A Virginia healthcare company said it was closing three rural clinics as part of its "ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act."
By Brad Reed
Hospitals and healthcare clinics across the US have been announcing layoffs, service cuts, and closures in the weeks since Republicans passed a budget law that’s estimated to slash spending on Medicaid by nearly $1 trillion over the next decade.
Monday reporting by CNN highlighted that Augusta Medical Group is closing three of its rural clinics in Virginia. The company said in a statement earlier this month that the closures were “part of Augusta Health’s ongoing response to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the resulting realities for healthcare delivery.”
The CNN report noted that Democratic gubernatorial candidate Abigail Spanberger recently campaigned in Buena Vista, one of the rural communities that will be losing its clinic, to make the case that the cuts in the GOP’s budget law should be reversed.
Tim Layton, an associate professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, told CNN that rural areas figure to be particularly vulnerable to the Medicaid cuts given their lower population densities.
“You can expect those places to be impacted by now having people who don’t even have Medicaid,” he said. “With fewer people to spread fixed costs across, it becomes harder and harder to stay open.”
Layton also dismissed Republicans’ claims to have created protections for rural hospitals with a $50 billion rural health fund, as he described it as a “short-term patch” that will “go pretty quick.” KFF earlier this year estimated that rural Medicaid spending would fall by $137 billion as a result of the GOP law, which is nearly triple the money allocated by the health fund.
Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for Virginia attorney general, seized on the CNN report and used it to tie incumbent Republican Virginia Attorney General Jason Miyares to the national Republican Party’s policy agenda under President Donald Trump.
“The Big Bill causing three rural clinics in Virginia to close is just the tip of the iceberg,” he wrote in a social media post. “And it’s happening because Jason Miyares is too scared to fight against Trump’s Medicaid cuts that will throw nearly 300,000 Virginians off their healthcare.”
American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten also ripped the GOP for passing Medicaid cuts that are hurting the communities they represent.
“Hundreds of healthcare providers in rural areas depend on Medicaid funding to keep doors open and care for patients,” she wrote. “But Trump’s Big Ugly Bill cuts millions from Medicaid, leaving these healthcare providers in jeopardy.”
Leor Tal, campaign director for Unrig Our Economy, said that the cuts to Medicaid looked particularly bad politically for Republicans when contrasted to the tax cuts that disproportionately benefit high-income Americans.
“These closures are the congressional Republican agenda in action: cuts to healthcare for rural moms and families, tax breaks for millionaires and billionaires,” Tal said. “These closures are not an accident—they are the direct result of a law written to serve the wealthy and leave working people behind, and unless Republicans in Congress reverse course, more working-class Americans will be left behind while the rich get even richer.”
"Milei was already gifted a $42 billion lifeline from the US-controlled IMF and the World Bank," said one economics writer, "but even that was not enough to stabilize Milei's crazy Austrian School experiment."
By Stephen Prager
In his first meeting with a foreign head of state after being reelected president last year, Donald Trump welcomed Argentina’s far-right libertarian President Javier Milei to Mar-a-Lago.
At a lavish gala, Argentina’s president slathered his host with compliments, describing Trump’s return to office as the “greatest political comeback in history.”
Before a crowd of onlookers, Trump would return the favor, telling Milei, “The job you’ve done is incredible. Make Argentina Great Again, you know, MAGA. He’s a MAGA person.”
On Monday, less than a year later, Milei arrived in New York for this week’s meeting of the United Nations General Assembly, begging for help as Argentina’s economy continues its freefall and reels from nearly two years of his radical economic austerity program.
Milei’s fealty to Trump bore fruit. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent promised that the nation’s financial department “stands ready to do what is needed within its mandate to support Argentina.”
In what he described as an effort to tame Argentina’s runaway inflation, Milei, who has described himself as an “anarcho capitalist,” has spent the time since he was elected president in 2023 instituting a brutal regime of what has been referred to as economic “shock therapy.”
His agenda has centered on taking a “chainsaw” to government institutions and worker protections: slashing energy and transportation subsidies, halting public infrastructure projects, declaring war on labor unions, freezing wage and pension increases, and firing tens of thousands of government employees.
The result was predictable: By February 2025, the country had begun to rapidly deindustrialize, unemployment was soaring, and more than half of Argentinians lived in poverty.
However, this did not stop Trump from modeling his economic agenda, often explicitly, after Milei’s—most notably through the exploits of the chainsaw-brandishing billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which he used to lay waste to the administrative state. Trump, meanwhile, has signed legislation gutting social services like Medicaid and food assistance, busted public unions, and canceled numerous green energy and infrastructure contracts.
The result has likewise been a slump in economic activity, culminating in unemployment numbers critics say the administration has been desperate to bury.
The US president has already intervened once to help soften Argentina’s landing. As El País notes:
Thanks to Trump’s political support, the government agreed to a $20 billion bailout with the International Monetary Fund last April—to which the country still owes another $40 billion—and achieved a measure of calm, but it lasted barely three months.
Now, with Milei facing mass street protests against his budget cut proposals, a hostile legislature that routinely vetoes his agenda, and a weakening peso in the face of continued uncertainty, he has turned to the US for another bailout, which the US hopes will help ease the country’s economic woes enough to stave off a thrashing for his party in the country’s general legislative elections on October 26.
Referring to Argentina as a “systemically important US ally in Latin America,” Bessent said that “all options for stabilization are on the table.” This, he said, “may include, but [is] not limited to, swap lines, direct currency purchases, and purchases of US dollar-denominated government debt from Treasury’s Exchange Stabilization Fund.”
Notably, Bessent continued to praise Milei’s “support for fiscal discipline and pro-growth reforms.” Despite its catastrophic effects, he described Milei’s chainsaw agenda as “necessary to break Argentina’s long history of decline.”
US Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) denounced the bailout as another favor from Trump to one of his political allies.
“First, Trump made us pay higher coffee and beef prices to support a convicted coup-plotter in Brazil,” she said, referring to Trump’s attempt to use harsh tariffs to pressure the Brazilian government into dropping charges against Jair Bolsonaro, who was ultimately convicted last week of attempting to overthrow the government. “Now, he wants American taxpayers to bail out his friend Milei in Argentina.”
(Video: The Geopolitical Economy Report)
But as Benjamin Norton of the Geopolitical Economy Report argues, the motivation goes deeper than simply helping out a friend. It is an effort to save the reputation of “actually existing libertarianism” and the fortunes of US investors who’ve cast their lot with him.
“Milei was already gifted a $42 billion lifeline from the US-controlled IMF and the World Bank (after Argentina already owed more debt to the IMF than any other country), but even that was not enough to stabilize Milei’s crazy Austrian School experiment,” Norton said. “The US government is doing this not only to prop up one of its most loyal puppets in Latin America, but also in order to benefit wealthy US investors who hold Argentine stocks and bonds, and US corporations that want Argentina’s lithium.”
With Trump having modeled his oligarch-friendly economic agenda on Milei’s, journalist Jacob Silverman—author of the forthcoming book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley—argued that allowing the libertarian radical to twist in the wind is not an option for Trump.
“Javier Milei can’t be allowed to fail,” Silverman said, “because MAGA leaders and the tech right have propped him up as a true libertarian fighting the globalists and ‘doing what needs to be done’: Immiserating his people on behalf of private capital.”
"Trump’s remarks, which downplayed the urgency of climate action and pushed for expanded fossil fuel investment, come as the world continues to experience record-breaking heat, fires, and floods," said one campaigner.
By Julia Conley
“A thinly-veiled threat to global peace, progress, and survival” was how one climate justice organization described US President Donald Trump’s hourlong address to the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday as the international community took in Trump’s attacks on global cooperation, migration, and the consensus among scientists that human activity is causing the climate crisis and a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy is needed to avoid the worst impacts.
Namrata Chowdhary, head of public engagement at 350.org, said the president’s speech offered proof of a warning from UN Secretary-General António Guterres just hours before, in which Guterres had said the world has “entered an age of reckless disruption and relentless human suffering,” with peace and progress “buckling under the weight of impunity, inequality, and indifference.”
Trump drew gasps from the assembled world leaders when he said predictions about the climate emergency by the UN and the global science community “were wrong” and “were made by stupid people.”
The BBCreported that some diplomats “could be seen shaking their heads” as the president called climate change “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said the comment showed Trump “is representing his fossil fuel billionaire friends, not science.”
“Climate change is REAL. It is an existential threat to the planet and future generations. We must transform our energy systems away from fossil fuels,” said the senator.
Guterres’ warning “was only emphasized by the erratic speech given by Donald Trump: Reckless. Disruptive. Indifferent,” said Chowdhary. “And mocking with impunity the relentless suffering around the world, in a speech hard to distinguish from reality TV of the worst kind.”
Trump’s speech came weeks after hundreds of people were killed in one day by flooding in Pakistan—a disaster fueled by increasingly intense monsoon seasons that scientists have said are caused by fossil fuel emissions and planetary heating.
Earlier this year, a study by British and Italian researchers found that deadly flooding in Texas was also made significantly worse by the impacts of climate change.
“Trump’s remarks, which downplayed the urgency of climate action and pushed for expanded fossil fuel investment, come as the world continues to experience record-breaking heat, fires, and floods,” said Chowdhary. “At the upcoming UN climate summit, world leaders face a stark choice: Stand with people and the planet, or with the fossil fuel industry.”
Mauro Vieira, the minister of foreign affairs in Brazil, which will host the UN Climate Change Conference (COP30) in November, told CNN that Trump’s attacks on policies demanding a shift to renewable energy do not change Brazil’s position on the climate.
“We believe in renewables,” said Vieira. “This will save the planet. That’s our position.”
JL Andrepont, US senior policy analyst at 350.org, emphasized that a majority of Trump’s own constituents know that the climate crisis is being caused by fossil fuels and support a shift away from them.
“This stream of lies is part of the same fossil-fueled billionaire agenda that got tens of thousands into the NYC streets this weekend, calling for climate justice,” said Andrepont. “The leader of the world’s top polluting country is trying to tell the people—from our Pacific family members to the climate- and conflict-displaced peoples he’s deporting—that their lived reality is not real. But there are far more of us calling for human rights than there are of him and his cronies.”
“We refuse to be pawns in Trump’s unjust quest to pad the pockets of billionaires like him,” added Andrepont. “It’s time to draw the line and make billionaires in and out of government pay for the damage they’ve caused and fund the needs of the people.”
"This outrageous act by immigration officials is inexcusable," said an advocacy group for children with disabilities and medical complexities.
By Jessica Corbett
A family in Leominster, Massachusetts is accusing US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of holding a 5-year-old autistic girl outside their home last week in an attempt to pressure her immigrant father to surrender to federal authorities.
Footage of the incident was published Monday by NBCUniversal’s Spanish-language Telemundo Nueva Inglaterra. The video shows the little girl seated outside an open vehicle, drinking from a water bottle while surrounded by law enforcement.
In the video, a man can be heard shouting “Don’t touch her!” and a woman identified as the girl’s mother tells one agent that the others took her daughter, who is 5 years old and on the autism spectrum. She also says, “Give me my daughter back.”
The mother, who did not want her name shared, told Telemundo that her husband, 22-year-old Edward Hip, called her while driving with their daughter because he thought they were being followed. When they tried to return home, agents grabbed the child.
The video shows agents trying to get Hip to come outside the house to show them identification. The mother told Telemundo that during the incident, which occurred last Tuesday, the agents threatened to enter their home.
According toNBC Boston, “Leominster police arrived at the scene, recovered the child, and returned her to the family.”
Neither parent was taken into custody that day. However, two days later, on his wife’s birthday, ICE returned to their home, pulled Hip out of a car, and arrested him, she said. He is now being held at a detention center in Plymouth.
NBC Boston reported that Hip and his wife, who are from Guatemala, “have an active asylum claim and are the parents of two children born in the United States.”
The family’s experience is part of an attempt by ICE to deliver on US President Donald Trump’s promise of mass deportations.
While ICE has not responded to Telemundo’s request for comment, the footage has sparked swift outrage, with critics across the United States and beyond condemning agents’ treatment of the family as “fascism,” ”truly evil,” and ”a fucking abomination.”
Joanna Kuebler, chief of programs at the advocacy group America’s Voice, said in a Tuesday statement: “That ICE would try to hold hostage a parent’s love for a child to force a father’s arrest and detention is abhorrent. This visceral event is just another frightening example of a broader and deeply disturbing pattern by this administration.”
“The combination of cruelty and impunity in pursuit of a mass deportation crusade is dangerous for America and all of our safety,” Kuebler added. “Smashing car windows, ripping families apart, and traumatizing children threatens the public safety of American communities and the stability of our nation.”
"The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech," said one First Amendment advocate.
By Julia Conley
The executive order issued by US President Donald Trump Monday evening claimed a legal authority that the president doesn’t have to designate the “antifa” movement as a “domestic terrorist organization,” despite the fact that no central group exists to assign the designation to—but rights advocates said Trump’s claims about antifa weren’t the point of the order.
“This isn’t an attack on antifa,” said Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Healthcare. “It’s an attack on our rights.”
The executive order states that antifa, a portmanteau of the term “anti-fascist,” will be designated a “domestic terrorist organization.” The movement is comprised of autonomous individuals and loosely affiliated groups who oppose fascism, but has no central organizational structure or leaders. People associated with the movement mobilized in 2017 to oppose the white nationalist “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, where a nonviolent anti-racist protester, Heather Heyer, was killed by a white supremacist who rammed a car into a group of demonstrators.
In the order, the president pinned blame for a “pattern of political violence” on anti-fascist protesters and organizers and pledged that the executive branch will “utilize all applicable authorities to investigate, disrupt, and dismantle any and all illegal operations—especially those involving terrorist actions—conducted by Antifa or any person claiming to act on behalf of Antifa.”
The order was written so broadly, said journalist Prem Thakker of Zeteo, that it suggests “someone recording masked agents snatching people off the streets, or asking these agents what they’re doing, can be deemed a ‘terrorist.‘”
The president has ordered US citizens, he added, “to be anti-antifa.”
With no central organization to assign the “domestic terrorist organization” to, said rights advocates, the executive order will likely be used to crack down on a wide range of left-wing protest activity and speech.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, was among those who noted that no US law or statute gives the president the authority “to designate anything as a ‘domestic terrorist organization.‘”
All 219 groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, such as ISIS and al-Qaeda, are foreign entities, and the designation makes it possible for people who provide material support to those groups to be prosecuted by the federal government.
“This would appear to have no direct legal effect beyond acting as a statement of policy for the executive branch,” said Reichlin-Melnick.
Chip Gibbons, policy director at the First Amendment advocacy group Defending Rights and Dissent, said that while the order “is without statutory basis, a close read of the language mirrors existing FBI powers, such as ‘terrorist enterprise investigations’ into ‘anarchist extremists.‘”
“The order appears to be a green light to law enforcement and intelligence to spy on and investigate left-wing political speech,” said Gibbons. “Given the FBI’s current guidelines, which encourage preventative intelligence in the name of counterterrorism, the FBI will have no problem continuing its sordid history of preemptively investigating political speech under the pretext of thwarting terrorism.”
At The Conversation, Dafydd Townley, a University of Portsmouth teaching fellow, wrote that the classification of antifa “as a terrorist organization could have profound effects on the First Amendment rights of large numbers of law-abiding US citizens.”
“It would be a serious danger to American democracy if US citizens were unable to voice their protest and exercise their right to free speech because of this classification,” Townley wrote.
The designation was announced amid widespread public opposition to many of Trump’s policies, including the deployment of federal troops to US cities to crack down on unhoused populations, immigrant communities, and what the president has claimed is a wave of violent crime—despite statistics showing crime is on the decline in all the cities he’s targeted.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have already responded violently to people protesting raids and arrests of immigrant neighbors, including last week when an ICE agent was filmed throwing US congressional candidate Kat Abughazaleh to the ground at a protest in the Chicago suburbs.
“This isn’t about ‘antifa’—whatever that is,” said journalist Erin Overbey on Tuesday. “Trump’s new executive order is written so that anyone protesting against the US government, ICE, or even top politicians can potentially be deemed a terrorist.”
“It’s federal weaponization against free speech and the right to protest itself. Full stop,” she said. “And it’s un-American as hell.”
"Congress should investigate and put everyone involved under oath at a public hearing to get to the bottom of this threat to free speech," said the co-CEO of Free Press.
By Stephen Prager
Jimmy Kimmel will return to the airwaves Tuesday night after his suspension by ABC was met with a massive public backlash. But while they say the comedian’s reinstatement is cause for celebration, advocates say that it’s just one small victory in a much larger fight against the Trump administration’s campaign to censor dissent.
Andrew O’Neill, the advocacy director of the group Indivisible, which called on its members to boycott ABC‘s parent company Disney in response to the company’s capitulation to President Donald Trump, said that Kimmel “wasn’t reinstated because Disney executives slept on it and had a change of heart.”
“He’s back on air because those executives got a wake-up call from the American public,” O’Neill said. “People all over the country showed up, canceling subscriptions, protesting outside ABC and Disney, Nexstar and more, and made it damn clear this political alliance with Trump was not in Disney’s best interest. Trump’s authoritarian playbook is unpopular, and when these CEOs comply, it’s not only cowardly. It’s unstrategic.”
Kimmel’s program was suspended last week after Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr threatened the broadcast licenses of local ABC affiliates, which led to pressure from the media conglomerates the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Nexstar to take action against Kimmel following comments he made criticizing Trump and his administration’s reaction to the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Craig Aaron, co-CEO of the media monitoring nonprofit Free Press, said that Kimmel’s reinstatement shows that “protest works.” However, he said, “the Trump regime’s war on free speech is no joke—and it’s not over. Brendan Carr threatened the licenses of ABC affiliates with coercive, mafia-like threats because his boss in the White House didn’t like Kimmel’s views, a chilling First Amendment violation that would have forced any previous FCC chair to resign.”
“The next time the Trump administration uses its power to shut down dissent, a rich and famous comedian likely won’t be the target,” Aaron continued. “We are seeing journalists being fired and even deported for simply reporting the facts about this administration. Their stories are not making headline news, but the government’s attacks on their speech are no less important.”
In the days after Kimmel was forced off the air, Trump also threatened to strip the broadcasting licenses of networks that gave him “bad press,” saying, “They’re not allowed to do that.”
“While we’re glad Kimmel is back on air,” O’Neill said, “the fight doesn’t end here. FCC Chairman Carr still must be hauled up to Congress to testify. Sinclair and Nexstar must commit to airing the program and drop their wild demands. And Bob Iger and Disney must make it clear they are fully opposed to being bullied by Trump and his cronies.”
Sinclair and Nexstar, which own a combined 20% of ABC’s local news affiliates, said Tuesday that they will refuse to air Kimmel’s broadcast. In order for Kimmel to return, Sinclair—known for its efforts to push right-wing talking points into the mouths of local anchors—has demanded that Kimmel issue a public apology and make a “meaningful personal donation” to Kirk’s family and to his conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA.
As Aaron noted, Sinclair and Nexstar, two of the US’s largest owners of local media, are currently ”lobbying for a major merger requiring FCC approval,” which he said may explain why they were so eager to pressure ABC to comply with Carr’s demands. Last week, Democrats in the House of Representatives called on Carr to resign from his post and threatened to subject him to an investigation.
Beyond Carr, Aaron said that “Congress should investigate and put everyone involved under oath at a public hearing to get to the bottom of this threat to free speech” including Nexstar founder Perry Sook, Sinclair CEO Christopher Ripley and chairman David Smith, and Disney’s Iger, so the public can understand “what pressure the government put on these media companies and what they were promised in exchange for cutting shows from their lineup and silencing network voices.”
Lina Khan, the former chair of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), toldMSNBC‘s Ali Velshi that the Kimmel saga is emblematic of a much broader problem of capitulation by corporations that have grown less accountable due to unchecked consolidation.
“Overwhelmingly, we have seen that some of the most powerful corporations in this country... have chosen profit and self-enrichment over any kind of commitment to democracy or the principles of liberty,” Khan said. “We’ve heard people say, ‘Well, actually, we really need to protect and pacify corporate interests because they’re going to be the ones that are going to stand up to government abuse. This moment should entirely disabuse us of that illusion.”
She discussed that this moment comes after “40 years of a bipartisan choice to accept a philosophy that basically thought monopolies are good, that consolidation was good.” This has been particularly evident in the media. As a recent article from the University of Chicago’s business schoolnotes:
In the past decade, consolidation of American TV broadcasting has accelerated and put 40% of all local TV news stations under the control of the three largest broadcast conglomerates: Gray Television, Nexstar Media Group, and Sinclair Broadcast Group. Their stations—each company now owns about 100 affiliated with ABC, CBS, FOX, or NBC—operate in more than 80 percent of US media markets.
“If you’re somebody who cares about protecting democracy, of course, we need to care about voting rights, making sure that elections are fair,” Khan said. “But we also need to make sure that we understand extreme concentration of economic power is incompatible with democracy, and that needs to be at the center of our democratic agenda too.”
Update: This article has been updated to note additional reporting from the New York Times that Nexstar, as well as Sinclair, would refuse to air Kimmel’s program Tuesday night.
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US President Donald Trump speaks about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk on September 10, 2025.
(Photo: WhiteHouse.gov)
To propel American fascism, the real Charlie Kirk had to be replaced by a mythologized one, something masters of deceit promptly manufactured.
By Werner Lange
For years, fascist forces in America have been loosely bifurcated along spiritual and secular lines, one turning a hijacked faith into a holy war against “godless Liberals” and the other using metastasized political power to cripple democracy, curtail free speech, and crush the “lunatic Left.” The murder of Charlie Kirk changed all that, and brought the two trajectories together, dramatically and dangerously.
A broad united front for fascism now confronts us. To propel its potency, the real Charlie Kirk had to be replaced by a mythologized one, something masters of deceit promptly manufactured.
In the wake of his death, comparing Charlie Kirk to martyred saints of the church, especially Stephen, was standard fare for MAGA pastors. Rob McCoy, who claims to have been Kirk’s pastor, declared that “we are in a spiritual battle; the same murderous spirit that raged against the prophets, that crucified Christ and martyred Stephen is raging again in our day.” A podcast called Reasons For Hope*Jesus produced a slick video on “Parallels in the Death of Stephen (Acts 7) and Charlie Kirk.” Garret Cuzick, a pastor in Kentucky, delivered a sermon on “The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk” the Sunday following his murder pointing out that “Saint Stephen was killed and thousands rose up; I pray that because of Charlie Kirk’s death, thousands, if not millions, rise up. The blood of martyrs is the seed of the church.” Bob Lonsberry, a member and former missionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the same church affiliation as Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s assassin), broadcast a “sermon on the death of Charlie Kirk” also comparing Kirk to Stephen, both as martyrs: “We saw that with Stephen, and saw it with Charlie. When you speak divine truth to the powers of darkness, the cost can be very high.” Timothy Dolan, cardinal of NYC and former president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, identified Kirk as a “modern St. Paul.” Ralph Hathaway went a bit further in his September 20 article in Catholic365—“Charlie Kirk, JFK, RFK, MLK and St. Stephen: All Heroes and Saints for the Courage to Speak Out for Righteousness.”
Comparing Charlie Kirk to St. Stephen was also a common theme at his memorial service held in a packed NFL stadium in Glendale, Arizona. Donald Trump Jr. even claimed that Charlie, like Stephen, likely saw Jesus standing next to God welcoming him to heaven. Other speakers enhanced his hagiography with comparisons to St. Francis, Moses, Washington, Lincoln, JFK, and MLK. Robert Kennedy Jr. even has the audacity to explicitly (and incorrectly) assert that both Christ and Charlie died at age 31 and that both “changed the trajectory of history” with their lives and deaths.
The memorial service, which attracted a MAGA pantheon of elected and appointed officials, was held on September 21, World Peace Day, yet speakers repeatedly talked of a spiritual war engulfing America and the need to put on “the full armor of God.” Benny Johnson of Turning Point opened his tribute with shouts of “fight for Charlie Kirk” and then referenced Romans 13 to substantiate his call for godly rulers to “wield the sword against the terror of evil men in our nation.” Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, asserted that the opposition “cannot conceive of the army they have arisen in all of us,” and confidently proclaimed that “we will defeat forces of darkness.” Ben Carson, perhaps the only African-American at this event, raged against Marxists and proponents of the Social Gospel. US President Donald Trump raised the specter of “Antifa terrorists” and “radical left lunatics,” contrasting them with “the immortal” Charlie Kirk, “a great American hero” whose “voice will echo through the generations.”
The Nazi Martyr
Instead of these contrived comparisons of Charlie Kirk with saints of the church and heroes of the state, there is a strikingly real one with another racist reprobate glorified by fascists. Horst Wessel was the son of a Lutheran pastor and raised as a devout Christian. During the turbulent 1920s in Weimar Germany, he joined several right-wing political gangs before settling on membership in the Nazi Party in 1926 as part of the notorious and brutal SA, the Brown Shirts. His passion and pugnacity caught the attention of the Nazi leader Joseph Goebbels, who sent him to a Nazi youth camp in Vienna for training in militancy and agitation. He returned to Berlin as the SA leader of his neighborhood and eagerly took part in many fights, verbally and physically, against communists and other anti-fascists.
In mid-January 1930, the 22-year old Wessel was shot in the head during an eviction action by Albrecht Höhler, a reputed communist though the German Communist Party denied he was a member. Nevertheless, Goebbels capitalized on his murder to demand that “the degenerate communist subhumans be crushed to a pulp.” Sensing the enormous propagandistic value of having a young Christian fascist as a martyr, Goebbels characterized Wessel as “Christlike,” as “a man who calls out through his deeds—‘Come, follow me, I shall redeem you… a divine element works in him, making him the man he is and causing him to act in this way and no other. One man must set an example, and offer himself as a sacrifice.” Wessel died of sepsis in late February.
The parallels between the now defunct Horst Wessel myth and the rapidly growing Charlie Kirk myth are painfully obvious, as is the intended propagandistic function by their respective fascist creators.
His funeral in early March was attended by several dignitaries, including a son of Kaiser Wilhelm, as well as key Nazi leaders such as Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels. Out of security concerns, Hitler did not attend the funeral, but did give a speech at Wessel’s gravesite in early 1933 calling him a “Blutzeuge” (martyr) and stating that his sacrifice was “a monument more lasting than stone and bronze.” In his eulogy, Goebbels said, “His spirit is lifted up to live with us all, he marches on with us.” Some 30,000 residents of Berlin lined the streets to witness the passing of his coffin. Along with the SA regiments, they joined in singing the “Horst Wessel Song,” (“Die Fahne Hoch”), which subsequently became the Nazi co-anthem from 1933 until 1945. Every Nazi ceremony included its performance, and every school child throughout the Third Reich was required to sing it as part of the curriculum. It is not unlike the song “Carry the Flame: Charlie Kirk Tribute Anthem,” which went viral after its Apple Music release on September 13.
The Horst Wessel myth became a core ingredient of the Nazi propaganda machine. Several schools, streets, districts, and military units were named in his honor as was a naval vessel. A popular 1933 biographical film about Wessel emphasized his Christian background. His myth along with the Nazi regime came crashing down in 1945. In 2011, anti-fascists vandalized his grave marker with the words “Keine Ruhe für Nazis” (No Rest for Nazis).
Growl of a Dying Empire
The parallels between the now defunct Horst Wessel myth and the rapidly growing Charlie Kirk myth are painfully obvious, as is the intended propagandistic function by their respective fascist creators. The target in both cases is democracy, particularly its anti-fascist defenders and promoters. Although the outcome of the current dialectical conflict between the two emergent fronts, one for and one against fascism in America, is not absolutely certain, progressive forces have a distinct advantage. Much has changed since WWII when the USA inherited economic and political supremacy in the world. Unilateral US hegemony is no more. A multilateral world of shared power has steadily and irreversibly emerged over the past several decades.
Accordingly, the boisterous outcry and desperate attempt to use the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk as a divinely empowered sword to make America supreme again represents the growl of a dying empire.
The Trump administration is abusing federal power to silence dissenting voices in a manner that has not been seen in over 70 years. The country survived Sen. Joseph McCarthy, but will it survive what Trump has wrought?
Kimmel isn’t the only voice that’s been targeted for failing to toe the line in the wake of Kirk’s murder, but Kimmel’s firing is the one that’s outraged millions of Americans who aren’t political junkies, so it's the one that offers the best chance to act.
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