PHOENIX — Members of the MAGA faithful gathered here Thursday to kick off Turning Point USA’s America Fest, the largest meeting for the organization since its founder, Charlie Kirk, was shot to death on a Utah college campus in September.
Despite that somber backdrop, the event quickly devolved into a spectacle of MAGA infighting.
Ben Shapiro, the first speaker after widow Erika Kirk, ripped into those who would take the same stage in the coming hours and days. He called out conservative commentators, blasting Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly and Steve Bannon as “frauds and grifters.”
“The conservative movement is in serious danger,” Shapiro said, arguing the danger is not just on the left, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”
He called Bannon “a PR flack for Jeffrey Epstein” ahead of the imminent release of files related to the late convicted sex offender, while praising President Donald Trump and his administration’s handling of the issue. Trump pushed to stop Republicans in Congress from voting to release the files, though he signed the legislation once it was passed. Both Bannon and Trump appear in photos with Epstein that were released by House Democrats.
Shapiro particularly focused on Carlson — both for elevating Owens’ conspiracy theories about Kirk’s murder and for his recent interview with far-right influencer Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who has repeatedly pushed antisemitic tropes. Carlson, a former Fox News host, now hosts his show on X and routinely garners millions of views.
“The people who refused to condemn Candace’s truly vicious attacks — and some of them are speaking here tonight — are guilty of cowardice,” Shapiro said, adding later: “If you host a Hitler apologist, Nazi-loving, anti-American piece of refuse like Nick Fuentes … you ought to own it.”
Both the Fuentes interview and Owens’ conspiracies have embroiled the party in recent weeks. On Wednesday, Shapiro called on the Heritage Foundation, the powerful conservative think tank whose president defended the interview, to change its tune about Carlson’s elevation of Fuentes.
Carlson responded with heat of his own from the stage Thursday.
“That guy is pompous,” Carlson said, saying he “laughed” while watching clips of Shapiro’s speech backstage. “Calls to deplatform at a Charlie Kirk event? That’s hilarious.”
Carlson went on to rail against cancel culture, and promised the crowd that he was not antisemitic. “Antisemitism is not just naughty, it’s immoral,” he said.
Erika Kirk addressed the MAGA movement’s fractures, while casting her late husband as a rare unifier and pleading with the crowd to embrace disagreement. “You won’t agree with everyone on this stage this weekend,” she said. “And that’s okay. Welcome to America.”
The event wasn’t entirely heated. Actor Russell Brand — who spoke between Shapiro and Carlson — focused on Christianity, while sprinkling attacks on vaccines and the pharmaceutical industry into his remarks. And earlier in the day, attendees danced to upbeat music, repeatedly chanted “USA” and celebrated Trump’s return to the White House at the Phoenix Convention Center, which is plastered with imagery of Charlie Kirk. More than 30,000 people gathered for the event.
Kirk’s influence on young people was particularly evident, with thousands of high school and college attendees, some of whom posed for photos in front of a tent that resembled the one Kirk was speaking in front of when he was shot during “The American Comeback Tour.”
Erika Kirk — who now serves as Turning Point’s CEO — said 80 percent of attendees had never been to America Fest before, and one-third of them were students. More than 140,000 people have submitted requests to join the organization since Kirk’s death, bringing the membership to over 1 million people across 4,000 chapters at high schools and colleges, she added.
While the group has welcomed speakers from across the conservative movement, it made clear choices about which politicians to welcome to the stage, providing a glimpse into how the organization hopes to shape the future of the GOP. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton and GOP Rep. Mike Collins, both candidates for Senate, and gubernatorial hopefuls Andy Biggs of Arizona and Byron Donalds of Florida, were given slots on the main stage.
Erika Kirk also made a point of promising to elevate Vice President JD Vance — who will close the event on Sunday — to the White House in 2028. Vance leads early polls of the likely GOP field.
“We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible,” she said.
PHOENIX. Arizona — Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk has endorsed Vice President JD Vance for president, an early sign of influential support for a likely leading candidate in 2028.
Kirk, who took over leadership of Turning Point after her husband, Charlie, was killed in September, announced her decision during a speech Thursday at the organization’s America Fest conference in Phoenix.
Vance is scheduled to speak at the conference on Sunday.
“We are going to get my husband’s friend JD Vance elected for 48 in the most resounding way possible,” Kirk said.
Vance has not yet committed to running in 2028, but as vice president he is widely expected to seek the White House. TPUSA — founded by Charlie Kirk — holds major influence for the MAGA movement, particularly among young conservatives, and the early endorsement could give an early lead among the Republican hopefuls.
“My attitude is the American people elected me to be vice president,” Vance told the New York Post in October. “I’m going to work as hard as I can to make the president successful over the next three years and three months, and if we get to a point where something else is in the offer, let’s handle it then.”
Kirk made the endorsement in front of a crowd of thousands of people, many of whom are ardent supporters of President Donald Trump — and they responded with resounding applause.
Vance and Charlie Kirk were particularly close before Kirk’s death.
RALEIGH, N.C. — Four-term North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt, a towering figure in North Carolina politics in the late 20th century who helped the Democratic Party focus nationally upon public education reform, died Thursday at the age of 88, his daughter Lt. Gov. Rachel Hunt announced.
Hunt, whose career provided a prototype for the modern “education governor,” served an unprecedented 16 years as governor as the state received the rewards and stings of shifting from textiles and tobacco to a high-tech economy.
Rachel Hunt’s office said that her father died peacefully Thursday at his Wilson County home.
“He devoted his life to serving the people of North Carolina, guided by a belief that public service should expand opportunity, strengthen communities, and always put people first,” Rachel Hunt said in a news release that also referenced “my beloved daddy and hero.”
Considered a business-oriented progressive, Hunt was a giant in state government and influential in the national education reform movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. He was first elected governor in 1976 and, after a constitutional change, became the first North Carolina governor elected to successive four-year terms.
Following an epic U.S. Senate campaign loss to Republican icon Jesse Helms in 1984, Hunt’s political career resumed eight years later with a third term at the Executive Mansion, followed by reelection in 1996.
Hunt remained active in Democratic politics after leaving office in 2001, particularly as he watched protégés such as former Gov. Roy Cooper and the late U.S. Sen. Kay Hagan achieve higher office. He campaigned for President Barack Obama in 2012 and Hillary Rodham Clinton and Cooper in 2016.
“I can think of no one who shaped North Carolina’s recent successes as much as Governor Jim Hunt,” current Democratic Gov. Josh Stein said Thursday. And Cooper called Hunt the “greatest Governor in North Carolina history.”
Even entering his 80s, Hunt urged Republicans in charge of the legislature to fund “big things” for public education, rather than pass more income tax cuts.
“I’m proud of what we’ve done together,” Hunt said in a May 2017 interview. “But I’m far from satisfied about where we are and determined to keep doing my little bit, I guess, to help us keep changing things and improving things in North Carolina. And I know you do it mainly through education.”
Relentless on building up public schools
Hunt concentrated relentlessly on public schools, talking about the connection between education achievement and competing in the world economy. In the 1970s, while lieutenant governor, he worked with Republican Gov. Jim Holshouser to make North Carolina the first state with full-day kindergarten.
In the 1980s, he helped create the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards and pressed for standardized testing for public school students nationwide so that states could compare themselves.
Returning as governor in the 1990s, he championed the Smart Start early childhood initiative, viewed as a national model to prepare children for school, and higher teacher pay. And after the end of his career in office, the Durham-based Hunt Institute trained up and coming political stars nationwide about public education policy.
“If there is one person that is responsible for remaking and reforming education in the nation, particularly in the Southeast and starting with North Carolina, it is Jim Hunt,” former Democratic Georgia Gov. Roy Barnes said in a 2009 interview. “We will feel the effect of Jim Hunt’s leadership for generations to come.”
Hunt was an unabashed lobbyist for his programs and initiatives, often making late-night phone calls to lawmakers to persuade them. If that failed, he would enlist key constituents in a legislator’s district to bombard with them calls all weekend.
“He really had a way of pushing you to do things you never thought you could do,” said Gary Pearce, a longtime Hunt staffer and later biographer. “He made you feel like that you were genuinely making the world a better place.”
Quick rise in North Carolina politics
James Baxter Hunt Jr. was born May 16, 1937, in Greensboro, North Carolina. He grew up on the family’s tobacco and dairy farm in Wilson County. After law school graduation, Hunt, his wife, Carolyn, and their young children lived in Nepal for two years while working for the Ford Foundation.
Hunt rose quickly in Democratic politics, serving as president of the state’s Young Democrats in 1968 and getting elected lieutenant governor four years later.
In a controversial move during his first term as governor, Hunt commuted the sentences of nine Black men and one white woman convicted of the 1971 firebombing of a Wilmington grocery store during days of violence that included the shooting of a Black teenager by police. Key witnesses in the case had recanted their testimony. Full pardons for the “Wilmington 10” didn’t come until 2012.
After loss to Helms, a rebirth and return to governor
His second four-year term closed with his political battle with Helms, the conservative firebrand known as “Senator No” for his opposition to civil rights, gay rights, abortion and the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. Hunt lost as Helms’ campaign blistered him with ads portraying Hunt as a flip-flopper on the issues.
A defeated Hunt returned to practicing law but remained in public life. His comeback to state politics in the early 1990s helped delay a growing Republican tide in North Carolina politics.
Even GOP leaders begrudgingly were impressed with Hunt’s ability to tack with changing political winds. In the mid-1990s, he called a special legislative session to get tough on crime and proposed tax cuts larger than what Republicans initially offered.
Republican U.S. Sen. Thom Tillis, a former state House speaker in the 2010s, called Hunt on Thursday “one of the most consequential public servants in North Carolina’s history.”
Rachel Hunt served in the legislature and was elected lieutenant governor in 2024. Jim Hunt was on hand at the Legislative Building in early 2025 when she took as a duty of lieutenant governor the gavel as Senate president, following in her father’s footsteps 52 years later.
Memorial information for Hunt will be announced later.
The Democratic National Committee is refusing to release its autopsy of the party’s major 2024 losses it announced on Wednesday, breaking Chair Ken Martin’s public pledge to do so. The decision underscores the party’s challenges in grappling with its electoral setbacks as it heads into what is expected to be a stronger midterm year.
The DNC’s completed post-election review of the party’s melodramatic and botched campaign cycle is based on hundreds of interviews with operatives in all 50 states. During that process, some Democrats raised concerns about releasing the findings, according to a DNC official granted anonymity to describe the sensitive process.
The DNC wanted to avoid another public debate over how the party lost the White House to Donald Trump, and instead, turn its focus on its recent successes, according to this official. Democrats have overperformed in special elections across the country this year, and won handily in New Jersey and Virginia last month. The committee previewed some initial findings from the autopsy to top donors and other Democratic stakeholders in October.
Former President Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection, despite his advanced age — and his disastrous debate performance — were not mentioned in the some excerpts of the report’s findings, which were shared with POLITICO. Democrats are still divided over what contributed to Kamala Harris’ loss.
In a statement, Martin said the committee had “completed a comprehensive review of what happened in 2024” and they are “putting our learnings into motion,” noting the party’s off-year victories.
“In our conversations with stakeholders from across the Democratic ecosystem, we are aligned on what’s important, and that’s learning from the past and winning the future,” Martin continued. “Here’s our North Star: does this help us win? If the answer is no, it’s a distraction from the core mission.”
The decision marks an about-face for a coalition that’s at odds over what went wrong last year, and still registering record-lowapprovalratings even among its own voters. Several outside groups, from the progressive Way to Win to the center-left Welcome nonprofit, released their own in-depth audits of the party’s missteps with differing diagnoses for how to fix its problems. Just last week, some DNC members called on the committee to provide more answers.
The DNC official described some examples of the report’s findings, including the party’s organizing strategies, necessary technological upgrades and its youth voter problem — though the details shared with POLITICO were sparse and incomplete. Excerpts from the review broadly described Democrats as defensive on immigration and public safety — issues that generally favor Republicans — but didn’t name-check a campaign, candidate or entity for its role in this posture, at least not publicly.
On the party’s organizing efforts, the DNC’s review urged campaigns to incentivize engaging conversations with voters over just the number of doors knocked and phones called. It called for investing more into relational organizing and year-round field infrastructure, efforts Martin championed during his chair’s race last year. Of the party’s data infrastructure, the DNC’s report issued warnings that it was out-of-date and overwhelmed at key moments during the campaign and called for it to be modernized.
It described the party’s much-reported losses among young voters, citing Republicans’ advantages in communicating through the influencer ecosystem and pressing Democrats to do engage with non-traditional media sources. Back in February, Democrats conceded the GOP was “running circles” around them online, but in describing its findings, the DNC doesn’t go much further in clarifying its own public recommendations.
This fall, the DNC held briefings with donors and other Democratic stakeholders on its initial findings. At the time, one Democrat who attended an October donor event confirmed that Biden’s initial decision to run in spite of his advanced age was not mentioned by DNC officials as a part of the review. It’s not clear whether his decision to run for reelection is discussed in the private review.
Biden’s age was not mentioned in the excerpts of the review shared with POLITICO on Thursday, nor was it raised in other briefings on the report’s initial findings. Most Democrats cite the last-minute candidate switch as a core reason for the party’s sweeping losses.
Martin’s decision to withhold the report doubles back on a pledge he made just hours after he was elected to be the DNC’s chair in February. In comments to reporters, Martin committed to the public release of the 2024 report.
At the time, he also questioned why the DNC hadn’t released its 2016 autopsy, when he questioned, “what happened with that … was there any utility in doing that?”
“Of course it will be released,” Martin said in February, referring to a future review on the 2024 election. “There has to be some lessons that we glean on that so we can operationalize it, not just here in DC, but through all of the 57 state parties, and, of course, the county parties, so people have a sense of what we need to do.”
Every week political cartoonists throughout the country and across the political spectrum apply their ink-stained skills to capture the foibles, memes, hypocrisies and other head-slapping events in the world of politics. The fruits of these labors are hundreds of cartoons that entertain and enrage readers of all political stripes. Here’s an offering of the best of this week’s crop, picked fresh off the Toonosphere. Edited by Matt Wuerker.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks during the daily press briefing on Nov. 4, 2025. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images
During a press conference on Dec. 11, 2025, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt announced there was good news on the state of the economy.
“Inflation as measured by the overall CPI has slowed to an average 2.5% pace,” she said, referring to the consumer price index. “Real wages are increasing roughly $1,200 dollars for the average worker.”
When CNN political correspondent Kaitlan Collins attempted to ask a follow-up question, Leavitt pivoted to an attack. Not on Collins, a frequent target of White House ire, but on Leavitt’s predecessor in the Biden White House, Democrat Jen Psaki.
Psaki, claimed Leavitt, stood at the same lectern a year before and told “utter lies.” In contrast, Leavitt insisted, “Everything I’m telling you is the truth backed by real, factual data, and you just don’t want to report on it ’cause you want to push untrue narratives about the president.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt speaks to the media on Dec. 11, 2025.
I’m a historian who has written about the enduring legacy of George Orwell’s ideas about truth and freedom. Listening to Leavitt assert a “truth” so obviously discordant with people’s lives, I was reminded of the repeated pronouncements from the Ministry of Plenty in Orwell’s “1984.”
“The fabulous statistics continued to pour out of the telescreen,” Orwell wrote. “As compared with last year there was more food, more clothes, more houses, more furniture, more cooking-pots, more fuel, more ships, more helicopters, more books, more babies — more of everything except disease, crime, and insanity. Year by year and minute by minute, everybody and everything was whizzing rapidly upwards.”
The novel’s doomed hero, Winston Smith, works in the Records Department that produces these fraudulent statistics – figures that are so far divorced from reality that they “had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie.”
In the world of “1984,” not only are statistics invented, they are continually reinvented to serve the needs of Big Brother’s regime at any given moment: “All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”
Transparency as doublespeak
The lack of transparency depicted in “1984” has an uncanny echo in our current political moment, despite Leavitt’s repeated assertions that President Donald Trump is the “most transparent president in history.”
In Leavitt’s usage, “transparency” has become a form of Orwellian “doublespeak,” a word or phrase which through the process of “doublethink” had come to encompass its exact opposite meaning.
“Doublethink,” in Orwell’s writing, was the mechanism of thought manipulation that allowed someone “to know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them.”
Doublethink was the mechanism that enabled the citizens of Oceania, the Anglo-American superstate governed by Big Brother’s authoritarian regime, to accept that “WAR IS PEACE; FREEDOM IS SLAVERY; IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.”
And it is the mechanism that allowed Leavitt to proclaim, in defending Trump’s unwillingness to release the Epstein files, “This administration has done more with respect to transparency when it comes to Jeffrey Epstein than any administration ever.” That claim was pronounced “fabulously audacious” by The Guardian’s Washington bureau chief, David Smith, in a story headlined “Nothing to see here: Trump press chief in full denial mode over Epstein.”
President Ronald Reagan records a radio address on foreign policy on Sept. 24, 1988, in which he discussed “our philosophy of peace through strength.”
Making ‘lies sound truthful and murder respectable’
In his famous essay “Politics and the English Language,” Orwell wrote that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
And she recently sought to delegitimize U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly and colleagues’ plea to servicemen and women not to obey illegal orders by suggesting tautologically that “all lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our servicemembers,” and hence Kelly’s plea could only serve to provoke “disorder and chaos.”
All governments lie. But Leavitt has become a master of the art of political language, wielded to aggrandize her boss, belittle his opponents and deflect attention from administration scandals.
Laura Beers 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.
Embracing a belief in American exceptionalism – the idea that America is a unique and morally superior country – some historians suggest that “it can’t happen here,” echoing the satirical title of Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 book about creeping fascism in America. The social conditions required for fascism to take root do not exist in the U.S., these historians say.
Still, while fascist ideas never found a foothold among the majority of Americans, they exerted considerable influence during the period between the first and second world wars. Extremist groups like the Silver Shirts, the Christian Front, the Black Legion and the Ku Klux Klan claimed hundreds of thousands of members. Together they glorified a white Christian nation purified of Jews, Black Americans, immigrants and communists.
The Bund also operated lodges, storefronts, summer camps, beer halls and newspapers across the country and denounced the “melting pot.” It encouraged boycotts and street brawls against Jews and leftists and forged links to Germany’s Nazi party.
Yet the Bund and other far-right groups have largely vanished from public memory, even in communities where they once enjoyed popularity. As a sociologist of collective memory and identity, I wanted to know why that is the case.
But the people who rallied with the Bund for a white, Christian nation were ordinary citizens. They were mechanics and shopkeepers, churchgoers and small businessmen, and sometimes elected officials. They frequented diners, led PTA meetings and went to church. They were American.
Nearly 1,000 uniformed men wearing swastika armbands and carrying Nazi banners parade past a reviewing stand in New Jersey on July 18, 1937. AP Photo
When they were interviewed decades later, many of those who had seen Bundists up close in their communities remembered the uniforms, the swastika armbands, the marching columns. They recalled the local butcher who quietly displayed sympathy for Nazism, the Bund’s boycotts of Jewish businesses, and the street brawls at Bund rallies.
German American interviewees, who remember firsthand the support the Bund enjoyed before the U.S. entered World War II, 50 years later laughed at family members and neighbors who once supported the organization. Even Jewish interviewees who recalled fearful encounters with Bundists during that period tended to minimize the threat in retrospect. Like their German American counterparts, they framed the Bund as deviant and ephemeral. Few believed the group, and the ideas for which it stood, were significant.
I believe the German Americans’ laughter decades after the war was over, and after the revelations of the mass murder of European Jews, may have been a way for them to distance themselves from feelings of shame or discomfort. As cognitive psychologists show, people tend to erase or minimize inconvenient or painful facts that may threaten their sense of self.
Collective memories are also highly selective. They are influenced by the groups – nation, community, family – in which they are members. In other words, the past is always shaped by the needs of the present.
After World War II, for example, some Americans reframed the major threat facing the U.S. as communism. They cast fascism as a defeated foreign evil, while elevating “reds” as the existential threat. Collectively, Americans preferred a simpler national tale: Fascism was “over there.” America was the bulwark of democracy “over here.” This is one way forgetting works.
Communities will remember what they have forgotten or minimized when history is taught, markers are erected, archives are preserved and commemorations are staged. The U.S. has done that for the Holocaust and for the Civil Rights Movement. But when it comes to the history of homegrown fascism, and local resistance to it, few communities have made efforts to preserve this history.
Remembering difficult pasts
At least one community has tried. In Southbury, Connecticut, community members erected a small plaque in 2022 to honor townspeople who in 1937 organized to keep the Bund from building a training camp there. The inscription is simple: “Southbury Stops Nazi Training Camp.”
New York City mounted police form a line outside Madison Square Garden, where the German American Bund was holding a rally on Feb. 20, 1939. AP Photo/Murray Becker
The story it tells provides more than an example of local pride – it’s a template for how communities can commemorate the moments when ordinary citizens said “no.”
When Americans insist that “it can’t happen here,” they exempt themselves from vigilance. When they ignore or discount extremism, seeing it as “weird” or “foreign,” they miss how effectively such movements borrowed American idioms, such as patriotism, Christianity and law and order, to further hatred, violence and exclusion.
Research shows that some Americans have been drawn to movements that promise purity, unity and order at the expense of their neighbors’ rights. The point of remembering such histories is not to wallow in shame, nor to collapse every political dispute into “fascism.” It is to offer an accurate account of America’s democratic vulnerabilities.
Arlene Stein 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.
The latest Supreme Court case related to abortion is not technically about the legal right to have one. When the court heard oral arguments on Dec. 2, 2025, the word “abortion” came up only three times. The first instance was more than an hour into the 82-minute hearing.
Many critics of the centers call them “fake clinics” because the centers appear to be medical facilities when they are not.
Often, their waiting rooms look like those at doctors’ offices, and their volunteers wear white lab coats or medical scrubs. And they offer free services that people think of as medical, such as pregnancy tests and ultrasounds. But these pregnancy tests are typically the same kind that drugstores sell over the counter.
They’re able to function without medical professionals because it’s generally legal in the U.S. to operate ultrasound machines without any specialized training. They ask clients to read their own pregnancy tests so they can avoid laws regarding medical licensing.
Under current law, crisis pregnancy centers don’t need to tell their clients that they are not medical clinics. Nor must they disclose that they don’t provide abortions or birth control.
Supporters of abortion rights rally outside the Supreme Court in 2018, as the court hears a case regarding California’s regulation of crisis pregnancy centers. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
Crisis pregnancy centers far outnumber the 765 abortion clinics operating across the United States as of 2024 – two years after the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion in its Dobbs v. Jackson ruling.
Researchers found that 80% of crisis pregnancy center websites include false information about abortion, including that it is linked to mental health issues, infertility and breast cancer.
First Choice, when asked for comment, said that it “provides women and families free, compassionate care, including ultrasounds, educational resources, baby clothes and food.”
Problem Pregnancy, a crisis pregnancy center located near a Planned Parenthood facility in Worcester, Mass., offers ‘free testing and counseling.’ Pat Greenhouse/The Boston Globe via Getty Images
First Choice’s website suggests that abortion can lead to depression, eating disorders and addiction. It makes claims about the prevalence of what it calls “post-abortion stress disorder,” a nonmedical term used by anti-abortion activists who have sought to falsely frame abortion as if it is something most women regret.
In November 2023, New Jersey Attorney General Matthew Platkin began investigating First Choice Women’s Resource Center to see whether the nonprofit had violated state consumer fraud laws by misrepresenting its services to clients, donors and the public.
The next month, First Choice sued Platkin in federal court.
The lawsuit asserted that the First Amendment protects the privacy of First Choice’s donors.
A district court and appeals and court determined that this case should be heard in state court.
New Jersey’s fraud investigation and the “sweeping subpoena” it issued “may chill First Amendment freedoms,” said attorney Erin Hawley, when she argued the case before the Supreme Court on behalf of First Choice.
Following oral arguments, Platkin released a statement that said “First Choice – a crisis pregnancy center operating in New Jersey – has for years refused to answer questions about its operations in our state and the potential misrepresentations it has been making.”
Analyzing training manuals
Many crisis pregnancy centers like First Choice are affiliated with large networks that provide training materials.
For example, First Choice is affiliated with Heartbeat International, a Christian anti-abortion global network, which says that it has 45,000 active volunteers. Because those volunteers undergo training, I’ve been learning more about the centers by examining the network’s volunteer and staff manuals.
I’ve analyzed nearly 1,600 pages of these materials put together by large anti-abortion networks, including Heartbeat International. Along the way, I’ve tracked medical misinformation and references to confidentiality, privacy and data retention.
These training guides instruct volunteers to highlight the “medical services” their center provides and to omit “Christian language” from their branding and materials.
But the manuals I examined indicate that advancing their religious beliefs, rather than providing health care, is the centers’ primary goal. One manual says, “Heartbeat International is convinced that the loving outreach of a pregnancy center in the name of Jesus Christ is the most valuable ‘service’ provided, no matter what else is on the list of services.”
Heartbeat International’s Talking About Abortion manual includes medical misinformation about the supposed risks of having an abortion, such as cancer and mortality risks. It encourages volunteers to share these claims with clients.
None of that information, which includes official-sounding statistics, is backed by peer-reviewed scientific research.
Crisis pregnancy centers, like this one in Charleston, West Va., sometimes have names that suggest they offer abortions, evoking the pro-choice branding of the abortion rights movement. AP Photo/Leah M. Willingham
Client privacy not protected
Although First Choice sued in part due to concerns about its donors’ privacy, crisis pregnancy centers do not necessarily protect the privacy of the health data they collect from their clients.
The training manuals use the language of HIPAA, referencing the policy itself or its protections of private medical data. At the same time, the manuals inform volunteers that crisis pregnancy centers are “not governed by HIPAA” precisely because they are not medical clinics.
Instead, the manuals make clear that the centers can offer clients the opportunity to request confidentiality. But as stated in Heartbeat International’s Medical Essentials training manual, they “are under no obligation to accept or abide” by that request.
Should the Supreme Court majority rule in favor of First Choice, I believe states may have more trouble trying to investigate crisis pregnancy centers’ practices, while anti-abortion networks may face even fewer obstacles to their efforts to publicize medical misinformation.
Indeed, Aimee Huber, First Choice’s executive director, has said she hopes other states would “back off” any other efforts to probe crisis pregnancy centers.
But based on my 20 years of experience researching crisis pregnancy centers, I also believe that this case can be helpful for abortion rights supporters because it shows that the crisis pregnancy center industry understands that greater public awareness of its practices may restrict its power.
Heartbeat International did not respond to a request for comment by The Conversation.
Carly Thomsen consults for Reproductive Health and Freedom Watch. She has contributed to the Public Leadership Institute’s policy playbook regarding crisis pregnancy centers and she has testified in support of Vermont’s legislation regulating crisis pregnancy centers.
Tucker Carlson triggered outrage in some quarters of the conservative movement by interviewing white supremacist Nick Fuentes.J. Scott Applewhite/AP
The Oct. 27, 2025, interview between former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and political streamer Nick Fuentes created a rare public divide inside the MAGA movement.
These reactions may seem incompatible, but both contain slices of the truth. Public debates about extreme views often pull us toward simple binaries – platform or censor, engage or avoid – when the real issue is how the engagement is structured and the purpose it serves.
The current tension raises a broader question that extends beyond any single interview: When does a conversation with someone who holds extreme views illuminate their beliefs, which could serve the public interest, and when might it risk being interpreted as validation?
As a communication scholar who studies how people engage across deep divides, I see this as a question not about whether to interact with individuals who espouse extremist views, but how to structure that engagement and to what end.
Engaging ideas does not mean endorsing
When public figures say they are “just asking questions” or having a “respectful debate,” it’s easy to assume they believe that all conversation is valuable. Indeed, Carlson opened his interview by claiming he is simply “trying to understand” what Fuentes “affirmatively believes.”
In practice, however, the format and tone of an interview do much of the ethical work. Some conversations interrogate ideas. Others normalize them, meaning they make extreme claims sound ordinary or socially acceptable – in other words, treating them as just another position in public debate rather than as views outside widely shared norms. A conversation that presents all viewpoints as morally equivalent risks signaling that even extreme positions belong within normal political discourse.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, has defended Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes, leading to some resignations from Heritage staff and board members. Jess Rapfogel/AP
This is the concern raised by Carlson’s interview. Fuentes has made a series of claims about Jewish people that mainstream conservatives have rejected for decades. Although Carlson pushed back at one point, saying Fuentes’s views are “against my Christian faith,” the overall tone of polite exchange allowed some listeners to interpret the discussion as a meeting of two legitimate positions rather than as a critical examination of ideas widely understood as bigoted.
Listening is not neutrality
One explanation for these differing interpretations comes from a recent series of experiments showing speakers often confuse “active listening” with agreement. Even when they had maintained eye contact and signaled attention using short phrases like “I see,” listeners who disagreed were consistently judged as worse listeners. Because people tend to assume their own views are correct, they often infer that anyone who disagrees must not have listened well.
This psychological tendency complicates how the public interprets interviews like Carlson’s. Conversations can sound civil while failing to challenge harmful claims, leaving listeners with the mistaken belief that those claims are widely held.
Listeners operating from a humanizing mode attempt to understand the person behind the belief, asking questions such as “When did you first encounter this idea?” or “What was happening in your life at the time?” or “What concerns does this belief address for you?” A decade ago, a Dutch study found that extremist views often grow from fear, misinformation, isolation and a desire for belonging, along with other demographic, personality and social factors. Understanding those roots helps explain how individuals arrive at certain worldviews.
But understanding is not the same as acceptance. Good listening does not have to signal agreement.
Examples of this kind of engagement exist outside politics. Former extremists such as Christian Picciolini, who founded the Free Radicals Project, and musician Daryl Davis, known for building relationships with members of the Ku Klux Klan, have shown that humanizing conversations can help people leave hate groups without normalizing the ideas those groups promote. Their work illustrates that it is possible to confront harmful beliefs while still recognizing the humanity of the people who hold them.
Moving beyond just calling out
The ongoing debate about Carlson and Fuentes also reflects a broader tension in terms of how society responds to harmful speech.
Calling someone out, usually in public, focuses on blame. “Calling someone in,” a term developed by scholar and activist Loretta Ross, emphasizes private accountability and the possibility of correction. In a media setting, this might look like an interviewer saying, “I want to understand what you mean by that claim, because some viewers may hear it as targeting an entire group. Can you clarify how you see the people affected by this?” This approach challenges the idea while signaling curiosity about the speaker’s reasoning.
Right-wing podcaster Nick Fuentes has had occasional differences with Donald Trump, but the president defended the decision by commentator Tucker Carlson to interview him. Jacquelyn Martin/AP
A similar approach, described by authors Justin Michael Williams and Shelly Tygielski, is known as “calling forward.” This framework focuses less on correcting a single remark, less on past mistakes and more on future growth by inviting reflection about how a belief fits within a person’s broader values. In practical terms, calling forward means setting clear boundaries around unacceptable beliefs while still recognizing an individual’s potential to change.
Using a “calling forward” approach, Carlson might have followed his mild pushback that Fuentes’s ideas are against his “Christian faith” by exploring how Fuentes understands the tension between his political claims and widely held moral or religious principles.
By stating directly when a claim is false or discriminatory but still allowing the conversation to explore how someone came to that belief, the interview places the idea in a fuller social and psychological context. The emphasis shifts to curiosity paired with accountability, and it can encourage someone to examine the roots and consequences of their beliefs without framing the exchange as a clash between equal positions.
Most people will never interview a national figure or decide whether to put an extremist on camera. Ideally, most of us won’t be faced with the burden of listening to views that question our or others’ humanity.
Even so, each of us likely has a relationship with someone who holds a belief we find troubling. More broadly, families, classrooms and community groups all face moments when someone introduces an idea that others find threatening.
The Carlson–Fuentes interview has become a flash point partly because it forces a public reckoning with a private question: What is the cost of engagement, and what is the cost of refusing it? Understanding that distinction requires paying attention not only to who is invited to speak, but also to how the ways in which we listen fundamentally shape the conversation.
Graham Bodie 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.
Ohio gubernatorial hopeful and former GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy urged conservatives to reject “Groyper transgressions,” becoming the latest Republican to weigh in on the ongoing debate in the party over antisemitism.
“If, like Mr. Fuentes, you believe that Hitler was “really f-ing cool,” or if you publicly call Usha Vance a “jeet,” then you have no place in the conservative movement, period,” Ramaswamy wrote in a New York Times op-ed published Wednesday, referring to a derogatory ethnic slur against South Asians.
In the quote, Ramaswamy was referencing Nick Fuentes and Vice President JD Vance’s wife Usha Vance, the daughter of Indian immigrant parents.
Ramaswamy shared that he has been the target of racial slurs and attacks on social media, despite “older Republicans” doubting the rising prevalence white supremacy in right-leaning online circles.
As the number of “Groypers,” or followers and fans of Fuentes, appears to grow, Ramaswmy said, there is a “real reluctance” from his fellow Republicans to condemn the “new identity politics on the right.”
“It should be acceptable on the right to criticize U.S. aid to Israel or immigrant visas, but it is downright unacceptable to spew poison toward Jews, Indians or any other ethnic group,” said Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants.
The Republican Party has been embroiled in an intra-party struggle over whether the party should welcome groups associated with Fuentes, a debate that burst into the open after Tucker Carlson interviewed Fuentes on his podcast. Carlson, during his friendly October interview with Fuentes, said GOP backers of Israel have been “seized by this brain virus.” Fuentes said that “organized Jewry” is a major barrier to unifying America.
While President Donald Trump defended Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes, House Speaker Mike Johnson called it a “big mistake.” The president of the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, also initially defended Carlson’s interview, arguing the real enemy was “the vile ideas of the left.” But after immense backlash — including from Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and multiple employees quitting — Roberts walked back his comments and condemned Fuentes’ rhetoric.
In his op-ed, Ramaswamy said that condemning the antisemitism brewing within a faction of the GOP does not need to equate to censorship but “moral clarity instead of indulgence.”
“The point isn’t to clutch pearls, but to prevent the gradual legitimization of this un-American animus,” he said. “This online edgelording reminds me of toddlers testing their parents’ limits: The job of a real Republican leader is to set firm boundaries for young followers, as a good father does for a transgressive son.”
