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North Carolina GOP Plans to Rig US House Map for Trump
"These shameless politicians are abusing their power to take away yours," Democratic Gov. Josh Stein told voters.
Oct 13, 2025
"The General Assembly works for North Carolina, not Donald Trump."
That's how the state's Democratic governor, Josh Stein, responded on Monday after Republican legislative leaders announced plans to vote on redrawing congressional districts for the 2026 midterms to appease the president.
"The Republican leadership in the General Assembly has failed to pass a budget, failed to pay our teachers and law enforcement what they deserve, and failed to fully fund Medicaid," Stein continued. "Now they are failing you, the voters."
"These shameless politicians are abusing their power to take away yours," he added. "I will always fight for you because the voters should choose their representatives, not the other way around."
Since Texas Republican lawmakers passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed a new congressional map gerrymandered for the GOP in August after pressure from Trump, legislators in other states have pursued similar efforts.
Some Democrats in blue states have responded with proposals to draw GOP-held districts out of existence—including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, whose redistricting plans are on his state's November ballot.
Newsom was also among the critics calling out North Carolina Senate President Pro Tempore Phil Berger (R-26) on Monday:
As The Associated Press reported Monday:
North Carolina Republicans already created a map in 2023 that resulted in GOP candidates winning 10 of the state's 14 US House seats in 2024. That division compared to the 7-7 seat split between Democrats and the GOP under the map used in 2022.
Now, only one of the House districts—the 1st District, currently represented by Democratic Rep. Don Davis—is considered a true swing district and could be targeted by the GOP for an 11th seat.
Former Democratic Congressman Wiley Nickel, who did not seek another term in the House of Representatives after the North Carolina GOP redrew the map two years ago, slammed state lawmakers for trying to oust Davis: "I've seen this movie before—and I didn't like the ending. NC Republicans gerrymandered me out of my seat and cost Democrats control of Congress. Now they’re coming for Don Davis. They couldn't beat him at the ballot box, so they're going to cheat. That's not democracy—it's rigging the system."
Rep. Deborah Ross, one of the other three Democrats representing the state in the US House, said Monday that "for multiple election cycles, Republicans in North Carolina have used partisan gerrymandering to silence voters and manipulate their way into office. With this announcement, we have now reached a decisive turning point for our democracy—a moment when the courts and our elected representatives will need to decide whether it's acceptable for Republicans to blatantly rig elections to cement their hold on power."
"The context is critical. North Carolinians from both parties should be alarmed by credible reports that Phil Berger is pursuing redistricting as part of a corrupt bargain to secure a political endorsement from Donald Trump," she continued. "Republicans are waging a war on American voting rights because they know the truth—their policies are unpopular, their candidates are unlikable, and they can't win a majority in Congress without stacking the deck in their favor."
"Now is the time for people of good faith from both parties who care about the future of our democracy to make their voices heard. Will we allow a corrupt deal to go unchallenged? Will we allow power-hungry politicians to select their voters? Or will we stand up for the bedrock American principle that voters should be empowered to select their leaders?" she asked. "I'm committed to fighting for every North Carolinian who is tired of being silenced by Republicans in Raleigh and Washington."
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Trump's Anti-Immigrant Violence Is a Message for the Rest of Us
This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.
Oct 13, 2025
For the Trump regime, the brutality is the point. It’s the means to the end of a violent, single-party state that they’re openly proclaiming, even though our media insists on turning away from it.
Back in the 1980s, I lived with my family and worked in Germany for a bit short of two years. The international relief agency I worked for (and lived at the HQ of) jumped through all the necessary hoops to get me a work permit, but if I’d overstayed my permit or visa nobody would have kicked in my front door or invaded my home with flash-bangs and automatic weapons drawn.
Nobody would have smashed in the windows of my car, or shot me with pepper balls or rubber-coated bullets, or snatched our three children and put them into a privatized “Christian” foster care system from which thousands of kids simply vanish.
Instead, a polite fellow from the Ausländerbehörden (“Immigration Office”) would have dropped by, perhaps with a local police officer, to tell me how to navigate the system to either acquire the right to stay, or work out how I’d be leaving. He’d give me a few weeks, or possibly even a few months, to get everything together and leave the country.
The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.
I knew a few German police officers; they’re incredibly professional, having to have graduated from a three-year college program and undergone what’s typically a yearlong probationary period before they can publicly handle a firearm.
This is how civilized countries handle “illegal immigration.” So, why are Border Czar Tom Homan, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem, President Donald Trump, et al., engaging in and celebrating such wild violence against people here?
There are now so many videos of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) thugs unlawfully beating, kidnapping, and terrorizing brown people, their supporters, protesters, and journalists—even maliciously spraying pepper gas at peaceful protesters in inflatable animal costumes—that it’s getting impossible to keep track of them all.
From ICE agents smashing a car window to pull a man from his vehicle in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Apr. 16, 2025), to an ICE agent shooting Eric Díaz-Cruz in the face in Brooklyn (February 2020), to masked agents breaking a car window during an arrest outside a Beaverton, Oregon preschool (July 21, 2025), and even pepper balling a Chicago pastor in the head during a protest (September 2025), the videos keep piling up.
Add to that a viral clip of a cuffed Portland protester being wheeled away on a flatbed cart (October 2025), neighbors in Nashville forming a human chain to stop an ICE pickup (July 2019), and the on-camera violent throwing to the ground and arrest of a WGN journalist during a Chicago raid last week, and you get the picture.
This is how it always starts, this process of getting citizens used to the government using violence that will one day be turned against them.
When a regime wants to turn the police powers of the state—with all the brutality and violence they can legally wield—against its political opponents, it never starts with the members of the opposition party. But it always ends up there, be it in Germany in the 1930s or today’s Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Iran, etc., etc.
Hitler didn’t start by arresting and imprisoning lawmakers from or supporters of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the Centre Party (Zentrum), or even the Communist Party (KPD) even though all of the three major German parties openly and outspokenly opposed his Nazi Party.
ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get noncitizens to leave the country.
German Pastor Martin Niemöller’s famous poem begins with, “First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out because I was not a socialist.” But, in fact, first Hitler came for queer people.
A year before Nazis began attacking union leaders and socialists, a full five years before attacking Jewish-owned stores on Kristallnacht, the Nazis came for the trans people at the Institute for Sexual Research in Berlin.
In 1930, the Institute had pioneered the first gender-affirming surgery in modern Europe. It’s director, Magnus Hirschfeld, had compiled the largest library of books and scientific papers on the LGBTQ+ spectrum in the world and was internationally recognized in the field of sexual and gender studies.
Being gay, lesbian, or trans was widely tolerated in Germany, at least in the big cities, when Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933, and the German queer community was his first explicit target. Within weeks, the Nazis began a campaign to demonize queer people—with especially vitriolic attacks on trans people—across German media.
German states put into law bans on gender-affirming care, drag shows, and any sort of “public display of deviance,” enforcing a long-moribund German law, Paragraph 175, first put into the nation’s penal code in 1871, that outlawed homosexuality. Books and magazines telling stories of gay men and lesbians were removed from schools and libraries.
Thus, a mere five months after Hitler came to power, on May 6, 1933, Nazis showed up at the Institute and hauled over 20,000 books and manuscripts about gender and sexuality out in the street to burn, creating a massive bonfire. It was followed by open and widely publicized violence against gay men and trans women.
It was the first major Nazi book burning and violence against an “other,” and was celebrated with newsreels played in theaters across the nation. It wouldn’t be the last: Soon it spread to libraries and public high schools.
Having established the legal precedent for dragging people from their homes and imprisoning them, Hitler then began arresting members of the non-Nazi political parties and their followers.
But first, he knew he had to get Germans used to the idea of authorities of the state kicking in doors and dragging screaming people into the street.
When the only victims of this brutality were queer people and “non-Aryans,” ethnic Germans let him and his Stormtroopers get away with it because the objects of the violence were “them.”
But it never ends with “them.”
Fascist regimes always turn their police powers against their own people, first going after those who ridicule, oppose, or have turned away from support for their leader.
ICE doesn’t need to rappel from helicopters, smash windows, zip-tie shivering naked American citizen children, and terrorize their parents to get noncitizens to leave the country.
Instead, like in Germany and most other civilized nations, they could simply give people the equivalent of a speeding ticket with a certain amount of time to get their affairs in order and leave the country before a next step—arrest and forced deportation—takes place. And they could threaten their employers with large fines, like my employer in Germany would have faced had I overstayed my visa.
But not here in America. Here, the agenda is quite different and involves explicit and highly publicized violence against undocumented people and their property.
For a reason.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller told us, when talking with Sean Hannity on Fox “News” in August, what that reason is, what their ultimate goal will be:
“The Democrat [sic] Party does not fight for, care about, or represent American citizens. It is an entity devoted exclusively [his emphasis] to the defense of hardened criminals, gang-bangers, and illegal, alien killers and terrorists. The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” (emphasis added)
Immigrants are just the Trump regime’s warm-up act, just like trans people and Gypsies were in 1933 Germany. The real goal of this administration—by their own declaration—is to turn America into a one-party-rule nation.
To get there, though, they first must get us used to Trump’s masked secret police using violence on the streets and in our homes, right in front of us.
This is why DHS is proudly producing videos showing people being brutalized to upbeat music, why their agents are concealing their identities to increase the terror and minimize the possibility of accountability, and why complicit Republicans refuse to even use the correct name for their ultimate target, members of the Democratic Party.
Back in the 1950s, Joe McCarthy advised Republicans never to use the actual name of the Democratic Party, but instead to slander them with a slur.
Never say Democratic Party, that sounds too nice, too democratic. Instead, always say "Democrat Party," with an emphasis on the "rat."
It’s why they’re flooding social media with celebrations of their violence, and why the millionaire talent on billionaire-owned Fox “News” are cheerleading them. It’s why Trump is openly talking about arresting Illinois’ Gov. JB Pritzker and Chicago’s Mayor Brandon Johnson. It’s why his masked thugs tackled a US senator, arrested a congresswoman, and imprisoned the mayor of Newark, all with great fanfare.
If you think Democrats—including registered Democratic voters—aren’t next, you’re not paying attention. They’re already trying to make sure our votes aren’t counted; when that fails they’ll proceed to Miller’s step two and start dealing with us as “domestic extremists.”
The brutality, in other words, is the point. It’s not an accident, a side effect, or the result of poor training. It’s intentional. It’s a signal of their broader intentions. Following the classic dictator’s playbook.
And if we ever get used to it, G-d help America.
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'Our New Reality': Planet Reaches First Climate Tipping Point With Coral Reef Dieback
“We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” said one researcher. “This is our new reality.”
Oct 13, 2025
Less than two years after researchers at the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom warned that the world was nearing numerous climate tipping points, a report out Monday warns that one such "point of no return" has already been reached, with warm-water coral reefs "experiencing unprecedented dieback."
Surging global temperatures, especially in recent years, have pushed the world's coral reefs into a state of widespread decline, with the worst bleaching event on record taking place since 2023. More than 84% of the world's reefs have been impacted.
In the Global Tipping Points Report 2025 released Monday, the researchers warned that "the central estimate" of coral reefs' "tipping point of 1.2°C global warming has been crossed," with planetary heating now at about 1.4°C above preindustrial levels.
The warming waters have caused widespread bleaching of coral reefs, which impacts the nearly a million species of marine animals and organisms that rely on them to support some of the planet's most diverse ecosystems.
“Unless we return to global mean surface temperatures of 1.2°C (and eventually to at least 1°C) as fast as possible, we will not retain warm-water reefs on our planet at any meaningful scale,” the report says. Minimizing non-climatic stressors, particularly improved reef management, can give reefs the best chance of surviving under what must be a minimal exceedance of their thermal tipping point."
The decline of coral reefs also leaves coastal communities without natural barriers against storm surge, compounds the overfishing crisis by depriving fish of a habitat in which to reproduce, and impacts thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in reef tourism each year.
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation."
"We can no longer talk about tipping points as a future risk,” Steve Smith, a social scientist at the University of Exeter and a lead author of the report, told Nature. “This is our new reality.”
The arrival of the tipping point necessitates immediate, significant reductions in fossil fuel emissions that are driving planetary heating in order to return to a global mean surface temperature of 1.2°C over preindustrial temperatures, but climate scientist Bill McGuire did not mince words Monday regarding the likelihood of mitigating the damage already done to coral reefs.
"We won't reduce temps to 1.2°C as soon as possible, so this is the death knell for most of the world's stupendous reef communities," said McGuire. "Other tipping points will follow."
The report notes that the world is still headed toward other climate tipping points, namely the "large-scale" degradation of the Amazon rainforest, which is projected to "weaken global climate regulation" and accelerate biodiversity loss; the melting of mountain glaciers like Áakʼw Tá Hít in Alaska; and for the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), which regulates the climate by transporting warmer waters from the tropics to the northern Atlantic Ocean, whose likelihood of reaching a tipping point "increases with global temperature" rise.
Without rapid cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, the Global Tipping Points report says, the upper threshold of global temperature rise for coral reefs of 1.5°C is likely to be reached within 10 years.
“We are going to overshoot 1.5°C of global warming probably around 2030 on current projections,” Tim Lenton of the University of Exeter’s Global Systems Institute told The Guardian.
Manjana Milkoreit, a co-author of the report and political scientist at the University of Oslo, told Nature that "we have the knowledge regarding how to stop the Earth from reaching more tipping points."gr
“What we need is a kind of governance that matches the nature of this challenge," she said.
The report also acknowledges "positive tipping points" that could have runaway impacts on the ability to rapidly draw down greenhouse gas emissions, such as the widespread adoption of regenerative agricultural practices and an acceleration in the transition toward electric vehicle and solar power use.
"Solar PV panels have dropped in price by a quarter for each doubling of their installed capacity. Batteries have improved in quality and plummeted in price the more that are deployed," reads the report. "This encourages further adoption. The spread of climate litigation cases and nature positive initiatives is also self-amplifying. The more people undertaking them the more they influence others to act."
Lenton told The Guardian that "the race is on to bring forward these positive tipping points to avoid what we are now sure will be the unmanageable consequences of further tipping points in the Earth system."
As Common Dreams reported last week, global progress toward transitioning away from fossil fuels and expanding the use of renewable energy is surging worldwide—but the US has been left out this year under President Donald Trump, with a major spending bill imposing new fees on solar and wind development and boosting drilling on public lands while the US Department of Energy is investing $625 million in coal.
The Global Tipping Points report was released four weeks before global leaders are set to meet in Belém, Brazil for the 30th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP30), where policymakers will be asked to contribute to a Granary of Solutions: "a reservoir of concrete tools and initiatives—scalable, replicable, and aligned with the Paris Agreement—that connect ambition with implementation" in order to trigger "positive tipping points of transformation leveraging solutions that already exist."
"As we head into the COP30 climate negotiations it’s vital that all parties grasp the gravity of the situation,” Mike Barrett, chief scientific adviser at the World Wide Fund for Nature in the UK and a co-author of the report, told Yale Environment 360. “Countries must show the political bravery and leadership to work together and achieve them.”
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