Politics | Voter.org

Charlie Kirk and the ‘Third Great Awakening’

September 27, 2025 Third, Kirk, Charlie, great, 'Awakening'0 comment

In the two weeks since Charlie Kirk’s killing, Trump-administration officials and allies have not only promised a sweeping crackdown on liberal groups. They have marshaled the language of a rising charismatic Christian movement to describe their political agenda as a cosmic battle against the forces of evil. At Kirk’s memorial service on Sunday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth described the moment at hand as “not a political war” and “not even a cultural war—it’s a spiritual war.” The right-wing influencer Benny Johnson called out the heads of the Justice Department, the…

Brendan Carr’s Half-Empty Threat

September 23, 2025 HalfEmpty, Threat, Brendan, Carr’s0 comment

As chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Alfred Sikes took the agency’s duty to foster broadcasting in “the public interest” seriously. Sikes, a conservative who was appointed by George H. W. Bush in 1989, engaged in a long-running battle against Howard Stern’s employer, Infinity Broadcasting, levying repeated fines against its stations for violating rules against broadcasting “indecent” material when children were in the audience. (The legal tangle helped persuade Stern to move to satellite radio, where he faced no such editorial restrictions.) One thing he never did, however, was seek…

Pity Trump’s Defenders

September 19, 2025 trumps, Pity, Defenders0 comment

Minutes after news broke that ABC had bowed to the Trump administration’s threats and indefinitely suspended Jimmy Kimmel, Ari Fleischer, the former Bush-administration press secretary, tried to explain why the thing that just happened was not actually what happened. “Liberals want to make this firing about ‘free speech,’” he wrote on X, “Did it ever occur to them the issue might be accuracy? Kimmel told his viewers that Charlie Kirk was murdered by MAGA.” Nothing to see here, just a network imposing a zero-tolerance standard for factual accuracy upon its…

Trump Has a Warning for Spencer Cox

September 15, 2025 Warning, Spencer, Trump0 comment

Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. “To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.” Shortly after he finished, Cox’s phone rang. The president was calling. “You…

Strawberries in Winter

September 11, 2025 Winter, Strawberries0 comment

This article was featured in the One Story to Read Today newsletter. Sign up for it here. Some years ago, trying to understand what it might take to break America’s fever of political violence, I asked a former Justice Department official what she thought about the possibility of a second civil war in the United States. Mary McCord, a former federal prosecutor who has spent much of her career thinking about how to combat extremism, was worried about worsening political violence. (I favor a simple definition of political violence: actions…

Democrats’ Epstein Derangement Syndrome

September 7, 2025 Democrats, syndrome', Epstein, Derangement0 comment

Updated on September 5, 2025, at 2:55 p.m. To hear Donald Trump’s critics tell it, all of the disquieting news that the president has generated this summer—the FBI raid on former National Security Adviser John Bolton’s home, the National Guard deployment in cities, Trump’s attempt to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, his accusation that Barack Obama led a coup and committed “the crime of the century”—has been an effort to divert attention from the issue that truly terrifies Trump: the Jeffrey Epstein files. It has become the Democrats’ go-to…