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A Truth From Iran to Minneapolis: Weak Governments Kill Protesters
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

A Truth From Iran to Minneapolis: Weak Governments Kill Protesters

“This is not who we are,” many well-meaning public officials said last week in various statements. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials’ assassination of 37-year-old ICU nurse Alex Pretti has been a shock to the American system, causing even sleepy Democrats to call for abolishing ICE and firing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.But this shocked response obscures a much more troubling truth: As horrifying as Pretti’s murder was, it was not an anomaly. The killing of mother-of-three Renee Good just 17 days prior, also in the streets of Minneapolis, was not an anomaly. The problem is bigger than Minneapolis, bigger than ICE, and bigger than Trump. And it’s not just a matter of police brutality in general. Violence against protesters is on the rise in the United States and all over the world, reflecting a horrifying escalation of authoritarianism and an elite disregard for basic democratic freedoms. Amnesty International cites “misuse of force” by the state as one of many trends making it harder, around the world, to “stay safe while making your voice heard.” In 2024, an international group of researchers—affiliations included University of California–Berkeley and the European University of Madrid—found a global rise in the use of dangerous weaponry against protesters.In Iran early this month, at least 5,200 people and possibly many more were killed by government forces during widespread protests. Raha Bahreini, an Iran expert for Amnesty International, has called it “a state-orchestrated massacre,” unprecedented even for this repressive regime. (As horrific as this situation is, it is rich for President Trump to threaten the Iranian regime with bombing for killing protesters, while his masked goons kill people on the streets of Minneapolis.) It’s easy to recognize Iran’s government as a totalitarian one, and Trump’s disregard for democratic freedoms is also well known. Trump seems proud of his disregard for such freedoms, threatening protesters with “very heavy force” and consistently labeling them, without evidence, as domestic terrorists. But violent crackdown on protest is not limited to these obvious bad actors.  More than 2,000 climate and environmental protesters have been killed around the world since 2012, University of Bristol researchers found in 2024—including in Atlanta, where Manuel Esteban Paez Terán, known as “Tortuguita,” was killed by state troopers in 2023, the first time an environmental protester had been killed in the U.S. In 2024, although protests had reached their lowest point since 2020, the rate of police intervention in protests was higher than it had been in years, especially at protests related to Palestine.  I asked Oscar Berglund, one of the Bristol researchers who co-authored the paper on the attacks on environmental protesters, why he thought this was happening. He attributes it to the fact that many of these protests—whether over racism, economic inequality, or climate change—have serious traction. Recent years  have seen “an increase in protest, and some of that protest has shifted public opinion quite dramatically,” he said. The violence is a sign of the protesters’ success—that ruling elites know that the protesters aren’t just a bunch of marginal kooks but may be speaking for, and influencing, millions more. Berglund also had another general observation that seems resonant, whether in Tehran or in Minneapolis. “Repression often increases when efforts to legitimize ‘things as they are’ have been less effective,” he said. “States with decreasing legitimacy will therefore resort to repression.”Sarah McLauglin, a senior scholar at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, affirmed Berglund’s analysis: “From Tiananmen decades ago to Tehran today,” she said, “ governments have violently cracked down on public protest because they understand that protest has power—perhaps even enough power to unseat public officials.” She thinks protest is, if anything, growing more powerful as a social force because it is so easily disseminated on social media, “where information can travel faster than the state can respond. That’s exactly what happened after the killing of Alex Pretti, where the immediate narrative conveyed by U.S. officials fell apart” because people could see with their own eyes, on their phones, what had really happened. In past eras—putting aside moments of great upheaval, like revolutions or wars—there has often been a sense that protest is futile, performative, a waste of time. Paradoxically, the recent killings and violence against protesters may suggest the opposite: that protest is, in fact, effective. Today, around the world, the threats to protesters are multiplying—but so is the support. Protesters’ concerns are not seen as niche or silly but, rather, are broadly shared. From protests to polls, the ruling class is increasingly confronted by the possibility that there is, in fact, a global consensus against injustice, for democracy, for climate action, and for basic humanity. These movements aren’t going away. That’s encouraging, suggesting that we can someday unseat these bad actors. It’s also terrifying, because as our governments continue to desperately spiral into illegitimacy, they may kill more and more of us. Yet as we’re seeing from Minneapolis to Tehran, an amazing number of people are confronting both these realities right now—and choosing hope.

Trump’s Lawsuit Against the IRS Is Even More Outrageous Than It Seems
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Trump’s Lawsuit Against the IRS Is Even More Outrageous Than It Seems

Last week Donald Trump filed suit against the IRS, demanding $10 billion in compensation for the unauthorized disclosure of his taxes in September 2020. Oftentimes a news story will seem outrageous at first glance but, on closer inspection, will become less outrageous, or perhaps not outrageous at all. On such occasions, it’s the duty of a sober journal of opinion like The New Republic to set the record straight. This is not one such occasion. Rather, this is a story that, the more you dig into the details, the more outrageous it becomes. News coverage has actually failed to capture fully how very stupid this lawsuit is. I have now reviewed the relevant documents and can attest that, even for Trump, this lawsuit is an outlier. It’s batshit crazy.And now, I’ll be happy to take your questions.Has a president of the United States ever before sued the executive branch over which he presides?He has not.Wait, didn’t Trump previously sue the Justice Department over the FBI’s Russiagate investigation and its Mar-a-Lago search for documents that he refused to turn over to the National Archives?Trump wasn’t a sitting president then, and that wasn’t a lawsuit but rather two administrative claims filed with the Justice Department. An administrative claim bypasses the courts to seek settlement under threat of filing a lawsuit. The Russiagate claim was filed in 2023, and the Mar-a-Lago claim was filed in 2024. You can read a copy of the latter here.The administrative claims were unresolved after Trump began his second term, and as recently as October The New York Times reported that they remained so and that Trump was demanding the Justice Department pay him $230 million. In one respect, the administrative claims are even more kleptocratic than the IRS lawsuit: The decision about whether to settle, and for how much, resides entirely with Trump’s own Justice Department.“It looks bad,” Trump admitted in October. “I’m suing [sic] myself, right? So I don’t know. But that was a lawsuit [sic] that was very strong, very powerful.” It’s possible that Trump is suing the IRS for $10 billion to make his demand for a $230 million settlement seem reasonable.OK, so Trump just became the first sitting president to sue the executive branch. But he’s suing over something that happened not recently, but years ago. Who was president when Trump’s taxes were disclosed?Donald J. Trump! Trump’s taxes were downloaded and then made public during Trump’s first term. This is a president not only suing his own executive branch, but suing it over something that happened while he was running it. Do we know who stole the tax records?Yes. It was an enterprising IRS contract employee named Charles “Chaz” Littlejohn (whose surname, yes, is also how the Merry Men addressed Robin Hood’s second-in-command). Littlejohn downloaded Trump’s tax information in October 2018 and gave it to The New York Times in May 2019. The Times then used the material in a September 27, 2020, story headlined “Long-Concealed Records Show Trump’s Chronic Losses and Years of Tax Avoidance.”  Littlejohn also downloaded tax filings by thousands of rich people and gave those to ProPublica, which, starting in June 2021 (after Trump was president), published a series of stories documenting how the ultrarich avoid paying taxes.Where is Littlejohn today?Between now and 2029, you’ll find him at the Federal Correctional Institution in Marion, Illinois. Although Littlejohn’s removal of the tax filings went undetected for three years, after the Times piece was published the IRS tracked Littlejohn down and prosecuted him for unauthorized disclosure of tax information. Littlejohn entered a guilty plea and is now serving a five-year sentence.Is five years a lot?Sure is. Federal sentencing guidelines recommend 10 months, and if the judge had followed these, Littlejohn would have gotten out last March. But the prosecution asked for five years to make an example of Littlejohn, and the judge (a Biden appointee, incidentally) assented.Do people who cheat on their taxes get five years?Not even close. More than a third who are prosecuted get no prison time at all, and among those who do, the average sentence is 16 months. Of course, every case is different. But in May 2024, Reuven Avi-Yonah of Tax Notes reviewed recent cases of massive tax fraud and couldn’t find anybody sent up the river even for three years. In effect, the federal judiciary would rather you commit tax fraud than that you make public the tax returns of the only president since Richard Nixon who refused to do so.Trump’s lawsuit says it’s the IRS’s fault that Littlejohn downloaded his files. How did Littlejohn do it?He explained all in a video deposition taken in March 2024. This was in a lawsuit that Citadel hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin brought against the IRS because he was mad that details of his tax returns turned up in ProPublica. Although the IRS’s internal computer safeguards prevented anyone from downloading tax files to Dropbox or other large-file storage sites (something that was well known inside the agency), Littlejohn discovered that the safeguards didn’t prevent him from downloading these to a private web page set up for that purpose. Then he transferred the tax files to a flash drive.OK, Trump was president when Littlejohn downloaded his taxes and gave them to The New York Times. Still, how was Trump supposed to know there were vulnerabilities in the IRS’s internal computers?Because while he was president, the IRS inspector general told him so. In support of its argument that the IRS is culpable, the Trump complaint says:“Every year from 2010 through 2020, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration (“TIGTA”) has warned the IRS about security deficiencies related to the protection of taxpayers’ confidential tax return information.” “Many of these deficiencies went uncorrected and … allowed Littlejohn to misappropriate the information, upload it to a private website, and then disclose it[.]”But for four of those years Trump was president. If the IRS was negligent in not responding sufficiently to these inspector general warnings, then Trump’s White House was negligent too. As Harry Truman said, the buck stops here. And for crying out loud, these reports were available not just to the Oval Office but to the general public.It’s weird that Trump’s lawyers think mentioning the IRS inspector reports helps Trump’s case when so clearly it does the opposite. Probably this language is included because Griffin’s lawsuit included near-identical language. The Trump lawyer who cribbed this language doesn’t seem to have considered that Trump’s relationship to the IRS is markedly different from Griffin’s. Would you like to hear Citadel’s take on the matter? Well, per a spokesperson, here you go: “Rather than seeking actual damages, Ken’s complaint sought only the minimum $1,000 required by law to proceed with litigation. This was never about money for Ken; what he wanted, and what he received in the settlement, was a public apology acknowledging wrongdoing and a commitment from the IRS to improve its data security protections for all American taxpayers.” Hope that helps.So Griffin’s lawsuit was the dry run for Trump’s. What happened?Griffin filed his lawsuit in 2022 and reached a settlement with the IRS in 2024. In the settlement, Griffin received no money; the IRS apologized and promised certain reforms. I can’t resist voicing my disappointment that the IRS apology didn’t say the following: “We are sorry there was an unauthorized disclosure that showed Ken Griffin paid an average effective income tax rate of 29.2 percent when Griffin was the fourth-highest paid human in the United States.” The apology just said the IRS “failed to prevent Mr. Littlejohn’s criminal conduct,” that it was working hard to prevent such disclosures in the future, et cetera.In his lawsuit, Griffin demanded $1,000 for every unauthorized disclosure of his tax returns, including subsequent disclosures. The court never settled on how much that amounted to. Trump’s demand for $10 billion may have some surface similarities to Griffin’s suit—but again: Griffin didn’t get a dime. You’d think that would discourage Trump. Maybe nobody told him. (Trump deals harshly with subordinates who deliver bad news.)Why did Griffin settle? Because the judge tossed out Griffin’s claim that the IRS violated the 1974 Privacy Act, on the grounds that Griffin (net worth: $51 billion) couldn’t show he suffered pecuniary harm. Trump’s lawsuit similarly claims that the IRS violated the Privacy Act. But since the Times published his tax data, Trump’s net worth has more than tripled to $6.5 billion. That should make it very difficult for Trump to show pecuniary harm. Griffin’s lawsuit never established that Littlejohn was a joint employee of both his contracting firm, Booz Allen, and of the IRS (though the judge declined a request by the IRS that he dismiss the case on grounds that he wasn’t). Trump’s lawsuit also seeks to establish that Littlejohn was a joint employee.“Joint employee.” That terminology sounds familiar. Don’t Republicans typically move heaven and earth to prevent contract employees from being assigned legal status as joint employees, in order to shield big corporations that routinely contract out work, especially low-paid work?Bingo. Trump’s expansive definition of joint employment in his IRS lawsuit flatly contradicts his own administration’s policy, which is to narrow that definition to maximally benefit big business. In this, as in so many other instances, Trump is a total hypocrite.During his first administration, Trump’s Labor Department issued a regulation dramatically limiting the circumstances under which the law would consider a contract employee to be jointly employed by the company (again, typically a large corporation) that hired out the work. Doing so effectively gave big corporations carte blanche to outsource labor violations to smaller and less visible firms. It also freed those big corporations from having to provide legally required benefits like Social Security, Medicare, and unemployment insurance. The human cost of this practice is documented extensively in David Weil’s 2014 book, The Fissured Workplace.The Biden administration reversed Trump’s rule, but the Trump administration is expected to reverse Biden’s reversal, restoring a narrow definition of joint employment.  If Trump actually pried $10 billion from the IRS, would it be the biggest civil judgment in history?Just about. The very biggest was the $206 billion tobacco company settlement in 1998. But the plaintiff in that case was not one person but forty state governments.The second biggest judgment was in a lawsuit against a 13-year-old boy who sexually assaulted and then set fire to an 8-year-old boy, who years later died from related causes. In 2011, the jury gave the child’s estate $150 billion, but of course the perpetrator didn’t have and would never have the money to pay even a fraction of that. The case was brought mainly to pressure prosecutors in Montgomery County, Texas, to bring murder charges against the 13-year-old, who was now an adult. The prosecutors did so, and in 2015 the killer was convicted of murder.Trump’s $10 billion, if he got it, would be the third-biggest civil judgment in U.S. history. It would be the the biggest civil judgment ever awarded to a plaintiff in a case where the defendant didn’t kill at least one person.What’s the IRS’s overall budget?The Trump administration has requested $15 billion to fund the IRS this fiscal year. So yes, Trump wants to help himself to two-thirds of the IRS’s annual budget.So, wow, the whole thing is pretty nuts, huh.You can say that again.This article has been updated.

Why This Might Be a Grim Week for the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Why This Might Be a Grim Week for the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio

You will recall, I’m sure, the story of the Haitian community of Springfield, Ohio, that arose during the most recent presidential campaign. It started in July 2024, when JD Vance—just days before Donald Trump tapped him as his vice presidential nominee—began railing against this community of about 15,000 people, saying Springfield had been “overwhelmed” by their arrival. The lies and calumnies escalated until September, when, on the basis of an unverified and untrue internet rumor, Vance charged that Haitians were stealing and eating people’s pets. “Reports now show,” he wrote, “that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who should not be in this country.”Many of the Haitians in Springfield have been living under a program called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, which the United States grants to certain immigrant groups from countries under extreme duress. In this case, the duress took the form of a 2010 earthquake that killed some 200,000 people. Things got worse still during a period of unrest following the assassination of President Jovenel Moises in 2021.TPS is just what the name says: temporary. And for a portion of this community, that protection expires at midnight on Tuesday. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, surprise surprise, revoked TPS status for some 300,000 Haitians nationwide last year, setting this February 3 as the date. After that, they will no longer be able to work or live legally in the United States. What is the Trump administration going to do?It’s a question that has the Haitian community of Springfield quaking. Carl Ruby, a Springfield pastor, told a local television station last week: “They are making preparations to stay inside, not to come out of their homes. They are afraid for their children. Just yesterday, I had some Haitians in our church give me power of attorney in case they become separated from their children so we can take care of them. They are afraid.”Immigration and Customs Enforcement, we have been told, is “moderating” its behavior and procedures under Tom Homan (no one’s idea of a moderate). I guess we’ll see this week how true that is. In any case, Pastor Ruby is not alone, and is not remotely a hysterical voice. Even Republican Governor Mike DeWine has taken a reasonably admirable stand here. DeWine said Friday, “These people are working, and they are hard workers, so I think from a public policy point of view, it is a mistake. It is not in the best interest of Ohio for these individuals who are working and who are workers to lose that status. Having said that, this is not my decision. This is a decision for the federal government, for the president of the United States.” (DeWine also defended the community back during the campaign, when Vance was spreading his racist, fascist lies.)There is good reason for concern. As Timothy Snyder detailed on his Substack Sunday, Trump picked up Vance’s baton with a vengeance. In his September 10 debate with Kamala Harris, he said: “In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs, the people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating, they’re eating the pets of the people that live there, and this is what is happening in our country, and it’s a shame.” As Snyder wrote: “One of the moderators pointed out that there was no evidence for any such claim. Trump then said that he had seen ‘people on television’ complaining that their dogs had been eaten. There were no such television reports.”Trump later went further. Three days after the debate, speaking to reporters in Los Angeles, he said: “We’re going to have the largest deportation in the history of our country. And we’re going to start with Springfield and Aurora [Colorado].”I don’t know about you, but if I were a Haitian in Springfield living here under TPS, seeing those words, and watching generally the mayhem that ICE and Customs and Border Protection agents have been wreaking upon this country, yes, I’d be worried.Last Friday, MS NOW’s website reported that, “according to four people familiar with the discussions,” ICE operations in Springfield could begin this week. The matter now rests in the lap of U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes. She is expected to make a decision, perhaps before Tuesday, on whether the Trump administration acted lawfully in ending TPS for the Haitians. She is a Biden appointee and is herself an immigrant, from Uruguay. These facts give us reason to hope she’ll rule against the administration. Emily Brown of Ohio State University’s immigration law clinic told Cleveland.com that based on her questioning during arguments, her “educated guess” was that Reyes “is likely to find that the termination was unlawful, and she is likely to block it.”Let us pray that this is so. And let us use this story as a reminder of how fascist lies against a beleaguered racial minority work. You really should read Snyder’s full post, which I linked to above. He dives deeply into the whole sordid history of how this lie got its pants on, including its promotion, once Vance took it up, by a neo-Nazi group.Snyder’s headline is stark: “Ethnic Cleansing in Ohio?” Is that overstating what could happen? Maybe. And yet, here’s a portion of the official definition of ethnic cleansing by a U.N. commission appointed to study what happened in the 1990s in the former Yugoslavia: “a purposeful policy designed by one ethnic or religious group to remove by violent and terror-inspiring means the civilian population of another ethnic or religious group from certain geographic areas.”  It is at best debatable. But that just leaves us asking: How in the world has it come to pass that in the United States in the year 2026, we even have to debate whether our country might start engaging in ethnic cleansing?  

The Second Amendment Failed Alex Pretti
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

The Second Amendment Failed Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti’s killing at the hands of federal agents last week is an American tragedy. It has also exposed the fallacies and fault lines that shape how Americans live with widespread access to guns.Put simply, the Supreme Court has handed down two irreconcilable lines of precedent over the past 20 years. The first is that Americans have a sacred constitutional right to carry guns in public. The second is that that police officers can kill people carrying guns in public with little risk of facing any legal consequences for doing so.In 2008, the court first held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involved a man who wanted to keep a fully assembled handgun in his home for self-defense, which was prohibited by D.C. law at the time. In a 5–4 ruling, the court’s conservative justices sided with him.“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court, referring to concerns by D.C. and other parties that the ruling would fuel gun violence. “These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”The Supreme Court revisited the Second Amendment in 2022 to strike down New York’s restrictive law on issuing concealed-carry permits. It marked the first time that the high court had directly addressed the Second Amendment’s scope outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, took an expansive view of it.“This definition of ‘bear’ naturally encompasses public carry,” he explained. “Most gun owners do not wear a holstered pistol at their hip in their bedroom or while sitting at the dinner table. Although individuals often ‘keep’ firearms in their home, at the ready for self-defense, most do not ‘bear’ (i.e., carry) them in the home beyond moments of actual confrontation. To confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.”Later this year, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on the lengths that states can go when restricting gun ownership in public. Wolford v. Lopez involves a Hawaii law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property accessible to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—without the property owner’s explicit permission. Most other states allow gun owners to carry their weapons in those locations unless the property owner explicitly says otherwise.Gun rights advocates have warned that the default-property rule, as the state calls it, would make it nearly impossible to carry a gun in Hawaii since most businesses would refuse consent. That argument appears to have persuaded most of the conservative justices at oral argument earlier this month. At one point, Justice Samuel Alito chastised a lawyer arguing for the state of Hawaii for allegedly trying to turn the Second Amendment into a “second-class right.”Running parallel to these rulings, however, is a consistent signal from the Supreme Court that law enforcement officials can kill people who pose a personal risk to them largely without risk of legal consequences.A federal law known as Section 1983 allows people to sue state and local officials for violating their federal constitutional rights. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has substantially narrowed Section 1983 claims by inventing the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” In general terms, officers are only liable if their conduct violates a “clearly established right,” which can be interpreted with great particularity and narrowness by lower courts.These hurdles are often highest in police use-of-force cases. As one justice wrote in a 1986 case, qualified immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” The court also views police-involved cases with great deference toward officers’ subjective views about the situation at hand. In a 1989 case, the high court noted that police officers are entitled to great deference because they are “often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”This deference is particularly high in use-of-force cases where the other side is armed. In a 2018 case, for example, the Supreme Court sided with a police officer who shot a woman holding a knife simply because she “did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented, raised broader concerns about the court’s approach in similar cases. She warned that the court’s “one-sided approach” to qualified immunity “transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.”“The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry,” Sotomayor wrote. “Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.” This is particularly true in situations where someone is armed: All of the major qualified-immunity cases involve either unarmed people or people with unconventional weapons like knives and swords because someone carrying a gun is such an obvious threat to police officers in that context. Pretti’s case is also unusual because it was so thoroughly documented by observers from multiple angles, which easily refutes the claims that he was a threat. Had it not been filmed, the federal government’s original claims would have been the only narrative of what had happened.For federal agents like those who killed Pretti, the threshold for accountability is far higher. Section 1983 can’t be used to sue federal officials, and Congress has not passed a similar statute to fill the gap. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs could sue federal agents for civil rights violations under the Fourth Amendment without relying on an act of Congress, but the court has effectively abolished this option since then.In theory, these agents could be criminally prosecuted for murder or for civil rights violations by state and federal officials. Or, as the Trump administration has shown, they simply could not be. The identities of the agents responsible for Pretti’s death are not publicly known. Since they wore masks, journalists and activists have been unable to identify them. And the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minnesota that have sought to investigate Pretti’s death. Unless the White House relents, Americans might not learn who shot Pretti until a new administration takes office and releases the names.This outcome is particularly disturbing because Pretti’s actions were completely lawful. He had a license to carry his concealed weapon under Minnesota law and did not wield or brandish it against the ICE agents in question. He did not use force against any of the officers, nor was he an immediate threat to them. (They outnumbered him by more than a half-dozen to one.) Multiple videos even show one of the agents disarming Pretti before he was fatally shot at close range.Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s response to Pretti’s death was to effectively declare that ICE agents were justified in killing him simply because he possessed a gun. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security initially described him as a “would-be assassin” and a “domestic terrorist.” Even after the video evidence proved them wrong, they stuck to their underlying rationale.“You can’t have guns,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn earlier this week. “You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that. But it’s just a very unfortunate incident.” Other Trump administration officials shared the same sentiment.“You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in an interview last Sunday. “It’s that simple.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem echoed that sentiment to reporters. “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” she claimed.Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent also offered a forceful rebuke of Pretti’s lawful possession of a firearm, during an interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl. “I am sorry this gentleman is dead, but he did bring a 9 mm semiautomatic weapon with two cartridges to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest,” Bessent said. Karl noted that Pretti was an ICU nurse who worked at the VA and, more relevantly, that he hadn’t brandished the weapon at all.“But he brought a gun!” Bessent testily replied. “He brought a gun to a protest!” When Karl noted that the Second Amendment existed, Bessent suggested that it didn’t apply in this scenario. “I’ve been to a protest,” the treasury secretary replied. “Guess what? I didn’t bring a gun, I brought a billboard.”This absolutist approach drew some ire among gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association. “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,” the organization posted on its official Twitter account earlier this week in an thinly veiled rebuke of the Trump administration.Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor in California, posted on Twitter that the Pretti shooting was completely justified. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he claimed. “Don’t do it!” The NRA directly responded to him by calling his claim “dangerous and wrong” in a quoted post. “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation,” the group warned, “not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”This state of affairs is not at all what gun rights groups had promised us. Other wealthy liberal democracies impose all sorts of restrictions on guns. In some European countries, civilians generally can’t own or possess them at all. Gun rights advocates have insisted, however, that the Second Amendment prevents Americans from making the same policy choices.As a result, the widespread availability of guns has had dire consequences. The Pew Research Center estimated last year that 46,728 people had died in the United States from gun-related injuries in 2023, which the center described as the most recent year “for which complete data is available.” That figure is likely an undercount, since the underlying Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data only counts deaths where a gunshot was the primary factor.Countries without widespread gun access also have murders and suicides, of course. But the availability of firearms likely plays a role in America’s higher rates. According to Pew, guns were used in four out of every five murders committed in the U.S. in 2023 and played a role in more than half of the roughly 27,000 suicides that year. It is impossible to know how many more people would be alive today if America had more restrictive laws, but the number would surely be much greater than zero.Even those who do not own guns must live with the consequences of their ubiquity. An entire generation of Americans has now grown up with mass-shooter drills in case their K-12 school happened to become the latest in a long chain of tragedies. The average American can likely recite the names of more mass-shooting locations than World War II or Civil War battlefields: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, Virginia Tech, and onward.In response to this regular churn of gun carnage, Americans have been told by gun rights advocates—both implicitly and explicitly—that these are acceptable losses for our society to bear. They defined the individual right to bear arms, which is only about 18 months older than the iPhone, as an intrinsic part of the nation’s social contract. One of the bluntest assessments came from Charlie Kirk, an influential conservative activist who frequently opposed gun-control proposals.“I think it’s worth it,” Kirk said in 2023, during a public event where he was asked about his support for gun rights. “I think it’s worth 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.”Kirk’s critics widely shared this comment after he was assassinated by a sniper on a Utah college campus last fall. In one sense, his analysis wasn’t completely flawed. (As seen earlier, it perhaps intentionally echoed Scalia’s opinion in Heller.) Every constitutional right comes with policy trade-offs. The First Amendment’s strict protections for free speech also mean that the government can’t simply criminalize hate speech and Holocaust denial. Life would be easier for Democratic presidents if they could simply shut down Fox News. Police would probably solve more murders if the Fourth Amendment didn’t require them to get warrants.Americans generally accept those trade-offs, often on a subconscious level, because they generally prefer to live in a free and open society where their rights are less likely to be infringed. To paraphrase Kirk, that is a prudent and rational deal. The problem with his formulation was that, even if you accept his premise, the Second Amendment doesn’t work.State legislatures and courts often describe the Second Amendment as a right to bear arms for lawful purposes like hunting and personal self-defense. But Kirk and other gun rights commentators also often suggested that the Second Amendment is necessary as a bulwark against government tyranny. The apparent implication is that if the government ever infringed upon our “God-given rights,” Americans could simply kill those who were responsible.Trump, a master of turning the implicit into the explicit, voiced this sentiment in stark terms in 2016 about Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival for the presidency that year. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump told a rally in North Carolina on the campaign trail. “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.” When Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke proposed a mandatory AR-15 buyback program in 2019 to stop mass shooting, conservative commentators likened it to an “incitement of violence” and a call for “civil war.”The United States is now awash in firearms, with all the resultant deaths, injuries, and other harmful social effects to achieve surely modest gains in personal self-defense. The Second Amendment has plainly failed to deter tyranny in any meaningful way. To the contrary, many of the most vocal gun rights advocates have been cheering on the Trump administration instead of rising up against it. And the Supreme Court’s rulings have failed to protect an individual right to bear arms because its other decisions make it all but impossible to hold government agents accountable for killing people who exercise it. It shouldn’t have taken the death of Alex Pretti to illuminate what was already plain as day.

Democrats Should Take Control on Immigration
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Democrats Should Take Control on Immigration

Last week, Senate Democrats made a deal with Senate Republicans to fund the Department of Homeland Security for only two more weeks while they hash out new accountability measures for Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents, in the wake of Alex Pretti’s shooting and other acts of brutality. It was the least they could do to address Americans’ growing concerns about the way the Trump administration is threatening daily life in Minneapolis and elsewhere, killing citizens, and kidnapping people as young as 2 for deportation based only on their skin color and accents.This DHS funding battle, however, is part of a bigger question Democrats must answer as they fight to regain power. Large sections of the Democratic base are now echoing calls to “abolish ICE.” Some Democratic leaders, like New York Senator Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, are pushing back against this with much more tepid, unwieldy, and frankly pretty weak ideas to “restrain, reform, and restrict” the agency. Others are pointing out that ICE is just over 20 years old, formed as part of the security theater fever after 9/11, and that the United States had immigration enforcement before it was created. Dismantling an agency that at least eight people have died interacting with this year doesn’t seem that outrageous.Up to now, the Democratic Party has been reluctant to wade into immigration, believing that President Donald Trump and the Republicans have an advantage on the topic. But that’s only partly true if investigated through a very narrow lens in the last presidential election. Most of the public doesn’t support the mass deportations Trump has carried out. There’s room to shape and reform public opinion on immigration and come out ahead, especially if Democrats make the issue part of their overall messaging on how to rebuild the U.S. post Trump.Following Trump’s second inauguration, Republicans quickly lost whatever advantage they had on immigration. Most voters believe Trump’s policies and the way he’s enacted them have gone too far. Even before the election, most voters didn’t like the most extreme things that Trump said. They believed American institutions like Congress and the courts would put the brakes on his administration. They were disappointed.By June, the Democratic research group Way to Win found that voters responded to messages emphasizing how Trump’s actions, lack of due process for immigrants, and the administration’s refusal to be reined in by the courts were a threat to all of us. These can fit into larger points about Trump’s disregard for the rule of law.Before the most recent events in Minneapolis, Democrats thought affordability would be their winning message in the 2026 midterms. But talking about the affordability crisis can include a pro-immigration message too. Americans generally like immigration and think immigrants make the United States a better place. In the run-up to 2024, Republican rhetoric about the border being “out of control” and a surge in migration under President Joe Biden had increased concern about the amount of immigration to the U.S. That concern has since waned. In June, one Gallup poll found a record high of 79 percent of Americans saying immigration is a good thing.Most people can see in their own communities that immigrants strengthen local economies. They start new businesses at higher rates than those born here, and studies have found they don’t pull down wages, as conservatives often claim. In fact, without immigrants in the workforce, we’re likely to see labor shortages and continued inflation. All of that is before the cost of continuing to fund ICE is taken into account. It’s hard to find a more wasteful way to spend government money than sending hastily hired, poorly trained agents into American cities.Trump’s immigration policies and ICE are extremely unpopular, and voters increasingly want someone in power to stand up to them. There’s room for Democrats to change the story on immigration; in fact, continuing to ignore it and act as though economic issues are separate from what’s happening on the ground—many Minneapolis restaurants and small businesses have closed until ICE operations cease—rings false to those of us watching.Over the next two weeks, there’s room for the minority party to be braver than simply requesting restraint from an agency and federal government apparatus that continues to ignore the rules already in place. It could actually shut the government down to force Trump’s hand; it could demand an end to deportations until the Trump administration agrees to abide by the courts; it could demand less funding for ICE and more for the overwhelmed immigration courts that are the actual path to citizenship for people who come here; and, even more importantly, it could demand negotiations on the immigration reforms it’s been trying to make since Barack Obama was in office. Democratic leaders have the upper hand now and could use it to change the policy conversation about what immigration means to Americans. It’s the smart and strategic path. It’s also the least they could do—to partly match the bravery and effort of regular people organizing and putting their bodies on the line in cities around the country.

Lessons from China’s Delicate Dance of Censorship and Expression
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Lessons from China’s Delicate Dance of Censorship and Expression

On a cold Valentine’s Day in 2012, three women walked down a Beijing shopping street in white wedding dresses smeared with red to look like blood. (It was lipstick.) They had bruises on their faces, as if they’d been beaten. (It was dark-blue eye shadow.) They chanted, “Yes to love, no to violence.” Photos of the protest spread instantly across the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo.The “bloody brides” were the invention of Lü Pin, founder of Feminist Voices, a digital magazine that had grown into a viral Weibo hub for young women unwilling to stay quiet. Activists called 2012 “Year One of the Chinese feminist movement.” Women shaved their heads to protest higher-education quotas that favored men, rode the subway with placards denouncing gropers, and Li Maizi’s “Occupy the Men’s Bathroom,” demanding more women’s stalls, trended on Weibo.These actions produced real legal and policy shifts. The Ministry of Education discontinued discriminatory college quotas, and a Beijing court for the first time issued a domestic violence protection order, ruling in favor of a U.S. citizen who sued her Chinese husband, a millionaire celebrity English teacher. China passed its first national anti–domestic violence law, and new buildings were required to add more women’s bathrooms.What made this surge of activism possible was Weibo. Launched in 2009, it quickly became the nervous system of China’s civic sphere. Before Weibo, feminist organizers could hand out newsletters or hold a small meeting but never get on state TV; afterward, they could turn a street protest into a nationwide conversation. A clever slogan or striking image could trend for weeks.Weibo marked the moment when young Chinese women discovered that even the most heavily restricted internet in the world contained a crack large enough to push a movement through. In May 2009, a spa worker was cornered by two local cadres demanding “special services.” One slapped her with a wad of cash and shoved her onto a sofa, where she stabbed him in the neck, killing him. Police detained her on suspicion of murder, but the case exploded on social media, and prosecutors had to drop the murder charge, conceding she had acted in self-defense. In October 2010, a drunk driver who had killed a student tried to flee from the police as he shouted, “My father is Li Gang!”—a local security official. The phrase went viral at the start of what came to be known as the “Weibo Spring,” when “Big V” accounts—bloggers with a large following who were “verified”—turned scandals like these into national dramas.Censorship does not simply extinguish voices, but reshapes them—training a generation to speak sideways, turning repression into a culture of coded speech.This rise of the mobile web in China in the 2010s produced a flowering of digital creativity even as suppression intensified—a tension at the heart of Yi-Ling Liu’s eye-opening book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Writing as someone who grew up alongside this digital universe, Liu reveals how censorship does not simply extinguish voices, but reshapes them—training a generation to speak sideways, turning repression into a culture of coded speech, creative improvisation, and stubborn survival.It might be hard to build a book around online life, but Liu—who grew up in Hong Kong, lived in Beijing, and even interned at the state-run China Daily (as I once did) before writing for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—follows a group of effervescent netizens (Lü Pin, Li Maizi, and others, including herself) who more than carry it. Take the episode of Li’s “Occupy the Men’s Bathroom” protest: The day after, two police officers picked her up. But to her astonishment, they didn’t arrest her. Instead, they treated her to a feast at a fancy restaurant, though they did tell her to stop protesting and posting on Weibo. The incident perfectly captures the odd, shifting political culture of the era, and in tracing such encounters Liu shows how social media became the space for her generation to work out the politics and passions of their everyday lives. To understand the Chinese people, understand what they’re doing online, she proposes. What emerges is a portrait of nonconformists who, by feeling out the walls the regime has built, turn that maneuvering into a kind of limited freedom. They do not escape the system; they improvise within it. They dance.Western observers have long swung between two caricatures of China—booming economic miracle or iron police state—and then demanded to know which is “real.” Cultural historian Ian Buruma tried to look past that binary. In his 2001 book, Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing, he traveled through the Chinese-speaking world to portray a scattered cohort of mavericks pushed to the margins yet still feeling out the system’s blurred edges: disillusioned activists, political prisoners-turned-businesspeople, human rights lawyers, Christian sect leaders and followers, and online critics. By tracing this unruly mix, Buruma punctured the myths of Chinese sameness and pointed to a messy underground current.An early online dissenter was Liu Xiaobo, who had been released from a labor camp two years earlier, in 1999. He recognized quickly how the emerging internet could allow everyday people to reach one another without passing through official channels. Cases that once were ignored—corruption scandals, police abuses, violence against women—could suddenly circulate everywhere. Liu, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, encouraged this new civic scrutiny, supporting figures such as Dr. Jiang Yanyong, whose revelations about the true scale of the 2003 SARS outbreak ignited a fury. Commentators began calling 2003 “the year of online public opinion.”From the state’s perspective, this was dangerous in a new way. One of the party’s governing tools has long been what sinologist Perry Link calls “fossilized fear”: Citizens self-police even before an officer appears. They say one thing in the open and another in private; topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen—the “three Ts”—are off-limits. In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched what it called the Golden Shield Project—an effort to create an integrated surveillance-and-filtering system that would let the authorities watch, sort, and erase content, and block and arrest violators. Outside China, it became better known as the Great Firewall of China, the title of a Wired article. As Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu note in Who Controls the Internet?, the wall was built partly with “American bricks,” with key technology from Cisco and other firms.By the end of “the year of online public opinion,” the Great Firewall had gone live. Detentions for offenses rose; overseas websites were blocked; filters swept pages for banned words. But the result was what former CNN Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon, in her 2012 book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, dubbed “networked authoritarianism,” in which tightly managed digital spaces still generate unpredictable discourse. MacKinnon argued that, even under authoritarian rule, social media inadvertently broaden the space for public conversation, creating rolling negotiations between state and society.The wall dancers emerged in that space, devising ingenious ways to slip past filters and tunnel under the Great Firewall. It wasn’t only activists and writers who sidestepped, but millions of ordinary participants who wanted to say what could not be said. To express “fuck your mother,” they recast the Chinese words caonima into a homophone that translates as “grass-mud-horse” and turned it into an alpaca meme. Another phrase, hexie, or “harmonization,” a euphemism for censorship, became “river crab.” The two animals were often portrayed in mortal combat, showing just how web-savvy individuals felt whenever posts vanished or comments were scrubbed.Then there was Ma Baoli, a married, then-closeted police officer in a northern port city who built a networked bulletin board for gay men. His hobby became Blued, one of the world’s largest queer social platforms and, eventually, a key hub for HIV-prevention campaigns and public health outreach. To survive, Ma learned to speak in the language of public service and medical necessity, partnering with state agencies while offering users a measure of private freedom.The good times would not last. In 2011, amid protests over illegal land grabs and Weibo chatter about a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution,” party leaders were terrified of social media’s ability to organize mass movements. Then-President Hu Jintao ordered significantly greater control of the internet and public opinion; within a year, Xi Jinping was elevated as his successor. Nicholas Kristof infamously predicted that Xi would be a reformer, and that Liu Xiaobo, who had been imprisoned in 2008 for a fourth time, would be freed.Instead, one day the “Big V” writer Murong Xuecun found his social media accounts deleted. Months later, the outspoken billionaire investor Charles Xue was jailed for soliciting a prostitute, in what appeared to be a warning aimed at social media users. Xi created the Cyberspace Administration of China and installed Lu Wei, a zealous former propaganda official, as its first chief. The CAC drafted a cybersecurity law requiring that data on Chinese citizens gathered within China be kept on domestic servers and mandating that platforms edit content and monitor private chats. Unauthorized virtual private networks, or VPNs, hitherto used to bypass the Great Firewall, were criminalized, and several sellers were jailed; Apple removed hundreds of VPNs from its Chinese app store.In 2013, someone began circulating side-by-side images comparing Xi walking with Barack Obama to Winnie the Pooh strolling with Tigger. It was lighthearted, maybe even meant affectionately. But the joke soon turned into mockery, used as visual shorthand whenever netizens wanted to criticize the increasingly despotic president. By 2015, Xi’s tolerance had evaporated. Pooh was axed from Weibo and WeChat. Searches were throttled. GIFs vanished. The China Netcasting Services Association issued guidelines banning content that “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” and directing posters to promote “positive energy,” praise the motherland, and applaud its heroes and its rulers.The state’s attitude toward culture shifted from wary tolerance to active engineering. Hip-hop was banned from state television. A single quip by a stand-up comic prompted regulators to accuse him of insulting the People’s Liberation Army and resulted in a multimillion-dollar fine for the company that booked him, casting a chill over the entire comedy scene. “Little Pink” nationalist commenters flooded the Facebook page of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, harassed brands like Lancôme for working with the Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho, and heaped fury on Lady Gaga for meeting the Dalai Lama.On March 6, 2015, while Lü Pin was away in New York, five other core members of the feminist movement, including Li Maizi, were detained and charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” That summer, in the “709” campaign of July 9, more than 300 human rights lawyers were interrogated or arrested on accusations of “subverting state power.” When China’s #MeToo movement began spreading under yet another animal homophone—mi tu sounds like “rice bunny”—Feminist Voices joined in, but soon the account was purged by Weibo and WeChat, erasing the country’s most influential feminist outlet from cyberspace.By 2019, as Xi presided over the People’s Republic’s seventieth anniversary, official culture leaned hard into muscular nationalism, warning against the “feminization” of boys and exalting a virile ideal of Chinese manhood—a campaign that culminated in a formal ban on “sissy men” from screens. Ma Baoli’s dating app Blued—once hailed as a landmark of queer tech entrepreneurship and fresh off an $85 million NASDAQ listing in 2020—soon faced regulatory pressures and was forced to go private again as Xi’s regime cracked down on LGBTQ+ content.In 2021, tennis star Peng Shuai posted on Weibo accusing former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Monitors yanked the post within minutes and scrubbed her from searches. She was no longer seen in public, and her brief reappearances later were closely stage-managed. When a surveillance video of a brutal assault on women in a Tangshan barbecue restaurant in 2022 went viral, Weibo wiped the “rice bunny” phrase and removed thousands of posts, blocking accounts for “inciting gender conflict.”The clampdown has reached every professional sphere. At universities, courses on “Xi Jinping Thought” and nationalist themes are now mandatory, while the state has increasing influence over hiring, research, and campus speech. Law firms must establish party cells that shape hiring and case selection, and many now avoid politically sensitive clients to reduce the risk of investigations or disbarment.Corporations, too, were brought to heel. Even Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, China’s dominant e-commerce giant, disappeared from view after criticizing regulators. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion for having allegedly “eliminated and restricted competition in the online retail platform service market.” The planned stock market debut of Ant Group, Ma’s fintech firm, set to be the largest IPO in history, was abruptly halted. The result is a choreography of threats and capitulation, a pas de deux between state and citizen. The number of active websites in China shrank by roughly a third between 2017 and 2023, to about 3.9 million—fewer sites than exist in Italian and a fraction of the Japanese web, even though these languages have far fewer speakers.Hong Kong offers a glimpse of what happens when that dance is imposed all at once on a previously free society. On June 30, 2020, Beijing’s national security law took effect in Hong Kong. Overnight, slogans once shouted on the streets became potential evidence of “secessionist intent.” Protesters were arrested and quickly silenced.Media outlets such as Apple Daily and Stand News were raided, and their editors were convicted in the first sedition cases since the territory passed from Britain to China in 1997. Apple Daily’s former owner, 78-year-old Jimmy Lai, who has already been in prison since 2020, was recently found guilty on four national security charges, including colluding with foreign governments, and could face a life sentence. The public broadcaster RTHK, once compared to the BBC for its independence, was brought firmly under the government’s grip, and its television program Headliner, Hong Kong’s longest-running political satire show, was taken off the air after regulators ruled that an episode had “insulted” the police. Celebrities like Denise Ho were blacklisted—concerts canceled, endorsements withdrawn, and jobs evaporated.College professors were detained or had contracts not renewed amid disciplinary procedures linked to political activity, and student unions were dismantled. Museums, nonprofits, and foundations have revised programming or leadership to stay within ideological bounds. As on the mainland, law firms avoid cases that might draw official scrutiny. Cathay Pacific was accused of “support” for the protests after staff expressed sympathy, prompting the Civil Aviation Administration of China to issue unprecedented directives threatening the airline’s access to mainland airspace. Top executives resigned, and employees suspected of supporting the protests were fired or disciplined. Every major Hong Kong company got the message: Stay silent or be punished.For journalists like Allan Au, a meticulous columnist and lecturer in journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the new order arrived as a shock. Au had spent decades in Hong Kong’s media, at the TV network TVB, where I was his colleague, then as a popular host at RTHK, before being dismissed in 2021 as the government reined in the station. He continued to write sharp commentaries for outlets including Stand News, the kind of journalism that once felt safe in Hong Kong, on broadcasters’ eroding independence and how the creeping normalization of self-censorship was hollowing out the city’s press. In April 2022, national security police arrived at his home before dawn and arrested him for “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.” The message was unmistakable: Words that had once been part of ordinary argument were now criminal. Au was forced to take a leave from his teaching post and placed under restrictive bail conditions that effectively bar him from leaving Hong Kong; his passport was confiscated, and the sedition charge hangs over him like a suspended sentence.When the city’s deadliest fire in decades broke out in late November 2025, killing at least 160 people, public anger raged across the internet. But authorities have used the national security law to expand their crackdown, arresting those who called for government accountability. Since the imposition of the national security law, at least 279 people, many of them activists, journalists, and academics, have been arrested; 149 were formally charged, 109 were found guilty, with 34 more overseas activists targeted with arrest warrants and bounties.If Hong Kong shows how a free city can be compelled to learn the dance, the United States now faces a no less unsettling question: whether its own walls are starting to rise—not through outright deletions, but through political arrests and prosecutions, institutional capitulation, regulatory threats, and corporate submission.The American version of censorship is not wholesale erasure but an escalating speech war that increasingly includes defunding, firing, prosecution, and even deportation.The American version is not wholesale erasure but an escalating speech war, where the consequences increasingly include defunding, firing, prosecution, and even deportation. In the latest Trump administration, an executive order grandly titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” has coincided with investigations, license threats, and funding cuts aimed squarely at the president’s critics. Protesters have been charged under federal statutes; ICE has targeted noncitizens involved in pro-Palestinian demonstrations for detention and removal.Newsrooms face mounting political pressure as Congress and the White House have terminated almost all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and private media conglomerates like Paramount (CBS), Disney (ABC), and Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN) have sidelined or dumped outspoken voices while their owners attempt to stay in the administration’s good graces amid renewed antitrust scrutiny and pending mergers. David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount was approved by the Trump administration only after Paramount paid the president $16 million to settle his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, and now Ellison is hoping for Trump’s blessing in his bid to outmaneuver Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. In December, Ellison’s new hire as editor in chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment on the stories of Venezuelan migrants who have been deported by the Trump administration to a notorious prison in El Salvador.Institutions from the Smithsonian to major foundations have been faced with political warnings, audits, and leadership shake-ups. Universities have become battlegrounds: presidents dragged before Congress, student protesters expelled or arrested, faculty disciplined for dissent, and billions of research funding frozen. Jimmy Kimmel, of course, was suspended by ABC and pulled by Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, after a joke that offended the president and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.Trump carried out an unprecedented assault on major U.S. law firms that had opposed him, issuing executive orders and presidential memorandums that restricted lawyers’ access to federal buildings, barred them from government employment, canceled contracts, and threatened companies that hired them—pressure that pushed firms like Paul Weiss to make deals and pledge nearly $1 billion in pro bono work. Meta, Target, Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, and many others have eliminated or rolled back their DEI programs under Trump’s coercion. Each is choosing compliance over becoming the next cautionary tale.Does this sound familiar? What begins as bare-knuckled politics ends as outright silencing. It is no longer culture war—it is delegated repression and state persecution. The First Amendment still offers a legal shield, and the United States lacks a centralized Great Firewall. Yet the pattern of control is unmistakable. The tools differ from China’s; the methods rhyme. We are not living behind China’s wall, but America’s own dance of censorship has already begun.

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