Breast-feeding must be inclusive.

A tangled web.

Fox News host Brian Kilmeade apologized on Sunday for saying days earlier that people who are experiencing homelessness and mental illnesses should be executed – remarks that prompted calls for him to be fired.

The host said his comments on Wednesday were “extremely callous”.

Kilmeade’s about-face came amid a climate in which people across the US are either being fired from or disciplined at their jobs amid a coordinated effort to clamp down on commentary that is critical about Turning Point USA’s executive director, Charlie Kirk, who was shot to death at an event in Utah on Wednesday.

Mere hours before the conservative political activist was killed, while on the rightwing Fox News program Fox & Friends, Kilmeade and two other hosts were discussing the killing of 23-year-old Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian woman who was fatally stabbed on a commuter train in North Carolina in August.

The guy who killed her is said to have schizophrenia as well as a long history of criminal arrests.

During the Fox and Friends appearance on Wednesday discussing Zarutska’s death, co-host Lawrence Jones said unhoused people with mental illness should either accept the publicly funded programs to help in their situation or be jailed. “Involuntary lethal injection or something,” Kilmeade responded to Jones. “Just kill ’em.”

Well, that’s where chatting on Fox News gets you. They compete to be Most Offensive, so once in a blue moon it catches up with them.

Unions kick women to the curb.

The trade union movement “spat in the face of women in the workplace” when they rejected the Supreme Court’s ruling on biological sex, the co-editor of a bestselling gender-critical book has said.

Susan Dalgety said misogyny still “festers at the heart” of unions after delegates at the Trades Union Congress (TUC) unanimously voted to dismiss updated guidance on single-sex spaces.

The motion, which was carried at the TUC’s annual conference in Brighton on Tuesday, declared that April’s Supreme Court ruling breached the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

There is no “human right” for men to force everyone to agree that men are women.

Dalgety, who co-edited The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, a collection of essays by prominent gender-critical women including the Harry Potter author JK Rowling and the academic Kathleen Stock, accused the trade union movement of having a “blatant disregard for the law as set out by the highest court in the land”.

She wrote: “No delegate recalled the fight for women’s rights, led by the trade union movement of the 1960s and 1970s, that resulted in not only the Equal Pay Act but the 1975 Sex Discrimination Act, on which the 2010 Equality Act is based.

“Instead, delegates made cheap jibes against author and philanthropist JK Rowling and warned of ‘segregation’ in the workplace if transgender men were not allowed to use women’s single-sex toilets and changing rooms. Women trade unionists in Scotland have long suffered the misogyny that arguably festers at the heart of the trade union movement.”

And elsewhere.

Susan Smith, co-founder of For Women Scotland, said: “Thanks to the Supreme Court, no one should be in any doubt about the law and the obligations to ensure that women’s rights are universally protected. Sadly, there are still thwarted and angry voices who want to dismantle those rights.

“The TUC would never stand by brazen attempts to attack, for example, the disabled or minority-ethnic groups, but, after over 150 years of defending workers, it seems thrilled by the prospect of betraying women who pay them to uphold their rights in the workplace.”

It never stops being depressing to see how eager “progressives” are to stamp on women.

Can we discuss this?

The backlash to “inappropriate” public comments made in the days following Charlie Kirk’s death has sparked a new wave of firings and suspensions, with a number of university employees disciplined for sharing their views.

Who decides what’s inappropriate? Are we allowed to talk about his words and ideas?

It follows reports of teachers, firefighters, journalists, nurses, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team, being censured in some form after publishing opinions on Kirk’s politics or death.

But we need to be able to talk about his politics, because they affect all of us.

At Florida Atlantic University, an art history professor was placed on leave after posting what officials called “repeated comments on social media … regarding the assassination of Charlie Kirk”.

But the professor, Karen Leader, told the Sun Sentinel that she “did not make comments about the ‘assassination,’ the murder of Charlie Kirk. I never mentioned it,” and had just reposted others’ critical commentary about Kirk’s politics, including his extremist positions on race, and gay and transgender rights.

Perhaps the thinking is that by talking about Kirk’s politics now one is necessarily talking about his murder. I suppose that’s true, but at the same time, his murder has made it necessary to talk about his politics. The idea isn’t that he had bad politics therefore it’s ok that he was killed, it’s that having been killed doesn’t make his politics automatically benign.

Free speech groups, meanwhile, have condemned efforts by far-right individuals, including Donald Trump political allies Steve Bannon and Laura Loomer, and Republican politicians such as South Carolina congresswoman Nancy Mace, to “doxx” people who have made uncomplimentary posts about Kirk.

Mace urged the public to send her tips about employees believed to be “celebrating” Kirk’s death, and on Monday called for the education department to defund any educational establishment that “refuses to remove or discipline staff who glorify or justify political violence”.

Um. Speaking of people who glorify or justify political violence, has she been paying attention to Donald Trump over the past 50 years or so? Remember when he demanded the death penalty for the Central Park 5, who were innocent?

H/t Mostly Cloudy

Lawsuit.

Maurene Comey, a federal prosecutor who handled criminal cases against Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, is contesting her abrupt July firing in a lawsuit that challenges Donald J. Trump’s claim of sweeping presidential power.

Ms. Comey, whose father, James B. Comey, is a former F.B.I. director, says in the lawsuit filed on Monday that she was never given a reason for her dismissal. She contends that no plausible explanation exists other than that she is the daughter of one of the president’s best-known adversaries — or her perceived political affiliations.

Ms. Comey is among many federal prosecutors and Justice Department officials who have been fired in President Trump’s second term, with no reason given beyond Article II of the Constitution, which broadly describes the president’s powers. Some have challenged their dismissals before administrative judges; others have sued in federal court.

Of course Article II isn’t a reason, it’s a power. Having the power to fire someone isn’t the same thing as having a reason to do so. I have the power to slap people in the street, but I don’t exercise that power, because I’m not a lunatic.

That’s not really a good analogy, except that with Trump it kind of is. He does enjoy exercising his power to harm people.

Ms. Comey’s lawsuit, filed in federal court in Manhattan, names as defendants the Office of the President, the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others, and calls her firing from the U.S. attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York illegal.

“The politically motivated termination of Ms. Comey — ostensibly under ‘Article II of the Constitution’— upends bedrock principles of our democracy and justice system,” the lawsuit says. “Assistant United States attorneys like Ms. Comey must do their jobs without fearing or favoring any political party or perspective, guided solely by the law, the facts and the pursuit of justice.”

And presidents ought to be doing the same, but Trump is very far from being guided solely by the law, the facts and the pursuit of justice.

The lawsuit argues that Ms. Comey’s firing was done without cause, advance notice or an opportunity to contest it, and was unlawful and unconstitutional. It says that the dismissal was retaliation for “her father’s protected speech, or because of her perceived political affiliation and beliefs, or both.”

Ms. Comey contends that the law provides no authority for the president to fire rank-and-file prosecutors, who are protected by civil service laws passed by Congress and signed by past presidents.

“Neither the president nor the Department of Justice have unlimited authority to remove” prosecutors, according to the lawsuit, which was filed by Ms. Comey’s lawyers Nicole Gueron, Ellen Blain, Deepa Vanamali and Margaret M. Donovan.

Good luck to them.

Good grief. What a mess of a system.

Also, side note – how does Helen do that? Talk quickly to get all the information out without any stumbling or losing track or umming or you knowing or like-ing or sort of-ing?

Anyway – the system. Yer trans person goes to the cops and says “This woman said these harassy things to me” and the cops record it, no questions asked, no evidence or corroboration or oath, just record it, so now it’s on the person’s record, end of story, have a nice day, mind the gap.

How is that any kind of way to deal with people and laws?

Dang. The Scottish government really does hate women.

The Scottish Government has confirmed it will challenge For Women Scotland’s legal bid to remove guidance that allows male-born prisoners to be housed with women and permits transgender pupils to use single-sex facilities and sports in line with their gender identity.

Forcing women to share all their spaces with men, no matter how dangerous that is to the women. That’s some intense hatred.

While John Swinney welcomed the “clarity” provided by the ruling, the Scottish Government has said it is awaiting further guidance from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) before issuing advice to public bodies. Some bodies, including the Scottish Parliament and Police Scotland, have already updated their policies in response to the ruling.

The EHRC has also repeatedly said ministers do not need to wait before acting on the ruling.

For Women Scotland co-director Trina Budge accused Mr Swinney’s administration of “arrogance.” She told the Mail on Sunday: “The Supreme Court ruling should have been the final word on the matter but it seems the arrogance of the Scottish Government knows no bounds. How it thinks it can possibly continue to defend these policies as being lawful is simply beyond our comprehension.”

The arrogance and the profound hatred of women.

The group’s summons, served on Scottish Ministers, the Lord Advocate and the Advocate General, was formally called by the Court of Session on September 10 after ministers failed to withdraw the policies within the 21-day deadline. Government lawyers have now confirmed they will appear in court to defend the guidance.

So they’re not just passively stalling, they’re defending their continued assault on women’s rights.

Ms Budge added: “Since the Scottish Government failed to withdraw the schools and prisons guidance within the 21 days given, our summons was called by the Court of Session on September 10. They now have seven days to lodge any defence.

“The Scottish Government has confirmed on Thursday that they will be making an appearance at court and we look forward to hearing how they can possibly justify promoting policies that allow boys into the girls’ changing room and house male murderers alongside women prisoners.

“It flies in the face of their public statement about accepting the Supreme Court judgment, which of course ruled that single-sex spaces should be provided on the basis of biological sex, and not how someone identifies. We think this is a shameful action by the Scottish Government and are totally flummoxed at what they think they are doing.”

I look forward to finding out.

Anoosh Chakelian, Britain editor of the New Statesman (and a woman), talks to Nicola Sturgeon:

The UK government blocked her attempt to introduce gender self-identification to Scotland. She believes she “lost the dressing room” when struggling to name the gender of a rapist, identifying as a woman, who was initially sent to a female prison. But still she remains an increasingly rare mainstream political voice standing up for trans rights.

That’s the end of the paragraph, and the next one shifts the subject. We are left with no clue what is meant by “standing up for trans rights.”

Journalists really need to stop doing this. They really need to ask their subjects exactly what they mean by “trans rights.” Not doing so implies that the opposition opposes rights for trans people, which is a calumny and a lie.

Perhaps just as divisive for some voters was Sturgeon’s attempt to pass a law allowing Scots to self-identify their gender. This was thwarted by the UK government, but deepened a rift in the Scottish left perhaps best symbolised by two of Scotland’s most prominent public figures and feminists: Sturgeon and the vocally gender-critical Harry Potter author JK Rowling.

In Frankly, Sturgeon describes Rowling’s decision to wear a t-shirt with the slogan “Nicola Sturgeon – destroyer of women’s rights” as a turning-point, making her feel “more at risk of possible physical harm”. In her review of the memoir on her website, Rowling wrote that her intention was to prompt journalists to ask Sturgeon questions about women’s safety, adding that she has never blamed Sturgeon for threats she’s herself received.

When I asked Sturgeon about this review, she said: “I don’t know where she gets the time! She is a highly successful woman. I’ve bought Harry Potter books for all the young people in my life, I think they’re great, but my goodness, where does she get the time to obsess about me? I hate to tell her that it’s just not reciprocated.”

Sorry to repeat myself (previous post) but come on. She was the first minister of Scotland! JKR paid attention to her because of the power! It wasn’t personal!

She knows this, of course; she’s being facetious, not to say flippant. But it’s a ridiculous and childish way of being flippant. Women’s rights are not a joke, thank you very much.

She continued: “I don’t obsess about other individuals who happen to have a different view about me, they’re entitled to have a different view. There are some people in this life who, it strikes me often, spend an awful lot more time, like immeasurably so, thinking about me than I ever spend thinking about them.”

Sigh. Yes of course they do: you were the prime minister.

Maybe she wasn’t even being flippant? Maybe she really doesn’t get that people are bound to pay attention to bosses?

Will the two women ever come together to heal this split? “I think it looks really unlikely, but that’s not from my perspective,” Sturgeon replied. “Look, I have no great animus towards JK Rowling. I never have done. We disagreed vehemently on independence. She has a very different view to me on trans rights. She’s entitled to that. I wish she would argue her position without what appears to me sometimes indulging in a bit of gratuitous cruelty to trans people.”

Oh hey. Take a look at what some trans people say to us. You’ll find more than a bit of gratuitous cruelty, I assure you.

Oh come ON.

JKR doesn’t “obsess about” Sturgeon, she resists powerful people who undermine women’s rights. None of this is about Sturgeon the person, it’s about women’s rights and how we can continue to have them when so many powerful people are hell-bent on taking rights away from women in order to give them to men.

As for “gratuitous cruelty” – have a word with people like “Sophie Molly” and “India” Willoughby and the rest of the women-hating crew. Seriously: have a word with them.

Be careful what you say.

Dozens of social media posts and messages about the murder of Charlie Kirk, including some that celebrated his death, are being spotlighted by conservative activists, Republican elected officials and a doxxing website as part of an online campaign to punish the posters behind the messages.

Prominent far-right influencer Laura Loomer, a US senator, and a site called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” have all drawn attention to people who have posted messages about Kirk’s Wednesday assassination.

…

The Charlie’s Murderers site, whose domain was registered anonymously and which says it is not a doxxing site, claims it has “received nearly 30,000 submissions,” according to a message on the site’s front page on midday Saturday. Currently, there are a few dozen submissions published on the site. “This website will soon be converted into a searchable database of all 30,000 submissions, filterable by general location and job industry. This is a permanent and continuously-updating archive of Radical activists calling for violence.”

Most people whose messages have been posted on the site do not seem to refer to themselves as activists, nor did it seem many were calling for violence. Administrators for the site did not respond to a request for comment. The site also opened an X account on Friday.

Ok so not activists and not calling for violence but were they saying what a great guy Kirk was? If not, on the list they go. It’s all perfectly fair and aboveboard.

[Rebekah] Jones posted about Kirk on Wednesday, writing: “Save your sympathies for the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire of MAGA’s violent political messaging machine.” The website republished that post along with other pieces of Jones’ personal information.

So we’re not allowed to object to MAGA’s violent political messaging machine?

Welp, I for one object to MAGA’s violent political messaging machine.

Some Republican elected officials are also publicizing people who posted about Kirk’s murder, including some public-sector employees like teachers.

Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee said a Middle Tennessee State University employee should be removed after writing they had “ZERO sympathy” for Kirk’s death. The university confirmed to CNN in a statement that the employee was fired “effective immediately.”

“No university employee who celebrates the assassination of Charlie Kirk should be trusted to shape the minds of the next generation in the classroom. The firing of this MTSU employee was the right decision, and it sends a clear message that this kind of reprehensible behavior must not be tolerated,” Blackburn said in a statement to CNN.

It’s interesting that she specifies celebrating the murder of Kirk specifically, as opposed to saying no university employee should celebrate a murder, period.

DC Comics canceled the just-released “Red Hood” comic book series after its author, Gretchen Felker-Martin, made comments about Kirk’s death on social media.

Interesting that Felker-Martin’s novel Manhunt that included burning JK Rowling alive was not seen as a reason to decline his new comic book series.

In since-deleted posts captured in screengrabs shared by other social media users, Felker-Martin allegedly wrote on social media after news of Kirk’s death: “Hope the bullet’s OK.”

“At DC Comics, we place the highest value on our creators and community and affirm the right to peaceful, individual expression of personal viewpoints. Posts or public comments that can be viewed as promoting hostility or violence are inconsistent with DC’s standards of conduct,” the company, which like CNN is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery, said in a statement. 

Oh? Then what about the JKR thing? Hello?

The website says its explicit aim is to get the people it spotlights fired. It was registered through a privacy service with an address in Iceland.

And the site’s name already implies that the people whose information it shares are responsible for Kirk’s murder, paving the way for harassment, Hank Teran, CEO at open-source threat intelligence platform Open Measures, told CNN. The website also echoes back to Kirk-founded conservative group Turning Point’s “Professor Watchlist,” whose purpose was to unmask what it called “radical professors,” but often led to harassment and violent threats directed toward people named on that list.

Altogether, “it could be reasonable to conclude that there’s some intent to incite harassment,” Teran said.

Harassment, and firing, and worse.

Oh surely not, he seems such a nice chap.

Let’s bring back…um…anti-Semitism?

“The story we got about World War II is all wrong,” a guest told Tucker Carlson on his podcast two weeks ago. “I think that’s right,” replied Carlson. The guest, a Cornell chemistry professor named David Collum, then spelled out what he meant: “One can make the argument we should have sided with Hitler and fought Stalin.” Such sentiments might sound shocking to the uninitiated, but they are not to Carlson’s audience. In fact, the notion that the German dictator was unfairly maligned has become a running theme on Carlson’s show—and beyond.

“What is it about Hitler? Why is he the most evil?” the far-right podcaster Candace Owens asked in July 2024. “The first thing people would say is: ‘Well, an ethnic cleansing almost took place.’ And now I offer back: ‘You mean like we actually did to the Germans.’” 

What do you mean “almost”? Is six million not enough to count as ethnic cleansing? And we actually didn’t to the Germans; what we did is prevent Hitler from winning the war that Hitler started.

In 1939, the U.S. and Canada turned away the M.S. St. Louis, which carried nearly 1,000 Jewish refugees. The ship was forced to return to Europe, where hundreds of the passengers were captured and killed by the Germans. Restrained by public sentiment, Roosevelt not only kept the country’s refugee caps largely in place but also rejected pleas to bomb the Auschwitz concentration camp and the railway tracks that led to it. When the United States finally entered the war, it did so not out of any special sense of obligation to the Jews but to defend itself after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

That indifference to the Holocaust was immediately dispelled when the Allied Forces liberated several of the Nazi camps where millions of Jews had been murdered. Entering the gates of these sadistic sites, American service members came face-to-face with unspeakable Nazi atrocities—rotting piles of naked corpses, gas chambers, thousands of emaciated adults. Denial gave way to revulsion.

And then Nuit et brouillard came out, in 1955, and more people saw some of what service members had seen, albeit at a much more comfortable distance.

Dwight Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Forces in Europe and future U.S. president, personally went to Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald and the first Nazi camp liberated by American troops. “I made the visit deliberately,” he cabled to Washington, “in order to be in position to give first-hand evidence of these things if ever, in the future, there develops a tendency to charge these allegations merely to ‘propaganda.’” Eisenhower then requested that members of Congress and prominent journalists be brought to the camps to see and document the horrors themselves. “I pray you to believe what I have said about Buchenwald,” the legendary CBS broadcaster Edward R. Murrow told his listeners after touring the camp. “I reported what I saw and heard, but only part of it. For most of it, I have no words.”

Two-thirds of Europe’s Jews had been murdered. American soldiers, drafted from across the United States, returned home bearing witness to what they had encountered. “Anti-Semitism was right there, it had been carried to the ultimate, and I knew that that was something we had to get rid of because I had experienced it,” Sergeant Leon Bass, a Black veteran whose segregated unit entered Buchenwald, later testified. In this way, the American people learned firsthand where rampant anti-Jewish prejudice led—and the country was transformed.

Though slowly, and never 100%.

Late last year, David Shor, one of the Democratic Party’s top data scientists, surveyed some 130,000 voters about whether they had a “favorable” or “unfavorable” opinion of Jewish people. Hardly anyone over the age of 70 said their view was unfavorable. More than a quarter of those under 25 did. The question is not whether America’s self-understanding is changing; it’s how far that change will go—and what the consequences will be.

Bad. They will be bad.

Selective sympathy and outrage.

Things President Donald Trump talked about publicly this week: Sylvester Stallone’s body, the $200 million ballroom he wants to build at the White House, receiving a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, not receiving a Kennedy Center lifetime achievement award and taking over the police force in the nation’s capital.

Something Trump hasn’t talked about: a gunman, upset by coronavirus vaccines, who on Aug. 8 killed a police officer while firing hundreds of bullets at the headquarters of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

…

A few weeks ago, within 15 hours of a shooting in New York in which four people were killed, Trump called the incident “tragic” and commended a police officer, one of the victims, for making the “the ultimate sacrifice.” But he’s gone nearly a week without acknowledging the death of David Rose, the Georgia police officer gunned down while protecting a federal agency’s headquarters from a gunman aiming to kill federal employees inside.

Well. You can see the problem. The federal agency in question was the CDC, and the whole idea of controlling disease is a liberal plot to corrupt Americans’ vital bodily fluids. A cop who protects the CDC is up to no good. Plus he wasn’t white.

More chat with Sturgeon:

“Nicola Sturgeon: Destroyer of women’s rights.”

That’s what JK Rowling wore on a t-shirt, which the author posted on social media in 2022, after Scotland attempted to pass a Gender Recognition Reform bill in an attempt to make legally transitioning an easier process.

Sturgeon says what Scotland attempted was not a “groundbreaking experiment” – with identical legislation already in place in the Republic of Ireland and many other countries.

But, Sturgeon admits, she was slow to recognise the intensity of the concerns about the legislation, because following other countries didn’t feel “controversial”. These “concerns”, from people such as Rowling, she adds were “unfounded” and could be easily answered.

“I didn’t properly engage,” she says.

Well yes they could be easily answered in the sense that she could just say “Your concerns are unfounded.” They could not be easily answered in the sense of explaining how and why making it official that some men are women would not destroy women’s rights. Yes it’s always possible to laugh the concerns off; no that doesn’t mean the concerns are bogus or wrong.

“When I realised it had become as divisive and polarised as it had, I should have paused and seen if we could find a different way of achieving the same outcome.”

But that “same outcome” is the problem. If you let men help themselves to women’s rights, then that’s the problem, and a different way of achieving it doesn’t make it not a problem.

Rowling’s hatred for Sturgeon continues to this day, with the Harry Potter author posting a damning critique of the former First Minister’s book, Frankly, on her personal blog after its release this year.

Is that hatred? Or is it perhaps a reasoned opinion of the book?

Despite this, Sturgeon says she harbours no ill will towards Rowling, and believes Rowling has “every right” to disagree with her views, especially due to her political position at the time.

“I don’t think that’s the same in reverse, but I am not accusing her of anything,” she says.

“If I have an issue with how JK Rowling goes about this debate, it’s that there does seem – at times – to be an attempt to be gratuitously cruel to trans people and I don’t think that’s warranted.”

What kind of cruel? You mean like disputing the demands and bullying and more demands emanating from the trans communinny? You mean failure to admire and flatter men like “Sophie Molly” and “India” Willoughby?

Also, Sturgeon should take a look at the cruelty directed at women by men like them.

“Most people want women’s rights to be protected and want trans rights to be protected,” Sturgeon says.

Yes but for the billionth time, when you define trans rights as men taking women’s rights, then that is not possible. You can’t protect women’s rights while allowing men to demolish them. It can’t be done.

“The one thing I believe really strongly, and I’m not going to just kind of change my mind on this, is that women’s rights and trans rights are not irreconcilable.”

Well then you’re admitting you’re an obstinate idiot. When trans rights=men can help themselves to women’s rights then the two are irreconcilable.

Uh………..

It’s the T shirt. It doesn’t show up very well. The tiny letters under the crossed-out names say “Dead Names – The 2025 list”

Geddit? Susie Green is calling for those five people to be killed.

Well at least we know he considered women subordinate and hence inferior.

And we want Taylor Swift on team America. We want you to leave the island of the wokeys. And we would welcome you with open arms. One of the reasons why so many people on the right have been just skeptical or at least a little bit negative on Taylor Swift is, up until this point, that’s not a great role model for young women, to wait all the way until you’re 35 and just put your career first.

Why? Why isn’t it? Do all women have to have children, whether they want to or not? Do all women have to have children long before they are 35? Do all women have to put their career second?

All kidding and sarcasm aside, this is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative. Engage in reality more and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge. 

Why? Why should she submit to her husband? Why can’t submission just be off the table entirely? Why can’t couples be equals instead of one boss and one submitter? Why can’t neither of them be “in charge”? Why can’t coupling up be completely separate from the boss/servant relationship? Why isn’t it better for adults to treat each other as equals instead of jockeying for boss over underling?

NPR tells us:

Wednesday at Utah Valley University was supposed to be the start of what Kirk was calling, “The American Comeback Tour.” It was slated to take him to nearly a dozen colleges, from Utah to Virginia, Minnesota to Louisiana.

This is what Kirk did often – he went to colleges across the country, holding court, casting doubt on liberalism and challenging anyone within shouting distance of a microphone to take to it and argue with him.

His conservative friends and followers describe Kirk as a Christian, a father and the nicest person they knew — someone who engaged in the “free marketplace of ideas,” as Johnson put it on CNN.

Kirk was provocative and often clips of his talks and arguments on campus or what he said on his podcast went viral, often stoking controversy.

For example, here is just a selection of some of those things Kirk said:

“White, college indoctrinated women will ruin America if we let them.”

“I’m sorry, if I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

“We should bring back the celebration of the M.R.S. degree.”

“Maybe one of the reasons that Taylor Swift has been so annoyingly liberal over the last couple of years is that she’s not yet married, and she doesn’t have children. … Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”

“It is so materially insane to think that 1 in 5 American women will be raped in their life … meaning that they’re lying about being raped, that they’re lying about being sexually assaulted. Like a fraternity guy and a sorority girl at age 19 hooking up, both five drinks in at 2 a.m. and all of a sudden, like, she removes consent. Yeah, like, that’s a murky, middle gray area.”

Of former TV personality Joy Reid, former first lady Michelle Obama, late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson: “They’re coming out, and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’ Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.”

Really?

He was a big fan of Donald Trump and he thought Michelle Obama is stupid? And he was happy to say so in public?

I wonder if it ever occurred to him that that kind of thing can inspire others to get violent. I wonder if he ever thought about the physical safety of Michelle Obama and Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Originally a comment by Mike Haubrich on Imbalance.

As someone who knows people on the same list of targets as the Hortmans and the Hoffmans, I do find this dispiriting, and the national government response of a half-mast flag at the Federal Buildings is a reminder of the lack of concern that the President had, choosing to golf rather than attend the funeral or even to visit when Melissa Hortman was lying in state, to be a reminder that the government is in the hands of people whose grief is dependent on the dead’s political persuasion. The RW conspiracy mongers who claimed that the murders were a result of Hortman voting for a budget deal that Republicans also voted for, and the governor ordered a “hit” on her, have never apologized or acknowledged that the murderer was a right wing crusader who had decided to be a John Brown.

And while there were a number of lefties who celebrated the death of Kirk, it’s a reminder that there are assholes everywhere and it’s not dependent on what your political views are. I have seen a whole bunch of righties declare that this sample is proof that the left are terrorists who want to kill people for their political views.

He did not espouse “Free Speech,” he espoused “Me Speech,” as Thomas Zimmer notes in this article:

The signature “contribution” of Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded as a teenager, is the “Professor Watchlist,” a website TPUSA runs. It serves to enable a McCarthyist hunt for “leftists” so that they can be publicly disparaged; once a professor is on the list, harassment, intimidation, and threat are guaranteed to follow. Kirk existed in a rightwing media and online eco system that runs on anger and monetizes outrage. And he was very good at his job, constantly telling his audience what new devious plot “the Left” was pursuing to take America away from “real Americans.” In the process, he propagated basically any rightwing conspiracy theory that has emerged over the past few years: the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Covid disinformation, Great Replacement… all combined with a hefty dose of bigoted white grievance. How much of what he preached did he *actually* believe, about the leftist conspiracies and dangerous “woke” domination? It’s unlikely even he knew. In significant ways, Kirk was the face of a New Right that is not “conservative,” certainly not in the colloquial sense, but devoted to permanent radical culture war.

And there is this undeniable set of observations by Zimmer:

All strands of the Right – Republican elected officials, the media machine, the reactionary intellectual sphere, the conservative base – have been embracing rightwing vigilante violence in an increasingly aggressive fashion. They have openly encouraged white militants to use whatever force they please to “fight back” against anything and anyone associated with “the Left” by protecting and glorifying those who have engaged in vigilante violence coded as rightwing – call it the Kyle Rittenhouse dogma, or the Daniel Perry dogma, or the Daniel Penny dogma, or the Ashli Babbitt dogma. The fundamental reality of American politics is that anyone who opposes Trump – politicians, judges, election officials, anyone – faces an avalanche of violent threat.

There is simply no equivalent to this among leaders of the Democratic Party or the influential circles of the institutionalized Left. It has become dogma on the Right to view the Democratic Party as a fundamentally illegitimate faction that must not be allowed to govern; that a nefarious, radically anti-American “Left” has taken over all the institutions of American life and desires to destroy the nation; that there is no room for restraint or compromise with the “enemy within”; that all measures, regardless of how extreme, are justified and indeed necessary in this struggle for the very survival of “real America.” That is what Donald Trump and the leaders of the Republican Party have been propagating relentlessly. That is how rightwing intellectuals have been portraying the political conflict. And that is also what rightwing media activists like Charlie Kirk have been telling their audience.

They really do consider us to be traitors, and while the Democrats do have this inexplicable devotion to trans ideology, there is nothing on the scale of hatred towards us that can be considered an equivalent from the Democrats. A government that honors Ashli Babbit and gives her family $5 million for wrongful death is not the friend of freedom nor liberty, and Kirk was a driver of that ideology. We are talking about someone who wanted single-party rule, not free speech.

Golly. I just learned that (some? many?) UK universities have a “gender expression fund”.

UCL is one.

Many people experience feelings of stress and anxiety at the disconnect they feel between their gender identity and appearance. We have created the Gender Expression Fund to provide financial assistance for students to purchase items that will make them more comfortable with their gender presentation and, we hope, improve their wellbeing.

Grants can be used to purchase gender affirming products such as clothing, binders, packers and beauty products.

Grants can also be used towards travel to medical or therapy/counselling appointments, but we are not able to provide funding for treatment or other medical procedures.

We anticipate grants will usually be around £50, but in expectational [sic] circumstances may be up to a maximum of £100.

Oh why bother. Just ask everyone to pitch in an old unwanted skirt or bra or lipstick. Ask Mummy to share. Convert a pillowcase into a blouse. Be creative. If you can pretend to be the other sex you can surely pretend that your trainers are actually catch me-fuck me shoes.

Sure enough, they’re Reichstag Firing it already.

[Utah Governor] Cox’s impulse to appeal to what Abraham Lincoln called the “better angels of our nature” was on display this morning in a press conference, where, flanked by FBI Director Kash Patel and local leaders, he announced the arrest of Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Kirk’s killing, on Wednesday.

“This is certainly about the tragic death, political assassination of Charlie Kirk. But it is also much bigger than an attack on an individual,” Cox said. “It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals. This cuts to the very foundation of who we are, of who we have been, and who we could be in better times.”

This kind of language was once common among mainstream politicians responding to a tragedy; now Cox is a notable and praiseworthy outlier in his own party. Trump’s response has been mercurial. At times, the president has seemed to call for a calm, measured reaction to the shooting. “He was an advocate of nonviolence,” Trump said of Kirk on Thursday. “That’s the way I’d like to see people respond.” In the next breath, however, he cast blame and demanded forceful reprisal. During Cox’s remarks this morning, the governor seemed almost to be trying to speak to Trump—or at least to those who might be swayed by his rhetoric.

“We have radical-left lunatics out there, and we just have to beat the hell out of them,” Trump said yesterday…“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” Trump said in a brief speech Wednesday night, “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.”

In other words his administration will “go after” anyone it feels like, regardless of facts or evidence or the law or any other inhibiting reality.

This morning on Fox & Friends, Trump told the hosts, “I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime.” He added: “The radicals on the left are the problem. And they’re vicious, and they’re horrible, and they’re politically savvy.”

That’s the US head of state talking. I know it sounds like a drunk 13-year-old but it’s not, it’s the guy with the nuclear codes.

But if Cox and Trump represent two rival impulses within the Republican coalition, Trump is undoubtedly winning. “Democrats own what happened today,” Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said on Wednesday. “Y’all caused this,” Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida told Democrats on the House floor. “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization,” the influential Trump adviser Laura Loomer posted on X. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”

So it’s time for a one-party state.