GOP Official Calls for Democratic Congresswoman to Be Executed

An Arizona state legislator called for the execution of Democratic U.S. Representative Pramila Jayapal for her statements advocating for peaceful protest, which were clipped out of context.

Republican state Representative John Gillette wrote of Jayapal on Wednesday: “Until people like this, that advocate for the overthrow of the American government are tried convicted and hanged … it will continue.” (“It” seemingly referring to political violence.)

Gillette’s threat came in response to an X account with the name “Patriot Oasis,” which shared a video notably cut to mischaracterize Jayapal’s statements in a March Zoom session, during which the congresswoman spoke about organizing peaceful protests against the MAGA agenda.

In context, Jayapal said:

We want to help you seed, participate, and coordinate these nonviolent resistance actions that are going to make a difference over the next coming months. If we were in the labor movement—and shout out to any of our union members that are on this call—we might call this getting strike ready. I think of it as getting us strike ready, or street ready, and part of that is understanding our own strength.

The “Patriot Oasis” version starts with Jayapal saying, “We might call this getting strike ready. I think of it as getting us strike ready, or street ready, and part of that is understanding our own strength.” The user tagged FBI Director Kash Patel and posted an inflammatory caption: “BREAKING: Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D) calls on Democrats to be ‘strike ready’ and ‘street ready.’ This is a CLEAR call to violence!”

The contextless clip has circulated widely in right-wing corners of social media since the spring, as users attempt to advance the baseless notion of Democratic lawmakers inspiring violence with their rhetoric. It has reemerged as Republicans have sought to advance that narrative in the wake of the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

In this instance, the only elected official guilty of calling for political violence was Gillette.

Sinclair Broadcast Group on Friday announced the end to its embargo on Jimmy Kimmel Live!

The company had previously refused to air Kimmel’s show on its nearly 40 ABC affiliates over a joke the late-night host had made about MAGA and President Trump’s reaction to the death of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk—even as ABC reversed its decision to cancel it.

Sinclair had gone so far as to demand Kimmel “issue a direct apology to the Kirk family” and “make a meaningful personal donation” to Kirk’s family and organization.

In a statement Friday, Sinclair said that “it will end its preemption of Jimmy Kimmel Live! and the show will return this evening on Sinclair’s ABC affiliates.”

“Over the last week, we have received thoughtful feedback from viewers, advertisers, and community leaders representing a wide range of perspectives,” the statement said, and also mentioned a shooting at an ABC affiliate in Sacramento last week. “These events underscore why responsible broadcasting matters and why respectful dialogue between differing voices remains so important.”

It also mentioned “ongoing and constructive discussions with ABC,” in which Sinclair offered proposals “to strengthen accountability, viewer feedback, and community dialogue” that ABC and Disney have not adopted.

The statement lashed out against the obvious conclusion that many drew from the incident—that the company’s censorship of Kimmel stemmed from threats made publicly by Trump’s Federal Communications Commission chairman, Brendan Carr.

Sinclair insists its actions were “independent of any government interaction or influence,” and included in the statement a prickly response to those who saw Sinclair’s move after Carr’s threat as a violation of Kimmel’s free speech: “It is simply inconsistent to champion free speech while demanding that broadcasters air specific content.”

It looks like Elon Musk was once expected to visit Jeffrey Epstein’s island, according to a new batch of documents from the estate of the alleged sex trafficker.

Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee released excerpts of flight logs and daily schedules Friday showing that Epstein had vacation plans with Elon Musk, held meetings with Peter Thiel and Steve Bannon, and flew around with Prince Andrew.

The documents included three pages that appeared to be from Epstein’s daily schedule, with mentions of powerful right-wing figures.

One entry dated December 6, 2014, included a reminder: “Elon Musk to island Dec. 6 (is this still happening?)”

It’s unclear whether Musk traveled to Epstein’s home in the Virgin Islands, where one survivor of Epstein’s abuse testified that guests used girls for “instant sexual entertainment.” Musk himself had become an outspoken critic of the government’s refusal to release the Epstein files, and pointed the finger at those in power, specifically President Donald Trump.

Peter Thiel, the apocalyptic prophet and defense contractor with ties to the Trump administration, was scheduled to meet with Epstein for lunch in Palm Beach on November 27, 2017.

Bannon, the architect behind the MAGA movement, was scheduled for a 7 a.m. breakfast on February 16, 2019, before leaving New York. Five months later, Epstein was arrested on federal sex-trafficking charges.

Bannon’s connection to Epstein isn’t totally surprising, either. In 2023, Epstein’s brother Mark said that he’d seen an unaired interview between Epstein and Bannon, in which the disgraced financier claimed he’d “stopped hanging out with Trump when he realized Trump was a crook.”

Epstein’s general ledger revealed that he had paid $200 each for two massages for “Andrew” in the year 2000, once on February 11 and again on May 16. A flight log showed that Prince Andrew flew with Epstein, and his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, from New Jersey to Palm Beach on May 12, 2000.

Virgina Giuffre previously alleged that she had been sexually exploited by Prince Andrew and Epstein’s other “adult male peers, including royalty, politicians, academicians, businessmen, and/or other professional and personal acquaintances.” The Duke of York denied the accusation, and the suit was settled in 2022.

The Cuban Foreign Ministry reported Friday that the legendary writer, activist, and political prisoner Assata Shakur has died of natural causes in Havana. She was 78. 

“On September 25, 2025, American citizen Joanne Deborah Byron, ‘Assata Shakur,’ passed away in Havana, Cuba, due to health conditions and advanced age,” the ministry said in the press release. 

Her daughter Kakuya Shakur confirmed the news on Facebook. “At approximately 1:15 PM on September 25th, my mother, Assata Shakur, took her last earthly breath. Words cannot describe the depth of loss that I am feeling at this time,” she wrote. “I want to thank you for your loving prayers that continue to anchor me in the strength that I need in this moment. My spirit is overflowing in unison with all of you who are grieving with me at this time.” 

Shakur was born Joanne Deborah Byron in Flushing, Queens, in 1947, and grew up in Wilmington, North Carolina. She graduated from CUNY and joined the Black Panther Party in Oakland, California, shortly after. There she witnessed FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s COINTELPRO initiative infiltrate the BPP and other organizations, as the government deliberately sowed chaos and misinformation within Black leftist groups fighting for basic human rights in the 1960s and ’70s. 

Shakur briefly led the Harlem BPP’s Free Breakfast for Children program before joining the Black Liberation Army, a group that engaged in militant guerilla tactics to “take up arms for the liberation and self-determination of Black people in the United States.” This included allegedly robbing banks, bombing buildings, and murdering police officers. 

Shortly after joining, Shakur rejected her born name, recognizing it as a name forced upon her enslaved ancestors when they were brought from West Africa to the United States. “It sounded so strange when people called me JoAnne. It really had nothing to do with me. I didn’t feel like no JoAnne, or no Negro, or no amerikan. I felt like an African woman,” she wrote in her autobiography. Assata means “she who struggles.” 

On May 2, 1973, Shakur was involved in a shootout with police on the New Jersey Turnpike after she and two Black men were pulled over by two officers for a broken taillight. One of the men was killed, as was an officer. Shakur was shot twice and later detained at Middlesex County Jail, chained to her hospital bed bleeding out while federal officers questioned her. 

Shakur was then moved to Rikers Island, where she spent nearly two years in solitary confinement. 

Shakur argued that the police fired first, and she herself was shot with her hands up—a key part of the trial. Yet she was eventually convicted by an all-white jury of first- and second-degree murder, among other charges. She was in various prisons from 1973 to 1979, and maintained her innocence until the day she died. 

“It had been and is in my view that it was the racism in Middlesex County, fueled by biased inflammatory publicity in the local press before and throughout the trial, fanned by the documented government lawlessness, that made it possible for the white jury to convict Assata on the uncorroborated, contradictory, and generally incredible testimony of trooper Harper, the only other witness to the events on the Turnpike,” Shakur’s lawyer Lennex Hinds wrote in 1998. 

In 1979, Shakur was broken out of the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey by fellow BLA members in an elaborate plot involving hostages, a stick of dynamite, and a stolen van. No one was injured.  

Shakur briefly lived as a fugitive in the U.S., as police monitored her daughter and friends and performed massive, armed sweeps of Black neighborhoods in New York City in search of her. She made it to Cuba in 1984, where she was granted political asylum. There she wrote books and essays, including her immensely popular Assata: An Autobiography. In 2013, she became the first woman ever added to the FBI’s “Most Wanted” list.  

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows,” she wrote, in the later chapters of her autobiography. “After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things. But to become free, you have to be acutely aware of being a slave.” 

Shakur was a poor Black woman in segregated America who was fed up, weary of this society’s constant denial of her humanity. Her life, words, and actions are a poignant example of the wide spectrum of responses—from peaceful protest to militance—that Black Americans have always had to their violent experiences as racialized others in this country. 

One of Shakur’s latest essays, from 2013, was a message to the media. It’s one that rings particularly true today, as President Trump continues to call for its muzzling.   

“Like most poor and oppressed people in the United States, I do not have a voice. Black people, poor people in the U.S. have no real freedom of speech, no real freedom of expression and very little freedom of the press,” she wrote. “I am only one woman. I own no TV stations or radio stations or newspapers. But I feel that people need to be educated as to what is going on and to understand the connection between the news media and the instruments of repression in Amerika. All I have is my voice, my spirit and the will to tell the truth. But I sincerely ask those of you in the Black media, those of you in the progressive media … to let people know what is happening. We have no voice, so you must be the voice of the voiceless.” 

Political prosecutions won’t be an anomaly for the remainder of the Trump administration if the president has his way.

Donald Trump broke a 50-year presidential tradition this week by directly involving himself in the prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, whom he has framed as “corrupt” and “crooked” since Comey rejected the president’s demand for personal loyalty in 2017.

Speaking with CNN Friday morning, Trump made it clear that there were would be “others” who would need to pay for daring to oppose his political ascendancy.

“Now that James Comey has been indicted, who is the next person on your list in this retribution?” asked CNN’s Kevin Liptak.

“It’s not a list, but I think there will be others,” Trump said outside the White House.

“I mean, they’re corrupt. These were corrupt, radical left Democrats. Because Comey essentially was a Demo–, he’s worse than a Democrat,” Trump continued. Comey identified as a Republican for “most of [his] adult life,” according to his congressional testimony.

“No, there will be others. That’s my opinion,” he added. “They weaponized the Justice Department like nobody in history. What they’ve done is terrible, I hope, frankly, there are others because you can’t let this happen to a country.”

In a Truth Social missive directed at Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this week, Trump ordered the top cop to not only focus her attention on Comey but also pursue leads on California Senator Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James.