标签： North America

A startling aviation incident has put Wisconsin politics in the national spotlight this weekend, as Republican gubernatorial nominee and sitting U.S. Congressman Tom Tiffany walked away with only minor injuries after a small plane he was traveling on suffered an in-flight mechanical failure and made an emergency landing in Lake Wausau.

Marathon County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that the accident unfolded Saturday evening as Tiffany and the plane’s lone pilot were returning from a campaign-related dinner in La Crosse County, en route to Wausau Downtown Airport. According to Tiffany’s public account of the incident, the single-engine Beechcraft K35 Bonanza, an aircraft certified to carry up to five passengers, suffered sudden total power loss while on final approach to the runway. With no time to reach a safe landing strip, the pilot was forced to ditch the plane in the adjacent lake.

Within minutes of the water landing, Tiffany and the pilot exited the rapidly submerging aircraft, swam to shallow water, and placed an emergency 911 call for help. Local emergency dispatch received the first report of the crash at 20:49 local time, and a Wausau Fire Department airboat reached the stranded pair just 16 minutes later, pulling them from the water at 21:05 local time.

Both Tiffany and the pilot suffered only non-life-threatening minor injuries in the ditching. Tiffany’s campaign confirmed the congressman received a small laceration above his right eye and was evaluated at a local hospital, where he released a statement reflecting on the close call. “God was watching over us tonight, and I am incredibly grateful to be here in the hospital with my wife, Chris, by my side,” Tiffany wrote in a social media post shared shortly after the incident. “An experience like this reminds you just how precious life is.”

Investigation into the root cause of the mechanical failure is still in its early stages, with no immediate conclusions released by authorities. The Marathon County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that two federal aviation regulators, the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board, have been called in to lead the official probe into the incident. As of Monday, the downed aircraft remains submerged in Lake Wausau, where specialized recovery crews are working to extract it from the water without causing additional environmental or ecological damage.

The incident comes as Tiffany campaigns for Wisconsin’s governor seat in the upcoming 2026 U.S. midterm elections, adding an unplanned variable to the high-states statewide race.

In September 2025, Gerald Bourguet stood on the cusp of the life he had long dreamed of. A full-time professional basketball journalist, he had just closed on a new home with a swimming pool alongside his wife, and the couple had welcomed their newborn son months earlier. That perfect picture collapsed in mere hours, after conservative icon Charlie Kirk was fatally shot on the campus of Utah Valley University, and Bourguet published a series of unflinching critical posts about the activist online.

In his public comments, Bourguet labeled Kirk an “evil man” who had spent his career advancing hateful ideological causes, and called out Kirk’s supporters for their longstanding silence on the crisis of school shootings. Speaking to the BBC a year after the incident, Bourguet explained his reaction was driven by the flood of glowing tributes that flooded social media immediately after Kirk’s death. “I had seen the way that people were talking about this person – kind of eulogising him and lionising him and it bothered me based on a lot of the things that he had said,” he said.

Kirk, the founder of the influential Christian youth conservative group Turning Point USA, was one of the most polarizing figures in modern American politics. To conservatives, he was a charismatic trailblazer who made right-wing ideology accessible and appealing to young generations. To his critics, his inflammatory rhetoric on issues ranging from racial justice and immigration to gun control and gender identity inflicted widespread harm on marginalized communities.

Within days of Bourguet’s posts, screenshots of his comments went viral across polarized social media platforms. He was fired from his position at PHNX Sports, his home address was doxxed, and he began receiving a steady stream of violent threats against his family. Fearing for the safety of their four-month-old son, Bourguet and his wife fled their home state, only returning months later to sell their house and relocate permanently. Today, PHNX Sports has not responded to the BBC’s repeated requests for comment on Bourguet’s termination.

Bourguet is far from alone. A year after Kirk’s assassination, a Reuters tally from November 2025 confirms more than 600 people across the United States have been fired or formally disciplined over critical comments they made about Kirk in the wake of his death, a number experts widely believe is an undercount, as many cases never attract local or national media attention. While some terminated workers have won large financial settlements or reinstatement through legal action, many others like Bourguet have been forced to rebuild their lives from scratch, with little legal recourse.

In the immediate aftermath of Kirk’s killing, most Americans chose to keep their private opinions about the activist confined to close circles. But on social media, the reaction split sharply along partisan lines: right-wing users demanded harsh consequences for anyone who spoke critically of Kirk, arguing that comments posted hours after his death were callous, disrespectful, and risked inciting further political violence. Prominent right-wing commentator Laura Loomer, who boasts nearly 2 million followers on X, issued a public warning to Kirk’s critics: “prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined.”

That pressure to punish critics extended all the way to the highest levels of the U.S. government. Days after the assassination, Vice President JD Vance publicly urged the public: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.” White House spokesperson Davis Ingle told the BBC that “Anyone who engages in or endorses political violence or assassination culture must be condemned in the harshest terms possible.”

Left-wing critics and free speech advocates push back on this framing, drawing a clear line between celebrating Kirk’s assassination and voicing criticism of his long career of activism. Many also point out that the same conservative leaders now calling for mass terminations have spent years decrying “cancel culture” — the phenomenon where people face professional and social ruin for voicing unpopular opinions.

South Carolina state Representative Jordan Pace, a Republican, pushed back on that charge of hypocrisy in an interview with the BBC, arguing that context matters when it comes to consequences for unpopular speech. “Cancel culture can be good, it’s bad when it’s applied in the wrong ways,” he said. “If you are someone who celebrates political assassinations and the murder of an innocent man with two young children in a way that many people did, then yeah, that’s an appropriate way for society to function, to shame those people.” Pace previously called for cutting public funding to South Carolina universities that refused to discipline employees who made critical comments about Kirk, a post that was later shared by President Donald Trump.

The actions that triggered disciplinary action varied wildly across cases. In Tennessee, anthropology professor Tamar Shirinian was suspended and ultimately fired after a public Facebook comment that read “the world is better off” without Kirk. A Delta Air Lines flight attendant was terminated after posting “good riddance” in response to news of Kirk’s death, and an Office Depot employee was fired after refusing to print vigil flyers honoring Kirk. Neither company responded to requests for comment from the BBC.

Some workers faced consequences even without making any direct critical comments about Kirk or his assassination. Darren Michael, a theater professor in Tennessee, was fired after sharing a 2023 news article that quoted Kirk arguing that protecting broad gun rights was worth the cost of annual gun deaths. Florida wildlife biologist Brittney Brown was fired by the state’s Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission after reposting a satirical meme mocking Kirk’s stance on gun violence following his killing. “I was absolutely gutted,” Brown told the BBC. “It was like the entire world just completely flipped on its head in a moment.”

Over the past year, dozens of wrongfully terminated workers have filed lawsuits across the U.S., arguing that their terminations violated their constitutional right to free speech. A number of these cases have resulted in substantial financial settlements for the workers, even as many say the payouts do not make up for the damage done to their careers and personal lives.

Brown accepted a $485,000 settlement — roughly 12 times her annual salary — after her termination. Michael won reinstatement to his position at Austin Peay State University, and the school agreed to pay him $500,000 to resolve his legal claims. The largest settlement confirmed by the BBC was a $1.9 million payout from the University of Tennessee to Tamar Shirinian, though as part of the agreement, Shirinian will not be reinstated and agreed not to apply for future roles at the institution. Just recently, an arbitrator ordered *The Washington Post* to rehire opinion journalist Karen Attiah, who was fired after posting that she would not participate in “performative mourning for a white man that espoused violence.” Dozens of other lawsuits remain pending in courts across the country.

Most successful lawsuits have been brought by public sector employees or unionized workers, who retain formal free speech protections that do not apply to most private sector workers. The majority of private sector employees in the U.S. work under at-will employment agreements, which allow employers to terminate workers for any reason, with no legal requirement for just cause.

For that reason, Bourguet, a private sector at-will employee, has little chance of winning a legal challenge to his firing. A year after his termination, he told the BBC he has struggled to secure full-time work as a journalist. Even though his new home state has a professional basketball team, he believes the viral controversy has made him unemployable in the tight-knit world of professional basketball journalism. He has launched his own independent podcast, but admits he doubts it will generate enough income to cover his family’s living expenses, and leaving the United States is now an option he is actively considering. “I have accepted that that life is over and that I need to start a new one,” he said.

Despite the profound personal and professional costs they have endured, almost all of the workers who spoke to the BBC said they do not regret the comments that cost them their jobs. “I have a right to say what I want to say,” Brown said. “They are the ones who should have the regrets, not me.”

Shirinian apologized for the tone of her comment shortly after her suspension, acknowledging it was an emotional outburst that was never intended to be widely public. But she stands by the core sentiment behind her words. “I don’t regret the sentiment, however,” she said. “the sentiment was that I am not sad. And I refuse to be made to feel like I have to be sad that someone who was so hateful was killed.” She took the settlement rather than waiting for a full trial to move forward with her life, saying “I took a settlement because this allows me to move on with my life. The one small regret that I have is that I will not see my day in court and justice will not be served in that way. But I think that the number of the settlement actually speaks to that anyway.”

Bourguet similarly stands by his comments, even as he grieves the impact the controversy has had on his family. “I don’t regret that line of thinking because I think it’s important to push back on things that are steeped in hatred,” he said. “I don’t regret what I said. I don’t regret the way that I said it. I do regret the ripple effects that came from it and the way that they impacted me, my career, my family, and my son.” At 35, he says, he is forced to start over: “My life will never be the same after this… I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

In an unprecedented legal milestone, a 47-year-old Afghan woman who held legal permanent residency in Texas has been deported from the United States, marking the first time the rarely used, secretive Alien Terrorist Removal Court (ATRC) has been invoked for an active case.

Nazira Haji Zada, a resident of Fort Worth, Texas, ultimately chose to voluntarily depart the U.S. rather than continue contesting her case before the specialized court, according to statements from both the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and her legal defense team.

Established by federal legislation in 1996, the ATRC was designed to handle deportation cases involving non-citizens accused of terrorism ties when evidence against them is classified and tied to national security concerns. Before this July proceeding, the court had never adjudicated a single case in its nearly 30-year history.

Haji Zada, an Afghanistan national, has never been criminally charged with any offense in the U.S. However, federal prosecutors have already secured convictions for her son Abdullah Haji Zada and son-in-law Nasir Ahmad Tawhed on terrorism-related charges. The pair were found guilty of plotting a mass shooting on the 2024 U.S. Election Day, inspired by the Islamic State group. Prosecutors have labeled Nazira Haji Zada the “matriarch” of the extremist cell, alleging she was responsible for radicalizing her family members to support terrorist activities.

In an official statement released Friday, the DOJ confirmed that Haji Zada “conceded that she is an alien terrorist and waived appeal of the removal order, terminating her previous [immigration] status.” U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche framed the outcome as a major success for U.S. national security. “This landmark case, resulting in the prompt removal of this alien terrorist to her country of origin, is a win for national security and the rule of law,” Blanche said. “Those who support and condone terrorism should not be living in the United States, and this first-ever case before the ATRC shows how the Department will use every tool at its disposal to protect our country.”

But Haji Zada’s court-appointed defense attorneys have raised sharp constitutional objections to the proceedings, arguing that the use of the secret court violated her Fifth Amendment right to due process under the U.S. Constitution. A core issue of contention is that defense counsel were denied access to the classified evidence prosecutors used to build their case against their client.

In a statement provided to *The Washington Post*, public defenders Matthew Farley and Mary Manning Petras emphasized that their client’s decision to consent to deportation should not be interpreted as validation of the ATRC’s authority. “Dragging lawful permanent residents into court but refusing to show them or their attorneys the evidence that will be used against them is a plain violation of due process,” they said. “We are confident that the Alien Terrorist Removal Court will be struck down as unconstitutional as soon as a judge is asked to address the issue.”

Twenty-five years have passed since the devastating terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and rather than rehashing the details of that tragic day, it is long past time to examine the strategic conclusions U.S. policymakers drew in its aftermath — and to question whether those conclusions have served the nation well. There is no question that the coordinated al-Qaeda strikes that killed thousands of civilians and targeted the heart of American power represented a profound national trauma and an unconscionable act of mass violence. But the policy assumptions built atop that trauma have become a catastrophe in their own right, a legacy of avoidable loss whose human, financial and institutional costs are still being borne by Americans today.

The first and most foundational wrong lesson Washington embraced after 9/11 was the claim that the attacks proved the world had grown uniquely dangerous, requiring an unprecedented expansion of U.S. military engagement across the globe. This narrative flipped the reality of the attacks on its head. Al-Qaeda’s ability to launch successful strikes against New York and Washington was not evidence of insufficient American military presence or global weakness — it was largely a byproduct of that longstanding presence. Osama bin Laden openly articulated his core grievances: the permanent stationing of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, harsh economic sanctions levied against Iraq, and unwavering U.S. backing for Israeli policy in the occupied Palestinian territories. None of these grievances can ever justify the mass murder of innocent civilians, but foreign policy realists have long warned that ignoring the direct causal link between overseas intervention and domestic “blowback” is not moral courage — it is dangerous strategic negligence. Instead of reevaluating overextension, however, Washington doubled down, concluding the U.S. needed to intervene more aggressively, not less, in every corner of the world.

The second flawed lesson held that large-scale foreign nation-building was the definitive solution to the threat of global terrorism. What began as a limited, strategically sound mission in Afghanistan — destroy al-Qaeda’s training camps and safe havens, and punish the Taliban regime for sheltering the terrorist network — quickly metastasized into a 20-year nation-building experiment. This effort attempted to impose a liberal democratic state on a country that had repeatedly repelled foreign efforts to remake its social and political order, stretching back centuries. The 2003 invasion of Iraq was an even greater failure: a war of choice, justified by flawed intelligence that ultimately collapsed under scrutiny, that had no tangible connection to the 9/11 attacks and was driven entirely by the ideological conviction that American military power could forcibly remake the entire Middle East in a pro-U.S. democratic image. Both wars grew from the same wrong premise: that terrorism could be cured by democratic transformation imposed at gunpoint. The outcome was not stable, pro-American democracies. Instead, it delivered two decades of deadly insurgency, brutal sectarian conflict, and in Iraq, the power vacuum that allowed the rise of the Islamic State (ISIS).

The third wrong lesson centered on the false tradeoff between national security and civil liberty, arguing that liberty must always give ground to security in the face of terrorist threats. In the wake of 9/11, the U.S. government rolled out an unprecedented architecture of expanded executive power: the Patriot Act, mass warrantless surveillance programs, indefinite detention of suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, and a host of emergency authorities that were sold to the public as temporary, proportional responses to an immediate crisis. Most of these powers have since become permanent fixtures of the American national security state. This approach embedded a dangerous assumption: that a free society facing a small but determined terrorist threat should automatically prioritize expanding state power over requiring the government to prove such expansion is necessary. A tradition of limited government would have demanded the opposite: that emergency powers include built-in sunset provisions, that surveillance be narrowly tailored to specific threats, and that the burden of proof always falls on those seeking to expand state authority, not on citizens defending constitutional checks on government power.

The fourth and most durable wrong lesson held that American credibility demanded endless open-ended military commitment, no matter the cost or diminishing strategic returns. Withdrawal from any engagement — whether Iraq, Afghanistan, or any other theater — would be interpreted as weakness by U.S. adversaries, the argument went, so the U.S. had to maintain a military presence regardless of changing circumstances. It was this logic that extended two wars meant to last months into conflicts that stretched across decades. It turned an open-ended military presence into an end in itself, disconnected from any realistic assessment of what additional troops and additional time were actually achieving. The eventual chaotic withdrawals from both Iraq and Afghanistan did not come from a deliberate change of strategy or a recognition of past error; they came only when the unsustainable cost of maintaining the status quo could no longer be ignored.

What would a more grounded, strategic response to 9/11 have looked like? A far more restrained path was already available in 2001: a targeted, focused campaign to eliminate al-Qaeda’s leadership and dismantle its safe havens, a refusal to conflate the threat of a single terrorist network with a blanket mandate for global regime change, and a honest reevaluation of how permanent forward-deployed U.S. military power in the Middle East was generating the very anti-American resentment it claimed to suppress. In the raw, emotional climate of 2001 and 2002, shaped by widespread grief and anger, that restrained path was politically unthinkable. But a quarter-century later, after two failed nation-building projects, more than $2 trillion in public funds spent, thousands of American service members killed and maimed, and a permanent surveillance state that has outlived every original justification offered for it, the case for that more modest, realistic reading of 9/11’s lessons looks far stronger than the aggressive approach Washington actually chose.