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Showing posts with label Charlie Kirk. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Charlie Kirk. Show all posts

Thursday, September 11, 2025

Has there ever been a bigger damn fool than Ezra Klein?



Ezra Klein has always gone out of his way to be kind to racists, even refusing to refer to Andrew Sullivan, supporter of gutter racist Charles Murray and shameless promoter of Neo-Nazi Emil Kirkegaard, a racist.

And now he's playing both-sides over the murder of Charlie Kirk, who was very much a racist.

In his NYTimes opinion piece, Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way, Klein warns the left and the right against using Kirk's death for political gain.

He's worried that the left will point out that Kirk was vocally in favor of a few sacrifices on the altar of NRA-level gun "freedom.

But if you mention that unpleasant fact about Kirk, Klein will consider you to be the equivalent of the right using Kirk's murder as a "Reichstag fire for our time."

Reichstag fire refers to a fire at the Reichstag which the Nazis used as an excuse to suspend civil liberties in Germany.

And this is how the right-leaning establishment at the New York Times attempts, again and again, to equate left-wing commentary with right-wing horror.

I am opposed to murder, even of wicked men like Charlie Kirk. 

But it is a fact that he was a professional hate-monger. To say he was doing politics "the right way" is to excuse hate-mongering.

There is an excellent piece in Word in Black - 'Black America's Digital Daily' that says it all:

Charlie Kirk was no martyr for freedom. He was a provocateur whose rhetoric leaned heavily on racist falsehoods. He dismissed diversity, equity, and inclusion programs as “anti-white.” He claimed white privilege was a “myth.” He denounced the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a “huge mistake.” He even reversed his praise of Martin Luther King Jr., later calling him “awful” and a “mythological anti-racist creation.”

Kirk also promoted the so-called “Great Replacement” theory — the white nationalist idea that demographic change in America is an intentional plot to reduce White influence. “The ‘Great Replacement’ is not a theory, it’s a reality,” he declared. Those words emboldened prejudice, spread division, and threatened the dignity of millions of Americans.

Kirk’s ideology was dangerous and rooted in racism. His assassination does not erase that truth. Violence doesn’t end hate; it deepens it, handing extremists a martyr.

Author Mark Harris also had an excellent response to Klein. 


Harris forgot to mention anti-Semitism. Kirk was a big fan of the "Great Replacement" lie.



Klein's claims about Kirk are so absurd that I find it hard to believe that this is his sincere opinion. I think it's just as likely to be Klein posturing for the right-leaning New York Times establishment to show them he's their guy - he can be trusted to promote the "both sides" narrative. I think it's probably about Klein's career advancement more than anything else.

This is what Klein considers "the right way."



UPDATE

Apparently this murder was a case of right-on-right crime. 

Augusta Free Press:


What we know about this Tyler Robinson: good student from a good Mormon family who scored high on the ACT, then dropped out of college after a semester.

More: Tyler Robinson appears, from online postings, to have been a Groyper, a White Nationalist movement led by another far-right provocateur, Nick Fuentes, who regularly picked public fights with Kirk, urging his followers to out Kirk as a “fake conservative,” raising issue, most recently, with Kirk’s insistence that the Trump administration should release the Epstein files.

Fuentes, of course, is now distancing himself from having been engaged in a MAGA civil war with Kirk, as is another far-right nutjob, Laura Loomer, who has been busy deleting recent tweets in which she had criticized Kirk as a “charlatan” and “political opportunist” who engaged in “mental gymnastics” and “stabs Trump in the back,” and wrote that she didn’t “ever want to hear Charlie Kirk claim he is pro-Trump ever again.”

More on Tyler Robinson: the messages etched into the bullets were not, in fact, pro-trans, as the media and political ecosystem on the far right initially asserted, but rather, from a video game known for its satirical use of fascist imagery, which terminally online Groypers are known to have co-opted to be able to, in essence, hide in plain view.

Still more: the parents are registered Republicans, and the father, Matt Robinson, seen in an online photo wearing a T-shirt repping the far-right Three Percenter movement, “is a Republican for Trump,” according to the grandmother, Debbie Robinson.




PREDICTABLY - the killer was a gun-nut MAGA and apparently influenced by groypers who loved Nicholas Fuentes, but you KNEW who Bari Weiss and her confederacy of dunces were going to blame for this:
There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.

Charlie Kirk was given a platform by the Utah Valley University. But Weiss and her ghouls are going to use his murder at a college campus - a murder that looks to be part of a right-wing civil war - to advocate for attacking universities and cracking down on student rights. 

Because the Free Press, and the money backing it, are monstrously evil. 

Wednesday, September 10, 2025

Charlie Kirk

Kirk was a named member of the Intellectual Dark Web.

Thanks to horrifically lax gun laws in the United States, someone was able to murder Charlie Kirk with a gun.

Was it worth it, Charlie Kirk?


Kirk is a martyr to the Republican Party's insane interpretation of the Second Amendment.

I think it's very likely the Trump administration is going to use this incident in a Reichstag fire way.

UPDATE: As of today, the shooter has not been captured, but Trump supporters are not wasting any time to use Kirk's death to call for violence against "the left" which they baselessly blame for the shooting. 

Reported in WIRED magazine: 'War Is Here': The Far-Right Responds to Charlie Kirk Shooting With Calls for Violence.

Sunday, March 12, 2023

SOME MORE NEWS vs. the IDW

I've mentioned "Some More News" recently, but I want to praise this almost-perfect video from them, explaining the Intellectual Dark Web's attempts to deny the importance of history and the existence of systemic racism. 

Like Steven Pinker, who as I pointed out the other day, does not believe that poverty or racism has any influence on crime - or the Black crime rates that Pinker said, back in 2018, were being hidden by the media.


Unfortunately the video doesn't mention Pinker - it would be full-on perfect if it did - which is a reason why Pinker is so much more insidious than the rest. 

Nobody else associated with the Intellectual Dark Web, as far as I am aware, was invited to the United Nations to express opinions. Steven Pinker was

And yet he holds the same beliefs as Sam Harris and others associated with the IDW and race pseudoscience. He's careful not to directly state those beliefs, especially since the brouhaha in 2018, but it's easy enough to infer his beliefs by who he supports and his statement that:
The left was uh completely out to lunch when it came to... the um causes of crime, badly badly wrong when it uh - it still does... when it attributes crime to um poverty and racism... 
I really wish I had been aware of Some More News long ago, I would have loved to post this video when it was first released two years ago. When the argument against the race beliefs of the IDW is stated so clearly you really have to wonder - is the IDW simply evil - or are they basically too stupid to grasp the complexity of socio-cultural-historical interactions, but have been socially promoted waaaay above their intellectual abilities.

We know how they have been promoted - racist plutocrats like Charles Koch and Peter Thiel have been funding them. Pinker was funded by Koch in 2018 when he made those controversial statements.

The best part of this video might be the analogy at minute 56:25, showing a Mario Cart race with Mario representing white people and Luigi representing Black people. It's so good but basic, even a sociobiologist might be able to understand it.

Wednesday, December 14, 2022

Elon Musk is a stochastic terrorist





Per CNN:
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety has fled his home due to an escalation in threats resulting from Elon Musk’s campaign of criticism against him, a person familiar with the matter told CNN on Monday.

Yoel Roth, who resigned from the social media company in November, has in recent weeks faced a storm of attacks and threats of violence following the release of the so-called “Twitter Files” — internal Twitter communications that new owner Musk has released through journalists including Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss.

Roth’s position involved him working on sensitive issues including the suspension of then-President Donald Trump’s account in 2021. On Monday, Weiss posted a series of screenshots purported to show internal Twitter documents where Roth and others discussed whether to ban Trump’s account, with some employees questioning if the former president’s tweets violated the platform’s policies.

While Musk had initially been publicly supportive of Roth, that soon changed after he left the company.

Roth has since been the subject of criticism and threats following the release of the Twitter Files. However, things took a dark turn over the weekend when Musk appeared to endorse a tweet that baselessly accused Roth of being sympathetic to pedophilia — a common trope used by conspiracy theorists to attack people online.

A person familiar with Roth’s situation told CNN threats made against the former Twitter employee escalated exponentially after Musk engaged in the pedophilia conspiracy theory. 

This is the second time Musk has falsely accused someone of pedophilia. It's insane he didn't lose the first case. Clearly he has no qualms about using false accusations to smear people. He needs to be sued into bankruptcy.

The American far-right loves stochastic terrorism. And by far-right I am very much including the Intellectual Dark Web. 

It's curious, that the far-right and the Intellectual Dark Web pretend to hate pedophilia when, as I have documented, they love blatant pro-pedophilia Camille Paglia.

Although for the last four years, this blog has focused on criticizing the race pseudoscience promoted by the Intellectual Dark Web, which has been aided and abetted by mainstream "celebrity intellectuals" like Steven Pinker, I have also ended up writing about the various stochastic terrorism projects connected to members of the Intellectual Dark Web.
Oh how the Intellectual Dark Web loved Andy Ngo. Sommers calls for backup from members and fans of the IDW in this tweet.






Is there any stochastic terrorist who Bari Weiss DOES NOT LOVE?
Libs of TikTok goes far beyond expressing political opinions about transgender issues. That would certainly be allowed under Twitter’s policies, which exist to curb harassment, violence, and hate speech, not opinions. In fact, Libs of TikTok has repeatedly highlighted specific individuals, events, and institutions with inflammatory language, often falsely suggesting they are guilty of heinous acts against young children. The account’s spotlight has repeatedly resulted in harassment and violent threats toward the individuals involved, in a process typically referred to as stochastic terrorism. Those targeted include doctors and hospitals that provide gender-affirming care for youth, teachers and schools with inclusive policies, and all-ages or youth-focused drag events.
"The Twitter Files" is Musk selectively releasing email exchanges in the hopes it will make old Twitter look bad. Musk has asked right-wingers Matt Taibbi, Michael Shellenberger and Bari Weiss to help him.

When her access was granted, Bari Weiss tried to show that Libs of TikTok was treated unfairly. As Kevin Drum writes:

...Bari Weiss, a writer whose primary motivation in life seems to be her deep resentment of liberals, is the author of Part 2, and she provides the names of three political actors who were de-amplified:¹ 
  • Charlie Kirk
  • Dan Bongino
  • Chaya Raichik (Libs of TikTok)
And that's it. Weiss doesn't explain why she picked these three to highlight. She doesn't say why these three were de-amplified. Nor does she say if she also knows of any liberals who were de-amplified. And even though Musk has given her access to anything she wants to see, she provides no statistics about how many people were de-amplified; the reasons they were de-amplified; how long they were de-amplified; or anything else. She just provides three hand-picked names and that's the end of it.

But I'll end this post on a high note:



Musk, the CEO of Twitter and Tesla, joined Chappelle onstage Sunday night at the Chase Center in San Francisco, where Chris Rock was also headlining. 

“It was more boos than I’d ever heard,” an attendee, Jason, said in a direct message. “Sustained jeering.” 

Two audience members said they booed Musk because of the widespread firings and layoffs at Twitter. A third person said he booed Musk because of his political agenda — before the midterm elections, Musk urged followers to vote for Republicans. The three people shared screenshots of their tickets to the show with NBC News and spoke on the condition that only their first names be used to protect their privacy and to avoid backlash from Musk’s fans.

Both cheers and boos can be heard in videos of the event, which were viewed millions of times on social media Monday. Later on Twitter, Musk attributed the mixed reception to his recent embrace of conservative politics.

“Technically, it was 90% cheers & 10% boos (except during quiet periods), but, still, that’s a lot of boos, which is a first for me in real life (frequent on Twitter),” Musk tweeted. 

He added, “It’s almost as if I’ve offended SF’s unhinged leftists … but nahhh.”

All three audience members said that Musk’s tweet was inaccurate and that the booing drowned out the cheering.

The incident and the audience members’ explanations represent a shifting tide for Musk, who has reached a new level of notoriety since he took over Twitter while vocally supporting conservative causes.

Friday, August 23, 2019

Charles Koch is still alive



I first got the news that David Koch died via the Twitter account of Jane Mayer, author of many New Yorker articles about the Kochs.

But as the NYTimes obituary makes clear, the most pernicious of the Koch brothers is Charles.

And of course the Kochs have heirs.
“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Mr. Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in a “Fresh Air” interview on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”
So the various members of the IDW who have taken Koch money including Candace Owens, Charlie Kirk, Charles Murray, Christina Hoff Sommers, Ben Shapiro and Steven Pinker don't have to worry.

Mayer recently reviewed a book which makes it clear that should humanity survive the effects of climate change, the Kochs, and especially Charles, will be known as people who did the most harm, personally, to the planet Earth.

From Mayer's review:
Because the Kochs opposed the candidacy of Donald Trump, in 2016, many have assumed that they are antagonistic to the Trump Administration. To the contrary, Leonard writes, with the help of allies such as Vice-President Mike Pence, “the politics that the Kochs stoked in 2010 became the policies that Trump enacted in 2017.” Whether announcing his intention to withdraw from the Paris climate accord, placing shills from the oil and coal industries at the head of federal energy and environmental departments, or slashing taxes on corporations and the ultra-wealthy, Trump has delivered for the Kochs. “Kochland” quotes Charles Koch telling his allied political donors, in 2018, “We’ve made more progress in the last five years than I had in the previous fifty.”


Wednesday, May 29, 2019

Heather Heying: "we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom"

Michael Shermer demonstrating
IDW "civility" by calling a critic
of Steven Pinker a cockroach while
suggesting the critic's motive was

nothing but being desperate for attention


I recently discussed the mystery of why Bari Weiss decided for herself to group people like Stefan Molyneux in with Steven Pinker and other presumably more respectable individuals in her article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web.

I did not solve the mystery.

But while reading the article more thoroughly than I ever have before, several things jumped out at me.

One is a Big Lie of the IDW, which Weiss promotes in her piece:
...they all share three distinct qualities. First, they are willing to disagree ferociously, but talk civilly, about nearly every meaningful subject: religion, abortion, immigration, the nature of consciousness...
If Pinkerite has demonstrated anything, it's that nobody in the IDW is especially civil. And in fact Weiss demonstrated it herself when she wrote:
“I’ve figured out how to monetize social justice warriors,” Mr. Peterson said in January on Joe Rogan’s podcast. On his Twitter feed, he called the writer Pankaj Mishra, who’d written an essay in The New York Review of Books attacking him, a “sanctimonious prick” and said he’d happily slap him.
So why does Weiss repeat the IDWs self-congratulatory marketing copy?

And who exactly is writing the copy?

My bet is on Eric Weinstein. He's often mentioned as merely the coiner of the term "Intellectual Dark Web" but Weiss's article makes it clear that it's about more than just the nomenclature:
...when Ms. Owens and Charlie Kirk, the executive director of Turning Point USA, met last week with Mr. West at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, just outside of the frame — in fact, avoiding the photographers — was Mr. Weinstein. He attended both that meeting and a one-on-one the next day for several hours at the mogul’s request. Mr. Weinstein, who can’t name two of Mr. West’s songs, said he found the Kardashian spouse “kind and surprisingly humble despite his unpredictable public provocations.” He has also tweeted that he’s interested to see what Ms. Owens says next.
And then there is this quote from Weinstein:
“I’m really only interested in building this intellectual movement,” Eric Weinstein said. “The I.D.W. has bigger goals than anyone’s buzz or celebrity.”
Weinstein has goals for the IDW.

And then there is Heather Heying, Eric's sister-in-law. I've argued several times with fans of the IDW on Twitter, pointing out that there is another side to the Evergreen story than the one promoted by the IDW and Fox News narrative. As Bari Weiss puts it:
A year ago, Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying were respected tenured professors at Evergreen State College, where their Occupy Wall Street-sympathetic politics were well in tune with the school’s progressive ethos. Today they have left their jobs, lost many of their friends and endangered their reputations.
But then Weiss includes Weinstein and Heying in her discussion of IDW profitability:
That hunger has translated into a booming and, in many cases, profitable market. Episodes of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” which have featured many members of the I.D.W., can draw nearly as big an audience as Rachel Maddow. A recent episode featuring Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying talking about gender, hotness, beauty and #MeToo was viewed on YouTube over a million times, even though the conversation lasted for nearly three hours.

As Weiss writes:
The exile of Bret Weinstein and Ms. Heying from Evergreen State brought them to the attention of a national audience that might have come for the controversy but has stayed for their fascinating insights about subjects including evolution and gender.
Spoiler alert: their "fascinating insights" on gender are garden-variety evolutionary psychology and in Heying's case scolding young women to wear more clothes lest they be guilty of "toxic femininity."

All in all, it sounds like they've used the Evergreen controversy to level up. And Heying seems to agree. Weiss quotes her:
“Our friends still at Evergreen tell us that the protesters think they destroyed us,” Ms. Heying said. “But the truth is we’re now getting the chance to do something on a much larger scale than we could ever do in the classroom.”

Tuesday, May 28, 2019

The IDW rightwing plutocrat support report - UPDATE

UPDATE - adding Candace Owens - so that is now five IDWs getting direct Koch funding.


Charlie Kirk, is the founder of Turning Point USA.
TPUSA’s upcoming Student Action Summit in December has additional sponsors including the Reason Foundation, the Koch-connected Generation Opportunity Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (International Business Times)
Candace Owens
Communications director for Turning Point USA (Source: Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web)

Charles Murray - AEI scholar.
David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. 
(Sourcewatch)

David Rubin - political commentator whose work is supported by Learn Liberty
Learn Liberty is a project of the Institute for Human Studies. Members of the IHS Board of Directors includes Charles Koch and Koch-related organization employees

More IDW-rightwing plutocrat connections as they are discovered...

Saturday, May 18, 2019

The IDW rightwing plutocrat support report

So let us review how many members of the "Intellectual Dark Web" are receiving funding from the Kochs. So far the definites are:

Charlie Kirk, is the founder of Turning Point USA.
TPUSA’s upcoming Student Action Summit in December has additional sponsors including the Reason Foundation, the Koch-connected Generation Opportunity Institute and the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education. (International Business Times)
Charles Murray - AEI scholar.
David H. Koch is on the American Enterprise Institute's National Council, whose members "serve as ambassadors for AEI, providing AEI with advice, insight, and guidance as [it] looks to reach out to new friends across the country."
Between 2002 and 2013, the American Enterprise Institute received a total of $867,289 in funding from the Charles G. Koch Foundation.
(Sourcewatch)

David Rubin - political commentator whose work is supported by Learn Liberty
Learn Liberty is a project of the Institute for Human Studies. Members of the IHS Board of Directors includes Charles Koch and Koch-related organization employees


I strongly suspect that Claire Lehmann/Quillette also receive funding from the Kochs but so far don't have anything definite. We do know that Quillette is supported by rightwing Australian plutocrat Mark Carnegie and others whom Lehmann won't name. Several Quillette authors, although not named as members of the IDW in the Bari Weiss article,  are funded by the Kochs including Cathy Young and Pamela Paresky.

More IDW-rightwing plutocrat connections as they are discovered...

Wednesday, May 15, 2019

Sam Seder v IDW

Sam Seder's channel is really good at keeping tabs on the more outrageous and media-centric members of the Intellectual Dark Web:

and of course Dave Rubin who has a feud going on with Seder.


Tuesday, May 14, 2019

Shermer celebrates the IDW, is ratioed and mocked


The image Shermer so proudly shares is made of the photos from the original Bari Weiss article Meet the Renegades of the Intellectual Dark Web, turned into a collage.

In case you're keeping score, the members of the IDW in the image are, from left to right, Michael Shermer, Eric Weinstein, Heather Heying, Joe Rogan, Dave Rubin, Christina Hoff Sommers, Sam Harris and Bret Weinstein.


What the IDW actually stands for is the same as the editorial positions of Quillette: anti-trans, pro-nuke, Islamaphobic, anti-socialist, anti-left, anti-feminist, pro-race science and constantly banging the drum about free speech in Academia over rude college students while ignoring plutocrats buying themselves their own academic hacks.



Monday, March 25, 2019

Trump aligns with the Intellectual Dark Web

Jerry Coyne was all ready to jump on the New Yorker article about the Southern Poverty Law Center but somehow missed the New Yorker article that demonstrates Trump's alignment with the Intellectual Dark Web as well as the free speech grifters called Trump’s Free-Speech Executive Order and the Right’s Fixation on Campus Politics.
Exactly a year ago, at a forum for millennial Republicans at the White House, President Trump was asked by Charlie Kirk, the founder of the conservative youth group Turning Point USA, what he made of recent controversies involving the free-speech rights of conservatives on college campuses. “You go to the real campuses, and you go all over the country, you go out to the Middle West, you go out even to the coast in many cases, we have tremendous support,” he replied breezily, brushing off the purported crisis.“I would say we have majority support. I think it’s highly overblown. Highly overblown.” 
He has since been better at sticking to the script. In a White House ceremony on Thursday afternoon, Trump signed an executive order barring colleges that are deemed unduly restrictive of free speech from receiving federal funds—a move that was previewed in the President’s speech to this year’s cpac conference, earlier this month, and in a tweet that he posted in early 2017, in response to protests that had broken out at U.C. Berkeley over a scheduled appearance by the right-wing agitator Milo Yiannopoulos: “If U.C. Berkeley does not allow free speech and practices violence on innocent people with a different point of view - no federal funds?”
You better believe Quillette immediately jumped in to praise Trump.
It will be interesting to see if the Trump administration takes a reactive or a proactive approach to restricting funding, warning offending colleges of their intent to strip funding unless something changes. Either way, the Executive Order is a step in the right direction. The requirement that colleges adhere to a transparent speech code which protects academic debate in return for federal dollars is both reasonable and measured. It empowers the Federal Government to be better stewards of public funds, while upholding the rights of its student citizens.
Funny how the American Enterprise Institute, like Charlie Kirk, also changed its mind - from the New Yorker article:
In October, 2017, the American Enterprise Institute published a report recommending that federal funding for schools thought to be insufficiently protective of free speech be withheld either by legislation, at the discretion of grant-making agencies, or, as Trump has now done, by executive action. Interestingly, just months earlier, A.E.I. had issued another report, based on survey data, that challenged the panic over free speech and expression on campuses. “Recent protests against speakers at different colleges have raised questions about free speech on campus, with some critics characterizing universities as increasingly intolerant,” the report’s summary read. “Polls of college students and young people show little evidence of such a trend, although responses differ depending on the nature of the speech in question.”
And as the article points out, this free speech tactic has long been a favorite of the right:
The right’s fixation on campus politics has never had much to do with realities on the ground, of course. William F. Buckley’s jeremiad against the power and influence of leftists in the academy, “God and Man at Yale,” was published in 1951, a time when leftists were being hounded out of their jobs at American universities and elsewhere by a Second Red Scare. The victimization narrative has changed little since then, even as the conservative movement has come to wield an extraordinary amount of power in American politics and life—so much so that they’ve managed to enlist a President of the United States as an ally in their undergraduate squabbles.
So of course the IDW and Quillette are doing it too - because Quillette also leans right, per the web site AllSides. Even though Claire Lehmann claims it's centrist.
In an interview, Quillette founder Claire Lehmann told The Australian that her publication is "independent, not polemical, not writing on behalf of vested interests and reasonably centrist." 

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