Jewish new year starts at sundown on September 22nd this year. The day before, slain highly influential MAGA promoter Charlie Kirk’s life and work were celebrated by MAGA nation.
Shortly after Charlie Kirk was brutally murdered, the NY Times published where he stood on various issues. They republished it yesterday, when thousands of the faithful are lined up to pay homage to this martyred Christian champion of free speech (to hear some tell it) at a mega-MAGA-rally celebrating his life and work. Look how mercilessly the super-judgmental New York Times smeared him for exercising his First Amendment rights to express a tiny bit of arguably antisemitic rhetoric! (The preceding sentence is an example of irony).
He was a proponent of “replacement theory,” a once-fringe conspiracy theory positing that Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants. That ideology motivated the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.
Mr. Kirk also accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement.
“The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country,” he said on his show in 2023.
Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling “not just the colleges — it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it.”
Allies of Mr. Kirk often sought to defend him against accusations of antisemitism by citing his support for Israel. Mr. Kirk defended Israel’s actions in Gaza. After his death, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel mourned him as “a lionhearted friend of Israel” who “stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.”
Heh, takes one to know one, eh, Bibi?!
Read the article for more of the lionheart’s highly commendable free speech views:
Would I be out of line, on the day thousands of the faithful are lining up for a mega-MAGA memorial service for slain MAGA icon Charlie Kirk, to note that these accidentally publicly divulged messages to his “apolitical” Attorney General come off as the ravings of an even whinier version of history’s own Mr. Hitler?
I hasten to add, to be scrupulously fair, that Bill Clinton got off a plane to speak, secretly, with Obama’s US Attorney General while his wife was a candidate trying to illegally steal the US election for president in 2016 after conspiring with George Soros!
This piece by Chris Hayes lays out the mafia style shakedown by Trump appointed Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr [1]. Carr issued a direct threat to the parties who need FCC permission to make an $8,000,000,000 deal. He delivered his threat on a far-right podcast. Hayes talks with a sitting FCC commissioner (one of only three, the law requires five, but what does Project 2025 care? Brendan Carr wrote, and denies he wrote, the FCC chapter in Project 2025) who confirms that Carr’s actions are the audacious, unethical, dangerous, illegal actions of a lawless, partisan, rogue chairman.
Even Lyin’ Ted, who applauded the firing of Jimmy Kimmel (no friend of the Senate’s most hated member), deplored this mafia style demand on Disney, Nexstar and other mega-entities whose love of monetary profit erases all other considerations. Check out Lyin’ Ted’s cool imitation of a mafioso, wicked cool.
These are desperate acts by desperate men making a desperate run to overcome the will of the vast majority of Americans of all political persuasions, before their time for seizing authoritarian control runs out. They may be acting exactly like Nazis, but we call them Nazis at our peril, because Nazis always kill as many of their enemies as possible, even after they lose the war. This is not a time to hesitate out of fear, it is a time to remain clear-eyed and resolute in resistance.
Every few years the NY Times, without breaking character, cracks me up with their deadpan delivery. Here is the latest example, from their recent article on being sued by Donald Trump for the paper’s allegedly “deranged hatred” of Donald Trump. The distracting temper tantrum packaged as an incoherent $15,000,000,000 lawsuit was summarily dismissed by the judge for lack of an actual legal theory. Here’s the Grey Lady, from the day she was sued:
The complaint also took issue with the endorsement of Kamala Harris by the editorial board of The Times in September 2024, describing it as “deranged” and criticizing the editorial board’s arguments.
Mr. Trump has sued The Times on a previous occasion, without success.
In 2021, Mr. Trump sued the paper over a series of articles that investigated his finances and tax records. (Ms. Craig and Mr. Buettner were two of the reporters who wrote them.) The suit was dismissed in 2023 and Mr. Trump was ordered to pay The Times’s legal expenses.
In addition, in 2020, his re-election campaign sued for libel over an essay in the Opinion section titled “The Real Trump-Russia Quid Pro Quo.” The lawsuit was dismissed in 2021. . .
In an effort to prove “malice” against Mr. Trump, the lawsuit cited more than a dozen articles from The Times dating back to his first term in office that it claimed “maliciously and falsely portray him as dishonest, erode public trust in him and tear down his achievements.”
The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”
The lawsuit also claims that the defendants “baselessly hate President Trump in a deranged way.”
Indeed.
Hatred is fine, according to the Hater-in-Chief, unless you oppose, or even question, anything about him, in which case you are hating in a deranged way. Rare to get this level of clarity from the boss.
Many of the richest, most pathologically greedy white men in the world (and their corporate alter egos) have an irresistible impulse to control everything. This is no conspiracy theory, just look around at what these self-interest blinded entities are doing. One of the world’s most lucrative entities, Disney and its affiliated corporate “persons”, is vying to become number one (presumably tired of smelling like number two) planning to consolidate more power, wealth and influence by buying another major television network group. They need Trump’s MAGA-headed FCC (president gets to pick the chairman) to approve their purchase of a huge swath of ABC — employer of nightly Trump exposer Jimmy Kimmel — or Nexstar, or some combination of corporate properties.
It was easy for Trump’s FCC chair, a pugnaciously partisan chap named Brendan Carr, to lean on the morally flexible corporate “person” who owns Kimmel’s contract, during a far-right podcast, to immediately fire Jimmy Kimmel because, “nice little monopoly you’re trying to build here, shame if something happened to it…” Not long ago Carr tweeted his true beliefs about the First Amendment (under the Biden tyranny, one supposes) and the proper role of the FCC:
Trump and his mouthpieces say if you speak ill of the radical rightwing movement that included both the martyred Charlie Kirk and his murderer, you risk your livelihood, if not your kneecaps and your nose. Unlike in a defamation case, the truth of your statements, or the ones you quote, is no defense against the charge of illegal opinions. What is best for the ever more feeble president’s delicate ego is the only consideration. Desperate men do desperate things in desperate times. What’s the world coming to when Cucker Carlson begins speaking common sense truth?
During his monologue on Monday’s show, Kimmel said: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it. In between the finger-pointing, there was grieving. On Friday, the White House flew the flags at half staff which got some criticism but on a human level you can see how hard the president is taking this.”. . .
. . .Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker posted: “This is an attack on free speech and cannot be allowed to stand. All elected officials need to speak up and push back on this undemocratic act.” He pointed out that in 2023, Brendan Carr [1 — my footnote] himself posted: “Free speech is…the check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.” Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) warned of a coming campaign to “use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext to use the power of the White House to wipe out Trump’s critics and his political opponents.”
. . .On CNN, conservative pundit David Frum called it “state repression.” On his show, right-wing activist Tucker Carlson said: “[I]f they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think. There is nothing they can’t do to you because they don’t consider you human…. A free man has a right to say what he believes.”
Dan Rather wrote a very cogent explanation of the corporate side of this hideous “free market” canning of a popular comedian for poking fun at an increasingly unpopular wannabe dictator. There is already a lot of blowback on this fascistic over-reach, even Lyin’ Ted Cruz denounced the unethical, illegal, unconstitutional quid pro quo move as a mafia-style shakedown (see following post).
Trump clearly believes in free speech only for himself and those debased enough to publicly kiss his crusty ring. Whatever else you want to call the recently martyred Charlie Kirk, he was not actually a champion of free speech or open debate. He was a well-financed bully, who franchised his billionaire-funded MAGA youth movement on 800 college campuses. He often used the Bible, and his take on Christ’s teachings, to figuratively whack people in the head during his staged free speech cage matches. “Read Leviticus 19,” an Old Testament section he liked to cite to shut his critics’ mouths. Note Mr. Kirk’s flagrant violation of these commands of his white, Christian God, from Leviticus 19:
16 “‘Do not go about spreading slander among your people.
“‘Do not do anything that endangers your neighbor’s life. I am the Lord.
18 “‘Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord.
33 “‘When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34 The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born. Love them as yourself, for you were foreigners in Egypt. I am the Lord your God.
Of course, any devil with access to the internet can quote scripture — and cut and paste it. Just because Kirk slandered accomplished, brilliant Black women as lacking “mental processing power”, preached that gun murders were an acceptable, prudent price for the freedom to own guns, advocated for public, televised executions of the president’s enemies and was, to put it tenderly, no friend of foreigners residing among us, does not make him … uh, does not, he wasn’t… not a hypocrite. He was not NOT a hypocrite is all I’m saying.
His death was horrible and literally nobody deserves to die that way, but to call him a Christian martyr whose death demands national mourning and not a bad word said against the self-made millionaire White Christian Nationalist is false.
“‘Do not lie.
“‘Do not deceive one another.
12 “‘Do not swear falsely by my name and so profane the name of your God. I am the Lord.
Leviticus 19.
Here’s Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, definitively nailing the evil, mean-spirited, nasty, heartless, catty, possibly violent, definitely radical (and comedic) comments that got Jimmy Kimmel fired…in Kimmel’s own explosive, obscene words.
[1] Brendan Carr, chairman of the FCC, is a Trump-appointed Trump ass licker. Here’s his application to president-elect Trump, a la Bill Barr’s.
Heather:
On the podcast of right-wing influencer Benny Johnson on Wednesday, chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Brendan Carr said that Kimmel’s words were part of a “concerted effort to try to lie to the American people” and that the FCC was “going to have remedies that we can look at.” “Frankly, when you see stuff like this,” he said, “I mean look, we can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take action, frankly, on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”
Carr explained: “There’s actions we can take on licensed broadcasters. And frankly, I think that it’s really sort of past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say…’We’re not gonna run Kimmel anymore…because we licensed broadcasters are running the possibility of fines or license revocation from the FCC.'”
The largest operator of ABC affiliates, Nexstar—which needs FCC approval for a $6.2 billion merger—said it would stop airing Kimmel’s show from its stations. Then ABC suspended Kimmel’s show.
Benny Johnson, the podcaster on whose show Carr threatened Kimmel, was one of the influencers Russian state media funded to spread propaganda before the 2024 election. After Kimmel’s suspension, Johnson posted on social media: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re just getting started.”
And the temporary triumph of enraged, heedless incoherence marches on. It’s no surprise that the most obsessively greedy in our nation, and their counterparts in foreign nations, would fall in line with a Nazi-like mob boss who promises them even more wealth — or the loss of it, and worse, for the capital crime disobedience to the Leader. A solid 65% of Americans oppose this kind of open tyranny, the percentage is probably much higher in the case of individual Project 2025 policies (e.g., cutting federal funds and closing rural hospitals so MAGA members will die — to give even more to those who already have hundreds, or thousands, of millions).
It is crucial in this sickening moment in our history to keep our equanimity as much as possible. We face a true catastrophe, but it is not a catastrophe until the curtain actually comes down. The constant roaring threats from these irrational, incoherent fascists are not quite the same as them actually being in charge, firmly and finally in control. Their crazed desperation to seize lawless power and put troops on the streets in Anarchist Jurisdictions before our next election tells us the outcome of this battle for America’s future is far from settled.
We must do everything in our power to remain calm, strong, and reasoning, in the face of desperately violent incoherence. We owe ourselves and the future the preservation of conversation, debate and discussion, rather than a centrally run AI based dystopia where only 1% get to thrive and enjoy life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
There is an argument raging, between Nazi-types (blind, loyal obedience to the needs of an infallible Leader) and those to the left of Nazis over who are the actual Nazis at this perilous moment in history. Read any history of the Nazi era and you will find not only historical rhymes, but direct one-on-one correlations between the America First movement during Hitler’s time and the one marching for MAGA today. Here are four:
1) the Leader is infallible and essential to protection from inhuman enemies; 2) personal loyalty to the Leader is the single most important value in the nation; 3) lies useful to the Leader, especially demonstrable ones, must be repeated with utter conviction, those who call them out angrily demonized and eliminated; 4) the Leader gets to decide who to attack, even kill, and he is always right to do so.
I don’t use the N-word word lightly as a mere insult, it is accurately descriptive of the fascistic regime we are facing now. These Nazis are always in a rage when faced with facts they hate. Check out FBI director Kashyap Patel’s torrent of rage at Adam Schiff, denouncing the senator as a coward and buffoon, for constantly “lying” about Russian electoral interference in 2016 and the Day of Love on January 6, 2021, as Schiff probed into the Trump cover up of the Epstein files and its recent preferential treatment of Epstein’s lying accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell [1].
Nazi logic is instrumental, transactional, designed to beat down your adversary by any means necessary, including inverting cause and effect and lying outright, then indignantly lying about the lie, with rage, more often than not. It is not strictly logic at all, because it is all based on the irrational will of psychopathic leadership whose every crazed word is law, enforced by terror and violence, but Nazi intellectuals will wrap it in a framework that makes it sound, to those unwary, unsophisticated or inclined to the same worldview, irrefutably logical.
Think of John Roberts needing only one lie, that the Senators who voted 98-0 to reaffirm the Voting Rights Act were relying on forty year-old data showing outdated forty year-old racist voting patterns in many states. The rest of his argument (if you lie, as he did, claiming that the Senators hadn’t studied thousands of pages of current voting data at numerous hearings [2]) sounds entirely reasonable. After reading his calm, logical ruling, before you get to the dissent, it seems plausible that the guy’s just calling balls and strikes and fairly ruling on the facts and the law. Check that shit out.
Here comes fellow Federalist Society stalwart Boof Kavanaugh, who denied, during his tantrum laden confirmation hearing, that the “boof” under his photo in the Georgetown Prep yearbook was a reference to having hard alcohol poured into his colon through a tube (it was a reference to his flatulence, he lied, sheepishly), making a particularly incoherent restatement of the demands of justice and the constitution’s Bill of Rights.
Neither, according to this supremely entitled mama’s boy and five other Federalists, is a brown, Spanish speaking or day laboring person’s Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable search, seizure, detention and extrajudicial rendition to foreign countries for the “crime” of displaying traits of a “non-white” culture an “especially weighty legal interest.” Nazi Logic 101.
Notice how Nazi logic twists the question under review: he turns it not into an innocent person’s right to go about their life in peace, protected by the Constitution, but a question of a guilty person using our law to “evade arrest”. Smug motherfucker, too, Boof Kavanaugh.
As the old maxim of justice goes, turned on its head by Nazi logic: better that a thousand innocent people get sent to a dictator’s torture prison, without the due process of a judicial hearing, as required by our laws, than one guilty person avoid their fate!
[1] Ladies and gentlemen, Kashyap Pramod Patel, from earlier today, fed up with being questioned about the concealment of the Epstein files and preferential treatment for sex offender Ghislaine Maxwell (note tepid gavel use by MAGA Senate Judiciary committee chairman, 91 year-old Chuck Grassley, during Patel’s outburst, and his idiotic “both of you be quiet” at the end):
[2] Only when you read Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s dissent (another magnificent piece of clear, precise legal and moral logic) do you realize the audacity of the Roberts majority’s legal sleight of hand. You learn that the reauthorization of the Voting Rights Act was passed, after 21 hearings and 15,000 pages of evidence of ongoing discrimination in the states under preclearance, by a vote of 390-33 in the House and, after further debate, 98 to 0 in the Senate. Reading the John Roberts decision you’d have no reason to suspect that President George W. Bush called a news conference to sign the reauthorization into law a week later, as Ginsburg writes (quoting Dubya):
recognizing the need for “further work . . . in the fight against injustice,” and calling the reauthorization “an example of our continued commitment to a united America where every person is valued and treated with dignity and respect.”
Colin Ferguson, the now mostly forgotten LIRR mass murdering “gunman,” insisted on defending himself at his murder trial. The judge was unable to convince him of the folly of doing so. Ferguson, who didn’t show any skill representing himself (and later lost an appeal on “ineffective assistance of counsel”), asked the witnesses “do you see the man who opened fire that day?” and the witnesses each said, “yeah, it was you.” The jury, not being as credulous or transactional as our corporate mass media, or as blinded as the followers of a charismatic cult leader, convicted Ferguson who is not eligible for parole until 2309.
I thought of Ferguson as I read Trump’s immediate, idiotic, violence inspiring lies following the hideous murder of extreme right wing activist and organizer Charlie Kirk:
In the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.” source
As a man who has never angrily gone after every judge who ever ruled against him, or their family, or ever called one stupid or corrupt, or threatened a prosecutor, never fomented a violent attack on police protecting Congress, never used tear gas and mounted federal law enforcement agents to disperse a legal, peaceful protest for a strongman photo op, or done anything else bad, ever, I guess the poor demented fellow gets to say whatever he likes. It’s a free country, after all.
On his most recent show David Feldman played the entire 4:00 clip of Bernie Sanders reacting to the murder of Charlie Kirk, saying he could find no way to edit it any shorter. I agree. Feldman’s only regret about Bernie’s statement is that it wasn’t delivered from the Oval Office. Mine too.
Imagine how much different the world would be if corporate Democrats hadn’t orchestrated the summary replacement of Bernie Sanders as the Democratic presidential candidate in the 2020 primary after putting their big donors’ fat thumbs on the scale in 2016 to give Hillary her turn.
Too bad so much of our commercially produced news is controlled by psychopathic judicially created “persons” focused exclusively on their sacred bottom line. “Both sides” journalism, in an age when one side is increasingly, openly lawless, and contemptuous of the law, leaves very fine people on both sides screwed.
The reason The Fourth Estate exists in a democracy, and is protected as the first order of business in the Bill of Rights, is to provide information and analysis to the populace so we can make informed, intelligent decisions about how we are governed. Democracy, our framers said, to distinguish this new form of rule from the tyranny of a king, was government by consent of the governed. You can’t give consent if you don’t know what you’re consenting to.
Fascism rises when real information is erased, dismissed as “fake news” and facts are replaced with an endless loop of constantly changing lies. Many of the people inundated with those lies will consent to whatever they are told. Attack judges as partisan lunatics, then accuse your enemies of attacking judges; foment political violence and accuse your enemies of being murderers; try to rig elections and accuse your enemies of doing it when you lose, the list goes on and on. Consent of the governed is replaced by “obey or die,” backed by the full violence of the state. Many are pleased, even proud, to do it, I’m sad to say.
Lawrence O’Donnell, brilliant journalist and great writer, consistently gives an intelligent take on the most important issues of the day.Here’s Lawrence on the moral and intellectual idiocy of our government’s defense of the privacy and reputations of wealthy, powerful pedophiles and sex traffickers. The lifelong trauma of their victims? “I haven’t even thought about that,” said our grifter-in-chief, America’s Greatest Liar:
Here’s Trump, after a still unknown murderer killed a well-funded, highly influential far-right extremist influencer, organizer and MAGA icon, now a martyr. As is often said, Trump’s every accusation is an admission:
PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: It’s long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie [1] to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.
My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.
very fine people, on both sides, on both sides.
[1]
I think it’s worth noting, because you’re seeing some people saying, “Well, you know, I disagree with what he said, but he was a champion of free speech. He died debating.” Look, the fact that he was murdered doesn’t change the fact that he also — he was an opponent of free speech. There’s no other way to cut it, for a man who created something called Professor Watchlist, School Board Watchlist, to name and frighten people from teaching, who advocated restrictions on what school teachers could teach, who called for — and there’s a clip you can see online — who called for the televised public executions, and he had a pretty broad category in mind. But what was really chilling was he wanted this to be required viewing for children. And you can look at this clip, and you can see his colleagues. They’re sort of trolling, but Kirk, again and again, pulls it back to seriousness, and he says, “No, no, no, this isn’t a joke. This has to be a holy experience, a teaching experience for children, watching enemies be killed.” That is not a champion of free speech.
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