This comment followed a NY Times piece by columnist Ezra Klein:
Opinion | Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way - The New York Times
"When Charlie Kirk was alive he was vilified as a purveyor of
right wing propaganda. I don't recall a single instance of any pundit on the
left applauding him for practicing politics the right way, for being the brave
steward of open debate, and certainly not for his success in shifting the
college vote toward Donald Trump.
Now he is all of the above and this, more than anything else,
is the American way: We rip and tear at one another until some real damage is
done, then we step back and mourn the carnage we've created.
There's a thing that says if you have a small enough ruler you
can measure something into infinity. That seems to be what we're doing,
measuring the distance between where we are now and where we're headed with the
smallest possible ruler, so that the horizon of our demise remains infinitely
far away, even if it's microscopically close.
There is no case to be made that Charlie Kirk had this coming.
At the same time, there is no case to be made that neither did we. We deserve
these tragic events not because we're bad, corrupt people who need to be
punished in some Old Testament fashion by a vengeful God, but because we
practice an arrogant form of social amnesia, in which we have no recollection
of the events that brought us to this point.
Yet we are, every
single time, stunned, shocked that it's come to this, terrified that we cannot
stop that which we have created. And that's as far as we go, measuring our
demise using the smallest ruler we can find."
I could not agree more.
See Also:
by Carl Gibson | September 13, 2025 - 5:36am | permalink
The grandmother of 22 year-old Tyler Robinson — who has been arrested for allegedly murdering far-right activist Charlie Kirk — is now saying her entire family is strongly in the Republican camp.
According to a Friday report in the Daily Beast, Robinson's grandmother, Debbie Robinson, told the Daily Mail that the alleged shooter was raised around a family of people who fully supported President Donald Trump. The 69 year-old said that her son, Matt — who is the suspect's father — is a "Republican for Trump."
“Most of my family members are Republican," she said. "I don’t know any single one who’s a Democrat.”
Robinson insisted she was completely caught off-guard by the news of her grandson's arrest, saying that the 22 year-old "has never, ever gotten in trouble in his life. And she added that despite her family's political leanings, she never personally had political conversations with her grandson — who was registered as non-party affiliated in previous elections.
And:
by Ailia Zehra | September 11, 2025 - 5:47am | permalink
Two Republican lawmakers disrupted a solemn moment on the House floor Wednesday honoring conservative commentator Charlie Kirk, who had been shot and hospitalized earlier in day, by turning their attention toward their Democratic colleagues.
Kirk passed away Wednesday following a shooting at Utah Valley University. The incident occurred during his “American Comeback Tour,” where he was participating in a Questions and Answers session while sitting cross-legged on a table under a tent.
According to Politico, when Speaker Mike Johnson (R‑La.) asked members to rise for a prayer for Kirk, who was alive but hospitalized at the time, Rep. Lauren Boebert (R‑Colo.) pressed for it to be spoken aloud. Migrant Insider editor Pablo Manriquez tweeted that "partisan shouting" broke out after the moment of silence.
And:
Excerpt:
Trump vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence”. He listed a number of other violent incidents, including his own attempted assassination, as well as attacks on Ice agents and the shooting of Steve Scalise, the US House majority whip, at a congressional baseball game in 2017. (Trump did not mention the two Democratic lawmakers from Minnesota who were shot, one fatally, along with their spouses in June).
Kirk, 31, shaped gen Z conservatism on college campuses through his organization Turning Point USA, leveraging rhetoric about “liberal rot” in education and “cultural marxism” to galvanize a young generation of Trump supporters.
And:
by Robert Reich | September 12, 2025 - 5:56am | permalink
— from Robert Reich's Substack
Friends,
The reaction by Trump to the horrendous assassination of Charlie Kirk has been as irresponsible as anything Trump has done to date to divide our nation.
When bad things happen, presidents traditionally use the highest office in the land to calm and reassure the public. The best of our presidents appeal to the better angels of our nature, asking that we harbor “malice toward none.”
Trump consistently appeals to the worst of our demons, as he did Wednesday night after the shooting when he said:
“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
And:
In an article for The Daily Beast published Thursday, David Gardner, the outlet's chief national correspondent, argued that the failure of the FBI’s response in the wake of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk's killing indicated that the bureau was ill-prepared and operating more like bumbling amateurs than a top‐tier law enforcement agency.
He noted the delay and opacity around releasing the suspect’s image, highlighting one specific misstep: Although the FBI had been directed under its current leadership to prioritize street crime and illegal immigration over political violence, the shooting brought that shift into harsh relief.
"The implication of failure was clear," he wrote.
Gardner noted that a man was killed and the event was streamed live; a video camera “tower” less than 200 yards from where the victim sat captured footage of the suspect almost immediately. Yet the bureau took a full day to locate that footage and release it.
"I can't stand the word empathy."
—Charlie Kirk, who became a multi-millionaire in his 20s by selling ignorant shit to people eager to hear it.
The left is wetting a lot of Kleenex over the assassination of Charlie Kirk. That’s just the sort of people we are. We’re woke, and we just can’t abide violence, especially if the blame turns out to have been one of “ours.” Violence is bad, period, though we do fall in line to honor the service of men who engaged in it while wearing uniforms.
Anyway, Mathew Dowd, a Bush-era Republican who worked at MSNBC as a commentator, was sacrificed upon the altar of good manners, I guess. Dowd had some unkind things to say about Charlie Kirk, from a “Christian” perspective, and it appears to have been just way too soon and not at all the sort of things people like “us” think should ever be said on a studiously left wing network where political correctness and plain old good manners count.
No comments:
Post a Comment