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Is Donald Trump’s bid to brand Democrats as ‘radical’ communists working?
(So many Americans are poorly educated and react to labels and that is the Republican audience. Remember in 2016 in Nevada Trump said "I love the poorly educated".)
"In deep red South Carolina, the president helped stoke apprehension of a deeper red surge ahead of November’s US midterm elections
President Donald Trump dances during a campaign event for Senator Darline Graham Nordone, a Republican from South Carolina, not pictured, ahead of a Republican special primary runoff election at the Myrtle Beach Convention Center in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, US, on Friday, Aug. 21, 2026. South Carolina is holding a Republican special primary runoff election on August 25.Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images
After casting his vote inSouth Carolina, a man who introduced himself as Chestnut was unwilling to give his full name. “You don’t have a need to know,” the air force veteran declared. He was, however, happy to share his views.
“I’m a true American. I believe in the USA,” said the man, outside Christ the Servant Lutheran church in Conway. “And I don’t believe in communism or socialism.”
The US president had traveled down to South Carolina days before the vote, reaching for a familiar theme as he rallied supporters to get behind his handpicked candidate. Also on the ballot was a message that Trump has been ramping up in recent months.
“So theDemocratshate our country. They’re communists,” Trump declared at a rally in Myrtle Beach. During the speech, he mentioned communists or communism no fewer than 13 times. “They’re radical left lunatics.”
As Democrats have looked left in some primaries, nominating socialists to represent the party in November’s US midterm elections, Trump has increasingly – erroneously – claimed the party has been overrun by communists. “You can be a communist or you can be a patriot,” hesaid in the shadow of Mount Rushmoreduring the US 250th birthday celebrations this summer. “You cannot be both.”
As Trump seeks to galvanize his base ahead of November’s US midterm elections, the thoughts of voters in South Carolina, and fears of an ascendant “Communist party” on the left, offer a window into how his efforts are faring.
Chestnut was not the only voter with whom such warnings appeared to resonate. In deep red South Carolina, where no Democrat has won statewide in 20 years, there is apprehension of a deeper red surge inUS politics.
“I don’t like the DSA,” Charles Rogers said, referring to the Democratic Socialists of America, as he left a polling station at Marion intermediate school. “I don’t like how the Democrats want to back them. Democrats used to be for the working man, but something’s changed … I do not agree with the DSA, and more Democrats are backing them with crazy ideas.”
While DSA members would adamantly describe themselves as standingforworking people, fears of communism coming for America – fanned by Trump – were on the mind of Republican voters contemplating their choices on Tuesday, and in November.
Lee and Donna Criswell voted on Tuesday afternoon at the Lamar library in Darlington county, South Carolina. Asked what issues they viewed as politically important, Lee replied: “We’re concerned about the socialism thing going on in some parts of the country. I don’t think we have an issue regardless of whether you’re Republican or Democrat here in South Carolina, but I don’t know where it’s going, you know, in other areas.”
“We want to maintain our freedoms,” Donna added.
As Trump continues to level allegations of political “extremism” at the feet of the Democrats, his own extreme actions – frompersistent election denialto thepursuit of his political enemies– continue to cause alarm in much of the country. Such concerns were not raised by Republicans in South Carolina who spoke to the Guardian this week.
Zachary Cogan, a retired army engineer voting in Lamar, called himself a transplant from the “communist state” of New York. He said he was looking for responsiveness and accountability from conservative political leaders, saying: “We’re not importing [New York City mayor Zohran] Mamdani voters into South Carolina. South Carolina has no danger of turning purple.”
Cogan thought about the political environment he left behind, and laughed. “I mean, when you have to say [US Senate minority leader] Chuck Schumer is the more moderate of the Democrats, that’s going the wrong way. OK? But why – why are the Democrats … well, you’ve got the Communist party now that is so pro-intifada.”
But they have also become daily fodder for conservative cable news channels like Newsmax or Fox News, and social media accounts on Facebook and X. The fear of communism has become a driving rhetorical force on the right.
Fox and other media outlets catering to a conservative audience have been amplifying the anticommunist rhetoric of Trump, according to Brian Leiter, a law professor and director of the Center for Law, Philosophy & Human Values at the University of Chicago. Leiter co-authored a book on Karl Marx and is a keen observer of America’s history with red-baiting politics.
“Trump and Fox News work in tandem on these things. They’re mutually reinforcing,” Leiter said. “Trump understands red-baiting better than anyone, because who was his mentor? Roy Cohn. And Roy Cohn was, of course, legal counsel to Joseph McCarthy in the original purge and political persecution.”
The words “socialist” or “socialism” have been mentioned almost 6,000 times in Fox News programming since 1 January, according to a search of the Internet Archive’sdatabaseof show transcripts. The word “communist” appeared more than 1,700 times. In each case, mentions spiked sharply in May and have steadily increased, occurring about five times as often in August as they did in April.
Often, Leiter said, Fox invites on its shows members of the DSA who – unlike media-savvy Democrats like Mamdani or congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez – look and sound like progressive caricatures, espousing fringe views within the Democratic party, unwilling or unable to articulate the difference between the beliefs of a democratic socialist and a committed communist.
“I gather they have been doing a lot on democratic socialism on the theory that it’ll help the Republican party,” Leiter said. “Communism has always been a bogeyman in American politics in a way it’s not in Europe, say, and it’s not helped by the fact that every self-proclaimed communist government was a disaster … None of these people – Zohran Mamdani, Bernie Sanders, AOC – none of them are communists. They’re not even close.”
But those distinctions do not seem to have generally filtered down to rank-and-file Republican voters of South Carolina. Trump’s rhetoric has landed."
Federal agents in Newark, New Jersey, on 30 May.Photograph: Julius Constantine Motal/The Guardian
TheTrump administrationhas been deploying an obscure legal maneuver to try to obtain private information on journalists, non-profits and unions, raising alarm over a power the government has asserted without judicial oversight.
In one instance, the government obtained six months of telephone records forGeorgia Fort, a Minneapolis journalist. Fort was not notified of the request for her information, nor was she given a chance to contest the government’s effort to obtain them, her lawyerssaid in court papers.
In February of this year, federal prosecutors twicesought search warrantsfor account information for the YouTube channel of Fort and the journalist Don Lemon, both of whom have pleaded not guilty to criminal charges in connection to a protest at a Minneapolis church in January that they were covering. A judge twice rejected the request,writingthat the government had failed to establish probable cause of a crime and that he wanted Lemon and Fort to be informed of the request so they could have a chance to challenge it. About a month after the judge’s ruling in late February, the governmentsaid it was withdrawingthe request.
But officials hadn’t given up on getting the data.
Less than a month later, theDHS served Googlewith a different request for the YouTube information. This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official. It served Google an administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law –19 USC 1509– dealing with customs imports. The provision gives the DHS broad power to inspect records in order to determine whether duties and taxes are being correctly levied on imported items. It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.
The DHS summons was issued under a statute that does give the agency broad power to demand records, but only in the limited circumstance of there being a need to investigate a customs issue, said Chris Duncan, a former lawyer at the Department of Homeland Security. “These laws have absolutely nothing to do with a domestic situation at a church, a social media post, even an immigration matter,” he said.
“It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. It’s hard to know where to begin,” said John Roth, who served as the inspector general for the Department of Homeland Security from 2014 to 2017. “This is an improper use of the subpoena under any circumstances. This is not a customs case; it is not a customs violation. They are not investigating a customs violation.”
The episode in Minnesota was particularly alarming because it appeared to be an end run around a judge who was skeptical of the government’s need for the information.
“There is no judge in the loop. You don’t have that independent authority to scrutinize the demand and to say whether or not it’s legitimate,” said Caitlin Vogus, a senior adviser at the Freedom of the Press Foundation.
The DHS alsosought and obtainedsix months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.
“That’s very concerning because the information demanded can help the government uncover a journalist’s confidential sources,” Vogus said.
In a statement, T-Mobile did not address why it turned over the information.
“We take our responsibility to protect customers’ privacy and personal information very seriously. Our team carefully reviews government demands for customer information and responds in accordance with the law. We don’t comment on specific law enforcement demands,” the company said.
The Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security both declined to comment on the use of the summons.
In addition to Fort and Lemon, the DHSalso soughtinformation on the YouTube accounts for the left-leaning outlet Democracy Now, conservative podcaster Megyn Kelly, the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel and an independent journalist named Brendan Gutenschwager. Some of the videos they cited in the summons were livestreams of the protest, but not all of them. The video cited as part of the request for information on Democracy Now involved a news report on the protest and an interview with Nekima Levy Armstrong, who led the protest. The video cited on the request for Kelly’s show included an interview with Jonathan Parnell, the pastor at the church.
It’s unclear why exactly the DHS wanted the YouTube account information, which includes things like a user’s IP address, and information about when a user was logging in.
“It’s still concerning that the government sought subscriber information for Lemon and Fort because there’s no reason it would need this information for the criminal charges that it’s brought against them,” Vogus said. “It’s not a crime to post a YouTube video, and it’s not at all clear why the government is demanding this information about Lemon and Fort’s YouTube accounts.”
The episode was the most recent example of an alarming pattern in recent months in which the DHS avoided judicial scrutiny and deployed a summons related to customs enforcement to pressure companies into turning over information on Americans. The US constitution’s fourth amendment protects againstunreasonable searches and seizuresand law enforcement generally must show a judge or a grand jury they have probable cause to believe the materials they want to search will produce evidence of a crime.
But over the last few months, the Department of Homeland Security has undertaken a brazen effort to get around that fundamental safeguard. In addition to efforts to obtain records on Minnesota journalists, the DHS has used 1509 summonses to pressure social media companies to unmask the identities of people who have criticized ICE officers and to obtain financial information on a host of unions and left-leaning non-profit organizations in Minneapolis.
In a separate case in which15 activists face criminal conspiracy charges, DHS successfully obtained the financial records of the Sunrise Movement, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the Communications Workers of America, as well asVenmo recordsfor a non-profit organization called Voices for Racial Justice. None of the organizations is charged with crimes and the DHS did not offer an explanation for why it needed the records. PayPal, Venmo’s parent company, declined to comment.
“There’s a long history of DHS abusing this summons authority in particular, and using it to seek both records that are clearly outside of its scope in general, and more particularly to try to go after people whose speech DHS is somehow irked by – but whose speech is protected by the first amendment,” said Nathan Freed Wessler, a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union who specializes in privacy issues.
It is difficult to determine the frequency with which the DHS is serving the 1509 summonses and how often they are successful in obtaining information. The summonses often remain hidden from public view unless the company being served, or the user, challenges them. Companies are not required to notify users that they have been served with a 1509 summons for information, though some do. The New York Timesreported in Februarythat the DHS had served hundreds of administrative subpoenas on social media companies for information on users.
“Without knowing how many of these subpoenas there are and what they’re being used for, there’s no way for courts or lawmakers or the public to put checks on executive branch abuses,” said Wessler, the ACLU attorney.
In the Minneapolis church case involving Lemon and Fort, the Trump administration has argued it had the power to use the customs-related summons to obtain information even though the crimes the defendants were charged with have nothing to do with customs. The protesters entered the church because a local ICE official was a pastor there, and could have potentially assaulted him or interfered with his duties, justice department lawyerswrote in a filingearlier this year. Even though the man does not appear to have been there, and there were no DHS officials at the church or involved in the protest, lawyers said the DHS was entitled to issue the summons because it was investigating a potential assault on a law enforcement officer.
In court filings, the Trump administration has argued the Department of Homeland Security has the power to demand such records without judicial oversight.
“Although § 1509 references ‘duties, fees, and taxes,’ the plain language of the statute does not limit DHS’s investigative authority to those subjects; instead, DHS is authorized to investigate potential crimes to ensure ‘compliance with the laws of the United States administered by the United States Customs Service,’” which has been folded into the Department of Homeland Security,a lawyer wrotein a December court filing last year.
That is an overbroad misreading of the statute, one expert said.
“I don’t buy that,” said Duncan, the former DHS lawyer. “It’s not a free-for-all that was thrown in there. Congress does not operate that way. Given these provisions were specifically incorporated into title 19, the customs statute, Congress obviously intended to authorize only records, demands and interviews in furtherance of investigations into customs violations, not wild goose chases into possible violations of any federal law without any judicial oversight.”
In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHSby sayingit had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation.
A Google spokesperson said the company reviews each request for data it gets to ensure it is legal and pushes back when it is too broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.
Many social media companies say they notify users when law enforcement makes a request for their information and give them a chance to contest the summons. It’s not always clear what the companies will do if the user doesn’t respond or won’t contest the request themselves. But privacy expertsquestionwhether that notice is adequate, saying many users are confused when they are contacted and do not have the resources to get a lawyer to contest the demand in court.
“They want people to think that they are going to stand up for people’s privacy, but they really shifted the burden completely onto the user,” said Lauren Regan, executive director of the Civil Liberties Defense Center, which represented a Reddit user who challenged the government’s efforts to get Reddit to reveal their identity through a 1509 summons.
Companies are not required to respond to a 1509 summons and can ignore the request if they think it is unlawful, forcing the government to go to court to try to enforce the summons. The Guardian was unable to identify any cases where the government attempted to get a court order to enforce a 1509 summons outside of the traditional customs context. Companies can also file their own motions to try to quash the summonses.
“If a user actually hired a lawyer, it would cost tens of thousands of dollars to fight one of these,” said F Mario Trujillo, a lawyer at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog. “They are not shouldering that burden; they’re pushing that cost onto users and onto non-profit groups when they could easily get their high-powered lawyers who are being paid $500 to $1,000 an hour to fight these.”
In 2017, Twitterfiled a lawsuitchallenging a Department of Homeland Security 1509 summonsseeking to unmaskan account, @alt_uscis, that was critical of the DHS. The department ultimately withdrew the summons.
In several cases, the DHS has withdrawn a 1509 summons after it was challenged in court and before a judge could rule on its legality. That may be a deliberate strategy to avoid having a judge rule on the legality of the summons.
In one instance last year, the DHS served a 1509 summons on Meta to unmask the user behind an Instagram and Facebook account that monitored ICE agent activities in the Philadelphia suburbs. The user challenged the summons in court, saying it was clearly not authorized under the law. Lawyers for the DHS defended the summons, saying it fell within the scope of laws the DHS enforced. Both sides presented arguments before a judge on 15 January and DHS withdrew the summons the next day.
“They don’t want a judge to take away this scary tool because they are getting stuff out of it,” Regan said. “Once a court ruling says ‘thou shalt not use this statute’, it does not apply.”
In 2017, the DHS inspector generalissued a reportfinding “inconsistent – and, in some cases, improper” – use of the 1509 summonses after the @alt_uscis case.
The office of the inspector general review found that officials in Customs and Border Protection’s office of professional responsibility were regularly misusing the subpoena and recommended a series of reforms to ensure more oversight over those that were used. The officeagreedto the reforms."
Senator Jon Ossoff, the youngest sitting senator and the only Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump won in 2024, hasn’t moderated his message in his critical race.
At rallies across Georgia this summer, Senator Jon Ossoff has delivered a series of blistering rebukes of the president and a challenger for his seat, Representative Mike Collins.Alex Kent/The New York Times
Robert Jimison, a congressional correspondent who has covered Georgia politics for more than a decade, reported from across the state.
Senator Jon Ossoff of Georgia entered this election cycle with every reason to tack to the political middle.
He is the only Senate Democrat seeking re-election this year in a state President Trump carried in 2024, making him one of the most vulnerable incumbents in his party and an obvious Republican target from the start.
But Mr. Ossoff hasn’t moderated his votes or his message to appeal to a broader swath of voters, as Democrats in competitive statewide races often do in the conservative-leaning South. Instead, he has dived into his party’s efforts to thwart the president’s agenda in Congress, and sharpened his attacks on Mr. Trump and Republicans on the campaign trail.
The approach risks alienating some members of the coalition whose backing he needs to win re-election in Georgia, including independents and conservative-leaning voters.
His strategy appears to be based in large part on taking advantage of two factors: Mr. Trump’s sagging approval ratings — a Fox News poll in June found him with net-negative ratings in Georgia, with 56 percent holding an unfavorable view of him — and a Republican challenger endorsed by the president, Representative Mike Collins, who is regarded by strategists in both parties as relatively weak.
Mr. Ossoff has submitted himself to little tough questioning and has not pushed any major policy proposal. He has leaned heavily on circulating flattering video clips of himself making his case, and in a recent interview with The New York Times, stuck to a disciplined script as he laid out his theory of the race.
“The crisis that the nation’s mired in is born in large part of widespread disillusionment that flows from negligent and ineffective public service,” he said between campaign stops in Savannah. “Trumpism feeds on and deepens the sense that the Constitution, the Congress, elected officials, don’t care and can’t deliver.”
The message appears to be resonating. Less than three months from Election Day, Mr. Ossoff leads Mr. Collins in every major public poll and holds a commanding fund-raising advantage, putting him in a strong position to keep a key seat critical to Democrats’ uphill battle to win control of the Senate.
At rallies across Georgia this summer, he has delivered a series of blistering rebukes of the president and Mr. Collins.
In Savannah, standing in front of a large crowd of supporters last month, he said Mr. Collins lacked the “judgment and integrity to serve in the United States Senate” and labeled him a Trump “puppet.” In Atlanta this month, he said Mr. Trump and those close to him — a group he calls the “Mar-a-Lago mafia” — have “taken American corruption to spectacular new heights,” a line he has used repeatedly. He has called Mr. Trump a “draft-dodging, crook president,” and recently drew the president’s rage by mentioning the name of his most devoted aide, Natalie Harp, as part of a screed in which he said that Mr. Trump “doesn’t want to do the job” of being president.
Along the way, his adherence to anti-Trump talking points — he repeats some so consistently that he can at times sound almost robotic — has turned Mr. Ossoff, at 39 the youngest member of the Senate, into a social media sensation. It has fed speculation he refuses to indulge about his potential as a presidential contender in 2028 at a time when other Democrats have struggled to coalesce around a clear message.
Mr. Ossoff still faces challenges in a state Mr. Trump won less than two years ago. Mr. Collins, the 59-year-old son of former Representative Mac Collins of Georgia, has focused heavily on the issues that animate the Republican base — illegal immigration, transgender athletes, crime and grievances surrounding the 2020 election — while adopting an aggressive online persona of the kind Mr. Ossoff has eschewed.
In Washington, Mr. Ossoff has not made the traditional election-year pivot to the center. He joined Democrats last year in voting to shut down the government — and against repeated efforts to reopen — in an unsuccessful bid to force Republicans to extend expiring health care subsidies. He did so again this year as part of Democrats’ failed attempt to impose new limits on the tactics of federal immigration agents.
As his party has shifted away from unequivocal backing for Israel, Mr. Ossoff has grown more critical as well; he has voted repeatedly, including twice this year, to limit or block some American weapons transfers to the Jewish state. But this week, he broke with Hasan Piker, the left-wing streamer, saying he “unreservedly rejects” a comment Mr. Piker made warning that support for Israel could prompt violence against American Jews.
He also drew outsized attention last month when he questioned Jay Clayton, Mr. Trump’s nominee to lead the nation’s intelligence community, so intensively at his confirmation hearing that Mr. Clayton was briefly left speechless. In the Times interview, Mr. Ossoff — who has made it a standard practice to repeat the same question several times in such settings — said he meticulously prepares for such moments.
“I take great satisfaction in putting folks who have abused their power on the spot and forcing them, through effective investigation and interrogation, to answer for what they’ve done,” Mr. Ossoff said.
But in recent months, the senator, a former congressional aide and documentary film executive, has also aggressively courted Republican backers. He appears to be winning over some, despite his frequent verbal broadsides against the president.
In Toccoa, a city of less than 10,000 residents in the foothills of northeast Georgia, Mayor Gail Fry, a lifelong Republican who voted against Mr. Ossoff when he ran six years ago, is backing the senator.
“We have gotten more support from Senator Ossoff than any other office that we’ve contacted,” she said in an interview, citing an $8.4 million federal grant he secured to replace aging natural-gas infrastructure. “He calls us and says, ‘What do you need?’”
Other local Republican officials, including Mayor Scott James Matheson of Valdosta and Mayor Julie Smith of Tifton, also endorsed Mr. Ossoff.
In the interview, Mr. Ossoff said that bad public service is what ushered in the Trump era and that voters would reward him for focusing on the basics.
“Thousands of folks across the state have my cellphone number,” he said. “They know that I will move heaven and earth to deliver for them, no matter their politics.”
He rejected the notion that his harsh criticism of the president — in the interview, he called Mr. Trump “a disgrace” and his administration “an obscenity” — would alienate the voters he needs to win. And he argued he was still able to work with Republicans when necessary.
“A big part of my job is to have the legislative skill and the relationships across the aisle to get results for the state,” Mr. Ossoff said. “I don’t think these things are in tension.”
That is a tricky balance to strike in an election year. Partisan tensions are running high as Mr. Collins is working to draw a stark contrast with Mr. Ossoff on issues including law enforcement and border security in a state that remains conservative.
At a campaign event this month, Mr. Collins said the choice between himself and Mr. Ossoff was “common sense versus communism crazy.”
Speaking to a crowd of supporters in Augusta, he called Mr. Ossoff a “trust fund kid” and portrayed him as out of step with the state’s deeply conservative values, accusing the senator of voting “to have that border wide open,” for the Biden-era domestic policy bill “that caused all this runaway inflation,” and for legislation “to allow men to play in girls’ sports.”
(Mr. Ossoff voted with his party last year to block Republican-written legislation aimed at barring transgender women and girls from school sports teams designated for female students.)
Mr. Ossoff, for his part, has attacked Mr. Collins for his ties to aides who have trafficked in racist and antisemitic material and associated with prominent bigots. The Washington Post reported this week that a former staff member had posted an image of a swastika and one in which he appeared to be dressed in Ku Klux Klan garb. (In a statement to The Times, a spokesman for Mr. Collins said he “unequivocally condemns” the posts.) The Republican also replaced his chief of staff last month after reports that he had been in communication with the white supremacists Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer.
Mr. Ossoff’s strong position in the race, formidable fund-raising and increasingly prominent confrontations with Trump administration officials have supercharged speculation about his presidential prospects, a topic he stubbornly avoids.
“I have zero interest in running for president in 2028, and, frankly, zero interest in the 2028 fantasy football right now,” Mr. Ossoff said in a recent interview on MS NOW.
Mr. Collins has sought to capitalize on the presidential chatter to portray Ms. Ossoff as out of touch with the state.
“Jon Ossoff sees Georgia as nothing more than a steppingstone and has abandoned our state to court the radical El-Sayed, Hasan Piker wing of the Democrat Party,” said Meyer Siegfried, Mr. Collins’s spokesman, referring to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan.
Yet some longtime Republicans are looking past Mr. Ossoff’s party affiliation.
Gary Paulk, a fifth-generation muscadine grape farmer in Wray, a small community in deeply Republican South Georgia, once backed Mr. Trump and plans to vote this fall for Rick Jackson, the Republican nominee for governor.
But for Senate, Mr. Paulk plans to support Mr. Ossoff.
He disagrees with the Democrat on abortion, among other issues, but Mr. Paulk has experienced the negative impacts of many of Mr. Trump’s policy moves — including tariffs that have raised his costs, an immigration crackdown he complained left crops to rot for lack of workers to pick them, and health care cuts that have hit rural areas like his particularly hard.
“You pick what’s important, and you go with the person that’s best,” he said. “You’re never going to find anybody that does everything like you want it.”
Robert Jimison covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on defense issues and foreign policy.“
(I unsubscribed from my years long subscription to the Washington Post due to it's ongoing racist decisions and policies)
"An arbitrator ordered the newspaper to reinstate Karen Attiah, who was fired after posting about “white men who espouse hatred and violence” following Charlie Kirk’s killing.
Karen Attiah in 2018. “This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said.Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Glamour
A private arbitrator has ordered The Washington Post to rehire the opinion columnist Karen Attiah, who was fired in September over her social media posts about the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. It also ordered the company to compensate her with back pay.
Sarah Miller Espinosa, the arbitrator, said in a written decision Thursday that The Post “did not have good and sufficient cause” to terminate Ms. Attiah and “violated” its labor agreement, according to a copy of the decision shared with The New York Times by Ms. Attiah’s lawyers.
“The Washington Post failed to establish the grievant engaged in gross misconduct,” Ms. Espinosa wrote.
In a statement, Ms. Attiah said that she hoped the decision “sends a message to journalists and media institutions everywhere that freedom of expression is always worth fighting for.” She said that she was “willing to go back” to her work at The Post, which she called “one of the world’s most storied newspapers.”
“This decision confirms what we’ve said from the start: I was doing my job as an opinion writer, and this was wrongful termination,” she said, adding that she was “relieved to finally have that record set straight.”
A spokeswoman for The Post said that the company respects the arbitration process and declined to comment further.
The decision is the result of a yearlong fight between The Post and Ms. Attiah, who last yearaccused the companyof violating its labor agreement and social media policy when it fired her for posts she said were within her purview as an opinion columnist. A clause in the agreement allows employees to submit disputes for arbitration.
Arbitration is generally considered binding in most disputes, though courts have occasionally overturned decisions after courtroom findings of fraud or other improprieties. The Post’s labor agreement says that arbitration is binding, though both the company and the employee retain their legal rights.
The Washington Post said in its termination letter that Ms. Attiah’s posts about Mr. Kirk had harmed “the integrity” of the organization and violated standards requiring employees to use social media with civility and respect.
Ms. Attiah’s remarks about Mr. Kirk’s assassination, which she posted to the social network Bluesky on Sept. 10, the day he was shot, responded to the outpouring of grief after the shooting. “Refusing to tear my clothes and smear ashes on my face in performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence is … not the same as violence,” Ms. Attiah wrote in one of the posts.
The Post’s opinion section has been in flux since early last year, when Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s owner, moved to reorient the section to focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” Some readers canceled their subscriptions and accused Mr. Bezos of attempting to curry favor with the Trump administration.
Lawyers for The Washington Post and Ms. Attiah made their arguments before Ms. Espinosa in June during a hearing that included testimony from Ms. Attiah; Adam O’Neal, then the opinion editor at The Washington Post; and Wayne Connell, the company’s chief human resources officer. Ms. Attiah was represented by the Washington-Baltimore News Guild and Democracy Defenders Fund, a nonprofit co-founded by the lawyer Norman Eisen.
In his testimony, Mr. O’Neal said that he saw Ms. Attiah’s posts the morning after Mr. Kirk died and sent them to Mr. Connell, according to a transcript of the hearing obtained by The New York Times. “Karen’s social media feed yesterday and today is beyond the pale, completely unacceptable for someone associated with Opinions,” Mr. O'Neal wrote, according to the transcript.
Soon after, Mr. O’Neal and Mr. Connell met with Will Lewis, then the chief executive of The Washington Post, to discuss the posts, according to the transcript. They ultimately decided to fire Ms. Attiah.
During her testimony, Ms. Attiah defended her social media posts, saying that they were part of her work for The Post, “commenting on our discourse on political violence,” Ms. Attiah said, according to the transcript.
In a statement, Mr. Eisen called the decision “a landmark victory for one of our nation’s crusading journalists.”
Corrected on
Aug. 24, 2026
An earlier version of this article misidentified the name of a group that is defending Karen Attiah. It is Democracy Defenders Fund, not Democracy Defenders Action.
“Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Josh Shapiro of fabricating two measles-associated deaths in Pennsylvania, despite Kennedy’s history of vaccine misinformation. Shapiro urged vaccination cooperation; health officials verified the cases.
It’s quite the charge coming from someone who made a career of promoting skepticism of scientific data and spreading misinformation.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused Josh Shapiro of lying about measles despite Kennedy’s own record of spreading vaccine misinformation.Carson Elm-Picard / MS NOW; Alex Kent / Getty Images; Andrew Harnik / Getty Images; BSIP / Universal Images Group via Getty Images
There’s a terrible irony baked into Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s latest feud. For the last several days, he’s been engaged in an angry back and forth with Gov. Josh Shapiro over the Pennsylvania Democrat’s announcement Tuesday of two measles-associated deaths in his state. According to the state’s Department of Health, neither of the two individuals were vaccinated against the disease.
After all, here we have a man who has made a literal career out of promoting skepticism toward scientific evidence and spreading misinformation.
Kennedy has taken offense at Shapiro’s “unseemly rush” to hold a press conference in Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, as he put it in a post on X. The secretary even said that “the deaths may even have been altogether fabricated by one of the Governor’s hopeful staffers.” Such a major accusation would be eyebrow-raising from anyone but is particularly galling coming from Kennedy. After all, here we have a man who has made a literal career out of promoting skepticism toward scientific evidence and spreading misinformation. But his attacks on Shapiro can’t deflect from the role he’s played in encouraging Americans to reject vaccination.
“The performance was a replay of the Democrats’ COVID playbook: fearmongering, misinformation, finger-pointing, and the weaponization of infectious disease fears for political gain,” Kennedy wrote in his X post. He also accused Shapiro of refusing to share information about the deaths with the Centers for Disease Control or the County Health Department. Shapiro pushed back in his own post to “set the record straight,” writing that in a phone call ahead of Tuesday’s press conference, he told Kennedy that “what would be most helpful is if he would join me in encouraging people to get vaccinated and stop spreading misinformation.”
Two factors are driving this online tit-for-tat. First is the term “measles-associated deaths.” Kennedy and Lancaster County Commissioner Josh Parsons, a Republican, have suggested the phrasing means Shapiro is overhyping these two deaths. The Pennsylvania Health Department, along with Shapiro’s office, told Politico in an emailed statement that it “uses the term ‘measles-associated’ when laboratory or epidemiologic evidence of measles is present, but the disease may not be assessed by the medical certifier or coroner to be the immediate cause of death.”
The other is a claim from Parsons that the county coroner’s office “currently has ZERO reported cases where measles is the immediate cause of death,” and only one death of a person who had measles. It feels silly to have to say, but regardless of whether it was the direct cause of death or not, the mere presence of measles in the community is a major problem. That’s especially true when vaccination rates have been falling across the U.S. And the Pennsylvania Health Department did confirm to Politico that “one of the two deaths is the one Parsons referred to: an infant with a positive measles test.”
“What is the cure for measles? Cure for measles is chicken soup and vitamin A, and neither of those things can be patented,” he told the crowd at an Amish country fair. (Unsurprisingly, his claims about the miraculous powers of vitamin A have not stood up to scientific scrutiny.) Kennedy went on to praise the attendees for rejecting vaccination and warned: “To all of you people who are Amish in here today, they are coming for you because they cannot stand the fact that you are healthy.”
Amazingly, Kennedy even wants credit for the current measles outbreak not being worse. During a press conference Wednesday, he said that the U.S. is “doing a better job than any country in the world in controlling the measles outbreak.” Left unsaid in that claim is that America’s low case rate is both almost entirely due to our extremely high vaccination rate. In contrast, countries with the highest ongoing measles outbreaks are those where it is exceedingly difficult to vaccinate vulnerable populations. The CDC’s websiteeven says that new outbreaks in the U.S. are largely due to “unvaccinated international travelers.”
Amazingly, Kennedy even wants credit for the current measles outbreak not being worse.
Despite Kennedy’s accusation of “fabrication,” Pennsylvania Health Secretary Debra Bogen posted on X Wednesday that her department’s “Epidemiology team thoroughly investigated and verified both individuals tested positive for measles.” Kennedy’s effort to undercut those findings is only prompting further mistrust toward public health officials. It’s maddening then to hear him claim the opposite, that his work is meant to restore the public’s trust that he and his allies worked so hard to erode.
The reality is that Kennedy’s attacks on vaccine safety and efforts to pare back vaccine requirements are actively harmful. Measles cases have surged in the U.S. to their highest in 30 years. The proper response to the deaths in Pennsylvania would be to offer increased monitoring assistance and stress the importance of vaccination to prevent further spread. Kennedy’s PR offensive against Shapiro shows how misguided his priorities remain.“
