Demand Trump kick whack job Laura Loomer out of the White House!

Sunday Dose of Democracy:

VIDEO OF THE DAY: “BOMBSHELL!” Newsom takes aggressive action against Trump
Brian Tyler Cohen and Glenn Kirschner break down California Governor Gavin Newsom's signing of a law barring Trump's goons from hiding behind their masks and the looming clash between federal and state powers.

Take Action: Investigate Trump's border czar's bribery scandal!

The right’s scary quick campaign to exploit Charlie Kirk’s death
Aaron Regunberg, The New Republic: "The moment that news of Kirk’s shooting hit the internet, MAGA—its influencers, podcasters, media figures, Republican elected officials, Cabinet directors, Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump—immediately began insisting that two and two make five. Their gaslighting around Kirk’s death has been so extensive—and so speedily promulgated—that it’s hard to fully grasp the sheer magnitude of their mendacity. Though all of these lies are shocking and dangerous, the narrative that has been most troubling to me—or at least has most caused me to feel like I may actually be losing my mind—has been the right’s insistence on the universal public canonization of Kirk. They have endeavored to make his mourning mandatory, enforcing it through threats—backed by the full power of the state—against anyone who dares to share truthful observations of who this man really was. Participate in the hagiographic whitewashing of a dedicated provocateur’s career, or suffer the consequences. (Unless, of course, you’re Donald Trump, who had already gone back to obsessing over the White House ballroom within hours of Kirk’s death, and skipped his Kennedy Center vigil to go golfing.) Today, Kirk is being framed as an elder statesman and a free speech champion, a model of positive civic virtue. Anyone who resists this false characterization now risks being targeted, not just by MAGA trolls online but by literally the most powerful people in the world. It would be bad enough if those of us who were ostensibly opposed to MAGA authoritarianism were facing this assault on the truth with a united front. But we are not. Too many Democratic leaders and liberal pundits have preemptively given in to the far right’s framing. The highest-profile example of this was New York Times columnist Ezra Klein’s now-infamous essay arguing that Kirk “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” The Kirk of Klein’s fevered imagination is a man no one else has met: a free speech advocate who abhorred political violence. This bears very little resemblance to the actual Charlie Kirk, a “Stop the Steal” champion who sent “80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president” on January 6, 2021, and encouraged supporters to bail out the man who attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer. Equally shocking were decisions by Democratic governors like Josh Shapiro and Jared Polis to copy President Trump in ordering their state’s flags to be lowered to half-staff in honor of Kirk—a sign of respect and public mourning that Polis notably did not extend to the victims at Evergreen High School in his own state. The affirmation of MAGA’s false narratives by high-profile Democrats and liberals greatly reifies the far right’s goal of severing our nation’s grasp on the existence of an objective reality. Because let’s be clear: That is their project. As Winston’s torturer in 1984 put it, 'Whatever the Party holds to be the truth, is truth. It is impossible to see reality except by looking through the eyes of the Party. That is the fact that you have got to relearn, Winston.' By mobilizing the power of the state to force the nation to see Kirk through the eyes of the Republican Party, the right is using his killing to escalate its war on truth. George Orwell understood the radical dangerousness of such efforts: 'The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future, but the past.… This prospect frightens me much more than bombs.'"

Take Action: Tell Congress to build clean energy now!

Progressive champion Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announces run for re-election
Tim Walz for Governor: Governor Tim Walz has spent the past six years making Minnesota the best place in America to raise a family — cutting child poverty, expanding labor rights, investing in education, and making sure every student gets free breakfast and lunch at school. But MAGA extremists are salivating at the thought of retaking the governor’s mansion, turning Minnesota into yet another failed Republican state, and sabotaging the election systems in a critical battleground state. Will you chip in to help re-elect Tim Walz and keep Republicans from ruining another state?

Trump’s idea of the criminal Left is a fiction. A coordinated defense against his fascism shouldn’t be
Natasha Lennard, The Intercept: "Multibillionaire investor George Soros is not funding a network of militant left-wing activists. That fact has not stopped President Donald Trump from spending the days since Charlie Kirk’s killing calling to press charges against the liberal philanthropist under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act for allegedly bankrolling “violent” leftist protests across the country. This absurd idea is among an array of repressive proposals, ranging from the illegal to the unconstitutional, that Trump and his acolytes have pulled from a cartoonishly blatant playbook of fascist scapegoating — conspiracies of Jewish dark money and all. The Trump administration will likely fail to bring successful prosecutions against the disparate liberal and leftist individuals and organizations they see as a well-funded criminal network. But we are long past the point of pretending the administration will be bound by law, or tethered to factual reality, when it comes to achieving its broader authoritarian goals. Trump announced on Wednesday night, for example, that he was designating antifa a “major terrorist organization.” The proclamation, posted on Truth Social, is senseless in a number of ways. Firstly, as has been stated ad nauseam, there is no such organization as “antifa” — an abbreviation of “anti-fascist” — which is a set of practices and militant tactics, deployed by activists for nearly a century. There are groups who come together under the “antifa” banner, but there is zero centralized leadership or membership structure. Secondly, the U.S. has no statutes under which groups are designated domestic terror organizations. It should not be overlooked that since Trump’s first term, all significant efforts to collectively prosecute social justice movements have failed. Having reported directly on both the J20 and Stop Cop City cases, I saw firsthand the toll a lengthy prosecutorial process can take on defendants, their supporters, and the entire targeted movement. Prosecutions need not lead to convictions to ruin lives and decimate social movement capacities; federal investigations do not need to have factual basis for their targets to be harassed and intimidated; First Amendment-protected speech can still get you fired. Fear spreads, cowardice abounds, and the real risks of state and state-sanctioned persecution hang over targeted communities. What these cases nonetheless made clear is that collective persecution must be met with collective defense. None of the J20 or Atlanta defendants collaborated with prosecutors or took deals that entailed throwing other movement participants under the bus. Without compliant targets, the meritless cases fell apart. The tragedy, though, is that while Trump’s chaotic and maximalist crackdown strategy aims to target centrist liberals alongside leftist activists as an imagined whole, there’s little promise that establishment liberal figures and organizations will act with the integrity and solidarity it takes to rebuff such attacks. To neglect to do so would be a grave mistake, morally and strategically, when clear lessons of collective defense are there to be learned. Trump’s conspiracy about a networked, well-funded greater left is a fiction; a united front against fascism shouldn’t be."

Take Action: Tell DeSantis: Don't destroy LGBTQ history!

In Venezuela, Trump is engaged in plain and simple murder
Chip Gibbons, Jacobin: "On September 15, 2025, the Trump White House announced, again, that it had carried out a military strike on a boat in the Caribbean. According to the administration, three people were killed. This is the second such strike in two weeks. On September 2, eleven people were riding in a small speed boat in international waters when they were also killed by a US military strike. The summary executions were captured on film and posted boastfully to social media by the US government. The Trump administration has offered as a rationale for these killings that the individuals were part of a Venezuelan cartel and involved in drug running. Claiming that drug cartels are terrorists and that drug overdoses mean drug traffickers pose a threat to the United States, the administration has claimed this lethal military action was justified. They have offered no evidence any of the individuals were involved in drug trafficking or part of a cartel. And the administration has given inconsistent explanations about exactly what happened. After the first strike on a speedboat, Secretary of State Marco Rubio initially claimed the boat wasn’t even headed to the US but to another island in the Caribbean. The administration then changed its tune, claiming the four-engine speedboat was headed from Venezuela to the United States. It was also revealed that the boat had turned around after getting spooked by a US military craft flying ahead. The US military repeatedly fired on the boat in order to kill survivors of the initial attack. Trump lacks any congressional approval for military action against Venezuela or Tren de Aragua. Trump is engaged in murder, plain and simple. Drug trafficking is a criminal offense, not an act of war. The Coast Guard has protocols for intercepting suspect drug vessels. The Coast Guard is supposed to halt the vessel, not kill first and ask questions later. The president cannot simply order someone dead because he claims they committed a crime. Such a move violates not only the Constitutions’ guarantees of due process but international law’s prohibition on extrajudicial killings."

Staggering death toll rises to 32 in single-deadliest Israeli strike on journalists
Shuaib Almosawa and Murtaza Hussain, Drop Site News: : On September 10, the Israeli military carried out a wave of bombings in Yemen’s capital of Sana’a, killing dozens of people at several locations. Among the targets hit was a building that Israeli officials referred to as 'the Houthis' military public relations headquarters.' Videos and images of dead and wounded civilians, including several children, quickly began to disseminate on social media after the attack. Among the dead were reported to be a large number of journalists and media workers—with as many as 32 killed in the strike. In a report on the aftermath of the Sana’a bombings, Human Rights Watch cited experts who noted that the office building struck by Israel was home to the media headquarters of Ansarallah, which is the de facto government of the region, as well as the offices of two local newspapers. The massacre of journalists from the papers Al-Yaman and 26 September was denounced by local Yemeni media groups, as well as international organizations. In a statement on Monday, the general-secretary of the International Federation of Journalists, Anthony Bellanger, denounced the Israeli attack and demanded an independent investigation into the killings. A funeral procession was held for those killed in Sana’a on September 16. 'Targeting journalists is a grave violation of international law and an attack on the public’s right to know,' Bellanger said, calling it an 'appalling massacre.' 'We join our affiliate, the Yemeni Journalists Syndicate, in demanding an immediate, swift, and truly independent investigation into this tragedy. Urgent steps must be taken to ensure the protection of journalists working in conflict zones.'

Trump team plots to CRIPPLE our ability to fight climate change
Earthjustice: A record-breaking summer of heatwaves, wildfires, and floods has made it grimly clear that climate change is not only here to stay but getting worse faster than we expected. But instead of taking action to fight it, the Trump administration is trying to repeal the Endangerment Finding, the declaration that greenhouse gases endanger human lives and is the foundation of our ability to fight climate change. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment to tell the Trump administration to not repeal the Endangerment Finding and stop putting the health and lives of millions of Americans now and for generations to come at serious risk. Add your name and make your voice heard!