Bang bang unity

 

By Nelly Bly in Washington with Spy Archivist Aula Minerva

If it’s a day ending in “y”, a loser white guy with insanely easy access to high powered weapons has once again inflicted death, torment, and terror in America.

Actually it happened multiple times last week in America but the one that attracted the most attention, for some reason probably unrelated to the ability of the hard-right to manipulate the American media, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk, a loathsome extremist hatemonger and rabble-rouser. For those of you who came in late, there is no justification for violence against such an individual, no matter how odious. 

The current Trump Regime immediately transformed Kirk into a martyr for the cause of Fascism, like Horst Wessel, dispatching real troops and Vice President Jimmy Don Vontz to accompany Charlie's body back to Arizona. 

Just as ridiculously, our fearless media, after firing a Republican who dared to note that Charlie's brand of divisive, hate-filled rabble-rousing might have somehow contributed to the current climate of anger and division, resurrected Kirk as a saintly martyr for free speech and debate:

 

Poor Ezra has been dragged so hard for this blazing hot take that St. David Brooks took him out for a consolatory soprassata sub (Ezra being of the class who would be comfortable savoring such an elite treat).  Even California Gov. and former Kimberly Guilfoyle boy toy Gavin Newsom said that “ The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”  

OK Gavin, here's some spirited discourse about that great philosopher Charlie Kirk:

[My spouse] works and does not have a marriage where she is considered inferior to her husband or required to obey him, as Kirk arrogantly told Taylor Swift she should do after learning of her engagement. (“Reject feminism,” he said. “You’re not in charge.”) We also live in a Haitian immigrant neighborhood, and if you only listened to Charlie Kirk, you might be under the impression that my neighbors eat pets. You would also be encouraged to believe that, simply by virtue of being non-white immigrants, they were “replacing” white people—and that, since they are also Black, they are dangerous. “Happening all the time in urban America,” he said, “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact.”

But he was always so nice to those hacks and pundits he talked to (like Ezra Klein!).

And now that he is being lionized as a martyr to free speech, let's take a quick look at his actual views on such freedom.  When college professors say things Charlie Kirk doesn't like, they are doxxed and harassed on his professor watchlist, putting them in danger of harassment and worse:

Professor Watchlist, launched in 2016 [by Kirk], describes its goal as seeking to inform students and parents about professors that may “discriminate against conservative students” or advance leftist ideology. More than 300 professors have been listed on the site for various reasons — some for political commentary, others for teaching subjects targeted by the right, such as critical race theory, gender studies, or systemic inequality.

But critics argue the list is more nefarious and can open professors to online harassment, public backlash, and even threats. Professors listed there, like Copeland, say they’re concerned about their safety and others who are more vulnerable. 

Nothing bespeaks a commitment to free discourse like intimidating professors who dare to disagree with you.  Someone explain this to Ezra, we're busy. 

The punditocracy is also wetting itself, whether through tears or otherwise, proclaiming that Kirk's killing represents some sort of watershed or inflection point in a country long drenched with hate, stoked by President VD Amin and every other Republican, and political violence:

The shooting of two schoolchildren the same day in Colorado was not one of the worst moments in recent political history, according to The Atlantic.  Nor was the cold-blooded murder of Democratic Minnesota Rep. Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her dog by a hard right whackjob in June.  

It's hard to take such selective outrage seriously, although we must. 

Their murder: not an inflection point,
according to The Atlantic

Speaking of inflection points, the day after the shootings in Utah and Colorado, America remembered the 24th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks. While that was an echte national trauma (unlike Charlie’s demise), some of the parallels are instructive.

Memories of 9/11 have grown somewhat distant, except for those who continue to mourn the loss of someone they loved on that date or due to the delayed effects of the toxic cleanup ever since. We want to remember what happened after.

You may (or more likely don't) recall that the President on that date was an insanely unqualified and feckless right-wing Republican named George W. Bush. If you don’t remember him, just follow his flacks, shills, and bag-carriers, many of whom have reinvented themselves as our most sententious allies weekdays at 4 Eastern or in numerous blogs and social media posts. 

Bush had been elected by a narrow 5-4 Supreme Court majority the previous year. Since being installed in office, he lounged around the White House and his vacation home (or “ranch” as his flacks told the press to call it) in Texas, doing dumb s*** to appease the hard reactionary right (like limiting life-saving research into stem cells) and the now-departed neocon war hawks (like terminating nuclear arms treaties with Russia).

What he wasn’t doing was listening to the multiple warnings he received from intelligence agencies and his own terrorism adviser, Richard Clarke, about al-Qaeda threats to the homeland. Since that intelligence didn’t fit with the Bush Administration’s preconceived list of bad ‘uns (Russia, Iraq, North Korea), Bush felt free to do nothing to protect us from al-Qaeda. This is an established fact, and easily distinguishable from the bizarre and falsified conspiracy theory that he knew about the actual attack in advance. After being caught with the chaps down and boots off (remember how he loved to play cowboy), he and the entire Republican Party called not for an inquiry into the causes of this intelligence debacle but for Unity.

In the face of the 9/11 calamity, we were told to Unite as a country. What we weren’t told explicitly was that meant we all had to support whatever George Bush and Deadeye Dick Cheney did in response to the challenge of 9/11.

The mother of the alleged assassin
of Charlie Kirk, shown here indoctrinating
him with left wing extremism

We all had to acquiesce in the unconstitutional seizure, imprisonment, and torture of anyone Deadeye Dick and his wingman Donald Rumsfeld thought deserved it, although almost all of the 780 persons they sent to the Guantanamo concentration camp have since been released without as far as anyone knows plunging the world into terrorism. 

When anyone dared to raise questions about these shenanigans, Bush flacks like Ari Fleischer (now shilling for the very democratic Saudi theocracy) said: “all Americans...need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” 

And indeed anyone who dared to question the Bush Administration's insane response – invade a country that had nothing to do with 9/11 – was routinely attacked as unpatriotic and soft on terrorism. Bush's 2004 opponent, war hero John Kerry, was smeared as a coward who didn't deserve his Purple Hearts.

The result was not very unifying, but it did serve to cement Republican power until Bush's catastrophic fumbling of Hurricane Katrina, the Iraq War, and the entire national economy finally caught up with him.

By the way, one of the pundits who backed the ridiculous bloody unnecessary war on Iraq was named Jeffrey Goldberg, who went on to fame if not fortune as the editor of, wait for it, The Atlantic! 

The moral we extract from this tale is that drinking from the chalice of Unity, if it means abandoning basic principles of right and wrong (like the rights of women and minorities) is not only fatuous, it is a path to political disaster.

The correct response to political and other gun violence is to control guns so that they don't end up in the hands of white male losers.  All this prattle about video games ignores the truth, freely available to anyone who reads The Onion, that while young men in all countries  are addicted to video games, only in one country does that lead to murder.  That should be something we should all be able to unite around, amirite?

If instead of fighting for what's right, we follow the pundits' advice and stifle ourselves in the name of Unity, then Unity will result.

We'll unite around “One Country, One People, and One Leader.”

It sounds a lot worse in the original German.  

UPDATE 9/14:  It turns out that real History Professor Heather Cox Richardson remembers the Republican abuse of post-9/11 Unity too:

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity, which had been dropping, soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced. He and his loyalists attacked any opposition to their measures as an attack on “the homeland.”

They tarred those who questioned the administration’s economic or foreign policies as un-American—either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks—and set out to make sure such people could not have a voice at the polls.