Dear Progressive Reader,

The murder of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk on September 10 during a speaking engagement on a Utah college campus has dominated this week’s headlines. In 2022, Bill Lueders reviewed a book that shed light on Turning Point USA, the group Kirk founded, which has become a key feature of the MAGA ecosystem. Kirk and other rightwing influencers “weren’t just some swashbuckling anti-establishment renegades; they were key players in a heavily endowed, incredibly well-organized and inter-connected initiative to lure as many people into the ultraconservative cause as possible,” writes author Kyle Spencer. According to FOXBusiness, “Americans across the country donated millions of dollars through online fundraisers for his family, a surge of support underscoring his influence on the right and the legacy he left behind.”

The same day Kirk was killed, another shooting at a Colorado high school took place wounding two students, but it has received almost no notice. The problem, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said last night during a talk in Madison, Wisconsin, is that these sorts of shootings have become “ordinary.” Walz, whose own state had two recent shootings, the first on June 14, resulted in the death of Walz’s friend and colleague Minnesota legislator Melissa Hortman and her husband and the wounding of two others, and a second which took place on August 27 at the Church of the Annunciation in Minneapolis (on the first day of the new school year) where two children were killed and twenty-one others wounded. In a time where political and cultural tensions are at a fever pitch, it is important to remember that the United States stands alone in the world in terms of the frequency of mass shooting events, in part because there are as many as 500 million civilian-owned guns in a population of just under 350 million adults in this country. According to the group Everytown for Gun Safety, “Every day, 125 people in the United States are killed with guns, twice as many are shot and wounded, and countless others are impacted by acts of gun violence.”

September 11 marked the anniversary of two other tragic events. The 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and other locations were remembered across the country with somewhat quieter events than in past years. The more than 2,753 deaths that day led the United States into more than twenty years of war in Afghanistan, and eight years of occupation in Iraq, leading to the deaths of 4419 service members in the Iraq War, 2459 in Afghanistan, and countless more combatants and civilians in both of those two countries. In 2021, photographer David Bacon and I remembered the demonstrations against those wars, many of which were framed by the slogan: “Our grief is not a cry for war.”

Also on September 11, but in 1973, the United States assisted members of the Chilean military in staging a coup against that country’s democratically elected president. The death of Salvador Allende led to the seventeen-year-long dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In 2014, I wrote the story of Frank Teruggi, a U.S. citizen killed in the wake of that coup. The stories of Teruggi and his friend Charles Horman are now chronicled in a new book, Chile in Their Hearts, by journalist John Dinges. In 2023, Dinges wrote for The Progressive about his memories of Chile. “I still have the cassette recording I made of Salvador Allende’s last speech on September 11, 1973,” he remembers.

This week on our website, former intern Caitlin Scialla writes about the attacks on democracy going on today in Texas and Florida; Owen Jakel, another former intern at The Progressive, reports on the candidacy of Omar Fateh for mayor of Minneapolis; Ed Rampell reviews the new documentary on civil rights advocate and Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall; and Eleanor Bader describes the struggles of teachers facing overcrowded classrooms and burnout. Also, Owen Schulz looks at the policy choices creating an oral health crisis; Jim DeBrosse pens an op-ed on the need to restrain AIPAC, the lobbying group for Israel; and Mickey Dollens opines that school coaches should not be pushing religion in college sports.

Finally, last Wednesday, I was invited to moderate an international symposium on The Legal Regulation of Drugs: A Call to the Development Sector sponsored by the nonprofit Health Poverty Action based in the U.K. but working around the globe. You can watch an archive of the live session on YouTube.

Please keep reading, and we will keep bringing you important articles on these and other issues of our time.

Sincerely,

Norman Stockwell
Publisher

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