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Juneau is actively planning and moving forward with the construction of a new Capital Civic Center, according to the project’s executive director Bob Banghart the Civic Center’s purpose is to provide Alaska’s Capital City with an essential and vibrant community cultural and conference center located within the Áak’w Village Arts and Culture District.
“‘I’ll take us back to the early 80s, when Centennial Hall was first being designed and built.” Said Banghart, “Centennial Hall was built as it is, with an idea that there would be an addition later that would support performing arts and the arts itself. So about 10 years ago, a group of people got together to say, we need to do this.”
According to Banghart, the process of designing the new Civic Center started with an independent standalone building in the vicinity of Centennial Hall, but the group kept running into opposition, “We started listening to the different, diverse voices in the community, and then pandemic hit us.” Said Banghart, “during that process, the city approached us and said, what if we were to join the two buildings together and see about looking for some synergy that could be generated there. So the city put up some money, and we did just that, we designed a facility that conjoined what we had programmatically in the standalone building with Centennial Hall.”
The project has overcome significant challenges in recent years, including high construction costs and community opposition.
“In August last year, we came up with an idea, and we shopped it around. Took a lot of evaluation of it. People were saying, we like this, we don’t like that.” Said Banghart, “predominantly, we were looking at just joining the two buildings together with a large common space that proved to be, again, non-viable because it completely eradicated all the local parking in the area, and the cost to operate was looking like it might be outside the boundaries that we were able to afford.”
The proposed facility, an addition to the existing Centennial Hall, will feature a 299-seat professional theater, expanded lobby space, a gallery, and a flexible “black box” performance area.
Banghart described the project as a strategic response to community needs. “We’ve designed a facility that not only meets current event management challenges but creates new opportunities for community gatherings,” Banghart explained.
The $60 million project has already secured significant community support, with over 140 local donors contributing more than $10,000.
In terms of timeline, Banghart says he’d love to see the Civic Center break ground in 2027, “That’s funding pending right? the city is not on the hook to do any of that, other than what they’ve already contributed, contrary to some people’s beliefs, we are on a full court press to raise the money. We’ve been having some very strong successes.” Banghart said “So we’d love to see it happen in 27, we’ll see the documents completed next year.”
Though Banghart says there’s uncertainty on the federal end of things, he’s optimistic about contributions from the Coast Guard, “they’ve been very positive. They see a lot of application for the building’s use. We’re right across the street from them.”
The City and Project, the founding nonprofit, are jointly managing the Civic Center project, sharing design phase costs.
Interested community members can follow the project’s progress at capitalciviccenter.org.
By: Jonathon Dawe, Wrangell Sentinel
For the first time in 38 years, the Wrangell Native community has raised new totem poles in town, with four days of events planned Thursday through Sunday, July 17-20.
Unveiling the five new poles marks a significant revival of a centuries-old Tlingit tradition. The event honors the carvers and apprentices who transformed logs into cultural masterpieces, continuing a legacy nearly lost to time.
By the early 1900s, most of the town’s 30 to 40 totem poles had decayed or fallen, and the art of pole carving faded. The last totem pole raised in Wrangell was the Sun House Totem in 1987, carved by Steve Brown and Wayne Price, according to organizers of this week’s events.
Last week’s celebration symbolized a broader cultural resurgence that began with the 2013 rededication of Chief Shakes House and the 2015 completion of the WCA’s Carving Shed on Front Street, the organizers explained.
The new poles were funded in part by the U.S. Army (Gunakaadeit Pole) and organized by the Wrangell Cooperative Association.
The poles and their stories
Each pole tells a story rooted in Tlingit and Haida traditions:
Bear Up The Mountain Pole: A Naanya.aayí X’atgu Hít narrative of survival during a great flood.
Gunakaadeit Pole: A Naanya.aayí X’atgu Naasí Hít tale of a man using a sea monster’s skin to feed his community.
Underwater Sea Bear Pole: A Sik’nax.ádi legend of a mythical good-luck creature.
Killer Whale Grave Marker: A Kayaashkeiditaan tribute to Shx’atoo, who died during the U.S. Army’s 1869 bombardment of the Native village at Wrangell.
Kadashan Pole: A replica of a 1940 pole, originally gifted by Haida relatives to honor intermarriage with Tlingit women in the 1830s.
Master carvers and apprentices
Leading the project are master carvers:
Joe Young (Haida, Yahgw’laanaas clan), who learned from his grandfather Claude Morrison and carved the Bear Up The Mountain and Gunakaadeit poles.
Tommy Joseph (Tlingit, Kaagwaantaan clan), a renowned woodcarver behind the Underwater Sea Bear Pole.
TJ Young (Haida, Yahgw’láanaas clan), lead carver for the Kadashan pole.
Apprentice carvers, including Mike Hoyt, Tony Harding, Linda Churchill and Susie Beebee, also contributed, ensuring the tradition’s future.
“What an incredible experience to witness the community, literally pulling together to stand Kadashan pole in Totem Park.” Tlingit &Haida said in a Facebook post.
“This is more than art – it’s healing,” said Joe Young. “We’re reclaiming our history.”
By: James Brooks, Alaska Beacon
Speaking in an interview on Friday, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski said President Donald Trump’s health care-cutting budget plan was destined to pass Congress, and her decisive vote on the package last month represented the best of a bad pair of options.
In a new analysis published Monday by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, Republicans’ “big, beautiful” law is estimated to add almost $3.4 trillion to the federal debt over the next decade and cause 10 million Americans to lose access to health insurance.
Murkowski said she believes that had she opposed the law, Republican senators would instead have sought a 50th vote from Kentucky Republican Sen. Rand Paul, and the result would have been deeper cuts to the federal budget, including to health care.
“What he was looking for was dramatically more cuts to Medicaid, dramatically greater reductions in spending,” Murkowski said. “And so it was no secret that the bill was going to pass. It was just a question of whether or not it was going to pass with Senator Paul’s vote, or with Senator Murkowski’s vote.”
In a column published July 3 by the Louisville Courier-Journal, Paul wrote, “They could have had my vote and saved money but instead chose more spending and tax and welfare changes targeted at Alaska at the cost of the fiscal sanity of our country.”
Murkowski, echoing comments made previously by Alaska Sen. Dan Sullivan, who also voted for the proposal, said she was disappointed that several provisions benefiting Alaska were stricken by the Senate parliamentarian after objections from Senate Democrats.
Those included large subsidies for the state’s Medicaid program and a new split of oil revenue from federal land on the North Slope, with 90% going to the state and 10% to the federal government.
Voting on the budget package began before the parliamentarian ruled on all aspects of it.
“And so we didn’t know what was in and we didn’t know what was not in,” Murkowski said.
During the process, the 90-10 split dropped to 70-30, and state-specific benefits for Alaska disappeared.
Afterward, one provision that survived — a concession for wind and solar projects — was quashed by executive orders issued by President Trump.
Speaking to the Anchorage Daily News on Friday, Murkowski said she feels “cheated” by the maneuver.
Speaking to the Alaska Beacon, she said, “I have been criticized. I have been hung out to dry. But you know what? At the end of the day, I fought for my constituents as best I knew how, and I should never, and I will never, apologize for doing the best that I can by them.”
In her last three Alaska U.S. Senate elections, Murkowski defeated more socially conservative candidates with the support of Democrats and independents.
On social media, after her vote in favor of the Republican budget plan, many of those voters voiced their disapproval.
Asked about that disappointment, Murkowski said she understands and hears that criticism.
“I get the fact that they want me to be principled on this. But if it costs Alaskans — which it would have — then how is that doing my job for them? … At the end of the day, I couldn’t kill it, and I understand that people might not believe that, but again, what I set out to do was try to make improvements to a measure that started out in a place that would have … made it very challenging for too many Alaskans.”
Murkowski said she expects the Trump administration to propose more retroactive budget cuts akin to the one that passed last week involving foreign aid and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
Sullivan voted in favor of the cut; Murkowski opposed it.
Afterward, Trump budget director Russ Vought said he wants congressional Republicans to get more partisan in the budget process and that lawmakers should expect more “rescission” votes like last week’s.
Murkowski said she hopes other Republicans will join her in rejecting that call.
“I would like to think that it’s comments like that, that would galvanize us as appropriators, galvanize us as Republicans and Democrats in the United States Senate,” she said. “Our oath is to the Constitution. We would say we’ve got our job to do here, and we know that in order to do it and have it be enduring, it takes 60 votes, and so we need to be more bipartisan and not more partisan. To me, it was absolutely offensive, his statement, and so arrogant.”
Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz recently sparked controversy by comparing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement to Nazi Germany’s notorious secret police, the Gestapo.
“Donald Trump’s modern-day Gestapo is scooping folks up off the streets,” Walz said during a May 2025 speech at the University of Minnesota Law School’s commencement ceremony.
“They’re in unmarked vans, wearing masks, being shipped off to foreign torture dungeons, no chance to mount a defense, not even a chance to kiss a loved one goodbye, just grabbed up by masked agents, shoved into those vans, and disappeared,” Walz added.
ICE, tasked with enforcing immigration policies, has dramatically increased the number of nationwide arrests of immigrants since President Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025. ICE’s arrests of immigrants have more than doubled in 38 states since then.
In recent months, other Democratic politicians, including U.S Rep. Dan Goldman of New York, have also compared ICE to the Gestapo, or Adolf Hitler’s “secret police,” as Rep. Seth Moulton of Massachusetts said in April.
But do ICE’s tactics actually resemble those of the Gestapo?
Because I am a scholar of modern Germany and the Holocaust, people regularly ask me if this analogy is accurate. The answer is complicated.
Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
Understanding the Gestapo
The Nazi regime established the Gestapo, short for the German phrase Geheime Staatspolizei, meaning secret state police, soon after Hitler became chancellor of Germany in January 1933. Among other responsibilities, the Gestapo was tasked with investigating political crimes and monitoring opposition activity. It later enforced racial laws in Germany and across occupied Europe.
As part of its daily work, the Gestapo identified and monitored the regime’s political enemies. It arrested, interrogated, detained and tortured suspects and sent others to concentration camps. To identify suspects, it often relied on anonymous denunciations that came not only from zealous Nazis, but also from disgruntled neighbors or business competitors who tipped off the Gestapo to Jews and other people.
While the Gestapo was relatively small in terms of personnel, it projected an image of being, as one scholar wrote, “omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent.”
It enforced the regime’s will and suppressed dissent not through sheer manpower but by creating a pervasive sense of fear. This aura of menace and terror has long outlived the Nazi regime itself.
ICE’s operations
ICE, with around 21,000 officers and staff operating in a country of more than 340 million, is smaller both in absolute terms and on a per capita basis. At its height between 1943 and 1945, the Gestapo had between 40,000 and 50,000 personnel in a country of 79 million.
ICE is set to expand its work in the next few years with an additional US$75 billion in funding that Congress appropriated in July as part of Trump’s tax and spending bill.
And while ICE focuses on immigration, the Gestapo had a more expansive role. It was responsible for suppressing all forms of political dissent, not just violations of immigration law.
ICE operates with vastly more advanced technologies that did not exist in the 1940s, including facial recognition and social media monitoring.
There is technically more transparency around ICE’s work than the Gestapo’s, since ICE is a federal agency that is subject to its work and information being reviewed by politicians and the public alike. But in June 2020, the first Trump administration reclassified ICE, which is part of the Department of Homeland Security, as a “security/sensitive agency.” This designation makes it harder for people to request and receive information about ICE’s work through Freedom of Information Act records requests.
Like the Gestapo, ICE can seem performative in its work, like when it carried out a dramatic July raid of a cannabis farm in California in which balaclava-wearing officers used tear gas against protesters.
The Gestapo in today’s world
Since World War II and the fall of the Nazi regime, the term Gestapo has become shorthand in the United States to describe police repression.
Using the word Gestapo to describe the worst possible authoritarian oppression has been popularized in popular movies in everything from the 1943 film “Casablanca” and “The Black Gestapo” in 1975 to “Inglourious Basterds” in 2009 and “Jojo Rabbit” in 2019.
Walz’s remarks in May, though provocative, were also far from isolated in politics. Politicians from both sides of the aisle, as well as political observers, regularly use Gestapo and Nazi metaphors to attack their opponents.
In 2022, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia famously confused the term Gestapo with gazpacho soup in a gaffe that went viral. “Now we have Nancy Pelosi’s gazpacho police spying on members of Congress,” she said.
In 2024, Trump accused President Joe Biden of running a “Gestapo administration” as the Justice Department prosecuted Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election.
Overall, mentions of the word Gestapo in social media increased by 184% between 2017 and 2024, according to the nonprofit group Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is among the organizations that have condemned making comparisons to the Holocaust and the Nazis for many reasons, including their historical inaccuracy and because they are insulting to people whose families remain scarred by the Holocaust.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images
What historical comparisons really say
Analogies can be useful for clarifying complex ideas. But especially when they stretch across decades and vastly different political contexts, they risk oversimplifying and trivializing history.
I believe that comparing ICE to the Gestapo is less a historical judgment than a reflection of modern anxiety – a fear that the U.S. is veering toward authoritarianism reminiscent of 1930s Germany.
If politicians and other public figures are looking for historical comparisons to modern law enforcement agencies that use severe tactics, there is, unfortunately, no shortage of options: the Soviet Union’s secret police agencies NKVD and KGB, Iran’s former secret police and intelligence agency SAVAK or East Germany’s Stasi, to name just a few.
All of those organizations denied suspects due process and grossly violated human rights in order to protect political regimes – but they don’t necessarily easily compare to ICE, either.
Still, politicians and political observers alike most often turn to the Gestapo and other Nazi references instead.
Ultimately, the Gestapo, Nazi Germany and the Holocaust serve as a powerful, shared cultural reference point. The catastrophes of World War II epitomize the worst possible outcomes of evil left unchecked.
They have become the master moral paradigm and an ethical compass for the world today. In an age of polarization, World War II and the Holocaust remain the mirror in which Americans examine their present.
Daniel H. Magilow received funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities (although DOGE cancelled the grant in April 2025).
He serves as Co-Editor-in-Chief of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the journal of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies
Politics + Society – The Conversation
President Donald Trump’s nomination of his former criminal defense attorney, Emil Bove, to be a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit, has been mired in controversy.
On June 24, 2025, Erez Reuveni, a former Department of Justice attorney who worked with Bove, released an extensive, 27-page whistleblower report. Reuveni claimed that Bove, as the Trump administration’s acting deputy attorney general, said “that it might become necessary to tell a court ‘fuck you’” and ignore court orders related to the administration’s immigration policies. Bove’s acting role ended on March 6 when he resumed his current position of principal associate deputy attorney general.
When asked about this statement at his June 25 Senate confirmation hearing, Bove said, “I don’t recall.”
And on July 15, 80 former federal and state judges signed a letter opposing Bove’s nomination. The letter argued that “Mr. Bove’s egregious record of mistreating law enforcement officers, abusing power, and disregarding the law itself disqualifies him for this position.”
A day later, more than 900 former Department of Justice attorneys submitted their own letter opposing Bove’s confirmation. The attorneys argued that “Few actions could undermine the rule of law more than a senior executive branch official flouting another branch’s authority. But that is exactly what Mr. Bove allegedly did through his involvement in DOJ’s defiance of court orders.”
On July 17, Democrats walked out of the Senate Judiciary Committee vote, in protest of the refusal by Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, to allow further investigation and debate on the nomination. Republicans on the committee then unanimously voted to move the nomination forward for a full Senate vote.
As a scholar of the courts, I know that most federal court appointments are not as controversial as Bove’s nomination. But highly contentious nominations do arise from time to time.
Here’s how three controversial nominations turned out – and how Bove’s nomination is different in a crucial way.
Mark Reinstein/Corbis via Getty Images
Robert Bork
Bork is the only federal court nominee whose name became a verb.
“Borking” is “to attack or defeat (a nominee or candidate for public office) unfairly through an organized campaign of harsh public criticism or vilification,” according to Merriam-Webster.
This refers to Republican President Ronald Reagan’s 1987 appointment of Bork to the Supreme Court.
Reagan called Bork “one of the finest judges in America’s history.” Democrats viewed Bork, a federal appeals court judge, as an ideologically extreme conservative, with their opposition based largely on his extensive scholarly work and opinions on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
In opposing the Bork nomination, Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts took the Senate floor and gave a fiery speech: “Robert Bork’s America is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids, schoolchildren could not be taught about evolution, writers and artists could be censored at the whim of government, and the doors of the federal courts would be shut on the fingers of millions of citizens for whom the judiciary is often the only protector of the individual rights that are the heart of our democracy.”
Ultimately, Bork’s nomination failed by a 58-42 vote in the Senate, with 52 Democrats and six Republicans rejecting the nomination.
Ronnie White
In 1997, Democratic President Bill Clinton nominated White to the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri. White was the first Black judge on the Missouri Supreme Court.
Republican Sen. John Ashcroft, from White’s home state of Missouri, led the fight against the nomination. Ashcroft alleged that White’s confirmation would “push the law in a pro-criminal direction.” Ashcroft based this claim on White’s comparatively liberal record in death penalty cases as a judge on the Missouri Supreme Court.
However, there was limited evidence to support this assertion. This led some to believe that Ashcroft’s attack on the nomination was motivated by stereotypes that African Americans, like White, are soft on crime.
Even Clinton implied that race may be a factor in the attacks on White: “By voting down the first African-American judge to serve on the Missouri Supreme Court, the Republicans have deprived both the judiciary and the people of Missouri of an excellent, fair, and impartial Federal judge.”
White’s nomination was defeated in the Senate by a 54-45 party-line vote. In 2014, White was renominated to the same judgeship by President Barack Obama and confirmed by largely party-line 53-44 vote, garnering the support of a single Republican, Susan Collins of Maine.
Alex Wong/Newsmakers
Miguel Estrada
Republican President George W. Bush nominated Estrada to the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2001.
Estrada, who had earned a unanimous “well-qualified” rating from the American Bar Association, faced deep opposition from Senate Democrats, who believed he was a conservative ideologue. They also worried that, if confirmed, he would later be appointed to the Supreme Court.
Scott J. Ferrell/Congressional Quarterly/Getty Images
However, unlike Bork – who had an extensive paper trail as an academic and judge – Estrada’s written record was very thin.
Democrats sought to use his confirmation hearing to probe his beliefs. But they didn’t get very far, as Estrada dodged many of the senators’ questions, including ones about Supreme Court cases he disagreed with and judges he admired.
Democrats were particularly troubled by allegations that Estrada, when he was screening candidates for Justice Anthony Kennedy, disqualified applicants for Supreme Court clerkships based on their ideology.
According to one attorney: “Miguel told me his job was to prevent liberal clerks from being hired. He told me he was screening out liberals because a liberal clerk had influenced Justice Kennedy to side with the majority and write a pro-gay-rights decision in a case known as Romer v. Evans, which struck down a Colorado statute that discriminated against gays and lesbians.”
When asked about this at his confirmation hearing, Estrada initially denied it but later backpedaled. Estrada said, “There is a set of circumstances in which I would consider ideology if I think that the person has some extreme view that he would not be willing to set aside in service to Justice Kennedy.”
Unlike the Bork nomination, Democrats didn’t have the numbers to vote Estrada’s nomination down. Instead, they successfully filibustered the nomination, knowing that Republicans couldn’t muster the required 60 votes to end the filibuster. This marked the first time in Senate history that a court of appeals nomination was filibustered. Estrada would never serve as a judge.
Bove stands out
As the examples of Bork, Estrada and White make clear, contentious nominations to the federal courts often involve ideological concerns.
This is also true for Bove, who is opposed in part because of the perception that he is a conservative ideologue.
But the main concerns about Bove are related to a belief that he is a Trump loyalist who shows little respect for the rule of law or the judicial branch.
This makes Bove stand out among contentious federal court nominations.
Paul M. Collins Jr. does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Politics + Society – The Conversation