I don’t know if they realize what they’re saying and are just trolling or if they have really lost touch with reality. They have prepared their MAGA audience to take everything they say at face value and never question the monumental hypocrisy of it all so I would guess they’re probably down the same rabbit hole by now.
It has literally come down to this:
TPM’s David Kurtz has some bracing thoughts about the now thoroughly corrupted DOJ. I felt it fully yesterday when I watched the press conferences about the Dallas shooter and realized that I simply had no faith in what the FBI and DOJ was saying about it. That’s frightening because while it’s always good to maintain skepticism about law enforcement I don’t think I’ve ever just assumed they were operating out of purely partisan motives before. I do now and for very good reason.
Anyway, Kurtz makes an important observation about all this:
The traditional journalistic practices for covering criminal investigations and prosecutions are not up to the task of dealing squarely with a president hijacking the Justice Department and using it to, variously, punish his political foes, reward his allies, and cover up his own corruption and that of those around him…
The key thing to remember is that we’re already well beyond the event horizon in the corruption of the Justice Department. If federal judges, having dispensed with the presumption of regularity in the functioning of the government, no longer give the Justice Department the benefit of the doubt in court, then we shouldn’t either.
The implications of that shift are enormous, but too many editors and producers are not fully grappling with them yet.
I think we all know why, starting with the clown show that is the FBI director. And the news media is inadvertently helping them:
The incremental drip-by-drip news coverage of criminal cases, especially in public corruption cases — a highly competitive news environment that rewards the best access and quickest trigger fingers — now does a public disservice. Continuing to cover bogus prosecutions in the traditional ways gives a veneer of legitimacy to what should be framed instead as illegitimate retribution, abuse of power, and public corruption in its own right.
If for days, weeks, and months in advance of charges being brought, news outlets allow themselves to be used to parcel out each investigative development and procedural step in a politicized prosecution, then they’re letting themselves be co-opted by the bad faith actors in service of smearing the putative target. If the average news consumer is seeing the same old headlines they’ve always seen in the run-up to an indictment, how are they to process it as anything other than a normal prosecution?
When prosecutions are driven by naked political considerations, as they are in the Trump DOJ, then every morsel of information is at risk of being part of the underlying propaganda effort to frame the target as a villain, to tar them as criminal, and to exact maximum extra-judicial punishment in the court of public opinion. Editors and producers had a chance to learn these lessons from, among other examples, the Trump I prosecutions of Michael Sussmann and Igor Danchenko, who were ultimately acquitted, and the corrupt pardons of those legitimately convicted in the Russia investigation. Distressingly, the lessons didn’t stick.
Kurtz uses the example of John Bolton pointing out that we’ve known he was a Trump target for retribution for a very long time. Kurtz wonders how this case should be covered if it’s determined that Bolton did have some classified documents even in light of the fact that we know he was fingered for being a Trump critic.
The answer can’t be to ignore court proceedings entirely. Those proceedings, more than anything else, may reveal the corrupt nature of the prosecution. And yet, the advantage (as it always has) still runs toward the government in these scenarios. Court filings unsealed this week showed the inventory of things that the FBI recovered from Bolton’s home and office. Among them, allegedly, were documents with classification markings.
You can cover the Bolton case like you might have the Sandy Berger case, another national security adviser involved in unauthorized retention of national security documents. But you would, of course, be mostly missing the point. Or you could cover the Bolton prosecution as corrupt, as it certainly is. Or you could attempt to cover it as both, not an easy choice given the inherent tensions in the framing, the confusion it could create in readers, and the fact that actual wrongdoing by the target doesn’t justify a corrupt predicate to the investigation.
(Bolton’s lawyer said that these documents were very old and had been declassified long ago, by the way.)
He doesn’t have any answers and God knows that I don’t. I think this is the best we can do for the moment but we’d better figure it out:
I hate to urge something as anodyne as greater awareness of the inadequacies of the old way of covering criminal cases, but for now it’s a start. And perhaps it’s less about amorphous awareness and more about basic humility. We’re up against a terrifyingly corrupt president abetted by a deeply compromised Supreme Court. It’s going to take new tools and different applications of the old tools to confront the threat we face. No shame in that.
Not only is there no shame — there is tremendous honor in trying to tell the truth about what’s going on and putting it in context for the American people. I thought that’s what journalism was supposed to be.
You knew they were going here, right?
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told Republican states this week that the FDA would conduct a new review of abortion pills, a move that abortion rights advocates say could lead to significant restrictions on the most common abortion method nationwide.
Medication abortion is used in nearly two-thirds of abortions, according to the Guttmacher Institute, a research group focusing on sexual and reproductive health. It is also the primary way that abortions continue in states where abortion is banned, largely because of telehealth appointments and shield laws, which allow some providers in other states to mail abortion pills to women in states with bans without fear of prosecution.
The Trump campaign told the anti-abortion zealots to keep their mouths shut and they would take care of them later. And that’s what they’re going to do. You saw that Christian Nationalist revival last weekend.
In a typically astute column, Ron Browstein points out something I don’t think I’d fully understood. Trump has a two pronged strategy to dominate America and I think we’ve only focused on the first:
The administration’s moves against Kimmel last week demonstrated both prongs of President Donald Trump’s strategy to undermine opposition. One is a determination to transform every component of federal authority into a lever to punish Trump’s perceived political adversaries and reward his friends. The second is a systematic attempt to enlist people and institutions operating in conservative regions of the country into Trump’s crusade to diminish the political and cultural influence of the Democratic-leaning parts of the country.
Kimmel’s swift fall, after incorrectly suggesting that Charlie Kirk’s alleged assassin belonged to the MAGA movement, underscored how much pressure these twin tactics can apply against basic democratic safeguards that many Americans have long considered inviolate.
From one angle, Carr, in his moves against Kimmel, simply extended the playbook the Trump administration has developed to deploy federal pressure against other institutions it considers obstacles.
Carr warned ABC’s affiliated stations that they could face FCC punishment, or even the loss of their license, for failing to uphold the public interest and/or engaging in “news distortion” if they allowed Kimmel to remain on the air. The unspoken blade looming over Carr’s threats was the fact that the Nexstar Media Group and Sinclair Broadcast Group, which together own about one-fourth of all ABC affiliates, need FCC approval for an assortment of planned mergers and acquisitions. Soon after Carr’s first Kimmel criticisms, Nexstar announced it would preempt the show, which helped force Disney’s hand; Sinclair soon followed.
With those warnings, Carr was following the familiar strongarm strategy of Trump’s second term. But the Kimmel controversy also illuminated a second strategy the Trump administration is using to consolidate power. Carr not only bullied the local ABC affiliates; he also cajoled them to identify as part of a movement to break the political and cultural influence of blue America.
Carr explicitly urged local stations to reject “the programming that is coming from Comcast and from Disney that’s being generated in New York and Hollywood and has been fed like foie gras to the entire country.”
Carr’s appeal echoed the argument Trump has made to Republican-controlled states to redraw their Congressional district lines, and that Trump’s aides have raised to suggest that red states supply the administration National Guard forces to deploy into blue states.
In each case, the administration is signaling that institutions in red states should view themselves less as a component of a unified nation — or even as individual states with their own priorities — than as a member of a red team. The Trump administration can then call on those “red team” states to use their leverage to entrench the MAGA movement’s national power, which provides it the means to subjugate blue America.
This part of the strategy acts as a force multiplier for Trump’s overt transformation of the federal government into a vast machine to reward friends and punish opponents. On this score, Trump has already far surpassed President Richard Nixon, who privately raged against many of the same targets (the media, universities, the “eastern establishment”) and ultimately prompted his aides to compile a White House “enemies list” of individuals he wanted to harass through IRS audits or other federal enforcement. Trump has gone further, repeatedly seeking to coerce other perceived adversaries by subjecting them to direct federal pressure — cutting off research grants for universities, barring law firms from federal contracts, withholding federal dollars from blue states and cities, and conditioning business deals (like the Paramount sale to Skydance Media) on adoption of policies the administration demands. Federal investigations disappear for allies and descend on adversaries.
We knew they had weaponized the federal government. I don’t think I had fully understood how they were working with the red states and conservative institutions within them to advance his agenda.
Just look at Texas and Florida. At every step they’re pushing the MAGA agenda, working as force multipliers. How does Blue America fight that? I haven’t the vaguest idea. But I would guess that in the case of both Texas and Florida there is a substantial threat to business if people start voting with their feet.
I have to have faith that the worm is going to turn at some point or I just won’t be able to get out of bed. The destruction of our institutions that literally threaten our lives and livelihoods has to start becoming dire for many people, even MAGA true believers. It’s clear we won’t be able to do much until Trump is gone because his hold on the cult is just too strong. But if we can hang on until that happens (thank God he’s so old) we might be able to start anew. To do that we’ll need to be aware of where the landmines are and there are many of them being laid in red states around the country as we speak.
President Trump has had a tumultuous week so far, what with his strange, inappropriate remarks about hating his opponents at Charlie Kirk’s memorial service to the bizarre press conference denouncing Tylenol and vaccines and then the downright unhinged speech before world leaders at the United Nations. He seems to be losing all inhibitions and can no longer read a room which were never his strong suits to begin with. But he did get some good news from his staunch allies on the Supreme Court. They once again used the so-called “shadow docket” to allow him to fire someone the law says he should not be allowed to fire. No doubt that felt very soothing. He is, after all, the man who ran for office shouting his reality show tag line, “you’re fired!”
Last March, Trump had fired two Democratic members of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya without cause. They sued the government on the basis of a landmark 90 year old Supreme Court case involving the firing of an F.T.C. commissioner called Humphrey’s Executor v. United States. That precedent had stated that when the Congress created the agency it intended that the president not to have the right to fire commissioners for any reason he chose and that ruling has held for nearly a century.
Bedoya dropped out of the case last June in order to seek other employment leaving Slaughter to carry on alone with the suit which demanded that she be given her job back. The lower courts all sided with her, citing the clear precedent in Humphrey’s Executor but this week the Supreme Court conservative majority accept Trump’s emergency appeal, ignored those lower court’s orders and instead ordered that Trump could fire her for now and they would hear the case on an accelerated timetable in December.
I don’t think you need to be a Supreme Court insider or a psychic to figure out which way they are going to go. After all, they couldn’t even bring themselves to allow the precedent to stand for a few more months until they could hear the case. They had to step in on an emergency basis to give President Trump the desperate relief he needs to be able to fire this woman.
Justice Elana Kagan, writing for the minority, pointed out that this is only the latest in a series of cases in which the majority has “has handed full control of all those agencies to the president…He may now remove — so says the majority, though Congress said differently — any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all. And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence.”
There is no other way to interpret their behavior so far and it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Being believers in the Unitary Executive theory, they have all been champing at the bit for years for a president to aggressively push the boundaries so they could break all the pesky precedents that their predecessors had created to stifle the full measure of presidential power. Led by his legal handlers of the Federalist Society and the Heritage Foundation, Trump has been more than happy to oblige.
The Trump team may be ramshackle and chaotic in most ways but they know what they’re doing when it comes to their legal strategy. The timing and the choice of cases to push on an emergency basis has been meticulously planned to bring to the Supreme Court majority the cases they know they want to hear. Since they are all on the same page to begin with, it’s created a serendipitous synchronicity that has the White House feeling “ecstatic,” according to NBC News.
And why wouldn’t they be? Of the twenty eight cases on which the administration has asked the Court to rule on an emergency basis, they’ve only lost two. There are still a few pending and three have resulted in no decision. But all in all it has been almost a clean sweep.
The NBC report notes that there have been more that 300 cases filed against the administration so far which they believe indicates that the Trump’s team has been careful not to push the conservative court majority to take up cases they could conceivably see as a bridge too far. I really doubt that’s going to be a problem. If I had to guess I’d think a couple of them might nod weakly toward American ideals and uphold birthright citizenship since it’s so clear in the text of the 14th Amendment, but I suspect they will generally rule with Trump on even the most draconian authoritarian policies.
They haven’t seemed even remotely interested in the findings of the lower courts and even less interested in giving them any guidance as to how they are supposed to carry on. A good case in point is Justice Kavanaugh’s fatuous opinion that citizens need not worry that unidentified masked men under color of law demand they prove their citizenship because they will only be briefly inconvenienced. It just shows that in his cushy Supreme Court bubble he has no idea what is actually taking place in the streets of America. (Either that or he does know and just chooses to ignore the truth in order to advance a policy preference for deportations without the normal constitutional constraints.)
Trump’s Solicitor General, D. John Sauer, yet another of his personal lawyers elevated to a top job in the government, is a former law clerk of Justice Antonin Scalia and clearly has the conservative majority’s number. (For all we know he has their cell phone numbers too.) He’s actually very competent, having argued the immunity case that has given Trump pretty much free rein to openly conspire with his Justice Department to persecute his political enemies.
Some of the biggest cases are yet to come and they may be a little bit harder for the court to justify. They have agreed to hear the big tariffs case next month and if the speculation is correct that the Trump team has only brought the cases they are pretty sure the Court will decide in their favor, that’s bad news for the world economy. The Court had shown in an earlier case that they considered the Federal Reserve to have special status apart from other quasi-independent agencies which may indicate that they are less likely to rubber stamp the president’s assertion of an obscure emergency power to justify his extreme tariff policies. They may not be as enthusiastic about letting Donald Trump mess with rich people’s money as they are about usurping people’s civil liberties and the constitutional balance of power.
But for the most part, there is no longer any doubt that the Supreme Court is working hand in glove with the administration to expand the power of the president to something more akin to a king’s or a dictator’s. Whether they’re prepared to accept that those powers might one day be in the hands of someone with whom they are not so ideologically aligned is another story. If we’re lucky we will find that out in the not too distant future.
If the Democrats manage to win back power in the next couple of elections they must understand that “guardrails” are insufficient. We’re watching what happens when we rely on the good faith of extremists with lifetime appointments to guard our rights and freedoms. They must build a big, beautiful, legal wall to prevent this from happening in the future— and make MAGA pay for it.
Add George Packer to the prominent commentators like Mona Charon, David French, and Michael Tomasky who believe that we are as Tomasky put it, “no longer a democracy.” Or else we are damned close.
“We are living in an authoritarian state,” Packer writes with conviction. On the surface of things, nothing looks any different, as I noted in April. “Yet it’s true,” Packer concludes. What makes it less recognizable for those raised in the 20th century is the lack of authoritarian trappings familiar from movies, black-and-white photos, and history books. There are no jackboots or firing squads, no “giant portraits of the leader, secret opposition meetings in basements,” etc. Nevertheless.
“Opposition parties, the judiciary, the press, and civil-society groups aren’t destroyed, but over time they lose their life, staggering on like zombie institutions, giving the impression that democracy is still alive,” Packer continues. We strive to name authoritarianism in the 21st century. It’s the same beast by other names: illiberal democracy, competitive authoritarianism, right-wing populism. But its features are the same (The Atlantic, gift link):
The blurred line between democracy and autocracy is an important feature of modern authoritarianism. How do we know when we’ve crossed it? These sorts of regimes have constitutions, but the teeth are missing. Elections take place, but they’re no longer truly fair or free—the party in power controls the electoral machinery, and if the results aren’t desirable, they’ll be challenged and likely overturned. To keep their jobs, civil servants have to prove not their competence but their personal loyalty to the leader. Independent government officers—prosecutors, inspectors general, federal commissioners, central bankers—are fired and their positions handed to flunkies. The legislature, in the hands of the ruling party, becomes a rubber stamp for the executive. Courts still hear cases, but judges are appointed for their political views, not their expertise, and their opinions, cloaked in neutral-sounding legal terms, predictably give the leader what he wants, endorsing his most illiberal policies and immunizing him from accountability. The rule of law amounts to favors for friends and persecution for enemies. The separation of powers turns out to be a paper-thin gentleman’s agreement. There are no meaningful checks on the leader’s power.
Twenty-first century authoritarianism doesn’t require sacrifice for the Fatherland. It has no guiding philosophy beyond securing power and riches for the ruler and his court. Open repression is unneeded in the digital age. Modern authoritarianism’s “dominant emotions aren’t euphoria and rage, but indifference and cynicism…. The most effective tools of control are distraction, confusion, and division.” Do it effectivley enough, Packer argues, and “the public throws up its hands and checks out.”
The U.S. under Trumpism bears all the hallmarks of an authoritarian state. He and his cronies take bribes. He works to cow the media. “He sends masked police to pick people off the streets without probable cause for arrest, disappear them into secret prisons, and ship them off to random countries. He fires experienced, patriotic civil servants and replaces them with unqualified toadies.” This you know.
After some anecdotes, Packer adds;
Today, in public life, and especially in the hellscape of social media, our habits of the heart tend to be unrestrained, intolerant, contemptuous. With the help of Big Tech’s addictive algorithms, we’ve lost the art of self-government—the ability to think and judge; the skills of dialogue, argument, and compromise; the belief in basic liberal values. Five years ago, in the midst of the George Floyd protests, I helped write a rather anodyne statement in defense of open inquiry, signed by more than 150 writers, artists, and intellectuals. Without using the phrase, it criticized cancel culture. Almost immediately upon its publication in Harper’s, the statement became the “notorious” Harper’s Letter—the object of furious condemnation by journalists and academics as the pearl-clutching of elites and an excuse for bigotry. This torrent of abuse came from the left, which no longer believed in open inquiry. Those on the right raged against left-wing puritans and declared themselves militants for free speech, even—especially—hatred and lies.
Since Trump’s return, Packer believes, those roles have reversed. “Free-speech hypocrisy is a symptom of the democratic decay that makes authoritarianism possible.”
But Packer’s assessment that, as Shakespeare wrote, the fault lies “not in our stars, but in ourselves,” is too one-dimensional. He acknowledges the “help” of social media and “Big Tech’s addictive algorithms” without laying enough blame there. Or rather on our insistence that any check on technological development is a crime against capitalism and freedom as Milton Friedman would see it. Packer gives too little credit to the toxic impacts of technological developments like social media and artificial intelligence, and even TV which gave us Donald Trump, and the personal automobile which gave us bedroom communities that aren’t. We set them loose on society like DDT or “forever chemicals” to meet a perceived need without a fleeting thought for longer-term consequences for society and the body politic for which we blame eash other.
Our way of life and our sense of ourselves is upended as much by avarice and royalist backlash as by our inventions. We create labor-saving devices that simply make possible more labor. We create online “communities” that instead erode them and our national sense of self.
Podcaster Joe Rogan “floated the idea of an AI president” and thought, “That’s awesome.”
Packer laments:
The philosopher John Dewey believed that democracy is not just a system of government but a way of life, one that allows for the fullest realization of every human being’s potential. I was granted more than half a century to benefit from it in the country that practically invented democracy. It makes me heartsick that my children might not have the same chance. What can we do to prevent authoritarianism from becoming our way of life? How can we change the habits of our heart and our society?
I don’t know. But I’m not done fighting for it.
“We are living in an authoritarian state.” Get busy fighting it or get used to being crushed by it.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
I’d fogotten this scene from The Sound of Music (1965). The film came out when I was a kid and it’s been years since I’ve watched it. The Hollywood Bowl on Saturday hosted a 60th anniversary party for costumed fans to watch and sing along with the remastered film. Seems it’s a local tradition.
The event only comes to my East Coast attention via a post on Threads. It is the scene of Captain Georg von Trapp (Christopher Plummer) tearing down and destroying a Nazi flag found hung outside his villa near Salzburg after the Anschluss. The crowd reaction at the Hollywood Bowl event was rather satisfying given recent events. I lost count of how many times I watched it on repeat.
View on Threads
The clip doesn’t bring tears to my eyes like La Marseillaise scene in Casasblanca (1942) does (every time), but it brought a broad smile. Hope it does for you.
* * * * *
Have you fought dicktatorship today?
50501
May Day Strong
No King’s One Million Rising movement – Next national day of protest Oct. 18
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense
President Donald Trump is once again making decorative changes to the White House — disparaging former President Joe Biden in the process.
The White House has installed a new presidential portrait gallery along the West Wing Colonnade, unveiling the wall of photos on Wednesday. While the new “Presidential Walk of Fame” features portraits of all the presidents in gilded frames, Biden’s portrait is replaced with a picture of an autopen.
I go back and forth daily over whether this stuff is just so bone deep stupid that they can’t possibly get away with it or if this is just the way the world is now and we have to accept it. I honestly don’t know.
I’m going to break the rules and publish this entire piece here because I want to have it on record for future reference. I hope they don’t mind too much. (Here is a gift link so please click over and read it there.) I think it’s super important and we need to think about it.
If you have the means to subscribe to Vox.com it’s well worth your money for Zack Beauchamp and Ian Milhiser alone. This is by Beauchamp:
The right wants Charlie Kirk’s death to be a “George Floyd moment”
It is impossible, I think, to grasp the terrible consequences of Charlie Kirk’s death without understanding who he was in life.
Liberals had a dim view of that track record — focusing on his often-offensive radio broadcasts and contributions to Trump’s authoritarian project (like sending seven buses to the January 6 protest). However, to conservatives, he was something very different: not just an effective political organizer but a living symbol of democratic politics done the right way.
I must admit that this second perspective doesn’t come naturally to me. But I wanted to understand it better, so I reached out to Tanner Greer — a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog The Scholar’s Stage.
In his piece, Greer argues that Kirk was “the indispensable man” on the populist right: Nobody else had his genius for organization or his extensive connections with nearly everyone of note in the MAGA movement. On an ideological level, per Greer, Kirk represented a vision of politics in which the populist right competes on the left’s turf, from universities to elections, and wins in direct political combat. In this, he stood against MAGA’s most radical anti-democratic voices.
So when he was killed, Greer explains, his many friends and allies saw it as proof that the broader left was now incapable of coexisting with even someone as genial and small-d democratic as Kirk — giving rise to the vehement, even authoritarian, response of people like Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance. Now, much of the right believes it’s their turn to seize control of culture, to have a version of the left’s “George Floyd moment” of 2020.
I didn’t agree with much of the thinking Greer described. But I found his explanation of it, to borrow a phrase, “indispensable.”
He helped me understand why leading Republicans blame an ill-defined “they” for Kirk’s killing, rather than a shooter who seemingly acted alone, and just how emotional these conservatives must be in the wake of Kirk’s passing. If we are to keep sharing a country, you need to understand this perspective — perhaps especially if you disagree with it.
What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.
Tell me what you think most people who only knew Kirk from his radio broadcasts missed about him.
Second only to Donald Trump himself, Kirk is probably the most important individual in creating the current intellectual and organizational landscape of the MAGA movement. You wouldn’t get any of this at all if all you knew of him was some guy who’s willing to say shocking things on the internet.
In the piece, I suggest there’s [several] aspects of Charlie Kirk that made him a very powerful individual.
First, the size of his audience. His radio show had about 500,000 people who listened to it. His TikTok channel had 7 million followers. He’s had campus debates that had upwards of 2 billion views in total all across the world. Five million Twitter followers on top of that. So he had this giant megaphone. If he wanted to come out and publicly take a position, Republicans would listen.
The second thing that he had was TPUSA and the little organizations that were built off of it. TPUSA is a very large, 850- to 900-chapter organization. This is a mass mobilization machine. This is a mass talent-building machine, as future political leaders often come from people who were TPUSA chapter leaders in their universities. And then on top of that, he builds these other outreach organizations. He has a giant outreach organization for evangelical church leaders.
Then he has a vote-getting machine that is very active in swing states in the 2024 election — most Republicans seem to think that TPUSA’s Turning Point Action Committee might’ve gotten 10 to 20,000 votes in Arizona, which is basically the margin of a [close] election. They had perfected the strategy of basically primarying people for not being MAGA enough in Arizona, which is TPUSA’s organizational home, and they were going to go state to state to state in the near future.
Your third source of power is that he’s this connector.
Donors love him. He’s famously charismatic. Because he himself had kind of raised up this whole generation of new activists, he knew who was the best potential staffers or the best potential state House candidates or congressional candidates. There are several congressional candidates who came from TPUSA and are in Congress right now. And because he was running this podcast where he’s talking to the existing class of staffers, the existing media magnates, the existing politicians, he’s at the center of this network of people. And this is probably one of his most important roles in the right, especially the more MAGA right. He was constantly working to get people from one part or one of these constituencies to meet them with somebody else.
You wrote, “There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf. And this was not only true of the Trump administration, but also across Congress and state governments and in news agencies like Fox News.”
It’s a guesstimate. The number might be underestimated — because Kirk was involved in a very personal way in vetting for this administration’s appointments.
You have to understand the right has a problem: We have a much smaller talent pool than the left. And if you are restricting it even further, if you need to restrict your talent pool to people who are more MAGA — people [who] can pass a Laura Loomer test — then you have an even smaller number of potential people. And so Kirk basically spends all the months of November and December and January, every day, meeting with [then-White House personnel director] Sergio Gor, talking about, “Here’s somebody who might be good for this position, here’s somebody who shouldn’t be in that position.” And he wasn’t the only one doing that, but he was a big part of getting people in the door and keeping some people out.
But this isn’t just true for little [roles]. This is true for Cabinet members. JD Vance is there because of Charlie Kirk.
During [2016], Charlie Kirk took a three-month break from TPUSA to basically be Don Jr.’s manager. And Kirk sends a text to Don and says [something like], “I know that this guy [Vance] said these things about how Trump was Hitler back in the time, but he’s had a conversion. He’s one of us now. You need to meet with him. You need to take him seriously. You need to introduce him to your dad.”
That’s how JD Vance got in with cahoots with Trump in the first place, just because of Charlie Kirk. If you listen to the Charlie Kirk radio show that JD Vance hosted, he mentions this story. And almost every single person they had from the administration come on has a very similar story. There’s half a dozen Cabinet-level or people just below that who can say, “Kirk advocated for me to have this position, and that helped tip the balance.”
You can hear that not just in what they said, but the way in which they said it, in the obvious pathos and emotionality that came across in the discussions of Kirk during that radio broadcast or during the funeral on Sunday night. They all say that they genuinely cared for Kirk.
Part of me thinks, “Well, everybody on the right wants to have been close to him now.” But listening to you talk and listening to some of the stories people tell, I think this is just actually true: that he really did mean a lot to a lot of the people that are in power right now. And so part of this vehement political reaction to Kirk’s death is born out of this deep emotional and personal connection with him.
I think that’s correct. If you look at the MAGA movement as a whole, Kirk was a lot of people’s friend. That’s why all these donors are able to give him so much money. He was very good at being very optimistic and being like, “We’re going to win, we can do this,” cheering people up.
This position at the center of the MAGA world network — in addition to these kind of institutional things that he built up, the big megaphone he had, his ability to basically leverage all of that into helping other people make connections — made him sort of an indispensable pillar of the movement.
So when he was shot, that was really not just an attack on somebody who says very controversial things. This is a person who helped pioneer [not only] the message, but also the institutions and the organizational networks of the current version of the right. And he did it by the time he was 31. An immensely talented individual.
One thing that’s also struck me in the responses and the way that these figures talk about Kirk’s death is the omnipresence of the word “they.” It’s “they” killed Charlie, “they” took Charlie from us, even though there’s no evidence that the shooter was in any kind of conspiracy.
So what do people on the right mean by “they?”
When George Floyd died in 2020, there was not a sense that this was the action of a single policeman, and if we put him in jail, then the problem’s over. There was rather a sense that you could only have a person like this policeman, who’s willing to stand on the neck of a Black man he’s just arrested until he dies — this could only happen if you have a larger systemic problem in America.
I think many, many people on the right want to have their own version of the 2020 moment, partially because their analysis is very structurally similar to how leftists thought about racism in 2020. They think there’s larger structural problems — that [the shooter] only can exist because of a larger culture that supports his conduct, excuses it, and allows it to happen.
All these people went through 2020 and they want to have a similar reckoning, because that was experienced by the right as a very harrowing event — where essentially every single institution in the United States, every university, every provost, most corporations all gave out statements talking about how what happened was an act of evil and we need to nationally atone for the sin. If you didn’t agree with that stuff, this felt very oppressive to you, like you were being chased out of the public sphere.
And I think this is the easiest way to make sense of why some people on the right feel very strongly that we need to do things like, say, take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.
They remember 2020, and they feel like if Jimmy Kimmel had gone against Black Lives Matter, he would’ve been taken off the air without the state. And we don’t have that same activist network [as the left], but we do have the state. And so we should try to create the same sort of structural cultural change that was imposed upon us in the Great Awokening.
Help me understand that comparison a little bit more. In the George Floyd scenario, it’s pretty easy to see what the structural roots of Derek Chauvin’s actions are — a policing sector, and a society more broadly, shot through with racism.
But in the Kirk case, what’s the equivalent force that created Kirk’s killer? Is it left-wing animosity toward conservatism? Is it mainstream liberal ideology? What is the thing that the violence against Kirk is supposed to be an outgrowth of? Who specifically are “they” that embody whatever the structure is?
This “they” will differ from person to person. I don’t think there’s a consensus. The possible options for “they” range from, at the narrowest, the kind of antifa people who are willing to use or at least endorse violence on the left. [At the broadest], it’s all the way to a [liberal] culture that sees Trump as inherently illegitimate and un-American and [as someone who] should be deplatformed.
Just to give you an example: Somebody was making a big deal out of a tweet that Vice President Harris had written in 2019, saying how basically, if we’re being honest with ourselves, Trump should be kicked off Twitter by now because of his bad comments. That was cited as an example of the left’s inherent desire to kick us out of public spaces. Very similar to when Hillary Clinton says, “[Half of] Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables.”
If you’re dehumanizing us, if you’re calling us deplorable, you’re basically saying we’re outside of the pale of American politics — then you are part of the “they” who basically dehumanizes someone like Kirk enough that he should be killed. I think that’s how they would say it.
I’m not trying to weigh in with my own opinions on this. I just want to understand better what is this “they”? Because to me, it seems analytically incoherent. JD Vance, for example, has brought up the Open Society Foundation, which in no plausible world had anything to do with Charlie Kirk’s death. But it was one of Vance’s political enemies.
Many actors on the right have for many years believed — and I have a lot of sympathies with this set of beliefs — that a lot of what the left has been about for the last decade, since the Great Awokening started, is basically making it difficult for conservatives to be part of the public sphere in a safe and confident way.
And that word “safe” is interesting because when you start talking about safety, you can start roping in several different streams, which I don’t think liberals would necessarily associate with each other, into one system. This allows you to say, okay, people being deplatformed on campuses, that’s one version of us not being able to participate publicly. All the way to the riots in 2020, which a lot of conservatives felt Democratic cities and the sitting government allowed — which made it impossible for a person like me to be in these urban spaces for X amount of time. They made these cities too dangerous for us to be in.
And that’s where people will do this kind of mining, where, okay, [liberal philanthropist George] Soros funded this Black Lives Matter-adjacent organization, which was making excuses for rioters here. That’s where they’ll kind of all connect that together.
Someone like you, you’ll look at that and say, “Well, what does that have to do with Charlie Kirk being assassinated by this [lone wolf]?” And I think a lot of people on the right will say, “No, no, no, this is a large systemic thing. All you guys excused the violence in 2020, excused antifa, excused taking over CHAZ, excused all this stuff because you normatively agreed with it and thought that Trump was bad enough that that this sort of violence was okay. And that’s the same attitude, that’s the same world that creates young guys who want to go and shoot one of our most prominent leaders.”
I think that’s how they would connect those dots.
Now, how does that attitude relate to something you talk about in the article at length, which is Kirk’s role in giving young conservatives permission to be themselves publicly in places like a university?
This question of what he meant to the young conservatives is quite relevant to this larger question: What is the “they”?
The way I explain it in this piece — this is really hard for liberals to believe — is that, if you were a young conservative on campus from 2013 to 2022, you felt afraid. Even when Trump was in power, a lot of these conservatives felt afraid. And this fear is really core to a lot of what has happened, I mean, really in this administration as well as people’s reactions to Kirk’s death.
If you were a young person on the right — you believe something like transgenderism is a lie or a mental disease, which is a pretty standard belief on the right — you were afraid to say what you believed because you felt like you would be socially ostracized, people on campus would bully you, harass you, treat you differently, you would have professors who might grade you differently, you wouldn’t have good job prospects, you would be afraid of becoming a viral example.
This is the environment in which TPUSA begins its giant rise. And Kirk’s campus tours, the sort of thing he was doing when he was shot, this is actually what they’re designed to combat. Yes, they created some viral clips, but that really was not their main purpose. Because Kirk was a campus activist first, a media figure second.
The purpose of these was for Kirk to go into these universities and say, “Hey, guys, look, we can be part of the public sphere. There are more of you than it seems. You guys are all afraid to stand up and show you’re conservative. I’m going to come here, I’m going to organize a TPUSA chapter, and you’re going to see that you’re not alone. Second, I’m going to go and debate all these people around you, anyone who wants to come up. A professor, a student, anyone who wants to can come and debate me. And I can show you guys that these beliefs we have are defendable. We can stand up, we can be part of the public sphere.”
And so there’s a lot of young conservatives who basically say, “Charlie Kirk made me unafraid to be an activist. Charlie Kirk is the one who made me unafraid to stand up for what I believed.”
Without someone like Charlie, the only people who would stand up for their conservative beliefs tended to be either extremely principled people or they were just assholes who like to be disagreeable. I’m sure you’ve probably met both of those sorts when you were in college. If you want to have a movement that isn’t just people like that, you have to find some way to inspire people to stand up. And that’s what Kirk was doing. He’s modeling to all these kids, look, you guys can do this too.
And that’s who was murdered. And so when the guy whose whole message is “you don’t have to be afraid” is shot, then it makes some sense why people might be feeling afraid.
That’s where I wanted to bring us to at the end: how both sides should feel about their enemies.
I have this fear, given Kirk’s personal significance, that the right’s authoritarian reaction to his death is not going to be a short-lived thing — you may disagree. But if Charlie Kirk was trying to create a politics where people who disagree could engage, the aftermath of his death is destroying that possibility. It’s making it very, very, very difficult for people across partisan lines to view each other with anything but mistrust and suspicion.
So what are we supposed to do about that?
I think there’s a little bit of a crossroads here. I think the right has to decide whether Kirk’s life or his death is the thing that should be remembered.
I think that Kirk’s life, although many aspects of it are very repellent to people on the left, is an example of how this conservative national populist thing can be done without authoritarian measures and be very popular. I personally am on the side of saying, “Guys, look, Kirk actually showed us the path for how to make this work, and we’d be stupid if we left it for something that we don’t know if it will work.”
What I’ve been telling people on the right is, if you seriously believe you’re going to have a 2020 moment, you guys are somewhat deluding yourselves. Because 2020 had very many special things that led up to it.
Obviously, you had a pandemic, everyone was cooped in their house and wanted to get out and be out. But in addition to that, you had years of activism. Black Lives Matter started seven years before 2020. And the New York Times had basically doubled its reporting on racism and racial problems in America in the three years that preceded 2020.
You had a huge amount of intellectual work being done. You had a huge amount of activism being done. And in many ways, 2020 was the culmination of a decade’s worth of theorizing and activism and changing public opinion. So I don’t think this attempt to use the state to have a 2020 moment is going to work. I just don’t think the public is there: I think it’s going to backfire.
And I understand, too, that certain people have a bad opinion of Kirk. But I do think that the impulse of some on the left to take this moment to say, “Well, Charlie Kirk was just this terrible person in all these ways, he said this terrible and that terrible thing, and we’re being censored if we don’t see otherwise” — to put it very frankly, lots of people on the [more radical] right are very happy to see those takes.
The debate the right has been having for a long time is “Do we think that the other side can live with us? How much of a threat really are they to us?” And so when the reaction of some people is to condemn the violence, but then talk about how actually it’s good that he’s gone, which is more or less what these people do, it sounds more like you are part of this structure of ideas that makes it acceptable for right-wing people to be killed.
A lot of people, a lot of politicians, understand this and have gone out of their way not to be inflammatory on all this. I think clearly this is what [former Vox co-founder and now New York Times columnist] Ezra Klein was thinking when he wrote that editorial. But he got dragged through the mud for that, and he really had to justify himself showing up, talking to people on the right.
Maybe it’s helpful if folks on the left don’t just discount Kirk as that terrible racist who says all these terrible things. If that’s the message you took away from all this, I think you’ll really misunderstand both what Kirk meant to the movement, but also what his death means to the movement as well.
There is much to quarrel with in this but I can see the logic behind it quite clearly. This is a monster backlash — against BLM, Me too, cancel culture, transgender rights, DEI, CRT, all of it. George Floyd and, perversely, January 6th shot it all into the stratosphere. They managed to institutionalize the blowback into MAGA and Turning Point and are now in the driver’s seat.
I remember thinking at the time of the George Floyd protests that there was going to be a very strong response at some point because that’s just how this works in America. It’s always two steps forward one step back (at best… often it’s one step forward two steps back.) This fight between two distinct political cultures has been waged in one way or another from the very beginning.
Anyway, I think this is a fascinating interview and we should think about it. I would just caution the right, however. Backlashes go both ways. Their behavior right now is very extreme and their flimsy rationale that they have to use state power because they don’t have the cultural power of the left is very likely a bridge too far. That’s encroaching on one of the very few pieces of common ground that’s always been there — the belief that the government cannot abridge free speech. I would even suggest that it’s highly possible that this rapidly evolving police state, with vindictive prosecutions and unidentified men in masks engaging in thuggish behavior on the streets of America (or the president ordering murders on the high seas) are also things even many conservatives who are angry about “wokeness” will not ultimately endorse. It’s too much.
Kirk was apparently able to put some lipstick on that pig but I don’t see anyone else in their coalition who can perform that task. It certainly isn’t the president and his henchmen like Stephen Miller who are intent upon fanning the flames into a full-fledged conflagration.
They’re going to bail out their good pal Milei for his re-election by propping up his disastrous economic policies.
Mr. Milei describes himself as a radical libertarian and since taking office in late 2023 he has introduced policies to curb fiscal imbalances and inflation by slashing government spending and reducing subsidies.
But Mr. Milei has suffered setbacks of late, including a double-digit defeat in provincial midterms; a corruption scandal over medical contracts tied to his sister, Karina Milei; and three congressional votes that overturned his vetoes and restored funding for public health and education. He argued those measures threatened the fiscal balance that he promotes as his signature achievement.
Earlier this year, Mr. Milei loosened Argentina’s currency controls but this month its central bank aggressively sold foreign currency reserves to support the peso, which has been declining sharply.
Last week, Argentina’s central bank spent more than $1 billion to shore up the peso and keep its exchange rate with the dollar below the ceiling set earlier this year in a $20 billion agreement with the International Monetary Fund.
Argentina’s economy has been screwed up for many decades. Milei’s “solution” is making it even worse than it was, the people are suffering and they are fighting back. But he’s a big pal of Trump’s so the U.S. will step in to help him stay in power. As Bloomberg reports:
Bessent’s plan would mark an extraordinary turnabout for a US president who was elected on a promise to limit American military and financial interventions overseas in favor of focusing on domestic concerns. Since taking office, Trump has slashed billions in foreign aid and cut or suspended military assistance for Ukraine in its fight against Russia. But in the case of Argentina, Trump appears to be coming to the aid of a leader whom the administration views as an ideological ally.
That’s ok. We’re saving so much by taking away health care, food stamps, cancer research, and more from Americans that this is easily affordable.
We’re talking about this guy:
He’s a real sweetheart.