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Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) defended constitutional protections for hate speech in the aftermath of the fatal shooting of conservative organizer Charlie Kirk.
In an interview with POLITICO’s Rachael Bade, Cruz said people who engage in hate speech are not “immune from the consequences of your speech,” expressing support for companies that have taken disciplinary action against employees for speaking negatively of Kirk.
"The First Amendment absolutely protects speech,” Cruz said Tuesday at POLITICO’s AI & Tech Summit in Washington. “It absolutely protects hate speech. It protects vile speech. It protects horrible speech. What does that mean? It means you cannot be prosecuted for speech, even if it is evil and bigoted and wrong.”
At the same time, Cruz endorsed “naming and shaming” as “part of a functioning and vibrant democracy,” citing English philosopher John Stuart Mill’s famous axiom that free and plentiful expression is the best antidote to undesirable speech.
"We have seen, as you noted, across the country, people on the left — not everybody, but far too many people — celebrating Charlie Kirk's murder,” Cruz said. “We've seen teachers in high schools and elementary schools posting online, celebrating. We've seen university professors posting. In my view, they should absolutely face the consequences for celebrating murder."
The senator lauded Kirk, who he described as a friend, for being willing to engage in civil debate.
Numerous individuals have been targeted online for making disparaging posts about Kirk, leading to firings in higher education, media and other industries. The Pentagon has also vowed to discipline service members who “celebrate or mock” Kirk’s killing.
Cruz also defended Attorney General Pamela Bondi, who said law enforcement would “absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Cruz said those comments had been “misconstrued.”
In a Tuesday morning statement posted to social media, Bondi clarified that “hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”
Cruz said while he was glad to see social media companies attempt to block the video of Kirk’s killing but added that the companies should “allow free speech,” echoing earlier comments by Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr who told POLITICO’s Alex Burns that the government should not crack down on social media posts about Kirk.
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President Donald Trump announced late Monday he was launching a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times in his latest attack on a major media company over its reporting and commentary on him.
The suit, filed in a Florida court, accuses the Times of being “a fullthroated mouthpiece of the Democrat Party” and cites a series of articles, including the paper’s front-page endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris in the lead-up to the 2024 election.
Trump said in a post on Truth Social the “degenerate” Times had “engaged in a decades long method of lying about your Favorite President (ME!), my family, business, the America First Movement, MAGA, and our Nation as a whole.”
“The New York Times has been allowed to freely lie, smear, and defame me for far too long, and that stops, NOW!” he added.
Trump’s suit names The New York Times Company, four of the publication’s reporters — Susanne Craig, Russ Buettner, Peter Baker and Michael S. Schmidt — and Penguin Random House, which published a book titled “Lucky Loser: How Donald Trump Squandered His Father’s Fortune and Created the Illusion of Success,” written by Craig and Buettner, that the legal filing calls “false, malicious, and defamatory.”
The suit alleges the reporting had harmed Trump’s “unique brand” and business interests, including his media company’s stock value, causing “reputational injury” worth “billions of dollars.”
Trump threatened only last week to sue the Times for reporting allegations he authored a sexually suggestive note in 2003 to disgraced financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who died by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019. Trump has vigorously denied he wrote the note.
The Republican leader has launched a flurry of lawsuits against publications and media companies he has accused of being unfriendly and defamatory, including The Wall Street Journal, ABC and Paramount, the parent of CBS News.
In July, Paramount agreed to settle a $20 billion lawsuit filed by Trump over an interview with former Vice President Harris on CBS news program "60 Minutes" that the president said was deceptively edited, paying him $16 million.
The socialist brand is on the rise, according to recent polling, fueling the left flank of the Democratic Party to argue its ideology is becoming more mainstream.
Shortly after Gallup released data showing Democrats and independents are cooling toward capitalism, a progressive organization is out with a poll finding that more than half of likely Democratic voters prefer socialist-aligned figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani to establishment politicians like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jefrries and Nancy Pelosi.
Democratic voters also view elected officials who describe themselves as democratic socialists about as positively as those who identify as Democrats, and they prefer democratic socialism to capitalism when written definitions of each are read aloud to them, according to the poll conducted by Data for Progress and shared first with POLITICO.
“What the mainstream of the party wants is both democratic socialism as a value system and democratic socialist politicians,” said Gabe Tobias, executive director of the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, a political nonprofit organization that funded the survey with the magazine Jacobin and the Berlin-based democratic socialist group Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.
Though Democratic voters are warming to socialism, the ideology is toxic to most Republicans and many independents, making it difficult for socialists to win in battlegrounds. Even within the Democratic Party, some voters are skeptical about the electability of democratic socialists in swing areas, a reality Sanders faced during his two unsuccessful presidential runs.
Democrats find themselves in turmoil after the national drubbing they took last year, and have been tussling for months over how to rebuild their party. Progressives and moderates alike have sought to shape the debate through polling, memos and in-person gatherings as they bicker over the path out of the wilderness.
This survey marks the first formal poll the DSA Fund has released — the latest example of the left seeking to professionalize its operations and create infrastructure to build on its recent electoral victories. The organization said it plans to share its findings with hundreds of socialists elected around the country.
Fifty-three percent of Democratic voters said they preferred politicians described as similar to Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez and Mamdani, while 33 percent favored those similar to Schumer, Jeffries and Pelosi. Fourteen percent didn’t choose.
Though Democratic voters reported viewing elected officials who describe themselves as Democrats or democratic socialists roughly equally, independent and Republican voters saw the socialists far more negatively. Both types of hypothetical politicians were described as having the same affordability-focused agenda.
The results help explain why socialists and progressives have found success in blue seats and cities — underscored by Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary in June — but have struggled to appeal to swing voters in battleground areas.
In the poll, democratic socialists were defined as believing “that the government should take a more active role to improve Americans' lives. They generally support higher taxes on corporations and high-income earners, support regulations that protect workers and consumers, and want more public ownership of key industries like housing, health care and utilities.”
The survey described capitalists as believing “that the private sector is best equipped to make improvements to Americans' lives. They generally support lower taxes, oppose government regulations of businesses, and want the private sector to own key industries like housing, health care and utilities.”
After hearing each description, 74 percent of likely Democratic voters said democratic socialism comes closest to their viewpoint, while 16 percent said the same of capitalism. A plurality of independent voters and a majority of Republicans said they preferred capitalism.
The survey of 1,257 likely voters nationwide, conducted from Aug. 22 to 24 using web panel respondents, had a 3-point margin of error.
Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said on Monday that she was fired from the publication over social media posts she made following the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Writing in a lengthy Substack post, Attiah said she was dismissed over her posts on Bluesky that she says were deemed to be "unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and that endangered the physical safety of her colleagues.
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Earlier this year, the publication shifted its opinion section to focus on supporting “personal liberties and free markets.” Owner Jeff Bezos said at the time that a “broad-based opinion section” was no longer needed because a diversity of opinions were available online.
Some of Attiah’s social media posts condemned political violence but also highlighted Kirk’s divisive comments on Black women. In her only post directly mentioning Kirk, she quoted the Turning Point USA founder’s comments that Black women lack “brain processing power.”
“I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them,” Attiah said.
Attiah, who started her career at The Washington Post in 2014, said the publication “silenced" her. She warned her firing is part of a larger trend.
“What happened to me is part of a broader purge of Black voices from academia, business, government, and media — a historical pattern as dangerous as it is shameful — and tragic,” she said.
President Donald Trump’s already brass-knuckled push for red-state redistricting is taking on an increasingly apocalyptic valence among MAGA stalwarts following the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Inside an Embassy Suites ballroom in suburban Indianapolis this weekend, Sen. Jim Banks’ inaugural Hoosier Leadership for America Summit drew hundreds of attendees who came to hear from next-generation MAGA figures ranging from Alex Bruesewitz, a top Trump adviser and longtime friend of Kirk’s, to GOP strategist Alex DeGrasse.
The summit marked the first official MAGA gathering since Kirk’s death and served as both a Kirk memorial and redistricting rally, unfolding amid an increased security footprint and ubiquitous police presence throughout the conference center.
Between musical interludes featuring Jason Aldean’s “Fly over States” and “Try That In a Small Town,” MAGA leaders spoke of “demons” at work behind the shooting of Kirk and the stabbing of Iryna Zarutska and “the righteous versus the wicked.” An attendee who posed a question to Banks wondered whether Kirk’s killing “lifted the veil between good and evil.”
“This isn’t a political battle anymore,” said Bruesewitz, who spoke to the crowd with visible emotion about his friendship with Kirk dating back to their teens, and recalled their last dinner together in South Korea just days ago. “It’s a spiritual battle.”
All of it presaged a coming national political hardening on the right with Kirk’s killing as the raison d'etre. More than any other issue at the conference, Kirk’s death seeped into the rationale for mid-decade redistricting.
In the final weeks of his life, Kirk underscored the argument for that push in Indiana: He posted to X last month Turning Point would “support primary opponents for Republicans in the Indiana State Legislature who refuse to support the team and redraw the maps.”
Bruesewitz in an interview with POLITICO on the sidelines of the summit said he initially considered asking Banks’ team to cancel the event in light of Kirk’s killing. But he decided to push ahead, recalling a message from White House chief of staff Susie Wiles. “She said, ‘Do not let your words or your voice get softer, speak out now more than ever,’” Bruesewitz recalled.
Bruesewitz made the case to still-hesitant Hoosier lawmakers for a congressional map that delivers Republicans all nine Indiana districts, carving up Democratic-held areas in Indianapolis and Northwest Indiana.
“They need to recognize what time it is in our country,” Bruesewitz told POLITICO. “We are up against a wicked ideology that cannot continue to have power in our country. And Indiana has a unique opportunity to take some of their power away, doing it through lawful means and doing it through legislative means, and they should listen to the president and get it done.”
Banks said in an interview that Trump is closely monitoring the redistricting effort — and similarly tied the importance of the push to Kirk’s death.
“They killed Charlie Kirk — the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine to zero map,” Banks said. “And I sense it in this crowd, in a big way. And I sense it from supporters all over the state; that now's not the time to back off. Now's not the time to be nice. Now's the time to engage in a peaceful and political way.”
Missouri lawmakers passed Republican-drawn maps this week at Trump’s behest. Ohio is required to produce new maps soon, too. But in Indiana, Burkean conservatives have dragged their feet. Since an Oval Office meeting with Trump last month, legislative leaders have neither publicly addressed that meeting nor shown their cards.
Speaker Todd Huston and state Senate President Rodric Bray have been holding behind-closed-doors caucuses to take the temperature of their members. But people familiar and briefed on those proceedings say Huston hasn’t taken a vote on the matter and Bray’s Senate is said to have not made much headway.
Throughout Saturday morning, precinct officials, local GOP grandees and state lawmakers heard speakers turn up the pressure on the issue.
War Room host and keeper of the MAGA flame Steve Bannon joined the event via live stream, calling for a maximalist approach to redistricting. “We’re absolutely pushing for 9-0,” DeGrasse told Bannon from the stage. “That’s the whole ballgame.”
Kurt Schlichter, the Townhall columnist, said Indiana lawmakers needed to “get hard” and “have the stones” to succeed in their push. “You need to carve this state into nine Republican districts and drink their tears,” he told Republicans of Democrats.
The keynote panel featured three Indiana GOP state lawmakers who have become vocal proponents of redistricting. Among them was state Rep. Andrew Ireland, who said in an interview that Kirk’s killing “crystallizes what a lot of people think, what the party believes,” emphasizing that the country has a “real issue” with political violence — which he claimed the left was particularly responsible for — and that Republicans have been complacent. “For too long, I think Republicans have tried to just rest on their laurels when it comes to things like redistricting.”
Not all of those gathered were nodding their heads. State Rep. Becky Cash, who represents more purple parts of the Indianapolis suburbs, told POLITICO that even after hearing the case for redistricting afresh at Saturday morning’s event following her White House visit last month, she remained opposed. Since Kirk’s death, Cash said she has received messages saying she and her colleagues should “redraw it all.”
“I tell people, ‘I don't think it's gonna happen,’ and then they look at me and they're like, ‘Oh, you're definitely going back in” for a special session, she said. “I'm like, ‘Well, do you know something that I don't know?’ Like, I think it's 50-50 at this point.”
Even if lawmakers do go back into a special session, Cash said based on her attendance at private caucuses she is not at all certain new maps would pass.
“I can tell you that the speaker did not take a count,” Cash said. “People are individually communicating with him. Obviously, we have three legislators who were on a panel today who are 100 percent yes. And I don't know many who are ‘yes.’”
Spokespeople for Huston and Bray did not return requests for comment.
Banks painted the stakes of the effort in no uncertain terms, asking the audience of statewide officials, lawmakers and precinct officials and grassroots powerbrokers to imagine Republicans losing their House majority by one or two seats because the state failed to take up redistricting.
“Indiana could be ground zero for keeping the House of Representatives,” Banks said.
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N. E. Felibata 👽 mag das.
@Easydor
ja, ich hatte auf einer schrappeligen Website eine unglückliche Erklärung zu folgendem Phänomen gelesen: "Personen, die noch keine Varizellen durchgemacht haben und nicht gegen Varizellen geimpft sind, können durch Kontakt mit der Flüssigkeit an Windpocken erkranken." (RKI) Also: man kann auch Windpocken davon kriegen.
Übrigens hatte eine Freundin Gürtelrose, das war ziemlich schmerzhaft. Ich überlege, mich impfen zu lassen.
nein, die aus den Herpes Zoster-Bläschen, also: jemand, der sich damit bei einer Gürtelrose ansteckt und noch keine Windpocken gehabt hat, bekommt dann Windpocken
Kanalmatrose
Als Antwort auf Deutschlandfunk (inoffiziell) • • •