curated citations to news sources
Oliver Darcy: Canceling Kimmel
Inside ABC, emergency meetings were convened after the FCC chair’s Jimmy Kimmel threat, with the late-night host ready to respond on-air—but Disney brass ultimately decided to bench the marquee talent instead.
(Oliver Darcy more…)
Heather Cox Richardson: Letters from an American – September 17, 2025
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Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”
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Kimmel’s suspension has produced an uproar. Comedian Paul Scheer noted that Kimmel is off the air but Brian Kilmeade of the Fox News Channel, who recently called for killing homeless Americans by “involuntary lethal injection,” is still employed. …
On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.” On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “[I]f 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…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”
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Two hundred and thirty-eight years ago today, the Framers signed their names to the blueprint for a new government established by “We the People of the United States.” The next day, James McHenry, a delegate to the Constitutional Convention, recorded in his diary that a lady had asked delegate Benjamin Franklin whether the convention had established a republic or a monarchy. “A republic,” Franklin said, “if you can keep it.”
(Heather Cox Richardson more…)
Dean Obeidallah: Kimmel wasn’t suspended for a joke about Kirk-he was suspended for mocking Trump.
Aaron Parnas: Trump Says Networks are not Allowed to Criticize him
Slate: No, the Supreme Court Did Not Give Trump a License to Silence Jimmy Kimmel
The justices have unanimously rejected this exact tactic of government-coerced censorship.
Dean Blundell: How an FCC Threat, A Major Trump Donor, A $6 Billion Power Play “Canceled” Kimmel
Pain & Tribute is the policy. The rest is just fascist paperwork.
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Timothy Snyder: “Show of Force”
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The transition to authoritarianism in the United States depends upon us. In Trump’s paradigm, this is all a show, and our role is to be bit players. We have been handed a script with no words and await our cue to do nothing.
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No one from the outside will invade us. We can only invade ourselves.And whether that happens is up to us: whether we choose to see the overall logic, whether we choose to name things as we are, whether we choose to talk to one another, and whether we choose to go on with the work of citizenship, decency, and humanity.
(Timothy Snyder more…)Robert Reich: Trump Tightens his Grip on the Media
A president shouldn’t be allowed to use defamation to suppress criticism of him. Big businesses likely to surrender to this shouldn’t be allowed to buy major media.
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Josh Marshall: Keep An Eye on What We Know (And Don’t)
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In the current environment I think it’s fair to say there’s really no reason to believe anything we’re hearing from federal law enforcement, either formally or on background to reporters.
(Josh Marshall more…)Fast Company: AI slop shows Springsteen, Dylan, and Robert Plant honoring Charlie Kirk. It never happened
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These days, it’s AI until proven otherwise.Rebecca Solnit: The War on Truth Heats Up (just in time for Constitution Day)
…It’s not that we can’t tell or don’t care about the difference between truths and lies. It’s that what we’re offered is so often untrustworthy, from people who don’t care about that distinction, mostly intended for people who aren’t clear on the distinction. The rest of us are supposed to be trampled underfoot, swept aside, or scared into submission.
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
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Above the Law: Todd Blanche Decides Heckling Donald Trump Is Organized Crime Now
Andrew Torrez: Trump Demands RICO For Protestors
Quick, someone ask him who RICO is!
Al Jazeera: Trump says he plans to designate Antifa a ‘major terrorist’ group
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It was unclear who or what exactly the US president plans to designate, with Antifa, short for anti-fascists, being a loosely organised band of activists opposed to right-wing ideology that lacks a distinct leader, structure or membership list.
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Rebecca Solnit: The Future Is Coming and It’s (Literally) Sunny: Notes on the Solar Revolution
Two things are striking about the Trump Adminstration’s tying itself to fossil fuel and particularly to affirmative action for coal, welfare for coal, bailouts for coal. One is that it’s a losing game in the long run, because renewable energy is just better in every way–profoundly cheaper, profoundly cleaner, more universally available, far quicker to install. More universally available means you can hook up your own house as people from Australia to Pakistan have done, and make your own power to run your home; you can achieve the kind of energy independence talked about as a national goal or make it a personal goal, even run your electric car off your roof.Propping up fossil fuel is like propping up white supremacy: the future of the USA is a nonwhite majority, and the future of the human race is renewable energy. You can batter it and badge it and try to roll time itself backward, but you can’t in the long term stop the renewable revolution. You can just make things worse in the short term, so that some planet-destroyers can grab a few more dollars. Bill McKibben spoke about all this on tour for his exhilarating new book Here Comes the Sun, a glorious compendium of solar facts and possibilities, a big-picture overview of where we’re at and where we could go.
(Rebecca Solnit more…)
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Noah Berlatsky: How the Cops Silenced Thelonious Monk
A precedent for our current authoritarian moment
Since the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk last week, MAGA has rushed to use the powers of the state and the mob to terrorize and silence liberals and marginalized people. Since I filed this piece at Public Notice over the weekend, the crackdown has only intensified. Yesterday the Washington Post, which has transformed its opinion pages into a MAGA mouthpiece, fired Karen Attiah, its last Black opinion columnist, for tweets about white male violence in which she barely mentioned Kirk.There are a lot of precedents in American history for authoritarian efforts to silence ideological opponents of the right in general and Black people in particular. During the Red Scare of the 50s, the government stripped Paul Robeson of his passport (the Trump administration is currently trying to pass legislation to allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to seize people’s passports for ideological reasons with no due process.) Left-wing Hollywood screenwriters were blacklisted at the same time; if you were too progressive, you were banned from the entertainment industry. Woodrow Wilson indicted thousands of pacifists and leftists who opposed World War I; it became a crime, upheld by the Supreme Court, to speak against the war. Even a presidential candidate, Eugene Debs of the Socialist Party, was imprisoned.
The Red Scares are fairly famous. I’ve also been thinking about a less well-known attack on free speech rights—the New York City Cabaret Card.
(Noah Berlatsky more…)
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Dispatch: An ICE Raid in Georgia Becomes a Massive (and Unsurprising) U.S. Policy Failure
Two weeks ago, U.S. immigration officials arrested almost 500 foreign nationals working at the construction site of a multibillion-dollar Georgia battery plant jointly owned by Korea’s LG and Hyundai. …
…Several U.S. government officials have also apologized to the Korean government, including once in public. For an administration that prides itself on never backing down, this is about as clear an admission of fault as you’ll get.
Whether the Koreans were technically violating U.S. immigration law is less clear. The Times notes that most of them were here on B-1 or B-1/B-2 visas, which are issued for business trips of up to six months, or through the State Department’s visa waiver program (ESTA), which allows for 90-day business or tourism trips without a visa.
(Dispatch more…)
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James Eagle: The Fed blinked. The real fight is over its independence
The Federal Reserve cut rates by a quarter point, taking the federal funds target range to 4%-4.25%.
That is the headline. The story beneath it is starker.
The labour market is losing momentum, core inflation has drifted higher, and political pressure is no longer background noise. The cut is modest, yet it signals a central bank that is being pushed toward an easing cycle even as inflation sits above target.
(James Eagle more…)
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Gideon M-K: Cinnamon For Diabetes And Vitamin D For COVID-19
(Gideon M-K more…)
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Texas Tribune: Ken Paxton’s legal crusade against Beto O’Rourke is faltering before an all-Republican appeals court
The court, appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott, recently allowed O’Rourke to continue raising and dispersing donations, and cast doubt on Paxton’s main arguments.
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Sarah Jones: Trump Embarrasses America with Multiple Breaches of Royal Protocol
Oops he did it again. Donald Trump sparked controversy again as he appeared to break royal protocol several times on his second state visit to the UK, hosted by King Charles III.
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James Eagle: The loneliness paradox in a digital age
(James Eagle more…)
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James Eagle: Is Ellison’s wealth surge justified?
(James Eagle more…)
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Decoding Fox News: The Murder of Charlie Kirk – Fox Called for Calm Yet Blamed the Vicious Left
A condensed overview of 20 hours of Fox News for the week ending 9/14/25
Timeline: Tracking the Trump Justice Department’s Anti-Voting Shift
Tracking the Lawsuits Against Trump’s Agenda
Trump Pardons Database
Project 2025 Tracker
DOGE Tracker
ProPublica: Elon Musk’s Demolition Crew
Wired: 6 Tools for Tracking the Trump Administration’s Attacks on Civil Liberties
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