They just can't quit their dream of turning my party into a Joe Manchin joint,
where any former Bush administration goofball or war criminal would feel
perfectly comfortable coming in, kicking their shoes off, putting their feet
up and ordering us lowly Liberals to fetch 'em beer and a sammich.
Because really, what else are we good for?
And don't kid yourself. There's plenty of money out there for that project, and that money is
bankrolling plenty of Centrist Democrats who think this is a terrific
idea.
A number of employees in a range of industries, as well as in academia,
are finding themselves in hot water over remarks they made about Kirk's
death or his political beliefs.
PHNX Sports, an online sports news site focused on Arizona, announced the
firing of reporter Gerald Bourguet after he said on social media on
Wednesday, in a since-deleted post, that "Refusing to mourn a life devoted
to that cause is not the same thing as celebrating gun violence."
"Truly don't care if you think it's insensitive or poor timing to decline
to respect an evil man who died," he added.
Bourguet declined to comment when reached by CBS News.
MSNBC said it cut ties with analyst Matthew Dowd after he said in an
on-air conversation that Kirk had pushed incendiary speech and that
"hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful
actions." In a public statement, Comcast accused Dowd of making "an
unacceptable and insensitive comment about this horrific event."
"That coverage was at odds with fostering civil dialogue and being
willing to listen to the points of view of those who have differing
opinions. We should be able to disagree, robustly and passionately, but,
ultimately, with respect. We need to do better," Comcast executives
said.
Dowd, the former chief strategist for Republican President George W.
Bush, apologized in a Substack post on Friday, saying he hadn't meant to
imply Kirk was to blame for the violence that killed him, the AP reported.
But Dowd, a long-time political analyst at ABC News before joining MSNBC
in 2022, also accused the network of caving to pressure to fire
him.
"The right wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of
platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob," he wrote on Substack. "Even
though most at MSNBC knew my words were being misconstrued, the timing of
my words forgotten ... and that I apologized for any miscommunication on
my part, I was terminated by the end of the day."
Also in the media industry, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said
in a Substack post Monday that the company dismissed her last week after
she spoke out "against political violence, racial double standards, and
America's apathy toward guns," noting that she only referred to Kirk once
in a separate social media post.
A spokesperson for the Washington Post declined to comment to CBS News on
personnel matters...
Reminds me of nothing so much as the CEO United Way hard-sell that I used to
run across back in my days working in the private sector. The question
was never "if", but always "How much?". Sometimes it was strongly
implied, sometimes it was more explicit, but always it was clear
what was expected of you if you wanted to keep your job.
Probably time to remind the what it means to work in an "at will" state.
"There are very few places besides The Bulwark that have been committed
to sounding the alarm about right-wing domestic terrorism, about Trump and
the MAGA movement and their... and the kind of violent tendencies that
he's stoking." -- Tim Miller, The Bulwark podcast, September 12, 2025
"Sacajawea carried a baby on her back all the way to the Pacific Ocean.
And somewhere, that baby thinks he discovered America."
-- Bert Cooper, Mad Men.
And Tim Miller is that baby.
If I looked for a month I don't think I could find a clearer or more succinct
example of how completely the Never Trumpers have erased the long history of
the Left's critique of the Right than Tim Miller's offhand,
self-congratulatory remark about "sounding the alarm".
Hundreds of Liberal writers and bloggers were sounding the alarm about the
dangerous trajectory of the Republican Party back when Tim Miller was bopping
through the halls of Regis Jesuit High School rocking out to Ricky Martin and
Jamiroquai. But because the existence of a vast body of urgent,
accurate, detailed pre-Trump analysis of the trajectory of the Republican
Party would fuck up Never Trumper claims that, A) no one coulda seen
this coming and, B) they and only they were the first and boldest
humans to ever stand athwart the
GOP's Pretty Hate Machine
and shout stop...all of those millions of words spilled by Liberals in the
deeply unpopular cause of warning the nation about where Republican madness
was taking us is just ... disappeared.
Gone.
Bulldozed down the Memory Hole and paved over.
And so, in aid of once again transgressing conservatism's #1 rule -- No Fair
Remembering Stuff -- here's a little history for whoever at
The Bulwark has the duty of monitoring this little blog 'o mine on the
downlow.
David Neiwert is an American freelance journalist and blogger. He received
the National Press Club Award for Distinguished Online Journalism in 2000
for a domestic terrorism series he produced for MSNBC's website. Neiwert has
concentrated in part on extremism in the Northwest.
...He went to work at MSNBC in 1996 as a writer-producer, where
he continued through late 2000. Since then, he has focused on writing books
and producing his blog Orcinus, which tends to report on the crossover
between the mainstream and the far right.
The Northwest Progressive Institute named its annual awards to the region's
best liberal bloggers after Neiwert. He edited the political blog Crooks And
Liars from 2008 to 2012. As of 2018, Neiwert worked with the Southern
Poverty Law Center as their Pacific Northwest correspondent.
In January 2019, Neiwert left the SPLC blog Hatewatch to join Daily Kos as a
correspondent...
The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit
legal advocacy organization specializing in civil rights and public interest
litigation. Based in Montgomery, Alabama, it is known for its legal cases
against white supremacist groups, for its classification of hate groups and
other extremist organizations, and for promoting tolerance education
programs.: 1500 The SPLC was founded by Morris Dees, Joseph J. Levin Jr.,
and Julian Bond in 1971 as a civil rights law firm in Montgomery.
Since the 2000s, the SPLC's classification and listings of hate groups
(organizations that "attack or malign an entire class of people, typically
for their immutable characteristics") and anti-government extremists have
been widely relied upon by academic and media sources...
You may also remember that, way back during Before Time, the Department of
Homeland Security published a report entitled,
“Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling
Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”. Which, if you were on the left and had been paying any attention at
all to American politics for the past few decades, came as no surprise.
And if you were on the Right, it was an occasion to completely freak out and
set the howling dogs of conservative media on those DHS commies who
concocted this obvious Lefty propaganda. Here's a sample:
Michelle Malkin: “One of the most embarrassingly shoddy pieces of
propaganda I'd ever read out of DHS.” (Newsweek)
Also Michelle Malkin: “A piece of crap report that serves as a sweeping
indictment of conservatives.” (CBS News)
House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH): “To characterize men and women
returning home after defending our country as potential terrorists is
offensive and unacceptable.”
Matt Lewis : “This is almost unbelievable. The message is simple: If you are
a conservative, you might be dangerous…” (Townhall)
Resistance hero Bill Kristol dismissed it as “Juvenile.” (Salon)
Rep. Gus Bilirakis (R-Fla.):“I am
disturbed and personally offended by the Department of Homeland Security's
view that returning military veterans and gun owners are likely to commit
terrorist acts.” (PolitiFact)
Lance Fairchok: “The Homeland Security Assessment targeting mainstream
conservatism was amateurish, poorly written and its logic absurdly shallow.”
(American Thinker)
Richard Thompson: “This is not an intelligence report but a diatribe
against those who oppose the policies of the Obama administration. It is a
declaration of war against the American people and our constitution.”
(Thomas More Law Center)
Although they should have expected it, defenders of DHS's findings were still
caught flat-footed by the Right's coordinated and aggressive attacks, pointing
out that the report was basically just ... math. The findings were
nothing more or less than a narrative explanation of statistics collected by
law enforcement and run through spreadsheets and charts and such. From
Daryl Johnson (former DHS analyst) in WIRED:
“It was an extremely frustrating time, to see conservatives and media folks
taking the report out of context and misinterpreting it.”
Shoulda asked literally any Liberal bloggers, Daryl. We coulda warned
you that this is always the way the Right reacts to facts it
disapproves of. It's why they lost their mind when Barack Obama was
elected. It's why they nominated Donald Trump three times, and elected
him twice.
So, what poisonous fruit was born out of the Right's massed attack on DHS's
pre-Trump warning about "Rightwing Extremism"?
DHS official whose early warning about militias was rebuffed speaks out
about Jan. 6
More than ten years ago, a report written by a Department of Homeland
Security official warning about the resurgence of right-wing extremism
caused outrage among conservatives and some veterans groups across the
country.
Titled "Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate
Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment," the report was met
with harsh criticism from officials including then-House Minority Leader
John Boehner, who accused the agency of not focusing on the "real
threats," like Islamist terrorism.
The internal study singled out white supremacists and warned that
veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan could be targeted for
recruitment by right-wing extremists. But due to the ensuing political
backlash, the DHS caved to pressure and dismantled the unit that had
published the report -- and all work connected to analyzing and tracking
the rise of violent right-wing extremism was halted.
Now, on the anniversary of the day that right-wing militia members helped
storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Daryl Johnson, the DHS official
who wrote the report, says he and his team could "have repelled against
the growth and the radicalization of [extremist] movements."
"We could've helped stem the tide and growth," Johnson told ABC News in
an interview for the new ABC News documentary "Homegrown: Standoff to
Rebellion," which charts the rise of the anti-government movements at the
center of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol...
Johnson said the formation of groups and movements like the Tea Party
"serve as a breeding ground and a recruitment pool for more hardline
extremists" like the Oath Keepers and Three Percenters, dozens of whose
members were present on Jan.6.
"These two movements started getting more organized as their membership
grew," said Johnson, "and they started actively participating in protest
activity, organizing rallies."...
Johnson's DHS report, which was leaked to conservative media, was meant
for law enforcement so they could "be prepared for the threat within,"
Johnson explained.
"And just like a disease or something of harm in our own bodies, this
threat metastasized over time," said Johnson. "Year after year, the cancer
and the virus spread within the body of America, to the point where we're
now in a critical life-or-death situation."
In April, a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by the Center for
Strategic and International Studies revealed a growing threat from
homegrown terrorism, with right-wing extremist attacks and plots "greatly
eclipsing those from the far left and causing more death."
And that’s the bitter irony.
Long before The Bulwark rebranded clear-eyed observation and common sense as some kind of uniquely Never
Trumper superpower of insight and bravery, Liberals, journalists, watchdog groups, and even
DHS itself were documenting, warning, and pleading with America to take
right-wing extremism seriously. Those warnings were mocked, buried, or
attacked until the threat metastasized into the open violence of January 6th.
So when Tim Miller congratulates The Bulwark for “sounding the alarm,” what he’s
really doing is standing on the rubble of a memory hole his own movement dug
-- pretending to discover a country that others had already mapped, at great
cost, long before he ever showed up.
Illinois Freedom Caucus seeks Pritzker’s removal from office over
‘vile’ rhetoric
Yes, we have our very own, Illinois legislature "Freedom Caucus", because
"fascist see, fascist do".
The Illinois Freedom Caucus has filed articles of impeachment against
Gov. JB Pritzker over “vile comments” made against Republicans.
The eastern Illinois Republicans are furious with Pritzker’s response
to the assassination of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk.
Pritzker expressed sympathy for Kirk and his family while condemning
political violence at an unrelated event Wednesday. However, the
Democrat said President Donald Trump ignites this type of violence.
“We saw the shootings, the killings in Minnesota. We’ve seen other
political violence occur in other states,” Pritzker said. “I would just
say, it’s got to stop. I think there are people fomenting it in this
country. I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it.”
That's what our governor, J.B. Pritzker said. Simple.
Clear. Factual.
But because they wear the Special Glasses --
-- this is what local MAGA nitwits heard:
Republicans have criticized Pritzker’s increased attacks on the GOP
over recent years, including a speech where Pritzker said Republicans
cannot know a moment of peace earlier this spring. Many are upset that
Pritzker blamed their party’s leader for the rise in violence following
Kirk’s death.
“For him to say these things for political gain is unacceptable,” said
Rep. Adam Niemerg (R-Dieterich). “That’s what this is all about. This is
about political gain for radical Democrats and pushing a woke narrative.
They can’t amount to anything to get that done, including assassinating
conservatives at college campuses.”
"Political gain"? Check.
"Radical Democrats"? Check.
"Woke narrative"? Check
They really are just reprogrammable meatbags.
Niemerg and Rep. Chris Miller (R-Hindsboro) told WAND News they know
Democrats have no desire to impeach Pritzker. They argued that other
Illinois Democrats are complicit in the governor’s actions.
“Just the rhetoric is nonstop about being Nazis and about being
fascists,” Miller said. “That includes people like me. I’m a farmer from
downstate Illinois. I’m about the farthest thing from a Nazi that you
will ever see. It’s extremely inflammatory to me personally and also my
family and all the things we stand for.”
What's exactly is the difference between someone who is a member of a
fascist political party, who votes for fascist, votes
with fascists, who helped nominate a fascist for president three
times and got him elected twice ... and a fascist? Sounds an awful
lot like being just a little bit pregnant.
Also, Fun Fact: Chris Miller, leader of the state-level Illinois Freedom Caucus is the husband of Mary "Nazi" Miller, who regularly disgraces herself and embarrasses the state as the representative from Illinois' 15th congressional district, which, at a rating of Batshit+20, is Illinois most conservative district.
Here is more of what governor Pritzker actually said:
Pritzker said no one in this country should have to fear gun violence,
whether they’re in class in high school or attending an event on a
college campus. The Pritzker administration reiterated that the governor
condemned the shooting that killed Charlie Kirk and believes political
violence should never become the norm.
And here is the predictable Illinois Republican Freedom Caucus freakout:
“Just two nights ago, I called for the governor to resign frankly over
his terrible comments blaming Trump and Jan. 6 for Charlie Kirk’s
political assassination,” Niemerg said. “The governor has shown that he
is not capable of leading. He has shown that he needs to be removed from
office, and that needs to happen immediately.”
Because the only law these elected Jukes and
Kallikaks
believe applies to them is Murc's Law.
“Murc’s Law” [was] named after a commenter at the blog Lawyers, Guns,
and Money who noticed years ago the habitual assumption among the
punditry that Republican misbehavior can only be caused by Democrats. Do
Republicans reject climate science? Must be because Democrats failed to
persuade them! Did Republicans pass unpopular tax cuts for the rich?
Must be that Democrats didn’t do enough to guide them to better choices!
Do Republicans keep voting for lunatics and fascists? It must be the
fault of Democrats for being mean to them! Even D____ T____’s election
was widely blamed on Democrats — who voted against him, to be clear — on
the bizarre grounds that Barack Obama should have rolled over and just
let Mitt Romney win in 2012.
So, has this ludicrous, stumblebum circus made any forward progress in the
past few days? Well, if you define "progress" in the broadest
possible terms, and measure it in micrometers, I suppose it has.
Pritzker’s rhetoric sparks impeachment calls from Illinois
conservatives
As you know, we here at the driftglass blog love a good rhetoric sparking
that leads to calls for things. Tell me more, World's Greatest
Network!
Sadly it's mostly retreads of what we already know ... except this.
Using the opening three paragraphs to execute what we in the trade call
the ol' "A.P. Stylebook eyeroll".
Amidst a debate over how to quell political violence in America,
Illinois elected leaders from both sides of the aisle are calling for a
change in tone.
Hey, both sides agree that tones should be changed. Isn't that
great!
In the aftermath of the fatal shooting of activist Charlie Kirk,
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker has called for the country to come
together to end political violence.
And the governor is leading the way. Isn't that terrific!
And then, the eyeroll, which I will highlight for your elucidation...
But the Illinois House Freedom Caucus, comprised of conservative
state lawmakers,
accuses the governor of inciting violence. The group brought articles of
impeachment against Pritzker, citing various statements made by the
Democratic Party, including remarks in New Hampshire back in April.
The article continues:
Illinois State Rep. Adam Niemerg (R-Dieterich) further explained the
motivation behind the Illinois House Freedom Caucus.
“We’ve proceeded with Articles of Impeachment against Governor
Pritzker for his own hateful rhetoric, as well as no safety and
security here in the state of Illinois,” Niemerg said...
Republicans also criticized Pritzker for statements made during his
February State of the State address.
“The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group
of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your
problems. If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too
soon, consider this: It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two
days, eight hours, and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional
republic,” Pritzker said...
Niemerg said Pritzker is attempting to do a bureaucratic shuffle.
“He’s trying to act like his hateful rhetoric has not been heard by
the radical left,” Niemerg added.
Then, in the last paragraph, comes the little touch that makes it
art. The article covering what everyone knows is time-wasting
garbage conjured into existence by the dregs at the bottom of the
Illinois MAGA barrel is bookended by another A.P.
Stylebook eyeroll, which I have highlighted for your edification:
The Articles of Impeachment are unlikely to move forward, as the
Democratic supermajority in Springfield would need to agree to bring the
bill to the floor.
Also worth noting is that the GOP leadership did not introduce the
measure.
Scientists have long pondered the question:
"Is Chuck Todd as big a 'Both Sides Do It' hack as he appeared to be when he
had the big chair on Meet the Press, or was he performing the part of a Both
Sides Do It hack on Meet the Press because that's what NBC executives
require of anyone who sits in that chair?"
Sadly this question seemed doomed to remain a topic of mere idle armchair
speculation, with scientists spending their lunch breaks arguing one side of
the question and then swapping around and arguing the other (you know how
scientists are) because there was insufficient funding available to build the
extremely sensitive equipment that would be required to settle the matter.
And then, one day last week, on local radio, right here in Springfield,
Illinois, the matter was settled when Chuck Todd dropped by the Patrick
Pfingsten show on WMAY to remove all doubt.
A thing to know about Mr. Pfingsten is that he is, in his own words,
"a conservative who's a former Republican" who, like so many other Never Trumpers who got run out of their own party but
cannot abide admitting that, far from being the dirty, commie, America-hating,
terrorist-loving, baby-killing caricatures his party made us out to be,
we on the Left are, in fact, the only group who have been right about the
Right all along.
And so Mr. Pfingsten has taken up residence in the mighty fortress of "Both
Sides Do It" about which we had a long chat one post ago. You should
also know that the station where Mr. Pfingsten works also syndicates Brian
Kilmeade and Clay Travis, so put a pin in that because it'll come up later.
Anyway, out of the clear blue comes now Chuck Todd to share his cultural and
political wisdom two days after Charlie Kirk was killed. And I, your
humble scrivener, listened to the whole fucking thing, grinding a quarter in
of enamel off my back molars in the process. So here are selected
portions of that conversation. It does not start well.
TODD: Well, here's the thing. We we all kind of know what we
should be doing, but in in some ways, you know, our ... we're going
to have to give up hoping our political leaders are going to do the right
things.
Right off the bat, fuck you and your "our political leaders" claptrap, Chuck
Todd. It's Republican political leaders, starting with
President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, who throw gas on these fires,
and Democratic political leaders who try to tamp it down, which
he fucking well knows.
TODD: Sometimes you need incentives to do the right thing.
You need reward structures to do the right thing. And right now all of our
incentives are aligned against us ... uh... to, to bring us together. All
of the incentives are aligned against us to sort of figure out how to act
bipartisan.
And right there, in three short sentences, Chuck Todd memory holes the legacy
of the last three Democratic administrations, and the increasingly berserk Republican reactions to each of them.
And, again, Todd fucking well knows better.
Let’s Just Say It: The Republicans are the Problem
by Thomas E. Mann and Norman Ornstein
...We have been studying Washington politics and Congress for more than
40 years, and never have we seen them this dysfunctional. In our past
writings, we have criticized both parties when we believed it was
warranted. Today, however, we have no choice but to acknowledge that the
core of the problem lies with the Republican Party.
The GOP has become an insurgent outlier in American politics. It is
ideologically extreme; scornful of compromise; unmoved by conventional
understanding of facts, evidence and science; and dismissive of the
legitimacy of its political opposition.
When one party moves this far from the mainstream, it makes it nearly
impossible for the political system to deal constructively with the
country’s challenges.
Chuck Todd continues, remembering 9/11 as a great, uniting
experience.
TODD: 9/11 is the last time we ... we ... we really got ... we
brought ... got brought together as a country and it lasted a good year or
so. But even when we stopped being united, y'know, the
wars. The... the wars divided us, it was respectful right?
It was sort of conventional political debate.
No surprise that a creature of a Beltway media that rolled over for Bush and
Cheney remembers those times very differently than those of us who live in the
real world. There are literally tens of thousands of Liberal blog posts
by those of us who were writing about what was really going on in real time,
but this should give you a taste of what those "respectful", "conventional"
debates were actually like:
The host then chimes in that, yes, it was all great until those god damn
Liberals...
PFINGSTEN: I don't know. There was a lot of calling George Bush
a war criminal...
For the record George Bush and Dick Cheney were and are war criminals.
And the rest is just more cask-strength, Chuck Todd Both Sides Do It drivel
TODD: I mean, this is where I don't, you know, if you
go online, most conservatives think most liberals are communists and most
liberals think most conservatives are fascists... The online world has us
at each other's throats.
For the record, conservatives were making a living slagging us liberals as
dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters long
before "the online world" was as omnipresent as it is now. And, for
the record, conservatives nominated a degenerate, corrupt, lying, rapist,
racist, fascist for president three times in a row and elected him twice, so
yeah, the case for thinking most conservatives are fascists is fucking well
open and shut.
TODD: It is instead like you could build an audience much
faster if you go hard right or hard left, right?
Who is there "hard left" of which Todd speaks? Where are they?
And what the hell does Todd think "hard left" even means?
TODD: The left doesn't police the left and the right doesn't
police the right.
For the record, everybody polices the left. The legacy media Tone
Police stomp all over any Liberal who raises their voice using unapproved
vocabulary. Meanwhile, nobody polices the Right, which is how hate-vampires like Charlie Kirk came to be.
Never has a man’s own words so adeptly justified contempt for him
People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own
words to show that he deserved being dragged.
It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful
things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting
what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should
have been done before he was killed, because what should have been
assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists
and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff
journalists shied away from while he was living and building a
movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late...
TODD: 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if there was a bad
actor on one side or the other, this, you know, there would be
people that would speak out about it so that the totality would
look bipartisan.
Barack Obama was president from January, 2009* until January, 2017. In
what fucking universe did the Republican Party's unified, racist, obstruction
of every single thing Obama tried to do "look bipartisan" in its
totality? In what fucking universe does Donald Trump oozing down the
escalator and into the hearts of the GOP base qualify as heroically standing
up to a "bad actor".
Once again, in one sentence, Todd simply erases the inconvenience part.
TODD: And and this is where ... I don't know if this is a
leadership problem. It's, y'know, I am ... I am exhausted from pointing
fingers somewhere. Oh, it's here, it's here, it's here. When really,
it's all of us, right?
There's that deep, well-reasoned, fact-based political analysis for which
NBC News shelled out big bucks.
TODD: And look, I... I accept the premise that there are
folks on the left who say, "Yeah, we have our extremists, but we think
those guys are worse." And I accept the premise that on the right they
say, "We may have our extremists, but those guys are worse."
This, right here -- the media' pathological obsession with providing "Both
Sides Do It" political cover for the worst people in America and an
all-purpose excuse for the laziest and most cowardly people in America -- is
the real reason American politics is fucked.
But at least those battling scientists can finally move on with their their lives
now that the question of which-came-first has been settled.
Chuck Todd continues:
TODD: Like take the Matthew Dowd comment. Okay. Terrible
thing that he said. What do we think? 125,000 people saw it in real time.
It gets amplified on social media, right?
First, as much as it pains me to admit, what Matthew Dowd said wasn't
terrible. At all. And second, it was
Fox News that amplified it... just as they have been
originating and amplifying the most grotesque slander during all those
halcyon decades of "bad actor" policing and "respectful", "conventional"
debate.
And now, let's remove the thing I asked you to pin 527 paragraphs ago and
get back to the issue Mr. Pfingsten's fellow WMAY talking heads, Brian
Kilmeade and Clay Travis.
'Just Kill 'Em': Fox Host Makes Shocking Comment On Homeless
People
“Fox and Friends” co-host Brian Kilmeade suggested this week that
homeless people suffering from mental health issues who refuse help
should simply be killed...
“Or uh, involuntary lethal injection. Or something,” he said. “Just
kill ’em.”
The other two hosts barely react to his remark before continuing
their discussion.
WMAY syndicated radio host and Fox News employee, Brian Kilmeade, got
to keep his Fox News gig and his WMAY gig after casually suggesting on live
television that the homeless should be mass murdered, while Matthew Dowd was
crucified by Fox News and fired from his MSNBC gig even after apologizing
profusely for what were a few anodyne comments about violent language.
Which brings it to that other WMAY syndicated radio host, Clay Travis and his
violent, unhinged rant about Liberals following the killing of Charlie
Kirk. From
Crooks & Liars:
Fox News Contributor Clay Travis Should Be Fired
The right can say and do anything and are not allowed to be criticized for
it.
Clay Travis, the host of Outkick, and a Fox News contributor went a
scorched earth to Sean Hannity on the left after the Charlie Kirk
shooting and received no push back from Fox News for his antics.
The incendiary rhetoric by most of the right-wing talk shows, media
outlets, and podcasters is a staple of the institutions, and they make
their living by vilifying the left with eliminationism.
They are quick to vilify anyone else who correctly describes the
actions some of them take, as well as their political leaders, and they
look for events to pile on.
Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC, where is Fox News' accountability?
Where's the accountability, WMAY?
Chuck Todd again:
TODD: You know, there was a time where we punished a
politician that didn't try to unify the country, right? It was just that's
bad politics.
By my calculations, Todd had now used up an entire Olympic swimming
pool's-worth of Kilz and White-Out to blot out the actual history of the
Actual Republican party. But he's not done yet, because
the stupidest, most craven and most sinister comment of all was buried inside
this slab of mildewed nonsense:
TODD: And that's what frankly both sides do
this. They grab the nubbest, nuttiest thing somebody says in one of these
somewhere online and says, grabs it, isolates it, right? Gets it to take
off and go viral and say that's all of them, right? This person, it was
representative of this entire community, right?
And you know, the right has been arguing that this has been happening
way too often in ... in mainstream media. And I know exactly. And my
answer is yes, you're correct.
But the answer isn't to do it that that there should be sort of mutual
assured destruction, right?
At a stroke, Todd has not only told the MAGA mob that, yes, one of their most cherished delusions is real -- that there is a Giant Liberal Media
Conspiracy plotting against them -- but that the mainstream media is in on
it! Also, hey asshole, you are the mainstream media.
What are the odds that the next time the Crooked Media lads --
-- or the Bulwark crew --
-- welcome Chuck Todd back onto their podcast like a long lost lodge brother,
his embarrassing WMAY wallow in the Both Siderist shitpile will be politely
forgotten or ignored by the hosts.
* Thanks to Alert Reader Bruce for catching my temporal error.
If you've read this blog for more than a minute, you know that since we opened
for business 20 years ago, Fake Centrism and Both Siderism have been a
consistent beat. And believe me, no one is sicker of writing about this than I
am, because it's not 1,900 posts. It's closer to 8,000 or 9,000, and, like you,
I am footsore and arm-tired pushing that fucking boulder up that fucking hill
over and over and over again. So I make this solemn pledge to my fellow
Sisyphi: I will stop doing it forever once the legacy media and the Right and
assorted other cowards, simpletons, political laggards and mopes forswear hiding
behind false equivalence forever, and quit writing paeans to a vast, silent,
utopian political Center that Does. Not. Exist.
Sadly, this week was not that week. In fact, this week was the
opposite of that week.
The murder of Charlie Kirk caused the legacy media to flee for the safety of
the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" like Edoras evacuating to the
fastness of Helm’s Deep: a place of thick walls and high
gates where they believed they could safely ride out anything and emerge
unscathed and still gainfully employed after the Right's bloodthirsty freakout
had abated a bit.
In case you are unfamiliar with the mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do", let me
give you the nickel tour.
The mighty fortress of "Both Sides Do It" is an ideological safe
space/dissociative disorder/lazy pundit's crutch, but mostly it is a Very Big
Lie. Or, to steal a phrase from William Gibson, it's a kind of
consensual hallucination, and it remains the biggest and most culturally
potent Big Lie precisely because so many people desperately want it to be
true...or are deeply invested in getting others to believe
it's true.
It's home to many different kinds of people. Some -- like MAGA filth
when they get caught out as liars and hypocrites -- are transients. They
will scuttle through the gateway and lay in the cut, swatting away critiques
with volleys of "But the Democrats..." until the coast is clear, and then
sneak out the back way and return to the quotidian business of sucking the
mushroom stub of President Shits-His-Pants von Cheats-At-Golf, and shrieking
that you and I are existential threats to civilization.
For example, as you will recall, the walls of the mighty fortress of "Both
Sides Do It" were the first line of defense once President Shits-His-Pants von
Cheats-At-Golf decided to launch his ham-fisted Epstein Files coverup.
Confident cries of
"Whatabout if Democrats are in the files, huh? Whatabout Clinton?" poured forth from the fortress's machicolations as if the
MAGA filth thought it was burning pitch and we were made of balsa wood.
Freaked 'em completely out when we shrugged it off, shouted, "Great!
Lock 'em all up!" back at them, and kept coming.
There are also permanent residents, about whom I am planning to write more in
the next post, because this one already threatens to break the TL;DR
threshold. For now, I'm going to discuss one of the fortress's
semipermanent residents -- the type who keeps a toothbrush there, and a
change of clothes, and they have a lease, but grinding out Both Sides Do It
columns every fucking week is not primarily what they're known for.
They're known for entirely other toxic claptrap
Today's subject is Mr. David French of
The New York Times. French was hired by the Times
apparently because having only three, middle-aged conservative white men
on the payroll -- Bret Stephens, Ross
Douthat and David Brooks -- was not representative enough of
the rich text that is modern conservatism, so they felt compelled to add one
more middle-aged white conservative guy. A middle-aged conservative
white guy who had to have his vicious, Bible-thumping, anti-gay bio tidied up
hurry-up-quick to get him into the Times' lineup.
Since coming to the Times, French has mainly specialized in writing
about how, as a deeply conservative Christian man, it came as a complete shock
to him that [checks notes] his Republican Party was full of Republicans.
He was indignant. He was saddened. Over and over again he
lamented, (to quote Pink Floyd)
"Who let all of this riff-raff into the room?"
We can discuss some other day how the fuck it came to pass that the
first-tier of elite, legacy media conservative political pundits all have
one thing in common: regarding all those decades when they were trading on their
supposedly uniquely deep and savvy insights into American politics ... they
all now swear they never had the slightest idea what was actually going on
inside their own political party and ideological movement. Suffice it to
say that David French's version of this is being very disappointed that his
party turned out to be just as barbaric, bigoted, hypocritical, hollow and profoundly un-Christian as we dirty hippies always said it was.
Very, very disappointed.
But not this time.
This time he climbed to the ippy-tippy-top of the keep at the center of the
fortress to make a direct address to the base of his recently-former party.
It is entitled, "There Are Monsters in Your Midst, Too" and if that "Too"
alone is enough to give you a giant ass-ache, congratulations, your bullshit
detector is in good working order.
Let's jump to the middle:
Online algorithms magnify the problem. They recognize that you are hungry
for content that amplifies every bad act by your political enemies and
that you hate to read or see any form of attack on your friends, so you
live in a carefully curated false reality.
As a result, no matter the direction of the tragedy, the end result is
the same — the right grows angrier at the left, and the left grows angrier
at the right.
You see this exact phenomenon unfolding in the aftermath of the
assassination of Charlie Kirk...
Can you smell it coming?
French then goes through the statements of several prominent conservative
influencers who all blame "the left" for Charlie Kirk's death, and all believe
that, one way or another, we should all be wiped out. This one
especially stood out because it attempted to short-circuit the inevitable
"Both Sides Do It" platitude before any pundit could advance it.
Blake Masters, a former Republican candidate for Senate and an ally of JD
Vance and Peter Thiel, posted on X, “There is no ‘both sides’ here. The
political aggression and taste for violence against innocent people are all
coming from the left.”
And then...
But wait. Can’t someone on the left mount a similar indictment of the
right?
Then French runs down a damning list of the Right's organized,
Conservative-media driven episodes of political violence, from shooting up a
pizza joint because Conservative media told weak-minded bigots that the world
pedophile HQ was housed in their non-existent basement, to the President of
the United States fomenting violent insurrection against the
government.
In fact, a person on the left might argue,
the data is clear
— over the last decade, right-wing extremists have killed
far more
people than left-wing extremists.
And then comes the razor in the apple, in which French torches whatever he
thought he was doing in the previous paragraphs:
If we’re convinced that political violence comes from only one side of
the divide, then the temptation toward punitive authoritarianism is
overwhelming. “They” are evil and violent, and “they” must be crushed.
If, however, we accurately understand that America has
an immense problem with violent extremism on both sides of the
ideological aisle
— even if, at any given moment, one side is worse than the
other...
To get past this dreadful moment, more and more Americans are going to
have to face a painful fact. Evil isn’t confined to one side of the
American divide. There are monsters in your midst, too.
As I have written on this blog ad nauseum, Republicans expended enormous
effort and billions of dollars creating a base of reliably reprogrammable
meatbags by demonizing Democrats in ever more lurid and eliminationist
terms.
And French was only too happy to do his part in creating this hate-fueled
electoral Doomsday Machine with no "off" switch.
Democrats twice nominated and elected a man who, for all intents and purposes,
might as well have been built in a Centrist laboratory. Decent.
Humane. A scandal-free family man who never stopped trying to reach
across the aisle to forge bipartisan solutions to our nation's very-real
problems.
And how did French's Republican Party react? Fanatical obstruction.
Relentless sabotage. And, from the pinnacles of "respectable"
conservative columnists to the sewers of Breitbart comment sections, an
eight-year-long, hysterical, racist primal scream. None of which David French
objected to. But every time some scumbag on Conservative Hate Radio and
on Fox News was given a raise and an "Atta boy!" for slagging Democrats as
dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving, baby-killing monsters, or
Obama as a Kenyan commie sleeper cell out to murder their sainted white
grandmothers with his fiendish Death Panels they were paving another mile of
road that led to Donald Trump.
Or, to put it in language French would understand, he and his fellow
Conservative Bible-waving bile merchants were "making straight the way" to
where we are now.
Then Trump showed up and easily took over the party that had been so
carefully prepared for his coming. And for Never Trumpers like David
French, the arrival of Trump was like shining a million watt black
light into their political orgy pit. One minute they're happily down in
the grind with the swinish base, the next minute they're shocked!schocked! to
discover that there's bigotry and rage and fascism going on in this
establishment!
So the Never Trumpers storm out, hilariously assuming that some substantial
number of the Pig People will follow them because they, too, must be deeply
offended by, well, getting what they wanted all
along?
Nope.
And now that his former party has eagerly nominated the apex predator of
fascist political violence three times, and twice elected him as President,
the very best French can muster is, "Sure, Democrats are dirty, commie, America-hating, terrorist-loving,
baby-killing monsters but consider, my brothers in Republican Jebus, there
are bad guys in your midst too! Join me in the mighty fortress of Both
Sides Do It, and together..."
Let us now consider how closely Charlie Kirk's used of "Christianity"
paralleled that of another famous racist con man.
The first step, always, it to take the measure of the suckers. In Hitler's case, the mob he wanted to harness and deploy was wall-to-wall
Christians who had already been steeping in centuries of antisemitism. If he
wanted to control then, he had to play them like a sax at the 10:30 jazz service.
So he tarted up Nazism in hymnals and scriptures, selling himself as the last
line of defense for “traditional Christian culture.”
The fact that he thought all of it was superstitious bullshit was
irrelevant. Speaking to the rubes in their own language -- mirroring them and their angry and resentments -- was a
prop. And it worked for Schicklgruber the same way it worked for
Kirklgruber, because MAGA's broken, ignorant, rage-drunk mutants are
desperate to believe they're God's own Seal Team Six.
Because, as every
two-bit fascist in every age knows, you catch more suckers with a flag pin and
a Bible than with facts and the constitution.
Then, after you've sized up the rubes and figured out just how desperate and
gullible they are, you need to aggressively rebrand Jesus. The bigots and imbeciles
don't wanna hear about some poor, illiterate, brown-skinned rabbi, who hung
around with with hookers and beggars, preaching peace and compassion. The guy
who said “love thy neighbor” and meant all of them. Not exactly adequate
material for building a Master Race. So Hitler did what every right-wing
grifter still does: he rebranded. Out goes the sandal-wearing hippie, in comes
Aryan Jesus -- blond, blue-eyed, aching for glorious conquest, and hating the
Jews as much as they did.
And slouching along right behind Aryan Jesus comes his grandchild -- the T-Rex
riding, AR-15 brandishing, MAGA hat wearing Republican Jesus, who demands tax
cuts for billionaires while sneering at immigrants and the poor. This
was Charlie Kirk's Jesus.
Then, after you've rebranded Jesus, you're gonna need to cast yourself as his
earthly enforcer. Crack open Mein Kampf and you'll find Hitler’s
strutting around like he’s God’s own
Luca Brasi,
bragging about “doing the Lord’s work” by crushing Jews. He didn’t believe it,
but the audience sure as hell did.
Thanks to Alert Reader Anonymous for this addendum:
In a speech delivered in front of a Nazi audience in April 1922, Hitler made a more explicit reference to Christianity, referring to Jesus as "the true God." He made it plain that he regarded Christ's struggle as direct inspiration for his own. For Hitler, Jesus was not just one archetype among others, but "our greatest Aryan leader."
--The Holy Reich: Nazi Conceptions of Christianity, Richard Steigmann-Gall, Cambridge Press
And that’s the playbook: drape yourself in piety. Pretend your bigotry
is a sacrament. Make hating the other a holy duty. It’s the same script
the American Right has been running for decades. For example, does
anyone still remember that
Dubya Bush said God told him to invade Iraq?
From there it's just a short hop to Trump's gaggle of batshit,
Armageddon-peddling pastors raving about him being chosen by God. Their own Cyrus the Great. And the
GOP base nodding right along with all of it, because nothing gets the rubes to empty their pockets
and run to the polls faster than “Jesus told me so.”
Hitler didn’t use Christianity by accident -- he knew exactly what he was
doing: weaponizing faith, laundering hate through holy language, and turning
pews into political muscle.
And if all of this feels familiar in 2025, that’s because it is.
Different century, different demagogues, same scam.
