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      Pentagon demands journalists sign pledge not to gather certain information

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      The US military has issued new media restrictions demanding that journalists pledge not to gather any information – including unclassified documents – that has not been authorized for release or else risk revocation of their press passes.In a memo issued Thursday, the Pentagon stated that “it remains committed to transparency to promote accountability and public trust”. However, using an abbreviation for the recently rebranded Department of War headed by the Trump administration’s Pete Hegseth, the memo added: “DoW information must be approved for public release by an appropriate authorizing official before it is released, even if it is unclassified.”It went on to say: “Only authorized persons who have received favorable determinations of eligibility for access, signed approved non-disclosure agreements, and have a need-to-know may be granted access to [classified national security information].”Journalists reporting from the Pentagon are now required to sign a pledge agreeing to restrict their movements within the building and not to access any unauthorized materials. If they refuse to sign the pledge, their Pentagon press passes will be revoked.In a post on X, Hegseth said Friday: “The ‘press’ does not run the Pentagon – the people do. The press is no longer allowed to roam the halls of a secure facility. Wear a badge and follow the rules – or go home.”The latest memo follows the announcement by Hegseth in May regarding new press restrictions at the Pentagon. These restrictions limit reporters’ movements within the building to specific areas including the press pens, food court and courtyard. This is a departure from the usual practice under previous presidential administrations where reporters typically had more freedom of movement within the Pentagon.Hegseth has severely limited media access after facing backlash for sharing sensitive information about US strikes in Yemen in March in a Signal group chat where a journalist was accidentally included.Since he assumed office, Hegseth has maintained a hostile attitude towards major media networks. He ordered the removal of various longstanding news organizations including the New York Times, CNN, Politico and NPR from their dedicated offices in the Pentagon.The Pentagon’s latest memo has drawn criticism from journalists and free press advocates, with the National Press Club’s president Mike Balsamo saying: “This is a direct assault on independent journalism at the very place where independent scrutiny matters most: the US military.“If the news about our military must first be approved by the government, then the public is no longer getting independent reporting. It is getting only what officials want them to see. That should alarm every American.”Similarly, Freedom of the Press Foundation said “this policy operates as a prior restraint on publication, which is considered the most serious” violations of the press freedoms guaranteed by the US constitution’s first amendment.“The government cannot prohibit journalists from public information merely by claiming it’s a secret,” the foundation said.Meanwhile, Thomas Evans, editor in chief of National Public Radio (NPR), said his outlet was “taking this very seriously”.“We’ll be working with other news organizations to push back,” Evans remarked. “We’re big fans of the first amendment and transparency, and we want the American public to understand what’s being done in their name.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Pentagon’s restrictions on media access come as Trump suggested recently that TV networks should be punished for “negative coverage”. That statement followed widespread backlash over ABC’s indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show, on which the veteran comedian said that many in Trump’s Make America Great Again movement “are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk”, referring to the 10 September killing of the rightwing activist.Speaking on Air Force One on Thursday, Trump said – without providing evidence – that “97% [of major US networks are] against me”.“They give me only bad press,” he said, adding that he believed broadcasters should have their licenses “taken away” as a result.Among those to endorse Trump’s argument was the US senator Cynthia Lummis. The Wyoming Republican recently told the US news website Semafor that such licenses are “a privilege” rather than a “right” – and she said to the outlet that she no longer believes the first amendment is “the ultimate right”.“I feel like something’s changed culturally,” Lummis said, in part. “And I think there needs to be cognizance that things have changed.” More

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      How Trump is seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing for a campaign of vengeance

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      They will gather to mourn one of their own. On Sunday the late rightwing activist Charlie Kirk is set to be hailed by Donald Trump as a martyr of the Make America great again (Maga) movement.But Kirk’s memorial service at a 63,000-seat football stadium in Arizona could, critics fear, be exploited by the US president to serve a darker purpose: turning collective grief into a campaign of vengeance against America’s enemy within.Trump has spent the past 10 days escalating threats against what he calls the “radical left” after the fatal shooting of Kirk, 31, on a university campus in Utah.The White House is considering classifying some groups as domestic terrorists and revoking tax-exempt status for certain non-profits, even though there is no evidence linking these groups to the killing.Trump and his allies have also sought to undermine the legitimacy of the Democratic party, branding it an extremist organisation despite it having roundly condemned the attack on Kirk.Although officials insist that their focus is preventing violence, critics see an extension of Trump’s campaign of retribution against his political foes and an erosion of free speech rights. They warn that, in an echo of authoritarian governments around the world, his administration is trying to harness outrage over Kirk’s killing to crush dissent.“Political violence is very often used as a pretext to crack down on civil liberties and on opponents – this is page one of the autocrats’ playbook,” said Steven Levitsky, a political scientist at Harvard University and co-author of the book How Democracies Die.“I’m a Latin Americanist by training and the language we’ve heard lately reminds me a lot of the outsized response of military dictators in South America in the 1970s and that was a response to much higher levels of political violence than we see in the United States.”Levitsky added: “One is hard pressed to find an authoritarian government that did not take advantage of either a terrorist attack or a political assassination – an episode of political violence – to further crack down on civil liberties. This is mainstream authoritarian stuff.”Emotions are bound to be raw at Sunday’s tribute to Kirk, a close ally of Trump and personal friend of his son Donald Trump Jr, and a key figure in mobilising support for the president on university campuses. Authorities said they believe the suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, acted alone and they charged him with murder on Tuesday.However, administration officials have repeatedly made sweeping statements about the need for broader investigations and punishments related to Kirk’s death. Stephen Miller, a top policy adviser, claimed without evidence that there was an “organised campaign that led to this assassination”.Miller’s comments came during a conversation with JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s talkshow from his ceremonial office in the White House on Monday.Miller said he was feeling “focused, righteous anger,” and “we are going to channel all of the anger” by working to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks” by using “every resource we have.”The vice-president blamed “crazies on the far left” for saying the White House would “go after constitutionally protected speech”. Instead, he said, “We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.”View image in fullscreenAsked for examples, the White House pointed to demonstrations where police officers and federal agents have been injured, as well as the distribution of goggles and face masks during protests over immigration enforcement in Los Angeles.The US attorney general, Pam Bondi, blamed “leftwing radicals” for the shooting and said “they will be held accountable”. She warned: “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech. And that’s across the aisle.”Her comments sparked a backlash across the political spectrum, since even hate speech is generally considered to be protected under the first amendment to the constitution. Bondi tried to clean up her remarks, writing on social media that they would focus on “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence”.But Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster, said: “What you’re hearing from Trump, JD Vance, Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi is an unambiguous intention to use this tragedy as a pretext to crack down on dissent and criticism.“This is almost a classic move from the authoritarian playbook: to use a crisis to declare an emergency, to identify enemies and then to use that as an excuse to use state power as a cudgel against political opponents.”Already Trump has declared that he is designating the antifa movement a terrorist organisation while the Heritage Foundation thinktank and the Oversight Project, the authors of the influential Project 2025 blueprint, released a memo designating transgender people as “violent extremists”.Conflating such so-called threats with the Democratic party would be a leap but it is one that Miller and company seem willing to make, in what Levitsky regards as another typical authoritarian manoeuvre. “There’s almost always a rhetorical slip of the hand in which you link extremists who may be real or imagined or exaggerated to your mainstream opposition,” he said.“It’s far from clear that the guy who perpetrated this assassination belongs to any far-left movement; it seems pretty clear he did not. It’s very difficult to imagine that the far left, which in the United States is incredibly weak, poses a threat.”He added: “This is being used – and this is what authoritarians have done in many places – as a pretext to go after the Democratic party, which uniformly to a person repudiated this assassination and is in no way linked to it, and to go after what might be called opposition civil society.”Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, drew a comparison with the June killing of Democrat Melissa Hortman, a former speaker of the Minnesota state house, and her husband. “The Democrats didn’t run around blaming the Republican party or the conservative philosophy,” he said. “We didn’t engage in a series of guilt by association tactics.”Raskin also reacted to recent comments in which Miller described Democrats as “a domestic, extremist organisation”. “What is his basis for that? That is out of an authoritarian how-to guide. Authoritarians like to describe anyone who does not accept their rule over society as a terrorist. That’s a Putin move; that’s a Pinochet move.”Since taking office Trump has mobilised the federal government to pressure law firms, universities and other independent institutions. The White House has reportedly pointed to Indivisible, a progressive grassroots network, and the Open Society Foundations, founded by George Soros, as further potential subjects of scrutiny.More than a hundred non-profit leaders, representing organisations including the Ford Foundation, the Omidyar Network and the MacArthur Foundation, released a joint letter saying “we reject attempts to exploit political violence to mischaracterize our good work or restrict our fundamental freedoms”.After years of railing against censorship and “cancel culture”, Trump and his allies are now policing their opponents’ speech. People deemed to have celebrated Kirk’s death have been portrayed as complicit in the surge of political violence, with dozens fired, suspended or disciplined by employers over “inappropriate” comments.This week, late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by the ABC network over comments he made about Kirk following pressure from the Trump administration. Trump suggested regulators should consider revoking licences for networks that “give me only bad publicity”.Trump also brought a $15bn defamation lawsuit against the New York Times and four of its journalists in what the newspaper described as a meritless attempt to discourage independent reporting. On Friday a judge tossed out the action but allowed Trump to refile and amend it within 28 days.Sykes, author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, observed: “The irony is that Charlie Kirk justified much of his rhetoric as free speech and denied that there was such a thing as hate speech so that all the speech was justifiable. They’re willing to completely do a 180, completely turn that entire position on its head by adopting a position that they had claimed to reject.“This is the party that before 2024 had insisted that they were the defenders of free speech. JD Vance went to Europe to lecture the Europeans on free speech. And now what are they doing? They are justifying and leading a state-sponsored cancel culture.”Trump’s concerns about political violence are selective. He described people who rioted at the US Capitol on January 6 2021 as “hostages” and “patriots” and pardoned 1,500 of them on his first day back in the Oval Office. He also mocked House speaker emerita Nancy Pelosi after an attack on her husband.View image in fullscreenWhen Trump condemned Kirk’s killing in a video message, he mentioned several examples of “radical left political violence” but ignored attacks on Democrats. Asked on Monday about the killing of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman over the summer, Trump said, “I’m not familiar” with the case.A recent study of political violence by the Cato Institute, a libertarian thinktank, found that rightwing extremists have killed six times more people than their far left counterparts over the past half century.Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, observed: “They expect the Democrats and people who don’t agree with Maga’s worldview to take the high road, that somehow the onus is on that side to be the better angel, but it’s not expected of them.“Donald Trump can go out and call his political opponents scum and say that he doesn’t care about their wellbeing. But if these people point out the vile and controversial positions of someone like Charlie Kirk or those within their own administration, like Stephen Miller and Pam Bondi, then they’re domestic terrorists.”Yet still Trump has unwavering support from Republicans in Congress. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and others proposed legislation that would enable the justice department to use racketeering laws, originally envisioned to combat organised crime, to prosecute violent protesters and the groups that support them.Congressman Chip Roy of Texas wants the House to create a special committee to investigate the non-profit groups, saying: “We must follow the money to identify the perpetrators of the coordinated anti-American assaults being carried out against us.”Rightwing commentators have also cheered on the clampdown. Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist with a long record of bigoted comments, said “let’s shut the left down” and acknowledged that she wants Trump “to be the ‘dictator’ the left thinks he is”.Some analysts believe that Trump is fulfilling that ambition. Steve Schmidt, a political strategist, said there has never before been a crime committed in the US where the president and his allies have “used the occasion to demand a consolidation of political power for themselves and collective punishment against their opposition, who have been named as co-conspirators in a crime for which they had no involvement”.Schmidt noted state demands that flags be lowered and tributes enforced: “What you’re witnessing is a propaganda campaign that is ruthless, brutal and cold, right down to the use of the highly choreographed videography and photographs from the open casket. It’s obscene.” More

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      ‘The devil is not gonna win’: how Charlie Kirk became a Christian nationalist martyr

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      Christian nationalists in the US are positioning Charlie Kirk as a martyr for their movement, one that has grown in popularity and whose rise was intertwined with Kirk’s own political ascent.After Kirk’s killing, his widow, Erika Kirk, wrote on social media that the “world is evil”, but God “so good.” The “sound of this widow weeping [echoes] throughout this world like a battle cry,” she said. “They have no idea what they just ignited within this wife.”While Erika Kirk’s private sorrow is no doubt very real, her public remarks are telling, said Jeff Sharlet, the author of several books on Christian nationalism and the far right. “That’s holy war, that’s accelerationism, and it’s incredibly powerful,” he said, particularly in the emotional context of a grieving widow.Sharlet noted that although Kirk was best known for his non-religious political organizing, conservative eulogizing has overwhelmingly emphasized that he was a man of faith. Some people have gone further, and characterized Kirk’s death as martyrdom for conservative Christian values.“We know that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church,” Sean Feucht, a pastor who worked with Kirk and is known for his Christian nationalist views, said in an emotional video on social media. “The devil is not gonna win. The forces want us to be silent; they want us to shut up … We need to be more bold.”Matt Tuggle, a megachurch pastor, posted a video of Kirk’s death with the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”The rise of Trump-era Christian nationalismKirk’s meteoric career as a pundit and far-right activist was in some ways a microcosm of the rise of Trump-era Christian nationalism. Kirk started as a publicly secular young Republican in the Alex P Keaton mold but came to embrace a strident Christian culture war, speaking of a “spiritual battle … coming to the West” that would pit “Christendom” and “the American way of life” against leftism and Islam.Similarly, Turning Point USA, which Kirk founded in 2012, started as a pro-free market organization downstream of the late-2000s Tea Party movement against “big government”, but by the time of his death he had leaned into ideas associated with the Christian right. The organization may have done so because it spotted an opportunity.Shortly before Donald Trump won his first election to the presidency, the mainstream Christian right was demoralized and open to more extreme and anti-democratic ideas, noted Matthew D Taylor, a scholar of contemporary Christianity and the author of The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement that is Threatening Our Democracy.View image in fullscreenChristian nationalism is the belief that the US is and should be an explicitly Christian nation. Experts tend to view the ideology as existing on a continuum that ranges from relatively mainstream cultural conservatism to extreme religious supremacy. Defining it is difficult because Christian nationalism is less an organized movement than a tendency or way of thinking, Taylor and others said.For many years, the Christian right was dominated by groups such as the Moral Majority, which emphasized the idea of organizing Christian voters to democratically achieve conservative outcomes, as well as efforts to train and elevate conservative jurists to influence the federal judiciary.Yet two electoral victories by Barack Obama and the US supreme court’s 2015 Obergefell ruling, which legalized same-sex marriage across the country, left Christian conservatives feeling that all their efforts were for nothing. Because of changing demographics and the ongoing secularization of society, the number of Americans who identified as Christian was also dropping – meaning that majoritarian democracy was no longer a reliable political tool for the Christian right.“The early summer of 2015 … was a low point for them,” Taylor said. “There was this sense of, ‘What we’re doing is not working. We need someone strong. We need a fighter.’ And it just so happened that Trump kind of appeared on the scene at that moment, and I think that was, in part, the rocket fuel behind his appeal to evangelicals; he said: ‘I will speak for you. I will defend you. I will give you more power.’”Despite occasional misgivings, the Christian right soon enthusiastically aligned with Trump. But when he came into office, Trump did something new: he surrounded himself with Christian advisers from outside the traditional leadership of the Christian right. Led by Trump’s longtime adviser, the pastor Paula White-Cain, his new consiglieres tended to be megachurch preachers who had big followings in their spheres of influence but were viewed as B-list – or C-list, or D-list – figures by the conservative Christian political establishment.White-Cain “was an independent, charismatic televangelist and megachurch pastor and was on her third marriage, a female preacher, and preached the prosperity gospel,” Taylor said – in other words, someone with many markers “that people in the conventional evangelical world would have either labeled heresy or just low-brow”.‘He drew the church into Maga’After this changing of the guard, there were “some pretty wild and extreme theologies” that gained access to the Trump administration and conservative centers of power, Taylor said, including a far-right movement, popular in some charismatic and Pentecostal circles, that is sometimes called the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The NAR advocates for modern-day apostles and prophets to lead conservative Christians in turning the US into a dominion of Christ on Earth.The NAR leaders who “attached themselves to Trump and the Maga movement very early on,” Taylor said, “had a vision of social change, of societal conquest, that was far more aggressive than some of the old frameworks of the religious right.” That vision was exciting and politically potent to people including Kirk, who adopted theories and language associated with the NAR.The NAR has a distinctly minoritarian and anti-democratic valence. Rather than a Christian public lobbying to make government and society reflect its values, NAR ideas argue for Christians to take positions of power and push their values from the top down. A key NAR concept is something called the “seven mountains mandate” – the idea that “spiritual war” will not succeed until Christians have scaled and conquered seven summits of influence in public life, commonly identified as religion, the government, the media, education, culture, entertainment, and business.“The seven mountains, as an ideology, is deeply ambivalent about democracy,” Taylor said. “If democracy works, and gets you to positions of power, great, but if not, well, God’s will is still for Christians to take over the seven mountains, and they need to do it by whatever means they can.”The concept of the seven mountains has existed since the 1970s but was popularized in the 2000s, according to Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia and the author of the forthcoming book The Seven Mountains Mandate: Exposing the Dangerous Plan to Christianize America and Destroy Democracy.Kirk had been an evangelical Christian since childhood but earlier in his career expressed reluctance at politicizing his religious views. That changed during the peak of the early pandemic, when Kirk made the acquaintance of several charismatic megachurch pastors protesting church lockdowns. He began to traffic in ideas influenced by the NAR, including the seven-mountain mandate. Turning Point USA also began to forge partnerships with churches.View image in fullscreenKirk’s own evolution was striking: he went from saying, in 2018, that it was important that Christians respect the separation of church and state to denying that any such separation existed in the US constitution.Kirk never used the exact phrase “seven-mountain mandate”, Boedy said, but at a Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in 2020 Kirk praised Trump by saying: “Finally, we have a president who understands the seven mountains of cultural influence,” which was one of the most prominent mentions of the concept in the conservative mainstream. Kirk also attended conferences organized around the theme of the seven-mountain mandate.“‘Seven mountains’ is a kind of weird, wonky theology,” Sharlet said; Kirk “normalizes it and mainstreams it and smooths it out”.Kirk understood “the political and religious baggage that comes with the idea of Christian dominionism, of theocracy,” Boedy believes, and was trying to gently popularize Christian nationalist ideas while avoiding their more negative connotations.The “Appeal to Heaven” flags seen at the January 6 riot and elsewhere are often an NAR symbol. Mike Johnson, the speaker of the US House of Representatives, has ties to NAR circles and flies an Appeal to Heaven flag at his congressional office. Ché Ahn, the Republican candidate for governor of California and a charismatic preacher, is an adherent of NAR and “seven-mountain” ideas.Kirk was an activist more interested in uniting conservative Christians than representing any one faction or denomination. Yet the NAR might be understood as one of three main currents of hardline contemporary Christian nationalism in the US, Taylor said. The other two streams are radical traditionalist Catholics and a certain aggressively “masculine” reformed Protestantism embodied in Pete Hegseth, the US secretary of defense.In contrast to the Catholic and reformed Protestant camps, which tend to be very white and male in their leadership and intellectually influential but not widely popular, the NAR has roots in a rapidly growing international charismatic movement that is multi-ethnic, open to women in leadership, and viscerally exciting to rank-and-file churchgoers.Yet the symbolism and rhetoric of Christian nationalism are also attractive to broad swathes of conservative Americans, including those who are not actively religious, Sharlet noted. Although the Christian nationalism of popular imagination is a strict, Handmaid’s Tale-style piety, he said he often encounters Maga conservatives who are intensely dedicated to Christian nationalist ideas despite the fact that they do not attend church.“It wasn’t so much that [Kirk] joined the church as he drew the church into Maga,” Sharlet feels. “And I think he made a kind of influencer-lifestyle Christian nationalism that was appealing, that you could adopt [as a] kind of performance without having to change your life too much.”“No civilization has ever collapsed because it prays too much,” Kirk declared not long before he died. But he also gestured at a broader and more potent theme: that “a civilization that abandons God will deteriorate and ultimately collapse from the inside out.” More

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      US attorney tasked with inquiring into Trump critics resigns after president says ‘I want him out’

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      The federal prosecutor for the eastern district of Virginia resigned Friday under intense pressure from Donald Trump, after his office determined there wasn’t sufficient evidence to charge New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, a political rival of the president, with a crime.Erik Siebert told colleagues he was resigning in a letter sent Friday, NBC News reported. Meanwhile, in an early Saturday post on his Truth Social platform, Trump maintained that Siebert didn’t quit – but rather: “I fired him!”Hours earlier, Trump bluntly told reporters in the Oval Office: “I want him out.” The president claimed he soured on Siebert because Virginia’s two Democratic senators had endorsed his nomination, but also claimed that James “is very guilty of something”. ABC News reported earlier on Friday that Trump decided to fire Siebert after he failed to obtain an indictment against James.In 2024, James filed a civil lawsuit against Trump and his company that resulted in a significant financial penalty. That penalty was thrown out in August by an appeals court that upheld a judge’s finding that Trump had engaged in fraud by exaggerating his wealth for decades.After a five-month investigation, officials did not find enough clear evidence to charge James with a crime, ABC News reported earlier this week. Trump nominated Siebert, who worked since 2010 as an assistant US attorney in that office, for the position in May.The investigation centered on the allegation that James falsely said she was going to use a home she purchased in Virginia as her primary residence. While one document indicated James intended to use the home as her primary residence, others in the transaction show James clearly indicating she intended to use it as a second home.Ed Martin, a former January 6 defendant lawyer who is leading the justice department effort to target Trump’s political rivals, pressured prosecutors to seek an indictment, according to ABC News. Bill Pulte, the head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency and a staunch Trump ally, who criminally referred James, had urged Trump to fire Siebert, according to ABC.Pulte also referred California senator Adam Schiff, another political rival of Trump, and the Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook for mortgage fraud. The allegations in both of those cases appear similarly thin.The justice department has long held a level of independence from the White House, an arms length seen as necessary to give Americans confidence its prosecutors and other attorneys are making enforcement decisions based on facts and not politics. Trump has upended that norm, firing career attorneys and FBI agents who worked on January 6 cases.Those fired include Maurene Comey, the daughter of former FBI director James Comey and a career prosecutor who worked on some of the highest-profile cases in the southern district of New York. Maurene Comey, who was not given a reason for her firing, sued the Trump administration this week. More

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      Even Tucker Carlson is worried about Trump’s free speech crackdown | Arwa Mahdawi

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      Welcome to the resistance, Tucker Carlson?Forgive me; I’m sorry; mea culpa! Having spent considerable time analyzing the events of the past week, I’ve realized I should probably issue a public apology for some of my statements over the years. Here we go: I’m sorry for expressing radical and dangerous opinions such as “women deserve equal rights and shouldn’t be treated like walking wombs”. I’m sorry for suggesting Palestinians shouldn’t be systematically exterminated while Donald Trump posts about building a resort in Gaza. Going forward I will do better and ensure that I double-check all my opinions with the government. There isn’t an official Department of Thought Control yet, but no doubt we’ll get there soon.I wish I was joking about all this but, as you will have noticed, we are in a critical moment for free speech in the US. The killing of Charlie Kirk was a tragedy for his family, but the Trump administration has been ruthlessly using Kirk’s death to further a crackdown on dissent and erode first amendment protections.The day after Kirk was fatally shot, for example, the deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, urged people to report any “foreigners” to the state department who post on social media “praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event”. The US secretary of state, Marco Rubio, later said that the state department has “most certainly been denying visas” to people celebrating Kirk’s death. It’s obviously not in good taste to celebrate anyone’s murder, but the fact that calling out Kirk’s divisive and bigoted views could possibly be considered “rationalizing” his death and get you deported is chilling.It’s not just foreigners who are being told they should be wary about what they say. On Monday Vice-President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show, encouraged people to report anyone celebrating the influencer’s death to that person’s employer. Presumably so said employer can fire them.There have, of course, already been numerous Kirk-related firings and suspensions. An employee at the Federal Emergency Management Agency was reportedly placed on administrative leave over an Instagram post describing Kirk as “the literal racist homophobe misogynist.” MSNBC fired political analyst Matthew Dowd after he suggested Kirk’s “awful words” fueled “awful actions”. Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was suspended “indefinitely” after he noted “many in Maga Land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk”. Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah has also said she was fired over social media posts after Kirk’s killing.The weaponization of Kirk’s death is so alarming that even one of Trump’s former allies is rattled. Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host who was once one of the loudest voices in the Magasphere, recently issued a stark warning about the way that the Trump administration appears to be leveraging Kirk’s murder to trample civil liberties.“You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of [Kirk’s] murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country,” Carlson said on Wednesday during an episode of his podcast. This was in reference to attorney general Pam Bondi’s comments (which she has now walked back) that the Trump Department of Justice would “target” people disseminating “hate speech” following Kirk’s killing.“And trust me, if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that, ever,” Carlson added. “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.”Like Marjorie Taylor Greene, the far-right congresswoman who has recently started speaking a limited amount of sense on certain topics, Carlson is no ally to progressives. Indeed Carlson’s hate-mongering, and his former public cheerleading for Trump, are a large part of why we are in such a mess. But the fact that even a far-right voice like Carlson is worried about the authoritarian direction in which the US is heading should chill you to the bones. Carlson appears to have realized that no one is safe in the dictatorship that Trump appears intent on building. Not even him.Nuns on the run in AustriaSister Regina, 86, Sister Rita, 81, and Sister Bernadette, 88, are doing it for themselves. And by “it” I mean defying their diocese by running away from their nursing home and returning to their former convent. The convent has no electricity or running water so the nuns have started an Instagram account and are crowdfunding for supplies.French first lady will present court with ‘evidence’ she is a womanRightwing influencer, crackpot and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens has repeatedly insisted that Brigitte Macron is actually a man. Owens even said she would “stake [her] entire professional reputation” on it. Now the Macrons, who are suing Owens for defamation, are submitting “scientific evidence” to a US court to prove Brigitte was not born male. RIP Owens’s “professional reputation”.Girls and women in Colombia are being held as sex slavesThe country’s Catatumbo region, near the border with Venezuela, has seen increased violence in recent years. The Guardian reports on more than 150 girls and women aged from 11 to 50 who have escaped what they describe as “sexual slavery” by armed groups in the region. Escapees have warned there are many more women and girls in captivity.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe Trump administration compares birth control to abortionTrump officials recently ordered that millions of dollars’ worth of contraceptives intended for low-income countries be destroyed. “President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world,” a spokesperson from USAID told the New York Times. “The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.” By falsely claiming that pills, intrauterine devices and hormonal implants induce abortions, the Trump administration may be paving the way to ban birth control, experts warn.Israeli minister salivates over ‘real estate bonanza’ in Gaza“A business plan is on President Trump’s table,” Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, said at a property development conference in Tel Aviv this week. “The demolition, the first stage in the city’s renewal, we have already done. Now we just need to build.” Mainstream media outlets keep referring to what is happening in Gaza as a “war”. But as the likes of Smotrich make clear, this is a genocidal land grab.Pete Buttigieg criticizes Kamala Harris for passing him over because he’s gayIn her new memoir, Harris said Buttigieg was her “first choice” for running mate; “he would have been an ideal partner – if I were a straight white man”. Forget Buttigieg’s sexuality, the fact that Harris thinks a former McKinsey consultant, the epitome of an out-of-touch elite, who polled at 0% with Black voters would have been a good running mate is mind-boggling.The week in pawtriarchyA new study has found chimpanzees may consume the equivalent of about one beer a day because of all the fermented fruit they eat. Some researchers believe this supports the “drunken monkey” hypothesis: the idea that humans got a taste for booze because our primate ancestors were constantly on the jungle juice. It seems the ape-oclayptical state of the world is enough to drive anyone to drink.

      Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More

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      ‘These results are sobering’: US high school seniors’ reading and math scores plummet

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      The average reading and math scores of American high school seniors fell to their lowest levels in two decades in 2024, according to new national data released last week.The results, from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), found that, on average, reading scores for 12th graders were 10 points lower in 2024 than they were in 1992, when the test was first administered, and that math scores fell to their lowest levels since 2005, when the math assessment began.The test, administered by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), which is part of the US Department of Education, assessed roughly 19,300 12th-graders in math, 24,300 in reading and 23,000 eighth-graders in science between January and March of last year.The report found that 35% of seniors “performed at or above” the NAEP’s “proficient” level in reading, and 22% were at or above that level in math.It also stated that 45% of 12th graders scored below the NAEP’s “basic” level in math, marking a five percentage-point increase from 2019. In reading, 32% of students scored below the basic level, which was a two-point increase from 2019.“These results are sobering,” said NCES acting commissioner Matthew Soldner. “The drop in overall scores coincides with significant declines in achievement among our lowest-performing students, continuing a downward trend that began before the Covid pandemic.“Among our nation’s high-school seniors, we’re now seeing a larger percentage of students scoring below the NAEP basic achievement level in mathematics and reading than in any previous assessment.”One lingering effect of the pandemic present in the report was chronic absenteeism. The report found that about a third of 12th-graders reported missing three or more days of school in the month before the test, up from 25% in 2019.“Students are spending less time learning,” said Thomas Kane, an education economist at Harvard. “And when they are present, instruction is less efficient because teachers are constantly reteaching material.”Robert Balfanz, a professor at John Hopkins University School of Education, said easy access to information online and the use of online assignments may also be leading some students to treat in-person school attendance as optional.“In their minds, they tell their parents, ‘Look, all my assignments are online, I can do them even if I’m not at school,’” Balfanz said.But while the Covid pandemic and school closures had major effects on learning, experts say the academic decline began before 2020.“The uncomfortable truth is that American students have been significantly losing ground for more than a decade,” Eric Hanushek, an education economist, wrote in an opinion piece last week. “The pandemic didn’t break American education – it was already broken.”Kane said the decline among lower-achieving students began some time around 2015 and has continued.“It’s clearly not just the pandemic,” Kane said. “It should be troubling to everyone, and we need to find a solution.”Experts point to a range of potential factors beyond absenteeism that could be contributing to the decline, including increased screen time and smartphone use, declining student engagement, and the rollback of test-based accountability since the expiration of the No Child Left Behind Act in 2015.Carol Jago, a longtime English teacher and literacy expert at UCLA, told the Associated Press last week that students today read fewer books and spend less time with longer texts.“To be a good reader, you have to have the stamina to stay on the page, even when the going gets tough,” Jago said. “You have to build those muscles, and we’re not building those muscles in kids.”Balfanz added that the constant exposure to short-form and visual media in students’ daily lives may be making academic focus more difficult.One potential solution, he said, could be to add more dedicated reading time into school days – and restricting smartphones in classrooms.Kane noted that academic declines are appearing in other countries as well, which suggests a broader global trend that could be linked to increased screen use.Some US states have already passed laws restricting phone use in schools. Kane believes that there needs to be a national effort to assess the impact and effectiveness of those policies to see whether they work and ought to be implemented in more areas.The role of smart phones and social media in academic performance came up this week during a Senate hearing on the NAEP results.Martin West, the vice-chair of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees policy for the NAEP, told lawmakers that the rise of “smartphones and social media platforms targeting youth” is one area they should investigate.“We lack direct evidence of a causal link between smartphones and learning, but I’m convinced that this technology is a key driver of youth mental health challenges, a distraction from learning, both inside and outside of schools, and a deterrent to reading,” West said.Rebecca Winthrop, a fellow at the Brookings Institution, testified that student disengagement was exacerbated by the pandemic and is being amplified by social media. She endorsed actions such as smart phone bans, higher academic expectations, and adopting more engaging teaching styles.The NAEP results also reignited the debate around the federal government’s role in education, with US education secretary Linda McMahon saying last week that the lesson from the results “is clear”.“Success isn’t about how much money we spend, but who controls the money and where that money is invested,” she said. “That’s why President Trump and I are committed to returning control of education to the states so they can innovate and meet each school and students’ unique needs.”Representative Tim Walberg, a Republican who chairs the House education committee, agreed and said that “by returning education to the states, we can empower parents and local communities and ensure every child gains the skills necessary to succeed”.But Democratic representative Bobby Scott pushed back, writing that the NAEP results “reinforce the urgent need for sustained federal investment in academic recovery and educational equity”.“Now is not the time to retreat from our responsibility to provide every child, regardless of zip code, with the opportunity to succeed,” he added.Balfanz believes that “some collective effort at the national level” is needed to support states and districts in implementing proven solutions. He emphasized the need to “set targets and goals and strategies” and help build the capacity at the local level to be able to achieve them.Kane said that he agrees that states need to take a “more aggressive role in helping to reverse these trends” but that the federal government also needs to prioritize partnering with states “in a concerted, coordinated effort to answer two questions: finding effective ways to lower absenteeism and measuring the impact of the cellphone bans”.“Something fundamental in US schools is broken,” Kane warned. “And we need to fix it.” More

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      Black women are being hit hard by the Trump layoffs and firings: ‘It chips away at morale and self-worth’

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      On 30 May 2025, Dr Ravon Alford received an email from leadership at her job that the federal government had chosen to revoke the organization’s active federal grants. At the time, Alford, who’s 33, had been working as a senior policy analyst at a criminal justice reform non-profit organization in Detroit. As a result of the budget cuts, all work related to projects that were funded by these grants were ceased. Organization-wide layoffs followed, affecting Alford and 75% of the staff.Alford is among the nearly 300,000 Black women who exited the US labor force in just three months – a shift tied directly to federal policy decisions. The most immediate cause has been sweeping cuts across public-sector agencies, historically one of the few reliable pathways to middle-class stability for Black women. Though they make up just more than 6% of the overall workforce, Black women account for more than 12% of federal employees. These positions have long offered pensions, benefits and more equitable pay than the private sector, where wage disparities remain stubbornly fixed.“It was an extremely traumatic experience for me because this was my first time ever being laid off,” said Alford, who once viewed the public sector as a stable industry. “Had I been laid off because of my own merit, then it would’ve been easier for me to deal with. But it was just the fact that this administration chose to not prioritize something that we actually were aligned with in the last administration cost me my job.” Since the layoffs, Alford has witnessed some of her Black female former co-workers exiting corporate America all together and pursuing entrepreneurial paths. The experience has changed Alford’s view on how to navigate the workplace as well: “Now I’m taking care of myself and not allowing my identity to be fully within a job.”Working under the constant threat of job loss can create a psychological climate of fear. “For African American women, that fear isn’t just about employment. It’s about identity, safety and dignity in spaces where we’re already underrepresented and under-resourced,” said Dr Rajanique Modeste, an industrial and organizational psychologist and author of After the Layoff: Reclaiming Power When Stability Disappears. “It shows up in how we engage, or don’t engage, with leadership, and influences how safe we feel speaking up.”In unstable work environments, self-advocacy is often the first casualty, Modeste says. When job security feels shaky, most employees retreat into survival mode. “It becomes a heads-down situation,” explained Modeste. “People avoid drawing attention to themselves out of fear they might be next on the chopping block.”Even for Black women who have been spared from layoffs at their organization, the sense of belonging and psychological safety might wither. “For Black women, connections at work often serve as more than just friendships. They can be a crucial part of navigating the workplace,” said Modeste. “When others are let go, it often means the loss of community, a safety net and a sense of stability. Suddenly, you may find yourself alone in spaces where you once felt supported.”For Duke, a 28-year-old account supervisor in Washington DC, who survived three rounds of company-wide layoffs at her advertising agency after the current administration ended federal contracts with the organization, the months since April have been marked by constant anxiety and feeling a need to overperform. She described waking in the middle of the night, bracing herself for an email from HR or her manager signaling she’d be next. “Every Sunday I was checking my emails to see if I had an invite,” said Duke, who’s using an alias because she is still employed at her company. “Going into the office, the morale was low. You couldn’t really plan ahead, because you didn’t know if this would be your last paycheck.” That uncertainty seeped into her personal life as well. When her lease was up for renewal, she delayed signing until the very last minute. “I just didn’t know if I was going to have a job,” she explained.As a first-generation college graduate, Duke had grown up believing higher education would provide stability. “You’re told to get your degree and you’ll be set for life,” she said. But the reality she’s facing in corporate America has been far different: “One minute you’re on top and doing great, and the next you’re laid off. We’ve seen that across every sector: tech, healthcare and now even the federal space.” In June, Black women faced the longest job searches of any group, spending an average of more than six months unemployed before securing new work.For Black women like her, that volatility doesn’t just undermine career expectations; it chips away at a sense of security they were told was within reach. Similar to Alford, Duke had once considered the public sector a safe haven. “I was so excited because you always hear that the public sector is the safest. Once you’re in, you’re in for life,” she explained. The sudden unraveling of that assumption was devastating: “To have that ripped away is jarring.”The rupture goes beyond lost income; it disrupts mental health and future planning. Instead of imagining long-term career growth, many Black women are recalibrating around avoidance. “From what I’ve seen, and what I agree with, a lot of people are going to stay away from the public sector for at least the next three years because it feels so unstable,” Duke said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionEven when companies insist that a round of layoffs has ended, the residue of fear lingers. Workers understand, deep down, that performance alone cannot protect them from business decisions. “That uncertainty creates silence,” Modeste said. “People stop asking for promotions, raises or accommodations – not because they don’t want or deserve them, but because they’re trying not to make waves. Staying under the radar starts to feel safer than speaking up.”That silence can be especially fraught for Black women. The pressure to prove they belong, to avoid being labeled “difficult” or “demanding”, compounds the risk of speaking out. “In moments when self-advocacy is most needed, fear of retaliation or being misunderstood can keep people quiet,” Modeste noted. Over time, that quiet takes a psychological toll. “It chips away at morale and self-worth. It reinforces the idea that your needs don’t matter, or that asking for more puts your job at risk.”The stress of layoffs isn’t just about surviving the present – it’s about facing a future that feels increasingly unpredictable. Even as Black women push through the daily strain of keeping their jobs, the prospect of losing one carries its own spiral of uncertainty. “It all takes a toll on your mental health,” Duke said. “There’s only so much you can do when it feels like the whole system is set up to have you fail.” At the end of this month, Duke will find out whether her team’s federal contract will be renewed. More

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      Media giants accused of ‘cowering to threats’ as Trump tries to stamp out criticism

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      Over the past two decades Jimmy Kimmel has interviewed thousands of people – including his ultimate boss – on his late-night talkshow.“I’ve probably, with the possible exception of Roseanne, caused you more headaches than anyone in the last 15 years,” Kimmel grinned at his guest one night in late 2019. “Absolutely,” replied Disney CEO Bob Iger.When ABC, broadcaster of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, decided to suspend the program “indefinitely” this week, it dispatched an anonymous spokesperson to announce the news. Iger, veteran leader of Disney, ABC’s parent company, was nowhere to be seen – but was widely reported to have been intimately involved in the decision.Iger is one of a small handful of powerful executives pulling the strings behind the most prominent media organizations in the US. David Ellison, the new CEO of Paramount Skydance, and son of the billionaire tech mogul Larry Ellison, is in charge of CBS, and reportedly pursuing a deal to buy the owner of CNN. Brian Roberts, the Comcast chair, is the most senior executive overseeing NBC and its cable news network, MSNBC.View image in fullscreenIn recent months, major broadcasters have faced criticism for their responses to threats and pressure from the Trump administration. CBS paid a $16m defamation settlement to Donald Trump and scheduled the cancellation of the The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. ABC paid a $15m settlement to the US president and suspended Kimmel.And Trump is publicly pushing NBC to cancel its two late night stars, Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers, too.The owners of the largest US TV networks, and the ultimate employers of their stars, are even bigger companies who conduct business transactions that most viewers may not pay a lot of attention to – mergers, acquisitions, licensing deals – but are firmly in the sights of the White House.On Wednesday, FCC chair Brendan Carr – dubbed Trump’s “censor-in-chief” – dangled the power of the federal government over ABC, and Disney, saying that the regulator has “remedies we can look at” to address comments Kimmel made about conservatives in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s killing.“These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead,” Carr said of the affiliates that carry ABC across the US. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”Soon after, ABC announced it would indefinitely suspend Kimmel’s show. “Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done,” wrote Trump.But Carr is not done. “I don’t think this is the last shoe to drop,” he said of Kimmel’s suspension, in an interview on the conservative Fox News on Thursday.To Robert Thompson, a media scholar at Syracuse University who specializes in TV history, battles between government regulators and the companies that broadcast America’s favorite shows have long been a part of broadcast history. But the way TV networks are now part of far larger businesses, and complex webs of interest and influence, have changed the stakes of the fight.“Entertainment and news are controlled by these large companies that are very dependent on new acquisitions and mergers that require approval by federal government agencies,” Thompson said. “That’s why there’s a vulnerability for this kind of thing to happen.”The Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed under Bill Clinton, loosened restrictions on how many TV and radio stations a company could own nationally.Now, the dominant US TV networks – and their news and entertainment arms – are controlled by a small, but powerful, collection of entertainment giants. CBS is owned by Paramount Skydance, which includes Paramount Pictures, cable channels like MTV, Nickelodeon and Comedy Central, and other TV channels abroad, including Channel 5 in the UK. ABC is owned by Disney, which also owns Marvel Studios, Hulu and ESPN. NBC is owned by Comcast, which is also a cable TV company and an internet service producer, while also being the company behind the European broadcaster Sky and DreamWorks movies like Shrek.The timing of recent mergers have alarmed first amendment advocates, who are starting to see a pattern of companies bowing to the Trump administration in order to get approval for their deals.CBS owner Paramount was criticized for settling with Trump and cancelling Colbert’s show weeks before the FCC greenlit an $8bn merger with Skydance, a Hollywood studio.The merger installed David Ellison, founder of Skydance, at the top of Paramount Skydance, and CBS.CBS News has since appointed a Trump ally as its ombudsman and Bari Weiss, founder of the Free Press, an “anti-woke” startup, is said to be in line for a role shaping its coverage.View image in fullscreenMeanwhile, Nexstar Media, a major owner of local television stations, including over 30 ABC-affiliated stations, has been looking for FCC approval for a $6.2bn merger with Tegna, another broadcast media company. After Carr’s podcast interview, Nexstar announced it would preempt Kimmel’s show on their ABC-affiliated stations, meaning the show wouldn’t access millions of TV viewers in specific markets. (Nexstar executives “had no communication with the FCC or any government agency” before making the call, the firm has stressed.)Christopher Anders, a senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, a leading defender of rights and freedoms enshrined in the US constitution, said Carr was using “the regulatory power the government has over media companies” through his comments.“That is exactly what the first amendment is designed to stop: the government using its power to stifle speech,” Anders said. “And if there’s any speech that’s at the very heart of the first amendment, it would be the ability to criticize those in power, particularly the ability to criticize the president.”Media giants have been “cowering to threats”, he added, ignoring the responsibility they have of defending free speech.Iger, who previously considered running for president, has tried to steer clear of the culture wars that embroiled his predecessor, Bob Chapek. Now he faces intense scrutiny for overseeing a decision – suspending Kimmel – which critics say raises serious free speech concerns.Michael Eisner, Disney’s former CEO, and Iger’s former boss at the firm, wrote on X on Friday: “The ‘suspending indefinitely’ of Jimmy Kimmel immediately after the Chairman of the FCC’s aggressive yet hollow threatening of the Disney Company is yet another example of out-of-control intimidation. Maybe the Constitution should have said, ‘Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press, except in one’s political or financial self-interest.’”It is still unclear when – or if – Kimmel will come back on air. The companies in charge of US television, and the government agencies who regulate their dealings, loom large.“Anyone that has the privilege of owning one of the major media networks, or owning the affiliate stations that carry those networks, ought to also have recognized the responsibility to protect the right of free speech,” said Anders. “Not just give up that right because an administration official is at least implicitly threatening to block their ability to carry out business.” More