+ Back in 2003,  during peak post-9/11/Iraq War patriotic fever, when, as Dylan said of the McCarthy Era, “as long as you don’t say nothing, you can say anything at all,” Bill and Kathy Christison and I gave a talk in Taos, New Mexico, about the Iraq War, the neocons and the Israel Lobby. It was a bitterly cold night with brutal winds blowing down out of the Sangre de Cristos. As we left the venue, Bill noticed we were being tailed by a black truck, which followed us down State Road 68 towards Santa Fe, sometimes flashing its brights in the rearview mirror. Just outside Española, the truck pulled even with us and someone fired two shots at us from the passenger side window. Kathy and I flinched and ducked at the flashes. We heard a sharp metallic “ting.”

Bill and Kathy had both retired from the CIA in the late 70s and became two of the Agency’s fiercest critics. Bill, who had started as an analyst in the 1950s, had risen to near the top of the Agency. In the course of his career, he worked on the Soviet desk and nuclear proliferation. He became the principal adviser to the CIA director for Southeast Asia, South Asia and Africa. He ended his career as director of the agency’s Office of Regional and Political Analysis. Few people knew more about how the world worked, who benefited and who paid the price.  Bill and Kathy met Cockburn shortly after 9/11 and quickly began writing erudite and incisive pieces for CounterPunch, excoriating US foreign policy. In an early essay, Bill laid out what he considered the root cause for many of the terrorist attacks on the US: “the support by the U.S. over recent years for the policies of Israel with respect to the Palestinians, and the belief among Arabs and Muslims that the United States is as much to blame as Israel itself for the continuing, almost 35-year-long Israeli occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.” Bill and Kathy had contributed a chapter to our book, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. I’d spent the previous week driving across the Southwest, giving talks about the book and speaking at anti-war rallies, starting in San Antonio, then El Paso, Las Cruces, and Albuquerque, before meeting up with Bill and Kathy for events in Santa Fe, where they’d moved after leaving DC, and Taos.

The truck continued to shadow us for several miles and fired at least two more shots. But Bill engaged in some fancy evasive driving techniques, which he’d once put to use in wartime Saigon, and we made it safely back to Santa Fe. (Had I been driving, I’d’ve probably steered us right into the Rio Grande Canyon.) The Christisons’ car didn’t escape unscathed, however. At least one of the shots creased the roof of their Toyota, just above where Bill’s head had been. I’ve given a lot of incendiary speeches over the years and I really prefer it if people do not respond to them, no matter how crazy they might sound, with gunfire…

+ The murder of Charlie Kirk is awful, disgusting and about as American as it gets. But let’s recall that when two Democratic legislators and their spouses were assassinated by a Trump supporter in Minnesota a few weeks ago, Trump said nothing. Nada. Zilch…..When an anti-vaxxer fired 173 shots at the CDC HQ in Atlanta last month, Trump stayed quiet, which was probably welcome, given what he might have said.

+ The leaders of the Right didn’t waste much time counseling their ranks to restrict themselves to “thoughts and prayers” over the murder of Charlie Kirk. Even before the assassin had been identified or a motive uncovered, they blamed the “violent rhetoric “of the Left for Kirk’s death…

+ Senator Markwayne Mullin: “He was a Christian, and Christians are under attack right now from this far crazy left views that say they don’t feel safe. Well, they’re the ones going in and shooting up our schools and shooting up our churches and shooting people that they don’t agree with, like President Trump and now Charlie Kirk.”

+ Elon Musk: “The Left is the party of murder.”

+ Now this from Trump’s backroom Kissinger, Laura Loomer: It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organization. If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”

+ Of course, Loomer had directed some pretty harsh words at Kirk herself…

+ Christopher Rufo: “The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years. It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”

+ Donald Trump: “My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”

+ Brendan Dilley, a MAGA pocaster/influencer, on Alabama GOP Senator Katie Britt’s call for “peace and unity” in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder: “You want to talk about ‘unity?’ Shut the fuck up. This is why you should have been in the kitchen. You have no idea what these people are thinking.  No thanks. Fucking, Katie Britt of Alabama. You could fuck off with that bullshit. Your rhetoric of fucking ‘unity’ with violent satanists?…Shut the fuck up, woman. I have no interest in what you have to say.”

+ Some recent acts of political violence committed by MAGA/Trump supporters…

August 2025: Firing of 180 shots into the CDC headquarters in Atlanta and the killing of David Rose, a black police officer.

June 2025: Killing Democratic state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark in their Minnesota home.

June 2025: Shooting and critical wounding of Democratic state Senator John Hoffman and his wife, Yvette, in their Minnesota home.

April 2025:  Attempted assassination of Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Josh Shapiro.

Late 2022 and early 2023: A series of shootings at the homes of four Democratic elected officials in New Mexico.

October 2022: Attempted kidnapping of Nancy Pelosi and assault on her husband, Paul.

January 2021: Storming of the Capitol, assaults on Capitol Hill and DC police, threat to lynch Mike Pence.

July 2020: Attack on the home of Obama-appointed District Judge Esther Salas that resulted in the murder of her son Daniel and the shooting and critical wounding of her husband, Mark.

July 2020: Attempted kidnapping of Michigan’s Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer.

August 2019: Mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso that killed 23 people and injured 22.

October 2018: The man who sent pipe bombs to the homes of Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, George Soros and other top Democrats in 2018 was a Trump supporter.

September 2018: Shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh that killed 11 people and wounded six.

January 2017: Mass shooting at the Islamic Cultural Center, Quebec City, that killed six and injured 19.

August 2017: Killing of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville during the counter-protest to the Unite the Right rally.

+ Take it from the, uh, ADL, Don?

+ Elizabeth Warren on calls for the Democrats to “tone down” their rhetoric: “Oh, please. Why don’t you start with the president of the United States? And every ugly meme he’s posted and every ugly word.”

+ Obama: “We don’t yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy. Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie’s family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children.” Perfectly fine and appropriate sentiments, if only he’d speak this forcefully about the genocide in Gaza…

+ Many of those condemning the rise of “political violence” have supported two years of genocidal violence in Gaza and recently celebrated when the President of the US released a snuff film of a US Navy drone strike that killed 11 people in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela in violation of international and US law, as well as that most mysterious of all laws, the Law of the Sea. Our society, already among the most violent in the world, has been saturated in official violence done in our name since 9/11. In the last quarter-century of the forever wars, hundreds of thousands have been killed and maimed. These daily slaughters, many if not most of them rationalized by politicians and the pundits, have done more to twist the psyche of Americans than ideologies, video games or serotonin uplifters. And the ubiquitous presence of high-powered, military weaponry has provided the means for these bomb-shattered minds to go off on full-auto in their own perverted missions of retribution and revenge.

+ The late, great Paul Krassner: “When John Hinckley shot Reagan, Hinckley later came out against gun violence, Reagan came out in support of it!”

+ Kirk was shot while he was answering, well, flippantly responding to, a question about mass shootings in the US:

Q. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last 10 years?”

Kirk: “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

+ Utah has some of the most permissive gun laws in the nation. You can open carry without a permit. There were almost certainly a lot of people packing weapons at Kirk’s speech. None of them prevented the shooting. None of them were able to append, disarm or shoot the assassin after the killing.

+ In fact, according to The Lever…

A recent Utah law forced state universities to allow anyone with a concealed weapons permit to openly carry a gun on campus. The Utah Valley University, where conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was killed with a suspected high-powered rifle yesterday, already allowed open carry — in part because a student there made a fuss about it in 2010, helping to inspire legislation that opened the door for the university to allow it. In other matters, in 2023, the Department of Education fined the college for not adequately filing security reports, for which the university eventually paid $200,000.

+ Will Trump send the National Guard to occupy Orem?

+ The Trump administration has issued a warning to immigrants that if they say anything negative about Charlie Kirk, their visas will be revoked. Naturally, Kirk’s murder would be used as justification for more deportations…

+ Charlie Kirk (2023): “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a completely alternate universe.”

+ Would Kirk have considered the kids shot at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, on the same day “unfortunate” martyrs for the 2nd Amendment? According to the Denver Post, Darren Holly, the 16-year-old boy who shot two students and then himself at Evergreen High School appeared “to espouse white supremacist views online and showed an interest in mass shooters…[His social media accounts] are littered with references to mass shootings and antisemitic views.”

+ One of the two people detained, interrogated, and later released as suspects in the murder of Charlie Kirk was Zachariah Qureshi, an Arab-American conservative who works for the Heritage Foundation. Since Qureshi is a fervent supporter of Turning Point USA, his arrest and subsequent were almost certainly a case of racial profiling.

+ How long can a “statement” be when “engraved” on a bullet casing?

+ This trend of inscribing messages on and/or of signing ammunition is one of the more macabre pathologies of post-9/11 America. How many politicians have signed US-made, Israeli-launched bombs that have killed Palestinian children? Nikki Haley signed her Israeli bomb: “Finish them.”

+ Greg Grandin: “There’s a weird, dangerous transubstantiation going on in which the failed shooting of Trump is manifest in the killing of Kirk, allowing Trump simultaneously to escape martyrdom and claim, in the name of his figurative son, martyrdom.”

+ Soon after the following interview aired, Matthew Dowd, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush, was fired as a commentator at MSNBC…

Katy Tur, MSNBC: “What about the environment in which a shooting like this happened?”

Matthew Dowd: “He’s been one of the most divisive, especially one of the most divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly pushing this sort of hate speech or sort of aimed at certain groups. And I always go back to hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which lead to hateful actions. And I think that is the environment we are in. You can’t stop with these sorts of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”

+ Tur asked a reasonable question. Doud gave a reasonable answer, even if it offended many on the right. But reason no longer matters. We’ve been beyond reason for some time, now.

+ What kind of “awful words” did Kirk say?

How about this: “Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson, they’re coming out and saying, I’m only here because of affirmative action.  And we know, you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to be taken somewhat seriously.”

Or this: “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic black woman, I wonder, is she there because of her excellence or is she there because of affirmative action?”

Or this: “If you’re a WNBA pot-smoking black lesbian, do you get treated better than a US Marine?”

Or this: “Prowling blacks go around for fun to target white people. That’s a fact.”

Or this: “The southern border is, of course, the great replacement. They’re trying to replace us demographically. They’re trying to make the country less white. It is an anti-white agenda. 

Or this: “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled, Alzheimer’s, corrupt tyrant. Who should, honestly, be put into prison or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”

Or this: “Taylor Swift is engaged to Travis Kelce. This is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.

Or this: “When blacks in America didn’t have the same rights they do today, they were less murderous, there were less break-ins. Why is that?”

Or this: “If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.”

Or this: “The American Democrat Party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.”

Or this: “The Democrats love everything God hates.”

Or this: “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the mid-1960s.”

Or this:  “MLK was awful. He’s not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn’t believe.”

Or this: “Jewish donors have been the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions and nonprofits. This is a beast created by secular Jews.”

+ Aaron Regunberg: “Always a good idea to be a little careful before calling for the death of half the country based on a shooter whose motivations are unknown, in case he turns out to be a straight white Christian gamer from a Republican family who may or may not have a few confused left views?”

+ The alleged shooter, Tyler Robinson, 22, still lived with his parents, both registered Republicans (his dad, a 27 year veteran of the county sheriff’s department), in their $600,000 house outside St. George, where he grew up around guns, including an M2 Browning machine gun.

+ Rachel Campos Duffy, Fox News:

“You heard the family members say that this man became more political in recent years—what did he do in recent years? He went to college. That is where kids are getting radicalized. Not just online, our campuses are where a lot of radicalization, hate, and intolerance starts from.”

+ It seems unlikely that his mind would have been warped by a cultural Marxist professor while taking classes in the 3-year electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah.  If so, then the red infiltration has been deep, very deep, indeed.

+ Less than a year at Utah State in that radical enclave of the Wasatch Front, Logan, Utah, was all it took. They come for the skiing, but leave with their heads full of Gramsci, Judith Butler and Foucault. Who needs Berkeley, Yale, Brown or Haverford?

+ When they saw the distance of the shot, many right-wingers like Roger Stone and Greg Guttfeld openly speculated (clicks!) that the murder of Kirk had to be a “professional hit”, not contemplating that it was just another kid who’d grown up with guns his entire life in a gun-obsessed family.

+ The Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox: “For the last 33 hours, I had been praying that this person [who murdered Charlie Kirk] was from another country. That he was not one of us because we are not like that. But it was one of us.” (They really wanted the shooter to be a Venezuelan or, at the very least, a Californian but definitely not a Utahn.)

+ Trump called for a “quick trial” and a death sentence for Kirk’s shooter, you know, like the Chinese:

We have to have quick trials. I call it quick trials because in China, they do have quick trials. You know, they don’t wait six years. What happens here is you go through seven, eight years. And by the time it ends, and then they say, ‘Well, you know, he had a reason to do it, because he wasn’t treated right in grade school, and it’s his teacher’s fault, and it’s the government’s fault. That guy should be — he should have a trial the following day.

+ A truly remarkable statement here from Trump this morning and even more remarkable for being a completely believable expression of his true sentiments…

Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt: What do we do about our country? We have radicals on the right, as well. We have radicals on the left. People are watching all these videos that people, some people, are sharing of Charlie being killed. How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?

Trump: “I’m going to tell you something that will get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right are often times radical because they don’t want to see crime.”

Translation: Radicals on the right commit crimes because they don’t want to see crimes.

+ After these kinds of traumatic episodes, Fox News invariably tries to coax Trump into saying something humane, but time after time, he shows that he just can’t do it…

+ Otherwise, more than a day and a half after the murder, the president seemed simply inconsolable…

+ Still, on the orders of Trump, the flags are flying at half-staff at his favorite restaurant: the McDonald’s at Guantanamo…

+++

+ Intriguingly, Kirk was killed as his views on Israel, which he once boasted he would “kill and die” for, had begun to moderate, ever so slightly–evidence of just how deeply Israel’s genocide in Gaza has begun to blowback against its supporters in the US. He spoke out against GOP plans to expand laws banning anti-Israel boycotts, claiming attempts to suppress the BDS movement would backfire on the party and “play into growing narratives that Israel is running the U.S. government.” Kirk opposed the crackdowns on campus protests when they targeted US citizens: “We’ve allowed far too many people who hate America move here from abroad, but the right to speak freely is the birthright of all Americans.” He urged the Trump administration to back off plans to criminalize “anti-Semitic” speech, saying, “Once ‘antisemitism’ becomes valid grounds to censor or even imprison somebody, there will be frantic efforts to label all kinds of speech as antisemitic — the same way the left labeled all kinds of statements as ‘racist’ to justify silencing their opposition.” He speculated that Netanyahu had advance warning of the October 7 attacks and allowed them to proceed in order to launch an all-out war in Gaza. He opposed the US going to war against Iran. He credibly claimed that Jeffrey Epstein was a Mossad agent. 

+ NBC News: “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth tells staff to find and identify military members, and any individual associated with the Pentagon, who have mocked or appeared to condone Charlie Kirk’s murder so they can be punished, according to two defense officials.”

+ When a right-winger is the shooter, it’s ascribed to “mental health” issues. When a right-winger is the victim of a shooting, it’s ascribed to “leftwing ideology.”

+ Members of the Patriot Front marched through Huntington Beach, California on Saturday chanting, “Fight Back! Say His Name! Charlie Kirk!”

+ RFK, Jr. at the Charlie Kirk memorial service at the Kennedy Center: “I met Charlie in 2001 and we became soul mates.” Kirk was 8 years old in 2001.

+ FBI Director Kash Patel on a note he believes existed showing evidence of the shooter’s alleged leftwing “ideology”: “The written note we believe did exist. Evidence of its existence we now have learned existed before the shooting…Even though it has been destroyed, we have found forensic evidence of the note.”

+ Utah Governor Spencer Cox: “We can confirm that he [Tyler Robinson] does come from a conservative family but his ideology was very different than his family. There clearly was a leftist ideology with this assassin.”

“Ideology?” Kirk had an ideology and he wasn’t shy about promoting it. This screwed up kid seems like 98% of the shooters we’ve seen since Columbine…

1. White
2. Male
3. Loner
4. Smart but alienated
5. Withdrawn
6. Lived in fantasy/gamer world
7. Access to guns, trained how to use them
8. Incel

+ There’s a lot of speculation in the online gaming subculture,  in particular, that Tyler Robinson may be a “Groyper.” I didn’t know what Groyper was and sure don’t want to be sucked into Groyperland, but this video on X serves as a pretty good field guide for those who want to take the trip…

+ Neighbor of Tyler Robinson: “The way he carries himself and speaks to others. I thought he’d be a C.E.O. or a businessman. He had good leadership qualities.”

+++

+ Stephen Miller:

We are going to channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign to led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks … The organized doxxing campaigns. The organized riots. The organized street violence. The organized of dehumanization. Vilification. Posting people’s addresses. Combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God and as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

+ JD Vance, hosting the Charlie Kirk Show on Monday from the VP’s office: “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left…” Sorry, JD, the “statistics” show otherwise, especially when it comes to political violence…

+ Vance attacking The Nation for Elizabeth Spiers’ article on Kirk (Charlie Kirk Deserves No Mourning), claiming the moldy old magazine financed by George Soros and the Ford Foundation:

I read a story in The Nation magazine about my friend Charlie Kirk…George Soros‘ Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation…Well-funded institutions of the Left lied about what [Charlie Kirk] said so as to justify his murder.

+ Baskar Sunkara, president of The Nation: “I’m not sure where he’s getting his information, but JD Vance is lying about The Nation magazine. We’d welcome donations from anyone who respects our editorial independence, but we’re not funded, not one dime, by Soros or Open Society Foundation.”

+ Vance urging MAGA world to doxx people for free speech: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out — and, hell, call their employer.”

+ Karen Attiah was fired from the Washington Post, where she was the last black staff writer for the paper’s Opinion page, for simply posting this quote from Charlie Kirk without comment, a statement which I assume Kirk, were he still alive, would welcome seeing reposted far and wide, because it is a precise distillation of his core political philosophy: “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”

+ Statement from the Washington Post Guild on the firing of Karen Attiah…

+ According to a tally by Drop Site News, there have been at least 70 teachers, professors, administrators and journalists fired over remarks they made about Kirk since his murder.

+ Arizona sports outlet PHNX Sports fired its lead reporter on the Phoenix Suns, Gerald Bourguet, after Bourguet questioned why outrage over right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s killing was louder than outrage over school shootings, mass deportations, or the “hundreds of videos of horrific murders in Gaza (which Kirk cheered on)…Too many of you are more concerned with being polite and appearing to be good people rather than showing some damn backbone and standing on principal to condemn hate.”

+ On the night John Lennon was gunned down, Howard Cosell was ridiculed for briefly interrupting a Monday Night Football game of little consequence to break the news of his murder outside the Dakota. Yesterday, all but four NFL games held a moment of silence for rightwing podcaster Charlie Kirk and the four teams that didn’t are now under fire for not doing so…

+ Sorry, Charlie…

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