Professor Can’t Be Fired for Criticizing Charlie Kirk, Judge Rules

A federal court has ordered the University of South Dakota to reinstate an art professor who was removed for calling Charlie Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi.”

U.S. District Court Judge Karen Schreier in South Dakota’s Southern Division granted Professor Phillip Michael Hook’s request Wednesday night to block the school from firing him over the post on his personal Facebook page, ruling that Hook had a fair chance of proving that his First Amendment rights had been violated.

Hours after the right-wing activist was fatally shot in Utah, Hook posted on Facebook calling Kirk a “hate spreading Nazi” and questioned why there had been no equivalent outrage for the shootings that killed Minnesota state Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband in June.

In a subsequent post, Hook said he’d taken down his original post and apologized to “those who were offended.”

Soon after, Hook received a letter from the university placing him on administrative leave and expressing school leadership’s intent to terminate his contract for violating USD’s speech policy requiring employees with “special obligations” to “be accurate, show respect for the opinions of others, and make every effort to indicate when they are not speaking for the institution.”

But Schreier didn’t buy it. “The court concludes that Hook spoke as a citizen and his speech was on a matter of public concern,” she ruled, adding that the university had blatantly punished him because of his speech, and done so without proving his words had an adverse impact on the institution. Therefore, Hook was likely to win First Amendment protections.

Schreier ordered the university to reinstate Hook until the preliminary injunction hearing early next month.

This ruling comes as Vice President JD Vance has come down hard against calling political enemies Nazis (something he once did to the sitting president), and Donald Trump warned that violent rhetoric from the left had sparked a recent spate of violence—and would soon invite “bad things” from the right.

Yet another Trump nominee is facing scrutiny for their history of incendiary and racist social media posts.

Jeremy Carl is a current senior fellow at right-wing Claremont Institute who is up for a position at the State Department in which he would head the Bureau of International Organization Affairs. He has a trove of despicable online statements that he went out of his way to wipe from X, according to CNN’s KFile. He also tried to delete his posts from the archival website The Wayback Machine, though posts from his previous username can still be found.

In one post, Carl called for the execution of American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. “If the U.S. were a serious nation,” he wrote, “Weingarten would be tried for crimes against America’s children and would get the death penalty.”

“I’m sure George Floyd is looking up from hell right now and he is so proud of America,” Carl wrote in another post, referring to the unarmed Black man who was choked to death by police in 2020. Carl also reposted that “statues in [Floyd’s] honor are a disgrace and an embarrassment to our country.”

“There is no ‘peaceful coexistence’ we are going to have when our opposition is led by people like this,” Carl said in response to former Representative Cori Bush commenting on the mass incarceration of Black folk on Juneteenth in 2021.

“If you’re a white person celebrating Juneteenth, you’ve already surrendered,” he said a day later.

Carl is also an ardent believer in the “great replacement,” the conspiracy theory that immigration is part of a plot to replace white people and destroy the United States.

“The great replacement is real,” he said in 2021. “And they’re going to try to make you pay for it.”

“We must utterly defeat the Great Replacement as a political strategy, and permanently remove from power all who advance it,” he wrote in 2022.

He also lamented what he saw as an insufficient number of white Anglo-Saxon Protestants in government.

“I just can’t understand why the under-representation of white Christians and the total absence of white Protestants in the Biden Administration isn’t a huge story,” he said. “The media loves covering stories of systemic exclusion and lack of representation.”

Carl was of course very pro–January 6. He considered the insurrectionists to be political prisoners and blamed Representative Nancy Pelosi, not Trump, for the events on that day.

“Donald Trump addressed a political rally and said ‘I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard,’” he said. “Pelosi attempted a military coup and must be prosecuted.”

So a man who is racist and thinks “Dems R the real fascists” has an excellent chance to be nominated and begin to impact U.S. policy at the United Nations and elsewhere. Carl would head more than 100 diplomats in over six countries.

This isn’t the first time a Trump nominee’s older tweets have been dug up. Current Undersecretary of State for Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie declared that “competent white men must be in charge if you want things to work,” among other racist statements. “Unfortunately, our entire national ideology is predicated on coddling the feelings of women and minorities, and demoralizing competent white men.”

There’s also E.J. Antoni, the MAGA rioter Trump tapped to replace Erika McEntarfer as head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, who said that former presidential candidate Kamala Harris couldn’t run for office “on [her] knees.”

It seems that the Trump administration is going out of their way to select the most despicable, incendiary characters to join their team. It might be time to fire up the Wayback Machine if you want a job with them next.

The Trump administration has not won over the hearts of America.

Instead, approval ratings among independents for the chief members of the president and his Cabinet have dropped to a two-to-one negative ratio, according to a Quinnipiac poll published Wednesday.

In that bracket, Donald Trump received a 29 percent approval rating, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. received a 28 percent approval rating, FBI Director Kash Patel received a 26 percent approval rating, Attorney General Pam Bondi received a 21 percent approval rating, and FCC Chair Brendan Carr received an abysmal 14 percent approval rating.

Their numbers were not much improved when all voters were taken into account. Trump’s total job approval was just 38 percent; Kennedy’s was 33 percent, as was Patel’s; Bondi’s was 30 percent; and just 19 percent of the country approved of the way that Carr is utilizing his office.

In the same poll, nearly eight in 10 voters agreed that the country is in a “political crisis.” The most pressing issue in the United States, according to the bulk of voters, is “preserving democracy.” Just 24 percent of surveyed Americans said that they were “satisfied” with the way that things are going in the country.

Political violence also took a front seat as a critical issue facing the nation. In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, 54 percent of queried voters said that they believed political violence would “worsen” over the next few years. That was compared to 14 percent of voters who said it would “ease” and 27 percent who believed that the current level of political violence affecting America would “remain the same.”

Their perspective on America’s political future was similarly bleak. Just 34 percent of the surveyed registered voters believed that it would be possible to lower the temperature of political rhetoric in the country—as opposed to 58 percent who reported that there wasn’t a shot in hell.

Colombian President Gustavo Petro this week called for criminal proceedings against Donald Trump, whom he compared to Adolf Hitler while speaking before the United Nations General Assembly.

In Petro’s final speech before the U.N. in New York on Tuesday, he observed (according to a live translation from the U.N.) that the world is in a “different situation” than it was when he first addressed the international body in 2022.

“The old societies of Europe are collapsing,” he said, “and the United States is applauding its new Hitler. It’s not listening to its own young people, or its older people who died in the battlefields of Europe, fighting against Hitler and against his criminal ideology. Today, the same thing is being done as Hitler did, building concentration camps for migrants, and it’s stated that migrants are of an inferior race, and they blame them just like Hitler blamed the Jews. They call them drug traffickers and thieves.”

In stressing the need for climate action, Petro said of Trump: “The most powerful man in the world does not believe in science. That is irrationality. And Germany, the country of great philosophers, of Kant, Feuerbach, and others, became prey of irrationalism in 1933, and today it’s this country that is becoming irrational. The solution is to stop consuming fossil fuels and to quickly switch to water, wind, hydrogen.”

He also described Trump as “an accomplice to genocide” in Gaza. “This forum,” he said of the U.N., “is a mute witness to a genocide, in a world where we thought that this was something only a legacy of Hitler.”

“A kind of stone age,” he said earlier in his remarks, has seemingly “descended on all of humankind”—citing inaction on the climate crisis, Trump’s strikes on “unarmed young people in the Caribbean,” Israeli strikes “that have killed some 70,000 people in Gaza,” and “the persecution, imprisonment, and expulsion of millions of migrants.”

The Colombian president denied Trump’s claim that the people on the Venezuelan boats the U.S. bombed (on shaky legal ground) earlier this month were trafficking drugs. “They said that the missiles in the Caribbean were used to stop drug trafficking,” Petro said. “That is a lie.”

“There should be criminal cases against those officials of the United States for doing this, including the utmost official, President Trump,” he said, “that allowed the shooting of missiles against these young people who were simply trying to escape poverty”—who “might have had a certain amount of drugs,” he added, but “were not drug traffickers.”

The U.S. mainstream media, for its part, has largely ignored his comments.

Every living former chair of the Federal Reserve Bank agrees that the Supreme Court should prevent President Donald Trump’s effort to oust Fed Governor Lisa Cook.

An amicus brief filed Thursday argued that removing Cook would “threaten [the] independence and erode public confidence in the Fed,” and stressed the historical importance of the agency’s freedom from political considerations.

“The independence of the Federal Reserve, within the limited authority granted by Congress to achieve the goals Congress itself has set, is a critical feature of our national monetary system,” the brief said.

The brief’s signatories represented decades of expertise on economic policy, and crossed political boundaries. They included former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan, who is 99 years old, as well as Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen. The brief was also signed by former Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Jack Lew, Timothy Geithner, and Hank Paulson, a Republican. Multiple former chairs of the White House Council of Economic Advisers also lent their support, including Greg Mankiw, Christina Romer, Cecilia Rouse, Jared Bernstein, Jason Furman, and Glenn Hubbard, another Republican.

Phil Gramm, a Republican who previously served as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, signed the brief as well, as did economists Ken Rogoff and John Cochrane.

Last week, Trump’s lawyer went running to the Supreme Court with a request to stay an appeals court decision keeping Cook in place. The appeals court said that Cook was likely to succeed in her statutory claim that she’d been fired without “cause,” as well as her procedural claim that she did not receive her due process prior to her removal. But attorney John Sauer argued that she was not entitled to due process, and that Trump has a sweeping discretion to fire whomever he wanted as long as he claimed it was related to their job.

President Donald Trump blamed “radical left Democrats” for recent violence, and warned that they were asking for trouble from their counterparts on the right.

Speaking to the press in the Oval Office Thursday, Trump was asked who he blamed for an “uptick” in violence. The reporter cited the Wednesday shooting at the Immigration and Customs Enforcement field office in Dallas, where the shooter reportedly left a note saying he hoped to inspire “real terror” in ICE agents.

“The radical left is causing the problem,” Trump replied. “They’re out of control. They’re saying things, and they’re really dumb people.”

Trump pointed to Representative Jasmine Crockett, a firebrand Democrat from Texas, who has pushed for more aggressive criticism of Trump, calling him a “piece of shit.” Earlier this month, Crockett criticized the administration for targeting Democratic cities with large Black populations, and likened ICE raids to modern day “slave patrols.”

Meanwhile, MAGA has always lauded Trump for speaking “authentically,” and ignored his use of violent language.

“It’s gonna get worse, and ultimately it’s going to go back on them. I mean bad things happen when they play these games” Trump warned. “And uh, I’ll give you a little clue. The right is a lot tougher than the left. But the right’s not doing this, they’re not doing it. And they better not get them energized, because it won’t be good for the left.

“And it’ll be a point where other people won’t take it anymore, and that will not be good for the radical left,” Trump added.

Trump’s framing conveniently ignores that the most recent shooting is in itself a response to right-wing violence: specifically, sweeping extrajudicial deportations carried out by masked agents directed by a far-right regime. State violence begets violence, as push comes to shove. And Trump’s own rhetoric has done little to lower the temperature.

Trump has also turned a blind eye toward violence targeting Democrats, including the shooting of two Democratic Minnesota state lawmakers in June, one of whom died. The deaths of state Representative Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog received little notice from the administration, and certainly no national holiday.

President Trump joked about rigged elections at the start of his press conference with Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan, who has amassed power in Turkey for over two decades. 

“It’s a pleasure to be with President Erdoğan of Turkey, and we’ve been friends for a long time, actually, even for four years when I was in exile unfairly, as it turns out, rigged elections, you know,” Trump said on Thursday. “He knows about rigged elections better than anybody, but when I was in exile, we were still friends.” 

This is yet another example of Trump’s affinity for strongman authoritarian leaders with sketchy records on political transparency, human rights, and free speech, from El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, to Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, to Erdoğan. 

Erdoğan first became prime minister of Turkey in 2003. Since then, he has jailed students, protesters (for things like throwing eggs), and hundreds of journalists. He has briefly blocked access to Wikipedia and nearly every social media platform and has overseen the Turkish Great Depression, all while hanging giant banners of himself throughout the country. (Sound familiar?)  

Most recently, Erdoğan arrested well-known opposition leader and political rival Ekrem Imamoglu on the grounds that he accepted bribes and rigged bids. Given Erdoğan’s history, it’s extremely likely that Imamoglu was arrested because he represents a serious threat to Erdoğan’s reign, even in the face of outright suppression and election rigging. 

Each thing listed here—muzzling journalists, cracking down on protesters, jailing political rivals, hoarding power for decades—is something Trump has already done or professed his desire to do. It’s no wonder he feels such a kinship with Erdoğan. 

Additionally, Trump referring to his losing the 2020 election and inciting a violent insurrection as his “exile” is rich. Let’s hope he doesn’t take any more notes from Erdoğan for 2028. 

The White House is planning to give its “tariff money” to U.S. farmers, though the exact figure could vary by billions of dollars, according to the president.

Speaking beside Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan at the White House Thursday, Donald Trump claimed that his staffers had discovered an inordinate amount of uncounted cash in the budget for U.S. farmers, though he recklessly mixed up “billions” and “millions” when describing the amount of aid that could be available.

“The other day, it was very interesting, they found $31 billion,” Trump said. “They said, ‘Sir, we’ve found 31.’ I said, ‘You mean positively, right?’ They said, ‘Yeah, $31 million more than we knew.’ And they said, ‘We don’t know where it came from.’”

Trump then claimed he instructed his staff to “check the tariff shelf,” and that staffers later confirmed the money came from Trump’s tariffs.

“So what we’re going to be doing is we’re going to be taking some money from all of the tariff money we’ve taken and we’re going to distribute it to our farmers, until the tariffs kick in to their benefit,” Trump said, promising that American farmers would eventually “be making a fortune” from his plan.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Wednesday that there was “potential” to leverage tariff assets to aid the country’s agricultural industry. In focus were the country’s soybean, corn, wheat, sorghum, and cotton farmers, all of whom Rollins said were facing “difficult times.”

“We should have an announcement very soon, perhaps in the next couple of weeks,” Rollins told reporters.

That plan could be completely upended, however, if the Supreme Court decides that Trump’s tariffs are illegal.

Of course, farmers may have avoided these difficult times altogether if Trump had never instituted his aggressive tariff plan to begin with. Tensions between the Trump administration and Beijing have practically halted trade with China, nixing a crucial market for American farmers. The end result, according to insiders, is a mandatory bailout—which will weigh heavily on the American taxpayer’s dime.

“The pitch being made to the administration is, ‘Look, if you don’t have some kind of ace up your sleeve here, like an imminent deal with China and/or a string of other trade deals that are about to be announced that also happen to lighten the load on soybeans, then there’s going to have to be a bailout,’” an anonymous agriculture industry representative told Politico.

The Trump administration on Thursday announced an agreement with Elon Musk’s company xAI, making his questionable chatbot, Grok, available to every federal agency over the next year and a half for a nominal fee of 42 cents.

“We value xAI for partnering with [the U.S. General Services Administration]—and dedicating engineers—to accelerate the adoption of Grok to transform government operations,” said Josh Gruenbaum, commissioner of the Federal Acquisition Service, which handles government purchasing. Musk, who publicly feuded with President Donald Trump just a few months ago, expressed excitement about working with his administration “to rapidly deploy AI throughout the government for the benefit of the country.”

Grok’s potential integration within federal agencies is certainly a high point for a chatbot that, in its time as a feature on Musk’s social media platform X, has had some notorious low ones.

There was the period when it began producing antisemitic screeds and calling itself “MechaHitler.” Or when it randomly came to share its South African creator’s obsession with alleged “white genocide” in South Africa—so much so that it would bring it up in unrelated inquiries. Or when it made disturbing sexual comments about then-CEO of X Linda Yaccarino, or similarly harassed prominent liberal X user Will Stancil, providing users instructions to break into his house, and reminding them to bring “lockpicks, gloves, flashlight, and lube—just in case.”

Musk, for his part, has made comments raising concerns about his possible tinkering with Grok such that it shares his right-wing beliefs. When Grok told a user that “right-wing political violence has been more frequent and deadly” than left-wing violence since 2016, while providing evidence, Musk called it a “major fail,” accusing the chatbot of “parroting legacy media.”

Days later, he announced Grok 4, the model available to federal agencies under the new xAI-GSA agreement. He promised to train Grok 4 by having the previous version of the chatbot “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge, adding missing information and deleting errors. Then retrain on that.” He also asked X users to provide “divisive facts” on which to train the model—“things that are politically incorrect, but nonetheless factually true”—which elicited replies such as “Covid-19 Vaccines did not save a single life” and “Nonbinary isn’t a real thing.”

Ryan Walters, responsible for a yearslong campaign to suffuse Oklahoma public schools with Christian nationalist and right-wing messages, is out as the state’s education superintendent and headed for the private sector.

Speaking on Fox News late Wednesday, Walters announced that he plans to join the Teacher Freedom Alliance as its chief executive officer. “We’re gonna destroy the teachers’ unions,” Walters said, promising to “build an army of teachers” and take the fight national.

The nonprofit, which is an offshoot of the far-right Freedom Foundation, seeks to lure educators to opt out of their unions. According to the website, the TFA seeks to assist teachers in producing “free, moral, and upright” American citizens. As of Thursday, the organization boasted a small membership of more than 2,700 teachers, compared to the 1.8 million represented by the American Federation of Teachers union.

In March, Walters landed in hot water after he issued multiple news releases about the TFA, potentially violating ethics rules that prohibit state officers from using state resources to promote private interests. State Representative Ellen Pogemiller requested that Oklahoma’s attorney general “clarify the legality” of Walters’s promotions and “investigate the financial ties and contacts” between the public official and the TFA.

Now it appears that Walters has dropped the pretense and decided to make a buck as Donald Trump’s administration attempts a massive overhaul of the Department of Education.

“Walters fearlessly fights the woke liberal union mob,” the TFA website said. “TFA will take the fight straight to the unions and we will not stop.”

Walters has made outlandish criticisms of the teachers’ unions, referring to them as “terrorist organizations” and even attempting to tie them to actual terror attacks.

His hatred of teachers can be tied directly to his Christian nationalist ideology, which puts him at odds with educators, parents, and the U.S. Constitution. Walters previously pushed teaching the Bible in Oklahoma public schools, and was sued by parents. The Trump fanboy made clear that the only version of the good book that suited his guidelines was Trump’s God Bless the USA Bible, and he later attempted to shove his prayers for President Trump down his students’ throats.