THE ATLANTIC – Politics | Politics & Government

Yesterday morning, Governor Spencer Cox stood behind a podium in Orem, Utah, to announce the end of the 34-hour manhunt for Charlie Kirk’s killer, and to plead for peace in a nation that seemed at risk of spiraling into further violence. “To my young friends, you are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage,” he said. “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”Shortly after he finished, Cox’s phone rang. The president was calling.“‘You know, the type of person who would do something like that to Charlie Kirk would love to do it to us,’” Cox says Trump told him. Trump went on to recite statistics suggesting the presidency was “one of the most dangerous jobs on the planet.” Fifteen percent of the men who’d held his office had been shot; eight percent had been killed.Cox… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

When Tyler Bowyer logged on to Benny Johnson’s X livestream on Thursday morning, pieces of tissue were stuck to the stubble on his unshaven face. Bowyer, the chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, had clearly been crying. Just a few hours before, he’d seen a video of his close friend and colleague Charlie Kirk being fatally shot in the neck.“What he would want more than anything is for people to channel their anger into proper activism,” Bowyer told Johnson, a few minutes later advising viewers: “Consider yesterday that moment—that turning point for you—of thinking about getting involved in your local community or running for office.” Later, Andrew Kolvet, a longtime spokesperson for Kirk, joined the stream and echoed Bowyer. “Charlie was not a revolutionary,” Kolvet said. “He does not want to see the rage we’re all feeling be misdirected to evil” and would want “more speech, more freedom, less… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

Before the president of the United States announced on this morning’s broadcast of Fox & Friends that the man who’d assassinated Charlie Kirk was finally in custody—“I think, with a high degree of certainty, we have him”—he had already told the American people who was to blame.Within hours of Kirk’s killing, when law enforcement had not released so much as a photograph of the suspected shooter, Donald Trump addressed the nation, accusing the “radical left.” His assertion fanned breathless speculation on social media that the shooter was some kind of operative, an agent of organized political violence, or maybe even a point man in an elaborate conspiracy involving antifa, Israeli intelligence, or operatives working for Kirk’s rivals in the MAGA sphere. Apparently inaccurate press reporting, attributed to federal law-enforcement officials, suggested that the shooter had carved messages espousing “transgender” ideology onto a bullet casing.[Read: Leading Democrats Are Condemning Charlie Kirk’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

From the moment an assassin shot Charlie Kirk, my social-media feed began filling up with people decrying the attack. The sentiment of horror—both at the murder itself and at what it portended for American political culture—was overwhelming and cross-ideological.From the pro–Donald Trump conservatives in my timeline, however, I detected another sort of response. Although most expressed genuine grief at the tragedy befalling a figure many of them admired or knew, some others seemed preoccupied with proving that “the left” was celebrating the attack.The challenge, for this cohort, is that Democratic Party leaders were united in condemnation of the attack on Kirk and political violence generally. California Governor Gavin Newsom, a gleeful pugilist who has made a brand out of aping the president’s disordered egomaniacal communication style, wrote, “The attack on Charlie Kirk is disgusting, vile, and reprehensible. In the United States of America, we must reject political violence in EVERY… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.

In Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s telling, citizenship checks by ICE officers are as straightforward and frictionless as presenting yourself at the entrance to a Costco. Just show a membership card, and you’ll be on your merry way.Kavanaugh wrote an opinion this week, concurring with the Court’s majority, that would afford Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers broad latitude to detain and question someone based on factors such as ethnic appearance, speaking Spanish, and speaking English with an accent. The risk that nonwhite Americans will be racially profiled or subject to unlawful detention should be weighed against the brevity of an encounter with ICE, Kavanaugh wrote.“If the officers learn that the individual they stopped is a U.S. citizen or otherwise lawfully in the United States, they promptly let the individual go,” he wrote.The problem is that ICE does not say what it accepts as definitive proof of legal status. Is it a driver’s… ...[TheTopNews] Read More.