealed his ambitions to rewrite America’s official history to, in the words of the Organization of American Historians, “reflect a glorified narrative … while suppressing the voices of historically excluded groups.”
This ambition was manifested in efforts by the Department of Education to eradicate a “DEI agenda” from school curricula. It also included a high-profile assault on what detractors saw as “woke” universities, which culminated in Columbia University’s agreement to submit to a review of the faculty and curriculum of its Middle Eastern Studies department, with the aim of eradicating alleged pro-Palestinian bias.
Now, the administration has shifted its sights from formal educational institutions to one of the key sites of public history-making: the Smithsonian, a collection of 21 museums, the National Zoo and associated research centers, principally centered on the National Mall in Washington, D.C.
On Aug. 12, 2025, the Smithsonian’s director, Lonnie Bunch III, received a letter from the White House announcing its intent to carry out a systematic review of the institution’s holdings and exhibitions in the advance of the nation’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
The review’s stated aim is to ensure that museum content adequately reflects “Americanism” through a commitment to “celebrate American exceptionalism, [and] remove divisive or partisan narratives.”
On Aug. 19, 2025, Trump escalated his attack on the Smithsonian. “The Smithsonian is OUT OF CONTROL, where everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was…” he wrote in a Truth Social post. “Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future. We are not going to allow this to happen.”
Such ambitions may sound benign, but they are deeply Orwellian. Here’s how.
Winners write the history
Author George Orwell believed in objective, historical truth. Writing in 1946, he attributed his youthful desire to become an author in part to a “historical impulse,” or “the desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.”
But while Orwell believed in the existence of an objective truth about history, he did not necessarily believe that truth would prevail.
Truth, Orwell recognized, was best served by free speech and dialogue. Yet absolute power, Orwell appreciated, allowed those who possessed it to silence or censor opposing narratives, quashing the possibility of productive dialogue about history that could ultimately allow truth to come out.
As Orwell wrote in “1984,” his final, dystopian novel, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.”
Historian Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska has written about America’s bicentennial celebrations that took place in 1976. Then, she says, “Americans across the nation helped contribute to a pluralistic and inclusive commemoration … using it as a moment to question who had been left out of the legacies of the American Revolution, to tell more inclusive stories about the history of the United States.”
This was an example of the kind of productive dialogue encouraged in a free society. “By contrast,” writes Rymsza-Pawlowska, “the 250th is shaping up to be a top-down affair that advances a relatively narrow and celebratory idea of Americanism.” The newly announced Smithsonian review aims to purge counternarratives that challenge that celebratory idea.
The Ministry of Truth
The desire to eradicate counternarratives drives Winston Smith’s job at the ironically named Ministry of Truth in “1984.”
The novel is set in Oceania, a geographical entity covering North America and the British Isles and which governs much of the Global South.
Oceania is an absolute tyranny governed by Big Brother, the leader of a political party whose only goal is the perpetuation of its own power. In this society, truth is what Big Brother and the party say it is.
The regime imposes near total censorship so that not only dissident speech but subversive private reflection, or “thought crime,” is viciously prosecuted. In this way, it controls the present.
But it also controls the past. As the party’s protean policy evolves, Smith and his colleagues are tasked with systematically destroying any historical records that conflict with the current version of history. Smith literally disposes of artifacts of inexpedient history by throwing them down “memory holes,” where they are “wiped … out of existence and out of memory.”
At a key point in the novel, Smith recalls briefly holding on to a newspaper clipping that proved that an enemy of the regime had not actually committed the crime he had been accused of. Smith recognizes the power over the regime that this clipping gives him, but he simultaneously fears that power will make him a target. In the end, fear of retaliation leads him to drop the slip of newsprint down a memory hole.
The contemporary U.S. is a far cry from Orwell’s Oceania. Yet the Trump administration is doing its best to exert control over the present and the past.
Down the memory hole
Even before the Trump administration announced its review of the Smithsonian, officials in departments across government had taken unprecedented steps to rewrite the nation’s official history, attempting to purge parts of the historical narrative down Orwellian memory holes.
Comically, those efforts included the temporary removal from government websites of information about the Enola Gay, the plane that dropped the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. The plane was unwittingly caught up in a mass purge of references to “gay” and LGBTQ+ content on government websites.
Other erasures have included the deletion of content on government sites related to the life ofHarriet Tubman, the Maryland woman who escaped slavery and then played a pioneering role as a conductor of the Underground Railroad, helping enslaved people escape to freedom.
Public outcry led to the restoration of most of the deleted content.
Over at the Smithsonian, which earlier in the year had been criticized by Trump for its “divisive, race-centered ideology,” staff removed a temporary placard with references to President Trump’s two impeachment trials from a display case on impeachment that formed part of the National Museum of American History exhibition on the American presidency. The references to Trump’s two impeachments were modified, with some details removed, in a newly installed placard in the updated display.
Responding to questions, the Smithsonian stated that the placard’s removal was not in response to political pressure: “The placard, which was meant to be a temporary addition to a 25-year-old exhibition, did not meet the museum’s standards in appearance, location, timeline, and overall presentation.”
Repressing thought
Orwell’s “1984” ends with an appendix on the history of “Newspeak,” Oceania’s official language, which, while it had not yet superseded “Oldspeak” or standard English, was rapidly gaining ground as both a written and spoken dialect.
According to the appendix, “The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the worldview and mental habits proper to the devotees of [the Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible.”
Orwell, as so often in his writing, makes the abstract theory concrete: “The word free still existed in Newspeak, but it could only be used in such statements as ‘This dog is free from lice’ or ‘This field is free from weeds.’ … political and intellectual freedom no longer existed even as concepts.”
The goal of this language streamlining was total control over past, present and future.
If it is illegal to even speak of systemic racism, for example, let alone discuss its causes and possible remedies, it constrains the potential for, even prohibits, social change.
It has become a cliché that those who do not understand history are bound to repeat it.
As George Orwell appreciated, the correlate is that social and historical progress require an awareness of, and receptivity to, both historical fact and competing historical narratives.
*This story is an updated version of an article originally published on June 9, 2025.
*The Smithsonian is a member of The Conversation U.S.
Laura Beers, Professor of History, American University
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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The top Trump official tasked with reshaping the Smithsonian’s collections into a more conservative presentation argues that, based on her experience and expectations, the institution should place less emphasis on the painful chapters of American history and more on its achievements.
Insurance attorney Lindsey Halligan is now Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy, as well as the Special Assistant to the President and Senior Associate Staff Secretary.
On Wednesday, Fox News host John Roberts told Halligan that “like just about every other country in the world, the United States has got a checkered past.”
He reminded her that “some of the worst episodes in our history were formative experiences that led us to where we are today, and those typically are reflected in museums.”
Halligan replied that from her point of view, “the fact that we had our country, was involved in slavery is awful. No one thinks otherwise.”
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“But what I saw when I was going through the museums personally was an overemphasis on slavery. And I think there should be more of an overemphasis on how far we’ve come since slavery.”
She insisted that Americans “should be able to take our kids, our students, through the Smithsonian, and feel proud when we leave,” and that “we need to keep moving forward.”
“We can’t just keep focusing on the negative. All it does is divide us, and we really need to unite the country and focus on all the positive as we approach America’s 250th birthday.”
A section of a Trump executive order titled “Saving Our Smithsonian” directs Halligan, by name, to seek “to remove improper ideology” from the Smithsonian Institution and its properties, “and shall recommend to the President any additional actions necessary to fully effectuate such policies.”
In April, Halligan told The Washington Post that she believes “improper ideology” means “weaponizing history.”
Halligan has a law degree from the University of Miami School of Law, and does not appear to have any education in museum sciences.
When she first moved to Washington, D.C. she “didn’t like everything she saw,” at the Smithsonian, the Post reported.. “Some exhibits, in her view, did not reflect the America she knows and loves.”
“And so I talked to the president about it,” Halligan said, “and suggested an executive order, and he gave me his blessing, and here we are.”
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She told Fox News that “it’s common knowledge that our education system in general has been just indoctrinated with political ideology and various ideological narratives. And the Smithsonian is really a version of education.”
“It could be the foundation of our American education,” she claimed, explaining the as a young child she went to the Smithsonian Museum on a class trip, “and the Smithsonian is really supposed to be a trust instrument.”
“And what’s happened is it’s become more of a platform upon which the curators and leadership at the Smithsonian can push ideological narratives and we really want to help the Smithsonian be the gem,” she said. “Represent our nation, properly and truthfully.”
Critics denounced Halligan’s remarks.
U.S. Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) remarked, “400 years of brutal bondage, torture, and murder should be emphasized. The generations of Black Americans who built this nation with their own hands and their own pain should be emphasized. The true history of this country SHOULD BE EMPHASIZED.”
“White American woman who went through the museum said there was an ‘overemphasis on slavery.’ What a thing. To say those words out loud,” wrote former Republican Tea Party Congressman Joe Walsh.
Watch the video below or at this link.
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'Banning people for speech': US State Dept. revokes English punk duo’s visa after Glastonbury chant
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DeSantis’ Florida is big on book bans, removing from schools books with LGBTQ characters, books about civil rights, books questioning American exceptionalism, books that tell painful truths about the world.
Toni Morrison’s “Bluest Eye,” Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse Five,” William Styron’s “Sophie’s Choice,” Khaled Hosseini’s “Kite Runner,” Margaret Atwood’s “Handmaid’s Tale,” Judy Blume’s “Forever,” and Anne Frank’s “Diary” have all been challenged or deep-sixed by parents and school boards who want to suppress stories that might deepen and complicate students’ knowledge of the country they live in or expand their understanding of ways to be human.
In Escambia County, they’ve yanked the dictionary off the shelf.
Seems Merriam-Webster might harbor smut and subversion.
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'Great victory': School board defies red state Republicans to strip chapters from textbooks
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The Trump administration's sweeping attacks on journalism and federal workers continued Thursday with an announcement that Social Security Administration employees can no longer access "general news" websites on government devices.
The Washington Postnoted the email in an update to its Thursday reporting that earlier this week, acting SSA Commissioner Leland Dudek told top staff that members of President Donald Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), headed by billionaire Elon Musk, are leading efforts to shrink the agency—which critics slam as a push toward privatization.
"DOGE people are learning and they will make mistakes, but we have to let them see what is going on at SSA," Dudek said, according to notes from the meeting. "I am relying on longtime career people to inform my work, but I am receiving decisions that are made without my input. I have to effectuate those decisions."
The newspaper reported that "on Thursday morning—three hours after the publication of this story—an all-staff email went out to SSA employees informing them that they would be prevented 'effective today' from accessing certain websites on their government devices, including 'online shopping,' ' general news,' and 'sports.'"
The email—a screenshot of which was posted on the Musk-owned social media site X by independent journalist Justin Glawe, author of the newsletter American Doom—states that "these additional restrictions will help reduce risk and better protect the sensitive information entrusted to us in our many systems."
An SSA spokesperson said in a statement that "employees should be focused on mission-critical work and serving the American people," but they "may request an exception if they have a business need for job-specific duties."
As Glawe pointed out: "To all the people saying BUT YOU SHOULDN'T READ NEWS AT WORK—they are government employees, so reading news and staying informed is part of their job. They're not working at a car dealership."
While SSA messaging frames the policy as an effort to promote safety and efficiency, and the email did not include a list of blocked websites, Wiredrevealed that some outlets "at the forefront of the reporting" on DOGE have been banned:
Wired has confirmed with two sources inside the SSA that Wired.com is no longer accessible today, though it was accessible previously. The sources also confirmed that the websites of The Washington Post, The New York Times, and MSNBC were inaccessible. However, the sources were able to access other news websites including Politico and Axios.
"Local news blocked," says one source at SSA, who was granted anonymity over fears of retribution. "So if there was a local shooting or something, I wouldn't be able to see."
It's unclear who has implemented the block list or what criteria were used to populate it, but it appears not to be based on ideological grounds, as Fox News and Breitbart are also blocked.
The policy change comes amid a flurry of reporting on Musk calling Social Security "the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time" during a recent podcast interview with Joe Rogan as well as efforts to shrink the agency and shut down multiple offices nationwide.
Over 150 House Democrats wrote in a Tuesday letter to Dudek that "Social Security helps approximately 70 million beneficiaries—including seniors, people with disabilities, children, and their families—put food on the table, pay the rent, heat their homes, cover medical bills, and more... Shuttering field offices and gutting SSA staffing has nothing to do with 'governmental efficiency.'"
Other federal agencies are also under assault by DOGE and its billionaire leader—who is facing new limits from the president. Citing two officials, Politicoreported that during a Thursday Cabinet meeting attended by Musk, "Trump told top members of his administration that Musk was empowered to make recommendations to the departments but not to issue unilateral decisions on staffing and policy."
While working to gut the federal government, the Trump administration has also taken aim at journalism. Amid a spat with The Associated Press over its refusal to use Trump's preferred name for the Gulf of Mexico, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced last week that the administration will now decide which outlets get to participate in the presidential press pool.
That came a week after the Postreported that the U.S. State Department told embassies and consulates to cancel "all non-mission critical contracts/purchase orders for media subscriptions (publications, periodicals, and newspaper subscriptions) that are not academic or professional journals."
According to the newspaper, a memo "directed procurement teams at embassies and consulates to prioritize the termination of contracts with six news organizations in particular: The Economist, The New York Times, Politico, Bloomberg News, The Associated Press, and Reuters."
Similarly, as Rolling Stonedetailed Thursday: "In the first weeks of the Trump administration, DOGE canceled subscriptions to services like Politico Pro, which many agencies rely on to stay abreast of legislation moving through Congress. DOGE also incorrectly identified a contract with a wing of Thomson Reuters as going toward news subscriptions. In fact, the contract—signed by the Defense Department under the first Trump administration—was with Thomson Reuters Special Services and dealt with preventing cyber threats."
The Republican president has a long record of attacking news outlets and individual reporters—from his frequent declarations of "fake news" to reportedly inquiring about how he could jail journalists if he returned to the White House.
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trms pix of enola gay hegseth ~ DEI
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Many MAGA Republicans vehemently criticize liberals and progressives for language policing, often mocking "woke" terms like "Latinx" and "pregnant people." And some Americans who vote Democratic are critical of "woke" language as well: "Real Time" host Bill Maher and veteran Democratic strategist James Carville argue that it's ridiculous for Democrats to say "Latinx" when the vast majority of Latinos don't use that word.
But language policing exists in the MAGA movement as well.
In an article published on March 7, New York Times journalists Karen Yourish, Annie Daniel, Saurabh Datar, Isaac White and Lazaro Gamio list some of the many words and terms that the Trump Administration is urging government workers to limit or avoid in their communications.
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The list includes a lot of terms that are often mocked on the right as stereotypically "woke," including "Latinx," "pregnant people," "non-binary" and "pregnant persons." But many of the terms listed aren't necessarily thought of as "woke" — for example, "Black," "stereotype," "prostitute," "mental health," "activists," "sexuality," "inequality," "disparity," "trauma" and "discriminatory."
Also on the list: "hate speech," "gender-affirming care" and "intersectional."
"All presidential administrations change the language used in official communications to reflect their own policies," the Times reporters explain. "It is within their prerogative, as are amendments to or the removal of web pages, which The Times has found has already happened thousands of times in this administration."
The journalists add, "Still, the words and phrases listed here represent a marked — and remarkable — shift in the corpus of language being used both in the federal government's corridors of power and among its rank and file. They are an unmistakable reflection of this administration's priorities."
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*Read the full New York Times article at this link (subscription required).
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A Texas county has mandated public libraries move a well-regarded children's book documenting the mistreatment of Native Americans in New England — Colonization and the Wampanoag Story — from the "non-fiction" section to "fiction." The decision was made after the government of Montgomery County, under pressure from right-wing activists, removed librarians from the process of reviewing children's books and replaced them with a "Citizens Review Committee." Colonization and the Wampanoag Storywas "challenged" by an unknown person on September 10, 2024. The Committee responded by ordering that the book be moved to the fiction section of public libraries in Montgomery County by October 17, 2024, according to public records obtained by the Texas Freedom To Read Project shared with Popular Information.
The author of Colonization and the Wampanoag Story is Linda Coombs, a "historian from the Wampanoag Tribe." Coombs spent three decades working at the Wampanoag Indigenous Program, an initiative to preserve the history of the Wampanoag people. The book is published by Penguin Random House, which describes the book as "[t]he true story of the Indigenous Nations of the American Northeast, including the Wampanoag nation and others, and their history up to present day."
Colonization and the Wampanoag Storytells the real story of the brutalization of the Wampanoag people by European settlers. An excerpt:
[C]ertain ship captain began kidnapping Wampanoag men and those of other tribal nations along the coast. Sailors invited them aboard their ships under the pretense of trading, then lifted anchor and sailed away. The men were prisoners, stolen from their families and homes.
They were taken to England and Spain to be sold into slavery and paraded through the streets as "novelties," something for the people of Europe to gawk at as curiosities — not as human beings. Imagine how these men must of felt when they realized their situation: they would never see their children, parents, wives, relatives or communities and homelands again. What a terrible shock for all their families when they realized their men were gone — just disappeared forever.
This is fact, not fiction.
In addition to telling the history of the Wampanoag people, the book also includes several parables. But these sections are identified in italics. It does not change that it is a history book, which is why it is classified as non-fiction by the Library of Congress. The book's Library of Congress classification begins with "E99," the non-fiction classification for books about Native American peoples. It is also classified as non-fiction by Penguin Random House, the Houston Public Library, the Austin Public Library, and the Fort Worth Public Library.
The move to reclassify Colonization and the Wampanoag Storycomes after a controversial decision last March to remove librarians from the decision-making process when a children's book carried by Montgomery County is challenged. Previously, there was an advisory committee comprised of five librarians and five community members. As a result of the change, the librarians were removed from the Committee, and the determinations of the new Committee, which consisted of five non-librarians, became binding.
The change to the book review process was driven by a local right-wing group, Two Moms and Some Books. The group is led by Michele Nuckolls, a local mother. Nuckolls believes "children’s books with alternate gender ideology to be moved to the adult section." The group also is demanding more "conservative and Christian’s [sic] books in the public library." The group is especially enthusiastic about titles from Brave Books, which publishes children's books from far-right authors like Congressman Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Donald Trump's former press secretary Sean Spicer, and Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn. In case there is any confusion about the objectives of the group, its slogan is "Make Libraries Great Again!"
Before the change to the review process, Nuckolls expressed frustration that the local library system was not altering its holding to conform to her ideology. Nuckolls then successfully lobbied the Montgomery County Commission to change the policy and put non-librarians in charge:
“It’s been a long road,” said Michele Nuckolls, a Montgomery County mom who advocates for keeping the children’s section of local libraries safe and appropriate for kids.
“I first sounded the alarm about concerning children’s books at commissioners court a year ago,” Nuckolls told Texas Scorecard…
“I challenged two of the most alarming children’s books late last year and the committee head, a librarian, sent me a letter saying that they would stay right where they were,” said Nuckolls. “The old policy was not working.”
Under the new policy, once a children's book is challenged, it must immediately be moved to the adult section, with only adults allowed to access it. The book is then considered by the Citizens Review Committee at a meeting that is "closed to the public except for the Resident who made a formal request for review." The decisions of the Citizen's Review Committee are final, and there is no appeals process.
From the outset, critics of the new policy warned that it could be abused.
Teresa Kenney, a Montgomery County resident who owns an independent bookstore, submitted a public records request revealing the decision to reclassify Colonization and the Wampanoag Story. No explanation for the decision was provided.
The Committee's decision to reclassify Colonization and the Wampanoag Storymay have exceeded the Committee's authority. The new policy allows the Committee "to reassign the material to a more restrictive portion of the library" or "recommend removal of a material." There is no provision for changing the classification of a children's book from non-fiction to fiction. But with no appeals process, it's unclear whether the decision can be challenged.
At the October 8, 2024, meeting of the Montgomery County Commission, Kenney spoke about her ongoing concerns regarding the Citizens Review Committee. She asked the Montgomery County Commission to "return librarian oversight to the review process and open the meetings to the public for complete transparency." Her request was tabled.
Members of the Montgomery County Commission and the Citizens Review Committee did not respond to requests for comment.
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Finally, unable to get his agenda adopted by the fellow members of the Arkansas State Library Board, Jason Rapert is "of the opinion that the state of Arkansas would be better served if the Arkansas Legislature would abolish the board completely."
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thom
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jason Rapert Says Members of the Arkansas State Library Board ‘Probably Should Be Tarred and Feathered’
[ | August 26, 2024 rww
In 2023, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed Christian nationalist activist and a zealously anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice former state senator Jason Rapert to the state library board. Predictably, his tenure on the board has been anything but smooth, with Rapert regularly lashing out at his fellow board members for refusing to support his far-right agenda and complaining that he’s been experiencing a “hostile work environment” because he is “a Christian white male.”
During a recent episode of his “Save The Nation” program, Rapert’s frustrations boiled over as he called on the state legislature to abolish the library board entirely, declaring that his fellow board members “probably should be tarred and feathered.”
“The Bible says, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,'” Rapert said. “Well, when you have leaders that are not allowing the nation to be blessed of God, they’re not doing godly things, you need to replace them, get rid of them, get them out of office, put people back in there that will. You’ve got schools where they’re fighting over allowing homosexual, LGBTQ material to be utilized to groom children. … There needs to be people that will take up and sue anybody that is allowing that sort of thing to go on in our school districts and in our libraries.”
“I serve on the Arkansas Library Board,” Rapert continued. “I cannot get those other board members to take a stand to stop some of the smut that is in those libraries. It’s ridiculous. I’ve made motions trying to do it, and I am at a point now where it’s going to take so long to get new board members on there, if I were the legislature, I would run a bill just to abolishing the Arkansas State Library Board and let it be reconstituted. Put new people in there, or maybe they just need to call on people to resign if you’re not going to do your job.”
“When you don’t protect children in America, you have no business serving in a public official’s role,” Rapert griped. “You have no business serving on a board, you have no business serving in a state legislature, you have no business being an elected official at any level if you’re not going to protect children. When you get to a point that you’re so confused and you’re so completely jaded that you cannot make a decision to keep smut or pornographic stuff [away from] children, you’ve lost your ever-loving mind and you need to be replaced. You need to be taken out. Some people say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about violence.’ No, I’m not talking about violence. You need to be run out on a rail. You probably should be tarred and feathered. That’s what they used to do in America is they would tar and feather those kind of folks. Get rid of them. Teach them a lesson. Get them out of office.”
Jason Rapert Says Members of the Arkansas State Library Board 'Probably Should Be Tarred and Feathered' from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.
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Do you know about Donald J. Trump’s Executive Order 13950? If you don’t, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Just weeks before he was fired by America’s voters in 2020, President Trump issued this piece of nastiness which was quickly rescinded by just-inaugurated President Biden.
The Executive Order is a “DCL,” what the right-wing brilliantly calls a, “Divisive Concepts Law.” These DCL’s terrorize teachers with the threat of losing their jobs if they dare teach the truth of America’s racial history: That white people enslaved Africans, that the Klan enforced racial vote suppression with the hanging rope. And God forbid, they teach that women were banned from the vote until the 20th Century. The Executive Order bans teaching any historical facts if,
“….any individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex….”
As a practical matter, it means teaching the truth of America’s racial stain will get you fired. In 2021, Tennessee high school teacher Matt Hawn lost his job because a student accused him of teaching—cover your children’s ears—“Critical Race Theory.” Hawn said he’d never heard of Critical Race Theory when he was canned.
(Critical Race Theory, taught in law schools, says many of America’s laws and their enforcement, contain a racial bias. Well, D’oh!].
On Thursday, Vice-President Harris told the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston, epicenter of the anti-CRT hysteria,
“While you teach students about our nation's past, these extremists attack the freedom to learn and acknowledge our nation's true and full history; including book bans! Book bans — in this year 2024! Just think about it: we want to ban assault weapons and they want to ban books.”
It was a century ago, that Tennessee was the laughingstock of the nation for prosecuting a schoolteacher for telling his class about human evolution, a story recounted in the film, Inherit the Wind. Now, a hundred years later, Trumpsters are again passing wind over Tennessee.
And he’s baaaaack! Trump has put his fixation with censoring “divisive concepts” into the GOP platform. Details are provided in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 master plan for the master race.
This ill wind originated in Georgia when Gov. Brian Kemp signed HB1084, threatening the jobs of teachers for teaching ‘divisive concepts’ that could make a white child feel “discomfort.”
Who would feel “discomfort” about the uncensored history of Georgia? Well, maybe it’s Gov. Kemp himself. Because it was the Kemp family, then known as the Habershams, that first brought Africans in chains to Georgia.
Maybe Kemp and family should feel a bit of discomfort. I spoke with Janie Banse, who told me she is she is heartsick that her cousin, Gov. Kemp, won’t admit that their family’s wealth originated in the African slave trade. Kemp’s ancestors held the largest auction of human beings in American history, still remembered by Black Georgians today as “Weeping Time,” when 436 men, women and their children were separated and sold.
Georgia’s HB 1084, passed in 2022,
Prohibit[s] the use of curricula that addresses the topics of slavery, racial oppression, racial segregation, or racial discrimination, including topics relating to the enactment and enforcement of laws resulting in racial oppression, segregation, and discrimination in a professionally and academically appropriate manner and without espousing personal political beliefs;
And what if a teacher expresses a personal distaste for slavery?
Since Georgia was among the first to pass a “DCL,” and at least 16 states have followed.
In Florida, Gov. Ron DeSantis, dubbed his DCL the “Stop WOKE Act.”
He banned the College Board’s AP African American Studies course and supported new Black history standards that include the requirement to teach, “how slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit.”
I can’t make this up.
Since 2021, at least 27 states have imposed or proposed bans or restrictions on teaching topics related to race and gender. Mississippi, Alabama, Arizona and Oklahoma all passed these Divisive Concepts laws. What do these states have in common? According to rankings by US News and World Report, they are all in the nation’s bottom third in educational achievement. Apparently, they won’t teach uncensored history—but then, it’s not clear that they teach much history at all.
Trump’s DLC brigade is not just putting a blindfold over students regarding slavery and Jim Crow. Oklahoma’s Divisive Concepts Law has effectively silenced the true story of the state that was once known officially as, “Indian Territory.”
Jim Gray, former Principal Chief of the Osage Nation, told me that teachers throughout the state have been yanking copies of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon off their classroom shelves. Killers, on which the Martin Scorsese/Leonardo DiCaprio movie is based, tells the true story about how, in the 1920s, over 100 Oklahoma Osage were murdered for their oil rights.
The insidious brilliance of the Oklahoma law is that it has a fuzzy general prohibition on “divisive” concepts—with teachers facing loss of their teaching credentials and the entire school district losing funding. Because teachers have to guess which books or films will get them fired, the result is mass self-censorship, with Killers culled from classrooms across the state.
A RAND corporation study found that a breathtaking two out of three K-12 teachers, “have decided on their own to limit instruction about political and social issues in the classroom.” Can you blame them?
Any student or parent can put a legal gun to a school principal’s head. But when the law says, “students,” as a practical matter, they don’t mean young kids on the Reservation. Every year, on April 22, Oklahoma celebrates “Sooner Rush Day”, the day in 1889, when any white man could simply stand on a plot of land and seize the surrounding 160 acres of what was, by treaty, Indian Territory. Indigenous kids have to re-enact the theft of their property whether they feel discomfort or not.
I have included this story of the Sooner Rush land grab in my documentary, Long Knife: the Osage Nation, Koch Oil and the new Killers of the Flower Moon. And for that alone, says Chief Gray, the chance it will screen in an Oklahoma school, even a state university, is zilch.
But some states are not shy about creating Black Lists of books to ban. Assigning anti-racist classics Huckleberry Finn or To Kill a Mockingbird, could kill a teacher’s career. PEN America counted 3,132 books banned in nine states in the 2022-23 school year.
Cui Bono? Who benefits from historical amnesia? Kemp alone was not the only white boy to make his fortune from a slaver’s whip. Historic amnesia is a profit center covering many historic misdeeds from Jim Crow to union busting to corporate corruption.
I found this out when I was physically ejected from the Georgia Historical Society in Savannah. I was having a polite interview with the Society’s in-house historian, Dr. Stan Deaton, who was explaining that the Klan took over control of the South when, in 1876, Republicans lost both the popular vote and the Electoral vote—yet a pact between the Klan-backed Southern Democrats and northern Republicans used a sly maneuver to overturn the vote and install the GOP candidate as President. It came down to one official, Dr. Deaton noted, then added, “We saw Mike Pence in that situation recently.”
The second the historian uttered the words, “Mike Pence,” the door flew open and the Society’s PR man halted the interview and expelled me from the building, saying, “We have to protect the new corporate donors on our board.”
I was curious. Who were these “donors” needing protection from history? I found their gala dinner on YouTube with their tuxedoed corporate money men: Georgia Pacific (owned by Koch Industries), Home Depot (owned by right-wing union buster Ken Langone), and Southern Company, whom I investigated some years ago for racketeering and the inexplicable death of whistleblowers. And the Chairman of the Historical Society? Gov. Brian Kemp.
Just below Savannah, at the Kemp family’s old plantation, I spoke with caretaker and Councilman Griffin Lotson whose own great-grandmother was sold at Weeping Time by Kemp’s progenitors.
Lotson emphasizes the connection between this legally enforced historical amnesia and the fight for voting rights. He says, “Suppressing history is suppressing the vote.”
Back in Oklahoma, the current Principal Chief of the Osage, Geoffrey Standing Bear, explained that if Oklahoma were to admit that its “Sooner Rush” was simply theft from the indigenous owners of the land, then it would force open eyes to what he calls, the “military occupation [of Native land] that continues today.”
Napoleon famously said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.” Trump’s DCL crusade sees history as a set of truths silenced.
*Greg Palast (Rolling Stone, Guardian, BBC) is the author of The New York Times bestsellers including The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. His latest film is Vigilantes Inc.: America’s New Vote Suppression Hitmen to be released in September. GregPalast.com
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