Them going mask off was sadly necessary. Fox news is now openly advocating to kill all liberals and forcibly euthanize the homeless against their will. Theres no more room for fence sitting, you are either with the fascists or you are pro democracy and the rule of law. The faster every sane Americaj wakes up to how insane the Magas truly are the better, we need everybody for the fight to come.
This Strum is not familiar with that Strom but does acknowledge the elemental truth in such a quotation. I grew up, somehow, in a family that never felt emotionally threatened by my questioning authority, or simply by my questioning. When we disagree with something, it can be taken as criticism, or it can be viewed with an open mind as a request for clarification and/or validation.
As an adolescent in Hebrew school, I was obsessed with both the New and Old Testaments. In my child's brain, I concluded that the Jews had wrongly expected the Messiah to descend from heaven a la Jacob's ladder, rather than arrive in Jerusalem on the back of an ass. When I raised my hand in Hebrew school to ask this question, I was escorted by my teacher, who held me by the ear and marched me to the Rabbi's office. In contrast to the "teacher," the Rabbi accepted my opinion and softly stated that most scholars viewed Jesus as a great prophet but not as the Messiah. My orthodox Jewish grandmother said basically the same.
What has become very wrong in America is the avoidance of discussion that involves confronting another with a thought they do not fully accept. In my talks about Trump and the GOP, I have stated for years that these parties are hell-bent on destroying the American democratic way of life, with its good and bad points. This has alienated me from family members and some colleagues who mystify me not in their disagreement with me, but rather that their thinking is based on minuscule amounts of reading content from reputable sources. I periodically attempt to watch Fox "News" and am shocked that so many have this as their Gospel. America has a considerable element that is plain ignorant, cognitively lazy, and reliant only on fast-food bits and pieces of information from social media. Rarely have I found a pro-Trumper or a devout Republican who reads many different periodicals or has read any books that document historically the actions of Trump and his cohort.
Lately, while exploring multiple AI assistants, I have posed numerous political questions and been surprised by the non-partisan replies from these large language models (LLMs). I do not think that many pro-Trump individuals will be curious enough to explore AI platforms, but who knows?
The commentary by Mike Brock on the state of Fascism in America is and has been real during this 2nd Trump term, with more to come. I anticipate the following will be at the core of every Trump and/or GOP move in the months to come:
1. DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment). The Trump administration will pursue a continued effort to destroy all semblances of Democracy.
2. Trump's actions will become more and more consistent with his adoration of Putin. Inspect aggressions against anyone, person or country, that Trump perceives as a threat or obstacle to his grab for power and wealth. Do not think that an invasion of Greenland is out of the question, and it will proceed just as Putin planted radical elements in parts of Ukraine to facilitate his invasion of that country.
3. Watch for ongoing, and more flagrant theft of the American dollar by Trump and family, and likely those in various departments. The millions of apathetic, ignorant, and hostile electorate in this country voted in a fox to sit at our table. Would you like more chicken? America and Americans are now Trump, Family & Friends' gravy train. Come and get it.
This is what happens when education is not a top priority and when neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party deals with immigration in a logical, rational, and step-wise fashion. What has happened in Germany and in the UK has happened here. We did not properly vet immigrants, nor did we provide the necessary resources to establish a clear pathway to citizenship. You cannot leave the human element to be moral or ethical. There must be a rule of law applied to such a critical issue as who you invite into your home. Both of our Parties have failed, but the Republican Party has gone rogue (i.e., off the rails). We are in deep guacamole, but sadly, the "guacamole" is brown and smells really bad. My prognosis for America is "dire." We let the cancer advance too far before initiating countermeasures. This will play out ugly. We have really disgraced the cornerstone of what made America wonderful.
Your great writing here made my life bearable again.
Just want to 'zoom out' briefly on 'the medium is the message' idea that I think is a glaring omission in the coverage of the past week because it is hiding in plain sight. The mental states of both the shooting suspect and the victim were almost certainly shaped in part by the violence they saw in the media as children and adolescents. If their political points of view as forces that shaped them can be removed from consideration for a moment, we are still left with two young boys who took in an enormous amount of media violence.
Almost all young people have a strong tendency to imitate the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of others. How could they not have become violent?
We owe it to our sons to support their tenderness, to gain their trust by modeling that we are fallible as adults so they have no shame when they ask questions. We can be curious about who the child actually is and speak to them with a seriousness that show we respect them as whole human beings. After working with thousands of children, I can assure you, they are actually born into our world with their own little essence and personality in tact. For young boys, emotional vocabulary is really helpful. It lays a foundation for when challenges arise. It keeps a channel open for dialogue with trusted adults who can then intervene to de escalate harmful behavior by processing intense emotions. 🤍
Thank you again Lisa. listened. It's beautiful. I'm an amateur (textile)artist and the words to this song belong on wearable art. If I do something with this I will post a picture. 😊
It's telling that the messaging from self-professed conservatives switched from demanding retribution to lamenting a lack of dialogue when the current suspect in Kirk's assassination was revealed to be a white man, possibly one associated with Nick Fuentes.
(It was funny to see Spencer Cox read online memes on live television, as macabre as it was that they were found on bullet casings.)
But it is also telling that people are condemning this shooting as political violence--which it is--but not also condemning as political violence policies like anti-homeless measures that see spikes put on public benches and such, in conjunction with policies that artificially limit the housing supply and cause skyrocketing land values, leading to increased homelessness. (To say nothing of youth homelessness caused by homophobic and transphobic parents who kick their queer kids out. As the online meme puts it, shall we kiss at the pro-LGBTQ park bench with anti-homeless spikes?) Violence is violence.
all these statements from the right are not dog whistles. They are throwing large chunks of meat in front of the ravening pack. Right now people are being fired for not treating Kirk as already beatified. But someone--kin to the Colorado school shooter perhaps--is going to take gun to hand.
It was rich when they claimed the shooter was "anti fascist." Doesn't using that as an accusation mean that they are all PRO fascist? Shouldn't we all, from trump on down, be anti Fascist? Isn't that what all Americans are supposed to be, from 1941 on? As with so much coming from the Right, the accusation is an admission
It's a reasonable question whether anything about Charlie Kirk has anything to do with democracy. We can be a little more thoughtful about throwing around such inanities. By now, we should be awakening with more discernment about what's going on in the public sphere, nowhere moreso than when it comes to fascist provocation. It's something that a democracy has to deal with, but let's be careful about giving his ilk any semblance of a productive place. His freedom to voice nihilism was respected.
No murder of this kind is acceptable in a civilized society -- which, by the way, raises a fair question as to his commitment to any such thing. His function was to provoke dissention and disruption, and many have noted his contribution to the sickness that results in exactly this outcome. Rather, we are called to see his role among the ilk that continues to foster more of exactly this. It is something that threatens our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor every day. Please do not mourn his absence. He is the unfortunate reaper of his own karma.
Reminds me of Nixon‘s quote “when the president does it it’s not a crime”. Back then the justice system rightly disagreed, but now SCOTUS house made it true for Trump, but zero of his cronies. And he’ll just pardon them anyway. What a shit show.
Trumphs new Hitlarian / KBG / Dictatorship was and is a welcomed substitution for our former democratic republic by millions of the hate-mongering masses!
Unless we rise up like the 60s and 70s generations did to protest Nixon and Johnson, it's all over.
And now they have a Martyr to scapegoat the rest of us !
Just the beginning!
Guns on the street coming and visible.
Started with the madman's insurrection ‼️
Dems couldn't-hold der Fuhrer accountable
So the Hitlarian train roles on.
One wrong word and your soon off to alligator land.
Substack exists in part, because the MSM is not doing their work.
They, are responsible for electing Trump. The Coup included the wealthy controlling media.
The more outrageous, the more attention without concentrating on needed and wanted policies in governance.
Mike Brock’s scholarship should blare everywhere. I’m reading The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Guardian in his information and opinions. MSM is flailing and failing while Mike is successfully in the lead!
Konstanin Kisins take was so hypocritical. He said all the talk about fascism directly contributed to the violence and those people have “blood on their hands”. Coming from someone who has sharply criticized the woke words are violence paradigms is beyond hypocrisy
I think it should be expanded to explain the culture war waged against American cities, and how the right has set up the scaffolding to occupy and pacify our populations.
The void of voices speaking in praise of our cities, and in defense of our rights is stunning. Trump and his Republican forces have deployed his maximum pressure campaign on us. But people urging an urban movement or saying how amazing it is that our cities have shown resilience to these tactics have been harder to find than people advocating concentration camps be built for our communities.
They have flooded us with armed forces, enacted over policing, exposed us to brutality against our neighbors, terrorized us with military weapons and equipment. They have set up hurdles to things which are necessary to dense populations (like vaccines), removed public school programs that made multicultural areas capable of airing differences without street fights, and defunded everything but police, in a nationwide front of urban factionalism policies.
They are trying to make voting impossible and they know that their policies are targeting our economy, and it isn't an accident.
Our cities deserve much better, and our representatives continue to attempt to expand American freedoms to all her residents.
You've just demonstrated the exact fascist logic I'm exposing. You're claiming that Democrats are 'complicit' in Kirk's murder because they support transgender rights, while simultaneously arguing that accurately describing Trump's systematic constitutional destruction makes me deserve death.
So supporting the civil rights of transgender people makes Democrats accessories to murder, but calling for RICO cases against Democratic fundraisers, designating opposition parties as criminal organizations, claiming unlimited authority to execute suspected criminals without trial, and deploying military forces against American cities—none of that counts as fascist behavior that deserves accurate description?
Your smoking gun is that Democrats believe transgender women are women. My smoking gun is that Stephen Miller wants to criminalize political opposition and Trump claims unlimited executive power. And somehow you think the first justifies assassination while the second doesn't even justify criticism?
This is precisely the totalitarian inversion I'm describing: you want to make supporting civil rights grounds for murder charges while making opposition to constitutional destruction grounds for actual murder. You want transgender acceptance to be treated as violent extremism while treating actual violent extremism as reasonable governance.
You've just proven my entire point: you're fascists who want to criminalize your opponents' political positions while threatening death for anyone who accurately describes your own. Thanks for the demonstration.
You've just proven everything I wrote about fascist methodology. You're arguing that Democrats are 'complicit' in Kirk's murder because they support transgender civil rights, while claiming that calling systematic constitutional destruction 'fascist' makes critics deserve violence.
You quote Kirk calling for 'Nuremberg-style trials' for doctors providing medical care to transgender patients and suggesting transgender people should be 'taken care of the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and '60s'—which is explicitly calling for violence against a vulnerable population—then argue that Democrats supporting transgender rights somehow caused Kirk's assassination.
So Kirk advocating violence against transgender people is reasonable political discourse, but Democrats supporting transgender civil rights is complicity in murder? Kirk calling for 'Nuremberg trials' for doctors is legitimate criticism, but calling Trump's behavior 'fascist' deserves death threats?
You've perfectly demonstrated the fascist logic: your side can call for violence against vulnerable populations while claiming that supporting those populations' civil rights justifies violence against you. Your side can advocate 'taking care of' transgender people 'the way we used to' while treating accurate description of your authoritarianism as grounds for retaliation.
This is exactly how fascist movements work: dehumanize target populations, advocate violence against them, then claim that defending their rights somehow justifies violence against the advocates. You want transgender people to face the kind of 'care' they received in the 1950s and '60s while claiming that opposition to that eliminationist rhetoric makes Democrats accessories to murder.
You're proving my point about death threat logic while making the case for why calling this fascist is accurate.
The funny thing is, this is how trans people were treated in the 1950s. You can find media articles from the time using feminine pronouns for Ms. Jorgensen.
The government of Mexico recognised Sr. Robles as a man for most of his life, from the 1920s until his death in the 1980s.
Meanwhile one of the Nazis' earliest book burnings was at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, attacking Weimar Germany's transgender community as one of the earliest targets of their oppression.
“When I was in middle school, I learned there were only two genders. When I did my bachelors in Biology, I learned that there are also people who are intersex and the importance of the SRY gene. When I completed my Masters in Neurosciences, I learned that sex is already hard to define, and gender is both social and in the brain, making everything a lot more complex. When people say ‘it’s basic biology’ they are telling you they haven’t moved past middle school.” (Rebecca Helm)
Prof. Helm detailed here why even defining "biological sex" is difficult, including a discussion of the aforementioned SRY gene, before one considers any difference between sex and gender: https://x.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1207834357639139328
(She doesn't even get into things like androgen insensitivity syndrome.)
My point in bringing up Ms. Jorgensen, Sr. Robles, and Weimar Germany's trans community is that being transgender was generally socially accepted when the matter first came to public attention--right up until trans people became a convenient target for oppression.
As for "who started the clusterfuck", in the instant case, the current prime suspect in the shooting is, it appears, an acolyte of Nick Fuentes, who was critical of Kirk because he felt Kirk was insufficiently conservative.
(In a comment on a previous article I listed off thirteen cases of suppression of democratic discourse through killing, violence or parliamentary manoeuvre; in only one of those cases, the shooting at the Republican Congressional Baseball Game practice which grievously injured Steve Scalise, was the assailant known to be left-wing, having supported Bernie Sanders. The censures and expulsions were all done by conservative legislatures; Donald Trump was attacked by an assailant of uncertain political views; the Pelosis and Mike Pence were threatened by conservatives; David Amess was murdered by an Islamic State supporter; Jo Cox, Heather Heyer and Melissa Hortman were all killed by conservatives; and Charlie Kirk was also apparently killed by a conservative.)
This is classic fascist methodology: first dehumanize the target population ('crime against nature,' 'transloonie tribe'), then advocate for their elimination ('taken care of the way we used to'), then claim that anyone defending their humanity is responsible for violence against the advocates of elimination.
You're proving exactly why calling this fascist is accurate. When you treat transgender people's existence as inherently criminal while treating Kirk's eliminationist rhetoric as legitimate political discourse, when you blame Democrats for Kirk's murder because they oppose dehumanization while excusing the dehumanization itself—you're demonstrating fascist logic in real time.
Transgender people commit mass shootings at a disproportionately low rate compared to their share of the population as ascertained by census data, which is, I suspect, the point the person questioning Kirk was about to make when Kirk was shot. (I agree with Kirk that transgender people commit too many mass shootings, but that is because one mass shooting is too many, never mind five or five thousand.) I would like to see a citation on how many mass shootings are committed by non-trans activists or "gender ideologues".
On the other hand, men commit mass shootings at a disproportionately high rate compared to their share of the population. If any group's "thuggery and murders" should be condemned in this context, it is not that of trans people--it is that of men.
Of the five identified transgender shooters, at least two were transgender men (who by your argument are actually women), meaning at most three were transgender women. Since, again, the data shows that the vast majority of mass shooters are men (how exactly we classify the transgender shooters in the denominators is a blip), this still leaves trans women as committing mass shootings at a disproportionately low rate relative to their share of the population. The only gender demographic that is confirmed to commit mass shootings at a disproportionately high rate is cisgender men.
(The AP article I linked was in the wake of the Nashville shooting, which was committed by a transgender man, and this same torrent of bullshit about how transgender people are disproportionately violent was spewed then, too.)
As for the second point, there is a quantitative difference between internet tough talk, or even burning someone in effigy, and enacting policies that harm a marginalised group or committing actual violence against actual people, which is that in the former cases no actual person is physically harmed or killed, and in the latter cases actual people are often physically harmed and/or killed.
I have nowhere denied that there are elements of the trans movement which go too far. (There are other trans people who routinely urge extreme caution in making claims about whether someone may be transgender, or attempting to convince someone that they are transgender, and hold the view that it is something which can only be determined through personal reflection without outside interference.) But even then there is a difference between social pressure (even social pressure from people with what one would hope are pertinent credentials) and government policy backed by the state monopoly on the legitimate use of force. (I point again to Brendan Eich, a co-founder of Mozilla who was forced to step down as CEO of Mozilla due to social and economic pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage, and has since founded another successful IT company, the latter being something that would almost certainly not have been possible had it been government policy to criminalise opposition to same-sex marriage.)
Them going mask off was sadly necessary. Fox news is now openly advocating to kill all liberals and forcibly euthanize the homeless against their will. Theres no more room for fence sitting, you are either with the fascists or you are pro democracy and the rule of law. The faster every sane Americaj wakes up to how insane the Magas truly are the better, we need everybody for the fight to come.
"If you want to know who rules over you, just look for who you are not allowed to criticize.” Kevin Alfred Strom
This Strum is not familiar with that Strom but does acknowledge the elemental truth in such a quotation. I grew up, somehow, in a family that never felt emotionally threatened by my questioning authority, or simply by my questioning. When we disagree with something, it can be taken as criticism, or it can be viewed with an open mind as a request for clarification and/or validation.
As an adolescent in Hebrew school, I was obsessed with both the New and Old Testaments. In my child's brain, I concluded that the Jews had wrongly expected the Messiah to descend from heaven a la Jacob's ladder, rather than arrive in Jerusalem on the back of an ass. When I raised my hand in Hebrew school to ask this question, I was escorted by my teacher, who held me by the ear and marched me to the Rabbi's office. In contrast to the "teacher," the Rabbi accepted my opinion and softly stated that most scholars viewed Jesus as a great prophet but not as the Messiah. My orthodox Jewish grandmother said basically the same.
What has become very wrong in America is the avoidance of discussion that involves confronting another with a thought they do not fully accept. In my talks about Trump and the GOP, I have stated for years that these parties are hell-bent on destroying the American democratic way of life, with its good and bad points. This has alienated me from family members and some colleagues who mystify me not in their disagreement with me, but rather that their thinking is based on minuscule amounts of reading content from reputable sources. I periodically attempt to watch Fox "News" and am shocked that so many have this as their Gospel. America has a considerable element that is plain ignorant, cognitively lazy, and reliant only on fast-food bits and pieces of information from social media. Rarely have I found a pro-Trumper or a devout Republican who reads many different periodicals or has read any books that document historically the actions of Trump and his cohort.
Lately, while exploring multiple AI assistants, I have posed numerous political questions and been surprised by the non-partisan replies from these large language models (LLMs). I do not think that many pro-Trump individuals will be curious enough to explore AI platforms, but who knows?
The commentary by Mike Brock on the state of Fascism in America is and has been real during this 2nd Trump term, with more to come. I anticipate the following will be at the core of every Trump and/or GOP move in the months to come:
1. DOGE (Destroy Our Great Experiment). The Trump administration will pursue a continued effort to destroy all semblances of Democracy.
2. Trump's actions will become more and more consistent with his adoration of Putin. Inspect aggressions against anyone, person or country, that Trump perceives as a threat or obstacle to his grab for power and wealth. Do not think that an invasion of Greenland is out of the question, and it will proceed just as Putin planted radical elements in parts of Ukraine to facilitate his invasion of that country.
3. Watch for ongoing, and more flagrant theft of the American dollar by Trump and family, and likely those in various departments. The millions of apathetic, ignorant, and hostile electorate in this country voted in a fox to sit at our table. Would you like more chicken? America and Americans are now Trump, Family & Friends' gravy train. Come and get it.
This is what happens when education is not a top priority and when neither the Democratic nor the Republican Party deals with immigration in a logical, rational, and step-wise fashion. What has happened in Germany and in the UK has happened here. We did not properly vet immigrants, nor did we provide the necessary resources to establish a clear pathway to citizenship. You cannot leave the human element to be moral or ethical. There must be a rule of law applied to such a critical issue as who you invite into your home. Both of our Parties have failed, but the Republican Party has gone rogue (i.e., off the rails). We are in deep guacamole, but sadly, the "guacamole" is brown and smells really bad. My prognosis for America is "dire." We let the cancer advance too far before initiating countermeasures. This will play out ugly. We have really disgraced the cornerstone of what made America wonderful.
Shame on all of us.
Your great writing here made my life bearable again.
Just want to 'zoom out' briefly on 'the medium is the message' idea that I think is a glaring omission in the coverage of the past week because it is hiding in plain sight. The mental states of both the shooting suspect and the victim were almost certainly shaped in part by the violence they saw in the media as children and adolescents. If their political points of view as forces that shaped them can be removed from consideration for a moment, we are still left with two young boys who took in an enormous amount of media violence.
Almost all young people have a strong tendency to imitate the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of others. How could they not have become violent?
We owe it to our sons to support their tenderness, to gain their trust by modeling that we are fallible as adults so they have no shame when they ask questions. We can be curious about who the child actually is and speak to them with a seriousness that show we respect them as whole human beings. After working with thousands of children, I can assure you, they are actually born into our world with their own little essence and personality in tact. For young boys, emotional vocabulary is really helpful. It lays a foundation for when challenges arise. It keeps a channel open for dialogue with trusted adults who can then intervene to de escalate harmful behavior by processing intense emotions. 🤍
😇 Thank you Lisa for helping so many children with such a loving, caring heart.
This is my catharsis…Violence by Low. We can’t trust violence.
”…wasted good silverware on ya…” 🕊️
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5RxS985rTTY&list=RD5RxS985rTTY&start_radio=1&pp=ygUMbG93IHZpb2xlbmNloAcB
Thank you again Lisa. listened. It's beautiful. I'm an amateur (textile)artist and the words to this song belong on wearable art. If I do something with this I will post a picture. 😊
Now that would be something. Cooler heads must prevail.
It's telling that the messaging from self-professed conservatives switched from demanding retribution to lamenting a lack of dialogue when the current suspect in Kirk's assassination was revealed to be a white man, possibly one associated with Nick Fuentes.
(It was funny to see Spencer Cox read online memes on live television, as macabre as it was that they were found on bullet casings.)
But it is also telling that people are condemning this shooting as political violence--which it is--but not also condemning as political violence policies like anti-homeless measures that see spikes put on public benches and such, in conjunction with policies that artificially limit the housing supply and cause skyrocketing land values, leading to increased homelessness. (To say nothing of youth homelessness caused by homophobic and transphobic parents who kick their queer kids out. As the online meme puts it, shall we kiss at the pro-LGBTQ park bench with anti-homeless spikes?) Violence is violence.
all these statements from the right are not dog whistles. They are throwing large chunks of meat in front of the ravening pack. Right now people are being fired for not treating Kirk as already beatified. But someone--kin to the Colorado school shooter perhaps--is going to take gun to hand.
It was rich when they claimed the shooter was "anti fascist." Doesn't using that as an accusation mean that they are all PRO fascist? Shouldn't we all, from trump on down, be anti Fascist? Isn't that what all Americans are supposed to be, from 1941 on? As with so much coming from the Right, the accusation is an admission
Thank you, Susan👍
The exhortation to kill: is it a
political view, or is it the last command before the firing squad pulls the trigger?
Thank you Mike. I read and process your clarifications on a regular basis because I feel like I1'm losing my mind in an upside down reality.
Exactly, the right wants our logic and reality to feel upside down!
It's a reasonable question whether anything about Charlie Kirk has anything to do with democracy. We can be a little more thoughtful about throwing around such inanities. By now, we should be awakening with more discernment about what's going on in the public sphere, nowhere moreso than when it comes to fascist provocation. It's something that a democracy has to deal with, but let's be careful about giving his ilk any semblance of a productive place. His freedom to voice nihilism was respected.
No murder of this kind is acceptable in a civilized society -- which, by the way, raises a fair question as to his commitment to any such thing. His function was to provoke dissention and disruption, and many have noted his contribution to the sickness that results in exactly this outcome. Rather, we are called to see his role among the ilk that continues to foster more of exactly this. It is something that threatens our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor every day. Please do not mourn his absence. He is the unfortunate reaper of his own karma.
Reminds me of Nixon‘s quote “when the president does it it’s not a crime”. Back then the justice system rightly disagreed, but now SCOTUS house made it true for Trump, but zero of his cronies. And he’ll just pardon them anyway. What a shit show.
Trumphs new Hitlarian / KBG / Dictatorship was and is a welcomed substitution for our former democratic republic by millions of the hate-mongering masses!
Unless we rise up like the 60s and 70s generations did to protest Nixon and Johnson, it's all over.
And now they have a Martyr to scapegoat the rest of us !
Just the beginning!
Guns on the street coming and visible.
Started with the madman's insurrection ‼️
Dems couldn't-hold der Fuhrer accountable
So the Hitlarian train roles on.
One wrong word and your soon off to alligator land.
Fix, not rail! Let's move on to solution.
We are seeing the world through different lenses.
Meanwhile, the elite relish the games they have us playing. They win! Up or down, they win!
But not if we see what they're doing. Unite. Be of one voice. Bring MAGA with us. No blaming! No us vs them. Don't abandon hope!
Substack exists in part, because the MSM is not doing their work.
They, are responsible for electing Trump. The Coup included the wealthy controlling media.
The more outrageous, the more attention without concentrating on needed and wanted policies in governance.
Mike Brock’s scholarship should blare everywhere. I’m reading The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The Guardian in his information and opinions. MSM is flailing and failing while Mike is successfully in the lead!
Konstanin Kisins take was so hypocritical. He said all the talk about fascism directly contributed to the violence and those people have “blood on their hands”. Coming from someone who has sharply criticized the woke words are violence paradigms is beyond hypocrisy
This is very illuminating.
I think it should be expanded to explain the culture war waged against American cities, and how the right has set up the scaffolding to occupy and pacify our populations.
The void of voices speaking in praise of our cities, and in defense of our rights is stunning. Trump and his Republican forces have deployed his maximum pressure campaign on us. But people urging an urban movement or saying how amazing it is that our cities have shown resilience to these tactics have been harder to find than people advocating concentration camps be built for our communities.
They have flooded us with armed forces, enacted over policing, exposed us to brutality against our neighbors, terrorized us with military weapons and equipment. They have set up hurdles to things which are necessary to dense populations (like vaccines), removed public school programs that made multicultural areas capable of airing differences without street fights, and defunded everything but police, in a nationwide front of urban factionalism policies.
They are trying to make voting impossible and they know that their policies are targeting our economy, and it isn't an accident.
Our cities deserve much better, and our representatives continue to attempt to expand American freedoms to all her residents.
You've just demonstrated the exact fascist logic I'm exposing. You're claiming that Democrats are 'complicit' in Kirk's murder because they support transgender rights, while simultaneously arguing that accurately describing Trump's systematic constitutional destruction makes me deserve death.
So supporting the civil rights of transgender people makes Democrats accessories to murder, but calling for RICO cases against Democratic fundraisers, designating opposition parties as criminal organizations, claiming unlimited authority to execute suspected criminals without trial, and deploying military forces against American cities—none of that counts as fascist behavior that deserves accurate description?
Your smoking gun is that Democrats believe transgender women are women. My smoking gun is that Stephen Miller wants to criminalize political opposition and Trump claims unlimited executive power. And somehow you think the first justifies assassination while the second doesn't even justify criticism?
This is precisely the totalitarian inversion I'm describing: you want to make supporting civil rights grounds for murder charges while making opposition to constitutional destruction grounds for actual murder. You want transgender acceptance to be treated as violent extremism while treating actual violent extremism as reasonable governance.
You've just proven my entire point: you're fascists who want to criminalize your opponents' political positions while threatening death for anyone who accurately describes your own. Thanks for the demonstration.
You've just proven everything I wrote about fascist methodology. You're arguing that Democrats are 'complicit' in Kirk's murder because they support transgender civil rights, while claiming that calling systematic constitutional destruction 'fascist' makes critics deserve violence.
You quote Kirk calling for 'Nuremberg-style trials' for doctors providing medical care to transgender patients and suggesting transgender people should be 'taken care of the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and '60s'—which is explicitly calling for violence against a vulnerable population—then argue that Democrats supporting transgender rights somehow caused Kirk's assassination.
So Kirk advocating violence against transgender people is reasonable political discourse, but Democrats supporting transgender civil rights is complicity in murder? Kirk calling for 'Nuremberg trials' for doctors is legitimate criticism, but calling Trump's behavior 'fascist' deserves death threats?
You've perfectly demonstrated the fascist logic: your side can call for violence against vulnerable populations while claiming that supporting those populations' civil rights justifies violence against you. Your side can advocate 'taking care of' transgender people 'the way we used to' while treating accurate description of your authoritarianism as grounds for retaliation.
This is exactly how fascist movements work: dehumanize target populations, advocate violence against them, then claim that defending their rights somehow justifies violence against the advocates. You want transgender people to face the kind of 'care' they received in the 1950s and '60s while claiming that opposition to that eliminationist rhetoric makes Democrats accessories to murder.
You're proving my point about death threat logic while making the case for why calling this fascist is accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_Jorgensen
The funny thing is, this is how trans people were treated in the 1950s. You can find media articles from the time using feminine pronouns for Ms. Jorgensen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amelio_Robles_%C3%81vila
The government of Mexico recognised Sr. Robles as a man for most of his life, from the 1920s until his death in the 1980s.
Meanwhile one of the Nazis' earliest book burnings was at the Institute for Sexual Science in Berlin, attacking Weimar Germany's transgender community as one of the earliest targets of their oppression.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DM7238LsY5n/
“When I was in middle school, I learned there were only two genders. When I did my bachelors in Biology, I learned that there are also people who are intersex and the importance of the SRY gene. When I completed my Masters in Neurosciences, I learned that sex is already hard to define, and gender is both social and in the brain, making everything a lot more complex. When people say ‘it’s basic biology’ they are telling you they haven’t moved past middle school.” (Rebecca Helm)
Prof. Helm detailed here why even defining "biological sex" is difficult, including a discussion of the aforementioned SRY gene, before one considers any difference between sex and gender: https://x.com/RebeccaRHelm/status/1207834357639139328
(She doesn't even get into things like androgen insensitivity syndrome.)
My point in bringing up Ms. Jorgensen, Sr. Robles, and Weimar Germany's trans community is that being transgender was generally socially accepted when the matter first came to public attention--right up until trans people became a convenient target for oppression.
As for "who started the clusterfuck", in the instant case, the current prime suspect in the shooting is, it appears, an acolyte of Nick Fuentes, who was critical of Kirk because he felt Kirk was insufficiently conservative.
(In a comment on a previous article I listed off thirteen cases of suppression of democratic discourse through killing, violence or parliamentary manoeuvre; in only one of those cases, the shooting at the Republican Congressional Baseball Game practice which grievously injured Steve Scalise, was the assailant known to be left-wing, having supported Bernie Sanders. The censures and expulsions were all done by conservative legislatures; Donald Trump was attacked by an assailant of uncertain political views; the Pelosis and Mike Pence were threatened by conservatives; David Amess was murdered by an Islamic State supporter; Jo Cox, Heather Heyer and Melissa Hortman were all killed by conservatives; and Charlie Kirk was also apparently killed by a conservative.)
This is classic fascist methodology: first dehumanize the target population ('crime against nature,' 'transloonie tribe'), then advocate for their elimination ('taken care of the way we used to'), then claim that anyone defending their humanity is responsible for violence against the advocates of elimination.
You're proving exactly why calling this fascist is accurate. When you treat transgender people's existence as inherently criminal while treating Kirk's eliminationist rhetoric as legitimate political discourse, when you blame Democrats for Kirk's murder because they oppose dehumanization while excusing the dehumanization itself—you're demonstrating fascist logic in real time.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/04/politics/transgender-firearms-justice-department-second-amendment
https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-transgender-nashville-shooting-misinformation-cd62492d066d41e820c138256570978c
Transgender people commit mass shootings at a disproportionately low rate compared to their share of the population as ascertained by census data, which is, I suspect, the point the person questioning Kirk was about to make when Kirk was shot. (I agree with Kirk that transgender people commit too many mass shootings, but that is because one mass shooting is too many, never mind five or five thousand.) I would like to see a citation on how many mass shootings are committed by non-trans activists or "gender ideologues".
On the other hand, men commit mass shootings at a disproportionately high rate compared to their share of the population. If any group's "thuggery and murders" should be condemned in this context, it is not that of trans people--it is that of men.
Of the five identified transgender shooters, at least two were transgender men (who by your argument are actually women), meaning at most three were transgender women. Since, again, the data shows that the vast majority of mass shooters are men (how exactly we classify the transgender shooters in the denominators is a blip), this still leaves trans women as committing mass shootings at a disproportionately low rate relative to their share of the population. The only gender demographic that is confirmed to commit mass shootings at a disproportionately high rate is cisgender men.
(The AP article I linked was in the wake of the Nashville shooting, which was committed by a transgender man, and this same torrent of bullshit about how transgender people are disproportionately violent was spewed then, too.)
As for the second point, there is a quantitative difference between internet tough talk, or even burning someone in effigy, and enacting policies that harm a marginalised group or committing actual violence against actual people, which is that in the former cases no actual person is physically harmed or killed, and in the latter cases actual people are often physically harmed and/or killed.
I have nowhere denied that there are elements of the trans movement which go too far. (There are other trans people who routinely urge extreme caution in making claims about whether someone may be transgender, or attempting to convince someone that they are transgender, and hold the view that it is something which can only be determined through personal reflection without outside interference.) But even then there is a difference between social pressure (even social pressure from people with what one would hope are pertinent credentials) and government policy backed by the state monopoly on the legitimate use of force. (I point again to Brendan Eich, a co-founder of Mozilla who was forced to step down as CEO of Mozilla due to social and economic pressure over his opposition to same-sex marriage, and has since founded another successful IT company, the latter being something that would almost certainly not have been possible had it been government policy to criminalise opposition to same-sex marriage.)