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Blame Social Media, Guns, Vacuums — Anything but Transgenders

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Blame Social Media, Guns, Vacuums — Anything but Transgenders

The biggest development coming out of Charlie Kirk’s murder last week is that the gun isn’t to blame. This time, “social media” did it.

On Sunday, The New York Times published an idiotic op-ed to that effect by Nathan Taylor Pemberton, who “writes about extremism and American politics,” and whose last article for The Nation magazine was presciently titled: “Why the Right Fantasizes About Death and Destruction.” So we know he’s a fair broker.

Long after it had been established that Kirk’s shooter, Tyler Robinson, was in a romantic relationship with a transgender, Pemberton proclaimed: “The only thing that can be said conclusively about Mr. Robinson, at this moment, is that he was a chronically online, white American male.”

Really? Was that the only thing that stuck out about the accused shooter?

If Pemberton’s right, we can narrow down future assassins to the 99% of the population that’s online — with the exception of people over 65, only a paltry 90% of whom are online, according to Pew Research.

I don’t know how the FBI’s profiling unit missed this.

On further thought, the usefulness of “chronically online” as a red flag is severely hampered by the fact that it encompasses the entire f-ing population. Most Americans spend more than 10 hours a day online, according to a recent survey. The only less helpful characterization would have been “mammal.”

Is there something — anything else — that stands out about a murderer who was living with his transgender partner?

Transgenders are, at most, 1% of the population. That’s about the same as the percentage of Americans who are deaf, missing a limb, have eyes of two different colors or support Stacey Abrams for any elected office.

Here are some of the most notorious recent public murders. Would it be at all odd if each of these had been committed by a deaf person?

In 2018, transgender Snochia Moseley, one year into her pre-surgery hormone therapy, shot and killed four people at a pharmaceuticals distribution center in Aberdeen, Maryland.

In 2019, transgender Maya McKinney, born female, but who “identified” as male (“Alec” McKinney), shot nine students, killing one, at a STEM high school in Denver, Colorado, allegedly because they’d mocked her identity.

In 2022, nonbinary (“they/them”) Anderson Lee Aldrich opened fire at a gay night club in Colorado Springs, Colorado, killing five. Liberals deny that Aldrich is really nonbinary — but you’re a Nazi if you deny that Joe Biden’s assistant secretary for health “Rachel Levine” (born Richard Levine) is really a woman.

In 2023, transgender Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who went by “Aiden” and “he/him” and was “miserable being raised a girl,” shot up a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing six, including three children.

In 2023, transgender Audrey Elizabeth Hale, who went by “Aiden” and “he/him” and was “miserable being raised a girl,” shot up a Christian school in Nashville, Tennessee, killing six, including three children.

In 2024, transgender Genesse Ivonne Moreno fired around 30 rounds from an AK-47 into a Houston, Texas, megachurch before being taken out by a couple of off-duty law enforcement officers.

Just last month, transgender Robin Westman, who changed his name from Robert because, as court documents put it, he “identified as female and wants her name to reflect that identification,” fired dozens of rounds from a rifle at the children attending Mass at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, Minnesota, injuring 21 and killing two, ages 8 and 10.

Taking into account their percentage of the population, economist John Lott determined that, between 2018 and 2024, transgenders committed a wildly disproportionate number of the mass public shootings — 6.8 times their share of the population.

But it would be difficult to discern any pattern to these crimes from listening to the American media. As far as they’re concerned, trans shooters might as well have been Muslims.

The media have only three responses to any heinous murder committed by a transgender, nonbinary or transgender-linked shooter:

1) Bury the story;

2) Doggedly refuse to believe the transgender’s chosen identity — something that gets you labeled a fascist in any other context;

3) Sneer at right-wingers for commenting, Say, isn’t the transgender community producing a lot of homicidal lunatics?

For example, there’s this classic New York Times headline: “Conservatives Use Minneapolis Shooting in Anti-Transgender Campaigns.”

One transgender shooting that got gobs of media attention was the attack on the Houston megachurch.

AP’s “fact check” was typical:

“CLAIM: The shooter who carried out an attack injuring two people at a Texas megachurch on Sunday has been identified as transgender.

“AP’S ASSESSMENT: False. Houston police said on Monday that its investigation has thus far determined that the shooter, Genesse Ivonne Moreno, identified as female …”

Hmmm. On the other hand, the attorney who represented her in divorce proceedings from 2021 to 2022 said that, at the time, she was going by the name “Jeffrey Moreno Carranza,” and even the police commander who claimed she only identified as female admitted she went by several aliases — “including Jeffrey Escalante.”

Apparently, in the case of a trans shooter, “deadnaming” is not White supremacist, it’s mandatory.

Why this burning animosity toward “social media”? One big reason is that liberals lose in any competitive environment, such as dating apps, Little League baseball and the internet. Pemberton can’t even figure out how it works, falsely claiming that a relative of Robinson’s described him as “full of hate,” when it was Robinson who described Kirk as “full of hate.” See, the internet can prevent stupid mistakes like that.

Without the internet, we’d be trapped in a media bubble, forced to rely on geniuses like Pemberton who informed Times readers that Robinson “most likely committed” Kirk’s murder as “an ironic gesture”; that Kirk “used his platform to coarsen our political discourse”; and that he was “a showman who attracted disaffected young Americans into the conservative movement with fantasies of white replacement or racial grievance.”

Obviously, ideas like this can only survive in a sensory deprivation chamber, stripped of dissenting voices — no conservative guests, no op-eds by Sen. Tom Cotton, no conservative college speakers, no unapproved economists who’ve calculated the transgenders per capita rate of mass shootings.

First, they came for our guns, now our computers. Let’s just hope none of the transgenders drove cars to the crime scene.

COPYRIGHT 2025 ANN COULTER**

Nick Fuentes is becoming HUGE

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NYTimes—Nick Fuentes: A White Nationalist Problem for the Right

For years, conservatives hoped that the notorious white nationalist would go away. Instead, Mr. Fuentes has gained more traction, even while opposing the president.

Listen to this article · 11:53 min Learn more

Until a month or two ago, Nicholas J. Fuentes was regarded by right-wing influencers as a mosquito-like interloper whose lifeblood was attention. Ignore his openly racist and sexist rants, their thinking went, and Mr. Fuentes would eventually flitter off into oblivion.

But today an entirely different consensus has emerged on the right. The footprint of the oratorically proficient late-night streaming show host has not dwindled in the least, with his tens if not hundreds of thousands of alienated young male conservatives followers known as Groypers, a nickname derived from an alt-right meme. If anything, his anti-Israel, anti-immigrant, anti-transgender and anti-civil-rights views seem to have gained new currency during the second Trump administration.

There is now growing alarm among leading conservatives about Mr. Fuentes, who routinely tests the cultlike devotion of his young male fans by savaging their patriarchal figure, President Trump, for not being right-wing enough. In the process, he has emerged as one of the loudest voices on the right to turn on the president.

“When I was a teenager, I thought he was a Caesar-like figure who was going to save Western civilization,” Mr. Fuentes, 27, said in an interview. “Now I view him as incompetent, corrupt and compromised.”

Specifically, he has criticized the president for showing solidarity with Israel over the war in Gaza, for refusing to release the Epstein files and for considering extending student visas to Chinese nationals. On Labor Day, Mr. Fuentes posted on social media, “Trump 2.0 has been a disappointment in literally every way but nobody wants to admit it.”

Asked to comment on Mr. Fuentes’s remarks, White House officials declined. Current and former members of the Trump administration as well as outside advisers would not be quoted for the record about Mr. Fuentes out of fear, they said, of inviting online attacks from him and his zealous followers. Three of them mentioned the sudden ubiquity of Fuentes-related clips circulating in their social media feeds.

Certain metrics attest to Mr. Fuentes’s surge. Since his X account was reinstated by Elon Musk 16 months ago, the number of his followers appears to have grown from roughly 140,000 to more than 750,000. His “America First” streaming show viewership on Rumble has quintupled to around 500,000.

“Fuentes represents the cutting edge of a right-wing racism that has surged over the past decade during the rise of Trump,” said Matt Dallek, a political historian and expert on right-wing movements at George Washington University. “And it’s clear that he’s becoming more prominent because these bigger influencers are now fighting with him.”

But Mr. Fuentes has yet to demonstrate that he can shape American politics on an electoral level. He said he is determined to thwart the presidential ambitions of Vice President JD Vance, who Mr. Fuentes described as “the end state of Trumpism, a complete fabrication who was created in a lab by Peter Thiel,” the Silicon Valley billionaire who bankrolled Mr. Vance’s 2022 campaign for Ohio’s open Senate seat.

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Mr. Dallek said Mr. Fuentes’s animosity toward the vice president was telling. “He’s going after JD Vance at a time when Donald Trump is likely in the twilight of his political career,” Mr. Dallek said. “What we’re seeing is Fuentes, Carlson, Vance and others engaged in the battle to be the legitimate heir to Trumpism.”

A group of people holding signs and flags in a city street with red and blue hats reading Make America Great Again and America First.
Mr. Fuentes, bottom right, addressing members of the far-right group America First at an anti-vaccine protest in New York in 2021.Credit…Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu Agency, via Getty Images

Mr. Dallek was referring to Tucker Carlson, perhaps the pre-eminent media figure on the right, who unwittingly kicked off Mr. Fuentes’s coming-out party this summer. On his podcast in July, Mr. Carlson wondered aloud how Mr. Fuentes, whom he described as “this weird little gay kid living in his basement in Chicago,” could wield any influence at all.

Mr. Carlson then supplied the answer: Mr. Fuentes, he said, “is really talented, legit,” but is also “clearly part of a campaign to discredit noncrazy right voices.”

Mr. Fuentes responded on his show to Mr. Carlson’s attacks with characteristic bombast. After denying that he is gay, Mr. Fuentes chided Mr. Carlson for being a trust-fund elitist. He embraced his own status as more than just a leader “of real disaffected white people. You want to talk about me and them? I am them!”

Mr. Fuentes was widely seen as having gotten the better of the exchange. In August, the former Trump White House adviser Stephen K. Bannon reposted on the conservative social media platform Gettr a comment by a fellow right-wing podcaster, Vincent Oshana, that Mr. Fuentes “is freaking on fire right now” and then added his own terse appraisal: “Reality.” That same month, Dave Smith, a comedian and libertarian podcaster who has been disparaged by Mr. Fuentes for being Jewish, said, “He’s been canceled by everyone and he’s bigger than ever.”

A similar sentiment was begrudgingly offered by the podcaster Jason Whitlock, a Black conservative who has frequently criticized Mr. Fuentes for his racist commentary. “Young men are listening to Nick Fuentes,” Mr. Whitlock lamented on his show in August, “and he’s reveling in that.”

In the interview for this article, Mr. Fuentes insisted that he remains “an underground figure.” Unlike prominent right-wing influencers like Mr. Bannon, Charlie Kirk and Laura Loomer, he has no ties to the Trump White House. He has been prohibited from attending the conservative movement’s highest-profile gatherings: Mr. Kirk’s Turning Point USA events and the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, or CPAC.

He has been banned on YouTube since 2020, for violating the platform’s hate speech policy. For the same reason, his name cannot be displayed on TikTok, an inconvenience that some of his followers have circumnavigated by posting clips of “Nick Fuentz” and other permutations. He has not been able to obtain the blue check mark on his X account that would allow him to amass paid subscribers. Instead, Mr. Fuentes said, his income derives from tips paid by viewers of his streaming show, as well as from merchandise that he sells on his website.

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Nicholas J. Fuentes sitting on a bed wearing a dark blue suit in front of a Trump flag.
Mr. Fuentes in May 2016. He suggested recently that his most outlandish musings were from the beginning of the Trump movement. Credit…William Edwards/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Fuentes has never seemed a likely candidate to lead a group built on the idea of white supremacy.

For one, his father, a vice president of a company that makes conveyor products, is half Mexican. Additionally, two individuals who knew him during his teenage years describe a lone wolf who was highly intelligent but also abrasive and condescending. Raised in La Grange Park, an upper-middle-class suburb of Chicago, he and his twin sister excelled in high school speech contests. A classmate recalls that as they began their senior year in the fall of 2015, Mr. Fuentes was an ardent supporter of the Republican presidential candidate Ted Cruz, with views very much in the mainstream of conservative politics.

In August 2017, a radicalized Mr. Fuentes emerged. That month, the 18-year old soon-to-be Boston University dropout joined the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., chanting, “You will not replace us” and claiming that white Americans were being subjected to a “cultural genocide.” Several national media outlets, including Time and NBC, interviewed Mr. Fuentes in the wake of Charlottesville, and several of Mr. Fuentes’s critics have suggested that he consciously began to stake out his turf as the most outrageous voice on the right.

On his show, streamed by the pro-Trump Right Side Broadcasting Network, he said, “I want people that run CNN to be arrested and deported or hanged.”

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Nicholas J. Fuentes standing on a chair holding a green sheet next to a microphone and studio lights.
Mr. Fuentes preparing for an episode of his online show “America First” in a dorm room at Boston University in March 2017. Credit…Craig F. Walker/The Boston Globe, via Getty Images

Mr. Fuentes’s hateful rhetoric began to extend to Holocaust denialism. “Six million cookies? I’m not buying it,” he said in 2019 in comparing baked cookies to the six million Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. He made some brazenly racist comments that year as well. Jim Crow, he said, “was better for them; it’s better for us.”

Leading conservatives distanced themselves from him.

Mr. Fuentes gained additional notoriety during the assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, when he stood a few hundred yards from the building and hollered through a megaphone, “Never relent!” Though Mr. Fuentes himself did not enter the Capitol, five Groyper associates did and were subsequently indicted. The F.B.I. spent several months investigating Mr. Fuentes but never brought charges against him.

Others on the right took notice of his burgeoning following of young male conservatives and deduced that he must be onto something. Representative Paul Gosar of Arizona gave the keynote speech at Mr. Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference in 2021. A year later, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia did the same, though she later expressed regret, claiming that she had been unaware of Mr. Fuentes’s racist beliefs.

Later in 2022, Mr. Fuentes accompanied the rapper and presidential aspirant Kanye West to Mar-a-Lago to have dinner with Mr. Trump. In the interview, Mr. Fuentes said that he had been working on policy papers for Mr. West, “who wanted us to rewrite the U.S. Constitution and to include in it Hitler’s most severe policies and also his most moderate policies.”

He was surprised to have been let into Mar-a-Lago “because of who I am” and recalled spending most of the evening “glazing” the former president with flattery and encouraging him to give only unscripted speeches. Still, the fact that Mr. Trump had dined with a notorious bigot created a firestorm. His former ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, condemned the meeting as “unacceptable.”

Mr. Trump, Mr. West later said, “is really impressed with Nick Fuentes.” The former president insisted that he had no idea who his young dinner guest was.

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Nicholas J. Fuentes speaking into a megaphone standing next to protesters holding America First flags.
Mr. Fuentes, surrounded by supporters of President Trump at a protest in 2020, has recently emerged as one of the loudest voices on the right to turn on the president. Credit…Jacquelyn Martin/Associated Press

Several conservative critics of Mr. Fuentes interviewed for this article asserted that he was little more than an internet version of a carnival barker, thriving in an attention economy that rewards the most extreme statements. In the interview, Mr. Fuentes acknowledged some validity to this view.

He recalled his mocking comment on X about women, right after Mr. Trump’s victory last year: “Your body, my choice?” That remark, Mr. Fuentes said, “was just trolling; it was cheap rage bait.”

What about questioning the Holocaust? “I’ve never taken a hard position,” he said, adding, “I’ve never done the deep dive into it, to tell you the truth.”

Mr. Fuentes suggested that his most outlandish musings were “when I was 18, at the beginning of the Trump movement. But I’ve become more moderate.” He added, “I would say that I’ve definitely mellowed with age.”

A review of Mr. Fuentes’s recent remarks indicates otherwise. He said on his show in July that “Hitler had aura” and chided Polish people for having “this bad habit of hating Hitler all the time.” Last month on X, he characterized the Indian American in-laws of Vice President JD Vance as “Uber drivers and call center scammers.” He also said on his show in August that all Black people should be “ashamed” of crimes committed by others of their race, adding, “White people are every single bit justified in being racist.”

“Ultimately it doesn’t really matter whether all of this is a put-on by Fuentes,” said Nicole Hemmer, a history professor at Vanderbilt University who specializes in conservatism, the presidency and media. “For seven or eight years now, he’s been pushing a consistent message of a world order in which white men are on top and hold that position through antidemocratic means. He doesn’t have to have the audience of Tucker Carlson or Fox News to be playing an important role in moving the political culture in a more radical, illiberal and violent direction.”

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Nicholas J. Fuentes sitting on a chair wearing a dark suit and tie next to indoor plants.
“I would say that I’ve definitely mellowed with age,” Mr. Fuentes said, but a review of his recent remarks indicates otherwise. 

More evidence Charlie Kirk was waking up

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Rod Liddle in Spector Australia: The Lies of the Land

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The lies of the land

Rod Liddle

You can gauge the fragility of an ideology by the blind fury with which it reacts to questioning. So it is with neo-liberalism. Teacher Simon Pearson, for example, was sacked for suggesting that the jailing of Lucy Connolly – who said very nasty things about asylum seekers – was an example of two-tier justice and that, while her words were indefensible, she should not have been sent to prison.

One could counter that opinion, but only at the risk of coming into collision with hard facts concerning sentencing – hence the sacking. Best to get shot of your political opponents, especially when he or she is demonstrably correct. Only by doing that can the ideology cling on. The other form of defence, if you are the adherent of an ideology which is palpably on its way out, is to lie to people, or to withhold information from them. Just shrug your shoulders and say: ‘Search me, mate – we don’t have any information on that, I’m afraid.’

For a good 60 years the British public have been lied to about immigration and had information withheld from them. The reason that information was withheld is because the authorities know full well that possession of it would infuriate the great mass of people. And so, when some deranged jihadi murders somebody, we are not given his ethnicity, or we are told a lie (that he is a Norwegian, say), or a truism – that he is mental. If the police released the ethnicity of the suspect every time a serious crime was committed, the public would be even more averse to continued mass immigration from cultures dissimilar to our own than they are at the moment. I still suspect that Crimewatch was taken off air a decade or so ago because the gallery of criminals displayed each week revealed a remarkable dearth of white folks in it. The programme is back, by the way, with diverse presenters and they don’t do the rogues’ gallery thing any more.

The lying, or obfuscation, about immigration has included withholding crime figures from us. Until recently we were un-aware that foreign nationals living in the UK were 70 per cent more likely to be convicted of sexual crimes. Meanwhile Algerians were 18 times more likely to be convicted of theft. The proportion of the under-18 prison population which is of black heritage is 30 per cent, compared with 5.5 per cent of under-18s in the general population.

These figures are all comparatively new to us and they have been released for the simple reason that the dominant paradigm, the guff we’ve been fed for decades – that multiculturalism is terrific and immigrants commit no more crime than do the locals – is increasingly rejected as being not merely untrue, but absurd. The only comeback you will hear from the left on the issue of, say, young black offenders is that if they constitute 30 per cent of the under-18 prison population, then the majority of underage crime must be committed by white youths. This is what I call the Dave Allen argument, and it has been deployed over and over again in the case of the Pakistani rape gangs, despite what we might agree are its obvious flaws.

The centre cannot hold, the disinformation no longer works – and people are angry

So we have been lied to about crime rates among immigrants, or simply not told. But we have also been lied to about how many immigrants are here, how many will continue to flood in and what benefit they will be to society. It is quite common for the left to insist that an influx of 900,000 or so every year will not have any impact upon our crumbling infrastructure – housing, schools, the NHS and so on – despite the epic denial of reality that this involves.

More recently, however, the truth has begun to leak out. While we are continually told that immigration boosts the economy, a report last year from the Office for Budget Responsibility showed that a low-skilled migrant costs the British taxpayer an average of £150,000 by the time he or she has reached pensionable age, and £500,000 if they make it to 80. This is the first time we have been given such information, and my suggestion is that in future the OBR breaks it down by individual ethnicity.

Meanwhile, at the beginning of this year it was estimated that by 2063 white British people will be a minority in their own country. For decades anti-immigrant groups and right-wing politicians have warned of this and their claims were laughed off as ludicrous. Nope, not ludicrous: the truth. And of course any time conscientious politicians raised the issue of mass immigration, the liberal authorities wheeled out the great wicker man of Enoch and set it on fire, while denouncing all those who questioned the avidity with which this country yearned for suicide as ‘racist’ and ‘far-right’.

The slightly better news is that the public no longer buys this rubbish. For a long while, attitudes towards immigration among the general public seemed to soften, the consequence of being kept in the dark, being lied to and not wanting to seem ‘racist’ to the nice researchers. Not any more. The latest YouGov poll shows that a whopping 45 per cent of Brits are in favour of admitting precisely zero new migrants and wish for large numbers to be persuaded somehow to leave the country. That would have been an unthinkable proportion even ten years ago. Meanwhile, only a small minority believe that immigration has been mostly good for the country, and three-quarters oppose greater numbers still coming here.

The lesson from this is that the centre cannot hold, that the disinformation no longer works – and that people are angry. Here, as in continental Europe, the indigenous populations have roused a little from their enforced slumber. A shame, really, that it’s too late.

ADL Crows about their victory over the NEA

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Sorry about the formatting, but a typical case of Jewish activism—pulling out all the stops, mobilizing 25,000 people writing letters, major Jewish organizations getting involved. They are very good at this. And no, students are not “getting the education they deserve.”

 

 

Ron Unz: The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

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This is the first half of Ron Unz’s article, focusing on criticisms of Kirk from the right,  some of it based on old statements by Kirk which may well have been outdated by the time he was assassinated. The second part focuses mainly on the important Grayzone article previously posted here. The whole thing is well worth reading.
I should say that I don’t find any of the theories that Israel was involved to be convincing, but Israel certainly benefited, and it’s important that Kirk had rejected funding from the pro-Israel crowd, including Netanyahu. It remains to be seen what directions Turning Point will take. It’s certainly worrisome that the disgusting Ben Shapiro is going to attempt to lead a similar youth-based movement. On the basis of Erika Kirk’s talk, we are going to see much more of her, probably not a good sign given that so few women really have the toughness and courage that are needed to redirect Turning Point in the direction that Kirk seemed to be heading—breaking with Israel and focusing more on White interests.
The Assassination of Charlie Kirk • 43m ▶
Credit: Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Audio Player


I don’t spend any time on social media nor do I have any interest in the mainstream conservative movement, so I’d only been very slightly aware of Charlie Kirk prior to his sudden assassination on Wednesday, shot dead at the age of 31 by a sniper while speaking at the University of Utah Utah Valley University.

I’d vaguely known that Kirk was a young conservative activist who had dropped out of community college as a teenager about a dozen years earlier to found Turning Point USA, an activist organization intended to draw youthful Americans into his ideological camp, and heavily funded by mega-donors, it had grown large and successful over time. Those bare facts exhausted my total knowledge.

Given that I’d paid so little attention to him, I was initially shocked by the enormous outpouring of media coverage his killing generated, seemingly greater than might have been accorded many important American elected officials or even major world leaders under similar circumstances. All our top newspapers gave his story large, front-page headlines, and the discussion of Kirk’s assassination and its implications entirely blanketed much of the Internet.

I’d always regarded Kirk as a rather bland mainstream Trump conservative, hardly the sort of figure most likely to inspire lethal hatred. I wondered whether my impression had been mistaken so I sought to assess his views and positions, and get a better sense of why he had been targeted in that deadly attack.

Given his brutal slaying at such a young age, I was hardly surprised that a large fraction of the commentary amounted to hagiography, with even most of his erstwhile ideological foes mourning his death as a tragedy and casting aside any past criticism. Indeed, when Matthew Dowd, a prominent former Bush-Cheney Republican political consultant made some disparaging remarks about Kirk, he was immediately fired from his longstanding position at MSNBC, demonstrating the risks of straying from that widespread position.

 

Fortunately, I found some important exceptions to this pattern of unremitting praise.

I’d occasionally read pieces by Michael Tracey, a prominent moderate or liberal-leaning Internet writer and the day after Kirk’s death he published a harsh 1,400 word column providing a very different perspective on Kirk.

Many of Kirk’s supporters had described him as a political truth-teller, with President Donald Trump declaring that he had been “a martyr for truth.” But Tracey was scathing in his criticism, portraying him as essentially a political propagandist, someone who regularly shifted his positions to conform to those of Trump, his leading patron:

He was a government functionary. A mouthpiece. He trafficked in ludicrous propaganda on behalf of the Administration he loyally served. And was doing this basically 24/7, in the extremely recent past.

Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.

His conduct was even more egregious in the run-up to Trump bombing Iran in June. During that episode, he pretty much served as a blatant government disinformation agent. Harsh as that might sound after he was brutally gunned down yesterday, it’s simply true. His mission was to demand uncritical faith in the US government, during a time of war — which is totally inexcusable for anyone who would consider themselves anything even remotely approximating a “journalist.” But that’s clearly not what Charlie Kirk considered himself. He instead considered himself a government media mouthpiece. On April 3, he said “A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.” Then by June 17, as drumbeats for the joint US-Israeli war against Iran were intensifying to full volume, Charlie changed his tune to mollify Trump, whom his whole identity was built around sycophantically serving. “It is possible to be an extreme isolationist,” Charlie Kirk warned his massive audience. “President Donald Trump is a man made for this moment, and we should trust him.” This was just pathetic. Turn off your critical thinking skills and place unquestioning “trust” in the US government to wage a war on false pretenses! What awesome, noble “truth-telling”!

Kirk then called for Trump to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, for the peace-bringing act of launching a new war in the Middle East. As I wrote at the time, “The shamelessness of these people has no bottom — it’s gotten to the point where you just have to marvel at the spectacle.” That was Charlie Kirk. He openly deceived his viewers and listeners, falsely insisting that Trump had been courageously pursuing “peace,” when in reality Trump was mobilizing for war in conjunction with Israel. At the time, I labeled Kirk a “depraved minion” for doing what he did, and I’m not about to retract that accusation just because he got killed yesterday. That would be absurd.

“We must trust Trump,” declared Charlie Kirk, the martyred truth-teller:

I stand by this completely, and there is zero reason to revise my assessment in light of Kirk’s death:

Charlie Kirk had been a cog in the propaganda machine of the Republican Party, declaring totally baselessly that a vote for Trump in the 2024 election was a vote to “bring peace to the Middle East.” And when the exact opposite happened, Charlie was imploring his followers to simply “pray” and uncritically trust the President. He was detestable.

And he wasn’t just some random commentator or podcaster. He was a full-time, extremely influential Republican Party apparatchik. His mega-donor funded outfit “Turning Point USA” ran “Get Out The Vote” operations for the Trump Campaign in the 2024 election. I’m not saying Charlie Kirk wasn’t entitled to engage in these political activities in a free society with lots of billionaire largesse available for ambitious operatives willing to serve as Republican Party Youth Galvanizer. I’m just saying I’m not obliged to fawningly express reverence for him now, simply by virtue of his sudden and hideous death.

Furthermore, I am very much entitled to challenge the hagiography and mythology that is so quickly congealing around him, such that he’s now being expeditiously put into the pantheon of martyred American saints — which is completely ridiculous. However, I’m fully aware that my limited efforts in this regard will have virtually zero effect. The absurd reverence-fest will continue unimpeded.

 

Even more hostile was the reaction of right-wing Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin, who maintained his angry, contrarian reputation by quickly publishing a series of posts ferociously denouncing the slain conservative activist. The lengthiest of these drew more than 500 comments on our website, with Anglin’s deeply emotional reaction probably explaining the obviously missing word in his title.

Sharply attacking Kirk from the right, Anglin eagerly dredged up quotes that demonstrated the victim’s notably liberal views on various hot-button issues. This hardly surprised me since it merely reflected the leftward shift of our conservative movement, whose right-wing MAGA partisans these days espouse many positions on social issues that would have marked them as extreme progressives as recently as the 1990s.

For example, Anglin noted that one of Kirk’s Tweets praised Trump’s strong support for global gay rights and condemned the media for failing to give the president sufficient credit on that score:

Anglin also highlighted another Kirk clip in which the conservative activist ridiculed the academic dogma that there are 47 different genders while strongly affirming his own support for ordinary transgenderism, saying that men had the right to declare themselves women and vice-versa.

This last example seems to perfectly exemplify the nature of our modern conservative movement. The promotion of totally insane ideas by the mainstream media and the academic community has provided self-proclaimed conservatives with considerable necessary cover, allowing them to win popular support by proudly advocating ideas that are only somewhat less insane in comparison.

As an example of Kirk’s personal support for transgenderism, Anglin noted that his organization heavily promoted an activist of that ilk called “Lady MAGA,” going much farther in that regard than most other pro-Trump conservatives. This certainly seemed to contradict early media reports suggesting that Kirk had been killed for his hostility to transgenderism.

According to Anglin, Kirk had also been a leading proponent of the notion that “America is an idea,” with our ideology and our constitutional principles defining what it means to be an American. Anglin located a 2019 clip in which Kirk took exactly this position, while simultaneously proclaiming that Israel should rightly remain “a blood and soil nation,” falling into a different category because of the holy connection to its land:

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As with many conservatives, Kirk apparently had some strong libertarian roots, and during Trump’s 2020 reelection campaign he had emphasized that wide open America could easily accommodate almost unlimited numbers of hard-working, productive legal immigrants. Anglin actually claimed that Kirk had invented the meme of “stapling green cards to diplomas” and indeed in this clip the latter proposed that any foreigner who graduated from an American university should be issued a green card allowing permanent legal residency. Kirk even suggested that our country could reasonably absorb an astonishing fifty million new legal immigrants over the next ten years.

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Anglin was obviously mining Kirk’s record to find those public statements most likely to infuriate the many right-wingers now mourning Kirk’s martyrdom, and I’m sure that clips could also be found in which Kirk sometimes took the opposite side of these same issues. For example, by 2023 he had apparently proposed halting all immigration.

But that’s the crucial point. Like so many other conservative activists, Kirk’s views on most ideological issues were hardly set in stone, and instead might easily change over time as Trump and other national leaders of his movement chose to move in different directions. This hardly indicated that Kirk was the sort of fanatic ideologue most likely to attract a deadly assassin.

All of this suggested that Tracey’s more cynical criticism of Kirk was probably much closer to the mark.

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