Grifters gotta grift

[Charlie Kirk] was—and this is uncomfortable to write at this moment, though obviously relevant—himself an apologist for political violence, specifically in the matter of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol and the attempted coup d’état of which it was one theatrical component. … Kirk began his career in public affairs criticizing overweening central government and ended it waving away due-process concerns as black-masked agents of the state [are] dragging people away into unmarked vans. Without quite meaning to, he spent his adult life documenting his own intellectual corruption.

…

Say what you will about a young man who made his living filming sophomoric pseudo-debates with hapless randos on college campuses, that isn’t the sort of thing that inspired Col. William Travis to draw his famous line in the sand all those years ago.

To Charlie Kirk’s friends and family, I offer my sincere prayers and sympathy. To his killer and those who make excuses, however obliquely or quietly, for the almost inconceivably imbecilic cruelty at work in his death, only “scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt.”

But save some of that scorn for Kirk’s so-called friends. My inbox is already full of game attempts to commercialize the assassination in Utah. So many people want a bloody piece of Charlie Kirk to wave around for fundraising and public-relations purposes that, if they are to be all satisfied, there won’t be anything left to bury.

Kevin D. Williamson.

Every word of this seems true to me, but there’s an important caveat: Kirk was murdered at age 31, having been in the limelight for 13 years. You could have said a lot of terrible-but-true things about me at that age and older, and I didn’t even have the excuse of needing to keep rich patrons happy.

Indeed, the Old Testament is full of the stories of great (mostly) men, who started off not-so-great but grew.

He ain’t no saint

Jamelle Bouie had a list of Charlie Kirk’s sins, using lots of adjectives, adverbs, and hyperbole. One valid thing he added to what I’ve already noted is that TPUSA has a “professor watch list” that tries to punish and suppress political opponents in the professoriate. In other words, he was not the pure free-speecher people are claiming. Bouie’s overall point is that there’s a foolish Kirk hagiography arising.

As if on cue:

Charlie Was A Light In The Darkness; The Darkness Did Not Comprehend It

Rod Dreher, blaspheming.

The Social Media User’s Prayer:

God grant me cacophonous wrath about the things I cannot change, habitual neglect of the things I can change, and absolute ignorance of the difference.

(Alan Jacobs)

How dare you!

How dare you tell me to stop hating! Righteous indignation is a potent drug, and I’m an addict! I need my fix, so go to hell!

The gist of responses Damon Linker got to a social media post calling for calm and unity.

Huey Long, Malcolm X, Charlie Kirk

I won’t pretend that I believe America just lost a great man. In the long history of American political assassinations, Kirk belongs in the company of charismatic provocateurs such as Huey Long and Malcolm X, cut down before their time. Like them, he had a feel for the political pulse of his moment, a demagogic flair, and the courage to take on all comers in argument, which exposed him to the sniper who ended his life.

…

Words are not violence—violence is violence. After Trump’s brush with death, before anything was known about his would-be assassin, J. D. Vance and others blamed the shooting on the rhetoric of his political opponents. Within hours of Kirk’s killing, with the shooter still at large, Elon Musk posted on X: “The Left is the party of murder.” Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, wrote: “You called us Hitler. You called us Nazis. You called us Racists. You have blood on your hands.” Some right-wing activists are calling for the Trump administration to crack down on leftist organizations—in other words, to use Kirk’s death as a pretext for political repression, which is just what an authoritarian government would do. No one should feel anything but horror and dread at the murder of Charlie Kirk. And no one should use the killing of a man known for his defense of free speech to muzzle others or themselves from speaking the truth about the perilous state we’re in.

George Packer

The Bullshit drug boat from Venezuela

I don’t believe a word Donald Trump says without corroboration (from someone whose lips are not permanently attached to his nether-regions). But when he’s bragging that we killed eleven people who were smuggling drugs to the US, I can at least hope that they actually were smuggling drugs to the US.

It doesn’t appear likely:

Cigarette boats typically come equipped with large fuel tanks, generally ranging from 200 to 250 gallons in total capacity. For example, the Cigarette Top Gun model—one of the most popular hulls—often features dual tanks with a combined capacity of approximately 220 gallons (two 110-gallon tanks). A typical cigarette boat with three outboard motors will burn approximately 28–35 gallons of fuel per hour per engine at wide-open throttle, which amounts to 84–105 gallons per hour in total when running all three engines at maximum power. At normal cruising speeds, fuel consumption can drop to about 18–25 gallons per hour per engine, for a combined 54–75 gallons per hour for the boat.

A cigarette boat with a 220-gallon fuel tank can typically travel between 286 and 330 miles on a full tank under normal cruising conditions. This estimate uses a cruising fuel efficiency of about 1.3–1.5 miles per gallon, based on common data for these high-performance boats. There is no way in hell that his boat was headed to the United States. Let’s assume that the boat departed from Maracaibo, Venezuela. The distance by water from Maracaibo, Venezuela to the Florida Keys is approximately 1,014 nautical miles, which is about 1,167 statute miles (1,878 km). This measurement reflects the shortest direct route between Maracaibo and Key West in the Florida Keys, often used as the reference point for the archipelago.

The maximum weight capacity (also referred to as the maximum load or maximum displacement) of a cigarette boat varies by model, but typical figures can range from about 10,000 pounds (4,500 kg) for smaller 38-foot models up to around 33,000 pounds (15,000 kg) or more for larger, high-performance models like the 52-foot Cigarette 52 Thunder. If we assume that the average weight of the 11 people on the boat was 180 pounds, that is 1980 pounds. The four outboard motors on that boat weighed a combined 2,800 pounds. If this boat was heading for the United States, it would have to carry around 2,000 pounds of fuel. Discounting the 220 gallons of gas already in the tanks, the boat would have to have an additional 339 jerry cans of fuel onboard to make it to Key West, Florida. Add all of this up and we have a total weight, without counting the alleged drugs onboard, of 6,780 pounds. This means that the boat could conceivably carry about 26,000 pounds of drugs. If each bundle of drugs weighed 100 pounds, that means we should have seen at least 260 bundles stacked in the boat.

Now look at a photo of the boat before it was destroyed… Can you see even 20 100-pound bundles of drugs? Can you see even a dozen jerry cans? No!!!

This story is bullshit. But no one in the media is capable, apparently, of doing basic math and asking logical questions.

Larry Johnson

Fyodor Lukyanov: Russia and China anchor a new world order where the West is optional — RT World News

Senator Cassidy asks HHS Secretary Kennedy “Is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not?”

IYKYK

Deterrence through ruthlessness

I ran across this dystopian sentence in the New York Times: “Pentagon officials were still working Wednesday on what legal authority they would tell the public was used to back up the extraordinary strike in international waters.”

…

Is the White House destroying people’s lives due to incompetence or because it’s overly eager to manufacture a public consensus that the president should be able to do anything he likes so long as he utters the magic words “Tren de Aragua”?

Another Trumpian hallmark of the missile strike is the proposition it stands for, that there’s no national problem that can’t be solved with more ruthlessness. The uniparty may have been content to have the Coast Guard interdict drug smugglers, arrest them, and confiscate their cargo, but that obviously wasn’t enough to cure America’s drug addiction. What else can the president do, then, except start summarily executing people who may or may not be guilty and trust that other drug dealers will recalculate the risk of trafficking to the U.S. accordingly?

Deterrence through terror has always been Trump’s answer to major social ills. In his first months as a candidate in 2015 he recommended killing jihadis’ families to make them think twice. As president he reportedly fantasized about building a moat along the border stocked with alligators, electrifying the wall, and shooting immigrants in the legs whenever they’re caught in the act of crossing over. He allegedly once congratulated Rodrigo Duterte on his notoriously bloody campaign against drug-dealing in the Philippines and told an audience on the campaign trail last year that America’s crime problem could be solved by letting police have one “real rough” hour with suspects.

“The word will get out” after the bloodletting is over, the president imagined, and the crime wave “will end immediately.” Deterrence through terror: That’s his approach to domestic politics and to immigration, so why wouldn’t it be his approach to drug-trafficking too?

On Wednesday Rubio went as far as to admit that the U.S. could have intercepted the Venezuelan ship instead of incinerating it but that doing so wouldn’t have packed the same deterrent punch, which I suppose is true in the same way that Trump’s “one rough hour” scenario is true. If you want to discourage crime, letting cops shoot suspects in the head in lieu of arresting them would do the job more efficiently.

Nick Cattogio

Bootstrapping in the Trump administration’s handling of deportations:

• We promised 1 million deportations per year.
• We cannot give due process to 1 million immigrants per year before we deport them.
• Therefore we must dispense with due process for deportations.

How rich is a progressive allowed to be?

Earlier this year, progressive Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar told Business Insider that she had been victim to a “coordinated right-wing disinformation campaign” alleging that she’s worth millions of dollars. But this week, The Washington Free Beacon reported that she and her husband, Tim Mynett, are worth between $6–$30 million.

The Free Press

May they devour each other in court

Broadcast network Newsmax filed an antitrust lawsuit Wednesday against Fox News and Fox Corporation, accusing the conservative media giant of illegally monopolizing the right-leaning pay-TV news market. The lawsuit alleges Fox uses exclusionary contracts with distributors to suppress competitors and seeks damages under federal antitrust law, though the complaint did not specify an amount for damages. Newsmax claims Fox imposes penalties on distributors who carry competing right-wing channels and has engaged in intimidation tactics against the company. “Newsmax cannot sue their way out of their own competitive failures in the marketplace to chase headlines simply because they can’t attract viewers,” a Fox News spokesperson said in response.

The Morning Dispatch

Conspiring against us?

“Trump’s second election was confirmation to the world that the American people can no longer be relied upon,” [Jonathan] Last argues. “We are too—well, you can fill in your own descriptor. Vapid? Decadent? Unserious? Inconstant? Whatever word you choose, the idea is the same: America as it existed from World War II to 2016 is a spent force. That age is over.” I’ve said as much myself, more than once.

For that reason, the president shouldn’t take it personally when Narendra Modi and other leaders descend on Beijing to kiss Xi Jinping’s ring. They’re not snubbing him, they’re simply shifting their bets on global leadership as a declining America goes about committing national suicide. A figure as infamously transactional as Trump should understand better than most that a “conspiracy” is just another transaction. He—or, rather, his voters—gave China and its allies an opportunity to transact. Why wouldn’t they take it?

Nick Catoggio

To gauge the speed of America’s third-world-ization, economist Noah Smith pointed out, consider just the past few weeks. Generalissimo Trump deployed troops to the capital, moved to seize power over setting interest rates, partially nationalized another American corporation, purged a few more high-ranking military and intelligence officials, issued a decree purporting to ban flag burning (sort of), and watched the FBI he commands search the home of one of his political nemeses for reasons that may or may not turn out to be justified.

He also put a henchman on the federal bench, instigated an irregular redistricting push to weaken the opposition’s chances of reclaiming power, and fired the federal bureaucrat in charge of calculating employment numbers because the July data made him look bad. His choice to replace her is exactly the type of person you’d expect.

Those are things that happen routinely in “sh-thole countries,” to borrow the president’s preferred terminology. Draw your own conclusion about America in 2025 from the fact that they’re happening here.

Nick Catoggio

Last fall’s electorate can be divided into three groups.

The first hoped Donald Trump would turn America into a third-world country. We call them populists.

The second feared he would turn America into a third-world country. We call them liberals.

The third doubted he would turn America into a third-world country. We call them imbeciles.

The imbeciles were the swing group.

Nick Catoggio

Where two or three gather in Trump’s name, there he is to bask in their obsequiousness, as if he’s extending his legs for a pedicure and each of them is calling dibs on a different toe. No checks and no balance there.

Frank Bruni

It’s the law

Iranian Christians Should Not Be Detained While Seeking Asylum. But they are being detained, likely will be killed if sent back to Iran — and Trump doesn’t care because he pulled the number “a million” out of his ass and promised to deport that many this year.

Keeping that promise means:

1. Hiring psychotic goons for ICE;
2. Denying any semblance of due process;
3. Detaining asylum-seekers in squalor with inadequate food and medical care.

Patriot Theater

As he inches (“foots”? “yards”?) us toward fascism, Trump regularly pauses to throw the booboisie some red (or red, white and blue) meat:

Yesterday President Donald Trump signed a new executive order on the “burning of the American flag.” As usual, the president decided to freelance a bit while signing the executive order in front of the cameras and declared that “you burn a flag, you get one year in jail.” Now that would be an interesting executive order! But fortunately, the order he signed does not actually say that. In fact, it is so hemmed in by legal qualifications that it does not do much of anything at all. Other than, of course, provide the president with the opportunity to hold a press conference and excite his fans with some patriotic bluster.

Keith E. Whittington