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Donald Trump says he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 17:06
Donald Trump said on Saturday he is deploying troops to Portland, Oregon, “authorizing Full Force, if necessary”, ignoring pleas from local officials and the state’s congressional delegation, who suggested that the president was misinformed or lying about the nature and scale of a single, small protest outside one federal immigration enforcement office.Trump made the announcement on social media, using references to antifascists and US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice). He claimed that the deployment was necessary “to protect War ravaged Portland, and any of our ICE Facilities under siege from attack by Antifa, and other domestic terrorists”.Oregon’s governor, Tina Kotek, rejected the president’s characterization. “There is no national security threat in Portland. Our communities are safe and calm,” she wrote on social media. “My office is reaching out to the White House and Homeland Security for more information. We have been provided no information on the reason or purpose of any military mission.”A visit by the Guardian to downtown Portland on Saturday morning confirmed that the city is placid, the farmers’ market was packed and the protest against immigration enforcement in an outlying residential neighborhood remained small. There were just four protesters on the sidewalk near the Ice field office Trump claimed was “under siege”. One, wearing a chicken costume and draped in an American flag, held up a sign that read: “Portland Will Outlive Him.” Passing motorists honked in appreciation.The White House did not provide details in connection with Trump’s announcement, including a timeline for the deployment or what troops would be involved.Portland’s mayor, Keith Wilson, said at a hastily assembled news conference on Friday night that the city had become aware of “a sudden influx of federal agents in our city. We did not ask for them to come. They are here without clear precedent or purpose.”“The President has sent agents here to create chaos and riots in Portland, to induce a reaction, to induce protests, to induce conflicts. His goal is to make Portland look like what he’s been describing it as,” Oregon’s junior senator, Jeff Merkley said. “He wants to induce a violent exchange. Let us not grant him that wish. Let us be the force of orderly, peaceful protest.”The senator also drew attention to video evidence from the local newspaper, the Oregonian, which showed federal agents using force against a small number of protesters outside the Ice facility, who remained peaceful.Although a spokesperson for the Oregon national guard told the Oregonian that no official request for troops had been made yet, convoys of dozens of federal agents, in marked and unmarked SUVs, were seen on Friday entering a federal building downtown and an Ice field office in a residential neighborhood that has been the scene of regular protests by dozens of protesters.“The President of the United States is directing his self-proclaimed ‘Secretary of War’ to unleash militarized federal forces in an American city he disagrees with,” Representative Maxine Dexter wrote in a social media statement on Saturday, referring in part to the Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth. “This is an egregious abuse of power and a betrayal of our most basic American values. Authoritarians rely on fear to divide us. Portland will not give them that.”Both of Oregon’s US senators and three of its House representatives had in recent days strongly rejected Trump’s claims about mass anarchy in the city as a fiction intended to justify the unnecessary deployment of federal troops as part of an “authoritarian” crackdown.Ron Wyden, the state’s senior Democratic senator, told reporters on Friday: “It’s important to recognize that the president’s argument is a fable – it does not resemble the truth.”“If he watches a TV show in the morning and he see Portland mentioned, he says it’s a terrible place,” Wyden added.During an Oval Office event on Thursday to announce that the administration intends to investigate and disrupt what it claims is “organized political violence” funded by leftwing groups, Trump made several wild claims about Portland, which was a center of racial justice protests in 2020 after the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer. But life has long since returned to normal, and barriers around the federal courthouse and police headquarters downtown have been removed.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe president, however, apparently deceived by video of a handful of protesters gathered outside the Ice facility in a south-west Portland neighborhood broadcast by conservative outlets, insisted that the city has been in non-stop “anarchy” since 2020 and is barely livable.“Portland is, I don’t know how anybody lives there, it’s amazing. But it’s anarchy out there,” Trump said. The president then claimed, falsely, that most of the city’s retail stores had closed, due to arson attacks, and “the few shops that are open” were covered in plywood.Describing the small number of protesters who have gathered outside an Ice facility that has been illegally used for detentions in a residential neighborhood, Trump claimed, without evidence: “These are professional agitators, these are bad people and they’re paid a lot of money by rich people.“But we’re going to get out there and we’re gonna do a pretty big number on those people in Portland that are doing that.”Representative Suzanne Bonamici, an Oregon Democrat, said on Friday: “This proclaimed ‘war on Antifa’ is completely a fallacy. Antifa is an ideology, it is not a group, and so we’re extremely concerned with what he’s going to try to do with that pronouncement.”“Donald Trump does not care about safety. If he cared about safety he would not have released 1,600 convicted insurrectionists into the streets. He cares about control and authoritarianism,” she added, referring to Trump’s clemency for those who carried out the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden. “Portland does not need the military. We do not want them, we do not need them, we do not welcome them to come here under his orders.”Trump, a Republican, has sent military troops to the Democratic-controlled cities of Los Angeles and Washington DC so far in his second presidency. He has discussed doing the same in Memphis and New Orleans, which are also Democratic strongholds. More
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US military brass brace for firings as Pentagon chief orders top-level meeting
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 15:07
US military officials are reportedly bracing for possible firings or demotions after the Trump administration’s Pentagon chief, Pete Hegseth, abruptly summoned hundreds of generals and admirals from around the world to attend a gathering in Virginia in the upcoming days.The event, scheduled for Tuesday at Marine Corps University in Quantico, is expected to feature a short address by Hegseth focused on military standards and the “warrior ethos”, according to the Washington Post.The order to attend the meeting, which has been described as unusual and unprecedented, was reportedly issued with little explanation – and prompted military personnel stationed overseas to have to make last-minute travel arrangements.The Pentagon has not disclosed details about the meeting or its agenda. But a senior Trump administration official told the New York Times on Friday that Hegseth intends to deliver a “rally the troops” message – and that one of the primary goals of the gathering is to “get our fighters excited” about the new posture of what was recently rebranded the Department of War.A White House official told CNN that the event is intended as a “show of force of what the new military now looks like” during Donald Trump’s second presidency.“It’s about getting the horses into the stable and whipping them into shape,” the military official familiar with the planning told CNN. “And the guys with the stars on their shoulders make for a better audience from an optics standpoint. This is a showcase for Hegseth to tell them: get on board, or potentially have your career shortened.”Hegseth’s team reportedly plans to record and publicly release the address later, according to CNN, which cited three of its sources.A Pentagon spokesperson confirmed the upcoming gathering to the Guardian, saying that Hegseth “will meet with his senior military leaders”, but did not provide any further details.According to the Times, the Pentagon informed congressional committees overseeing the military on Friday that Hegseth intends to use the gathering to share with “most senior service members his intent for the department”, including new guidance on “military fitness standards and several other areas of interest”.Sources cited by the Post say that Tuesday’s address will be the first of three short lectures by Hegseth. The second, the Post reported, will reportedly focus on the defense industrial base, and the third on deterrence.The meeting has reportedly stirred unease and anxiety among some military officers, especially given Hegseth’s efforts to reshape the Pentagon and his recent firings of several senior officers.In May, he ordered a 20% reduction in the number of four-star generals and admirals across the military and a 10% cut in the number of flag and general officers. And in recent months, he has dismissed more than a dozen senior military officials, according to the Times.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionIn an interview on Thursday on MSNBC, retired army Lt Gen Mark Hertling described Tuesday’s planned gathering as highly unusual, adding that it was something he had “never seen before”.“There are a couple of reasons why he might be calling this meeting,” Hertling said. “It could be about a shifting national security strategy, or cuts to the general officer corps, which is something he has talked about several times – he’s floated it, to shrink the number of flag officers in the military. It could be a preparation for a potential budget stalemate next week, or it could be concerns over information leaks.”“Secretary Hegseth has fired 12 senior ranking general officers, so he could be firing more,” Hertling added. “Or is it performative theatre?”In a post on social media on Friday, Lt Gen Ben Hodges of the army compared Tuesday’s gathering to a 1935 “surprise assembly in Berlin” where German generals were “required to swear a personal oath to the Führer”, Adolf Hitler, in the lead-up to the Holocaust and the second world war.Hegseth, a former army national guard officer and ex-Fox News host, responded to Hodges by writing: “Cool story, General.” More
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FBI fires agents who kneeled during 2020 racial justice protest
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 13:43
The FBI has fired agents who were photographed kneeling during a racial justice protest in Washington DC that followed the 2020 murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police officers, three people familiar with the matter told the Associated Press on Friday.The bureau last spring had reassigned the agents but has since fired them, said the people, who insisted on anonymity to discuss personnel matters with the AP.The number of FBI employees terminated was not immediately clear, but two people said it was roughly 20.The photographs at issue showed a group of agents taking the knee during one of the demonstrations following the May 2020 killing of Floyd, a death that led to a national reckoning over policing and racial injustice and sparked widespread anger after millions of people saw video of the arrest. The kneeling had angered some in the FBI but was also understood as a possible de-escalation tactic during a period of protests.The FBI Agents Association confirmed in a statement late on Friday that more than a dozen agents had been fired, including military veterans with additional statutory protections, and condemned the move as unlawful. It called on Congress to investigate and said the firings were another indication of the FBI director Kash Patel’s disregard for the legal rights of bureau employees.“As Director Patel has repeatedly stated, nobody is above the law,” the agents association said. “But rather than providing these agents with fair treatment and due process, Patel chose to again violate the law by ignoring these agents’ constitutional and legal rights instead of following the requisite process.”An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on Friday.The firings come amid a broader personnel purge at the bureau as Patel works to reshape the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency.Five agents and top-level executives were known to have been summarily fired in August in a wave of ousters that current and former officials say has contributed to declining morale.One of those, Steve Jensen, helped oversee investigations into the attack on the US Capitol that Donald Trump supporters carried out on 6 January 2021 after his first presidency ended in defeat to Joe Biden. Another, Brian Driscoll, served as acting FBI director in the early days of Trump’s second presidency, which began in January, and resisted US justice department demands to supply the names of agents who investigated the Capitol attack.A third, Chris Meyer, was incorrectly rumored on social media to have participated in the investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida. A fourth, Walter Giardina, participated in high-profile investigations like the one into Trump adviser Peter Navarro.A lawsuit filed by Jensen, Driscoll and another fired FBI supervisor, Spencer Evans, alleged that Patel communicated that he understood that it was “likely illegal” to fire agents based on cases they worked but was powerless to stop it because the White House and the justice department were determined to remove all agents who investigated Trump.Patel denied at a recent congressional hearing that he took orders from the White House on whom to fire and said anyone who had been dismissed failed to meet the FBI’s standards. More
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Outrage mounts as Republicans in Congress move to protect pesticide makers from lawsuits
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 13:00
It’s been seven years since Germany’s Bayer bought US agrochemical giant Monsanto, inheriting not only the company’s vast portfolio of seeds and pesticide products, but also more than 100,000 lawsuits alleging Monsanto’s popular Roundup herbicide causes cancer. Bayer, which has so far paid out billions of dollars in settlements and jury verdicts to cancer victims, has been working – so far in vain – to put an end to the litigation and to block any future such cases.Now Bayer appears closer than ever to success, as many Republican congressional leaders push for measures that would effectively block lawsuits against pesticide makers around the country.A group founded by Bayer called the Modern Ag Alliance is the face of the legislative push, advocating for liability shields they say are necessary to allow companies to continue to sell chemicals that farmers use to kill weeds and bugs in their fields.“Without legislative action, a potential catastrophe is on the horizon that could result in many farmers going out of business and food prices rising even further,” the alliance, which represents more than 100 agricultural organizations, including farmers who grow wheat, corn, soybeans and other key food crops, warns on its website.The alliance has been lobbying for the passage of state laws blocking such lawsuits. They’ve succeeded thus far in two states – Georgia and North Dakota – and continue to lobby for such laws in all 50 states.But the immediate battleground is in the halls of Congress, where a provision tucked into a congressional appropriations bill is outraging consumer advocates, including those affiliated with the influential Make American Healthy Again (Maha) movement. Similar protective language for pesticide makers is expected to be included in the new farm bill as well.“The audacity of elected officials voting for legislation to fully strip our legal rights away when injured by chemicals is stunning,” said Kelly Ryerson, a leading Maha advocate who has been lobbying lawmakers and her 84,000 social media followers to oppose pesticide company protections. “Especially in this age of Maha when an unprecedented number of Americans are rallying against toxins in food and the environment.”‘Important investments’Bayer has made it clear that changing laws in its favor is a priority. The company states on its website that without “legislative certainty”, lawsuits over its glyphosate-based Roundup herbicide and other weed killers can affect its research and product development and other “important investments”.The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) should be the ultimate arbiter of product safety and what warnings should be required on product labels, Bayer says. The company also says if the EPA approves a product label, consumers should not be able to sue companies for failing to warn of perceived risks.In a statement to the Guardian, Bayer said federal legislation is “needed to ensure that states and courts do not take a position or action regarding product labels at odds with congressional intent, federal law and established scientific research and federal authority”.Bayer has already removed glyphosate, classified as “probably” carcinogenic to humans by World Health Organization cancer experts, from consumer herbicide products. And the company has threatened to stop selling it to farmers if the litigation is not brought to an end.The company disputes, however, that the appropriations bill will provide that certainty, saying in its statement that the language doesn’t prevent lawsuits and asserting it does is a “distortion of reality”.The relevant section of the House version of the appropriations bill – section 453 – does not mention litigation or pesticide company liability. Section 453 simply says that no funds can be used to “issue or adopt any guidance or any policy, take any regulatory action, or approve any labeling or change to such labeling” inconsistent with the conclusion of an EPA human health assessment.But critics say the language effectively would impede states and local governments from warning about risks of pesticides even in the face of new scientific findings about health harms if such warnings are not consistent with outdated EPA assessments. The EPA itself would not be able to update warnings without finalizing a new assessment, the critics say.Due to the limits on warnings, consumers would find it nearly impossible to sue pesticide makers for failing to warn them of health risks if the EPA assessments do not support such warnings.The language is “by design sneaky and complicated and hard to explain”, said Daniel Hinkle, senior state affairs counsel for the American Association for Justice, who has been lobbying against the action.“Nobody thinks that a giant chemical company should be able to lie about the risks of using their product and get away with it. It’s just making sure that people understand that is what is at stake,” Hinkle said.‘Very worried’Representative Chellie Pingree, a Democrat from Maine who tried but failed to overturn the language in a July appropriations committee hearing, said she is “very worried” about the “outrageous” efforts to protect pesticide companies from litigation.“We’re talking about chemicals here that are already prone to health risks,” Pingree said. “And the chemical industry is trying to keep that information from consumers … and then to have immunity from being responsible if you get cancer from being in the presence of these chemicals.”The language is not currently included in the short-term government spending package being debated ahead of a looming government shutdown that would occur at the end of the month in the absence of continued spending authorization.But it is expected to see support in both House and Senate appropriations bill versions once the short-term budget is resolved. The new farm bill is also expected to include language limiting or preventing pesticide injury lawsuits, with strong signals from Glenn Thompson, chair of the House committee on agriculture, favoring such protections.Previously, Thompson has weighed in on the side of Bayer amid its ongoing efforts to get the supreme court to weigh in on federal “preemption” over pesticide regulation.The involvement and influence of the Maha movement, made up of voters from both parties, is adding a bipartisan element to what otherwise might be a highly partisan fight.Max Lugavere, a health journalist, author and podcaster who posted a photo of a Maha-related visit to the White House to his 1.1 million Instagram followers, said pushing lawmakers is important, but “awareness among everyday people is the first domino”.Citing “growing evidence linking pesticides to health risks”, Lugavere said: “Stripping away legal recourse in these cases wouldn’t just be wrong, it would be [a] tragedy.”For California lawyer Brent Wisner, who helped lead the early Roundup litigation against Bayer, the efforts by lawmakers to protect the company against future litigation is un-American and potentially unconstitutional.“I don’t care what party you are in, if you get poisoned by a pesticide manufacturer you want to be able to sue. You need to be able to sue,” he said. “Bayer is paying millions of dollars to get these laws passed because it’s cheaper than it is to pay people they’ve given cancer to.”This story is co-published with the New Lede, a journalism project of the Environmental Working Group More
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Trump’s war on Tylenol is also very much a war on women | Arwa Mahdawi
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 13:00
Trust-fund-Trump wants women to “tough it out”Donald Trump is a man with no medical training. However, that’s never stopped the very stable genius from inflicting his unhinged health views on the rest of us, has it? Back in 2020, for example, Trump memorably mused that injecting disinfectant could help fight the coronavirus – which forced the maker of Dettol and Lysol to put out an urgent statement explaining that this was a very bad idea.Now the president, who once vowed to be a protector of women “whether they like it or not”, has turned his attention to prenatal care. “Taking Tylenol is, uhhhh, not good,” Trump said on Monday, with his trademark eloquence. He was flanked by health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr, the guy who told Congress this year that “people shouldn’t take medical advice from me”.Trump went on to link autism to prenatal exposure to acetaminophen, which is the active ingredient in Tylenol. If you’re feeling poorly while pregnant you should “fight like hell” not to take Tylenol to relieve your pain, the president instructed. Which basically means suffering instead: ibuprofen, for instance, is generally not recommended after week 20 of pregnancy.“If you can’t tough it out, if you can’t do it, that’s what you’d have to do,” Trump continued. “You’ll take a Tylenol, but it’ll be very sparingly. Can be something that’s very dangerous to the woman’s health, in other words, a fever that’s very, very dangerous, and ideally, a doctor’s decision, because I think you shouldn’t take it and you shouldn’t take it during the entire pregnancy.”Like everything Trump says, this incoherent quote makes zero sense. But the bottom line here is that the Trump administration is advancing wildly irresponsible guidance. There is no evidence for a causative link between acetaminophen and autism and many experts were aghast at Trump’s statements. Indeed, even the moral vacuum that is JD Vance balked at repeating Trump’s advice, instead urging women to lean on their doctors. And while Trump claimed that there is “no downside” in avoiding Tylenol, an untreated fever during pregnancy could cause problems for the baby.Trump’s demand that pregnant women “tough it out” is also deeply misogynistic and a reminder of how women’s pain is often misunderstood or ignored. Numerous studies show that the medical establishment takes men’s pain more seriously. A 2022 study from the Journal of the American Heart Association, for example, found that women who visited emergency departments with chest pain waited 29% longer than men to be evaluated.This sudden Tylenol scare is also yet another example of mom-shaming. “ We really have a long history of blaming mothers in this country, and we’re seeing that reinforced through the narratives around autism’s causes right now,” Martine Lappé, a sociology professor, told NPR.Women are shamed for not getting pregnant or waiting “too long” to get pregnant. They’re shamed (and, increasingly, criminalized) for losing a pregnancy. They’re shamed for everything from the size of their baby bump to what they eat while they’re pregnant. They’re called out for exercising while expecting – or not exercising enough. And if they give birth to a baby that isn’t able-bodied or neurotypical, women are often told it’s probably because of something they did. It’s their fault.While pregnant women are often treated like public property, expectant fathers are not treated with the same scrutiny. About 15% of couples in the US have trouble conceiving, and, by one count, over 50% of the time a male infertility issue contributes. Yet women are traditionally blamed. Indeed back in the 1940s researchers even posited that women’s unconscious hatred of their husbands was what stopped them from conceiving. We’ve moved on from that a bit, but infertility is still widely thought of as a woman’s problem.Studies have also found a link between advanced paternal age and autism. But does society constantly shame men for having kids later in life? Of course not. When a 59-year-old Trump fathered Barron, he crowed to the press about his virility. “I continue to stay young, right? I produce children, I stay young,” said Trump at the time.No doubt there are numerous things motivating this sudden Trump administration obsession with Tylenol, including a need to distract people from those pesky Epstein files. However, a concern for women’s health is absolutely not at the heart of it. Rather, this is yet another way to control women; another way to reduce us to walking wombs rather than multidimensional human beings. This war on Tylenol is also very much a war on women. Now, if only there was a pill we could take to help deal with this Maga-induced malaise. As it is, we are all just going to have to tough it out.Elon Musk’s father accused of sexually abusing his children and stepchildrenConsidering it is common knowledge that Errol Musk fathered at least one child with his former stepdaughter, who was only four years old when he married her mother, these new accusations, reported by the New York Times, are not a huge surprise. Errol, meanwhile, has dismissed the allegations as “nonsense” and “rubbish.”75-year-old weightlifter heading to world championshipsKate Evert got into weightlifting when she was 69 after her kids nagged her to go to the gym. Now she’s getting ready to travel from Missouri to Cape Town for the World Masters Powerlifting Championships. There are some excellent videos of her deadlifting in this Guardian piece.Slovakia rolls back LGBTQ+ rightsOn Friday the Slovak parliament voted on steps that will lead to the recognition of only two genders, restrict sexuality education, and limit adoption to only married heterosexual couples.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDrug traffickers livestream torture and killing of Argentinian women and girlTwo young women and a 15-year-old girl were lured to a house by suspected drug traffickers and then murdered on a livestream that went out to a closed Instagram group.Maga dentist says she gives different care to DemocratsA Santa Clarita dentist joked two years ago that she cuts back on pain relief for patients who aren’t Trump supporters. Now the video has gone viral and the dentist is reminding us it was just a gag. Hilarious!What it’s like to be married off at 13“I was about 13 when my family decided to marry me off to a man of 29,” an anonymous Iraqi woman writes in the Guardian. “Any attempt to refuse this groom in front of him or his family, I was told, would end in my death… My experience was not an isolated incident, but an early glimpse of what Iraq’s new law legalising marriage from the age of nine may mean.”Israeli minister says she’s optimistic about ’voluntary migration from the West Bank’Science and Technology Minister Gila Gamliel of the ruling Likud party told Israel’s Channel 12 that Gaza is being made unlivable. “There must be voluntary migration in order for us to fulfill the war aim of ensuring that Gaza does not pose a threat to Israel in the future,” she said, according to the Times of Israel. “I am even optimistic that [there will be voluntary migration from] Judea and Samaria and not just from the Gaza Strip,” Gamliel added, referencing Israel’s name for the occupied West Bank. Israeli government officials have repeatedly made clear that ethnic cleansing is the plan. Mainstream western media outlets have not covered Gamliel’s remarks.The week in pawtriarchyWhat do you call a bear in winter? A brrrrr! OK, OK, I apologize profusely for that and offer this link to the Fat Bear Week tournament to make it up to you. The fur-midable challenge, run by a national park in Alaska, is meant to find the bear that “exemplifies fatness and success” best, as the animals ready themselves for hibernation. It’s a little bit of cuteness amid an unbearable news week.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist More
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Trump’s attack on George Soros is the next step in the autocrat’s handbook | Kenneth Roth
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 11:00
As a former federal prosecutor, I know that prosecutors should be guided by the facts. But in his determination to hound George Soros, Donald Trump wants prosecutors to become agents of his personal vendetta, facts be damned. That is the conclusion to be drawn from the instructions issued by one of Trump’s senior justice department officials to a group of US attorney’s offices across the country, telling them to investigate Soros’s foundation.This is the latest step in Trump’s implementation of the autocrat’s handbook, with the aim of chipping away at the checks and balances on presidential authority. Having already attacked judges, lawyers, media companies and universities, Trump now sets his sights on civil society. Soros, a longtime and extraordinarily generous funder of progressive causes around the world including in the United States, is Target Number 1. Trump shares this fixation with the likes of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, Europe’s most prominent autocrat, who for years has used Soros as a scapegoat for widespread and growing dislike of his corrupt, self-serving rule.As the name of Soros’s Open Society Foundations (OSF) suggests, he promotes the free and public exchange of ideas. Soros made his billions by recognizing that markets are fallible. He gave away billions based on the insight that human governance is imperfect, too, and that the best way to compensate is with independent voices engaged in free debate. Having survived as a Jewish boy in Hungary under Nazi rule, Soros understands that we are safer when people can contest government dogma.Soros has funded not only human rights activists who defend open societies but also intellectuals and journalists who have pushed the limits of public debate, as well as organizations devoted to redressing a range of injustices. My former organization, Human Rights Watch, was and remains a major beneficiary.Despite his brilliance, Soros is too modest to believe he has the ultimate answers to society’s most vexing problems. He is always self-critical, deeply aware of his inability to see the full truth, skeptical of any moment’s conventional wisdom.At age 95, he has stepped back from an active role in his foundation, which is now chaired by his son Alex. But his vision still guides the foundation and is antithetical to Trump’s delusional belief that he alone is the guardian of all wisdom while critics are to be demonized and persecuted. Soros has the self-confidence to eschew the kinds of sycophantic lackeys whom Trump prefers.The debate that Soros has long promoted is peaceful. That is the essence of the open society that he champions. OSF recently reiterated that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism. Our activities are peaceful and lawful, and our grantees are expected to abide by human rights principles and comply with the law.”But that has not stopped Trump from insinuating without evidence that Soros and OSF are somehow supporters of people who engage in political violence. I have known Soros for more than three decades and have never seen a hint of that. It is the opposite of who he is. But stubborn reality has never impeded Trump and his acolytes in their universe of “alternative facts”.Straining to justify the vendetta, Trump’s justice department points to a report issued by a group that calls itself the Capital Research Center. It is filled with tendentious, McCarthyite allusions about OSF grantees having alleged sympathy for Hamas or tolerance of “direct action”, a supposed reference to violence.One of the prominent examples it cites is OSF’s funding of the highly respected Palestinian human rights group Al-Haq, one of six Palestinian organizations that the Israeli government in 2021 designated as supposed terrorists. But the Israeli government bandies about accusations of terrorism the same way it tries to silence critics with false allegations of antisemitism. I have worked with Al-Haq throughout my career and have always known it to be a fact-based, principled, and peaceful organization that fairly and objectively investigates and reports on Israeli abuses in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.Another OSF grantee targeted is the human rights group Dawn, which was founded by Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi journalist who was murdered by the Saudi government. One of its stated offenses is that while it condemned Hamas’s 7 October 2023 attack, it focused on the civilian, not the military, victims.That such “evidence” might tempt Trump to order criminal charges against Soros under his newly announced effort to counter “domestic terrorism and organized political violence” means that almost anyone could be targeted.In persecuting Soros, Trump has taken on a tough target. Like Harvard, which successfully sued rather than capitulate, Soros has the means to fight back. Moreover, unlike some law firms that cut deals with Trump to escape his wrath, 100 progressive foundations have announced that they will mount a common defense if any of them faces Trump’s vengeance. That mutual support is the right response to Trump’s divide-and-conquer strategy.I would expect that the courts will promptly dismiss any action that Trump takes against Soros. Despite Trump’s efforts to bully them, federal judges have maintained their independence, and many continue to apply the law rather than Trump’s dictates. A fact-free prosecution of a well-known critic is a recipe for judicial rejection.But that doesn’t relieve Soros and his foundation from the burden of defending themselves from fabricated charges, which can be substantial. Trump’s abuse of his power to persecute an independent voice – his posturing to his base in utter contempt of the first amendment – should be widely and firmly denounced. Unless the pushback is intense enough, Soros may be Trump’s first civil society target but not the last.
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch (1993-2022), is a visiting professor at Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. His book Righting Wrongs: Three Decades on the Front Lines Battling Abusive Governments is published by Knopf and Allen Lane More
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‘Free speech for me, not for thee’: how Trump’s censorship blitz is splitting the right
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 10:00
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It has taken barely two weeks for Donald Trump to turn the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk to his political advantage, unleashing an unprecedented peacetime assault on free speech and a free press on the back of the assassination.Since Kirk’s death, the president and his top team have:
forced a private media company to suspend late-night TV star Jimmy Kimmel for inaccurate comments he made about Kirk’s suspected shooter;
threatened other TV networks with losing their licences should they say things Trump doesn’t like;
vowed to prosecute “hate speech” that is fully protected under the first amendment;
declared antifa a terrorist organisation in an indiscriminate attack on political ideology;
and told journalists covering the Pentagon that they will have their access revoked unless they agree to restrictions on their reporting.
That’s a far cry from the promise Trump made on the first day of his new presidency.On 20 January, hours after he had been sworn in as 47th president, Trump sat at his desk in the Oval Office and applied his distinctive signature to executive order 14149 – Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.The order pronounced that government censorship of speech was “intolerable in a free society”. It promised that under Trump’s watch, no federal official would engage in any conduct that would “unconstitutionally abridge the free speech of any American citizen”.View image in fullscreenIt was a bold pledge to return America to the values of free speech and expression enshrined in the first amendment of the US constitution. But for some observers following events that day, the executive order was to be taken with a large pinch of salt.“I knew at the moment that the ink was not even dry, that executive order 14149 was a load of BS,” said Matt Welch, editor-at-large of the libertarian magazine Reason. “I knew it would not last.”Despite the administration’s rush to censorship as a result of Kirk’s killing, Trump has so far enjoyed almost complete support from the Republican party and his wider “Make America great again” (Maga) movement. Relatively few voices from the right of American politics have cried foul.But those voices are pointed, and in the longer term potentially critically important. Many of them subscribe to libertarianism, with its emphasis on individual rights, civil liberties and limited government. Or as Reason puts it, devotion to “free minds and free markets”.Other free speech critics have raised their voices from the wider conservative movement, while a few brave souls have even spoken out against Trump from within the Republican party. Collectively, they articulate a conservative and libertarian critique of Trump’s second presidency that, given that it comes nominally from his own side, may carry some weight with the president as he proceeds to pulverise constitutional norms.Their presence – lonely though at times it may seem – underlines that Trump and his Maga army have not yet secured an absolute monopoly of thought on the right. As guardians of free speech trying to hold back an increasingly authoritarian tide, they can also offer tentative clues as to how American conservatism might one day claw its way back from Maga’s iron grip.But for now they remain engaged in a long, uphill battle. “We are locked in a type of memetic combat,” Welch said. “We’re standing on the sidelines trying to get their attention, telling them that each new development is making it worse, and they are not listening at all.”Rightwing thinktanks have been central to Trump’s second presidency. The Heritage Foundation presented him with the blueprint for his incendiary return to office: the 920-page Project 2025.America First Legal, founded by the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, has provided legal ballast for many of Trump’s key ambitions. They include tearing down diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs and initiating mass deportations.But as Trump has begun aggrandising his own power and wielding it against his opponents, a separate heavyweight thinktank, the libertarian Cato Institute, has emerged as a thorn in the president’s side.Initially, Cato’s belief in small government and deregulation led it to show enthusiastic support for the Maga agenda.Within 48 hours of Trump’s second inauguration, the thinktank had flagged up 22 of his predecessor Joe Biden’s executive orders including several countering the climate crisis and enhancing healthcare, all of which Trump dutifully revoked. It also offered its own blueprint, in this case a manual for Elon Musk and his demolition crew, the “department of government efficiency”, that was so well received that Rolling Stone dubbed Cato “Doge’s unofficial think tank”.More recently, however, Trump’s egregiously unconstitutional assault on the first amendment has goaded Cato into speaking out as a rare but influential adversary on the right. Thomas Berry, Cato’s director of constitutional studies, told the Guardian that several of Trump’s recent actions had offended one of the institute’s most fundamental values.“When government officials use the power of the state either to suppress speech or tilt the free marketplace of ideas, that’s incredibly dangerous in the long term. It places a core restriction on individual liberty – the right to say what you want and say what you believe,” he said.Cato began objecting to Trump’s authoritarian tendencies well before Kirk’s death. In June the thinktank joined a coalition of groups in filing an amicus brief supporting Harvard in its lawsuit against the Trump administration after billions of federal dollars were withheld from the university ostensibly as punishment for its failure to combat antisemitism.Cato also expressed concern about Mahmoud Khalil and Rümeysa Öztürk, students from Columbia and Tufts universities respectively, whom the administration tried to deport after their public criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza. Berry called the administration’s yanking of Harvard funding and the student immigration actions “core infringements on academic freedom and speech”.He also denounced Trump’s executive order last month vowing to prosecute anyone burning the American flag. As he pointed out, “there is ironclad legal precedent that flag burning is protected speech.”View image in fullscreenSince Kirk’s killing, Berry has watched the unfolding of Trump’s “free speech for me, but not for thee” response with mounting alarm. Disney’s temporary cancellation of Kimmel’s late-night show for misrepresenting the Kirk suspect as a Maga supporter after threats of government penalties from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), was in Berry’s estimation a clear example of “government power being used to suppress speech that the administration doesn’t like”.Then there was the intervention of Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, who days after Kirk’s death vowed to prosecute hate speech. Like flag burning, hate speech is fully protected under the first amendment, as the country’s top law enforcement official ideally should have known.Ironically, Kirk himself was clear on this point, saying last year: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the first amendment.”Berry also regards as a free speech violation Trump’s threats to go against leftwing groups he dislikes. On Monday the president designated antifa a “domestic terrorist organization”, a move that potentially breaches the first amendment by criminalising political ideology.All of these quick-fire steps after Kirk’s assassination towards controlling public discourse leaves Berry profoundly apprehensive. “I’m very worried about what the executive branch is trying to do,” he said.In particular, the Cato director is concerned about what he calls the “capitulation factor”. He fears that private companies such as Disney, ABC’s owner that suspended Kimmel for six days before the comic was allowed back on air on Tuesday, will settle with Trump rather than stand up for constitutional rights.“Long term, we’ll get through this,” Berry said. “But in the short term a lot of speech is going to be chilled without ever getting into court, and that’s very, very bad.”View image in fullscreenOpposition to the assault on free speech goes beyond the libertarian right. Other prominent public figures from conservative and libertarian circles have spoken out, indicating fissures that, should they grow, could challenge Trump’s Maga hegemony.Bari Weiss, a rising star on the anti-woke right who is being reportedly groomed for a top job at CBS, has castigated the president in her online outlet, the Free Press. In an editorial, the site decried Trump’s many threats against media organisations as a “case where the medicine is worse than the disease”.In Congress, senator Ted Cruz, normally a reliable Trump acolyte, warned the president to avoid habitually bullying media companies. If he did, it would “end up bad for conservatives”.Thomas Massie, a Republican congressman from Kentucky who has led the charge to have the Epstein files released, compared Bondi’s threat to prosecute hate speech to George Orwell’s dystopian “thought crimes”.Even the Maga cheerleader Tucker Carlson cleared an episode of his online show to rail against the risk of hate speech laws being introduced in America. Were that to happen, Carlson said, then civil disobedience would be called for.“Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human.”So how did it come to this? How did Trump go from executive order 14149 to threatening an ABC reporter to his face last week that he might face prosecution “because you treat me so unfairly”?How did JD Vance move from pledging in February that under Trump’s leadership “we may disagree with your views but we will fight to defend your right to offer it in the public square”, to calling for a mass doxing of anyone who had celebrated Kirk’s murder?How did the FCC chair Brendan Carr veer from having denounced in 2023 government censorship as the “authoritarian’s dream”, to using his federal power to force Kimmel’s suspension with the mob-like menace: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way?”Eugene Volokh, a libertarian conservative who is a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, has a word for the Trump team’s razor sharp U-turn on free speech. He calls it “censorship envy”.“It’s human nature to want to restrict speech that you disapprove of, to retaliate,” he said. “People are motivated by censorship envy – the idea that the other side got to suppress speech they disliked, so I should jump on the bandwagon and get some of that action too.”Volokh added that in his opinion Trump’s get-you-back censorship was a mistake. “It’s bad for the country. It’s bad for the conservative movement.”View image in fullscreenThat admonition was echoed by Sabrina Schaeffer, a member of the executive team of the R Street Institute, which preaches classical liberalism, individual liberty and free markets. She said that she has been scratching her head over the past few days as so many Republicans applauded the clampdown on free speech.“I know they’re tired of ‘woke’ politics. But this should be a cautionary tale, because one day Democrats will hold the levers of power again and then they will be even more empowered to shut down dissenting views.”Welch, who regards his strain of libertarianism as neither of the right nor left, sees the current moment against the long arch of history. Under Ronald Reagan, the Republican party was a broad church that combined conservatism with libertarian activism, with free speech as one of its central tenets.What Trump has unleashed, by contrast, “is going against Reagan and 40 years of American politics. People are so addicted to power right now that they are throwing principles out the window.”It was Republicans, Welch pointed out, that in the 1970s and 80s led the charge on free speech grounds against the FCC’s so-called fairness doctrine that required TV networks to carry opposing viewpoints on controversial public issues. That is a world away from the Republican chair of the FCC threatening a broadcast company over one comment from a comedian.“I care about the federal government telling a private broadcaster how they are supposed to conduct their business,” Welch said. “That’s crazy.”Cato’s Berry is clearly disturbed by the turn of events, but he has not despaired. For him, the way out of this quagmire lies with the American judiciary and the first amendment itself, which he regards as the strongest safeguard of free speech in the world.“I remain confident that the courts will uphold the principles that the government cannot be biased, that it cannot chill speech through selective enforcement, that there is no law against hate speech.”As for Welch, he draws comfort in the storm from a more amorphous source. He looks to the American spirit, and a characteristic within it that he believes has been integral since even before the country’s founding.That is, the ability of Americans to trash each other.“We criticise, always have done,” he said. “We have just always been kind of assholes, cheeky.”Welch sees the portrayal of Trump in the latest season of the animated sitcom South Park as a seamless continuation of this trait. The president is depicted as a censorship-addicted dictator sleeping with the devil.That gives Welch hope.“I feel like the South Park in all of us will eventually win,” he said. “It’s the natural place for us to be, and by the time Trump finally goes, he’ll find himself on the losing end.”body{–primary-text-color: #121212;–secondary-text-color: #707070;–tertiary-text-color: #707070;–primary-bg-color: #ffffff;–secondary-bg-color: #f3f3f3;–tertiary-bg-color: #f6f6f6;–primary-line-color: #333333;–secondary-line-color: #dcdcdc;–border-divider-color: #dcdcdc;–axis-color: #bababa;–primary-button-color: #121212;–primary-button-text-color: #ffffff;–primary-button-highlight-color: #333333;–highlight-color: #ffe500;–highlighted-text-color: #121212;–info-color: #00b2ff;–news-grey-01: #121212;–news-grey-02: #707070;–news-grey-03: #a1a1a1;–news-grey-04: #bababa;–news-grey-05: #dcdcdc;–news-grey-06: #f3f3f3;–news-core-01: #005689;–news-core-02: #0094da;–news-core-03: #c70000;–news-core-04: 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Democrats race to embrace swearing and angry comebacks – but will it work?
by Evelyn Reynolds 27 September 2025, 10:00
Democrats want your attention, and they’re done asking politely.Several months into Donald Trump’s second term, presidential aspirants, members of Congress and party officials are abandoning carefully calibrated messaging in favor of gut-level rhetoric that is angrier, rawer and unapologetically more profane.“Things are really fucked up right now,” Democratic congressman Robert Garcia said in a TikTok video with the influencer known as the Regina George liberal, who has built a following demanding Democrats get meaner.With party approval ratings at decade-lows and their base increasingly alarmed by what they fear is America’s authoritarian slide, Democrats are racing to revamp how they talk – and how they resist.Democrats’ wider embrace of swearing, trolling and scorched-earth comebacks is part of a broader mission to sound more like “normal people” and less like a party of poll-tested talking points and white papers. From campaign rallies to TikTok vent seshes, the characteristically buttoned-up Democrats are taking more risks – and punching back harder at Trump and his administration.“This is not the Democratic party of your grandfather,” Ken Martin, chair of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), declared earlier this year. “This is a new Democratic party. We’re bringing a knife to a knife fight.”There is widespread agreement among soul-searching Democrats that they have an authenticity problem.View image in fullscreen“We are tired of being seen as weak and out of touch, and are really trying to make the point that it’s some bullshit that the Republican party and all the big corporations that support them continue to try to frame us as [such],” said Jane Kleeb, chair of the Nebraska Democratic party and head of the DNC’s association of state Democratic parties.The party has hemorrhaged rural and working-class voters for years. But in 2024, Democrats also saw worrying drops in support among Black and Latino voters as well as young people – becoming a party increasingly confined to the coasts, major metros and college towns.After losing to Trump, again, fundraising has slumped and Democrats now lag far behind Republicans in voter registration. Since November, several leading Democrats, including California governor Gavin Newsom, have described the party’s brand as “toxic”.Democrats have many theories as to how it got so bad – but they keep circling back to the most basic political skill: communication.Critics say risk-averse party elders – valued more for their fundraising prowess than their digital fluency – failed to adapt to the tectonic shifts in media consumption. Democrats anodyne messaging, they argue, might have made the evening news, but it was too easily drowned out by the right’s online surround sound, turbocharged to amplify Trump and his Magaworld allies.“A message that nobody hears cannot persuade them,” Anat Shenker-Osorio, veteran Democratic strategist and communications researcher who has convened hundreds of focus groups with American voters. “If you keep producing blandly unobjectionable 100-word statements … then it truly does not matter what you are saying because literally no one’s gonna hear it.”The bigger challenge, Shenker-Osorio notes, is that Democrats aren’t just competing for eyeballs with Republicans — they’re up against an algorithm that prizes outrage and emotion, whether it’s Maga memes or Taylor and Travis engagement headlines.Months into Trump’s second term, buoyed by a string of off-cycle election wins and a revved up base, Democrats are experimenting more. More members of Congress are on TikTok and heeding advice to adopt platforms like Twitch and Snapchat. They’ve jumped on viral trends and livestreamed hot takes stepping off the chamber floor. They’re also venturing into less friendly terrain, yakking it up on “manosphere” podcasts or launching their own.Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary and a possible 2028 presidential contender, was an early evangelist of the go-everywhere style. He appeared on Fox News when many Democrats refused to sit down with Trump’s favorite network hosts. In April, he sat for a nearly three-hour interview on the podcast Flagrant, covering everything from White Lotus to “Trump Tariffs, Taxing Billionaires, and Republican Gays”.View image in fullscreenThe push for a more free-wheeling style hasn’t slowed the circulation of polling memos and strategy briefs coaching Democrats on how to be more free-wheeling. There has been reams of guidance on what to say (Trump’s takeover of DC is a “distraction” from his market-rattling tariffs and Medicaid cuts, for example) and also what not to say (words like birthing person, BIPOC).Republicans have sneered at Democrats’ newfound brashness, deriding the effort as “desperate” and “Maga cosplay”. Comparatively, the White House’s social media strategy seems designed to shock. In a July post on X, its official account wrote: “Nowhere in the Constitution does it say we can’t post banger memes.”Democrats accept that some attempts will be cringe. In February, an unfortunate turn-of-phrase at a rally alongside federal workers became a cautionary tale.“I don’t swear in public very well,” first-term congresswoman Maxine Dexter of Oregon warned before throwing caution to the wind and declaring: “We have to fuck Trump!”The crowd cheered. “You said it!” an audience member shouted encouragingly. But the remark was dragged online, with Politico observing that it “landed less like a diss and more like a proposition”.View image in fullscreenBut the stakes have grown far more serious.In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination this month, Trump’s White House has led a clampdown on political speech, threatening to punish left-leaning figures and groups it accuses of spreading hateful rhetoric.At a rally in North Carolina this week, vice president JD Vance, who once feared Trump could be “America’s Hitler,” urged Americans to abandon such rhetoric: “If you want stop political violence, stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi.”Elected Democrats were near-universal in their condemnation of political violence, which has targeted officials in both parties. But that hasn’t stopped Trump and other prominent Republicans from casting blame on the left. “I hate my opponent,” Trump said, speaking at Kirk’s memorial.In a widely circulated exchange, a reporter asked progressive Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren for her response to calls on Democrats to “lower the temperature”.“Oh, please,” Warren replied. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States?”For years, Democrats took Michelle Obama’s “go high” mantra as gospel.In 2018, when Barack Obama’s former attorney general Eric Holder reinterpreted the refrain, suggesting that “when they go low, we kick them,” he was rebuked by Michelle Obama herself and also by Trump – despite his own long record of disparaging and even threatening language. Earlier that year, Trump asked lawmakers why the US should accept immigrants from “shithole countries” in Africa rather than from places like Norway.Seven years later, Trump is still heaving expletives and insults from the bully pulpit. But this time, Democrats are far less reticent to respond.“If we’re serious that Trump is a threat to the fundamental values of our country and a threat to democracy, then we have to use these tactics and be real fighters,” Kleeb said.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet, as Democrats fight to break through Trump’s unfiltered media dominance, there is deep frustration among their base that the party’s leadership is not doing enough to stop him – no matter how tough they talk. In Washington, out-of-power Democrats are under pressure to use the little leverage they have in a looming government shutdown showdown with Republicans.Meanwhile, some of the fiercest resistance is coming from the states. In August, Texas Democrats fled the state to deny Republicans a quorum needed to vote on a brazen, Trump-sought plan to redraw its political maps in the middle of the decade. Though Republicans ultimately approved a new map carved up in their favor, the Democrats’ quorum-breaking gambit helped trigger a response from governors like Newsom in California, whose Trump 2.0-era mantra now is: “fight fire with fire.”In recent months, Newsom has matched his combative posture with a pugnacious social media persona, a mimicry of Trump’s all-caps bombast. The governor’s team now regularly trolls the president, posting with a cadence that mirrors the right-wing outrage machine they mock, blasting out lengthy rants, AI-generated taunts, even the occasional Spanish-language vulgarity.“I’m sick of being weak,” Newsom said on a podcast in August, adding: “We’re going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.”View image in fullscreenIn a full-circle moment, Holder, a longtime champion of clean maps, threw his support behind California’sretaliatory gerrymander.Lorena Gonzalez, the salty-tongued leader of the influential California Labor Federation, said the appetite for a no-holds-barred approach is strong.“People are frustrated. We’re frustrated,” she said. “So we’re fighting back – and the language, I think, mirrors the frustration and the urgency.”At a rally launching California’s redistricting campaign, Gonzalez rendered a blunt verdict on Trump’s presidency: “We tell our members who believed him, it’s okay. He fucking lied.” The crowd roared, and she repeated the bit. Handing the mic to the next speaker, Gonzalez grinned: “I’ve exceeded my number of fucks today.”More and more Democrats argue that the real divide in their party isn’t between the ideological left and center, but between the fighters and the so-called “folders”. And the so-called fighters tend to be the angriest.Among the most prolific Democratic swearers were Representatives Eric Swalwell of California, Maxwell Frost of Florida and Jasmine Crockett or Texas, all younger progressives, according to a Washington Post analysis of social media posts, podcasts and other public statements by politicians. Among party officials, Kleeb topped the list. Overall, it found that Democrats cursed far more frequently than Republicans in the months following Trump’s return to the White House.“I do cuss but I’m just passionate,” Crockett said in an interview last month. “I don’t imagine myself saying, ‘Trump is trying to be a dictator,’ and then sitting quietly. No. If I say it, I mean it.”A former trial attorney, Crockett said language can help build trust. “I never had the benefit of putting on a facade,” she said. “You’ve got to build a rapport quickly, and the best way to do that is to be authentically who you are.”View image in fullscreenResearch suggests that swearing can make a speaker seem more honest and sincere –though voters are quick to detect a false note.“Swearing as a tactic is dumb,” said Lis Smith, a veteran Democratic strategist known for her bluntness. Her advice: “Just be normal. Don’t use weird lefty academic jargon. Don’t dismiss people’s real concerns about things like crime by citing stats and data. And don’t think that the key to coming across as authentic is dropping four letter words that you don’t use normally.”As younger Democrats rise through the ranks, an “extremely online” vernacular has crept into the party’s messaging – snarky, irreverent and tailor-made to go viral.Earlier this year, Garcia brought a poster of Elon Musk to a Congressional hearing in a stunt he called a “dick pic”. In June, House Democrats elected Garcia to serve as ranking member on the influential House oversight committee – the first time in 100 years a second-term congressman was elevated to the role.The DNC has also sharpened its trolling game, with edgy posts, including one suggesting the Secretary of Defense was “tweeting while drunk” and another taunting White House aide Stephen Miller with a crude “cuck-chair” meme. They’ve also seized on right-wing anger over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case, breathlessly boosting calls for Republicans to “release the files”.View image in fullscreenAt the party’s summer meeting, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, the former vice-presidential nominee with a “Midwest nice” reputation, took a juvenile jab at Trump’s chronic venous insufficiency, mocking his “fat ankles”.“Petty as hell,” Walz admitted, as the room erupted in cheers.Yet for those who fear authoritarian drift, trolls and clap backs can seem woefully insufficient in the face of Trump’s mass deportation campaign or his deployment of federal troops to American cities.Ridicule, Shenker-Osorio argues, can be a powerful tactic, but only as part of a broader resistance. “Taking the piss out of the strongman is a really critical part of fighting authoritarianism,” she said.Still, she cautioned: “Rhetoric without action is nothing. If anything, it just makes voters more frustrated.”David Smith contributed to this story from Washington More

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