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    The right wants Charlie Kirk memorials across the US – but is it just an attempt to capitalize on his killing?

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    Republicans and conservatives are campaigning to quickly build statues and other memorials across the United States for the slain rightwing activist Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination at a college event in Utah last month.Political leaders in states such as Florida, Michigan and Oklahoma have not only called for construction of memorials but in some cases also threatened to penalize colleges that refuse to publicly honor Kirk, who was killed on 10 September.The heavy-handed push to honor Kirk, who held views that many see as racist and sexist, follows Donald Trump’s moves to restore monuments of Confederate leaders that were removed in recent years, which appear to be part of a broad effort to impose rightwing views on the country.“The way in which you keep the culture war going – or the way that you win it – is to have religious icons like Charlie and use their face and their name and their likeness to further your cause,” said Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia who has studied Christian nationalism.Kirk, who co-founded the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was killed at Utah State University during one of his signature events in which he debated students.Since then, Trump and others in his administration, such as Stephen Miller, have blamed the shooting – without producing any evidence – on a coordinated violent effort by the “radical left” and threatened to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” the left’s “terrorism and terror networks”.Kirk often criticized gay and transgender rights and made Islamophobic statements and once suggested that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. However, at the state and local level, Republican lawmakers have described Kirk as a “modern civil rights leader” who stood for “allowing everybody to voice their opinion respectfully”.Just a week after Kirk’s murder, Ohio Republican state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto introduced legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to build a “Charlie Kirk memorial plaza” with a statue “that features the conservative leader sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk “and his wife standing and holding their children in their arms”.A few weeks later, in Florida, Kevin Steele, a state house Republican, also proposed legislation that would require all of the state’s public universities to rename roads for Kirk.“The Florida State University shall redesignate Chieftain Way as Charlie James Kirk Road,” the bill states. “Pasco-Hernando State College shall redesignate Mrs Prameela Musunuru Health and Wellness Trail as Charlie James Kirk Trail.”In Florida, if the schools do not establish the memorials by stated deadline, the state would withhold funding from the institutions, and in Oklahoma, the state would fine the schools, according to the legislation.Boedy, the University of North Georgia professor, likened the lawmakers’ threats to withhold state money to Trump’s moves to cut off federal funding to universities unless they met his list of demands.“State funding for education should be based upon students’ interest in majors, in enrollment and in science, in objective criteria, and honoring a single person is not part of that,” said Boedy, who has been on Turning Point’s watchlist of “professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom”.Jett, Prieto and Steele did not respond to requests for comment.Kirk was critical of higher education and wrote a book titled The College Scam: How America’s Universities Are Bankrupting and Brainwashing Away the Future of America’s Youth.“I find it really ironic that the state of Oklahoma is demanding that every public university have a Charlie Kirk memorial plaza,” said Erika Doss, an art historian at the University of Texas at Dallas and the author of Memorial Mania: Public Feeling in America.While the states have not approved the legislation requiring the memorials, at least one Florida county has installed a sign for a Charlie Kirk Memorial Highway, despite some public opposition.And less than a week after the murder, New College of Florida, a liberal arts university that has been the subject of a conservative takeover, also posted on X an AI-generated image of a bronze sculpture of Kirk at a table and stated that it would build the statue on campus “to defend and fight for free speech and civil discourse in American life”.That may not be easy. After events like 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the assassinations of John F Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, public monuments were often not built for years, sometimes decades.Quickly sharing a fake image of a Kirk memorial “is a lie”, Doss said. “It matters because it doesn’t tell the truth about how complicated and necessarily complicated making public art should be.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionBy waiting years to build a memorial, you can see how time really changes the “emotional tenor and the perspective on the event”, said Gabriel Reich, a professor of history and social studies at Virginia Commonwealth University who has studied collective memories of the US civil war and emancipation.“How people feel about [Kirk’s killing] five years from now may be different, and it may depend on what happens between now and then,” said Reich. “Does the political violence escalate and continue? Does it get tamped down?”It’s not a foregone conclusion that the schools will build the monuments.In Michigan, the Mecosta county board of commissioners wanted Ferris State University to build a statue for Kirk and offered to split the funding, but the school president declined, citing a “a longstanding practice that limits statues on campus to individuals who have made significant, direct contributions to Ferris State University itself”, according to the Detroit Free-Press.At New College, alum William Rosenberg sees the proposed statue as an attempt by the administration to distract from problems at the school, which was once a highly ranked institution considered among the most liberal in the country.“New College was a welcoming environment for people who were motivated and wanted to learn and wanted to do it on their own terms,” said Rosenberg, who graduated in 1980 with a degree in medieval studies.Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, a Republican, has tried in recent years to transform the school by appointing political allies such as the conservative activist Christopher Rufo to its board of trustees, firing its president and revamping its curriculum.Since then, the school has seen its national ranking and graduation and retention rates plummet, while the state now spends significantly more on each student than those at its other public universities, according to Inside Higher Ed.After posting the AI image of the statue, New College’s president, Richard Corcoran, touted the public response in a weekly email.“In the first 72 hours of the announcement, New College of Florida was mentioned nearly 3 billion times (including traditional media in the graph below, and reposts on social media),” the email stated. “Normally, New College receives about 100 million impressions a month. In 72 hours, New College received about 2 1/2 years of media coverage.”A New College spokesperson, James Miller, declined an interview request.Rosenberg, a semi-retired computer engineer, doubts the school will actually build the statue because of Corcoran’s “history of promising the world and delivering nothing”.“A lot of alumni feel it was a gross PR move to capitalize on Charlie Kirk’s murder,” Rosenberg said. “New College of Florida has now become a political pawn whose real mission is about making political headlines while the on-the-ground education has nosedived.” More

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      US revokes six foreigners’ visas over social media comments criticizing Charlie Kirk

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      Donald Trump’s US state department said on Tuesday it had revoked the visas of six foreigners over social media comments made about the assassination of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.“The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” the state department said in a statement posted on X. “The State Department continues to identify visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.”The state department then listed six “examples of aliens who are no longer welcome in the US” in a thread on the social media platform owned by Elon Musk, the Trump donor who called himself “a free speech absolutist” before buying the site formerly known as Twitter.The thread included screenshots and quotes from people identified as foreign nationals of Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa.None of the individuals was identified by name, but the screenshots made it possible to trace the identities of two people, including one who had been singled out for abuse by conservatives on X.“Charlie Kirk won’t be remembered as a hero,” one of the comments posted on X read. “He was used to astroturf a movement of white nationalist trailer trash!”The thread ended with a statement from the state department that Trump and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, “will defend our borders, our culture, and our citizens by enforcing our immigration laws. Aliens who take advantage of America’s hospitality while celebrating the assassination of our citizens will be removed.”Last month, a deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, urged social media users to send him posts critical of Kirk, saying he was “disgusted to see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe administration has previously ramped up efforts to identify and potentially expel thousands of foreign students it accuses of participating in unrest in the form of protests against Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The administration has also required foreign visitors to make their social media accounts public so that they can be checked before they are allowed to enter the land of the free.In recent months, the administration has expelled South Africa’s ambassador to the US for comments critical of Trump, revoked a visa for Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas to attend the United Nations General Assembly in New York and cancelled visas of the visas for British punk-rap duo Bob Vylan.The government has also said it is reviewing the status of the more than 55 million holders of visas to enter the US for potential violations of its standards.Those actions have been criticized by civil rights groups as blatant violations of constitutional protections for freedom of speech, which apply to anyone in the US, not just citizens. More

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      Trump calls Charlie Kirk a martyr and boasts about 2024 election at posthumous medal ceremony – live

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      Donald Trump just presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk’s distraught, tearful widow, Erika Kirk.Erika Kirk then made remarks from the podium, telling Turning Point USA members that her husband’s mission lives on through them.Erika Kirk delivered an emotional speech, at times dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief, as Trump stood to her right.She said: “I have spent seven and a half years trying to find the perfect birthday gift for Charlie… But now I can say with confidence, Mr President, that you have given him the best birthday gift he could ever have.”The pair then spoke quietly for some moments as a band began to play Amazing Grace.The White House ceremony in honor of Charlie Kirk has now concluded.At a campaign event last year, Donald Trump said that the Presidential Medal of Freedom for civilians, which he bestowed on Kirk on Tuesday, was “much better” than the top military award for those killed or wounded in action: the Medal of Honor.Trump was widely criticized for that comment, made as he addressed Miriam Adelson, the widow of the Republican mega-donor Sheldon Adelson. Trump had awarded Miriam Adelson the Medal of Freedom in 2018.The civilian medal, Trump told supporters then, is “actually much better because everyone [who] gets the congressional Medal of Honor, they’re soldiers.”“They’re either in very bad shape because they’ve been hit so many times by bullets or they’re dead. She gets it, and she’s a healthy, beautiful woman. And they’re rated equal.”Charlie Kirk is not the first to receive the medal from Trump posthumously. During his first term, he gave it to Babe Ruth, Elvis Presley and Antonin Scalia.In 2020, Trump also presented the medal to the rightwing radio host Rush Limbaugh during a State of the Union address.In his speech at the memorial for Kirk in Arizona last month, Trump revealed that Limbaugh was one of Kirk’s role models. “He was an Eagle scout who spent his school lunch breaks listening to another champion for liberty, somebody that he greatly admired, Rush Limbaugh,” Trump said.“Charlie Kirk was one of a kind. He was unstoppable… He’s irreplaceable. Nobody can replace him,” Donald Trump said in his remarks.“In Charlie’s honour we will continue to fight, fight, fight and win, win, win.”A military officer then read Kirk’s citation for the presidential medal of freedom.Kirk’s widow Erika thanked Trump and said: “Charlie always admired your commitment to freedom.”In remarks at the White House, Charlie Kirk’s widow praised her late husband in explicitly Christian terms and said that he would likely have run for president one day had he not been killed before his 32nd birthday.“If the moment had come, he probably would’ve run for president, but not out of ambition,” Erika Kirk said.In paying tribute to Kirk, Trump railed against “radical left extremism, violence and terror.”He asserted: “They have the devil’s ideology… They seem to become very violent on the left.”Trump claimed these attacks included the attempt on his own life at a campaign rally last year, even though the would-be assassin had no apparent political motive.The president went on tout his law and order crackdown on US cities. “We’ve done a great job.”He said of Washington: “We’re done with the angry mobs.” He claimed the city is now safe.But then police car sirens wailed near the White House. Trump, however, insisted: “That’s a beautiful sound. They’re stopping crime. That’s what they’re doing.”Donald Trump just presented the Presidential Medal of Freedom to Charlie Kirk’s distraught, tearful widow, Erika Kirk.Erika Kirk then made remarks from the podium, telling Turning Point USA members that her husband’s mission lives on through them.As Donald Trump boasted about the impact of his federal takeover of policing in the District of Columbia, blaring sirens could be heard in the distance, undermining his claim that there is no longer any crime in the capital city.Trump then claimed, falsely, that sirens were previously not heard in Washington DC because the city’s police force did not respond to crime.“You hear those sirens going off? That’s good, that’s a good sound,” the president said. “That means they either got the bad guy, or are gonna stop the bad guy. You didn’t hear that sound, because nobody wanted to do anything.”“Charlie Kirk was a martyr for truth and freedom,” Donald Trump just said in the Rose Garden. “From Socrates and St Peter, from Abraham Lincoln to Martin Luther King, those who change history the most, and he really did, have always risked their lives for causes they were put on earth to defend.”In the course of praising Charlie Kirk for his efforts to turn out conservative voters, Donald Trump boasted at length about his victory in the 2024 presidential election, repeating his familiar exaggerated claims that his popular vote victory “was massive”.Trump in fact got about 77.3 million votes, or 49.81%, to Kamala Harris’ 75 million votes, or 48.33% — a 1.48-point margin.From my vantage point at the back, I saw Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity greet each other warmly. Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Spicer and Jesse Watters are also present.Reflecting on Kirk’s death, Trump said: “It’s a horrible, heinous, demonic act of murder.”The president, who just returned from the Middle East, noted the inconvenient timing of today’s event but insisted: “I would not have missed this moment for anything in the world.”Guests are sitting or standing in warm sunshine and a gentle breeze as Trump speaks from a lectern with four US flags behind him.Recent additions to the rose garden and surrounding area include a statue of George Washington, bust of Abraham Lincoln and gold framed portraits of every president except Joe Biden, replaced by an auto pen.Trump referred to the government shutdown and commented: “We’re dealing with some radical left lunatics.”He suggested that Kirk would have responded by organising a young people’s march on the US Capitol.Trump said: “Charles James Kirk was a visionary and one of the greatest leaders of his generation.”The president seemed to be telling Kirk’s life story but veered off into talking about his past election campaigns. “Too big to rig.”Donald Trump has arrived for Charlie Kirk’s posthumous presidential medal of freedom ceremony, which is taking place in the Rose Garden at the White House.Trump walked out of the Oval Office with Charlie Kirk’s widow Erica.The guests here include JD Vance, treasury secretary Scott Bessent, commerce secretary Howard Lutnick, attorney general Pam Bondi and defense secretary Pete Hegseth.Also here are top Trumpworld operatives who were close to Kirk, including lobbyist Arthur Schwartz, former Trump deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich and Alex Bruesewitz.Donald Trump just began his remarks by praising his own renovation of what he called “the new and improved Rose Garden, and people are loving it”. He also drew attention to the new “presidential walk of fame”, which is a gallery of portraits of 44 of the 45 men to have served as president, with an image of an automatic pen in place of Joe Biden.Trump said that they were gathered to honor “the late, great Charlie Kirk”, the founder of the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA he is awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor.The president took issue with the characterization of Kirk at his memorial in Arizona as someone who loved his enemies. “He didn’t necessarily love those enemies”, Trump said.Trump also suggested that he would have asked to push back the ceremony so that he could stay longer in the Middle East with the wealthy leaders of Gulf nations, but “October 14 is Charlie’s birthday, and he should have been turning 32 years old”.The president went on to give a largely familiar political speech, attacking Democrats as “radical left lunatics” and making jokes about the ABC host George Stephanopoulos, whose name he intentionally mispronounced.Trump also suggested that the current government shutdown would have been ended by Kirk, had he not been killed last month in Utah, who would have led “a march on the Capitol.”Guests have assembled in the new Mar-a-Lago style patio in the White House Rose Garden for the Medal of Freedom ceremony to honor Charlie Kirk, the murdered conservative activist and podcaster.The guests include Kirk’s widow, Erika, and current or former Fox hosts Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Bill O’Reilly and Jesse Watters.Also there is Jack Posobiec, a conspiracy theorist who hosts a show on the far-right Real America’s Voice network sponsored by Turning Point USA, the advocacy group founded by Kirk.The are currently listening to a rendition of Ave Maria as they await the president, Donald Trump.

      Donald Trump said that a list of ‘Democrat programs’ that White House plans to cut will be released on Friday. He noted that he plans to cut “egregious, semi-communist” programs that, he claims, Democrats hold dear, but doesn’t plan to touch Republican programs, “because we think they work”. While hosting Javier Milei, president of Argentina, Trump took questions from reporters, in what became a far-ranging, impromptu press conference.

      Trump warned that Hamas must disarm ‘or we will disarm them’. Trump added that could happen “quickly and perhaps violently”. When he was asked about a timeline for disarmament, the president said that it would be “a reasonable period of time … pretty quickly”. So far, Trump has been taking a victory lap, complete with bipartisan praise, for brokering the hostage-prisoner exchange on Monday, and the ceasefire deal in Gaza.

      Earlier, Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that the United States has struck another small boat that he accuses of carrying drugs in waters off the coast of Venezuala, killing six people aboard. “The strike was conducted in International Waters, and six male narcoterrorists aboard the vessel were killed in the strike,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social. “No U.S. Forces were harmed.”

      Back in Washington, the government shutdown enters its 14th day, with no end in sight. House Republicans continued to criticize the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, who they accuse of holding out on the House-passed funding bill to appease the left-wing base of his party. “We’re certainly not going to allow the American people to be taken hostage for his political gain,” House speaker Mike Johnson said today. Meanwhile Democrats, claim their colleagues across the aisle have abandoned good faith negotiations. House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries said that Republicans have gone “radio silent” since congressional leadership met with Trump at the White House days before the shutdown began. The Senate will hold its eighth vote, in the hopes of passing a funding bill to reopen the government. Spoiler alert: it’s unlikely to happen.

      The supreme court declined to hear Alex Jones’s challenge to a $1.4bn judgment awarded to families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School mass shooting in 2012. Jones, a noted conspiracy theorist and founder of Infowars, made several false statements that the shooting – which killed 20 children – was a hoax.

      On the campaign trail, Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, has officially announced that she’s running for US Senate, challenging the incumbent, Republican Susan Collins. Mills, 77, will face a primary challenge from Graham Platner, the progressive oyster farmer entering politics for the first time and backed by Independent senator Bernie Sanders, of Vermont.
      Speaking to reporters while hosting Argentina’s president, Donald Trump said that he plans to cut “egregious, semi-communist” programs that, he claims, Democrats hold dear.“They’re never going to come back,” Trump said. “The Democrats are getting killed, and we’re going to have a list of them on Friday.”“We’re not closing up Republican programs because we think they work. So the Democrats are getting killed, but they’re not telling the people about that,” he added.Donald Trump floated taking away Boston’s ability to host several 2026 World Cup matches, calling out mayor Michelle Wu. “She’s intelligent, but she’s radical left,” Trump said, while offering to send federal law enforcement to the city. “All she has to do is call us. We’ll go in and take them back. But she’s afraid to, because she thinks it’s bad politically.”Trump added that if he feels that the city is “unsafe” he will “call up Gianni” and tell him to move the games to another location. Gianni Infantino, the head of Fifa, has emerged as an ally of the president as the games inch closer.“Boston better clean up their act, that’s all I can say,” Trump said. More

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      Trump posthumously awards Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom

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      Donald Trump posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States, to the assassinated far-right commentator Charlie Kirk at the White House on Tuesday.Kirk, who was shot at an event at Utah Valley University in September, was among the most significant rightwing activists in the modern political era, galvanizing a younger generation of conservatives to engage in politics and support Trump’s candidacy ahead of the 2024 election.But Kirk was also polarizing through his rhetoric, which often criticized gay and transgender rights. He made suggestions that the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a “mistake”. Some critics have argued tributes to him elevated extremist views that stoked division.The ceremony for Kirk was held on what would have been his 32nd birthday. Kirk’s widow, Erika, accepted the award on her husband’s behalf.Trump returned to the US early Tuesday morning in time for the event after an impromptu trip to Israel and Egypt to take a victory lap after Israel and Hamas agreed to an initial ceasefire deal last week.The Presidential Medal of Freedom was first awarded in 1963. Previous recipients have included Audrey Hepburn, Milton Friedman, Walter Cronkite and Edward Kennedy. Trump has often conferred it to his supporters, like Rush Limbaugh, and last month said he would award it to Rudy Giuliani, his former personal lawyer.Kirk became a key ally to Trump through his organization Turning Point USA and its various offshoots, including Turning Point Action, which in effect ran the ground game operation for the Trump campaign in the key battleground state of Arizona, which Trump won.His introduction to Trumpworld came around a decade earlier. In the early days of Trump’s 2016 campaign, Kirk scored a meeting at Trump Tower and offered advice to Don Jr on how to attract young voters.That meeting got Kirk hired on the spot as Don Jr’s personal campaign assistant, but Kirk’s closeness with Trump grew in the wake of the 2020 election when he became a leading voice in pushing baseless claims that the election had been stolen.Kirk was also one of the few political operatives who stuck by Trump when he was in exile at Mar-a-Lago after the January 6 Capitol riot, which Trump remembered as a notable display of personal loyalty at one of the lowest points for the president.During the 2022 midterms cycle, Kirk encouraged Trump to endorse JD Vance’s Senate campaign – and then two years later urged Trump and Don Jr to select Vance as running mate before the 2024 Republican national convention. After his death, Vance accompanied Kirk’s casket to Arizona on Air Force Two. More

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      FBI cuts ties with two advocacy groups that track US extremism after rightwing backlash

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      Kash Patel, the FBI director, says the agency is cutting ties with two organizations that for decades have tracked domestic extremism and racial and religious bias, a move that follows complaints about the groups from some conservatives and prominent allies of president Donald Trump.Patel said on Friday that the FBI would sever its relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), asserting that the organization had been turned into a “partisan smear machine” and criticizing it for its use of a “hate map” that documents alleged anti-government and hate groups inside the US. A statement earlier in the week from Patel said the FBI would end ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a prominent Jewish advocacy organization that fights antisemitism.The announcements amount to a dramatic rethinking of longstanding FBI partnerships with prominent civil rights groups at a time when Patel is moving rapidly to reshape the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency. The organizations over the years have provided research on hate crime and domestic extremism, law enforcement training and other services – but have also been criticized by some conservatives for what they say is an unfair maligning of their viewpoints.That criticism escalated after the 10 September assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk amid renewed attention to the SPLC’s characterization of the group, Turning Point USA, that Kirk founded. For instance, the SPLC included a section on Turning Point in a report titled “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024” that described the group as a “case study in the hard right”. Prominent figures including Elon Musk lambasted the SPLC in recent days about its descriptions of Kirk and the organization.A spokesperson for the SPLC, a legal and advocacy group founded in 1971 as a watchdog for minorities and the underprivileged, did not directly address Patel’s comments in a statement Friday but said the organization has for decades shared data with the public and remains “committed to exposing hate and extremism as we work to equip communities with knowledge and defend the rights and safety of marginalized people”.The ADL has also faced criticism on the right for maintaining a “Glossary of Extremism”. The organization announced recently that it was discontinuing that glossary because a number of entries were outdated and some were being “intentionally misrepresented and misused”.Founded in 1913 to confront antisemitism, the ADL has long worked closely with the FBI – not only through research and training but also through awards ceremonies that recognize law enforcement officials involved in investigations into racially or religiously motivated extremism.James Comey, the former FBI director, paid tribute to that relationship in May 2017 when he said at an ADL event: “For more than 100 years, you have advocated and fought for fairness and equality, for inclusion and acceptance. You never were indifferent or complacent.”A Patel antagonist, Comey was indicted on 25 September on false statement and obstruction charges and has said he is innocent. Patel appeared to mock Comey’s comments in a post Wednesday on X in which he shared a Fox News story that quoted him as having cut ties with the ADL.“James Comey wrote ‘love letters’ to the ADL and embedded FBI agents with them – a group that ran disgraceful ops spying on Americans,” he said in a post made as Jews were preparing to begin observing Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar. “That era is OVER. This FBI won’t partner with political fronts masquerading as watchdogs.”An ADL spokesperson did not immediately comment Friday on Patel’s announcement. But CEO and executive director Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement Friday that the ADL “has deep respect” for the FBI.“In light of an unprecedented surge of antisemitism, we remain more committed than ever to our core purpose to protect the Jewish people,” Greenblatt said. More

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      FBI arrest man who allegedly threatened to shoot people at Texas Pride parade

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      Federal authorities in Texas have arrested a man for allegedly threatening to shoot people at a pro-LGBTQ+ parade, to avenge the murder of Charlie Kirk.According to court documents viewed by the Guardian, on 18 September, the FBI’s field office in Dallas was notified by Abilene, Texas, police about online threats from a local resident.The resident, identified as Joshua Cole, allegedly used a Facebook account under the name “Jay Dubya” where he “threatened to commit a shooting” at a Pride parade in Abilene on 20 September.“Fk their parade, I say we lock and load and pay them back for taking out Charlie Kirk,” Cole allegedly wrote, referring to the rightwing political activist, in one comment.Kirk was shot to death on 10 September at Utah Valley University (UVU).Citing investigators’ interviews with people close to the suspect in the case, Utah prosecutors have alleged Tyler Robinson killed Kirk after becoming sick of what he perceived to be Kirk’s “hatred”. Investigators reported being told by his family that Robinson had become “more pro-gay and trans rights oriented” in the year prior to Kirk’s killing.Another comment Cole allegedly posted about the Abilene Pride parade read: “Theres only like 30 of em we can send a clear message to the rest of them.” Invoking an insult used to demean LGBTQ+ people, Cole also allegedly wrote: “come on bro let’s go hunting fairies.”In a sworn affidavit, FBI special agent Sam Venuti wrote that investigators confirmed the “Jay Dubya” account belonged to Cole.Venuti said that he had attempted to contact Cole at his place of work, where he had been employed for the past year. But the employer said that Cole had “just quit” and had “stormed out of the facility in anger”, Venuti said.Co-workers reportedly described him as a “hot head”, according to Venuti’s affidavit.Not long after, local police, with Venuti present, conducted a traffic stop on Cole.When the agent told Cole that he wanted “to talk to him about his online activity”, Venuti wrote that “Cole then sighed and his body posture indicated that [he] knew the reason for our discussion”.Venuti’s affidavit added that Cole “did not appear surprised”.Cole was then detained. According to the FBI, Cole waived his rights against self-incrimination and – during questioning – reportedly admitted to owning a firearm, to operating the “Jay Dubya” Facebook account and to making the threatening posts.The affidavit states that Cole reportedly agreed that “a reasonable person could interpret his comments as a threat”. He also said he did “not believe that the gay pride event should be allowed” though denied “that he was going to take action or shoot parade participants”.Venuti concluded in the affidavit that Cole’s “threats were not conditional”.“The threats were specific,” Venuti wrote. “The threats were also specific to a particular set of victims: people participating in the gay pride parade.”Based on the evidence, the FBI agent wrote, he believed that there was probable cause to arrest Cole for violating a federal law that prohibits threatening communications.Cole could face up to five years in prison if convicted, according to the Cornell University law school’s Legal Information Institute.After being jailed, Cole appeared briefly at a preliminary hearing, where a judge ordered him to remain in custody pending further proceedings.An attorney listed for Cole did not immediately respond to a request for comment.On 26 September, the Abilene Pride Alliance issued a public statement about the incident.“We want to reassure our community that the safety of everyone at Pride has always been, and will continue to be our top priority,” they wrote. “The swift action and continued diligence of [authorities] reflect their commitment to protecting our city and ensuring that Pride remains a safe, inclusive and celebratory space for all.”The Trump administration – which has threatened to crack down on leftwing groups who opposed Kirk’s views – did not announce and has not commented publicly on Cole’s arrest. More

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      ‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right

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      It has taken barely two weeks for Donald Trump to turn the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk to his political advantage, unleashing an unprecedented peacetime assault on free speech and a free press on the back of the assassination.Since Kirk’s death, the president and his top team have:

      forced a private media company to suspend late-night TV star Jimmy Kimmel for inaccurate comments he made about Kirk’s suspected shooter;

      threatened other TV networks with losing their licences should they say things Trump doesn’t like;

      vowed to prosecute “hate speech” that is fully protected under the first amendment;

      declared antifa a terrorist organisation in an indiscriminate attack on political ideology;

      and told journalists covering the Pentagon that they will have their access revoked unless they agree to restrictions on their reporting.
      That’s a far cry from the promise Trump made on the first day of his new presidency.On 20 January, hours after he had been sworn in as 47th president, Trump sat at his desk in the Oval Office and applied his distinctive signature to executive order 14149 – Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.The order pronounced that government censorship of speech was “intolerable in a free society”. It promised that under Trump’s watch, no federal official would engage in any conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen”.View image in fullscreenIt was a bold pledge to return America to the values of free speech and expression enshrined in the first amendment of the US constitution. But for some observers following events that day, the executive order was to be taken with a large pinch of salt.“I knew at the moment that the ink was not even dry, that executive order 14149 was a load of BS,” said Matt Welch, editor-at-large of the libertarian magazine Reason. “I knew it would not last.”Despite the administration’s rush to censorship as a result of Kirk’s killing, Trump has so far enjoyed almost complete support from the Republican party and his wider “Make America great again” (Maga) movement. Relatively few voices from the right of American politics have cried foul.But those voices are pointed, and in the longer term potentially critically important. Many of them subscribe to libertarianism, with its emphasis on individual rights, civil liberties and limited government. Or as Reason puts it, devotion to “free minds and free markets”.Other free speech critics have raised their voices from the wider conservative movement, while a few brave souls have even spoken out against Trump from within the Republican party. Collectively, they articulate a conservative and libertarian critique of Trump’s second presidency that, given that it comes nominally from his own side, may carry some weight with the president as he proceeds to pulverise constitutional norms.Their presence – lonely though at times it may seem – underlines that Trump and his Maga army have not yet secured an absolute monopoly of thought on the right. As guardians of free speech trying to hold back an increasingly authoritarian tide, they can also offer tentative clues as to how American conservatism might one day claw its way back from Maga’s iron grip.But for now they remain engaged in a long, uphill battle. “We are locked in a type of memetic combat,” Welch said. “We’re standing on the sidelines trying to get their attention, telling them that each new development is making it worse, and they are not listening at all.”Rightwing thinktanks have been central to Trump’s second presidency. The Heritage Foundation presented him with the blueprint for his incendiary return to office: the 920-page Project 2025.America First Legal, founded by the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has provided legal ballast for many of Trump’s key ambitions. They include tearing down diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiating mass deportations.But as Trump has begun aggrandising his own power and wielding it against his opponents, a separate heavyweight thinktank, the libertarian Cato Institute, has emerged as a thorn in the president’s side.Initially, Cato’s belief in small government and deregulation led it to show enthusiastic support for the Maga agenda.Within 48 hours of Trump’s second inauguration, the thinktank had flagged up 22 of his predecessor Joe Biden’s executive orders including several countering the climate crisis and enhancing healthcare, all of which Trump dutifully revoked. It also offered its own blueprint, in this case a manual for Elon Musk and his demolition crew, the “department of government efficiency”, that was so well received that Rolling Stone dubbed Cato “Doge’s unofficial think tank”.More recently, however, Trump’s egregiously unconstitutional assault on the first amendment has goaded Cato into speaking out as a rare but influential adversary on the right. Thomas Berry, Cato’s director of constitutional studies, told the Guardian that several of Trump’s recent actions had offended one of the institute’s most fundamental values.“When government officials use the power of the state either to suppress speech or tilt the free marketplace of ideas, that’s incredibly dangerous in the long term. It places a core restriction on individual liberty – the right to say what you want and say what you believe,” he said.Cato began objecting to Trump’s authoritarian tendencies well before Kirk’s death. In June the thinktank joined a coalition of groups in filing an amicus brief supporting Harvard in its lawsuit against the Trump administration after billions of federal dollars were withheld from the university ostensibly as punishment for its failure to combat antisemitism.Cato also expressed concern about Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, students from Columbia and Tufts universities respectively, whom the administration tried to deport after their public criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Berry called the administration’s yanking of Harvard funding and the student immigration actions “core infringements on academic freedom and speech”.He also denounced Trump’s executive order last month vowing to prosecute anyone burning the American flag. As he pointed out, “there is ironclad legal precedent that flag burning is protected speech.”View image in fullscreenSince Kirk’s killing, Berry has watched the unfolding of Trump’s “free speech for me, but not for thee” response with mounting alarm. Disney’s temporary cancellation of Kimmel’s late-night show for misrepresenting the Kirk suspect as a Maga supporter after threats of government penalties from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was in Berry’s estimation a clear example of “government power being used to suppress speech that the administration doesn’t like”.Then there was the intervention of Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, who days after Kirk’s death vowed to prosecute hate speech. Like flag burning, hate speech is fully protected under the first amendment, as the country’s top law enforcement official ideally should have known.Ironically, Kirk himself was clear on this point, saying last year: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the first amendment.”Berry also regards as a free speech violation Trump’s threats to go against leftwing groups he dislikes. On Monday the president designated antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”, a move that potentially breaches the first amendment by criminalising political ideology.All of these quick-fire steps after Kirk’s assassination towards controlling public discourse leaves Berry profoundly apprehensive. “I’m very worried about what the executive branch is trying to do,” he said.In particular, the Cato director is concerned about what he calls the “capitulation factor”. He fears that private companies such as Disney, ABC’s owner that suspended Kimmel for six days before the comic was allowed back on air on Tuesday, will settle with Trump rather than stand up for constitutional rights.“Long term, we’ll get through this,” Berry said. “But in the short term a lot of speech is going to be chilled without ever getting into court, and that’s very, very bad.”View image in fullscreenOpposition to the assault on free speech goes beyond the libertarian right. Other prominent public figures from conservative and libertarian circles have spoken out, indicating fissures that, should they grow, could challenge Trump’s Maga hegemony.Bari Weiss, a rising star on the anti-woke right who is being reportedly groomed for a top job at CBS, has castigated the president in her online outlet, the Free Press. In an editorial, the site decried Trump’s many threats against media organisations as a “case where the medicine is worse than the disease”.In Congress, senator Ted Cruz, normally a reliable Trump acolyte, warned the president to avoid habitually bullying media companies. If he did, it would “end up bad for conservatives”.Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky who has led the charge to have the Epstein files released, compared Bondi’s threat to prosecute hate speech to George Orwell’s dystopian “thought crimes”.Even the Maga cheerleader Tucker Carlson cleared an episode of his online show to rail against the risk of hate speech laws being introduced in America. Were that to happen, Carlson said, then civil disobedience would be called for.“Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”So how did it come to this? How did Trump go from executive order 14149 to threatening an ABC reporter to his face last week that he might face prosecution “because you treat me so unfairly”?How did JD Vance move from pledging in February that under Trump’s leadership “we may disagree with your views but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square”, to calling for a mass doxing of anyone who had celebrated Kirk’s murder?How did the FCC chair Brendan Carr veer from having denounced in 2023 government censorship as the “authoritarian’s dream”, to using his federal power to force Kimmel’s suspension with the mob-like menace: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way?”Eugene Volokh, a libertarian conservative who is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has a word for the Trump team’s razor sharp U-turn on free speech. He calls it “censorship envy”.“It’s human nature to want to restrict speech that you disapprove of, to retaliate,” he said. “People are motivated by censorship envy – the idea that the other side got to suppress speech they disliked, so I should jump on the bandwagon and get some of that action too.”Volokh added that in his opinion Trump’s get-you-back censorship was a mistake. “It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for the conservative movement.”View image in fullscreenThat admonition was echoed by Sabrina Schaeffer, a member of the executive team of the R Street Institute, which preaches classical liberalism, individual liberty and free markets. She said that she has been scratching her head over the past few days as so many Republicans applauded the clampdown on free speech.“I know they’re tired of ‘woke’ politics. But this should be a cautionary tale, because one day Democrats will hold the levers of power again and then they will be even more empowered to shut down dissenting views.”Welch, who regards his strain of libertarianism as neither of the right nor left, sees the current moment against the long arch of history. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican party was a broad church that combined conservatism with libertarian activism, with free speech as one of its central tenets.What Trump has unleashed, by contrast, “is going against Reagan and 40 years of American politics. People are so addicted to power right now that they are throwing principles out the window.”It was Republicans, Welch pointed out, that in the 1970s and 80s led the charge on free speech grounds against the FCC’s so-called fairness doctrine that required TV networks to carry opposing viewpoints on controversial public issues. That is a world away from the Republican chair of the FCC threatening a broadcast company over one comment from a comedian.“I care about the federal government telling a private broadcaster how they are supposed to conduct their business,” Welch said. “That’s crazy.”Cato’s Berry is clearly disturbed by the turn of events, but he has not despaired. For him, the way out of this quagmire lies with the American judiciary and the first amendment itself, which he regards as the strongest safeguard of free speech in the world.“I remain confident that the courts will uphold the principles that the government cannot be biased, that it cannot chill speech through selective enforcement, that there is no law against hate speech.”As for Welch, he draws comfort in the storm from a more amorphous source. He looks to the American spirit, and a characteristic within it that he believes has been integral since even before the country’s founding.That is, the ability of Americans to trash each other.“We criticise, always have done,” he said. “We have just always been kind of assholes, cheeky.”Welch sees the portrayal of Trump in the latest season of the animated sitcom South Park as a seamless continuation of this trait. The president is depicted as a censorship-addicted dictator sleeping with the devil.That gives Welch hope.“I feel like the South Park in all of us will eventually win,” he said. “It’s the natural place for us to be, and by the time Trump finally goes, he’ll find himself on the losing end.”body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: 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      Charlie Kirk was a divisive far-right podcaster. Why is he being rebranded as a national hero?

      by

      The streets of Washington DC are unmistakable. In addition to noting the city’s signature architecture and public monuments, one will know they are in the nation’s capital when they can barely go half a city block without spotting a US flag. Two weeks ago, those flags were flying at half-staff, but not in recognition of the passing of a high-ranking public official, as would be customary. Instead, the half-staff was ordered by the White House in a highly politicized effort to memorialize the 10 September killing of Charlie Kirk, a 31-year-old podcaster, hard-right party operative, and Maga youth influencer, as an event of national tragedy.Kirk ruled over an online fiefdom peddling his signature brand of rage-baiting racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and misogynistic commentary. It wasn’t just his vitriolic style, but also his popularization of cruelty, humiliation and dehumanization of political opponents – especially college students – that attracted millions to his audience. He famously said empathy was “a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage”.As a Black woman, I felt no sorrow watching these flags hang limp and lifeless from chrome posts in the stiff, humid summer heat that, even on the eve of autumn, will not unhand a city already stifled by federal threats of military occupation. I felt the same when, just hours after the shooting, the speaker of the House of Representatives called for a moment of silence on the floor for a private citizen who had never held office nor served in the military. (The brief silence erupted seconds later into a shouting match melee when congresswoman Lauren Boebert requested that members hold an open prayer for Kirk from the floor). Just nine days later, the House passed a Republican resolution eulogizing Kirk’s life with a sweeping 310-58 majority.I felt no mourning when seven teams in the National Football League – the very organization that has long been criticized for its inconsistent and often hypocritical stance on the place of politics in sports – held in-game memorials for Kirk, who never played any professional sport nor held a role within the league. In the Dallas Cowboys stadium in Texas, Jumbotrons featured a statesman-like image of Kirk, what one might expect for the passing of a former president or a longtime team affiliate. The grand gesture was drenched in hard-to-miss hypocrisy: forced silence from Black players who were punished for advocating for social justice in 2020, while, in the endzone, a painted astroturf read “End Racism” – a relic of just how fleeting the league’s lip service to the Black Lives Matter movement just a few years ago proved to be.I feel no grief because these memorials to Kirk are not created for me to grieve. Instead, they seek not only to enshrine Kirk into the national consciousness, but also to foster national memories about what he represents ideologically and culturally. The lionizing is an official effort to coalesce the state into his movement – a brazen proclamation that his consistently hostile white nationalist, homophobic and misogynistic convictions represent the federal government’s interests, and thus, what the presidency believes should be the national priority.It’s reminiscent of the long aftermath of the civil war, when Confederate memorials were fashioned well into the 20th century not by those seeking to grieve any one individual, but rather by those who wanted to send a message about racial politics in the present. Some people have settled comfortably into a belief that the recent years of anti-racism protests and organizing have successfully toppled enough of these Confederate monuments, that their white-washed histories collapsed with them. But memorials to Kirk conducted by the country’s most powerful institutions are evidence of the revival of a new iteration of neo-Confederate memorialization.Like the Confederate tributes and monuments of the past, current memorials to Kirk function to throttle any interrogation of their subject. Those who are elevated to the esteem of official national memorializing are commonly – although with notable exceptions –figures that the public agrees are beyond reproach. In honoring Rosa Parks with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1996, for example, Bill Clinton sought to canonize the entire Civil Rights Movement for which she fought. It cemented the era as worthy of national honor because it telegraphed the meaning of democracy and freedom for all Americans.In contrast, with the insta-extolling of Kirk, Donald Trump, who has announced that his late close personal friend will be awarded a posthumous Medal of Freedom, echoes the intentions behind Confederate memorials of yore. Instead of public recognitions that reflect the long march towards a national reckoning with our past, memorials like those for Kirk elevate his consistent record of hard-right extremism above the reach of public questioning.Kirk’s style of seizing upon those who challenged his ideologies and punishing his detractors is an agenda that has expanded well beyond Trump’s track record of punishing his personal and political enemies. Though I, like the majority of Kirk’s critics, do not condone his shooting, Kirk himself said gun deaths were “worth it” to maintain gun rights. While rhetoric this extreme, including his claim that Black women in government and media lacked “brain processing power”, is being euphemized in tributes as his “advocacy for free speech”, media figures and government employees who openly question if he should be publicly lauded are being fired from their jobs.Additionally, hundreds of college professors were doxed, harassed and threatened by Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA, and its notorious “Professor Watchlist”, which published the names and information of any academics with views Kirk construed as incompatible with his own. It’s curious how a virtue like “doing politics the right way” can be afforded to someone who sought to devastate the lives of scholars and intellectuals.The aggrandizing of Kirk shares yet another, more lasting legacy with Confederate memorialization. The historian David Blight notes that in the aftermath of the civil war, the call for reconciliation between white northerners and southerners was achieved at the expense of erasing the legacy of slavery from the postbellum narrative. Thus, the reunification of the white citizenry was done wholly on southern terms and exacerbated the racial atrocities that were never addressed in the postwar era, leaving Black Americans to be wholesale lynched and terrorized throughout the south.Further still, reunification campaigns exonerated and elevated rebel insurgents who were, by definition, traitors and enemies of the state, to a status otherwise reserved for senior statesmen and decorated US veterans. It was a damning declaration that even those who sought to overthrow this country would be celebrated as its heroes before Black Americans would be treated as its citizens. The same tone is struck in the tributes to Kirk that exalt a highly controversial private citizen as though he were a national hero.Elected officials, journalists and public figures on the left who stress calls for unity do so on the right’s terms, and are reminiscent of the kid-gloved white northerners who sought to rebrand a war fought expressly over human trafficking and bondage into a national moment for celebration of duty, honor and valorous military service on both sides. Those who call for us to honor the life of a man who said the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”, and who described Martin Luther King Jr, as “awful”, have betrayed those of us who heard Kirk espouse eugenics and replacement theory loud and clear, with such vast online influence that it prompted a 2024 investigation by the Southern Poverty Law Center.The valorization of Kirk by his far-right defenders is an insult to millions of the most marginalized Americans who lived every day in the crosshairs of his rhetoric. Kirk’s memorialization by his supporters and apologists is but a new opportunity to announce an old message about whose country this is and whose it isn’t.

      Saida Grundy is an associate professor of sociology and African American studies at Boston University, and the author of Respectable: Politics and Paradox in Making the Morehouse Man More

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      in US Politics

      Pennsylvania official faces threats over post misconstrued as Charlie Kirk killing celebration

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      A member of a Pennsylvania school board says she is stepping back from her duties – and has been grappling with threats to her safety – after a “one down, hundreds to go” social media post about windblown milkweed seeds was misconstrued as celebrating the killing of far-right pundit Charlie Kirk.Homer-Center school district board member Misty Hunt uploaded the post in question on 10 September, the same day Kirk was shot to death by a sniper while speaking at Utah Valley University (UVU).Numerous people across the US have been fired from or otherwise disciplined at their jobs over commentary about Kirk’s murder, which authorities allege was carried out by a young man who viewed the Turning Point USA director’s political statements as “hatred”.And once it became apparent that people were accusing Hunt of extolling Kirk’s murder, the school board announced an investigation to “completely understand her intentions”.Subsequent social media posts from Hunt maintained that her “one down, hundreds to go” post was meant to accompany a video of wind blowing one of the milkweed seed pods that she customarily releases to nourish monarch butterflies.Poor cell phone reception near a former local power plant undermined her attempt to upload the video that was meant to be paired with the text, she said. She also said she did not learn of Kirk’s killing – or that video failed to upload – until later that night, having been too absorbed with the outdoors that day.“A tragedy occurred. And I was too busy enjoying nature to know what went down,” Hunt wrote. Calling gardening “my life” and offering condolences to Kirk’s family, she said her post was “only about butterflies and creating a space for them. The end.”Hunt later followed up with a separate social media post condemning all political violence, saying: “No cause, no ideology, no disagreement is worth a human life.”She also wrote: “In a world already torn by division, the killing of anyone – regardless of their political beliefs – is an unacceptable tragedy.”Nonetheless, the Homer-Center school board’s 18 September meeting drew about 60 people, much larger than the usual sparse crowds who typically attend the Indiana county-based panel’s gatherings. Authorities moved the meeting from a central district office board room to a school gymnasium to accommodate the bigger crowd. And law enforcement provided security for the meeting due to the interest Hunt’s posts had gotten online – as well as because of the “death threats” resulting from them, the news outlet PennLive.com reported.Three of seven community members who spoke at that meeting expressed support for Hunt, according to reporting from the Indiana Gazette. Three others assumed Hunt’s “one down hundreds, to go” was indeed about Kirk’s death despite her denial. And the Gazette noted that a fourth speaker simply said: “Every action has consequences, especially with being a public figure.”Hunt, for her part, reportedly apologized for causing “pain”, “misunderstanding”, and “division”.“Even though I did not celebrate anyone’s death, and I do not condone violence, the safety of myself and my children are now in jeopardy,” she said.The Gazette wrote that Hunt described people “threatening her place of work and pressuring her boss to terminate her employment”.“My children – we’re all afraid of going places right now, so it’s been really hard for the family,” she reportedly added. “That’s just where we’re at.”Hunt abstained from voting at the 18 September meeting, was removed from the school board’s negotiations committee and would step back from her role on the seven-member panel for the time being. The Gazette reported that she is running for re-election in November and would wait to see the outcome of the race before plotting her political future.“If the community chooses me again,” she said, “then I feel confident I will continue my good work.” More