The death of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy. Donald Trump and his MAGA base are treating it like an opportunity. The first thing Trump did, before Kirk’s assassin was even identified, was to blame his killing on “the radical left.” He ordered the flag over the White House and all flags on federal buildings and installations to be flown at half-staff. He ordered that Air Force Two, the aircraft that is used by the Vice President, to transport Kirk’s body from Utah to his home in Arizona. A uniformed Air Force color guard carried Kirk’s casket on and off the plane, as if he was a servicemember who had been killed in combat.

The hero treatment Kirk is getting cheapens the honors that are afforded to those who have given their lives for their country. The paeans being delivered for Kirk are embarrassing. Yesterday Ezra Klein in the New York Times published a column titled, “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” celebrating Kirk for debating students on college campuses and being supportive of free speech and open to dialogue with people who did not share his beliefs. Kirk was certainly free in sharing his racist beliefs. He identified Joy Reid, formerly one of the evening hosts on MSNBC, as someone who did “not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person's slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” He called Reid and Michelle Obama and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Jackson Brown “affirmative action picks.”

As we would expect, Trump is canonizing Kirk’s garbage. He’s saying in effect, I think so much of Kirk’s beliefs and legacy that I’m going to afford him the same honors as someone such as John R. Lewis, who was beaten nearly to death at the Edmund Pettis Bridge for his belief in civil rights and his fight for equality between the races. Trump wants his followers to think that John Lewis was beaten for his beliefs, Martin Luther King was killed for his, and Charlie Kirk died for his.

Charlie Kirk felt entitled to go around the country telling college students there is something wrong with being gay or lesbian or transgender, that same sex marriage is an abomination, that wives should “submit” to their husbands, that aborted babies are the moral equivalent to Jews killed in the Holocaust. He made millions with a podcast that promoted exactly those beliefs.

Trump and his MAGA minions are certainly welcome to celebrate Kirk and turn him into a martyr to their cause. People paid to listen to his podcast and attend his Turning Point USA speeches on college campuses. Capitalism is perfect in that way. You get what you pay for. Martyrdom is its own reward, and the person now profiting is Trump, not Charlie Kirk.

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Charlie Kirk is dead. As of this writing, we know that 22-year-old Tyler Robinson of Utah is the killer. Allegedly, he did it because Kirk was “full of hate.”

But, in the end, it will not matter what the motivation of the shooter is. It COULD be that he’s a trans antifa operative, whatever the fuck that is, as first “reported” by the Wall Street Journal, even though that doesn’t actually exist. Maybe Robinson did it in the name of Jesus. Maybe he did it because he plays video games. RFK Jr. says that’s a real problem, and we all know RFK Jr. is a Very Serious Man.

It won’t really matter because the press and the right are treating this as an attack by the left, ALL of the left, and nothing will change that narrative now. It’s set in stone, and nothing can alter it. Charlie Kirk is dead because people like me called him a Nazi.

Fuck you.

I’ve been railing against this inevitable bullshit since shortly after Kirk was shot, but it wasn’t until Thursday afternoon that someone delivered the words I’d been groping for:

That’s fucking it. That’s ALL of it. Fuck your big sobby tears. Charlie Kirk was white trash who laughed at the pain and suffering of others for a living.

That hasn’t stopped the right from going into full victim mode, though. Republicans are vowing to destroy the lives of anyone who says a mean word about Kirk:

Several people have already been fired for making fun of this scumbag racist. Meanwhile, the State Department has announced it will revoke the visas of anyone who reposts a meme or makes a joke about Kirk getting got. You know, because they do so love “free speech.”

As this is going on, far-right influencers have gone completely rabid, vowing death and destruction and violence:

A common thread, you’ll notice, is the non-stop victimization. Why, they were just sitting around not doing a fucking thing. Just innocent little ol’ Republicans just passing the time. And then someone came and murdered this honest, decent, God-fearing man of the people!

The press is no better. Charlie Kirk was not a fascist purveyor of hate speech who openly advocated for the overthrow of the government and democracy while pushing white Christian Nationalism. He didn’t engage in dangerous conspiracy theories and antisemitism and promote rabid homophobia, or send mobs of violent, unhinged supporters after people he targeted by name.

He was an “activist” who was “doing politics the right way,” according to Ezra Klein at the New York fucking Times. As if Kirk just pulled himself up by the bootstraps and wasn’t funded by the billionaire propaganda machine funding the entire right-wing fascist movement. As if hate speech were just politics. As if Kirk hadn’t encouraged and celebrated the very political violence that claimed his life.

The press is absolutely distraught. Shouldn’t Democrats, not “both sides,” DEMOCRATS, do something to turn down the heat? Are they to blame for this terrible tragedy?

Exactly, I will not be lectured about political violence by people whose politics IS violence. And I will be godDAMNED if I will allow the fucking press to cluck their tongues at us for calling Republicans Nazis as Republicans embrace literal fucking Nazis at their fucking Nazis rallies screaming for public executions and concentration camps and praising Hitler and calling for Final Solutions. The same fucking press that wagged its finger at us when we screamed in outrage as Republicans smirked and laughed at right-wing violence, telling us to stop blaming the entire right for the actions of a LONE WOLF.

I’ve had trolls swarming my page for days, trying to gaslight me about how peaceful the right is and how the left is out of control. Motherfuckers are not smart enough to do this, but thanks for the laugh, I guess?

Did you know the Opinionated Ogre has a weekly podcast? It’s true! New episodes every Thursday! Catch the latest episode here:

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It’s insulting to watch, and I refuse to participate in whitewashing the life of a soulless monster because his death has scared the living shit out of the worst people in the country. And that IS what we’re seeing here. Unbridled fear in the press and on the right.

But why? We don’t see this when the right kills. Ever. What’s happening here? Why are the press and the right going absolutely fucking insane over this? Well, we’ve seen this before with Luigi Mangione, except this is far worse.

Fear Of A Violent Left

Back in February, I wrote about how Luigi Mangione shooting the CEO of a healthcare company sent the legacy press into a hyperventilating panic for weeks. Far more so than any murder of minorities by the far right or any school shooting. Jesus fucking Christ, after just FOUR FUCKING DAYS, the press almost completely stopped talking about what happened in Minnesota in June: The assassination of Democratic Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband, the attempted assassination of John Hoffman and his family, and the planned assassination of several other Minnesotan Democrats by a Trump-supporting Republican.

I was counting. Four. Fucking. Days. And the story went away. The media response to Luigi was markedly different.

The press foamed at the mouth over Luigi for weeks, and one has to assume they’ll obsess over Kirk for just as long, if not longer.1

I explained why in the Luigi article, and I will explain it again because it’s important.

The one thing the right and the press fear more than anything else is the left fighting back. It fucking terrifies them. It doesn’t matter what form the fighting back takes. Non-violent protest terrifies them. Winning elections terrifies them. Passing legislation terrifies them. Certainly left left-wing violence terrifies them.

The problem is that when the right does what it does, it entrenches the power of the rich, the white, the male, the powerful. It enforces the status quo that the haves will have more and the have-nots will have less.

Even when the right becomes violently extreme to the point of Nazism and eugenics. Even when the right burns democracy to the ground and shreds the rule of law, they aren’t dismantling the system that really counts. Rich white male privilege remains intact, and that is the only thing the press and the right, ultimately, care about.

Once you understand this, you will understand why the press does not “see” right-wing violence and the GOP’s fascist project as a threat. You will also understand why they see violence against the right (regardless of who commits it) as THE threat.

So, we already understand why right-wing violence doesn’t “count.” When the right attacks, they do not threaten the system. They attack the imaginary threats to their power. They attack women or Muslims or Jews or minorities. When they kill Democrats, the press immediately pivots to “both sides” or muddies the waters with conspiracies and will never hold Republicans accountable.

But what is the difference when people like Charlie Kirk die with a bullet in their throat? What is the difference when a rich and powerful CEO gets gunned down?

Those people matter to the press and the right, whereas the rest of us do not. The hundreds of dead children in schools? They don’t matter. The dozens of dead in the Pulse nightclub? They don’t matter. The dead Jews, Blacks, and Latinos in Pittsburgh, Charleston, and El Paso don’t matter. Every bullet shot at a Democrat does not matter.

They don’t matter because the press doesn’t give a fuck about them, but mainly because their death or injury will not change anything. The system of white male power is not threatened.

But a CEO? That matters. Charlie Kirk? He REALLY matters.

And that’s the difference between right-wing violence and left-wing violence. The right threatens boogeymen. They chase conspiracy theories and Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster. There is no Grand Jewish Conspiracy to replace the white race. There is no underground child sex chamber beneath a pizza parlor. Black gangs are not roving your streets looking for your white women to rape.

But when the left picks up a gun? They know who to aim at. They don’t go to a church and shoot a bunch of Evangelicals. They don’t go to a racetrack and shoot a bunch of NASCAR fans. They don’t find a country music concert and shoot everyone wearing a cowboy hat.

They find the people who do the bad things. The people who spread the hate. Who pass the cruel laws. Who control the evil from on top. The people who “matter.”

THAT’S why the press and the right freak out so badly at the idea of the left taking up arms. They know, they KNOW, if it really gets to that, the people who will have the targets on their back, or, you know, their necks, will be the people who think they’re untouchable. The billionaires. The influencers. The elected Republicans. The rich and famous and powerful who have been laughing as they destroy millions of lives from their comfortable seats above all the little peons they rule over.

If they can kill Charlie Kirk, ANY of them can be killed. No one is safe, and that is not how Things Are Supposed To Be. Only the little people are supposed to die. The unimportant people. The nobodies. The NPCs.

The “important” people. The Elon Musks. The Sean Hannitys. The Stephen Millers. The Peter Thiels. The “real” people aren’t supposed to be in danger. This is just a game, and who cares if some worthless peasants get hurt? The people who matter will be just fine. Charlie Kirk getting got showed them that it’s not a game and even an NPC can kill the main character. They don’t like that. Not one little bit.

They told themselves and their followers that the left are a bunch of pussies. That the right were the only real Americans and only they were manly and tough. That they had all the guns and the Second Amendment belonged to them and them alone.

But as I have been pointing out for a long time now, this is a country with 400 million guns. This is a country whose most beloved founding myths are spilling the blood of power-mad tyrants who would subjugate us. Sic Semper Tyrannis. The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. Give me liberty or give me death.

The panic you are seeing is the growing realization that nothing can protect them if the mob comes for them. Nothing short of hiding inside a bunker for the rest of their lives, which would be intolerable. They are the rich and powerful white men! Who are we to tell them where they can and cannot go?!

But all of the security and body armor and bullet-proof glass in the world will not stop a bullet in a country with more guns than people. The only other option is to take the guns, and the second the regime tries to do that, millions of gun-loving ‘Murikans from the MAGA side are going to pull the trigger. Molon Labe is not just a slogan for the right.

So what happens now? Will the right follow through on its threats of violence? I don’t know. This isn’t the first time they’ve promised war and mass murder. They do it quite frequently. We’d know more about that if the quisling press ever reported on it with the intensity they reserve for violence from the left.

Will they rant and rage for a week or two and weave this into their security blanket of grievances that keeps them from ever having to confront the evil monsters they are? Another shibboleth they’ll chant to ward off admitting they are the very thing they accuse us of being: Violent, soulless creatures devoid of humanity? Perhaps.

I do know that whatever happens, we should not accept their framing for even a second. Republicans call abortion doctors “baby killers,” but are not responsible for the dozens of firebombings and murders at clinics? Republicans call immigrants criminals and murderers, but are not responsible for the massive spike in hate crimes? Republicans call women whores and sluts, but are not responsible for the spike in sexual assault? Funny how that works.

But Republicans embrace Hitler and eugenics and concentration camps, and we’re vile and cruel and monstrous for accurately calling them Nazis? Get the fuck out of here.

Live by the swastika, well, you know the rest. America has a long and glorious history of taking care of Nazis. You have to be a fucking imbecile to get on the wrong side of that equation.

But good luck. Nazi.

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Fascism hates organized protests. They fear the public. They fear US. Make fascists afraid again by joining Indivisible or 50501 and show them whose fucking country this is!

The Blue Wave has begun and the fascist fucks are scared. There are 52 days until it hits Virginia and Pennsylvania. If I were a billionaire fascist loser, I’d think REALLY hard about getting out of the way.

Exploiting his murder for partisan gain threatens free speech, fuels authoritarianism, and erodes the respect for human life our democracy depends on.

Following the news and commentary on the assassination of Charlie Kirk leaves me deeply troubled because we’re missing the important moral issues. That, in turn, poses grave risks to our liberties. 

Far too many partisans, across the political spectrum, are exploiting this monstrous crime for gain, damaging our democracy in the process, none more so than Donald Trump, who lowered the White House flag to half-staff.

When a Trumper assassinated a Democrat in the Minnesota legislature leadership and her husband in June, and shot two others in their homes, Trump did nothing.

Many people who detest Kirk posted on social media that the TurningPoint USA founder had it coming, receiving a fatal dose of a Second Amendment idea he preached. Schadenfreude is understandable, but still despicable.  

While Kirk’s messages were odious, he had every right to speak his mind and try to sell his often not-so-subtly racist, misogynist, and ahistorical beliefs in the marketplace of ideas. 

This includes Kirk advancing ideas showing his utter disregard for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Consider the statement below, one of many similar comments.

“It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights…That is a prudent deal,” Kirk said in April 2023 at Awaken Church in Salt Lake City.

Wrong, in my view. Indeed, indefensibly wrong on moral grounds.

But the problem here is not with Kirk’s disgusting and immoral views which elevate abstract ideas over human life. It’s with anyone justifying his murder or even making light of it or using it to oppress, as Trump clearly is seeking.

Donald Trump immediately seized on an opportunity to further cement his position as America’s first dictator. In a video address from the Oval Office, he declared a “dark moment for America” and lashed out at news organizations he calls “radical left” for their coverage of Kirk’s career.

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

This from a president who said nothing when those Minnesota Democrats were shot by a Trumper. This from a president who eight years ago called Americans chanting the Nazi “blood and soil” slogans “very good people.” This from a president whose statements drip with racism, hatred, and claims of unlimited power including to murder suspected drug traffickers as he ordered a few days ago.

Mike Lee, the far-right senator even for deep red Utah, labeled Kirk’s killer a terrorist and suggested the killing was part of a larger scheme. “The terrorists will not win,” Lee said.

Kirk’s anti-human ideas weren’t selling all that well. Survey after survey shows that the overwhelming majority of Americans—in some polls close to 90%— oppose weak gun laws and favor serious controls or outright bans on civilians owning military-style assault rifles. 

Strong opposition also applies to open carry laws that allow people to walk into grocery stores, public parks, and down the neighborhood sidewalk with a loaded handgun on their hip or a military assault-style rifle slung over their shoulder. 

This week a Florida appeals court struck down Florida’s ban on open carry, saying it was inconsistent with the “tradition” of American gun laws. 

In Dodge City, the iconic Old West outpost, and most other frontier towns, you had to check your guns with the local sheriff. Indeed, the very first municipal law in Dodge City, enacted in 1878, prohibited walking around with guns. Strict gun regulation was the norm, but sadly and infuriatingly Florida appeals court judges Stephanie Ray, Lori Rowe and M. Kennerly Thomas are ignorant of those facts.

Most Americans have always favored gun regulation. That’s because, unlike the majority of the U.S. Supreme Court and those three ignorant Florida 1st Appellate District judges, the American people appreciate and understand that the “well-regulated” part of the Second Amendment is crucial to both the right to bear arms and to their own safety.

The deeper problem we fail to recognize is the growing movement on the right to venerate objects—guns in this case, but also money—over the right of every person to live their life.

We should remember (or learn) from how another assassination opened the way to strip freedoms away from advocates of unpopular (and in my view horrible) ideas more than a century ago, especially for noncitizens. It can happen again and if Trump and his ilk have their way it will.

Those limits on liberty followed the 1901 murder of President William McKinley in Buffalo. 

The New York legislature soon adopted laws limiting political speech, which eventually led Congress to approve the Smith Act (formally the Alien Registration Act of 1940) which made it a crime to advocate overthrowing our government, forced noncitizens to register with the federal government and to carry identification papers. As a practical matter it made it a crime to be a capital C Communist. 

In 1951, at the height of the Red Scare, the United States Supreme Court, voting 7-2, upheld the Smith Act and the convictions of communists for speaking their minds. This was when naked and mostly false claims that Soviet agents infected our political, diplomatic and military leadership flowed from Capitol Hill. 

Justice William O. Douglas, in dissent in Dennis  v. United States, wrote that the First Amendment makes no exceptions for odious ideas. Justice Hugo Black, in a separate dissent, agreed.

“Communism has been so thoroughly exposed in this country that it has been crippled as a political force,” Douglas wrote. “Free speech has destroyed it as an effective political party. It is inconceivable that those who went up and down this country preaching the doctrine of revolution which petitioners espouse would have any success.”

But he went on with observations we should ponder today as the vast majority of Americans struggle in an economy rigged to subsidize and insulate the already rich.

Douglas, referencing the Great Depression, wrote, “In days of trouble and confusion, when bread lines were long, when the unemployed walked the streets, when people were starving, the advocates of a short-cut by revolution might have a chance to gain adherents. But today there are no such conditions. The country is not in despair; the people know Soviet Communism; the doctrine of Soviet revolution is exposed in all of its ugliness, and the American people want none of it… some nations less resilient than the United States, where illiteracy is high and where democratic traditions are only budding, might have to take drastic steps and jail these men for merely speaking their creed. But in America, they are miserable merchants of unwanted ideas; their wares remain unsold. The fact that their ideas are abhorrent does not make them powerful.”

If you don’t support the free speech of people whose views you detest you don’t really believe in free speech. Instead, you believe in free speech for people like yourself. That’s not free speech. That’s Donald Trump’s vision of free speech for him and Trumpers, but not anyone else.

Today, many Trumpers advocate for the Russian dictator to prevail in Ukraine. Also, hunger stalks America and the Trumpublicans revel in making it worse as they cut food, cash, and medical benefits for the poor as well as children, the disabled, the elderly and the sick.

Are we as resilient today as in 1951 given the latest literacy research? The 2019 study found that more than half of Americans read at fifth grade level or below and more than a fifth read at the level of third graders.

These American adults lack critical thinking skills, unless you think what sixth graders say in class shows adult sophistication. They are prey to Trump’s masterful con artistry and his openly expressed desire to take any action he chooses under the false claim that our Constitution grants him unfettered power.

But even with our serious decline in language comprehension and the appalling ignorance of Americans about our history, there is no reason to suppress any ideas, even those advanced with a smug smile by Charlie Kirk.

Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama professor of tax law, who also holds a divinity degree from a conservative evangelical divinity school, has long taught that venerating objects, especially money, over humans is a widespread error among those who consider themselves Christians or even just believers in Judeo-Christian morality.

“The Bible commands that the law promote justice because human beings are not good enough to promote justice individually on their own,” she told me nearly two decades ago. Hamill was speaking of taxes, but her point is that legal systems, which is to say governments, have duties to care for people.

“Wait a minute,” some of you may be saying to yourselves, “what about automobiles and trucks which killed 39,000 Americans last year?”

It’s a false analogy, an indication of the poor quality of civic debate in America. Cars and trucks are not built for the purpose of killing or even intimidating. 

The number of traffic deaths reflects the safety features, or lack thereof, in automobiles and trucks as well as less than optimal design of roads, poor driving skills, drinking before or while driving and other factors which, over time, are slowly being addressed. 

Even when used to hunt, guns are designed to kill. Military style assault rifles, which can fire numerous rounds in a matter of seconds belong only on military training camps and the battlefield because their sole purpose is to kill as efficiently and effectively as possible. No civilian has any need of such a weapon. To argue otherwise is to venerate a killing machine over human life, a moral position I find indefensible even as I respect the right of people to make such a despicable claim.

The way to counter Kirk’s appeals to implicit violence is not to kill him or even block him from speaking. The antidote is more speech, smarter speech, better speech.

That speech will ultimately prevail, assuming it is not suppressed, because it is based in what Kirk mocked: respect for the sanctity of human life.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Charlie Kirk’s Assassination and the Moral Crisis America Ignores appeared first on DCReport.org.

The Opinionated Ogre Podcast is 100% listener-supported. Please help us continue to inform/amuse/outrage you by becoming a supporting subscriber today for only $5 a month or just $50 a year (a 17% discount!)! If not, it’s all good. Welcome to the Ogre Nation anyway!

The regime is going so far into crazytown that not every Republican is comfortable riding the Trump Train to disaster. Will the tiny bit of pushback grow, or will they lose their nerve? We’re going to find out soon enough.

Special Commentary: After we finished recording the show, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah. I recorded a segment and put it before the regular show.

Here’s the unedited video if you like puppet theater. :)

Ogre Nation News Update!

0:00 - 2:16 Special Commentary on Charlie Kirk

8:20 - 16:38 The regime illegally killed a boat full of people in international waters, crossing a dangerous line. The press was professionally concerned, but not every Republican fell in line…

16:39 - 20:31 Trump declared “war” on Chicago and the press was, again, professionally concerned. Time for an Ogre rant.

20:32 - 44:19 RFK Jr. continues to be a threat to the lives of the American people, especially our children.

44:20 - 51:25 Your Weekly Epstein Update - Everything is going just great for the Pedo-in-Chief!

51:26 - 54:30 Some notes on the 24th anniversary of 9/11.

54:31 -11:43 You Scream, I Scream, We All Scream Because of Fucking ICE

1:11:44 - 1:21:50 Headlines for Short Attention Spans

1:21:51 - 1:26:50 Self-care of the Week

Things We Discuss In The Show

Paul slams Vance’s ‘despicable’ comments about alleged drug boat strike

What is Trump doing in the Caribbean?

“Chipocalypse Now”: Trump Threatens Again to Send Troops to Chicago

Protest against Trump's ‘Operation Midway Blitz' descends on Michigan Avenue

Trump Protests in Washington, DC, and Chicago Condemn National Guard, ICE Deployment - See Photos

CDC left leaderless after new Director Dr. Susan Monarez is ousted and other key officials follow

Hepatitis B birth dose in question as RFK Jr. challenges vaccine policy

RFK Jr. Said ‘Everybody Can Get’ a Covid Vaccine. Is That True?

Florida surgeon general says decision to end school vaccine requirements wasn't based on data

In seeking something to blame for autism, RFK Jr. wrongly attacks Tylenol

Research shows no causal link between Tylenol and autism

Trump’s Epstein letter denial just suffered another huge blow

Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday book – in pictures

FBI Informant, My Ass

GOP support erodes for Epstein files petition

Citizenship dream turns nightmare: ICE detains woman with Green Card even after passing exam

Attorney says detained Korean Hyundai workers had special skills for short-term jobs

Even as slain conservative Pied Piper Charlie Kirk was being heralded as a martyr to political violence, myriad underlying contradictions remain for Americans to choose what to learn from another apparent assassination.

The many immediate questions ranged from about how best to show concern, especially from those who dislike the misogynistic, pro-gun and anti-liberal ideas towards an increasingly White, Christian nation that Kirk promoted, to the weirdness of an FBI director ready to declare victory in a manhunt still underway with an apparent dearth of physical clues.

It was off-putting that Donald Trump, without evidence of an arrest or motive, selected a tone of anti-Left belligerence amid a sea of bipartisan messages about the need to calm political differences and to avoid violence. Trump, among some others, made it sound as if only those on the political right are under attack.

We were left wondering more about the scope of Trump retribution than restraint on the use of weapons to settle political debate or any attempt to find commonality.

It almost was as if unnecessary partisanship was overtaking the importance of a life halted early simply for arguing for his political ideals, however controversial. Despite the talk of “thoughts and prayers” for Kirk, it felt as if there was immediate desire to stamp the fatal shooting either as conservative martyrdom or live-by-the-sword thinking about promoting the politics of disruption and full rights only for some. The desire to express sympathy got rocky with what-aboutism over assassination attempts for non-conservatives, as if political violence stops at one argument or another.

Why is it that political assassination — even of someone not a top-rank elected leader — can bring our country to a halt for a day but that the slaughter of schoolchildren does not? Why is it that we accept the idea that political “debate” should be settled with a rifle bullet?

Kirk’s ‘Free Speech’

On a deeper level, there remain questions about the message that Kirk promoted.

Kirk’s public broadcasts, appearances and debates were labeled with a desire to promote “free speech,” particularly among the young and on campuses. He distinctly argued that his rightist message was not being fully represented in the public marketplace — even while claiming a social media following of tens of millions.

Even this campus appearance in Utah drew a reported audience of thousands to offer an array of opinions against abortion, for Christian values, against immigration, for gun rights, against anything related to diversity, equity and inclusion, and for voting restrictions.

Curiously, as in Elon Musk’s takeover of X, the “free speech” message is that some speech — the speech that supports deportations and the end of civil rights, for example, is more valued than other speech,

The irony is that “free speech” as Kirk and Trump promote, increasingly does not allow for speech that raises questions about the excesses of Israeli Palestinian warmaking, or the struggles of trying to live as a transgender person, or the values of businesses, universities and a military that sees value in actively seeking to hire and promote non-White candidates.

The very campuses that Kirk sought to open to “debate,” are being subjected to Trump extortion and prosecution to stop any understanding of “free speech” that does not support what an authoritarian Trump dictates should be policy about everything from medical “science” to rewritten history to politicized use of federal agencies from Justice to the Smithsonian Institution museums.

Clearly, millions of conservatives saw Kirk as a symbol of a Christian movement to breaking down borders between right-wing politics and evangelical faith — and ensuring that some form of Trumpism will continue beyond the current term with the help of younger converts to his cause. Why that cause necessarily continues to exclude public policy that protects the vulnerable and allows for individual choice and responsibility is a question that martyrdom will not answer.

“FREEDOM OF THE PRESS IS NOT JUST IMPORTANT TO DEMOCRACY, IT IS DEMOCRACY.” – Walter Cronkite. CLICK HERE to donate in support of our free and independent voice.

The post Making Charlie Kirk a Martyr appeared first on DCReport.org.

Mr Magpie has always been a bold friend. He sits at the table with us when we are outside. In the warmer months when we often leave the back door open he walks inside the house, sometimes looking for a snack, but often enough walks all the way through the house, apparently just to say hello.

Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr are friendly, but less bold. They come and sit near us on the ground, not at the table. And they join Mr Magpie in eating nearby, but they don’t eat with us as he does – insists upon, even.

When there is food the three magpies sing a special song. It starts with one low warble, then the other two join in. The pitch of the warble gets higher and it ends with a long note, in three parts, pleasantly discordant. The song feels like gratitude or celebration to me, but who knows.

Being in relationship with Magpies is just great.

For the past few months we’d been noticing Magpie Jr is looking pretty adult. How long with they live with Magpie parents, we wondered? Turns, out, not much longer.

For a bit, Mrs Magpie and Magpie Jr hadn’t been around much. Then on a pleasantly warm day that turned out to be a False Spring (it was beautiful – but now we are kinda expecting snow tonight), Mr Magpie walked up to us while we were having lunch in the outdoor kitchen. Seeming kinda coy, but bolder than she had been for months, along came Mrs Magpie AND ALSO A NEW BABY.

Soft downy grey feathers along its little neck, I am totally anthropomorphising, but Mr and Mrs M seemed so proud. We felt so lucky that they wanted us to meet the new baby.

But what happened to the old baby? Obviously I googled. Apparently the young magpies go and join a young magpie gang. The youth gang roams around without a territory and then maybe one day our former Magpie Jr will settle with their own mate and take ownership of a new territory.

That process of roaming, mating and then claiming territory is fundamentally unstable. Each magpie carries with them the potential to maintain control over territory that they don’t yet have. It is messy, power hungry and a bit violent.

As spring looms the violence brews; magpies swoop magpies, in groups and alone. From now until summer is a pretty uncertain season as birds – magpies and their mortal enemies, the sulfur-crested white cockatoos – battle for territorial rights.

Is this a bit like what is happening to us, now?

Globalisation is over, Globalisation is Back on

I’m no expert on tariffs but their intention is surely towards deglobalisation. The Economist magazine, which as I understand it has supported free trade for 182 years, has been all doom and gloom about this whole tariff thing. I’m not saying they are wrong, but rather that 182 years of such a position also constitutes a politics.

Those economists (like at The Economist) who declare tariffs to be universally, ahistorically bad may be correct from certain angles, but we also gotta say that the latest phase of anti-tariff globalisation since the 1970s/8-s has not been that great, based as it is/was on enforcing governmental austerity (from some quarters, a deliberate attempt to override democracy’s tendency to redistribute the booty of capitalism to make things slightly fairer), so that goods, human labour and contracts flow like water to where profit can be extracted at the lowest cost.

Well, really the lowest price for the costs were and are enormous. The environmental cost alone might one day kill us all, while in the meantime we live with unspeakable levels of inequality that may well spill over to Magpies-in-spring level violence, but by humans who have nuclear weapons.

Carbon-spewing globalisation has been terrible for the actual (not just metaphorical) magpies, too, whose trees burned to an existential degree in the 2019 Black Summer bushfires. We were in green, damp England, but my wonderful local friend Naomi Parry Duncan says that many birds moved into town and began to build closer relationships with humans.

When I came home (due to Covid return-home directives) I shed tears as I walked in silent, burned forests with no birdsong – and not even the scuttling of tiny lizards beneath the leaves. The silence, it seemed to me, of mass extinction.

See the entangled nature of our living, and of historical capitalism. Even our present friendship with the Magpie family and their new baby may well be a result of globalisation.

The next story on the ABC news website contradicted the first. Mr “America First” was now choosing our Australian mining giants over red blooded American corporations to mine copper in Arizona.

Well, the end of globalisation didn’t even last as long as the End of History. Before I even scrolled down, globalisation was already back on.

I wonder if that is because deglobalisation is just not what is happening, but instead a kind of geoeconomic fragmentation, forging new complex, networked and multiple trading and relationship blocs.

I find this thought tantalising. But although Google Ngram shows ‘geoeconomic fragmentation’ growing since 2016 (wonder what happened then?), it still thinks ‘deglobalisation’ dominates – if frequency of mentions is a measure of anything (and it probably is).

Finding Capital Down the Back of the Sofa

In fact, under geoeconomic fragmentation, nations may instead be anxious not to lose critical goods, resources and human capital – and definitely, definitely not capital capital, which surely needs to be invested at home, especially to build more homes, flats and high-rise apartments, since somehow everyone seems to now have a housing crisis.

As a result, nations may have more difficulty accessing markets, components, materials, iron ore, and those dangerous-to-get but essential rare earths – and may need to look for them closer to home. So that one might also ask local capital to hang around, please. That really does sound like deglobalisation, doesn’t it, actually?

A related problem is that the workforce is getting older on average and the global workforce is shrinking, due to declining birthrates (except perhaps in Oz where we have high migration).

What it looks like, at least to my inexpert eyes, is that, no longer able to trust in the flow of global capital and a workforce ever-expanding by adding women, migrants and just more people being born, everyone instead is coerced into hunting for the scraps of capital in every dusty corner, under each piece of furniture and between the couch cushions.

Capitalists have long colonised ‘empty’ (not empty) worlds and accumulated their resources. They have exhausted forests (but are still bulldozing the last of them), have tapped the water sources (and are pouring their last dregs into AI) and are scraping the bottom of the very large coal and gas barrel provided by the carboniferous period (and are determined to exploit the last of it, even to the end of the world).

In recent decades the system has gathered women into the workforce (though boosting childcare might grab the scraps of the gendered commodity frontier).

What is left? Maybe the speed of investment, producing faster reinvestment?

Because now, a new deregulation (not-actually-deregulation, really) movement seeks to loosen selected regulations (in a flexible, targeted way) so that capital can be deployed more quickly (but without the perverse, deadly results of deregulation). Less friction, more profit from even small scraps of capital, right?

Similarly, encouraging labour mobility, at least within domestic borders, so that skills that are under-utilised in one area can be exploited by a sector that really needs them.

Augmenting labour with AI and other forms of automation waves the metal detector over the old mine.

And then, combining multiple, previously-marginal, sources of energy will ensure there is enough power to make the AI run.

Somewhere under those couch cushions is some loose capital which, added up, amounts to something that is not austerity and we might as well call abundance – though it does not look, at least to me, like abundant life.

Can the Magpie Unionise?

And in an anti-colonial, turning-power-systems-upside-down sense, we also, surely, want to attribute agency to the Magpies – and maybe even those dickhead suflur-crested cockatoos who snip the heads of hyacinths, lettuces and even the solar-powered outdoor lights in the outdoor kitchen. Rather than extract value from a perceived passive ‘nature’, we include it as agents that make our world, history and economy.

In our history of capitalism reading group last week we (re)read Timothy Mitchell’s classic book chapter ‘Can the Mosquito Speak?’.

A wondrous, meandering discussion about agency and relationships between non-human things (birds, coal, mosquitos, pens, AI) and humans in the history of capitalism a clever postdoc at the beleaguered UTS, Matt Ryan, pointed out that the question of agency in the history of capitalism may not be so much about whether the mosquito can speak as whether the mosquito can unionise.

When I went out to the outdoor kitchen to find snipped light bulbs, I gotta say that felt like anti-colonial, collective direct action on the part of the cockatoos – against me.*

So, maybe.

I’m not certain about much. But things are changing. Power relations. Geopolitics. The global economy. And the logics and intellectual frameworks in which we try to think, do and make policy. Even if we are Magpies.

*Since I drafted this the sulfur crested cockatoos also destroyed a bed of garlic, another of spring onions and DUG UP (not just snipped) the jonquils.