Some Episcopal clergy invoke faith to counter ‘fascism’ after ICE killing of citizen in Minnesota; Episcopal News Service, January 13, 2026

David Paulsen, Episcopal News Service; Some Episcopal clergy invoke faith to counter ‘fascism’ after ICE killing of citizen in Minnesota

"When a U.S. citizen, 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good, was killed last week by federal immigration officials in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the congregation at Grace Episcopal Church responded by finding solace in their faith. They gathered for worship and prayer. The Rev. Susan Daughtry, Grace’s rector, invited members that evening, Jan. 7, for an impromptu Compline on Zoom, and they grieved together.

Grace Episcopal Church is located about three miles from where an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official shot and killed Good in her car. Their brief altercation and its deadly conclusion were captured on video, generating intense reactions on all sides, from the White House to American communities far from the violent scene on a residential Minneapolis street.

Since then, Episcopalians and Episcopal clergy across the United States have joined anti-ICE protests and attended prayer vigils for Good. Some read her name in their Sunday services during the Prayers of the People. Many are looking to Jesus’ life and teachings for guidance on how best to respond, as Christians, to what some fear is an increasingly authoritarian and unchecked federal government.

“It’s been a painful week in Minnesota, and this is a critical moment in the history of our nation,” Minnesota Bishop Craig Loya said in a Facebook post inviting Episcopalians to join an online prayer vigil at 7 p.m. Central Jan. 13 on Zoom. Presiding Bishop Sean Rowe also will participate.

The Episcopal Church also is promoting its Protesting Faithfully tool kit, offering “spiritual grounding and practical resources for faithful presence at protests and public demonstrations.”"

What unites Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine? Trump’s immoral lies and Europe’s chronic weakness; The Guardian, January 11, 2026

Simon Tisdall, The Guardian; What unites Greenland, Venezuela and Ukraine? Trump’s immoral lies and Europe’s chronic weakness

 "Donald Trump made 30,573 “false or misleading” claims during his first term, according to calculations published in 2021 by the Washington Post. That’s roughly 21 fibs a day. Second time around, he’s still hard at it, lying to Americans and the world on a daily basis. Trump’s disregard for truth and honesty in public life – seen again in his despicable response to the fatal shooting in Minneapolis – is dangerously immoral.

Trump declared last week that the only constraint on his power is “my own morality, my own mind”. That explains a lot. His idea of right and wrong is wholly subjective. He is his own ethical and legal adviser, his own priest and confessor. He is a church of one. Trump lies to himself as well as everyone else. And the resulting damage is pernicious. It costs lives, harms democracy and destroys trust between nations...

Disrespect for international law, the flouting of sovereign rights and territorial independence, and the ongoing replacement of the UN-backed rules-based order with neo-imperial spheres of influence are evident in all three crises. So, too, is a failure to defend the democratic rights of ordinary people. The US has presumptuously, illegally ruled out elections in Venezuela. Russia is trying to kill Ukraine’s democracy. Greenlanders say they alone must decide their future. But who’s listening to them?

Many of these broader trends were already well established. Yet Trump’s destabilising, unprincipled, lawless, chaotic and fundamentally immoral carrying-on in 2025 has undoubtedly acted as catalyst and accelerant. Of all these ills, his moral turpitude is the greatest. It corrupts, bedevils, darkens and poisons the humanity of the world. It is toxic to all it touches. Trumpism is a corrosive disease. Its latest victims are in Minneapolis and Portland. In truth, they are everywhere.

To mangle Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and Donald Trump.” Americans and their too-diffident friends in Britain and Europe must be more forceful in speaking truth to power – before, like the much-reviled George III, Trump does something really crazy."

Is the Law Still King?; The Bulwark, January 9, 2026

William Kristol, The Bulwark; Is the Law Still King?

Two-hundred fifty years ago tomorrow, on January 10, 1776, in Philadelphia, Thomas Paine published his pamphlet Common Sense. Six months before the Declaration, Paine made the argument for independence directly to the people. The pamphlet was a sensation, and seems to have been read and discussed almost immediately and everywhere. The numbers are a bit fuzzy (there was no New York Times best seller list then!), but Common Sense seems to have sold something like 100,000 copies in a few months. In proportion to the population at that time, it may have had the largest sale and circulation of any book in American history.

As a key part of his argument, Paine makes the general case against hereditary or absolute monarchy, and for popular government and the rule of law. Here’s the famous paragraph:

But where, say some, is the King of America? I’ll tell you, friend, he reigns above, and doth not make havoc of mankind like the Royal Brute of Great Britain. . . . [T]he world may know, that so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be king; and there ought to be no other.

From the beginning, the rule of law has been central to the American experiment in self-government. Obviously in both theory and practice the concept brings with it complications and controversies. But the rule of law has always been seen as a necessary corollary, a central feature, of popular self-government. From Paine on, No Kings has meant that the law is king.

Is the law king in America today? We’re seeing a sustained and conscious effort to undermine the rule of law. From Minneapolis to Caracas, from the White House to the Department of Justice to the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump administration has engaged in what the Declaration called “a long train of abuses . . . pursuing invariably the same Object”—the object of eviscerating the rule of law and reducing us to mere subjects rather than self-governing citizens.

This has been obvious for the past year to all who have eyes to see, or who are willing to let their eyes do any seeing. But the last few days have provided especially clear instances of the assault on the rule of law. Just yesterday, for example, in the wake of the killing of Renee Good, Donald Trump’s FBI told Minnesota’s criminal investigative agency, the Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) that they were to be excluded from the investigation into Good’s death. The BCA reported that Trump’s FBI would not allow the BCA to “have access to the case materials, scene evidence or investigative interviews necessary to complete a thorough and independent investigation” of this killing in their jurisdiction. That’s because Trump’s FBI isn’t interested in trying to discover the truth. Their orders are clearly to cover up the lawless behavior of federal agents.

Meanwhile Trump confirmed on Wednesday in an interview with the New York Times that in international matters, he respects no legal limits on his power. The only limits he acknowledges are “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” I suppose we should thank Trump for providing a kind of living illustration, a kind of tableau vivant, of the claims of absolute monarchy that Thomas Paine ridiculed and denounced. But Trump’s not a faraway king from whom we’re about to separate ourselves. He’s our president.

And all this while Trump’s Justice Department is routinely ignoring the law that required the full release of the Epstein files by December 19, 2025. Yesterday, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) and Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), the lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, asked a federal court to appoint “a Special Master and an Independent Monitor to compel” the the Justice Department to produce the Epstein files as the law requires. “Put simply,” they wrote, “the DOJ cannot be trusted with making mandatory disclosures under the Act.” Or put even more simply, Trump’s Department of Justice cannot be trusted to follow the law.

Earlier this week, political scientist Jeffrey Isaac addressed the apparent paradox that people who allegedly believe in “America First” have rallied to support Trump’s attack on another country. But as Isaac puts it, at its heart Trumpism is neither isolationist nor interventionist. It’s about authoritarianism: “contempt for the very idea of law” and “an embrace of the power politics of domination and conquest.” It’s a repudiation of democracy and the rule of law, both at home and abroad.

So which is it to be? A stand for liberty in the spirit of Thomas Paine, or acquiescence to the depredations of our own mad King George? The rule of law or the rule of Trump?"

DOI cracks down on stickers covering Trump's face on national park passes; SF Gate, January 5, 2026

Sam Hill, SF Gate; DOI cracks down on stickers covering Trump's face on national park passes

[Kip Currier: It's still hard to believe this news story is real -- the Department of the Interior is voiding people's U.S. National Parks passes if Donald Trump's face (yes -- his face is on the entrance passes!) is covered up by anything -- and not from The Onion.]

[Excerpt]

"Covering up Donald Trump’s face on an America the Beautiful pass may come with an extra cost at national park entrance gates this year.

The Department of the Interior recently updated its “Void if Altered” rules for 2026, explicitly flagging stickers and other coverings as alterations that could invalidate the pass. The move appears to respond to visitors preparing to cover the image of Trump, which was set to begin appearing on passes Jan. 1 despite legal challenges.

An internal email from department business specialists Allison Christofis and Jeff Beauchamp to regional National Park Service staff shared updated guidelines for passes this year, highlighting changes to the department’s altered pass policy. The email was provided to SFGATE by a Park Service employee who requested anonymity to protect their job, which was granted in accordance with Hearst’s ethics policy."

Trump Is the Jan. 6 President; The New York Times, December 31, 2025

 THE EDITORIAL BOARD, The New York Times; Trump Is the Jan. 6 President

"It was a day that should live in infamy. Instead, it was the day President Trump’s second term began to take shape.

Five years ago, on Jan. 6, 2021, a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, hoping to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election. After the sun set that day, Congress reconvened to certify Joe Biden’s victory. The rioters lost, and so did Mr. Trump, who had summoned them to Washington and urged them to march to the Capitol. The Trump era seemed to have ended in one of the most disgracefully anti-American acts in the nation’s history.

That day was indeed a turning point, but not the one it first seemed to be. It was a turning point toward a version of Mr. Trump who is even more lawless than the one who governed the country in his first term. It heralded a culture of political unaccountability, in which people who violently attacked Congress and beat police officers escaped without lasting consequence. The politicians and pundits who had egged on the attack with their lies escaped, as well. The aftermath of Jan. 6 made the Republican Party even more feckless, beholden to one man and willing to pervert reality to serve his interests. Once Mr. Trump won election again in 2024, despite his role in encouraging the riot and his many distortions about it, it emboldened him to govern in defiance of the Constitution, without regard for the truth and with malice toward those who stand up to his abuses.

Tragically, America is still living in a political era that began on Jan. 6, 2021. Recognizing as much is necessary to bring this era to an end before it has many more anniversaries."

Putin’s ‘Keeper of Secrets’ Dies Suddenly After Firing; The Daily Beast, December 26, 2025

Opheli Garcia-Lawler, Erkki Forster, The Daily Beast; Putin’s ‘Keeper of Secrets’ Dies Suddenly After Firing

"Since the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022, numerous top government officials have died under suspicious or sudden circumstances...

Orlov’s death adds to a growing list of Russian military and civilian leaders who have died, most notably Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner mercenaries...

Other deaths have long sparked jokes about staying away from windows and seen a series of former high-ranking officials being suddenly found dead stories below where they were last seen."

Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy; The New York Times, December 5, 2025

Anton Troianovski, The New York Times; Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy

[Kip Currier: At the heart of this heartless Trump 2.0 National Security Strategy is an ethos of naked transactionalism and moral bankruptcy.

The transparent inhumanity, unbridled avarice, and indifference to the wellbeing of fellow human beings are a shameful repudiation of fundamental American democratic values and ethical principles.]

[Excerpt]

"The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.

President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.

The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash."

Ukraine’s inspiring democratic resilience; The Washington Post, November 28, 2025

Editorial Board, The Washington Post; Ukraine’s inspiring democratic resilience

"Democracy and martial law make strange bedfellows. In Russia, where President Vladimir Putin’s hierarchical power is never contested, authoritarianism is entrenched. Repressive measures imposed for the sake of the war are unlikely to ever be lifted.

In Ukraine, however, the democratic spirit never bridled under wartime restrictions. Most Ukrainians understand that emergency measures have been necessary but remain skeptical of permanent centralized rule.

Isolationists in Washington may try to use Yermak’s resignation as an excuse to ditch Ukraine, citing it as evidence of endemic corruption. In truth, his ouster is evidence of resiliency and maturity that should hearten the Trump administration. Friday’s news shows Zelensky’s willingness to sideline even his closest aide to do what’s best for his country in its fight for national survival."

What would you do if democracy was being dismantled before your eyes? Whatever you’re doing right now; The Guardian, October 31, 2025

Andy Beckett, The Guardian ; What would you do if democracy was being dismantled before your eyes? Whatever you’re doing right now

"How would you behave if your democracy was being dismantled? In most western countries, that used to be an academic question. Societies where this process had happened, such as Germany in the 1930s, seemed increasingly distant. The contrasting ways that people reacted to authoritarianism and autocracy, both politically and in their everyday lives, while darkly fascinating and important to study and remember, seemed of diminishing relevance to now.

Not any more. Illiberal populism has spread across the world, either challenging for power or entrenching itself in office, from Argentina to Italy, France to Indonesia, Hungary to Britain. But probably the most significant example of a relatively free, pluralist society and political system turning into something very different remains the US, now nine months into Donald Trump’s second term."

Are We Losing Our Democracy?; The New York Times, October 31, 2025

The Editorial Board, The New York Times; Are We Losing Our Democracy?

"Countries that slide from democracy toward autocracy tend to follow similar patterns. To measure what is happening in the United States, the Times editorial board has compiled a list of 12 markers of democratic erosion, with help from scholars who have studied this phenomenon. The sobering reality is that the United States has regressed, to different degrees, on all 12.

Our country is still not close to being a true autocracy, in the mold of Russia or China. But once countries begin taking steps away from democracy, the march often continues. We offer these 12 markers as a warning of how much Americans have already lost and how much more we still could lose."

From CBS to TikTok, US media are falling to Trump’s allies. This is how democracy crumbles; The Guardian, October 29, 2025

Owen Jones, The Guardian; From CBS to TikTok, US media are falling to Trump’s allies. This is how democracy crumbles

"Democracy may be dying in the US. Whether the patient receives emergency treatment in time will determine whether the condition becomes terminal. Before Donald Trump’s return to the presidency, I warned of “Orbánisation” – in reference to Hungary’s authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán. There, democracy was not extinguished by firing squads or the mass imprisonment of dissidents, but by slow attrition. The electoral system was warped, civil society was targeted and pro-Orbán moguls quietly absorbed the media.

Nine months on, and Orbánisation is in full bloom across the Atlantic. Billionaire Larry Ellison, the Oracle co-founder, and his filmmaker son, David, have become blunt instruments in this process. Trump boasts they are “friends of mine – they’re big supporters of mine”. Larry Ellison, second only to Elon Musk as the world’s richest man, has poured tens of millions into Republican coffers...

US democracy has always been heavily flawed. It is so rigged in favour of wealthy elites that a detailed academic study back in 2014 found that the political system is rigged in favour of what the economic elites want. Yet because, unlike Hungary, the US has no history of dictatorship, with a system of supposed checks and balances, some felt it could never succumb to tyranny. Such complacency has collided with brutal reality. In just nine months, the US has been dragged towards an authoritarian abyss. A warning: Trump has 39 months left in office."

‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America; The Guardian, October 18, 2025

David Smith, The Guardian; ‘Indecency has become a new hallmark’: writer and historian Jelani Cobb on race in Donald Trump’s America

"It is now fashionable on the left to bemoan the rise of US authoritarianism as a novel concept, a betrayal of constitutional ideals envied by the world. Cobb has a more complex take, suggesting that the US’s claim to moral primacy, rooted in the idea of exceptionalism, is based on a false premise.

He argues: “America has been autocratic previously. We just don’t think about it. It’s never been useful … to actually grapple with what America was, and America had no interest in grappling with these questions itself. Who has ever managed personal growth while constantly screaming to the world about how special and amazing they are?”

Cobb’s book maps an arc of the moral universe that is crooked and uneven, pointing out that, between the end of reconstruction and 1965, 11 states in the south effectively nullified the protections of the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments of the constitution, imposing Jim Crow laws, voter suppression and violence to disenfranchise Black citizens...

It is therefore hardly unexpected that business leaders and institutions would capitulate, as they have in the past, he says: “We might hope that they would react differently but it’s not a shock when they don’t. Go back to the McCarthy era. We see that in more instances than not, McCarthy and other similar kinds of red-baiting forces were able to exert their will on American institutions.”...

He is unwavering, however, in his critique of Trump’s attack on the university sector: “What’s happening is people emulating Viktor Orbán [the leader of Hungary] to try to crush any independent centres of dissent and to utilise the full weight of the government to do it, and also to do it in hypocritical fashion...

Spencer Cox, the governor of Utah and a rare voice urging civil discourse, wondered whether this was the end of a dark chapter of US history – or the beginning. What does Cobb think? “There’s a strong possibility that it will get worse before it gets better,” he says frankly.

“We’re at a point where we navigated the volatile moment of the 1950s, the 1960s, because we were able to build a social consensus around what we thought was decent and what we thought was right, and we’re now seeing that undone. Indecency has become a new hallmark.

“But we should take some solace in the fact that people have done the thing that we need to do now previously. The situation we’re in I don’t think is impossible.”"

‘Bow to the Emperor’: We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency; The New York Times Magazine, October 6, 2025

Emily Bazelon , The New York Times Magazine ; ‘Bow to the Emperor’: We Asked 50 Legal Experts About the Trump Presidency

"Last year, in the months before the 2024 presidential election, the magazine surveyed 50 members of what might be called the Washington legal establishment about their expectations for the Justice Department and the rule of law if Donald Trump were re-elected. The group was evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. They had worked as high-level officials for every president since Ronald Reagan.

A majority of our respondents told us they were alarmed about a potential second Trump term given the strain he put on the legal system the first time around. But several dissenters countered that those fears were overblown. One former Trump official predicted that the Justice Department would be led by lawyers like those in the first term — elite, conservative and independent. “It’s hard to be a bad-faith actor at the Justice Department,” he said at the time. “And the president likes the Ivy League and Supreme Court clerkships on résumés.”

Eight months into his second term, Trump has taken a wrecking ball to those beliefs."

‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ Review: How George Came to See the World as Orwellian; The New York Times, October 2, 2025

 Manohla Dargis, The New York Times; ‘Orwell: 2+2=5’ Review: How George Came to See the World as Orwellian

"“The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, a year after the end of the World War II. That line appears early in “Orwell: 2 + 2 = 5,” an essayistic documentary from Raoul Peck that surveys its title subject’s life and work, using them as a lens to explore authoritarian power in the past and the present. Densely packed, the movie is a whirlwind of ideas and images, by turns heady, enlivening, disturbing and near-exhausting. It’s a work of visceral urgency from Peck, who’s best known for his 2017 documentary “I Am Not Your Negro,” about James Baldwin.

Peck plucked that observation about art and politics from Orwell’s essential 1946 essay “Why I Write,” in which he lists “four great motives for writing” — especially for writing prose and, of course, aside from earning a living — including “political purpose.” Near the end of the essay, Orwell writes that he hopes to start a new book. What soon followed was “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” the seismic novel that helped turn his name into an adjective. Anchored by Orwell’s writing — and Damian Lewis’s calm, intimate voice-over — Peck charts the writer’s life in tandem with world-shattering events, focusing on when he was working on “Nineteen Eighty-Four,” which was published in 1949. Months later, Orwell was dead."

Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal’; The New York Times, September 19, 2025

Luke Broadwater, The New York Times; Trump Says Critical Coverage of Him Is ‘Really Illegal’

[Kip Currier: The most objective (and nicest) way to respond to Trump's assertion that critical reporting on him is "really illegal" is that it is legally incorrect and factually untrue. Whether Trump is regrettably misinformed in stating this falsehood or intentionally uttering this inaccuracy is less material than the fact that he is objectively wrong.

There are countries where it is illegal to say critical things about heads of nations: Russia. China. North Korea. Iran. Saudi Arabia. Turkey. Thailand. Others. Indeed, criticizing the head of state will likely get one defenestrated (as tragically happens all too often in Russia), killed in other ways, tortured, jailed, or disappeared.

Fortunately, it is not (yet) illegal to say negative things about U.S. Presidents at present. And it never has been, since the founding of the country in 1776 when the monarchical dictates of England's King George III were soundly declined by the American colonists. The t-shirt below proudly (and wholly truthfully) proclaims that historical truth that occurred in America 249 years ago:

[Excerpt]

"President Trump said Friday that news reporters who cover his administration negatively have broken the law, a significant broadening of his attacks on journalists and their First Amendment right to critique the government.

A day after asserting that broadcasters should potentially lose their licenses over negative news coverage of him, Mr. Trump escalated his condemnations of the press, suggesting reporters were lawbreakers.

“They’ll take a great story and they’ll make it bad,” he said, speaking to reporters in the Oval Office. “See, I think that’s really illegal.”

Mr. Trump did not cite a specific law he said he believed had been violated. It remained unclear Friday why Mr. Trump believed negative news coverage, which every president has faced and is protected by the Constitution, would be “really illegal.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment Friday evening."

ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons; The Guardian, September 17, 2025

 Amanda Meade , The Guardian; ABC barred from Trump’s UK press conference after his clash with Australian journalist John Lyons

"The ABC has been barred from attending Donald Trump’s press conference near London this week after a clash between the broadcaster’s Americas editor, John Lyons, and the president in Washington DC over his business dealings.

The Australian broadcaster said its London bureau was informed by Downing Street that its accreditation to attend the press conference had been withdrawn for “logistical reasons”...

Lyons, who is reporting for Four Corners, drew the ire of the president on Tuesday when he asked Trump how much wealthier he had become since returning to the Oval Office for his second term in January.

Trump accused the reporter of “hurting Australia” with the line of questioning.

“In my opinion, you are hurting Australia very much right now,” Trump said. “And they want to get along with me.

“You know, your leader is coming over to see me very soon. I’m going to tell him about you. You set a very bad tone. You can set a nicer tone.”

Trump subsequently told Lyons: “Quiet.”"