I kept waiting for this creature to turn cute:
Speech as incitement
Ace covers a few examples on the left here.
I suggest you go to the link and read it. It’s impossible to summarize.
But here’s one instance [emphasis mine]:
Meanwhile: the left has been promoting Cenk Uygur’s nephew …
… [H]e’s been celebrated by all the organs of leftist propaganda: Politico, CNN, the New York Times. He’s the Bro Whisperer for the left, and they want to make him famous.
What they don’t tell their readers, of course, is that he has been calling for the murder of Republicans (including Tom Cotton) and celebrating terrorist violence for years.
This is no fringe nobody. He is the biggest political streamer in the world, making millions of dollars, feted by the Democrat Party as the guy who is going to deliver them the young male vote again.
He urges his listeners to “gut” Republians and “shank” them: “You have to shank these motherf***ers so that their intestines writhe upon the stage! Slice ’em up! Slice ’em and f***in’ dice ’em!”
He also urges his followers to murder property owners, shouting “Kill them! Kill those motherf***ers! Murder those motherf***ers in the street! Let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood, dude!”
Bloodcurdling.
Kimmel, TV, and government coercion
The Jimmy Kimmel brouhaha has many elements to it. For example, the left sees the opportunity to frame it as the Trump administration unfairly pressuring the network to drop Kimmel because it didn’t like his remarks, and succeeding in getting their way.
But it’s perfectly okay for networks to drop shows if they don’t like the content and/or if they’re losing money. Kimmel’s show was already in big financial trouble, and was probably not going to be renewed. What’s more, by the time FCC head Carr made his statements (and I wish he hadn’t made them, because they were unnecessary under the circumstances and also gave the left ammunition for their accusations), the affiliates were already objecting to what Kimmel had said and saying they’d drop him, which put even more financial pressure on ABC to get rid of him even before his contract was up.
Plus, the FCC is actually charged with regulating networks – and there’s a law (unenforced for decades) about equal time for political speech. Some information on that:
Mollie and Mark Hemingway made this point: The federal government really does have a statutory regulatory power over broadcast networks. The airwaves are regulated by the government because we can’t just have six stations all attempting to broadcast on the same frequency in the same area, or else they’d all interfere with each other. So the federal government assigns these valuable spectrum rights to companies, but with restrictions and requirements. One is equal time, and Brenden Carr says he’s going to enforce that requirement.
More here [emphasis mine]:
… Carr makes a very important distinction about jurisdiction. The FCC issues licenses for broadcasters only pursuant to the Communications Act of 1934 and other legislation, ie, those whose signal goes out over the public airwaves. As Carr notes (and as I noted briefly last night), the FCC does not have jurisdiction over cable channels such as Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, or others. The FCC has absolutely nothing to do with online outlets either, nor newspapers. …
Most of the offensive material they would normally police has moved to cable or the Internet. The irony of this is that the FCC has largely stood down while the Biden administration essentially created its own OfCom [censorship operation] at the State Department and HHS, funding “misinformation” policing that targeted mainly the online and cable-channel markets. The federal government created censorship regimes on platforms where they had no jurisdiction, while allowing broadcasters to exploit government-provided monopolies with carte blanche on blatantly false content with clear partisan and malicious intent.
Now, one can argue that the FCC really should use a more laissez-faire approach to enforcing the “public interest” clause. However, one can’t argue that the authority doesn’t exist and hasn’t been enforced in the past.
The Biden administration pressured social media to censor the right and statements questioning the administration’s COVID policies, as Mark Zuckerberg has testified.
As the headline to this article says:
So Now the Left Is Against Government Extortion to Suppress Speech?
Congratulations, Democrats. You’re now living in the world you created.
The equal time requirement was never repealed, just ignored.
Also, we have this:
The Commission’s [FCC’s] prohibition against the broadcast of hoaxes is set forth at Section 73.1217 of the Commission’s rules, 47 C.F.R. § 73.1217. This rule prohibits broadcast licensees or permittees from broadcasting false information concerning a crime or a catastrophe if:
— the licensee knows this information is false;
— it is foreseeable that broadcast of the information will cause substantial public harm; and
— broadcast of the information does in fact directly cause substantial public harm.
Kimmel was giving out false information about a crime, and that information could cause public harm (although it doesn’t seem to have actually caused harm in any provable way). You’d also have to prove that Kimmel knew it was false, which could be difficult. So I don’t think this rule would apply.
More here:
First, a summary of what happened. Kimmel during his show’s opening monologue on September 15, 2025 blatantly lied, claiming that Kirk’s murderer was a conservative and part of Trump’s MAGA movement. Not only was this statement fundamentally untrue, based all the available evidence, it was an evil slander against the millions of people who voted for Donald Trump.
The uproar against Kimmel was immediate and gigantic. Within hours local affiliates told ABC they would not air Jimmy Kimmel Live!. FCC chairman Brendan Carr said that if ABC did not take action to publicly correct the record its FCC license could be revoked.
It is important to point out that Kimmel did not lose his job because of government action — though that action was threatened. He got fired because numerous ABC affiliate stations told the network that they would no longer air his show. These local stations decided they had had enough of this slander culture. It had to stop.
ABC was thus forced to take action. It knew that if it didn’t address the concerns of its local affiliates, its entire network could collapse.
Nor is Kimmel’s removal an unjustified action similar to the hundreds of blacklisting cases I have documented since 2020. Kimmel wasn’t fired because he stated an opinion based on reasonable facts — the typical situation when conservatives were blacklisted for the past decade. He was fired for spreading a lie about current events that could be easily verified to be false in only a few seconds of research on line. And the lie was expressly designed to defame Kimmel’s political opponents in the most vile manner.
However, Kimmel didn’t actually say point blank that the killer was MAGA. He said this: “The MAGA Gang (is) 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 was strongly implying the killer is MAGA and that saying the killer is anything other than MAGA is false. The implicit assumption – no other interpretation makes sense – is that of course the killer is MAGA. That is something for which there is zero evidence and goes against everything police and FBI had said at that point and thereafter. But he may have phrased it that way in an attempt to avoid exactly what happened.
They come to bury Kirk, not to praise him
More fallout from the Kirk assassination:
The House of Representatives passed a resolution on Friday condemning political violence and honoring Charlie Kirk, but nearly a hundred Democrats refused to support it. The final tally was 310-58, with every Republican voting in favor and 96 Democrats either voting against it or refusing to take a stand at all by voting present. That raw number is impossible to ignore: Close to 100 Democrats balked at denouncing political violence when the resolution also praised Kirk’s legacy.
What sort of praise was deemed unconscionable by so many Democrats? This sort of thing:
The resolution, which House Speaker Mike Johnson sponsored, honored Kirk as a “courageous American patriot” who modeled civil discussion and promoted unity without abandoning conviction. It described his dedication to free speech and debate as being done with “honor, courage, and respect.”
All of that is true, but the left can’t afford to admit it. There’s no list of the 100, but among them were most of the Black Caucus members, who signed on to a statement that included:
“The resolution introduced in the House to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy is not about healing, lowering the temperature of our political discourse, or even ensuring the safety of members of Congress, staff, and Capitol personnel,” they wrote. “It is, unfortunately, an attempt to legitimize Kirk’s worldview — a worldview that includes ideas many Americans find racist, harmful, and fundamentally un-American.”
The caucus outlined some of Kirk’s past comments that they said they “strongly” disagreed with, listing “his belief that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which ended racial segregation, was a mistake; his denial that systemic racism exists; his promotion of the Great Replacement theory; and his offensive claims about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, Michelle Obama, and Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee lacking adequate cognitive ability.”
So the misrepresentation by lack of context continues. Kirk was against the 1964 act for the following reasons, which are not racist and obviously he was not at all in favor of continuing segregation, which is the implication of what the caucus wrote:
“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk told the crowd at his annual conservative political conference, AmericaFest, in 2023. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
It was a refrain Kirk would return to often in public remarks and on his social media talk show. He argued the bill “created a beast” focused on equality of outcomes rather than equality of opportunity, and that it “led to more crime.”
Denial that systemic racism exists is a completely mainstream belief, and his claims about these particular black women had to do with their being, in his opinion, DEI hires. Here’s the actual quote, which occurred two weeks after SCOTUS ruled against affirmative action in university admissions:
If we would have said three weeks ago […] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action.”
Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.
The article goes on to add that Kirk showed clips to back up his assertion that the women themselves were admitting they were DEI and/or affirmative action hires. What he said about the women was certainly one of his less tactful remarks, but it rested on their own words.
Now that Kirk’s been murdered by a leftist one would think the Democrats would be able to join in the sort of generalized praise that the bill contained, but they refused. However, they did push an alternate bill that condemned all political violence:
Rep. Marc Veasey (D-Texas) introduced an alternative measure this week condemning political violence in general, citing Kirk’s murder and last year’s assassination attempts against President Donald Trump, as well as attacks targeting Democrats and the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot. The measure garnered 118 cosponsors, all Democrats, as of Friday.
Of course, the only person murdered on J6 was Trump supporter Ashli Babbitt.
[NOTE: The title of this speech comes from Marc Antony’s oration at Caesar’s funeral.]
Open thread 9/19/2025
The “it’s the Jews who did it!” folks didn’t waste any time
As expected.
I didn’t know exactly what form it would take, but after I heard that Charlie Kirk had been assassinated, I considered it inevitable that the Jew-haters would blame the Jews, and quickly. This of course includes the Jew-haters on the right, one of whom (Candace Owens) I wrote about recently in this post.
I didn’t know exactly what form it would take, because Charlie Kirk was such a strong supporter of Israel. But where there’s a Jew-hating will, there’s a Jew-hating way that the narrative can be shaped.
And so we have this:
One of the most popular unfounded narratives promoted a “false flag” conspiracy theory, suggesting Israel or Jewish organizations colluded to have Kirk killed because he had supposedly become more critical of Israel, or that Israel suspected he would eventually “turn on them.” An initial analysis on September 11 found that there were over 10,000 posts on X that included the phrase, ‘Israel killed Charlie Kirk.’ As of September 16, five days later, that figure has increased to over 72,000.
Please read the whole thing if you want to get an idea of how widespread it’s been. It doesn’t list the politics of all the people spreading this sort of word, but they seem to be people who liked Charlie and they seemed therefore to be on the right. Some, of course, are unequivocally on the right; this guy follows the typical “I’m just asking questions” modus operandi of Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens:
I’ve got questions about Charlie Kirk’s assassination:
> He used to be an Israel loyalist
> He feared ‘Israel would kill him’
> He started *mildly* criticizing Israel
> He said Epstein was Mossad
> He said no Iran war on behalf of Israel
> He let anti-Zionists speak at his events
> Zionist media started attacking him
> Netanyahu calls Charlie about Israel visit
> FBI fires chief of Utah FBI field station
> Tells Ben Shapiro “question Israel”
> Loomer says Kirk backstabbed Trump
> Charlie shot in jugular from 200yd away
> Police arrest patsy claiming to be shooter
> Patsy tells “shoot me!” during arrest
> Actual shooter flees without a trace
> Netanyahu tweets within minutes
> Israeli media 1st to confirm Charlie’s death
> Assassin escapes without a trace
> Private jet takes off 12 minutes away
> Private jet disables location monitoring
> Jet is owned by Chabad Lubavitch donor
> Netanyahu posts about Charlie’s Israel trip
> Police arrest 2nd suspect with pellet gun
> 2nd suspect is not the shooter
> FBI claims they have photos of shooter
> Rifle found in nearby wooded area
> Scope was likely planted on shooter’s gun
> FBI says shooter was wearing tactical gear
> FBI releases photos of suspected shooter
> Alleged shooter wearing no tactical gear
> Alleged shooter not carrying gun in photos
> Zionists go on social media blitz about Kirk
> Netanyahu goes on media blitz about Kirk
> Netanyahu says Islamist behind shooting
> Netanyahu says Israel didn’t kill Kirk
> FBI says foreign intel assisting manhuntBut I’m sure it was just some random liberal kid…
That was written prior to Robinson’s arrest and all the revelations that followed.
But Hinkle is small potatoes compared to Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson. As Roger L. Simon (who used to be quite friendly with Carlson) writes:
… [N]ow we are learning that, according to Tucker, Charlie Kirk had secret concerns with Israel despite all Charlie’s public praise for the Jewish state we have seen and can see now on YouTube. We have to take Tucker’s word as evidence. It’s hard to do. Meanwhile, he seems to be positioning himself as the posthumous spokesperson for Kirk who most agree is already well-represented by his wife Erika.
The whole thing is at once creepy and ineffably sad. The best we can say for the new Tucker is that he is not as whacked-out as Candace Owens. Candace has become the poster woman for something we might call ICI or “Internet-Caused Insanity,” the lust for more and more online notoriety until your brains explode. Every day it’s something new. Brigitte Macron is a man. Stalin is Jewish. Now it’s the Jews who killed or coerced Charlie (hard to tell with Candace who appears to be dodging another defamation suit in her phrasing—one’s enough). Hedge fund manager Bill Ackman is in some kind of lead position in manipulating Kirk, she claims to have been told. Charlie’s own producer, Andrew Kolvet, has debunked the whole thing, but it’s nonsense on its face.
These people have enormous followings on the right, and although most people on the right don’t subscribe to this sort of hateful message, it does pull in way too many. The goal is not just to stir up the right against Israel and Jews – although that indeed is a big goal – but also to split the right and gain power (and clicks, of course).
Jew-hating is an ancient sport and its manifestations and motives are legion. It has taken root on the left (and among its adherents number some ethnic Jews, which is not new either). It has a long history on the right, too, although in recent years that segment of the right had shrunk way way down. But it’s growing again, fanned by online “influencers” with massive followings. Yes, some of those followers are bots. But way too many are real.
If they can twist the assassination of Kirk into a supposed Jewish plot, they can do the same for just about anything. But that’s the protean nature of Jew-hatred.
[ADDENDUM: See also this for a report of recent coolness between Kirk and Owens. Hat tip: commenter “Jon baker.”]
Roundup, roundup, roundup
Some days the news just calls out for a roundup. So here it is.
(1) This was overdue. But better late than never:
“I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION,” Trump wrote. “I will also be strongly recommending that those funding ANTIFA be thoroughly investigated in accordance with the highest legal standards and practices. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
A White House official told CNN, “This is just one of many actions the president will take to address left wing organizations that fuel political violence.”
It’s been obvious for a long time that Antifa is funded by groups with deep pockets. The name, of course, signifies “anti-Fascist,” but in the best leftist/anarchist tradition the name is the opposite of what the group actually is.
(2) Jimmy Kimmel, buh-bye:
“Jimmy Kimmel Live will be preempted indefinitely,” a Disney spokesperson said.
Nexstar Media Group, which owns hundreds of television stations, announced earlier it would preempt Kimmel’s show on its ABC affiliates starting Wednesday night “for the foreseeable future” and would replace it with other programming over his comments about alleged Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson.
“Mr. Kimmel’s comments about the death of Mr. Kirk are offensive and insensitive at a critical time in our national political discourse, and we do not believe they reflect the spectrum of opinions, views or values of the local communities in which we are located,” Nexstar’s broadcasting chief, Andrew Alford, said in a press release.
“Continuing to give Mr. Kimmel a broadcast platform in the communities we serve is simply not in the public interest at the current time, and we have made the difficult decision to preempt his show in an effort to let cooler heads prevail as we move toward the resumption of respectful, constructive dialogue.”
Kimmel was singularly unentertaining prior to this, and his ratings weren’t good. I think that Nexstar was probably not planning to renew him even prior to this, and so this represents something that would have already happened in a little while.
As so many have pointed out, free speech doesn’t mean everyone has to give you a job and a platform. And those who shrieked against “misinformation” (much of which, like the origins of COVID, turned out to be true after all) seem to be massive purveyors of misinformation when it suits their political purposes; Kimmel was pushing the idea the Kirk’s killer was MAGA.
(3) Here’s a nefarious group that wasn’t previously on my radar screen. It’s called the 764 network:
Leonidas Varagiannis, also known as “War,” 21, a citizen of the United States residing in Thessaloniki, Greece, and Prasan Nepal, also known as “Trippy,” 20, of North Carolina, were arrested and charged for operating an international child exploitation enterprise known as “764,” a nihilistic violent extremist (NVE) network. Varagiannis was arrested yesterday in Greece; Nepal was arrested on April 22, 2025, in North Carolina and had a court appearance. Court hearings in Washington, D.C. are pending for both defendants. …
According to the affidavit in the District of Columbia, 764 is a network of nihilistic violent extremists who engage in criminal conduct in the United States and abroad, seeking to destroy civilized society through the corruption and exploitation of vulnerable populations, which often include minors. The 764 network’s accelerationist goals include social unrest and the downfall of the current world order, including the United States Government.
What a lovely bunch of people.
This seems relevant, considering recent events:
Using online and gaming platforms like X, Roblox, and Discord, members of the group befriend teenagers and coerce them to commit and document sexually-charged and violent behavior: graphic pornography, harming family pets, cutting themselves with sharp objects, and even committing suicide.
The internet broadens the reach of such groups – unfortunately.
(4) From Jim Treacher – I was wrong about Kirk:
I never paid that much attention to Charlie Kirk when he was alive. I knew who he was, what a prodigy he seemed to be, and that more and more people on the right were listening to him. But I’m not his target audience: young. So I just said, “Okay, good luck,” and went on with my day.
But years ago, Kirk figured out something that most media figures on the right hadn’t grasped yet: Young people aren’t reading National Review. They aren’t reading Substacks by obscure, marginally employable shut-ins with nothing better to do. (Ahem.) They aren’t reading much of anything.1
No, they’re listening to podcasts. They’re scrolling TikTok.2 They’re going to big crowded conferences full of other young people they might get a chance to spend some private time with. So that’s how he reached out to them.
And, as I’m learning, he was a terrific messenger: young, articulate, knowledgable, rational, calm, focused. Every debate video I’ve watched so far has been very impressive. He was masterful at what he did. …
But I regret not paying more attention to him when he was alive. I’m not MAGA, and a lot of MAGA people hate me for criticizing Trump when I think he’s wrong. So, I figured Kirk was akin to those clowns: “You’re owned, cry about it, cuck,” etc. Anger, resentment, spite. A thirst for humiliation. Some call it “Trumpism.” I put him in that category, if not the worst offender. Alex Jones Lite.
Now I know it wasn’t Kirk’s approach at all, and I wish it hadn’t taken his assassination for me to learn that.
Maybe you’re not listening to MAGA very well, either.
(5) The Brits are champs at pomp and circumstance, and they’ve pulled out all the stops for Trump’s state visit.
Open thread 9/18/2025
Obama does what Obama does best: blame the right
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
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
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.