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WOKE IS SO BACK!!!
11:56
Hasan Abi • Feb 2, 2026

WOKE IS SO BACK!!!

Trump Forced to Admit He Drove Kennedy Center Into the Ground
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Trump Forced to Admit He Drove Kennedy Center Into the Ground

Donald Trump has decided to close the Kennedy Center entirely.Starting in July, for the next two years, the performing arts space will undergo “construction, revitalization, and complete rebuilding,” according to a Trump Truth Social post Sunday evening.The decision follows a year of canceled performances by a litany of artists who oppose the Trump administration’s agenda, Trump’s ousting of the center’s Democratic board members, and the center’s recent, potentially illegal name change. Trump claimed that he deemed the decision necessary after a “year review” of the center, suggesting that he had anticipated an overhaul of the historically apolitical arts space as soon as he returned to high office.“Based on these findings, and totally subject to Board approval, I have determined that the fastest way to bring The Trump Kennedy Center to the highest level of Success, Beauty, and Grandeur, is to cease Entertainment Operations for an approximately two year period of time, with a scheduled Grand Reopening that will rival and surpass anything that has taken place with respect to such a Facility before,” Trump wrote.The center will shutter for the project on July 4, “in honor of the 250th Anniversary of our Country.”“Financing is completed, and fully in place!” Trump continued. “This important decision, based on input from many Highly Respected Experts, will take a tired, broken, and dilapidated Center, one that has been in bad condition, both financially and structurally for many years, and turn it into a World Class Bastion of Arts, Music, and Entertainment, far better than it has ever been before.” Long before Trump’s meddling, the Kennedy Center was widely considered a premier, world-class arts institution. But since the White House became directly involved in its operations and programming, its normally star-studded lineup has fallen apart. In December, the president suddenly decided to rename the venerated cultural institution “The Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts,” in a flagrant rejection of the laws that created the center in the first place.Kennedy’s family was quick to rip the president apart for the half-baked idea Sunday.“I’ve determined that due to this change in schedule, it’s best for me to close this center down and rebuild a new center that will bear my name, which will surely get everybody to stop talking about the fact that everybody’s cancelling … right?” mocked Maria Shriver, the thirty-fifth president’s niece, on X.Kennedy’s grandson, Manhattan congressional candidate Jack Schlossberg, bit harder, arguing on X that Trump could try but would never succeed in killing Kennedy’s legacy.“Trump can take the Kennedy Center for himself. He can change the name, shut the doors, and demolish the building. He can try to kill JFK,” Schlossberg wrote online. “But JFK is kept alive by us now rising up to remove Donald Trump, bring him to justice, and restore the freedoms generations fought for.”

The Second Amendment Failed Alex Pretti
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

The Second Amendment Failed Alex Pretti

Alex Pretti’s killing at the hands of federal agents last week is an American tragedy. It has also exposed the fallacies and fault lines that shape how Americans live with widespread access to guns.Put simply, the Supreme Court has handed down two irreconcilable lines of precedent over the past 20 years. The first is that Americans have a sacred constitutional right to carry guns in public. The second is that that police officers can kill people carrying guns in public with little risk of facing any legal consequences for doing so.In 2008, the court first held that the Second Amendment protected an individual right to bear arms. The case, District of Columbia v. Heller, involved a man who wanted to keep a fully assembled handgun in his home for self-defense, which was prohibited by D.C. law at the time. In a 5–4 ruling, the court’s conservative justices sided with him.“The enshrinement of constitutional rights necessarily takes certain policy choices off the table,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote for the court, referring to concerns by D.C. and other parties that the ruling would fuel gun violence. “These include the absolute prohibition of handguns held and used for self-defense in the home.”The Supreme Court revisited the Second Amendment in 2022 to strike down New York’s restrictive law on issuing concealed-carry permits. It marked the first time that the high court had directly addressed the Second Amendment’s scope outside the home. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, took an expansive view of it.“This definition of ‘bear’ naturally encompasses public carry,” he explained. “Most gun owners do not wear a holstered pistol at their hip in their bedroom or while sitting at the dinner table. Although individuals often ‘keep’ firearms in their home, at the ready for self-defense, most do not ‘bear’ (i.e., carry) them in the home beyond moments of actual confrontation. To confine the right to ‘bear’ arms to the home would nullify half of the Second Amendment’s operative protections.”Later this year, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on the lengths that states can go when restricting gun ownership in public. Wolford v. Lopez involves a Hawaii law that forbids gun owners from bringing firearms on private property accessible to the public—restaurants, stores, gas stations, and so on—without the property owner’s explicit permission. Most other states allow gun owners to carry their weapons in those locations unless the property owner explicitly says otherwise.Gun rights advocates have warned that the default-property rule, as the state calls it, would make it nearly impossible to carry a gun in Hawaii since most businesses would refuse consent. That argument appears to have persuaded most of the conservative justices at oral argument earlier this month. At one point, Justice Samuel Alito chastised a lawyer arguing for the state of Hawaii for allegedly trying to turn the Second Amendment into a “second-class right.”Running parallel to these rulings, however, is a consistent signal from the Supreme Court that law enforcement officials can kill people who pose a personal risk to them largely without risk of legal consequences.A federal law known as Section 1983 allows people to sue state and local officials for violating their federal constitutional rights. Since the 1960s, the Supreme Court has substantially narrowed Section 1983 claims by inventing the doctrine of “qualified immunity.” In general terms, officers are only liable if their conduct violates a “clearly established right,” which can be interpreted with great particularity and narrowness by lower courts.These hurdles are often highest in police use-of-force cases. As one justice wrote in a 1986 case, qualified immunity “provides ample protection to all but the plainly incompetent or those who knowingly violate the law.” The court also views police-involved cases with great deference toward officers’ subjective views about the situation at hand. In a 1989 case, the high court noted that police officers are entitled to great deference because they are “often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.”This deference is particularly high in use-of-force cases where the other side is armed. In a 2018 case, for example, the Supreme Court sided with a police officer who shot a woman holding a knife simply because she “did not acknowledge the officers’ presence or drop the knife.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who dissented, raised broader concerns about the court’s approach in similar cases. She warned that the court’s “one-sided approach” to qualified immunity “transforms the doctrine into an absolute shield for law enforcement officers, gutting the deterrent effect of the Fourth Amendment.”“The majority today exacerbates that troubling asymmetry,” Sotomayor wrote. “Its decision is not just wrong on the law; it also sends an alarming signal to law enforcement officers and the public. It tells officers that they can shoot first and think later, and it tells the public that palpably unreasonable conduct will go unpunished.” This is particularly true in situations where someone is armed: All of the major qualified-immunity cases involve either unarmed people or people with unconventional weapons like knives and swords because someone carrying a gun is such an obvious threat to police officers in that context. Pretti’s case is also unusual because it was so thoroughly documented by observers from multiple angles, which easily refutes the claims that he was a threat. Had it not been filmed, the federal government’s original claims would have been the only narrative of what had happened.For federal agents like those who killed Pretti, the threshold for accountability is far higher. Section 1983 can’t be used to sue federal officials, and Congress has not passed a similar statute to fill the gap. In the 1960s, the Supreme Court held that plaintiffs could sue federal agents for civil rights violations under the Fourth Amendment without relying on an act of Congress, but the court has effectively abolished this option since then.In theory, these agents could be criminally prosecuted for murder or for civil rights violations by state and federal officials. Or, as the Trump administration has shown, they simply could not be. The identities of the agents responsible for Pretti’s death are not publicly known. Since they wore masks, journalists and activists have been unable to identify them. And the Trump administration has refused to cooperate with local law enforcement agencies in Minnesota that have sought to investigate Pretti’s death. Unless the White House relents, Americans might not learn who shot Pretti until a new administration takes office and releases the names.This outcome is particularly disturbing because Pretti’s actions were completely lawful. He had a license to carry his concealed weapon under Minnesota law and did not wield or brandish it against the ICE agents in question. He did not use force against any of the officers, nor was he an immediate threat to them. (They outnumbered him by more than a half-dozen to one.) Multiple videos even show one of the agents disarming Pretti before he was fatally shot at close range.Nonetheless, the Trump administration’s response to Pretti’s death was to effectively declare that ICE agents were justified in killing him simply because he possessed a gun. The White House and the Department of Homeland Security initially described him as a “would-be assassin” and a “domestic terrorist.” Even after the video evidence proved them wrong, they stuck to their underlying rationale.“You can’t have guns,” Trump told reporters on the White House lawn earlier this week. “You can’t walk in with guns. You just can’t. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that. But it’s just a very unfortunate incident.” Other Trump administration officials shared the same sentiment.“You cannot bring a firearm loaded with multiple magazines to any sort of protest that you want,” FBI Director Kash Patel said in an interview last Sunday. “It’s that simple.” Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem echoed that sentiment to reporters. “I don’t know of any peaceful protester that shows up with a gun and ammunition rather than a sign,” she claimed.Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent also offered a forceful rebuke of Pretti’s lawful possession of a firearm, during an interview with ABC News’s Jonathan Karl. “I am sorry this gentleman is dead, but he did bring a 9 mm semiautomatic weapon with two cartridges to what was supposed to be a peaceful protest,” Bessent said. Karl noted that Pretti was an ICU nurse who worked at the VA and, more relevantly, that he hadn’t brandished the weapon at all.“But he brought a gun!” Bessent testily replied. “He brought a gun to a protest!” When Karl noted that the Second Amendment existed, Bessent suggested that it didn’t apply in this scenario. “I’ve been to a protest,” the treasury secretary replied. “Guess what? I didn’t bring a gun, I brought a billboard.”This absolutist approach drew some ire among gun rights groups like the National Rifle Association. “The NRA unequivocally believes that all law-abiding citizens have a right to keep and bear arms anywhere they have a legal right to be,” the organization posted on its official Twitter account earlier this week in an thinly veiled rebuke of the Trump administration.Bill Essayli, a federal prosecutor in California, posted on Twitter that the Pretti shooting was completely justified. “If you approach law enforcement with a gun, there is a high likelihood they will be legally justified in shooting you,” he claimed. “Don’t do it!” The NRA directly responded to him by calling his claim “dangerous and wrong” in a quoted post. “Responsible public voices should be awaiting a full investigation,” the group warned, “not making generalizations and demonizing law-abiding citizens.”This state of affairs is not at all what gun rights groups had promised us. Other wealthy liberal democracies impose all sorts of restrictions on guns. In some European countries, civilians generally can’t own or possess them at all. Gun rights advocates have insisted, however, that the Second Amendment prevents Americans from making the same policy choices.As a result, the widespread availability of guns has had dire consequences. The Pew Research Center estimated last year that 46,728 people had died in the United States from gun-related injuries in 2023, which the center described as the most recent year “for which complete data is available.” That figure is likely an undercount, since the underlying Centers for Disease Control and Prevention data only counts deaths where a gunshot was the primary factor.Countries without widespread gun access also have murders and suicides, of course. But the availability of firearms likely plays a role in America’s higher rates. According to Pew, guns were used in four out of every five murders committed in the U.S. in 2023 and played a role in more than half of the roughly 27,000 suicides that year. It is impossible to know how many more people would be alive today if America had more restrictive laws, but the number would surely be much greater than zero.Even those who do not own guns must live with the consequences of their ubiquity. An entire generation of Americans has now grown up with mass-shooter drills in case their K-12 school happened to become the latest in a long chain of tragedies. The average American can likely recite the names of more mass-shooting locations than World War II or Civil War battlefields: Columbine, Sandy Hook, Parkland, Uvalde, Virginia Tech, and onward.In response to this regular churn of gun carnage, Americans have been told by gun rights advocates—both implicitly and explicitly—that these are acceptable losses for our society to bear. They defined the individual right to bear arms, which is only about 18 months older than the iPhone, as an intrinsic part of the nation’s social contract. One of the bluntest assessments came from Charlie Kirk, an influential conservative activist who frequently opposed gun-control proposals.“I think it’s worth it,” Kirk said in 2023, during a public event where he was asked about his support for gun rights. “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”Kirk’s critics widely shared this comment after he was assassinated by a sniper on a Utah college campus last fall. In one sense, his analysis wasn’t completely flawed. (As seen earlier, it perhaps intentionally echoed Scalia’s opinion in Heller.) Every constitutional right comes with policy trade-offs. The First Amendment’s strict protections for free speech also mean that the government can’t simply criminalize hate speech and Holocaust denial. Life would be easier for Democratic presidents if they could simply shut down Fox News. Police would probably solve more murders if the Fourth Amendment didn’t require them to get warrants.Americans generally accept those trade-offs, often on a subconscious level, because they generally prefer to live in a free and open society where their rights are less likely to be infringed. To paraphrase Kirk, that is a prudent and rational deal. The problem with his formulation was that, even if you accept his premise, the Second Amendment doesn’t work.State legislatures and courts often describe the Second Amendment as a right to bear arms for lawful purposes like hunting and personal self-defense. But Kirk and other gun rights commentators also often suggested that the Second Amendment is necessary as a bulwark against government tyranny. The apparent implication is that if the government ever infringed upon our “God-given rights,” Americans could simply kill those who were responsible.Trump, a master of turning the implicit into the explicit, voiced this sentiment in stark terms in 2016 about Hillary Clinton, his Democratic rival for the presidency that year. “If she gets to pick her judges, nothing you can do, folks,” Trump told a rally in North Carolina on the campaign trail. “Although the Second Amendment people—maybe there is, I don’t know.” When Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke proposed a mandatory AR-15 buyback program in 2019 to stop mass shooting, conservative commentators likened it to an “incitement of violence” and a call for “civil war.”The United States is now awash in firearms, with all the resultant deaths, injuries, and other harmful social effects to achieve surely modest gains in personal self-defense. The Second Amendment has plainly failed to deter tyranny in any meaningful way. To the contrary, many of the most vocal gun rights advocates have been cheering on the Trump administration instead of rising up against it. And the Supreme Court’s rulings have failed to protect an individual right to bear arms because its other decisions make it all but impossible to hold government agents accountable for killing people who exercise it. It shouldn’t have taken the death of Alex Pretti to illuminate what was already plain as day.

Lessons from China’s Delicate Dance of Censorship and Expression
New Republic • Feb 2, 2026

Lessons from China’s Delicate Dance of Censorship and Expression

On a cold Valentine’s Day in 2012, three women walked down a Beijing shopping street in white wedding dresses smeared with red to look like blood. (It was lipstick.) They had bruises on their faces, as if they’d been beaten. (It was dark-blue eye shadow.) They chanted, “Yes to love, no to violence.” Photos of the protest spread instantly across the Chinese microblogging platform Weibo.The “bloody brides” were the invention of Lü Pin, founder of Feminist Voices, a digital magazine that had grown into a viral Weibo hub for young women unwilling to stay quiet. Activists called 2012 “Year One of the Chinese feminist movement.” Women shaved their heads to protest higher-education quotas that favored men, rode the subway with placards denouncing gropers, and Li Maizi’s “Occupy the Men’s Bathroom,” demanding more women’s stalls, trended on Weibo.These actions produced real legal and policy shifts. The Ministry of Education discontinued discriminatory college quotas, and a Beijing court for the first time issued a domestic violence protection order, ruling in favor of a U.S. citizen who sued her Chinese husband, a millionaire celebrity English teacher. China passed its first national anti–domestic violence law, and new buildings were required to add more women’s bathrooms.What made this surge of activism possible was Weibo. Launched in 2009, it quickly became the nervous system of China’s civic sphere. Before Weibo, feminist organizers could hand out newsletters or hold a small meeting but never get on state TV; afterward, they could turn a street protest into a nationwide conversation. A clever slogan or striking image could trend for weeks.Weibo marked the moment when young Chinese women discovered that even the most heavily restricted internet in the world contained a crack large enough to push a movement through. In May 2009, a spa worker was cornered by two local cadres demanding “special services.” One slapped her with a wad of cash and shoved her onto a sofa, where she stabbed him in the neck, killing him. Police detained her on suspicion of murder, but the case exploded on social media, and prosecutors had to drop the murder charge, conceding she had acted in self-defense. In October 2010, a drunk driver who had killed a student tried to flee from the police as he shouted, “My father is Li Gang!”—a local security official. The phrase went viral at the start of what came to be known as the “Weibo Spring,” when “Big V” accounts—bloggers with a large following who were “verified”—turned scandals like these into national dramas.Censorship does not simply extinguish voices, but reshapes them—training a generation to speak sideways, turning repression into a culture of coded speech.This rise of the mobile web in China in the 2010s produced a flowering of digital creativity even as suppression intensified—a tension at the heart of Yi-Ling Liu’s eye-opening book The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. Writing as someone who grew up alongside this digital universe, Liu reveals how censorship does not simply extinguish voices, but reshapes them—training a generation to speak sideways, turning repression into a culture of coded speech, creative improvisation, and stubborn survival.It might be hard to build a book around online life, but Liu—who grew up in Hong Kong, lived in Beijing, and even interned at the state-run China Daily (as I once did) before writing for The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine—follows a group of effervescent netizens (Lü Pin, Li Maizi, and others, including herself) who more than carry it. Take the episode of Li’s “Occupy the Men’s Bathroom” protest: The day after, two police officers picked her up. But to her astonishment, they didn’t arrest her. Instead, they treated her to a feast at a fancy restaurant, though they did tell her to stop protesting and posting on Weibo. The incident perfectly captures the odd, shifting political culture of the era, and in tracing such encounters Liu shows how social media became the space for her generation to work out the politics and passions of their everyday lives. To understand the Chinese people, understand what they’re doing online, she proposes. What emerges is a portrait of nonconformists who, by feeling out the walls the regime has built, turn that maneuvering into a kind of limited freedom. They do not escape the system; they improvise within it. They dance.Western observers have long swung between two caricatures of China—booming economic miracle or iron police state—and then demanded to know which is “real.” Cultural historian Ian Buruma tried to look past that binary. In his 2001 book, Bad Elements: Chinese Rebels From Los Angeles to Beijing, he traveled through the Chinese-speaking world to portray a scattered cohort of mavericks pushed to the margins yet still feeling out the system’s blurred edges: disillusioned activists, political prisoners-turned-businesspeople, human rights lawyers, Christian sect leaders and followers, and online critics. By tracing this unruly mix, Buruma punctured the myths of Chinese sameness and pointed to a messy underground current.An early online dissenter was Liu Xiaobo, who had been released from a labor camp two years earlier, in 1999. He recognized quickly how the emerging internet could allow everyday people to reach one another without passing through official channels. Cases that once were ignored—corruption scandals, police abuses, violence against women—could suddenly circulate everywhere. Liu, who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010, encouraged this new civic scrutiny, supporting figures such as Dr. Jiang Yanyong, whose revelations about the true scale of the 2003 SARS outbreak ignited a fury. Commentators began calling 2003 “the year of online public opinion.”From the state’s perspective, this was dangerous in a new way. One of the party’s governing tools has long been what sinologist Perry Link calls “fossilized fear”: Citizens self-police even before an officer appears. They say one thing in the open and another in private; topics such as Tibet, Taiwan, and Tiananmen—the “three Ts”—are off-limits. In 1998, the Ministry of Public Security launched what it called the Golden Shield Project—an effort to create an integrated surveillance-and-filtering system that would let the authorities watch, sort, and erase content, and block and arrest violators. Outside China, it became better known as the Great Firewall of China, the title of a Wired article. As Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu note in Who Controls the Internet?, the wall was built partly with “American bricks,” with key technology from Cisco and other firms.By the end of “the year of online public opinion,” the Great Firewall had gone live. Detentions for offenses rose; overseas websites were blocked; filters swept pages for banned words. But the result was what former CNN Beijing bureau chief Rebecca MacKinnon, in her 2012 book, Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom, dubbed “networked authoritarianism,” in which tightly managed digital spaces still generate unpredictable discourse. MacKinnon argued that, even under authoritarian rule, social media inadvertently broaden the space for public conversation, creating rolling negotiations between state and society.The wall dancers emerged in that space, devising ingenious ways to slip past filters and tunnel under the Great Firewall. It wasn’t only activists and writers who sidestepped, but millions of ordinary participants who wanted to say what could not be said. To express “fuck your mother,” they recast the Chinese words caonima into a homophone that translates as “grass-mud-horse” and turned it into an alpaca meme. Another phrase, hexie, or “harmonization,” a euphemism for censorship, became “river crab.” The two animals were often portrayed in mortal combat, showing just how web-savvy individuals felt whenever posts vanished or comments were scrubbed.Then there was Ma Baoli, a married, then-closeted police officer in a northern port city who built a networked bulletin board for gay men. His hobby became Blued, one of the world’s largest queer social platforms and, eventually, a key hub for HIV-prevention campaigns and public health outreach. To survive, Ma learned to speak in the language of public service and medical necessity, partnering with state agencies while offering users a measure of private freedom.The good times would not last. In 2011, amid protests over illegal land grabs and Weibo chatter about a Chinese “Jasmine Revolution,” party leaders were terrified of social media’s ability to organize mass movements. Then-President Hu Jintao ordered significantly greater control of the internet and public opinion; within a year, Xi Jinping was elevated as his successor. Nicholas Kristof infamously predicted that Xi would be a reformer, and that Liu Xiaobo, who had been imprisoned in 2008 for a fourth time, would be freed.Instead, one day the “Big V” writer Murong Xuecun found his social media accounts deleted. Months later, the outspoken billionaire investor Charles Xue was jailed for soliciting a prostitute, in what appeared to be a warning aimed at social media users. Xi created the Cyberspace Administration of China and installed Lu Wei, a zealous former propaganda official, as its first chief. The CAC drafted a cybersecurity law requiring that data on Chinese citizens gathered within China be kept on domestic servers and mandating that platforms edit content and monitor private chats. Unauthorized virtual private networks, or VPNs, hitherto used to bypass the Great Firewall, were criminalized, and several sellers were jailed; Apple removed hundreds of VPNs from its Chinese app store.In 2013, someone began circulating side-by-side images comparing Xi walking with Barack Obama to Winnie the Pooh strolling with Tigger. It was lighthearted, maybe even meant affectionately. But the joke soon turned into mockery, used as visual shorthand whenever netizens wanted to criticize the increasingly despotic president. By 2015, Xi’s tolerance had evaporated. Pooh was axed from Weibo and WeChat. Searches were throttled. GIFs vanished. The China Netcasting Services Association issued guidelines banning content that “hurt the feelings of the Chinese people” and directing posters to promote “positive energy,” praise the motherland, and applaud its heroes and its rulers.The state’s attitude toward culture shifted from wary tolerance to active engineering. Hip-hop was banned from state television. A single quip by a stand-up comic prompted regulators to accuse him of insulting the People’s Liberation Army and resulted in a multimillion-dollar fine for the company that booked him, casting a chill over the entire comedy scene. “Little Pink” nationalist commenters flooded the Facebook page of Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen, harassed brands like Lancôme for working with the Hong Kong singer and activist Denise Ho, and heaped fury on Lady Gaga for meeting the Dalai Lama.On March 6, 2015, while Lü Pin was away in New York, five other core members of the feminist movement, including Li Maizi, were detained and charged with “picking quarrels and provoking trouble.” That summer, in the “709” campaign of July 9, more than 300 human rights lawyers were interrogated or arrested on accusations of “subverting state power.” When China’s #MeToo movement began spreading under yet another animal homophone—mi tu sounds like “rice bunny”—Feminist Voices joined in, but soon the account was purged by Weibo and WeChat, erasing the country’s most influential feminist outlet from cyberspace.By 2019, as Xi presided over the People’s Republic’s seventieth anniversary, official culture leaned hard into muscular nationalism, warning against the “feminization” of boys and exalting a virile ideal of Chinese manhood—a campaign that culminated in a formal ban on “sissy men” from screens. Ma Baoli’s dating app Blued—once hailed as a landmark of queer tech entrepreneurship and fresh off an $85 million NASDAQ listing in 2020—soon faced regulatory pressures and was forced to go private again as Xi’s regime cracked down on LGBTQ+ content.In 2021, tennis star Peng Shuai posted on Weibo accusing former Vice Premier Zhang Gaoli of sexual assault. Monitors yanked the post within minutes and scrubbed her from searches. She was no longer seen in public, and her brief reappearances later were closely stage-managed. When a surveillance video of a brutal assault on women in a Tangshan barbecue restaurant in 2022 went viral, Weibo wiped the “rice bunny” phrase and removed thousands of posts, blocking accounts for “inciting gender conflict.”The clampdown has reached every professional sphere. At universities, courses on “Xi Jinping Thought” and nationalist themes are now mandatory, while the state has increasing influence over hiring, research, and campus speech. Law firms must establish party cells that shape hiring and case selection, and many now avoid politically sensitive clients to reduce the risk of investigations or disbarment.Corporations, too, were brought to heel. Even Jack Ma, founder of Alibaba, China’s dominant e-commerce giant, disappeared from view after criticizing regulators. Alibaba was fined $2.8 billion for having allegedly “eliminated and restricted competition in the online retail platform service market.” The planned stock market debut of Ant Group, Ma’s fintech firm, set to be the largest IPO in history, was abruptly halted. The result is a choreography of threats and capitulation, a pas de deux between state and citizen. The number of active websites in China shrank by roughly a third between 2017 and 2023, to about 3.9 million—fewer sites than exist in Italian and a fraction of the Japanese web, even though these languages have far fewer speakers.Hong Kong offers a glimpse of what happens when that dance is imposed all at once on a previously free society. On June 30, 2020, Beijing’s national security law took effect in Hong Kong. Overnight, slogans once shouted on the streets became potential evidence of “secessionist intent.” Protesters were arrested and quickly silenced.Media outlets such as Apple Daily and Stand News were raided, and their editors were convicted in the first sedition cases since the territory passed from Britain to China in 1997. Apple Daily’s former owner, 78-year-old Jimmy Lai, who has already been in prison since 2020, was recently found guilty on four national security charges, including colluding with foreign governments, and could face a life sentence. The public broadcaster RTHK, once compared to the BBC for its independence, was brought firmly under the government’s grip, and its television program Headliner, Hong Kong’s longest-running political satire show, was taken off the air after regulators ruled that an episode had “insulted” the police. Celebrities like Denise Ho were blacklisted—concerts canceled, endorsements withdrawn, and jobs evaporated.College professors were detained or had contracts not renewed amid disciplinary procedures linked to political activity, and student unions were dismantled. Museums, nonprofits, and foundations have revised programming or leadership to stay within ideological bounds. As on the mainland, law firms avoid cases that might draw official scrutiny. Cathay Pacific was accused of “support” for the protests after staff expressed sympathy, prompting the Civil Aviation Administration of China to issue unprecedented directives threatening the airline’s access to mainland airspace. Top executives resigned, and employees suspected of supporting the protests were fired or disciplined. Every major Hong Kong company got the message: Stay silent or be punished.For journalists like Allan Au, a meticulous columnist and lecturer in journalism at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, the new order arrived as a shock. Au had spent decades in Hong Kong’s media, at the TV network TVB, where I was his colleague, then as a popular host at RTHK, before being dismissed in 2021 as the government reined in the station. He continued to write sharp commentaries for outlets including Stand News, the kind of journalism that once felt safe in Hong Kong, on broadcasters’ eroding independence and how the creeping normalization of self-censorship was hollowing out the city’s press. In April 2022, national security police arrived at his home before dawn and arrested him for “conspiracy to publish seditious publications.” The message was unmistakable: Words that had once been part of ordinary argument were now criminal. Au was forced to take a leave from his teaching post and placed under restrictive bail conditions that effectively bar him from leaving Hong Kong; his passport was confiscated, and the sedition charge hangs over him like a suspended sentence.When the city’s deadliest fire in decades broke out in late November 2025, killing at least 160 people, public anger raged across the internet. But authorities have used the national security law to expand their crackdown, arresting those who called for government accountability. Since the imposition of the national security law, at least 279 people, many of them activists, journalists, and academics, have been arrested; 149 were formally charged, 109 were found guilty, with 34 more overseas activists targeted with arrest warrants and bounties.If Hong Kong shows how a free city can be compelled to learn the dance, the United States now faces a no less unsettling question: whether its own walls are starting to rise—not through outright deletions, but through political arrests and prosecutions, institutional capitulation, regulatory threats, and corporate submission.The American version of censorship is not wholesale erasure but an escalating speech war that increasingly includes defunding, firing, prosecution, and even deportation.The American version is not wholesale erasure but an escalating speech war, where the consequences increasingly include defunding, firing, prosecution, and even deportation. In the latest Trump administration, an executive order grandly titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship” has coincided with investigations, license threats, and funding cuts aimed squarely at the president’s critics. Protesters have been charged under federal statutes; ICE has targeted noncitizens involved in pro-Palestinian demonstrations for detention and removal.Newsrooms face mounting political pressure as Congress and the White House have terminated almost all federal funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and private media conglomerates like Paramount (CBS), Disney (ABC), and Warner Bros. Discovery (CNN) have sidelined or dumped outspoken voices while their owners attempt to stay in the administration’s good graces amid renewed antitrust scrutiny and pending mergers. David Ellison’s acquisition of Paramount was approved by the Trump administration only after Paramount paid the president $16 million to settle his lawsuit against 60 Minutes, and now Ellison is hoping for Trump’s blessing in his bid to outmaneuver Netflix to buy Warner Bros. Discovery. In December, Ellison’s new hire as editor in chief of CBS News, Bari Weiss, abruptly pulled a 60 Minutes segment on the stories of Venezuelan migrants who have been deported by the Trump administration to a notorious prison in El Salvador.Institutions from the Smithsonian to major foundations have been faced with political warnings, audits, and leadership shake-ups. Universities have become battlegrounds: presidents dragged before Congress, student protesters expelled or arrested, faculty disciplined for dissent, and billions of research funding frozen. Jimmy Kimmel, of course, was suspended by ABC and pulled by Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, after a joke that offended the president and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr.Trump carried out an unprecedented assault on major U.S. law firms that had opposed him, issuing executive orders and presidential memorandums that restricted lawyers’ access to federal buildings, barred them from government employment, canceled contracts, and threatened companies that hired them—pressure that pushed firms like Paul Weiss to make deals and pledge nearly $1 billion in pro bono work. Meta, Target, Amazon, McDonald’s, Walmart, and many others have eliminated or rolled back their DEI programs under Trump’s coercion. Each is choosing compliance over becoming the next cautionary tale.Does this sound familiar? What begins as bare-knuckled politics ends as outright silencing. It is no longer culture war—it is delegated repression and state persecution. The First Amendment still offers a legal shield, and the United States lacks a centralized Great Firewall. Yet the pattern of control is unmistakable. The tools differ from China’s; the methods rhyme. We are not living behind China’s wall, but America’s own dance of censorship has already begun.

How Polarization Tore a Hole in America’s Mainline Churches
New Republic • Feb 1, 2026

How Polarization Tore a Hole in America’s Mainline Churches

One Sunday, Ryan Burge looked out over his Mount Vernon, Illinois, church as the pianist played the service’s prelude. The American Baptist part-time pastor counted nine people in the sanctuary, including himself. Nine, total. The tiny head count was a shock to Burge but soon enough became the norm. In 2024, the church finally closed, its 156-year history ending with a small service. A local Methodist church sent a flower arrangement, fresh blooms like those at all the weddings and funerals held in Burge’s church over generations.Over his lifetime, Burge has served as paid staff at three Baptist churches. Two have closed. The third is 80 percent smaller than when he was there two decades ago. Burge is no grim reaper of church closure. He happens to have presided over mainline Protestant churches during a period in which roughly 40 million Americans quit attending church. Those who did remain churchgoers over these years often veered toward more politically and culturally conservative faith communities. Burge was left standing in the middle as American belief polarized away from him and other moderate believers. It just so happens that Burge was also among those most equipped to analyze the erasure of America’s religious middle. The part-time pastor is also one of America’s preeminent religion number crunchers, a political scientist at the John C. Danforth Center at Washington University, St. Louis, and author of five books about religion (and irreligion) in the United States. His latest, The Vanishing Church, is about the hollowing out of moderate congregations. It isn’t just the heartbreak of his own church’s collapse that nags at Burge. It’s the broader trends of which his church was one part, making it a data point for how the Christian right’s more extreme influence bifurcated American religion and relationships. Mainline churches, which Burge notes once represented much higher degrees of American political, ideological, and economic mixing, are disappearing as Americans shift to the extremes.In the 1950s, more than half of Americans were associated with mainline churches, also known as the “Seven Sisters” of mainline Protestantism: the United Methodist Church, Episcopal Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterian Church (USA), United Church of Christ, American Baptist Church, and Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Burge describes what used to be a common scene: a thriving house of worship with factory workers taking communion right after lawyers and doctors; little kids sitting a row ahead of elders in their nineties; near-even odds of sitting next to a Republican or a Democrat.Through the 1970s, large swaths of Americans belonged to these mainline churches, but according to General Social Survey data, that cross-section of Americans has been thinning out for decades. By the early 1990s, only 19 percent of Americans were mainline Protestants. By 2022, the figure had dropped to 9 percent. Those who remain in these churches tend to be older. As Burge notes, since 2017 Episcopal priests have conducted more burials than baptisms. While a third of Presbyterian Church (USA) members are over 70 years of age, only 4 percent are children under 18. Time is not on the side of mainline churches.Today’s hollowed-out mainline churches are a remnant of the 1980s religious and political culture shifts. According to Burge’s research, as recently as 1984, 50 percent of white evangelicals were Democrats; 40 percent were Republicans. But throughout the Reagan years, as the Christian right grew in political prominence and became synonymous with evangelicalism, the portion of Democrats began to shrink. The portion of Republicans grew among white evangelicals after Barack Obama’s election, reaching 49 percent by 2010, then 55 percent in 2016, and on up to 63 percent by 2002. There’s a danger in “over-romanticizing ‘moderate’ spaces in the past,” notes Brian Kaylor, a Baptist minister and co-author of Baptizing America: How Mainline Protestants Helped Build Christian Nationalism. In the middle of the last century, notes Kaylor, it was mainline clergy and politicians who pushed Christian nationalism (e.g., putting “God” in the Pledge of Allegiance, making “In God We Trust” the national motto, creating the National Prayer Breakfast). Evangelical churches may have filled thanks to a good deal of attrition from more staid mainline churches, but today’s Christian nationalists are “building on the theological and civic foundation laid by mainline tradition,” according to Kaylor. It’s just that when they were mainliners, those conservatives used to have to sit alongside progressives.Burge predicts a similar polarization may be coming for Catholics, as well.There are pockets of renewed interest in Catholicism, namely among Traditionalist Catholics (or tradcaths), a growing subset of conservative Catholics who advocate for the Latin Mass, tend to break other post–Vatican II norms by dropping to their knees to receive the host on their tongue during communion, and practice complementarian gender roles. Enough tradcaths have been pushing for Latin Mass that in 2021, Pope Francis cracked down, reasserting restrictions on the old Latin Mass (that had been relaxed by Pope Benedict). Pope Francis believed the Latin Mass was being used by Catholics opposed to Second Vatican Council’s modernizing reforms and was fostering divisions within the faith.American Catholicism has plenty of progressive touchstones, from Dorothy Day’s Catholic Workers movement to Cesar Chavez’s labor movement, which linked Catholic social teachings with justice work. For decades, the majority of nonwhite Catholics have registered as Democrats.While over 70 percent of American Catholics are white, the denomination is becoming increasingly diverse over time. This does not mean Catholics’ voting habits are becoming more liberal. In 2024, according to Cooperative Election Study data, 64 percent of white Catholics voted for Trump. In 2016, 24 percent of nonwhite Catholics voted for Trump; in 2024, 40 percent did. Burge did a county-level analysis of voting results in 2020 and 2024 and found “the places that moved the most significantly toward the GOP had two things in common: The largest religious tradition was Catholicism, and huge portions of the population were Hispanic.”There is another sign of American Catholicism’s impending rightward tilt, and it’s coming from the pulpit. According to a survey administered by Catholic University of America that polled 10,000 priests, there has been a seismic shift in self-described theological views among priests over the past five decades. Among priests ordained between 1965 and 1969, only 16 percent considered themselves conservative (another 16 percent were “middle of the road,” and 68 percent were progressive). With each successive four-year cohort of priests, the rate of conservatism increased. Among those ordained in 2020 or later, 84 percent of the newest priests consider themselves conservative (14 percent middle of the road and just 2 percent progressive). As Burge writes, “The Catholic priesthood in the United States will likely be almost completely theologically homogeneous in the next thirty years as older priests retire and are replaced by new priests who are uniformly conservative.” He suspects the rightward shift of priests will drive out a lot of moderate, left-leaning, and social justice Catholics. Catholicism has seen a steep decline in attendance since 1972, when nearly half of Catholics reported attending mass once a week or more. Today, Burge notes, there are more U.S. Catholics who never attend mass than who attend weekly or more often. He speculates this might be part of the reason why the share of Catholics who attend weekly has dropped so much since the 1970s. “I think it’s, at least at some level, a rebellion against the conservatism of the Catholic hierarchy when the laity is not as conservative as they are.”While mainline pews emptied, some denominations suffered a sort of identity crisis with attempted centrism that believers with stricter convictions often found frustrating.For instance, compromise positions left denominations like the United Methodist Church open to yearslong battles over issues such as LGBTQ inclusion. Fissures started in 1972, with a compromise position of recognizing homosexuals as “persons of sacred worth,” while calling the practice of homosexuality “incompatible with Christian teaching.” In the late 1990s, United Methodist clergy were suspended and threatened with being defrocked over officiating gay marriages. While in some regions of the country, some queer clergy were tolerated so long as they didn’t “practice” homosexuality (openly have a queer relationship), others faced church charges over being “self-avowed, practicing homosexuals.” After years of fractious debate, in 2024, United Methodists voted on a regionalization plan that would allow American UMC churches to govern differently than other United Methodists abroad. Namely, United Methodists lifted prohibitions on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex nuptials in the United States. Progress came at a cost. Over 7,000 congregations left the denomination as part of a (mostly) amicable separation that allowed churches to leave with their properties between 2019 and 2023. It is the largest denominational split since the Civil War. In 1968, UMC had over 11 million members; in 2024, there were 3.9 million. While the exodus of churches in recent years was dramatic and sizeable, with over a million people leaving during the split, millions more left over the course of UMC’s yearslong fight over the issue. They just did so more privately, and without church property. There’s not much “middle” left.As Burge writes, today “there are huge geographic swaths of America where the only place a Protestant can worship on a Sunday morning is an evangelical church that takes a literalist view of the Bible and believes that women have no role in spiritual leadership.” America’s religious marketplace has largely been reduced, he continues, to a form of faith that is “objectionable, if not downright repulsive, to a significant number of Americans.”While progressive Christians certainly do still exist in this country, their left-leaning political kin are far more likely to be religiously unaffiliated.As more conservative believers tended to become evangelicals, right-wing Christianity repelled a lot of progressives and moderates from church altogether. The rise of the religious right may have grown white evangelicalism, gutted mainline Protestantism, and started pulling Catholicism further right, but it also “pushed a growing number of Americans, especially young adults, to no longer align with any religious tradition at all,” Burge writes.Depending upon the survey, between 25 percent and 35 percent of Americans consider themselves nonreligious (atheists, agnostics, or “nothing in particular”). One of the greatest predictors of a person also identifying as a religious “none” is political belief. Burge notes that “nones” are experiencing “purification pressures” similar (if opposed) to those of white, evangelical Christians. Between 2016 and 2018, the share of atheists who described themselves, on an ideological scale, as “very liberal” doubled. Their view that the Republican Party was “very conservative” (the farthest end of the scale in the other direction) also doubled. In the same Cooperative Election Study data, spanning from 2012 to 2023, atheists also have viewed themselves as more liberal than the Democratic Party. While it might be hard to find a left-leaning believer in many evangelical churches, Burge notes it may be even harder to find an atheist who voted for Trump or an agnostic who favors tighter abortion restrictions. “People on the ends of the political spectrum want their religious tradition” or lack thereof “to reflect their own political proclivities,” Burge notes. And so, religion (or nonreligion) becomes a sort of tribal marker that reflects political leaning and preserves boundaries against those with whom we disagree.Not only have Americans’ religious views fractured along political lines, but the split has also corresponded with economic stratification. According to Burge’s research, and based upon General Social Survey data, in the 1970s there was no real difference in religious attendance of people at the top and bottom income brackets. By the 1980s, the bottom quarter of earners increasingly said they never attended services. By 2018, 35 percent of people in the bottom income bracket never attended church.At the same time, there’s a bubble of weekly regular church attendance among people who earn more than $70,000 a year. Regular church attendance peaks at incomes of $100,000 and $120,000. People most likely to attend church usually have a bachelor’s degree, are married and have children and a solid income. Burge tells a story about a Sunday morning at a Methodist church during his college years. During a part of the service when congregants voiced concerns and asked for prayers, a young man asked for prayers to help him get a job. He’d lost his job and was afraid he wouldn’t make rent. He’d come to church that morning with his girlfriend and their baby. At the end of the service, an older man dashed back to the man at the back of the sanctuary and offered him a job in his lumberyard, starting the next day. Such a scene is less likely to play out in many mainline churches today. The needy family would be less likely to attend; the upper-income boss might have a different attitude about offering a job.The other side of income homogeneity at church is that it is less and less likely that many well-off, conservative evangelicals will come into contact with people less fortunate than themselves at their religious services. Such conservatives, who also often oppose social services that low-income families depend upon, are insulated in congregations where they rarely have to confront others with real needs just down the pew and part of their in-group faith community. In Burge’s view, loss of the old mixing place once represented by mainline denominations is a threat to our democracy.Kaylor agrees that the loss of middle spaces for Americans to meet across political and religious continuums is a serious problem that harms our civil society and our religious communities. But it’s hard to have real fellowship with people from different perspectives, backgrounds, and beliefs, Kaylor notes, when some “refuse to acknowledge the right of other voices or refuse to enter into good-faith dialogue.” We might already be too polarized to circle back to that middle. And there’s a danger, Kaylor warns, of harkening to the “good ol’ days” of mainline mingling when that cross-section represented diversity largely among white people. It’s just that today is not “good,” either, however much our siloed feedback loops reenforce that we are each, in our far corners, right.Burge now attends the Methodist church that contributed flowers to his former church on the day of their last service. He tends to sit in the last row, all the way back in the corner. Yet he keeps showing up because he feels the need to “be constantly reminded of the fact that I am not as good as I think I am.” A middle-of-the-road Protestant who wants the familiar press of sometimes awkward community, in a strain of religion on the verge of extinction, Burge is an increasingly rare species, signaling the importance of his endangered habitat.If America could survive wars, the Great Depression, and 9/11, “but we are taken down by political and religious polarization,” Burge writes, “then we may not be as good as we once were.”

Laura Ingraham Makes Racist Flub Live On Air
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The Majority Report • Feb 1, 2026

Laura Ingraham Makes Racist Flub Live On Air

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The Majority Report • Jan 31, 2026

Making Fun Of The Unfunny | Bryan Quinby & Chris James | TMR

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