If "They" Killed Kirk The Ones Theying Us Are The Ones Who Provided The Gun And Trained His Killer And Gave Him The Ideology To Think It Was OK

I HAVE POINTED OUT many times here that lies are the lifeblood of the Trump movement, that if lies were not permitted to be told freely by our corporate media and individuals then American democracy would never have been in any danger.  There is a reason that Donald Trump, even in Trump I had a proven record as the biggest liar who has ever been president of the United States,  and there have been plenty of also-rans especially among recent Republican ones.  

That permission for the media to lie with impunity was first given in the Sullivan Decision of the Warren Court in which those "liberal" justices, who, by the way, were hardly "liberals" even then, I wouldn't even put William O. Douglas in that category.* Certainly foremost in those lies are the lies targeting groups of People,  People of Color, Women, LGBTQ+, the destitute.  Note: I'll have something to say about Kilmeade saying the quiet part out loud and how the Roberts Court isn't all that far behind him in its desire to kill off the destitute.    And certainly far from least among those who they lie about are  "liberals."  Lying about liberals, real and some of the liberalish libertarian kind has been the lifeblood of the modern conservative movement,  certainly from the time that the fascist and racist with a silver plated tongue,  William F. Buckley and the more in print and behind the scenes traitorous faggot, racist and Buckley's fellow fascist William Rusher .**

But to get back to my theme.   This short piece by Paul Blumenthal says it quite well. 

“They couldn’t silence him so they killed him,” Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) told the Albany Times-Union.

“They’re killing us in our churches. They tried to kill our president. They killed Charlie, one of our greatest advocates,” conservative podcaster Matt Walsh said on X.

“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die,” billionaire Elon Musk wrote on X.

“They are at war with us!” Fox News anchor Jesse Watters said on Sept. 10.

Life: Jesse Watters’ ‘War’ Remarks After Charlie Kirk’s Killing Have Experts Sharing 1 Dire Warning

“The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done,” Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk, said. “They should all know this: If you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea what you just have unleashed across the country and this world.”

“They almost killed Donald Trump, they killed Charlie Kirk, both outdoors,” Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) told Fox News Digital.

Who “they” is is rarely said explicitly, though it is heavily implied — some blurry coalition or Venn diagram encompassing Democrats, liberals and political opponents; but also institutions that are already right-wing targets such as think tanks, donors and higher education, with some conservatives blaming the one semester of college suspect Tyler Robinson attended for radicalizing him.

Conservatives’ efforts to blame some vague “they” for these attacks are not a slip of the tongue: It crafts a narrative of victimhood aimed at enacting retributive repression or violence against their political opponents. This is made explicit in calls to indict billionaire liberal donor George Soros, investigate and dismantle liberal nonprofits and target media companies, none of which appear to have had any involvement, as a response to Kirk’s murder.

Vice President JD Vance made this clear in a furious speech stating that the country cannot be united unless the institutions of the political opposition are dismantled and destroyed.

"They" is not the kid who is the guy who shot the right wing liar, racist, misogynist and targeter of LGBTQ+ People,  they is their political opponents who didn't provide the shooter with an uncontrolled gun, with an apparent lifetime of gun culture and the ability to gain his proficiency in killing.   "They" didn't provide him with a social, "religious" and political culture in which such a killing would be held to be justifiable,  THAT WAS THE MODERN RIGHT WING OF WHICH EVERY ONE OF THOSE "THEYING" ASSHOLES ARE MAJOR FIGURES IN. 

If they want to put the blame for the murder of Charlie Kirk on a "They" the one that really fits that role is THEM.    And I would include Kirk himself in that.   HE DID SAY THAT GUN DEATHS WERE WORTH IT TO HAVE THE SECOND AMENDMENT WHEN IT WAS A "THEY" WHO DIDN'T INCLUDE HIM.   He was a part of what killed him and that should never be forgotten. 

No one on the left should ever let them get away with this one because IT'S ONLY WHEN CERTAIN PEOPLE ARE MURDERED THAT THEY CARE AT ALL ABOUT IT AND THEY OPENLY DELIGHT WHEN OTHER PEOPLE ARE TARGETS OF ASSASSINS AND ATTEMPTED ASSASSINS.   Kirk did that when it was one of theirs who went to kill Nancy Pelosi and nearly did kill her husband.   And when it wasn't Kirk proposing a fund to bail the assassin out,  it was others of his ilk who were trying to justify it by painting Paul Pelosi as gay.   And the corporate media lets them get away with having it every which way all the time.   The idea that the "free press" is a pillar of democracy is as crumbling to dust in reality as it is a major participant in the destruction of democracy.  Buckley and Rusher had a lot to do with that, too.   Two of the original false=faces of American fascism.   Two huge liars. 

*  "Civil libertarians" who put the rights of words over the lives of human beings and other living creatures aren't liberals in the traditional American meaning of the word.   Douglas was a civil libertarian, his "liberalism" was more in line with the corrupted meaning of that word derived from 18th century laissez faire than the ethic of doing unto others what you would have them do unto you and loving others as you love yourself.   That corrupt understanding of liberalism is really not much different from the money side of the Republican-fascist coalition.  Even many former laissez-faire libertarian Republicans have had to face what their ideology produced in the real test of history instead of lawerly-liarly language. 

** I've become more interested in the role that the putrid hypocrite and general asshole William Rusher played in turning what was merely a conservative Republican Party into the Republican-fascist party we have today,   all the time being protected as an in-the-closet gay man by the viciously anti-gay conservative movement.   As can be heard in this confrontation of Buckely biographer Sam Tanenhaus by Margaret Hoover on the resurrected "Firing Line" in which she complains that it was unfair of him to "out" the long dead Rusher even as Tanenhaus says that when he interviewed him he "outted" long lists of other men.  Rusher's hypocrisies and lies were his whole personality and existence.    May he linger in hell a long, long time. 

If I knew I had twenty more years I'd do a study of the decidedly bizarre frequency of male homosexuals in the worst of the American fascist movement.  William Rusher is an especially putrid specimen of that pathology.    I am, by the way, entirely on-board with outting Republican-fascists who are living a sex life in the closet.  Not only those who bash other LGBTQ+ People but the racists, misogynists, haters of the poor and destitute.    From here on in,  I'm all in with them as much as I am LGBTQ+ People.   

I've Changed My Mind We've Got To Destroy The Phony Front They're Putting On Kirk To Make Him A MAGA Martyr He was As Bad As Some Of The Worst Of Them - Hate Mail

I WOULD WELCOME SOMEONE, anyone documenting to me any time that any MAGA,  Republican-fascist,  Trumpzi, or anyone on the right who has recently invoked the many instances when Leviticus or other verses in the Bible command the stoning murder of straight men who commit adultery or any or a range of sexual or other crimes.   I'm trying to think of any time I ever heard anyone, even the most rabid of old-line "trad" Catholics who may still take Luke 16:18 or Matthew 5:32 seriously* take the logical step to say that according to Leviticus those straight adulterers have to be taken out and stoned to death. 

I would welcome it knowing full well that apart from, perhaps, some of the cultists of the late and excommunicated Fr. Leonard Feeney, you won't find a one.    

I would like to know when Kirk or any other Republican-fascist influencer ever advocated  that treatment for straight adulterers explicitly or even in the wink and nod way that Kirk did when he and his fascist bros were slamming an nice young woman on instagram for advocating love - I'll give you the link to where you can hear what he actually said.

MS Rachel, in her Pride Month message pointed out that Jesus said that Loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself were the very basis of the Law and the Prophets:

37 He replied, “You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being,[a] and with all your mind. 38 This is the first and greatest commandment. 39 And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself.[b] 40 All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”   Matthew 22: 37-40  Common English Bible 

You can listen to what Kirk and the other creeps said,  you might notice that Patriot Takes gives you the gist of what Kirk asserted SPECIFICALLY ABOUT THE STONING GAY PEOPLE  PART OF IT:

While criticizing YouTuber Ms. Rachel for quoting “love your neighbor” to defend celebrating pride month, Charlie Kirk quoted a Bible verse used to justify stoning gay people “to death.”

Kirk called the stoning verse, “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”

I have no idea why Stephen King backed down but his original reading of it was right,  it's exactly what Charlie Kirk was advancing in his selective reading of Scripture, just as everyone selectively reads it while calling one of the most brutal of verses EVER REALLY FOLLOWED UP TO AND INTO THE MODERN ERA AS THE REST OF IT IS IGNORED.   If you think that kind of thing is over,  when Charles Rhines was sentenced to death in South Dakota (executed in 2019) one of the jurors took him being gay into their decision he should die.  One who sentenced him said that just sending him to prison for life would be what a gay man would want.  The courts wouldn't even look at the evidence:

South Dakota executed death row prisoner Charles Rhines on November 4, 2019, following unsuccessful litigation on multiple fronts. A South Dakota judge issued an execution warrant for Mr. Rhines in June 2019, on the heels of the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to grant certiorari review of his claim that his jurors had sentenced him to death based on his sexual orientation. From 2016 to 2019, Mr. Rhines had attempted to obtain judicial review of that claim, armed with sworn statements from multiple jurors confirming this basis for their decision. However, state and federal courts repeatedly refused to grant him a hearing to determine whether his death sentence was constitutional in light of the new evidence.

I could go on and on with that.  I would point out that even today that anyone who murders a gay man in many, perhaps all states could put him on trial by bringing that up and many law scholars say that that should be allowed. 

Perhaps someone should give the generally thoughtful Stephen King that real context to what Kirk said as an excuse to reject the "Love your neighbor"  "all your neighbors" part of what Ms. Rachel said.  

Kirk called the stoning verse, “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.”   I'm sure that he and the bros would reject the parts about straight guys getting stoned for committing adultery,  I'm sure they'd exempt their god-man Trump for his lifetime of violating what Kirk called "God's perfect law when it comes to sexual matters."   And that's just one of the massive hypocrisies, lies, racist slanders, etc.  that came out of that fountain of hate and advocacy of violence. 

* Every one that putteth away his wife, and marrieth another, committeth adultery: and he that marrieth her that is put away from her husband, commmitteth adultery. Luke 16:18

But I say to you, that whosoever shall put away his wife, excepting for the cause of fornication, maketh her to commit adultery: and he that shall marry her that is put away, committeth adultery. Matthew 5:32

Douay-Rheims Bible

Olbermann Is Excellent Today

STARTING WITH KILMEAD'S FINAL SOLUTION to homelessness while dealing the Republican-fascist attempt to turn Kirk into Trumpzi America's Horst Wessel better than anyone I've encountered, he analyzes Putin's trial runs for his attempt to reestablish the Soviet Union with turning the entirety of Eastern Europe into his vassals and then move on to Western Europe with the American Republican Party being all-in on it here.    I would have to give you the entire transcript to do justice to how he covers everything, including the attacks on Kirk by Laura Loomer and Nick Fuentes (far more likely to have influenced Robinson than anyone on the left,  that that white supremacist troll-boy) and why the fascist mouth flappers from FOX Lies to the most obscure of them online are freaking out about one of their getting shot - by one of theirs - is because they never believed all of that violence they have called for since right-wing hate-talk radio first started getting off the ground in, like, the 1920s might touch their lily white hides but now they have to figure someone might do what they wanted done unto so many others being done unto them. 

Just listen to it.  

Hate Mail

 Dave Rubin?   That right-wing whore?   

I read what he said,  I stand by what I said.  No LGBTQ+ PERSON who saw that doesn't know what it means.   Especially given who his audience is.   I'd advise anyone who is inclined to take him seriously should consider that very carefully. 

If they insist on presenting my choice as between children's safety and Lady Chatterly's Lover, the book goes.

ANSWERING MY MOST persistent and persistently wrong troll brought the reaction to this early post of mine to mind.    I will call your attention to the very last line added to it noting that I first posted it on June 1st, 2006 less than a month after I started posting regular blog pieces.  I vaguely remember it was in reaction to a Supreme Court ruling that protected commercial speech while the members of the Roberts Court diminished the noted consequential harm to children their ruling would result in.  Maybe I should go back and try to figure out which of the atrocities of the Rehnquist years that might have been.  

It's unfortunate that the original comments this piece got deleted by the technology it was done in dying because being a violation of liberally-lefty free-speech absolutism, it got a huge reaction, far more than I was used to getting at the time.   I will admit that I included the line about Lady Chatterly's Lover because of the iconic first-amendmenty vibes that piece of tripe held due to its ancient legal suppression - D. H. Lawrence is a very overrated writer who would have been even more forgotten if that piece of junk hadn't become a rather stupid cause celebre.   There is no work of fiction I'd put above the rights of children but I chose that one for that reason.   But the idea that someone would dare put the rights of real, living children over words was deemed to be beyond tolerance at even a feminist blog of the time.  It is insane to put a book over the rights of anyone.   I have no common ground with "liberals" or any left that puts the make-believe "rights" of objects over the lives of humans and other living beings. 

Rereading this last night it struck me how much of it was a description of what Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Trump and the other Birthday Book 12-year-old boy types were regularly doing to children,  the youngest we know about, 14.  If their crimes had been revealed then, they certainly would have figured as examples of what I was talking about.   As it turns out, the children were the ones who have lost out entirely under our pathologically degenerate legal system.   Don't tell me that's unrelated to the permission of pornography. 

Monday, August 14, 2006

The Most Important Right Children Have is to the Protection of Adults

Do you hate people who pretend that children are like adults, too? Who pretend to pretend that children are like adults. They know children aren't like adults and that's the reason they do it. They want to use them. It's not just those ironically misnamed "pedophiles" who most certainly don't love children. Advertisers, markerters, fast food and entertainment companies, youth sports and those sordid beauty pageants we found about when the little girl was murdered in Colorado, they don't love them either. All of them fall on the same continuum of adults and industries turning children into commodities and business opportunities.

Judges and the law too often go along with the pretense of the pretense. Pretending that children are little adults because that's how their bread is buttered. They pretend to be standing on high principle while allowing the violation of children's' most important right, to be protected from creeps and their business partners.

Children aren't little adults only because they're too small to protect themselves physically, they aren't able to reason at a level sufficient to see through con men. Even at the fairly advanced age of their teens they can't talk themselves out of doing the first dumb thing that seems attractive. If you need proof, just ask a public health nurse what happens to her teen pregnancy case load in the months after the carnival comes to town. Children being targeted by advertising are a lot younger than those. Toxic consumerism is turning out to be the major health threat facing children in the developed world.

The religion of free trade has successfully hidden some of the worst child abuse for profit. Children kept as slaves still produce a lot of what is sold here. It's not just the discount junk either, they produce some of the higher ticket stuff too. The trade in children as sweatshop workers isn't that far removed from the trade in them for sex, there is a lot of cross over between the two. When not enslaving children directly, their parents are kept from caring for them with long work hours at too little pay to feed or house them. That is happening here in the Unites States as well as across the third world. That is what is hidden behind the happy face of advertising and the trained voice of the corporate spokeswoman who WAS chosen for her gender.

Children are seen by corporations as either disposable robots for maximizing profit by cutting production costs or as easy marks on the consuming end of the production cycle. In the post Reagan-Thatcher world we live in the legal system and larger society threat them that way too. How bad are conservatives for children? Never forget, Thatcher blocked action that would restrict children being used as soldiers. Conservatives are filth.

The most important right that children have is to the protection of adults, their parents, their community and the world. For children that is more important than the entire Bill of Rights. Without it they have no life and no chance to pursue their own happiness free of deception and the worst forms of abuse. They have a right not to be lied to by mass media. This is so clear that it shouldn't ever have gotten lost. It might be prettied up in legal nice talk but too many law professors, judges lawyers and the constitutional purity industry have chosen corporate profits over the protection of children. Theories of freedom of the press concerning commercial speech are part of it. And that's over. If they insist on presenting my choice as between children's safety and Lady Chatterly's Lover, the book goes. Handing that crap over to the far right for them to throw against real, important First Amendment protections is one of the stupidest things that the free speech absolutists do. Theories of the market and its artificial rights are the rest of it and the far right isn't going to do anything to endanger those. Civil libertarians aren't so stupid that they can't come up with more nuanced ways to protect children and the right of speech while keeping corporate interests from deceiving us all at the same time. But it's not possible until you stop making believe that corporate "speech" deserves the same protection as the lives of real people.

Theories are supposed to help clarify the truth, not to shield degenerate behavior. Any legal theory that leads away from a society protecting every child here and around the world is the come hither call of a carny barker and a brothel Madame. Corporate lawyers and spokespersons who tell these lies don't belong on the morning shows chatting with Diane and Matt, they belong on the grainy footage of the Dateline camera.

First posted Thursday, June 01, 2006 on olvlzl

I Either Don't Deal With Hate Mail At All

OR I DEAL WITH IT ON MY TERMS.   Sometimes that means posting it and answering, sometimes it means posting it and ridiculing it, sometimes it means having fun, sometimes it means posting parts of what was sent without dealing with the whole thing because I don't have to if I don't want to and putting it to any use I choose to.    

I'm not under any moral obligation to post crap that trolls want to post but if they volunteer material,  I'm not under any moral obligation to put it to the use they want me to.  

Just to make my approach clear. 

Update:  Simps gives me a chance to show you what I mean in something I may or may not post as a complete comment:

Stop pretending like you're some kind of free speech hero -- everybody knows you're not.

If he were smart, which he likes to pretend he is, he'd realize if there's something I don't pretend to be it is "some kind of free speech hero" because one of the things I won't let him do here is lie about other People, something he does all the time at Duncan's.   It's a point I remember being something of a novelty when I first pointed it out to someone who complained that Duncan wasn't permissive enough, some troll whining about having a comment taken down back when Duncan was still making some kind of effort.    "Free speech" as in the typical whining about "the First Amendment" doesn't apply to private persons who publish a blog or a magazine or newspaper or other publication,  there is no "First Amendment" obligation or even "free speech" one anymore than I'm obligated to let you say whatever you will in my home.   And as Simps knows, I'm in favor of all kinds of "free speech" restrictions,  against lying in the media, lying by private individuals.  I'm really big on the right of People to protect themselves by suing the likes of Trump or FOX Lies or anyone else who can destroy People and their lives by lying.   I'm in favor of the banning of a large range of pornographic material and violent material from the media.  I'd go a lot farther than the idiotic Supreme Court would in that banning even simulated BD and SM and pedo-porn -  I haven't had the stomach to go look at what "AI" has done to the production of that.   I fully believe that susceptible moral degenerates act on what they find sexually stimulating when they are encouraged by such shit.  And even if that's rare, there's no reason to facilitate those rare occasions.  It's not like it has any important role to play that would make allowing it an important cause for the left - the left has been led down too many moral sewers by what I long ago labled as the "free speech industry"  those huge liar-lawyers who get money from the porn industry and the idiot elite level lawyer-liars in the judiciary and on that most "First Amendment" addled bunch of liars on the Supreme Court.  Both the original "free speech heroes" on the Warren Court who thought they were being all free speechy when they did it and the Republican-fascists on later courts who used their precedents to make money equal "speech" to free up millionaire and billionaire money to corrupt our politics (scuttling the emergency legislation to clean up our politics in the wake of the revelations of the Nixon crime spree) and going on to further open up our politics in crimes against democracy such as "Citizens United."   

There is no such a thing as a "right" to lie, there is a right to tell the truth which has an obligation attached to tell the truth responsibly.   I had occasion the other day while re-reading Exodus to note for the first time that the exception to that, perhaps the first one in human literature, was the two mid-wives who were told to commit infanticide by Pharaoh lying to him about why they didn't follow his order and so destroying the Children of Israel in one generation (I wonder if that was the origin of the matrilineal determination of who was a member of the Children of Israel).   If you're forced to lie to prevent a greater moral wrong, you have an obligation to do that but its moral consequences fall on the ones that make you do that.  It has nothing to do with the political lies that have swamped our democracy and given us Nixon, Reagan, Bush I and II,  Trump and the Republican-fascist Congress and Court.   "Free speech" as understood in 20th and 21st century America is a moral atrocity so it can't be right. 

Just thought I'd use the chance Simps gave me to repeat that.  I may choose to post his slightly longer though even stupider post after he's stewed in it a while. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Clarity At Last - Charlie McGinnes

 Clarity At Last 

Clarity at Last by Charlie McGuinness was joint winner of the 2024 P.J. O'Connor Awards.

A man, his daughter and a Clob detail the events of an evening in their lives, and each in their own individual way find some clarity.

Seamus O'Rourke plays The Man

Eamonn Owens is the Clob

Aoibhéann McCann is the Daughter

Original music was composed and performed by Alannah Thornburgh

Directed by Eithne Hand

Sound Supervision Damian Chennells

Series Producer of Drama on One is Kevin Reynolds

Before anyone asks,  I don't know and can't find out what "Clob" means. 

All People Are Created Equal Means ALL PEOPLE Only Republican-fascists Don't Believe That For A Second - A footnote

HOW MUCH MOURNING did the Charlie Kirk's of the United States go into for 

Tiara Banks, a 24-year-old Black transgender woman, was killed in Chicago, Illinois on April 21, 2021. According to a news report, Tiara was sitting alone in her Ford Fusion when the shooter approached the vehicle and shot Tiara multiple times. Tiara was pronounced dead at the scene. “At just 24 years old, Tiara had her whole entire life ahead of her and, instead, we are remembering her because of the ongoing fatal violence against transgender people," said HRC Director of Community Engagement for the Transgender Justice Initiative Tori Cooper.

or

Oliver “Ollie” Taylor, a 17-year-old white trans boy, died on May 19 after being kidnapped and shot on May 12 in Gervais, Oregon. He was a student at Gervais High School, where he was involved in the Gervais Future Farmers of America organization. The high school held a vigil to remember Oliver on May 20. Oliver is remembered as “an amazing child with a quirky sense of humor, who impacted so many people.”

Who killed them,  why did they kill them?   Maybe someone heard what someone like Kirk had to say about Trans People  

How much mourning did Kirk and his fans do for them?   Did any politicians or media flacks or pundits demand that they pretend to care about them?  

Last Hate Mail On This Topic?

NOW THAT THE Republican-fascist, even Trumpist background of the reportedly cis-gender white Mormon who killed the fascist hate monger, Charlie Kirk is established,  I don't expect that the use of it to bash Trans People,  Democrats, etc. will subside, though I think that Trump has gotten all the use from it that he wants so I don't expect him to spend a lot of time on it.   From what I've heard the Republican-fascists are accusing his teachers in an electrician-apprentice program IN FUCKING UTAH! with wokening the kid.  That's the thing about Republican-fascists and the FOX Lies led media, they don't care how outlandish what they say about anything is.   If there is a group in my state which I would bet would rank as among the most unwoke, it would be those in that line of work.   I've never much trusted anyone in the building trades to be woke. 

I asked yesterday if it had happened today,  if it would be demanded of Jews that they pretended to be unhappy at the murder of the American Nazi Party founder George Rockwell and, if they expressed understandable approval that they'd be getting fired from their jobs or condemned and the subject of Republican-fascist instigated death threats.    AND SOME OF THOSE GETTING FIRED DIDN'T EVEN DO THAT, THEY EXPRESSED NOTHING LIKE APPROVAL.   If the same standards being applied to those who aren't especially broken up over the hate monger being murdered by someone who is closer to one of his than one of ours were applied to Jews in regard to someone targeting them then, yes,  it would be demanded that they put on the same false-face of mourning that is being pushed by the fascists now.   And not only them but pseudo-liberal idiots like David Axelrod and Ezra Klein.

Thinking about the ancient assassination of George Rockwell made me think of his killer,  the truly bizarre prominent member of his Nazi Party John Patler who was recruited by Rockwell for his ability to knock out Nazi cartoons and knowledge of the printing process.  Looking him up I read that he had named one of his sons after Horst Wessel a member of the Nazi Sturmabteilung (SA) who was assassinated in 1930.   I had been tempted to compare his killing to that of Kirk instead of  George Rockwell, as both of them were young, asking if Jews should have mourned his assassination but that would have been inapt.   In 1930 the Nazis were nine years from explicitly announcing their intention to murder all the Jews in Europe whereas Charlie Kirk was openly calling for the murder of gay men,  advocating their lynching by stoning well before he was killed.    

You, if you are a straight person, may think that was a mere rhetorical flourish by an attention seeking fascist on the make, that it may have been a bit over the top but as a gay man who was the subject of violent attacks by straight male punks on two occasions and was in threatening situations on too many to have kept track of,  that's not just hot air coming from a hate monger IT WAS AN ENCOURAGEMENT TO MURDER MY PEOPLE AND ME MADE FOR CHARLIE KIRK'S PROFIT.  Hate was his stock-in-trade.   

If there is one thing we know in the wake of his assassination,  HIS FANS ARE READY AND WILLING TO ATTACK LGBTQ+ PEOPLE.   REPUBLICAN-FASCIST MEMBERS OF CONGRESS AND THE TRUMP II REGIME  TARGETED US FOR ATTACK BEFORE ANYONE KNEW WHO KILLED HIM.   If the guy who killed him turns out to be a fully trained and active member of Utah gun culture - brought into that by his straight, white, Republican,  Trump voting parents - someone who is reportedly having seemed like a fairly normal straight-white-conservative-boy,  it's not unlikely that the many, many far less stable people sharing that same description are fully capable of murdering us.   I get trolled by those who celebrated the mass killing at the Pulse nightclub who targeted LGBTQ+ People in large numbers,   I don't remember anyone telling Turning Point fascists that they were required to pretend they cared about that. 

The Nazis made the fullest use of Hoest Wessel - a violent thug who got what he deserved and I wouldn't have faulted any Jews or others who were the target of SA violence who celebrated his murder.   It is certain that our equivalent, the Republican-fascist right will do the same with Kirk.   It's not my style or in line with my sense of morality to celebrate anyone's murder or assassination - though there are plenty of those and even more natural deaths I think are hardly misfortunes for the world.    I don't approve of assassination or murder or even non-violent attacks.  Having been the victim of those and knowing what it's like to wonder if your life is at stake,  I don't do that.   I would bet that Charlie Kirk had never experienced that as he blithely advocated what would be, in effect, the lynching murder of gay men and others who I stand with as an LGBTQ+ PERSON.   I'll bet he'd never have figured he might be the target of a straight-white-Mormon boy whose Republican parents encouraged him learning to become an expert marksman and, so,  sniper,  I'll bet Kirk fully expected to live out his life as a rich-white-straight-cis gendered-Republican-fascist who had made a fortune out of peddling hate and calling for the deaths of People he never knew and who never did a thing to him.   As it turns out, he was wrong about that.   For what reason,  as of my writing this, we don't know.  I would like to know that but I wouldn't trust anything that came out of the FBI or anyone else associated with Republican-fascism, not the Utah police or government, not the Turming Point fascists, not his widow, not anyone of that lot.   I'm not sure I'd believe what the killer, himself, said on that count.  That's the thing about those who are willing to kill, whether an assassin whose victim is a famous Republican-fascist advocate of lyncing or someone who murders someone whose even more violent death on the street because he thinks they're LGBTQ+ (and there have been straight people attacked on that assumption) - you never know if they're telling the truth about that.   

From My Inbox To You

 Someone sent me this:

Of the total victims, 73% were killed with a gun. More Hate Mail

CONSIDERING WHO KIRK WAS MALIGNING when he was shot, TRANS PEOPLE  and his promotion of guns - and remember he said that gun deaths were "worth it" to have the Second Amendment, -  HOW MANY OF THE PEOPLE MURDERED THIS WAY WERE MOURNED BY THE GODDAMNED MEDIA, REPUBLICAN POLITICIANS, THE ASSHOLES LIKE AXELROD, ETC. 

The number of trans people who were murdered in the U.S. nearly doubled between 2017 and 2021, according to data released Tuesday by the non-profit Everytown for Gun Safety. 

Everytown's Transgender Homicide Tracker found that there was a 93% increase in tracked homicides of trans and gender-nonconforming people in the United States and Puerto Rico over the last four years. In 2021, 56 people were killed, compared to 29 reported deaths in 2017. 

Notably, while only 13% of the transgender community is estimated to be Black, according  to UCLA School of Law's Williams Institute, Black trans women accounted for nearly threequarters of the known victims. 

Bias-motivated crimes are a real, frightening problem in the United States, and LGBTQ+ people continue to be targeted because of who they are," the Everytown report saidIn 2019, the American Medical Association recognized "an epidemic of violence against the transgender community," who are over 2.5 times more likely than cisgender people — those whose gender identity aligns with the sex they were designated at birth — to experience volence, according to the Everytown report.

I will give you an answer to the question I asked above,  the answer is certainly next to not one if not actually not a single one.  

I'll shed crocodile tears for the trans-hate, gun-death pooh-poohing asshole Charlie Kirk when those pretending they care about this except as a political opportunity can demonstrate that they expressed any regret over the death of these very real PEOPLE most of whom never said anyone elses gun-murder was "worth it" for fascist political reasons 

IF THEY GAVE A FLYING FUCK ABOUT THE GUN MURDER OF CHARLIE KIRK THEY'D DEMAND LAWS THAT WOULD TAKE THE GUNS OUT OF THE HANDS OF THE MURDERERS, INCLUDING THE GUY WHO MURDERED HIM.   Their silence on that is the most eloquent witness to their real thinking about this. 

Update:  I suppose by 2025 American politics and media standards,  if it happened today Jews would be expected to mourn the assassination of the American Nazi George Rockwell.  

By the way, he was also murdered with a Mauser, specifically a Mauser C96,  a different and more antique model.   Gun technology has made it possible to kill from farther away than it was possible with one of those,  it was also very popular with assassins.   The goddamned Second Amendment is deadly dangerous when guns aren't loaded like an 18th century musket.   Not that our fascist Supreme Court or the goddamned idiotic Constitutionalists care about that any more than they really care about Kirk's assassination.  It's all political theater to them or they'd DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. 

Hate Mail - According To The CDC From When We Had One Of Those, An Average Of About 125 Americans Are Killed With Guns Every Day

and you want me to pretend to mourn the one of those from yesterday who I know said the other 124 were "worth it" to have the Second Amendment.

To hell with you and the media hacks who are pretending they care about this.   About the only reason they care is because Kirk was one of them, a right-wing white guy who made a living in the degenerated American media.  You don't give any more of a fuck for those others killed yesterday or the 125 killed today or any of the other 365 days of the year. 

Trump and his regime are blowing this up because they hope it deflects from the Epstein scandal and the rotting economy end everything else.   And it might for a few more days but that's not going to last. 

Got To Go

but as he so often does,  Keith Olbermann puts the story, no doubt, about to become bigger and more durable in the goddamned American free press than the school shooting with the biggest body count ever has in exactly the right perspective, far behind Putins' attack on Poland and Trump's complicity and irresponsibility regarding it. 

He is really better than Murrow was.   Especially now that he is a real independent like I.F. Stone was.   I'd argue he's better than Stone was, too.  

Hate Mail - I Don't Take A Word Of What I Said Back

HERE IS WHAT CHARLIE KIRK was doing just before he was a victim of the gun availability he supported.   And by "doing"  I mean what he did, the only thing he did flapping his lying fascist mouth 

Before the shooting, he was seated at his “Prove Me Wrong” debating table, taking questions from an audience outdoors.

Videos show that Kirk was going back and forth with a student about mass shootings and transgender people when he was shot.

 “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?” Kirk was asked.

“Too many,” Kirk responded as the crowd clapped.

“Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?” To which Kirk replied, “Counting or not counting gang violence?”

Maybe it was a right winger and it was right-wing gang violence.  

I think the reason this is such a big deal in the right-wing media and the media in general is because instead of liberal politicians, political figures, OR SCHOOL CHILDREN INCLUDING THOSE WHO ARE FIVE AND SIX one of their own got shot this time,  a media babbler and liar and a Republican-fascist one at that.   THE MEDIA DOESN'T MAKE THIS MUCH OF A FUSS WHEN A WHOLE SCHOOL HAS BEEN SHOT UP.    Neither does the entire American right. 

David Axelrod Is A Horses Ass

David Axelrod says Kirk is like Martin Luther King. Really.

digby 

From  the same link as in my last post:

On Civil Rights: In another 2023 event, Kirk had called civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr "awful" and "not a good person" as he decried the Civil Rights Act of 1965, which outlawed discrimination based on race, religion, colour, sex and national origin, and prohibited segregation.  

"I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I've thought about it," Kirk said. "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s," he said at a December 2023 political conference hosted by his Turning Points USA group. He claimed that the law ushered in a "permanent" bureaucracy meant to promote diversity, equity and inclusion.

You can add David Axelrod to the list of those I never need to hear from or of again along with James Carville,  Michael Moore,  Ralph Nader, . . . .  

For more about what he said about MLK jr. 

 Kirk, who is no stranger to polarizing statements in the political realm, addressed his view in several social media posts and during an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show that aired on Monday.

"Who was MLK? A myth has been created and it has grown totally out of control," Kirk posted on X on Monday morning. "While he was alive most people disliked him, yet today he is the most honored, worshipped, even deified person of the 20th century Today we are going to tell the truth and explain how this myth was born."

David Axelrod apparently doesn't even do the level of research that an obscure blogger does before he goes on national TV and makes an ass of himself.   Fortunate for him, pretty much everyone who gets their face on American TV is a complete ass so he just fades into the wallpaper of horse shit. 

A Quick Look For Charlie Kirks Not Infrequent Advocating That The Republican-fascist Right Use Violence And Murder Yields This Interesting Fact

Here's A Look At Some Of Kirk's Controversial Takes On Public Issues

On Gun control: In 2023, Kirk said that gun deaths were "worth it" to ensure the preservation of Second Amendment rights in the US-- which is the right to keep and bear arms. 

"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,"  Charlie Kirk during an appearance at the Salt Lake City campus of Awaken Church on April 5, 2023

Ironically, Kirl was answering a question about gun violence when he was shot dead.

So Kirk would seem to have reaped exactly what he sowed.  He would have to count his own gun murder as "worth it" as his side does absolutely nothing AGAIN AND AGAIN in the face of gun murder.   If I were like him and his fans I'd say he got what he asked for.  From whom and for what reason,  I don't know as I write this.  I do know that political violence, of the kind Kirk supported when it was Paul Pelosi (who was attacked by a man who wanted to assassinate Nancy Pelosi)  or the Minnesota legislators who were murdered who were victims of it, it's the American right who have the longer history of political violence and support for that from their own side.   

To which I'll add another reference from Scripture in that translation that a large percentage of Republican-fascists think is the only legitimate translation of Scripture:

7  For they have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind: it hath no stalk: the bud shall yield no meal: if so be it yield, the strangers shall swallow it up.  Hosea 8:7

I will also add Hosea 8:3-4 because, as the Jewish Prophets generally are, it is a perfect description of the last days of the American republic. 

3 Israel hath cast off the thing that is good: the enemy shall pursue him.

4 They have set up kings, but not by me: they have made princes, and I knew it not: of their silver and their gold have they made them idols, that they may be cut off.

I think that last warning about kings and princes and idols made of metal (our gods are guns) justifies my prediction of the end of the American republic.   Only I think the Republican-fascists on the Supreme Court did that a year ago last June. 

I'm Asked What I've Got To Say About Charlie Kirk Being Shot

  IF YOU DON'T SUPPORT GUN CONTROL IN 2025 YOU ARE IN FAVOR OF SCHOOL SHOOTINGS. PERIOD.  

Hate Mail - Unlike You I Want My Party To Be Cleansed Of Pedophile Rapists And Other Criminals

I HOLD A GREAT deal of affection and respect for the late Stephen Jay Gould - one of those from dear old Harvard whose name  the Harvard liar-lawyer Alan Dershowitz threw up when he was trying to deflect attention from the suspicions about and accusations against him.    But if there is evidence that he was guilty of child rape,  I am entirely in favor of exposing that evidence and allowing the judgement of the public determine his posthumous reputation.   Mine would shatter if it turned out he was a child rapist.   I say the same about any members of my political party, the Democratic Party who are guilty of child rape, child abuse, knowingly associating with the Epstein pedophile-rape-blackmail operation whether it be those I detest such as Larry Summers, those who I voted for, such as the accused Bill Clinton and George Mitchell (note, I don't really much like either of them) or any who have not been named but who I may have liked and respected.  I especially don't want any who may ask for my vote to go unrevealed as being such, even as you're entirely OK with Republican child-rapists getting your vote. 

You  want Trump to be unanswerable for his close association with his once close friend Jeffery Epstein and his co-rapist-pimpess, Ghislaine Maxwell.   Not only Trump but the members of his cabinet who Maxwell mentioned so as to better blackmail Todd Blanche's client,  Trump and the rest of the Trump regime.   That's the difference between us on this issue,  I say anyone who is guilty of such crimes should be exposed and if not prosecuted - as I will note again, both Republican-fascist and Democratic Attorneys General have not prosecuted the rich and powerful men and, perhaps more women involved in child rape and trafficking and blackmail., they should be exposed and, if possible, subjected to civil actions.    

I have slammed Merrick Garland for not releasing the material that was in his hand to let the American voters know who they were going to be voting for - I don't give a pint of warm piss about the judicial matters involved in comparison to the all important one of THE VOTE AND THE LEGITIMACY OF THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT.    No attorney general owes the courts or the goddamned "law" more than they owe the integrity of the government according to an informed vote of the public.  I will go so far as to say I suspect William Barr may have been involved in the hush-up murder of Epstein that I'm sure Maxwell suspects happened.   But which you, obviously, don't care about.   

and those classes which have not their centinels in the government, in proportion to what they have to gain or lose, most infallibly be ruined

. . . an aristocratic faction: a junto of unprincipled men, often distinguished for their wealth or abilities, who combine together and make their object their private interests and aggrandizement; the existence of this description is merely accidental, but particularly to be guarded against. 

Federalist Farmer 7 

THE CYNICISM OF JOHN ROBERTS goes unremarked on even though he is one of the most cynical officials in the government.   His declaration in 2007 that "The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race" is certainly obliterated by his silence on his Republican-fascist colleagues giving the Supreme Court seal of approval to racial discrimination by the Trump regime's ICEstapo.   While I think that he and his fellow Republicans on the Roberts Court's ultimate goal is the re-imposition of racial and other restrictions on voting - IT SHOULD NEVER BE FORGOTTEN THAT ROBERTS, KAVANAUGH AND CONEY-BARRETT ALL WORKED AS PARTISAN REPUBLICANS ON THE SUPREME COURT NULLIFICATION OF THE VOTER IN BUSH V GORE, not to mention that that cesspool of pathology,  Clarence Thomas was all-in on that original ultimate Supreme Court power grab - I think that for Roberts there is also a whiff of the aristocratic style of white supremacy to it.   I get the feeling, looking over his record in regard to such matters, that he didn't especially like seeing Black and Brown faces at Harvard when he went there.   Though I'm sure he didn't use the "N" word or make that overtly apparent.  He's certainly got something about that stuck in his aristocratic craw, thus his hypocritical evocation of "colorblindness."   

For the rest of it,  he is an anti-democrat in the same vein as all aristocrats eventually prove themselves to be because they know that their privileges are most endangered by majority rule - eventually the majority will always tend towards the diminution of privilege in favor of the common good, as deferred as that is under the media promotion of racism and the privilege of the rich. 

No matter what other ancillary aspects of inequality that contribute to their primary goal, racism, Constitutional "originalism" or "textualism" or the most overtly fascist academic theory currently fashionable among lying lawyers, the unitary executive, the first and greatest motive of what gets lumped together as "conservatism" is that protection of privilege, whether of great wealth or on behalf of it as in the case of the aristocratic grifters* of the Roberts Court or the billionaire syndicate that they are handing the country to or the merely middle-class who are foolish enough to believe those leeches will not take their little pile, using government policy to facilitate that - as so many Southern, MidWestern and other farm families are quickly finding out as J. D. Vance and his colleagues buy their foreclosed on farms for pennies on the dollar.** 

The most glaring of defects in the Constitution though eyes which see by the light of the Golden Rule, the ultimate and simplest codification of the moral supremacy of equality,  is that it nowhere promotes equality among human beings.  You can do a reading of the original text before the Bill of Rights was inserted AND AFTER IT WAS and find no to precious little notion of the equality of human beings.  There is a lot of talk of equality among states, among Electors and Senators - notably in all of these areas among the most anti-egalitarian features of the Constitution - but not of human beings or even citizens.   About the closest to that comes in the entirely disregarded preface to it, the phrases "provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare" (note Welfare is capitalized, which something should be made of) which is belied immediately by the pro-slavery provisions in the body of it and which the structuring of the Senate and Electoral college all demolish any claim that the slave-holders, financiers and aristocratic lawyers who wrote it had any intention of treating most others as they would want to be treated.    For anyone who claims that the ultimate law of the United States, The Constitution is a document in line with the Christian religion,  it most certainly fails on that as so many other teachings of Jesus and Moses and the other Prophets.  

As I said, I think , ultimately, the goal of the Republican-fascists is the protection, enhancement and enjoyment of their own wealth. 

The fact is that all that is good in American history is the struggle to gain equality and that has always been a struggle against the Constitution as it was written and that means against the various ruses that the champions of privilege, white supremacy, aristocracy invent and put into academic legal double-talk.  In that an enormous struggle with huge pain and sacrifice and blood, costing untold thousands and more of lives,  a little progress made, such as through the Civil War Amendments will quickly be turned back by something such as the general amnesty given to the Confederate traitors by the white supremacist Confederacy sympathetic Andrew Johnson,  the corrupt Electoral College deal of Rutherford Hayes and, ultimately, the Plessy ruling of the Supreme Court (not to mention how the Court turned the 14th Amendment on its head over and over again)  the original sins of the framers as codified in the Constitution will always be there to let the likes of Taney or Roberts et al knock it back.   That is the role of the Supreme Court in our history with the fewest of exceptions and those exceptions - such as were made by the Court under Earl Warren - can be nullified by the more typical of anti-egalitarian courts such as under Rehnquist and Roberts.  You won't get that from high school civics and American history,  you won't get that from Ken Burns on PBS but it is the actual history of the country and ESPECIALLY the Supreme Court under the Constitution. 

It is the goal of Republican-fascists - the traditional Republicans of wealth, new and old allied with the traditionally Southern but now generally dangerous white supremacists, to do what the original framers did in the 3/5th deal made with the slavers,  keep "those classes" from having "their centinels in the government" and, so be ruined.   They have succeeded in gulling many a white person of modest means and even those with considerable means by middle-class standards through the media into voting against their own interest - which is what the Southern aristocracy started doing as soon as they realized they could harness poor whites by promoting racism and granting them a piddling status above Black People.   That is one of the major themes of the true history of America not only as told in terms of equality but, also, in terms of freedom.  Someone has to lose their freedom in order for that scheme to work,  that is also one of the things that John Roberts and his colleagues are doing.  

*  With her huge advance for writing her book,  Amy Coney-Barrett joins the overt grifters Alito and Thomas and the indirect grifting of Roberts (through his wife) known to sit on the Roberts Court.  Either the publisher made that advance knowing that there was no way that it would be made back in honest sales of the book, so it was a bribe, or that they could depend on one of those phony NYT Bestsellers List mass buys financed by millionaire or billionaire money - so still a bribe.   One thing is certain, the Roberts Court is the most overtly bought Supreme Court in our history, though "justices" on past courts have certainly ruled in their own financial self-interst, including the most revered of them all,  the major slave-holder John Marshall. 

**  Federalist Farmer 7 has an interesting analysis of American society - at least the white male part of it.  The very end of it carries an implicit warning from which the title of this is taken.

The third is the natural aristocracy; this term we use to designate a respectable order of men, the line between whom and the natural democracy is in some degree arbitrary; we may place men on one side of this line, which others may place on the other, and in all disputes between the few and the many, a considerable number are wavering and uncertain themselves on which side they are, or ought to be. In my idea of our natural aristocracy in the United States, I include about four or five thousand men; and among these I reckon those who have been placed in the offices of governors, of members of Congress, and state senators generally, in the principal officers of Congress, of the army and militia, the superior judges, the most eminent professional men, &c. and men of large property--the other persons and orders in the community form the natural democracy; this includes in general the yeomanry, the subordinate officers, civil and military, the fishermen, mechanics and traders, many of the merchants and professional men. It is easy to perceive that men of these two classes, the aristocratical, and democratical, with views equally honest, have sentiments widely different, especially respecting public and private expences, salaries, taxes, &c. Men of the first class associate more extensively, have a high sense of honor, possess abilities, ambition, and general knowledge; men of the second class are not so much used to combining great objects; they possess less ambition, and a larger share of honesty: their dependence is principally on middling and small estates, industrious pursuits, and hard labour, while that of the former is principally on the emoluments of large estates, and of the chief offices of government. Not only the efforts of these two great parties are to be balanced, but other interests and parties also, which do not always oppress each other merely for want of power, and for fear of the consequences; though they, in fact, mutually depend on each other; yet such are their general views, that the merchants alone would never fail to make laws favourable to themselves and oppressive to the farmers, &c. the farmers alone would act on like principles; the former would tax the land, the latter the trade. The manufacturers are often disposed to contend for monopolies, buyers make every exertion to lower prices, and sellers to raise them; men who live by fees and salaries endeavour to raise them, and the part of the people who pay them, endeavour to lower them; the public creditors to augment the taxes, and the people at large to lessen them. Thus, in every period of society, and in all the transactions of men, we see parties verifying the observation made by the Marquis; and those classes which have not their centinels in the government, in proportion to what they have to gain or lose, most infallibly be ruined.

The White Supremacist Who Trolls Me

says:

The fact that you haven't fled to that Constitutionless paradise up north shows you're in a state of arrested development.

Geesh, I take it back,  I thought he worked at a college.   He doesn't even know how to fact check the most simple to find of facts.   If there's one thing that Canada has been since 1982 it's been all about it's Constitution when Papa Trudeau famously repatriated their Constitution.   Here's the famous photo of Queen Elizabeth II signing it.

I suppose since both the Roberts Court fascist majority and Trump and the Republican-fascist majority in Congress proves everything I've said about the U.S. Constitution entirely collapsing,  he's got to say something.   Though he should do the slightest bit of research if he wants to make a point other than the one on top of his head.   I've said over and over again that the American right is more a matter of complete amorality than it is stupidity but sometimes it's both.   As the entire Trump regime shows. 

Now, let's get the names of those in the Trump cabinet that Epstein's pimpess Ghislaine Maxwell notified Todd Blanche that she could name if they don't do what she wants.   That and those two potential witnesses that Epstein paid off that Trump's crooked DoJ has tried to keep from being revealed.  

Getting Called Out On A Family Issue Today So I'll Leave You With This

IN RELATION TO THE WARNING given by the antifederalist "Centinel" in yesterday morning's post,  that the government under the Constitution would be free to kill People without anyone stopping it,  

"Centinel" believed the Constitution would "subject" American citizens

"to the most arbitrary military discipline, [and] even death may be inflicted on the disobedient; in the character of militia, you may be dragged from your families and homes to any part of the continent, and for any length of time. . . and as militia, you may be made then unwilling instruments of oppression, under the direction of government; there is no exemption upon account of conscientious scruples of bearing arms .... "

listen to the excellent Heather Cox Richardson talking about two aspects of freedom and, especially, in regard to the Trump regime blowing up the boat, killing eleven People without any restraint and which no one is going to stop him and his band of gangsters doing again whenever they want to distract from the Epstein scandal.    But listen to the whole thing when you have the chance.   She is really one of the best I know about. 

I do have to wonder how many members of the military, the police agencies, etc.  who know they are being ordered to break if not American law then international law are doing it unwillingly.   Certainly some of them know what they're being ordered to do is wrong and some of them who might not care about that wonder if they might be subject to prosecution in the future.    But they could refuse to follow those orders so that's not my biggest worry, it's the ones who are breaking the law and doing evil stuff knowingly and insouciantly, no doubt some of them beleiving Trump and or Vance will give them a blanket pardon like he did the insurrectionists as allowed under our dangerously flawed Constitution and the Roberts Court rubber-stamping of Republican-fascist criminality. 

"What Happened To Dershowitz?" - Why I Suspect Dershowitz Wants Republicans To Retain Control Of Congress Next Year

And just one more reason for me to hate Harvard Law 

READ LAST NIGHT that Alan Dershowitz has announced he will be working to make sure that Republicans win the 2026 election,  I interpret that to mean he will be lying, hedging, shaving the truth past the point of lying while technically not lying - if you want to pretend you don't see through that,  just something lawyers are trained to do,  to try to ensure that Republicans win the election because that's what Dershowitz does.   

For anyone who doesn't believe that, there is an especially good example of that in this discussion by Norman Finkelstein about how Dershowitz slandered his mother, a death camp survivor, accusing her of being a Kapo on a Harvard Law website.   I will recommend you notice the part that the now "justice" then Dean of Harvard Law, Elena Kagan, played in it and Finkelstein's response to her freedom of speechy defense allowing one of their most public faculty members lie and libel in association with her law school - it's quite an eye opener about her character as an institutional apparatchik  too.   She's hardly the only big name at Harvard Law that covered up for him over the years, including some of the biggest and most august of names there. 

I suspect that the reason Dershowitz would want Republicans to keep control of the Congress is so that the Epstein material will  never be made pubic while that old degenerate is alive to suffer the consequences of appearing in them.   I think Dershowitz may suspect  or maybe even knows he's all over it  - which would explain a lot about his political activities since the time Epstein was first being exposed to legal jeopardy.     I have every confidence that Epstein and Maxwell collected material to blackmail - the only credible reason so many of his rooms were wired for video recording - which I would bet you anything they trafficked in,  selling the material to governments, I suspect Russia and Israel would have gotten some if not all of it, which would also explain a lot about Trump.  I would suspect that as one of his lawyers Dershowitz would have known something about what might be contained in that material and what better way to make sure it never sees the light of day than to have Trump as president and certainly one of the most inside of the Epstein pedo-rapists, grantee it will never be released.   I mean, I always knew Dershowitz was a total sleaze, certainly when I first heard him defending the use of torture,  but so many are always asking "what happened to Dersthowitz."  I generally say nothing "happened to him" he's always been a slime-ball but now I think we may reasonably suspect there's more to this than that. 

I generally hate Harvard Law School, one of the birth places of the "unitary executive" fascist theory of the Constitution and training ground for so many fascists and criminals.   It is a moral cesspool, the kind that has produced so many of the most appalling liar-lawyers and, when they didn't produce them themselves, hiring some of them.   What I don't get is why the ones who are better than that don't call out their school for its vileness.   But they do produce lawyers. 

*  I have to ask again why, since the same material was in the hands of the DoJ when Merrick Garland was Attorney General why he and his team kept it under wraps, especially as they don't seem to have done much to prosecute anyone who may have been exposed as criminals by it.    I have to wonder if his connection to Harvard and the number of those from that school who were involved with Epstein didn't have something to do with that, as well.   Though it could have just been Garland  once more preferring his lawerly scruples to democracy and the truth.   I hate"institutionalists" (more honestly called "careerists") which just about all lawyers are.  You can count on them not valuing the truth especially when they can profit from lies. 

If you want to read more about the Dershowitz slander of Maryla Husyt Finkelstein, Norman  Finkelstein has posted a large but not very clearly formatted or edited number of documents about it.   Note that there were lots of People who showed how sleazily and blatantly Dershowitz distorted things to tell his big lie about her and how Dershowitz's lie was picked up by others who wanted to discredit her son.   What a sleaze that guy is. 

in the character of militia, you may be dragged from your families and homes to any part of the continent, and for any length of time

IF YOU WANT ANOTHER example of the foresight of the antifederalists,  here is another passage from Paul Finkelmann's review of The Complete Antifederalist that should sound familiar to anyone following the news since January 21st. 

"Centinel" feared not only a standing army but the abuse of local militias by the national government.  He also understood, far better than the Federalists, that the Constitution would allow a tyranny of the majority to persecute Quakers and other conscientious objectors. "Centinel" believed the Constitution would "subject" American citizens

"to the most arbitrary military discipline, [and] even death may be inflicted on the disobedient; in the character of militia, you may be dragged from your families and homes to any part of the continent, and for any length of time. . . and as militia, you may be made then unwilling instruments of oppression, under the direction of government; there is no exemption upon account of conscientious scruples of bearing arms .... "

Of course, all through our history such has been the case for Black People, certainly for Native Americans but also many other groups for whom which the Constitution never was intended to work by the framers of it.   Now, under Republican-fascism and the Roberts Court many white citizens of the United States are feeling themselves to be under that threat WITHOUT ANYONE MUCH STOPPING THEM, LEAST OF ALL THE SUPREME COURT.   And that's WITH THE BILL OF RIGHTS that the First Congress was forced to pass due to the promises made by James Madison to get Virginia to approve of the thing.   But that will get me started on the many defects in the Bill of Rights, not least of which is the completely defective and now Supreme Court worsened Second Amendment which makes anyone with the means of assembling an arsenal able to do what even the huge lynch mobs of the past couldn't do, kill large numbers of People which happens with such frequency that mass gun murder has become routine in the country under the Bill of Rights.  

Anyone who believes or says that all we need to do is to go back to the regular order of things in the past is an idiot of the kind who does the same thing over and over again and expects there to be a different result.  Those trained as lawyers regularly either are or pretend to be such idiots, my greatest nightmares over Democrats getting the kind of chance Obama and Biden got to right things will listen to the lawyers and, like they did, blow that chance. 

The Constitution isn't the solution, it is the problem,  if not in how  it was written then it certainly is now in how the Supreme Court rewrites it to suit itself according to which elite lawyers sits on it at any time.   And as the many mistakes of the Warren Court prove, mistakes that were then weaponized by the Rehnquist and Roberts Courts to opposite ends,  you can't depend on the maybe one brief period when "liberals" dominated it making everything better.   It has to be cut down to the size of a reasonably less dangerous court in a modern democracy.    It has to be correctable by the Congress and, through them the only basis of any legitimate government, the true, adequately informed and equally accessed voting of The People. 

Saturday Night Radio Drama - Eugene O'Brien - Heaven

 Heaven 

A radio version of Fishamble's hit stage show starring Janet Moran and Andrew Bennett, directed by Jim Culleton. The multi award-winning Heaven is set in the Irish midlands, during the weekend of a local wedding. Mairead and Mal are struggling to keep their marriage together. Perhaps attending a wedding will help, or it might raise questions that are difficult to answer. First commissioned and produced on stage by Fishamble: The New Play Company.

Writer: Eugene O'Brien

Cast:

Andrew Bennett (Mal)

Janet Moran (Mairead)

Director: Jim Culleton

Composer: Carl Kennedy

Sound: Tommy O'Sullivan

Producer for RTÉ: Kevin Brew

Series Producer, Drama On One: Kevin Reynolds

Head of Drama, RTÉ: David Crean

First TX 8pm, Sept 7 2025

"It first glance such fears seem virtually unfounded, but there is an erie modernity to these antifederalist concerns"

THE MAN WHO MAY BE our finest living historian on these topics,  the Constitutional scholar and historian Paul Finkelman,  in his 1984 review of "The Complete Antifederalist" listed some of the things the antifederalists predicted would be possible under the proposed Constitution which, in fact, turned out to be very true.  I'm going to give you a good part of that passage asking you to see what is glaringly obvious,  most of what he noted had already happened under the Constitution WITHOUT THE SUPREME COURT OR ANYONE ELSE STOPPING IT has been repeated under Trump.  BUT NOW WITH SUPREME COURT APPROVAL.   The Roberts Court has made what would have seemed a few years ago to be a wild warning by that hot-headed revolutionary   Patrick Henry the law of the land through their six-three amending of the Constitution.   

I will note that I have copied this with the computer and that's asking for problems of line justification.  I'll try to fix that but I can't promise to catch all of it. 

How might the Constitution "totally destroy the liberties" of America? Some antifederalists feared the presidency, a position that combined the responsibilities of the nation's civil executive with those of commander-in-chief of the Army, while allowing for unlimited terms in office. Patrick Henry looked at the Constitution and did not see the "beautiful features"  that James Madison saw. Henry told the Virginia ratifying convention, "when I come to examine these features, Sir, they appear to me horridly frightful: Among other deformities, it has an awful squinting; it squints towards monarchy .. . Your President may easily become King .... "

Others worried about the Senate whose members would serve long terms without any check on them by the people. Many antifederalists predicted that the Senate would become an aristocracy. Because the Senate possessed executive and judicial, as well as legislative, roles, that body seemed especially dangerous. Henry warned, "Your Senate is so imperfectly constructed that your dearest rights may be sacrificed by what may be a small minority; and a very small minority may continue forever unchangeably this Government, athough horridly defective." 

Even the House of Representatives was too remote for some antifederalists. In their view, that body consisted of too few members for it to be truly representative of the people. 

It first glance such fears seem virtually unfounded, but there is an erie modernity to these antifederalist concerns. Is the modern imperial presidency any different from the one the antifederalists feared? Even the War Powers Act  has not prevented an American president from sending troops to Lebanon and Grenada. Without such a law, a secret war in Cambodia and Laos was fought for many years. And the imperial presidency has not been confined to foreign affairs. With a single order, Franklin Roosevelt incarcerated nearly 100,000 American citizens for three and a half years.  As the antifederalists might have predicted,even the Supreme Court lacked both the moral authority and the moral sensitivity to object.  The use of federal troops to suppress strikes in the nineteenth century and veterans protesting the depression during the 1932 Bonus March are yet other examples of what the antifederalists feared. If there are few such instances of this type of behavior in our nation's early history, it may be because the fears of the antifederalists remained alive until the Civil War. If there are more instances in recent years, it may be because a less well-read and less historically aware America has forgotten the warnings of antifederalists.

If you don't get an eerie feeling noticing the repeating, beyond rhyming, of history with the past eight months under Trump,  you are as stupid as the majority of the Roberts Court and the Republican-fascist majority in the Senate.    The same review by the same reviewer 41 years later could fill paragraphs, with little doubt including the crimes of Bush II and the Rehnquist Court's Bush v Gore decision.   Such things are coming far more often and in far more extreme forms as we go on in the Constitutional order. 

Anyone who has read much of what I've written might notice that I have always stressed the importance of equality as THE absolute foundation of legitimate democratic government,  leaving the far more widely noted matter of liberty in the background.   That's not because I don't value that thing which the antifederalists as well as the federalists were always harping on,  "liberty" but because, as the Constution has allowed all of those evils listed in that very partial list made by Paul Finkelman,  it has given "liberty" out in the most grotesquely unequal way,  over-complete liberty to rich, white men over the most basic rights of Black People, other People of Color, Women, Children,  WORKERS.  Note that what Trump is doing with federal troops now was done UNDER THE CONSTITUTIONAL ORDER to keep workers from organizing in the past, most of whom were poor, white men and women.    That was among the greatest evils of the Constitution, that it was founded and continues to promote inequality favoring the very same small minority which the framers favored.   Any time in our history when  partial progress towards equality and against the original reading of the Constitution was made,  in abolishing slavery through the civil war,  the Supreme Court can be counted on to knock it back if not down entirely as the Roberts Court is doing in nullifying the Voting Rights and  Civil Rights Acts.    That is the role that the Court has played AGAINST LAWS DULY ADOPTED BY THOSE SUBJECT TO THE VOTE, over and over again in our history.    That is why I have noted that the Supreme Court has been, since at least 1803 when it gave itself the Marbury power to do that,  MAKING THE PREDICTIONS OF "BRUTUS" THE LAW OF THE LAND.   

Now that the Roberts Court is outdoing the Taney Court, the Court of Plessey v Ferguson, the Courts that totally distorted the 14th Amendment out of any sense of its original meaning,  it's time to face the fact that no hard won progress towards equality or even rational government is going to be safe while the Supreme Court as it stands now retains its ability to do what was warned about in Brutus 15.

I will point out that the extreme rightists in the Roberts Court majority know that they cannot depend on what they want being had and secured through democracy,  maybe not even through the gerrrymandered, rigged-election Congress holding up through the various financial crises, recessions and depressions that have brought Democrats into the majority there, so they want the presidency to have the very powers of a king which the antifederalists warned it would always have a tendency to be.  It is one of the things that has been noted that third-world countries which followed a presidential system instead of a parliamentary system had a greater chance of becoming dictatorships.  I think it is worth considering that it was the antifederalists who predicted such a tendency,  not the federalists who won through the most dubious of means*. 

I'll call your attention to this part of Brutus 15 that I'll focus on more later. 

The power of this court is in many cases superior to that of the legislature. I have showed, in a former paper, that this court will be authorized to decide upon the meaning of the constitution, and that, not only according to the natural and obvious meaning of the words, but also according to the spirit and intention of it. In the exercise of this power they will not be subordinate to, but above the legislature. For all the departments of this government will receive their powers, so far as they are expressed in the constitution, from the people immediately, who are the source of power. The legislature can only exercise such powers as are given them by the constitution, they cannot assume any of the rights annexed to the judicial, for this plain reason, that the same authority which vested the legislature with their powers, vested the judicial with theirs — both are derived from the same source, both therefore are equally valid, and the judicial hold their powers independently of the legislature, as the legislature do of the judicial. — The supreme court then have a right, independent of the legislature, to give a construction to the constitution and every part of it, and there is no power provided in this system to correct their construction or do it away. If, therefore, the legislature pass any laws, inconsistent with the sense the judges put upon the constitution, they will declare it void; and therefore in this respect their power is superior to that of the legislature. In England the judges are not only subject to have their decisions set aside by the house of lords, for error, but in cases where they give an explanation to the laws or constitution of the country, contrary to the sense of the parliament, though the parliament will not set aside the judgment of the court, yet, they have authority, by a new law, to explain a former one, and by this means to prevent a reception of such decisions. But no such power is in the legislature. The judges are supreme — and no law, explanatory of the constitution, will be binding on them.

*  Read the review by Finkelman for only some of the examples of the rigging of the ratification process by the federalists.   Here's one that should remind you of recent events by the Republican-fascists in that most emblematic of "liberty loving" states,  Texas.

The third procedural issue, like the first, centered on the legality of the process. Storing asserts that the argument that the Convention lacked legal power to write a new Constitution "became less pertinent every day simply because the Constitution was in fact before the people."'  The process of ratification emerged as an even more dangerous factor, however. In Pennsylvania, for example, the state assembly voted to call a ratification convention before the Congress (meeting in New York at the time) had even transmitted the Constitution to the states.

On the penultimate day of the session, the pro-Constitution "Republicans, enjoying a temporary majority in the Assembly, pressed for immediate action.''50 Those opposed to the Constitution argued that a decision on when and how to choose delegates to a ratifying convention should be postponed until after the election of the new legislature set for the following month. The antifederalists advocated delay on the grounds that the Constitution was not officially before the assembly, and that the people of the state deserved the opportunity to read the proposed Constitution and vote for or against assembly members on the basis of that document. When the temporary federalist majority rejected these arguments, the antifederalist members of the assembly boycotted the last session in order to prevent a quorum. The next day, a mob forced two of the assemblymen back to the chamber in order to establish a quorum, and the call for a convention was approved. 

If this behavior on the part of the federalists reflected the tenor of politics to be expected under the new Constitution, it is understandable that many people feared an impending end to liberty.

The process of ratification of the Constitution was hardly less crooked in many of the other states,  Massachusetts - of which my state was then a part - was very much in line with the kind of vote rigging that Trump and the Republican-fascists want to make the law of the land right now.