A CURIOUS MIX OF BRITISH FOLK MUSIC AND AMERICAN POLITICS
The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out our public life. A free society relies on the premise that people can speak out without fear or humiliation. No more political violence.
Senator Bernie Sanders is the senior senator from Vermont. He is the longest-serving independent in U.S. congressional history and the ranking member of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP).
Br Rosanne Cash | Aug 31, 2025
I have to believe that at some point soon a critical mass of those of us who cannot bear the reality of one more drop of a child’s blood on a little princess backpack or Minecraft lunchbox will awaken the national conscience and create a groundswell of clarity and empathy so powerful that common sense gun safety laws and regulations will be created almost overnight, and not a soul in Congress will ever take a dime from the blood money gun lobby again. I have to believe that.
If I don’t believe it, then I have to accept that the critical mass will stay with those who are willing to see children murdered by the score for their ‘right’ to own unregulated, easily concealed handguns and military-style assault weapons, or an entire arsenal of the same, and that they see this as a fair exchange for the price of ‘freedom’. And that is intolerable. Or, I have to accept that there are those who offer their perfunctory thoughts and prayers but think it will never happen to their child, and that other people’s children are just statistics, not real, so it doesn’t matter how they vote or if they make their voices heard. That is also intolerable— that there are people who think the suffering of others is irrelevant.
We hear from many leaders and pundits that school shootings are the result of mental illness. Absolutely true. Anyone who shoots children is mentally ill. No question, no argument. It’s the easy access to guns for people who should not have them that is the problem. We have the same rate of mental illness in this country as every other developed nation, but we are the only country that regularly has mass shootings, the only country where there are more guns than people in the total population, and the only country where the access to weapons is basically unregulated. Background checks are state by state, not federal, and transferring guns across state lines is legal if it’s a ‘personal’ gun. Private gun sales are unregulated and do not even require a criminal background check. You say we need more mental health services. Absolutely true, but the Trump administration just gutted access to mental health services and revoked the Obama-era gun checks for people with mental illness. They also revoked funding for anti-gun violence programs. Clearly, the talking point about mental illness is just something leaders say to avoid talking about how much money they get from the corporate gun lobby.
They say the 2nd Amendment is a sacrosanct right, not to be abridged. Bullshit. If amendments to the Constitution were carved in stone and could not be revised, repealed, or new ones made, then I wouldn’t be able to vote. The 19th Amendment giving me that right was ratified in 1920. There were 18 amendments before that. And none of us could raise a glass of wine at dinner before the 21st Amendment repealed the 18th Amendment prohibiting the sale and consumption of alcohol. The 19th and 21st amendments were added and the 18th was repealed to respond to progress and the evolution of the concept of personal freedom. The 2nd Amendment was written at a time when a ‘well-regulated militia’ was armed with muskets that took a full minute to reload. They didn’t foresee the invention of high capacity ammunition magazines that outgun the police. In the Highland Park shooting, the shooter fired 83 rounds in the same minute it would take to reload a musket. The phrase ‘well-regulated’ in common usage is a wink and a nod to vigilantism. New technology requires new and thoughtful legislation, for the protection of the populace, the police who are dedicated to serve and protect, and for the republic at large.
When the massacre at Columbine happened in 1999, I turned to my then teenage daughter and said ‘My god, how did these kids get the guns?’ She looked at me incredulously and said, ‘Mom, I could get a gun easier than I could get cigarettes.’ That was 26 years ago. In 2000, I spoke at the Million Mom March in Washington, D.C. advocating for common sense safety and regulatory gun laws. In the last 25 years, I’ve attended dozens of marches, performed at fundraisers, benefits, and house concerts, participated in a lie-in in Times Square, written op-eds, joined boards of anti-gun violence organizations and more, and nothing has changed. In fact, it’s worse. The federal assault weapons ban expired in 2004, and mass shootings with semi-automatic weapons have increased exponentially. That ban actually worked. There was a 66% reduction of the 19 specific weapons listed in the bans that showed up in crimes. Reinstating that ban would be a simple stopgap to at least reduce mass shootings. It wouldn’t fix everything, and it wouldn’t have affected the recent school shooting in Minneapolis, the 44th school shooting this year, but it’s a critical first step with proven results. There are mind-boggling hypocrisies in the United States regarding child safety. We have a law requiring small children to be in a carseat, but there is no law requiring safety locks on guns that are not in the control of the gun owner. We have child safety laws about the cords on window blinds, aspirin bottles, cribs, and toys, but no laws to prevent a child from accessing and using a gun in the house and accidentally shooting themselves or another child. (There is an outrageous irony in the fact that toy guns are regulated— they have to have a red dot at the end of the barrel— but real ones are not.)
You say it’s a slippery slope from regulation to abolishment. Also bullshit. There is no credible leader who wants to take a registered hunting rifle or personal handgun away from a mentally sound, responsible citizen. But if you think you need an arsenal of weapons of mass destruction in your house, then, yeah. No. You don’t get to have that in the same way you don’t get to have a stockpile of nuclear weapons-grade plutonium in your basement or a B-52 bomber in your garage. If you have a documented history of violent or unstable behavior, in person or online, then no. If you want a civilized society, where people feel safe around their neighbors, where mutual trust is a given, and where you feel confident that when you send your child to school that they will come home that day, or send them to play at another kid’s house without fear that there are loaded and unlocked guns lying around, then you have to give up your military arsenal and the bizarre idea that deadly weapons should be less regulated than toys or cars. If you think you need your arsenal to protect yourself from ‘the government’, then, as Steve Hofstetter says, ‘You don’t know how tanks work.’
You say it’s an infringement on our freedom. What kind of freedom? We make 5 year olds do active shooter drills. We inject fear and trauma into the nervous system of an innocent child and set up the conditions to make her permanently anxious—the same child we wouldn’t let watch a movie with the kind of violence we ask her to role-play in real life. There is more gun violence in America than in the other 26 industrialized nations combined. Those other countries don’t have less freedom. They have more, because they have less fear of being shot in a school, shopping mall, church, concert, nightclub, parade, or any other spot where people gather. Fear truncates freedom. I gave a speech years ago in which I said, ‘The life of a single child is more important than your right to own a military style weapon.’ A man wrote me after that speech and said simply, ‘No it’s not.’ That comment still chills me. I wanted to ask, ‘Does that include the life of your child, or just the imaginary children of other people?’ Every other developed country has figured this out— they don’t allow unrestricted access to deadly weapons, and they don’t willingly let children die of preventable causes. This is a choice we have made: to allow our elected representatives to get away with murder by deregulating weapons, so they can have unregulated campaign contributions from the gun lobby.
Who will we be if we give up the guns? Will we be a decent parent, a hard worker, a compassionate friend, a good daughter, an upright son, a visionary, an artist, good with numbers, strong and brave, shy, emotional, resolute? Will we be an informed citizen, a mentor, a volunteer, a hermit, a social butterfly? Will we feel vulnerable? Is that a bad thing? Who will we be if we give up the guns?
Once again, as we go through the nightmarish ritual of wiping the blood of children off the church pews and the princess backpack and the superman t-shirt and the Minecraft lunchbox and the fairy necklace and the friendship bracelet and the lighted sneakers, isn’t it time to find out who we’d be? Is the country of the future that belongs to our grandchildren and great-grandchildren an even more dangerous place to live? Don’t we owe them something? Can we learn to have zero tolerance for sacrificing children? Who will we be if we give up the guns?
May 25, 2023
U.S. District Judge Amit Mehta today sentenced the leader of the right-wing Oath Keepers organization, Elmer Stewart Rhodes III, to 18 years in prison, followed by 3 years of supervised release. In November a jury found Rhodes guilty of seditious conspiracy, obstruction of an official proceeding, and tampering with documents and proceedings, for his role in organizing people to go to Washington in January 2021 and try to stop the counting of the electoral votes that would make Joe Biden president.
Rhodes told the court that his only crime was standing against those who are “destroying our country.” He says he believes he is a “political prisoner” and that he hopes Trump will win the presidency in 2024. “You are not a political prisoner, Mr. Rhodes,” Judge Mehta said. “You, sir, present an ongoing threat and a peril to this country and to the republic and to the very fabric of this democracy.”
And yet, former president Trump has said he would not only pardon the January 6 offenders, but would apologize to them for their treatment by the government. Today, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, who yesterday announced he is running for president, said he, too, would consider pardoning them, promising to be “aggressive in issuing pardons.”
Rhodes struck at our elections. Today in the Sackett v. Environmental Protection Agency decision, the Supreme Court struck at the government regulations that underpin modern America.
Michael and Chantell Sackett bought land near Priest Lake, Idaho, and backfilled the wetlands on the property to build a home. The EPA found they had violated the Clean Water Act, which prohibits putting pollutants into “the waters of the United States.” Officials told them to restore the site or face penalties of more than $40,000 a day. By a vote of 5–4, the Supreme Court found that “waters” refers only to “‘streams, oceans, rivers, and lakes’ and to adjacent wetlands that are ‘indistinguishable’ from those bodies of water due to a continuous surface connection.”
This decision will remove federal protection from half of the currently protected wetlands in the U.S, an area larger than California. Homeowners, farmers, and developers will have far greater latitude to intrude on wetlands than they did previously, and that intrusion has already wrought damage as wetlands act like a sponge to absorb huge amounts of water during hurricanes. From 1992 to 2010, Houston, for example, lost more than 70% of its wetlands to development, leaving it especially vulnerable to Hurricane Harvey, a category 4 hurricane that in 2017 left 107 people dead and caused $125 billion in damage.
The decision said that the EPA had overreached in its protection of wetlands as part of the Clean Water Act, and that Congress must “enact exceedingly clear language” on any rules that affect private property. This court seems eager to gut federal regulation, suggesting that Congress cannot delegate regulatory rulemaking to the executive branch. As investigative journalist Dave Troy put it, “If [the] EPA can’t enforce its rules, what federal agency can?”
Justice Elena Kagan warned that by destroying the authority of the EPA, both now and in the West Virginia v. EPA decision last June that restricted the agency’s ability to regulate emissions from power plants, the court had appointed itself “as the national decision maker on environmental policy.”
The Clean Water Act passed by an overwhelming bipartisan vote in 1972, during the administration of Republican president Richard M. Nixon. Nixon backed the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970 after a massive oil spill off the coast of Santa Barbara, California, over ten days in January–February 1969 poured between 80,000 and 100,000 barrels of oil into the Pacific, fouling 35 miles of California beaches and killing seabirds, dolphins, sea lions, and elephant seals, and then, four months later, in June 1969, the chemical contaminants that had been dumped into Cleveland’s Cuyahoga River caught fire. In February 1970, Nixon told Congress “[W]e…have too casually and too long abused our natural environment. The time has come when we can wait no longer to repair the damage already done, and to establish new criteria to guide us in the future.”
Nixon called for a 37-point program with 23 legislative proposals and 14 new administrative measures to control water and air pollution, manage solid waste, protect parklands and public recreation, and organize for action. At Nixon’s urging, Congress created the EPA in 1970, and two years later, Congress passed the Clean Water Act, establishing protections for water quality and regulating pollutant discharges into waters of the United States.
House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) tweeted that “[t]oday’s Supreme Court ruling is a win for farmers, businesses, and Americans across the nation by rejecting, yet again, the Biden administration’s costly and burdensome regulatory overreach.” But it sure looks like the story is not about Biden, but rather is about an extremist SCOTUS overturning 50 years of law that gave us clean water because it is determined to slash federal authority to regulate business.
McCarthy is trying to manage his conference while members of the far-right Freedom Caucus strike at our economy. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre reiterated today that defaulting on the national debt is not an option. “The President has said that, the Speaker has said that, and we want the American people to understand that as well…. What is up for debate, though, is the budget,” she said. “And that’s what these discussions are about: two very different fiscal visions for our country and our economy.”
Biden’s proposed budget invests in ordinary Americans and over 10 years is projected to reduce the deficit by nearly $3 trillion by “asking the wealthy and corporations to pay their fair share and by slashing wasteful spending on special interests.” In contrast, “House Republicans…want to slash programs millions of hardworking Americans count on, while also protecting tax breaks skewed to the wealthy and corporations that will add $3.5 trillion to the debt. That’s where these negotiations began,” she said.
Finally, there is news today about the man that Rhodes is going to prison for, concerning his strike at our national security. Devlin Barrett, Josh Dawsey, Spencer S. Hsu, and Perry Stein of the Washington Post reported that on June 2, 2022, the day one of Trump’s lawyers contacted the Justice Department to say that officials were welcome to come to Mar-a-Lago to retrieve the classified documents the department had subpoenaed, two of Trump’s employees moved boxes of papers. The next day, when FBI agents arrived, Trump’s lawyers gave them 38 documents, said they had conducted a “diligent search,” and claimed that all the relevant documents had been turned over. Yet, when FBI agents conducted a search two months later, they found more than 100 additional classified documents.
The timing of the moved boxes suggests that Trump was deliberately hiding certain documents. The Washington Post article also says that more than one witness has told prosecutors that Trump sometimes kept classified documents out in the open and showed them to people.
Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement: “This is nothing more than a targeted, politically motivated witch hunt against President Trump that is concocted to meddle in an election and prevent the American people from returning him to the White House.”
May 16, 2023
On Saturday, May 13th, President Joe Biden spoke to the graduating class at Howard University, a historically Black university in Washington, D.C. In his speech about “excellence, leadership, and truth and service,” Biden singled out white supremacy “as the most dangerous terrorist threat to our homeland.”
Biden called for Americans to reject political extremism and violence, and to protect fundamental rights and freedoms for women to choose and for transgender children to be free. He called for affordable healthcare and housing and the right to raise your family and retire with dignity. He urged the graduates to “stand with leaders of your generation who give voice to the people, demanding action on gun violence,” and to stand “against books being banned and Black history being erased…. To stand up for the best in us.”
While Biden based his remarks on former president Trump’s declaration after the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally that “there are very fine people on both sides,” there were plenty of examples from just this week that he could have used.
Last night, Hunter Walker of Talking Points Memo broke the story that the digital director for right-wing representative Paul Gosar (R-AZ) appears to be Wade Searle, a devoted follower of white supremacist leader Nick Fuentes. Fuentes has openly embraced Nazism and Russian president Vladimir Putin’s authoritarianism, and he is one of those to whom the alt-right Groypers look up.
Although Fuentes calls the Groypers “Christian conservatives,” historian of the far right in the U.S. Nicole Hemmer told Walker: “The Groypers are essentially the equivalent of neo-Nazis…. They are attached to violent events like Jan. 6. Nick Fuentes, as sort of the organizer of the Groypers, expresses Holocaust denialism, white supremacy, white nationalism, pretty strong anti-women bigotry, he calls for a kind of return to Twelfth Century Catholicism. They’re an extremist group that is OK with violence.”
Walker has also identified an intern in Gosar’s office as another Fuentes follower.
A February study by the Public Religion Research Institute, a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that conducts independent research on religion, culture, and public policy, found that the so-called Christian nationalism at the heart of those like Fuentes is closely linked with a willingness to commit violence to make the U.S. a white Christian nation. The PRRI poll showed that nearly 20% of those who sympathize with Christian nationalism agreed they were “willing to fight” to take the nation back to what they incorrectly believe it always was.
Maria Cramer of the New York Times noted yesterday that while no one actually knows much about Daniel Penny, a white man who was recently charged with choking Jordan Neely, a homeless Black man, to death on a subway in New York, right-wing politicians and supporters have rallied around Penny. They seem to see him as a symbol of a powerful man who took matters into his own hands to restore order—although the events that led to the choking are still unclear—much as they lionized Kyle Rittenhouse after he killed two people and wounded another at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020. Florida governor Ron DeSantis tweeted: “We must defeat the Soros-Funded DAs, stop the Left’s pro-criminal agenda, and take back the streets for law abiding citizens.”
Historian Thomas Zimmer explained the danger: “All strands of the Right—leading Republicans, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base, the donor class—are openly and aggressively embracing rightwing vigilante violence,” he wrote. “This sends a clear message: It encourages white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with ‘the Left’ by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence—call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma.”
In Washington this weekend, about 150 masked members of the white supremacist group Patriot Front marched toward the U.S. Capitol, chanting, “life, liberty, victory.”
Professor of journalism at New York University Jay Rosen noted on MSNBC on May 11, the day after CNN gave Trump the space to hold what amounted to a political rally, that journalists could better cover this moment in our history by focusing not on the horse race strategy, but on the consequences for the country if Trump wins again. How will American life change? Who will benefit? Who will suffer? He says the question should be “not the odds, but the stakes” as a principle for better campaign coverage.
A lawsuit filed today in New York by Noelle Dunphy, a woman who says Trump ally Rudy Giuliani hired her in January 2019 to manage his media presence, documents the sordid world she observed in her two years working for Giuliani. He promised her a salary of $1 million a year but said he couldn’t pay her until his divorce was final and, ultimately, paid her only small amounts of cash. In her account, he seemed to become obsessed with her, forcing her into sex and trying to dominate her. She is suing Giuliani, his companies, and 10 unidentified individuals over “unlawful abuses of power, wide-ranging sexual assault and harassment, wage theft, and other misconduct” and is asking for $10 million in compensation and damages.
The story of her time with Giuliani, whom she describes as a chronically alcoholic sexual abuser prone to racist and sexist outbursts, is bad enough—and she claims to have recordings—but her other allegations are politically incendiary. She claims to have heard Giuliani say that he was selling presidential pardons for $2 million a pop, splitting the proceeds with Trump, and that Giuliani told her on February 7, 2019, “about a plan that had been prepared for if Trump lost the 2020 election.” Specifically, Giuliani told Ms. Dunphy that Trump’s team would claim that there was ‘voter fraud’ and that Trump had actually won the election…. That same day, Giuliani had Ms. Dunphy sit in on a speakerphone conversation about a potential business opportunity involving a $72 billion dollar gas deal in China.”
Also of note is her claim that, since part of her job was managing emails, Giuliani gave her access to his email account. The system stored at least 23,000 emails on her own personal computer, including “privileged, confidential, and highly sensitive” emails from, to, or concerning Trump, his children Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump, and Eric Trump; Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner; Trump’s lawyers and advisors; media figures including Rupert Murdoch, Sean Hannity, and Tucker Carlson; and so on.
There are a number of stories in the news today that wrap up long-standing issues. John Durham, the special counsel picked by Trump loyalist attorney general William Barr to undermine the FBI investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election, released a report today finding fault with the categorization of the FBI’s initial investigation into the Russia attempt to swing the 2016 election to Trump.
Representative George Santos (R-NY) has pleaded guilty to charges of theft in Brazil, but insists he is not guilty of the federal charges against him for financial crimes. He says he will not resign from Congress.
As predicted by everyone who correctly attributed the high cost of eggs late last year to the deadly avian flu and price gouging, there are now so many eggs on the market that the wholesale price is $0.94 a dozen, down from $5.46 a dozen six months ago.
The number of migrants at the southern border has dropped 50% since the end of the pandemic restriction known as Title 42 on May 11.
And finally, Representative James Comer (R-KY), chair of the House Oversight Committee, yesterday told Fox News Channel personality Maria Bartiromo that the committee has lost track of a top witness to alleged wrongdoing by the Biden family. “Well, unfortunately, we can’t track down the informant,” Comer said. “We’re hopeful that the informant is still there. The whistleblower knows the informant. The whistleblower is very credible.”