Trump, Who Incited Jan 6 Insurrection, Wants Sedition Charges for Lawmakers Reminding Troops of Duty to Disobey Illegal Orders

“If you’re threatening Dems for reminding the military that they are obligated to not follow illegal orders, you’re admitting your orders are illegal.”


President Donald Trump delivers a speech in front of US Navy personnel on board the USS George Washington aircraft carrier at the base in Yokosuka, Japan on October 28, 2025.
(Photo by Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images)

Jessica Corbett
Nov 20, 2025
COMMON DREAMS

Nearly five years after inciting an attempted insurrection, President Donald Trump on Thursday called for sedition charges against Democrats in Congress who reminded members of the US military and intelligence services that “you must refuse illegal orders.”

“We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” says Sen. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.), a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst, in the 90-second video circulated on social media Tuesday.

Sen. Mark Kelly (Ariz.), a former Navy captain, notes in the video that “like us, you all swore an oath” to the US Constitution

Reps. Jason Crow (Colo.), Chris Deluzio (Pa.), Maggie Goodlander (NH), and Chrissy Houlahan (Pa.)—all veterans of the US military and intelligence community—join the senators in calling on service members to stand up to any illegal orders from the Trump administration and “don’t give up the ship.”



Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff for the Department of Homeland Security who anonymously spoke out against Trump in a high-profile op-ed and book during his first term, said that it is “pretty insane that we are living in a moment where a video message like this [is] necessary.”

Also responding to the video on the platform X, Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security adviser, claimed that “Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection.”

Kelly hit back, citing the January 6, 2021 attack: “I got shot at serving our country in combat, and I was there when your boss sent a violent mob to attack the Capitol. I know the difference between defending our Constitution and an insurrection, even if you don’t.”

Slotkin also responded, saying: “This is the law. Passed down from our Founding Fathers, to ensure our military upholds its oath to the Constitution—not a king. Given you’re directing much of a military policy, you should buff up on the Uniformed Code of Military Justice.”



Trump weighed in on his Truth Social platform just after 9:00 am on Thursday morning, writing: “It’s called SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL. Each one of these traitors to our Country should be ARRESTED AND PUT ON TRIAL. Their words cannot be allowed to stand—We won’t have a Country anymore!!! An example MUST BE SET.”

“This is really bad, and Dangerous to our Country. Their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???,” Trump continued, linking to the right-wing Washington Examiner‘s coverage and signing both posts “President DJT.”

Just over an hour later, the president added, “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”

Responding with a lengthy joint statement, the lawmakers behind the video reiterated their commitment to the oaths they took, and said that “what’s most telling is that the president considers it punishable by death for us to restate the law.”

“Our servicemembers should know that we have their backs as they fulfill their oath to the Constitution and obligation to follow only lawful orders,” they added. “Every American must unite and condemn the president’s calls for our murder and political violence. This is a time for moral clarity.”

Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.)—who has for years faced threats from Trump supporters, including Arizona state Rep. John Gillette (R-30) in September—stressed that the president’s “calls for political violence are completely unacceptable.”



Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), another frequent target of right-wing threats, similarly took aim at Trump’s sedition remarks, saying, “None of this is normal.”

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on the chamber’s floor Thursday: “Let’s be crystal clear: The president of the United States is calling for the execution of elected officials. This is an outright threat, and it’s deadly serious. We have already seen what happens when Donald Trump tells his followers that his political opponents are enemies of the state.”

“We all remember what January 6th was like. We lived through January 6th. We have lived through the assassinations and attempted assassinations this year. We have members whose families have had to flee their homes,” he continued. “When Donald Trump uses the language of execution and treason, some of his supporters may very well listen. He is lighting a match in a country soaked with political gasoline. Every senator, every representative, every American—regardless of party—should condemn this immediately and without qualification.”

Melanie D’Arrigo, executive director of the Campaign for New York Health, said Thursday: “Trump tried to overthrow our government almost five years ago, and is calling for Dems to be put to death for sedition. If you’re threatening Dems for reminding the military that they are obligated to not follow illegal orders, you’re admitting your orders are illegal.”

The Democrats’ video and Trump’s outburst come as members of Congress and legal experts lambast the Trump administration’s deadly bombings of boats allegedly running drugs in the Caribbean and Pacific Ocean. Critics have emphasized that even if the targeted vessels are transporting illicit substances, the strikes are illegal.



Trump is also under fire for his attacks on immigrants in Democrat-led communities. Kelly and Slotkin, along with Democratic Sens. Tammy Duckworth (Ill.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), and Ron Wyden (Ore.), recently introduced the No Troops in Our Streets Act, which would limit the administration’s ability to deploy the National Guard and inject $1 billion in new resources to fight crime across the country.

“Our brave military men and women signed up to defend the Constitution and our rights, not to be used as political props or silence dissent,” said Duckworth, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who has been especially critical of the administration’s operation in the Chicagoland area, including efforts to deploy the National Guard there.

“These un-American, unjustified deployments of troops into our cities do nothing to fight crime—they only serve to intimidate Americans in their own neighborhoods,” she added. “I’m introducing this legislation with my colleagues to stop Trump’s gross misuse of our military and devote more resources toward efforts that would actually help our local law enforcement—which Trump has actually defunded to the tune of $800 million.”

‘How Many More Have to Die?’ Asks Democrat as Another Texas Woman’s Death Blamed on Abortion Ban

“Let’s be very clear: Republicans are killing women,” said one abortion rights advocate. “Democrats need to start calling them murderers loudly and often.”


Pro-abortion rights protesters stand outside of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC on June 24, 2024.
(Photo by Celal Gunes/Anadolu via Getty Images)

Julia Conley
Nov 20, 2025
COMMON DREAMS


After new reporting detailed the latest known woman who died because doctors would not provide her with abortion care under Texas’ ban, the Democratic lawmaker who authored the Women’s Health Protection Act condemned Republicans in Congress for refusing to “protect women’s basic freedom to survive their own pregnancies.”

“It would take only six Republicans in the House to join with us and pass this vital legislation to restore bodily autonomy to every person in this country, regardless of their state or zip code,” said Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), whose bill would create a new legal protection for the right to provide and obtain abortion care.

Chu’s call came as ProPublica reported on the death of Tierra Walker, a 37-year-old pregnant mother of a teenage son who asked doctors to terminate her pregnancy in October 2024 after she experienced seizures and feared she would develop preeclampsia, a life-threatening complication that had led to the stillbirth of her twins a few years earlier.

“Wouldn’t you think it would be better for me to not have the baby?” Walker asked doctors at Methodist Hospital Northeast in San Antonio.

The medical staff assured her there was nothing wrong with her pregnancy and blamed her symptoms on pre-existing conditions including diabetes and high blood pressure—but more than a dozen OB/GYNs reviewed her case and told ProPublica doctors had not followed standard medical practice, which would have been to advise Walker early on in the pregnancy that her health conditions could lead to complications and “to offer termination at any point if she wanted.”

Had doctors done do, all of the medical experts said, Walker would not have died at 20 weeks pregnant on her 14-year-old son’s birthday last December.

“Her death was preventable, and it was caused by a law written by Republicans to control women’s bodies, no matter the consequences. This is the disgraceful reality of Republican abortion bans that criminalize care and sacrifice women’s lives,” said Chu.

Walker found out she was five weeks pregnant in September 2024 after experiencing a seizure. Doctors also noted she had “hypertension at levels so high that it reduces circulation to major organs and can cause a heart attack or stroke,” which put her at increased risk for preeclampsia.

But instead of warning Walker of the risks, the medical staff sent her home, where she continued having seizures through her first trimester and her fiance and aunt took turns watching over her.

Texas law prohibits medical providers from “aiding and abetting” abortion care, with doctors facing the loss of their medical license and up to 99 years in prison if they provide an abortion. Abortions are ostensibly permitted in cases when a pregnant person’s life or major body function is at risk—but Walker’s case demonstrates how medical exceptions within abortion bans often do nothing to ensure a dangerous pregnancy can be terminated to protect a woman’s life.

At least one of the more than 90 doctors—including 21 OB/GYNs—who became involved in Walker’s care last year, when she was repeatedly hospitalized, acknowledged in a case file that she was at “high risk of clinical deterioration and/or death.”

But none of them ever talked to her about terminating the pregnancy.

As Walker’s pregnancy progressed, she developed a blood clot in her leg that didn’t respond to anticoagulation medicine, and her seizures and high blood pressure remained uncontrolled.

She was diagnosed with preeclampsia at 20 weeks pregnant on December 27—but doctors did not even label her condition as “severe” in her files, let alone provide her with the standard care for the condition at that point in pregnancy, which is an abortion.

Instead, they gave her more blood pressure medication and sent her home, where her son, JJ, found her dead days later.

Author and abortion rights advocate Jessica Valenti said Republicans would likely respond to the news of Walker’s death—as they have in the cases of other women who have died after being unable to get abortions in states that ban them—with claims that doctors were legally allowed to “intervene” or “treat” Walker.

“They won’t say she could have had an abortion because they don’t believe in life-saving abortions,” she said.

This year, in the months after Walker’s death and following outrage over numerous similar cases, Texas lawmakers passed a law that Republicans claim would make it easier for women to obtain abortions in cases where they face life-threatening conditions in pregnancy; their conditions no longer need to put them in “imminent” danger for them to obtain care.

But doctors told ProPublica that hospitals in Texas are still likely to avoid providing abortions in cases like Walker’s, even under the new statute.

“How many more women have to needlessly suffer?” asked Chu. “How many more have to die? How many more children have to grow up without their mother? How many more parents have to lose their adult daughters before Republicans in Congress finally do what’s right and protect women’s basic freedom to survive their own pregnancies?”

“This doesn’t have to be our reality,” she added.

Top Dem Speechwriter Says Young Jews’ Empathy for Gaza Shows Holocaust Education Has Backfired

“Holocaust education is too successful, it made the kids anti-holocaust while Israel is trying to do one,” quipped one prominent critic.


Sarah Hurwitz speaks during the opening plenary of the Jewish Federations of North America general assembly at the Marriott Marquis Hotel in Washington, DC on November 16, 2025.
(Photo by Jewish Federations of North America/YouTube/screen shot)

Brett Wilkins
Nov 19, 2025
COMMPN DREAMS

A speechwriter for prominent Democrats including former President Barack Obama and presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry faced widespread outrage this week after video emerged of her blaming Holocaust education for young Jews’ empathy for Palestinians in Gaza and revulsion at Israel’s genocidal war there.

Earlier this week, Sarah Hurwitz—who was also a senior speechwriter for former First Lady Michelle Obama and other Democrats—spoke at the opening plenary of this year’s Jewish Federations of North America general assembly in Washington, DC. The event featured speakers including Free Press staff writer Olivia Reingold, who implicitly attempted to absolve Israel from blame for the Gaza famine by noting that 12 of the at least 463 Palestinians who starved to death had preexisting health conditions.




300+ Writers Boycott NYT Opinion Pages Over ‘Shameful’ Anti-Palestinian Gaza Coverage

“There have been huge shifts in America on how people think about Jews and Israel, and I think that is especially true of young people,” Hurwitz said during the panel discussion, noting the rise of social media as a primary source of news and information.

“Today, we have social media,” she added “Its algorithms are shaped by billions of people worldwide who don’t really love Jews.”



Hurwitz continued:
It’s also this increasingly post-literate media. Less and less text, more and more videos, so you have TikTok just smashing our young peoples’ brains all day long with video of carnage in Gaza. And this is why so many of us can’t have a sane conversation with younger Jews, because anything we try to say to them, they are hearing it through this wall of carnage. So I wanna give data and information and facts and arguments and they are just seeing in their minds carnage, and I sound obscene.

“I think, unfortunately, the very smart... bet we made on Holocaust education to serve as antisemitism education, in this new media environment, I think that is beginning to break down a little bit, because Holocaust education is absolutely essential,” Hurwitz asserted.

“But I think it may be confusing some of our young people about antisemitism, because they learn about big, strong Nazis hurting weak, emaciated Jews,” she added, “...so when on TikTok all day long they see powerful Israelis hurting weak, skinny Palestinians, it’s not surprising that they think, ‘Oh, I know, the lesson of the Holocaust is you fight Israel, you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.’”

Reaction to Hurwitz’ remarks ranged from incredulity to anger.

“I am almost literally speechless,” American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee nation legal director Jenin Younes said on X. “She’s decrying the fact that kids’ takeaway from Holocaust education has been that we must protect helpless people from powerful people killing them. The real lesson from the Holocaust, it seems, is that Israel must be able to commit genocide if it wants to.”



Argentinian economist Maia Mindel also took to X, writing that it is “extremely grim that a substantial number of very influential people seem to think that the lesson from the Holocaust isn’t ‘mass murder of civilians based on their ancestry so your nation can take their land is wrong’ but rather, ‘Fuck you, got mine.’”

Jewish Currents editor-at-large Peter Beinart wrote on X that “the level of condescension” in Hurwitz’s commentary “is quite remarkable.”

Writer Bryce Greene lamented: “We’re at the point where Israels supporters are now claiming that the Holocaust was not bad because it was the powerful attacking the weak.”

“No, that would be the wrong lesson from the Holocaust,” he added. “According to them it was only bad because Jews were the victims. Real sick shit.”



Independent journalist Ahmed Eldin said on X that “Zionism is so morally bankrupt it sees empathy as a design flaw.”

Eldin wrote Wednesday on his Substack that “Hurwitz didn’t slip up—she said the quiet part out loud and exposed the Zionist project for exactly what it is.”

“She even admitted that, amidst the carnage, she sounds ‘obscene,’” he noted. “That admission, said almost accidentally, is the closest thing to honesty her worldview will allow: The problem is not the violence of Zionism itself, but the visibility of it. Zionism, as she inadvertently revealed, depends not on morality but on opacity. The ideology requires not less brutality, but simply fewer witnesses.”

Moving on to Holocaust education, Eldin wrote:
According to Hurwitz, Holocaust curricula have “backfired” because they taught young people that “you fight the big powerful people hurting the weak people.” In her telling, this universal ethical principle—this most basic moral intuition—is the problem.

The implication is staggering: the “correct” lesson of the Holocaust, she seems to believe, is not “never again for anyone,” but “never question Israel.” What outrages her is not the suffering of Palestinians but the possibility that young people are recognizing it as suffering.

“A world that is witnessing and seeing Palestinians as human is a world in which Zionism cannot function,” Eldin concluded. “A world that sees the violence cannot romanticize the ideology producing it. Once people witness the truth, the mythology cannot be resuscitated and the propaganda cannot be rehabilitated.”

“Israel may be able to flatten Gaza’s buildings, but it cannot rebuild the ignorance it once relied upon,” he added. “The truth is already out, the narrative collapse well underway, the mask irretrievably gone.”

Trump to skip Dick Cheney's funeral after speaking snub: report

Daniel Hampton
November 19, 2025 

RAW STORY


FILE PHOTO: Republican vice presidential candidate Dick Cheney (L) points out something to Texas Governor and Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush during a campaign stop July 26, 2000 in Casper, Wyoming, Cheney's home state. REUTERS/Jeff Mitchell/File Photo

The late former Vice President Dick Cheney may have irked President Donald Trump one last time, as the MAGA leader plans to skip Cheney's funeral after being curiously left off the list of speakers.

Cheney was a strong critic of Trump, once calling him "the greatest threat" to the republic.

“In our nation’s 248-year history, there has never been an individual who is a greater threat to our republic than Donald Trump,” Cheney said last year in announcing he'd vote for Vice President Kamala Harris. “He tried to steal the last election using lies and violence to keep himself in power after the voters had rejected him. He can never be trusted with power again.”

Cheney died on Nov. 3 at the age of 84 from complications from pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. On Wednesday, USA Today reported at least two former presidents plan to attend the service: George W. Bush, who served two terms with Cheney as his vice president, and Joe Biden. Bush is slated to speak at the service.

Trump, however, will not attend the funeral — and "wasn't asked to speak at the service," the report noted.

"A senior White House official said that the president would not attend the funeral and was not aware of anyone else on his staff going to the invitation-only service that will be held in Washington, DC, on Nov. 20 at the National Cathedral," the report said.

The White House has said Trump was "aware" of Cheney's death and lowered flags to half-staff.

How Donald Trump and his Jeffrey Epstein scandal lay bare our racist roots

Thom Hartmann
November 19, 2025 

COMMON DREAMS


The Jeffrey Epstein scandal stripped away the polite fiction that wealthy white men in America are held to the same standards as everyone else.

Epstein wasn’t an exception. He was the rule, laid bare.

From the first days of European settlement, powerful white men have moved through this country with a kind of immunity that would be unthinkable for anyone else. That isn’t just a cultural habit: it’s the residue of the original architecture of America.

We built a nation on the belief that white men were entitled to rule, entitled to take, entitled to decide whose lives mattered and whose didn’t.

That belief never died. It adapted. It modernized. And today it animates a political movement that has captured one of our two major parties.

The root of the problem goes all the way back to the Doctrine of Discovery. A European/papal decree announcing that white nations had a God-given right to seize any land they encountered became the legal and moral starting point for American expansion.

The Supreme Court wrote it into our jurisprudence in the nineteenth century, and we never really let it go. From that twisted foundation flowed the taking of Native land, the destruction of Native nations, and the belief that whiteness itself conferred ownership.

And then — as I point out in The Hidden History of American Oligarchy — that logic didn’t stay confined to the frontier. It seeped into every corner of American life and rose up to try to destroy even the idea of a pluralistic democracy in this country.

Slavery was built on the same logic. It wasn’t an ugly exception to American values; it was a central expression of them. The economy depended on it. Congress bent itself into knots to protect it. The Constitution accommodated it.


When the Civil War ended, our country had a chance to uproot the white male supremacist ideology that had allowed human beings to be treated as property. Instead, we dodged it.

I still remember well, when our son was nine years old and we lived in suburban Atlanta, asking him over dinner, “What did you learn in school today?” and his answer was, “We studied the ‘War of Northern Aggression.’”

We allowed the old Confederates back into the halls of power in the 1870s. We let them write the history books. We abandoned the freedmen who had been promised protection and citizenship.


And the system that emerged was simply white male supremacy, the foundation of slavery, by another name.

Jim Crow wasn’t a detour; it was the natural continuation of the racial hierarchy this country was built on and today’s GOP — and ICE, CPB, and Trump’s toadies in DHS — are trying to re-solidify for the 21st century.

Every tool was used to maintain it. Poll taxes. Literacy tests. Lynching. Chain gangs. Sharecropping. Segregated schools. Redlining. Policing practices that looked far more like occupation than law enforcement.


All of it justified by the same foundational lie that today animates the brutality of Trump‘s ICE raids: that white people were meant to rule and everyone else existed by their pleasure. And the Big Lie that brown-skinned immigrants are committing “voter fraud” that justifies purging millions from our voting rolls every year.

That lie still echoes in our institutions. It’s why entire communities — and now polling places — are policed like enemy territory. It’s why Republicans on the courts (particularly SCOTUS) have so often sided with the powerful over the vulnerable. And it’s why we’ve seen, in recent years, an explicitly brutal willingness to use federal force against Americans exercising their constitutional rights of free speech and protest.

When Trump sent federal agents and troops into Los Angeles, DC, Chicago, Portland, Memphis, and threatened to deploy them elsewhere, it wasn’t a new idea. It was an old ideology flexing its muscles again. It treats American citizens as though they’re foreign enemies. It uses military-trained forces not for defense but for control.


James Madison warned us precisely about this danger of the military policing civilians:
“The means of defense against foreign danger have been always the instruments of tyranny at home.”


He couldn’t have been clearer. The Founders feared the domestic use of military force not because they were naïve, but because they knew exactly how easily power could be turned inward. They knew that once a government starts treating its own people as threats, liberty becomes the first casualty because they’d seen it done by the British in their own time.

The chilling truth is that the movement dominating the modern GOP has embraced that very mentality.


It draws its energy from white grievance and Christian nationalism. It relies on the belief that democracy is legitimate only when it protects white cultural dominance (which is why the Trump Department of Labor is exclusively posting pictures of white workers as if they’re the only “real” Americans).

It thrives on fear and resentment, and encourages a view of fellow nonwhite and female Americans as enemies to be controlled rather than citizens to be represented.

Today’s GOP and the rightwing-billionaire-funded, 50-year-long “Conservative Movement” that drives it have embraced every bad instinct of the Confederacy, the frontier, Jim Crow, and the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement.

They’re not “conserving” anything. They’re restoring an old order.


This didn’t happen suddenly. It took decades and the investment of billions of dollars.

People of a certain age (like me) well remember William F. Buckley Jr.’s 1966-1999 show Firing Line, every Sunday on PBS, as he pontificated about the wonders of “conservatism” and promoted Republican politicians. My dad was a religious viewer and we watched it together every weekend; the show was a major force in national politics.

In a 1957 editorial titled Why the South Must Prevail, Buckley laid out explicitly what the foundation of conservatism must be.

“Again, let us speak frankly,” Buckley wrote: “The South does not want to deprive the Negro of a vote for the sake of depriving him of the vote. … In some parts of the South, the White community merely intends to prevail — that is all. It means to prevail on any issue on which there is corporate disagreement between Negro and White. The White community will take whatever measures are necessary to make certain that it has its way.”


He asked, rhetorically, if white people in the South are “entitled” to “prevail” over nonwhites even in rural areas of the country or large cities with majority Black populations.
“The sobering answer,” Buckley wrote, “is Yes — the White community is so entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.”


Arguably following up, in April 2021, the National Review published an article headlined: Why Not Fewer Voters? justifying Republican voter suppression.

Nixon welcomed the old segregationist Democrats into the GOP. Reagan polished the rhetoric and wrapped it in patriotic language. The Republican Party spent years perfecting techniques to suppress votes, gerrymander districts, and reshape the judiciary.

By the time Trump arrived, the Party was ready for someone who would drop the coded language and say the quiet part out loud.

Trump told white male voters they were the only “real Americans” and everyone else was suspect. He told them the military and the police existed to protect them from demographic change. He told them the only valid elections were the ones they won.

The good news is that most Americans reject this.

Most Americans believe in a multiracial democracy. They want equal justice. They want freedom that applies to everyone. They don’t want their own government treating nonwhites or women as enemy combatants. They don’t want Epstein-style impunity for morbidly rich white men. They don’t want leaders who behave as if the military is a toy for intimidating political opponents.

But we can’t defeat what we refuse to name. America’s original sin wasn’t just slavery or colonialism: it was the belief that white men are entitled to rule by default and women and nonwhites must be subordinate to them.

That belief still infects our politics and largely controls the GOP. It still shapes our institutions. It still animates Republican justices on the Supreme Court who see equality as a threat and democracy as negotiable.

We can’t move forward until we reckon with that truth about our nation’s history and today’s GOP.

We can’t protect liberty while ignoring the warnings of the people who built this country.

And we can’t defend American democracy — and democracy around the world — while the GOP wages war against the very idea of a nation where everyone counts.

The reckoning is long overdue. This time we have to finish the job.

Double-check your voter registration and pass along the good word to everybody you know.

This horrifying comment exposed an ugly truth about America

Robert Reich
November 19, 2025 

RAW STORY


Donald Trump, Melania Trump and Mohammed bin Salman arrive for a dinner. REUTERS/Tom Brenner


When Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) arrived at the White House yesterday, he was met by a Marine band, officers on horseback carrying the Saudi and American flags, and fighter jets flying over the White House in a V formation.

It was far more pomp than visiting foreign leaders normally receive.

What had the crown prince done to merit such honor from the United States?

He has helped broker a tentative peace between Hamas and Israel. But so have Egypt, Qatar, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates.

The real reason for the honor is that MBS and the Saudis are doing lots of business with Trump’s family — and this visit is part of the payoff.

It’s MBS’s effort to rehabilitate his reputation after Saudi operatives murdered Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi and chopped his body into pieces with a bone saw: a killing that U.S. intelligence determined was greenlit by MBS.

But in yesterday’s joint Oval Office appearance — freighted with flattery between Trump and MBS — Trump brushed off a reporter’s question about MBS and the murder.

“A lot of people didn’t like that gentleman that you’re talking about, whether you like him or didn’t like him, things happen,” said Trump, referring to Khashoggi.

Things happen?


When the reporter then asked MBS about the finding by U.S. intelligence, Trump quickly interjected:

“He knew nothing about it. You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking something like that.”

All of which raises once again the question of who is honored in this upside-down Trump era, and who is subject to shame and disgrace.

Larry Summers, who had been secretary of the treasury under Bill Clinton and a high official in the Obama White House, said Monday he was “deeply ashamed” about his relationship with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and therefore would be “stepping back” from all public engagements as he works to “rebuild trust and repair relationships.”

New details of Summers’s relationship with Epstein emerged last week when a House committee released emails showing years of correspondence between the two men, including Summers’s sexist comments and his seeking Epstein’s romantic advice.

Consultants who specialize in rehabilitating the reputations of public figures often advise that they begin with a full public apology, along with a period in which they “step back” out of the limelight.

What separates consultant-driven contrition from the real thing depends on whether it involves any real personal sacrifice.

It’s not clear what Summers will have to sacrifice. Apparently he’ll continue in his role of University Professor at Harvard, the highest and most honorable rank a faculty member there can achieve. (Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has called on Harvard to sever ties with Summers to hold him accountable for his close friendship with Epstein.)

The same question — whom we honor, whom we shame, and who is genuinely contrite — is also relevant to Eric Adams’s final weeks as mayor of New York City, during which the pace of his foreign travel is increasing even as the city foots much of the bill. No contrition from the mayor — although he was indicted on corruption charges that focused, in part, on improper foreign travel.

And then comes Elon Musk, who, despite his reign of terror in the federal government, including a stack of court rulings finding what he did to be illegal, to say nothing of his blowup with Trump, will preside this weekend at a festive DOGE reunion in Austin at a high-end hotel where Musk often has a suite.

In this era of Trump, America’s moral authority — its capacity to separate right from wrong, and to pride itself doing (or at least trying to do) what is honorable — seems to have vanished, along with the norms on which that authority has been based.

Under Trump, the only normative rule is to gain as much power and money as possible. Power and wealth are honored, even if the honoree has greenlit a brutal murder.

The only exception appears to be pedophilia. Or close association with a pedophile, for which an earnest expression of contrition may be sufficient to get back on the honor track.

High on the list of things America must do when this period of moral squalor is behind us will be to restore real honor and real shame.Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

Robert Reich's new memoir, Coming Up Short, can be found wherever you buy books. You can also support local bookstores nationally by ordering the book at bookshop.org

'Irreversibly damaged': Trump sued over 'big white blob' Eisenhower Building plan

Ewan Gleadow

November 20, 2025 

RAW STORY

Legal action could be taken against Donald Trump over the president's proposed refashioning of the Eisenhower Building.

Historic preservationists have sued the president over his plans to paint the office building next to the White House. Trump has been warned that such a plan could do irreversible damage to the building, with a suit filed on Friday by the DC Preservation League and Cultural Heritage Partners, CNN reported.

The suit has asked the US District Court for the District of Columbia to stop Trump and other federal officials from making any changes to the Eisenhower Executive Office Building before the potential changes are assessed in a standard review process. Judge Dabney L. Friedrich is, according to The Washington Post, expected to rule on this request.

The White House has since confirmed no changes will be made to the building until 2026. A statement from the acting commissioner of the General Services Administration, Andrew Heller, confirmed on Tuesday (November 18) that there would be no "physical actions of power" used on the building before New Year's Eve, 2025.

Heller said, "GSA will not authorize or engage in the physical actions of power washing/cleaning, painting, or repointing the Eisenhower Executive Office Building before Dec. 31, 2025." Work on other parts of the White House, such as the East Wing, began earlier this year.

Trump's ballroom plan was roundly criticised when first announced, and his plans for the Eisenhower Building were also ridiculed, described as a "big white blob" by Fox News host Laura Ingraham. Trump shared a photo of the proposed redesign of the 137-year-old building, saying, "Look at that, how beautiful is that?"

Ingraham replied, "Are you not worried it's like... a big white blob?" Trump disagreed, replying, "No, what it does is it brings out the detail." Trump is unsure of whether the renovation of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building will go ahead, but did say he's "getting bids" for the project.

He added, "I don’t even know if I’m going to do it yet, I’m getting costs, I’m getting bids right now from painters, and we’ll see. It would be a great addition to Washington." Trump was roundly criticized for knocking through the East Wing to make way for a ballroom.

One presidential historian likened the change to "slashing a Rembrandt painting." Douglas Brinkley said, "Maybe it’s just the dislike of change on my part, but it seemed painful, almost like slashing a Rembrandt painting. Or defacing a Michelangelo sculpture.

John Roberts' 'corrupt bargain' exposed in eye-popping new analysis

Nicole Charky-Chami
November 19, 2025 
RAW STORY

FILE PHOTO: WASHINGTON, DC - JANUARY 20: U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts attends inauguration ceremonies in the Rotunda of the U.S. Capitol on January 20, 2025 in Washington, DC. Donald Trump takes office for his second term as the 47th president of the United States. Chip Somodevilla/Pool via REUTERS/File Photo

The Supreme Court’s John Roberts' ‘corrupt bargain’ reveals what led to President Donald Trump's "abusive reign," a new analysis found.

Roberts and the high court are in a "love triangle" with Republicans and billionaires, Mother Jones wrote Wednesday.

" Trump needed Roberts to win, and Trump’s victory came just in time for Roberts," according to Mother Jones.

"His corrupt bargain has had an exorbitant cost, both for the nation and the court’s reputation," the outlet reports.

The conservative majority justices have paved the way for the president's "lawless second term."

“The court has traded public legitimacy as a significant basis for its authority in favor of just alignment with the GOP," Harvard Law professor Ryan Doerfler told the outlet.

And the justices appear to be on Trump's side, allowing the courts to be used as a shadow docket while "the Roberts court had handed Trump almost unlimited power to defy the law without accountability. And once Trump was back in office, it weaponized the shadow docket to bless his lawless actions, reversing lower court findings, often without a word of explanation. As of this writing, the right-wing majority has used the shadow docket to uphold Trump’s actions roughly 90 percent of the time, repeatedly bailing him out of any obligation to follow the law."

It's puzzled lower courts and added more questions to the high court's decisions.

"As the justices keep rushing to Trump’s aid, Democrats grow more open to reform if they return to power—and thus Roberts lashes himself more tightly to Trump’s mast," Mother Jones reports.

“It seems like what the court is trying to do is maximize the likelihood of future GOP control,” said Doerfler, who studies the judiciary's role in democracy.

With a legal attack on the Voting Rights Act in the current term, the court will also consider "the last remaining limits on billionaires financing campaigns; it’s no mystery how the justices are likely to rule."

It's now a matter of whether the Roberts court will push to secure a permanent GOP court.

"Roberts didn’t just strip political power from ordinary people—he handed it to billionaires," Mother Jones reports. "His decisive vote in 2010’s Citizens United v. FEC lifted restrictions on political spending, while ludicrously insisting it would not 'lead to, or create the appearance of, quid pro quo corruption.' Political spending by billionaires has since increased 160-fold. There’s a direct line between the ruling and Elon Musk buying Trump the White House with more than $290 million and being given free rein to fire his companies’ regulators in return."

'We protect our own': Chicago parents stand up to ICE despite threat of gas and violence

Alexandria Jacobson,

 Investigative Reporter

RAW STORY
November 20, 2025


A demonstrator confronts agents in Little Village, Chicago. REUTERS/Jim Vondruska/File Photo

One recent weekday, a group of Chicago kindergartners visited their neighborhood high school. It should have been an unremarkable moment — but as the visit was in motion, parents learned that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had been spotted nearby.

Instantly, the community mobilized. Teachers left school and hopped on their bikes. Around 100 volunteer patrollers came out to “protect these kindergarteners … and make sure that they got back safely,” said Lizzie Turner, a parent of a sixth-grader at the Peirce School of International Studies in the Andersonville neighborhood.

“It was very encouraging and very inspiring,” Turner said.

Turner is an administrator of Peirce Pathways, a parent-led support network with more than 100 volunteers currently monitoring neighborhood ICE activity, coordinating parent patrols and working with the school “sanctuary” team to address concerning interactions with agents known to detain parents and teachers, and to have deployed chemical agents near schools.

The group is one of several activated in Chicago since agents descended on the city as part of an aggressive Trump administration immigration enforcement mission, Operation Midway Blitz.


“The resistance movement here has been so successful,” Turner said.


“As much harm as they have been able to get away with, I also think as a city we protect our own … everybody's come together, and everybody's been very selfless in how they've approached it — the collaboration and just willingness to put our own needs aside in the moment to protect our neighbors.”

Jenn Graville Bricker, a second-grade parent, co-founded another parent-led network, Rogers Park School Patrols.



A volunteer with Rogers Park School Patrols watches a school (Photo credit: Meggus Wolf)

Part of grassroots neighborhood support organization Protect Rogers Park, the group has nearly a thousand volunteers across 10 schools on the city's north side, Graville Bricker said.

Volunteers wear orange armbands to signal they’re safe people to ask for help. Children have taken note, Graville Bricker said, describing how one child was recently overheard telling her caretaker, “Orange is for whistles, butterflies and safety.”

“Kids are clearly feeling it, and there's a lot of fear,” she said. “It impacts families in really, really deep ways.”

‘On the fly’

Turner said her group was “building the plane as we fly it” but had come up with a multi-faceted system for monitoring ICE activity and protecting children whose families might be undocumented.

First, a coordinator monitors channels on Signal, an encrypted messaging platform, for reported ICE sightings.


Then the group organizes two volunteers at each of the four corners around a school, during drop-off and pick-up. Mobile patrol teams use bikes or cars.

Local businesses have agreed to be “safe haven sites” for anyone in need of protection from ICE, Turner said.

The community has created other “scrappy” ways to monitor and respond to ICE activity, said Turner, who built a searchable database of license plates confirmed to be ICE vehicles.


“Even just the tooling and technology that we've thrown together on the fly to make it work has been impressive,” said Turner, whose day job is at a software company.

“I hope that other cities don't experience this but if they do, I hope we can be a helpful starting point or model for how to tackle it, and I'm sure other cities will do it better if they build on it.”
‘Collective response to oppression’


Volunteers working with Turner have gone through “ICEWatch” training, which nonprofits and community organizations throughout Chicago have put together to help people know their rights, document when ICE comes into neighborhoods and warn neighbors who might be targets.

Jill Garvey, co-director of anti-authoritarianism nonprofit States at the Core, hosts a weekly ICEWatch training in partnership with Protect Rogers Park.

Gabe Gonzalez, an organizer with Protect Rogers Park, said as many as 6,000 people have been trained — 80 percent from the north side of Chicago and 20 percent watching from around the country.

Gonzalez estimates the group’s reach is as much as 7 percent of Rogers Park, which he said is “enormous.”


“I did community organizing for years, and if you had 1 percent of the neighborhood engaged in what you're doing, you had power, and we're well past that,” he said.

The training has its roots in CopWatch training that originated in the 1960s with the Black Panther Party and is focused on “documenting and responding, not interfering,” Garvey said, adding that the training emphasised “nonviolent protest and dissent.”

Volunteers who respond to an ICE encounter are instructed to send videos and documentation to their local ICEWatch group and an immigrant rights hotline.


Protect Rogers Park’s efforts extend to incorporating other community-based support as a “collective response to oppression,” Gonzalez said.

That includes a knitting club making hats and scarves for patrollers, volunteer appreciation events and arts shows, including one where people get two minutes to vent or perform at a local wine shop. It’s all part of “people coming together to resist,” Gonzalez said.
‘Breaking bodies’

ICEWatch and neighborhood support work comes with risks. Garvey said training focuses on helping people “physically stay safe and to be as prepared as possible for what we would now consider really unusual or aggressive behavior from law enforcement.”

Responders have been detained, tear-gassed, driven off the road while riding bikes and “had guns pointed into their cars,” Garvey said.

Illinois State Senator Graciela Guzmán said she and her staffers are working by 7 a.m. nearly every day, responding to calls from the Northwest Side Rapid Response Team. Ninety schools on Chicago’s Northwest Side have “school watch” teams, Guzmán said.

One Saturday in October, in a residential neighborhood, Guzmán and her staffers were tear-gassed.

“I'm not sure that I'm gonna get the sound of my staffer trying to breathe out of my brain for quite some time,” Guzmán said.

“It's really, really scary when that happens to you. It's scary when you're seeing it happen en masse to community members.”

Guzmán said ICE’s presence has been "overwhelming," the Trump administration "indiscriminate" in who it detains.

Of Guzmán’s constituents, those detained include a daycare worker, a cook, “parents on their way to school with their kids” and a handyman — not to mention U.S. citizens, she said.

“One of the eerie feelings is when you just miss someone getting detained, and you get on site and their car is still on. It's parked, everything is open,” she said.

Andre Vasquez, alderman for Chicago’s 40th Ward, said the Trump administration’s claim of detaining the "worst of the worst" was “bull—t.”



Andre Vasquez at a protest in downtown Chicago (Photo credit: Deana Rutherford)



Landscapers, single parents, elderly people and churchgoers have also been detained, Vasquez and Garvey said.

“They're breaking bodies. They're breaking doors. They're breaking windows, and they use tear gas as if it's something that should be used every day in our streets, when we know that it should not be,” Guzmán said.

“They're using incredibly violent, heartbreaking tactics.”

One ICE agent “clocked” a young man in the chin as he observed the arrest of a woman in suburban Evanston who crashed her car into an ICE vehicle after it stopped suddenly, Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez said he and other observers were threatened with pepper spray. Agents sat on the young man and one “put his foot by his neck” before handcuffing him, he said.

“The kid was staring at me. His face was just beat up, already starting to swell up, and it was ugly. It was really f—g bad,” Gonzalez said.

Vasquez was tear-gassed twice when visiting the ICE facility in Broadview, Ill.

He has organized whistle kit events, “Know Your Rights” business trainings and rapid response efforts with his chief of staff, Cat Sharp, who is running for Cook County commissioner and was one of six Broadview protestors federally indicted for conspiracy to impede or injure federal officers.

“These fascists are looking [at] every possible way to attack people,” Vasquez said.

“If it's not physically on residential streets, it's politically to the court systems, so what we know is, ultimately, justice will prevail.

“These folks don't understand Chicago if they think we're going to tolerate it.”

Alexandria Jacobson is a Chicago-based investigative reporter at Raw Story, focusing on money in politics, government accountability and electoral politics. Prior to joining Raw Story in 2023, Alex reported extensively on social justice, business and tech issues for several news outlets, including ABC News, the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune. She can be reached at alexandria@rawstory.com. More about Alexandria Jacobson.

#METOO REDUX

Young girls told to forgive and forget after sex abuse by church member

Jessica Lussenhop, 

Propublica

Andy Mannix, 

Minnesota Star Tribune
November 20, 2025 


The Woodland Park Old Apostolic Lutheran Church in Duluth, Minnesota. 

( Leila Navidi, Minnesota Star Tribune/ProPublica"

LONG READ


The girl pleaded not to go.

She fought with her father on the drive over, screaming and crying in his truck until they arrived at the office building for Bruckelmyer Brothers, a home construction company on the outskirts of Duluth, Minnesota. She was just entering her first years of grade school.

In the office, two men were waiting. One of them was Clint Massie, who the girl had recently told her parents had touched her genitals and groped her under her shirt. The other was Daryl Bruckelmyer, a preacher and leader of the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church down the road, where the girl’s family worshipped. Massie was a respected member of the congregation. Bruckelmyer had asked them all to the meeting, according to the girl’s account to police years later.


In front of the girl, her father and Bruckelmyer, Massie asked her for forgiveness. Looming over her, the three men wept. Then the girl’s dad and preacher allowed the man who had been sexually abusing her since kindergarten to hug her.

“It was one of the worst things ever,” she told police some 15 years later.

In accordance with one of the core tenets of their church, the matter was resolved. It was forgiven. It should now be forgotten. If she spoke of it again, she would be guilty of having an unforgiving heart and the sins would become hers.


But she could never forget. And neither could the other children.

Over the course of about 20 years in two states, Massie had, according to court documents and by his own admission, sexually abused children within the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, or OALC, community. He touched girls under blankets when their parents were present, in the backseat of a car with other passengers — even in the pews at church. His abuse was such an open secret among the tight-knit congregation that mothers warned their daughters to stay away from him.

Some former victims, as adults, confronted preachers, including Bruckelmyer, about what Massie had done to them. Church leaders told Massie to stay away from the congregation’s children, and they sent him to a therapist who specialized in sex offender treatment.


But they never reported Massie’s crimes to police, as required by the law. Instead, Bruckelmyer and other leaders in the church encouraged the victims to take part in forgiveness sessions — which allowed Massie, now 50, to continue abusing children, according to an investigation by the Minnesota Star Tribune and ProPublica.

Massie did not respond to requests for comment but has denied abuse allegations relating to some individual victims in pending lawsuits. In December 2024, he pleaded guilty to four counts of felony criminal sexual conduct with victims under the age of 13. In March, a judge sentenced him to 7 1/2 years in prison. Church officials, including Bruckelmyer, were not charged in connection with Massie’s crime, but prosecutors said they should have done more to stop him.

“It gives the appearance of a group of people who are not just trying to protect someone — but something,” Mike Ryan, the St. Louis County assistant district attorney who prosecuted Massie, said at his sentencing. “And they have enabled something awful here.”


Law enforcement there first became aware of the allegations against Massie in 2017. They said that the church’s lack of cooperation — including pressuring potential witnesses and victims to stay quiet about the abuse and preachers failing to report it to authorities — was a major factor in the delay in bringing charges.

Bruckelmyer declined to comment or to answer a detailed list of questions. But in a 2023 interview with a St. Louis County detective, he acknowledged knowing about Massie’s sexual abuse and didn’t dispute that he took part in forgiveness sessions involving Massie and his victims.

He said it was up to the victims to report the crimes to police, a clear misreading of the law for mandated reporters — doctors, teachers and others who are required to report crimes against children.


“We don’t protect either one,” Bruckelmyer said of sexual abusers and their victims.

Bruckelmyer also told police his actions followed church protocol. An internal church document, obtained by the Star Tribune and ProPublica, suggests that, when appropriate, church leaders and others facilitate “a conversation with both parties together” — an action that experts who work with abuse victims say can add to a victim’s trauma. While the document praises the police and the justice system, it doesn’t mention mandatory reporting laws and gives preachers wide latitude on whether to involve police.

Kimberly Lowe, a lawyer and crisis manager for the church, said its preachers are unpaid and therefore might not be legally required to report sexual abuse of children. Asked if she believes the preachers are mandated reporters under Minnesota law, Lowe would only say that the language of the statute is unclear.


Bruckelmyer’s church, Woodland Park, is one of two OALC congregations north of Duluth, in the bluff region above Lake Superior. Some members live nearby, in a rural, forest-lined community. Members are not obviously identifiable by their clothing — they dress modestly but modernly, in muted colors and long skirts. Women do not wear makeup, jewelry or open-toed shoes and they keep their hair up in a bun, giving rise to the nickname “bunners.” According to church literature, members are to live simple, modest lives like Jesus did; television, music and dancing are seen as sinful, according to former members.

On a recent Sunday, the modern, unadorned sanctuary of the Woodland Park church, which seats 1,000, was full of families, parents soothing babbling and crying infants, older children clutching baggies of candy or toy cars.

At the close of the sermon, the preacher asked the entire congregation for forgiveness, which kicked off “movements” — a portion of the service when congregants embraced and begged one another for forgiveness for various sins, frequently in tears.


OALC is a conservative Christian revival movement that came to the U.S. with 19th-century settlers from Norway, Finland and Sweden, and it is not affiliated with any mainstream Lutheran denominations. There is no official count, but one academic study estimated 31,000 members worldwide as of 2016, with most in the United States. The church is rapidly growing, experts say, and the member count today is likely much higher. OALC’s emphasis on large families has created booms in places like Washington state and Duluth.

There are 33 OALC churches in the U.S. and Canada. Only men hold leadership positions. The less formal nature of OALC structure — a spokesperson said there’s no headquarters in the U.S. — means that, unlike sexual abuse scandals in the Catholic Church or Southern Baptist Convention, there’s no central authority to hold accountable. Still, news of the criminal case against Massie spread widely in the insular OALC, inspiring more victims to come forward in Minnesota and other states.

St. Louis County investigators say they have been contacted by current and former church members in South Dakota and Washington who allege they were victims of sexual abuse that was never reported to law enforcement. The Star Tribune and ProPublica have interviewed more than a dozen alleged victims of Massie and of other church members in Wyoming, Maryland and Michigan.

By forgiving men like Massie, prosecutors and police said, preachers created a situation where the alleged victims had to worship next to their alleged abusers — and allowed Massie to escape arrest and prosecution for years.


“He was so brazen about it — and there was so little done about it — that he thought it was permission,” Ryan said.
“Church Knows”



For the girl who said she was pressured to forgive Massie at Bruckelmyer’s office, the silence that followed only compounded her trauma. She reported struggling with debilitating anxiety and obsessive-compulsive disorder in her teens. She grew tense every time she walked into the church, especially when she saw Massie holding another little girl.


“I lived in darkness for so many years of my life because I couldn’t talk about it,” the girl said in a recorded interview with police. “Multiple times in my life I wanted to die.”

When she was 16 and in counseling, she told her therapist how Massie had abused her. The therapist reported it to the police, which is how the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office in Duluth first learned about Massie in summer 2017.

Sgt. Jessica LaBore was the investigator assigned to the case. In a recorded interview, the girl reluctantly told LaBore how she used to sit with Massie and his wife, Sarah, at church, just a few rows from the front. Massie would snake his hands up her skirt and touch her thighs and genitals. Another time, at a gathering at the home of her parents’ friends, she said, Massie told her to get a blanket and began touching her underneath it, with her mom and dad nearby.

She told LaBore that she’d reported the abuse to a preacher, Calvin Raisanen, and that her mother had spoken to Bruckelmyer about it, according to police documents and a recording of the interview obtained through a public records request. Raisanen did not respond to requests for comment. In her own conversation with LaBore, the girl’s mother confirmed that Massie had asked forgiveness from her husband and daughter years ago.

Like some victims in the records from Massie’s case, she declined to speak to reporters for this story and is not being identified because the news organizations typically don’t name victims of sex crimes without their consent.

In an email to reporters, she wrote that she is still a member of the church and feels supported by its community: “I truly believe I’m in the right place.”

When LaBore interviewed Massie, he confirmed some important details about the allegations: Bruckelmyer was aware that several girls had accused Massie of sexual abuse. And he remembered asking for forgiveness at his preacher’s business office.

LaBore did not respond to requests for comment, but police reports show that the girl’s family stopped cooperating with the investigation. The mother told her that preachers at the church had spoken to Massie and that he’d “learned his lesson,” though the mother believed that Massie had “continued to sexually assault children after this point,” according to LaBore’s notes.

LaBore referred the case for charges to Deputy St. Louis County Attorney Jon Holets. In a statement to the Star Tribune and ProPublica, Holets said he also spoke to the victim’s mother, who informed him “that there had been therapeutic intervention, that ‘they were good’” and that her daughter did not want anything more to be done. Without the girl’s cooperation, Holets said he decided he could not bring charges against Massie, an outcome he said gives him “heartache” to this day.

Three years later, Massie again came to the attention of the sheriff’s office. Two crime-reporting hotlines received anonymous tips saying Massie had sexually assaulted “little girls” over the course of three decades. “Church knows but no action,” reads a police summary of one of the tips.

This time, LaBore went to Bruckelmyer. According to her notes, Bruckelmyer said the church encourages abuse victims to go to police, but he told her he believed it was “on them to do that.”

LaBore explained the state’s mandated reporting law to Bruckelmyer and told him that he and others at the church could be charged criminally if “somebody that they already know about” were to keep abusing children and they failed to report it.

“We are finding out from our investigations that these Mandated Reports are not being made, and instead, these incidents are being dealt with within the church,” she wrote in a departmental memo to update other detectives. “Sometimes the preachers are facilitating in the asking for forgiveness.”

For the second time, Holets decided not to bring charges, though this time it was about church preachers rather than Massie. In a statement to reporters, Holets said law enforcement decided to try to “educate” church leaders about their legal responsibility to report the sexual abuse of children.

“I believed it was more effective to work with existing leadership to influence practices and attitudes regarding child abuse reporting, rather than to pursue criminal enforcement at that stage,” Holets wrote. “That said, criminal charges for failure to report remain a possibility in such cases.”

When LaBore spoke to Bruckelmyer, she read him the entire mandated reporter law over the phone, line by line, then texted it to him.
Haunted by Silence



In 2023, a call to police breathed new life into the case.

A woman told police that she’d been sexually abused repeatedly as a kid. Her abuser was a relative: Clint Massie.

The case landed on the desk of Sgt. Adam Kleffman of the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office. He interviewed the victim and listened to the different ways the woman said Massie sexually abused her: the nights when she slept over after helping tend to his horses, the day when she rode a tractor with him, or swam with him and other members of her family at the lake.

Her mom had reported Massie to a preacher when she was a child, she told Kleffman. At the time, the preacher promised to handle it, she said, and told her mother never to speak of it again, not even to her husband. Later, she went through a session with Bruckelmyer, similar to the other girl, where she was pressured to forgive Massie and forget the abuse.

As an adult, she was alarmed to see Massie in church, hugging and kissing children about the same age she was when the abuse began, which is why she’d felt a duty to report it all these years later, she said.

“I went back to the same preacher, which is Daryl [Bruckelmyer], and said, ‘Why is he still able to hold kids and whatever?’” she recalled to Kleffman in a recorded interview. “And he’s like: ‘I don’t know. Like, we’ve told him that he’s not supposed to, but he still does.’”

Kleffman picked up where LaBore left off and contacted the girl who spoke to their office in 2017. She was now in her early 20s, married, a new mom living in Washington state. In a recorded conversation, she told Kleffman that the trauma — and in particular, the mandate that she remain silent about it — still haunted her.

Though the woman had tried to put time and distance between herself and Massie, Massie’s wife, Sarah, had asked for a meeting about a year earlier when the woman returned to Duluth for a visit. At a Starbucks, she said, Sarah Massie told her that the abuse was no big deal and she needed to forget about what happened. The conversation, the woman said, was “horrible.”

Sarah Massie declined to comment for this story.

The woman agreed to be part of the police investigation but told Kleffman that she had little faith it would go anywhere. It did not, after all, go anywhere last time.

“I can tell you,” Kleffman said, “you should have lots of faith in me.”

The investigator now had two victims. They gave him the names of others they suspected had also been abused by Massie. Kleffman tried to contact them, but some were reluctant to cooperate. One woman told Kleffman that Massie had asked for forgiveness. The sin, she said in the recorded call, was “washed away in the blood of reconciliation.”

“It is gone forever,” she told Kleffman.

“So you’re following what the church says to do,” Kleffman replied.

“I am following what God says to do,” the woman told him, before hanging up.
“There Could Be Hundreds”



On Feb. 10, 2023, Massie sat opposite Kleffman and Investigator Tony McTavish in a beige, windowless room at the sheriff’s office in Duluth. In a video of the interrogation, Massie downplayed the allegations as a series of accidents and misunderstandings. But as the 90-minute interrogation progressed, his demeanor shifted. He admitted he’d felt a “tinge” of a “sick, perverted thing” when, he claimed, one very young girl had pulled his hand to her vagina before he realized what was happening.

“I’m a lustful man, sure,” he said, but he denied he touched girls on purpose. “Strike me dead right now if I’m lying to you. I was not trying to touch her sexually.”

“I call bullshit on that,” Kleffman said.

Massie told Kleffman and McTavish that Bruckelmyer had spoken to him “at least” three times about inappropriate behavior with children. The investigators asked how many more girls might come forward with stories about him touching or kissing them.

“I mean, there could be hundreds,” Massie said.

Five days later, Bruckelmyer walked into the same interview room with Raisanen, another preacher at the church.

Bruckelmyer, now 68, is described as a kind but domineering force in the church, a father of at least 12 who worked in construction.

Unlike in other branches of Christianity, OALC preachers like Bruckelmyer do not attend traditional seminaries or receive formal training before assuming their leadership roles. Instead, according to a church spokesperson, they are selected by the congregation.

Their advice is seen as coming directly from God, according to several former church members.

In a video recording of the police interview, Bruckelmyer and Raisanen joked quietly with one another before Kleffman and Sgt. Eric Sathers, another investigator, entered the room.

“Do you know what the mandated reporting laws are in the state of Minnesota?” Kleffman asked.

“We have looked at them some, but it’s hard for us to interpret everything,” Bruckelmyer replied.

“Have you ever been told about them?” the officer asked.

“No,” Bruckelmyer said.

Kleffman said he knew that wasn’t true and brought up the 2020 call with LaBore. “I just listened to the audio recording, and it was line-for-line. You said you understood what they were,” Kleffman said.

“We felt, unless it’s changed, that as a part of the church that we keep silent,” Bruckelmyer said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hys6s4WqDJk&rel=0

Kleffman and Sathers explained that if someone like Massie confessed to Bruckelmyer one-on-one, that would constitute a protected conversation with clergy. But hearing directly from the victims, from parents of victims or about abuse allegations in a group setting was another matter entirely.

Bruckelmyer and Raisanen claimed ignorance of the legal distinction and thanked the officers for the “clarification.” Bruckelmyer asked what became of the 2017 investigation into Massie. “I mean, it should have been taken care of then, you know?” the preacher said. “It’s like, what happened?”

Kleffman reminded him that a decade before that, the girl’s parents had come forward to Bruckelmyer and was told to forgive Massie.

“Nothing was done by you,” Kleffman said. “So in that meantime, she is not being protected while Clint is still scot-free doing what he’s been doing for 15 years.”

“I see,” Bruckelmyer said quietly.

“You’re just keeping a pedophile in your church,” Kleffman said.

Both Bruckelmyer and Raisanen confirmed they’d known about the girl from the 2017 report, and Bruckelmyer said he knew of two others as well. He expressed his eagerness to cooperate with law enforcement moving forward but denied knowledge of any other victims beyond the three.

Bruckelmyer and Raisanen left the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Department office without facing any consequences. John Hiivala, a spokesperson for the Woodland Park Old Apostolic Lutheran Church, said that the church “has fully complied with the law in the referenced case, and it’s a matter of legal record.” Hiivala declined to comment further.

By the time prosecutors brought the case against Massie, the three-year statute of limitations had run out on charging Bruckelmyer with failure to report.
Reckoning



On the day of Massie’s sentencing in March 2025, Kleffman walked Kyla Chamberlin to the front row of the high-ceilinged courtroom. The opposite side of the courtroom quickly filled with at least a dozen Massie supporters, including his wife, Sarah.

Chamberlin had flown in from North Dakota alone. Of the nine alleged victims prosecutors identified from the case, she was the only one to attend the sentencing in person. As she waited, she was shaking. She didn’t want to look back, particularly at Sarah Massie, whom she’d adored as a child. She said she could feel the eyes of her former church community on her, people she’d once trusted and loved.

A former EMT and mother of three, Chamberlin had grown up in the Black Hills of South Dakota in the 1990s. Clint and Sarah Massie lived nearby and opened their home to Chamberlin and her four siblings. Her parents sometimes asked Clint, starting in his late teens, to babysit.

The sexual abuse began around the time Chamberlin was 7 years old, she told police. In interviews with Kleffman, she described a remarkably similar pattern of abuse as the two Duluth victims.

After the Massies moved to Duluth in the early 2000s, Chamberlin’s parents say she went from meek and sweet to being filled with an inexplicable anger. She rebelled, she drank. The close-knit family began to fray. She and one of her older sisters, Kristi Bertolotto, stopped speaking to each other.

“I’ve lost a lot of friendships, a lot of relationships, divorces, anger management — didn’t understand why I was so mad,” Chamberlin said.

She stopped attending church in 2010 and, in response, her parents made it clear that she was no longer welcome at family and holiday functions, a painful and common experience described by several former church members.

“It’s like you don’t even think for yourself,” Janie Williamson, Chamberlin’s mother, said in an interview. “To turn against your own children because of some of those things is — it’s awful.”

After St. Louis County announced charges against Massie, Kleffman began receiving calls from alleged victims all over the country. One of those was from Chamberlin. Months later, Kleffman realized that one of the other victims he interviewed was Chamberlin’s older sister, Bertolotto.

Neither of them knew what had happened to the other. Neither knew the other sister had come forward. Both women agreed to be named in this story.

Court filings listed nine alleged victims, but only three of the cases resulted in charges of felony sexual conduct with a victim under the age of 13. The statute of limitations under South Dakota law had run out for Bertolotto and Chamberlin. And the girl who’d been pressured to forgive Massie in Bruckelmyer’s office hadn’t had her case charged either; under Minnesota law, too much time had passed between her initial report in 2017 and the prosecution.

Nevertheless, six of the alleged victims whose cases didn’t result in charges were still part of the case, and some of the women traveled to Duluth in December 2024 to testify at Massie’s trial. Just after jury selection, Massie agreed to plead guilty to four felony counts. One charge was dropped.

Four months later, at his sentencing, Massie looked pale and paunchy in an orange jumpsuit, his hands and feet shackled. His attorney, citing Massie’s lack of a criminal record, asked that he receive no prison time and be allowed to seek treatment and receive probation that he could serve at home. Massie apologized to his victims and their families.

“I beg for their forgiveness, for the damage and hurt that I’ve caused them over the years,” he said in a quavering voice. “I feel responsible for the horrible acts to these children.”

But Judge Eric Hylden noted that since Massie had pleaded guilty, he’d never tried to enroll in sex-offender treatment or written apology letters to his victims. Hylden also quoted aloud from one of 17 letters of support for Massie, many from OALC members, which he said demonstrated that some in Massie’s community still did not believe he’d done anything wrong: “I wish you find ones that have actually done these things and get them put away rather than putting your energy into lying and seeking evil where there is none to be found.”

The judge sentenced Massie to 7 1/2 years in prison.

Afterward, in the witness room a floor higher in the courthouse, Chamberlin met Ryan, the assistant district attorney, and Kleffman — the two men she credited with putting Massie in prison 30 years after he’d abused her. The three exchanged hugs.

“I feel a sense of justice for the first time in 30 years,” Chamberlin said.

At the same time, none of them felt completely satisfied that the problem began and ended with Massie — that church leaders had not been held accountable.

Ryan said that he’d struggled as he prepared to go to trial with keeping several of the women from succumbing to what he called “a constant effort” by members of the church to “try to get these girls to either tone down their position on it or just to not cooperate.” One alleged victim, he said, had dropped out weeks before trial.

Chamberlin and her sister have retained the same lawyer who represented some of the victims in the Jeffrey Epstein case. He has filed lawsuits on their behalf against Massie, their church in South Dakota and the Old Apostolic Lutheran Church of America.

In a letter written from prison that was filed in court, Massie denied both sisters’ allegations. The OALC, in a motion to dismiss both lawsuits, wrote that “while OALC-America is mindful and sympathetic to Plaintiff for the abuse Plaintiff alleges occurred by Massie, such empathy does not take away from the plain fact that this Court does not have personal jurisdiction over OALC-America.”

Chamberlin and Bertolotto’s family has left the church. They are now navigating a delicate reconciliation, which Chamberlin credits to the abuse finally coming to light.

Chamberlin said she hoped to have a role encouraging other victims to come forward before the secrecy consumes their lives the way it had consumed hers.

“There’s a lot more to be done,” she said. “There’s a lot of Clints out there.”