Bad, Horrifying, Wrong 🤯 😱 ✡️🌻😱 🤯

🤯 😱 🤯 😱:  Charlie Kirk’s assassination was horrifying. The views he professed were awful too. It should be okay to say that without being accused of celebrating his terrifying murder but apparently that is a problem, at least for some people and some companies which is in itself part of the problem confronting us, a problem amplified and distorted by social media.  Trump who was largely silent when Minnesota politician Melissa Hortman and her husband were murdered, who consistently responds to school shootings by invoking the overused “thoughts and prayers” trope, and who still jokes about the brutal beating of Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul, has come out swinging, blaming radical leftist Democrats and George Soros for Kirk’s death because he blames them for everything and why not use Kirk’s murder as another cudgel against those he considers his enemies which includes just about anyone who isn’t in his MAGA tent or hasn’t sent a minimum of $1 million his way. Thus, Kirk will be getting a posthumous Presential Medal of Honor while all those other victims get his John McCain treatment.  Trump’s outrage is even more over the top than usual because Kirk was in his family circle, a position he earned by employing his Turning Point USA platform to grow Trump’s support among young conservative voters, something that helped Trump win the popular vote in 2024. Kirk was unquestionably a force to be reckoned with. He left college after only one semester but took to politics like he had doctorates in sociology, psychology, and political science.  According to the internet he had a net worth of at least $12 million, not bad for a 31-year-old college dropout.  As noted by the NY Times, his views were extremely right wing.  He criticized the separation of church and state, disdained all things LGTBQ, and was such a strong supporter of gun rights that he said: “it’s worth it to have a cost of unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,” though he probably didn’t contemplate that he’d be one of those losing his life. He believed the Civil Right Act of 1964 was a mistake, called Martin Luther King an awful person, and said that Harvard College and Law School graduate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was a “diversity hire,” though given the commonality of their views he had no problem with Justice Clarence Thomas who he thought was a great role model for Black people. Like the Charlottesville tiki torch marchers who chanted “Jews will not replace us” he was a proponent of Replacement Theory.  He also rejected climate change, saying it was complete gibberish, but to be fair he probably didn’t take any science courses during his one college semester. Kirk was also a staunch opponent of abortion even for ten-year-old rape victims and thought that women should prioritize motherhood and marriage because feminism was detrimental and would leave them angry and bitter. Ironically, his wife who has already taken to social media to raise money off of his death, is hardly a shrinking violet, rather she’s a former Miss Arizona with three degrees. His extreme positions resonated with the MAGA right which viewed him as a hero. Before last week’s shooting many of the rest of us may have been familiar with his name but probably knew little about him but now we’re to believe that he was a hero, right up there with Abraham Lincoln and George Washington because saying otherwise could come with consequences.  Given Trump’s personal foibles, multiple marriages, proclivity for porn stars and Playmates, and admiration for first daughter Ivanka’s “accomplishments,” it’s hard to believe that he bought into all of Kirk’s beliefs, but he did share a lot of them particularly the racist ones, but more than anything he loved the voters Kirk delivered. It’s not just Trump, JD Vance considered Kirk to be among his closest friends (his only friend?), or at the very least a valuable friend because getting Kirk’s endorsement would have been key to him getting first dibs at the mantle he hopes to grab upon Trump’s exit, assuming that is that the Orange one ever exits. With Kirk out of the picture, JD will have to find himself another charismatic leader to latch on to because while he has the support of billionaire Peter Thiel and his friends who are good providers of funds, they have far less sway among the MAGA right, particularly those who share Kirk’s anti LGBTQ views.    

The Shooter: It turns out that the shooter who won’t be cited by name here is not a radical Soros funded Democrat nor transgender but unsurprisingly fits the profile of most of those who commit this type of heinous crime.  He’s a 22-year-old once promising college drop-out who grew up in a conservative household in Utah a state with few limitations on gun ownership.  He was heavy into online gaming and despite initial assertions that the messages he wrote on his bullets had to do with gender ideology they were more likely gaming terms and/or reflected his interest or alliance with Groypers.  You’d be excused for not knowing that Groypers refers to an alt-right white nationalist group led by Nick Fuentes, the neo-Nazi who once dined at Mar a Lago together with Kanye West but who has since been more or less been banished from the MAGA bandwagon for being too extreme.  Apparently, Fuentes and his Groyper followers weren’t all that fond of Kirk because as part of his efforts to become more acceptable to the mainstream, Turning Point USA and Kirk had been excluding Fuentes and his supporters from their events. That said, no one is sure what motivated the shooter, least of all FBI Director Kash Patel who by making several inaccurate announcements during the run up to his arrest proved that appointing a conspiracy spreading podcaster as FBI Director wasn’t the most brilliant decision but instead was right up there with putting someone who abhors vaccines in charge of health care. And no one should be surprised to learn that earlier this year the head of the local FBI office, an experienced and respected agent was fired.  Her crime, she is a woman of Pakistani heritage.

Shiny Object Alert:  Trump is already milking Kirk’s death for all it’s worth.  The tragedy is serving as a useful distraction from all those other things that are looming over his head: Ukraine, Gaza, the pissed off Qataris, his buddy former President of Brazil Bolsonaro’s guilty verdict and 27-year sentence, the questionable missile attack of the Venezuelan “drug” boat, the faltering economy, and Epstein. We should all be concerned because despite a few Republicans like Utah Governor Spencer Cox sounding kind of reasonable, far more on the right are calling for retribution or worse.  Stephen “Goebbels” Miller who Rolling Stone reports is the architect and implementer of Trump’s worst immigration policies, took to Fox to declare that he and Trump should use the shooting to “dismantle” left-wing organizations saying that Kirk’s final message to him was the importance of taking on the “radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence."  Elon Musk posted on X where he has 219 million followers that "the Left is the party of murder" adding "if they won't leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die."  Steve Bannon said, "Charlie Kirk is a casualty of the political war," adding for those who missed his point that "We are at war in this country." Along those lines, Fox’s Jesse Waters said we are at war, presumably with the left or anyone who isn’t MAGA, while asking what are we going to do about it?  As if the environment isn’t treacherous enough MSNBC, which is one of those so-called radical left entities that the Miller’s and Bannon’s want destroyed, fired political contributor Matthew Dowd for saying that Kirk may have “fueled the violence that took his life.” Dowd probably said that too soon but in addition to hardly being the worst thing said this week, given what we’ve learned about Kirk’s view about guns wasn’t far off the mark and certainly wasn’t the same as saying that the murder was justified because to be clear it was definitely not. Worth noting that while Dowd is out, Fox’s Brian Kilmeade isn’t because all he said was that homeless people should be euthanized.  #WTF

More 💩 :  Switching gears if that is even possible, Trump is still trying to fire Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook even though recently revealed documents show that, she did not claim her second home as a primary residence but instead appropriately referred to it as a vacation home on her loan documents, so no crime other than being a Black woman who supports Jerome Powell’s interest rate strategy.  Peter Mandelson who until last week was the UK Ambassador to the US has resigned, a casualty of the Epstein mess but Teflon Trump remains unscathed, at least so far, aided by a DOJ that continues to sit on documents while probably also dangling a pardon in front of abettor Ghislaine Maxwell in exchange for her silence.  Also Trump is talking up war with Venezuela, putting more conditions on the imposition of Russia sanctions, and trying to figure out a way to keep his Qatari friends happy all while getting ready to occupy Memphis because he’s figured out that going after Democratically led cities in Republican states is easier than going after the ones run by articulate Democratic governors particularly those who relish the opportunity to get national attention for their future presidential runs, assuming we still have presidential elections.

#BringThemAllHomeNow