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      As boys shift to the right, we are seeing the rise of the ‘new chill girl’ | Naomi Beinart

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      Since Donald Trump returned to office, I have noticed a phenomenon at my high school that I call the “new chill girl”. A group of kids is talking casually about something. Seemingly out of the blue, one of the boys makes an off-handed joke. Maybe it’s racist or sexist or homophobic, but whatever the poison, they inject it and the group dynamic shifts ever so slightly. As a general rule, the boys continue as usual while the girls – who tend to be more politically progressive – face a choice: they can speak up, which usually results in them getting the reputation as annoying and unable to take a joke, or they can let it pass and be regarded as a chill girl who isn’t angry or woke. Since November 2024, the latter reaction has become far more common.This kind of fearful silence is becoming more common outside of high schools, too. In December 2024, Disney removed a transgender character from a new series. This April, the New York Times reported that a new Trump administration regulation bars government employees from adding pronouns to their email bios. Two days after that, Gannet, one of the US’s largest newspaper chains, cited Trump’s opposition to diversity, equity and inclusion when announcing that it would no longer publish statistics on employee diversity.This cultural shift promotes nostalgia for an earlier time, before the birth of DEI, when women wore aprons and let their husbands earn the money. As of August, the “trad wife” influencer Hannah Neeleman, better known as Ballerina Farm, has amassed 10 million followers on Instagram alone. Her videos of kneading sourdough and raising her eight kids mark a return to the ideal of women as homemakers. Last November, she appeared on the cover of Evie, a conservative magazine that openly praises Trump.This trickles down to us. In the Trump era, left-leaning teenage girls feel less comfortable expressing political views that could be derided as “woke”. This isn’t because most of them are becoming rightwing: last November, 58% of women ages 18-30 voted for Kamala Harris. It’s because the political atmosphere has changed and progressive-minded girls now feel more afraid of the consequences of speaking their minds.The girls I talked to say it’s riskier to be outspokenly blue. A high school girl reported that boys “are becoming more emboldened, more confident to make these [bigoted] jokes”. Another said that since Trump took office, casual racism and sexism have become common: “We see [the behavior] more and it’s happening to us.” Young women feel social pressure to remain passive in the face of offensive remarks. Your guy friends “will think you’re attacking them”, one girl said, adding that “it’s not worth it” to speak out against every incident. You need to “pick your battles”.A third girl added that the desire to not be known as one of those “super woke” girls is enough to make someone clamp their lips, knowing that if the girl objects, “there is no chance [boys] will ever take you seriously again.” These opinions are harsh, but they’re true. Pew Research Center reports that as of March, 45% of girls ages 13-17 feel “a great deal” of pressure to fit in socially, and as cultural conservatism grows, that changes what fitting in means. Even in comparatively liberal spaces, like my high school, girls who wince at locker room talk risk exclusion. No one wants to hang out with the stickler, so no one wants to become her. And therefore, juvenile illiberalism lives on.Trump has damaged our country in many blatant ways, but what I’m seeing is more subtle. Tectonic shifts don’t always make it to CNN. The cultural effects of this openly racist and sexist government on young people may skew gender relations as we enter the workforce, enabling sexual assault and discrimination and keeping women from positions of power. The divide between young women and young men is growing massively, with no end in sight. Trump is distorting American society, and I fear distorting us.

      Naomi Beinart is a high school student More

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      FBI director Kash Patel fails to recognize name of Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof in Senate questioning – live

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      In a remarkable moment during his appearance before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, appeared not to recognize the name of the white supremacist murderer, Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black congregants at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.At the start of a series of questions on violent extremism coming from both sides of the partisan divide, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles, asked Patel to tell her if he disagreed with the characterization that several violent extremists were motivated by rightwing views.“So Dylann Roof, who followed white supremacist propaganda, murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015. Do you deny this?” Kamlager-Dove asked Patel.“I’m sorry, Dylan Ruth?” Patel asked, puzzled.“Roof,” Kamlager-Dove corrected him.“Roof. Can you give me some more information?” Patel asked.“You’re head of the FBI, you probably know this,” Kamlager-Dove said. “If you don’t know, that’s fine.”“If you can give me a reminder, I’ve got a lot in front of me,” Patel said.“It was national news,” Kamlager-Dove said. She then moved on to ask if Patel disagreed with the statement that “Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh in 2018–”“I do remember that,” Patel interjected.“And it was the deadliest antisemitic attack. So do you admit that that happened?” Kamlager-Dove asked.“I’m not saying the other thing didn’t happen, I’m just asking for a little information,” Patel replied.After the hearing, the congresswoman shared video of the exchange on social media with the comment: “The Director of the FBI doesn’t know who Dylann Roof is? It’s incredibly shameful and concerning that Kash Patel doesn’t know about one of the most heinous hate crimes against Black Americans in the last decade.”Outside DC, and on the campaign trail, Kyle Sweetser, who is running as a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Alabama, delivered a speech this week where he accused Donald Trump of “tearing” down the economy.Sweetser, who voted for Trump in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, noted that he once “believed” the president’s promises to “shake up Washington”.But now, the president’s widespread tariffs, Sweetser says, have pushed him across the aisle and into electoral politics.“His [Trump’s] favorite thing to do is raise OUR prices with HIS tariffs. Those tariffs have hurt businesses like mine and driven up prices on just about everything,” he said.Sweetser, who owns a construction company, spoke at last year’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and has said the January 6 attack led him to become a “Republican voter against Trump.”At an event for rank-and-file Alabama Democrats in downtown Mobile, Sweetser said that instead of strengthening our economy, Trump has “made it harder for families and small businesses to get by.”“I’ve come to understand that Trump isn’t the answer – he never was. His policies are cruel, reckless, and defy logic,” he said. “ He sees himself above the law, and with the Republican Party groveling at his feet, bending over backwards to praise their so-called King, he can get away with anything – no matter the cost to the American people.”But Sweetser also called out a wing of the Democratic party rallying around progressive policies and candidates – like Zohran Mamdani, the NYC mayoral candidate surging ahead in the polls.“I’m a common sense, Southern Democrat – not a New York City socialist. I’m a hardworking American who owns more guns than shoes,” Sweetser said.Despite calling for Americans to treat the trans community with respect, Sweetser did note today that he doesn’t “think it’s fair for men to participate in women’s sports” and urged the party at large to “reevaluate” its “image and policies.”“We need to start talking about the most important issues. Not focusing on everyone’s pronouns,” he added.Sweetser is running to fill the Alabama Senate seat in 2026 — left open by Tommy Tuberville, the incumbent Republican running for governor. He faces a stiff challenge from the state’s attorney general and GOP front runner, Steve Marshall.In a remarkable moment during his appearance before the House judiciary committee on Wednesday, the FBI director, Kash Patel, appeared not to recognize the name of the white supremacist murderer, Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black congregants at Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015.At the start of a series of questions on violent extremism coming from both sides of the partisan divide, Sydney Kamlager-Dove, a Democratic congresswoman from Los Angeles, asked Patel to tell her if he disagreed with the characterization that several violent extremists were motivated by rightwing views.“So Dylann Roof, who followed white supremacist propaganda, murdered nine Black parishioners in Charleston in 2015. Do you deny this?” Kamlager-Dove asked Patel.“I’m sorry, Dylan Ruth?” Patel asked, puzzled.“Roof,” Kamlager-Dove corrected him.“Roof. Can you give me some more information?” Patel asked.“You’re head of the FBI, you probably know this,” Kamlager-Dove said. “If you don’t know, that’s fine.”“If you can give me a reminder, I’ve got a lot in front of me,” Patel said.“It was national news,” Kamlager-Dove said. She then moved on to ask if Patel disagreed with the statement that “Robert Bowers murdered 11 Jewish worshippers in Pittsburgh in 2018–”“I do remember that,” Patel interjected.“And it was the deadliest antisemitic attack. So do you admit that that happened?” Kamlager-Dove asked.“I’m not saying the other thing didn’t happen, I’m just asking for a little information,” Patel replied.After the hearing, the congresswoman shared video of the exchange on social media with the comment: “The Director of the FBI doesn’t know who Dylann Roof is? It’s incredibly shameful and concerning that Kash Patel doesn’t know about one of the most heinous hate crimes against Black Americans in the last decade.”As our colleague Lucy Campbell reports on the UK live blog, Donald Trump has just completed his toast to King Charles at the state banquet in the UK.Trump’s remarks were laced with a heavy dollop of praise for his own leadership.“We are, as a country, as you know, doing unbelievably well,” Trump said, reading from printed remarks. “We had a very sick country, one year ago, and today I believe we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. In fact, nobody’s even questioning it.”This is a slight departure for Trump from a claim that he has made dozens of times this year, in a variety of settings. More usually, Trump claims that, during the presidency of Joe Biden, the United States was “a dead country”. What prompted his revised diagnosis of the state of the US under Biden is unclear.Trump also did not, as he usually does, attribute the appraisal that the US is now “the hottest country” in the world to the king of Saudi Arabia, as he has done since visiting Riyadh in May. (Trump did not actually meet the Saudi king, who is elderly and in poor health, on that trip, but that has not stopped him from repeatedly claiming since then that it was the king who told him the US was “dead” a year ago, and is now “the hottest”.)Trump also overlooked centuries of imperialism and unprovoked military aggression of the part of the UK and the US to claim: “Together, we’ve done more good for humanity than any two countries in all of history.”Also today, FBI director Kash Patel appeared before the House judiciary committee today. He answered questions from lawmakers about the department’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.In several exchanges Patel sparred with Democratic representatives. When congressman Jamie Raskin of Maryland – who also serves as the committee’s ranking member – asked why Patel had not released the full tranche of Epstein records, the FBI director said he was hamstrung by recent court orders preventing him from doing so. “I’m not going to break the law to satisfy your curiosity,” Patel said.Raskin also played clips of Patel on a podcast where he urged the Biden administration to “put on your big boy pants” and release Epstein’s so called “client list”. Patel had previously claimed that the FBI was in possession of the list.More broadly, Raskin denigrated Patel’s management of the FBI, including the firing of senior officials for, what they claim, are politically motivated reasons. “You share [J Edgar] Hoover’s dangerous obsession with blind loyalty over professionalism,” Raskin said. “For you, it’s blind loyalty to Donald Trump and keeping his secrets.”Later, California congressman Eric Swalwell, also a Democrat, went back and forth with Patel over whether he spoke to attorney general Pam Bondi about the president’s name appearing in the Epstein files. When Swalwell pushed Patel for answer, the FBI director snapped back with an unrelated diatribe: “Why don’t you try serving your constituency by focusing on reducing violent crime in this country, and the number of pedophiles that are illegally harbored in your sancturary cities in California.”After Swalwell attempted to discuss Patel’s history of listing several “political enemies” for investigation, the FBI director said: “I’m going to borrow your terminology and call bullshit on your entire career in Congress. It has been a disgrace to the American people.”A group of 95 members of Congress have written a letter to Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, condemning the arrest of protected immigrants known as Dreamers and demanding to know how many have been detained and deported in recent months.In a letter shared with the Guardian and submitted to Noem on Wednesday morning, Democratic representatives denounced the recent rise in the wrongful detention and deportation of immigrants residing in the US under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (Daca) program.The representatives’ letter is also addressed to Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice), the federal agency tasked with carrying out the Trump administration’s mass deportation program.In the letter, co-written by House members Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Sylvia Garcia of Texas and backed up by the dozens of other signatories, the representatives condemned the “blatant disregard” of the protections afforded to people under Daca.The members of Congress also included various examples of the detention and even deportation in the second Trump administration of Daca recipients, who are known as Dreamers after the Dream Act, legislation first introduced in 2001 to protect a large group of undocumented people who had been brought to the US as children.As Donald Trump’s second state visit to the UK continues, guests are due to start arriving for the state banquet shortly, with the dinner expected about 3.30pm EST/8.30pm BST, to top off a day off pomp, pageantry and parades in Windsor.Prime minister Keir Starmer will want to make the most of the face time with Trump, with the aim of this unprecedented visit to keep relations sweet with the administration, as opposed to securing any immediate big-ticket deals or international agreements.Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is expected to meet the president for the first time. And a number of American business leaders, who accompanied Trump on Air Force One yesterday, will also attend the dinner, as the UK government tries to court investment and boost growth. Among those expected are Apple’s Tim Cook, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Open AI’s Sam Altman.Both King Charles and Donald Trump are expected to deliver short speeches at today’s banquet.You can follow the latest developments at our dedicated live blog below:Per my last post, classes at Utah Valley University have resumed today – one week after Charlie Kirk’s murder on campus.Following the shooting on 10 September, the university closed and students and faculty were sent home. There will be a vigil on campus in Kirk’s honor, scheduled for Friday 19 September.Republican congressman James Comer, who also serves as chair of the House oversight committee, has called the CEOs of the leading online forum and messaging companies – Discord, Twitch, Steam and Reddit – to a hearing on 8 October.“The hearing will examine the radicalization of online forum users, including instances of open incitement to commit politically motivated acts,” Comer said. This comes after the news that Tyler Robinson, the man charged with killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk, used Discord to communicate that he had killed Kirk.Comer added that the leaders of these platforms must appear before lawmakers to explain “what actions they will take to ensure their platforms are not exploited for nefarious purpose”.At a Senate committee hearing on Tuesday, FBI director Kash Patel said that the department was investigating other members of the Discord group chat in which Robinson was providing updates.The Federal Reserve has cut interest rates by a quarter point – the first time in nearly a year. Rates now stand between 4% and 4.25%, the lowest since November 2022. Fed chair Jerome Powell is due to host a press conference at around 2:30pm ET where our business blog will be bringing you all the details:Barack Obama addressed the recent killing of Charlie Kirk and told a crowd in Pennsylvania on Tuesday the country was “at an inflection point”, but that political violence “is not new” and “has happened at certain periods” in US history.Obama added that despite history, political violence was “anathema to what it means to be a democratic country”.The former president made the remarks at the Jefferson Educational Society, a non-profit in Erie, Pennsylvania. He explicitly denounced political violence, addressing the fatal attacks this year of Kirk and the Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman. He called both incidents “a tragedy” and said that Donald Trump has further divided the country rather than work to bring people together.“There are no ifs, ands or buts about it, the central premise of our democratic system is that we have to be able to disagree and have sometimes really contentious debates without resorting to violence,” he said.For the full story, click here:With the hearing of fired CDC director Susan Monarez and fomer public health official Debra Houry now over, here’s a look at today’s key developments so far – both on Capitol Hill and beyond:

      Susan Monarez said that there had been “several explanations” about her removal from the top role at the CDC. “I had refused to commit to approving vaccine recommendations without evidence, fire career officials without cause or resign,” she said, adding: I told the secretary that if he believed he could not trust me, he could fire me … I was fired for holding the line on scientific integrity.”

      Asked by Senator Bernie Sanders why she refused to rubber-stamp vaccine recommendations without seeing them or the evidence behind them, the former CDC director explained that it wasn’t negotiable. “I refused to do it because I have built a career on scientific integrity, and my worst fear was that I would then be in a position of approving something that would reduce access of life-saving vaccines to children and others who need them,” she said.

      Both Monarez and Houry expressed their concerns about the decisions that the vaccine advisory committee meeting tomorrow will make. “I know that the medical community has raised concerns about whether or not, again, they have the commensurate backgrounds to be able to understand the data and the evidence and to evaluate it appropriately.” Meanwhile Houry said she had “significant concerns” as the public had not been able to weigh in.

      Health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr did not express condolences for the police officer killed at the CDC shooting, Monarez said. David Rose was the police officer who was killed during the recent shooting at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. The perpetrator had blamed the Covid-19 vaccine for making him depressed and suicidal.

      Houry also called for Kennedy’s resignation. Speaking at the hearing, she said: “After seeing his Senate finance testimony, and the number of misstatements, seeing what he has asked our scientists to do, and to compromise our integrity, and the children that have died under his watch, I think he should resign.”

      The Trump administration is using civil rights laws to wage a campaign against the University of California in an attempt to curtail academic freedom and undermine free speech, according to a lawsuit filed on Tuesday by faculty, staff, student organizations and every labor union representing UC workers. The lawsuit comes weeks after the Trump administration fined the University of California, Los Angeles $1.2bn and froze research funding after accusing the school of allowing antisemitism on campus and other civil rights violations.

      The Trump administration has aggressively rolled back efforts across the federal government to combat human trafficking, a Guardian investigation has found. The sweeping retreat threatens to negate decades of progress in the drive to prevent sexual slavery, forced labor and child sexual exploitation, according to legal experts, former government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.
      As he brought the hearing with fired CDC director Susan Monarez, and former public health official Debra Houry to a close, Republican chair Bill Cassidy spoke about his years as a practising physician, specializing in liver issues.He noted that in Thursday’s vaccine advisory panel meeting, ending the recommendation for the birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine is reportedly set for discussion.“Why should a child be vaccinated for a sexually transmitted disease when they’re at birth? The child passes through the birth canal and is exposed to the same secretions of one would otherwise, and that passage through the birth canal makes that child vulnerable to the virus being transmitted,” Cassidy said. “If that child is infected at birth, more than 90% of them develop chronic, lifelong infection.”Cassidy summarized the impact of the vaccine on infection rates in the decades following the approval of a birth dose of the hepatitis B vaccine. “Now, fewer than 20 babies per year get hepatitis B from their mother,” he added. “That is an accomplishment to make America healthy again, and we should stand up and salute the people that made that decision, because there’s people who would otherwise be dead if those mothers were not given that option to have their child vaccinated.”Dr Debra Houry just said that Robert F Kennedy Jr should resign.
      After seeing his Senate finance testimony, and the number of misstatements, seeing what he has asked our scientists to do, and to compromise our integrity, and the children that have died under his watch, I think he should resign.
      And another update on that front. Senator Cassidy has just said that Senator Mullin told reporters that “he was mistaken” in saying that the meeting between secretary Kennedy and Dr Monarez on 25 August was recorded.“But in case he’s mistaken, that he was mistaken,” Cassidy said, invoking laughter from those in the hearing room. “If there is a recording, it should be released, and would beg the question of what other conversations were recorded.”Per my earlier post, where senator Mullin made claims that Monarez was lying about her meeting with Kennedy – where she told him that if he felt she was untrustworthy he could fire her.Republican senator Bill Cassidy – the committee chair – has called out Mullin’s “implication” that he has a recording of that meeting.“I will note that if materials have been provided to Senator Mullin, and invoked in official committee business, they’re committee records and all other senators on the committee have the right to see those records,” he said. “This is allegiance to President Trump’s values, and so I ask that that recording be released.”He added:
      I’ll also note that we put in a request for any documents or communications that would bring transparency to the situation. We have not yet received those documents. If a recording does not exist, I asked Senator Mullin to retract his line of questions.
      When asked by Democratic senator Ed Markey, of Massachusetts, whether Dr Monarez and Dr Houry feel that politics is driving the change to vaccine recommendations, including hepatitis B vaccines, instead of science in children’s health, both former officials agree.“I’m thankful to Senator Cassidy for really raising hepatitis B via social media,” Houry said of the series of posts by the Republican chair of the committee, which sought to debunk misinformation around testing and the vaccine. “I think there’s a lot of moms that don’t know they have hepatitis that can then transmit it to their baby, and even the mom is hepatitis B negative, we don’t know what the home situation is.”Republican senator Markywane Mullin, of Oklahoma, is saying that Monarez is “not being honest” about her recollection of the conversation with secretary Kennedy.“I tell my kids all the time, you know one thing I want from you. I can deal with any situation we walk into, as long as I know you’re being 100% honest with me,” he said.Mullin has provided no evidence about how why he feels she is not telling the truth.“Your personality and your answers aren’t correct,” Mullin said in an exchange with the fired CDC director. More

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      Trump at first says he is ‘not familiar’ with Minnesota Democrat’s assassination

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      In response to a question about why he did not order flags lowered to half-staff to honor Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was assassinated alongside her husband this summer, Donald Trump initially said he was “not familiar” with the case.The question came up during a briefing in the Oval Office on Monday, in light of the president’s order last week to lower flags in response to the killing of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk.Trump was pressed on why he and Republicans continued cast blame the left for a rise in political violence when elected officials and activists from both parties have been targets.The exchange began when the reporter asked about the tributes paid by the White House to Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth activist group Turning Point USA and a close ally of the president and his family.“Do you think it would have been fitting to lower the flags to half-staff when Melissa Hortman, the Minnesota house speaker, was gunned down by an assassin as well?” asked Nancy Cordes, the chief White House correspondent for CBS News.“I’m not familiar. The who?” Trump replied, leaning in across the Resolute Desk.“The Minnesota house speaker, a Democrat, who was assassinated this summer,” she said.“Oh,” Trump replied. “Well, if the governor had asked me to do that, I would have done that.”Trump did not mention the Minnesota governor Tim Walz – a Democrat and the vice-presidential nominee in 2024 – by name, but suggested that had he made the request, the White House might have obliged.“I wouldn’t have thought of that, but I would’ve, if somebody had asked me,” Trump said. “People make requests for the lowering of the flag, and oftentimes you have to say no, because it would be a lot of lowering.”At the time, Trump said that speaking to Walz, a close friend of Hortman, would have been a “waste of time”.“I could be nice and call, but why waste time?” Trump said then, referring to Walz as “whacked out” and a “mess”.Kirk was fatally shot last week while speaking at Utah Valley University. In the wake of his death, Trump and other prominent conservatives have sought to place the blame for political violence squarely on Democrats, vowing to crack down on the left-wing groups and institutions they allege “fund it and support it”.As Republicans grieve the loss of Kirk, they have largely ignored the violence against Democrats, including Hortman’s assassination, the arson attack on the home of Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro, the violent assault on Paul Pelosi, the husband of former speaker Nancy Pelosi, and a thwarted plot to kidnap the Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer.House Republicans and a handful of Democrats gathered at prayer vigil for Kirk on Capitol Hill on Monday. In brief remarks, Representative Tom Emmer, a Republican from Minnesota, reflected on several recent incidents of political violence, including Hortman’s killing by “another evil coward” who also shot a second Democratic state lawmaker that night.Trump, who survived two assassination attempts during the 2024 presidential campaign, denied on Monday that he had blamed just “one side” before accusing the “radical left” of causing “tremendous violence”.“The radical left really has caused a lot of problems for this country,” he said. “I really think they hate our country.”Earlier on Monday, vice president JD Vance, a close friend of Kirk’s, said he hoped for national “unity” while hosting the slain activist’s podcast. But then he insisted that this was not a “both sides problem” and that Democrats were primarily to blame, despite widespread condemnation of Kirk’s killing by party officials and elected leaders.During the lengthy episode, Vance made no reference to Hortman or other acts of political violence, such as the 6 January assault on the US Capitol.“Something has gone very wrong with a lunatic fringe – a minority, but a growing and powerful minority on the far left,” he said, and committed to using the levers of the federal government to “dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”. More

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      JD Vance threatens crackdown on ‘far-left’ groups after Charlie Kirk shooting

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      JD Vance assailed what he called the “far left” and its increased tolerance for violence while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast on Monday, saying the administration would be working to dismantle groups who celebrate Kirk’s death and political violence against their opponents.Vance, hosting the podcast from his office next to the White House, spoke to high-profile members of the Trump administration and some of Kirk’s long-time friends in the movement, including Tucker Carlson and Trump adviser Stephen Miller.Vance said the administration would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country”.The administration would be working to do that in the coming months and would “explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don’t like what they say”, Vance said.Miller also detailed how the administration would use the federal government to achieve this goal.“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, [Department of] Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.Vance added: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”Miller said he had been feeling “incredible sadness, but there’s incredible anger” and would be focusing his “righteous anger” on the “organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks”.Detailing what he believes is a “vast domestic terror movement”, Miller pointed to what he said were “organized doxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger, incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence”.The political leanings of the shooter who killed Kirk are not yet clear. Bullet casings found with the shooter’s gun were inscribed with references to video games and online culture. Still, prominent figures on the right – before a shooter was apprehended – declared war on the left, claiming it was responsible for Kirk’s death.There is no evidence of a network supporting the shooter, and Miller did not provide substantiation of his claims that there is a “vast domestic terror movement” at play.Since Kirk’s death, rightwing influencers have found examples of people they say are glorifying or celebrating the violence and have sought to get them fired. One post that Miller retweeted said people should go beyond contacting employers and should go after professional licenses for lawyers, teachers and medical professionals because they “cannot be trusted to be around clients, children, or patients”.Trump has also said the problem today is on the left, not the right. “When you look at the agitators – you look at the scum that speaks so badly of our country, the American flag burnings all over the place – that’s the left, not the right,” Trump said on Sunday.On the podcast, Vance said that after he left Kirk’s family in Arizona, he read a story in the Nation, a leftwing publication, where the author detailed Kirk’s views and, he said, took a quote about several prominent Black women out of context to imply it applied to all Black women.The magazine is not a “fringe blog” but a “well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American civil war. George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement”, Vance said, hinting at the organizations the administration might target.Vance later mentioned that the foundations that helped fund the magazine are tax-exempt, a sign that the government could go after that status.“Charlie was gunned down in broad daylight, and well-funded institutions of the left lied about what he said so as to justify his murder,” Vance said. “This is soulless and evil, but I was struck not just by the dishonesty of the smear, but by the glee over a young husband’s and young father’s death.”The writer of the Nation article said on Bluesky that she was not paid by the Ford Foundation or Open Society to write the article.Vance said he “desperately” wants national unity and appreciated the many condolences he has received from Democratic friends and colleagues, but he said there was no unity without confronting the truth. “The data is clear, people on the left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence,” he said, citing the results from a recent YouGov poll. “This is not a both-sides problem. If both sides have a problem, one side has a much bigger and malignant problem, and that is the truth.”On the show, Vance also interviewed Kirk’s friends and political allies, showing how Kirk worked to keep the warring factions of the right aligned behind Trump and tried to bring in other political movements by elevating them into roles in the administration. They shared how Kirk was omnipresent in the transition after Trump won the White House.Robert F Kennedy Jr said Kirk was a “spiritual soulmate” to him and that his endorsement of Trump, at a Turning Point rally in Arizona amid fireworks and sparklers on stage, was “Charlie’s orchestration”. Kirk helped shepherd Kennedy into his role as health secretary, Kennedy said, and also helped his daughter-in-law get a role in the administration.On breaks between guests, the live stream rolled footage of Kirk during his typical college campus visits debating about the Trump administration’s first 100 days or the left’s views on immigration.Since Kirk’s killing, Turning Point USA has seen a massive rise in inquiries to start new chapters on high school and college campuses. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for the organization, said on X that the group received over 32,000 inquiries over the course of two days. Turning Point currently has about 900 official college chapters and 1,200 high school chapters.“Charlie’s vision to have a Club America chapter (our high school brand) in every high school in America (around 23,000) will come true much much faster than he could have ever possibly imagined,” Kolvet wrote. More

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      Election deniers now hold posts on local US election boards, raising concerns for midterms

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      A number of people who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and often of other elections in which Republicans have not been victorious, have been elevated to positions of power since Donald Trump’s re-election, raising concerns about the potential for partisan meddling in critical parts of the country such as Arizona and Georgia.State by state, activists aligned with the “election integrity” movement have found their way on to local elections boards and elections offices, raising red flags for Democrats who have already started efforts to have them removed.“I think Republicans want to put us in jail,” Fulton county commissioner Dana Barrett said, moments after a contempt hearing in an Atlanta, Georgia, courtroom in August, where she and five other county commissioners were fighting a battle to reject the appointment of two Republican election denialists to the Fulton county board of registrations and elections.The commission’s charter says the board must appoint two nominees made by each political party. A finding of criminal contempt could have resulted in commissioners being jailed until they agreed to make the appointment, but Fulton county superior court judge David Emerson found the board in civil contempt last month for refusing to vote for the appointment as ordered by the court. A $10,000 daily fine for failing to make the appointment is on hold, pending appeal.“At the end of the day, we have no choice but to resist,” Barrett said. “This is not a particularly strategic move on my part, but rather a move to defend the integrity of our elections and to do what I can in my corner of the world to try to help hold this democracy together. If that means I’m resisting, then by all means, I’m resisting.”One of the two appointees in question, Julie Adams, works for the Election Integrity Network, an election denial activist organization founded by Cleta Mitchell, a Trump ally who aided his efforts to overturn the election in Georgia and elsewhere. The other, Jason Frazier, is a consultant for EagleAI, software that collects open-source data of dubious validity to aid activists making thousands of voter challenges at a time. Frazier was a plaintiff in a 2023 lawsuit demanding voter registration purges by the county and the state.“I believe that Jason Frazier and Julie Adams are election deniers,” Barrett said.“We all find ourselves in positions where we have to make tough decisions considering the climate in our country,” said Fulton county commissioner Mo Ivory. “I’m glad to be standing up for the people that put me in office, and continue to fight for our democracy, not for partisan politics, but for what it means to live in a democracy.”In Georgia, board appointments to county election offices are idiosyncratic. Fulton county’s charter gives power to the board of commissioners and to the political parties’ county committees. In neighboring DeKalb county, the appointments are made by the chief judge of its superior court, who is free to reject a nominee by one of the party’s committees if that person doesn’t meet the judge’s legal standards.Such was the case earlier this year, when Shondeana Morris, chief judge of the DeKalb county superior court, rejected William Henderson after a letter campaign by the county’s Democratic committee and voting rights activists. But the judge did allow the appointment of Gail Lee, another Republican activist linked to the Election Integrity Network.During a DeKalb county election board meeting last week, local political activists challenged the qualification of Jason Lary, a former mayor of Stonecrest, Georgia, to run for the city council. Lary recently returned from federal prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud after being convicted of stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal Covid-19 relief funds allocated to the city.Lary is a Democrat and the board has a Democratic majority, but after a brief discussion, the board voted unanimously to kick him off the ballot and strip him of his voter registration, given that he was still under supervision for his sentence and thus ineligible to vote.“The one thing that became clear is the importance of the public to remain vigilant on little things like people who qualified for office,” Lee said at the end of the meeting. “Because if a person hadn’t come for and challenged the candidates then they would have gone forward and possibly had a felon in office.”There’s only so much a Republican activist can accomplish on a five-person board with a Democratic majority, as is the case in metro Atlanta’s core counties. When Adams refused to certify a primary election in Fulton county in 2024, state superior court judges ruled that she was required to do so by state law, a decision affirmed by the Georgia supreme court this week. The duty to certify is “ministerial”, a pronouncement that is obligatory, not discretionary.And many if not most decisions by an elections board involve mundane procedural questions about where to site a voting drop box or how to schedule poll worker training. Even contentious issues often result in unanimous votes.But elections offices are staffed by human beings maintaining sensitive equipment and critical records, all of which are vulnerable to someone with authority and an agenda.Protect Democracy, an advocacy organization, describes a strategy of election subversion in three parts: deceive, disrupt and deny.Disinformation from influencers suggests that voter fraud or noncitizen voting occurs often enough to swing an election. Then these influencers call on their supporters to disrupt election administration and voting process and introduce chaos into the system. Finally, they attempt to interfere or halt the certification process and “declare the true result untrue, unknown, or unknowable”, Protect Democracy’s advocates wrote.The object is to allow the loser to claim victory regardless of the results, forcing a court to either choose a winner or order a new election, delegitimizing a fair vote.Changes wrought by a new law specific to Spalding county, Georgia, populated its board with Republican election activists. The board members and the county’s new elections director called for a hand-count of ballots following elections in 2022 and 2023. The process, observers noted, was painfully slow and riven by inaccuracies that took days to rectify, with an end result that showed Dominion machines had counted votes correctly.They did not hand count ballots in 2024.Spalding county’s Republican elections board members – Ben Johnson, Roy McClain and James Newland – are among the many defendants in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn a law permitting mass voter challenges passed in the wake of the 2020 election that voting rights advocates argue violates the Voting Rights Act.Meanwhile, Maricopa county’s board of supervisors has been in a political war with the county’s elected recorder Justin Heap to prevent this outcome. Maricopa county contains Phoenix and almost two-thirds of Arizona’s population.Heap, a former state representative, defeated the incumbent Republican in 2024 while refusing to say if he believed the 2020 and 2022 elections were fair and calling Maricopa county elections a “laughingstock”.After Heap’s victory, the board stripped the recorder’s office of its duties to manage in-person early voting and some IT management of voter rolls. Negotiations broke down in May, leading to lawsuits and acrimony. Heap retained America First Legal, a Trump-aligned firm, to represent him in the lawsuit.“Justin Heap is lying about me, and going forward, he better keep my name out of his lying mouth,” Maricopa county supervisor Steve Gallardo said in a July release, refuting claims by Heap that Gallardo had agreed to restore power to the recorder’s office. “Since his election, Justin Heap has taken actions that have confused voters and damaged relationships. This must end. Justin Heap should stop the performative theater and just do his job.”Some states appear to be more fertile ground than others for election denialist’s influence on boards.North Carolina’s Republicans controlled the state legislature with a veto-proof majority last year, even though its former governor Roy Cooper was a Democrat. After Josh Stein, another Democrat, won the governor’s race, legislators stripped the governor of the power to appoint members to state and county elections boards, handing it to newly elected state auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican.The state’s Republican-majority supreme court ratified the law in May after court challenges. Boliek almost immediately replaced 3-2 Democratic majorities with 3-2 Republican majorities across all 100 county election boards.Those appointments have drawn pushback from election denialists as well as from Democratic activists.Places such as Durham county, where less than 10% of voters are registered Republicans, now has a Republican majority on its elections board. But most new board members appear to have been rewarded for their loyalty to the party and not their fidelity to election denialism.“There are concerns that there are people that are getting rewarded as a political favor, as opposed to their working knowledge and their experience in elections,” said Jim Womack, Lee county GOP chair and the president of the non-profit North Carolina Election Integrity Team, speaking to North Carolina news site The Assembly. More

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      Democrats are facing a gerrymandering armageddon. It was avoidable | David Daley

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      There are many reasons why Democrats find themselves on the wrong end of a gerrymandering armageddon.There’s John Roberts and the US supreme court, who pretended partisan gerrymandering is just politics as usual, left voters naked to extreme power grabs, and failed the nation when voters most needed the courts’ protection.That 5-4 decision in 2019 would have been different if not for Mitch McConnell, who prevented Democrats from filling an open seat on the court in 2016, and preserved it for the Republican party and Neil Gorsuch.But perhaps the most important reason is the brilliant 2010 Republican strategy called Redmap – short for the Redistricting Majority Project – which left Republicans in charge of drawing lines for four times as many congressional seats as Democrats, and close to 70% of state legislatures nationwide.Just a few years earlier, jubilant Democrats had celebrated Barack Obama’s 2008 victory and dreamed that America’s changing demographics would lead to a decade of triumphs and a new permanent majority. It did not work out that way – because they fell asleep on redistricting.The following election, Republicans captured the approximately 110 state legislative districts they needed to dominate congressional redistricting. They held the House in 2012 despite winning 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats, and haven’t looked back since. Democrats are still trying to catch up – and now, even as the party insists it’s going to fight back against Republican gerrymandering, remain hamstrung by snoozing more than a dozen years ago.How could a party with such a genuine demographic edge get out-organized, out-strategized and out-energized in election after election? How could no one have seen the looming redistricting nightmare? How did they do nothing about this when they controlled a trifecta in Washington with a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate?Turns out some people did issue warnings. When I wrote my book Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count, the definitive history of how Republicans gerrymandered the nation, I went in search of the wise men and would-be Paul Reveres, the people who knew all about the importance of redistricting, but whose shouts vanished into a black hole of complacency, overconfidence and unimaginative thinking.Had Democratic leadership listened to Steve Israel, John Tanner and Martin Frost then, all of this could have been avoided.After the Republican rout of 2010, Israel, a New York congressman then in his sixth term representing suburban Long Island, took over as chairman of the Democratic congressional campaign committee. If Washington is a city filled with unpleasant jobs, Israel stepped into one of the most hopeless. The DCCC chair serves a two-year sentence as a party road warrior, raising money, barnstorming chicken dinners and county barbecues, and most importantly, trying to recruit congressional candidates who might actually be able to flip a district. A successful term pole-vaults a politician into leadership. But swing districts are few – and few ambitious mayors or state senators want to sacrifice careers and endure those barbecues themselves only to lose an unwinnable race. So the chairman bounces from one Hampton Inn to the next, marshalling every drop of persuasion.Israel spent four years doing this. His second marriage collapsed. The late nights, the loneliness, the flight delays all seemed so unbearable that the only relief came from writing a novel on his iPhone that was a vicious satire of Washington ridiculousness.You can imagine why all that travel might have seemed worth it. The 2010 spanking meant that basic competence would look good by comparison. Also, 2012 brought a presidential cycle, and Democrats actually turn out to vote in presidential years. Sometimes that enthusiasm even trickles down-ballot and helps elect Democrats to Congress. But that was before it became clear how the Republicans had used gerrymandering to push their 2010 advantage into a durable and lasting majority. As he studied the new districts and criss-crossed the country, Israel may have been the first national Democrat to realize how ratfucked his party was – and how long it would last.“What shocked me when I first came into the DCCC was when I learned that the expansive battlefield that I thought I would have at my discretion was actually a pretty small map,” Israel told me. “There are a couple dozen competitive districts, maybe … You can have the best recruit, the best candidate, the best fundraising. But if you have an uncompetitive district, there’s no path.“I mean, the math proves it,” he says, and you hear the anguish of every night at a chair hotel bar with a burger and a bad Syrah. “Look, we won 1.4 million more votes than they did in 2012 and we only picked up eight seats. That tells you that this whole thing was jury-rigged in order to stop Democrats from playing in competitive districts. It worked brilliantly for them. I’m just sorry we didn’t figure that out in 2008.”As Israel sees it, that’s the year when Democrats really screwed up. He thinks the party should have been thinking ahead then to redistricting and down-ballot races. Instead, they planned for nothing. Redistricting, he says, never seemed to cross the mind of Democratic leadership. It was, he says, “a catastrophic strategic mistake”. In 2006 and 2008, Democrats “won districts that we had no business winning. But then we started losing state legislatures and governors across America – and that’s what destroyed us in 2010 and 2012. Had we devoted resources to protecting Democrats in state houses across America, the Republicans still would have won the majority in 2010. But we would have had a seat at the table in redistricting and we might have been able to take it away from them in 2012.“The DNC,” he says, shaking his head, “they just whistled past the graveyard. I don’t understand why.”Republicans, he says, “have always been better than Democrats at playing the long game. And they played the long game in two fundamental ways. Number one, on the judicial side. They realized they had to stock courts across the country with partisan Republican judges and they did it. The second long game was on redistricting. The center of gravity wasn’t an immediate majority in the House. It was rebuilding the infrastructure in courts and state houses across the country so when they got the majority back they could stay in it for a long, long time.”Israel walks me to his office door. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he says. “This wouldn’t have happened if Martin Frost was still here.”Frost, a Texas Democrat who served from 1979 until 2005, and Tanner, a Tennessee Democrat who held office from 1989 until 2011, were the two Democrats in previous Congresses who really understood the long-term ramifications of redistricting and agitated, usually alone, for action. Both are long gone from the Capitol, but when I hunted them down for my book I found them where I half expected: steps from K Street, along the Washington DC legal and lobbying corridor where former pols cash in on years of connections and experience.Tanner, then the vice-chair of Prime Policy Group, had a cushy corner office with a putting green, a cushy landing for an 11-term Democrat from Tennessee. Exhausted by partisanship, and well aware that even his reputation for bipartisanship would not save him when Tennessee Republicans redrew congressional lines after 2010, Tanner chose not to seek re-election. And so Republican gerrymandering claimed one Democrat who had repeatedly tilted at a then lonely windmill: redistricting.As his fellow moderate Blue Dog Democrats disappeared, white southern Democrats went extinct, and congressional partisanship began to harden, Tanner was moved to take action. In three successive Congresses, under both Democratic and Republican control, he tried to put a stop to partisan gerrymandering. He proposed national standards that removed the power to draw distinct lines from state legislatures and handed it to commissions. His plan also prohibited redrawing lines more than once in a decade, which would have prevented the gerrymandering armageddon now under way. This was not an issue that made the otherwise garrulous Tanner a lot of friends. Neither Democrats nor Republicans wanted anything to do with it.“Here?” Tanner says of Washington. He pushes at a cup of coffee. “Ha! They’re drawing their own districts. I had many members come up to me and say, ‘What are you doing?’ They have deals. ‘Don’t come around here fucking with the maps. I won’t fool with your map if you don’t fool with mine.’”Tanner first introduced his plan in 2005, when Republicans ran the House. Tanner knew it would be an uphill battle, and indeed, his bill never earned as much as a committee hearing. When Democrats took back the chamber after the 2006 election, he thought he might convince his leadership to listen. He flagged down the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the majority leader, Steny Hoyer, who ignored him and wriggled free.“I told them, if you don’t do this, all the population growth is under Republican control. The only stronghold left for Democrats is cities … They didn’t want anything to do with it.”Tanner remembers Pelosi saying: “We’ll take a look at it.” But he couldn’t get a hearing on his bill in 2007 or 2009 either. Partisan warriors, he suggested, never really want to reform the process. They might fight to take away the other side’s advantage, but never, ever do they want to risk their own.Might Democratic elders regret ignoring him now, as leaders of a permanent minority? Tanner snorts again. “It’s just not something anyone wants to take up. I went through (redistricting) three times. There’s a lot of power connected to that system.”Tanner says that far more than 300 seats are responsive only to the most partisan elements.“We can’t even do the small problems now, let alone the big ones,” he says. “These guys are trapped in this system where the only threat is from their base in a primary … No one will do what they all know has to be done to keep the country from going adrift. Is that because of redistricting? Hell, yes.”Tanner speaks with appealingly frank disgust for a man whose living was long based on his relationships with these same pols. “Democracy? The people’s will? It doesn’t matter,” he says. “That’s redistricting, too. The average citizen is a pawn. Without the protection of a fairly drawn district, the citizen is a pawn of billionaires who use the map of the country as a checkerboard to play politics on.”Hidden behind owlish glasses, Frost doesn’t look the part of an aggressive warrior, but he is the last hardened Democratic street fighter to serve in the House. When we spoke, he escorted me into a conference room with a well-appointed cookie tray and explained how he had learned the importance of redistricting after Texas gained three seats in Congress after the 1990 census.In the 1990s and 2000s, Frost watched as Republicans sought maps that packed as many voters of color as possible into one district – knowing that doing so would create whiter and more Republican seats in the surrounding areas. Sometimes they even worked together with Black Democrats. Frost represented the Dallas-Fort Worth area and it became clear that one of these new seats would be a majority Black district, which had the potential to cut into his base. Frost wanted to stay in Congress, and wanted white and Black Democrats to work together to create districts that would benefit both. As he wrote in his book The Partisan Divide: “The survival of white Southern Democrats would be determined by how many Black voters were left over for their districts after the new majority Black seats were created.“So I started asking the question, ‘Who is doing redistricting for the Democratic party? I wanted to talk to that person. I was stunned by the answer. No one.”Texas by the 1980s was trending red, but Democrats still controlled the legislature and the governor’s office, and therefore redistricting. They came up with a plan that added three new districts whose voters were largely people of color without dismantling the bases of the white incumbents. Frost calls it “a classic example of what could be done when all members of a state Democratic delegation work together for the common good.” Texas Democrats extended their advantage in the US House from 19-8 to 21-9. The Frost gerrymander held until Republicans took the state house in 2002, and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay, pushed the legislature into a mid-decade redistricting plan, much as is happening now.The problem for Democrats is that despite these repeated lessons in the importance of line-drawing, no one continued Frost’s work after the DeLay map knocked him out of Congress. “For a while, we fought them to a standstill because we had good legal talent and technical help. Then we just got overcome on the political side.”How is this possible? I ask. “I’m not the right one to ask that question to,” he demurs, but says he thinks about it all the time. He has concluded that the party’s coastal and white leadership simply doesn’t understand what it’s like to run for office as a Democrat outside of Pelosi’s San Francisco. “Leaders in the Democratic party come from safe, white districts. So they don’t worry about these things, because nothing can be done to them. You can’t do anything to Nancy Pelosi’s district.“White northern leaders don’t think of this the same way that white southern politicians think about it. We instinctively understand the problem, but white liberals didn’t really focus on this very much. They said, ‘Well, everything’s fine. We’ll just continue what we’re doing’ and didn’t make this a priority. I argued for 20 or 30 years about the importance of paying attention to state legislatures, but I couldn’t get enough people in the party to really embrace that. The Republicans understood that and had a strategy. We didn’t.”Frost even became chairman of the DCCC after the 1994 Newt Gingrich rout, but, like Israel later, could never convince anyone else in power to take redistricting seriously. I tell him what Israel said, that this wouldn’t have happened had anyone listened to Frost, and he gives a quick nod that suggests he agrees.“No one else in the party cared about this or understood how important it was, for whatever reason.” The Republicans not only got it, but knocked out the one Democrat who did too. “Maybe I wouldn’t have been able to change history, but we sure as hell would have gone down fighting.“It didn’t have to be. If the Democrats had put the same type of emphasis on redistricting that the Republicans did, there might have been a different outcome. Could have been. Should have been. We’ll never know.”

      David Daley is the author of Antidemocratic: Inside the Right’s 50-Year Plot to Control American Elections as well as Ratf**ked: Why Your Vote Doesn’t Count More

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      Jim Edgar, two-term former Republican governor of Illinois, dies aged 79

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      Former Illinois governor Jim Edgar, a popular two-term Republican credited with guiding the state into a period of greater financial stability in the 1990s, died on Sunday, according to his family. He was 79.Edgar died from complications related to his treatment for pancreatic cancer, his family said in a statement. He had disclosed his cancer diagnosis earlier this year.“We are deeply grateful for the love, support and kindness so many have shown to Jim and our family over these last several months,” the statement said.A former state legislator who was Illinois secretary of state for a decade, Edgar was elected governor in 1990. The moderate Republican easily won re-election, including winning heavily Democratic Cook county, where Chicago is located.He remained a party statesman and adviser, and grew uneasy with the Republican party’s shift to the right. Edgar was among high-profile Republicans who did not support Donald Trump’s presidency, joining a campaign to support Kamala Harris’s bid for president last year called Republicans for Harris.Born in small-town Oklahoma, Edgar was much more reserved than his flashy, charming predecessor, James R Thompson, who was the longest-serving governor in state history. At the time Edgar took office, the state was hundreds of millions of dollars in debt and paying its bills months late.Amid a recession, Edgar pushed legislators to cut the state budget, making layoffs and cuts in popular programs. He also managed to fulfill his campaign promise of getting a temporary income tax surcharge made permanent, guaranteeing a stable source of money for public schools.“It wasn’t always pretty how it was done, but we got a lot done,” Edgar told the Associated Press in 1998. “We went after some pretty tough issues. We didn’t get them all, but we got most of them.”He surprised many political observers when he announced in 1997 that he would not seek a third term, considering his popularity. Republicans tried to draft him to run for office again, including bids for the US Senate and again for Illinois governor. But he did not accept.Edgar went on to teach and served as president emeritus of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library Foundation, among other things.“By any standard, he was a Republican whose integrity guided his time in office and who managed one of the most successful periods in Illinois state government,” Bob Kustra, who served as Edgar’s lieutenant governor, said in a statement.JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor, said on Sunday that flags in the state would fly at half-staff in Edgar’s honor.“Now more than ever, we should channel that spirit and resolve to live as Governor Edgar did: with honesty integrity, and an enduring respect for all,” Pritzker, a Democrat, said in a statement. “He will live on in the incalculable number of lives he touched and in the stronger institutions he helped build.”Edgar is survived by his wife and two children.His relatives said details on funeral plans would follow in the coming days. More

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      Several people fired after clampdown on speech over Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Reactions on social media to the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk have cost multiple people their jobs as authorities in numerous states clamp down on critical commentary.Among those to have been fired, suspended or censured in recent days for their opinions include teachers, firefighters, journalists, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team.The dismissals come as the administration of Donald Trump promises to take action against foreign nationals it deems to be “praising, rationalizing or making light of” Kirk’s killing, himself a fervent free speech advocate.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, meanwhile, has ordered staff “to find and identify military members, and any individual associated with the Pentagon, who have mocked or appeared to condone Charlie Kirk’s murder”, NBC News reported Friday.The outlet, citing two defense department officials, said several members of the military were relieved of their duties because of social media posts – and that “dozens” more, including civilian Pentagon employees, had been “called out on X”.Along with government efforts to clamp down, a number of conservative figures and groups are attempting to collate and expose examples of commentary seen as objectionable.Others have been subjected to torrents of online abuse or seen their offices flooded with calls demanding they be fired, part of a surge in rightwing rage that has followed the killing.Some Republicans want to go further still and have proposed deporting Kirk’s critics from the United States, suing them into penury or banning them from social media for life.Laura Loomer, a Trump loyalist, posted to X: “Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.”Republican congressman Clay Higgins said in a post on X that anyone who “ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man” needed to be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER”. The US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, said on the same site that he had been 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”.Republicans’ anger at those disrespecting Kirk’s legacy contrasts with the mockery some of the same figures – including Kirk – directed at past victims of political violence, Reuters reported.For example, when former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was clubbed over the head by a hammer-wielding conspiracy theorist during a break-in at their San Francisco home shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, Higgins posted a photo making fun of the attack. He later deleted the post.Loomer falsely suggested that Paul Pelosi and his assailant were lovers, calling the brutal assault on the octogenarian a “booty call gone wrong”. Speaking to a television audience a few days after the attack, a grinning Kirk called for the intruder to be sprung from jail.“If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out,” he said.Loomer and Higgins did not return messages to Reuters seeking comment.Scott Presler, a far-right activist with 2.3 million followers on X, asked for tips about teachers “celebrating Kirk’s death” – and he has shared posts and social media profiles of alleged wrongdoers, including details of their workplaces, Time reported.In Florida, the state’s board of education issued a proactive memorandum specifically warning school employees not to post any personal viewpoints that “may undermine the trust of the students and families that they serve”.Two educators in Clay county were removed from their classrooms and placed under state investigation on Thursday, one an elementary school teacher who posted to her personal social media account an article about the shooting, and the words: “This may not be the obituary we were all hoping to wake up to, but it is a close second for me.”The other, a high school counselor, alluded in a post to Kirk’s position, expressed in 2023, that it was “worth it” to have “some gun deaths every single year” to protect the “God-given right” of gun ownership.The counselor wrote, “37 years in public education, ready to take a bullet for my kids. No I’m not shedding a tear, he chose to sacrifice himself for the rights [to] be protected. Karma’s a bitch.”The comments were “egregious” and “hateful”, Jennifer Bradley, a Republican state senator, said in a statement.Arguably the most prominent individual to lose employment was Matthew Dowd, a veteran political analyst fired by MSNBC for suggesting on air that Kirk’s radical rhetoric may have contributed to the violence that killed him.“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said, adding: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”The network and Dowd issued separate apologies. But in a Substack article published Friday, Dowd said he was the victim of a “rightwing media mob”, and that his words had been misconstrued because he spoke before knowing Kirk was the target or had been fired upon.Most of those who have been fired or suspended, however, are people in regular jobs whose comments displeased their employers or were otherwise exposed. They include a Secret Service agent who said Kirk “spewed hate and racism on his show” and “you can’t circumvent karma”.The Carolina Panthers, an American football franchise, fired a communications coordinator who asked on Instagram: “Why are y’all sad? Your man said it was worth it,” another reference to Kirk’s previous comments on the constitution’s second amendment, guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms.A reporter covering pro basketball’s Phoenix Suns lost his job for posting comments including: “Truly don’t care if you think it’s insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died.”A New Orleans firefighter was reportedly thrust under investigation by her employer after posting – then deleting – a social media comment that called the bullet that struck Kirk “a gift from god”.Delta Air Lines announced it had suspended employees over “social media content related to Kirk’s killing that the company judged to have gone “well beyond healthy, respectful debate”. According to a statement signed by Delta’s chief executive officer Ed Bastian, the suspensions would remain in effect pending an investigation, and the company made it a point to say “violations of our social media policy can carry meaningful consequences, including termination”.Separately, American Airlines issued a statement on social media saying “employees who promote such violence on social media were immediately removed from service”.“We will continue to initiate action with team members who display this kind of behavior,” American Airlines’ statement said.The Hill gave numerous other examples of workers, including nurses, university employees, and others, fired or disciplined for their comments. A teacher in Oregon, it said, lost their job for saying Kirk’s death had “really brightened up my day”.Reuters contributed reporting More