New York Times:
A preliminary and unverified report circulated inside the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives found that ammunition recovered with the rifle used to kill Charlie Kirk appeared engraved with statements “expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology.”
A senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that the report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted.
In fast-moving investigations, such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information.
Will Bunch/Philadelphia Inquirer:
The Utah campus assassination of a right-wing radical should spark a new movement for free speech...for everyone.
At the moment he was gunned down, the co-founder of the right-wing, youth-oriented Turning Point USA had been doing what he was most famous for: sitting under a canopy at the Orem, Utah university before a throng of several thousand students and onlookers and answering questions from all comers, left or right. Kirk’s last words on Earth, fittingly, were a dubious, overblown claim about transgender mass shooters.
That was just one of so many bitter ironies that made Kirk’s assassination — by a rooftop gunman who is still at large and whose motive is thus unknown — the stuff of network news bulletins and banner headlines, not to mention an American Rorschach test for how a divided and agitated land feels about our obsession with guns, our foundational penchant for political violence, and the true meaning of free speech.
Jerusalem Demsas/The Argument:
A man was murdered
Refuse to play the game of abstractions
There’s going to be a lot of dooming in the next few weeks. People on the right will blame left-wing political rhetoric for turning up the temperature. People on the left will point out the many political murders that targeted Democrats. Professors will solemnly note the threat of escalating political violence. The opinion pages of prestigious media outlets will tell you that now is the time to fight for democracy.
The best advice I can give to you is that you should tune all of it out.
Refuse to play the game of abstractions. Reject the pull to detach from the concrete into larger themes about social media or guns or political violence or “what it all means.” Repel the impulse to pop off about how the right shot first, about how a left-wing activist called Kirk a Nazi, about how Republicans made this inevitable because they refused to pass gun legislation, or about how it’s unfair that Kirk is receiving adulation in the wake of his death when others get so little. All of that is worse than useless.
If you are worried that the President could seize on this opportunity to go after his political opponents – a sort of a modern-day Reichstag Fire – making any joke or flippant comment about Kirk’s death is at best, meaningless, at worst, counterproductive. These people look insane all on their own, never interrupt your opponent when he is in the middle of making a mistake.1
Andrew Egger/The Bulwark:
Is This Who We Are?
Political violence has always been a dark part of America. Can we move past it again?
Cable news and X are cesspools, designed to rile up the anger of their users and viewers. Congress is supposed to be more reasoned. But up on Capitol Hill, the House of Representatives couldn’t even manage to get through a moment of silence for Kirk without partisan incident. As that moment ended, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) requested a verbal prayer as well, provoking some audible Democratic grouching and an objection that the House had not acknowledged a school shooting in Colorado the same day. This, in turn, sparked an angry outburst from Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.): “Y’all caused this! You f—ing own this!”
It was all such a sad, awful spectacle, reflective of a deeply sick nation. If we aren’t yet broken we surely seem hellbent on tearing ourselves apart.
Can anything be done about this? Or are we too far gone already? Maybe we are doomed to spiral into increasingly violent cycles of recrimination and counter-recrimination, with both sides convinced all the way to their deathbeds that the other side is to blame.
POLITICO:
Trump’s popularity is sinking in a swing Pennsylvania county
A new poll from a Democratic firm signals Republicans face backlash in one of America’s most tightly divided regions.
A new private poll in one of the nation’s top bellwethers shows President Donald Trump’s popularity taking a nosedive and Democrats staking out a lead in local elections — a potential warning sign for Republicans in the 2026 midterms.
Fifty-three percent of likely voters in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, view Trump unfavorably, compared to 42 percent who see him favorably, according to the survey by the Democratic firm Upswing Research & Strategy that was shared first with POLITICO.
Will Saletan/The Bulwark:
No, Zohran Mamdani Isn’t a Communist
Trump tries to smear the NYC mayoral candidate. But it’s Trump himself who uses Communist tactics.
Mamdani isn’t a Communist. He’s a democratic socialist. He wants rent control, free childcare, and tax hikes on the rich. These ideas, whatever their merits, are familiar in democracies. He also proposes a few city-run grocery stores, but he supports collaboration with the private sector and decentralization of education policy. That’s not communism.
When Americans think of communism, we don’t think of a utopia like the one Karl Marx imagined. We think of real regimes that have used and abused Marxist ideology: highly centralized governments that cripple opposition parties, suppress information, constrict civil liberties, crush local autonomy, commandeer industry, and use police to control the population.
Mamdani hasn’t done any of those things. But Trump has.
Washington Post:
Stagflation concerns rise with increased inflation and jobless claims
The consumer price index rose in August at a 2.9 percent annual rate, up from July. Weekly jobless claims rose to the highest level since 2021, as the labor market weakens.
The Labor Department said Thursday that higher housing and food prices put a strain on consumers’ wallets last month, while overall inflation rose to a 2.9 percent annual rate. Separately, new applications for weekly unemployment benefits jumped to 263,000 last week, the highest since October 2021.
Cliff Schecter/BlueAmp:
Today Republicans Traumatized our Kids at Their Schools Once Again
The Madness Must Stop
In the end, the way to stop this disease—that by numbers as high as 90% Americans support passing measures to end— is actually pretty easy.
Because the two political parties have made it simple for us to do the math.
One party post-Newtown, the Democratic Party, voted 97% in favor of key measures to stop this sick blight on our society. While the other, Republicans, voted 97% against these common sense reforms (yes, it really is this symmetrical).
So to summarize: Vote every single fucking cowardly, cruel, corrupt Republican out of office. And we’ll put a stop to this child-killing virus.
