Wednesday, September 17, 2025. Annette’s Roundup for Democracy.

Trump is hated in the UK too.

The Brits are playing him like a fiddle, to get whatever they want. They plan to make his fantasies all come true- welcoming by the King, a night in a castle… whooo!

But this will be happening too.

BRITISH TV STATION TO AIR MARATHON OF TRUMP’S LIES AS HE VISITS UK.

The president’s 2019 state visit to London was met with widespread protests. He’s headed back this week.

This Photo of Trump in 2018 appears in The Guardian.

President Donald Trump will be traveling London this week for a state visit with King Charles III and Prime Minister Keir Starmer. The trip has already drawn criticism given Trump’s increasingly authoritarian governance of the United States, and one UK news station is adjusting its programming to ensure the American president’s affinity for lies and misinformation isn’t overlooked in the pageantry.

Channel 4, the publicly owned broadcaster founded in 1982, announced on Monday that it will greet Trump’s visit with a televised special chronicling the many lies told by the president during the first months of his second administration. Trump v The Truth will air on September 17 and, according to a statement provided to The Hollywood Reporter, the special will likely be “the longest uninterrupted reel of untruths, falsehoods and distortions ever broadcast on television.”

The special will catalogue over 100 of Trump’s lies and falsehoods, with “brief text-based fact-checks, offering viewers the truth behind the tweets, speeches and soundbites.”

Channel 4 Chief Content Officer Ian Katz told The Hollywood Reporter that he hopes the special programming “will remind viewers how disorientating and dangerous the world becomes when the most powerful man on earth shows little regard for the truth. And if President Trump cares to watch along after the state banquet, he may even clear up a few misconceptions.”

This is not Trump’s first visit with the British monarchy. Trump met with Queen Elizabeth II in 2019, during his first term, in a state visit that was marked by widespread protests in London, and a visibly frosty reception from the queen. While the queen reportedly found Trump to be “very rude,” the visit provided Trump with a level of public legitimacy on the international stage — which he hopes to burnish this week despite ever increasing turmoil at home.

On Thursday, the president is scheduled to meet with British Prime Minister Keir Starmer for a bilateral summit. The pair are expected to sign off on a series of economic and tech deals during the visit, including plans to develop a dozen nuclear power plants and nuclear powered data centers.

The visit comes just weeks after Trump met with Starmer in Scotland at one of his golf clubs. Trump inaugurated a new golf club on the same, taxpayer-funded trip. As European leaders wary of Trump’s erratic economic whipsawing over the last few months attempt to butter up the American president, the masses should expect an excess of pomp and circumstance for this state visit that only the British monarchy could provide. (Rolling Stone).

Hey, do you think PBS or MSNBC could get and re-broadcast the Channel 4’s scheduled programming of Trump’s lies or, as the station calls it, ‘longest uninterrupted reel of untruths’?

Ask them.

PBS (Public Broadcasting Service)
• Website contact form: https://help.pbs.org
• Viewer Services email: viewerservices@pbs.org
• Phone: 703-739-5000 (Headquarters, Arlington, VA)
• Mail:
PBS Viewer Services
2100 Crystal Drive
Arlington, VA 22202

⸻

MSNBC
• Website contact page: https://www.msnbc.com/contact
• General inquiries email: msnbctvinfo@nbcuni.com
• Phone: (212) 664-4444 (NBC/MSNBC viewer services, New York headquarters)
• Mail:
MSNBC Viewer Services
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112

Sample merchandise appears at Windsor Palace.

Thank Trump’s tariffs for this.👇

Love your Subaru? If you live in the USA, it may the last one you will own.

There is still time to get a Covid or other Vaccine.

Kennedy Said He Wouldn’t Take Away Vaccines. This Week Will Be the Test.

I was recently counseling a patient who was planning to become pregnant. In addition to prenatal vitamins, I discussed the vaccines recommended by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists. My patient cut me off, “Is it a choice or is it mandatory?”

“It’s your choice, of course,” I replied, although I explained why vaccination during pregnancy is important to help protect newborns from an array of serious diseases. Because of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., however, I wonder how much longer I’ll be able to offer my patients the choice of that protection.

This month, Mr. Kennedy testified before Congress, and repeated what he’d promised before his Senate confirmation: “I’m not taking vaccines away from anyone.” But this flies in the face of what Americans are experiencing. As a result of Food and Drug Administration restrictions on Covid vaccines put in place last month, vaccines are suddenly harder to get. Average-risk adults in many states can no longer walk into their pharmacy and get the vaccine as they had last year. Most children will need a medical evaluation before they can get it.

Even those considered high risk are struggling to find shots. A 76-year-old teacher in the Pacific Northwest told me that employees at every pharmacy he called said they were unsure when the vaccine would be available “due to government rules.” Even his doctors’ office didn’t have it.

For many of us in health care, this unscientific rollback of the Covid vaccine feels like the warning shot. This week’s meeting of the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, the C.D.C.’s advisory committee on vaccines, is scheduled to include votes not only on the Covid vaccine, but also the hepatitis B vaccine and the combined measles, mumps, rubella, varicella vaccine, or M.M.R.V. for short.

There is good reason to fear that this meeting will be more political theater than scientific debate; all of the original vaccine experts on the committee were sacked by Mr. Kennedy three months ago and replaced by a new panel that included several people known for vaccine misinformation and anti-vaccine views. On Monday, five more members were added, including one who’s promoted unproven Covid treatments like ivermectin.

Some experts worry that the committee will do away entirely with recommending hepatitis B vaccines at birth. This vaccine, which helps prevent liver infection, cirrhosis and cancer, has long been a target of several of Mr. Kennedy’s allies. The committee may recommend against the M.M.R.V combo that has been in use for two decades. Children could still be vaccinated against these diseases with a two-shot regimen of the M.M.R. vaccine and the varicella vaccine, but for some patients extra shots represent an additional barrier to vaccination.

And Covid shots could become even harder to get. The Washington Post reported last week that government officials plan to link the deaths of 25 children to the Covid vaccine based on information submitted to the C.D.C.’s open reporting system. (Anyone can submit unverified reports of “vaccine adverse events,” even if it’s unclear that the vaccine was the cause.) Extensive studies have demonstrated far more severe outcomes in children from Covid infection than from Covid vaccination.

Many states and school districts tie their vaccine guidelines to the advisory committee’s recommendations, which are cited in nearly 600 statutes and regulations nationwide. The recommendations affect school enrollment policies, vaccinations for health care workers, vaccine reminder systems, standing orders that allow nursing homes to vaccinate residents, authorizations for pharmacists to administer vaccines, even state purchasing protocols. Most insurance companies base their coverage on its recommendations. If certain vaccines are no longer recommended, people can face prohibitive out-of-pocket costs. (M.M.R.V. vaccines, for example, cost $300 or more without insurance).

I suspect Mr. Kennedy would be happy to ban many vaccines outright, but that probably wouldn’t go over well with the overwhelming majority of Americans who support vaccinations for preventable diseases. So he’s tackling the vaccine infrastructure, instead. A recent poll suggests that most Americans believe that vaccines should be made more available, but many feel that Mr. Kennedy is doing just the opposite.

And it’s not just the meeting of the vaccine advisory committee that worries experts. Dr. Michael Osterholm, the director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, expects Mr. Kennedy will tackle the production of vaccines next — adding costly and burdensome requirements to slow their development and manufacture.

Dr. Paul Offit, a vaccine expert and professor of pediatrics at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, warned me that Mr. Kennedy may soon turn his sights on the National Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, a federal program created to curb frivolous litigation against vaccine makers, while giving people an avenue to petition for compensation for vaccine injuries. Before this program began in 1986, many drug manufacturers simply stopped producing vaccines because the liability threats were too great.

“There is no better way to harm vaccines,” Dr. Offit said of dismantling the compensation program, “and then we’re right back to where we were in the 1980s.” This may be Mr. Kennedy’s way of hobbling vaccination without even needing to ban vaccines outright.

How should ordinary people — and ordinary health care professionals — respond to deliberate steps to make vaccinations less available? At this point, it’s fair to say that the F.D.A. and the C.D.C. and its vaccine advisory committee have been scientifically neutered. The recent decision of California, Washington and Oregon to form a regional alliance for health recommendations is both a reasonable response and a depressing necessity. The best sources of scientifically validated recommendations at this moment are the medical professional societies such as the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the Infectious Diseases Society of America.

Medical groups with lobbying muscle, such as the American Medical Association, need to start listening to their members and use their full force to oppose Mr. Kennedy’s efforts to make vaccines less accessible. Insurance companies need to base their coverage guidelines on the evidence-based recommendations of medical professional groups, rather than the eviscerated federal agencies.

State governments need to provide legislation or executive orders that allow pharmacies to easily administer vaccines, as Gov. Kathy Hochul recently did for New York. Doctors and nurses will have to spend precious medical time during visits to focus on vaccine access and countering growing vaccine hesitancy, not to mention begin treating illnesses from their grandparents’ generation.

In the end, though, the prescription for this mess is political rather than medical. Americans need to confront their cowardly elected officials before the vaccines that have saved more than 150 million lives globally in the last half century become unobtainable in this country. And when the hospitalization rates and deaths begin to rise — as they inevitably will — we will communally suffer the painful lesson that politics and incompetence cause far more side effects than any vaccine ever could.(New York Times)

Remember - Even if you don’t meet the present guidelines, you can ask your doctor for a prescription.

Who will be running on the blue ticket in 2026 and 2028?

By drips and drabs, we will learn.

This 👇 suggests Tim Walz is not running for Prez.

Tim Walz announces he will run for third term as Minnesota’s governor | Tim Walz | The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/16/tim-walz-running-minnesota-governor-third-term)

For Governor of Georgia?

Republican Brian Kemp is out by term limits.

Former Mayor of Atlanta, Keisha Lance Bottom is running too, along with others. The Blue Primary is May 19, 2026- Election, November 3, 2026.

We may soon learn more. Or maybe not .

Free Speech is as American as Apple pie.

It comes in all shapes, colors, flavors.

Trump administration joins Republicans' campaign to police speech in reaction to Kirk's killing

Vice President JD Vance on Monday jumped onto the conservative movement demanding consequences for those who have cheered Charlie Kirk’s killing, calling on the public to turn in anyone who says distasteful things about the assassination of his friend and political ally.

“When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance urged listeners on the slain activist’s podcast Monday. “And hell, call their employer.”

Vance’s call also included a vow to target some of the biggest funders of liberal causes as conservatives stepped up their targeting of private individuals for their comments about the killing. It marked an escalation in a campaign that some warned invoked some of the darkest chapters of American history.

“The government involvement in this does inch this closer to looking like McCarthyism,” said Adam Goldstein of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, referring to the 1950s campaign to root out communists that led to false allegations and ruined careers. “It was not a shining moment for free expression.”

Campaign broadens to those who quote Kirk critically

Republican-controlled states such as Florida, Oklahoma and Texas have launched investigations of teachers accused of inappropriate statements after last week’s assassination. The U.S. military has invited members of the public to report those who “celebrate or mock” the killing and said some troops have already been removed for their comments.

At the same time, the Trump administration has vowed to target what it contends is a “vast” liberal network that inspired the shooter, even as authorities maintain it appears he acted alone and the investigation is ongoing.

The campaign has broadened to include even those whose statements were critical of Kirk without celebrating his assassination.

The Washington Post fired Karen Attiah, an opinion columnist, for posts on the day of the shooting that lamented how “white America” was not ready to solve gun violence and that quoted Kirk denigrating the intelligence of prominent Black women such as Michelle Obama.

PEN America, a press freedom group, warned in a statement that firings like Attiah’s “risk creating a chilling effect.”

Goldstein worried there were many cases of people targeted for simply quoting Kirk or failing to mourn his passing adequately. “That’s one of the key symptoms of cancel culture,” he said. “Trying to paint everyone with the same brush.”

Conservatives coined the term cancel culture for what they claimed was persecution of those on the right for their views, especially related to the COVID-19 pandemic and Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, leading to campaigns to get regular people fired.

It was a significant cause for President Donald Trum p, who pledged to end it during his campaign last year. But after the Kirk killing, he and his administration have instead leaned into it from the right.

A hero to conservatives, a provocateur to many Democrats

A father of two and a Christian conservative, Kirk was a hero to many Trump Republicans for his fiery warnings about the dangers of Democrats and ability to organize young voters. But Kirk also was a provocateur and supporter of Trump’s attempt to overturn his 2020 election loss who left a long record of partisan quips that enraged many on the left.

“According to Kirk, empathy is a made-up new-age term, so keep the jokes coming. It’s what he would have wanted,” read one post on X that Melvin Villaver Jr., a Clemson University music professor, re-posted the day of the killing, according to a screenshot circulated by college Republicans demanding his firing. Clemson eventually fired one staffer and suspended Villaver and another professor after intense pressure from elected South Carolina Republican officials.

Other targeted posters, such as Army Lt. Col. Christopher Ladnier, simply quoted Kirk on the day of his assassination. This included Kirk calling the Civil Rights Act a “beast” that “has now turned into an anti-white weapon,” his criticism of Martin Luther King Jr. and his statement that some gun deaths are the cost of a robust Second Amendment.

Ladnier, who has been targeted by conservative activists online, said in a Facebook message to The Associated Press that he would respond “when/if” his chain of command takes action.

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott approvingly posted a video of a Texas Tech University student who was arrested Friday after a confrontation at a campus vigil for Kirk, writing: “This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech.”

Some people targeted have been victims of mistaken identity.

A school district in rural Elkhorn, Wisconsin, reported receiving more than 800 messages after one conservative influencer mistakenly identified an associate principal at an elementary school as celebrating Kirk’s death.

Top Republicans vow to go after ‘domestic terrorist network’

Authorities say Kirk was shot by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who grew up in a conservative household in southern Utah but was enmeshed in “leftist ideology,” according to the state’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox.

Cox said investigators may reveal more about what motivated the attack after Robinson’s initial court appearance, scheduled for Tuesday. The governor said the suspect, who allegedly carved memes onto his bullet casings, appeared radicalized by the “dark corners of the internet.”

On Monday, Vance was joined on Kirk’s podcast by Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff, who vowed to crack down on what he called the “vast domestic terrorist network” he blamed for Kirk’s death.

Alluding to free speech concerns, Vance said: “You have the crazies on the far left that say, ’Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech.’”

But he added: “No no no! We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence,” — a reference to non-governmental organizations.

The White House did not immediately return a request seeking clarity on the remarks, including which groups might be targeted.

The idea of a retribution campaign against individuals or groups for expressing a particular viewpoint has alarmed many.

“Just having that ideology, just believing differently than some other American is not illegal,” Republican Sen. James Lankford of Oklahoma said on CNN on Sunday.

Instead, he said any groups that have been involved in illegal or violent acts should be targeted.

Killing as a pretext to go after political rivals

On Kirk’s show, Vance talked about the need for unity after the assassination, but then dismissed it as impossible given what he described as the left’s embrace of political violence. Naming two foundations that fund a wide range of liberal causes, Vance said: “There is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers.”

Democratic officials have roundly condemned Kirk’s murder. Democrats also have been victims of political violence recently, including the June assassination of a Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and the 2022 beating of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in their San Francisco home.

Caitlin Legacki of Stop Government Censorship, formed to fight the Trump administration’s use of government against its political rivals, said it was one thing for people making abhorrent statements to face consequences.

“When we get concerned is when there appears to be a concerted effort in the government to use this tragedy to punish political opponents,” she said. (Association Press)

Have you heard about the Watch List on Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA?

Charlie Kirk’s Watch List Made Some Professors’ Lives a ‘Living Hell’

For Tobin Miller Shearer, a professor of history at the University of Montana who had received death threats after being placed on a Turning Point USA target list, news of Charlie Kirk’s murder on a college campus in Utah prompted a flood of emotions. “I cried for our nation, for what this will mean for his family, for all the harm he did in his life, for all of us,” he said. “It was a horrible moment in all of its complexity.”

After those threats, Shearer moved his class on the history of white supremacy to a secret location, with a campus police officer on guard. “I did not want any threats on my life to ripple out and affect my students,” said Shearer, who heads Montana’s program in African American studies.

Shearer was one of hundreds of professors whose lives had unexpectedly intersected with Kirk’s when their names ended up on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist.

Kirk created the watchlist in 2016 as a signature product of his new nonprofit. Its mission, it says, is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” It’s based on published news stories about “radical” behavior by professors, but also informed by recordings leaked by students and tips from the public.

The publicly searchable database has grown to more than 300 professors, who are grouped into categories including diversity, equity, and inclusion, climate alarmist, feminism, abortion, terror supporter, racial ideology, and LGBTQ.

The Chronicle spoke to more than a dozen professors who, like Shearer, ended up on a list that exposed many of them to doxxing and threats. As the examples below show, Kirk’s death conjured up mixed emotions ranging from empathy for his family to contempt for his ideas. It also elicited frustration over how the country is mourning his death.

‘So Much Hypocrisy’

David S. Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University, was placed on the list because of his outspoken pro-choice scholarship and views. Cohen’s scholarship examines how law impacts abortion provision and violence against abortion providers.

Shearer was one of hundreds of professors whose lives had unexpectedly intersected with Kirk’s when their names ended up on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist.

Kirk created the watchlist in 2016 as a signature product of his new nonprofit. Its mission, it says, is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” It’s based on published news stories about “radical” behavior by professors, but also informed by recordings leaked by students and tips from the public.

The publicly searchable database has grown to more than 300 professors, who are grouped into categories including diversity, equity, and inclusion, climate alarmist, feminism, abortion, terror supporter, racial ideology, and LGBTQ.

The Chronicle spoke to more than a dozen professors who, like Shearer, ended up on a list that exposed many of them to doxxing and threats. As the examples below show, Kirk’s death conjured up mixed emotions ranging from empathy for his family to contempt for his ideas. It also elicited frustration over how the country is mourning his death.

‘So Much Hypocrisy’

David S. Cohen, a professor of law at Drexel University, was placed on the list because of his outspoken pro-choice scholarship and views. Cohen’s scholarship examines how law impacts abortion provision and violence against abortion providers.

“See, Charlie Kirk was a good guy who should be honored because he valued free speech,” Cohen wrote on Facebook last week. “So much so, in fact, that he put me and many of my friends and colleagues on his Professor Watchlist. No, not because he wanted us targeted — why would you think that you cynical fool?! Rather, because he was being so kind and thoughtful to highlight our work for his rabid, highly-armed rightwing extremist audience. I’m so grateful for all he did to promote us to this new group of people!” In an interview, Cohen said he won’t celebrate anyone’s murder, but that people shouldn’t forget what Kirk did when he was alive.

“There’s been so much hypocrisy with how his death’s being covered,” he said. “He’s being touted as this paragon of free speech who just wanted to engage with people who disagree with him. In fact, he was behind a website that targeted those who he disagreed with and broadcast information about us to his extremist readers with the clear intention that they should take some kind of action against us.”

Cohen said he was also alarmed that people are being fired for comments they made publicly about Kirk’s death that were viewed as being unsympathetic. “They weren’t lionizing him the way we’re apparently supposed to,” he said.

‘It’s Open Season’

Albert Ponce, a professor of political science at Diablo Valley College, a community college in California, ended up on the watchlist after a 2017 public lecture on white supremacy in the United States was edited down to a two-minute clip and circulated on conservative media outlets, starting with a right-wing site called Red Elephant.

“It ended up on Fox and Breitbart. Once it hit that ecosystem, it was gone,” he said. Hate mail turned into death threats against him and his family. Pictures of his family, including his then 9-year-old daughter, appeared online. He told a public radio show that he stopped letting her open the mail.

College administrators were flooded with demands that he be fired.

Now a tenured professor, Ponce said he has no intention of backing down from his scholarship, but he understands why many of his colleagues are worried that with Kirk’s death, the attacks on scholars could escalate.

“Now in this moment for what we teach, our areas of expertise, we’re all targets for these organizations that try to silence us,” Ponce said. “For anyone who touches these issues now, it’s open season.”

‘Greatest Stress of My Life’

Saida Grundy, a professor of sociology and African American and Black diaspora studies at Boston University, said she experienced “epistemic terrorism” as a result of being on multiple professor watchlists, including Turning Point USA’s.

Grundy first appeared on conservative watchlists in 2015 as an incoming professor to BU for her tweets calling white male college students a “problem” for America’s colleges.

Grundy said she received countless death threats and demands that the university fire her. In her first year on the faculty, her office was broken into and vandalized, she said.

“It was the greatest stress of my life, and I literally was just coming off having stage-three breast cancer,” Grundy said. “It was far more stressful than the cancer, far more stressful.”

Grundy said her reaction to Kirk’s death wasn’t celebration, but indifference: “I really take issue with this idea that … I could be made to mourn a person who wanted to deny my right to exist.”

‘A Complicated Political Legacy’

David Austin Walsh, an academic adviser at the University of Virginia, said that while he was initially intimidated, being added to the watchlist had little effect on his career or safety. Walsh was added to the list in 2020 when he tweeted “Americans don’t need to just ‘protest.’ They need to actively topple the government,” in response to the presidential election.

“The default target for TPUSA and their political allies … tends to be faculty of color, women, and then other people in what they perceive to be vulnerable positions,” Walsh, who is white, said. “The efficacy of the professor watchlist in making a faculty member’s life a living hell is deeply connected to that.”

Walsh was teaching a class on the American far right when he learned of Kirk’s shooting. When his students asked him to discuss the event in real time, Walsh declined, in fear that he would face political backlash. Walsh said his own feelings on Kirk’s death are complicated.

“Any honest attempt to grapple with Kirk and his political legacy has to grapple with … the degree to which he contributed to the ongoing degradation of our civil society and political culture and the normalization of violence in that culture,” Walsh said. “Which is not to say that he deserved what happened to him, but it is a complicated political legacy.”

‘He Was Also a Human Being’

Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric at the University of North Georgia, also ended up on the professor watchlist because of an opinion piece he wrote in 2016 challenging a bill, which has since become law, allowing concealed firearms on college campuses. He has gone on to dedicate much of his research to the role that Kirk and Turning Point USA have played in, what he calls, in a book coming out in a few weeks, “the dangerous plan to Christianize America and destroy democracy.”

He learned the news of Kirk’s death while he was driving. “I gripped the wheel and tried not to drive off the road,” he said. “As much as he was a public figure and larger-than-life influence on our nation, he was also a human being.”

Boedy said he was shocked “not only because of the brutal nature of the crime, but also the fact that it happened on a campus where we want ideas to flow freely.” He worries about Kirk being portrayed as a martyr, which he said “gives approval to a lot of retribution and payback.”

“Viewing Kirk as a martyr,” he said, “is a flashing red light for our democracy. I would not want his death used to further the culture war that he was raging.” (The Chronicle of Higher Eduction)

A free people have a free press too.👇

One more thing.

What the Constitution means to them. 👇

Post this 👆 on your social media. Make the world know that some Americans care about our Democracy.

See what the Constitution says about Free Speech.

First Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights (ratified in 1791): “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” — First Amendment, U.S. Constitution.

Makes me cry? You?

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