I just had an ah-HAH! Moment. A fwq days ago there were news stories (and Rachel Maddow commentary) on how the Trump Administration has effectively shut down cancer research in the U.S. We were leading the world in cancer research, and now we’re not. And this destroying of the research doesn’t appear to be just a by-product of the DOGAE cuts but has been systemic and target4ed. And Rachel asked, why is he doing this? What is the constituency that is pro-cancer? A guest she interviewed speculated that it was the tech bros like Peter Thiel who wanted to smash up the cancer research establishment because they think finding a cure is taking too long. Maybe, but that didn’t really make sense, and there doesn’t seem to be evidence that the tech bros have discussed such a thing.

But I just read that at a recent press conference Trump started rambling about Joe Biden having “stage 9” cancer — there is no “stage 9” — and how he must have had it for a long time to get that far. But this tells me Trump has “Biden cancer” living in his addled head. Is he destroying cancer research because he hates Joe Biden?

On to the bigger crisis, which is media consolidation. Behind the Kimmel firing is a bigger story about how nearly all of our media are being gobbled up by a few right-wing rich people. Corporate ownership of media has been an issue for a while, but there has been a standing FCC regulation that prevented any single entity is from owning television stations that, in total, reached more than 39% of all U.S. TV households. Look for that to be eliminated soon, to allow right-wing media to control much more of the nation’s televised news. And then there’s David Ellison, a very rich right-wing guy who already controls Skydance and Paramount and is gunning for a lot more stuff, including streaming companies. We’re going to be hearing a lot about media consolidation going forward.

See also Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next from Poynter.

Regarding censorship, I keep reading comments from righties claiming that Biden did it too. They are angry because, during the covid crisis, the Biden Administration reached out to social media companies and asked that they clamp down on covid misinformation, which was hampering efforts to get the pandemic under control and actually killing people. Righties called this “pressure,” but I have yet to hear that any social media company was actually threatened with anything. In any event nothing seems to have changed, so it didn’t work.

As I keep saying, righties don’t fundamentally grasp what “censorship” is. And they think the 1st Amendment mans they have a right to not be disagreed with.

At Intelligencer, some guy named Ross Barkan writes that  Trump Is Going to Lose the War on Free Speech. I truly hope so. Barkan says some insightful things but throws in a few too many elements of both-siderism for the article to get my full endorsement.

What MAGA will learn, as enough time passes, is that they cannot engineer full cultural control. They cannot force millions of people to suddenly pretend to think Kirk is a fallen martyr who should never be critiqued again. They cannot convince college students, through brute pressure on gutless administrations, to salute the Israeli flag and cheer Benjamin Netanyahu’s genocidal incursions into Gaza. The moral panics of the 20th century, for all their vileness, had genuine backing across the culture; there was widespread anti-communist mania that fueled the Red Scare and made red-baiters like Richard Nixon into major political and cultural figures. After September 11th, George W. Bush enjoyed an approval rating north of 90 percent, and anti-war dissidents were forcibly suppressed as many Americans cheered on new invasions. The specter of another mass casualty terrorist attack was the Bush administration’s justification for the Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay, and spying on American citizens.

Trump has no comparable emergency to gesture towards and Republicans, utterly subservient to his whims, are glad to dispense with the illusion they ever cared about free speech. It’s remarkable to witness how fast conservatives have abandoned any pretense of caring about the First Amendment after years of decrying illiberalism on the left. 

Okay so far. But I think this is off —

The Kirk assassination is to the right what George Floyd was to the left: a spectacular, filmed murder that galvanizes their side to make unprecedented demands on language and speech. In 2020, openly criticizing the movement to defund or even abolish the police was, on the left, the ultimate taboo. It was similarly taboo to question the conventional wisdom of prolonged Covid lockdowns. A year later, individuals who refused to take the new Covid vaccine could be fired from their jobs and barred from all forms of indoor entertainment.

Are these things really equivalent? Were there media personalities who were taken off the air or fired under government pressure for badmouthing George Floyd? Here and there some people were fired for publicly making racist remarks about George Floyd that their employers decided reflected badly on the company. That happens. But Barkan forgets that “George Floyd” as a label covers more than George Floyd. There also was Breonna Taylor and Elijah McClain.. Ahmaud Arbery wasn’t killed by police, but it was apparent the only reason his killers were brought to justice in Georgia is that there was a nationwide stink about a black man murdered while jogging on the assumption he was a thief. And going back further there was Michael Brown and Philando Castile and Trayvon Martin. And many more. “George Floyd” wasn’t about a single man but a pattern of brutal injustice that had been going on much too long. I’m not seeing an equivalence with the shooting of What’s His Name. Not even apples an oranges; more like apples and toothpaste.

Even on the Left “defund the police” (I never saw serious calls to abolish the police) was never more than a slogan / talking point that elected Democrats wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot billy club. And mostly what happened to it is that the Right used it against Democrats who never once expressed agreement with it, but it got hung around their necks anyway. And even on the Left expressing disagreement with it was hardly taboo; I saw plenty of disagreement, especially once a backlash started. It seems to have gone away now, though.

Further, I never saw any repercussions against anyone who complained about Covid lockdowns  A number of people were fired by their employers for refusing to get Covid shots, but this was not at the insistence of the Left. And there have long been many state regulations about people who work in hospitals and medical clinics being fully vaccinated, for good reason.

If this writer could lose the both siderism he might go places. Too bad, though.

Finally — there are a number of reports that Trump is about to fire his own U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia because the guy has failed to file charges against New York Attorney General  Letitia James. And this is apparently because the U.S. attorney, Erik Siebert, hasn’t found any evidence against James to make a case. See Greg Sargent, Trump Firing Top Prosecutor for Failing to Invent Fake Crimes by Foes.

Did you catch Kash Patel’s claim that there is “no credible evidence” that Jeffrey Epstein ever trafficked girls and young women to anyone but himself? If so, one wonders how Epstein was indicted and Ghislaine Maxwell, his primary accomplice, convicted? And what about all the survivors who described themselves being trafficked to many men so compellingly? Not credible?

Raise your hands if you suspect the exchange in the video above was scripted and directed by Trump.

Patel dropped this bomb, or what should have been a bomb, in a Senate hearing yesterday. The news about it has been surprisingly muted. So Trump finally found an issue — the shooting of What’s-His-Name — that really has distracted people from Jeffrey Epstein.

Patel mentioned that there are three court orders that limit what he can release about Epstein. I can find only two — the one from a few weeks ago involving Grand Jury testimony and a more recent one that denied a request to unseal the names of two individuals who were mentioned in court documents but not charged. One, nobody cares about the bleeping Grand Jury testimony. Two, the two individuals were women who may have been Epstein enablers but, as it says, have not been charged. Their names are sealed for their safety. So redact the names.

What the third court order might be I do not know.

Again, what really disturbs me is that I’m not seeing headlines about this. Maybe it’s being talked about on cable news — I don’t watch television during the day. It was reported on the MSNBC shows last night. But anywhere else? I can’t tell.

Pam Bondi is getting more attention today. After the Attorney General threatened to prosecute “hate speech” she got slammed by other Righties. The Right has spent too many decades defending its right to speak hatefully to toss it out overnight. The general principle — with which liberals agree  — is that speech is not criminal unless it incites violent or criminal behavior or maybe causes a dangerous panic — the shouting “fire” in a crowded theater thing. Usually where there’s disagreement it’s about where the “incitement” line is crossed.

Bondi also has a problem with an Office Depot employee who refused to print some flyers about a vigil for the late Mr. Whozits.

“Businesses cannot discriminate,” she told Sean Hannity, saying that she’d already referred the Office Depot case to the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

“We can prosecute you for that,” she said.

Wait a minute — what about the gay wedding cake controversy? The Right steadfastly supported the right of a baker to refuse to decorate a cake for a same-sex wedding. There was even a Supreme Court case about it. The case was decided on “free exercise of religion” grounds, which may not apply to the Home Deport employee — who was fired, btw. But I’m seeing commentary on right-wing sites (example) that criticized Bondi about this. The Right generally supports the right of a business to refuse service if doing the service would violate the beliefs of the business owner or employee. Think right-wing Christian pharmacists who won’t fill prescriptions for birth control or abortion pills.

A few days before the recent murder of a well-known right-wing political activist, the DoJ announced it was looking into possibly banning trans people from owning firearms. This was apparently a reaction to the Annunciation Catholic School shooting in Minneapolis. The apparent shooter was a trans woman. A web search told me that since 2018, four of the nation’s mass shootings have been perpetrated by trans people. They appear to all have been transitioning from male to female, although it’s a bit hard to tell from news stories, so I could be wrong. There is no official count of how many mass shootings there are in the U.S. — it depends on how one defines “mass shootings” — but since 2018 there have been at least a few hundred, possibly more. It’s probably a safe guess that less than 1 percent of mass shooters are trans. About the only statistic nearly all mass shooting data-gatherers agree on is that at least 97 percent of mass shootings are perpetrated by men. And the whopping majority of those men are heterosexual and not gay or trans.

But Pam Bondi’s DoJ wants to jump in and ban trans people from having guns? Nearly immediately the gun rights groups let their opposition be known. If, as they claim, the Second Amendment protects an individual right of gun ownership (which is not how the 2nd is understood by everybody), then the government cannot take that right away from a group or class. If Trump’s DoJ can take the right from trans people, then a future DoJ might ban all those heterosexual men who are doing most of the shooting from owning guns, too. Oops!

So is the DoJ admitting that gun ownership is not a protected individual right? One suspects even now the issue is being quietly re-thought.

Anyhoo — while Trump may be the undisputed leader of the Right and the Republican Party at the moment, it seems he and many people loyal to him are oddly out of step with some issues that have been important to movement conservatism for some time.

In related news — a bunch of Red states recently have passed various anti-trans laws and are eager to get them reviewed by the Roberts Supreme Court. See New Supreme Court Term Will Go All In On Anti-Trans Panic by Kate Riga at TPM. And AI is telling me that approximately 1.0% of Americans aged 13 and older identify as transgender. I seriously think we have more serious things to get into a panic about.

Update: I’m just now hearing that the Regime has had Jimmy Kimmel yanked off ABC. See Disney’s ABC pulls ‘Jimmy Kimmel Live!’ after FCC chair criticizes the host’s Charlie Kirk comments.

The New York Times just posted an investigation into lucrative deals between the Trump family and United Arab Emirates that blur the line between Trump family business and the presidency. Gift article. This could blow up into the biggest money-based scandal in U.S. presidential history. We’ll see.

I don’t know who Breccan F. Thies is, but his opinion piece in The Federalist is the ugliest and most hateful expression of post-Charlie Kirk right-wing lunacy yet. I think people need to read this to understand what we’re dealing with. Be warned that it’s very disturbing.

First off, we’re up against a big boatload of stupid. Something I posted on Bluesky —

Right-wing activists found pronouns! Oh, no! Pronouns are of the devil. We must not use them. Wait … “we” is a pronoun! And so is “them”! See how sneaky they are! Whups, “they” is a pronoun! There is no escape! What will (pronoun deleted) do? www.kpbs.org/news/local/2…

[image or embed]

— Barbara O’Brien (@mahabarbara.bsky.social) September 13, 2025 at 8:40 PM

Recently I’ve heard several statements coming from MAGAts about pronouns that make me suspect they don’t know what pronouns are. But pronouns are bad, because transsexuals have pronouns. Or something.

I have joked about giving the late Charlie Kirk a state funeral. It appears we are. WaPo reports,

The memorial for Kirk, a 31-year-old activist and online provocateur who built Turning Point USA, an organization growing the right’s reach among young voters, is scheduled for next Sunday in the Phoenix area at State Farm Stadium, where the Arizona Cardinals play. President Donald Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Cabinet secretaries and members of Congress are expected to attend, according to people familiar with the planning who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the details.

Who is paying for this? It was bad enough that Kirk’s body got flown from Utah to Arizona on Air Force Two, accompanied by the Vice President, and with a military detail carrying the casket across the tarmac even though Kirk never served in the military. But who is paying to rent a football stadium? If it’s Turning Point, okay. If it’s U.S. taxpayers, not so much. And it’s obvious a lot of taxpayer money is going into this sendoff, even if Turning Point is paying for the stadium. This is all utterly inappropriate.

We seem to be in a phase of falling into opposing camps as to whether the shooter was Left-Wing or Right-Wing. I’ve read a lot of arguments, including the arguments that  Tyler Robinson, the accused, was a Groyper. Anything is possible, but from what I’ve seen Robinson is mostly an immature young man utterly immersed in Gamer/Internet culture with no clearly definable political orientation. And yeah, I know the story about the old feud between Nick Fuentes and Charlie Kirk and that Robinson posted a Groyper meme on the web some time or another. The feud was resolved some time ago, and Robinson posted a lot of random things on the Internet that don’t add up to a clear ideological picture. Although the Right is certainly having a field day over the revelation that Robinson’s romantic partner is transitioning to being a woman. but being sympathetic to transsexuals is not a sure sign that someone is a political Leftie. There are, in fact, right-wing trans people.

Here’s another Bluesky post from someone else.

Meanwhile in Korean media there is clarity that Trump directed this raid out of spite following his Oval Office meeting with the ROK President, who pushed back aggressively on Trump’s praise for the North Korean dictator. They’re right. US media have no clue of what’s going on.

[image or embed]

— Scott Horton (@robertscotthorton.bsky.social) September 14, 2025 at 1:29 PM

I’ve read some accounts of Trump’s White House meeting with the president of South Korea, and it seems Trump did go on and on about what a great guy Kim Jong Un is. Which is a really bizarre thing to do when you’re meeting with the president of South Korea. But the U.S. news stories didn’t say anything about the South Korean president pushing back. Which doesn’t mean he didn’t. But this whole thing to me just smacks of inept management. Nobody is actually in charge.

Speaking of inept, note that Trump has pretty much destroyed U.S. cancer research. He doesn’t want to pay for it, apparently.

I wasn’t going to write about what’s-his-name who was shot this week, but the FBI is crowing that they’ve caught the perp. This wasn’t necessarily because of their competent investigating, however. The guy’s family turned him in.

The deceased individual’s body was flown to Arizona for burial in Air Force Two, by the way. As a taxpayer, I don’t recall giving permission for that. At least they aren’t planning a state funeral, I don’t think.

The accused is a 22-year-old male who appears to have acted alone, although I’m sure Kash Patel’s crew is working hard to find a way to link him to some established left-wing organization. But males that age tend to have more testosterone than sense. He did inscribe things on the ammunition, but nothing reported was about trans people. Most of it was a tad flaky. (Update: Most of inscriptions are from a video game.)

There were inscriptions on casings found within the rifle, Cox said. The inscription on the fired casing said: “notices, bulges, OWO, what’s this?”

Three unfired casings also had inscriptions, Cox said.

One read, “Hey fascists! Catch!” with an up arrow, a right arrow and three down arrows.

The second said, “Oh bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao.”

The third, “If you read this, you are gay LMAO.”

I do hope that if there are any more lone wolf would-be political assassins out there, they are noting the reaction and realizing that shooting Whoozits didn’t really help make the world a better place, just a more unstable and dangerous one.

Now, let’s talk about other things.

There’s a piece by Derek Thompson at The Atlantic called The Era of Step-on-a-Rake Capitalism that I really like. There are a few statements by Thompson I have quibbles about, but on the whole it’s spot on. I believe this is the first piece in major media that links Trump’s economic policies to socialism, which is refreshing. Of course, Trump and his culties doesn’t recognize some of Trump’s actions as socialist, but arguably they are.

Some of his initiatives are pure Ronald Reagan, such as his corporate-income tax cuts and deregulation efforts targeted at oil and gas. Some of his interventions would impress a Democratic Socialists of America chapter, such as demanding a public stake in Intel, requesting 15 percent of revenues from Nvidia’s chip sales to China, and securing a “golden share” of U.S. Steel to retain veto power over its decision making. As for the rest of Trump’s economic policy, it is a hodgepodge of 19th-century mercantilism, developing-world authoritarianism, and extremely online weirdness. The U.S. tariff rate stands near a 100-year high. When Trump isn’t firing the statisticians who calculate unemployment, he’s waging war against the independent central bank or posting about the fierce urgency of corporate-logo design.

To put it simply, or at least as simply as one can: Trump’s economic agenda is deeply Reaganite and deeply anti-conservative; somewhat capitalist and frequently socialist; declaratively obsessed with “American greatness” yet constantly sidetracked by online outrages that do nothing for the country.

So, what is Trumponomics?

I’m not sure Thompson entirely understands what the Democratic Socialists are about — I’m not sure all of them do, either — but otherwise this is right. Trump’s administration is knocking down the walls between public and private enterprise and making it all public, which is to say all about Trump. I’ve already written that the staunch free-market groups like the Cato Institute and the crew at Cafe Hayek are not at all on board with Trump. Cato is running a piece that compares Trump to Juan Perón. Which is an interesting thing to read after Thompson’s piece. Perón’s policies often were hard to pigeonhole, combining elements of Right and Left. Likewise Trump’s policies have no ideological consistency. They’re mostly about what Trump feels like doing at any given hour.

But speaking of stepping on a rake, the ICE raid of the Georgia battery plant seems to be a prime example. Startup of the factory is now delayed. The South Koreans who were detained are now back in South Korea and are not eager to return. South Koreans are really angry about this. Good luck getting more South Korean investment in the U.S. But PBS reports that Trump actually delayed the release of the South Koreans because he wanted them to agree to stay and work to open the plant. They must have told him to get bent. Maybe somebody should have thought of that before ICE raided it.

For another good Atlantic article — all gift links — see How Originalism Killed the Constitution by Jill Lepore. A lot of this is about Antonin Scalia and the Amendment process. But I’m on board with anything that badmouths originalism, which artificially keeps the Constitution locked in the 18th century and unable to respond rationally to 21st century issues.

And Jamelle Bouie has a great column at the New York Times, They Don’t Want to Live in Lincoln’s America. He begins with a look at Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address

Abraham Lincoln imagined a nation dedicated to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the aims of the founders as he understood them. His critics, from Stephen Douglas to Roger Taney to the leaders of the Confederate rebellion, said no — ours was not a society of equals but one of rigid, permanent hierarchies. Ultimately, this contest of national identity was settled by force of arms. Lincoln’s vision, backed by what was, at the time, one of the largest and mostdiverse armies ever assembled on the North American continent, won the day. And his allies, charged after his martyrdom with the great work of reconstruction, wrote this vision into the Constitution with three amendments that aimed to realize the fullness of the Declaration.

To a great extent, then, we live in Lincoln’s America as much as anyone else’s. Which makes it supremely ironic that the project of Lincoln’s partisan political descendants — the project of the modern Republican Party — is the destruction of his republic of equals in favor of a so-called homeland for a select few.

But of course, today’s Republic Party has been largely taken over by neo-confederates.

Last week, at an annual conference for National Conservativism — the illiberal right’s term of choice for its movement — Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri gave a speech that, in its rejection of the creedal vision of the American republic and in its embrace of an exclusionary racial nationalism, went even further than Vance has in his public statements.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.”

I’ve been wondering what Schmitt has been up to. Now I know. Anyway — speaking as the great-great-great-great-granddaughter of two Revolutionary War soldiers and the descendant of a whole mess of pioneers who settled Appalachia and the Ozarks way back when — Schmitt can stuff it. There were African Muslims in Colonial America, and some of them fought in the Revolution, too. Among the ancestors of President Warren Harding and the fabled Vanderbilt family was a character known as Anthony the Turk, credited with being the first free Muslim in North America. Anthony the Turk took up residence in New Netherland, now Manhattan, in the 17th century.

Groups of Sephardic Jews began arriving also as early as 1654. Jews fought in the Revolution. And there was already a substantial Chinese population in California when it became a state in 1850. Before that, of course, a big chunk of California and the southwest was territory of Spain and settled by Spanish. And Native Americans were here first.

This country has always been wildly diverse, however much bigots want to pretend otherwise.  What makes us a nation is indeed a proposition — that common people, equal under the law, can govern themselves. No kings. No dictators. Never forget that.

As usual, last night I tuned in to Chris Hayes on MSNBC to watch the evening lineup of political commentary. I was expecting coverage of the Charlie Kirk shooting. I wasn’t expecting the entire hour to be about the Charlie Kirk shooting, but it was. Same with Jen Psaki’s show — at least I think so; I was tuning out after a while. I didn’t bother watching Lawrence O’Donnell. The two MSNBC hosts I did watch were going out of their way to stress, over and over, that Kirk shouldn’t have been shot and we should all feel terrible about it. Well, yeah, okay, but what the bleep? Didn’t anything else happen yesterday?

I didn’t learn until this morning that, earlier in the day, senior political analyst Matthew Dowd had said some politically incorrect things about the late Mr. Kirk. Dowd was promptly fired, and MSNBC issued an apology. What did he say? According to The Guardian,

During his appearance on Katy Tur Reports, Dowd suggested that Kirk’s rhetoric may have contributed to the violence that claimed his life. Kirk, 31, had a history of rightwing provocation and Christian nationalism, and frequently espoused bigoted rhetoric about Islam, women , LGBTQ+ communities and people of color.

“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said, adding: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”

Dowd also speculated about the circumstances of the shooting, saying: “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration. So we have no idea about this.”

Um, that didn’t seem entirely out of line to me. Kirk was famous for his vile, bigoted rhetoric. Compare what Dowd said to things that were said by major political and media figures about the assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband or the assassinations of  Minnesota House Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband. Dowd’s comments don’t come anywhere close. But MSNBC was so freaked out the execs must have ordered that the rest of the days’ schedule be dedicated to groveling to the Right about how sorry they all are. And most of what I’m seeing in media today, including left-leaning media, amounts to the apology fest, continuing. You’d think we’d all conspired to assassinate the Pope.

Here’s another what the bleep news story — Florida Reporter Suspended After Texting MAGA Congressman to Ask If He Still Supports Campus Carry After Kirk Shooting. The text was sent before it had been announced that Kirk had died. That wasn’t an unreasonable question, IMO. Also some upstate New York public school staffer has been placed on leave because of some social media posts, but I don’t know what the posts said.

Frankly, if you had gone out yesterday before the shooting and stopped 100 random people on the street and asked them what they thought about Charlie Kirk, most of them wouldn’t have recognized the name. Kirk was a well-known figure among us politics nerds and the younger MAGA crowd, and that was about it. Today flags are being flown at half mast, on Trump’s order, and Kirk has been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. The flag thing is grossly inappropriate for someone who was strictly a partisan political operative, but no one dares to say so. And I sincerely hope that once Trump is no longer President and we (hopefully) have a not-sociopathic chief executive again, the Presidential Medal of Freedom will be retired. Trump has contaminated the thing too much. I’d rather start over with some new award that can’t be given to the president’s political cronies and donors, but to people who have made genuine contributions to the nation.

And let me also say that if the shooter, whoever that person is, had come to me and asked whether shooting Kirk was a good idea, I would have said no. Don’t do it. It won’t help anybody. Well, except maybe Trump. Nobody is talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now.

But once again, lefties are held to a different standard from righties. And I’m frankly tired of having to be the one who is reasonable. One of these days I’m going to get very tired of being reasonable.

Trump, true to form, has collectively blamed the Left for Kirk’s shooting. He’s basically invited his hot-heated cuties to go out and shoot Democrats. We’ll be very lucky if some prominent Democrats aren’t killed over the next few days. And see also ‘War Is Here’: The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence by David Gilbert at WIRED.

Ed Martin, the US pardon attorney and former acting US attorney for DC, wrote on X: “For it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,’ says the Lord,” citing Romans 12:19.

Elon Musk, the X owner and former figurehead of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), posted: “The Left is the party of murder.” He then quoted a post blaming “the left-wing mainstream media, as well as figures like Gavin Newsom” for radicalizing people against right-wing figures like Kirk. “Exactly,” Musk wrote.

Katie Miller, who worked closely with Musk at DOGE and is the wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy, Stephen Miller, wrote on X that even liberals condemning the violence “had blood on their hands.”

Basically, we on the Left are not allowed to criticize anyone on the Right in any way, shape, or form, because doing so is the same thing as inciting murder. We are supposed to just smile and not at everything the Right says or does and keep our mouths shut about it. Got that?

This is my favorite part:

Oath Keeper founder Stewart Rhodes, who had his sentence for seditious conspiracy with regards to the January 6 Capitol riot commuted by Trump earlier this year, announced on Infowars that it was time to restart his militia group in order to provide public protection for figures like Kirk.

“I’m going to be rebuilding the Oath Keepers, and we will be doing protection again,” said Rhodes. “If my security team had been at that event, if they had been up there on the high point, looking for potential threats, they would have saved Charlie Kirk from being shot.”

Rhodes then called on Trump to “do what’s right, what’s necessary” and “invoke the Insurrection Act” in the wake of the shooting. “You should declare the left in this country is in obvious open rebellion against the law of the United States. They’re committing insurrection, they’re aiding and abetting an invasion, and they’re blocking the execution of federal law,” Rhodes said.

Well, Rhodes would know insurrection.

And About the FBI — one of the ironies of the moment is that Trump’s politicization of the FBI may have rendered the agency unable to find Kirk’s killer. See David Kurtz, TPM, Insiders Describe the Trump FBI Clown Show in Vivid, Buffoonish Detail.

A new lawsuit containing devastating allegations about the clownish politicization of the FBI calls into serious question whether the bureau — under the nominal control of Kash Patel — is up to the task of investigating a major case like the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

Hours before Patel befooled himself by live-tweeting the serial apprehension then release of two different people mistakenly believed to be Kirk’s assailant, three fired senior FBI officials described in vivid detail a bureau nearly crippled by the social media obsessions of Patel and his top deputy Dan Bongino. …

… The entire complaint is worth a read to appreciate the buffoonish of Patel and Bongino, but also of a White House that variously:

used an inexperienced 29-year-old staffer to vet candidates to lead the FBI;
refused to fix a clerical error that made Driscoll the acting director instead of the acting deputy director.

But the overall impression left by the lawsuit is far worse: an FBI supine to the Trump White House, led by feckless loyalists who easily wilt under pressure from the likes of deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Some major media are seriously reporting that the shooter used ammunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology. I suppose that could be true, but I’m skeptical. The transgender part especially aligns too closely to the Right’s current obsession with trans mass shooters. A week ago there were reports that the Trump DoJ was looking into a way to ban transgender people from owning guns. Smells like agitprop from the DoJ to me. Let’s see if this claim holds up, assuming the shooter is ever found.

Charlie Kirk with Trump

So somebody shot and killed Charlie Kirk. While I am no Charlie Kirk fan, I don’t encourage shooting people. The last thing we need now are a bunch of retaliatory shootings. And let’s not give Trump any more excuses to send out jack-booted thugs.

Regarding Kirk, a number of people have cited an old quote of his — “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 to protect our other God-given rights.” And karma always gets the last word.

Ironically, there was a school shooting in Denver today. There were no deaths. But the legacy of Second Amendment Worship lives on.

Now there are lots of front-page news stories about the birthday book, and lots of names being named. And lot of commentary everywhere, in spite of Trump calling it a “dead issue.” Epstein associated with a lot of famous and influential people, but let’s remember that it’s possible not everyone he associated with is guilty of anything.

Going back to the New York Times story on JP Morgan and Epstein — the nation’s leading lender continued to do business with Epstein while ignoring signs there was something hinky going on –this from the Times story —

During a time when Epstein was regularly sexually abusing teenage girls and young women, JPMorgan processed more than 4,700 transactions, totaling more than $1.1 billion, for him, including payments to his victims. It also wired his money to Russian and Eastern European banks that appeared connected to Epstein’s sex-trafficking operations.

Cash is a currency of criminals, and JPMorgan allowed Epstein to withdraw tens of thousands of dollars a month — amounts that should have set off internal alarms. The bank also opened accounts for Epstein’s victims and assistants, sometimes without conducting proper due diligence and missing warning signs for human trafficking.

The story goes on to say that bank staff did raise alarms, but upper management chose to ignore them. Epstein was generating a lot of business, I guess.

But it’s so often the case that people are righteously opposed to sex crimes like rape and other abuses in the abstract but are less so when confronted by a real-world plaintiff and defendant in a sexual assault case. It’s widely reported that only 4 percent of reported sex crimes in the U.S. result in a conviction. And it’s believed a whole lot of rapes go unreported, in part because the victims just don’t want to deal with going to police; they’d rather blot it all out of their minds. And they fear the police won’t take them seriously, for good reason. And often when someone is convicted, he gets a ridiculously light sentence or no sentence at all. And the judge will say the perp’s future shouldn’t be ruined because of one mistake, or whatever.

I once encountered a fellow who thought rapes would stop if rapists got a death penalty. I told them that if a rape conviction carried an automatic death penalty, no one would ever be convicted. He didn’t believe me.

JP Morgan was blinded by profits, and maybe because Epstein associated with famous and influential people. But what about the USA Gymnastics episode of a few years ago? The team doctor was sexually abusing the athletes, upper management knew it — apparently the U.S. Olympic Committee knew it — yet they allowed it to continue. I wrote back when it happened,

All these officials enjoy the prestige and income of being associated with world-class athletes. You’d think they would care about the athletes. Surely it’s easier to dismiss and replace a team doctor than to replace Olympic gold medal contenders. Yet their first reaction is to protect the doctor and throw the athletes under the bus.

They were protecting the organization, I suppose, and probably their own jobs. But it all came tumbling down anyway. I understand today’s  U.S.A. Gymnastics is a different organization with new management and bylaws.

The famous Catholic Church child abuse scandals — again, protecting the organization, which didn’t work — come to mind also. And see my old post Harvey Weinstein Types Pervade the Universe.

Getting back to Trump — the way he’s defending himself makes no sense. As Reason magazine points out, the birthday letter by itself is not defamatory. That much is widely noted in media. If Trump had acknowledged writing the letter and just explained he’d been told to write something risqué there would be much less brouhaha about it now, IMO. But instead he’s calling the thing a hoax and a “dead issue.” He’s terrified, obviously.

See also Axios, Trump and Johnson likely doomed in effort to stop Epstein files vote.

I wasn’t going to post today because some other things needed attention, but the House Oversight Committee has the original Epstein birthday book, courtesy of the lawyers overseeing the Epstein estate. They’ve released a photocopy of Trump’s letter, which the New York Times has published. Trump is denying he drew/wrote the thing. Here’s a gift link.  Among other things, the the Times compares Trump’s signature on the Epstein letter to other Trump signatures from about the same time period. Looks the same to me.

The thing is, there’s nothing in the letter that explicitly ties Trump to Epstein’s sex trafficking. It hints at it, yes. But Trump could have just explained it away by saying that Maxwell solicited letters from Epstein’s friends and wanted something “racy.” But no; Trump stupidly is calling the letter a fake. That can be authenticated, I suspect.

Lots happened today; I’ll catch up eventually.

Moses Mike might have inadvertently gotten Trump into deeper hot water. The other day he said that Trump was an “FBI informant” in the Epstein case. To which the world replied, huh?

Here is what Josh Marshall wrote yesterday. You want to read this.