Republicans are insane.

Republican lawmakers in Oklahoma introduced legislation this week that would require every public university in the state to construct “a Charlie Kirk Memorial Plaza”, with a statue of the assassinated Republican activist and a sign calling him a “modern civil rights leader”, or pay monthly fines.

The proposed legislation comes as conservatives pay tribute to the murdered activist and podcaster, whose life will be commemorated by the president at a service in Arizona on Sunday, by comparing him to martyred political and spiritual leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr and Saint Paul.

The Oklahoma bill, sponsored by state senators Shane Jett and Dana Prieto, specifies that the memorial site must be in “a prominent area” on the main campus of every institution of higher education in the state system, and must include “a statue of Charlie Kirk sitting at a table with an empty seat across from him” or one of Kirk and his wife holding their children. Designs for the statue must be approved by the legislature.

A rendering, created with artificial intelligence, of what the Charlie Kirk statue at New College of Florida could look like (yeah, Florida is considering the same thing)

Each plaza must also include “permanent signage commemorating Charlie Kirk’s courage and faith and explaining the significance of Charlie Kirk as a voice of a generation, modern civil rights leader, vocal Christian, martyr for truth and faith, and free speech advocate”.

I hope they make provisions for an adjacent vomitorium, because I’d need to use it.

The only truth is that proposed signage is that he was a vocal Christian. I think he was the perfect representative of the modern Christian. If only they could look into the mirror.

People are having a grand time digging through Charlie Kirk’s own words to show that he deserved being dragged.

It’s tempting to sit down and just compile a list of all the hateful things the man said — I could spend the next few weeks documenting what a horrible little man he was. But that’s something that should have been done before he was killed, because what should have been assassinated was his reputation while he was cuddling up to racists and anti-semites and anti-gay and trans people, all that stuff journalists shied away from while he was living and building a movement. All we can do now is condemn him when it is too late.

When asked about mass shootings he said, “I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the Second Amendment.” Perhaps Kirk did not believe that his own life would be cut short by gun violence, but, like the rest of us, he has witnessed countless school shootings. When he said “some gun deaths” are acceptable, he surely knew he lived in a country where the deaths he deemed acceptable included those of children, some of whom were the age of his own. There is no inherent virtue in caring about your own children; that is the bare minimum requirement for effective parenting. Virtue lies in caring about the safety and well-being of children you don’t know.

On that front, I’m fairly sure Kirk did not care about my child. My child lives in Brooklyn, in a progressive family. His mother 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.”

Now is the time to talk about the evil being done by Trump and Steven Miller and JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and RFK jr (I’m beginning to see some open detestation of that foul creature) and all the billionaires backing the current political moment. I’m done with Kirk. He’s dead, good.

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A great response from a Christian minister:

I’ve been disturbed for the last day by all the unfounded speculation that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a far left fanatic, gay or trans, and that this was a hate crime against conservatives, which I had to recognize as a possibility. That was the constant drum beat from social media (and Donald Trump, and Nancy Mace, and all sorts of irrational people) at any rate, but suddenly, since late this afternoon, the drums have stopped pounding. The shooter has been caught. His personal history revealed. Suddenly, it has become apparent that he is a weird gamer from a right wing family who had criticized Kirk for not being conservative enough…and he may be a follower of Nick Fuentes and a groyper. The Serfs summarize what we know so far.

Oops. Don’t expect an apology, though, the right wing version of the story wasn’t based on facts or evidence, so facts won’t change their mind.

Somebody is compiling a public list of people who “support political violence online,” which seems to mean only people who are insufficiently upset about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and only Charlie Kirk. It’s a curious list: they post photos of the “violence supporters”, but I noticed that most of them seem to be young and attractive men and women. I am forced by the empirical evidence to conclude that if you hated Charlie Kirk, you are probably very pretty (do not submit my name to their list, or you’ll ruin the streak.) Also most of the comments by these “haters” are mild — pointing out the Kirk was a radical 2nd amendment absolutist is enough to qualify you.

TPUSA has also long maintained a Professor Watchlist targeting people who speak against TPUSA’s agenda, which is a very strange thing for a free speech advocacy group to do. By the way, I’m on that list already. I wouldn’t want to not be on that list.

It’s weird how the worst people on the internet aspire to be List Lords.

Did you know that Melissa Hortman’s murderer has still not been charged with domestic terrorism, despite the fact that he specifically targeted Democrats in Minnesota?

Also, we still have no serious restrictions on gun ownership. You can gun down small children and far-right political figures, and we still can’t get gun control. In South Korea, guns are tightly regulated — even hunting rifles are expected to be locked up in the city courthouse, and if you want to use them, they have to be checked out. I would vote for that.

Trump went to court again, to claim that he should not have to pay the large sum he was expected to pay to E. Jean Carroll for sexual assault. He lost.

A federal appeals court on Monday upheld a civil jury’s finding that President Donald Trump must pay $83.3 million to E. Jean Carroll for his repeated social media attacks and public statements against the longtime advice columnist after she accused him of sexual assault.

Does anyone believe he will ever pay that penalty, no matter how many courts and judges declare that he must? He’s just going to delay and delay and claim that no one is allowed to interfere with a US president, and wait out the judgement until he dies. That’s how the rich operate. If I had a legal claim of millions of dollars against me that I refused to pay, the sheriff would come to tow my car away, the city would start carving away my property, I’d be kicked out of my house and it would be auctioned off, and if I were really obstinate, I’d be hauled off to jail. But if you’re rich enough that you could pay the sum, they’ll respectfully watch you dither and scheme to get out of it.

One law for the wealthy, another law for the rest of us.

The MAGA or Mar-A-Lago face is the new costly signal for anyone who wants to be part of MAGA (or right-wing news), and it’s pretty darned creepy.

It has a signature look.

Defined by copious use of Botox, a Miami-bronze tan, puffy lips and silky smooth skin, plastic surgeons told DailyMail.com it was giving Trumpland an almost ‘plastic’ and ‘Real Housewives’ look.

We can thank Donald Trump for this weird habit.

I wouldn’t normally be snarky about someone’s looks but let’s be clear: nobody is born with Mar-a-Lago face. These are not human faces, they are luxury meat-masks meant to signal wealth and in-group belonging. People such as Laura Loomer, Kristi Noem, and Matt Gaetz can afford excellent surgeons and subtle cosmetic work but, unless they’ve all had botched procedures, it seems they deliberately chose to look like AI-generated caricatures. One can only surmise that they live in such weird little bubbles, where everyone is addicted to filler, that this sort of conspicuous consumption of cosmetic surgery has become desirable.

Having the right look is certainly desirable to optics-obsessed Donald Trump, whose chief concern for his underlings appears to be how they perform on TV. In 2017, an Axios report claimed that Trump wanted his female staff to “dress like women” and demanded that his male employees have a “certain look.” Over the years it seems the “certain look” has only become more extreme.

An obsession with traditional gender norms also seems to factor into today’s exaggerated aesthetics. Earlier this year a New York-based dermatologist told Politico that fashion often shifts to more traditional gender expression in culturally conservative times. “It’s ironic … that they’re so against trans-ness and gender-affirming care for trans people,” the dermatologist said of Trump’s inner orbit. “Because, you know, they’re all doing their own gender-affirming care.” The Zambian bum-stick chimps seem positively sophisticated in comparison.

You know, I’m not unhappy at all about this. Remember the end of Inglourious Basterds, in which Brad Pitt pulls out a big knife and carves a swastika into Christoph Walz’s face, before he follows orders and takes him to the US to reward him for betraying the Nazis? This is the same thing. If we ever overthrow our fascist regime, the people behind it will have all self-labeled themselves.

Put this post by Donald Trump on Truth Social front and center when he’s tried for treason.

He thinks it is amusing to threaten an American city of almost 3 million people with apocalyptic destruction. He’s a criminal despot.

His pretext is that crime is too high in Chicago. Unfortunately for that excuse, invading the city to deport a subset of people whose primary “crime” is being brown and speaking Spanish would not address that problem, the statistics show that crime has been declining already, and Chicago is not the most crime-ridden city in the country. That distinction belongs to cities in red states.

The four cities of populations larger than 100,000 with the highest murder rates in 2024 are in Republican states: Jackson, Mississippi (78.7 per 100,000 residents), Birmingham, Alabama (58.8), St Louis, Missouri (54.1) and Memphis, Tennessee (40.6).

…Chicago is bracing to be the next city targeted by the Trump administration. To date this year, 278 people have been killed in Chicago, 118 fewer people killed when compared with 2024. It is at pace for 412 deaths for the year, which would be a rate of about 15 per 100,000 residents. The rate is likely to be lower still than that, because homicide rates increase during summer months.

The Windy City ranked 37th in homicide rate in 2024 for cities larger than 50,000 residents in the United States. For cities with more than 100,000 residents, it placed 14th. This year, it is likely to slide farther down the list, even as violence falls to 60-year lows.

What are the National Guard going to do in Chicago, anyway? Stand around on street corners, eat deep dish pizza, guard the Bean in Millennium Park, visit the Field Museum? Trump is putting on a show, the same as renaming the Department of Defense the Department of War was an empty gesture.