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First things first: hello!
My name is Emily Carmichael, and I’m incredibly excited to take the helm of the News Briefing. Over the past decade, I’ve reported on music, culture and politics across the country, including elections in Louisiana and Connecticut, a queer bar in Vermont (where I spent a winter working as a ski instructor), and a whole lot of music festivals. This time last year, I was working as a travel editor, and you can always email me for U.S. travel suggestions that won’t break the bank.
I want to write a newsletter that’s worth your time. Please, let me know what you like, don’t like, want to see in this newsletter, and are generally curious about. I love story ideas, news tips, agreements, disagreements, suggestions of all stripes—send them all to briefing@currentaffairs.org.
HERE & ABROAD
❧ DEEP DIVE: “Sorry, Erika” — Consequence Culture and the Canonization of Charlie Kirk❧
It’s quite the week to join the news briefing. We are in the midst of what may be a watershed moment in American politics. On Sept. 21, Jack Posobiec declared as much while eulogizing Turning Point USA Founder Charlie Kirk at his memorial in Glendale, Ariz. Looking out at tens of thousands people gathered in State Farm Stadium and clutching an unreasonably large rosary in his fist, Posobiec said historians will one day call Kirk's death the “turning point” (bad pun) in “the saving of western civilization.” The alt-right political crusader got a standing ovation as he said it was time for Kirk’s followers to don “the armor of god” and fight.
The Trump administration has seized upon Kirk’s death to try and reshape the United States at breakneck speed. I want to quickly, bluntly, and in one place, document how bizarrely everyone is acting right now. And there’s a whole lot of data.
Art by C.M Duffy from Current Affairs Magazine
Kirk’s Memorial: The memorial service was half Trump rally, half knock-off canonization event, and was attended by members of the highest levels of government. Speaker after speaker, many of whom advanced their career through their association with Kirk, called the fallen YouTuber the leader of a Christian “revival,” “a martyr,” “a prophet.” Nearly every single one mentioned Jesus, government officials included. Their message: Kirk is you. He died for your conservative beliefs, which are under violent attack by the left. Fight accordingly. It was church and state, connected by Charlie Kirk.
Crypto entrepreneur Donald Trump Jr. used this somber moment to do a surprisingly poor impression of his father telling him to “cool it” with his social media posting, before pretending like the right has never committed an act of political violence (factcheck via journalist Laura Jedeed: as far as political killings go, the right far outpaces the left ). A heavy-lidded Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff, gave a speech of white supremacist dogwhistles: “our ancestors [read: white people] built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry,” and that “the light will defeat the dark.” President Donald Trump, the last speaker, said Kirk is “a martyr now,” then announced that he and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, had “found an answer to autism.” (The culprit is apparently Tylenol, by the way.) That’s one way to politicize a shooting.
The quote that sums it all up: “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them,” Trump said of Kirk during his weirdly upbeat eulogy, which he gave soon after Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow, tearfully forgave the man who killed her husband, an exculpation she saw as commanded by her Christian faith. “That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponents and I don’t want what’s best for them,” Trump said with a smile; the crowd laughed. “I am sorry, Erika.”
Art by Pranas Naujokaitis from Current Affairs Magazine
The Post-Kirk Cultural and Political Cascade: Trump and his followers have already used Kirk’s death as a force multiplier for Trumpian hate and a convenient excuse to restrict free speech. The highest profile example of this is the temporary suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live!, a frequent Trump critic yanked off the air after Kimmel misreported the political affiliation of the man who allegedly shot Kirk.
People of all stripes are being similarly demonized, doxxed, pilloried, and fired for not extolling Kirk as some kind of saint, or for pointing out his many statements on gun control, people of color, Jews, Muslims, and LGBT people, which imply these ideas groups are, by turns, dangerous, unqualified for intellectual work, perverse or otherwise threatening to the white Christian way of life.
For good measure, here’s a non-exhaustive list: Karen Attiah, the only Black opinion columnist at the Washington Post, lost her job. A city council member in Palmetto Bay, Fla. is fighting pressure to resign. MSNBC senior political analyst Matthew Dowd was fired. An assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University was fired. (See this list for more people punished on campus.) A U.S. Secret Service member was put on leave. An Office Depot employee was fired after refusing to print a poster of Kirk; United States Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice was looking into the incident as a case of discrimination. A huge doxxing campaign is underway to identify, harass, and unemploy anyone who the online right thinks inappropriately posted about Kirk’s death on social media—and, as Taylor Lorenz reported, they’re massively disrupting the lives of people who didn’t even post. A searchable online database of Kirk-grief-offenders, originally called Charlie Kirk’s Murderers, has accumulated tens of thousands of names. The day after Kirk’s killing, multiple HBCUs received threats of violence, though the threats have not been conclusively linked to Kirk’s acolytes. The FBI is reportedly gearing up to name trans people as “nihilistic violent extremists.” Trump designated the loosely associated group antifa a domestic terrorist organization, despite no such legal category actually existing, in what looks like a cover for investigating left-leaning nonprofits.
Art by Harriet Burbeck from Current Affairs Magazine
Pam Bondi dubbed this “consequence culture,” a rightwing mega-upgrade to cancel culture. It’s federally-backed and seems to be based on conservative caprice, emotional reactivity, and a valorization of Kirk and his ideals, including his beloved Donald Trump. Trump, emboldened by this new political environment, went so far as to say negative media coverage of him is “really illegal,” and pressure Erik Siebert, a federal prosecutor who would not bring charges against New York Attorney General Letitia James, to resign. James won a civil fraud suit against Trump for his shady business practices, but its half-billion dollar penalty was later thrown out.
After discussions with ABC and Disney, Jimmy Kimmel Live! will return to air tonight, though affiliate stations owned by Nexstar and Sinclair still refuse to air the show. Sinclair will air its notoriouslyconservative news programming instead.
What's more fragile than a snowflake? A pudgy, leathery elephant, I guess.
❧ In Other News ❧
❧ SanitationWorkers Strike in India. Bengaluru is banning sanitation workers from striking for the next year as nationwide protests have left garbage piling in the streets of multiple cities. The striking workers are fighting against low wages, poor working conditions, and the privatization of municipal sanitation services, which they say will only make their situation worse. According to Frontline, this an issue of both government corruption and caste; most sanitation workers are Dalits, a group that has historically “been forced into the work of disposing of waste.” The protests have taken place since at least June and cropped up across the country, including in the states of Punjab, where workers say they are “deprived of minimum wages and social security," and Telangana, where workers are protesting two months of unpaid wages. In Chennai, largest city of Tamil Nadu, and where many of the thousands of the protestors are women, hundreds have been roughed up and arrested, and 13 women were arrested for going on hunger strike.
Art by Meg T. Callahan from Current Affairs Magazine
❧ The United Nations finally admits Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Better late than never. What’s more, within the past week, Canada, Portugal, Belgium, France, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Andorra, Belgium, Australia, and the UK have announced they now recognize Palestinian statehood, joining what is now a total of 157 UN member states. Netanyahu is pissed, and shot back that “A Palestinian state will not be established west of the Jordan River.” Speaking to the UN this morning, Trump said the actions could “encourage continued conflict.” To date, nearly 65,000 Palestinians have died in Gaza.
There’s been lots of talk of Kirk’s love of debate and free speech, but his “gotcha” “own the libs” model is, by far, not our society’s best model for healthy and open discourse. Neither, according to our Editor-in-Chief Nathan J. Robinson, is the approach favored by New York Times columnist Ezra Klein. In recent op-eds and podcast interviews, Klein has treated right-wingers like Kirk and Ben Shapiro “with kid gloves.” Nathan writes: “Honesty means telling the truth about Charlie Kirk’s odious views even as we fully denounce his murder.”
❧ In More News ❧
❧ Porn company accuses Meta of stealing its adult content to train AI . In Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to learn how normal humans move their normal bodies in the world outside his compound, he’s turned to porn, a famously normal medium. Wired reports that Meta is being sued by Strike 3, a self-proclaimed feminist, ethical porn company, for allegedly torrenting their content to help create an “AI superintelligence.” The company claims that “Meta’s motive was partly to obtain otherwise difficult-to-scrape visual angles, parts of the human body, and extended, uninterrupted scenes—rare in mainstream movies and TV.” On a related note, Wired also reports that Meta just released AI-enabled smart glasses, and despite the company’s, erm, research, the Meta Ray Bans are still awkward.
❧ The only known journalist detained by ICE on U.S. soil has published a letter. MGNews Founder Mario Guevara, an El Salvadoran in the United States on a legal work authorization, was arrested on June 14, 2025 while reporting on an anti-Trump protest in DeKalb County, Ga. Although Guevara’s original misdemeanor charges have long been dismissed, he remains in detention and at risk of deportation as the government claims he “presents a danger to the community because he films and records law enforcement activities and shares his reporting with the public” — that’s just journalism. The Bitter Southerner has published his communique from detention. Guevara describes months during which a white light in his cell was never turned off and he had very limited outdoor access.
THE BRIGHT SIDE
Good people do good things everyday.
❧ Something good: Grist released their list of50 climate leaders you should know, emphasizing that “climate progress is still happening.” And it is! Charles Hua, along with his nonprofitPowerLines, educates Americans on who controls the utility spending in their state (it's probably a public service commission) and shows them how to influence these government entities to invest in clean energy. Albert Carter foundedBank.Green, an AI-powered greenwashing detector that goes deep into banks’ records and susses out if their investments choices actually line up with their public pledges of sustainability. Give the article a read for 48 more little injections of green glee.
❧ Something beautiful: “Emergent City,” a PBS documentary about local residents in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park rallying against property developers with deep pockets. The developers are intent on rezoning the last industrial pier in Brooklyn, hoping to create another area of Williamsburg-style gentrification in Sunset Park’s backyard. A multi-year showdown ensues. It is a wonderful example of democracy working, in case you need to remind yourself what that looks like.
You can run your car on elephant poop if you reallllllly want to
Elephants are big eaters and bad digesters. According to the International Elephant Foundation, they spend 16 hours per day eating between 250 and 300 pounds of food (the same weight as a newborn elephant calf), only to digest “with less than 50% efficiency.” The obvious outcome is that elephants defecate a lot, like to 250 pounds of excrement daily, and frequently; we’re talking 12 to 15 times a day. And to a clever person, that poop could be as good as gasoline. The IEF contends that “Properly equipped, a car could travel 20 miles on the amount of methane produced by one elephant in a single day.” Vroom vroom.
Writing and research by Emily Carmichael. Editing and additional material by Emily Topping and Nathan J. Robinson. Header graphic by Cali Traina Blume. This news briefing is a product of Current Affairs Magazine. Subscribe to our gorgeous and informative print edition here, and our delightful podcast here.
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