Considering her choice of pants, I think she already knows.
(I’m assuming the alleged couch was leather or pleather.)
This remains largely true, three weeks later. We are simply exhorted to consider Charlie Kirk a living saint, and never inconvenienced by having to read or hear what he actually said. (Which is pitfall-laden at best.)
His alleged sainthood is usually said to lie in his (again) alleged propensity to Talk To Everyone and Debate in Good Faith. The reality seems to be less admirable:
(I gave Substack an email months ago and so see the full article; it might be worthwhile to do so for those who appear to see a paywall. (No ‘pay’ required.) Substack does have a lot of content.)
After more than eight weeks since the shooting, it appears that he is still being discussed. Sporadically at best. Why he has not evaporated all but completely is beyond me.
How many winning topics do the Republicans have to talk about these days? That’s pretty much it, of course they’re going to milk it.
It’s also a massive effort at self-soothing on the part of right-wingers. For years they’ve enjoyed using incendiary apocalyptic rhetoric and violent imagery to demonize their political opponents, secure in the conviction that the only people who might resent it are soy-latte peacenik types and some distant brown mobs that they can fantasize about violently subduing.
That scenario means that the only people they expect to get actually hurt by any consequences of their gleefully aggressive rhetoric are the said political opponents, and various minorities and other people who are not them. But if their dehumanizing paranoid imagery of attack and treachery and slaughter and their demands for desperate militant resistance are also generating schisms and fears that could encourage violence against themselves… well, that is suddenly a lot more unsettling.
So the frantic insistence on forcing everybody to express veneration for Kirk is trying to reassure themselves that Kirk’s murder was just a universally repudiated extremely aberrant anomaly, and the fundamental social principle of “no political violence against straight white conservative Christians” remains in operation.
This makes a lot of sense. Yes, of course the shooting has to have disturbed their sense of safety (no matter how much provocative language they themselves use).
Just checking, but the basic facts have not changed, right? An uber MAGA kid from an uber MAGA family took one of his father’s rifles and shot Charlie Kirk because he wasn’t a big enough Trump fan.
Then the blame machine twisted the story to try to say Democrats were involved.
Then JD Vance started schtupping Kirk’s widow instead schtupping of his own wife (possible racist overtones involved).
That’s the quick version, right?
That’s my understanding.
There are clear parallels with the two guys who (allegedly) tried to shoot Trump. Both were right-wing.
And that ear, to this day, shows no marks in it. ( Blood packets? We’ll never know. )
I think this is either very oversimplified or flat out wrong. There was plenty of hope from the left that the kid was MAGA, but reality was more complicated.
I especially haven’t seen anything suggesting the killing was because Kirk wasn’t MAGA enough.
@Sherrerd if you have better info, I’d love to see it.
My information is that the Kirk shooter was from a very right-wing family. “MAGA-ness” wasn’t really assessed by any source I’ve seen.
“Democrats were involved” is a baseless rumor, true, and the parents of the alleged shooter Tyler Robinson are Mormons, gun owners and registered Republican voters (I don’t know about “uber MAGA”).
But AFAICT, Robinson himself is not a Trumper and was not motivated by Trump loyalism:
Natch, a lot of the credibility of these claims depends on how much confidence we place in Utah prosecutor Jeffrey Gray, whose official statements appear to be the source of them. But I know of no reason to suppose that the basic facts of the claims are in dispute.
Wait, what? By “basic facts”, do you mean “salacious rumors”, or what?
Mind you, I have no personal knowledge of, and zero personal interest in, whether JD Vance might be having an affair with Erika Kirk, though I very much doubt that it’s happening. But AFAIK the only “evidence” for such a hypothesis is that the two of them hugged affectionately in public at a recent MAGA event.