TV News LIES

A theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee who was fired in September for his “insensitive” social media post after Charlie Kirk’s assassination is back on the job and will receive a $500,000 settlement.

Darren Michael, an associate professor of acting and directing, had shared a Newsweek article on social media on Sept. 10 that quoted Kirk’s own words about gun violence after the right-wing activist was fatally shot.

“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” Kirk said at an event in 2023. “That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.”

Michael did not caption the post with his own thoughts, but his social media activity gained the attention of Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.), who posted a screenshot of his post and professor page on X, asking the university, “What do you say?”

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The noted banjo player Béla Fleck has canceled three performances scheduled for next month with the National Symphony Orchestra, or NSO, at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Fleck, who has won 18 Grammy Awards and often performs with symphonies around the country, is the latest artist to cancel engagements at the Kennedy Center amidst many administrative and curatorial changes at the Washington, D.C. arts complex.

In a post published to social media Tuesday evening, Fleck wrote: "I have withdrawn from my upcoming performance with the NSO at The Kennedy Center. Performing there has become charged and political, at an institution where the focus should be on the music. I look forward to playing with the NSO another time in the future when we can together share and celebrate art."

The National Symphony Orchestra did not respond to requests for a response to Fleck's decision to cancel. Tuesday evening, however, the center's president, Richard Grenell, wrote on X: "You just made it political and caved to the woke mob who wants you to perform for only Lefties. This mob pressuring you will never be happy until you only play for Democrats. The Trump Kennedy Center believes all people are welcome — Democrats and Republicans and people uninterested in politics. We want performers who aren't political — who simply love entertaining everyone regardless of who they voted for."

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Approaching the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, the official plaque honoring the police who defended democracy that day is nowhere to be found.

It's not on display at the Capitol, as is required by law. Its whereabouts aren't publicly known, though it's believed to be in storage.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, has yet to formally unveil the plaque. And the Trump administration's Department of Justice is seeking to dismiss a police officers' lawsuit asking that it be displayed as intended. The Architect of the Capitol, which was responsible for obtaining and displaying the plaque, said in light of the federal litigation, it cannot comment.

Determined to preserve the nation's history, some 100 members of Congress, mostly Democrats, have taken it upon themselves to memorialize the moment. For months, they've mounted poster board-style replicas of the Jan. 6 plaque outside their office doors, resulting in a Capitol complex awash with makeshift remembrances

"On behalf of a grateful Congress, this plaque honors the extraordinary individuals who bravely protected and defended this symbol of democracy on Jan. 6, 2021," reads the faux bronze stand-in for the real thing. "Their heroism will never be forgotten."

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The Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the so-called Epstein files, a court filing has revealed, as Democrats step up criticism of the Trump administration’s “lawlessness” for keeping records under seal.

The department conceded that only 12,285 documents, totalling 125,575 pages, relating to the disgraced financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein have been published to date, despite a federal law requiring the vast majority to be released by 19 December.

Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, wrote a five-page update to Paul Engelmayer, the federal New York judge overseeing the case, on Monday, asserting that efforts to protect the identities of Epstein’s victims were a priority, and had slowed the process.

“There are more than two million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review,” she wrote in the letter co-signed by Todd Blanche, her deputy, and Jay Clayton, US attorney for the southern district of New York.

“This work has required and will continue to require substantial department resources.” She said about 400 justice department lawyers were supporting “efforts to comply”, along with 100 FBI document analysts trained in handling sensitive material.

More...https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/06/epstein-files-release-justice-department

A major Texas teachers’ union filed a federal lawsuit against the state on Tuesday challenging what it describes as unconstitutional investigations into hundreds of educators who posted comments on social media following the September killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk.

The Texas American Federation of Teachers, which represents approximately 66,000 public school employees, is asking a federal court to block the Texas Education Agency and its commissioner, Mike Morath, from continuing investigations that the union argues violate teachers’ free speech protections.

The legal challenge centers on a 6 September letter Morath sent to school superintendents across Texas, instructing them to report educators who made what he termed “reprehensible and inappropriate” remarks about Kirk, who was shot and killed on 10 September while speaking at Utah Valley University. The union argues this directive has triggered a sweeping crackdown on constitutionally protected speech.

“Public school teachers and other employees do not surrender their first amendment rights simply by virtue of their employment,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit describes cases of four teachers who faced discipline ranging from termination to formal investigations after making personal social media posts criticizing Kirk’s rightwing positions on issues including race and immigration. According to the complaint, educators were punished despite posting from personal accounts, outside work hours, and without causing any disruption to school operations.

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“Public school teachers and other employees do not surrender their first amendment rights simply by virtue of their employment,” the lawsuit reads.

The lawsuit describes cases of four teachers who faced discipline ranging from termination to formal investigations after making personal social media posts criticizing Kirk’s rightwing positions on issues including race and immigration. According to the complaint, educators were punished despite posting from personal accounts, outside work hours, and without causing any disruption to school operations.

Congressional Republicans were largely silent on the fifth anniversary of the January 6 insurrection on Tuesday, even as Democrats sought to use the occasion to condemn Donald Trump and a small group of protesters convened on the grounds of the US Capitol in solidarity with those who carried out the attack.

Democrats, who are in the minority in Congress after fruitlessly hoping that the well-documented violence would cause voters to reject Trump for good, seized on the anniversary to decry the president as a threat to democracy, and accuse Republicans of acting as his accomplices.

“Instead of holding those responsible for the attack accountable, Donald Trump and far-right extremists in Congress have repeatedly attempted to rewrite history and whitewash the horrific events of January 6. We will not let that happen,” the House minority leader, Hakeem Jeffries, said at an unofficial hearing his party convened to examine the effects of the attack.

The anniversary was the first since Trump returned to office nearly a year ago and immediately pardoned almost everyone convicted or charged over the violence, the crowning achievement of a campaign that Republicans began almost immediately in the attack’s aftermath to blunt public outrage.

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