Vengeance

WE’VE identified five intriguing talking points ahead of Gameweek 7.

We encourage you to notice, observe and scrutinise these points of interest — full immersion in Dream Team is the best way to climb the leaderboard!

5

Cherry Picking

The first thing that demands your attention in Gameweek 7 is the deadline.

Bournemouth v Fulham is scheduled to kick-off at 8pm on Friday night, which means the deadline is 6:30pm — don’t wait until Saturday morning.

It’ll be all eyes on Antoine Semenyo (£4.8m) once the game gets underway as the Ghana international features in over a quarter of teams.

He ranks fourth among midfielders at the time of writing having amassed 52 points from seven outings.

The only downside to owning Semenyo is his limited schedule as the Cherries do not have European commitments and were eliminated from the Carabao Cup early doors.

However, that’s not relevant right now as Gameweek 7 simply consists of a full round of Premier League games.

Semenyo will always come to the fore when every club has the same number of fixtures to fulfil.

Stat Padding

5

The Saturday lunchtime fixture sees Tottenham visit Leeds, who haven’t lost at home in well over a year.

Thomas Frank will hope the early kick-off time will negate the Elland Road atmosphere, which seems to have drawn out below-par performances from Everton, Newcastle and Bournemouth this season.

Anton Stach (£2.9m) and Sean Longstaff (£2.7m) have produced unexpected mega hauls in recent weeks but Dream Team managers will be more focused on Mohammed Kudus (£4.9m), the fourth-most selected midfielder in the game.

The mercurial 25-year-old is leading the way for both successful dribbles (33) and accurate crosses (18) among all players, an indication of his influence and, more importantly, a consistent supply of bonus points.

Kudus has racked up 45 points but he’s not the best Spurs midfield right now, that honour belongs to Joao Palhinha (£3.7m) on 49 points.

Everyone expected the Portuguese loanee to rack up tackles – only Moises Caicedo (£4.7m) has made more challenges – but he’s been surprisingly effective in final third so far with three goals to his name.

Whether his attacking output is sustainable remains to be seen.

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Fixture Flip

5

Arsenal assets should be at the forefront of your mind now their difficult run of fixtures is seemingly at an end.

The Gunners have already been to Old Trafford, Anfield and St James’ Park, not to mention a home game against Manchester City, but the schedule flips in their favour now with an appealing string of match-ups until the November international break.

Mikel Arteta’s side are due to face West Ham (h), Fulham (a), Atletico Madrid (h), Crystal Palace (h), Brighton (h), Burnley (a), Slavia Prague (a) and Sunderland (a) over the next five Gameweeks.

It’s notable that the hardest opponents of that bunch (Atletico and Palace) are both home games.

If you’ve resisted Arsenal players until now because of their tricky fixtures, consider this a turning point.

Backers of David Raya (£4.8m) and the first-choice defenders will be particularly hopeful of substantial points this autumn.

Cue Jarrod Bowen (£5.2m), boosted by Nuno Espirito Santo’s new manager bounce, playing the role of party pooper on Saturday.

The Hammers’ talisman ranks third among forwards at present, a mighty effort without European fixtures.

Mo Problems

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At the time writing, Mohamed Salah (£7.3m) is the third-most transferred-out player ahead of Gameweek 7.

It’s extremely rare that the Egyptian superstar suffers a significant dip in popularity when fully fit and available.

He mustered just four points in Gameweek 6, worlds away from the massive haul achieved by a certain Norwegian poacher, but he remains the second-best performer among players in his position.

Given Salah’s history, might everything be set up for a statement performance at Stamford Bridge this weekend?

The Blues haven’t won in the league since August and with absentees in defence, they may find it hard to resist Arne Slot’s troops.

Alisson (£4.1m) is unlikely to recover before the weekend and so Giorgi Mamardashvili (£3.5m) is expected to start between the sticks for Liverpool.

Salah has registered nine goal involvements in 15 league meetings with Chelsea.

Wouldn’t it be typical of him to take revenge on the swarm of gaffers who have ditched him this week?

Best for Last

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We’ve skirted around the issue but it’s time to address the elephant in the room that is Erling Haaland’s (£7.7m) otherworldly form.

After just six Gameweeks, the relentless striker has 105 points to his name and a lead of 41 over his closest rival.

A brace against Monaco in the week took his goal tally for the season to 11 — nobody else has scored more than five.

Haaland will take to the stage last in Gameweek 7 as Man City’s trip to Brentford is the late kick-off on Sunday.

And who would bet against another double-digit return?

The Bees are 13th in the table but their underlying numbers are a concern.

Only Burnley have conceded more shots than Brentford while Keith Andrews’ mob rank dead last for shots taken.

Igor Thiago (£3.3m) and company have the capacity to make life difficult for their opponents but Pep Guardiola will expect one-way traffic in his favour at the Gtech.

The captaincy conversation is a non-starter, it’s Haaland and anyone that sees it differently is playing with fire.

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At a tense political moment in the wake of conservative lightning rod Charlie Kirk’s killing, President Trump signed a presidential memorandum focusing federal law enforcement on disrupting “domestic terrorism.”

The memo appeared to focus on political violence. But during a White House signing Thursday, the president and his top advisors repeatedly hinted at a much broader campaign of suppression against the American left, referencing as problematic both the simple printing of protest signs and the prominent racial justice movement Black Lives Matter.

“We’re looking at the funders of a lot of these groups. You know, when you see the signs and they’re all beautiful signs made professionally, these aren’t your protesters that make the sign in their basement late in the evening because they really believe it. These are anarchists and agitators,” Trump said.

“Whether it be going back to the riots that started with Black Lives Matter and all the way through to the antifa riots, the attacks on ICE officers, the doxxing campaigns and now the political assassinations — these are not lone, isolated events,” said Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff. “This is part of an organized campaign of radical left terrorism.”

Neither Trump nor Miller nor the other top administration officials flanking them — including Vice President JD Vance, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel — offered any evidence of such a widespread left-wing terror campaign, or many details about how the memo would be put into action.

Law enforcement officials have said Kirk’s alleged shooter appears to have acted alone, and data on domestic extremism more broadly — including some recently scrubbed from the Justice Department’s website — suggest right-wing extremists represent the larger threat.

Many on the right cheered Trump’s memo — just as many on the left cheered calls by Democrats for a clampdown on right-wing extremism during the Biden administration, particularly in light of the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. In that incident, more than 1,500 were criminally charged, many convicted of assaulting police officers and some for sedition, before Trump pardoned them or commuted their sentences.

Many critics of the administration slammed the memo as a “chilling” threat that called to mind some of the most notorious periods of political suppression in the nation’s history — a claim the White House dismissed as wildly off base and steeped in liberal hypocrisy.

That includes the Red Scare and the often less acknowledged Lavender Scare of the Cold War and beyond, they said, when Sen. Joseph McCarthy and other federal officials cast a pall over the nation, its social justice movements and its arts scene by promising to purge from government anyone who professed a belief in certain political ideas — such as communism — or was gay or lesbian or otherwise queer.

Douglas M. Charles, a history professor at Penn State Greater Allegheny and author of “Hoover’s War on Gays: Exposing the FBI’s ‘Sex Deviates’ Program,” said Trump’s memo strongly paralleled past government efforts at political repression — including in its claim that “extremism on migration, race and gender” and “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity” are all causing violence in the country.

“What is this, McCarthyism redux?” Charles asked.

Melina Abdullah, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter-Los Angeles, said the Trump administration is putting “targets on the backs of organizers” like her.

Abdullah, speaking Friday from Washington, D.C., where she is attending the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference, said Trump’s efforts to cast left-leaning advocacy groups as a threat to democracy was “the definition of gaslighting” because the president “and his entire regime are violent.”

“They are anti-Black. They are anti-people. They are anti-free speech,” Abdullah said. “What we are is indeed an organized body of people who want freedom for our people — and that is a demand for the kind of sustainable peace that only comes with justice.”

Others, including prominent California Democrats, framed Trump’s memo and other recent administration acts — including Thursday’s indictment of former FBI Director James Comey over the objections of career prosecutors — as a worrying blueprint for much wider vengeance on Trump’s behalf, which must be resisted.

“Trump is waging a crusade of retribution — abusing the federal government as a weapon of personal revenge,” Gov. Gavin Newsom posted to X. “Today it’s his enemies. Tomorrow it may be you. Speak out. Use your voice.”

White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, left, FBI Director Kash Patel and Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi listen to President Trump Thursday in the Oval Office.

(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)

California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta noted that the memo listed various incidents of violence against Republicans while “deliberately ignoring” violence against Democrats, and said that while it is unclear what may come of the order, “the chilling effect is real and cannot be ignored.”

Bonta also sent Bondi a letter Friday expressing his “grave concern” with the Comey indictment and asking her to “reassert the long-standing independence of the U.S. Department of Justice from political interference by declining to continue these politically-motivated investigations and prosecutions.”

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said the Trump administration is twisting Kirk’s tragic killing “into a pretext to weaponize the federal government against opponents Trump says he ‘hates.’”

“In recent days, they’ve branded entire groups — including the Democratic Party itself — as threats, directed [the Justice Department] to go after his perceived enemies, and coerced companies to stifle any criticism of the Administration or its allies. This is pure personal grievance and retribution,” Padilla said. “If this abuse of power is normalized, no dissenting voice will be safe.”

Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, said it was “the highest form of hypocrisy for Democrats to falsely claim accountability is ‘political retribution’ when Joe Biden is the one who spent years weaponizing his entire Administration against President Trump and millions of patriotic Americans.”

Jackson accused the Biden administration of censoring average Americans for their posts about COVID-19 on social media and of prosecuting “peaceful pro-life protestors,” among other things, and said the Trump administration “will continue to deliver the truth to the American people, restore integrity to our justice system, and take action to stop radical left-wing violence that is plaguing American communities.”

A month ago, Miller said, “The Democrat Party is not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization” — a quote raising new concerns in light of Trump’s memo.

On Sept. 16, Bondi said on X that “the radical left” has for too long normalized threats and cheered on political violence, and that she would be ending that by somehow prosecuting them for “hate speech.”

Constitutional scholars — and some prominent conservative pundits — ridiculed Bondi’s claims as contrary to the 1st Amendment.

On Sept. 18, independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that unnamed national security officials had told him that the FBI was considering treating transgender suspects as a “subset” of a new threat category known as “Nihilistic Violent Extremists” — a concept LGBTQ+ organizations scrambled to denounce as a threat to everyone’s civil liberties.

“Everyone should be repulsed by the attempts to use the power of the federal government against their neighbors, their friends, and our families,” Human Rights Campaign President Kelley Robinson said Wednesday. “It creates a dangerous precedent that could one day be used against other Americans, progressive or conservative or anywhere in between.”

In recent days, Trump has unabashedly attacked his critics — including late-night host Jimmy Kimmel, whose show was briefly suspended. On Sept. 20, he demanded on his Truth Social platform that Bondi move to prosecute several of his most prominent political opponents, including Comey, Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and New York Atty. Gen. Letitia James.

“We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility,” wrote Trump, the only felon to ever occupy the White House. “They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Comey’s indictment — on charges of lying to Congress — was reported shortly after the White House event where Trump signed the memo. Trump declined to discuss Comey at the event, and was vague about who else might be targeted under the memo. But he did say he had heard “a lot of different names,” including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman and George Soros, two prominent Democratic donors.

“If they are funding these things, they’re gonna have some problems,” Trump said, without providing any evidence of wrongdoing by either man.

The Open Society Foundations, which have disbursed billions from Soros’ fortune to an array of progressive groups globally, said in response that they “unequivocally condemn terrorism and do not fund terrorism” and that their activities “are peaceful and lawful.” Accusations suggesting otherwise were “politically motivated attacks on civil society, meant to silence speech the administration disagrees with,” the group said.

John Day, president-elect of the American College of Trial Lawyers, said his organization has not taken a position on Trump’s memo, but had grave concerns about the process by which Comey was indicted — namely, after Trump called for such legal action publicly.

“That, quite frankly, is very disturbing and concerning to us,” Day said. “This is not the way the legal system was designed to work, and it’s not the way it has worked for 250 years, and we are just very concerned that this happened at all,” Day said. “We’re praying that it is an outlier, as opposed to a predictor of what’s to come.”

James Kirchick, author of “Secret City: The Hidden History of Gay Washington,” which covers the Lavender Scare and its effects on the LGBTQ+ community in detail, said the “strongest similarity” he sees between then and now is the administration “taking the actions of an individual or a small number of people” — such as Kirk’s shooter — “and extrapolating that onto an entire class of people.”

Kirchick said language on the left labeling the president a dictator isn’t helpful in such a political moment, but that he has found some of the administration’s language more alarming — especially, in light of the new memo, Miller’s suggestion that the Democratic Party is an extremist organization.

“Does that mean the Democratic Party is going to be subject to FBI raids and extremist surveillance?” he asked.

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A few hours after Charlie Kirk was killed, Sean Feucht, an influential right-wing Christian worship leader, filmed a selfie video from his home in California, his eyes brimming with tears.

The shooting of one of the nation’s most prominent conservative activists, Feucht declared, was no less than “a line in the sand” in a country descending into a spiritual darkness.

“The enemy thinks that he won, that there was a battle that was won today,” he said, referencing Satan. “No, man, there’s going to be millions of bold voices raised up out of the sacrifice and the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.”

Soon afterward, Pastor Matt Tuggle, who leads the Salt Lake City campus of the San Diego-based Awaken megachurch, posted a video of Kirk’s killing on Instagram, adding the caption: “If your pastor isn’t telling you the left believes a evil demonic belief system you are in the wrong church!”

People place lighted candles below a photo of Charlie Kirk at a vigil in his memory in Orem, Utah.

(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)

Kirk’s death has triggered a range of reaction, much of it mournful sympathy for the 31-year-old activist and his family. But it also has sparked conspiracy theories, hot-take presumptions the left was responsible and calls for vengeance against Kirk’s perceived enemies.

At a vigil for Kirk in Huntington Beach this week, some attendees waved white flags depicting a red cross and the word “Jesus,” while some chanted, “White men, fight back!” Kirk spread a philosophy that liberals sought to disempower men, and some of his male supporters see his killing as an attack against them.

Whether the calls for vengeance will ebb or intensify remains to be seen, especially with Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s announcement Friday that a suspect in the fatal shooting, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, had been arrested after a family member turned him in.

In life, Kirk spoke of what he called a “spiritual battle” being waged in the United States between Christians and a Democratic Party that “supports everything that God hates.”

In death, Kirk, one of the Republican Party’s most influential power brokers, is being hailed by conservative evangelical pastors and GOP politicians as a Christian killed for his religious beliefs.

President Trump called Kirk a “martyr for truth and freedom,” and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff in his honor. He blamed Kirk’s death on the rhetoric of the “radical left.” Vice President JD Vance, who helped carry Kirk’s casket to Air Force Two, retweeted a post Kirk wrote on X last month reading, “It’s all about Jesus.” And Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, quoting Jesus, wrote on X: “Well done, good and faithful servant.”

A woman lays her head down on a seat during a vigil at CenterPoint Church for Charlie Kirk in Orem, Utah.

(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)

Experts on faith and far-right extremism say they are troubled by the religious glorification of Kirk in this era of increased political violence — and the potential vengeance that may spring from it. The activist’s death, they say, seems to have ignited various factions on the right, ranging from white supremacists to hard-core Christian nationalists.

“The ‘spiritual warfare’ rhetoric will only increase,” and Kirk is now being lifted up as “a physical manifestation” of a religious battle, said Matthew Boedy, a professor of rhetoric and composition at the University of North Georgia who has written a forthcoming book about Christian nationalism that prominently features Kirk.

“Spiritual warfare rhetoric was a big part of Jan. 6,” he said of the deadly 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters. “Making a martyr out of Charlie Kirk will change our nation in severe ways.”

Samuel Perry, a sociologist at the University of Oklahoma and expert on Christian nationalism, said he is a Christian himself but that religion, cynically used, “has the potential to amplify what would otherwise be very secular political conflicts between Democrats and Republicans.”

“What if those are amplified with a cosmic and ultimate significance?” he said. “It becomes, ‘This is God vs. Satan. This is angels vs. demons — and if we lose this next election, we plunge the nation into a thousand years of darkness.’ … It basically provokes extremism.”

Feucht, a Christian nationalist and failed Republican congressional candidate from Northern California, said that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church” and that, in the wake of Kirk’s death, “we have to do something.”

Kirk — who rallied his millions of online followers to vote for Trump in the 2024 election — declared that God was on the side of American conservatives and that there was “no separation of church and state.” He was also known for his vitriol against racial and religious minorities, LGBTQ+ people, childless women, progressives and others who disagreed with him.

Kirk called transgender people “a throbbing middle finger to God.” He said the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was “a huge mistake” and called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. “awful.” On his podcast, he called with a smirk for “some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area [who] wants to really be a midterm hero” to bail out of jail the man who attacked then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer in their home in 2022.

A memorial is set up for Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

(Lindsey Wasson / Associated Press)

In 2023, Kirk sat on the stage of Awaken Church in Salt Lake City and said: “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the 2nd Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Two days before his death, Kirk retweeted a video of himself saying that a “spiritual battle is coming for the West,” with “wokeism or marxism combining with Islamism” to go after “the American way of life, which is, by the way, Christendom.”

Perry said, “There’s no need to whitewash the legacy of Charlie Kirk.”

“This is a tragedy, and no one deserves to die this way,” Perry said. “Yet, at the same time, Charlie Kirk is very much part of this polarization story in the U.S. who used quite divisive rhetoric, ‘us vs. them, the left is evil.’”

Perry noted that Kirk’s Turning Point USA had placed him on its Professor Watchlist, a website that says it aims to expose professors “who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda.” The entry on Perry flags him for “Anti-Judeo-Christian Values.”

Some on the right say their recent fiery words are only a response to the hateful rhetoric of the left. One widely shared example: Two days before Kirk’s killing, the feminist website Jezebel published an article titled, “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk.” It has since been removed and replaced by a letter from the site’s editor saying it had been “intended as satire and made it absolutely clear that we wished no physical harm.”

Kirk was killed by a single sniper-style shot to the neck Wednesday during an outdoor speaking event at Utah Valley University.

After announcing the suspect’s arrest Friday, Gov. Cox said he had prayed that the shooter was not from Utah, “that somebody drove from another state, somebody came from another country.” But that prayer, he said, “was not answered the way I hoped for.”

He then said that political violence “metastasizes because we can always point the finger at the other side” and that, “at some point, we have to find an offramp, or it’s going to get much, much worse.”

Some of Kirk’s most prominent evangelical followers have said that his death represents an attack on conservative Christian values and that he was gunned down for speaking “the truth.”

Jon Fleischman, Orange County-based conservative blogger and former executive director of the California Republican Party, who started out as a conservative college activist, knew Kirk and said “there is one hell of a martyr situation going on.”

“A lot of people are getting activated and are going to walk the walk, talk the talk, and give money as their way of trying to process and deal with losing someone they care about,” he told The Times.

In recent years, Kirk had become more outspoken about his Christian faith. He founded the nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012 as an avowedly secular youth organization and became known for his college campus tours, with videos of his debates with liberal college students racking up tens of millions of views.

But in 2020, during the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, college campuses closed. Kirk started speaking at churches that stayed open in violation of local lockdown and mask orders, including Godspeak Calvary Chapel in Ventura County, which was led by Pastor Rob McCoy, a former Thousand Oaks mayor.

McCoy is now the co-chair of Turning Point USA Faith, which encourages pastors to become more politically outspoken. McCoy, who could not be reached for comment, wrote in a statement Friday: “For those who rejoiced over his murder, you are instruments of evil and I implore you to repent. For those of you who mock prayer, you would do well to reconsider. Prayer doesn’t change God, it changes us toward a more peaceful and civil life.”

Professor Boedy said McCoy turned Kirk toward Christian nationalism, specifically the Seven Mountains Mandate — the idea that Christians should try to hold sway over the seven pillars of cultural influence: arts and entertainment, business, education, family, government, media and religion.

Christian nationalism, which is rejected by mainline Christians, holds that the United States was founded as a Christian nation and that the faith should have primacy in government and law.

Brian Levin, founder of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism and a professor emeritus at Cal State San Bernardino, said, “the more violent fringes of Christian nationalism have disturbing aspects that are eliminationist and antidemocratic.”

He noted that some of the same Christian nationalists and white supremacists who are now calling Kirk a martyr already deified Trump, especially after he survived two assassination attempts on the campaign trail last year and said he had been “saved by God to make America great again.”

Levin said many Christian nationalists portray Trump as “an armed Christian warrior protecting America from a disturbing assortment of immigrants, religious minorities, genders and sexual orientations.” And so, when he uses martyr language to describe Kirk, his adherents latch on.

“Where do martyrs come from? From violent conflicts and wars,” Levin said. “The fact of the matter is that this is a moment that Trump could have more effectively seized, but he veered into divisive territory.”

California Senate Minority Leader Brian W. Jones (R-Santee) also called Kirk “a modern day martyr.” In a statement, Jones quoted Thomas Jefferson, who said, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”

Jones wrote: “Let us take care that we allow that tree to grow and blossom as it feeds on the lifeblood of Charles J. Kirk in the years to come.”

Times staff writer Seema Mehta contributed to this report.