James Gillen

While it is alleged that Charlie Kirk’s murder was, if not a conspiracy, an event that the Trump Right wanted to use to create their own Horst Wessel and “unite the Right”, the aftermath actually seems to be causing cracks in the foundation. For one thing, Kirk colleague Candace Owens (a conspiracy theorist of the first order) said that he was assassinated right after telling other friends that he was no longer supporting Israel for its war on Gaza.

Frankly, if our species ever gets its shit together long enough to advance science and break the lightspeed barrier, within 40 years of first contact, the natives of Alpha Centauri are going to be blaming The Jews for all of their problems throughout history.

It would be simplistic to say that Trump’s support is entirely based on white supremacy, given the support he has gotten in three elections from Jews and non-whites. However, he gets that much more support from actual white supremacists, and they are pretty simplistic.

When I say they are simplistic, I mean that literally, because they really do think that they should judge someone’s moral and intellectual value on the basis of their origin. Look at their role model, who uses “low IQ person” as his code for “black woman.” This is why a right-winger like Richard Hanania, who has been credibly accused of racism himself, disavows the brand-name Right now, because at least in America they’ve become useless at everything but racism.

The American reactionary movement always has had a very elitist view of the world, traditionally disdaining not just non-whites and non-Christians but any white Christian who isn’t straight Protestant. Their idea of tolerance is dating a Methodist. The 19^th Century Know-Nothing Party (no really) was based largely on treating Irish Catholics the way MAGAts treat Hispanics now. So no surprise that not only is the recent murder bringing out the inherent Jew-hate, it’s also revealed that even other Christians aren’t good enough for some in MAGA.

Charlie Kirk died while holding a debate session at a Mormon university in Utah, and in the wake of his murder, some “conservatives” actually blamed the Mormon community. On September 27, at a college football game between Brigham Young (BYU) and Colorado State university, the hometeam crowd frequently yelled things like “Fuck the Mormons.” The very next day, a Trump supporter drove to a Mormon church in Michigan, rammed into the building, opened fire with a semi-auto rifle, set the building on fire and killed four people before he was taken down by police. That weekend Mormons were holding special prayer after the death of their church president, Russell M. Nelson. According to one account, “Between 2015 and 2024, the FBI counted 160 hate crimes reported against LDS victims. These included 63 acts of vandalism and property destruction and 29 assaults. The states with the most incidents were Utah (25), California (23), Washington (14), Tennessee (12), Georgia (10) and Nevada (10).”

It’s kind of odd given that Mormon codes are that much more devoted to clean living than those of most professed Christian Republicans. Mormonism, originating in the US, is maybe that much more “white” than other American denominations. (There was a whole thing about how the Church considered Black people to be under ‘the Curse of Cain‘.)

Mormonism is very much an offshoot of traditional Christianity. It is considered “non-trinitarian” in that it considers the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit to not be one being in three aspects, but three distinct beings. Indeed, most Christians consider Mormons heretical in that they consider God to be a physical living man. The Church of Trump considers Mormonism heretical because Mormons do not believe that man is Donald Trump.

My own opinion is similar to the kids on South Park: The inner mysticism of Mormonism may be pretty weird, but all the Mormons I’ve known have been stand-up people, and I don’t argue with results.

But the wave of anti-LDS prejudice is only the latest example of how what seems to be a broad Trump movement is motivated by hatreds more than love of country or God.

I’ve been seeing a lot of YouTube posts about cults (since we have one running the country now) and how to break people out of them, and related to this are a set of related posts about a “purple revolution”, largely from a poster labeled “Cult College” about how people disillusioned by Trump might actually join with “the Left” (that is, the rest of us) and get rid of his regime. And in one of her posts, “Screenshots From A Breaking Cult” she shows social media remarks and conversations from Trump supporters saying things like “It’s not just Trump, it’s the entire government. I’ve been turned off from him recently with his dedication to Israel.” “I feel the same way!!!!!! I was republican UNTIL this reveal of what has happened with CHARLIE!!!” and “Always been a Trump supporter but things have changed. Two wings on one bird. Israel is pulling all the strings”.

I don’t see these people waking up. I see them going deeper down the rabbit hole. Because the main thing that distinguished Trumpniks from outright Nazis was the fact that their Christian identity (or rather, their superficial identification with Christianity) caused them to idealize “Zion” and thus Israel. But then they saw Israel performing outright genocide on Gaza, they saw that the country is doing so at the behest of Benjamin Netanyahu, who might actually be more crooked then Trump, and they looked back and realized just how much influence Israelis and Israel-aligned Americans (like Jeffrey Epstein) have on both major political parties. And they decided they no longer needed to square the circle between their racial anti-Semitism and their political philo-Semitism. They could just be honest with themselves and hate Jews.

This is how those on the Left (meaning, anybody who doesn’t think Trump is like Jesus only better cause Jesus has to be celibate) can look at media and go “how is it that I’m on the side of Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene?” Because as I say, it is possible for two different things to be true at the same time.

For my own view: I think that the history of the planet indicates that we need a state of Israel, because Jews cannot be secure as a minority where they live, and that includes the United States. (See above.) I think that Israel, like any other nation, has a right of self-determination and self-defense, and was justified in going after Hamas, if not the deliberate campaign against civilians in Gaza. And while there is indeed undue Jewish/Israeli influence on the American government, the influence of Saudi Arabia on Washington may be even greater and more dangerous. After all, Israel doesn’t have any oil.

Oh, and speaking of Arab oil monarchs:

Just Friday, the Trump Organization announced a deal with the Gulf emirate of Qatar to build an “air force facility” at our existing base in Idaho. Now we’ve already had some training done for Qatar and other nations at our bases historically so this is not radical in itself. But less publicized is the fact that on September 29 – after Israel bombed a Hamas base in Qatar – Trump on his own initiative created a joint defense pact with Qatar without involving the Senate.

This in context of a year in which Trump, shortly after coronation inauguration received a “gift” of a luxury jet from Qatar, which will cost “hundreds of millions” to refit and is simultaneously supposed to be granted to the government after he leaves office and is to be given to Trump’s projected presidential library in the increasingly unlikely event that he leaves office. Come to think of it, now-Attorney General Pam Bondi worked as a consultant for the Ballard Partners lobbying firm to represent Qatar, and while it is apparently not true that Bondi herself was paid $115 million per month during her service, the firm was. “It was unclear how much of the $115,000 per month Bondi personally received.” Of course the Qatar news came up after Bondi’s Senate hearing this week, which was probably the best for her.

Sloppy Steve Bannon told Newsweek, “There should never be a military base of a foreign power on the sacred soil of America.” Israel booster and Trump insider Laura Loomer responded to the Friday news saying “Never thought I’d see Republicans give terror financing Muslims from Qatar a MILITARY BASE on US soil so they can murder Americans.”
Because even some of these people see that this is not about national security or national priorities, it’s all about feeding more slop to the Big Pig. Which to them isn’t so bad, but it actually causes them agita when they have to weigh their Trump worship against their xenophobia.

I mean the obvious point in all this is that even if you are a lily-white Christian member of the Trump cult – and especially if you’re not – a movement based on hatred is going to keep pursuing objects of hate and you cannot be safe with them.

But it also means that a movement based on hate has nothing constructive holding it together, and would turn on itself if its binding force were removed.

It really raises the question of what’s going to happen with these people when (if) Trump finally dies.

Or more pressing: the question of what is so terrible about the Epstein Files that Trump can’t let the Congress know what’s in them, when the Republican Congress flocked back to his side after January 6, when he sent a mob in the Capitol to kill them?

Could you live forever?
Could you see the day

Could you feel your whole world fall apart and fade away?
– Steely Dan, “Kid Charlemagne”

Right now the big story from Washington is Donald Trump’s second Shithole Shutdown, where allegedly the impasse is because the Democrats are holding out. But really, everyone knew Trump wanted a shutdown because he was the one who refused to negotiate until the very last day before the budget ran out. The bigger story and one with long-term political implications for the Project 2025 government was the command meeting by Pete Hegseth, Secretary of Bombing Venezuelan Fishing Boats.

Actually, Kegsbreath and his boss insist on calling the Defense Department the “Department of War”, as it was before 1946. On one hand, this is one of those things like rump renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America”, as though he were a God with the magic power to change the fundamental aspects of the world just by changing the labels. On the other hand, this is actually one of those things where in principle I’d agree with the Trump agenda. Our military is not very “defense.” Our “defense” is bombing the shit out of everything. It makes sense to call your military a department of defense when you’re a small country that can’t do much more than defend itself. If you’re Croatia, Austria, even Japan, it makes sense to call your military a defense force. Us? No.

Plus, the postwar renaming is exactly the sort of thing that inspired George Orwell’s world in Nineteen Eighty-Four, where destructive government agencies are sold as the opposite of what they actually are. I think Trump and Hegseth are just being honest. Would that they extended this policy and renamed the Department of Homeland Security the Department of Justifying Paranoia and Repression and the Department of Justice the Department of Railroading Trump’s Enemies.

But in September, Secretary Hegseth announced that all the commanders were ordered to attend a meeting at Quantico, in person, with all of the costs involved, and requiring them all to leave their posts no matter where they were in the world. This led to all sorts of speculation about whether sinister motives were involved. Like if Pete wanted to make all our generals take some Fuhrer Oath to Our Lord and Savior. Well, the meeting happened September 30, and while the general tone might have set the stage for a later Commissar Order against civilians, Hegseth just brought the top commanders all in one room just to review his already established political agenda for the military, in a speech that lasted maybe 30 minutes, and pacing the stage as he spoke, like a televangelist or time-share salesman. He said America must not only be able to win any war that is thrust upon us but “any war we choose”. He said while the military should not have “nasty bullying and hazing” he would do a “review of the department’s definitions of so-called toxic leadership, bullying, and hazing, to empower leaders to enforce standards without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”

He said he was going to enforce uniform standards of appearance, including getting rid of “beardos.” He said that all servicemen, of all ranks, had to do PT (physical training) twice a year. Because apparently Hegseth was sick of seeing “fat generals and admirals” in the halls of the Pentagon.

He said this prior to introducing Donald Trump, who is looking more and more like he swallowed the orange version of that gum Violet Beauregard ate in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory.

You know, when the Oompa-Loompas had to roll her away because she no longer had legs, she was just a ball with a head on it? That’s where we are now.

The fact that both rump and Kegsbreath seemed to think the goal was to get a bunch of applause moments on camera was clear when Trump told the crowd that he’d never seen a room so quiet before. And he joked that anyone could leave, but “there goes your rank, there goes your future.” And unlike Hegseth, he was not brief and on point. He went on for over an hour, apparently to demonstrate he has stamina in at least one endeavor. Mostly it was the same wheezy, whiny airing of the grievances that we got at his last UN speech, but he also said that this country faces a “war from within” and lamented the fact that the enemy are civilians who don’t wear uniforms, and that he told Hegseth that he should “use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.” Which should give some indication of what Hegseth means by dedicating the military to a “warrior ethos” where soldiers and commanders can act “without fear of retribution or second-guessing.”

Now, supposedly the fact that there was little reaction (other than laughter at Trump’s humor) was because the military, especially the higher ranks, are supposed to be professional and non-partisan. But the body language was telling. The audience was more stone-faced than Easter Island. I’m sure the fact that Little Boy and Fat Man brought them there just to be insulted and coerced didn’t help staff morale. But Hegseth could have told me to come in from halfway around the world to announce we were getting free hookers and blow, and I’d still ask “Why couldn’t we have done this over Zoom?” But then again, we know why Pete can’t secure a virtual chat meeting.

Even so, security was the exact opposite of the point. The point was to summon all the command staff of our military for an on-camera event to be props in Pete’s propaganda exercise announcing his “paradigm shift” for a “warrior ethos” Pentagon that would ignore liberal standards against hazing and “toxic leadership”. Odd given that he disdains beards as being for a bunch of “Nordic pagans”, if acting like a Viking is apparently regulation now. Especially since his own tattoos indicate being a fellow traveler with Nordic identity groups.

And if you’re asking why I’m focusing on this rather than Trump’s (latest) Shithole Shutdown, one, it’s not like we’re not going to have a government shutdown every year if Republicans have anything to do with it, and two, the results of Tuesday’s publicity stunt are more directly embarrassing to Trump and his Party in the short term, and imply the potential results of Trump’s shutdown publicity stunt in the long term.

As The Fucking News points out, while Russell Vought, Project 2025 architect and incidental head of the OMB, is withholding funds already allocated from Democrat states, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (‘O BuBBA’), without concessions to the Democrats, is going to take away even more money from Republican-voting states, because O BuBBA causes the Affordable Care Act subsidies to expire, which would cause insurance premiums in Alaska to go up 346 percent and Mississippi 314 percent, to give just two examples.

Cuts also include supports to first-responder and counterterrorism efforts. (‘a massive bailout for Antifa and Black Lives Matter‘)

Given that the public is largely blaming Republicans for this, the Church of Trump’s Society for the Propagation of the Faith is pushing the dogma that the main reason Democrats are holding out is because they want healthcare services to go towards illegal immigrants. Wednesday this was mostly the line of JD Vance. (Trump has apparently been posting on social media but hasn’t made any public appearances since the Hegseth meeting. Apparently the most macho Olympian demigod president ever is a bit tuckered out.)

This is of course raging bullshit, but when Trump debated Harris, he wailed, “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats!” And that was even more raging bullshit, but who’s president now?

Democrats are once again being outmaneuvered by The Trump Party on the shutdown. The latest Big Lie is that Democrats started this cause they won’t accept a budget that doesn’t give healthcare to illegals. And Democrats keep going, “But it’s already against the law to give federal healthcare to the undocumented!” You don’t respond to the lie. That keeps it in public consciousness. It’s like responding to “Have you stopped beating your wife?” Instead, point out that Moscow Mike Johnson (the Hero-General of Avdiivka) wouldn’t even let the House debate a bill during the last day of September, instead choosing to close the chamber early. The Trump Party WANTS this, because they want a government that doesn’t fund anything (including soldiers’ pay) other than the security state and Trump’s personal priorities. Y’know, what they wanted to do anyway. What point is there in negotiating with that?

Like I say, fascism is evil and horrible even when it works. But this is not working. This is worse than fascism. At least Hitler had an infrastructure program. This is just looting the candy store until it goes bankrupt, and expecting someone else to hold the bag. Basically, what Trump did to Atlantic City, only applied to the largest, most powerful and most influential government on Earth.

The Trump Party isn’t negotiating with the Democrats or the rest of the country, because they don’t want to. The goal is not to preserve the congressional system of funding and legislation, the goal is to destroy it so that Our President can run everything by fiat, hopefully forever.

The goal is to treat the entire population (including Trump supporters and rich people who don’t goosestep in line) like the peasants in the French Revolution, blanking out what happened to the aristocrats in the French Revolution.

And to do this, Trump and his “War” Secretary need the support of the armed institution whose members were just ordered to make a wasteful, expensive, global security-threatening and completely unnecessary trip to one location, like their subordinate status made them magic genies to be summoned with a rub of the lamp, just to tell them that they’re fatsos who need a shave.

Anybody else see the flaw with this strategy?
Cause I don’t think Trump does.

Well, that’s it for this post. But before I go, here it is, Your Moment of Zen:

This is a follow-up to my last piece, not so much on the Charlie Kirk issue as to its use as a pretext to censor Jimmy Kimmel, and the reason that the federal government has the power to do that.

When I was a lot more outspokenly libertarian, I would come up with joke names for the various alphabet-soup bureaucracies in the federal government. Like, after the Waco fiasco, BATF was “Blame After The Fact.” FBI was “Fucking Bumbling Incompetents”. And the FCC was “Fascist Communist Collusion.”

And I might seem a lot more lefty than I was in the Clinton days, but I’m that much more convinced that Big Government can’t be trusted, especially when “small government conservatives” are in charge of it.

But in the wake of the Trump regime twisting executive arms to remove both Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel from late night, it raises the question of how that is even possible, while media people who are much more rude towards Viceroy Trump still have their jobs.

For example, prior to the merger with Skydance, CBS/Paramount was part of a larger media conglomerate run by the Redstone family, which also runs Viacom, which runs Comedy Central, which plays the Jon Stewart-led The Daily Show, along with the culturally libertarian shock comedy South Park. And in the wake of the corporation ending Colbert’s contract, they renewed the contract for South Park. Which started its latest season by saying PC Principal and Jesus Christ were in mortal fear of Donald Trump, even though his penis is “teeny tiny.”

Then you have Bill Maher, who lately has tried to play Switzerland in America’s culture wars. In the wake of the 2024 election, he decided to suck up to Trump out of mutual contempt for the PC Democratic Left, but that hasn’t stopped him from bagging on Trump recently. But no networks or affiliates can “cancel” him cause he’s not on a network beholden to sponsors.

That is in fact why Bill Maher is on HBO, because previously he was host of a show called Politically Incorrect, which just happened to be on ABC after the late-night news, and got cancelled (both socially and professionally) for “insensitive” comments after 9-11.

This is why guys like Bill Maher and the creators of South Park have not (yet) suffered the same pressures as Kimmel and Stephen Colbert, despite the fact that they are also within media megacorps. That’s not to say they can’t be cancelled; the HBO parent Warner Bros./Discovery has cancelled a lot of projects for reasons that could best be described as arcane. But the incentives are different.

This is also why Brian Kilmeade still has a job after telling the guys on Fox & Friends that it would be a good idea to subject the homeless to lethal injection. He’s on basic cable. Although that doesn’t explain why MSDNC cancelled commentator Matthew Dowd after offering his opinions on Charlie Kirk. That decision was just the general media cowardice we are seeing under Trump 2.0.

Just the day before he engaged in official censorship, Carr told a POLITICO reporter “I think you can draw a pretty clear line, and the Supreme Court has done this for decades, that our First Amendment, our free speech tradition, protects almost all speech”. On the Reason Magazine website it was pointed out that under FCC rules, and Supreme Court precedent, the FCC can regulate broadcast media but not online content. The rationale for this has always been that the broadcast airwaves are a “scarce public resource”. Given that radio waves were the only broadcast communication medium, the FCC was created, and it served a purpose in resolving disputes between parties with regard to signal interference and related issues. But even prior to that, with the Radio Act of 1927, Congress defined that a radio station could only be given a broadcast license “in the public interest, convenience, or necessity”. This according to Wikipedia, which as of September 19 is still defining the FCC as an “independent” agency. In NBC v. United States (1943) the Supreme Court confirmed that rather than simply regulating radio stations to prevent interference with each other, the FCC should also “determine the composition” of content. This essentially made the federal government the ultimate media gate keeper and led to networks developing internal Standards and Practices censorship departments through the television era. Such strictures have rarely applied to premium cable outlets like HBO and Showtime, and the FCC did not seek to expand its control over cable since it was a for-pay service and not free to the public. However as cable/satellite and then streaming became more standardized, pay TV became the standard with broadcast becoming almost an afterthought, and most people picking up television through pay TV or streaming subscriptions, even with local TV networks. (Incidentally, the fact that HBO and similar services were not censored is also why the Fairness Doctrine was never applied to Fox News and other right-wing media on cable).

The idea that the airwave spectrum is subject to scarcity was based on a misunderstanding of physics even considering the limits of contemporary technology. “When a traditional telephone call occurs on copper wire, the same movement of electrons that occurs on “The People’s Airwaves” occurs within the phone wire. It has never been suggested, however, that the FCC limit the number of persons who may have telephone conversations or regulate what they say.”

Like much else in this government (see the Department of Homeland Security), the standard was based on a contemporary judgment that may have been flawed even at the time and as of now not only is useless but actually counterproductive.

All this really begs the question, if the enemies of Our Divine Sovereign are so unfunny and unpopular, and network shows aren’t making as much money as they used to, why is it so necessary for national security and the sainted memory of Charlie Kirk that the freest country God gave Man must ban late night comedians for telling mean jokes that mostly consist of just repeating what Republicans actually say?
As with so much else in this regime, the answer is “because they can.” And they can because of the FCC. The irony being, if network TV is no longer the draw that it used to be, it’s not only because capitalism gives us other options, it’s because those options are not so arbitrarily restricted.

If cancelling late night talk shows is a good business decision because the model is in decline and not making money, it raises the question of just how feasible the rest of broadcast TV is. CBS already decided that it was better to get rid of its 11:30 time slot altogether rather than have its own product on. And ABC, at the direct behest of both Brendan Carr and its right-wing affiliates, had to make that decision on the spur of the moment. To punish dissenting speech, they are undermining themselves. Not to mention, the affiliates that depend on networks for content will no longer get it, and both networks and affiliates are undermining themselves by aligning with an obviously senile and declining tyrant, who is, if not an actual pedophile, clearly covering for people who were, and who is the direct cause of Middle America losing their farms, losing their standard of living and losing their place in the world. People might start to realize who’s on their side, who is against them, and who helped bring about this state of affairs. And that would be bad for business. Although not necessarily America.

And then there is Newton N. Minow [then chairman of the Federal Communications Commission] who declares: “There is censorship by ratings, by advertisers, by networks, by affiliates which reject programming offered to their areas.” It is the same Mr. Minow who threatens to revoke the license of any station that does not comply with his views on programming—and who claims that that is not censorship . . . .

-Ayn Rand, The Virtue of Selfishness

LEGALIZE COMEDY!
-Elon Musk, at CPAC 2025

Wednesday September 17, Viceroy Trump’s occupation government looked over Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue on ABC Monday and Brendan Carr (Project 2025 mastermind and incidental head of the FCC) told ABC and its affiliates that they had better play ball and get rid of the guy, telling a podcaster “we can do this the easy way or the hard way.” And so, allegedly at the behest of Nexstar affiliates that were going to black out the show, ABC obeyed. Jimmy Kimmel’s late night broadcast has been taken off the air “indefinitely.” Immediately. They didn’t even let his contract play out like CBS did with Stephen Colbert.

Expect Guillermo to get arrested by ICE any day now.

Ostensibly this was because Kimmel had made light of Charlie Kirk’s killing, but if you see the tape, Kimmel was not disparaging Kirk or his family, but “this MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it”.

(Watch the link before it gets yanked!)

This is of a piece with Matthew Dowd, the most milquetoast of liberal pundits, getting kicked off MSNBC (the second most milquetoast basic-cable news after CNN) simply for pointing out that Kirk’s opinions were divisive.

Folks, let’s get real: If Charlie Kirk were a teenager shot to death in a high school, the Republican Party would not care. We know this because we have more examples than we can count.

I am frankly not sure why Our Lord and Savior has not solved the problem by using his holy touch to resurrect Charlie Kirk from the dead. Is he not the Son of Man? Is he not one with the Father? Has he not conquered death, and conquered sin, for our sake?
Prove to me you’re really cool! Walk across my swimming pool!

But then, a day or so after the murder, reporters caught Trump attending a Yankees game and asked him how he was holding up after the loss of a close friend. Trump responded by bragging about the work they’re putting in at the White House to build his great new ballroom. And then he did his jerking-off-two-men-at-once dance. In his seat, and with no “YMCA” accompaniment. So I guess he had other priorities. Like when somebody shot at him and only killed an an audience member in the stands behind him. That guy never got to lie in state at the Capitol.

Liberals have charged that the Trump regime has been trying to not only martyr Kirk but make his death a combination Horst Wessel/Reichstag Fire. Given that the accused came from a right-wing Utah Mormon family, it seems unlikely that “this kid who killed Charlie Kirk (is) anything other than one of them”. But now Kash Patel’s FBI (Fumbling Bumbling Incompetence) has released transcripts of the suspect sending texts to his roommate, who he refers to as “my love.” So allegedly this is all because the roommate is transitioning to female and this goes along with the Trump (and Kirk) campaign to demonize trans people as violent killers. The suspect also explained, “I had enough of (Kirk’s) hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” And apparently in the text, he confirmed the location of the weapon, the type of weapon, that it was a family weapon, confirms he engraved a bullet with ‘owo bulges’, while also using police terms like ‘squad car’ and ‘drop point.’ As several people online put it, this is history’s first murder confession written on ChatGPT.

Presumably the authorities can back all this up by confirming the ballistics of the round that killed Kirk with the weapon in custody. Presumably. I haven’t heard them announce that yet.

But that is a separate issue. Because again, people in this country get shot every day. What doesn’t happen every day is that the government directly orders a network and its affiliates to cancel a program because they don’t like what it says about them. And it’s even more rare for a target to cave so quickly and completely.

In the case of Colbert, one could say that however popular he was in a certain demographic, the show was still losing money overall and CBS had been penny pinching in other areas. But in retrospect, that was simply plausible deniability. In the CBS case, the parent company wanted to merge with the Skydance company run by the pro-Trump Ellison family, and that was a lot more important than the fact that CBS’ “nothing personal” declaration meant that the network would no longer get any money at all from the time slot. Here both the Nexstar and Sinclair media companies that hold ABC affiliates decided they were going to independently cancel Kimmel, having already decided to go along with the program that Charlie Kirk must not only be mourned but canonized. More to the point, Nexstar is in the midst of a corporate merger with the smaller media company Tegna. This is of course subject to final approval by the FCC, meaning Brandon Carr. And as with CBS, it may not be so much that the capitalists were victims of fear and extortion and more that they were just cooperating to get the goals they wanted anyway.

Unless the regime mandates Nineteen Eighty-Four style surveillance equipment on our phones, radios and TV sets, we as individuals still have a right to free speech, in the privacy of our own homes. But maybe not in the workplace. And certainly not in the media sphere. Where corporate media are concerned, the problem isn’t that speech is free, it’s that speech is bought.

Is it not yet clear that Trump IS a dictator and that he intends to create a totalitarian state? Do you really think he and his pet political party would be making all these changes, on this scale, so radically and so fast, and would be allowing him and his cronies to profit from such titanic levels of bribery and grift, if they were willing to risk losing it all in next year’s midterms, let alone the next presidential election?

And for all the people who say “our country is better than this” – NO WE’RE NOT. Cause we can see what is happening, we see where it is leading and we aren’t doing a damn thing about it. Cause if it’s not Trump destroying the Constitution, it’s his pet Supreme Court, and if it’s not them, it’s these co-opted megacorps that go along and tell us everything is wonderful and everything is normal, and this is how it’s supposed to be and we have to put up with this because the man whose arterial fat is increasing in inverse proportion to his brain activity is appointed by God to reign over us forever and ever.

The Old Republic is not coming back. The institutions that supported it have been eviscerated and co-opted. And addressing what needs to be done will likely attract a lot more attention than asking why Charlie Kirk gets to lie in state at the Capitol when he was never in government.

At the command of our divine and immortal sovereign, Donald Trump, who causes the oceans to part with his imperious glare, who is the only reason the grass continues to grow, and the birds continue to sing, and the Sun continues to revolve around the Earth.

All I can say is that this proves one thing:

Whatever’s in the Epstein Files must be REALLY, REAALLY BAD!!!

Wednesday right-wing organizer Charlie Kirk got assassinated while he was holding a debate at a Utah campus. I spent the day going over my review of the second season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, cause frankly I considered that more important.

And no, I’m not going to say “RIP.” That can be interpreted in different ways.

The reaction among Republicans is predictable, as is the reaction of the co-opted “liberal” media, who spent much of their coverage calling Kirk a “free-speech advocate.” The current occupant of the White House ordered all US flags at half-staff through the week, and Station Casinos in Las Vegas put up marquee displays celebrating Kirk “in loving memory”.

If anything the ubiquity of gun violence in this country ought to be pointed up by the fact that also on Wednesday, another mass shooting occurred when a student at Evergreen High School outside Denver, Colorado shot two other kids, one critically, before killing himself to avoid capture.

If one day, the press says that three kids got shot in a school, nobody panics, cause it’s all ‘part of the plan’. But the same day, one conservative influencer gets shot, everybody loses their minds!

My first impressions:
The main thing that stood out to me when I heard the story was that Kirk was only 31 years old. He seemed a lot older.

The assassin took one shot, straight to the carotid artery of the neck, which is guaranteed to cause massive blood loss and quick death. I thought, that’s what happens when you get a professional.

And for that reason, unlike the Right, I did not assume the shooter is some transwoman vegan antifascist with pastel hair. Cause if Sniper School has been training those people, I finally get why Pete Hegseth is so mad.

As it turns out, just this Friday, the shooter was caught based on photographs from the scene, and because his own father talked to the police. He turned out to be Utah’s own, a 22-year old named Tyler Robinson, from a right-wing household that frequently trained with guns. When police picked up materials, including rounds, from the scene, they saw slogans like ‘notices bulges OWO’, ‘Bella Ciao’ (an Italian partisan song) and ‘catch this fascist’ – which would seem to indicate a leftist antifascist sentiment but have actually been co-opted by the so-called ‘groypers‘ who opposed Charlie Kirk within the Right because he wasn’t reactionary enough.

One reason I thought Kirk was older than he was is that I barely pay attention to him. You have on one hand Trump, who is a total attention sponge, and then you have the various other “intellects” of the alternative-to-being-Right like Kirk and Benny Johnson, and the “mainstream” media doesn’t pay attention to them and I don’t see much cause to either. But they are very popular and influential in their own sphere, which is why the Trump Right is so discombobulated by Kirk’s murder, more so than they were by yet another school shooting.

Did I want Charlie Kirk dead? No. Like I said, I barely even think about him more than I have to. I certainly don’t think he should have been killed for opinions. He was shot while holding a debate. Debate is how this country is supposed to work. But am I surprised that Kirk was killed?

No.

And the real story of this event is that I doubt anyone on either side of the political debate is all that surprised that such a thing could happen either.

As one person on social media perfectly summed it up: “I’m not advocating for what happened to Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk advocated for what happened to Charlie Kirk.”

I can go over some of his more offensive political opinions, like him being the kind of professional Christian who thinks Christianity means women should submit to their husbands and carry unwanted pregnancies even at the age of ten, as opposed to say, caring for the poor or protecting life outside the womb. Indeed he also said “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty … But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment”. He’d also said that black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” Those are opinions. You do not kill somebody for having opinions.

The issue that so many on the “Left” are bringing up in the wake of the shooting (‘Left’ meaning, ‘anybody who doesn’t think Trump was appointed directly by God to rule America for eternity’) is that Charlie Kirk went beyond political advocacy.

He said for instance that Leviticus 20:13 (‘If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death’) was “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” When Nancy Pelosi’s husband was beaten half to death by a deranged home invader, Kirk said that a “patriot” should have been able to bail the assailant out and said, “I’m not qualifying it. I think it’s awful. It’s not right. But why is it that in Chicago you’re able to commit murder and be out the next day?” Regarding the same incident, Trump joked, “Nancy Pelosi has a big wall wrapped around her house. Of course, it didn’t help too much with the problem she had, did it?”

An academic on Substack posted a first-hand account of what it’s like to be on the receiving end of Kirk’s campaign: https://substack.com/@drstaceypatton1865/note/c-154757002

“For weeks my inbox and voicemail were deluged. Mostly white men spat venom through the phone: “bitch,” “c*nt,” “n****r.” They threatened all manner of violence.

They overwhelmed the university’s PR lines and the president’s office with calls demanding that I be fired. The flood was so relentless that the head of campus security reached out to offer me an escort, because they feared one of these keyboard soldiers might step out of his basement and come do me harm.

And I am not unique.

…Some received death threats. Some had their jobs threatened. Some left academia entirely. Kirk sent the loud message to us: speak the truth and we will unleash the mob!

That is the culture of violence Charlie Kirk built. He normalized violence. He curated it, monetized it, and sicced it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement’s lies.

And now, in the wake of his shooting, there’s all this national outpouring of mourning, moments of silence, yellow prayer hands, and tributes painting him as a civil debater. But the truth is that Kirk and his foot soldiers spent years terrorizing educators, trying to silence us with harassment and fear!

And now the same violence he unleashed on others has come full circle.”

This is of course the same culture that had nothing to say about the attacks on Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the assassination of a Minnesota state legislator and her husband, by the same person who tried and failed to kill a state senator. Under the LOL Right, threats are free and acting on them is tolerated. Mob intimidation by Republicans and Right fellow-travelers is to be considered fair and expected by their Democrat opponents, but Republicans wail like Lucille Ball should they get any such treatment in return.

If this were not in fact the policy of the Trump Party, Trump would not have issued a blanket pardon for all the people who committed violence against the Congress on January 6, 2021.

If such provocation only aggravated one side of the debate, that would be bad enough, but the abstract argument against the destruction of standards and the toleration of violence is that it makes it possible for your enemies to act on the same level. As we now see.

Again: I’m certainly not going to endorse violence against Charlie Kirk or his side, but I also don’t think that’s the point. The point is it’s happening anyway.

I’m still going to affirm the libertarian Non-Aggression Principle, that one has a right to self-defense, but not to initiate force to achieve political or social goals.

And I’m still going to share things like The Onion post saying “Charlie Kirk Bravely Offers Himself As Tribute To The 2^nd Amendment”.

Because as anti-gun liberals know all too well, getting all sad and offended that people on either side are using violence to achieve political or social goals doesn’t stop that violence from repeating, because no one in charge really wants it to stop, and it’s looking like some people want to encourage it.

Doesn’t it make you feel better?
The pigs have won tonight

Now they can all sleep soundly

And everything’s all right

-nineinchnails, “March of the Pigs”

The big news at the start of the week was Viceroy Trump’s telegraphed announcement that he is mobilizing the National Guard and directly commandeering the Washington DC police force to protect the “Capital”, despite the fact that District Represenative Eleanor Holmes Norton pointed out that the crime rate is down 26% this year compared to the same period last year. And despite the fact that he previously cut District security in DC’s budget by at least 20 million dollars with his One Big Bullshit Bill.

And it was just announced that on Friday the 15^th, Trump will have a Ukrainian “peace” summit with his liege, Vladmir Putin, and without Ukrainian or European representatives. In Alaska. Which implies that the talk is less about selling out President Zelenskyy by handing over Ukraine’s fortified eastern territory and more about selling out Sarah Palin’s home state and returning it to Papa Czar.

All just another week in Trumpworld, where the most powerful nation on the planet is run by a retarded pigboy who grunts and oinks and squeals and treats the whole world as his personal trough of slop and we all just accept this cause apparently that’s what God wants.

So we all have to join JD Vance in vainly wishing, hoping and praying for the happy day when little piggy finally becomes bacon.

But this is why we need to recognize Trump’s increasing escalations for what they are. Distractions. Of course he was going to militarize DC anyway. He’s probably thinking of calling it “Trumpburg” or something. (I know, I shouldn’t give him ideas.) Of course he is going to try to give away the store on Ukraine and lift sanctions on Russia, apparently because they’re worth more money than the EU. And as if Ukraine is going to accept a 1938 Munich deal when they still have the EU on their side.

This is a semi-successful attempt to distract people from what everyone had been talking about:
The Epstein Files! (TM)

Because again, the only thing that unites the Church of Trump and the rest of us who believe in causality is: “Epstein didn’t kill himself.” Nothing else can turn the Trumpniks. You certainly can’t appeal to reason. With them everything is that much more identity politics than the postmodernist Left. Normally a Christian would say “I am a Christian because I believe in the Credo” or “I am a Christian because I believe that obliges me to do certain things.” The reason things are different with the Trumpniks, and the reason you can’t persuade them with bourgeois concepts like facts, is because their morality is based on identity politics. Rather than saying “Because I am a Christian, I believe certain things are good and evil” they say “Anything I believe is Good, because I identify as a Christian.” It’s like “I identify as an Army Attack Helicopter”, only you expect people to take you seriously.

Which goes to the point that you also cannot convince them with morality. I had mentioned that liberals tend to complain that the alt-Right are bullies. People should stop that. Trumpniks take it as a badge of virtue. And recently they’ve been throwing around the word “cruel.” Stop that already.

Like Trumpniks care that they’re cruel. They LOVE it when you say that. “Aw, does little baby think I’m cruel when I pour lemon juice in his paper cuts? How KYOOT!” That means you don’t like them, and since they don’t like you, that validates them. Like with “deplorables.” They’re out and proud about it. “We’re here! We hate queers! Get used to it!”

The hook it that this identity is based on the projection of self-righteousness, that the Demonrats are irredeemably Evil and Republicans are automatically Good. But now the Church sees the government they voted for do everything they’ve always accused Democrats of doing, what they voted for Republicans to get to the bottom of, and the coverup is far more active than anything in Democratic administrations because Jabba the Slut doesn’t want us knowing what’s in those files.

Like, it was revealed, basically by accident, that the FBI redacted Trump’s name the files, supposedly 40,000 times, but eventually they settled on saying “numerous times.” “During that process, agents came across multiple references to Trump, as well as “dozens of other high-profile figures,” according to investigative journalist Jason Leopold. However, FBI FOIA officers determined that Trump’s name and others were to be blacked out under existing FOIA exemptions. The rationale? Trump was a private citizen at the time the federal Epstein investigation launched in 2006. That legal status gave the FBI a basis for redacting personal names from public records unless a clear public interest could be shown. …Importantly, Leopold emphasized that the presence of names in the Epstein files does not imply any wrongdoing or criminal conduct.”

Yeah but, isn’t that kinda giving it away? How careful were the stooges in making sure that anybody else connected to Trump was likewise redacted, and who were those people? Wouldn’t we just be able to see what text was redacted in the files and add up the clues?

And this weekend, Vice President JD Eyelashes had a Fox News interview with Maria Bartiromo and tossed off the defense that well, the Biden Administration never made much of the Files because Democrats were in them. This was a bad move on three levels. First, it brought attention back to the seeping wound when Trump was trying to distract the marks with more atrocities.

Two, it assumes that after more than 15 years of Bill Clinton not being in public life, after Hillary Clinton basically railroaded her presidential nomination against Bernie Sanders, only to realize she was the only Democrat who couldn’t exploit the news of Donald Trump’s sexual assaults, people frankly don’t need to protect the once popular Bill Clinton if he was involved in the sex scandals on Epstein Island.

Third point, related to the second, if evidence incriminates Democrats, wouldn’t there be that much MORE reason for a Republican government to release it, even if only selectively?

And why give a sweetheart deal to Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, reassigning her to a Club Fed – where sex offenders are legally NOT allowed – if you aren’t planning to use her for the coverup?

I saw this meme on the internet that explained the whole situation: “If the Epstein list doesn’t exist, Trump lied to you. If the Epstein list exists and he doesn’t want to publish it, then it’s because he’s on it, and therefore he lied to you. If the Epstein list exists and only your perceived enemies are on it, but he still doesn’t want it published even though he made you believe that your enemies are his enemies, he lied to you.”

As a much wiser, braver, more accomplished president put it, “people have got to know whether or not their president is a crook.”

I’m starting to agree with Seth Meyers: It’s getting to where they should just call them The Trump Files Featuring Jeffrey Epstein.

Trump is a greasy little pig who has managed to slip out of every trap he’s laid for himself with his own malicious incompetence, but now he sees himself going down a metal corridor, and he knows where that metal corridor goes, and he would rather have ANYbody else go down that corridor but him.

The only reason he has never had to face the consequences of his actions is that he has had damn near half the country (at least, the ones who bother to vote) backing him up no matter how repulsive he is. And it’s worked up to this point, because even the Trumpniks with more than room temperature IQ – and there are lots of them – have to rationalize the fact that they have invested themselves in someone who is not just utterly immoral, but a malicious failure. Nixon and Clinton may have been utterly immoral, but they weren’t actively trying to destroy the country.

And there are two reasons why the Epstein case matters and why the non-Trump part of the country (real America) has to bite this case like a pit bull: One, such gain as Viceroy Trump got in 2024 from non-white and independent voters was from people who previously didn’t support Trump, and in that respect said more about how much America hates Democrats. (Cause let’s face it: We ALL do.)
In other words, he won because he got support from people who aren’t in the cult and who previously would have been just as likely to vote Democrat. So those are the people who don’t see Trump’s history of crime and sexual immorality as a resume asset.

Unlike the cult. Which gets to the second point. They now have to work harder and harder to maintain the pretense that their Lord and Savior is going to save Real America from the creeps and crooked elites, now that they know that Trump is a creep and crooked elite. But unlike the smart Trumpniks, they aren’t just in sunk cost fallacy, they’re in identity fusion.

The cult has to keep up support because as in the beginning, any support for Donald Trump says a lot more about the supporter than it does about Trump. So I speak out to you people again: Admit it.

YOU ARE TRUMP. You have power only as long as he does and he has power only as long as you support him. So you will never give him up. NEVER. No matter what he does to you and no matter what you can see yourselves turning into.

You voted to turn us into a shithole country. You voted to turn us into a Third World dictatorship because you would rather be a fearful peasant than an American.

You knew what he was. He said so himself. “You knew I was a snake when you took me in.”

You knew he’d been judged to have committed sexual assault when he lost a defamation case. You knew he was convicted of 34 felonies. You heard words out of his own mouth.

Don’t tell me this isn’t what you voted for. YES IT IS.

So I expect you to smile, stand up, take off your hats (except the red MAGA caps) and sing along to the MAGA National Anthem:

And I’m proud I elected a pedophile

Cause he means so much to me

And I guess I forgot the men who died

Who thought that we’d stay free

And I’ll gladly stand up

Next to you and defend him still today

Cause there ain’t no doubt, I hate this land

God Damn the U S AAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAA

(everybody!)

And I’m proud I elected a pedophile

Cause he means so much to me

And I guess I forgot the men who died

Who thought that we’d stay free

And I’ll gladly STAND UP

Next to you and defend him still today

Cause there ain’t no doubt, I hate this land

God Damn the U S AAAAAAAAAAA