Observing MLK, Jr. Day By Judging Republicans by the Content of Their Character.

No Half Measures

Remember When This Used to Be a Federal Crime Instead of Federal Policy?

From Fox News 59, Indianapolis, Indiana, April 2, 2013.

Teen says masked men forced him into van, drove him around until he escaped

Indianapolis Metropolitan police are investigating a teenager’s report that masked suspects forced him into a van and drove him around before he escaped.

According to an IMPD report, the eighth-grade student was walking to the Immaculate Heart of Mary School around 7:25 a.m. when the van approached him near 57th Street and Pennsylvania Avenue. According to the teen, two people got out of the front, grabbed him and “tossed him inside” the van, where a third suspect awaited.

The third suspect hit him “several times using his left and only and held him” while the van continued on. The teen described the vehicle as a white, full-size maintenance vehicle without any rear windows, according to the report. The teen also said a partition with a small sliding door separated the front passenger area of the van from the back...

Administrators put the school on lockdown after the encounter. The case remains under investigation.

Now masked thugs routinely snatching innocent people off the street, or just murdering them in front of a dozen witnesses, is the official policy of the Trump regime.  

Step out of line or just get in the way and they'll not only blow your head off, they'll slander you from the highest offices in the land before your body grows cold.

 But Kamala has a weird laugh.

And Biden is old.

 

No Half Measures

MAGA is a Genre

You want to know why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are?

Well, because I like you, I'll tell you.  And I do this in the full knowledge that none of this secret intel will leak to the savvy people because the savvy people do not read Liberal blogs.

Ready?

Ok...but first we have do a thing.  What the kids call a side-quest.  

You love Westerns, right?  Anyway, I do, so there we are. 

So, Westerns.  What defines a Western?  Well, even if you're not a professional deconstructor of films, if you watch enough Westerns from every era, you can see clear themes and commonalities, some of which remain fairly constant across time, and others which change and morph into something else entirely.  

For example, in early Westerns, the heroes and villains were mostly two-dimensional.  Often literally White Hats versus Black Hats.  Or White Hats versus The Savages.  But over time this changes.  For example, John Ford's landmark 1939 Western Stagecoach (The Canterbury Tales with Stetsons) is all about inverting social hierarchies, with John Wayne's Ringo Kid and Claire Trevor's Dallas characters -- the Outlaw and the Prostitute -- emerging as the heroes of the tale.

30 years later, in Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, the recognizable tropes of the Western were mostly still there -- heroes, villains, hats, horses, guns, saloons, etc. -- but their meanings had all been scrambled.    The villain was no longer the Savages or the Black Hats, it was the crippled railroad baron.  The Black Hat gunslinger was now reduced to the status of a hireling: the henchman of capitalism.  

To make the point absolutely clear -- that this was about the closing of the frontier and the end of the traditional Western -- Leone hired iconic American good guy actor Henry Fonda to play Frank, the murderous, amoral tool of capitalism.   

And sticking with Once Upon a Time in the West for just one more minute, the opening scene does what all great opening scenes do: it sets the tone for the rest of the tale.   In Fred Zinnemann's High Noon, the entire story is about a train that's due to arrive at...when?  When?  Don't go simple on me now, it's the title of the movie.  Four bad men -- Frank Miller and his backup singers -- are due to arrive in town at noon and they are out for revenge.  Everyone in town knows it,  and as the fateful hour approaches (the director keeps the audience apprised of the time by placing clocks in nearly every scene) the townspeople slowly desert their sheriff, leaving him to face the four bad men all alone.

Then, at last, the clocks strike twelve.

Once Upon a Time in the West completely inverts this.  Instead of an arrival by train being the event towards which all plot lines are moving, Once Upon a Time in the West starts with an arrival by train.

Instead of four bad men getting off the train and marching into town to hunt down the hero, three bad men are waiting at the train for the hero to arrive.  

To drive home the point that this movie was to be the end of the Western, Leone originally wanted the stars of his Dollars Trilogy --  Clint Eastwood, Lee Van Cleef, and Eli Wallach -- to play the three gunmen.  But they declined, so Leone cast Woody Strode, Jack Elam, and Al Mulock instead.

At this point I was going to go on a long thing about how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, but this isn't a movie review post, and if you didn't already know how awesome The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance is, well, I just feel sorry for you is all.

Obviously Once Upon a Time in the West wasn't the end of the Western genre, because the archetypes the genre developed are too sturdy and too firmly rooted in human nature to disappear.  And so, every year or two, someone comes along to mix and match the same elements in different way.  In Silverado you find a classic Western done very well, even ending in a gunfight in the street with the church behind our hero.  In Lonesome Dove, a sweeping epic.   In Quigley Down Under you get the Western in Australia.  In No Country For Old Men, you get the Western in the West Texas of 1980 because the Coen brothers love Westerns.

Is Unforgiven a Western?  Obviously.  But is Firefly a Western?  You bet.  It's whatchacall a "neo-Western", but c'mon.  

Is Justified?  Damn right it is.  

So what is all of this to do with Republicans and their MAGA headgear?

Well, since you asked, getting back to explaining why all the savvy people -- every one of them -- were baffled and confused by the rise of Trump and MAGA, and still are... don't go simple on me now, because it's the title of this post.   

MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a genre.  MAGA is a vibe.  

Which is why, when the savvy crowd sees Republican voters appear to casually and completely reverse what they swore were their bedrock beliefs (and then do it again... and again) the savvy crowd are flummoxed.   They have no theory to fit the facts, because they had always taken as gospel that what Republican mopes say they believe on any given day was something akin the hammer throw at a track and field event: momentum is built up, then released, and the hammer follows a straight tangent line from the point of that release.

But Republican voters do not behave that way.  At all.  Because the policies they'll swear by on a Monday because Sean Hannity said so... and then drop like first period French on Wednesday because Sean Hannity said so...are just props.   Just plot devices.  

This is why MAGA mopes not only don't give a shit that Trump lies constantly, they're thrilled by it.  Since, in the MAGA genre, everything is treated as a plot device that either advances the MAGA narrative, or threatens it, who cares whether an individual story element is true or not?

Now for a quick bit of genre hopping.  

You love Film Noir, right?  Well anyway, I do, so here we are again. When Howard Hawks was filming The Big Sleep, his writing team couldn't figure out who killed the chauffeur, Owen Taylor.  So Hawks fired off a telegram to the author of the original novel, Raymond Chandler, asking him to clarify.  Here was their exchange.

Hawks:  "Who killed the chauffeur?" 

Chandler: "Dammit, I don't know either."

Even though the murder of Owen Taylor is central to the plot, Chandler didn't know or care who killed him because that wasn't the point of the novel. The Big Sleep is about atmosphere and characterization, not nailing down every detail, and since it didn't really matter who offed the chauffeur, Chandler didn't bother with it.  

From the MAGA perspective, asking whether or not this is true...

... or this is true ...

Trump repeats false claims that children are undergoing transgender surgery during the school day

Trump’s remarks escalated conservatives’ claims that educators are “grooming” or “indoctrinating” children to become gay or transgender.

...or this is true ...

Trump:  “It’s a tremendous difference... We’re going to get the drug prices down… Not 30 or 40 percent… No, we’re going to get them down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent — numbers that are not even thought to be achievable… and it will be, you know, serious. It will be numbers that nobody can even imagine.”

... or the 10,000 other lies Trump has spewed are true is irrelevant.

As irrelevant as who killed Owen Taylor.   

Because all those lies are just plot devices designed to advance the MAGA narrative.  

Ergo understanding which way the MAGA mob will jump next is not (and never had been) a matter of sifting through the mountain of self-contradicting bullshit that constitutes MAGA dogma.   This is what the savvy crowd always gets wrong.  

Understanding the wild oscillations of MAGA dogma only makes sense when you understand the Republicans mythos being served by those lies: a mythos that long pre-dates the rise of Trump. 

And it's really pretty simple.  As simple as the earliest Westerns.  Their world is a world of Black Hats and White Hats.  They -- white Conservative Christian nationalists and their fellow travelers-- are the White Hats and pretty much everyone else are the Black Hats.  

They're the real Americas.  They are "righteous" in the original meaning of that word: just, upright, and in accord with divine law.  And since, to MAGA, this is all self-evident -- that they and only they are properly aligned with God's moral order -- then it follows that whatever they feel to be true and good must be true and good.

Instead of "Cogito ergo sum" -- "I think therefore I am" -- the MAGA way is (pardon the rough Latin translation) "Sentio ergo est" -- "I feel therefore it is".  

It's a pre-Enlightenment way of thinking, where faith doesn't merely beat facts all day long, but facts that conflict with the One True Faith are the darkest heresy.  Something to be rooted out and destroyed. 

For decades Conservative media and Republican politicians have been making fortunes and winning elections reinforcing this mythos by feeding the base an endless supply of Black Hats to hate and vote against.  Liberals.  Mouthy women.  Brown people who don't know their place.  Urbanites.  The gays.  Immigrants.  Unions.  Trans people.  Pointy-headed intellectuals.  Government employees.  Hollywood.  "Rootless cosmopolitans".  Socialists.  You know the drill.  

And once the base came to accept as axiomatic that is was perpetually under siege by the Black Hats, everything became existential crisis.  Deficits were an existential crisis...then they weren't...then they were again...then they weren't again.  Every Democratic president was somehow illegitimate and also  simultaneously a feckless weakling, a jackbooted tyrant and the Worst President in History.  

Everything was a battle in a forever war for the survival of real America where the salvation of the nation was always hanging by a thread.   And gradually, the fascist "blood and soil" language that has been thrown around on Hate Radio since the 1980s -- constantly framing the press as the "enemy of the people", slandering any opposition as deranged parasites, speaking of the nation as something that needed cleansing and purification -- filtered up from the base, where it was the common tongue, and into Conservative teevee, Republican political ads, Conservative think tanks and publications and Republican politicians.  

And in that environment, what does it matter if what the Dear Leader says is true or not?  What does it matter if what fascist state media says is true or not?  Who cares if slander about eating the pets is racist bullshit?  Who cares if trans people are no threat to anyone?  The only thing that matters is the utility of the words coming out of the Dear Leader's mouth. And since us Black Hats are so dangerous -- "the face of pure evil" (Liz Cheney, 2019) -- any and all weapons and tactics are permitted.  

Which is why we can carefully pack up all our facts -- our mountains of irrefutable facts stretching back decades --  and lay them aside for another day, or for when we talk among ourselves.  Conservative media and Republican politicians worked very hard for many decades engineering a voting base for whom facts are irrelevant and anyone who tells them anything they don't want to hear is dismissed as treason and Fake News.  This how Conservative media and Republican politicians paved a road for Donald Trump to win the White House.

Did lies about Obama's birth certificate feel true to the racist Republican base?  Did lies about Somalis eating people's pets feel true to those same bigots 15 years later?  Did lies about cafeteria castrations feed the MAGA moron's hysteria about trans people?  Does the torrent of lies that Trump vomits out on a daily basis tickle MAGA's ganglia and reinforce their myths about apocalyptic struggle, heroism and destiny?  

Yes.  And in the end, to them, that's all that matters.  

Because MAGA is not a set of policy beliefs or checked set of ideological boxes.  

MAGA is a vibe.  MAGA is a genre in which it's just Black Hats versus White Hats, all day long.

And all those lies are the necessary story elements that move the plot along.  

I Am The Liberal Media

The Ghost of ACA Sabotage Plots Past*

Since the latest battle in the Republican Party's 15 year long campaign to gut the ACA will reach its catastrophic conclusion in just a few days...and since we may well be going from one government shutdown to the next over that issue... and since a leitmotif of this little blog of mine has been the absolutely lethal effect which the Both Sides Do It lie has had on our media and our politics... in the spirit of the season, let's tie that all together in a big, Christmas bow and take a No Fair Remembering Stuff (™) journey back to the Before Time about which most dare not speak.

The date: September 25, 2013.  

The location: The United States Senate.

The issue: Passing the damn budget.

Tea Party crank, first-term Texas senator and possible Zodiac-killer, Ted Cruz, decided that heaving a boulder onto the budget-approval tracks by staging a filibuster to kill the Affordable Care Act by stopping the vote to pass the budget would conjure him some political capital.  So he began running his mouth on September 25th and didn't stop until the next day.  His all-night stunt included him quoting the Founding Fathers and the Bible and reading “Green Eggs and Ham.”  

There are videos of this on YouTube which I will spare you because I'm a nice guy.

Cruz's irritating stunt didn't delay the Senate vote on the ACA.  It didn't change any votes in the Senate, but it did manage to piss off a number of Senate Republicans.  However it also inspired Republican Tea Party lunatics in the House to just up and shut the whole government down to try to kill the Affordable Care Act.  

The Republican House kept the government shut down for 16 long days and then gave up.  

In the end the shutdown accomplished nothing but the temporary furlough of 800,000 federal workers, punching the economy in the gut and infuriating the general public.  This doomed idiocy was led by Heritage Action and the Fake Tea Party.  Republicans lost, Democrats won, and the government reopened with an agreement to vote on a clean funding bill that didn't screw with the ACA, on October 25 

Here is a portion of a speech that then-president Barack Obama gave during the shutdown, included here because it'll come up later.

Given all of this high drama, it should come as no surprise that on Sunday, October 20, 2013, the Sunday Shows were full of Gummint Shutdown Talk.  And, since I have extensive Sunday Morning Comin' Down archives --

-- I rooted around in there for a bit and my oh my, is this all going to sound familiar.  

This is me, from The Before Time of 2013.

This week, another drunk dial from the Valley of the Dead as the Both Sides Caucus fired up their fighters and screamed into the sky to strafe any attempt at truth and reconciliation to bits.

First, on "This Week...with The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea" we begin with a panel of delusional teabaggers perfectly ordinary, indignant white Americans who express their love for Murrica and their completely rational concerns about how the Kenyan Usurper has personally stomped everything they ever loved to death by dutifully regurgitating every brain-dead, wingnut bumper-sticker you have ever heard of.

What was missing?

How about...an identical panel of non-crazy Liberals?

Anywhere?

Ever?

Patiently and lovingly deconstructing paranoid Conservative piffle?

For the one millionth time?

That you will never see on network teevee.

Instead, we pivot straight to Matthew Dowd (paid Conservative Shill who still has a job in front of a teevee camera for reasons that continue to defy understanding) and Adam Kinzinger (R, IL Whitelandia) tag-teaming the Kenyan Usurper for committing the single most horrific transgression against the serenity of the life forms who exist floating from party to party within the Washington D.C. terrarium: actually naming and blaming the people who were actually to blame for the most recent Republican clusterfuck:

DOWD I think that Martha, part of the real problem in this is until this part changes I think that we're going to be in this situation. We need to redefine winning differently. We define winning today as us versus them.

I'm going to score points and if I don't score points I'm going to decide who the winner and the loser is. We define everything as a battle, everything as a civil war. The president, I think, has tried to balance this tension, but I think he constantly falls into; I think he would like to bring the country together and be accommodating and do all that. He ran on that just like Bush ran on that.

The end result of Bush's didn't turn out well. The end results of President Obama's didn't turn out well. But I think President Obama lapses back into this sort of dualistic thing that, OK I wasn't able to do it, I'm going to point fingers and I'm going to, and you watched his speech last week. And his speech last week was a perfect microcosm--

Martha Raddatz, (warming the seat for The Clinton Guy Who Fell From Grace with the Sea): Let's change the tone, but maybe not. 

DOWD: Let's change the tone but they're at fault. Whenever you say they're at fault, you can't--

To her credit, Representative Donna Edwards, (D, MD) actually attempted to haul this umpteenth iteration of the same, sick, tired, trifling, poisonous, premeditated, highly profitable and genuinely evil Both Sider bullshit to the ground:

EDWARDS: Well Matt come on it is really important here. We don't want to do a rewrite of this. And in order not to do a rewrite, you actually have to understand who was, who was at fault. And there was real fault here. We had a majority of Republicans--

And for her trouble, she was promptly and frantically side-tackled (in a brutal, face-mask-grabbing, fact-snapping move called "Blitzering" in the lingua franca of Bullshit Mountain) by Ms. Raddatz:

RADDATZ: But that again is--

EDWARDS: And Democrats who wanted to keep the government opened.

RADDATZ: Peter let me switch a little bit here. I want you all to talk about Obamacare...

Translation: Please stop pointing out that more than half the guests on this show are paranoids, nihilists, rubes and liars!

Meanwhile, over at "Meet the Press" we find exactly the same song being sung in a different key.

First, to establish that one is not flat-out insane, one must make a token gesture in the direction of acknowledging that the Tea Party (for which you expressed such fondness back in 2010) might actually be a little tetched:

DAVID BROOKS:  I think the Republicans may decide to tire of doing face plants. And so I think the moderate Republicans, such as they exist, may have had a little manhood injection, willing to stand up to the Tea Party and actually be a much more bipartisan, or at least a more moderate, party, a more realistic party...

DAVID BROOKS: ...The question now is will the Republican Party have a civil war over the nature of the party? And I think we're beginning to see rumblings of that. The problem is, to have a civil war, you actually have to have two sides. The Tea Party has a side. They have a political movement. They have a think tank. They have a donor side. 

The other side, the Republicans who want to be able to compete in California, in New York, along the east coast and in Illinois, they don't have a side. They have American Crossroads, a PAC. They have a cocktail party. And so what they need to do is actually build some institutions, some think tanks, some fundraising efforts, some grassroots organizations, to match Tea Party, or else the Tea Party will take over.

driftglass aside/

Golly, I wonder whatever happened to those institutions and think tanks and passion and money?

Oh yeah!  I remember!   

In order to win elections, you handed all of that over to these people  

 

when you made Rush Limbaugh your "Majority Maker" 20 years ago.

/ end driftglass aside

Then, once they were done with all the icky work of grudgingly granting that Liberals have been right all along (without, of course, actually acknowledging the existence of Liberals or their rightness) 'bout a mile outta Both Sider Town...

...Andrea Mitchell says, "Pig Pen, this here's Rubber Duck...

...And I'm about to put the hammer down."

ANDREA MITCHELL:  Both sides are going to have to give.

'Cause we got a little ol' convoy

Rockin' through the night.

Yeah, we got a little ol' convoy,

Ain't she a beautiful sight?

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. The question [President Barack Obama had] never answered in all these years is, "How do I build a governing majority in this circumstance?"

Come on and join our convoy

Ain't nothin' gonna get in our way.

DAVID GREGORY [rough translation]:  Fuck yeah!

We gonna roll this truckin' convoy

'Cross the U-S-A.

DAVID BROOKS:   He's got 40 House Republicans who are never going to be with him. How does he siphon them off and get the other Republicans on his side to get a majority coalition? You have to anger the left a little to build that bipartisan coalition. He's never figured out a way to do that.

Convoy!

E. J. Dionne was on-hand to provide some tired, token push-back -- 

--compared to the Democrats, oddly particularly in Tea Party. The president, a lot of times, though, when people say the president should lead, what they want him to do is adopt Republican positions and then push for those. That's not leadership, that's capitulation. I think we should stop talking about a grand bargain and try to have normal government in the next two months. Let's just get rid of some of this sequester, which is hurting the economy, and which a lot of Republicans don't like.

-- to which absolutely no one paid any heed.  Of course, if E.J. Dionne did want anyone to pay any attention to what he was saying, all he really needed to do was turn on Mr. Brooks fast-fast-fast, put a finger right in his face and precede his remarks with "Look fucko..."  But then he would be faced with the unhappy task of explaining to his wife and all the little Dionnes why daddy didn't have no job no more, so don't waste to much time waiting at that bus stop...

End of 2013 Sunday Show tour.  Before exiting the vehicle, please check around your seat for any personal effects (or affects, hahaha) you may have dropped during the journey.

And looking back at that 2013 shitshow, the thing is, Republicans were entirely to blame. 100%.  There was no dispute about that.  What these two men were bitching about was that Obama had violated the legacy media's Both Sides Do It commandment by saying what everyone knew out loud.  That Republicans were at fault.  Period.  

And remember, this was a year and a half after respected political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein published their now-famous article in the Washington Post, "Let's just say it: The Republican Party is the problem".  And the two diametrically opposed reactions to the article tell the story of just how corrupt the legacy media had become.  Because while it got both Mann and Ornstein blackballed from the Sunday Shows, it also quickly became the most widely read, shared and forwarded opinion piece they had ever written, even briefly crashing the Post's comment section servers.

Also, remember that the Mann and Ornstein column came a full decade after the dawn of the Liberal blogosphere, which gave us the capacity to say -- in print and in public -- all the stuff we'd been saying among ourselves for decades, but the legacy media wouldn't touch with a barge pole.  Especially our assault on the Both Sides Do It Lie.

But in October of 2013 that patently ridiculous lie was still being staunchly defended across the board by America's media elite on the Sunday Shows.

And in December of 2025 it still is.

*Note:  We mentioned this incident briefly on our December 23rd episode of The Professional Left Podcast.  However, we got the timeline backwards: Cruz's filibuster preceded the shutdown, it didn't follow it.  Management regrets the error and, rest assured, although our entire research staff and all of our archivists have all fled into the hills in shame, those responsible will be hunted down and brutally reprimanded.  

Burn The Lifeboats

 

Professional Left Podcast Episode 946: So Much For The 'Tolerant Right'

"I'm shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!" -- Captain Renault, Casablanca

• 
  

Stephen Miller Official White House Portrait

 

From Oberdiaperfuhrer Miller today via The Daily Beast:

Stephen Miller Shouts Unhinged Message to Gun-Wielding Cops 

...“Every resource we have federal, state and local we are going to use to dismantle their [criminal] networks without apology and without mercy,” Miller said. “Everything we have, we are going to bulldoze the criminal element of this city and liberate all the law-abiding citizens in this city.”

Claiming he wanted to eliminate “any physical space, anywhere” in Memphis where a citizen didn’t feel safe, a fired-up Miller then took his impassioned rant up a notch.

“This is Memphis, this is the United States of America, and all that bulls--t is done,” Miller blasted. “It’s over, it’s finished.”

“The gangbangers that you deal with, they think that they’re ruthless, they have no idea how ruthless we are,” Miller added.

“They think they’re tough, they have no idea how tough we are. They think that they’re hardcore, we are so much more hardcore than they are, and we have the entire weight of the United States government behind us. What do they have? They have nothing behind them. So we are gonna win, they’re gonna lose.”

Turns out fascists really, really hate being called "fascists", in the same way and at the same volume that racists really, really hate being called "racist.   Also from The Daily Beast:

MAGA Lawmaker Calls for Gavin Newsom’s Arrest After Calling Miller a ‘Fascist’

Remember kids, when it comes to dealing with fascists... 

No Half Measures

Charlie Kirk: Confederate Monument

"History is a set of lies agreed upon." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

From NPR :

Illinois lawmaker proposes Charlie Kirk Day in the state

 

State Senator Neil Anderson (R-Andalusia) has introduced Senate Bill 2694 to permanently honor the life and legacy of Illinois native Charlie Kirk, who was murdered on September 10, 2025 while speaking to a group of students at a Utah college campus.

“Charlie Kirk, a man of strong faith, a devoted husband and father, dedicated his life to fostering open and honest dialogue,” said Senator Anderson. “He stood unafraid in challenging prevailing narratives and consistently did so through peaceful demonstrations rooted in the belief that free speech is worth protecting. His voice resonated far beyond Illinois, but he never forgot his home state.”

The legislation would amend the State Commemorative Dates Act to recognize September 10 each year as “Charlie Kirk Day” in Illinois. If approved, it would be listed among dates that recognize people or events. It would not be an official holiday...

Get your sick-up bag ready.  Back to NPR:

“Much as Martin Luther King Jr. Day reminds us of the transformative power of one individual’s fight for justice and equality, Charlie Kirk Day would stand as a testament to the enduring importance of free speech and open debate in our society. While their causes were different, both lives underscore the truth that courage and conviction can inspire generations.”

Also too, this, from Raw Story:

Charlie Kirk statues would be mandated on every campus with red state's new legislation

One Republican state lawmaker in Oklahoma now wants to require every public university in the state to erect statues to slain far-right activist Charlie Kirk.

On Friday, Jeffrey Sachs — an assistant professor at Nova Scotia's Acadia University — called attention to a bill by Oklahoma state senators Shane Jett (R) and Dana Prieto (R) that would mandate every public university in the Sooner State build a "Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza." The bill, which has been filed as Senate Bill 1187 and does not yet have a formal name, would force universities to set aside a portion of real estate in a visible public location — like the quad, the student union or main entrance pathways — "to maximize public awareness and utilization."

Senate Bill 1187 would also make it a requirement for schools to erect a statue of both Kirk and his family, and to include a plaque honoring Kirk as "a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate."

Or, to quote Bill Shakespeare,  "Tis too much proved -- that with devotion's visage/ And pious action we do sugar o'er/ The devil himself." 

So let's take a look one of hundreds of similar or worse quotes from Charlie Kirk, man of faith:

"[Joe Biden is] a bumbling, dementia-filled Alzheimer’s, corrupt, tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” -- Charlie Kirk, "The Charlie Kirk Show", July 24, 2023.

And, of course, there's Charlie Kirk, free speech champion.   From The Chronicle of Higher Education:

Charlie Kirk’s Watchlist Made Some Professors’ Lives a ‘Living Hell’

For Tobin Miller Shearer, a professor of history at the University of Montana who had received death threats after being placed on a Turning Point USA target list, news of Charlie Kirk’s murder on a college campus in Utah prompted a flood of emotions. “I cried for our nation, for what this will mean for his family, for all the harm he did in his life, for all of us,” he said. “It was a horrible moment in all of its complexity.”

After those threats, Shearer moved his class on the history of white supremacy to a secret location, with a campus police officer on guard. “I did not want any threats on my life to ripple out and affect my students,” said Shearer, who heads Montana’s program in African American studies.

Shearer was one of hundreds of professors whose lives had unexpectedly intersected with Kirk’s when their names ended up on Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist.

Kirk created the watchlist in 2016 as a signature product of his new nonprofit. Its mission, it says, is to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” It’s based on published news stories about “radical” behavior by professors, but also informed by recordings leaked by students and tips from the public.

The publicly searchable database has grown to more than 300 professors, who are grouped into categories including diversity, equity, and inclusion, climate alarmist, feminism, abortion, terror supporter, racial ideology, and LGBTQ.

And from The Baltimore Banner:

Faculty placed on Kirk’s ‘professor watchlist’ fear for their safety and the future of higher education

Charlie Kirk spent much of his career trying to reshape higher education, frequently attacking professors by name and crusading against colleges and universities across the country.

After the conservative activist and founder of Turning Point USA was assassinated Wednesday, some of the professors he targeted worry for their own safety and feel anxious about the climate of distrust the 31-year-old sowed among young people.

“I feel less safe after Kirk’s murder,” said Nathan Connolly, a history professor at the Johns Hopkins University. “I think that his death, like his life, ripens murderous fruit.”

Connolly and more than two dozen other university faculty in Maryland appeared on Turning Point’s “professor watchlist,” a website the conservative activist group founded in 2016 to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”...

And from The Chicago Sun-Times:

Illinois professors face threats after landing on Charlie Kirk group watch list

An online database compiled by Turning Point USA, affiliated with slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk, identifies nearly 50 Illinois college instructors it labels “radical professors.”

Nearly 50 instructors from public and private colleges across Illinois are named in an online database dubbed “Professor Watchlist” that was created by a group affiliated with slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk to unmask “radical professors,” WBEZ has found.

Since landing on the list, some professors have gotten hateful emails, online messages and letters threatening rape or death, and in some instances they have seen that activity intensify since Kirk’s death.

WBEZ reached out to all of the roughly four dozen Illinois-based instructors on the nonprofit Turning Point USA list. All those who responded said the allegations lodged against them were distortions of their work.

The site includes the professors’ names, head shots, a brief description on what they did to land on the list and, in some cases, contact information for their department...

I could go on and on, but you understand the point.

This is all of a piece with former Confederate states during the Civil Rights era putting up monuments to traitors and (some) incorporating the Confederate flag into their state flag as a giant "Fuck You" to the civilized world's attempts to drag their bigoted, backwards asses into the 20th century.

It's also of a piece with Grover Norquist's Ronald Reagan Legacy Project, the goal of which was to slap up Reagan's name everywhere, so that every county in the country would have at least one prominent landmark named after Reagan.

It's also of a piece with Trump awarding Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom, which was the equivalent of pinning a halo on a sewer rat.  And yet there was president Donald Trump, during a State of the Union speech, awarding highest civilian honor in the land to a monster whose life’s work was the slow, methodical poisoning of the American mind.  And when Limbaugh finally kicked off in 2021, the Beltway’s Very Serious People and the entire Republican media complex went into full sainthood mode, solemnly concluding that he was a some kind of sage,  patriotic conservative voice and champion of the truth, when what he actually left behind was a half-century-long audio snuff film: cruelty-as-entertainment, industrial-grade racism, pig-eyed misogyny, gay-bashing, and the endless flogging of whatever half-baked conspiracy floated up that morning from the fetid wingnut fever swamp.

It's also of a piece with Trump and Hegseth re-renaming military bases after Confederate traitors, reversing the trend of taking down monuments to Confederate traitors, and the Biden administration removing the names of Confederate traitors from those same military bases.

Lord Whorfin may be right that "History is made at night." -- 

-- but history becomes agreed upon and passed down the generations by the active efforts of those who codify it in monuments, street names, songs, official days of memory and observation, and the texts of history books as yet unwritten.  

For example, the "history" of Horst Wessel, the 22 year old Nazi goon who, in 1930, was living with a a former prostitute named Erna Jaenichen. Their landlord, who had Communist sympathies, got into a dispute with Wessel.  The landlord's friends confronted him, and during the altercation, Wessel was shot.  He died of his wounds a few weeks later.  It was ugly, and personal, and linked to Berlin’s underworld, but Nazi propagandists laundered it into the death of a sainted martyr.   The Horst-Wessel-Lied became a Nazi anthem and was elevated to near-sacred status, second only to the German national anthem during the Third Reich.  His funeral was staged as a massive propaganda spectacle.

And had the Nazis not been crushed by the Allies, that propagandized, fascist "history" would be what American children would be studying in history classes today.  

I Am The Liberal Media

Charlie Kirk's Christianity Hustle

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.

I Am The Liberal Media

Headlines Aging Badly

 

From NBC News, January 13, 2023:

One more thing for Democrats to fix: the Republican Party

At some point, Republicans will be in charge. That is why we must do everything we can to ensure a more moderate, saner version of the GOP is in place when that happens.

By Neal Urwitz

Remember kids, not a single Republican anywhere -- from the gas-sippin', mouth-breathin', Confederate-flag flyin' double-wide denizens of Sisterfuck Arkansas, to Republican congressmen and senators, to the decrepit orange traitor and pedo-protector in the White House -- none of them have any agency at all.  

Not a one of them has the capacity to control their actions or behave like civilized humans.  

Therefor it will always fall to Democrats to be responsible for everything.

By this same clown after Trump won in 2024.

How Dems Fight Back: Treat Trump Like a Potty-Training Toddler

Children respond best to praise and rewards. The Resistance should adopt the same strategy with the president-elect.

My wife and I have spent the last week potty training our son. Anyone who has been through this knows what’s involved: reading and rereading “Elmo Learns to Use the Potty,” effusive praise for successful trips to the toilet and lots of M&Ms as a reward.

As every parent knows, the most effective strategy to train a toddler is to cajole them to do the right thing and heap on the praise; it’s prettied-up manipulation.

We need to praise him effusively every time he even approximates doing the right thing. We need to laud him for every mainstream, reasonably competent appointment he makes, for every bipartisan bill he supports, and for any time he refrains from outrageous or unlawful actions and negotiates with Congress instead...

The goal for Democrats should be to prevent worst-case scenarios by coaxing Trump to behave like an adult. If we are not disciplined enough to lead with praise for good behavior, we risk accelerating his democratic backsliding, his most draconian policies and the irreparable damage he could do to our economy and our society.

Have I mentioned that, apparently, not a single Republican anywhere -- from the gas-sippin', mouth-breathin', Confederate-flag flyin' double-wide denizens of Sisterfuck Arkansas, to Republican congressmen and senators, to the decrepit orange traitor and pedo-protector in the White House  -- is capable of controlling their moral or constitutional bowels?  

That uncontrollably shitting out lies and treason and ludicrous conspiracy theories and outright fascism is just who they are, and it is unreasonable to expect them to behave like civilized humans?

That it therefor follows that Democrats are to not only to be held responsible for everything every Democrat says and does (even garbage that Fox News just makes up), but everything Republicans do as well?

Have I mentioned that?  Because it feels like I might have mentioned that once or twice over the past 20 years.  

I Am The Liberal Media

40 Years, Noob.

 

At least 40 years.

I swear, these fucking dilettantes will be the death of us. 

From me, three years before Murrica "unraveled", documenting the previous half-century that led straight to where we are now.  In the Beginning...

I Am The Liberal Media

Some Escaped

In Jonestown, not everyone in the cult drank the poison.

Some had already defected and left when Jim Jones gave the death order.

Some were away from the compound.

When the order came down, some were forcibly injected with poison, or forced to drink the cyanide-laced Flavor Aid.

Some tried to resist and were shot.

Some escaped into the jungle.

And hanging over it all was the fact that Jonestown was physically isolated from the rest of the world.

But MAGA cultists are not physically isolated from the rest of the world, are they?

Quite the opposite: they live in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet, during an era of instant communication and instant access to information unlike anything that has ever existed in history.   There are no barbwire fences or guards with machine guns forcing them to swallow increasingly hateful and ludicrous propaganda every day. 

They choose this life.  Every day they choose to believe liars who laugh at them as they take their money and their votes.  Every day they make a grotesque mockery of the Christianity they claim to believe in.  And every day they have to work just a little bit harder to make sure that nothing of the outside world and the horrendous consequences of their electoral decision leaks into their tiny, suffocating, self-imposed cave.   

And now, after a decade of Trump ordering them to swallow all kinds of toxic garbage in the name of Jebus and Freedumb,  he is ordering them to drink straight cyanide.  No additives.  Nothing to make it go down easier.  Just shut up and drink it.  

From CNN:  

Trump lashes out at ‘weaklings’ who believe Epstein ‘bullsh*t’ amid building GOP pressure to release documents

From ABC: 

Trump blasts 'stupid' and 'foolish' Republicans amid calls to reveal more Epstein files
The president made baseless claims that Democrats created a "hoax."

From NPR:

Trump tells supporters not to 'waste time' on Epstein files. They're not happy

From NBC:

Trump can't stop MAGA from obsessing about the Epstein files

MAGA-friendly media has been torn over how to respond to a base that wants more on the Epstein files and a president who wants it to move on.

And now they're praying to Republican Jebus like they've never prayed to him before to please let this cup pass from them.  But it won't.  Because it can't.  Because faith in their insane conspiracy theories is, at the moment, synonymous with their faith in the pope of their Church of Insane Conspiracy Theories, Donald Trump.

So, in then end, most will drink from the cup Trump offers.  Rather than admit they were wrong, they will swallow whatever stupid hellbrew of transparent lies, deflections of supplementary conspiracy nonsense it contains.  They will shout whatever deranged bullshit he commands them to shout.  They will do this because they really are nothing more than reprogrammable meatbags.  And however humiliating it might be to go along with Trump Pedophile coverup, the alternative -- admitting they had been wrong about Trump all along -- is literally unthinkable.  To extend the "reprogrammable" metaphor, the Epstein Files are an "app" but their blind faith in Trump is their operating system, so do not make the mistake of expecting better from these dregs of humanity.

In the end, most of them will drink from the cup Trump offers... 

... but not all of them.  And that is where hope lies.  

Those who stay in the cult are lost, damned souls.  There is no saving them so stop wasting your time trying.  

But because they live in one of the most technologically advanced societies on the planet, during an era of instant communication and instant access to information unlike anything that has ever existed in history, no matter how diligently they work to keep the blinding nova daylight of Trump's complicity in his dead best friend's child sex trafficking ring from leaking into their tiny, suffocating, self-imposed cave, some of it will break through and some of them will be thrown into panicked confusion.

Some will resist and be cast out. 

Some will flee.  

And that may be enough.  

Do not expect the few MAGA meatheads who make a break for it to show up at our doorstep offering to knock doors for Zohran Mamdani, Kat Abughazaleh or Ro Khanna.  Decades of relentless Conservative media slander has done its work: to MAGA meatbags, Democrats are nothing but a Soros-funded cabal of commie baby-killers, and nothing but the erosion of mortal demography is going to change that.

But for those few MAGA meatheads who flee the cult, the Both Sides Do It lie they've used to keep Reality at bay through all previous Republican scandals may finally pay some unexpected dividends. 

 Whether they opt to scream "Uniparty" until they burst a blood vessel and throw their vote down Musk's third party rathole, or they just quit politics altogether and spend the rest of their miserable lives hunkered down in their doublewides, getting drunk watching NCIS, and weeping themselves to sleep listening to a Lee Greenwood cover of "Didn't We Almost Have it All"... I don't fucking care.  

If enough of them take French leave from MAGA to give Democrats enough leverage to start to drive a stake though the heart of the Trump presidency, that will be enough of a first step to warrant a toast.

Not be enough to win the war, obviously. Because this is a war.  But maybe enough to give democracy some breathing room. 

Burn The Lifeboats