Charlie Kirk Holds up a Mirror to American Society

“It's on the TV, f*k. Turn off your TV. Can you say "brainwashing?" (b-b-b-b-brainwashing)” - “Violent Pornography” System Of A Down

God I’m tired.

No, it’s not a drooping-Donald-Trump-face kinda tired, where the right side of my pumpkin visage decides to take the express elevator down to LL like it did yesterday at the 9/11 Memorial event for the lumbering lecherous lummox.

Yet, still, emotionally exhausted from the political insanity this week I talk and write about to make a living.

You know, there was a brief moment after I got my MA in International Affairs and prepared to set off for Washington to become a speechwriter, that I contemplated just saying f*k it and moving to Los Angeles to write comedy.

I had a few friends encouraging me to take that path…and I must admit when I get this gassed with our inane twenty-eight-ring DC circus…I do sometimes wonder.

But I digress! And we return to our regularly scheduled broadcast. So, look, my friends, I think every take and then some has been written about the Charlie Kirk assassination this week. I really have nothing else to offer about that specific event.

But it’s broader meaning America, 2025? Now there I have some things to say.

Honestly, there may be no better encapsulation of the mutually reinforcing trends attacking our democracy. The ones that delivered us from a golden age of change, innovation, building big things, embracing civil rights and creating the largest middle class the world’s ever known, to the increasingly necrotic democratic republic we now inhabit.

Think the Romans ever looked around and just said, WTF?

Yes, with Kirk’s killing, what I refer to as The Iron Triangle of Fascism.

The original term referred to Congress, the government bureaucracy and lobbyists/interest groups and it has been chugging right along for anyone who care to look up and see its true pathology.

It has corrupted our government, turned much of big business into sociopathic monopolies and deeply eroded key elements of our civil society. So what is it and how does it affect us?

Let me put it simply: a major negative event or mistake that can be portrayed as such occurs. It can be something close to home like the Kirk shooting or Hillary’s emails, or something thousands of miles away like Benghazi or Somalia (1993).

And here’s how it goes from there.

The Right and Republican Party—interchangeable at this point, and filled with so many cranks there are caves the world over asking for its batshit back—acts in entirely bad faith, unleashing a torrent of vitriol, threats, fear, anger and hate (see Yoda) that end up, inevitably, at the level of bloodlust for the more unhinged among them.

Right wing pundits, tv hosts, social media influencers and yes, major elected officials, instead of trying to cool things down, because after all, we’re all Americans, right!?

Instead, they turn up the flame way past Firestarter and well past napalm all the way to star going supernova.

They blame Democrats (btw: with Kirk the shooter’s white, Christian and from a Trumper family—and statistically I could’ve predicted all of that) call for some kinda generic revenge or even violence against specific groups or targets, which is exactly what is happening right now after Kirk’s murder.

The new ingredient from the days when jabronis like Rush Limbaugh belched out “feminazi” or Rick Santorum tossed off some brain frothed theory related to abortion is now our President with the biggest mic in the land whose eagerly leading the digital lynchmob.

Trump, who literally never shuts his anus-lipped cakehole—except when he spends a week seemingly near death and hands blotched to hell—shows up with Semtex and C4 to add to any fire he can find.

Here is drooly, Mcdrippy face himself on Fox & Friends doing all he can to inflame everyone at a dangerous moment:

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Trump’s exclusion of political violence committed by his allies was intentional. When asked about violence from right-wing radicals on Fox News on Friday, Trump replied, “I couldn’t care less.”

As we know, Trump never does any of this except when he does it all the time. From Trump’s Dollar-Tree Twitter, Truth Social, four days ago, we see Trump totally not doing anything of the sort and I’m shocked to find out there’s gambling going on in here:

I could share a ton more. But you know the story.

From bathroom cop, Rep. Nancy Mace, to right-wing activist Chris Rufo—who seemingly has “Critical Race Theory Will Kill Us All” tattooed on his buttocks right next to “I ❤️ Mom”—the calls for rounding people they think were involved and specific threats to Democrats were swift, per usual.

All amplified by a President and the richest pile of Apartheid blubber in the world, Elon Musk, tweeting out to the many tens of millions who follow this AI-infested doofus, “Democrats are the party of death.”

So there you have Part 1 of the Iron Triangle of Fascism, the threats, the completely unhinged blame, lacking any and all proof, has now reached, conservatively, 200 million people?

We then take our horror story to Part II of the Iron Triangle of Fascism.

By the way, did I tell you I’m tired? I did? Ok, we continue…

So now the histrionic bullshit that caused right-wing heads to do a 360 lands in the purview of that choir of eunuchs called corporate media. Here, they purposely choose not to provide any context or nuance.

Or tell you what they know, if it doesn’t balance Democrats with Republicans (it never does) or upsets the fascist-adjacent or tax-cut guzzling owners of their monopoly media organizations.

So, GOP Senator Mike Lee can make a joke about the political murder of MN Democratic State House Speaker, Melissa Hortman, and the attempted murder of State Senator John Hoffmann, shot by the same deranged, shitheel on the same night. A murderer who had a long list of Democrats he intended to target and had not been caught when Mike Lee tweeted out the following:

Hilarious, Mike! Like the thought of your head not looking like a Pterodactyl egg!

And, as you’ll guess, Mike Lee is still in good stead to go on any network or cable channel he wants to pontificate about politics.

Meanwhile, Matthew Dowd, now-former analyst for supposedly liberal MSNBC (see: Comcast write off. They want a few liberal hosts but enough Scarborough to make Homo Erectus go extinct again) simply pointed out Charlie Kirk helped create the atmosphere of division that has seen Melissa Hortman and Kirk get murdered.

Dowd was fired on the spot.

A Florida reporter was suspended for asking a whiny MAGA Congressman if he’d rethink his stance on gun control after what happened to Charlie Kirk. Seriously, that question got a reporter suspended.

Mike Lee, though, I’m sure there’s a mic at that outlet for him anytime he wants.

Because corporate media looks at one party with a leading Senator who thinks the murder of opponents is funny, plays hide the salami with genocidal man-boob-exposing maniac Putin, and is not considered a normal party in a democracy by any number of objective international observers, and equate that total fucking mess with the Democrats. Because…both sides!

Experts from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden said the US Republican Party had become more illiberal and populist in recent decades and that its recent retreat from democratic norms has left it resembling authoritarian ruling parties like Hungary’s Fidesz and Turkey’s AKP.

“What we see is that the disrespect of political opponents, the encouragement of violence and also the violation of minority rights … they have all clearly increased with the Republican Party in recent years, since [President Donald Trump] came in the leadership but also before that,” Anna Luehrmann, V-Dem’s deputy director and one of the lead authors of the study, told CNN.

Right, so from these atavistic gangsters our corporate media picks up the story, framing it on Benghazi or Hillary’s emails or Charlie Kirk from these “sources” and 100% goes with it, normalizing every dehumanizing, demonizing or demagogic word Trump & the other nutters utter putting Americans, and America, in mortal danger.

And gets us to Part III, the final chapter of our Iron Triangle of Fascism. After a story has gotten into the consciousness of the public via right-wing lies and corporate media whitewashing, Democratic leaders says…well, often, they’re reading a book.

If we’re lucky, Chuck Schumer responds, looking at the press with his glasses hanging off the tip of his nose like he’s Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man sketch come to life.

He’ll talk in meandering sentences, express his hope to work with Republicans—no matter that that hasn’t worked the last 1,197 times he tried it. And he won’t put together a strong, stinging message against the most cruel, corrupt, openly criminal and completely incompetent leader since Caligula.

Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries, who I once had much hope for…I don’t even know what he’s doing anymore. Or if he’s even in control, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi may have stepped down as Leader, but didn’t retire, and we know who controls Democratic donors.

Jeffries responded two weeks ago to a Trump presser by talking about working with him on making housing more affordable, if Trump was willing.

This was a presser where Trump said people wanted him to be a dictator, right after he’d just had the DOJ raid his political enemy John Bolton’s home. Trump had also just just armed the National Guard to enter Washington, D.C., violating posse comitatus—an 1878 law explicitly forbidding this.

And he attacked the independence of the Fed, which I’m not being hyperbolic when I say threatens to destroy our fiscal credibility worldwide. The end result could send the economy crashing faster than the right side of Trump’s face.

After we just saw the effects of Trump’s pro-recession policies in the 22,000 jobs we created last month! Which likely is right up there with Micronesia.

That is your Iron Triangle of Fascism, folks.

A fascist Republican Party saying and pushing insanity, normalized by the wusses of corporate media and then allowed to get away with it by feeble Democratic leadership scared of fighting, or their donors, or the life we just found on Mars.

Who the F knows. But whatever it is—they need to go.

The two exceptions here are thankfully we have leaders like Govs Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker, and some fighters in the House and Senate who just kinda brushed their leadership aside, like Chris Murphy in the Senate and Jasmine Crockett in the House.

Also, luckily, we have a growing, more influential ecosystem of independent media able to get the message out about GOP evil even when corporate media won’t—so as a reminder, apply to and support our Soundcheck Fund to be part of the solution!

But none of this changes my current level of exhaustion. Because those last two factors are growing but not fully operational yet. So we still, too often, get treated to the new Iron Triangle that runs American politics.

Only broken up once in a while by a story so salacious, like the Epstein files, they have to cover it for clicks even if it damages Trump.

Independent-minded elected Democrats and independent medi—Let’s speed this up and get this show fully on the road!

Til then, I need a nap.

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