Obama does what Obama does best: blame the right

The New Neo Posted on by

Call it “the tactic of the about-face.” Or call it “on the one hand, on the other hand.”

Call it what you will, but here’s a good example.

We have this statement from Obama on Charlie Kirk’s assassination. When I read its beginning, I felt a sense of relief. It seemed appropriate, unequivocal, and reasonable:

Former President Barack Obama insists the nation is at an “inflection point” following Charlie Kirk’s assassination as the Democrat in his first public remarks on the shooting called the conservative commentator’s violent death a “tragedy” regardless of his views.

“Even if you think they’re quote unquote on the other side of the argument, that’s a threat to all of us and we have to be clear and forthright and condemn it,” Obama said during the Jefferson Educational Society’s global summit Tuesday night.

The 44th president said he believes the country is facing a precipitous rise in political violence …

So far, so good. But next we have this:

… – and accused President Trump and members of his administration of fueling some of the sharp political divisions.

“But I’ll say this — those extreme views were not in my White House. I wasn’t empowering them. I wasn’t putting the weight of the United States government behind them,” he claimed, according to the Erie Times-News.

“When we have the weight of the United States government behind extremist views, we’ve got a problem. …

“When I hear not just our current president, but his aides, who have a history of calling political opponents vermin, enemies, who need to be ‘targeted,’ that speaks to a broader problem that we have right now and something that we’re going to have to grapple with, all of us,” he said inside the Erie Insurance Arena.

What a pivot. One thing I think we can safely say is that Tyler Robinson was not motivated by anything Trump or his aides said on that score; he was not a person on the right murdering someone on the left. However, Obama nicely ignores Biden (“Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic”), Harris (“Trump’s a fascist”) – and yes, Barack Obama, who used the word “enemies” to describe his political opposition in 2010.

Perhaps Obama might instead have concentrated on the many many comments from the left and Democrats that Trump, Kirk, and those on the right in general are Nazis or Hitler or Fascists or outside the pale of political discourse in the US. But no. The one good thing is that I doubt Obama has been influencing much of anyone lately.

NOTE: It reminds me of those who said, when JFK was killed by a Communist, that it was the result of a “climate of hate” from the right in Dallas [emphasis mine]:

Immediately after the assassination, leading journalists and political figures insisted that Kennedy was a victim of a “climate of hate” in Dallas and across the nation created by racial bigots, the Ku Klux Klan, and anti-Communist zealots. …

The repetitive commentary about hatred and bigotry circulated rapidly through the media in the days after the assassination, almost as if coordinated or directed from a high level.

James Reston, then chief political correspondent for the New York Times, published a front-page column the day after the assassination titled, “Why America Weeps: Kennedy a Victim of Violent Streak He Sought to Curb in Nation.” He wrote that right-wing groups were behind the assassination. Chief Justice Earl Warren, who would soon head the investigation into the shooting, blamed “bigots” for Kennedy’s death. He never retracted or revised those comments, and he expanded on the theme in an official eulogy to Kennedy that he delivered two days later in the Capitol.

Syndicated newspaper columnist Drew Pearson wrote that JFK was the victim of a “hate drive.” The “eradication of hate,” he wrote, would be the most appropriate monument to his life. Senator Mike Mansfield, in a eulogy, blamed the assassination on “bigotry, hatred, and prejudice.” Chet Huntley, chief newscaster for NBC, told millions of viewers that the assassination had been brought about by “the sickening and ominous popularity of hatred” across the United States and by influential “pockets of hatred” within the country. The president’s death, he said, is “thundering testimonial of what hatred comes to and the revolting excesses it perpetrates.” …

These were the myths that grew up around Kennedy’s death and, curiously enough, remain widely believed. Many who doubted Oswald’s guilt traced the assassination to a “climate of hate” created by right-wing businessmen, religious leaders, and a few media figures. This became the prevailing interpretation of the assassination.

That was written in 2023.

RIP Robert Redford

The New Neo Posted on by

Robert Redford has died at 89. When I read that number I can hardly believe it – where oh where did that impossibly handsome young man go? But yes, he was 89, with a long life and an enormous number of films behind him.

He was a much-loved film giant and will be sorely missed. There are so many clips of his from which to choose, but I’ll go with this one:

The swelling tide of hatred

The New Neo Posted on by

For anyone who follows the news it’s impossible to ignore the tide of hatred unleashed against the affable, smiling, “let us all reason together,” and now-deceased Charlie Kirk and his supporters.

However, it’s not new. From those who admire the cold-blooded killer of a heretofore obscure insurance executive to those who applaud the murder of a young Jewish couple, from those who use the occasion of a Kirk memorial ceremony to mockingly enact Kirk’s death to teachers who think nothing of telling their students after Kirk’s assassination that Kirk was “a piece of garbage,” examples are unfortunately legion. They not only think it, they feel no hesitation to publicly go on record with these sorts of abominable sentiments.

Although it’s impossible to say when this started, it’s been steadily growing. But on reflection, I’ve decided there was a turning point that I don’t see anyone else mentioning. It happened in 2019, and it was the widespread hatred unapologetically expressed towards a very young and very innocent person: 16-year-old Nicholas Sandmann.

Remember? He’d never been a public figure before, but he suddenly became one for the “crime” of smiling at some activists who were harassing him when he was on a school trip to Washington DC. The media lied about what was happening, with edited videos and a platform for the multiple falsehoods of the supposed victim. Sandmann ultimately got money awards for the defamation, but not before he was subjected to all sorts of abuse expressing the general idea the he had a “punchable face” that many adults would have loved to smack.

I wrote many posts at the time about the incident, but probably the most relevant one to the present discussion is this, entitled “The Covington chronicles: on hating the face of a teenage boy.” An excerpt:

One of the most chilling aspects of the hatred fanned by the duplicitous reporting on the videotaped incident regarding the Covington students and the 60-something Native American has been the venomous rage directed against the face of one of the students, as well as the conclusions drawn about the expression on the face and what it might signify about the person.

I’ve talked about Orwell before in connection with all of this, and I’m going to bring him up again, because the anger unleashed resembles Orwell’s Two Minutes Hate (although this hasn’t been limited to two minutes at a time). …

The image that provoked a truly hideous rage in an enormous number of people on the left and some on the right was of a teenaged boy named Nicholas Sandmann …

From [an article in Slate] by Ruth Graham, which shows us what the author is fantasizing based on the manipulated story and video:

“I think the real reason the clip has spread is simpler: It’s the kid’s face. The face of self-satisfaction and certitude, of edginess expressed as cruelty. The face remains almost completely still as his peers hoot in awed delight at his bravado. The face is both punchable and untouchable. Many observers recognized it right away.”

What is it they “recognized”? A face that is now permissible to hate, apparently; they’re not shy about writing about their hate and signing their names to it. That face is white, male, and supposedly “privileged” (whether they know a single thing about that person’s actual life circumstances or not). I have come to think of it in a kind of shorthand as hatred towards the “frat boy” in their minds. And it’s not new, although I’ve never before seen a national eruption of this hatred expressed towards someone who is not yet an adult.

The post I wrote is long, but I think it’s relevant to Kirk’s murder. To be sure, Sandmann was just a powerless boy being harassed by activists who later used him to stir up a certain kind of rage, whereas although Kirk was an adult and a political activist he didn’t hold a post in government and he was smiley, confident, white, and young.

More from the Slate piece by Graham, which was published in January of 2019:

The face is in this photo of a clutch of white young men crowding around a single black man at a lunch counter sit-in in Virginia in the 1960s, and in many other images of jeering white men from that era. The face is the rows of Wisconsin high school boys flashing Nazi salutes in a prom picture last year. The face is Brett Kavanaugh—then a student at an all-boys Catholic prep school—“drunkenly laughing” as he allegedly held down Christine Blasey Ford. Anyone who knew the popular white boys in high school recognized it: the confident gaze, the eyes twinkling with menace, the smirk. The face of a boy who is not as smart as he thinks he is, but is exactly as powerful. The face that sneers, “What? I’m just standing here,” if you flinch or cry or lash out. The face knows that no matter how you react, it wins.

I maintain that this sort of sentiment is at least part of what was behind the hatred of Kirk – augmented by his actual ability to argue with leftists and be so reasonable that he sometimes dislodged people from that mindset. Whether or not it was especially prominent in the killer’s motivations (which perhaps were more specific to trans issues?), it certainly seems to have motivated the haters who supported the killer and the killing and/or called it justified.

My post ends with this:

The people hating on Sandmann ought to be ashamed of themselves, but there is no indication of even a flicker of that feeling. Nor are they likely to damp down their hatred based on the evidence of Sandmann’s innocence.

They know that face, you see, and it’s the face of their enemy.

That Slate article is still online, and I decided to check out some of the comments there. There aren’t many, but here they are:

One reason that video is cutting so deep today: The smug, fixed, chilly smile. That’s not a teenager out of control. It’s the familiar gleam of a zealot. Never in the history of this country has that look portended anything but bad news.

I honestly haven’t stopped thinking about that MAGA kid all day – in part because I think so many of us have been on the receiving end of the face he was making: a smug, untouchable, entitled ‘fuck you’.

You saw that sort of thing constantly at the time. It’s been six and a half years since then, and such sentiments have only festered, intensified, and spread.

And the Kirk assassination-related news keeps coming and coming and coming

The New Neo Posted on by

So fast and furious it’s hard to keep up. But here’s some of it.

(1) There’s no reason to trust a person’s enemies to represent that person’s words fairly. The Kirk-hating forces – and they are legion, it turns out – twist his words and thought to characterize him as a vicious hater who deserved what he got, and I think most people predisposed to dislike him take their word for it. But for those who check it out by watching videos or reading fair accounts, the truth emerges. See this, for example, for his 2nd amendment position. I fervently hope more people actually watch the many videos he left behind, and realize for themselves how much he’s being lied about.

(2) Remember that old guy in the crowd at the Utah venue, the one who was quickly tackled to the ground, taken into custody, and then released? Doesn’t seem to have known Robinson – at least, there’s nothing so far to indicate it, although I have to say that all bets are off at this point. But his story is far more pernicious than originally reported, although I read some rumor of it earlier:

George Zinn, 71, sparked confusion in the moments after gunshots rang out on Utah Valley University’s campus last week when police said he approached an officer and yelled, “I shot him, now shoot me,” according to a probable cause affidavit obtained by Fox News. …

After Kirk was shot and Zinn claimed to be the shooter, according to the document, the officer did not observe Zinn carrying a weapon, but ultimately arrested him after he yelled, “I shot him, now shoot me,” again.

When asked where his weapon was hidden, Zinn allegedly refused to tell the officer, who performed a search and was still unable to locate a gun.

According to police, Zinn continued to claim that he shot Kirk as he was being led away in handcuffs, while telling the officer to “just shoot him.”

His arrest led to confusion in the crucial minutes immediately following the shooting, with videos of Zinn being taken away in handcuffs circulating online with false claims that the perpetrator had been captured.

Once Zinn arrived at the police department, he reportedly walked back his admission that he shot Kirk and asked for an attorney. While being questioned by authorities, who relayed to Zinn that they did not believe he was the real shooter, he allegedly admitted to making the false claims to “to draw attention from the real shooter.”

Zinn was subsequently transported to a local hospital to receive medical attention, where he later added he “wanted to be a martyr for the person who was shot,” police said.

Martyr for the person shot, or more likely for the shooter? Is this guy suicidal? Or did he want to be shot in order to spark a backlash against police brutality? And if he didn’t know in advance about the shooter’s plans, can you imagine having – as your first and immediate response to seeing someone’s neck being blown away in front of you – to run interference for the killer? What an extraordinary degree of hatred.

Oh, and also this, just to complete the picture:

Upon being taken into custody, authorities performed a search of Zinn’s phone, which allegedly revealed images of child pornography, according to police. Zinn was subsequently taken into custody and booked into the Utah County Jail on four counts of sexual exploitation of a minor and one count of obstruction of justice, according to authorities.

(3) There’s no doubt at this point that Robinson and his trans roommate were lovers. There’s a lengthy written record you can find here, in which he confesses to the roommate and calls him “my love.” It’s a curious back and forth which either is really the first time the roommate-lover learns about Robinson’s guilt, or it’s a pretense, a way to try to absolve the roommate of guilt by creating evidence he had no foreknowledge. It’s a very weird document, as you might expect. Here it is; it begins just after Robinson has directed the roommate to a note he left, a confession:

Robinson: I am still ok my love, but am stuck in Orem for a little while longer yet. Shouldn’t be long until I can come home, but I gotta grab my rifle still. To be honest I had hoped to keep this secret till I died of old age. I am sorry to involve you.
Twiggs: You weren’t the one who did it, right????
Robinson: I am, I’m sorry.
Twiggs: I thought they caught the person?
Robinson: No, they grabbed some crazy old dude, then interrogated someone in similar clothing. I had planned to grab my rifle from my drop point shortly after, but most of that side of town got locked down. It’s quiet, almost enough to get out, but there’s one vehicle lingering.
Twiggs: Why?
Robinson: Why did I do it?
Twiggs: Yeah.
Robinson: I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out. If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence. Going to attempt to retrieve it again, hopefully they have moved on. I haven’t seen anything about them finding it.
Twiggs: How long have you been planning this?
Robinson: A bit over a week I believe. I can get close to it but there is a squad car parked right by it. I think they already swept that spot, but I don’t wanna chance it.
Robinson: I’m wishing I had circled back and grabbed it as soon as I got to my vehicle. I’m worried what my old man would do if I didn’t bring back grandpa’s rifle. Idek if it had a serial number, but it wouldn’t trace to me. I worry about prints. I had to leave it in a bush where I changed outfits. Didn’t have the ability or time to bring it with.
Robinson: I might have to abandon it and hope they don’t find prints. How the fuck will I explain losing it to my old man… Only thing I left was the rifle wrapped in a towel.
Robinson: Remember how I was engraving bullets? The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme. If I see “notices bulge uwu” on Fox News I might have a stroke.
Robinson: Alright I’m gonna have to leave it. That really fucking sucks.
Robinson: Judging from today I’d say grandpa’s gun does just fine idk. I think that was a $2k scope ;-;
Robinson: Delete this exchange.
Robinson: My dad wants photos of the rifle… he says grandpa wants to know who has what, the feds released a photo of the rifle, and it is very unique. He’s calling me rn, not answering.
Robinson: Since Trump got into office, [my dad] has been pretty diehard MAGA.
Robinson: I’m gonna turn myself in willingly. One of my neighbors here is a deputy for the sheriff.
Robinson: You are all I worry about love.
Twiggs: I’m much more worried about you.
Robinson: Don’t talk to the media please. Don’t take any interviews or make any comments. If any police ask you questions ask for a lawyer and stay silent.

Clears up the question of how he got the rifle.

(4) But some people seem quite touched by that exchange. An example:

ABC’s Matt Gutman says he’s not sure “if we have seen an alleged murder with such specific text messages” that were “very touching, in a way, that I think many of us didn’t expect — a very intimate portrait into this relationship between the suspect’s roommate and the suspect himself, with him repeatedly calling his roommate, who is transitioning, calling him ‘my love.’ And ‘I want to protect you, my love.’”

“So, it was this duality of someone who the attorney said not only jeopardized the life of Charlie Kirk and the crowd, but was doing it in front of children, which is one of the aggravating circumstances of this case. And then, on the other hand, he was, you know, speaking so lovingly about his partner. So a very interesting and, as Pierre said, riveting press conference.”

He’s right, actually, that’s it’s interesting – that is, if you think much about people and what makes them tick, and how they can compartmentalize things. But it’s hardly surprising – Hitler was a vegetarian who loved animals, and all that. Anyone who studies human evil is aware of how common this sort of duality is.

(5) Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty for Robinson. The charges are “aggravated murder, two counts of obstruction of justice and felony discharge of a firearm causing serious bodily injury, two counts of witness tampering, and commission of a violent offense in the presence of a child.”

He didn’t enter a plea and showed no emotion. It’s important to recall that about three thousand people, many of them children, witnessed the murder in person and many were emotionally traumatized by it.

ADDENDUM from a comment at Ace’s:

The piecemeal leaks in this case are very Trumpy. A bit of info comes out, the Left tries to spin it as showing the shooter is rightwing…and then another piece of evidence comes out refuting the Left and taking things further. I just stumbled across a David Pakman subreddit (super soy and super Left YouTuber) with a recent thread titled “Is there evidence that Tyler Robinson is gay or his roommate is trans?”, where they deflect, say there’s no evidence of a sexual relationship, etc.

Now these texts come out where he says “my love” lol. These losers can’t catch a break.

True. They take the bait over and over.

Is Israel “winning the war but losing the world”?

The New Neo Posted on by

From commenter “Mike Plaiss”:

Another thing that has been on my mind lately, and this one has really been bugging me.

Israel Is Winning the War but Losing the World
https://archive.md/mmikK

“The war for hearts and minds is lost,” Howard Wolfson, a veteran Democratic strategist, said recently on a podcast. “The reality here is that public opinion is shifting very quickly and very dramatically away from Israel.”

And later in the article:

More Americans now say they sympathize with Palestinians than with Israel in the conflict (37% to 36%), for the first time since the question began to be asked in 2001. And half of Republican or Republican-leaning voters under age 50 now say they have negative views of Israel.

Across Europe, Israel now registers record-low approval ratings. Nearly half of British adults say Israel is treating the Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews in the Holocaust, and antisemitic attitudes in the U.K. have doubled in the past five years. The ongoing conflict is leading to a surge in antisemitism across the globe …

Someone I respect immensely, Daniel Pipes, who has been highly enthusiastic about the prospect of completely destroying Hamas, thinks it’s time to change course.

https://www.danielpipes.org/22646/how-israel-became-a-leper-state-and-how-it-can

My opinion? Israel became “a pariah state” a long time ago. I’ve written on the topic before and won’t go into depth here, but it started in the 1960s when the USSR turned its back on Israel and began an intense campaign to make the world hate Israel – which the world was only too happy to do (see this). The heinous 1972 Munich Olympics attack only served, ultimately, to enhance Arafat’s status and demand for a Palestinian state. By the year 2001 the international hatred of Israel had reached epic proportions with the notorious Durban conference.

All of this was accomplished though propaganda/lies from not just the Palestinians but the Russians and China, and the amplification and spread of those lies by the Western MSM, the internet and especially social media such as TikTok, the international courts, NGOs, and of course academia.

The existence of anti-Semitism – otherwise known as Jew-hatred – is a huge element in the propensity to believe the Jewish state of Israel to be uniquely evil. I submit that there was no way whatsoever that Israel could have defended itself post-10/7 that would have changed that. For example, the huge and widespread demonstrations against Israel began on 10/8 before Israel had done a thing. And the “Gazans are starving and its Israel’s fault” message started almost immediately, too.

Europe has never been fond of its Jews and for many centuries persecuted them, and many European countries were only too happy to cooperate with Hitler’s plans to make them Judenfrei. As many Western European countries turned more to the left – and had to placate their swelling numbers of pro-Palestinian Jew-hating Islamic immigrants (who far outnumber those countries’ Jews) – the antipathy to Israel grew and took on a practical political aspect as well.

In the US, the growing leftism among the young and the anti-Israel nature of academia tells much of the tale. As for anti-Israel sentiment on the Tucker/Owens/Fuentes fringe of the right, they are using their internet and media power to spread an anti-Israel message that has been latent on the right for decades (perhaps forever) and which mainly lands with the young. One of the first things I noticed when I went online around 1996 was the vast amount of anti-Jew and anti-Israel propaganda being pushed by a plethora of sites. Some of the sites have changed but the message is the same, or worse.

So when Pipes writes, “If Israel’s post-Oct. 7 campaign in Gaza began with the goal of eradicating Hamas, it has become a mission to salvage its own reputation,” I respond, “what reputation?”, as well as “what choice did Israel have?” Pipes’ recommendation in that article that Israel should never have tried to free the hostages but should have just gone full speed ahead with the war is profoundly unrealistic, and that’s putting it kindly. It ignores the fact that not trying to free the hostages would have shattered Israeli society and any unity the government needed to fight the war, it ignores the fact that until late January of 2025 it was President Biden throwing huge roadblocks in Israel’s way and that the cooperation of the US was sorely needed, and it ignores the fact that lies spread with the cooperation of most of the world are tremendously difficult (probably impossible) to counter.

A “no” on unity

The New Neo Posted on by

Did you ever have a friend or lover or spouse or relative who did something for which that person needed to do some soul-searching, make some changes, and apologize, and that person didn’t do any of that but merely asserted that he or she had “moved on” and “put it behind” him or her, and why couldn’t you do the same? It’s funny how perps are often so eager to say forget it, and to berate you for not being similarly magnanimous.

Easy to want to move on when it’s your own crimes you want to forget. It’s a bit harder for the victim.

And so it is with “unity.” After decades of the left falsely calling the right Nazis and fascists and a threat to the Constitution and democracy (accusations that have increased in the last decade), after countless riots, after a leftist almost blowing Trump’s head off at a rally and countless other leftists regretting only that the would-be assassin wasn’t successful, after another attempt on Trump’s life from another leftist, after the near-murder of Scalise, after the attack on Rand, and now after the successful assassination of rising conservative star Charlie Kirk and the left celebrating it and lying about the leftist leanings of the suspect (and Kirk’s message itself) and trying to pin the crime on MAGA – now, after all that, some Democrats want unity and for the right to forgive and forget.

J. D. Vance has a few words for them:

“There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents’ politics,” he added. “There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder. There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend.”

“There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” the VP continued. “And there is no unity with the people who fund these articles, who pay the salaries of these terrorist sympathizers. Who argue that Charlie Kirk….deserved a shot to the neck because he spoke words with which they disagree.”

The Kirk assassination: were there accessories before the fact and/or accessories after the fact? [scroll down for UPDATE]

The New Neo Posted on by

The question of whether Tyler Robinson may have had accomplices is being investigated, and for good reason:

The feds have widened their investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk to probe whether pro-trans, online groups and others connected with Tyler Robinson knew in advance about the plan to kill the MAGA influencer, The Post has learned.

Law enforcement sources said that investigators are examining leftist groups both in Utah and online to figure out if they helped him with the shooting — or at least heard it was going to happen.

The probe includes groups in online gaming community Steam, as well as a pro-trans organization called Armed Queers SLC, which took down their Instagram after Kirk was killed, the source confirmed.

The question seems to be whether this was actual knowledge of what was to happen, and if so was it actionable knowledge and even assistance. Or were the type of discussions that are being revealed more a form of sick jokes, repulsive snark, and/or random threats, versus real knowledge? I don’t have the answer, but I hope the answer will emerge.

For example, someone with the moniker “Omar” wrote on September 9: “Charlie kirk is coming to my college tomorrow i rlly hope someone evaporates him literally.” and then “Lets just say something big will happen tomorrow” with a grinning dog photo. Then after the assassination, “Omar” wrote: “CHARLIE KIRK GOT SHOT BRO I PROMISE I DIDNT HSVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT.”

Were these threats just trash talk, or something more?

In addition:

Another widely-shared archived post from a TikTok user appearing to be made a day before the shooting uses ominous music and a video of a person wearing glasses and what appears to be a medical scrubs cap accompanied by the disturbing text, “charles james kirk. mr. college dropout does NOT know what’s coming tomorrow. be ready… This isn’t a threat it’s a promise.”

The video was captioned “it’s a BADDD day to be charlie [tomorrow] #uvu #charliekirk #liberal #debate #fyp.”

And then there’s Robinson’s roommate (perhaps his trans lover) who received incriminating messages from Robinson:

When investigators contacted the roommate, he said Robinson “made a joke on Discord,” a social messaging app, which caused law enforcement to ask him to show them the messages, according to an arrest affidavit.

The messages from “Tyler” stated a “need to retrieve a rifle from a drop point, leaving the rifle in a bush, messages related to visually watching the area where a rifle was left and a message referring to having left the rifle wrapped in a towel,” the affidavit shows.

I haven’t read anything that gives much context to this; for example, what possible reason would there be to assume it was a joke, was it prior to the murder or after, was it to a group or to the roommate alone, what was the group, and what were the responses? If it was an attempt to get the roommate to actually retrieve the gun, it reminds me of the case of Charles Stuart in Boston, who got his brother Matthew to dispose of the gun thinking he was involved in an insurance scam when it actually was the murder of Charles Stuart’s wife. It was Matthew, by the way, who went to police and implicated Charles, and Matthew spent several years in prison for his own role.

And then there was Michael Fortier of the Oklahoma City bombing:

At state and federal bombing trials, Fortier testified he received stolen weapons that were sold to finance the bombing, shared money from their sale with McVeigh, handled blasting caps and other explosives and had the same anti-government literature that McVeigh gave Nichols.

Fortier also accompanied McVeigh on a trip where they cased the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building four months before it was bombed on April 19, 1995, killing 168 people and injuring more than 500 others.

Lori Fortier, who was granted immunity and never served prison time, also testified at McVeigh’s trial that she laminated a fake driver’s license for McVeigh with the name of one of the many aliases he used, Robert Kling. …

However, Aitan Goelman, a Washington attorney who served on the bombing prosecution team, said it is appropriate that Fortier is being freed.

“He has paid his debt to society,” Goelman said. “Knowing about a horrible crime and doing nothing to prevent it is on one side, and on the other side of the scale is the tremendous assistance he provided to the government in order to prosecute the guys who actually did the bombing.”

Fortier pled guilty to a lesser charge, gave the state important testimony, and his wife got off. He (or they?) have apparently been given new identity (identities?) and are in the witness protection program.

The investigation into the Kirk assassination and the involvement of others is still in its infancy. But even if the FBI determines there was no meaningful or actionable involvement, the conspiracy theories will never die – and it’s easy to see why.

UPDATE 6:15 PM:

Robinson appears to have confessed to his buddies on Discord, but very shortly before he turned himself in. Makes me wonder if he’ll plead guilty:

Tyler Robinson apparently confessed to killing conservative icon Charlie Kirk in an online message to nearly three dozen people the day after the assassination.

“Hey guys, I have bad news for you all,” reads a chat message purportedly sent by Robinson, 22, through online community Discord, according to the Washington Post.

“It was me at UVU yesterday. i’m sorry for all of this,” Robinson allegedly wrote.

“Im surrendering through a sheriff friend in a few moments. thanks for all the good times and laughs, you’ve all been so amazing, thank you all for everything.”

I don’t think this goes to the issue of whether they have any legal liability, if it truly happened right before he turned himself in. But the tone is fascinating, and shows either what a psychopath can do or how some people can compartmentalize their personalities.

Health update on my ex-husband

The New Neo Posted on by

The summary version: he’s (knock wood) doing a great deal better.

The major crisis – which lasted about four months and required three or four visits to the ER (I forget exactly how many), one hospital stay of several days, and about two and a half weeks in rehab – has mercifully passed. He still has a chronic degenerative illness plus a few other major odds and ends. But for now the intense new problems have mostly receded and he’s once again living successfully on his own – with a little nagging from me, of course.

I’m very grateful for all your prayers and good wishes.

Oliver and Fawn, together at last

The New Neo Posted on by

This story seemed so odd when I saw it that I wondered whether it was for real. But apparently, it is:

Oliver North and his loyal former secretary Fawn Hall reportedly married in secret last month — 40 years after their leading roles in the infamous Iran-Contra affair.

A copy of the couple’s marriage license, obtained by journalist Michael Isikoff, shows North, 81, and Hall, 65, were married in Arlington County, Virginia, on Aug. 27. …

After the scandal, Hall worked as a model in Hollywood, Calif., where she married Danny Sugarman, the manager of rock band The Doors, in 1993.

Hall was married to Sugarman until his death in 2005. …

North reconnected with Hall last December, at the funeral for his wife of 56 years, according to Isikoff, writing for the “SpyTalk” Substack page.

“She rekindled the relationship at the funeral,” a friend of the couple said. “They started spending time together.”

And there you have it.