PROVO, Utah — When Erika Kirk, the widow of slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, takes her seat in the gallery of the courtroom Monday, she will be there to watch the state make its case against Tyler Robinson, the man accused of killing her husband. 

Two dozen members of the public allowed in the courtroom, along with thousands more people online, will have eyes on Erika Kirk during the weeklong preliminary hearing. A growing chorus of conspiracists and their followers will be examining the widow — and new CEO of Turning Point USA — for proof of the outlandish theories that have proliferated in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassination last September, including baseless claims that she helped orchestrate or cover up his killing.

The state of Utah plans to seek the death penalty against Robinson and has charged him with aggravated murder and six other counts, including witness tampering and obstruction of justice. Over the next five days of preliminary hearings, prosecutors will argue that Robinson should stand trial for Kirk’s killing, calling witnesses and presenting evidence to make their case. Judge Tony Graf of the 4th District will ultimately decide where there is probable cause to move the case to trial. Robinson has yet to enter a plea. 

Erika Kirk is represented by an attorney and has already argued motions before the court, including that cameras should be allowed in the courtroom and that invoked her right to a speedy trial. She was not required to attend the hearing, but a source close to the family told MS NOW that she and Charlie Kirk’s parents, Robert and Kathryn — who rarely appear in public — felt compelled to be there “to bear witness.” 

Much of what they will hear is already a matter of public record. Prosecutors have previewed their case against Robinson in court documents and hearings. At an April hearing, prosecutors said they had surveillance video showing Robinson’s movements the morning of the shooting, including footage of him scouting Utah Valley University and returning with a rifle, taking the shot from a rooftop and then fleeing into a wooded area, where police later recovered a rifle wrapped in a towel. Investigators found ammunition and a tool used to etch inscriptions on the bullet casings in Robinson’s home, prosecutors said. They also alleged that Robinson made four separate confessions to evidence connecting him to the shooting: a note left for his roommate and romantic partner; a text exchange with that roommate; a message to an online group chat; and an admission to a family acquaintance who helped him surrender. Independent DNA testing by federal agencies would match Robinson to the rifle, the towel and a screwdriver, prosecutors said. 

This evidence will be introduced in court this week through law-enforcement witnesses, recorded testimony, and dozens of exhibits: videos, photographs and Robinson’s alleged communications, including a note left for his roommate that read, “I had the opportunity to take out Charlie Kirk, and I took it.”

The preliminary hearing was set to be livestreamed. Robinson’s attorneys fought to keep cameras out of the courtroom, arguing that media coverage had been disparaging and sensational and would taint a jury pool. But Graf decided to allow cameras as he had for other hearings, supporting the arguments for transparency that had been made by prosecutors, the media and Erika Kirk.

Among those watching will be a network of conspiracist creators and their rabid audiences, who have already decided, without evidence, that Robinson is a patsy and that the case against him is rigged. They have already spun up fantastical alternative accounts of Kirk’s death and its supposed cover-up over thousands of podcast episodes and online posts, and the blame has been spread widely: to prosecutors, the federal government, foreign nations and TPUSA. But no one has been targeted more relentlessly than Erika Kirk.

Conspiracists have wrongly tied her to convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, claimed that she was part of an Israeli operation to assassinate her husband, and forwarded the theory that her marriage — and thus her two children — were a product of a long-term scheme to gain control over Charlie Kirk and TPUSA. 

Right-wing podcaster Candace Owens has been the main driver of these largely online conspiracy theories. And the threat these theories pose reaches beyond distorting reality, according to new research by the Network Contagion Research Institute, a nonprofit that studies online radicalization and shared its findings exclusively with MS NOW.

NCRI’s report found that Owens has “caused a measurable, statistically significant surge in death threats and calls for violence” against Erika Kirk over the past nine months. When Owens attacks her online — as she has done repeatedly, most recently on Shawn Ryan’s podcast, where she called Erika Kirk a “psychopath” and suggested that she had some hidden knowledge about her husband’s death — threats against Erika Kirk follow, the report found.

Owens declined to comment, but posted MS NOW’s emailed request to X, seemingly disputing the findings. 

“Anyone who notices Erika Kirk keeps lying is responsible for her receiving death threats,” she wrote. 

NCRI identified about 1,000 violent threats against Erika Kirk on X following Charlie Kirk’s death. 

“Owens built a narrative ecosystem that her audience turned into explicit threats,” the research nonprofit wrote, describing Owens’ attacks as creating a “permission structure” for violence. 

It’s a dynamic NCRI has previously used to describe the killing of a health insurance executive and multiple assassination attempts against President Donald Trump. In it, a target is named, an accusation frames harm against that target as justifiable, and a community is primed to act on it.

Several popular online conspiracists have said they plan to attend Robinson’s preliminary hearing this week. Elizabeth Lane, a former model and actress who now makes conspiracy content largely about Erika Kirk posted about the hearing last week. 

“I can’t wait to see dear Erika Kirk!!!!” Lane wrote. “I hope she doesn’t cancel last minute saying she is too scared due to security threat .”

The post Erika Kirk faces Charlie’s alleged killer and conspiracists as preliminary hearing begins appeared first on MS NOW.

One of Donald Trump’s favorite selling points about his planned $600 million ballroom is its windows. According to the president, they’ll be “impenetrable,” with 5-inch-thick laminated glass.

That’s impressive, but nowhere near as fortified as the glass house Trump has built when it comes to corruption — a glass house that Republicans in Congress seem determined to let stand.

For decades, Trump and Republicans have pointed to the alleged corruption of Democratic lawmakers and their families.

But if corruption means using public office to enrich yourself, your family or your associates, then even the wildest Republican allegations about Democrats pale in comparison to what the president is doing openly today.

Let’s take one of their favorite targets: the Biden family. 

Republicans have long accused Hunter Biden of influence peddling through his consulting work, board positions and even the sale of his artwork. Estimates suggest that businesses tied to Hunter Biden received roughly $11 million from 2013 through 2018. His art also sold for prices well above what most novice artists command. Objectively, not a great look.

Two years ago this month, Republicans on three House committees sent a letter to then-Attorney General Merrick Garland. Announcing an impeachment investigation into President Joe Biden, they wrote:

In total, since 2014, the Committees have accounted for over $35 million received by Biden family members, their companies, and business associates, which includes financial transactions described as loans. Despite much effort, the Committees have not identified legitimate services warranting such lucrative payments. The amount of money the Biden family has received from concerning companies and individuals is alarming. 

The Bidens have repeatedly denied improperly using Joe Biden’s elected positions for personal enrichment, but for argument’s sake, let’s take the claim as true: that Biden family members, associates and businesses made $35 million over a decade.

If Republicans described that as “alarming,” we may need a new word for what we have learned about Trump’s corruption in recent weeks alone.

In May, some top-tier investigative reporting shed light on a $620 million loan from the Pentagon to a small North Carolina startup linked to Donald Trump Jr. The loan to Vulcan Elements — in which Trump Jr. has an undisclosed stake — was the only deal initiated by a top aide to the president, reported ProPublica, citing an official at the Pentagon who was not authorized to speak publicly. “The call came from the White House: We have to get this done,” the official reportedly said.

Play

New details on Trump family’s business dealings raise ethical concerns

July 2, 2026 / 11:37

On Wednesday, Trump flew to North Dakota aboard a $400 million jet presented to him by the Qatari government. It was the culmination of a controversy that began over a year ago, when Trump’s announcement of the gift sparked widespread concern about foreign influence and corruption. Just weeks before it became public, the Trump Organization announced a deal to build a luxury golf resort in Qatar in “collaboration” with a Saudi company and a firm owned by the Qatari government.

On Tuesday, Trump’s mandatory financial disclosures showed he made $1.4 billion from cryptocurrency ventures alone in one year. That’s more than 34 times the wealth that House Republicans accused the Bidens and their businesses and their associates of taking a decade to make, and it’s in an industry that Trump — as president — has a major say in regulating.

On Sunday, The New York Times reported that Trump’s sons could profit from a $1 billion mining deal in Kazakhstan brokered by the federal government. What’s more, according to documents reviewed by the Times, Trump’s family and the family of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick combined have financial ties to at least 14 companies that are actively working with the federal government on critical mineral projects.

Trump’s White House has repeatedly denied that there’s anything unsavory happening, insisting that Trump has only the best interests of the American people at heart, and that there are no conflicts of interest.

Republicans launched years of investigations over allegations that members of the Biden family profited by tens of millions of dollars over the course of a decade. Yet when their own president openly reports billions in business income, accepts lavish gifts from foreign governments and sees his family’s business interests intersect with federal policy, congressional oversight all but disappears.

Maybe Donald Trump’s proverbial glass house isn’t that strong at all. Perhaps it would fall under a Congress with some stones.

Evan Brechtel contributed to this report.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.

The post Trump’s self-dealing dwarfs the GOP’s Biden accusations appeared first on MS NOW.

The plan wasn’t working. Less than a year into President Donald Trump’s second term, his administration’s signature initiative — facilitating the mass deportation of “millions and millions” of immigrants, as he once put it — had become a political liability. A surge of federal agents to Minnesota proved to be the apex of a flashy, combative strategy that tried to steamroll any opposition — and failed.

But now, according to The New York Times, the seeming lull in arrests that followed the winter’s chaos has given way to a renewed effort to round up as many immigrants for deportation as possible — without drawing the same level of attention. The shift shows both the limits that the administration has faced in its deportation spree and its determination to continue apace despite the president’s approval ratings on immigration tanking. Without the same amount of spotlight-seeking from immigration officials, however, the White House hopes to deny opponents the clear targets to organize against that last year’s deportation campaigns provided.

When the Trump administration retreated from Minnesota in February, it left behind two dead Americans, killed by federal agents while protesting the show of force in their communities. Six months later, Markwayne Mullin has replaced Kristi Noem atop the Department of Homeland Security. Mullin has rejected many of Noem’s most eye-catching tactics: Gone are the announcements of major operations in Democratic-controlled cities, the photo ops with tactical gear, the videos from former Border Patrol Chief Greg Bovino.

Play

Trump names new ICE Director nominee

June 29, 2026 / 09:06

In its place, the Times reported, is a new push to hit a new set of quotas for Immigration and Customs Enforcement to meet. And unlike previous demands from White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, it seems that ICE has been on track to hit those numbers. Over the course of last week, according to the Times, federal officials detained more than 10,000 people — and intends to keep that pressure going:

ICE officers have arrested people at check-ins with immigration authorities, during traffic stops and on the street. The push has apparently yielded results, with recent arrest numbers roughly doubling from the 1,000 picked up each day earlier this year.

ICE officials were told that the White House wanted an increase in arrests, according to three officials with knowledge of the conversations. One of the officials said that it was unclear how long the pace could continue, but that ICE officials had been told that 2,000 arrests a day was the new standard for enforcement.

As I argued in March, when the previous strategy’s failings were still fresh, Miller’s determination to purge the country of immigrants was unlikely to be deterred for long. Boosting arrest numbers to 2,000 a day is still short of the 3,000 daily arrests he demanded last year. But even this downgraded ask still reflects how much of a priority this campaign remains among the administration’s many struggles.

Meanwhile, Mullin has shed many of the high-profile episodes that helped organizers to rally the public to their cause. The black helicopter raids that galvanized attention and criticism have been replaced with less showy but no less harrowing operations. The warehouses that his predecessor purchased to convert into detention centers are being placed back on the market. This leaves the existing overcrowded facilities to be stuffed further but doesn’t add new sites for locals — in both blue and red states — to reject.

The new surge also comes after yet another influx of cash from Congress for ICE and the Border Patrol. The Times reported that “top ICE officials were told to make sure that as many officers as possible were working seven days a week, and to put 80 percent of their officers on arrest operations.” The pace may not be sustainable in the long-term, but the funding — $70 billion in cash over the next three years, on top of the roughly $170 billion over the next four years from last year’s so-called “Big Beautiful Bill” — can pay for a lot of new recruits and even more overtime pay.

The shying away from public confrontations represents a rarity from the Trump administration: the ability to learn from mistakes. By keeping their deportation efforts under the radar, it’s harder for the fears within the immigrant community to spread to the broader population. It has likewise hampers the efforts of activists, lawyers and organizers to sustain the pressure that led to ICE’s previous retreat.

The challenge then becomes preventing the general population from believing that the clashes in Minnesota were a decisive victory for immigrant rights. The fight continues, with the administration having swapped out a militarized approached with a less aesthetically alarming crackdown. And after the Supreme Court granted the White House new license to transform legal immigrants into undocumented immigrants, there will be plenty of people for ICE to quietly target for removal.

The post Trump’s war on immigrants is ramping back up. And it’s flying under the radar. appeared first on MS NOW.

There’s one benefit of yoga you may not have considered: improved gut health. Not only can yoga promote better digestion, but it may improve the gut microbiome.

President Donald Trump has been on a single-minded, months-long quest to try and get one particular bill — the SAVE America Act — through Congress.

It’s a bill that would transform voting registration and ballot-casting across the country by creating strict nationwide requirements to prove citizenship when registering, to show photo ID when voting, and to include photocopies of ID for voting by mail.

And Trump’s obsession with getting it passed has swallowed up practically everything the GOP-controlled Congress has tried to do this year. 

He’s said he won’t sign other bills — a bipartisan housing bill, or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act reauthorization — until SAVE America gets passed. He’s heaped pressure on GOP Senate leaders to eliminate the chamber’s filibuster, so SAVE America could advance with a simple majority (rather than needing 60 votes, since Republicans only have 53). He’s tried to slip it into this year’s “budget reconciliation” bill, which can’t be filibustered; when the Senate parliamentarian ruled he couldn’t, he demanded her firing.

Some Republicans claim that the bill is merely a simple, commonsense effort to close loopholes in the voter system that bad actors could take advantage of — to ensure that only citizens are actually voting and that the people showing up to vote are who they say they are.

But the intensity of its support on the MAGA right goes well beyond that: The bill’s strongest supporters — including the president and the world’s richest man, Elon Musk — are those who advance the false conspiracy theory that Democrats rig elections through unauthorized immigrants illegally voting, bogus mail ballots, and other malfeasance. They claim they’re so desperate to pass it to stop this outrageous electoral theft.

Election experts point out there’s no real evidence that non-citizen voting is a serious problem. “All the evidence is that very few non-citizens get on the rolls, almost all those cases are accidental — and even among the people who get on the rolls, tiny percentages of them vote,” says Charles Stewart III, director of the MIT Election Data and Science Lab.

Progressives argue that, in practice, these strict requirements would make it much harder for many citizens to register, vote, and have their votes counted. Indeed, they say, that’s probably Trump’s true goal: to suppress Democrats’ voters and make it easier for the GOP to win — or to outright steal elections like he tried to do in 2020. Michael Waldman, the president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has said the bill would be “Trump’s power grab in legislative garb.”

“It’s about voter suppression: putting Trump’s DHS in charge of who stays on the rolls, purging eligible voters, and blocking millions from registering,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said in March, adding, “That’s not democracy, that’s election rigging.”

What would the SAVE America Act actually do if passed? Would it fulfill liberals’ worst fears — and Trump’s heart’s desire? Or would things not change as much as either side expects?

What’s in the SAVE America Act

There have been various versions of the bill since it was first introduced in 2024. (It was initially called just the SAVE Act, which stands for Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act. This year, Trump decided to rebrand it as the SAVE America act, even though that makes little sense with the acronym.)

But the core has remained consistent: strict new requirements for proving citizenship when registering to vote and proving identity when voting (including by mail). These would entail:

• Proof of citizenship for voter registration (or for updating registration): Currently, most states do not require proof of citizenship for registration, so this would be a major change. Proving citizenship is not as easy as showing a driver’s license. Instead, it can be done by presenting a passport. Alternatively, a voter could show either a birth certificate or naturalization papers in addition to a government-issued photo ID (like a driver’s license).
• Strict photo ID requirements to vote in person: States vary on whether they require voters to show ID at all and on which sorts of IDs are accepted. The bill’s requirements would be stricter than those of most states; it would notably exclude student IDs from state universities (which some states currently accept). An earlier version of the bill would have required proof of citizenship for voting (not just registration), but this was dropped in the House-passed version.
• Mail voters would have to provide photo ID or identifying information: Typically, states with widespread mail voting send ballots to voters’ addresses and accept returned ballots with a signed affidavit. The House-passed bill says that the voter should submit a photocopy of their ID, as well — or, if they can’t obtain one, they can sign an affidavit and provide the last four digits of their Social Security number. Trump has repeatedly said he wants the bill to go further and ban almost all mail voting (except for special exceptions such as military service). 

The bill would also require states — and empower the federal government, specifically the Department of Homeland Security — to try and purge any non-citizens from the voter rolls. Basically, states would have to run every registered name through DHS, so DHS can flag purported non-citizens for removal (though voters would then have a chance to contest this decision). It also would impose criminal penalties on state election officials who register someone lacking documentary proof of citizenship.

On top of all that, Trump wants to jazz the bill up by playing his culture war hits: banning trans women from women’s sports and banning gender reassignment surgery for minors. (He calls this the “full version” of the bill.) But these were not included in the version of the bill that passed the House earlier in February.

Since its House passage, the bill has been stuck in the Senate for months, held up by the perennial problem for a narrow Senate majority: the filibuster. The GOP’s 53 senators aren’t close to the 60 necessary to advance the bill, and several of them are refusing to support a “nuclear option” rules change that would ram it through anyway. So, despite Trump jawboning and threatening Senate Republicans for months, the bill hasn’t moved forward.

Why does Trump want this bill so badly — and what would its impact actually be?

For years, Trump has claimed that elections he or his party loses were somehow rigged or stolen. Even in his first presidential victory, where he won the Electoral College, he maintained that he should have won the popular vote, as well, and only failed to do so because of millions of unauthorized immigrants voting illegally. And he justified his attempt to stay in power after losing in 2020 with various false claims that Democrats stole the election for Joe Biden. There has long been a debate about whether Trump truly believes this, was opportunistically lying, or was adopting beliefs convenient to him. 

But the claim that Democrats and “illegals” regularly rig elections in cities and blue states had been common on the right long before Trump entered politics. Indeed, the GOP’s push for state voter ID laws — and the Democrats’ argument that such laws are, in fact, partisan plots meant to disenfranchise young and nonwhite voters who’d be less likely to have such IDs — goes back decades.

In an earlier era of American history, rigging and ballot-stuffing by party machines was known to happen. But in recent decades, there’s been no evidence of large-scale rigging of the sort that Republicans allege (though there have been certain cases of organized fraud in local races and in a rural North Carolina congressional race in 2018).

Many Democrats and advocacy groups fear instead that the bill would be a disaster for voting rights — that its strict requirements would, in practice, inevitably lead to many legitimate voters being wrongly blocked from voting. There are darker fears, too, about the centralization of authority to review voter rolls with Trump’s DHS and whether all this would be a prelude to Trump trying to steal another election.

Partisans and their allied advocates have long hyped up the effects of voter ID laws as being great for Republicans and horrible for Democrats (and widespread mail-in voting as having the reverse partisan impact). But Republicans have frequently managed to implement voter ID requirements at the state level, and nonpartisan experts and studies have often found much less dramatic partisan impacts in practice from that and from different vote-by-mail rules. Voters, campaigns, and parties can adjust to new rules.

Polls consistently show that voter ID requirements are overwhelmingly popular, and Democrats’ reluctance to support it does put them on the wrong side of public opinion. Indeed, considering that — and considering the Trump-era re-sorting of the parties’ coalitions, in which upscale, educated voters more likely to have an ID handy have moved toward Democrats — some in the party have quietly questioned whether these bills would really hurt them so much. 

Still, the SAVE America Act would be voter ID on steroids, beyond what has been implemented in states. The Bipartisan Policy Center estimates that more than 20 million eligible voters lack easy access to a passport or a birth certificate. However, those people wouldn’t all be disenfranchised overnight, since the proof-of-citizen requirements are for new registrants or for those updating registrations (due to, say, moving or a name change).

Stewart, the director of the MIT election lab, said that evidence from Arizona — which now requires citizenship proof for state and local elections — suggests young people newly registering have the toughest time. So, if the SAVE America Act were implemented he said, “there’s a good chance that a nontrivial number of 18 to 22 year olds would be cut out of the upcoming election.”

At the very least, there’d certainly be a chaotic adjustment period, as many of the bill’s requirements would go into effect immediately, without any funding to help states implement them.  

And, of course, there are very valid reasons to distrust what the Trump administration might get up to if they gain more power over voter rolls, given their prosecutions of political enemies, the involvement of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in investigating Georgia ballots and, of course, Trump’s conduct in 2020.

For now, the bill remains stuck in the Senate. But the issue isn’t going away. Trump has been increasingly frustrated with Majority Leader John Thune’s inability to get the bill through, and a right-wing challenger could use the issue to contest Thune’s leadership after the midterms. 

And whether the bill ever passes or not, the false claims of large-scale non-citizen voting — and elections being rigged against the GOP — are central to the party’s mythology in the age of MAGA. The SAVE America Act will remain as the bill that Trump and the right claim could have stopped all that — if only it had been passed.

Norfolk County Council confirms it has launched the inquiry following the attack near Huntingdon.

The Chinese military test-fired a missile from a nuclear submarine into the Pacific Ocean on Monday, state media reported, drawing criticism from U.S. allies in the region concerned about Beijing’s intensifying military activity.

It’s hot outside. But the DSA is hotter.

Fresh off major primary wins in Colorado and New York, the Democratic Socialists of America is looking to prove that it can translate its momentum beyond deep-blue House primaries and into competitive statewide races.

DSA officials and allies told POLITICO they’ve already shifted organizers, volunteers and resources toward battleground Michigan and Wisconsin, where progressive Abdul El-Sayed is locked in a three-way Democratic primary for Michigan Senate and DSA-backed Francesca Hong is gaining steam in her primary for Wisconsin governor.

Both El-Sayed and Hong are planning a series of major rallies ahead of

Satluj, Honey Trehan’s human rights drama starring Diljit Dosanjh, has been pulled days after its launch in India. The film has been at the center of a censorship battle and tells the story of human rights activist Jaswant Singh Khalra. It launched on the Zee5 streaming service on July 3. It was taken down two […]

Dust off your school notes and see if you’re a true trivia champion!

View Entire Post ›

Former Crystal Palace manager Oliver Glasner replaces Vitor Pereira following his sacking last week.

The Venice Film Festival is to celebrate George Clooney with a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement. Clooney, who has close ties to Italy and the festival, has been on the Lido with multiple films over the years, including most recently with Netflix’s Jay Kelly. “I’ve had so many extraordinary moments in Venice. This festival is […]