Month: September 2025

The menacing menacers

The extremist right has created federal and amateur informant networks since Charlie Kirk’s murder last week. What are they looking to punish? Free speech coming from the left. Sometimes toxic, insensitive, gross, etc., but speech protected by the First Amendment. Except not protected from retribution from the right.

The Associated Press this morning reports:

This past weekend, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s assassination.

“This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,” Duffy said on the social media site X.

Try counting on your fingers the disgusting behaviors, not just speech, of federal employees operating under Trump administration orders, some illegal, that merit firing. You’ll run out.

As elected officials and conservative influencers lionize Kirk as a warrior for free expression who championed provocative opinions, they’re also weaponizing the tactics they saw being used to malign their movement — the calls for firings, the ostracism, the pressure to watch what you say.

It’s not as if the left has not used the tactic before against foes on the right. “Make him famous” has been used liberally online (pun intended) for years. But not with federal blessing. Kirk’s mourners have taken it to the next level. It smacks of McCarthy-era paranoia, observes Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer.

“Charlie Kirk’s allies warn Americans: Mourn him properly or else,” reads a Reuters headline:

Some Republicans want to go further still and have proposed deporting Kirk’s critics from the United States, suing them into penury or banning them from social media for life.

“Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” said conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, opens new tab, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump and one of several far-right figures who are organizing digital campaigns on X, the social media site, to ferret out and publicly shame Kirk’s critics.

U.S. lawmaker Clay Higgins said in a post on X, opens new tab that anyone who “ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man” needed to be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER.” The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said on the same site that he had been disgusted to “see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.”

Republicans’ anger at those disrespecting Kirk’s legacy contrasts with the mockery some of the same figures – including Kirk – directed at past victims of political violence.

That’s another counting exercise that will require more digits than the typical human possesses.

Bunch writes:

Sure, Kirk went to college campuses and didn’t ban liberals from his events and looked to debate them — a good thing that we should hope to see emulated in a time of angst over free expression. But Kirk was also a raging hypocrite about free speech — his Turning Point USA sought to blacklist scores of liberal academics — and made so many immoral or false statements about his fellow Americans who were gay or transgender or Black or Latino or liberal that it would require a whole separate column.

The books editor of the Boston Globe posted to Bluesky:

“I shouldn’t be shocked, but I’m still always brought up short to realize how many people think ‘civility’ means ‘white people speaking in relatively calm voices’ no matter what vile shit they say.”

Bunch concludes:

Asha Rangappa, the lawyer and former FBI agent, said that what people need to understand about the Kirk fallout is that “Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is ‘allowed’ to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police.”

It would be pointless to call out the utterly ridiculous irony of turning Kirk into a statue-worthy icon of American free speech while threatening to destroy any citizen who offers a different opinion — or merely repeats the things that Kirk actually said. That’s because the fascists who run our government and are now pressing its full weight upon our free speech don’t do irony. Millions of Americans are already terrified to say what they really think. Those of us who aren’t yet intimidated now know that every public opinion might be our last.

There have always been fascists among us. And royalists, as I’ve said repeatedly. But until recently, American conservatives who regularly cry “communist” at the left never seemed to want to emulate East Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Authoritarian followers right now feels far too anoydyne and clinical for the kind of menace on display at the highest levels of government.

* * * * *

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You know what they say about a stopped clock…

It’s hard to choose but this might be it

Trump is taking so many destructive, pernicious actions that it’s almost impossible to keep yourself from just crawling under the covers and moaning “wake me when it’s over.” Obviously, we can’t do that because well… somebody’s got to resist or, at least, bear witness to what is happening. But of all the atrocities he’s committing, I have to say that this is the one that makes me howl with outrage: he destroying cancer research in America. If there’s anything more senseless and self-defeating I can’t think of what it would be.

The NY Times did a deep dive into just how thoroughly he and his henchmen RFK Jr and Russ Vought have already been in this nihilistic pursuit. (Gift link, here.)

Here are the takeaways from the author:

America is in the midst of one of its most productive periods in cancer-research history.

The benefits of America’s sustained investment in cancer research are borne out by striking statistics: In the mid-1970s, America’s five-year cancer survival rate sat at 49 percent; today, it is 68 percent. Every $326 that the government invests in cancer research extends a human life by one year. And there are potentially transformative research projects happening all across the country right now, like cancer vaccines and a “flash” radiation treatment that lasts just a few tenths of a second and causes much less damage to the surrounding tissue.

The Trump administration is actively dismantling the cancer-research system.

New presidential administrations have usually gone out of their way to make transitions at the National Institutes of Health as seamless as possible so as not to disrupt ongoing research. The Trump administration, in sharp contrast, has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of cancer-related research grants and contracts and suspended or delayed payments for hundreds of millions more — largely for political reasons.

It is also seeking to cut the N.C.I.’s budget by more than a third, and to sharply lower the percentage of overhead expenses that the government will cover for federally funded research labs.

Traditionally, there have been only two political appointees inside the N.I.H; since Trump took office, that number has grown to more than 20.

The research bureaucracy is at the heart of the cancer-research system’s success.

America’s cancer-research system depends on a very different model than other engines of innovation, like Silicon Valley, whose influence has grown in Trump’s Washington. The government research system is not a culture of individual visions, competitive silos and overnight growth; it is a culture of collaboration, incremental progress and the gradual accumulation of shared knowledge. It is sprawling and diffuse, but it is also uniquely vulnerable, because it depends almost entirely on government funding and because once ongoing research projects are interrupted, they can be very difficult to restart.

The changes underway threaten to derail potentially transformative moments.

My article highlights the work of a lab at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School led by Rachael Sirianni, who has spent the last several years working on a new treatment for an aggressive form of pediatric brain cancer known as medulloblastoma.

Sirianni was making good progress, and in late 2024, she applied to the N.I.H. for two new grants to continue her work. But days after the Trump administration took office in January, the meetings to review her applications were canceled and not rescheduled for months. UMass Chan was soon facing its own research-budget crunch because of the ongoing disruptions at the N.I.H. Sirianni had no choice but to shrink her lab and suspend one of her most promising pediatric brain-cancer trials.

Sirianni is just one of thousands of cancer researchers around the country suddenly confronting the ongoing uncertainty. The disruptions to existing projects and larger doubts about the government’s commitment to funding future cancer research are already causing damage that may be very difficult to undo, potentially depleting the country’s supply of scientists and scientific innovation for decades to come.

It’s a crime against humanity.

Here’s where Trump’s economic “policy”( such as it is) runs up against Stephen Miller’s purge of all foreigners from American soil:

Still think mass deportation has no economic or political consequences? The fallout from last week’s blunderbuss raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia continues to reverberate in South Korea, and it pays to listen to President Lee Jae Myung’s remarks this week.

More than 300 South Korean workers were sent back to South Korea on Thursday after being arrested in an immigration raid on a battery factory next to the Hyundai plant. “This could significantly impact future direct investment in the U.S.,” Mr. Lee said at a news conference. South Korean companies “can’t help hesitating a lot” about making new investments in the U.S. if their workers are liable to end up in detention facilities.

Companies often bring in skilled workers to get factories up and running and to train local staff. “It’s not like these are long-term workers,” Mr. Lee continued. “When you build a facility or install equipment at a plant, you need technicians, but the U.S. doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work.”

Trump relented and said he’d allow Koreans to come in temporarily but I’m going to guess they aren’t going to have a whole lot of takers especially after Howard Lutnick said the whole thing was Hyundai’s fault for not following the rules. Why would anyone trust his word on such a thing after everyone in the country now knows that Stephen Miller’s sadistic program led to this, as reported in the Korean press:

Their waists and hands were tied together, forcing them to bend down and lick water to drink. The unscreened bathrooms contained only a single sheet to cover their lower bodies. Sunlight barely penetrated through a fist-sized hole, and they were only allowed access to the small yard for two hours. Detained by US immigration authorities for eight days, the workers and their families expressed shock, describing human rights violations and absurdities they could not have imagined as ordinary Koreans living in 2025.

The 330 workers detained in a crackdown on illegal immigrants at a Hyundai-LG Energy Solutions joint battery plant in Georgia, USA, returned home on the 12th, and reports of human rights abuses they suffered during their detention are pouring in. Their testimonies from the 14th revealed a detention facility that violated all internationally recognized minimum standards for detainee treatment (Nelson Mandela Rules), including hygiene, communication with the outside world, the ability to raise objections, and the ability to explain the situation.

The arrest process itself was absurd. No one could properly understand the situation because there wasn’t even a basic explanation, such as a Miranda rights notice. Mr. Seo, a 40-year-old employee at an LG Energy Solutions subcontractor, said, “I didn’t even know I was under arrest. I thought it was a procedure to confirm my identity, but they asked me to sign some document.” The family of Mr. K (48), an employee at another subcontractor, said, “They said they saw the word ‘arrest’ on the document and whispered that they shouldn’t do it, but the agents were holding guns, so they ended up signing anyway.” Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, who confiscated personal belongings such as cell phones in ‘onion net’-like pockets, reportedly tied the workers’ arms and legs with chains, and when that wasn’t enough, they used ‘cable ties’ to restrain the workers.

It was so bad that even the Trump administration is apologizing.:

A senior U.S. state department official on Sunday expressed regrets over the recent mass detention of South Korean workers in America and vowed to prevent similar occurrences.

According to Seoul’s foreign ministry, Landau conveyed his deep regrets over the detention of hundreds of South Korean workers in an immigration crackdown earlier this month at an electric vehicle battery plant construction site for a joint venture between Hyundai Motor Group and LG Energy Solution in Bryan County, Georgia. A total of 316 South Korean workers returned home Friday, after being held in a detention center for a week…

Landau also said U.S. President Donald Trump has a keen interest in the matter and ensured that those who have returned home will not face any disadvantages when reentering the United States. The state department official said Washington would try to ensure there would be no further incidents of a similar nature in the future.

They’ll try. That’s nice. I’m going to guess that not one of those workers will be coming back. And considering how the Korean public is taking this, it would be unlikely that anyone else will be volunteering.

The only reason Trump gives a damn about this is because of the factories S. Korean manufacturers are threatening to close down or build elsewhere. Otherwise, he’d be happy to let Stephen have his fun. He is certainly letting him do whatever he wants with immigrants from other countries. The meaner the better.

If only the left would get with the program of sadistically treating anyone the regime sees as enemies with equal fervor everything would be fine.

Update:

I wrote about the S. Korean visit last week. it was a trainwreck.

He’s not talking about Islamic terrorism or even immigration…

There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.

It is an ideology at war with family and nature. It is envious, malicious, and soulless. It is an ideology that looks upon the perfect family with bitter rage while embracing the serial criminal with tender warmth.

Its adherents organize constantly to tear down and destroy every mark of grace and beauty while lifting up everything monstrous and foul.

It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence—violence against those [who] uphold order, who uphold faith, who uphold family, who uphold all that is noble and virtuous in this world.

It is an ideology whose one unifying thread is the insatiable thirst for destruction.

We see the workings of this ideology in every posting online cheering the evil assassination that cruelly robbed this nation of one of its greatest men. Postings from those in positions of institutional authority — educators, healthcare workers, therapists, government employees — reveling in the vile and the sinister with the most chilling glee.

The fate of millions depends upon the defeat of this wicked ideology. The fate of our children, our society, our civilization hinges on it.

Now we devote ourselves, with love and unyielding determination, to finishing the indispensable work to which Charlie bravely devoted his life and gave his last measure of devotion.

He’s talking about us.

This piece about Miller’s ascendance to power in the second term in Rolling Stone is just … chilling. If you have a sub. I urge you to read the whole thing. Here’s a bit of the flavor:

To see the expression of unbridled joy written across Miller’s face at that moment of Trump’s restoration was to stare into the eyes of someone who could see the future: Trump’s top adviser, his most faithful believer, the one close aide who had somehow survived the countless purges of MAGA officials in the first term, knew the country was now his.

Speaking to one overjoyed woman, Miller said, “It’s gonna be great.”

[…]

More than seven months into Trump’s second term, Stephen Miller has become America’s — if not the world’s — most powerful unelected bureaucrat. With Trump’s blessing, Miller has been allowed to run and remake the country in a manner virtually unheard of for a U.S. government official of his rank. Think of any egregious policy from the Trump administration: Chances are, it was driven by Stephen Miller.

All of it bears Trump’s signature, but the president is not the one spending his nights writing executive orders and bending legal theory to his will; nearly all of this bears the authorship (or, at least, co-authorship) of Miller. Everything you loathe or love about Donald Trump’s America, you hate or cherish about Stephen Miller’s republic of fear.

Under Miller’s guiding hand, the government can deport (or kidnap and rendition) you or your spouse, without due process, to a foreign gulag, if the president feels like it. The White House can repeatedly threaten to take away the most basic of constitutional protections, such as habeas corpus. The president can launch Justice Department criminal investigations against his enemies who, by all known accounts, did nothing wrong except annoy the commander-in-chief, or refuse to help him steal an election. The president and his lieutenants can arrest you at a routine courthouse check-in, at your church, outside your kid’s school, even if you have no criminal record. They’ve instituted a heavily draconian system of immigration arrest “quotas,” ensuring a regime not mainly of mass deportation, but of mass disappearances and indefinite detention in jails and newly erected camps.

They’ve quickly turned much of federal law enforcement into the masked, nameless, unaccountable secret police, working at the whims of the president and his staff. The president can deploy armed National Guard troops, and even U.S. Marines, to the streets of an American city any time he wants — and deem it enemy territory. The administration has made censoring media organizations, comedians, and aging rock stars a policy priority, in an anti-free-speech crusade waged from the West Wing to the Federal Communications Commission.

“Shadow Sec Def.”

“Prime Minister Miller.”

“The REAL Attorney General.”

“The DHS boss.”

“President Miller.”

Trump administration officials and other Republicans close to the president and this White House are paranoid that Miller will one day hear them gossiping about him behind his back — but they still whisper the unofficial titles and nicknames that they bestow onto the White House deputy chief of staff.

When Rolling Stone asks one senior administration official about former Fox News star and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, this source says, unprompted, that “he does what Stephen wants him to do.”

As bad as you think it is — as he is — it’s worse. This man is running the country. And he is a sociopath.

Jason Islas, who first met Miller at Lincoln Middle School in Santa Monica, says he and Miller and a third friend were a tight-knit band of outsiders who spent middle school doing preteen-boy stuff, like talking about Star Trek (Islas remembers Miller as a big Captain Kirk fan). That all changed, though, in the summer of 1999, between eighth and ninth grades, when, Islas says, Miller informed him they couldn’t be friends anymore. “One of the things he did say was that he didn’t like the fact that I’m of Latin heritage,” Islas recalls.

That sounds like a familiar profile doesn’t it? How about this?

He’s yearned to erect a vast hyper-militarized network of what he’s dubbed “camps” for detention and mass deportation — a network he hopes will change the American political and physical landscape forever.

Yeah, that’s familiar too.

The list of testimonials from Josh Hawley to Steve Scalise sounds like nothing so much as this:

In reality the people who work with him loathe and despise him. We can only hope that when the worm turns, as we must hope it will, they will turn on him first.

Or is he just incompetent?

They can be both!

A loan estimate for an Atlanta home purchased by Lisa Cook, the Federal Reserve governor accused of mortgage fraud by the Trump administration, shows that Cook had declared the property as a “vacation home,” according to a document reviewed by Reuters.

The document, dated May 28, 2021, was issued to Cook by her credit union in the weeks before she completed the purchase and shows that she had told the lender that the Atlanta property wouldn’t be her primary residence. The document appears to counter other documentation that Cook’s critics have cited in support of their claims that she committed mortgage fraud by reporting two different homes as her primary residence, two independent real-estate experts said.

[…]

Administration officials led by Bill Pulte, director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, have used mortgage documents from her Atlanta and Michigan properties to accuse Cook of claiming both as her “primary residence.” The allegedly false claims of residence, which could improve mortgage and tax implications for a homeowner, led Pulte to refer the matter to the Department of Justice, prompting a federal investigation and an order by President Donald Trump to dismiss her.

Well, I’m sure she must have done something wrong. They’ll no doubt be searching 24/7 to find it.

Pulte is a MAGA weirdo desperate to be moved to the top tier in the Trump administration. This is a high level screw up so I have no doubt he’ll be getting a nice promotion any day now. That’s how it works.

We really don’t know much about the Kirk shooter’s motivation except some descriptions of etchings on bullets and retracted quotes from a few people who knew him. But it is clear that he was deep into online culture, which I posted about yesterday. This analysis from Vanity Fair was good, I thought:

As of yet, little is known about Robinson’s alleged motivations or ideology. But the few details surrounding the 22-year old point toward a troubling trend: young shooter suspects who communicate primarily via obtuse memes and digitally inflected irony.

All sorts of young adults are familiar with the culture of video games, Twitch streamers, and YouTube, speaking a language completely foreign to those who do not spend as much time online. Is that language inherently sinister? No more than, say “Skibidi Toilet,” a series of crude animated shorts about toilets from which talking heads emerge. (There’s a movie in the works.) None of the phrases Robinson allegedly wrote are known code words for anything nefarious; they signal little beyond a connection to a contextless internet, where memes take on a life of their own and are used by the benign and malignant alike.

Some memes, however, aren’t so neutral. The young men who admired, and still admire, Charlie Kirk tend to be extremely online—which doesn’t necessarily mean that they all share exactly the same ideology. Internecine conflict between conservative factions is common, both on social media and at events for young conservatives. The most notable of these are the “Groyper Wars” of 2019. “Groypers” are fans of white nationalist agitator Nick Fuentes who like to hide their racism behind ironic jokes; when Kirk began making an effort to mainstream his ultra-right-wing Turning Point USA movement, Fuentes instructed them to publicly troll Kirk.

A Facebook photo in which Robinson appears to reference a Groyper meme has led to early speculation that Kirk’s killing may have been an outgrowth of these intra-far-right skirmishes. But another feature of the modern far-right is an embrace of the post-truth huckster. In these circles, it’s always possible that someone is playing a character—or will claim to be doing so, muddying the waters so no one can accuse them of having a sincere belief beyond the desire to rile up their targets. For people like this, the whole world is a forum board, where lewd public comments and real-world violence are becoming increasingly interchangeable. (Consider the messages left behind by the deceased shooter of Annunciation Catholic School, which were full of references to both other shooters and innocuous memes.)

In every respect, the circumstances surrounding Kirk’s murder are alarming for those with the understandable impulse to make some kind of sense out of terrifying events. It is true that real-life violence is the end result of our cultural coarsening. It is also important to remember that Robinson’s generation is entering public life with frames of reference that are totally foreign to its elders, regardless of individual ideology. We cannot properly comprehend the harm of bad actors or the concerns of the innocent until we have taken the time to learn their language—and sometimes, even then we won’t understand.

This, by Charlie Warzel in The Atlantic hits on the same theme:

This dynamic—a young shooter who seems to have no barriers between fringe online life and the real world—has become an alarming meme unto itself. Just last week, I wrote about the mass shooting at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis; the shooter there was also extremely online and apparently affiliated with a number of groups that defy normal political ideologies. These groups are better thought of as fandoms—a hybrid threat network of disaffected people that can include Columbine obsessives, neo-Nazis, child groomers, and trolls. They perform for one another through acts of violence and cheer their community on to commit murder. Though these groups might adopt far-right aesthetics, the truth is that their ideology is defined by a selfish kind of nihilism. To them, murder is the ultimate act of trolling, and they want to be remembered for it.

From the little we know, Kirk’s assassin seems to differ some from this profile. He appeared to have intentionally carried out a targeted assassination rather than attempting a mass shooting—both are horrific, but they are different. And he did not take his life in the hopes of becoming a “saint” online, as many mass shooters do. But the bullet casings suggest a desire to reach an audience—and to troll the media and law enforcement tasked with trying to find a motive.

This leaves the broader discourse around Kirk’s assassination in an awkward position, deprived of the certainty that so many crave. The killer’s motive is not clear yet, nor is the full political and cultural impact of Kirk’s death. And yet, as this and so many other shootings have demonstrated, none of this matters to individuals who are using the tragedy to get attention for themselves online.

[…]

The shooters who fall into this mold implicitly understand these internet dynamics. They seek an audience, but they are also acting out to get the world—especially the online world—to respond. “If you read this you are gay lmao” is a trolly, nihilistic thing to inscribe on a bullet casing, but the point is for people to see it, for people like me to write it down so that people like you can read it and feel something, be it shock, outrage, confusion, or sadness. The shooters may not have a coherent ideology, or even be particularly politically motivated per se, but they seem to know the ecosystem they are dropping their horrific acts of violence into.

For some shooters, online communities—with all their irony-poisoning, shitposting, and feuding—are more real, or at least more meaningful, than physical ones. With their senseless violence, these killers are bringing a part of that networked, online chaos to tangible, life-and-death reality. They know that their violence will be flattened, picked apart, argued over, and, crucially, amplified by the justification machine. In this way, they will get what they’re after. The violence will continue.

It’s an attitude, not an ideology. And it’s not just online:

It was Saturday, and the police had finally called for everyone to clear the park. As I filmed officers opening up a blocked street, a young man ran into view, screaming for help. He wore the khaki-and-white uniform of the white nationalist group Vanguard America. He had been separated from them and was being chased by at least one protester. He ripped off his shirt and begged the crowd for mercy. He wasn’t actually into white power, you see.

“Barely,” he clarified to me. As he shoved his polo shirt into a plastic bag, the fear on his face settled into a smirk. “It’s kind of a fun idea,” he explained. “Just being able to say ‘white power,’ you know?”

Papers, please

On Friday, I posted about a crowdsourced effort by the Trump State Department to identify and deport noncitizens for thought crimes. Basically, anyone posting snarky comments about Charlie Kirk’s death would be considered a supporter of terrorism, justifyiing deportation (to God knows where).

The Guardian reported:

Expanding such social media vetting to encompass commentary on an event such as Kirk’s death would be a significant expansion of the administration’s efforts to restrict dissenting views and opinions, particularly of “foreigners” in the US.

Online sleuths worked to identify Jan. 6 rioters wanted for what they did, for committing crimes. The right is working to out ideological opponents for what they said.

That isn’t the only effort on the right to create an informant network. This effort means to get people fired (CNN):

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

[…]

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

The site opened an X account on Friday.

Loomer posted on X on Wednesday, hours after the fatal shooting, that “I will be spending my night making everyone I find online who celebrates his death Famous, so prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death.” CNN was unable to reach Loomer for comment.

On X, one account has begun a running “Trophy Case” — a “mega-thread of all of the people Twitter gets fired, updated live as the news comes in,” with dozens of entries of people it claims have lost their jobs.

Very fine people.

“It is absolutely fair to call it a coordinated harassment campaign,” said Laura Edelson, assistant professor at Northeastern University and director of the Cybersecurity for Democracy Project. “That’s absolutely why it exists, to coordinate and target the harassment toward the selected individuals.”

CNN notes that this is nothing new. Kirk’s Turning Point USA keeps a “Professor Watchlist”:

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

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

Ya think?

Donald Trump is a Russophile or at least a Putinophile. His followers are looking to recreate the United States in the image of the former Soviet state that gave us Vladimir Putin, the former KGB agent. You’ll be required to register your place of residence with the local police soon enough.

Update: Will Bunch takes on the right’s selective defense of the 1st Amendment in the wake of comments like those mentioned above after Kirk’s death:

Some seemed to celebrate his death — terrible, but also not illegal — but others face sanctions for daring to speak the truth: that Kirk’s love for free speech was mainly for those who agreed with him and that he frequently used his First Amendment rights to spew hate speech toward Black people, the LGBTQ community, immigrants, and liberals.

But it’s Trump pet psychopath, Stephen Miller, who’s really itching to amp up his jihad against all persons and organizations left of himself:

In a Fox News segment discussing what the conservative network branded “the left’s dangerous rhetoric,” top White House aide Stephen Miller proclaimed this weekend, in a presumed shot at those still criticizing Kirk’s extremist views after his death, that “the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power and if you have broken the law, take away your freedom.”

With extreme prejudice, if at all possible. Why is this man in the West Wing and not a psych ward?

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

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May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
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Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
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Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Helluva week, huh?

These are extraordinary times. Frightening times.

After Charlie Kirk’s murder last week, Donald Trump and the far right “declared war on the left,” writes Dan Froomkin. The mainstream press ignored it. Mother Jones and Wired did not.

Russian drones encroached on NATO airspace last week in Poland, then again in Romania. “Together with our NATO allies, we remain vigilant and ready to defend every inch of allied airspace,” Romanian Defense Minister Ionut Mosteanu said in a post to X. Russia’s Vladimir Putin is “probing with bayonets,” looking for weakness.

Extraordinary times require extraordinary measures. Take some. It will help.

I’m an introvert by nature, a campaign adviser, a numbers cruncher, a behind-the-scenes activist. But not today. I now hit the streets during rush hour 4-5 times a week in different locations. A Resistance no one sees is not a Resistance. Nor is it the reassurance your neighbors need.

Friends believe I have a talent for creating clever, pithy messages. I go kinetic, spinning a 3’x1’ corrugated plastic sign overhead to maximize attention (and text size, roughly 400 pt) by spreading out a four-to-seven word message on two sides. The week’s two-sider reads: DICTATORS | TREAD ON YOU.

At one major intersection on Wednesday (solo), a woman waiting for the light stuck her head out the window of her car to thank me multiple times. A woman jogger thanked me. A cyclist waiting for the WALK signal thanked me too.

“I guess somebody’s got to do it, right?’ he said.

I told him I hate that feeling because it means that somebody is probably me. There was only one middle finger on Wednesday, the night of Kirk’s murder.

At a different location on Thursday with the same sign and about 30 friends (I play dance music on an Bluetooh speaker), a cop shot me a thumbs-up from his patrol car. A woman waiting for the light gave me two thumbs-up, then started blowing kisses.

Your neighbors want to see you out there. They need to see you.

In the wake of the Charlie Kirk shooting and taut tensions, your neighbors need to know that they are not alone. And not just by your re-posting internet memes. Neighbors appreciate you (at least where I live). You’re helping them cope and tamp down their fears. Maybe they’ll even get off their couches for the first time in their lives. Our groups are growing.

Friday nights (again solo), I spend an hour-plus on an overpass with a larger, one-sided sign (3’x2’). The messages are deliberately less edgy and more empathetic (know your audience). This week’s message read: YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD. (The side facing the bridge reads: ARE YOUR GROCERIES CHEAPER?) To confound preconceptions of political protesters when solo, I wear crisp, button-down Oxford shirts and a Nike golf hat.

The overpass effort is a longer-term strategy to become a trusted messenger before getting more political. The responses from the highway on Friday were enthusiastic and uniformly positive: thumbs-up, fist pumps, peace signs, waves, honks. Judging by the vehicles, many from blue-collar tradesmen.

But there are also pedestrians crossing the bridge going to and from work at that hour.

A woman maybe 35-40 walked up Friday night and told me she works downtown. It lifts her spirits, she said, to see me there every Friday. She admires the commitment. When I told her I’m doing this 4-5 nights a week in different locations, she was even more impressed. I guess the trusted-messenger strategy is working.

Harrah’s runs the civic center on the downtown side of the overpass. A slim, tattooed young woman about 30 on her way there Friday in a dark Harrah’s shirt read YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD.

“Oh, hell yeah,” she said, shooting me a pinky-and-thumb, shaka salute. She asked if she could take a picture.

An older man headed in the same direction in a Harrah’s shirt asked what the sign said. I pivoted to show him. 

“You got that right, brother,” he said and slapped me on the shoulder as he passed.

Not one middle finger on Friday.

Not today

Some readers may find actions like these too small-ball. You may fancy yourself the region’s foremost expert on [your pet issue here], an issue you believe will rewrite politics as we know it if only people would listen. But get real. Grassroots often starts small. Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus.

There comes that pivotal moment in films where heroes make a choice: to run or to set their jaws and stand and fight. I think of the late Bruno Kirby who played Ed in City Slickers. In a violent lightning storm, stuck tending someone else’s cattle, the vacationing wannabe cowboys from New York City face that choice. Phil (Daniel Stern) wants to run:

Phil: Let’s just leave the herd and get the hell out of here, huh?

Ed: No. A cowboy doesn’t leave his herd.

Phil: You are a sporting goods salesman!

Ed (digging deep): Not today.

Whoever you are, whatever you do or once did? Not today.

Dig deep. Get offline some, willya? Be seen. Bring friends. In redder areas, definitely. Your neighbors (some, anyway) will love you for it.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 
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