— What if Tyler Robinson isn’t a leftie? Increasingly, as Joy Reid reports, it appears that Kirk’s alleged assassin is a rightwing “Groyper” gamer, not a leftie. This is a hard right hate-driven group/gamer-subculture that disdained Kirk as a Republican establishment sellout. Keep an eye on this story, particularly since if this reporting turns out to be true the GOP (and Trump’s FBI/DOJ) will probably do everything they can to keep it out of the news.
— Stop asking America to mourn the makers of hate. No one is celebrating Kirk’s death because in a democracy, political violence is never acceptable. But that doesn’t mean we should rewrite his legacy. Kirk spent his career stoking fear, smearing the vulnerable, and legitimizing hate. To demand mourning for a man who mainstreamed cruelty is to excuse the damage he did to our democracy and to sanctify the very playbook that threatens it still. On a July 13, 2023 episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, he said: “You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot,” referring to Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. Snopes verified the clip and linked the original episode. It provoked a Black woman on Daily Kos to write: “Men like Charlie Kirk are why I’m afraid to leave my house. They’re why I had to have ‘the talk’ with my autistic son — telling him that even though he’s mixed and light-skinned, his hair might be ‘too nappy’ for some people to accept, and some people might hate or harm him for that. Men like him are why I worry my college-age daughter could be raped on campus and forced to carry her rapist’s child — he literally said he’d allow his own ten-year-old daughter to carry a rape baby. HIS OWN DAUGHTER. Men like him are why people will assume I’m a DEI hire even though I’ve worked since I was 14—legally emancipated—to build a better life.” Meanwhile, Republican George Conway warned that Trump and the GOP are trying to turn Kirk into the martyr that Hitler made of Horst Wessel: “They may not want to hear it, and it may incense them, but the parallels between what the Nazis did then, and what Trump and MAGA are doing today, are striking, chilling—and as any expert on authoritarianism will tell you, straight out of the same toxic, but dog-eared, playbook.” Along those lines, multiple states are now “investigating” teachers and other public employees for having said negative things about Kirk online in the past and the State Department is looking over social media from people with Green Cards and other authorizations to live in the US for anything bad they’ve said about Kirk; the whitewashing of Kirk and his rightwing project is underway.
— Will Republicans “own the shutdown” if Democratic senators refuse to vote to break a filibuster before the end of the month? Federal funding for the government runs out when the fiscal year ends on September 30th. When this happened in March, Chuck Schumer told his colleagues to vote to keep the government open (Republicans can’t do it alone) because, he said, the courts were stopping Trump and shutting down the government would shut down the courts. Now that the courts are facilitating Trump rather than stopping him, that argument will likely fall on deaf ears, and Schumer is already making noises about not going along to get along like he did in March. The key to the whole thing, though, will be whether the media blames the shutdown on the Republican extremism (its real cause) or blame the Democrats (as they almost always do about pretty much everything the GOP screws up). Keep an eye on this one; the debate/battle is already heating up among Democrats who don’t want the blame but also don’t want to fund more of ICE and Trump’s other excesses. Former Republican Congressman Adam Kinzinger wrote: “Democrats got little in return while Republicans claimed victory and quickly moved on to their next demand; this cannot happen again, this is the only realistic chance Democrats will have before the next election to press for practical, popular priorities. ... Some moderate Democrats are fretting that they’ll be blamed for a shutdown. That fear is misplaced. Democrats don’t control the House. They don’t control the Supreme Court. They don’t control the White House. This is a Republican government and it is the Republican Party’s responsibility to keep the lights on.” I agree with Kinzinger!
— Bolsonaro Behind Bars: What Brazil’s Democracy Got Right and America Still Won’t. Brazil has shown the world what accountability looks like. Jailing former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro for 27 years after he did an almost identical imitation of Trump’s January 6th attack on the Capitol is more than justice, it’s a declaration that democracy won’t be dismantled without consequence. Contrast that with America, where coup plotters, insurrectionists, and election deniers still roam free, fundraising off their crimes and preparing for the next assault on the system. The message from Brazil is clear: democracies that enforce consequences survive; those that shrug at authoritarian attacks invite their own collapse.
— Trump Admits ‘I Couldn’t Care Less’ When Pressed on ‘How Do We Fix This Country?’ Say What?! The wannabe dictator was on Fox & Friends yesterday morning, and co-host Ainsley Earhardt made a good-faith attempt to get him to pull back from his near-constant excuses for and advocacy of political violence. She asked: “What do we do about our country? … How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” Trump was having none of it, saying: “I couldn’t care less. Radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime. We don’t want people coming in, we don’t want you burning our shopping centers, shooting our people in the street. Radicals on the left are the problem and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, open borders. Worst thing that happened to this country.” He’s already led one violent attack on American democracy that put almost 150 police officers in the hospital and killed three of them; clearly he’s comfortable with the nation being torn apart. Disgusting.
— Senators Merkley and Van Hollen visited Israel recently, and compiled a damning report that calls out the Netanyahu government for “ethnic cleansing” in explicit terms. It’s rare — although becoming more common — that American politicians are willing to risk AIPAC’s ire (the pro-Israel front group took down four Democrats who’d criticized Netanyahu in last year’s elections), but these two went there with honesty and decency, writing: “The fact that both the Netanyahu government and now the Trump administration are framing their plan as a call for the ’voluntary’ exodus of Palestinians from Gaza is one of the most fraudulent, sinister, and twisted cover stories ever told. It is a farce to suggest people who have been subjected to destruction and dehumanization on such a vast scale would be departing Gaza ‘voluntarily.’ The plan is clearly to pressure Palestinians to leave Gaza by making life for them there virtually impossible.” They also explicitly called out the Trump administration for facilitating the destruction of Gaza and the deaths of over 64,000 people at Israel’s hands. I’m proud of my senator, Jeff Merkley, and Senator Chris Van Hollen; we need more brave statesmen like them.
— Another city with a Black mayor, another raid by the National Guard is on the way. Trump now claims he’s going to send the National Guard to Memphis, Tennessee. Democratic Mayor Paul Young had said he welcomed federal money for law enforcement, but doesn’t think bringing in the military will help. Being a soldier, after all, is all about blowing things up and killing people, a very different job description from being a police officer. Trump doesn’t care, though, as he works to up his dictator cred, saying, “Memphis is deeply troubled, and the mayor is happy. He’s a Democrat mayor.”
— Trump again chooses to suck up to Putin; what does Vlad have on him? Is it just that Trump wants to be like him? Does Putin have the Epstein videos, like Russian TV has implied several times? Or is it about all the money laundering Trump is accused of doing for rich Russians? Or something even worse? After Russia sent 19 drones into Poland, provoking a NATO Article 4 crisis, Trump was asked about the situation. Cowering in front of the Russian dictator, he said, “It could have been a mistake, but regardless, I’m not happy about anything having to do with that whole situation, but hopefully it’s going to come to an end.” Yeah, “hopefully.” The Manchurian Candidate is not only doing Putin’s work of tearing America apart and deconstructing our government and intelligence services, he’s also stabbing Ukraine in the back and risking World War III in Europe. It’s both infuriating and pathetic.
— Bob Kennedy is getting ready to scare the crap out of America’s parents, and Trump’s down with it. The Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) is a government database that anybody who thinks they’ve been harmed by a vaccine can make a report to. There’s no confirmation, no reality check, no physicians looking into the claims; it’s just an open spreadsheet that any old crank can slap stuff into. So Kennedy, according to reporting, will use information from VAERS to tell us next week that at least 25 children have been harmed by the Covid vaccine. Having a former heroin- and sex-addicted lawyer with no medical training whatsoever who got a brain worm from eating road kill and takes steroids run our national health is turning out to be just about as terrible an idea as physicians have been warning about.