Charlie Kirk: More reason I'm not a Democrap

Per Thomas Zimmer on Substack, national-level Democraps and Democrap-oriented media thought leaders are tying themselves in knots to fellate an untrue legacy of Kirk's:

Since the moment Kirk was murdered, however, leading Democrats and influential voices on the center-left have been engaged in a campaign to paint a very different picture of the man who was assassinated. It has been a strange spectacle. 

[L]eading Democrats have been asking us to honor Kirk’s memory and “continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse” while liberal opinion leaders are explaining how Kirk was “practicing politics the right way.” I suspect there is an element of trying to appease the President and his followers – which is quite the indication of how far down the dark path America already is. Some of this is also intended to demonstrate how magnanimously above the partisan fray one is: a performances of faux-high-mindedness. But there is certainly, I am sure, a genuine desire to model good democratic behavior behind this. That impulse I commend and share. I believe, however, that sanitizing Charlie Kirk’s politics and actions is the wrong way to go about this. We should trust ourselves and those we address to be able to hold two thoughts at the same time: That we must forcefully condemn political violence but also acknowledge that it festers and thrives in a deeply unhealthy political culture that Kirk himself helped create.

There you are.

He has two links in the original. 

The first is to Gov. Pothole's Bluesky, which says:

The best way to honor Charlie's memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse. In a democracy, ideas are tested through words and good-faith debate — never through violence.

In reality, Kirk did no such thing. As Hasan Piker said Thursday, he was a debate troll who showed up to joint debates with people like him to perform a racist wingnut version of a Gish Gallop and to "own/dunk on the libs." Specifically:

I don’t think he was ever debating for the purpose of finding the truth or from a position of intellectual curiosity. ...  For Charlie, I think the format was more so to just humiliate his ideological opponents. And he was very successful at doing propaganda of this sort, by going to college campuses and listening to what people had to say, and then giving them the right-wing talking points on the matter. Getting a couple dunks in the process.

Yep, Charlie was one of the first pushers of the "own the libs" angle. 

The second link from Zimmer's original piece is to the odious Ezra Klein, who claims Kirk was "practicing politics the right way."

Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election

I half-joked on Shitter that Ezra will next write that Bibi Netanyahu is "practicing land reform the right way." 

Back to Zimmer, for the reality:

The signature “contribution” of Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk founded as a teenager, is the “Professor Watchlist,” a website TPUSA runs. It serves to enable a McCarthyist hunt for “leftists” so that they can be publicly disparaged; once a professor is on the list, harassment, intimidation, and threat are guaranteed to follow. Kirk existed in a rightwing media and online eco system that runs on anger and monetizes outrage. And he was very good at his job, constantly telling his audience what new devious plot “the Left” was pursuing to take America away from “real Americans.” In the process, he propagated basically any rightwing conspiracy theory that has emerged over the past few years: the Big Lie about the 2020 election, Covid disinformation, Great Replacement… all combined with a hefty dose of bigoted white grievance.

Zimmer links to this Wired piece for the "bigoted white grievance." This:

“MLK was awful,” Kirk said. “He's not a good person. He said one good thing he actually didn't believe.”

Is the real Charlie Kirk, as per the Wired story, that was just one broadside in a planned strategic ongoing salvo. 

So, Gov. Pothole was already way off my list of Democraps I would vote for, for president. This makes it even worse. 

Of course, Democraps of both sexes have no gonads on many other things. Like Gaza, or even Israel bombing Qatar (with the apparent blessing of Trump). 

Worst among the wingnuts are ex-libruls. (I'm aware of no wingnuts who are ex-leftists, at least not popping up on this issue.) 

But, isn’t that, to get back to the theme, yet another illustration why I’m not a Democrap? Were all that many of them that good of librulz in the first place? Some, the Bernie—>Trump people like gun nut H.A. Goodman, may only have been interested in him personally, not the party, and found him a mix of stalking horse and cudgel.

At the same time, they, and Bernie himself, refute Marxian-type leftist claims that issues of race almost always reduce to those of class. I’ve argued with Doug Henwood, and with Adolph Reed via Henwood, and others like this. It’s why the family groupies of the Socialist Equality Party aren’t all right for their attacks on the likes of the Party of Socialism and Liberation, either.

==

Joe Costello claims none of the recent shootings or assassinations, and attempts, are political. I think he's only half-right. Tyler Robinson and the two would-be Trump assassins, per Costello, seem apolitical with vague but generally wingnut grievances. The Party of Socialism and Liberation dude? Vague but generally aggrieved leftist grievances. But? The shooters of the Israeli embassy staffers were clearly political. The guy who allegedly killed the Minnesota state legislator? Political. Luigi Mangione was "para-political," to the degree that both the right hand of the duopoly and much of the left hand both oppose national health care. 

==

At the same time, while I'm here, it's a lie that "no Republican" did anything or said anything after Minnesota state House Speaker Melissa Hortman was killed. Trump did relatively little, yes. And, given who Tyler Robinson may be — other than meeting all the checkpoints of the lone White lone shooter, per Counterpunch — Trump doing nothing with Hortman, IMO, opened the door for false flagging claims on social media.

 

Banned by the cowardly tribalist anal retentives at r/AskHistorians

Actually, that would be r/AskPseudoHistorians, since the reason for my ban is that one cannot question empirically unsubstantiable claims of genocide, i.e., Kirkpatrick Sale type claims that American Indians were genocided.

Here's the ban message:

Hello, You have been permanently banned from participating in /r/AskHistorians because your comment violates this community's rules. You won't be able to post or comment, but you can still view and subscribe to it.

Note from the moderators: The definition of genocide does not require intent to eradicate a people completely. The correct definition is intent to harm a people whole or in part. European settlers engaged in indigenous genocide. Minimizing/denying it is unacceptable on AskHistorians.

And here's my response.

No, you don't really want to chat, because you permabanned me. Second, I know that (see Gaza) complete eradication doesn't have to be intended. Third, that said, per your comment and the sub's definition, you don't really want discussion about this issue in general. Fourth, from that, I've been banned by tribalists besides you before. Fifth, it's cowardly mixed with tribalism to downvote me for a comment related to an archived post where I can neither comment nor downvote back in the first place. SIxth and related, of course, a hidden list of mods only doubles down on the perception of cowardice.

On the second and third response points, it's not just me. Plenty of liberal academic historians, and even some leftists, reject this claim. This isn't just wingnuttery. AND, if these are actual academic historians?

THEY KNOW THAT. Tribalist pseudohistorical non-skeptical leftists. The starting point is what percentage of American Indians were killed in "zones" within a "reasonable" distance of European contact, and how and why. The percentage is certainly not Kirkpatrick Sale's 90-plus percent.

Second point is whether intent involved deadly intent. Many European actions could indeed be called "ethnic cleansing" but fall short of genocide.

Things like this would be discussed by actual historians, and per this Oxford piece, actually are. (Unfortunately, that site is nowhere near perfect, with pretendian (he IS!) Ward Churchill leading off the bibliography. Vine Deloria's son is second. Tying to this issue, sadly, even after being exposed as a pretendian, and not just by vengeance-seeking wingnuts, a place like Mother Jones continued to platform him. (Cheyenne-Muscogee Suzan Harjo has been a leader in exposing the likes of Churchill, including Churchill himself.) Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a leading pusher of the genocide thesis today, is also a pretendian, though she's tried to elide away her past claims then backpedaled from them more fully. Actually she's only rejected her Cherokee claims, which she peddled after peddling her Cheyenne claims. See Pretendians website. Also note that besides Churchill and Dunbar-Ortiz, it includes other academics like Elizabeth Hoover. In fact, I counted 13 current or former academics among 27 listed people. Remember, these are only those who have been formally identified as such.

The one other thing, off the top of my head, is are these people librulz who are wagon-circling tribalists, or non-skeptical leftists?

Back to the issue. Could individual actions be considered genocide? Absolutely!  Anglo America's treatment of Gold rush and later California Indians definitely is, in my book.

In many cases, we have ethnic cleansing. That's quite serious, too. But, it's not genocide.

The old post I was criticizing? The mod identifies as Nez Perce and Yakama, so I'm not allowed to criticize. I guess I can't criticize Bari Weiss for thinking the Holocaust justifies everything. I guess, more to the point, that I can't also point out that Indian slavery was sometimes chattel slavery, that the potlatch culture involved human sacrifice and other things. Oops, I guess I did. (Shockingly, that Reddit admitted it, but without any moderators weighing in.)

That gets back to the first point above. We have numbers for the Holocaust. We have numbers for Gaza today. We have nothing better than a broad range of guesses for pre-Columbian Contact American Indian numbers. And, many websites that say 90 percent or more of American Indians were killed go with the passive "It is estimated" and no citation of sources.

Related are stories about how so many American Indians were killed that it contributed to the Little Ice Age. Even if the 56 million in approximately 120 years is correct? That's 56 percent of a pre-Contact 100 million, if we take that number as a population guess at contact that's reasonable. It's not 90 percent. And, noting that the definition of genocide doesn't include full extermination, there's other issues. Above all, that's that there was intent behind all of this.

We have other issues. Those are issues like "likely" in the first paragraph and "may" in the second.

We also have lies on related issues.

First, in today's US, Sir Jeffrey Amherst's failed attempt to spread smallpox by blankets is about the ONLY attempt to deliberately spread disease, lies (they are) of people like Ward Churchill aside.

Second, since we don't have really good numbers of pre-Contact American Indians either in the US, or the "New World" as a whole, percentages of death are a mug's game, too. Pre-Contact Western Hemisphere population has been estimated by sound academics at 8-15M on the low end to more than 100M on the high end. In the US, it's been from less than 2M to more than 15M. See this paper, but also note it's problematic for calling this a "holocaust." The climate change paper above claims 60 million, and it has to claim that many, or almost that many, to avoid a "genocide" that results in negative population.

And, if we're seriously going to claim that disease spread is de facto genocidal, then why aren't the Mongols called out for genocide via plague? Yes, it's snarky. And, it's also serious.

As for the de rigueur threat of banning from Reddit if I try to circumvent it? This:

Otherwise, on the de rigueur "don't attempt to circumvent this ban" note? I've already called you people anal-retentives on my own feed. I wouldn't want back here, especially if tribalist pseud-historians are allowed to pontificate.

Such notes in general are some mix of condescending and snooty.

And pretentious. That second comment got a response: 

I'm not sure if you want us to respond to your list of points, or if you just want to vent your spleen at us, but either way, you can consider this matter closed.

To which I replied:

Thanks for giving me yet more material to write about is my response. Per my second paragraph above, why would I think you would reopen it, and throwing in presumptuousness on your side, why would you think I cared? Even before this, I'd realized this sub wasn't all that.

There you go.

I had already "threatened," as with r/BiblicalAcademic, to create a new sub, not "public" but not fully "private," either, but rather the third category on Reddit, and this probably did it!

Or, back to the OP at Reddit? Per the above and per my Bari Weiss and Gaza? Should we accept all Indigenous "science" (yes, scare quotes) as actual science? No, we should test it. Unfortunately, the likes of High Country News went, yes, "woke" in a wrongful way on this issue during COVID.

Back to the OP at Reddit further.

Texas Progressives talk environment, more

Off the Kuff notes the latest Republican effort, this one driven by Trump, to make voting harder. 

SocraticGadfly talks two water and environment issues. FIrst, he notes that Texas and New Mexico, with the feds properly looped in, settled the Rio Grande water rights suit, while noting that still doesn't solve the problem of less and less water availability with nearly a century of long-term drought likely ahead. Second, he salutes the city of Corpus Christi for pulling the plug on its desal project while wondering what's next, since the city has not pulled the plug on committing to a refining-and-fracking economy.

The Trib doesn't tell you, sadly, that the parental consent law for school nurses has been made vague deliberately, for the same reasons the "medical treatment that's not abortion" definitions were made vague.  And that's why Jeff Leach et al won't give non-vague comments.

If the Texas GOP succeeds in its suit to force closed primaries, the wingnuttery level of nominees will only go higher.

The Barbed Wire discusses and discusses again the "bounty hunter for abortion medications" law and its likely impact. The Monthly discusses the work in getting an out-of-state abortion.

Per the Monthly, yes, go see Charles Butt's modern art collection, starting at the Amon Carter, then elsewhere.

Neil at the Houston Democracy Project said it is good for Houston Councilmember Martinez to support striking workers at the Hilton Americas. He can also call for light HPD hand with pro-democracy protesters & for end of HPD cooperation with ICE.

The TSTA Blog warns that you will like the STAAR replacement less than you liked the STAAR. (The Texas 2036 group of Bushie Republicans sent out a mass blast newspaper column last week, with nothing from either TSTA or TASB.)

G. Elliott Morris shows why you can't replace polling with AI.

Steve Vladeck analyzes the court rulings that the Trump tariffs are illegal.

Both The Barbed Wire and the Current delve into a report debunking the existence of a "Rainey Street Ripper" in Austin.

In the Pink Texas tries in vain to find a COVID shot.

Houstonia reviews the lessons of the Trump Burger saga.

Lee Camp: conspiracy theorist and grifter

A week ago, I wrote about Lee Camp (yes, that Lee Camp) looking like "controlled opposition" on Israel-Gaza.

Well, part two is at least part of "the rest of the story" about Camp.

Even though Google's AI claims he's not a JFK conspiracy theorist and doesn't have any real focus there, per his actual website, he sure as hell is and does.

For more, I quote from a Scheer Post piece he wrote five years ago:

Let's read:

December 22, 1963 — exactly one month after President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated, former President Harry S. Truman published an op-ed in the Washington Post that most people, especially our perfumed ruling elite, wanted to ignore.

Truman, who signed the CIA into existence just after World War II, wrote, “I think it has become necessary to take another look at the purpose and operations of our Central Intelligence Agency—the CIA. […] For some time I have been disturbed by the way the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment. It has become an operational and at times a policy-making arm of the Government. This has led to trouble and may have compounded our difficulties in several explosive areas. …There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.”

Not only did that adorn the pages of the Washington Post one month after JFK’s death, Truman hand wrote the first draft just one week after JFK met up with a bunch of bullets in Dallas. Sure, one may wish Harry had sent his thoughts to John a month before the President’s televised execution. Maybe he could’ve sent a singing telegram or something. But let’s at least give Truman partial credit for the belated message.

Before his death President Kennedy also held no love for the Central Intelligence Agency. Following the calamitous Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy said he wanted to “splinter the CIA into a thousand pieces and scatter it into the winds.”

Point being, clearly Truman, who created the CIA, and Kennedy, who met a mysterious untimely end by professional killers, knew the agency had run amok.

There we go.

Realities?

Jack and brother Bobby were using the CIA to run Operation Mongoose against Castro long after the Bay of Pigs. If anything, they were making it even more amok. The Ba'athist coup in Iraq in 1963 was quite likely supported by the CIA. The 1964 coup against British Guiana's president was getting support from Kennedy's CIA and even the man himself:

U.S. intelligence concluded that Prime Minister Cheddi Jagan, one of the main presidential candidates in the upcoming 1964 elections, was a communist, although not necessarily under the sway of Moscow. Nevertheless, Kennedy decided Jagan would have to go and urged London to cooperate in the effort. As early as mid-1962, JFK informed the British prime minister that the notion of an independent state led by Jagan “disturbs us seriously,” adding: “We must be entirely frank in saying that we simply cannot afford to see another Castro-type regime established in this Hemisphere. It follows that we should set as our objective an independent British Guiana under some other leader.”

Whether Camp is figuratively or not some sort of controlled opposition on Israel, he's an uncontrolled, self-disinformed conspiracy theory idiot in general, and a smoker of the crack cocaine of the Camelot legend.

And, as such, he's a pseudoleftist.

Finally, like a lot of such people, a "merch" page including a coffee mug for $18 and T-shirt for $34 show he's a big-ass grifter.

James Talarico running for Senate? Meh

James Talarico has officially jumped in the Democratic Senate primary. Unless on Israel-Gaza, Russia-Ukraine, certainly, and maybe a few other issues, you have different stances than ConservaDem establishmentarian retread Colin Allred does, and I presume space guy Terry Virts has, I'll look for a Green, a write-in, or an undervote in November 2026.

As a mainline Protestant, rather than a dispensationalist fundamentalist, he's not a conservative Zionist. Is he a liberal Zionist? Possibly.

Teh google, in a quick search, shows nothing other than other people asking the same question. MANY other people. As Israhell moves beyond trying to eliminate Gaza to trying to eliminate Hamas outside of Gaza, to trying to kill pro-Hamas journalists outside of Gaza, to trying to nibble away more at the West Bank portion of Palestine even as some ultra-hard-hardliners advocate annexing all of it? Unless Talarico wants to be seen as Allred's whiter younger brother, he'll have to indicate he has a different stance and that it's a principled one.

On Russia-Ukraine, we know the reality. No Democrat will even entertain giving the time of day to Russia, even with discounting Putin's grievances 75 cents on the dollar.

Beyond that, on the domestic side? What's his stance on national health care? Lone Star Left, which is not always close to perfect, says Dem candidates in general should make that part of their policy package.

The Monthly also talks about his entrance, along with Allred's lackluster 2024 effort against Havana Ted. Apparently, Allred has a new schtick —public weightlifting and isometrics like Brainworm Bobby, Joe Rogan and Pete Hegeseth. 

I expect to do a follow-up when Talarico is forced to reveal more of his hand on some of these and other issues. 

The larger problem is that very few Dem state legiscritters, or Congresscritters, are really that "pergressuve." 

Update: The Trib platforms Talarico for 5,000 words or more, and manages not to ask him about Israel or Gaza. It does note he HAS accepted money from Miriam Adelson. The Trib also manages NOT to identify her as "ardent Zionist." Politico has more; Talarico says it was all for legalizing gambling. But, couldn't he take the money from someone else, rather than this blood money? He does say on Instagram he won't take AIPAC money and that "God is screaming at us in Gaza." But, wasn't your nonexistent god screaming in 2024?

And, if he really believes that, about gambling bringing jobs to Texas, how does he square that with his original plans to enter the ministry, and the ethics of gambling, gambling addiction and more? 

Thoughts on various sub-reddits

Per my other site, I got banned by Nazi mods at r/AcademicBiblical and per her, I got banned by left hand of the duopoly tribalists at r/NationalPark and r/TexasPolitics. (They can both continue to fuck off.)

 I'm going to write here about some other subs where I'm semiregularly active.

R/mlb is trying to get to be too much like r/baseball, but hasn't gone fully down that road yet. The only thing I don't like is that I can't post videos via a link, like an ESPN or YouTube link. Mods could change that if they wanted; it's not something structural to Reddit. But they haven't.

R/Cardinals allows that and is pretty chill.

R/Butterflies is pretty chill and recently did the good thing of banning any more posts about home-breeding butterflies. It's all au naturel stuff now.

R/Dragonfly is also all good.

R/Flowers, where I haven't posted in little while? Ditto.

R/AskHistorians is .... interesting. I think whether or not your answer is considered "in depth" enough depends on what mod looks at it. And, not being able to cite myself, even though in this case, I have relevant academic background? I guess I can halfway understand that, but not totally. tribalist librulz (or maybe a few pseudoleftists) who have banned me for not following the party line.

R/RoadTrip used to be known for karma farming, followed by being known by me for mods tolerating that.

I'm a member of r/politics, to be technical, but refuse to post there because of BlueAnon tribalism. I stopped posting at r/NBA after they did a head fake on pretending to back subs' strike against Reddit a couple of years back, but mods secretly kept running the sub between themselves.