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.

Don’t mention the women.

It was predictable that August in Edinburgh would see a flare-up of the gender wars. Scottish politics has been pivotal in the UK-wide battle over gender self-identification, and the issue has come up at the Edinburgh festival before. Probably no one would have expected the National Library of Scotland to be the battlefield. But when a bestselling gender-critical anthology, The Women Who Wouldn’t Wheesht, was excluded from a centenary exhibition, that is what happened.

Trying to make the women who wouldn’t wheesht wheesht is a fool’s errand. They told you they wouldn’t wheesht!!

Its editors, Lucy Hunter Blackburn and Susan Dalgety, were already upset when they learned that their book had not been chosen for the Dear Library exhibition. They had not been invited to appear at the Edinburgh book festival either – despite their big-name contributors and hot topic. So they put in a freedom of information request. When it revealed that their book had received four nominations from members of the public, before being rejected at the urging of an LGBTQ+ staff network, they complained.

Last week’s result, after a pointed intervention by Index on Censorship, was an apology and a U-turn. Blackburn, a former civil servant, said it had been “emotional”, and that she would now tell her 97-year-old mother, a retired bookseller, all about it.

This perhaps sounds tame compared with the Irish writer Graham Linehan’s arrest at Heathrow by armed officers, and the row about the policing of tweets that followed.

Nah, it doesn’t, because it’s all the same thing. None of it is tame; all of it is aimed at silencing women entirely.

Blackburn and Dalgety were ignored not only by Edinburgh’s book festival. They have not been invited to any book festivals at all. Nor has Jenny Lindsay, the Scottish author of Hounded, which describes how she was driven out of her career as a poet and arts programmer due to her gender-critical views. There are more than 100 literary festivals in the UK each year, and big ones such as Edinburgh’s feature hundreds of authors.

I was invited to three literary festivals, and am lucky to be able to write about these issues in the Guardian. But I have also been snubbed. Last year the Conway Hall in London refused a booking for a launch of my book, and complaints to other venues where I was appearing were stressful and upsetting.

That’s the goal. Punish women for existing. Needle needle needle. Get all the institutions to tell us to shut up.

Jenny Murray points out an important distinction.

At last, evidence of a bout of common sense in relation to the policing of tweets. Sir Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, said this week that non-crime hate incidents should be scrapped and that officers must separate ‘the offensive from the criminal’.

If follows Met Police chief Sir Mark Rowley’s comments that he will talk to new Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood about a proposed change in the law meaning police officers would not be required to record and investigate complaints about tweets unless it is clear the suspect intended real harm and violence.

She notes that this is obviously prompted by what the cops did to Glinner last week.

The tweet may not have been in the best possible taste, but there was certainly a marked contrast between the police response to Linehan’s words and their response to the violent threats meted out by trans activists against women they call TERFS (Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists) like me. While Linehan was arrested, the trans activists making frightening threats to me simply got away with it.

That certainly was a marked contrast, and we’ve been dealing with it for years. The police would never ever lift so much as an eyebrow at abuse and threats aimed at women on social media, but men who pretend to be women are a whole other story.

Why is that exactly? Why do the police see women as so much worthless garbage and men who pretend to be women as infinitely valuable?

As someone who has spent their life championing women’s rights, I have long been appalled by the impact of the Stonewall campaign which pushed trans rights to the detriment of women’s rights. I was not prepared to have breastfeeding dubbed ‘chestfeeding’ or trans women described as real women.

Neither did I want to work for an organisation – the BBC – so seduced by Stonewall that it asked us to put our pronouns on our emails. I didn’t want men with a penis, dressed in a frock and a wig, invading spaces reserved for women. I was determined that young teenage girls should not be encouraged to believe they had been born into the wrong body, to be given potentially dangerous, irreversible drugs and have their breasts cut off.

In 2017, I accepted a commission to write an opinion piece for The Sunday Times in which I insisted that while trans people should be treated with respect, they must also respect women and acknowledge that they were not the same as us. No matter how they dressed, they had no experience of what it meant to be a woman. They would never have a period, they could never become pregnant, their medical needs would never be the same as ours. They must not describe themselves as women but as trans women.

Friends had told me my career would be damaged by expressing my strongly held beliefs. I thought I didn’t care. The defence and protection of women and girls was at the centre of work I had done for most of my life. But my friends were right about the backlash.

First came transgender newsreader India Willoughby demanding that I should be sacked by the BBC. I wasn’t sacked, but was banned from discussing the debate on air. More tweets followed with India calling me a nasty cow and far worse. Then the threats from her acolytes began. ‘History has its eyes on you, those who dehumanise us might want to consider where they’re standing,’ wrote one.

Then came endless promises that I would be raped or murdered, leaving me genuinely worried for my safety.

So, again, why are the police on Team Trans Women and not on Team Women? Why does none of the above cause the police to question their choices?

Oh honestly. The levels of spite and petty malice here.

By an unhappy coincidence, the Polari Prize nonsense blew up the following day and, from my very first reply, my messages over the next 6 weeks were completely ignored, as were messages from my agent.

This morning, under threat of legal action, they finally deigned to respond, simply informing me that they were withdrawing the award.

How any organisation can say that my “insistence on empathy, justice, and authenticity is more vital than ever”, that I “confront uncomfortable truths with courage”, and that for “college students navigating questions of identity, belonging, and ethical responsibility, your work is not only moving, it is essential” and then rescind their prize when I demonstrate those very qualities is baffling.

Their cowardice is disappointing, but at least gives me another opportunity to be clear:

Awards are ultimately meaningless. The books matter. Readers matter. And if using one’s platform to defend the rights of women, children, lesbians and gay men means that some plaque doesn’t end up on my wall… well, I won’t be losing any sleep over it.

I’m staggered by the childish pettiness of not answering for all these weeks.

Trans ideology really is some kind of corrosive substance that eats the brain.

I’m seeing a lot of grief and anguish for Charlie Kirk on the left.

You know what I didn’t see? The same kind or amount of grief and anguish for Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark, not on the right and not even on the left.

Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed, and state Sen. John Hoffman and his wife were wounded in politically motivated shootings early Saturday, Gov. Tim Walz said. Authorities have also identified a suspect who is still at large.

Why the difference?

Now if only we could have done that.

Bolsonaro found guilty of plotting coup

Four out of the five Supreme Court justices tasked with judging the former leader found him guilty. One judge voted to acquit him.

The 70-year-old has been convicted of leading a conspiracy aimed at keeping him in power after he lost the 2022 election to his left-wing rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.

While the plot failed to enlist enough support from the military to go ahead, it did culminate in the storming of government buildings by Bolsonaro’s supporters on 8 January 2023, the justices found.

Sound familiar at all?

The charges carry heavy sentences and could add up to a prison term of more than 40 years. The justices have begun with the sentencing.

Casting the decisive vote, Justice Cármen Lúcia said on Thursday that Bolsonaro had triggered the “insurgency” of 8 January 2023, when thousands of his supporters vandalised the Supreme Court, the presidential palace, and Congress.

She found him guilty on all the five charges: attempting to stage a coup, leading an armed criminal organisation, attempted violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, and two more charges related to the damage of property during the storming of buildings in Brasília on 8 January 2023.

Why couldn’t we do that? How did we manage to let him get away with it and then re-elect him?

Justice Lúcia compared the attempted coup to a “virus”, which, if left to fester, can kill the society in which it has taken hold in.

Can confirm.

Couldn’t happen to a nastier guy.

DC has shelved its Red Hood comic book series following writer Gretchen Felker-Martin sharing posts on Bluesky that joked about the shooting of Charlie Kirk, who was killed by an assassin’s bullet Wednesday.

“Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie Kirk,” read one post. “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch,” read another by Felker-Martin. The writer is trans, while Kirk was known for his anti-trans stance. Felker-Martin’s Bluesky account is now deactivated, but those posts were screenshotted and widely spread before DC canceled the series.

To refresh your memories of Felker-Martin’s novel that had JK Rowling sadistically murdered:

A horror novel by a transgender author that features the death of JK Rowling has been branded “vile, misogynistic drivel”.

Manhunt, by Gretchen Felker-Martin, follows two transgender women’s battle for survival in a post-apocalyptic world in which they face threats from murderous “terfs” (trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and a virus that turns people with a certain level of testosterone into zombies.

As well as naming Rowling, who has been accused of transphobia and received death threats over her stance on gender, the novel features a warship called the Galbraith, which appears tobe a reference to Robert Galbraith, the pseudonym Rowling uses for her Cormoran Strike novels. In Manhunt, Rowling reportedly dies in a fire in a Scottish castle.

Hur hur hur. Art for art’s sake, yeah?

H/t Mostly Cloudy

The San Francisco Chronicle points out:

The reaction of Second Amendment absolutists and their enablers to the slaying of conservative activist Charlie Kirk Wednesday during his rally at Utah Valley University was as predictable as it was dangerous.

In a moment that begged for calm and unity, Democrats — even those who loathed Kirk politically — offered condolences and railed against political violence. Meanwhile, Republicans, who control Congress and the White House (and, let’s face it, the Supreme Court) were much less likely to condemn political violence, and none suggested they should pursue gun safety measures…

Kirk himself was prone to inflame tensions in the wake of tragic violence. “Having an armed citizenry comes with a price,” he once told his followers days after a horrific mass shooting.

Yes, letting people freely shlep guns around does indeed come with a price, and quite a steep one.

Live by the sword…

What is the result of this having the Second Amendment?

It’s an exceptionally high level of gun deaths.

Nearly 47,000 people died of gun-related injuries in the United States in 2023, according to the latest available statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). While the number of gun deaths in the U.S. fell for the second consecutive year, it remained among the highest annual totals on record.

…

In 2023, the most recent year for which complete data is available, 46,728 people died from gun-related injuries, according to the CDC. That figure includes gun murders and gun suicides, along with three less common types of gun-related deaths the CDC tracks: those that involved law enforcement, those that were accidental, and those whose circumstances could not be determined.

…

How does the gun death rate in the U.S. compare with other countries?

The gun death rate in the U.S. is much higher than in most other nations, particularly developed nations.

Is it worth the cost?

Belief in magic gender is mandatory in The New Party.

Gender-critical MPs have “no place” in Jeremy Corbyn’s new hard-Left party, his co-founder has said.

Zarah Sultana, who was suspended by Labour last year and quit the party last month, said there was “no room” in the party for people who don’t have “pro-trans” values amid an escalating transgender row between party hopefuls.

What is “hard left” about believing in magic gender? It’s not hard left or soft left or any kind of left at all. It’s just dumb.

“Ms Sultana told the Pod Save the UK podcast on Tuesday: “If people don’t have pro-trans, pro-migrant, anti-racist values, there are plenty of other political spaces you can enter but not this one.”

Why? How is anti-racist connected to pro-trans ideology? I specify trans ideology because that’s the issue here. It’s not a matter of saying “we get to be mean to people who claim to be trans”; it’s matter of saying trans ideology is a bad new religion. There’s nothing lefty about it, unless you think worship of self-indulgent fantasies at the expense of reality is lefty. (To be fair, lots of lefties apparently do think exactly that.)

Sultana continues:

“Because we have to have our values, we have to let people know what we stand for. We have to defend the rights, life and dignity of everyone, and that means centring the most marginalised.”

Not necessarily. It doesn’t mean centering murderers or torturers or rapists. Some types of people are marginalized for good reasons.

“There is no room for socially conservative views in a Left-wing party, period.”

Ah but now explain how you define “socially conservative views”. Is it really socially conservative to be aware that men are not women? If it is, how can feminism exist at all? If everyone is a woman if he/she says so, then feminism becomes an empty category, because women can just identify into having more rights.

Originally a comment by maddog on A red line for the Greens.

Trans people have been massively targeted over the past few years, entirely wrongly, by a great number of people, and they just want to go and live their lives.

T have not been “massively targeted.” The entire T enterprise is a literally massive targeting of women, gay men, and lesbians, and of children that they can groom to their cause. T also ” massively target” anyone who supports women, gay men and lesbians, or who opposes the mutilation of children for a false ideology.

To the extent T have been “targeted,” it’s entirely rightly, because it’s simply false that men can be women or that women can be men.

They manifestly do not “just want to go and live their lives.” What a joke! No, they want to interfere in the lives of everyone, everywhere, at all times. If they simply wanted to live their lives, then they would cross-dress however felt comfortable to them, go to their jobs, shop for groceries, care for their children, do household chores and repairs, etc., and so on, and just live their same boring lives as they had before. They would recognize that they can’t change their sex, and the men would leave the women alone, not pushing their way into everything belonging to women. They don’t want to “just go and live their lives”; they want to run and control the lives of every single person in the world. They’re megalomaniacal in that way. “Just go and live their lives,” my foot. Do that, leave everyone else alone, and all the “targeting” would magically disappear.

It is a matter of basic human decency in some cases as well, and having that and having empathy for people who have been marginalised and targeted, who just want to exist in public spaces.

You’ve described the women’s position to a T (pun intended). Where is the human decency for women? Why do T and their supporters never have an ounce of empathy for women, children, G, and L? Why are they wholeheartedly committed to marginalizing, if not wholly erasing, women, lesbians, gay men, and anyone who knows that sex is real? Why are they trying to obliterate women, L, and G from all public spaces? Every protestation is an admission of what they themselves are doing. The gaslighting is strong in this one.

Is this the new Reichstag fire? I think we can be pretty sure it won’t go well for Team Not Crazy.

Though no motive has been disclosed, the circumstances of the shooting fueled concerns that it was part of a spike of political violence that has cut across the political spectrum.

Well of course it is; what else would it be? Violent and political but not part of the spike in political violence? How would that work? I do wish journalism could skip the meaningless banalities.

Kirk was a regular presence on cable TV, where he leaned into the culture wars and heaped praise on the then-president. Trump and his son were equally effusive and often spoke at Turning Point conferences.

Bad moon rising.