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Politics
Category: Politics
Top Democratic public affairs firm SKDK has cut short its contract with the Israeli government, for which it promoted Israel’s perspective on the conflict in Gaza.
The firm’s work initially included media efforts to raise the profile of the tragedy of the Bibas family, three members of which were killed while in captivity in Gaza. SKDK then changed its focus to pitching guests for news shows to hear Israel’s side of the war in Gaza. The $600,000 contract with the Israeli government — first reported by POLITICO in March — was supposed to run from April of this year through March.
SKDK has worked for several pro-Israel efforts over the years, but this was the first time it represented the Israeli government itself. It collaborated with Havas, a European advertising and PR firm, on behalf of Lapam, the Israeli government advertising agency, with the ultimate client being the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
“SKDK stopped this work on Aug. 31 and has begun the process of de-registering,” a spokesperson for SKDK said in a statement. The spokesperson declined to comment on why it was ending its work, saying only that the work “had run its course.”
SKDK’s announcement came one day after the investigative news outlet Sludge reported that one aspect of its work was setting up a bot program “to amplify pro-Israel narratives on Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, and other platforms.” The story linked to a Foreign Agents Registration Act filing that showed that Stagwell, the parent company of SKDK, agreed to perform such work.
But SKDK and Stagwell both said they did not work on a bot initiative. “Our work focused solely on media relations and nothing else,” the SKDK spokesperson said.
A spokesperson for the Israeli embassy in Washington didn’t respond to a request for comment. Havas and Lapam also didn’t respond.
Politics
With two executive orders related to school sports, President Donald Trump recently tried to settle the growing legal conflict over the right of transgender students to participate in school sports.
That conflict, which the Biden administration tried to address and is now taking place in states, lower federal courts and the Department of Education, will reach the U.S. Supreme Court in its upcoming term.
Supporters of transgender athlete participation argue that gender is a social construct, shaped by societal norms and cultural beliefs more so than by biology. They say that people should have the right to self-identify. And they argue that there is no significant threat to fairness, safety or opportunity in student sports.
Opponents say that sex and gender identity are distinct from each other. They argue that including biologically born male athletes in women’s sports subverts fairness and threatens the impact of Title IX in women’s sports.
As a professor of sport management with a law degree, I believe the progress in equity, access and participation made by women in sport since the passage of Title IX is at risk if U.S. institutions and legislators depart from the federal law’s original intent: to ensure equal opportunities for women in education settings.
Inclusion versus fairness
Women’s sports are experiencing unprecedented success. In 2024, the NCAA women’s basketball championship final drew a larger TV audience than the men’s final for the first time ever. Sponsorship deals for women’s pro sports have witnessed double-digit growth year over year the past two athletic seasons.
The 2023-2024 academic year saw 235,735 student-athletes participate in NCAA women’s sports. That’s a record high.
When Congress passed Title IX in 1972, the goal was simple: make sure women have the same educational opportunities as men in school, including in sports programs.
For decades, it worked. Thousands of new teams and opportunities for women emerged, and participation skyrocketed. Before 1972, only about 30,000 women had participated in college sports. Today, 220,000 female athletes compete in NCAA sports.
But while Title IX was expanding access for women athletes in schools, the boundaries of women’s sports were being tested in professional leagues.
Focus on Sport/Getty Images
In 1977, Renée Richards, a transgender tennis player, successfully challenged the United States Tennis Association’s eligibility rules and was allowed to compete in women’s tennis after undergoing sex reassignment surgery.
She played in the 1977 women’s U.S. Open and competed on the women’s professional tour, where she played for four more years before retiring.
Richards was hailed as a pioneer for transgender athletes. But her perspective has shifted over time. In February 2025, Richards said: “I believe that having gone through male puberty disqualifies transgender women from the female category in sports.”
Richards’ perspective underscores the tension between the inclusion of transgender people and maintaining fairness in competition and opportunities for women – a tension that remains at the center of legal debates today.
Court challenges
Courts across the country are now confronting a new wave of challenges to policies on transgender athlete participation from K-12 through college.
In 2021, Becky Pepper-Jackson, a transgender girl, sued the West Virginia Board of Education in federal court over the state’s “Save Women’s Sports Act,” which requires that sport participation in schools must be based on biological sex at birth. Pepper-Jackson argued that the act violated Title IX and the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment that requires states to treat people in similar situations equally.
A lower court struck down West Virginia’s law as unconstitutional, and in July 2025, the Supreme Court agreed to hear the case.
Roy Rochlin/Getty Images for Lambda Legal
In 2024, several college athletes filed a lawsuit against the NCAA and participating universities. The suit claims the organization violated the athletes’ Title IX rights by allowing transgender swimmer Lia Thomas at the University of Pennsylvania to compete at the national championships in 2022. The plaintiffs argued that competing against athletes who had undergone male puberty created unfair conditions in women’s sports.
The suit has not been resolved. But in April 2025, the Department of Education concluded that the University of Pennsylvania violated Title IX by allowing Thomas to swim on the women’s team during the 2021-2022 season. As part of a resolution agreement with the Education Department, the university was required to restore to female athletes all individual Division I swimming records broken by biologically born male athletes competing in women’s categories. Per the agreement, the university also issued an apology to the affected athletes and adopted biology-based eligibility standards.
These collegiate cases form part of a larger picture. From high school track meets to NCAA championships, the participation of transgender women in female sports has, in the opinion of some, altered outcomes, raised safety concerns and challenged the principle of fair play.
Studies show that males have strength and size advantages over women. Those differences translate to advantages in sport, even after hormone suppression. To introduce competitive disadvantages in women’s sport threatens the premise of Title IX: to provide women with equal opportunity.
As these court cases unfold, their resolutions will help define standards for transgender participation in women’s sports across educational levels.
They underscore the ongoing challenge for institutions and governing bodies to balance inclusion, competitive fairness and compliance with Title IX.
Amanda Siegrist 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
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.
Politics
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.”
A spokesperson for the Washington Post declined to comment on personnel matters. The Washington Post’s public social media policyrequires employees to ensure any posts made do not make “reasonable people question their editorial independence, nor make reasonable people question The Post’s ability to cover issues fairly.”
The guidance also urges staffers to “avoid curating your feeds in ways that suggest you have a partisan point of view on an issue The Post covers,” though the policy specifically states that does not apply to columnists, critics and other practitioners of opinion journalism posting as part of their work.
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.
In a statement, the Washington Post guild called Attiah’s firing “unjust” and said it would continue to defend her rights.
“The Post not only flagrantly disregarded standard disciplinary processes, it also undermined its own mandate to be a champion of free speech,” the guild said in a post on X. “The right to speak freely is the ultimate personal liberty and the foundation of Karen’s 11-year career at The Post.”
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.
Politics
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.
Politics
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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Politics
Charlie Kirk emboldened a new generation of conservatives. His killing Wednesday as he addressed a crowd on a college campus has left those he brought into politics grieving — and vowing to continue his mission.
Nearly every young conservative staffer in Washington was involved with Kirk’s enormous youth organizing group Turning Point USA, whether through a college campus chapter or its national and regional conventions. That created a pipeline of young conservatives, who are now looking to cement his legacy in next year’s midterms and beyond.
“I was passionate before and this movement was important, but now it’s personal,” said 19-year-old commentator Brilyn Hollyhand, who met Kirk when, at 11 years old, he asked Kirk to appear on his podcast. “We have a martyr.”
Young men have become key to the coalition that elected President Donald Trump to his second term, a trend that many in the movement credit to Kirk.
Kirk was divisive — beloved by a generation that is shifting rightward; castigated for controversial and antagonistic remarks that critics deemed hate speech.
But that divisiveness helped him gain national attention and turn out young voters for Trump, particularly Republicans in Arizona, which flipped to Trump in 2024. In 2020, Trump lost young men by 11 points, according to Catalist data. In 2024, he won them by 1 point. And his vote share among young women improved too — from a 35-point deficit in 2020 to a 23-point gap four years later.
Kirk’s killing this week “has awakened an army of believers,” said 25-year-old activist Isabella DeLuca, who was arrested in 2024 for her role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol and pardoned by Trump in January.
“We are at war for the soul of this nation. I will not retreat. I will advance,” DeLuca said. “Charlie’s voice did not die with him. It will live through us.”
Hollyhand, who has worked closely with Turning Point, said he hopes to return to Utah and continue the “American Comeback” tour, which kicked off the day Kirk was shot. On Friday, Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox announced that law enforcement had apprehended a suspect in the shooting, 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson, who a judge ordered to be held without the option of bail. Formal charges against Robinson are expected to be announced next week.
The rightward shift among young people is largely credited to Kirk’s megaphone, as well as his grassroots political organization, which he founded at 18. It quickly grew to more than 800 chapters on college campuses, with more than 250,000 student members nationwide.
Turning Point “is what got me interested in politics,” said 24-year-old White House assistant press secretary Taylor Rogers, who founded Clemson University’s first chapter in the fall of 2020.
“That’s what truly guided my career in politics and where I am now,” Rogers added. “It was really Turning Point and their resources that were able to jumpstart the career of a young conservative like me.”
Kirk has a huge social media platform — he posted TikTok videos of him debating college students to more than eight million followers and hosted a popular podcast. It is likely to be hard for the movement left in his wake to replicate the charisma and political organizing skills of Kirk, who also had a direct line to Trump and Vice President JD Vance.
Kirk’s critics noted he utilized provocative language to roil national debate and normalize fringe theories. Some of his most memorable exchanges come from clips of his inflammatory back-and-forths with liberals over LGBTQ+ rights, restrictions on firearms and gender roles.
Kirk once called abortion in the U.S. comparable to, or worse than, the Holocaust. He promoted the “white replacement” conspiracy, which baselessly claims that immigrants are replacing white Americans.
Harry Sisson, a prominent online figure in Democratic circles who has drawn the ire of conservatives online, is one of those who commended Kirk’s legacy as an influential defender of open debate.
“Charlie Kirk did welcome debate from anybody,” Sisson, 23, said in an interview. “Do I think he did it in good faith? No. … But he did encourage debate.”
For college student Matthew Kingsley, his father’s Fox News-informed conservatism didn’t appeal to him while growing up in North Carolina. But he commended how Kirk encouraged young people to do their own research when forming their own political views, and joined his local chapter while in college at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, where he now serves as chapter president as a rising senior.
Kirk’s impact on the young conservative movement has been “astronomical,” Kingsley said. “I really don’t think this is going to stop it at all,” he said. “I think it is actually going to accelerate it.”
Liz Crampton contributed to this report.
Politics
The day after conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University, commentators repeated a familiar refrain: “This isn’t who we are as Americans.”
Others similarly weighed in. Whoopi Goldberg on “The View” declared that Americans solve political disagreements peacefully: “This is not the way we do it.”
Yet other awful episodes come immediately to mind: President John F. Kennedy was shot and killed on Nov. 22, 1963. More recently, on June 14, 2025, Melissa Hortman, speaker emerita of the Minnesota House of Representatives, was shot and killed at her home, along with her husband and their golden retriever.
As a historian of the early republic, I believe that seeing this violence in America as distinct “episodes” is wrong.
Instead, they reflect a recurrent pattern.
American politics has long personalized its violence. Time and again, history’s advance has been imagined to depend on silencing or destroying a single figure – the rival who becomes the ultimate, despicable foe.
Hence, to claim that such shootings betray “who we are” is to forget that the U.S. was founded upon – and has long been sustained by – this very form of political violence.
Bettman/Getty Images
Revolutionary violence as political theater
The years of the American Revolution were incubated in violence. One abominable practice used on political adversaries was tarring and feathering. It was a punishment imported from Europe and popularized by the Sons of Liberty in the late 1760s, Colonial activists who resisted British rule.
In seaport towns such as Boston and New York, mobs stripped political enemies, usually suspected loyalists – supporters of British rule – or officials representing the king, smeared them with hot tar, rolled them in feathers, and paraded them through the streets.
The effects on bodies were devastating. As the tar was peeled away, flesh came off in strips. People would survive the punishment, but they would carry the scars for the rest of their life.
By the late 1770s, the Revolution in what is known as the Middle Colonies had become a brutal civil war. In New York and New Jersey, patriot militias, loyalist partisans and British regulars raided across county lines, targeting farms and neighbors. When patriot forces captured loyalist irregulars – often called “Tories” or “refugees” – they frequently treated them not as prisoners of war but as traitors, executing them swiftly, usually by hanging.
In September 1779, six loyalists were caught near Hackensack, New Jersey. They were hanged without trial by patriot militia. Similarly, in October 1779, two suspected Tory spies captured in the Hudson Highlands were shot on the spot, their execution justified as punishment for treason.
To patriots, these killings were deterrence; to loyalists, they were murder. Either way, they were unmistakably political, eliminating enemies whose “crime” was allegiance to the wrong side.
US Supreme Court
Pistols at dawn: Dueling as politics
Even after independence, the workings of American politics remained grounded in a logic of violence toward adversaries.
For national leaders, the pistol duel was not just about honor. It normalized a political culture where gunfire itself was treated as part of the debate.
The most famous duel, of course, was Aaron Burr’s killing of Alexander Hamilton in 1804. But scores of lesser-known confrontations dotted the decade before it.
In 1798, Henry Brockholst Livingston – later a U.S. Supreme Court justice – killed James Jones in a duel. Far from discredited, he was deemed to have acted honorably. In the early republic, even homicide could be absorbed into politics when cloaked in ritual. Ironically, Livingston had survived an assassination attempt in 1785.
In 1802, another shameful spectacle unfolded: New York Democratic-Republicans DeWitt Clinton and John Swartwout faced off in Weehawken, New Jersey. They fired at least five rounds before their seconds intervened, leaving both men wounded. In this case, the clash had nothing to do with political principle; Clinton and Swartwout were Republicans. It was a patronage squabble that still erupted into gunfire, showing how normalized armed violence was in settling disputes.
Gun culture and its expansion
Bob Grieser/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
It is tempting to dismiss political violence as a leftover from some “primitive” or “frontier” stage of American history, when politicians and their supporters supposedly lacked restraint or higher moral standards. But that is not the case.
From before the Revolution onward, physical punishment or even killing were ways to enforce belonging, to mark the boundary between insiders and outsiders, and to decide who had the right to govern.
Violence has never been a distortion in American politics. It has been one of its recurring features, not an aberration but a persistent force, destructive and yet oddly creative, producing new boundaries and new regimes.
The dynamic only deepened as gun ownership expanded. In the 19th century, industrial arms production and aggressive federal contracts put more weapons into circulation. The rituals of punishing those with the wrong allegiance now found expression in the mass-produced revolver and later in the automatic rifle.
These more modern firearms became not only practical tools of war, crime or self-defense but symbolic objects in their own right. They embodied authority, carried cultural meaning and gave their holders the sense that legitimacy itself could be claimed at the barrel of a gun.
That’s why the phrase “This isn’t who we are” rings false. Political violence has always been part of America’s story, not a passing anomaly, and not an episode.
To deny it is to leave Americans defenseless against it. Only by facing this history head-on can Americans begin to imagine a politics not defined by the gun.
Maurizio Valsania 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
In naming Memphis the next destination for National Guard deployment, President Donald Trump has opened a new front in his crusade against cities — one that relies on cooperation from Republican governors.
So far, Trump has targeted crime in cities within states led by Democrats, deploying the Guard to Los Angeles and Washington, and threatening action in Illinois, Maryland and Oregon. But launching troops into one of deep-red Tennessee’s largest cities marks a shift for the White House, alleviating legal hurdles and strengthening the president’s efforts as he increasingly relies on the military for policing.
And Memphis may just be the start — GOP governors have shown a willingness to lean on the Guard to aid in crime fighting and deportation efforts. Before it was declared the next target on Friday, Trump had suggested he would dispatch the Guard to New Orleans — which GOP Gov. Jeff Landry celebrated. Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders this week detailed the Guard to assist in immigration enforcement in Little Rock and Fayetteville. In Texas, Gov. Greg Abbott has routinely sent the Guard to police the border, and in June authorized 5,000 troops in anticipation of protests against deportation raids.
Tennessee Republicans view the entrance of the Guard in their state as an opportunity to sharpen their attacks on Democrats over crime, an issue that remains one of the GOP’s biggest strengths.
“Why these blue state governors would act like dumbasses and not welcome the federal help to reduce the crime for their own citizens is beyond me,” said Tennessee Sen. Brent Taylor, a Memphis-area Republican who has long requested federal intervention in his city. “When it comes to the crime issue, blue state governors are as useless as a milk bucket under a bull.”
But by teaming with Republican governors, Trump will “be able to demonstrate to the rest of the country, in particular to the blue state governors, that your opposition kept your crime rate high in your cities,” he said.
Trump’s decision to go to a red state also offers more flexibility in how the National Guard is mobilized — and allows him to avoid some of the legal resistance he has faced with Democratic leaders. The White House and governor’s office have yet to decide how resources will be deployed in Memphis, but with Lee’s buy-in, the National Guard could remain under the state’s authority and avoid the constraints of the Posse Comitatus Act, which which bars the military from enforcing domestic laws without explicit permission from Congress, said Christopher Mirasola, an assistant law professor at the University of Houston Law Center.
A White House official touted the president’s federal takeover in Washington, and pointed to Memphis’ crime statistics as a key driver in the president’s decision — as well as the fact that he has the backing of some local and state Republicans who welcomed Trump’s announcement. Violent crime in Memphis has risen in the last decade, but like other large American cities, rates have decreased since pandemic-era spikes. The city’s police department said in a release this week that murder is at a six-year low, aggravated assault at a five-year low and sexual assault at a 20-year low.
“The president’s action in Memphis and what he has talked about in cities — dangerous cities around the country — is not about pushing back against a Dem narrative. It’s not about scoring political points,” said the official, granted anonymity to speak candidly. “It is something he has talked about for many, many years, dating back to when he first ran for president in 2015.”
The official called Memphis “a very dangerous city” adding, “so, of course, having the buy-in of local officials is great.”
On Friday, after Trump derided Memphis as “deeply troubled,” Republican Gov. Bill Lee said he was working with the White House on a plan to combat crime that leverages “the full extent of both federal and state resources.”
“This is politically smart of Trump, insofar as it lets him accomplish two goals at once. First, he gets to take away an opposition talking point — that crime is higher in many cities in red states than in DC or Chicago. He can say ‘Look, I take crime seriously everywhere,’” said Rosa Brooks, a Georgetown University law professor who served as a counselor to the undersecretary of defense for policy under President Barack Obama. “Second, he continues to normalize the once unthinkable use of uniformed military personnel in American cities.”
But even with the state’s Republicans on board, the deployment sets up a clash with local Democratic leaders. Memphis Mayor Paul Young said at a press conference on Friday that he did not request the National Guard, and he doesn’t believe it’s an effective way of driving down crime: “However that decision has been made — my commitment is to make sure strategically that we make sure this happens in a way that truly benefits and strengthens our city.”
Other Tennessee Democrats point to Trump’s military takeover of Memphis as an extension of his policies to stoke racial divisions and to make an example of the perceived ineptitude of cities that have a high number of Black elected officials.
“If he was interested in responding to his base, he would be in Utah,” state Rep. Justin Pearson said. “Immediately after Charlie Kirk is killed there’s a National Guard deployment to one of the Blackest cities in the United States of America?”
Pearson argued sending National Guard troops exposes the incompetence of Republicans who control all levels of power across the state.
“If indeed the problem is so bad here in Memphis, it shows the failure of our Republican-led statehouse and our governor…to do their jobs well,” added Pearson, who was briefly expelled from chamber after protesting in support of gun safety two years ago. “If all the money that is going to be spent on this political charade would instead be given to poor people in our cities and in our communities, we wouldn’t have crime problems the way that we do.”
Others say Republicans, who enjoy a governing trifecta and a supermajority in both chambers of the statehouse, have overseen the steady roll back of state and federal resources that could help local officials tamp down on crime. This includes federal gun violence prevention funding that was cut under the Trump administration and the relocation of the FBI’s main field office last October across the state to Nashville during the Biden administration, despite Memphis ranking high on the FBI’s list of violent crimes per capita.
“I’m fearful [of] where this is going, and that we will not get the promise of zero crime,” Shelby County Mayor Lee Harris said at a press conference Friday. “Send FBI agents and law enforcement agents who can get guns off of the street. Don’t send armored vehicles.”
Democratic leaders in New York and Illinois are bracing for Trump to follow through on his threats to deploy the Guard in New York City and Chicago. In Chicago, as ICE’s presence has grown in recent weeks, National Guard troops have yet to be deployed. Gov. JB Pritzker believes Trump may yet change his mind ahead of the midterms.
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has insisted a federal deployment of the Guard is unnecessary given the progress made addressing crime. Hochul deployed the National Guard late last year to New York City’s subways, a move intended to.make New Yorkers feel safer when riding the nation’s largest mass transit system.
New York State Homeland Security and Emergency Services Commissioner Jackie Bray said city officials have been meeting multiple times a week to discuss preparations if Trump directs his attention to New York City next.
“My message as it has been from day one is: ‘We’ve got this,’” Bray said. “The NYPD is the best law enforcement entity in the country. It would be an insult to them if the federal government thinks they can do a better job.”
Nick Reisman and Shia Kapos contributed to this report.
Politics