Further

The fiery shards from the murder of Charlie Kirk still ricochet in baleful ways, even as his shooter's views and motives remain murky. Despite rabid calls by a regime eager for revenge to extinguish leftist "scum" who rendered their bigot hero "a martyr for truth and freedom," the killer seems to be a muddled mix of gun freak, devout gamer and violent nihilist. In his bloody wake, many now beset by irrational vitriol are left to argue, "I don't support what happened to Charlie, but Charlie supported what happened to Charlie."

Political violence is, of course, as old as America: Federalists vs. anti-Federalists, indigenous genocide, slavery, lynching, war, Lincoln, the 1960s' white and black assassinations, civil, women's and gay rights struggles, Jan. 6 riots, police state troops, racist ICE raids and, in a country with perhaps 500 million guns, an estimated 125 Americans killed daily with guns - a rate 26 times higher than any other developed nation - and up to 800 children killed in school shootings impacting over 360,000 students. In 2023, the most recent year with full data, nearly 47,000 people died in gun violence. The first six months of this year saw an almost 40% surge in gun-related acts of terrorism and targeted violence over last year, with over 520 reported plots or acts of violence and, to date, 300 mass shootings, forty-seven at schools. In a nation awash in killing machines, an increasingly right-wing GOP and a mood of rage-fueled paranoia and polarization, each act of political violence makes the next more likely.

After decades of silence born of fear, shame, trauma, over 20 Epstein survivors came together in D.C. for the first time to publicly tell their grievous stories of rape and abuse - what did it cost them? - when they were 14, 15, 16 years old. Facing not just their own dark pasts but dogged denial, stonewalling, and a literal silencing by a senseless military flyover, they still wielded "the fire and the power of our voices" to insist, "We are the proof that fear did not break us."

It was months after Trump vowed to release the Epstein files "on Day One" and Pam Bondi said an upright DOJ was "lifting the veil" on Epstein's crimes - and decades after they were committed - when the resolute victims came to stand together, speak of "the weight we live with daily," and demand to be heard. Their signs said "He Is On the List," "S-H-A-M-E," "Trust the Victims, Not the Felon." Many had never met each other, and thought they were the only ones bruised and haunted by long-ago rape, abuse, enduring trauma. "Our government could have saved so many women. Those women didn’t matter,” said Marina Lacerda, who was 14 when she was raped by Epstein. "Well, we matter now. We are here today, and we are speaking, and we are not going to stop speaking."

Implausibly, it keeps getting weirder, darker, worse. Hankering to make war against his own citizens in the name of an imaginary crime wave, the deranged, draft-dodging Peace President of the United States just posted a mock Apocalypse Now meme of himself as Duvall's warmongering sociopath, warning Chicago is "about to find out why it's called the Department of War" and leering, "I love the smell of deportations in the morning." Sigh. Nothing to see here.

Wildly flailing in a job he is utterly unfit for and so eager to deflect from the looming, damning Epstein files he'll do pretty much anything even kill us, the old, bored, crumbling, makeup-caked cretin now defiling the White House randomly decided it was time to "send a message of strength" to an unlistening world by changing the longtime name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. "We won the first World War, we won the second World War, we won everything before that and in between," he babbled, "and then we decided to go wokey and we changed the name to Department of Defense." Umm. Ok. So now he's changing it back except Congress would need to approve the change so not really.

Sparking a populist fire, the "Fighting Oligarchy" tour in Portland brought tireless Bernie, aspiring governor Troy Jackson, and electrifying veteran, oyster farmer, harbormaster, and unabashed populist Graham Platner - come, finally, please, to rid us of odious collaborator Susan 'I'm-Sure-He's-Learned-His-Lesson' Collins. With his "plainspoken fury at the billionaire economy," Platner's unafraid to "beat back fascism," "name the enemy - oligarchy" - call genocide genocide, and summon "a life that allows us to dream."

Boasting he can now say he's barnstormed from California to Maine - and drawing over 300,000 people en route - Bernie told a revved-up Labor Day crowd here of over 6,500, triple his likewise ardent audience in 2016, to "think big" and in unprecedented ways to combat our "unprecedented and dangerous moment in American history." On his travels, he's learned Americans "do not want to live under a kleptocracy" where they "sure as hell are sick and tired of the ongoing war of the rich against the working class." His now-decades-old solution: Building a "strong, progressive grassroots movement" to make real "a vision of where we want this country to be." The trick of the ruling class, he said, is "to say that ordinary people are powerless," that "they have all the money, all the power, you got nothing, and they can do anything they want....We must, must stop them today."