Hoosiers protest potential mid-cycle redistricting outside the Indiana Statehouse on Tuesday, August 26, 2025. (Leslie Bonilla Muñiz/Indiana Capital Chronicle)

The stakes of the current redistricting debate threaten the health of our representative democracy. This is not hyperbole. Most elementary definitions of democracy indicate that free and fair elections are a prerequisite for government responsiveness. Voters get to choose their elected officials. It should not work the other way around.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade is facing calls to resign after suggesting earlier this week that the state should execute homeless people who decline help during a live broadcast.

Free speech advocates are sounding the alarm about a bill in the US House of Representatives that they fear could allow Secretary of State Marco Rubio to strip US citizens of their passports based purely on political speech.

The bill, introduced by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), will come up for a hearing on Wednesday. According to The Intercept:

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed Friday that he and President Donald Trump would use this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk to “dismantle” the organized left using state power.

Demonstrators in Chicago protest against President Donald Trump’s immigration policies on Sept. 6. Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images

When 30-year-old American journalist William L. Shirer arrived in Germany in 1934, he was puzzled by why the vast majority of everyday Germans had accommodated themselves to living in a totalitarian state.

As a direct result of Republicans’ controversial HEA 1447 (2023) and SEA 442 (2025), one Indiana school corporation has just banned 6 books:

Purdue University researcher Danzhou Yang is exploring a natural check on cancer that could be used to stop the disease. Yang’s work is partly funded by a current grant from the National Institutes of Health. She is not on the list of recipients with canceled grants. (Charles Jischke/Purdue University)

The nation’s largest scientific research funder abruptly canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants earlier this year, specifically targeting projects that addressed diversity, inclusion or vaccines.

— What if Tyler Robinson isn’t a leftie? Increasingly, as Joy Reid reports, it appears that Kirk’s alleged assassin is a rightwing “Groyper” gamer, not a leftie. This is a hard right hate-driven group/gamer-subculture that disdained Kirk as a Republican establishment sellout.

President Donald Trump speaking in the Oval Office on Wednesday. White House video

There are an estimated 500 million civilian-owned guns in the United States. There are 340.1 million people in America. It only takes 0.00000029 percent of the population—one person—with one of those half-billion guns to change our world.

Dear Fellow Vermonter,

Amid growing pressure for the Trump administration to release the full Jeffrey Epstein files, a New York Times investigation reveals how the country’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase, enabled Epstein’s sex-trafficking operation and profited from its ties to him. The exposé is based on more than 13,000 pages of legal and financial records. The Times reports JPMorgan processed more than 4,700 transactions for Epstein totaling more than $1.1 billion, including payments to some of the women who were sexually trafficked.

A Washington Post editorial correctly asserted that the old name, The Department of War, more accurately describes what the agency of the US government does than the cold war euphemism, the Department of Defense, a renaming in 1947. The editorial points out that our use of words becomes embedded in our collective consciousness such that we begin to incorporate ideology in our thinking.

Today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War, although the 1947 abandonment of the Department of War name was not simply a matter of substituting a new name for the original one. In 1947, to bring order and efficiency to U.S. military forces, Congress renamed the Department of War as the Department of the Army, then brought it, together with the Department of the Navy and a new Department of the Air Force, into a newly established “National Military Establishment” overseen by the secretary of defense.

Acclaimed historian Greg Grandin joins Democracy Now! to discuss the Trump administration’s attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in international waters, which killed 11 people earlier this week. President Trump and other senior officials have claimed without evidence that the boat was carrying narcotics from Venezuela to the United States and was operated by the gang Tren de Aragua, which the U.S. has designated a terrorist organization. “It was pure murder,” says Grandin.

Israel’s military says it now controls 40% of Gaza City as its forces expand their assault on densely populated residential areas, including camps for displaced Palestinians. Israeli attacks so far today have killed at least 44 people across the Gaza Strip, including at least seven children. This is Somaya Mikdad, a relative of a family hit by an Israeli strike near Al-Shifa Hospital in Gaza City Thursday that killed a pregnant woman and her unborn child.

The Trump administration will roll out 60 rule changes after Labor Day, which will be devastating for millions of American workers.

What the Trump administration is doing - Transporation Department. Please read

Just days before Labor Day, a holiday designed to celebrate the importance and power of American workers in the United States, the Transportation Department cancelled $679 million in funding for offshore wind projects, and the Department of Energy announced it is withdrawing a $716 million loan guarantee to complete infrastructure for an offshore wind project in New Jersey.

What the Trump administration is doing - on Immigration. Please read

In the early hours of Sunday morning, in the middle of a three-day holiday weekend, the Trump administration attempted to take children out of government custody and ship them alone to their country of origin, Guatemala.

Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich on Thursday proposed the systematic annexation of Gaza over the coming months if Hamas keeps fighting, as well as the implementation of US President Donald Trump's plan to ethnically cleanse the Palestinian enclave.

Smotrich, who leads the far-right Religious Zionism party, announced his plan to "win in Gaza by the end of the year" during a press conference in Jerusalem.

Running on the following Domestic Compact for America is a winning election strategy for candidates at the local, state, and national levels.

International human rights organizations have pleaded with governments to oppose Israel’s blockade of aid into Gaza for t

Monday night, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker came right out and said it. Trump sending troops into American cities has nothing whatsoever to do with crime or policing but, instead, is all about stealing the 2026 election:

“Eight of the top 10 states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans,” Pritzker said bluntly. “None of those states is Illinois.”

In fact, the cities with the highest crime and homicide rates are Memphis, Tennessee and St. Louis, Missouri respectively, both in Red States.

US Border Patrol outside the Japanese American National Museum where Gov. Gavin Newsom was holding a redistricting press conference Aug. 14 in Los Angeles. Photo by Getty Images

As Gavin Newsom stood inside the Japanese American National Museum in Los Angeles to announce a California redistricting initiative aimed at countering gerrymandering in Texas ordered up by Donald Trump, federal agents in tactical gear massed outside. Helmets. Guns. Concealed identities. No clear explanation. Just presence.

(Illustration: Ren Velez / POGO; Photo: Gage Skidmore / Flickr (CC BY-SA 2.0))