About The Arrested In NYC-

These Are the 15 New York Officials ICE and NYPD Arrested in Manhattan

More than a dozen elected officials were arrested in or around 26 Federal Plaza in New York City, where ICE detains people in what courts have ruled are unsanitary conditions.

Police arrested more than a dozen New York state and city elected officials Thursday at 26 Federal Plaza, the Manhattan immigration court and an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) field office, many as they pressed to gain access to the building’s 10th-floor lockup, where recent court rulings—including a temporary restraining order—directed ICE not to cram immigrants into overcrowded, unsanitary conditions.

The lawmakers and other officials, arrested around 3:45 pm local time, say they were “attempting to conduct oversight” following claims that people appearing for court hearings were being confined for hours or days without proper food, medical care, or contact with attorneys.

A spokesperson for New York City comptroller Brad Lander’s office told WIRED by phone that Lander and 10 other elected officials were denied access and then arrested while “engaged in an action on the 10th floor of 26 Federal Plaza, where ICE inhumanely detains thousands of immigrant New Yorkers.” Lander was previously arrested at the same facility in June while accompanying a migrant man whom ICE targeted with arrest.

A joint press release issued by New York officials in the aftermath lists the electeds among those arrested:

  • NYC comptroller Brad Lander
  • State senator Julia Salazar
  • State senator Jabari Brisport
  • State senator Gustavo Rivera
  • Assembly member Robert Carroll
  • Assembly member Emily Gallagher
  • Assembly member Jessica Gonzalez-Rojas
  • Assembly member Marcela Mitaynes
  • Assembly member Claire Valdez
  • Assembly member Tony Simone
  • Assembly member Steven Raga
  • Public advocate Jumaane Williams
  • Assembly member Phara Souffrant-Forrest
  • Council member Sandy Nurse
  • Council member Tiffany Caban

At least some officials, according to Lander’s office, had been released at the time of writing. The final four on the list were arrested outside the facility, reportedly by the New York City Police Department. Dozens of New Yorkers who had gathered, holding signs and chanting “ICE out of NY,” were also arrested, officials said. A follow-up demonstration was planned for 6 pm ET at Foley Square, a longtime rallying point for immigrant rights protests in the heart of Manhattan’s Civic Center neighborhood.

NEW YORK NEW YORK  SEPTEMBER 18 Comptroller Brad Lander joins 11 local elected officials inside lower Manhattans federal...

Neither the Department of Homeland Security nor ICE immediately responded to a request for comment. Reached by phone, a New York Police Department spokesperson declined to comment because “the incident is ongoing.”

Under federal law, members of Congress have explicit authority to inspect immigration detention facilities, including conducting unannounced visits. State and city lawmakers don’t have that authority and must rely on DHS or ICE to approve such requests. The Trump administration has instituted new policies, such as mandating advance notice and designating certain field offices and short-term sites off-limits, that have blocked or delayed congressional oversight visits in recent months.

Federal judges and civil rights groups have zeroed in on the conditions inside 26 Federal Plaza. This summer, a federal court issued a preliminary injunction against the government after allegations surfaced that the facility’s detainees were being crammed into severely overcrowded rooms and made to sleep on bare floors and were denied food, hygiene, and confidential access to their lawyers.

NEW YORK NEW YORK  SEPTEMBER 18 Dozens of anti Immigration and Customs Enforcement  protesters are arrested after...
NEW YORK NEW YORK  SEPTEMBER 18 Dozens of anti Immigration and Customs Enforcement  protesters are arrested after...

The problems echo a broader pattern across the US, where watchdogs and courts have flagged overcrowding, poor sanitation, and blocked access to counsel in ICE facilities from Arizona to Louisiana.

Advocates say some of the most jarring overcrowding is happening on 26 Federal Plaza’s 10th floor, where detainees have estimated that between 70 and 90 people have been crammed into rooms measuring roughly 215 square feet. That would leave each person with roughly the space of a doormat—less room than a folded bath towel—in an area no bigger than a studio apartment kitchen.

The arrests came as part of a coordinated action by progressive Democrats, timed to amplify demands for Albany to reconvene and pass the New York for All Act. The bill would bar state and local agencies, including police and sheriffs, from sharing information or resources with ICE, aiming to stop what lawmakers describe as abductions of immigrants at court hearings and check-ins. Along with New York City Council’s proposed Trust Act—which would let people sue if city agencies unlawfully cooperate with ICE—the legislation is essential, Democrats say, to defend due process and prevent local governments from becoming de facto extensions of ICE.

NEW YORK NEW YORK  SEPTEMBER 18 Dozens of anti Immigration and Customs Enforcement  protesters are arrested after...

“The criminalization, demonization, and state-sponsored violence against immigrants in this country has reached a fever pitch under this administration. All of us, and especially elected leaders, must do more to protect New Yorkers, regardless of when they arrived,” Assembly member Emily Gallagher, a Democrat who represents parts of Brooklyn, said in a statement.

Many elected officials have been arrested while protesting the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement tactics. Among others, in June, Senator Alex Padilla of California was handcuffed after challenging Homeland Security secretary Kristi Noem at a Los Angeles press conference, and in May, Newark mayor Ras Baraka was arrested outside a federal detention center during an attempted oversight visit.

In a statement, Yasmine Farhang, executive director of the Immigrant Defense Project, applauded the lawmakers’ actions Thursday, accusing the US government of “egregious abuses of power,” and imploring New York governor Kathy Hochul to use her clemency powers to shield migrants dealing with overlapping punishments from the courts and immigration authorities.

“New York leaders cannot let this cruelty go unchecked,” she said. “The moment to act is NOW.”

Additional reporting by Andrew Couts.

Governmental Overreach

Brendan Carr Isn’t Going to Stop Until Someone Makes Him

In the wake of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, experts say the FCC commissioner’s conduct is flatly unconstitutional. They also expect him to keep going.

In what has become an all-too-regular display from Brendan Carr, the Federal Communications Commission chairman used a podcast appearance Wednesday to flex his regulatory power. In this instance, he threatened action against broadcasters that refused to punish Jimmy Kimmel for remarks he made on his ABC show Monday night.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on former Turning Point USA contributor Benny Johnson’s podcast on Wednesday. “These companies can find ways to change conduct to take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Since taking over the FCC at the beginning of the year, Carr has tested how far the agency can limit speech without ever quite formally censoring it. By leveraging his position as chairman, he has relied on informal threats and regulatory incentives to keep broadcasters in line with the Trump administration’s politics—and experts say Carr won’t end this campaign until someone stops him. For now, it’s not clear who’s even willing to try.

“He’ll push it until he’s stopped. Congress has been silent on this, and there hasn’t been a basis to get to court,” former FCC chair Tom Wheeler tells WIRED. “He’s been very artful in not making formal decisions that are appealable to the court, but instead having these informal, coercive activities that are not appealable, and so until Congress or the courts say he can’t, he’ll keep pushing.”

Over the past eight months, Carr—a formerly light-touch telecom regulator turned MAGA hardliner—has shown how far he’s willing to take this crusade. He has threatened to revoke broadcast licenses for outlets the administration sees as “distorting” news content, targeting Comcast outlets over news coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s deportation in April. He opened investigations into NPR and PBS underwriting announcements, alleging that they crossed into commercial advertising. Carr oversaw the merger between Paramount and Skydance and extracted concessions on CBS’s editorial work, pressuring the company to do away with its DEI policies and promise “viewpoint diversity” in coverage. (David Ellison, son of billionaire Trump supporter Larry Ellison, founded Skydance and became Paramount’s chair and chief executive officer following the merger.) At the same time, Donald Trump was suing CBS for having edited a 60 Minutes interview with Kamala Harris; after Paramount paid out $16 million to settle the suit, CBS said it would end Stephen Colbert’s show next spring.

“The FCC under Brendan Carr uses mergers and business interests of media companies as leverage to extract concessions, extract bribes, and extract censorship,” says Seth Stern, director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

Carr did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

While Carr’s threats have chased social media companies and cable networks, they’ve hit companies with business before the FCC the hardest. Nexstar, which owns dozens of ABC affiliate networks, was one of the companies to pull Jimmy Kimmel Live! just hours after Carr’s Wednesday threat. The company is currently seeking approval from the FCC for a $6.2 billion deal to buy Tegna, which owns networks in major markets including Austin, Texas, and San Diego, California. Sinclair, another major broadcasting company, also relies on the FCC to periodically renew its licenses and allocate the company spectrum.

To Genevieve Lakier, a professor of law at the University of Chicago whose research focuses on free speech, Carr’s threats against ABC appear to be “a pretty clear-cut case of jawboning.” Jawboning refers to a type of informal coercion where government officials try to pressure private entities into suppressing or changing speech without using any actual formal legal action. Since jawboning is typically done in letters and private meetings, it rarely leaves a paper trail, making it notoriously difficult to challenge in court.

This Kimmel suspension is a little different, Lakier says. During the podcast appearance, Carr explicitly named his target, threatened regulatory action, and within a matter of hours the companies complied.

“The Supreme Court has made clear that that’s unconstitutional in all circumstances,” says Lakier. “You’re just not allowed to do that. There’s no balancing. There’s no justification. Absolutely no, no way may the government do that.”

Even if Carr’s threats amount to unconstitutional jawboning, though, stopping him could still prove difficult. If ABC sued, it would need to prove coercion—and however a suit went, filing one could risk additional regulatory retaliation down the line. If Kimmel were to sue, there’s no promise that he would get anything out of the suit even if he won, says Lakier, making it less likely for him to pursue legal action in the first place.

“There’s not much there for him except to establish that his rights were violated. But there is a lot of benefit for everyone else,” says Lakier. “This has received so much attention that it would be good if there could be, from now on, some mechanism for more oversight from the courts over what Carr is doing.”

Organizations like the the Freedom of the Press Foundation have sought novel means of limiting Carr’s power. In July, the FPF submitted a formal disciplinary complaint to the DC Bar’s Office of Disciplinary Counsel arguing that Carr violated its ethical rules, misrepresenting the law by suggesting the FCC has the ability to regulate editorial viewpoints. Without formal rulings, companies affected by Carr’s threats would be some of the only organizations with grounding to sue. At the same time, they have proven to be some of the least likely groups to pursue legal action over the last eight months.

In a statement on Thursday, House Democratic leadership wrote that Carr had “disgraced the office he holds by bullying ABC” and called on him to resign. They said they plan to “make sure the American people learn the truth, even if that requires the relentless unleashing of congressional subpoena power,” but did not outline any tangible ways to rein in Carr’s power.

“People need to get creative,” says Stern. “The old playbook is not built for this moment and the law only exists on paper when you’ve got someone like Brendan Carr in charge of enforcing it.”

This vacuum has left Carr free to push as far as he likes, and it has spooked experts over how far this precedent will travel. Established in the 1930s, the FCC was designed to operate as a neutral referee, but years of media consolidation have dramatically limited the number of companies controlling programming over broadcast, cable, and now streaming networks. Spectrum is a limited resource the FCC controls, giving the agency more direct control over the broadcast companies that rely on it than it has over cable or streaming services. This concentration makes them infinitely easier to pressure, benefitting the Trump administration, Carr, but also whoever might come next.

“If political tides turn, I don’t have confidence that the Democrats won’t also use them in an unconstitutional and improper matter,” says Stern. The Trump administration is “really setting up this world where every election cycle, assuming we still have elections in this country, the content of broadcast news might drastically shift depending on which political party controls the censorship office.”

Makena Kelly is a senior writer at WIRED focused on the intersection of politics, power, and technology. She writes the Politics Lab newsletter that helps you make sense of how the internet is shaping our political reality—sign up here. She was previously at The Verge, CQ Roll Call, and the … Read More

What Always Happens, Explained

Politics / September 19, 2025

Threatening Vulnerable People Is No Way to Mourn Someone Who Was Murdered

Those who had nothing to do with the violence against Charlie Kirk are being menaced—just like always.

Elie Mystal

Charlie Kirk’s suspected murderer was a 22-year-old white guy from Utah, but in the week since he was shot, at least six Historically Black Colleges and Universities have been forced to cancel classes due to bomb threats made against their students and faculty. Columnist Karen Attiah got fired from The Washington Post. Representative Ilhan Omar was nearly censured. Countless Black people have been harassed and, worse, countless immigrants have been threatened with the possibility of deportation, all for insufficiently respecting the life and death of a white supremacist. 

Charlie Kirk’s suspected murderer was, again, a 22-year-old white guy from Utah who, I’ll bet, does not own either of my books and has most likely never read a single word I have written over my nearly two decades of public life, but this is what my mentions on Elon Musk’s apartheid-curious platform have looked like for a week:

Not that we needed more evidence, but the past week has been Exhibit One that this country hates Black people, and will do everything it can to silence, harass, and even murder us. A white man killed another white man for reasons we still don’t know, with a gun I don’t think he should have had, but Black people are catching death threats. That doesn’t make sense, unless you understand how deeply racist this country is. Black people are being fired from jobs and harassed online for insufficiently venerating a white supremacist, and having the temerity to describe his beliefs in public. It’s as if we’re all being asked to say our name is “Toby” instead of Kunta Kinte while being informed that the beatings will continue until morale improves. The white-led government, and many white employers, white-owned sports leagues, white public intellectuals, and a non-zero number of Black assimilationists and assorted would-be overseers are largely playing along with this racist gaslighting, proving once again that Black people have few, if any, real allies.

Somebody who considers themselves a good-white-ally(™) is just about to type “not all white people” or “also Matt Dowd” or “look at what happened to Jimmy Kimmel” in response to this article, as if I give a shit. What’s happening to white folks is that they’re being made to feel like Black people are made to feel every freaking day. Whenever white people catch a cold, Black people catch the flu, but God forbid I do a bit of triage before handing out chicken soup and Sprite to white folks feeling a bit under the weather these days.

The same thing is happening to the trans community, and the LGBTQ community more broadly, because when Kirk wasn’t railing against Black people, he was trying to stamp the LGBTQ community out of existence.

At this point, I’m supposed to turn and analyze what makes white males violently erupt against vulnerable people who have nothing to do with their problems. I’m supposed to talk about white gun culture and how it inevitably leads to racial and cultural violence. I’m supposed to talk about how Trump and his white supremacist government have given the very worst people in this country permission to carry out violence against any person they don’t like, with the promise of pardons should they undertake violence that pleases him. I know I’m supposed to address these topics, because these are the questions that have been floating around my professional networks for a week.

But even addressing those questions recenters the conversation around white folks and whiteness. It’s asking, “Now why did the monkey throw its poop at that fellow?” before you secure soap and a shower for the person covered in feces. At the moment, I’m just a little too beset by threats against myself and even my mother to think deeply about why white people do this. Analyzing why young white men are so dangerous to me is an intellectual luxury I do not have right now. I’m just trying to survive America for another week. 

Luckily, after a fashion, I have some experience with this. This is not the first round of death threats I’ve gotten, and, unless they successfully kill me this time, it won’t be the last. I’ve been a Black man in the public eye for a while now, and you don’t get to be an old public Black person without developing a few coping mechanisms to keep you going. For a lot of people currently under threat, this is their first rodeo. There are, for instance, a number of staffers at The Nation who are for the first time having to live with what I live with every day, since the vice president went after our publication. There are folks who were never on the kind of violent watch lists Kirk created who now find themselves on the wrong end of the online rope. 

It is terrifying to be in the eye of violent white folks. You have to take them seriously when they say they want you to come to harm. I cannot promise that you, or I, will survive what they’ll do next, but here are some tips to make it through this current phase of white America.

  1. Stick Together

They cannot kill, fire, or silence all of us. The violent people are predators and if you look at every natural predator on this earth, their first move is always to separate their target from the herd.

People must resist the urge to say some people deserve to be harassed and menaced by the government and the online right, as if to distinguish the people who deserve death threats from those who are “doing it the right way.”

Silence in the face of white supremacy is complicity with white supremacy. If we all resolve to not stay silent, we become a truth-telling hydra. Every time the white wing gets one of us, there should be others ready to take our places. (snip-MORE-excellent information)

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/black-people-threatened-after-assasination

Useful Info & Resource

Understanding the Legal Framework Governing a Shutdown

September 17, 2025 | By Sam Berger

The government funding deadline is fast approaching. With the Trump Administration’s continued efforts to impound and rescind funding, complicating Congress’s ability to reach an agreement on funding bills for the upcoming year, it is important to keep in mind the legal framework that governs a shutdown, and the limits a shutdown places on the executive branch.

This primer focuses on the activities that can (and cannot) legally continue during a shutdown; it does not address the impacts of a shutdown on government programs or the people who use them.

Critically, while the executive branch has some discretion as to what activities continue during a shutdown — and it is impossible to predict whether the Administration will take unlawful actions under the pretext of a shutdown[1] — a government shutdown does not provide the Administration any additional legal authority to fire federal employees, limit review of its actions by federal courts, or freeze funding once full-year appropriations are provided.

Activities That Can Continue During a Government Shutdown

Under the Antideficiency Act, agencies can neither spend, nor make commitments to spend, money without appropriations from Congress.[2]

Some activities continue during a shutdown because they are separately or already funded. For example, activities funded by multi-year or indefinite funding, such as disaster relief, continue, with payments made as normal. Likewise, if some appropriations bills have been enacted prior to a shutdown, activities funded by those enacted appropriations also continue (a scenario sometimes described as a “partial” government shutdown). The Administration has no legal authority to impound or freeze these funds.

Based on long-standing Department of Justice (DOJ) guidance, there are also a limited set of activities for which the federal government can make commitments to pay — though it still cannot make payments — during a shutdown[3]:

  • Activities expressly provided for in law to continue during a shutdown. Some laws expressly provide that certain activities can continue in the absence of appropriations, such as the Department of Defense’s “feed and forage” authority allowing it to obtain certain types of necessary supplies for military personnel.
  • Activities to protect against imminent threats to life or property. This includes activities related to law enforcement, national security, air traffic control, and federal prisons, among others.
  • Activities that are necessary to prevent significant damage to a funded program. For example, activities necessary to ensure Social Security payments (which themselves are funded under law) are made in a timely way can continue during a shutdown even if those activities themselves do not have funding.
  • Activities necessary to discharge the President’s constitutional duties. This includes, for example, the President’s Commander-in-Chief responsibilities.

Different administrations have interpreted these exceptions to apply more or less narrowly, meaning that the activities that continue during a shutdown have differed to some extent from administration to administration. The first Trump Administration took a more expansive view of the public services that should continue.[4] However, to date, a core set of services — such as defense, law enforcement, transportation safety, Social Security, and Medicare — have continued during every shutdown.

Executive Branch Restrictions During a Government Shutdown

While the executive branch has some latitude in what activities it continues during a government shutdown, there are clear limits on its actions.

If an activity is not funded, no actual payments can be made during a shutdown.

Even for activities that continue during a shutdown because they are subject to one of the exceptions described above, funding to pay for them cannot be provided without appropriations. The federal personnel required to work — including law enforcement, prison guards, and the staff that process Social Security benefits — only receive IOUs that will be paid when appropriations are enacted. Federal contractors required to work or provide services also go unpaid during the shutdown.

Under current law, when the shutdown ends all federal employees receive backpay for the time the government was shut down regardless of whether they were working on an activity that could continue during a shutdown or were forced to stop work until the shutdown ended. However, federal contractors do not receive pay for this time period except for any work they were required to perform during it.

Each branch of government determines which of its activities can legally continue during a shutdown.

Congress and the judiciary make their own independent determinations about what activities continue during a lapse. The executive branch is not involved in those determinations.

In prior shutdowns, the judiciary has had sufficient funding in the absence of new appropriations to continue normal operations for the duration of the shutdown. Courts have said in previous shutdowns that in the event they ran out of funding during a shutdown, they would continue to hear cases and otherwise fulfill their constitutional responsibilities.[5] Thus, litigants who are suing in federal court would be able to bring suits against the Administration during a shutdown.

When DOJ does not have funding during a shutdown, its lawyers may request extensions from courts for filing deadlines and other procedural steps. Individual courts have the discretion to determine whether to provide such extensions, and courts have both granted and denied such requests depending on the circumstances.

A shutdown would not provide the Administration with any additional legal authority to engage in widespread firing of federal employees.

A temporary lapse in funding does not provide grounds for an agency to fire employees. In addition, during a shutdown most agencies will not be able to legally conduct personnel actions unrelated to the shutdown itself because their HR departments will not be funded and these types of actions do not fall under any of the available exceptions.[6]

A shutdown would not impact the Administration’s legal obligations to spend money once full-year appropriations are provided.

While many activities would cease during a shutdown because of a lack of funding, the shutdown would not provide the Administration with any authority to impound or freeze funds once appropriations are provided.

While this primer focuses on the legal framework that governs during a shutdown, the Administration has shown itself willing to take actions that are inconsistent with the law, which presents major challenges for the country at all times, not just during a shutdown.

Topics:  Federal BudgetBudget Process

End Notes

[1] Sam Berger, “Trump is ignoring the law to keep the shutdown from causing him political pain,” The Washington Post, January 15, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/01/15/trump-is-ignoring-law-keep-shutdown-causing-him-political-pain/.

[2] Government Accountability Office, “Antideficiency Act,” https://www.gao.gov/legal/appropriations-law/resources.

[3] Walter Dellinger, “Government Operations in the Event of a Lapse in Appropriations,” Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, August 16, 1995, https://www.justice.gov/sites/default/files/olc/opinions/attachments/2014/11/10/1995-08-16-lapse-in-appropriations.htm.

[4] Juliet Linderman, “Selective shutdown? Trump tries to blunt impact, takes heat,” Associated Press, January 13, 2019, https://apnews.com/article/66b50739f4b84063a2ff56dff3156712.

[5] United States Courts, “Judiciary Has Funds to Operate Through Jan. 31,” January 22, 2019, https://www.uscourts.gov/data-news/judiciary-news/2019/01/22/judiciary-has-funds-operate-through-jan-31

[6] Office of Personnel Management, “Guidance for Shutdown Furloughs,” January 2024, https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/pay-leave/furlough-guidance/guidance-for-shutdown-furloughs.pdf.

Good News! Get On The Phone-

Bipartisan bill seeks to reinstate national suicide hotline for LGBTQ+ youth

Sep 17, 2025

Orion Rummler

This story was originally reported by Orion Rummler of The 19th. Meet Orion and read more of his reporting on gender, politics and policy.

If you or a loved one are in crisis, please call or text 988 or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a live volunteer crisis counselor.

Sens. Tammy Baldwin, a Democrat, and Lisa Murkowski, a Republican, introduced a bipartisan bill on Wednesday to re-establish national emergency suicide prevention services for LGBTQ+ youth — which have been stripped by the Trump administration at a time when the vulnerable group needs it most. 

In July, the Trump administration terminated the 988 hotline’s LGBTQ+ services, which connected young people in crisis with counselors trained in supporting LGBTQ+ youth. This new bill, backed by the LGBTQ+ youth suicide prevention organization Trevor Project as well as the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention, would modify the Public Health Service Act to reinstate those services and require the Secretary of Health and Human Services to maintain them. The bill now moves to committee.

The Trevor Project estimates that more than 1.8 million LGBTQ+ young people seriously consider suicide each year in the United States, as they face high rates of bullying, assault and discrimination. And when the 2024 presidential race was called for Donald Trump, calls and texts to the Trevor Project’s own crisis hotlines spiked by 700 percent, as LGBTQ+ youth felt afraid about the outcome of the election. 

“Given that LGBTQ+ youth are more than four times as likely to attempt suicide than their peers, the need for these services remains pressing,” said Jaymes Black, CEO of The Trevor Project, in a statement. “This is not about politics, or identity; this is about doing what is best to support our country’s highest risk populations — and save young people’s lives nationwide.”

During his first term in 2020, President Trump signed a bipartisan law to create 988 as a more accessible resource for mental health emergencies. The free hotline launched in July 2022. Since then, millions of people in crisis have turned to 988. And nearly 1.5 million of those calls, texts and chats were sent by young Americans seeking specialized LGBTQ+ services. 

“We are in the middle of a mental health crisis, and the 988 lifeline saves lives, plain and simple,” said Baldwin, who wrote the original legislation to create the 988 hotline. Cutting funds for specialized services within 988 puts the lifeline in jeopardy, she said in a statement. 

“There is absolutely no good reason that Donald Trump took away this specialized help for our LGBTQ youth. Mental health does not see partisan lines or geography,” the Wisconsin Democrat added.

Racist bigot Stephen Miller is trying to use the death of Charlie Kirk which was done by a republican to attack / destroy the left. It is the way of authoritarians.

Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs

The far-right commentator didn’t pull his punches when discussing his bigoted views on current events

Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.

If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.

Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.

On race

If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024

If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023

On debate

We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.

– Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

Prove me wrong.

– Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.

On gender, feminism and reproductive rights

Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.

– Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.

– Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024

On gun violence

I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.

– Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023

On immigration

America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024

On Islam

America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025

Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.

– Charlie Kirk social media post, 8 September 2025

On religion

There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022

Dani Anguiano contributed reporting.

Charlie Kirk was a hate monger who vilified and called for the violent erasure of anyone not a white cis straight Christian males.

Things I don’t tell Mom

There was a time, long ago before my eyes starting going bad and when foolishness was that bit of mischief all of us get into whether someone is there to see it or not, and that our parents secretly laugh about because it was the same stuff they did.

I was Bat Masterson, Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp with my bb-gun. No, I didn’t have a Red Rider, I had a Crossman! And, I was a wiz, the terror of chipmunks everywhere. And, of course, me and my friend Benny had bb-gun fights, but we had a rule: no shooting in the face.

Some of you who have read my past writings are not surprised by this, but some of you may for the first time realize that yes, the boy is that dumb. And you have also recognized that this is, yes, another post on the demise of Charlie Kirk by someone who mistakenly believed a gun would solve his problems.

As I grew older I advanced my gun ownership advanced to a Marlin 22, then later to an older 30-06. I liked guns – until one day I realized that gun could solve all my problems, all my days of hatred, loneliness, my want to be different than what I was. One simple pull of one simple finger…

Dad talks of a time when he was in school and was part of an after-school gun club. He would get on the school bus with his gun and take it to school for his after hours activities. I remember when I took my hunter safety courses as a kid. Guns then were a tool; it was how we went hunting, sport targets, and in extreme moments perhaps, personal safety. Somehow they have gone beyond this. Now there are magazines by the truck-load telling us how we need a personal protection weapon as they peddle fear. Our politicians aren’t talking about how we need to deal with the issues that people think they need a gun to help them, but how they have the right to guns and how great and cool guns are.

I guess I’m a horrible person, because I just couldn’t really care less that Kirk is gone. He wasn’t an innocent by any stretch of the word. He advocated hate, he advocated second-class citizenry for those he didn’t like, he advocated for the right of the government to limit the rights of others that he didn’t like, and he even advocated for the loss of life so the importance of keeping his gun rights could be underscored. He advocated for the very scenerio that took his life, in a crushing bit of sad irony.

Who I do care about are those small children in that Catholic School who were shot while praying. No one flew them home on Air Force 2. I didn’t see Cenk Uygur crying for them! I didn’t the sitting republican party politicians calling out in outrage. I didn’t see fucking drumpf demanding retribution for the victims of the Colorado High School that happened that very same day! Somehow seeing one of their own shot was a bridge too far and little innocent children was not. And now, seeing that the shooter was a cis white male maga son of a cop, there went their favorite scape-goat that he was a plant of the Democrats.

But, evidently the nra checks cleared because I’m not seeing any hopeful measures to limit guns to ANYONE! Oh, let me take that back – drumpf wants to limit guns to the Trans community. Haven’t heard from the nra about the atrocity of such a statement yet…?

I once asked myself just what it would take before our children and young people became more important than our guns. I wondered what would it finally be to get people to demand that there be no more. Then I realized that the fear, the anger, the hatred that has been generated has just made us all tense and numb to it all; we are forlorn to the realization that it will never change because those in power are all too willing to sacrifice everything we care deeply about and even one of their corrupt mouthpieces to the money and power that death brings them.

Nancy Mace’s Charlie Kirk Hypocrisy Exposed By Reporter’s Simple Question

This is an important video that shows how republicans have been trained by tRump.  She heaps responsibility on the democrats and clearly wants to politicize the violence.  Yet when asked about democrats who were shot she tries to shut down the reporter and refused to answer if republicans should be blamed for the democrats being shot.  Instead she kept repeating that this was on the democrats and how the democrats were fomenting hate.   She spread lies with the complete confidence and authority knowing she was wrong.  Hugs