Disney’s ABC has OFFICIALLY removed Jimmy Kimmel from the air nationwide, effective immediately and indefinitely, after his lies regarding Charlie Kirk’s assassination. by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Disney’s ABC has OFFICIALLY removed Jimmy Kimmel from the air nationwide, effective immediately and indefinitely, after his lies regarding Charlie Kirk’s assassination.

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, September 25, 2025 11:57
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VIEWED: 3408
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Wednesday, September 24, 2025 12:42 PM

THG

Keep it real please

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Winning.

https://deadline.com/2025/09/jimmy-kimmel-live-off-abc-charlie-kirk-co
mments-1236547397/

Go fuck yourself, Ted.

Your world is getting smaller and smaller by the day.

Just like I keep telling you it would.

Winning...

T

Jimmy Kimmel RETURNS to television as Trump seethes and threatens to sue

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Wednesday, September 24, 2025 5:40 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Why don't you read what I wrote yesterday, Ted.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2025 5:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Bullshit out of Paul Krugman's mouth in 2025 isn't helping anybody except for those among us who want to spend every day of the rest of their lives angry at other people.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
6ixStringJack, why did you change your signature today, from The Democrats are the party of Murder to an obviously religious theme? Because Charlie Kirk died for your sins. Charlie is a Martyr.

It's lyrics to a song, dummy. Don't worry about it. It's way over your head.

Democrats are still the party of murder, and Paul Krugman is hate porn for morons.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2025 6:59 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Bullshit out of Paul Krugman's mouth in 2025 isn't helping anybody except for those among us who want to spend every day of the rest of their lives angry at other people.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
6ixStringJack, why did you change your signature today, from The Democrats are the party of Murder to an obviously religious theme? Because Charlie Kirk died for your sins. Charlie is a Martyr.

It's lyrics to a song, dummy. Don't worry about it. It's way over your head.

Democrats are still the party of murder, and Paul Krugman is hate porn for morons.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

Yanno what? I've got time...

Not that I imagine this will be time well spent since I won't change anything by writing this, but you were perceptive enough to notice the change and you asked a question. Even if you followed it up with whatever bullshit you posted that I didn't read, as per usual, you asked a good question.

Why did I change my signature? It used to read Democrats are the Party of Murder., and now it reads For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

There are actually three posts I made last night that I would like you to read if you have the time. The first was a very ill-timed ask of everyone here what their predictions for Jimmy's show was going to be, both short-term and long-term.

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67107&mid=12294
02#1229402

* My apologies for not toning down the rhetoric for you, but if you manage to just disregard the insults along the way, I think you'll find my prediction for how the monologue was going to go down was spot on. And mark my words, one day, especially if last night was the beginning of a turning point in America and Jimmy does the right thing with the rare gift he was given last night, it will come out that somebody high up in the "old school" Democratic Party wrote a majority of that monologue. My money would be on Rahm Emanuel, even if he wasn't actually the person who wrote it, and it would be brought to the "top of mind" for voters when he launches his campaign for President.

That's not the important bit though. Did you read my $1.4 Trillion PowerBall pick?

http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=67107&mid=12294
05#1229405

After proof reading and making changes, I put an edit on the end saying that I really liked that scenario. One where Trump was actually invited onto the show and Donny and Jimmy had a Ceasefire.

Quote:
I've got my fingers crossed that this is more or less the way things go down tonight. I didn't win the big PowerBall a few weeks ago when I played for the first time in quite a few years, but maybe I win this one...?

It sounds kind of nice...

Waking up a few tens of millions of people the furthest on either side just for a moment to slip that little seed in their brains that we can disagree with each other, but everybody we disagree with isn't automatically Satan.

Am I wrong? Doesn't that sound nice?

I thought it sounded kind of nice.

And then the monologue went down almost exactly as I originally predicted that it would. (I can't say anything about the rest of the show because I didn't watch it myself and I refuse to watch anybody else's take on it).

I feel my review of his monologue was fair and I stand by every word of it. Even appreciating the Tylenol joke near the beginning.

But again, the important bit of that post was this...

Quote:
It all sounded great, Jimmy.

Now stop being a chronic fuck face and stop riling up all the other chronic fuck faces five nights a week. Just do your fucking job and entertain us.

I'm looking for the country to heal, and I'm looking for people finding ways to finally, GENUINELY try to turn down the temperature.

You, Jimmy, are in a position of influence that can make this happen. But if you go right back to the show you used to do up until last week and pretend that more than half the country didn't hate you going into last week, your viewership is going to tank again and everyone is just going to keep being pissed off at each other forever.

I'd suggest for all of us that you don't do that. And I'd suggest that you encourage people like Ted and Second to stop being assholes to everybody else all the time too.

Maybe this will work out well for everyone in the end.

Honestly, I don't think this monologue could have possibly been any better than it was, given your current vantage point. What you choose to do with that now is up to you.

The ball is in your court.

So...

As I'm writing that last night and making a few edits, I realize how incongruous my posts of the night and my signature for the last week were with each other.

It didn't make any sense for me to even post like that if I was going to continue using that signature to punctuate every post I made.

Charlie Kirk was murdered for embodying everything you claim to be fighting for when Jimmy was being cancelled from TV. And the fact that you don't see that is simply shocking to me.

But I realize that I may be a big part of the problem. As long as you have a totem to focus all of your hate on and personal justification for it, you don't ever have to budge a single inch on anything and you can go around believing that you have all the answers for everything and that anyone who disagrees with any thought in your head is Super Mecha Hitler Satan.

...

So why did I change my signature last night?

I mostly did that for the benefit of Ted, but I did it for you as well. I did it for everybody, really.

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

I am not a perfect man. I've never pretended to be. Sometimes I think I'm just about the furthest you can possibly be from it while still residing on the top side of the horizon. I know who I am. I also know who I'm not.

I'm done with your hate man.

You guys burned down cities over the death of George Floyd for an entire summer, and everybody who supported Charlie Kirk all over the world got together peacefully and in a positive spirit to show their support. Nobody got hurt. No small business owners were ruined. Nobody died. The worst thing that happened were some of these events being crashed by people with rabies who were celebrating Kirk's death.

We're all just done with your hate.

I don't know all of the answers. Truth be told, I don't know most of them.

But I've been searching for quite a while behind the scenes, and I know I don't want to keep living with all this political shit and hate for much longer. I don't live it at all when I'm out in the real world. Being online so much has done this to me. It's done this to most of us.

I might never stop wandering, and I probably never will find any of the answers that matter.

But this bullshit we do here everyday is just so fucking stupid.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Wednesday, September 24, 2025 11:15 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Charlie Kirk hagiography shows our society's empty worship of form. He held debates, so he was a champion of free speech. Never mind that these were rigged events where he'd tempt unwary college kids to spar with him and then humiliate them with cheap rhetorical tricks and put the footage online.

This gets to something that as a former stand-up I recognized but couldn't name. A 31-year-old professional content creator baiting 19-year-old amateurs into the format of his choice isn't debate, it's crowd work. It's debate-shaped crowd work farmed for content.

Conservatives recognise that their biggest threat is an educated population. Shapiro ran the same grift and failed spectacularly against anyone who’d actually graduated. Another notable point is that Charlie was at Universities debating the students, not the professors.

Charlie didn't even rig the debates that well. He just started talking louder or some other aggressive tactic when he started losing.

His literal last words were these bullshit deflection tactics meant to dance around the actual issue and question posed to him. Like to be trying to avoid talking about gun violence and then get shot was so on the nose it would be cliche in a TV show but hey we're in hell so anything goes.

https://imgur.com/gallery/free-speech-vs-abusing-sleep-deprived-stress
ed-college-kids-running-late-to-western-civ-content-LffpstY

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 25, 2025 7:14 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump: Take Kimmel off the air!
[Kimmel gets taken off]

Trump: I had nothing to do with Kimmel getting taken off.
[Kimmel comes back]

Trump: Take Kimmel off the air again or I will make you pay!
[Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

I can't believe ABC Fake News gave Jimmy Kimmel his job back. The White House was told by ABC that his Show was cancelled! Something happened between then and now because his audience is GONE, and his "talent" was never there. Why would they want someone back who does so poorly, who's not funny, and who puts the Network in jeopardy by playing 99% positive Democrat GARBAGE. He is yet another arm of the DNC and, to the best of my knowledge, that would be a major Illegal Campaign Contribution. I think we're going to test ABC out on this. Let's see how we do. Last time I went after them, they gave me $16 Million Dollars. This one sounds even more lucrative. A true bunch of losers! Let Jimmy Kimmel rot in his bad Ratings.

Sep 23, 2025, 9:35 PM

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115256938634035559 ]

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 25, 2025 8:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Lower Than Cowards

The surrender of America’s elites

By Adam Serwer | September 25, 2025, 7:31 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/09/freedom-trump-threat
s-kimmel/684358/

“We have to speak out against this bully,” Jimmy Kimmel said in an emotional monologue after returning to ABC on Tuesday. The network had suspended him, under pressure from the Trump administration, for remarks last week in which Kimmel appeared to inaccurately suggest that Charlie Kirk’s killer was a conservative. Kimmel choked up when discussing the violence and praised Kirk’s widow, Erika.

But he also warned his viewers—an audience four times larger than usual—that Trump and his cronies are threatening free speech in all its forms: “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their jobs, because he can’t take a joke,” Kimmel said. But “he’s not stopping. And it’s not just comedy.” True to form, Trump has since threatened to sue ABC for bringing Kimmel back, as if it were illegal not to like him.

Kimmel’s refusal to capitulate stands out because so many other well-situated people—those with the resources, platform, and power to stand up to the president, including, initially, the leaders of ABC—have surrendered, withdrawn, or become Trump sycophants themselves. One by one, American leaders supposedly committed to principles of free speech, due process, democracy, and equality have abandoned those ideals when menaced by the Trump administration. These cascading acts of cowardice from the people best positioned to resist Trump’s authoritarian power grabs have made Trump seem exponentially more powerful than he actually is, sapping strength from others who might have discovered the courage to stand up. Defending democracy requires a collective refusal to acquiesce to lawless behavior from many different sectors of society. All of these powerful people trying to save their own skin have effectively multiplied Trump’s attacks on constitutional government, by enhancing a false sense of inevitably and invincibility.

ABC and its parent company, Disney, had been menaced into suspending Kimmel by Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission. “We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said on a right-wing podcast.

He later attempted to walk back what he’d said—despite what your lying ears may have heard, and despite his gloating on social media. As it turns out, you can’t sell your soul to Trump and keep your spine; they’re a package deal. Nonetheless, the bullying was effective. Kimmel may have returned to ABC, but two of the network’s biggest broadcasters, Sinclair and Nexstar, are still refusing to air him on their stations.

If Trump has been right about anything, it is that there is a deep rot in the upper echelons of American society, among people who have been put in positions of power and leadership. Trump understands that many of these people are weak, that their public commitment to civic principles can crumble under sustained pressure. In many cases, those folding have had ample resources to resist Trump’s shakedowns but haven’t been brave enough to do so. They are, in a word, chickenshit.

I want to distinguish between chickenshit and cowardice. Fear is part of human existence. Bravery is the overcoming of fear, not its absence. Acts of cowardice can be provoked by genuine danger—think of a deserting soldier fleeing the peril of the battlefield. When you’re chickenshit, you capitulate to avoid the mere possibility of discomfort, let alone something resembling real risk. Disney is one of the largest companies in the world, with a devoted following and a market cap bigger than many countries’ stock markets. It did not have to cave.

Big companies and their CEOs have cowered before Trumpist intimidation, trying to ease his temper by settling frivolous lawsuits over “bias” or slathering the president in juche-style flattery. Media companies have settled First Amendment cases they were likely to win in order to curry favor or protect their parent company’s commercial interests. Newspaper owners have compromised the integrity of their own publications. Elite academic institutions have sacrificed their independence to try to preserve their federal funding. At least one has turned the names of its own students over to the government for potential political persecution. Major law firms with deep pockets and armies of lawyers have shrunk from defending the rule of law because they fear Trump’s wrath.

Promoting her book, former Vice President Kamala Harris told the MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, “I always believed that if push came to shove, those titans of industry would be guardrails for our democracy, for the importance of sustaining democratic institutions.” Now we know most titans of industry won’t be fighting right-wing authoritarianism as fiercely as they would a tax hike on private equity.

For years the leaders of the Republican Party, with all its tough-guy bravado, have shrunk from standing up to Trump when it matters. But even the opposition party has been less confrontational this time around. This week, the House passed a congressional resolution honoring Kirk in part for “respect for his fellow Americans.”

The Congressional Black Caucus rightfully condemned his murder but also opposed the resolution, in part because of Kirk’s view that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed Jim Crow, was a “mistake” that had become an “anti-white weapon.” Kirk also called for the most recent Democratic president to be executed, which doesn’t seem very respectful, in all honesty. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries voted for the resolution anyway, saying, “I look at it as a two-page resolution that doesn’t even have the force of law.”

Everyone always has sound, rational reasons for caving to intimidation. They’re protecting their reputation, their job, their family, their institution, their investments—the number of reasons to succumb to an autocrat’s whims compound until fighting back can feel like a fool’s errand. Multiply that decision a thousand-fold, and you have a society in which people who could otherwise fight back collectively choose to surrender individually, thinking themselves alone. But in every case, the act of capitulation compromises the very thing those capitulating say they want to protect. Fighting doesn’t always result in victory, but surrendering guarantees defeat. The only people who have preserved their dignity or their rights in dealing with Trump are those who have been willing to stand up to him.

The sheer number of American elites willing to acquiesce to the destruction of democratic institutions is demoralizing. But it’s worth noting that many ordinary people seem to be made of sterner stuff. ICE detainees such as the Palestinian-rights activist Mahmoud Khalil, for example, have continued to speak publicly about the administration’s abuses. These are people who stand to lose their homes, their freedom, their families, and they are showing more courage than people who have summer homes and trust funds. Protesters continue to show up in the streets, risking being brutalized by armed agents of the state. In Washington, D.C., citizens called to serve on grand juries have refused to indict people accused by the Trump administration of political crimes.

The people, it turns out, are far more courageous than their leaders.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 25, 2025 8:55 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Vice President JD Vance has urged Democrats to "stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi" if they want to end political violence in the United States.

"If you want to stop political violence stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo, if you want to stop political violence stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi."

House Democrat Eric Swalwell asked: "Why did @JDVance call Trump 'America's Hitler.'"

Vance sent a message to a friend in which he said: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a****** like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler."

Trump also has a track record of describing political opponents as "fascists."

Speaking in November 2023 he said: "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections."

During a Minnesota campaign event in August 2020 Trump said: "Democrats want to...replace American freedom with left-wing fascism. Fascists, they are fascists. Some of them, not all of them."

Canadian political commentator Marlene Robertson said: "Vance you called Trump America's Hitler before anyone else."

Columbia Journalism School teacher Marlow Stern commented: "The only major politicians who've called trump hitler: j.d. vance and rfk jr."

https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-says-nazi-should-not-used-insult-213
4222

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 25, 2025 10:47 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Vice President JD Vance has urged Democrats to "stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi" if they want to end political violence in the United States.

"If you want to stop political violence stop attacking our law enforcement as the Gestapo, if you want to stop political violence stop telling your supporters that everybody who disagrees with you is a Nazi."

House Democrat Eric Swalwell asked: "Why did @JDVance call Trump 'America's Hitler.'"

Vance sent a message to a friend in which he said: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a****** like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler."

Trump also has a track record of describing political opponents as "fascists."

Speaking in November 2023 he said: "We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country that lie and steal and cheat on elections."

During a Minnesota campaign event in August 2020 Trump said: "Democrats want to...replace American freedom with left-wing fascism. Fascists, they are fascists. Some of them, not all of them."

Canadian political commentator Marlene Robertson said: "Vance you called Trump America's Hitler before anyone else."

Columbia Journalism School teacher Marlow Stern commented: "The only major politicians who've called trump hitler: j.d. vance and rfk jr."

https://www.newsweek.com/jd-vance-says-nazi-should-not-used-insult-213
4222

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The right wants Charlie Kirk’s death to be a “George Floyd moment”

A conservative explains what Kirk meant to the MAGA movement — and how it’s reacting to his death.

By Zack Beauchamp | Sep 24, 2025, 1:14 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/on-the-right-newsletter/462695/charlie-kirk-george
-floyd-trump-kimmel

It is impossible, I think, to grasp the terrible consequences of Charlie Kirk’s death without understanding who he was in life.

Liberals had a dim view of that track record — focusing on his often-offensive radio broadcasts and contributions to President Donald Trump’s authoritarian project (like sending seven buses to the January 6 protest). However, to conservatives, he was something very different: not just an effective political organizer but a living symbol of democratic politics done the right way.

I must admit that this second perspective doesn’t come naturally to me. But I wanted to understand it better, so I reached out to Tanner Greer — a conservative author and essayist who had written brilliantly about what Kirk meant to the right on his blog The Scholar’s Stage.

In his piece, Greer argues that Kirk was “the indispensable man” on the populist right: Nobody else had his genius for organization or his extensive connections with nearly everyone of note in the MAGA movement. On an ideological level, per Greer, Kirk represented a vision of politics in which the populist right competes on the left’s turf, from universities to elections, and wins in direct political combat. In this, he stood against MAGA’s most radical anti-democratic voices.
https://scholars-stage.org/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of-charlie-k
irk/

So when he was killed, Greer explains, his many friends and allies saw it as proof that the broader left was now incapable of coexisting with even someone as genial and small-d democratic as Kirk — giving rise to the vehement, even authoritarian, response of people like Stephen Miller and Vice President JD Vance. Now, much of the right believes it’s their turn to seize control of culture, to have a version of the left’s “George Floyd moment” of 2020.

I didn’t agree with much of the thinking Greer described. But I found his explanation of it, to borrow a phrase, “indispensable.”

He helped me understand why leading Republicans blame an ill-defined “they” for Kirk’s killing, rather than a shooter who seemingly acted alone, and just how emotional these conservatives must be in the wake of Kirk’s passing. If we are to keep sharing a country, you need to understand this perspective — perhaps especially if you disagree with it.

What follows is a transcript of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.

Tell me what you think most people who only knew Kirk from his radio broadcasts missed about him.

Second only to Donald Trump himself, Kirk is probably the most important individual in creating the current intellectual and organizational landscape of the MAGA movement. You wouldn’t get any of this at all if all you knew of him was some guy who’s willing to say shocking things on the internet.

In the piece, I suggest there’s [several] aspects of Charlie Kirk that made him a very powerful individual. https://scholars-stage.org/bullets-and-ballots-the-legacy-of-charlie-k
irk/

First, the size of his audience. His radio show had about 500,000 people who listened to it. His TikTok channel had 7 million followers. He’s had campus debates that had upwards of 2 billion views in total all across the world. Five million Twitter followers on top of that. So he had this giant megaphone. If he wanted to come out and publicly take a position, Republicans would listen.

The second thing that he had was TPUSA and the little organizations that were built off of it. TPUSA is a very large, 850- to 900-chapter organization. This is a mass mobilization machine. This is a mass talent-building machine, as future political leaders often come from people who were TPUSA chapter leaders in their universities. And then on top of that, he builds these other outreach organizations. He has a giant outreach organization for evangelical church leaders.

Then he has a vote-getting machine that is very active in swing states in the 2024 election — most Republicans seem to think that TPUSA’s Turning Point Action Committee might’ve gotten 10 to 20,000 votes in Arizona, which is basically the margin of a [close] election. They had perfected the strategy of basically primarying people for not being MAGA enough in Arizona, which is TPUSA’s organizational home, and they were going to go state to state to state in the near future.

Your third source of power is that he’s this connector.

Donors love him. He’s famously charismatic. Because he himself had kind of raised up this whole generation of new activists, he knew who was the best potential staffers or the best potential state House candidates or congressional candidates. There are several congressional candidates who came from TPUSA and are in Congress right now. And because he was running this podcast where he’s talking to the existing class of staffers, the existing media magnates, the existing politicians, he’s at the center of this network of people. And this is probably one of his most important roles in the right, especially the more MAGA right. He was constantly working to get people from one part or one of these constituencies to meet them with somebody else.

You wrote, “There are a good four dozen people in the Trump administration who owe their appointments to an introduction Kirk made on their behalf. And this was not only true of the Trump administration, but also across Congress and state governments and in news agencies like Fox News.“

It’s a guesstimate. The number might be underestimated — because Kirk was involved in a very personal way in vetting for this administration’s appointments.

You have to understand the right has a problem: We have a much smaller talent pool than the left. And if you are restricting it even further, if you need to restrict your talent pool to people who are more MAGA — people [who] can pass a Laura Loomer test — then you have an even smaller number of potential people. And so Kirk basically spends all the months of November and December and January, every day, meeting with [then-White House personnel director] Sergio Gor, talking about, “Here’s somebody who might be good for this position, here’s somebody who shouldn’t be in that position.” And he wasn’t the only one doing that, but he was a big part of getting people in the door and keeping some people out.

But this isn’t just true for little [roles]. This is true for Cabinet members. JD Vance is there because of Charlie Kirk.

During [2016], Charlie Kirk took a three-month break from TPUSA to basically be Don Jr.‘s manager. And Kirk sends a text to Don and says [something like], “I know that this guy [Vance] said these things about how Trump was Hitler back in the time, but he’s had a conversion. He’s one of us now. You need to meet with him. You need to take him seriously. You need to introduce him to your dad.”

That’s how JD Vance got in with cahoots with Trump in the first place, just because of Charlie Kirk. If you listen to the Charlie Kirk radio show that JD Vance hosted, he mentions this story. And almost every single person they had from the administration come on has a very similar story. There’s half a dozen Cabinet-level or people just below that who can say, “Kirk advocated for me to have this position, and that helped tip the balance.”

You can hear that not just in what they said, but the way in which they said it, in the obvious pathos and emotionality that came across in the discussions of Kirk during that radio broadcast or during the funeral on Sunday night. They all say that they genuinely cared for Kirk.

Part of me thinks, “Well, everybody on the right wants to have been close to him now.” But listening to you talk and listening to some of the stories people tell, I think this is just actually true: that he really did mean a lot to a lot of the people that are in power right now. And so part of this vehement political reaction to Kirk’s death is born out of this deep emotional and personal connection with him.

I think that’s correct. If you look at the MAGA movement as a whole, Kirk was a lot of people’s friend. That’s why all these donors are able to give him so much money. He was very good at being very optimistic and being like, “We’re going to win, we can do this,” cheering people up.

This position at the center of the MAGA world network — in addition to these kind of institutional things that he built up, the big megaphone he had, his ability to basically leverage all of that into helping other people make connections — made him sort of an indispensable pillar of the movement.

So when he was shot, that was really not just an attack on somebody who says very controversial things. This is a person who helped pioneer [not only] the message, but also the institutions and the organizational networks of the current version of the right. And he did it by the time he was 31. An immensely talented individual.

One thing that’s also struck me in the responses and the way that these figures talk about Kirk’s death is the omnipresence of the word “they.” It’s “they” killed Charlie, “they” took Charlie from us, even though there’s no evidence that the shooter was in any kind of conspiracy.

So what do people on the right mean by “they?”

When George Floyd died in 2020, there was not a sense that this was the action of a single policeman, and if we put him in jail, then the problem’s over. There was rather a sense that you could only have a person like this policeman, who’s willing to stand on the neck of a Black man he’s just arrested until he dies — this could only happen if you have a larger systemic problem in America.

I think many, many people on the right want to have their own version of the 2020 moment, partially because their analysis is very structurally similar to how leftists thought about racism in 2020. They think there’s larger structural problems — that [the shooter] only can exist because of a larger culture that supports his conduct, excuses it, and allows it to happen.

All these people went through 2020 and they want to have a similar reckoning, because that was experienced by the right as a very harrowing event — where essentially every single institution in the United States, every university, every provost, most corporations all gave out statements talking about how what happened was an act of evil and we need to nationally atone for the sin. If you didn’t agree with that stuff, this felt very oppressive to you, like you were being chased out of the public sphere.

And I think this is the easiest way to make sense of why some people on the right feel very strongly that we need to do things like, say, take Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

They remember 2020, and they feel like if Jimmy Kimmel had gone against Black Lives Matter, he would’ve been taken off the air without the state. And we don’t have that same activist network [as the left], but we do have the state. And so we should try to create the same sort of structural cultural change that was imposed upon us in the Great Awokening.

Help me understand that comparison a little bit more. In the George Floyd scenario, it’s pretty easy to see what the structural roots of Derek Chauvin’s actions are — a policing sector, and a society more broadly, shot through with racism.

But in the Kirk case, what’s the equivalent force that created Kirk’s killer? Is it left-wing animosity toward conservatism? Is it mainstream liberal ideology? What is the thing that the violence against Kirk is supposed to be an outgrowth of? Who specifically are “they” that embody whatever the structure is?

This “they” will differ from person to person. I don’t think there’s a consensus. The possible options for “they” range from, at the narrowest, the kind of antifa people who are willing to use or at least endorse violence on the left. [At the broadest], it’s all the way to a [liberal] culture that sees Trump as inherently illegitimate and un-American and [as someone who] should be deplatformed.

Just to give you an example: Somebody was making a big deal out of a tweet that Vice President Harris had written in 2019, saying how basically, if we’re being honest with ourselves, Trump should be kicked off Twitter by now because of his bad comments. That was cited as an example of the left’s inherent desire to kick us out of public spaces. Very similar to when Hillary Clinton says, “[Half of] Trump supporters are a basket of deplorables.”

If you’re dehumanizing us, if you’re calling us deplorable, you’re basically saying we’re outside of the pale of American politics — then you are part of the “they” who basically dehumanizes someone like Kirk enough that he should be killed. I think that’s how they would say it.

I’m not trying to weigh in with my own opinions on this. I just want to understand better what is this “they”? Because to me, it seems analytically incoherent. JD Vance, for example, has brought up the Open Society Foundation, which in no plausible world had anything to do with Charlie Kirk’s death. But it was one of Vance’s political enemies.

Many actors on the right have for many years believed — and I have a lot of sympathies with this set of beliefs — that a lot of what the left has been about for the last decade, since the Great Awokening started, is basically making it difficult for conservatives to be part of the public sphere in a safe and confident way.

And that word “safe” is interesting because when you start talking about safety, you can start roping in several different streams, which I don’t think liberals would necessarily associate with each other, into one system. This allows you to say, okay, people being deplatformed on campuses, that’s one version of us not being able to participate publicly. All the way to the riots in 2020, which a lot of conservatives felt Democratic cities and the sitting government allowed — which made it impossible for a person like me to be in these urban spaces for X amount of time. They made these cities too dangerous for us to be in.

And that’s where people will do this kind of mining, where, okay, [liberal philanthropist George] Soros funded this Black Lives Matter-adjacent organization, which was making excuses for rioters here. That’s where they’ll kind of all connect that together.

Someone like you, you’ll look at that and say, “Well, what does that have to do with Charlie Kirk being assassinated by this [lone wolf]?” And I think a lot of people on the right will say, “No, no, no, this is a large systemic thing. All you guys excused the violence in 2020, excused antifa, excused taking over CHAZ, excused all this stuff because you normatively agreed with it and thought that Trump was bad enough that that this sort of violence was okay. And that’s the same attitude, that’s the same world that creates young guys who want to go and shoot one of our most prominent leaders.”

I think that’s how they would connect those dots.

Now, how does that attitude relate to something you talk about in the article at length, which is Kirk’s role in giving young conservatives permission to be themselves publicly in places like a university?

This question of what he meant to the young conservatives is quite relevant to this larger question: What is the “they”?

The way I explain it in this piece — this is really hard for liberals to believe — is that, if you were a young conservative on campus from 2013 to 2022, you felt afraid. Even when Trump was in power, a lot of these conservatives felt afraid. And this fear is really core to a lot of what has happened, I mean, really in this administration as well as people’s reactions to Kirk’s death.

If you were a young person on the right — you believe something like transgenderism is a lie or a mental disease, which is a pretty standard belief on the right — you were afraid to say what you believed because you felt like you would be socially ostracized, people on campus would bully you, harass you, treat you differently, you would have professors who might grade you differently, you wouldn’t have good job prospects, you would be afraid of becoming a viral example.

This is the environment in which TPUSA begins its giant rise. And Kirk’s campus tours, the sort of thing he was doing when he was shot, this is actually what they’re designed to combat. Yes, they created some viral clips, but that really was not their main purpose. Because Kirk was a campus activist first, a media figure second.

The purpose of these was for Kirk to go into these universities and say, “Hey, guys, look, we can be part of the public sphere. There are more of you than it seems. You guys are all afraid to stand up and show you’re conservative. I’m going to come here, I’m going to organize a TPUSA chapter, and you’re going to see that you’re not alone. Second, I’m going to go and debate all these people around you, anyone who wants to come up. A professor, a student, anyone who wants to can come and debate me. And I can show you guys that these beliefs we have are defendable. We can stand up, we can be part of the public sphere.”

And so there’s a lot of young conservatives who basically say, “Charlie Kirk made me unafraid to be an activist. Charlie Kirk is the one who made me unafraid to stand up for what I believed.”

Without someone like Charlie, the only people who would stand up for their conservative beliefs tended to be either extremely principled people or they were just assholes who like to be disagreeable. I’m sure you’ve probably met both of those sorts when you were in college. If you want to have a movement that isn’t just people like that, you have to find some way to inspire people to stand up. And that’s what Kirk was doing. He’s modeling to all these kids, look, you guys can do this too.

And that’s who was murdered. And so when the guy whose whole message is “you don’t have to be afraid” is shot, then it makes some sense why people might be feeling afraid.

That’s where I wanted to bring us to at the end: how both sides should feel about their enemies.

I have this fear, given Kirk’s personal significance, that the right’s authoritarian reaction to his death is not going to be a short-lived thing — you may disagree. But if Charlie Kirk was trying to create a politics where people who disagree could engage, the aftermath of his death is destroying that possibility. It’s making it very, very, very difficult for people across partisan lines to view each other with anything but mistrust and suspicion.

So what are we supposed to do about that?

I think there’s a little bit of a crossroads here. I think the right has to decide whether Kirk’s life or his death is the thing that should be remembered.

I think that Kirk’s life, although many aspects of it are very repellent to people on the left, is an example of how this conservative national populist thing can be done without authoritarian measures and be very popular. I personally am on the side of saying, “Guys, look, Kirk actually showed us the path for how to make this work, and we’d be stupid if we left it for something that we don’t know if it will work.”

What I’ve been telling people on the right is, if you seriously believe you’re going to have a 2020 moment, you guys are somewhat deluding yourselves. Because 2020 had very many special things that led up to it.

Obviously, you had a pandemic, everyone was cooped in their house and wanted to get out and be out. But in addition to that, you had years of activism. Black Lives Matter started seven years before 2020. And the New York Times had basically doubled its reporting on racism and racial problems in America in the three years that preceded 2020.

You had a huge amount of intellectual work being done. You had a huge amount of activism being done. And in many ways, 2020 was the culmination of a decade’s worth of theorizing and activism and changing public opinion. So I don’t think this attempt to use the state to have a 2020 moment is going to work. I just don’t think the public is there: I think it’s going to backfire.

And I understand, too, that certain people have a bad opinion of Kirk. But I do think that the impulse of some on the left to take this moment to say, “Well, Charlie Kirk was just this terrible person in all these ways, he said this terrible and that terrible thing, and we’re being censored if we don’t see otherwise” — to put it very frankly, lots of people on the [more radical] right are very happy to see those takes.

The debate the right has been having for a long time is “Do we think that the other side can live with us? How much of a threat really are they to us?” And so when the reaction of some people is to condemn the violence, but then talk about how actually it’s good that he’s gone, which is more or less what these people do, it sounds more like you are part of this structure of ideas that makes it acceptable for right-wing people to be killed.

A lot of people, a lot of politicians, understand this and have gone out of their way not to be inflammatory on all this. I think clearly this is what [former Vox co-founder and now New York Times columnist] Ezra Klein was thinking when he wrote that editorial. But he got dragged through the mud for that, and he really had to justify himself showing up, talking to people on the right.

Maybe it’s helpful if folks on the left don’t just discount Kirk as that terrible racist who says all these terrible things. If that’s the message you took away from all this, I think you’ll really misunderstand both what Kirk meant to the movement, but also what his death means to the movement as well.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Thursday, September 25, 2025 11:57 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The right wants Charlie Kirk’s death to be a “George Floyd moment”

No. We don't.

We've already proven how infinitely better as human beings that we are than you and your people are.

You are cancer, Second.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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