I guess we aren’t done with Charlie Kirk. The talk show host, Jimmy Kimmel, made a few entirely accurate remarks that were mainly critical of Trump and the Right’s efforts to capitalize on an assassination, and on Trump’s infantile mental ability.
On Tuesday’s “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” the host, during his monologue, addressed Charlie Kirk’s murder and the way some Republicans were seeking to portray the suspect, Tyler Robinson. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said, before pivoting to a segment where a reporter asked Trump how he was holding up, and he responded, in part, by bragging about White House construction.
“This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he called a friend,” Kimmel said. “This is how a 4-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
Kimmel also talked about Trump’s appearance on “Fox & Friends,” where Trump related the story about how he learned of Kirk’s death, and talked again about the construction.
“There’s something wrong with him,” Kimmel said. “There really is. Who thinks like that?”
For that, he has been yanked off the air indefinitely, maybe permanently. This is political censorship; his words were not particularly offensive to anyone, especially at a time when Trump is clearly losing his faculties, and when right-wing figures are declaring war on the Left.
So much for free speech. We knew that was never their honest goal.
Kirk was a parasite, notable for the fact that he used the illusion of civility to worm his way into the affections of pundits on both sides of the aisle, who praised the way he said things, rather than the content of his speech. He was an unabashed racist, anti-semite, misogynist, Christian nationalist, and queer-baiter, but we’re not allowed to say that now — in fact, quoting his own despicable words is a great way to get canceled.
They’re probably sharpening their knives for Ta-Nehisi Coates, who still speaks truth to power.
Before he was killed last week, Charlie Kirk left a helpful compendium of words—ones that would greatly aid those who sought to understand his legacy and import. It is somewhat difficult to match these words with the manner in which Kirk is presently being memorialized in mainstream discourse. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein dubbed Kirk “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion” and a man who “was practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California governor Gavin Newsom hailed Kirk’s “passion and commitment to debate,” advising us to continue Kirk’s work by engaging “with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.” Atlantic writer Sally Jenkins saluted Kirk, claiming he “argued with civility” and asserting that his death was “a significant loss for those who believe engagement can help bridge disagreements.”
The mentions of “debate” and “engagement” are references to Kirk’s campus tours, during which he visited various colleges to take on whoever come may. That this aspect of Kirk’s work would be so attractive to writers and politicians is understandable. There is, after all, a pervasive worry, among the political class, that college students, ensconced in their own bubbles, could use a bit of shock therapy from a man unconcerned with preferred pronouns, trigger warnings, and the humanity of Palestinians. But it also shows how the political class’s obsession with universities blinds it to everything else. And the everything-else of Kirk’s politics amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.
It is not just, for instance, that Kirk held disagreeable views—that he was pro-life, that he believed in public executions, or that he rejected the separation of church and state. It’s that Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans people with the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” Garden-variety transphobia is sadly unremarkable. But Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that. Large “dedicated” Islamic areas were “a threat to America,” Kirk asserted, and New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani was a “Mohammedan,” with Kirk supposing that anyone trying to see “Mohammedism take over the West” would love to have New York—a “prior Anglo center”—“under Mohammedan rule.”
Kirk habitually railed against “Black crime,” claiming that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” He repeated the rape accusations against Yusef Salaam, a member of the exonerated Central Park Five who is now a New York City councilman, calling him a “disgusting pig” who had gotten away with “gang rape.” Whatever distaste Kirk held for Blacks was multiplied when he turned to those from Haiti. Haiti was, by Kirk’s lights, a country “infested with demonic voodoo,” whose migrants were “raping your women and hunting you down at night.” These Haitians, as well as undocumented immigrants from other countries, were “having a field day,” per Kirk, and “coming for your daughter next.” The only hope was Donald Trump, who had to prevail, lest Haitians “become your masters.”
The point of this so-called mastery was as familiar as it was conspiratorial—“great replacement.” There was an “anti-white agenda,” Kirk howled. One that sought to “make the country more like the Third World.” The southern border was “the dumping ground of the planet,” he claimed, and a magnet for “the rapists, the thugs, the murderers, fighting-age males.” “They’re coming from across the world, from China, from Russia, from Middle Eastern countries,” he said, “and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in and they’re coming in…”
You can probably imagine where this line of thinking eventually went.
“Jewish donors,” Kirk claimed, were “the number one funding mechanism of radical open-border, neoliberal, quasi-Marxist policies, cultural institutions, and nonprofits.” Indeed, “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
Tommy Robinson, a far-right British activist, held a rally this week in which supporters chanted support for Kirk. The gathering turned violent, injuring 26 police officers.Lab Ky Mo/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images.
Kirk’s bigotry was not personal, but extended to the institution he founded, Turning Point USA. Crystal Clanton, the group’s former national field director, once texted a fellow Turning Point employee, “I HATE BLACK PEOPLE. Like fuck them all … I hate blacks. End of story.” One of the group’s advisers, Rip McIntosh, once published a newsletter featuring an essay from a pseudonymous writer that said Blacks had “become socially incompatible with other races” and that Black culture was an “un-fixable and crime-ridden mess.” In 2022, after three Black football players were killed at another college, Meg Miller, president of Turning Point’s chapter at the University of Missouri, joked (“joked”) in a social media message, “If they would have killed 4 more n-ggers we would have had the whole week off.”
Kirk subscribed to some of the most disreputable and harmful beliefs that this country has ever known. But it is still chilling to think that those beliefs would be silenced by a gunshot. The tragedy is personal—Kirk was robbed of his life, and his children and family will forever live with the knowledge that a visual record of that robbery is just an internet search away. And the tragedy is national. Political violence ends conversation and invites war; its rejection is paramount to a functioning democracy and a free society. “Political violence is a virus,” Klein noted. This assertion is true. It is also at odds with Kirk’s own words. It’s not that Kirk merely, as Klein put it, “defended the Second Amendment”—it’s that Kirk endorsed hurting people to advance his preferred policy outcomes.
In 2022, when Kirk was frustrated, for instance, by the presence of Lia Thomas on the University of Pennsylvania women’s swim team, Kirk did not call for “spirited discourse.” Instead, while discussing a recent championship tournament, he said he would have liked to have seen a group of fathers descend from the stands, forming “a line in front of [Lia] Thomas and saying, ‘Hey, tough guy, you want to get in the pool? ’Cause you’re gonna have to come through us.” Mere weeks before his death, Kirk reveled in Trump’s deployment of federal troops to DC. “Shock and awe. Force,” he wrote. “We’re taking our country back from these cockroaches.” And in 2023, Kirk told his audience that then president Joe Biden was a “corrupt tyrant” who should be “put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
What are we to make of a man who called for the execution of the American president, and then was executed himself? What are we to make of an NFL that, on one hand, encourages us to “End Racism,” and, on the other, urges us to commemorate an unreconstructed white supremacist? And what of the writers, the thinkers, and the pundits who cannot separate the great crime of Kirk’s death from the malignancy of his public life? Can they truly be so ignorant to the words of a man they have so rushed to memorialize? I don’t know. But the most telling detail in Klein’s column was that, for all his praise, there was not a single word in the piece from Kirk himself.
More than a century and a half ago, this country ignored the explicit words of men who sought to raise an empire of slavery. It subsequently transformed those men into gallant knights who sought only to preserve their beloved Camelot. There was a fatigue, in certain quarters, with Reconstruction—which is to say, multiracial democracy—and a desire for reunion, to make America great again. Thus, in the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s.
Words are not violence, nor are they powerless. Burying the truth of the Confederacy, rewriting its aims and ideas, and ignoring its animating words allowed for the terrorization of the Black population, the imposition of apartheid, and the destruction of democracy. The rewriting and the ignoring were done not just by Confederates, but also by putative allies for whom the reduction of Black people to serfdom was the unfortunate price of white unity. The import of this history has never been clearer than in this moment when the hard question must be asked: If you would look away from the words of Charlie Kirk, from what else would you look away?
Fuck Ezra Klein, fuck Gavin Newsom, and fuck ABC news. Also, damn these people who are going to speak at his memorial service, you know they aren’t going to bring up his unapologetic racism, except to praise it. Especially Stephen Miller.
Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk
President Trump
Vice President JD Vance
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles
Secretary of State Marco Rubio
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth
Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard
Donald Trump Jr.
Tucker Carlson
Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller
Ambassador to India nominee Sergio Gor
I can understand the widow speaking, but the rest are all there to promote hatred. Don’t expect an honest word out of any of them.
He was many things, but I really doubt he was a queer-baiter. Or I have entirely misunderstood the term.
He was not very smart. He once ranted against some named “unintelligent” Black women whom he said are taking the jobs of better qualified white men. One of the women he mentioned was Michelle Obama.
Whose job was being the wife of Barack Obama.
So logically he was arguing for a white man being married to Barack Obama. I suppose this is…enlightened…while simultaneously being very racist.
(OT) Cool news for when you are decompressing from anger.
“Spider-inspired magnetic soft robots could perform minimally invasive gastrointestinal tract procedures”
So, a robot for doing facehugger insertion stuff?
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-spider-magnetic-soft-robots-minimally.html
Meanwhile the right wingnuts have totally ignored a real political assassination.
The head of the Minnesota House, a Democrat named Melissa Hortman was assassinated along with her husband and dog. Two other Democrats were also shot multiple times.
When Trump was recently asked about them, he had no idea who they were. Trump is clearly showing signs of short term memory problems.
Am antivaxxer terrorist also attacked the CDC, firing 500 rounds at the building and killing a cop. Ignored by the right wingnuts.
Sure, Charlie Kirk is a made up martyr.
This is just theater, a propaganda performance.
The system is working as intended. The goon put in charge of the FCC is punishing Trump critics. This was always the plan.
.
Good news. Just in the last few days I learned it seems that Dem senate candidates may flip several seats and reach the magical “51” number of seats 13 months from now. And in the House it looks even more promising.
The fascists are using the Charlie Kirk murder as an excuse for a lot of oppressive measures.
Trump just designated Antifa as a “major terrorist organization”.
.1. Antifa doesn’t even exist.
It is an idea or a loosely associated group of people.
.2. They haven’t done anything in years.
.3. They aren’t funded by anybody.
.4. There is no legal classification of “major terrorist group” and he probably doesn’t have the legal authority to go after groups he doesn’t like.
Whatever. Just say no to fascism.
@2:
Probably he meant that both presidency and first-lady position are for white people. He was a racist scumbag as usual.
Three sourecs linked here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/15/never-has-a-mans-own-words-so-adeptly-justified-contempt-for-him/comment-page-1/#comment-2277889
Aussie ABC on Kimmi’s firing, a thought -provoking essay comparing Kirkj’s death and Palestinian -Gazan journalist Anas Al-Sharif’s via The New Arab and a yt clip on the firing of the Washington Posts only remaining balck woman journo.
A lot of meme s have been going around on fb with Snopes now verifying that many of them are correct eg
Source : https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/charlie-kirk-10-year-old-rape/
All depsite Kirk’s deliberate refusal to publish his own transcripts of his hate rnating show as noted by #29. Acroyear here :
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2025/09/15/never-has-a-mans-own-words-so-adeptly-justified-contempt-for-him/#comment-2277726
It came as a profound shock to me that it was the federal government that forced Disney to fire Kimmel. It was not a business decision, though Disney may claim that at some future point. This is in direct contradiction to the First Amendment’s right to free speech. This is troubling beyond words. We must not allow this to stand. If they can do this to Kimmel, they can do it to any of us. They could do it to PZ’s blog if they really wanted to. PZ has been sued before, admittedly by cranks, but being sued by the U.S. Govt. would be an entirely different level of bad.
FTFY
Seen on fb :
Then too I suspect the average 6 year old school child is probly more ethical & honest than both Trump and Kirk ever were in their lives -and far toomany young kids have died due to guns whilst as another meme noted Kirk’s is the only / first school.shooting the Repugs have ever cared about.
@6. raven : Of course antifa just means anti-fascist so admittiung that they are your enemy is really quite a big confession as to who you are or at least stand with and are helping.
“Sure, Charlie Kirk is a made up martyr.
This is just theater, a propaganda performance.”
That’s so true. No different than the worthless theater and propaganda performance Dumb Idiot Ham stages in his putrid unrealistic, fantasy attractions in Kentucky.
To call ABC cowards and fascist enablers would be an understatement.
I thought I could at least add them to my boycott list.
I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since Bezos turned fascist.
The problem I ran into is that I don’t buy anything from ABC.
I never watch TV and only occasionally read an ABC news article on the net for free.
It turns out that ABC is now owned by…Disney, which I didn’t know.
This doesn’t help much either.
I haven’t been to the Disney theme parks in decades and have no interest in going to Disneyland.
I don’t pay to watch Disney movies either.
ABC and Disney are just irrelevant to my life.
Oh well, they are going to stay that way forever now.
It would not surprise me at all if ‘the president’ makes some sort of ‘BIG!!!!!’ announcement. It might be some meaningless symbolism, it might be the arrests of….. or something else repressive. (Note: ‘the president’ has several times mentioned that he wants the budget to be passed by only Republican votes…. it might be prudent for certain people to have an indeterminate location this weekend.)
How dare Kimmel tell the truth?!?!?!
Always
Bigoted
Cowards
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/09/18/speech/
While Carr absolutely made inappropriate comments as a regulator (see Mike Masnick for a predictably excellent post on why his comments were illegal https://www.techdirt.com/2025/09/17/cowardly-disney-caves-to-brendan-carrs-bogus-censorial-threats-pulling-jimmy-kimmel/ ), the specific means by which Carr silenced Kimmel was the learned helplessness of massive corporations putting speech considerations behind their hopes of regulatory approval for expansion. . . . MONEY
As we see everywhere, in his own words, charlie kirk was an evil bigoted, misogynistic, hateful rtwing magat
(do I dare say ‘prove me wrong’?!?!?)
Kind of off topic but I’ve been searching for an Antifa flag to buy. So I could put it on a flag pole and put some nice spot lights on it. I’ve been searching web sites and all the ones with “America” in their title sell mainly conservative themed flags (not a big shock right) but no Antifa themed ones, but they do sell Nazi themed ones (shocked I tell you) ,weird/s
@17 hyper1doom1spiral wrote: but I’ve been searching for an Antifa flag to buy.
I reply: You need to go to the Antifa Organization official website to find those.
WTF!!!! dying evil magat emperor rants at non-existent organization!!!!
@17 hyper1doom1spiral
Reject capitalism, make your own. Or start by buying a nice solid color and painting something appropriately anti-fascist on it.
raven @ #4
Now, now. They didn’t totally ignore it. They laughed and made jokes about it.
@19 beholder
Not saying I would do this but I think to fully reject capitalism, I would need to steal all the flag making materials from my neighbors(what a minute I think I back door-ed myself in to a true form capitalism there!). Only Neighbors with the rapists propaganda out front of course.
“Fuck Ezra Klein, fuck Gavin Newsom, and fuck ABC news”
Hey FUCK YOU too, you worthless cock.sucker.
Too bad nobody gives two shits about you and shoot you in the throat.
Though at this point he will just put you out of your misery, right?
@14 raving nutjob
“I haven’t bought anything from Amazon since Bezos turned fascist.”
Hahaha
That’s the level of a pharyngula reader, huh? A certifiable nutjob. Just like the crazy, disgraced cuck running this shitshow.
Hey everyone, they have an antifa flag here:
https://mockpaperscissors.com/2025/09/18/one-lump-of-stupid-or-two-hair-furor-2/
Must have bought it at Antifa Corp. headquarters.
Crapitallism destroys societies; always has, always will! AOC was exactly correct: It’s all about the benjamins.
The number of people who can ACCURATELY define capitalism, socialism and communism can (almost) be counted on the fingers of both your hands.
OH, OH, somebody let that rabid monkey sanjay (@22) loose again. Get the net!
So America is declaring a war on the insane “far left”, that is, on the fringe crazy people of whom Crazy Pau.la is such a good representative.
Hey sl.ut, were you not this great atheist leader back in the day?
What happened, can you reminds us?
Now look at you. Forever a total joke and a pariah, chocking on her own bile.
Choke on it b.itch!
But first give us the list with all those rapists that you know of. We’ll take it serioisly, we promise.
Raven provided us with a means of providing (polite?!) feedback:
Walt Disney Company Customer service: 1 (800) 230-0229
Maybe EVERYONE should call and let them know how we feel. OH, NO, wait, that would be free speech and they would have the magat speech police put us in jail!
@25
You are one of those castrated freaks, aint you?
Did you feed your discared husk to P.aula?
Or is she too busy getting her ass pounded by transgendered wife.
@26 sanjay, obviously literacy eludes you. May I politely suggest that you C. O. A. D. (Crawl Off And Die).
@22 sanjay
What’s wrong, is that pile of decomposing Charlie Kirk meat got you feeling down? Feeling like a fascist piece of shit? Cry more.
Oh look, a foul excrescence has slithered out of the slymepit. It is so bigly mad that it’s still a sad loser incel.
Away wretched slug! Ban hammer is eminent.
I hope PZ gets the net soon. I don’t want us all to have to get rabies shots because of sanjay and their diseased sputum.
Lets review a couple of Crazy Myers ramblings.
“So if you want to read about how the atheists who rode the glory train of the atheist resurgence 10 or 15 years ago to fame and fortune now are doing, check it out and be depressed. The faces of the New Atheism are Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Richard Dawkins, James Lindsay, Peter Boghossian, David Silverman, and Steven Pinker”
Yes. Be depressed. The people who actually do the hard work of doing serious academic research and have succesful publishing careers are the faces of New Atheism onstead of, get this, a NUTJOB biologist, a shemale who has exhibited a level of immaturity and the sort of behavior that would be shameful for a 15 year old, let alone a 60 year old adult.
Yes, why isn’t this shemale the face of New Atheim?
A question for the ages..
Ah, don’t lose heart P.aula, I am sure that if you take your medications regularly, you have a chance to be somebody again!
Miracles happen, don’t they?
:D :D
So, who according to Myers should be the face of New Atheism and invited to main news outlets to share their opinions?
“Think about Greta Christina, Mandisa Thomas, Jey McCreight, Lauren Lane, Rebecca Watson, Monette Richards, Sikivu Hutchinson, Annie Laurie Gaylor”
HAHAHAH
You cant make this stuff up.
EARTH to mental pacient Myers:
Call your shrink and up the dose of you meds.
Now, let’s see:
Rebecca Watson: a textbook professional victim whose ‘achievements’ consist of… well, aparently attending a workshop and making ‘angry vaginas’! No kidding! There is a video on youtube with her bragging about that.
Thats what, say CNN, would like to have on, for sure!
Gretta Chtistina: a mentally ill sex freak, publishing sadomasochistic fantasies, which aparently Myers likes and has publicly endorsed.
Last I have seen of her is her holding a sign that reads ” I Need Actual Therapy.”
Indeed she does.
Not that it would help.
Finally, Jey McCreight.
Formerly JEN McCreight: a Transgender crazy person. One can have sympathy for people with psychiatric conditions such as Gender Dysphoria, but not for this one.
And certainly, NOT for a toxic, hateful, mindless dwarf, who has spent an extraordinary amount of effort becoming a pitiful pariah by, among other things, defending and trying to normalize the abnormal: the trans whatever…
#27, Disney has only a recording on there….. referring people to ABC.com for comments….
@30 behold the worm
Hopefully you will be decomposing meat soon.
And P.aula, as well.
You are not worth the worms that will feed on your corpse.
Stop talking to it Sherman. PZ will scrub all its rabid frothings as soon as he sees them.
@34 profpedant wrote: Disney has only a recording on there
I reply: Thanks for trying. Maybe I’ll see about that abc.com. But, they probably don’t want feedback.
@36 Tethys wrote: Stop talking to it Sherman. PZ will scrub all its rabid frothings as soon as he sees them.
I reply: you are correct. I’ll stop. I was just hoping to call it to PZ’s attention (and to have a little fun poking that insane bear)
@36 Tetris
You are one of P.aula’s regulars. I expected you’d have commited sicide by now.
Boycotting of Disney and ABC seems eminent too.
Or we can take their FCC precedent and use it to annihilate Fox.
I am not worried about Jimmy Kimmel. I’m sure he can afford a good lawyer who is going to absolutely drag the scum through the courts.
Hey Tetris,
Just like you, Kimmel is worthless.
And who is going to boycot? Psychiatric pacients like you?
HAHA
Who gives a fuck what you do, you slime.
#37, scroll down to the bottom of the page, “Contact Us” leads to https://support.abc.com/hc/en-us, then “How do I submit feedback for shows on ABC.com?”. Below that is “Where do I send fan mail and request autographed photos?”, and now I have submitted a ‘fan letter’ to Jimmy Kimmel as well….
Right, free speech was never the goal. Nor was “local control” a goal of the American rightwing. The best kind of control is whatever they control. Nor, obviously “freedom of religion.” Nor were they even honest about capitalism or globalization. They like these things only when they reinforce money and privilege.
But TBH I’m getting a little tired of pointing out the hypocrisy. Every element of rightwing hypocrisy should be recorded, not ignored, but there’s not need to call it out like it’s a big discovery. This is what we have to expect from them.
Funny how you no longer see them out there flying the Gadsden flag and complaining about government overreach.
Hey, where is the B.ITCH?
Stop sucking off the transgendered, you little wh.ore, and pay attention: you are a sore loser. You sjw cause is dead. You are a total joke, and wodely regarded as a lunatic.
Does that get you depressed? Shoot yourself the thoat.
Hey, where is the B.ITCH?
Stop sucking off the transgendered, you little wh.ore, and pay attention: you are a sore loser. Your sjw cause is dead. You are a total joke, and widely regarded as a lunatic.
Does that get you depressed? Shoot yourself in the thoat.