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Conservative provocateur Charlie Kirk is dead

Charlie Kirk’s assassination in Utah on Wednesday occured at a time in Hullabaloo’s daily cycle when Digby had the conn. She posted about it here, here, and here with information on the killing still fuzzy. My turn now.

This morning, the murder suspect(s) remains at large. That information void did not dissuade Donald Trump, Laura Loomer, Christopher Rufo, Elon Musk, Katie Miller and others on the far right from claiming sans evidence that the killing was the fault of the “radical left.” Conservatives are already amplifying lefty randos on social media who mocked Kirk’s death. On this anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, don’t be surprised to hear claims that “thousands and thousands” of liberals celebrated Kirk’s death in New Jersey.

Robert McCoy of The New Republic noted instead that “prominent Democrats  were quick to condemn the violence.” Of course, they did.

A few on the right in the information void called for vengeance. Alex Jones declared, “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war.” Chaya Raichik of Libs of TikTok posted at 3:37 pm ET Wednesday, “THIS IS WAR.”

To be determined

Commenting on Trump’s statement on Kirk’s assassination, The New Republic‘s Greg Sargent posted this morning:

Here we go. Trump just made it unmistakably clear that it will now be absolutely open season on whoever they decide to label “the left,” and that this will be pursued with the full force of the government. This could get very, very bad.

Kirk’s murder is horrific. His family is destroyed. What happens to his Turning Point USA (TPUSA) movement remains to be written. As does what happens next. I’m holding my breath.

George Packer considers what Kirk’s death means at a moment when, as Digby suggested, this feels like 1968:

His murder is a tragedy for his family and a disaster for the country. In an atmosphere of national paranoia and hatred, each act of political violence makes the next one more likely. Last year, Trump came within a couple of inches of being assassinated. In June, two elected Democrats in Minnesota were shot, one fatally. President Trump has ordered flags across the country to be lowered to half-staff in Kirk’s honor, but he wasn’t a statesman like John F. Kennedy, or a moral leader like Martin Luther King Jr. (whom Kirk called “not a good person”). I won’t pretend that I believe America just lost a great man. In the long history of American political assassinations, Kirk belongs in the company of charismatic provocateurs such as Huey Long and Malcolm X, cut down before their time. Like them, he had a feel for the political pulse of his moment, a demagogic flair, and the courage to take on all comers in argument, which exposed him to the sniper who ended his life.

Kirk was killed on a college campus in Utah, seated under a tent with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong,” facing a crowd of several thousand people, debating anyone who wanted to approach and challenge him. He kept up this practice—part recruitment, part provocation, part entertainment—throughout his years as Turning Point USA’s leader. He was using his freedom of speech, and if his style was aggressive, divisive, sometimes mocking, losing his life this way was no less an assault on everything that democracy’s remaining believers should hold dear. Those who disagreed with Kirk ought to be able to deplore what he stood for and also the violence that killed him.

As do I.

“Words are not violence—violence is violence,” Packer continues. He cites some of the same comments by prominent conservatives to which I linked without quoting in paragraph two. Packer’s hope is that Trump’s MAGA administration will not use the murder of a young man who celebrated free speech and exercised his liberally “to muzzle others or themselves from speaking the truth about the perilous state we’re in.”

I am as concerned as Sargent is that we are on the road to Trump and his Project 2025 advisers declaring that anyone they define as “the left” is guilty of thought crimes. They’ve telegraphed that lean for months before Kirk’s killing. Whatever comes of the murder investigation, the right is already hard at work setting its preferred narrative while the adults in the room wait for actual facts to emerge.

These are perilous times. There is no First Amendment in an autocracy. Nor separation of powers in a dictatorship.

* * * * *

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Reichstag Fire?

“For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we’re seeing in our country & it must stop right now. My admin will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity”

Meanwhile, Every Day There Is This

No one knows who these people are. They could be cartel gang members for all we know. They are even hiding identifiers on their vehicles.

So yeah. 1968. We even have the beginnings of a war.

Political Violence Approval

Nobody knew who shot Charlie Kirk when those were written. Nobody knows as I write this now. But as you can see, they aren’t waiting to find out to gin up retribution against the left.

Apropos of nothing, this discussion just before the election in 2024 about the growing acceptance of political violence in America is interesting:

UANA SUMMERS, HOST:

Tensions are high among Americans leading into the 2024 election. According to a new national survey, 75% of respondents believe the future of the country’s democracy is at risk next year. And the survey also found that a growing number of Americans support political violence in an effort to save the United States. That is all according to data collected by the Public Religion Research Institute and the Brookings Institution. NPR’s Ashley Lopez is here. And, Ashley, I just want to start with that finding, the increased support for political violence.

ASHLEY LOPEZ, BYLINE: Yeah.

SUMMERS: Just how common is that view?

LOPEZ: So the good news is that this is not an overwhelmingly popular position among Americans. Only 23% of people who responded to the survey said they support political violence in some situations. But the bad news is this is a view that is becoming more accepted. And I should point out, the level of support for this view is growing, like, relatively fast.

SUMMERS: How fast are we talking about here?

LOPEZ: Well, according to the Public Religion Research Institute, they’ve been asking Americans in just the past few years whether they agree with this statement, quote, “because things have gotten so far off track, true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country,” end quote. Researchers say they first asked about this statement in March, 2021. And at that time, only 15% of respondents said they agreed with it. Cut to just two years later, and researchers say that support has grown to nearly a quarter of Americans, which is a significant jump for such a short amount of time.

SUMMERS: Right. What do we know, if anything, about what’s driving this uptick in support for political violence?

LOPEZ: So it’s likely a combination of things. I talked to Robert Jones, who is the CEO and founder of the group that conducted this study. And he thinks two big things have been happening in American politics that are driving this. One is the continued polarization in American politics, right? Like, people in one political party are increasingly distrustful of people in a different political party, which just doesn’t really help bring down the temperature when there are big divides on issues. And the second thing, Jones says, has to do with the January 6 attack on the Capitol.

ROBERT JONES: We had our first election that we cannot say that there was a peaceful transfer of power in the last election year. We had an insurrection on January 6. So I think we are seeing violence spill over. And I think Americans are kind of feeling the country coming unraveled in a way and worried that they may have to brace themselves for that.

LOPEZ: Jones told me he thinks we are in for, like, a pretty challenging season between now and the presidential election in 2024.

SUMMERS: What did they find out about who is most likely to hold these views?

LOPEZ: Yeah, so what we know is that this does fall along party lines in a pretty significant way. Researchers found that one-third of Republicans support violence as a means to save the country, compared with 22% of independents and 13% of Democrats. And more specifically, Republicans who have favorable views of Trump were found to be nearly three times as likely as Republicans who have unfavorable views of Trump to support political violence. They also found that Americans who believe that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump were also three times more likely than those who do not believe the big lie to support political violence in an effort to save the country.

Just thought it was worth mentioning.

He Looked Like A Mexican

Horrors of Trump detention centre: Lisburn man tells his story after arrest for ‘looking like a Mexican’ Lee Stinton was lifted by US immigration police on an American street — in an incident he compared to a kidnapping. Here, he tells us his story.

Watch that interview if you have the chance.

Despite believing he had a legal right to stay in the US due to personal circumstances, Lee Stinton’s life was turned upside down when he was arrested by an ICE (Immigration Customs Enforcement) officer.

Lee (45) had been a successful Key West hairdresser with a partner, DeVaun Davis, whom he had planned to marry in August.

For a month, he was kept in a cramped cell in the notorious Krome Detention Centre, which has been criticised for providing inadequate and little food, overcrowded cells and denial of medication for detainees.

Speaking to the Belfast Telegraph from his parents’ home in Lisburn, he sits where he can see the door — his escape route, a safety net after what he alleges happened at Krome.

It is unbelievable:

“I had been making my own money, paying my taxes, I had my own apartment. It is all going well. I had my new partner, a great job.”

“I was on my way to work one day. An ICE officer said to me: ‘You look Mexican.’ I said: ‘I am not. I am from Northern Ireland.’

“They asked me if I had my paperwork with me. I don’t know who carried that stuff around with them anyway; I would want to keep it somewhere safe.

“It was like I was kidnapped off of the street. I managed to get through to my partner on the phone while they were shackling me in the streets.

“They were trying to say I ran a stop sign. I was on a bike — there was no stop sign. I had stopped to let a car go by me. But they needed some form of probable cause.

“The man who was arresting me looked at my phone. My screensaver is a picture of my partner and me. He said: ‘He looks Haitian. This might be a two-for-one deal today.’

“They brought me to the Krome Detention Centre in Miami.”

[…]

“I never even had so much as a parking ticket. I have no criminal record. I have never done anything wrong. I was doing everything the US Government asked me,” says Lee.

“Then I suddenly find myself in a cell with all of these people. I was housed in this concrete cell with these really bright lights. It was meant to be for about 10 people and there were over 100 men in the cell. There was one toilet.

“There were nights where everyone was lying on the ground. On the concrete, it was freezing cold. I had to sleep right by the toilet some nights because there was no where for me to sleep.

“I have been vegan for a long time. They wouldn’t get me food. If they did, it was always meat. When you talked to someone about the type of dietary requirements you had, you just didn’t get [anything].

“They didn’t bother bringing me food. I lost a lot of weight. I was very malnourished.

“You didn’t shower for about two weeks. I couldn’t brush my teeth or anything.

“It was so hard to get anything. To even get toothpaste, things for basic human needs like a shower, everything was a struggle.

“They brought you outside once a day for an hour. You’d walk around in circles to get a bit of exercise.

“This man had been begging for days for his heart medication. He literally dropped dead of a heart attack in front of my eyes. They didn’t give him the medication he needed.

“That was someone’s father, someone’s grandfather, and he just dropped dead. I never saw anything like that before.”

[…]

“I can barely deal with this as an adult. And the things they did to me were horrible. I asked one of the ladies about food. I had not eaten for three days. She just started screaming in my face: ‘Bye! Bye! Bye!’

“They weren’t supposed to mix the oranges and blues, but they had mixed everyone together.

“You were given phone calls. My partner had to put [up] a lot of money for me to be able to call them. They listen to every phone call.”

[…]

“[ICE] were meant to involve the British Consulate; they didn’t do that. It was actually my parents who got the British Consulate involved,” he explains.

“They would hold you in the holding cell for three or four hours. I only saw the consulate for 10 minutes. They put me back in a holding cell for hours, again with no food.

“Then they brought me back to the camp with everyone else. It almost felt like, for me, if you were getting any kind of help you were punished.

“When my lawyer came, they kept me in a holding cell for four hours. I could see my lawyer — there are glass doors — and she could see me very clearly. But for those four hours, [ICE] were telling me they couldn’t contact my lawyer…

“It was just non-stop trying to get food. My parents would call up the British Consulate, which would then call on my behalf to get me food. They were getting to the stage where they had to call every day.”

“An officer had been taking me to this room and he said: ‘You aren’t allowed to have those.’ He pointed at my piercings,” he recalls.

“Next thing I knew I was being shackled again. Chains around my ankles, my wrists. They brought me to a hospital in Miami.

“They made me stand with all of these people looking at me like I was some sort of murderer. It was so degrading. They brought me into a room. They told the doctors to cut out all of my piercings.

“I had already been there for almost a month. I didn’t understand why this was suddenly an issue. I just feel like everything was done to intimidate and torture.

“I told the nurses specifically: ‘I do not consent to this.’ But they put lidocaine [for numbing] on my face and on the back of my neck. The thing is it is only supposed to work for 40 minutes; I was lying there for well over an hour and they just started doing it. I was shackled to the bed. I couldn’t move.

“The guards who brought me there were laughing at me. They were just like: ‘Oh, that’s gnarly.’ I kept saying: ‘I can feel this. It hurts.’”

[…]

“[ICE] said: ‘You, you’re gone.’ They made you pack up everything you had, which was basically a few blankets,” he says.

“They held me in another holding cell for 13, 14 hours.

“They brought us to the airport, where they kept me in a little room.

“I went to the airport at 5am; my flight wasn’t until 7pm.

“They put me in this tiny room. They allow you to put your own clothes on. It was freezing cold in that place and all I had was shorts, a tank top and Birkenstocks.

“They send you to what is considered the capital of your country. They just dropped me off in London. They don’t give you any plan on getting you back home. They just left me in the middle of the big city.”

This is what we’re doing.

Feels Like ’68

Ever since Pelosi’s husband was attacked and Trump got hit, I’ve been wondering if we were escalating into another period of horrific political violence. It appears it’s now. Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk was shot at an event in Utah. Details aren’t available right now except that he was shot in the neck and in the hospital. The assailant is in custody. I sincerely hope he fully recovers.

This is very bad and the last thing we need right now. All violence is wrong but political violence in a situation like this is going to lead to more tyranny. I guess we wait to see what the motive was but I have no doubt that the right is going to seize on this as a rationale for escalation.

Kirk is being elevated right now on television to the level of folk hero to all of America’s youth, but that isn’t quite true. He’s very popular on the right. But that doesn’t include the entire younger generation of Americans. I suppose that’s sort of inevitable but if there’s a time for both honesty and decency it is now.

Update:

Some In GOP Express Reservations About Mass Suffering And Death

Will they do anything about it? Probably not.

cc

The Hill reports:

“Vaccinations have proven to be — the basic ones — helpful in preventing the spread of measles, polio and other things,” Sen. Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) said. “My children are vaccinated, my grandchildren are vaccinated. I don’t agree with that.”

The charged issue had already been front and center under President Trump, whose pick to lead the Health and Human Services Department (HHS), Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has long fought vaccines with warnings that they cause autism — a view roundly rejected by most public health experts.

Building on that vaccine skepticism, the Florida Department of Health last week announced it will ban mandates for schoolchildren to be vaccinated for numerous diseases, making it the first state to make such an action. 

The decision affects jabs for hepatitis B, chickenpox, haemophilus influenzae type B and pneumococcal diseases, including meningitis. 

Plenty within the GOP expressed doubts about mandating the COVID-19 vaccine in recent years. But Florida’s move against routine childhood vaccinations unnerved a number of Republican lawmakers who worry not only about the decision, but also what it could mean for their respective states as vaccine skepticism continues to rise in the years following the COVID-19 outbreak. 

How odd that denigrating the vaccine that saved hundreds of millions of people around the globs might lead to skepticism of all vaccines? Who could have predicted?

“It’s a horrible idea,” Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) told The Hill. “I think it’s a bad idea, and I think it could create … a pressure on other states to do the same thing.” 

“I just think it’s bad policy. I don’t think it’s rooted in science. I think it’s rooted in political science, but not epidemiology,” he continued. “I think it’s a mistake, and I think there could be some one-upsmanship measure that I hope North Carolina doesn’t touch.” 

That’s almost certainly going to happen. And the more states that do it the more these diseases will spread to the rest of us. This country is going to become a much more dangerous place especially for small children and anyone who is immunocompromised.

But as we saw with COVID, even mass death didn’t stop the MAGA cultists from refusing the vaccines and it’s estimated that at least 200,000 excess deaths resulted from their selfishness. Many of them were their own friends and relatives.

Some House Republicans are expressing similar misgivings with the direction the country is headed, warning that Kennedy’s ascension to the top of the HHS threatens to undermine a decades-old trust in vaccines that experts say have saved countless lives. 

“I don’t agree with him on vaccines, it’s that simple,” said Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick (R), a Pennsylvania centrist. “Vaccines save lives. I support them, and I think any effort to erode them is damaging to our country.” Fitzpatrick said he’s hearing those same anxieties among his constituents, citing a simple reason. 

“My district supports common sense,” he said. 

I’m sure they still back Trump to the hilt through — the man who made a cheap backroom deal in the election to get Bobby Jr on board and is now letting him kill their children. Nothing is ever his fault.

Meanwhile in Florida, this quack thinks his job is to protect parents’ rights above all else:

Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo admitted over the weekend that the department did not engage in any projections or data analysis of what removing vaccine mandates could mean for future disease outbreaks, such as measles, polio or whooping cough. He added he did not believe any such studies were necessary. 

“Ultimately, this is an issue very clearly of parents’ rights,” he said. “So, do I need to analyze whether it’s appropriate for parents to be able to decide what goes into their [child’s body]? I don’t need to do an analysis on that.”

So, I guess parents have a right to hurt their children. Good to know. But coming from the party that worships Donald Trump I guess it isn’t much of a surprise.

This Is Why He Only Goes To His Own Properties

Free D.C! Free Palestine!” “Trump is the Hitler of our time!” 

It was Trump’s first dinner out in D.C. as president, except at his own hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue. Code Pink’s D.C. organizer, Olivia DiNucci, told the Daily Beast the group simply reserved a table “pretty last-minute” at the swanky restaurant, where king crab claws can set you back nearly $160, in order to confront Trump.

I guess the restaurants aren’t as packed as Trump says they are.

“Nobody Has Ever Done Anything Like This”

By any means necessary

Donald Trump and his loyal subjects mean to rig the 2026 elections by any means necessary.

Trump subjects both in the Justice Department’s civil rights division and criminal divisions are compiling a national voter database “to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally,” The New York Times reports (gift link):

“Nobody has ever done anything like this,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Marymount University’s law school and a former Justice Department official.

The Justice Department has requested data from at least 16 Republican-controlled states, including Mississippi, Alabama and Texas. It has also sent more formal demands for data to at least 17 mostly Democrat-controlled or swing states, including Pennsylvania, Nevada, Wisconsin and New York.

Nearly every state has resisted turning over voter files with private, personally identifiable information on voters like driver’s license numbers or Social Security numbers. Last week, a local judge blocked South Carolina from releasing private voter information to the Justice Department.

In particular, Trump’s subjects want to gather the last four digits of every voter’s social security number.

The administration plans to compare that voter data to a different database, maintained by the Department of Homeland Security, to see how many registered voters on the state lists match up with noncitizens listed by immigration agents, according to people familiar with the matter.

Except if our experience in North Carolina is any indication, any registrant in a blue county that lacks that number in their voter file — whether by data input error or because it’s not required under HAVA if the voter supplies a drivers license number could have their votes challenged. This “election integrity” effort is not about rooting out noncitizens. That’s a pretext. (There’s a file drawer full of them in the West Wing.)

“The biggest structural concern is using this information in an irresponsible manner to fuel the narrative that something is amiss in any election in which the preferred outcome is not the actual outcome,” said Sophia Lin Lakin, the director of the Voting Rights Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.

Election officials also note that creating a federal database has its own complications. A state’s voter file is not a static document; new voter registrations, changes in address, deaths and other adjustments to voter rolls take place every day. A federal database would be out of date a day after any voter list was turned over to federal officials.

The Trump administration deserves neither fealty nor any benefit of the doubt. If it wasn’t for bed faith, they wouldn’t have no faith at all.

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

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And The Iron Horse You Rode In On

Americans push back

“The Republican Party … is trying to destroy our democracy. That is pretty much incontrovertible,” declares historian Heather Cox Richardson. But remember, she emphasizes, how broadly unpopular that is, along with Donald Trump’s policies and job performance. Trump is running a reality-show presidency. The White House is obsessed with selling an image of strength for a president who is weak. Yet 46 percent of the American people per recent polling are strongly opposed to what Trump and MAGA Republicans are up to.

But weak in polling is not weak functionally. Republicans control all branches of our government and many state governments. Several states are at Trump’s insistence working feverishly to rig the 2026 elections so Republicans don’t have to face the wrath of voters. The time to push back is now, Richardson insists. Let neighbors know what’s going on. Use social media, post memes, show up to protests, incuding on bridges and overpasses.

“You are not normal people,” my friend Arshad Hasan told us when he lead my first campaign training. Normal people don’t spend their weekends learning to run political campaigns. Normal people do not hang out all day on the internet and on cable news channels. They won’t see those memes and social media posts. Public actions in high-traffic areas lets the offline neighbors see you think our nation is at risk. They get noticed (as I found out last week).

Public pushback works. Ask Rochester.

Chicago is gearing up big-time for Trump’s incursion:

A U.S. Army veteran who did a tour in Iraq said he was reminded of his military oath as Trump threatens to bring the National Guard to Chicago and other U.S. cities. The man, who declined to give his name, said he would tell National Guard members who are conflicted about Trump’s orders to “remember your oath.”

He said he was an immigrant himself and the United States “adopted” him when he moved here.

“I feel frustration, I feel sadness,” he said. “I’m scared for my family, I’m not scared for myself.”

[…]

David Villegas showed up to support his friends who he said have been affected by Trump’s anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ+ policies and rhetoric. By the time he was within view of the Trump tower, he jumped up and down with both middle fingers in the air.

“During Trump’s first term, I never felt like doing it,” he said. “But now with the second term and what he’s been doing recently, I felt the power to do so, just to take away the stress.”

Arrests continue. People are frightened and angry.

“They’re bullies with badges and guns,” Little Village resident Jose Sanchez, 42, posted to Facebook. “They’re terrorizing the community.”

I like this observation on community solidarity from Rick Perlstein:

For of us, resisting them has culturally become part of what it means to be a Chicagoan. These are from today and Sunday: two huge rallies in 72 hours, the second called with a days notice. Note how they all specifically tie together civic identity with resistance to tyranny. Not things scrawled on cardboard with magic marker: art, lovingly conceived and seriously executed.

I especially like the very-Chicago references to the Field Museum and Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.

It's going to be hell for ICE in Chicago. For many of us, resisting them has become part of what it means to be a Chicagoan. These are from today and Sunday: two huge rallies in 72 hours, the second called with a days notice…

Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) 2025-09-10T01:51:49.148Z

Note how they all SPECIFICALLY tie together civic identity with resistance to this specific tyranny. Note that they are not scrawled on cardboard with magic marker: they are art, lovingly conceived and seriously executed. Fuck ICE. Chicago is going to neuter you.

Rick Perlstein (@rickperlstein.bsky.social) 2025-09-10T01:53:48.972Z

* * * * *

Have you fought dicktatorship today?

50501 
May Day Strong
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Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense