June 9, 2026 at 5:52 PM EDT
Hard right 'seized power' to spread extremist rhetoric under Trump: watchdog

Hard-right groups have expanded their influence inside the Trump administration, a new report on hate and extremism by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds, according to The Guardian. A federal grand jury indicted the SPLC, a civil rights organization, on federal fraud charges earlier this year -- months before the report's publication. "2025 was a turbulent year marked by injustice, social upheaval and stark new threats from a hard-right movement rapidly establishing its power across institutions," reads the director's note to the SPLC's "2025 Year in Hate and Extremism" series. "The hard right effectively seized the power of government as a messenger for extremist rhetoric and a tool to dictate policies affecting the everyday lives of millions of people."

June 9, 2026 at 5:25 PM EDT
Republican received a text with Mussolini and Shrek -- so he sent the sender to jail

A self-identified pro-free speech Ohio state senator sent an Ohio gossip blogger to jail for sending a text message that compared the Republican to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini -- and included a sexually explicit image of the Dreamworks cartoon character Shrek. "D.J. Byrnes""an Ohio blogger who runs a Statehouse gossip Substack called The Rooster""was arrested on a misdemeanor warrant at the Ohio Statehouse," observed Reason's Meagan O'Rourke on Tuesday. "Byrnes' arrest, according to reporting by Signal Ohio, likely stems from a picture he texted to state Sen. Jerry Cirino (R-Kirtland) on May 6. The offending image? A 'digitally altered version of Shrek, the ogre with a titular children's movie franchise, with his p---- exposed,' according to Signal Ohio."

June 9, 2026 at 5:09 PM EDT
Trump is bringing back a 1950s American form of persecution

President Donald Trump is reviving the Lavender Scare, an infamous period in American history that began in the 1950s and led to the widespread persecution of members of the LGBTQ community. "A defining feature of the mid-20th century was the government-wide panic over communism, anarchism, and other leftist beliefs known as the Red Scare," wrote ACLU Social Editor Hanna Stolzer on Tuesday. "However what many don't know is that an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 government employees were fired or forced to resign during that same time period, solely because they were suspected or confirmed to be queer. This purge of queer people from government jobs further instilled distrust of the LGBTQ community by the general public under the guise of protecting national security. It's called the Lavender Scare."

June 9, 2026 at 4:20 PM EDT
Former Republican congressman warns Trump turning GOP into 'party of sore losers'

According to a former pro-Trump lawmaker, President Donald Trump's greatest legacy is being a sore loser -- and he is eroding American democracy by spreading that mindset to other Republicans. "I've said repeatedly -- ad nauseam -- that Donald Trump's greatest legacy is the destruction of truth," former Rep. Joe Walsh (R-IL) said in a podcast posted on Tuesday. "Not a surprise, right, when this good, great, decent country puts into the White House twice somebody who lies every time he opens his mouth.

June 9, 2026 at 4:11 PM EDT
Trump campaign promise is sinking him in this key swing state

In 2024, one of Donald Trump's campaign promises was "no tax on tips." And the promise generated a lot of discussion in Nevada, one of the swing states that Trump flipped after having lost it to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020. But according to Bloomberg News' Caitlin Reilly, the promise isn't getting a lot of enthusiasm in 2026 in Las Vegas -- a city where tipped workers are plentiful but tips are down. "When a Las Vegas cocktail waitress pitched President Donald Trump on eliminating taxes on tips," Reilly explains in Bloomberg News, "it seemed like a surefire bet: an easily digestible policy that could break Democrats' longtime hold on Nevada's political machine by wooing culinary workers. At first, it seemed to work, with Trump becoming the first Republican presidential candidate to capture the state in two decades. But like many schemes cooked up on the Las Vegas Strip, Trump's luck may be running out."

June 9, 2026 at 12:02 PM EDT
'The big one': CA braces for massive earthquake as fault stress hits 1,000-year peak

California's fault lines are under the most amount of stress than they've experienced in 1,000 years, researchers revealed. A new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth, cites concerns that a major earthquake might be on the horizon. There's no real way of knowing when it could happen, the experts warned.

June 9, 2026 at 11:40 AM EDT
Texas Republicans' betting on MAGA messaging may soon pay a price

Far-right talking points have proven effective in the recent Texas Republican primaries, handing wins to Trump-backed Senate candidate Ken Paxton, attorney general nominee "MAGA" Mayes Middleton (as he likes to be called), and railroad commissioner nominee Bo French. But while MAGA messaging resonates with Republican voters well enough to come out ahead in a primary, according to Houston Pubic Media political columnist Blaise Gainey , that approach is likely to fall flat in the general election this November.

June 9, 2026 at 11:32 AM EDT
Trump's 'collusion and fraud' torn apart as retired judges break silence

President Donald Trump's attempt to create an "anti-weaponization" slush fund prompted dozens of retired judges to speak out against him, and as one ex-federal prosecutor argued for The Hill, this shows the true extent of the "collusion and fraud" inherent in the plan. James D. Zirin is a legal analyst who previously served as a federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York. In a new piece for The Hill published Tuesday, he invoked a classic turn-of-phrase to emphasize the severity of the pushback against Trump's slush fund from these judges.

June 9, 2026 at 11:01 AM EDT
Republican who defied Trump over Epstein braces for defeat in deep red stronghold

A series of recent GOP primaries found incumbents who President Donald Trump was upset with -- including Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), and at least five Indiana state lawmakers -- losing to Trump-backed MAGA candidates. One of the things that is driving tensions between Trump and other Republicans is his handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files, and according to Newsweek reporter Hugh Cameron, those tensions are playing out in deep red South Carolina.

June 9, 2026 at 10:57 AM EDT
Susan Collins isn't safe even if Platner implodes: report

Democrats are betting controversial candidate Graham Platner is their best chance to unseat U.S. Senator Susan Collins, the Maine Republican who has not lost a race since she first won her seat in 1996. But scandal could sink his campaign even after Tuesday's primary, handing Collins a clearer path to a sixth term. Bloomberg opinion columnist Ronald Brownstein writes that the voting will "illuminate the one thin path that could allow" Democrats to "avoid that fate."