Stephen Miller’s War on Everybody / Robert Kennedy Jr. Takes Money From Minority Health For His Own Security / Israel’s Incredible Shrinking Democracy / More Hope from the New Hungary / China Expands Its Nuclear Arsenal
We Are Going To Dismantle The Radical Left Organizations In This Country
New York Times
Charles: Matthew Purdy and Alan Feuer wrote one of the most important stories of the week, detailing the massive perversion of the Federal government directed by the Trump White House in pursuit of its ideological enemies.
Days after the murder of Charlie Kirk, Stephen Miller made it clear that he would use Kirk’s death as a “blunt instrument for attacking the left.”
Demonstrators in January outside the Whipple Building in Minneapolis.Credit...Victor J. Blue for The New York Times
Miller said, “The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me …was that we have to dismantle the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. And we are going to do that.”
The targets of the effort are networks whose ideologies supposedly include “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
In other words, anyone who doesn’t embrace MAGA’s versions of racism and Christian Nationalism is now an automatic target of the Federal government–especially if you’re Black, trans or gay. So are “myriad organizations whose causes, from the environment to civil liberties to voting rights, are at odds with the president’s agenda.”
Officials have taken a government wide approach to scrutinizing citizens and organizations opposed to Trump policies. Tax agents have examined nonprofit groups. Investigators have looked into the books of labor unions. Prosecutors have brought charges against anti-ICE protesters, asserting that a leftist conspiracy is provoking political violence on the streets.
These efforts came together this year in Minnesota, the scene of heated protests in response to the government’s aggressive immigration sweep. Federal investigators infiltrated neighborhood watch committees, church meetings and an environmental group in an operation that surveilled hundreds of ordinary people. Ultimately, 15 protesters were charged with conspiring to impede immigration enforcement as members of the far-left movement known as antifa, but prosecutors did not accuse them of any violent acts beyond kicking an ICE vehicle and sideswiping another.
From the start of his second term, Mr. Trump has wielded power to punish those he views as opponents, including law firms, universities, pro-Palestinian activists and news outlets, three of which he banned last week from the White House. But after the Kirk killing and assassination attempts on the president, Mr. Trump and his allies have recast the effort in existential terms.
“What we are finally coming to grips with on the right is that our opponents on the left, some of them, enough of them, want us dead,” Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Turning Point USA, Mr. Kirk’s conservative organization, said in an interview. “You have to deal with this or you are a sitting duck.”
The government’s effort is so broad and so unhinged that even libertarian and conservative groups have recognized its dangers.
An amicus brief filed in Minnesota included the Cato Institute and the right-leaning Society for the Rule of Law. It said Mr. Trump’s political violence directive, known as National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, “effectively uses the domestic-terrorism label to justify criminal investigations into disfavored groups that would not otherwise be targeted.”
In Minnesota investigators obtained three years of financial records from two large mainstream labor unions and a climate action group, according to court documents.
Some of the 15 people charged in the so-called antifa case in Minnesota did, in fact, belong to some of the unions and political organizations that faced scrutiny over several months during the spring and winter. But the newly released documents, which were disclosed as part of a motion asking for more details about the criminal inquiry, suggest that investigators used those tenuous connections to take a deep dive into the inner workings of the groups.
Kevin Riach, the lawyer who filed the motion, in Federal District Court in Minnesota, wrote that the homeland security investigation into the interference with federal agents “extended far beyond any potential threat to law enforcement safety.”
“It concluded, with no evidence (but obvious political animus),” he wrote, “that numerous Twin Cities unions and nonprofit organizations were involved in a widespread conspiracy,” adding that “it surveilled and surreptitiously gathered financial records generated by these organizations despite the lack of any connection between those organizations and criminal conduct.”
In his motion, Mr. Riach described how federal agents took down the license plate numbers of people who attended a training session at a church in Roseville, Minn., and used that information to obtain their names. The agents then searched social media for images of the people, compiling an “intel work-up” that included detailed personal information about them.
“None of these individuals did anything other than engage in protected First Amendment speech in a church meeting room,” Mr. Riach wrote. “Yet now their personal information is memorialized in a D.H.S. dossier.”
RFK Jr.’s Enhanced Security Funded With Money From Minority Health Office
Wall Street Journal
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is typically flanked by bodyguards in public. ALEX WROBLEWSKI/BLOOMBERG NEWS
Scott: For Robert F Kennedy, born to wealth, power and privilege, service to his fellow man, and particularly to the poor and needy, was a moral obligation of which he spoke regularly. For his son, RFKJr, however, the poor and the needy are no more than marks ripe for exploitation and theft. And in this attitude, he adopts not the legacy and beliefs of his father, but those of his new patron, Donald Trump, whose cabinet is filled with like-minded figures. They are grifters one and all, and nowhere is this more evident that in their routine, thoughtless diversion of public moneys intended to serve the people to their own private use: whether lavish office furniture, use of public aircraft and vehicles for vacation travel and lavish entertainment, appropriation of military housing for their private use, and ostentatious use of federal funds and resources for their own private protection. Because in the age of Trump, wealth, power and importance are projected in the crassest manner possible, starting with bloated security details that clash rudely with ordinary citizens who dare to draw too close. And RFKJr unsurprisingly chooses to steal from Black infants to fund his strutting majesty.
The Department of Health and Human Services informed congressional appropriators earlier this year that it was moving about $12 million from its Office of Minority Health to help cover the ballooning cost of security for Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., according to people familiar with the matter and a document reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
The cost of security for Kennedy, a high-profile figure in the Trump administration whose father and uncle were assassinated in the 1960s, grew from roughly $10 million in fiscal year 2025 to $17 million in fiscal year 2026, some of the people familiar with the matter said.
The secretary’s office has a large pot of discretionary money that it could have tapped for the cost, those people said. HHS cut $12 million from the minority health office, rather than just the $7 million that represented increased security costs, in part because the secretary’s office has been subject to across-the-board budget cuts, those people said.
The Office of Minority Health was created under President Ronald Reagan after a landmark report found that Black infants in the U.S. were more likely than white babies to die and that Black life expectancy was shorter, among other disparities. The office for years has funded research and efforts to close those gaps, which have persisted. Its annual budget has been roughly $74 million.
In Israel’s Incredible Shrinking Quasi-Democracy, If You’re Arab, You Can’t Stand for Office
Ha’aretz
Sami Abu Shehadeh, with Ofer Cassif and other Joint List members, this month. Credit: Itay Cohen
Scott: Among Israel’s Jewish majority, hostility towards Arabs and the notion that Arab citizens of Israel are entitled to equal protection of the law, starting with the right to vote and to stand for political office, is growing. And now that hatred manifests itself in the vote of the Elections Committee to bar Arab Parties from seeking election to the Knesset.
Israel’s Central Elections Committee voted Wednesday to disqualify Mansour Abbas’ United Arab List slate from running in the election, as well as the Joint List, which consists of the parties Hadash, Ta’al and Balad.
The vote came after left-wing Knesset member Ofer Cassif of the Arab-Jewish Hadash party and Balad chairman Sami Abu Shehadeh were banned earlier the same day.
These decisions may be reversed by appeal to the High Court of Justice.
More Hope From Post-Orban Hungary
Reuters
Charles: Hungary's new government has introduced a bill that will remove anti-LGBTQ+ rules prohibiting the "promotion of homosexuality" to under-18s implemented by Viktor Orban's former nationalist government.
Hungary's new Justice Minister Marta Gorog said in May that Hungary would need to revise legislation restricting access to LGBTQ+ content after the EU's top court ruled in April that the restrictions breached EU law and contributed to the stigmatisation and marginalisation of gay and transgender people.
Even more dramatically, Hungarian Prime Minister Péter Magyar said on Saturday that his government would also change rules that had effectively banned gay adoption.
Budapest Pride march, June 27, 2026.
China Expands Its Nuclear Arsenal at Seven Secret Sites
Daily Telegraph
Scott: As Chinese President Xi Jinping prepares for a Washington summit at which Trump is rolling out all the honors usually reserved for the visiting head of state of a close long-time ally, the Daily Telegraph releases its investigation into the major security project of Xi’s lengthy presidency—a dramatic expansion of the Chinese nuclear arsenal including the creation of seven secret launch and storage sites.
China is rapidly expanding its nuclear weapons programme across at least seven major sites despite calling for non-proliferation, a Telegraph investigation has found.
Satellite image analysis has uncovered significant construction at nuclear facilities and testing areas across the country.
At one site, where China is believed to produce the plutonium triggers designed to activate nuclear weapons, an entire support town has been built, with new apartment blocks, an athletics field, and a bus depot used to transport staff to and from the nuclear site.
At another, a 600m-long tube has been built. Experts say it is used to test how nuclear weapons would withstand blasts – for instance, from enemy weapons.
Small villages and farms have been flattened to make way for a third site: a fusion research centre, where Chinese scientists are believed to use super-powered lasers to test how materials behave during a nuclear bomb’s detonation.
Taken together, experts say these images from the seven sites – Pingtong, Zitong, Lop Nur, Jiuquan, Mianyang, Jinta and Guangyuan – show that Xi Jinping has overseen a record expansion of the country’s nuclear programme.
This is despite the leader of the Chinese Communist Party – who is due to meet Donald Trump this week – repeatedly saying nuclear weapons should be prohibited and destroyed.
China maintains a “no first use” nuclear policy and has signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty.
Mr Trump, who will host Mr Xi at the White House on Thursday, has cited testing by other countries as justification for expanding America’s nuclear weapons testing programme, something experts have warned against.
“Because of other countries’ testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” Mr Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, before a meeting with the Chinese president in October. “That process will begin immediately.”
China’s nuclear arsenal has more than doubled under Mr Xi to 620 warheads as of January, according to an annual report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.
