When an assassin murdered Charlie Kirk in September 2025, the MAGA movement seized the moment to demand a campaign of repression. Vice President Vance called for an ambitious program to 'go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.' He named the Ford Foundation, Open Society Foundations, and The Nation magazine as examples of candidates for the retaliation he had in mind. The people who faced consequences after the killing almost universally did so for things they had written or said, not for acts of violence. In November, Reuters counted some 600 cases of people who were fired, suspended, or otherwise disciplined for their speech about Kirk's life and death. Now another gunman has attacked political targets. At the White House Correspondents' Association dinner, a man discharged a firearm in the vicinity of hundreds of people from the worlds of politics, media, and business'among them, the president and vice president of the United States. Although much about the event remains unclear, the available evidence suggests that the gunman was motivated by an anti-Trump agenda. Yet this time, MAGA's immediate response to political violence has been much less aggressive. At his press conference after yesterday's attempted shooting, President Trump cited the attack as proof of the need for his wished-for White House ballroom. Social-media accounts that take their cues from the White House promptly echoed the message....

A government customer of sanctioned spyware maker Intellexa hacked the phone of a prominent journalist in Angola, according to Amnesty International, the latest case of targeting someone in civil society with powerful phone hacking software. The human rights organization published a new report Tuesday analyzing several hacking attempts against local journalist and press freedom activist Teixeira Candido, in which he was sent a series of malicious links via WhatsApp during 2024. The new research shows again that government customers of commercial surveillance vendors are increasingly using spyware used to target journalists, politicians, and other ordinary citizens, including critics. Researchers have previously found evidence of Predator abuse in Egypt, Greece, and Vietnam, where the government reportedly targeted U.S. officials by sending the spyware via links on X. Intellexa is one of the most controversial spyware makers of the last few years, operating from different jurisdictions to skirt export laws, and using an 'opaque web of corporate entities' ' as a U.S government official put it at the time ' to hide its activities....

At the federal level and on down, American government has come to rely heavily on nonprofits to deliver public services. This dependence is in many ways understandable, but it comes with serious risks. Feeding our Future, the Minnesota nonprofit whose employees were caught billing for services they didn't provide, was not the first instance of an NGO stealing from taxpayers, nor will it be the last. NGOs'private nonprofits that receive government funding'theoretically offer a nimble, targeted way to put policy into effect. Progressives like their grassroots nature; conservatives like that they might offer something closer to private-sector efficiency. Some NGOs perform admirably. Many others don't, and evidence is scant that this system overall delivers services better than the government. Despite this record, in the past several decades, NGOs have become not so much a policy instrument under democratic control as a sprawling, semiautonomous administrative system with little accountability....

The release of information about the powerful cadre of men associated with convicted sex offender and accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein ' known as the Epstein files ' has been a long time coming. I'm a clinical psychologist who studies intimate violence ' from child abuse to domestic violence and sexual assault. After more than two decades in this field, I wasn't surprised to hear someone minimize the abuse of adolescents. My research and the work of other researchers across the country have shown that victims who disclose their abuse are often met with disbelief and blame. Unlike stereotypes of teens being kidnapped out of parking lots, people who traffic minors use a range of tactics and build relationships with the teens and tweens they're targeting. Getting young people to trust and depend on the traffickers is part of entrapping them. The researchers found it was common for traffickers to use flattery or romance to entrap adolescents. Some built trust with the teens by helping them out of difficult situations. Meanwhile, the traffickers normalized sex and prostitution as they isolated their victims from their friends and family ' all of which echoes the grooming described by victims of Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell....