The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals was long known as one of the most liberal courts in the nation. No more. In a 2-1 decision, the Court overturned California’s ban on open carry of guns. Two of the three judges were appointed by Trump. Expect more gun deaths. Expect to see people in restaurants and grocery stores packing a gun. Stay away from people with a hot temper.
The Los Angeles Times reported:
California’s ban on the open carry of firearms in most parts of the state is unconstitutional, a San Francisco-based federal appeals court ruled Friday.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the ban, which applied to counties with populations greater than 200,000, violates residents’ 2nd Amendment right to keep and bear arms. Under those regulations, 95% of the state’s population was subject to the ban.
The 2-1 opinion was supported by two appointees of President Trump, U.S. Circuit Judges Lawrence VanDyke and Kenneth Kiyul Lee. U.S. Circuit Judge N. Randy Smith, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, dissented.
VanDyke, writing for the majority, stated that California’s urban ban on open-carry permits does not stand under the Supreme Court’s landmark gun rights ruling New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. vs. Bruen. That 2022 decision made it much easier to carry a gun in public by striking down laws that required people to show a special need for self-defense…
VanDyke wrote in his opinion that California’s open-carry ban fails this test.
“The historical record makes unmistakably plain that open carry is part of this Nation’s history and tradition,” he wrote. “It was clearly protected at the time of the Founding and at the time of the adoption of the Fourteenth Amendment.”
Today, many of us are following the news about a terror attack at Brown University, where a gunman walked into a large classroom, murdered two students, and wounded at least a dozen more. A suspect is in custody. And we are following the news about a massacre at Bondi Beach in Sydney, Australia, where terrorists fired on a large crowd of Jews celebrating the first day of Chanukah. At least 16 people died, and many more were wounded.
It happens to be the 13th anniversary of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. A mentally deranged young man killed his mother, then went to the school, where he killed 20 children–first- and second-grade students–and six staff members, the principal and teachers. Then the murderer killed himself.
The children were babies.
The nation was in a state of shock. I remember being glued to the television as the extent of the horror was revealed. I remember the weeping parents, the shell-shocked survivors, children and teachers.
For many, it seemed that Congress was sure to enact meaningful gun control. Certain to limit access to deadly weapons.
But, not long after the event, the conspiracy theories began to roll out. The vile Alex Jones said that there was no massacre. No one was killed. The parents and students were “crisis actors.” It was all staged to create momentum for gun control. President Obama was in on the hoax. One of this blog’s readers sent me a video created to “prove” that Sandy Hook was a lie. It was shocking and sickening.
Some Newtown parents sued Alex Jones for his lies, which caused them extreme pain and suffering. The parents won their case and were awarded more than $1 billion from Alex Jones. Jones, however, declared bankruptcy and through legal maneuvers has paid little to those he defamed.
Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tragedy that would compel Congress to enact strict control. Needless to say, gun enthusiasts blocked any efforts to strengthen gun control laws. Then, with Trump’s addition to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Court decided that guns should not be controlled at all, citing their interpretation of the Second Amendment.
Then there was the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. Nineteen children and two teachers were murdered by an 18-year-old man with an assault weapon. Nearly 400 law officers from local, state, and federal agencies arrived on the scene, where they crowded the hallways and did nothing. They waited 77 minutes before confronting and killing the gunman.
Gun advocates would have you believe that gun control has never happened and can never happen. That’s not true.
During the Clinton administration, Congress passed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban in 1994. The law, called the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, had a 10-year sunset clause for the ban on assault weapons. It expired in September 2004, during the George W. Bush administration, and was not renewed.
The current Supreme Court opposes gun control. So here we are.
You can be forgiven for not having noticed that today is the anniversary of the Sandy Hook shootings, the murder of 26 human beings, 20 of them children. There’s not the usual wave of retrospective stories, perhaps because we’re busy catching up on the latest US campus shooting from the weekend.
It makes me angry, every day. Sandy Hook stands out among all our many various mass murders in this country, all our long parade of school shootings, because Sandy Hook was the moment when it finally became clear that we are not going to do anything about this, ever. “If this is not enough to finally do something,” we thought, “then nothing ever will be.”
Today was the 13th anniversary of the shooting that established that we aren’t going to do a damned thing about it, other than blaming the targets for not being hard enough. Need more security. Arm the (marxist untrustworthy) teachers. And somehow Alex Jones and Infowars have not been sued severely enough for them to STFU.
One thing that has happened over the past several years is a huge wave of folks expressing their deep concern about the children.
A whole industry of political activism has been cultivated around the notion that children– our poor, fragile children– must be protected. They must be protected from books that show that LGBTQ persons exist. They must be protected from any sort of reference to sexual action at all. They must be protected from any form of guilt-inducing critical race theory. They must be protected from unpatriotic references to America’s past sins. And central to all this, they must be protected from anyone who might challenge their parents’ complete control over their education and lives.
Well, unless that person is challenging the parents’ rights by shooting a gun at the child.
The Second Amendment issue is the issue that combines so poorly with other issues. We may be pro-life and insist that it be illegal to end a fetus– but if the fetus becomes an outside-the-womb human that gets shot at with a gun, well, nothing we can do about that. Students should be free to choose whatever school they like–but at any of those schools, people still have the right to shoot at them with a gun. We must protect children from all sorts of evil influences–but if someone wants to shoot a gun at them, well, you know, nothing we can do about that.
The other ugly development has been the ever-growing school security industry, peddling an ever-growing array of products that serve no educational purpose but are supposed to make schools safe, harden the target. Lots of surveillance. Lots of stupid mistakes, like the Florida AI reading a clarinet as a weapon. Lots of security layers that now make entering a school building much like entering a prison. It is what NPR correctly called the “school shooting industry,” and it is worth billions.
That’s not counting the boost that gunmakers get after every school shooting. The panic alarm goes off and the weapons industry sells a ton more product as the usual folks holler, “They’ll use this as an excuse to take your guns” even though in the 26 years since Columbine, the government hasn’t done either jack or shit about taking anybody’s guns. I expect that part of that sales bump is also from folks saying, “Now that I’m reminded that the government isn’t going to do anything about keeping guns out of the hands of homicidal idiots, I guess I’d better arm myself.”
Miles of letters have been strung together to unravel the mystery of why this country so loves its guns and why none of the factors used as distraction (mental health, video games, bad tv shows) could possibly explain the prevalence of gun deaths in this country because every other country in the world has the same thing without having our level of gun violence.
We are great at Not facing Problems in this country, and there is no problem we are better at Not facing than gun deaths. Hell, we can’t even agree it’s an actual problem. The “right” to personally possess the capability to kill other human beings is revered, and more beloved than the lives of actual human children.
And if some of our fellow citizens and leaders are unwilling to make a serious effort to reduce gun violence and these folks insist that the occasional dead child is just the cost of liberty (particularly the liberty to conduct profitable business), well, how can we expect them to take seriously other aspects of young humans’ lives, like quality education and health care.
It is a hard thing to know, every day, that we could do better, and we aren’t going to. We have already taken a long hard look at this issue, and we have decided that we are okay with another Sandy Hook or Uvalde. A little security theater, a little profiteering on tech, a few thoughts and prayers just to indicate that we aren’t actually happy that some young humans were shot dead (talk about virtue signaling), and that pivot quickly to defending guns. Send letters, make phone calls, get the usual platitudes back from elected representatives, who will never, ever pay an election price for being on the wrong side of rational gun regulation.
The whole dance is so familiar and well-rehearsed that we barely have to pay attention any more. It’s exhausted and exhausting, and yet I am still angry.
Fact one: The U.S. leads the world–by far– in the number of mass shootings.
Fact two: Perpetrators of mass shootings are overwhelmingly men and boys. 98% of Mass shootings are committed by males. 2% by females. 1% by transgender people.
Fact three: Mass shootings are increasing.
Could it be because the U.S. has the weakest gun control laws in recent history and in comparison to other nations with similar populations?
When I heard that MAGA firebrand Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed at a campus rally in Utah, I got a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had a visceral memory of the day that President John F. Kennedy was killed, the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the day that Bobby Kennedy was killed.
I loved them. I didn’t love or admire Charlie Kirk. I never agreed with anything he said.
But I despise political violence. I am sorry for his family.
We are supposed to be a nation that protects dissent, protest, and diverse opinions. If speaking against the grain makes you a target of assassins, our country is in deep trouble.
It seems obvious to me that our country needs gun control. But it’s equally obvious that the Supreme Court and the GOP have made almost any kind of gun control impossible. Just this week, a court in Florida struck down a ban on open-carry of guns. The judges said that it was a violation of the Second Amendment to forbid people to carry their gun openly.
We are all targets.
Children in school, people in malls and at concerts will continue to die because of the current insane interpretation of the Second Amendment. Guns are currently the leading cause of death for children and teens. Learning how to react to a murderer is now a rite of passage in school–every kind of school.
The right claims that it’s devoted to the “right to life.” But that’s not true. The right to life is secondary to the right to carry a gun.
The deaths of scores of children and the blood of Charlie Kirk stain the hands of the Supreme Court majority, which strikes down any effort to control access to guns, to require gun-owners to keep their weapons locked away, and to make gun safety a priority rather than a violation of the Second Amendment.
I don’t expect this love affair with deadly weapons will end in my lifetime. I hope it ends someday. Many people will needlessly die before then.
John Merrow was the education correspondent for PBS for many years. Now, in retirement, he continues to write and help us think through the existential moments in which we live.
More than five million demonstrators in about 2000 communities stepped forward to declare their opposition to Donald Trump, on June 14th. “No Kings Day” was also Trump’s 79th birthday, Flag Day, and the anniversary of the creation of the American army.
So now we know what many of us are against, but the central question remains unanswered: What do we stand FOR? What do we believe in?
Just as FDR called for Four Freedoms, the Democratic party needs to articulate its First Principles. I suggest three: “The Public Good,” “Individual Rights,” and “Rebuilding America after Trump.”
THE PUBLIC GOOD: Democrats must take our nation’s motto, E pluribus unum, seriously, and they must vigorously support the common good. That means supporting public libraries, public parks, public schools, public transportation, public health, public safety, public broadcasting, and public spaces–almost anything that has the word ‘public’ in it.
INDIVIDUAL RIGHTS: Because the fundamental rights that are guaranteed in our Constitution are often subject to interpretation, debate, and even violent disagreement, Democrats must be clear. Free speech, freedom of worship, habeas corpus, and other fundamental rights are not up for debate, and nor is a woman’s right to control her own body.
Health care is a right, and Democrats must make that a reality.
Conflict is inevitable–think vaccination requirements–and Democrats should come down on the side of the public good.
Because Americans have a right to safety, Democrats should endorse strong gun control measures that ban assault weapons that have only one purpose–mass killing.
REBUILDING AMERICA AFTER TRUMP: The Trump regime was and continues to be a disaster for a majority of Americans and for our standing across the world, but it’s not enough to condemn his greed and narcissism, even if he goes to prison. Let’s first acknowledge that Trump tapped into serious resentment among millions of Americans, which further divided our already divided country.
The challenge is to work to bring us together, to make ‘one out of many’ in the always elusive ‘more perfect union.’ The essential first step is to abandon the ‘identity politics’ that Democrats have practiced for too long. Instead, Democrats must adopt policies that bring us together, beginning with mandatory National Service:
National Service: Bring back the draft for young men and women to require two years of (paid) National Service, followed by two years of tuition or training credits at an accredited institution. One may serve in the military, Americorps, the Peace Corps, or other helping organizations. One may teach or work in distressed communities, or rebuild our national parks, or serve in other approved capacities. JFK famously said “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” Let’s ask BOTH questions.
Additionally: 1) Urge states to beef up civic education in public schools, teaching real history, asking tough questions. At the same time, federal education policies should encourage Community schools, because research proves that schools that welcome families are more successful across many measures.
2) Rebuild Our Aging Infrastructure: This is urgent, and it will also create jobs.
3) Adopt fiscal and monetary policies to address our burgeoning national debt. This should include higher taxes on the wealthy, emulating Dwight Eisenhower.
4) Adopt sensible and realistic immigration policies that welcome newcomers who arrive legally but close our borders to illegal immigration.
5) Rebuilding America also means rebuilding our alliances around the world. Democrats should support NATO and Ukraine, and rejoin efforts to combat climate change.
Guns are the leading cause of death among children. A new study concludes that states that have eliminated gun restrictions have higher death rates among children than states that have retained restrictions. The National Rifle Association, which opposes any restrictions on access to guns, dissented.
The NRA, the Supreme Court, and the gun-loving Republican Party can take credit for the deaths of thousands of children. Their extremist interpretation of the Second Amendment is lethal to children.
Firearm deaths of children and teenagers rose significantly in states that enacted more permissive gun laws after the Supreme Court in 2010 limited local governments’ ability to restrict gun ownership, a new study has found.
In states that maintained stricter laws, firearm deaths were stable after the ruling, the researchers reported, and in some, they even declined.
Guns are the leading cause of death in the United States for people ages 1 through 17, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. Jeremy Faust, an emergency room doctor at Massachusetts General Brigham Hospital in Boston, who was the study’s lead author, said he was dismayed to find that most of the children’s deaths were homicides and suicides.
“It’s surprising how few of these are accidents,” Dr. Faust said. “I always thought that a lot of pediatric mortality from guns is that somebody got into the wrong place, and I still think safe storage is important, but it’s mostly homicides and suicides.”
John Commerford, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, called the study “political propaganda masquerading as scientific research.”
The study, published Monday in JAMA Pediatrics, examined the 13-year period after the June 2010 Supreme Court ruling that the Second Amendment, which protects the right to bear arms, applies to state and local gun-control laws. The decision effectively limited the ability of state and local governments to regulate firearms.
The researchers classified states into three categories based on their gun laws: most permissive, permissive and strict. They used a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention database to analyze firearm mortality trends from 1999 to 2010 — before the Supreme Court ruling — and compared them with the 13-year period afterward.
Nationally, they found that the number of people under 18 who died from firearm injuries in the period after the ruling exceeded the projected figure for that time by about 7,400, with a total of about 23,000 fatalities.
But in the nine states with the strictest gun laws, youth firearm deaths did not increase. In four — California, Maryland, New York and Rhode Island — they dropped significantly.
The average age of those killed was 14, according to the study, which was coauthored by researchers from Yale New Haven Hospital, the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and the schools of public health at University of Pittsburgh and Brown University.
Advocates for stricter gun laws praised the study, saying it expanded the evidence that gun safety laws save lives.
“We have shown in the past that states that have the strongest laws when it comes to gun policy have a gun violence rate that’s 2.5 times less than the states with the weakest,” said Nick Suplina, senior vice president for law and policy at Everytown for Gun Safety. “Lawmakers that refuse to take action or further loosen laws are putting kids’ lives at risk.
He also said that gun safety laws had multiple benefits, reducing accidental shootings, while also preventing youth suicides and school shootings. “Three of four school shootings are committed with a weapon taken from the home of the family or a close relative,” Mr. Suplina said.
Peter Green explores one of the strangest paradoxes of our time: how can people be “pro-life” and also oppose any gun control? Guns kill people. Guns kill thousands of people every year. Consistency would demand that a person who is pro-life would also want to regulate the sale of guns.
But no. Among the most zealous pro-life governors is Ron DeSantis of Florida. He doesn’t want any woman to get an abortion, regardless of the peril to her life or the fetus. But when it comes to guns, DeSantis wants everyone to have at least one.
Green writes:
This week in his State of the State speech, Ron DeSantis announced that it was time to get over the Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School shooting–that would be the one in Parkland in which a 19-year-old killed 17 and injured 17 others in the deadliest mass shooting at a high school in US history.
After that shooting, the state put in place a piddly excuse for an attempt to make such horrors less likely, but even that is too much for DeSantis, who specifically wants to get rid of language raising the age to purchase a shotgun or rifle from 18 to 21 and also the red flag law that lets family members or law enforcement petition the court to remove someone’s firearms id they are risk to themselves of others. You know– like maybe a 19 year old with a long history of racism and fascination with mass shootings. “We need to be a strong Second Amendment state. I know many of you agree, so let’s get some positive reform done for the people in this state of Florida,” DeSantis was quoted by the Florida Phoenix.
Also, he’d like to have open carry in the state.
Because nothing is more important than an American’s God-given right to shoot other people. Because we should go to any length to “protect” a fetus, but once it’s a live child, its life is less important than someone’s right to fire off a couple of rounds at anyone that bugs them. Because this is one more way politicians can show that for all their talk, they don’t particular care about young humans.
On the right column of the blogspot version of this blog, I have had one image parked for years. It’s not complicated
I would say that it’s the least we could do, but of course the least we can do is nothing, and Ron DeSantis would like us to get back to doing that.
The only bright spot here is that the legislature doesn’t seem to have his back on this. Good. DeSantis should be ashamed that he can’t even produce a bad argument for his favored policies other than complaining that Florida has “lagged on this issue.” What a bummer– imagine all the people who are going to some other state because it’s easier to shoot people there.
EXCLUSIVE – An organization that wants to reform school boards across the country is launching what they call “the new NRA for education.”
“The 1776 Project PAC … was extremely successful over the last, I guess, four years now, electing over 250 conservatives to school boards across the country,” Ryan James Girdusky, founder of the 1776 Project PAC, told Fox News Digital. “We’ve seen that after they were elected, a lot of them wanted further help and outreach to sit there and talk about policy.”
Girdusky added that “The 1776 Project Foundation is going to meet that role and fill that void that is desperately needed as far as public policy goes when it comes to public schools and school boards.”
Founded in 2021, the 1776 Project PAC, says their mission is “Reigniting the spark and spirit of that revolution by reforming school boards across America.”
An embargoed press release from the 1776 Project PAC says the new foundation, “is an off-shoot of the 1776 Project PAC.”
“Since 2020, the 1776 Project PAC has led the conservative fight to win conservative school board seats and own the education issue, from ending remote learning to championing a return to classical education,” the release reads. “Over 250 of their endorsed candidates won elections. They have a majority of small donors and are currently #22 on Win Red….”
Aiden Buzzetti, president of the 1776 Project Foundation, told Fox News Digital that they want to be the “intellectual backbone” of education reform.
“There are so many school board members in the United States, there’s over 80 to 100,000 individual board members,” Buzzetti said. “And that is very important that those with an eye towards education reform are organized and are able to get the resources they need to implement the right policies or even review the policies that the current board has already put in place.”
Heather Cox Richardson brilliantly identifies the signal flaw of the MAGA movement. Trump described the Second Amendment right to bear arms as “foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.” (Of course, Trump’s lawyers–not Trump himself– wrote those words as raw meat for his base.)
Richardson replied that “it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”
On Friday, President Donald Trump issued an executive order “protecting Second Amendment rights.” The order calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to examine all gun regulations in the U.S. to make sure they don’t infringe on any citizen’s right to bear arms. The executive order says that the Second Amendment “is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.”
In fact, it is the right to vote for the lawmakers who make up our government that is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans.
The United States Constitution that establishes the framework for our democratic government sets out how the American people will write the laws that govern us. We elect members to a Congress, which consists of the House of Representatives and the Senate. That congress of our representatives holds “all legislative powers”; that is, Congress alone has the right to make laws. It alone has the power to levy taxes on the American people, borrow money, regulate commerce, coin money, declare war, “to make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper.”
After Congress writes, debates, and passes a measure, the Constitution establishes that it goes to the president, who is also elected, through “electors,” by the people. The president can either sign a measure into law or veto it, returning it to Congress where members can either repass it over his veto or rewrite it. But once a law is on the books, the president must enforce it. The men who framed the Constitution wrote that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” When President Richard Nixon tried to alter laws passed by Congress by withholding the funding Congress had appropriated to put them into effect, Congress shut that down quickly, passing a law explicitly making such “The impoundment” illegal.
Since the Supreme Court’s 1803 Marbury v. Madison decision, the federal courts have taken on the duty of “judicial review,” the process of determining whether a law falls within the rules of the Constitution.
Right now, the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives, the Senate, the presidency, and the Supreme Court. They have the power to change any laws they want to change according to the formula Americans have used since 1789 when the Constitution went into effect.
But they are not doing that. Instead, officials in the Trump administration, as well as billionaire Elon Musk— who put $290 million into electing Trump and Republicans, and whose actual role in the governmentu remains unclear— are making unilateral changes to programs established by Congress. Through executive orders and announcements from Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” they have sidelined Congress, and Republicans are largely mum about the seizure of their power.
Now MAGA Republicans are trying to neuter the judiciary.
After yet another federal judge stopped the Musk/Trump onslaught by temporarily blocking Musk and his team from accessing Americans’ records from Treasury Department computers, MAGA Republicans attacked judges. “Outrageous,” Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR) posted, spreading the lie that the judge barred the Secretary of the Treasury from accessing the information, although in fact he temporarily barred Treasury Secretary Bessent from granting access to others. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) said the decision had “the feel of…a judicial” coup. Right-wing legal scholar Adrian Vermeule called it “[j]udicial interference with legitimate acts of state.”
Vice President J.D. Vance, who would take over the office of the presidency if the 78-year-old Trump can no longer perform the duties of the office, posted: “Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power.”
As legal scholar Steve Vladeck noted: “Just to say the quiet part out loud, the point of having unelected judges in a democracy is so that *whether* acts of state are ‘legitimate’ can be decided by someone other than the people who are undertaking them. Vermeule knows this, of course. So does Vance.” Of Vance’s statement, Aaron Rupar of Public Notice added: “this is the sort of thing you post when you’re ramping up to defying lawful court orders.”
The Republicans have the power to make the changes they want through the exercise of their constitutional power, but they are not doing so. This seems in part because Trump and his MAGA supporters want to establish the idea that the president cannot be checked. And this dovetails with the fact they are fully aware that most Americans oppose their plans. Voters were so opposed to the plan outlined in Project 2025—the plan now in operation—that Trump ran from it during the campaign. Popular support for Musk’s participation in the government has plummeted as well. A poll from The Economist/YouGov released February 5 says that only 13% of adult Americans want him to have “a lot” of influence, while 96% of respondents said that jobs and the economy were important to them and 41% said they thought the economy was getting worse.
Trump’s MAGA Republicans know they cannot get the extreme changes they wanted through Congress, so they are, instead, dictating them. And Musk began his focus at the Treasury, establishing control over the payment system that manages the money American taxpayers pay to our government.
Musk and MAGA officials claim they are combating waste and fraud, but in fact, when Judge Carl Nichols stopped Trump from shutting down USAID, he specifically said that government lawyers had offered no support for that argument in court. Indeed, the U.S. government already has the Government Accountability Office (GAO), an independent, nonpartisan agency that audits, evaluates and investigates government programs for Congress. In 2023 the GAO returned about $84 for every $1 invested in it, in addition to suggesting improvements across the government.
According to Musk’s own Grok artificial intelligence tool on X, the investigative departments of the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Department of Justice (DOJ), the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB), the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Department of Transportation, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), as well as USAID, have all launched investigations into the practices and violations of Elon Musk’s companies.
The vision they are enacting rips predictability, as well as economic security, away from farmers, who are already protesting the loss of their markets with the attempted destruction of USAID. It hurts the states—especially Republican-dominated states—that depend on funding from the National Institutes of Health and the Department of Education. Their vision excludes consumers, who are set to lose the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau as well as protections put in place by President Joe Biden. Their vision takes away protections for racial, ethnic, religious, and gender minorities, as well as from women, and kills funding for the programs that protect all of us, such as cancer research and hospitals.
Musk and Trump appear to be concentrating the extraordinary wealth of the American people, along with the power that wealth brings, into their own hands, for their own ends. Trump has championed further tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations, while Musk seems to want to make sure his companies, especially SpaceX, win as many government contracts as possible to fund his plan to colonize Mars.
But the mission of the United States of America is not, and has never been, to return huge profits to a few leaders.
The mission of the United States of America is stated in the Constitution. It is a government designed by “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” Far from being designed to concentrate wealth and power in the hands of a single man, it was formed to do the opposite: spread wealth and power throughout the country’s citizenry and enable them to protect their rights by voting for those who would represent them in Congress and the presidency, then holding them accountable at the ballot box.
But we have a candidate for President who constantly encourages violence against enemies and disparages the federal government that he wants to lead.
And we have a political party that wants no restrictions on guns. And here we are.
LAKE LURE, N.C. — Federal emergency response personnel on Saturday had employees operating in hard-hit Rutherford County, N.C., stop working and move to a different area because of concerns over “armed militia” threatening government workers in the region, according to an email sent to federal agencies helping with response in the state.
Around 1 p.m. Saturday, an official with the U.S. Forest Service, which is supporting recovery efforts after Hurricane Helene along with the Federal Emergency Management Agency, sent an urgent message to numerous federal agencies warning that “FEMA has advised all federal responders Rutherford County, NC, to stand down and evacuate the county immediately. The message stated that National Guard troops ‘had come across x2 trucks of armed militia saying there were out hunting FEMA.’”
“The IMTs [incident management teams] have been notified and are coordinating the evacuation of all assigned personnel in that county,” the email added.
Two federal officials confirmed the authenticity of the email, though it was unclear whether the quoted threat was seen as credible. The National Guard referred questions to FEMA when asked about the incident. One Forest Service official coordinating the Helene recovery said responders moved to a “safe area” and at least some work in that area — which included clearing trees off dozens of damaged and blocked roads to help search-and-rescue crews, as well as groups delivering supplies — was paused.
By Sunday afternoon, personnel were back in place, said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The setback is one of the latest examples of growing concerns about safety and security in western North Carolina, where many towns were almost wiped off the map after the historic hurricane made landfall two weeks ago. In the weeks since, misinformation and rumors have made the recovery more difficult, targeting multiple federal agencies operating as part of the recovery. Federal officials such as the secretary for the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA’s director of public affairs have been the target of antisemitic attacks.
Chimney Rock, in Rutherford County, has become one of the centers of tension and conflict after a rumor spread on social media that government officials planned to seize the decimated village and bulldoze bodies under the rubble. Authorities and news outlets debunked the assertion, but people still took to social media imploring militias to go after FEMA.
A person familiar with FEMA operations, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the agency was working out of an abundance of caution and its teams were operating at fixed locations and secure areas instead of the usual practice of going door to door.
Diane Ravitch's blog 