Emergency’ naked bike ride plans underway after troops deployed to Portland

After President Donald Trump announced plans to deploy the Oregon National Guard to Portland, organizers are planning an “emergency” naked bike ride in protest.

The organization, an offshoot of the World Naked Bike Ride group, made the announcement in an Instagram post on Wednesday, writing, “Emergency World Naked Bike Ride coming up in response to the militarization of our city. Plans are being worked on.”

While this “emergency” bike ride is in response to the National Guard deployment, generally, the World Naked Bike Ride aims to promote body positivity and encourage decreased reliance on fossil fuels. In Portland, the event splintered after the original organizers decided not to host one in 2024. A smaller group hosted their own version instead, resulting in two separate events last year. The upcoming event is hosted by an offshoot group of World Naked Bike Ride.

“As a longstanding protest, we believe strongly in the power of people, and love that Portlanders use bikes (and sometimes their bodies) to stand up for justice and community,” the official Portland World Naked Bike Ride said in a statement on Thursday.‘Oregon has no choice’: New SNAP requirements will impact over 313K residentsThis comes after President Donald Trump announced on TruthSocial on Sunday that he planned to bring troops to Portland with the intent to use “full force” and claims “Antifa and the radical left anarchists” have been attacking federal officers outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility.

Following Trump’s TruthSocial post, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth issued a memorandum calling 200 members of the state’s National Guard into federal service.

During a press conference Monday, Oregon Governor Tina Kotek shared that the Portland Police Bureau is managing the protests outside of Portland’s ICE facility while complying with sanctuary city laws, which state that officers will not aid federal immigration enforcement efforts. In text messages to the president, the governor called the deployment “unlawful” and “unwarranted.”General to National Guard on Portland mission: ‘We don’t get to pick and choose’

The Oregon Military Department told KOIN 6 News that the city could see boots on the ground as early as Thursday; however, military officials later said that timeline could be delayed.

In response to the deployment, Oregon Attorney General Dan Rayfield filed a temporary restraining order on Monday, challenging the president’s call for federal troops in Portland, saying the decision is “unlawful” and poses a “substantial risk” to its residents.

Michaela Bourgeois

Fascist: Heal Thyself

Communist California Governor Gavin Newsom — who, like every Democrat in America, is running for President — has called President Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller a “fascist.”

Ouch! That hurts, coming from such a pillar of integrity like Gavin Newsom, doesn’t it?

So interesting to be called a “fascist” by people who support gun confiscation and social media censorship; to be called a “racist” by people who support Black Supremacy terrorism sponsored by Black Lives Matter; to be called “domestic terrorists” by people who applaud the assassination of Charlie Kirk and fund snowflake teen thugs hilariously labeled “Antifa.” Never in human history, even with all the authoritarianism that has plagued us, have you ever witnessed the hubris, duplicity and craven dishonesty of today’s ruthless, psychopathic, totalitarian Left.

When their demise finally arrives, I hope to be around to witness it, because it will be spectacular.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Exposes the Depth of America’s Moral Crisis.  The body politic is sick, and America’s survival is at stake.

Only a week before Charlie’s gruesomely broadcasted killing, a young Ukrainian immigrant, Iryna Zarutska, was stabbed to death by a repeat violent offender on public transportation in North Carolina. She bled out, terrified and alone, in front of train passengers.

Underneath the surface of economic betterment and the herculean efforts of the Trump administration to root out the rot, it’s clear that the body politic has a metastasized cancer that threatens the life of the republic. Time is short.

Thousands of Americans rejoiced at Charlie’s death. This systemic psychopathy is horrendous to behold. One flippant girl said to her dad on camera, thinking her empathetic father was the problem, “What do I care that this bad person is dead?”

TV commentators also expressed sympathy for the killer of Iryna Zarutska, with CNN’s Van Jones saying, “[W]e don’t know how to deal with people who are hurting in the way this man was hurting.”

The following passage from the book of Isaiah comes to mind:

Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter! (Isaiah 5:20, New International Version)

The backdrop for this murderous rage isn’t malnutrition, hunger, or the deprivations of war. The people fomenting the violence are living, by nearly any historical measure, decadent lives. They are overfed, psychologically indulged, technologically sophisticated, and materially rich. Most have families who love them. And yet, simmering rage and grievous resentment infect their minds and their actions. The violence within is spilling over and they kill with callous disregard, while their compatriots cheer them on — uploading TikToks of themselves grinning with glee — so confident are they that they’re right, justified, and, worse, that everyone agrees with them.

The faces of the murderers are not sad or regretful. They’re not ashamed. They’re confident and defiant.

There will be more targeted killings of conservatives. The killers believe they’re killing “fascists” and feel entirely justified in doing so. 

Remember COVID? Remember how nearly half of Democrats were willing to take children away from their parents if the parents weren’t vaccinated? Remember how leftists imposed mandates — in workplaces ranging from the military and government to hospitals and private businesses — requiring employees to submit to an untested vaccine or be fired? Even so-called conservatives and libertarians made the argument that Americans did have a choice — it was their choice not to have a job. Those in power hated anyone who refused to comply, and, if someone died, they shrugged and took pleasure in it.

This anti-American, anti-Christian malady is not new. It is not isolated. It is not exclusive to young, disturbed trans kids.

We have a nation of rich, spoiled, aggrieved people. Teachers — from preschool instructors to college professors — along with the media and Democrat leadership have encouraged this wrath and inculcated young minds with communist propaganda disguised as DEI. Leftist organizations, including Open Society Foundations, Tides, Ford, and the Rockefeller Foundation, as well as funders like George Soros, Michael Bloomberg, and Reid Hoffman, have helped shape and mold these disaffected people. 

Antifa is now militarized, organized, and present in every state. Black Lives Matter destroyed cities, and now their founders live in luxury. SSRI-addled aging hippies, looking to recreate their halcyon youth, fuel this insanity — bowing to BLM, protesting government firings, and parading around in pink pussy hats. The whole of the Left — from the Democrat Party, which is increasingly overtly socialist (hello, Mamdani), to the militarized activist wing — is insane. Most have been diagnosed with mental disorders and are medicated. It’s not helping.

America is also now home to millions of unassimilated illegal and legal aliens. The Trump administration has been heroically expelling the criminal element, and illegal immigration has largely been halted. But what to do about the legal immigrants who, rather than become Americans, cling to their own ideologies and refuse to assimilate?

The Biden administration — the third term of Obama — did incalculable damage. The scope and breadth of it is overwhelming. Tens of thousands of children who entered the country illegally and unaccompanied did not show up for their court dates. Many were found as sex slaves and indentured servants “working off” their trip to America. 

Democrats were importing slaves. Read that sentence again.

How do you combat the minds that believe this is acceptable? This is a spiritual problem with heinous real-world implications.

The first thing a doctor must do when a patient is sick is prevent death. The Trump administration is going after root causes, but it must also dismantle and stop Antifa, as well as go after its associated organizations and funders, immediately. Just as there are thousands of criminal illegal immigrants and thousands of hardcore criminals in major cities, there are brainwashed Antifa militants who have instigated violence, committed violent acts themselves, and been let go by the Democrats in power. These psychopaths need to be rounded up, tried federally, and put in prison. And their funders need to be rounded up and tried under RICO laws.

We face domestic enemies who hate America and everything she stands for. Charlie Kirk embodied these values: Christian, married, a devoted father, a defender of free speech, and a promoter of American values. He was killed because he was those things.

America cannot survive if this metastasizing rot is not stopped and removed. Here’s the thing: The cancer has spread for so long, and so much of the body is affected, that the body will inevitably be harmed in the process. It cannot escape damage. Too much healthy tissue has already been lost to the disease. What will remain after this surgery will be scarred, misshapen, less mobile, less energetic, and exhausted. Already, many on the right fret about civil liberties. They’re right to worry. But what has been occurring is not freedom. American citizens have cowered before these woke, DEI, communist bullies, and now they see Catholic children, a refugee, and Charlie Kirk murdered. They see that words cannot combat this violence.

The alternative to dealing with this demon is death.

I don’t think the center Right grasps the implications of this. While conservative influencers fight over the legacy of what Charlie Kirk built and inveigh that they will continue his courageous work on college campuses, they risk ultimate failure because they are only addressing those who share the fundamental belief in free speech and the power of persuasive words. While the Right has succeeded in winning thousands of hearts and minds — as shown by the worldwide outpouring of grief and solidarity in the wake of Charlie’s death — many on the left reject this premise entirely. They believe that hurt feelings and what they perceive as “mean words” deserve violence and death. If you disagree with me, they reason, you hate me, and you deserve to die.

When Charlie Kirk is talking and the political opposition is shooting, civil authorities who are unwilling to deal with the terrorist cells producing these killers are no different from Redcoats standing in careful formation, flummoxed by motivated Americans using guerilla tactics they dismiss as “uncivilized.” Tut-tut, how dare you? 

The enemies of Western civilization are uncivilized, godless heathens. Accept this. Do not pretend that the demon-possessed can be reasoned with or persuaded by words.

Majorie Taylor-Greene has proposed a national divorce — she concludes that the two worldviews of the Left and the Right cannot coexist and so need to be separated. But how could this be done? Our country is utterly intermingled. We are one body, for better or worse. The heinous violence on the left will not be stopped with words alone.

A demonic spirit is at work. The corruption affects the minds and actions of these killers. When Jesus met the demon-possessed, he talked to them, but then he acted, casting the demons out and sending them into pigs at their own request. The demons promptly drove the pigs over the cliff to their deaths. They want their hosts to die. To them, death is more meaningful than life.

In journal entries posted on YouTube, the Minnesota church assassin expressed regret over his decision to transition, anger at his mom for not approving of his life choices, and, ultimately, resentment at the truth: His mom had been right. Rather than admit his mistake and change his life, he chose the path of Judas: betrayal and murder, and then suicide.

Charlie Kirk’s killer had his whole life ahead of him. All good things were within his reach. He is smart, good-looking, and utterly nihilistic. Killing Charlie Kirk gave his life meaning. Rotting in jail or death by firing squad is preferable to making a life.

The enemy determines the battlefield, and they are using bullets. They have been entreated to talk, and some respond to grace with murder. To be clear, I am not seeking vigilantes or street justice, but those will come if Republicans and the president who leads them do not take these dangerous Antifa elements seriously. Rather, it is time to fully grasp that the America that the America First voters seek will not come through persuasion alone, but through elected leadership and the power of the state to impose that vision and crush violence. The Left came close to achieving total domination, and Trump’s election does not mean they have given up. Now, instead of creating CHAZ units in Portland, some are carrying out target assassinations.

But it is risible that the American people, seeking relief, will likely get none from the people they elected because those leaders lack the internal fortitude.

Reflect on this passage from Jeremiah, chapter 6:

“From the least to the greatest, all are greedy for gain; prophets and priests alike, all practice deceit. They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace. Are they ashamed of their detestable conduct? No, they have no shame at all; they do not even know how to blush.” (Jeremiah 6:13–15, NIV)

What will happen if the sickness of progressive ideology is allowed to advance unchecked? We don’t have to wonder. Nearly every Protestant denomination has been hollowed out from within by cultural Marxists. The churches convulsed internally, and a small but dedicated minority took them over, filled them with heresy, and destroyed them in the name of gay marriage and women preachers.

Ultimately, America has a spiritual problem. It started as a Christian nation, giving glory to God and standing firm in her convictions, and a good half of the nation remains Christian today. Charlie glorified Christ in word and deed. He fought for Trump’s election, believing that Trump would use his divinely given power to steer the country back onto a healthy path.

Where Charlie was naive is that he believed persuading people toward liberal values would be enough — that this would mean conservatives in positions of authority would be willing to use the power of the government to stop the violence of the radical Left. There are limits to this approach. Jesus had to actively cast out the demons for the bodies to heal (Matthew 8:28). 

Our elected leadership must get down to the business of casting out. It is what the people voted for. This, for a time, is going to escalate social pain, but it is necessary to heal America. We must also acknowledge that America will not remain the same. It will be harmed in the process, but it will live.

Without this sort of reckoning, America is lost.

So while there is good news all around, it’s delusional to ignore the poison within. Cultural Marxists are destroying the vestiges of what made America great. And if the movement’s violent elements are not stopped by the government, in an official capacity, the country will eventually be in civil war because average Americans have far more courage of their convictions than their elected officials.

Before concluding, it’s also worth noting that the FBI did not catch Charlie Kirk’s killer. The FBI — who sat in Catholic churches and perhaps still does, who entrapped hapless rednecks to manufacture a kidnapping plot, and who sent their khaki-clad minions marching around to intimate being right-wing goofballs — could not find a killer sitting in his parents’ home. This is concerning. Is it incompetence? Is it malice? Or are the remaining agents still loyal to their Marxist masters rather than the American people?

Targeting Antifa, arresting lawbreakers, and destroying their funding mechanism: This is what MAGA voted for. Will President Donald Trump deliver? If he doesn’t, I fear that America will get a true tyrant, or that the American people will take matters into their own hands.In the meantime, the solution is to prepare one’s heart. To pray. To seek God’s face. To see clearly and not pretend. In times like these, when seeing is so difficult, that alone is an act of courage.

Melissa Mackenzie is Publisher of The American Spectator. Melissa commentates for the BBC and has appeared on Fox. Her work has been featured at The Guardian, PJ Media, and was a front page contributor to RedState.Melissa commutes from Houston, Texas to Alexandria, VA. She lives in Houston with her two sons, one daughter, and two diva rescue cats.You can follow Ms. Mackenzie on Twitter: @MelissaTweets.

January 6th was America’s Reichstag Fire

Mark C. Ross

Hitler was originally democratically elected — not by a majority, but rather by a plurality, as allowed by the Weimar Republic’s constitution.  It was a turning point for all of world history.

The Nazis, being ambitious tyrants, leapt at any possible opportunity to expand their grip on Germany.  So, on February 27, 1933 — just four weeks after Hitler was sworn in as chancellor — the fire that struck the German parliament building was at least partially blamed on Bolshevik agitators.  Sound familiar?

Germany’s then-president, Paul von Hindenburg, issued a decree suspending all civil liberties in order to facilitate the rounding up and disposal of communists.  And thus, Hitler became an absolute dictator.

Today’s American Democrats have not been quite so lucky.  Hitler’s Germany was rife with a profound sense of betrayal, since the German people had been continuously told by their government that they were winning the world war.  This was added to the subsequent misery that came with Weimar’s catastrophic inflation — which was ostensibly intended to screw the Allies out of their reparations, which were defined in German marks.  This is well described in Paul Johnson’s Modern Times, in the chapter aptly titled “Waiting for Hitler.”

The days after January 6 have seen anything other than a leftist surge in the USA.  How so?  Short answer: This is America, land of the free.  No two-bit public official can suspend our civil rights, to say nothing of the obvious political incompetence that has infected today’s Democrat party.  Also, we have not been as softened up as the German people had been in the early thirties.  However, the possibility of some staged event to push us into surrendering our personal sovereignty remains in the background.

Ninety-two years after the fact, suspicion still lingers as to the details of the cause of the Reichstag fire.  Did Hitler’s minions assist in making it such a big deal?  The same is already true for the January 6 event.  FBI director Kash Patel recently confirmed that about 300 federal agents were present at the scene on that day.  Their ostensible purpose was crowd control.  Really?

Without hesitation, the Democrats moved heaven and earth to showcase January 6 as a prime example of right-wing violent extremism.  Did that impact Trump’s re-election attempt?  Wink, wink.

It is entirely reasonable to expect continuing revision of the particular details of January 6.  The dozens of alleged participants, who’ve faced criminal charges as a result, will remain as focal points of this process.  As the future of the Democrats dims, they will act out of increasing desperation.

What’s next?  Far be it for me to have any specific idea, but it can be safe to assume that whatever is in the offing will be even more stupid than what has been put out in public thus far.

Do We Really Need “Non-Essential” Government Agencies?

Democrats fell into Trump’s trap. They are used to blaming shutdowns on Republicans. The media will always portray it that way. But what if a sizable and growing portion of the population simply doesn’t care what happens to the non-essential part of the government? Shut it down and leave it shut down. Fire them permanently. So what? It only matters to the parasites and profiteers living off the labor of others. President Trump speaks for that sizable and growing portion of the population, the ones fed up with the graft, the wealth redistribution, the two-tiered society: those who produce, those who take from the government.

Have fun with what you’ve started, you socialistic leftists.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

Chinese Dictator Xi Jinping Calls for ‘Strict Law Enforcement’ over Religion

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping told his Politburo on Monday that tougher law enforcement in religious affairs was needed to complete the project of “Sinicizing” all faiths, which means making them all subordinate to the authority of the Chinese Communist Party.

“Governing religious affairs in accordance with the law is the fundamental way to properly handle various contradictions and problems in the religious field,” Xi told a Politburo study group, as reported by Chinese state media.

Xi told the Politburo to “enhance relevant laws and policies, carry out in-depth legal publicity and education, and implement strict law enforcement” to achieve full Sinicization, which he said was “the only way” to achieve social harmony.

Xi directed his regime to make “efforts to guide religious figures and believers to develop an accurate understanding of country, history, ethnicity, culture and religion.”

“He said religions in China can only be passed down healthily by always having their roots in the Chinese culture, and required efforts to promote the integration of religions with fine traditional Chinese culture,” China’s state-run Xinhua news service reported.

The India-based Tibetan Review smelled another Chinese crackdown on religion brewing, noting that Xi placed a heavy emphasis on Sinicization during his unusual visits last month to Tibet and Xinjiang, home of the oppressed Uyghur Muslims. In both cases, Xi commemorated China’s forcible conquest of the regions and talked up efforts to subordinate their language, culture, and religion.

The Tibetan Review pointed out that Sinicization is as much a war against culture as against religious freedom, since the Chinese use the excuse of “correcting” religious practices to marginalize Tibetan and Uyghur language and cultural traditions. A heavy component of Sinicization involves forcing religious schools to use the Chinese language, and forbidding religious groups from accepting overseas support.

Asia News saw Xi’s remarks to the Politburo as further confirmation of how the dictator’s “political vision” depends on subduing the five officially recognized religions in China – Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Protestantism, and Catholicism – and teaching adherents to view Chinese Communist dogma as superior to any religious text.

Xi told the Politburo to strengthen the “Five Identities,” one of Chinese Communism’s myriad euphemisms for its tools of political and cultural control. The Five Identities essentially tell religious leaders they are required to imbue their teachings with the principles of loyalty to the government in Beijing, Chinese nationalism, Chinese culture, Chinese socialism, and the Chinese Communist Party.

“These identities clearly show that for Beijing, Sinicization is not simply a matter of translating the message of each faith into its own cultural categories, but a patriotic imperative that views religions as cogs in its own system.,” Asia News noted.

Some observers think Xi is battening down his political hatches ahead of a major conflict with Tibetan Buddhism, as Beijing is demanding the power to choose the spiritual successor to the Dalai Lama, who will soon turn 90 years old. Human rights groups have called on China to cease its political interference with Tibetan Buddhism, but if anything, Xi is ramping up his efforts to exert supremacy and control over the religion.

John Hayward, Breitbart

Democrats Storm the Heights of Illogic

It wasn’t long ago when the party anxious to avoid piling on more debt (Republicans) would capitulate to additional spending when shutdowns loomed. Democrats ran an extortion racket: acquiesce to more spending or we’ll close the government and blame Republicans. 2025 began with DOGE slashing government spending. Democrats then rushed to the courts seeking injunctions. That was then. With their government shutdown push, Democrats just ran a bus over their base. Because you-know-who resides rent-free in their heads, they’ve concluded a government shutdown sounds great.

Because Republicans cut funding to the Democrats’ favorite programs, Democrats’ brain trust now grants OMB Director Russ Vought unlimited rescission authority. Their specious logic goes like this: if Democrats support a shutdown because Republicans support insufficient spending, voters will blame Republicans for the ensuing shutdown. Yet it’s not Republicans supporting the shutdown.

It’s unclear whether Democrats managed to self-destruct on their own or were manipulated into it. The party of Really Big Government handed the administration a blank check for wholesale layoffs. Maybe Democrats believe a shutdown will encourage voters to rise up and demand restoring positions. Maybe they’re just insane. Nobody will notice or care if hundreds of thousands of surplus federal workers are fired, except the workers.

Democrats might want to rethink this one. The ones being hurt the most are their fellow travelers, foot soldiers comprising the ranks of overpaid and underworked federal bureaucrats. Shutdowns normally conclude with furloughed government employees receiving vacations, then receiving full back pay after the charade concludes. Except this time, workers will be terminated. Have Democrats considered the loss of campaign contributions from federal workers and their unions?

Republican presidents have long dreamed of a constitutional amendment granting them unlimited line-item veto authority. Christmas arrived early for Trump this year. The areas targeted for the largest cuts include healthcare, education, science, and social services. Defense (War), immigration enforcement, and law enforcement workers are safe. The federal government is being reformulated away from touchy-feely objectives, with an emphasis on restoring its original primary mission to ensure public safety. It’s not all cuts. Thanks to the OBBB, ICE is adding 10,000 agents.

Education faces approximately $5 billion in additional cuts; HHS is slated for $33 billion (about 26%); NSF faces a 56% cut, with HUD scheduled for a 43% cut. Labor faces a 35% cut, and over $10 billion more is slated to be drained from foreign aid and public broadcasting. Imagine the horror: platoons of overpaid NPR and PBS executives forced to take pay cuts or pink slips. Woke corporations might need to advertise to woke listeners and viewers.

By September 30, over 350,000 workers had left the federal workforce from an initial 2.4 million total, almost a 15% reduction. The biggest cuts were made to the War Department, 55,000. The second biggest was Treasury, down 33,000, mostly from the IRS. Agriculture cut 21,000 and HHS cut 20,000. A shutdown provides the administration a clean way to permanently eliminate hundreds of thousands more jobs. Litigation and costly buyouts are avoided.

Grok

Critics complain that the administration’s planned cuts bypass Congress. Precisely. The Number One impediment to wholesale reform is Congress. Number Two is the judiciary. A government shutdown removes the ability of both branches to obstruct executive branch spending determinations. Democrats just defenestrated two government branches, then empowered the executive.

Shutdowns eventually conclude. The longer that date gets postponed, the more bureaucrats who will be signing up to learn to code. Democrats are running out of factions in their base to antagonize. Legal citizens, males, Whites, Christians, Jews, cisgenders, female athletes, the law-abiding, and now bureaucrats have been systematically run over by the bus. The party’s remaining minority females, criminals, and transgenders don’t yield a winning coalition.

Senator John Kennedy concluded that Democrats’ shutdown antics provide “that much more evdence that human evolution is a slow, slow process. I thought humans had advanced more as a species, but apparently we haven’t.” Trump has dialed his trolling up to 11, with backup from MAGA forces. The White House assembled a highlights reel of Democrats decrying shutdowns. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-Bedlam): “If the government shuts down, it will be average Americans who suffer the most.” There might be a sliver of truth in Schumer’s statement, but Democrats’ problem is they’re the ones creating chaos. The shutdown’s impact is mostly confined to hundreds of thousands of overwhelmingly leftist bureaucrats.

We’ve seen this movie before. TDS victims such as Hillary, Mitt, or Kamala never recover their bearings. They wallow in self-pity, seeking others to blame. The infection has spread throughout Democrats’ ranks. Kaitlan Collins tried, but failed, to trip up House Speaker Mike Johnson over the Schumer Shutdown. Johnson noted that Democrats oppose the same funding they voted for in March. Polling shows 2.4 times as many voters oppose Democrats’ refusal to fund the government as those who approve.

Gaza parallels are obvious. Hamas leaders, wallowing in luxury abroad, sacrifice their population on anti-Zionism’s altar. Democrats routinely sacrifice their constituencies. They also aren’t allowing their shutdown to go to waste. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee scheduled an October 13-14 retreat at the five-star Estate Yountville in Napa Valley. Rooms start at $700 nightly. Organic wine, hot tubs, massages, and spa treatments are extra. The event features vineyard and wine cave tours before dinner at the exclusive Staglin Family Vineyard.

Feel free to draw the Marie Antoinette analogy. The retreat also includes a crypto roundtable. Maybe Democrats’ $40 million donor Sam Bankman-Fried can phone it in. His schedule remains free for 24 years. Trump is unconcerned about the shutdown: “I don’t worry aboutthat because people that are smart see what’s happening. The Democrats are deranged.”

Douglas Schwartz blogs at The Great Class War, applying pattern recognition of historical cycles to place current events into context.

Divided We Stand

Of course Democrats and Republicans can’t agree enough to keep the government open. Democrats view government as a means of forcing unpopular, irrational ideology down people’s throats while turning the United States into a totalitarian international welfare state. Republicans are looking to return us to something resembling the original American idea of private property, freedom of association and freedom of thought. These two avenues are completely at odds and the impossibility of keeping the government open makes sense given the utterly irreconcilable differences.

If you still don’t think it’s time for some kind of a national divorce, then ask yourself how this situation can sustain itself, and how much worse a divorce might actually be than what we’re forced to watch right now.

Michael J. Hurd, Daily Dose of Reason

The Left’s Love Affair With Terrorists Isn’t New — It’s The Playbook

If violence can be cloaked in the language of ‘justice,’ then terrorism is transformed into activism.

Assata Shakur died Thursday. If you read The New York Times’ headline, you’d think Shakur was convicted for being a “revolutionary” and had to flee to Cuba. USA Today headlined their piece, “Assata Shakur, Tupac’s godmother who sought political asylum in Cuba, dead at 78.” Rolling Stone wrote she was a “Convicted Black Liberationist and Tupac’s Godmother.” Harper’s Bazaar wrote: “Assata Shakur, Legendary Revolutionary and Black Liberation Army Member, Has Died.”

But you wouldn’t necessarily glean from any of those headlines the actual truth — that is, Shakur murdered New Jersey officer Werner Foerster and was convicted of first-degree murder. She then escaped prison and was placed on the FBI’s most wanted terrorist list. Shakur was also part of the Black Liberation Army, which supported “killing cops,” according to the Maryland state police, The Washington Free Beacon reported.

So why the whitewashed coverage?

Because the left weaponizes language to launder extremism into respectability. Branding Shakur as a freedom fighter is meant to justify being a cop killer — the same way the modern left brands itself “Antifa” to legitimize assaulting conservatives or fighting for “democracy” to justify violence, murder and destruction. In all of these instances, radical leftists seek a moral veil for their crimes.

And this isn’t a one-off trend. The left has a long history of glamorizing terrorists in order to reach a political end.

Take, for example, the Black Panther Party — a radical, militant group of anti-white, cop-hating terrorists. One example of their barbarism is their torturing of Alex Rackley. Rackley, a 19-year-old black kid who joined the organization but was accused of being a rat, was strung up in a noose during a mock lynching before he was placed in a wooden chair, as The Daily Beast reported. But his captors bound and gagged him so that his screams couldn’t be heard when the group proceeded to pour boiling water over his naked body. After days of torture, Rackley was murdered. The FBI states the Black Panther Party is an “extremist organization” that “advocated the use of violence and guerrilla tactics to overthrow the U.S. government.”

Nonetheless, The Black Panther Party has been recast as merely “challenging police and promoting social change,” and as a group that “protected black citizens from brutality” and created so-called “survival programs” to provide food, clothing, and transportation to the black community, according to the Smithsonian. PBS News said the group is “often misunderstood” and was “vilified by the white establishment.”

Or take Black Lives Matter — a radical left-wing organization that gained popularity in the summer of 2020. The organization led nationwide riots that resulted in burned-out police precincts, looted cities, toppled statutes, and the murder of retired officer David Dorn.

Despite the violence, bloodshed, and destruction, the propaganda press has spent the past five years peddling the lie that the riots were merely “protests” and “peaceful.” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi described watching a liquor store burn in Minneapolis in the days after George Floyd’s death, noting that the AutoZone that had been burned to the ground by rioters the night before was still smoldering. Velshi justified the violence, writing: “Violence that is intended to spread democracy, end injustice and encourage fairness in the application of the rule of law” is permissible, compared to “wanton” violence.

But that line encapsulates the left’s entire playbook: if violence can be cloaked in the language of “justice,” then terrorism is transformed into activism.

Nowhere is that more apparent than in the recent acts of heinous violence we’ve witnessed.

When Luigi Mangione allegedly murdered United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson in cold blood on a New York City street less than a year ago, the left rushed to excuse the massive outpouring of ghoulish delight from the people who celebrated Thompson’s murder. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., sympathized with the “visceral response from people across this country who feel cheated, ripped off, and threatened by the vile practices of their insurance companies” and suggested Thompson’s death “should be a warning to everyone in the health care system.”

Then were was a proposed California ballot measure — “the Luigi Mangione Access to Health Care Act,” — that would target health insurance denials, one of Mangione’s reported flashpoints. It was a measure framed as “reform” but was nothing more than an attempt to legitimize a political assassination by turning it into a policy platform.

And, most recently, Charlie Kirk was gunned down on a Utah college campus by a deranged leftist who inscribed anti-fascist slogans on bullet casings. The message was clear: the alleged shooter thought Kirk was a fascist. Drawing such a historic parallel conditions people to believe that resistance to fascism by any means necessary is justified just as it was during WWII.

But the left doesn’t merely glorify terrorists — it rewards them. The same movement that rebrands radicals as “revolutionaries” and freedom fighters is the same movement that elevates them with commutations, pardons, honors.

Then-President Joe Biden commuted Leonard Peltier’s sentence despite Peltier having murdered two FBI agents. President Bill Clinton granted clemency to Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) members despite the “militant terrorist organization” having claimed responsibility for “the bombings of approximately 130 civilian, political, and military sites throughout the United States,” according to a congressional resolution deploring the decision. President Barack granted clemency to Oscar Lopez Rivera, who NPR describes as “either a freedom fighter or a terrorist” depending on who you ask. Rivera was a member of the FALN and involved in a deadly bombing in the United States.

Obama also has deep ties with William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn. Ayers is the co-founder of the terrorist organization, the Weather Underground. He and his wife were involved in the firebombing the home of a New York judge who was overseeing a case related to the terrorist group. Obama hosted a fundraiser at their home. Ayers went on to teach at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Or take Cambridge University, which conferred an honorary degree to Angela Davis earlier this year. Davis, as described in these pages by David Harsanyi, was a “Stalinist cheerleader,” and the Soviet Union propped her up via a propaganda campaign. Davis supplied the guns that black radicals used to take over a courtroom, kidnap a judge, and eventually kill four people. The killers were attempting to secure the release of other radicals from prison. Davis was later acquitted of involvement in the crime. She also stood by ideologies that led to the imprisonment of dissidents and the deaths of tens of millions of people.

But, as Harsanyi pointed out, Davis is “another reminder that the progressive left will tolerate the most odious characters as long as they seek ‘justice’ for a favored cause.”

Whether it’s the whitewashing of groups like the radical and violent Black Panther Party or the rewarding of violence, it’s clear the left seeks to turn terrorists into martyrs and to transform political violence into some type of virtue. The pattern is the same: violence for the cause is justified, as Velshi said. And until this is confronted, the cycle will continue.

Brianna Lyman, The Federalist

The Government has been Shut Down for Months

The American Prospect
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Evan Vucci/AP Photo

Russell Vought, Office of Management and Budget director, speaks alongside, from left, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), and Vice President JD Vance as they address members of the media outside the West Wing of the White House, September 29, 2025, in Washington.

Talks at the White House on Monday aimed at preventing a government shutdown left both sides far apart on a deal. Earlier in the day, reports emerged that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) would consider a ten-day extension of government funding if Trump agreed to negotiate on enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies that expire at the end of the year.

Reaction to this was swift. “You don’t pick a fight and then run away,” said Emma Lydon, managing director of P Street, the government relations arm of the Progressive Change Campaign Committee. Within a couple of hours, Schumer told reporters that he would not back a short-term funding agreement under any circumstances. But one bigger problem with the conversation around government funding, with less than 24 hours to the deadline, is the nature of the fight being picked.

The negotiations and debates are operating under the premise that appropriations to federal agencies are flowing today and will stop flowing tomorrow, and that this is something political leaders want to avoid. It’s hard to uncover any evidence that this is truly the case.

The Supreme Court’s latest ruling definitively allows the Trump administration to cancel whatever funding they disfavor within 45 days of the end of the appropriation, without any approval from Congress. The administration now has power, formalized by the Court in a sleight-of-hand move by claiming nobody has standing to sue, to cut whatever they want out of the budget, at a time when they are pressuring Congress to send them a budget.

That Supreme Court ruling involved $4 billion in foreign aid funding that the administration semi-formally tried to rescind; it doesn’t include the $410 billion that the White House has simply withheld from programs across the country. That represents close to half of all outlays in the fiscal year 2025 nondefense discretionary budget, which have simply vanished, perhaps permanently after the last day of the fiscal year, which is today. The Office of Management and Budget, as Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) has explained, has offered no explanation of how money is being spent or where withheld spending is going.

About 12 percent of the federal workforce has been terminated. Last week, we heard threats from OMB director Russ Vought that a shutdown will really allow the Office of Management and Budget to fire workers. A shutdown provides no actual legal authority to fire federal employees, but then again there was no legal authority to rescind or withhold appropriated spending without congressional approval, or put workers on extended administrative leave, as they did with the unauthorized buyout back in January.

As Daniel Schuman points out, Vought presented guidance to agencies in February that they should prepare for mass layoffs by today, September 30. Any allegedly shutdown-induced “mass layoff” should be seen as the continuation of an existing plan that has been public for seven months.

The reality is that Republicans have every opportunity to fund the government if they want.

The larger point is that the government is already shut down, and has been for several months, as the Trump administration initiated an assault on this system of government. Activities deemed “essential” by the president—stalking immigrants, lobbing missiles at Iran, etc.—have gone on, but activities purported to conflict with the president’s policies, regardless of whether they have been authorized by the lawmaking body of the United States, have been stopped, interrupted only by occasional federal courts telling the president that doing so is illegal, which the Supreme Court subsequently brushes aside.

The shutdown can certainly be used rhetorically to justify more firings, but they’re just the same firings with a different rationale, one that is no more legal or legitimate than before. Of course, “legal” and “legitimate” are loaded words given the rubber-stampers at the Supreme Court.

“Unfortunately, a shutdown seems very likely because nobody, not even my Republican colleagues, can trust Donald Trump,” Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) told the Prospect. “So far, Republicans refuse to sit down and have an honest negotiation.”

The individuals most knowledgeable about this slow-motion shutdown, and most forthright about what Democrats should do in the face of it, are the workers living through it. On Monday, 30,000 federal workers told House and Senate Democratic leaders that they’d rather miss out on their paychecks than see Trump further erode federal programs.

In a letter delivered Monday morning and coordinated by the Federal Unionists Network (FUN), workers implored Schumer and Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), the House Democratic leader, to “reject any bad deal in the name of protecting federal employees,” and said fighting Trump’s consolidation of power is paramount, even if that means shutting down the government. “A government shutdown is never Plan A. Federal workers and the communities we serve will face severe hardship. But federal workers will willingly forego paychecks in the hopes of preserving the programs we have devoted our lives to administering,” workers said in the letter.

The letter, which agreed that the government is functionally shut down, outlined the “unprecedented harms” Americans are already experiencing from Trump’s deadly funding cuts, including to Social Security and the Department of Veterans Affairs, and from Trump’s attacks on independent science and data, agency closures without congressional input, and the decimation of labor.

“Enough is enough. At a certain point we can’t allow continued destruction of programs that tens of millions of Americans rely on,” federal worker and labor lawyer James Kirwan told the Prospect. Kirwan said Americans want politicians who “stand up and protect them from further harm.”

Jeffries and Schumer didn’t respond to requests for comment on the letter. But Democrats, by and large, have appropriately depicted Vought’s threats as empty intimidation. Unfortunately, they are foregrounding health care cuts as the main reason for the fight, and not the fact that the government has been shut down for several months and it must be reopened, with guarantees that Trump and Vought cannot meddle to shut it down again, piece by piece.

Some members of Congress understand this imperative. Behold this quote: “If you’re a Democrat—even just like a mainstream Democrat—your predisposition might be to help negotiate with Republicans on a funding mechanism … Why would you do that if you know that whatever you negotiate is going to be subject to the knife pulled out by Russ Vought?” That didn’t come from a Democrat but from Rep. Steve Womack (R-AR), a senior Republican on the House Appropriations Committee.

Schuman has put this best: “There is no point for Senate Democrats (or Republicans, for that matter) to negotiate or vote for a spending bill, short term or otherwise, unless it resolves or leads to the resolution the issues of impoundments and restricting further withholding of funds, reinforces GAO authority to investigate and litigate impoundments, places political shackles on Vought (such as a new Inspector General at OMB), and requires regular, accurate reporting of agency spending.”

The reality is that Republicans have every opportunity to fund the government if they want. They can do what they have done repeatedly when stymied by Democrats in the Senate from achieving their goals; they can change the Senate rules. In this case, they can end the filibuster on legislative activities like the budget and pass it with the majority they have. Democrats are not needed to lend support to a process that is so distorted and broken that the executive is telling Congress he will not honor any deal they make. If Republicans want to hand over Congress to Trump, they can do it themselves.

Vought has been waiting for four years to implement his pre-20th-century vision of supreme executive power that invests the prerogatives of government in one person. In a shutdown, the government can dictate what parts of the executive branch stay open; Vought has already been doing that. If it feels like the current fight isn’t about health care or insurance subsidies but about our system of government itself, that’s because it is.

jsoad2xs.jpeg.jpe

David Dayen

David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is ‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’

Whitney Curry Wimbish

Whitney Curry Wimbish is a staff writer at The American Prospect. She previously worked for the Financial Times newsletters division, The Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh, and the Herald News in New Jersey.

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RELATED

  • The Art of the Budget DealToday on TAP: With a government shutdown looming on Wednesday, will Trump screw Democrats, Republicans, the public, or himself?Sep 29, 2025
  • Russ Vought’s Empty Shutdown ThreatToday on TAP: The OMB director says that if Democrats don’t cave, he will do mass layoffs. Imagine that.Sep 25, 2025
  • Russ Vought’s Scheme Has Been UnmaskedHundreds of billions in appropriated spending has been withheld, with dire consequences. Government funding shouldn’t be derailed like this.Sep 16, 2025

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