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Tanks and armored vehicles belonging to the Israeli army are seen mobilizing near the Gaza border, as Israel’s attacks on the Gaza Strip continue without pause, on September 15, 2025. [Tsafrir Abayov – Anadolu Agency]
Israel has killed more than 10 per cent of Gaza’s population since the start of the genocide in October 2023. The statistics, now reported by mainstream media as they come directly from an Israeli source – none other than former army commander Herzi Halevi who was chief of staff for the Israeli military for 17 months of Israel’s genocide – confirm the annihilation directly from the perpetrators.
There is no more talk about Hamas exaggerating the statistics, although the Guardian repeats the statement that is part of mainstream official narrative about Hamas not distinguishing between civilians and resistance fighters. The picture that emerges is that of mainstream media reporting admission of genocide from a source that is responsible and culpable, after spending almost two years of denying the Palestinian people the chance to articulate the same statement as lived experience.
“This isn’t a gentle war,” Halevi is reported saying. “We took the gloves off from the first minute. Sadly not earlier.” This rhetorical pondering of not having indulged in genocide earlier only illustrates the historical intent to eradicate all Palestinians from Palestine. This is also an admission of how Israel can secure its existence through the obliteration of the indigenous.
Halevi asserted that he was never restricted on how to carry out the genocide and stated that Israel’s military attorney general “had no power to restrict me.” However, Halevi also repeated the claim that the Israeli military “operates within the constraints of international law.”
According to a new UN report by the Independent Commission of Inquiry, Israel has committed four out of five acts of genocide as defined in the 1948 Geneva Convention.
Not one single international institution has taken genocide seriously. Gaza has been a major news focus, an area of research, an opportunity for rhetorical practice and futile debates, and a territory to test weapons and international parameters of human rights. That international institutions and world leaders are now catching up with what Palestinians have been saying since the start should read as an aberration of justice, not an upholding of it.
Even when quoting Israelis on genocide, the international community still finds space to debate the evidence instead of acting upon it. There have been other instances where Israeli officials clearly incited in favour of genocide and spoke openly of war crimes. Halevi’s comment, however, is statistical. Israel has killed over 10 per cent of Gaza’s population. What does that statistical data convey to the international community and what will be done about it?
The international community is not averse to statistics, but it certainly loathes interpreting them in ways that obliges action against Israel. The UN has published countless statistics on forced displacement, home demolitions, Palestinian prisoners, violence against Palestinian journalists, Palestinian minors in Israeli jails, depicting the severity of colonialism purely for embellishing the institution’s records. However, not one single statistical report has ever moved the UN to act against Israel. Maybe one should not even have that expectation because behind the veneer of human rights, the UN not only endorsed but also planned, Israel’s creation.
The international community is not helpless in the face of genocide; it is willing to see it through.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.
This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone object to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities, mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
Trump said the strike was carried out against ‘confirmed narco-terrorists’. Photograph: Truth Social/Donald Trump
President says three people killed in strike against vessel he said was transporting drugs ‘headed to the US’
Donald Trump said on Monday that the United States had carried out a strike on a second Venezuelan boat and killed three alleged terrorists he claimed were transporting drugs, expanding his administration’s war against drug cartels and the scope of lethal military force to stop them.
The US president gave few details about the strike, saying in a social media post that the action was on his orders and that it had happened earlier in the morning. The post was accompanied by a video clip showing the boat, which appeared to be stationary, erupting into a fireball.
“The strike occurred while these confirmed narco-terroists from Venezuela were in International Waters transporting illegal narcotics (A DEADLY WEAPON POISONING AMERICANS!) headed to the US,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.
Trump’s announcement of the strike appeared to be worded in a way to suggest there was a valid legal basis for the strike – an issue that became a source of heavy criticism in Washington after the operation against the first alleged Venezuelan drug boat earlier this month, which killed 11 people.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
The assassination of far-right podcaster and political activist Charlie Kirk in Utah was truly shocking in every sense. It happened in the open, at a college campus in broad daylight with 3,000 onlookers. Graphic and close-up video footage of his final moment, showing a bullet placed precisely at his carotid artery at the very second Kirk was questioned about mass shootings, seemed out of a movie. The man who once said gun deaths were worth the price of the Second Amendment (Newsweek, 4/6/23) became an illustration of what that price looks like before our eyes.
Flags at half mast. A moment of silence at Yankee Stadium. The vice president skipped a 9/11 memorial event to be with Kirk’s family (USA Today, 9/11/25), and Kirk’s body was transported back to his home state on the vice president’s aircraft (CBS, 9/11/25). He was no mere pundit or activist, but a valued capo in the Trump political machine.
“Charlie Kirk’s murder was one of the worst moments in recent American history,” read the subhead of an Atlantic piece (9/11/25) by Graeme Wood. (It was apparently much worse than US support for killing thousands of children in Gaza, about which Wood shrugged, “war is ugly,” arguing that it’s “possible to kill children legally”—Atlantic, 5/17/24.)
Wood was not alone in the press, as much of the coverage has framed the murder as a moment where the United States crossed the Rubicon when it comes to political violence. While Kirk’s murder was bad news for democracy—as no one ever deserves to be killed for their speech—the media reaction glossed over the role that President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and Kirk himself, as a prominent supporter of that movement, have helped to legitimize the kind of political violence that Kirk apparently fell victim to.
‘Epidemic of leftist violence’
The assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June 2025 was one of several right-wing attacks that New York Post columnist Miranda Divine (9/11/25) ignored in order to claim that “political violence is almost exclusively from the left.”
The right-wing press, as expected, has whipped itself into a frenzy over a wave of domestic terrorism that is only coming from the left, though the motives of the killer at the time were unknown. “We are suffering through an epidemic of leftist violence,” said Miranda Divine of the New York Post (9/11/25), adding that Kirk’s killing is “the latest manifestation of the hateful rhetoric aimed at President Trump and his MAGA movement.”
President Trump has fanned the flames. As the New Yorker (9/11/25) noted:
Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”… Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned.
Elsewhere, coverage didn’t blame the left, but did suggest that Kirk’s killing had brought US society to an inflection point. The New York Times (9/11/25) said that before Kirk’s killing, “there were signs of a looming political crisis” and increased “polarization and the coarsening of public discourse.” While there have been other acts of political violence, reporters Richard Fausset, Ken Bensinger and Alan Feuer wrote, the “killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus…raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.”
The Times quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, saying “I think that you have a cultural civil war underway.” (Gingrich has been waging cultural civil war for a long time now; in 1990, he put out a memo urging Republican candidates to tar their opponents with words like “sick…pathetic…traitors”—Extra! Update, 2/95).
The Washington Post editorial board (9/10/25) noted, while listing off other instances of political violence:
Months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, the conservative activist warned about the spread of “assassination culture.” He cited the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, as well as the killing of a healthcare CEO. And now it seems all too likely that he himself became a victim of that violent fervor while speaking on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.
The Post’s news side featured a report (9/11/25) claiming that the nation is “facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s.” The paper summoned memories of the “assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson (9/10/25) said Kirk’s murder “will unleash unknown consequences in a nation that is angry and already confronting a fractured political future.”
‘More frequent and deadly’
Donald Trump posted an image of himself as an Apocalypse Now character as he declared war on Chicago.
Most of these pieces rightly situated Kirk’s murder with other acts of political violence that targeted both Democrats and Republicans. But what these pieces miss—or actively try to hide—is how much this dangerous era escalated when Trump came into the White House. The president and his allies in right-wing media not only provided the rhetoric that inspired an enormous amount of political violence, but worked actively to normalize it.
From Trump’s calls for violence against protesters who disrupted his rallies (FAIR.org, 3/12/16) to official presidential social media posts depicting Trump as Robert Duvall’s napalm-loving colonel from Apocalypse Now, MAGA is a political agenda that celebrates violence (FAIR.org, 11/1/19).
“We’ve seen a rising tide of attacks by far-right extremists in recent years,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Frontline. “The threat is coming from a host of ideologies, from white supremacists to incels, to everything in between. Unfortunately, the attacks are becoming both more frequent and deadly.”
To track that change, Frontline analyzed data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS defines terrorism as the “deliberate use—or threat— of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact,” a similar definition to the one used by the FBI.
According to a CSIS database, there were 405 such terror attacks or plots in the US from 2015 through 2020—more than double the total number in the previous decade. And in the last five years, those attacks or plots were predominantly carried out by white supremacists, militias and other far-right extremists: 63% and increasing. Far-left incidents are also on the rise but made up a smaller portion of the whole, 13% from 2015 to 2020, according to Frontline’s analysis. Religious extremists accounted for 19%, with the remaining 5% linked to “ethnonationalist” or “other” ideologies, per CSIS categorizations.
Political violence is of course nothing new in American culture; deadly extremism, coming mainly though not exclusively from the right, was rampant both before (Extra!, 3–4/95, 7–8/95; Extra! Update, 10/96) and after September 11, 2001 (FAIR.org, 4/16/13, 6/13/14). But MAGA has moved what was once far-right rhetoric and tactics to the center of the US right. As the Brookings Institution (3/12/21) pointed out, many right-wing tactics of the Trump era were pioneered by self-styled militia groups that have operated along the US’s southern border since the 1980s:
Many of the right-wing armed groups’ tactics exhibited during Trump’s presidency—harassment of minorities, purposeful recruitment of military veterans, cultivation of allies in law enforcement forces and among politicians, and efforts to influence elections—had years of beta testing at the US/Mexico border.
Five years ago, the Guardian (3/18/20) also painted a frightening picture:
White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the Trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a “surging” racist movement continues to be driven by “a deep fear of demographic change.” Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity groups and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs.
‘Bring a gun with you’
The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) wrote admiringly of Kirk’s “moxie and fearlessness.”
Charlie Kirk was a central actor in the right-wing hate machine that fomented violence. He encouraged violence against immigrants (Media Matters, 3/22/24):
At what point is it time to start to at least use rubber bullets, or use some sort of tear gas, to prevent this and quell this invasion?… And at what point do we use real force?. . . Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?
He incited partisan division and hatred, and encouraged the purchase and use of weapons in that context (Media Matters, 10/12/23):
You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. if you go into a public place, bring a gun with you…. Thank goodness in Arizona we can carry, and we carry.
Where the New York Times (9/10/25) saw “a charismatic right-wing activist” who “showed a genius for using social media and campus organizing,” those who found themselves targets of Kirk’s “genius” saw something entirely different.
Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” doxxed academics Kirk claimed “advanced leftist propaganda”; those listed quickly found themselves and their universities subject to a torrent of abuse—including racial slurs and death threats—from Kirk’s followers, at times requiring universities to offer those academics extra security. Journalism professor Stacy Patton, who experienced this harassment firsthand when she was put on the list in 2024, observed:
Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.
This is the activism that the New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) described as “practicing politics in exactly the right way”:
He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.
‘Throbbing middle finger to God’
Charlie Kirk (X, 9/11/23): ““The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God is the transgender thing happening in America.”
Kirk referred to LGBTQ identity as a “social contagion,” and called trans people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God” (Erin in the Morning, 9/11/23).
He said that Black women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson “had to go steal a white person’s slot” through affirmative action, because they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” he declared (Wired, 1/12/24).
Upon Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary, Kirk posted: “Twenty-four years ago, a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim socialist is on pace to run New York City.” “When we think of what it means to be an American, is [it] someone by the name of Islami Mohamed?” he remarked on another occasion (Media Matters, 8/19/25): “I don’t think so.”
“You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population,” Kirk insisted (Religion News, 1/7/25). He also claimed (Media Matters, 8/19/25) that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
‘Disgracefully ill-timed’
MSNBC‘s Rebecca Cutler said it was ““inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable” to connect Kirk’s murder to his hate speech (Guardian, 9/11/25).
In the wake of Kirk’s murder, it was taboo to point out that his politics, and those of the MAGA movement he embraced, contributed to a culture of hatred and demonization. MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd was promptly fired by the cable network after he observed:
Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions…. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.
When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in condemning violence, remarked that “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” the Washington Post (9/10/25) editorialized that this was “a disgracefully ill-timed comment.”
In fact, there is no better time to point out that the right-wing movement Kirk was a crucial part of has played the leading role in dehumanizing others and normalizing violence. Failure to honestly examine the politics that are driving extremism will steer us away from the kind of analysis and action that are needed to prevent more tragedies.
This image was posted on social media by President Donald Trump and shows a boat that was allegedly transporting cocaine off the coast of Venezuela when it was destroyed by US forces on September 2, 2025. (Photo: President Donald Trump/Truth Social)
The recent massacre in the Caribbean was a step toward making America a police state under President-for-Life Trump.
Why is Donald Trump committing murder on the high seas?
Last week President Trump bragged that “On my Orders,” the Navy destroyed a speedboat with eleven people aboard, claiming that those slain were “Tren de Aragua Narco terrorists . . . transporting illegal narcotics, heading for the United States.”
The legal procedure for dealing with drug traffickers on the high seas is actually for the Navy or Coast Guard to stop and board the suspect vessel, confirm it is carrying illegal drugs, then arrest and prosecute those on board.
Instead, Trump treated what should have been an (alleged) criminal law enforcement matter as open warfare and, without any need, killed everyone aboard. Why? Because Trump wants the lethal use of military firepower on supposed foreign “bad guys” to serve as a model for militarizing American cities – in the name of stopping an imaginary crime wave.
One week after the Caribbean Sea attack, Trump and the Defense Department have yet to provide evidence the vessel was carrying drugs to America. But even if had been, summarily killing eleven civilians is still murder.
Killing eleven people in Venezuela was Donald Trump’s out-of-town tryout. Trump’s militarization of our cities, if not resisted, could lead to the termination of free elections in America.
Calling a criminal gang a “foreign terrorist organization” does not make it legal to slay alleged gang members without a trial – particularly when the gang has not been linked to acts of political terrorism, as confirmed by the fact that the Justice Department’s twoindictments of gang members include no charges of terrorism.
Still less does tagging them “Narco terrorists” mean that the United States is in “armed conflict” with a gang, to which the laws of war might apply. Gangs aren’t enemy nations and they’re not fighting for a political ideology – they’re in it for the money. Suppressing them isn’t warfare. The Navy was not engaged in a naval battle with a speedboat.
A former State Department attorney specializing in counterterrorism, Brian Finucane, put it succinctly. “Outside of armed conflict, we have a word for the premeditated killing of people. That word is murder.”
Annie Shiel, the U.S. advocacy director of the Center for Civilians in Conflict, confirmed the point. “Using lethal force in this way, outside of any recognizable armed conflict and without due process, is an extrajudicial execution, not an act of war.” Myriad legal experts confirm that obvious conclusion.
But Secretary of State Marco Rubio sought to justify the slayings by asserting “interdiction doesn’t work.” “What will stop them is when you blow them up, when you get rid of them.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth echoed the sentiment. “Anyone trafficking in those waters who we know is a deadly terrorist will face the same fate.”
But if our military is allowed to blow up people on unproven assertions of drug dealing, the same logic would justify the military engaging in summary executions of those they deem “bad guys” in the United States itself. Which is perhaps the point.
Drug trafficking is not a capital offense in the United States. The alleged crimes would not warrant execution even if Trump’s targets were found to be cartel drug smugglers..
In reality, there is little reason to credit Trump’s claims about who the people on board were and what they were doing.
The U.S. Department of Justice brought two indictments against the Tren de Aragua gang this year, in April and August. Neither indictment alleges the gang brings drugs from Venezuela to the United States.
The indictments actually suggest more disturbing possibilities: that most of those Trump ordered killed were victims of sex trafficking. The April indictment charged Tren de Aragua with “forcing young women trafficked from Venezuela into commercial sex work.”
A former senior federal law enforcement official suggested that the vessel was on a human smuggling run, carrying refugees seeking to flee Venezuela.
Nonetheless, Trump prefers the drug smuggling story because it is part of his strategy to conflate immigration, crime and gangs to justify sending troops into American cities.
Trump’s claim that undocumented immigrants have brought rampant crime to America is false. Few of those Trump is deporting have committed a serious crime, and immigrants as a group are actually less likely to commit crimes than native born Americans. But Trump has repeated his phony charge hundreds of times, and it has had an impact.
Drug-running gangs enjoy little sympathy, and Trump expects few people to worry about whether the eleven individuals he ordered killed were drug traffickers or actually the gang’s victims. But if he gets away with having the Navy blow them up, he hopes Americans will come to see troops on our streets as acceptable, even desirable, since they are (purportedly) fighting the same drug dealing villains.
Trump himself drew the direct connection between his war powers as commander in chief and his claim that military force is the solution to crime in the U.S. when he recently threatened, “Chicago about to find out why it’s called the Department of WAR.”
He will not immediately order unrestrained violence against alleged criminals (or opponents) as freely as he did in the Caribbean Sea off Venezuela. But he has begun the process of legitimizing law-free military “law enforcement,” first abroad and eventually in America.
Where will it end?
Trump has declared emergency after emergency, many of them focusing on his deportation agenda, and all of them stretching – and breaching – the lawful limits of presidential power. Trump has correctly concluded that if he is to swiftly deport millions of immigrants without considering their possible right to be here, his targets must be deprived of the due process of law which our Constitution guarantees to everyone in America.
But eliminating due process rights does not enjoy broad popular support, and Trump’s deportation efforts have repeatedly been stymied by the courts. Enter the concocted “Narco terrorist” boat incident. In Trump’s narrative – never mind truth or evidence – the U.S. Navy eliminates “bad guys” on the high seas without bothersome legal process.
It’s political theater. But not just theater.
The legal theories are those Trump’s Justice Department has asserted with little success in federal court: First, that Trump is entitled to use the military for “law enforcement” because we are being “invaded.” Second, that alleged gang members can be summarily deported and imprisoned (and now killed) because we are “at war” with cartels. Trump may not be able to persuade the courts that these outlandish legal theories are correct, but he can act on them with impunity in the waters off Venezuela, by ordering the Navy to dole out death.
Trump’s ultimate end is plain enough: unlimited power.
Donald Trump was the only president in the life of the Republic to refuse to surrender office after losing an election. Donald Trump was the only president to unleash an insurrection to try to hold onto office. And now, having lawfully returned to power, he has not concealed his desire to remain after his current term ends.
During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised his followers that if he was elected, things would be “fixed so good” that “in four years, you don’t have to vote again.” And, after predicting his election to a second four-year term, Trump told another audience “we’re probably entitled to another four after that.”
Trump has said he is “not joking.” “A lot of people want me to do it,” he told NBC News this Spring. “There are methods which you could do it.”
What method does Trump have in mind? Here are some ways Trump could use the military to unconstitutionally retain power:
Arrest or detain voters. Recall Trump’s baseless assertion that undocumented immigrants are voting en masse in American elections. With the military placed in key cities as a “crime fighting” force, Trump could use the soldiers and his masked ICE agents to remove Hispanics and other “suspect” voters from polling places, on the claim the soldiers are “ensuring election integrity.” Troops at polling places arresting people would certainly also frighten others away from the polls.
Seize voting machines. In 2020 Trump explored having Homeland Security or the Defense Department take control of voting machines in swing states. Attorney General Robert Barr reportedly shot down the suggestion.
But loyal sycophants Attorney General Pam Bondi or “War” Department Secretary Hegseth might well direct their departments to obey Trump’s orders to confiscate voting machines – and later report Trump’s amazing, landslide electoral victory.
Cancel elections because of an “emergency.” Donald Trump is the master of emergencies. He might manufacture one to justify suspending elections.
Trump claimed a handful of disruptive protests against ICE raids in Los Angeles constituted a “rebellion,” requiring a military response. And he falsely asserted crime was “totally out of control in the District of Columbia” to rationalize the troop takeover of the nation’s capital. Now he threatens to send troops into Chicago, Baltimore and other cities that tend to vote Democratic.
As Trump prepares to rig the 2028 election as best he can, millions of Americans will take to the streets against his illegal candidacy. Trump has little tolerance for the constitutional right to assemble and protest. In June 2025 he warned: “For those people who want to protest, they’re going to be met with very big force.” During the widespread peaceful demonstrations over the murder of George Floyd in 2020, Trump asked his Defense Secretary about protestors near the White House. “Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?”
The Defense Secretary at the time did not grant Trump’s wish. But loyalist Hegseth is not likely to oppose any Trump suggestion.
A president who whipped up a mob to seize the Capitol in January 2021 could mobilize right-wing militias and MAGA forces for political violence before an election, and Trump might assert that elections had to be suspended until “order” was (someday) restored. Troops would enforce “calm” as the election was dismantled.
These scenarios only seem far-fetched because we still find it difficult to contemplate an American president engaging in naked, lethal dictatorial action.
Killing eleven people in Venezuela was Donald Trump’s out-of-town tryout. Trump’s militarization of our cities, if not resisted, could lead to the termination of free elections in America.
Mobilizing for the next election is not enough. The danger is now and we must resist now. We must withhold our cooperation from Trump’s authoritarian moves, refuse to obey in advance, pressure the institutions we are associated with to stand up for our constitutional democracy, and peacefully take to the streets to demonstrate the scope of the resistance. It is not too late. But if democracy is to be rescued, we must be the rescuers ourselves.
Don’t just blow your horn. Get out of the car and join the protest.
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks during the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC, on June 3, 2025. (Photo by Saul Loeb/AFP)
“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” said one free speech advocate.
Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech.
The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:
Mast’s new bill claims to target a narrow set of people. One section grants the secretary of state the power to revoke or refuse to issue passports for people who have been convicted—or merely charged—of material support for terrorism…
The other section sidesteps the legal process entirely. Rather, the secretary of state would be able to deny passports to people whom they determine “has knowingly aided, assisted, abetted, or otherwise provided material support to an organization the Secretary has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.”
Rubio has previously boasted of stripping the visas and green cards from several immigrants based purely on their peaceful expression of pro-Palestine views, describing them as “Hamas supporters.”
These include Columbia protest leader Mahmoud Khalil, who was arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after Rubio voided his green card; and Rumeysa Ozturk, the Tufts student whose visa Rubio revoked after she co-wrote an op-ed calling for her school to divest from Israel.
Mast—a former soldier for the Israel Defense Forces who once stated that babies were “not innocent Palestinian civilians”—has previously called for “kicking terrorist sympathizers out of our country,” speaking about the Trump administration’s attempts to deport Khalil, who was never convicted or even charged with support for a terrorist group.
Critics have argued that the bill has little reason to exist other than to allow the Secretary of State to unilaterally strip passports from people without them actually having been convicted of a crime.
As Kia Hamadanchy, a senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, noted in The Intercept, there is little reason to restrict people convicted of terrorism or material support for terrorism, since—if they were guilty—they’d likely be serving a long prison sentence and incapable of traveling anyway.
“I can’t imagine that if somebody actually provided material support for terrorism, there would be an instance where it wouldn’t be prosecuted—it just doesn’t make sense,” he said.
Journalist Zaid Jilani noted on X that “judges can already remove a passport over material support for terrorism, but the difference is you get due process. This bill would essentially make Marco Rubio judge, jury, and executioner.”
The bill does contain a clause allowing those stripped of their passports to appeal to Rubio. But, as Hamadanchy notes, the decision is up to the secretary alone, “who has already made this determination.” He said that for determining who is liable to have their visa stripped, “There’s no standard set. There’s nothing.”
As Seth Stern, the director of advocacy at the Freedom of the Press Foundation, noted in The Intercept, the language in Mast’s bill is strikingly similar to that found in the so-called “nonprofit killer” provision that Republicans attempted to pass in July’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” Act. That provision, which was ultimately struck from the bill, would have allowed the Treasury Secretary to unilaterally strip nonprofit status from anything he deemed to be a “terrorist-supporting organization.”
Stern said Mast’s bill would allow for “thought policing at the hands of one individual.”
“Marco Rubio has claimed the power to designate people terrorist supporters based solely on what they think and say,” he said, “even if what they say doesn’t include a word about a terrorist organization or terrorism.”
Elon Musk urges you to be a Fascist like him, says that you can ignore facts and reality then.Donald Fuhrump says that Amerikkka doesn’t bother with crimes or charges anymore, not being 100% Amerikkkan and opposing his real estate intentions is enough.Orcas discuss how Trump was re-elected and him being an insane, xenophobic Fascist.
dizzy: There are similarities to what’s happening in UK with showing support for Palestine Action currently being a terrorist offence. Disagreeing with the dominant Neo-Liberal/Capitalist ideology is becoming terrorism.
