Welcome to Friday, September 12, 2025, as October presses in on us ever urgently. It’s National Chocolate Milkshake Day, the typical American accompaniment to an order of burgers and fries (it usually comes with a coupon for an angioplasty). Here is Portillo’s famous “cake shake,” which I swear I’m going to get before the end of the year! It’s a chocolate shake that contains an entire piece of homemade chocolate cake fragmented in the milk and ice cream:
It’s also National Blackberry Day, National Just One Human Family Day, National Police Woman Day, and World Dolphin Day. Here’s a rescue of a baby dolphin from entangled in a fishing net. I hope it found its mom. I love the guy giving it a kiss before letting it go.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the September 12 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*While many people are apparently celebrating the murder of Charlie Kirk, even though he had a wife and two young kids, Jonathan Turley argues on his website that Kirk’s murder is symptomatic a new genre of political discourse: violence.
What is most chilling about the murder of Charlie Kirk is that it was not in the least surprising. Not anymore.
The response to TPUSA [“Turning Point USA: Kirk’s organization} was all too often rage and violence. Liberals and anti-free speech groups like Antifa would trash their tables and threaten the students. Recently, at UC Davis, police simply watched as a TPUSA tent was torn apart and the tent carried off.
Violent speech has long been acceptable on campuses so long as it targets conservatives. Teachers have called for others to “take out” Trump supporters and for the Secret Service to assassinate him.
University of Wisconsin Professor José Felipe Alvergue, head of the English Department, turned over the table of College Republicans supporting a conservative for the Wisconsin Supreme Court. He reportedly declared, “The time for this is over!”
At universities, professors have called for “detonating white people,” denouncing police, calling for Republicans to suffer, strangling police officers, celebrating the death of conservatives, calling for the killing of Trump supporters, supporting the murder of conservative protesters, and supporting the attempted assassination of President Trump. One professor who declared that there is “nothing wrong” with such acts of violence as killing conservatives was actually promoted.
At Hunter College in New York, Professor Shellyne Rodríguez trashed a pro-life display of students, telling the students that “This is bulls–t. This is violent. You’re triggering my students.”
When the students tried to engage the professor and apologized for upsetting her, Rodríguez yelled, “No you’re not — because you can’t even have a f–king baby. So you don’t even know what that is. Get this s–t the f–k out of here.” In an Instagram post, she is then shown trashing the table.
Turley gives other examples.
In recent months, some of us have warned Democratic politicians about their violent rhetoric. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D., N.Y.) has called for people to take to the streets to save democracy and posted a picture brandishing a baseball bat.
Former Democratic National Committee deputy chair Keith Ellison, now the Minnesota attorney general, once said Antifa would “strike fear in the heart” of Trump. Liberal sites sell Antifa items to celebrate the violent group.
California Governor Gavin Newsom declared, “I’m going to punch these sons of bitches in the mouth.” It follows other violent rhetoric from Democratic leaders.
. . .Yes, this is an age of rage. However, amidst the rage and the violence, there are a special few who have defied the threats and the attacks. The writer George Bernard Shaw once said that unreasonable people expect the world to conform to them. He then added that that was why all history is made by unreasonable people.
Kirk was one of those wonderfully unreasonable people who refused to yield; refused to be silenced. Despite unrelenting attacks by the media and the establishment, he remained undeterred and unbowed. Students need to remember not how Kirk died, but why he died. His loss is Charlie’s final challenge to all those today wringing their hands and muttering the usual expressions of shocked regret. Kirk would likely say, “prove it.” Speak. Defy those who spend their time silencing others rather than speaking themselves. If you want to honor Charlie Kirk, speak out, speak boldly on both the right and the left. Prove them wrong.
Now I diverge 100% from Kirk’s views, which are by and large repellent, but the remedy for speech like his is counterspeech. To his credit, he never espoused violence. Turley’s article is a bit misleading in that Republicans have also espoused violence, but most of what I hear along these lines comes from the Left, who are rightly enraged by many of Trump’s actions. But being enraged should lead to only two things: political actions like legal demonstrations, voting, and lobbying, and of course counterspeech.
Three relevant articles from the NYT, which agree with conservative Turley. You can look them up for yourself.
*The guy who killed Kirk was apparently a good shot since he fired from 200 meters away and hit a vulnerable spot, is still on the lam. There are new videos I’ll post tomorrow, by which time I hope they’ve caught him. (Remember, all people are assumed to be innocent until convicted in a trial.)
The authorities on Thursday released two images of a person they are seeking as they investigate the fatal shooting of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, indicating that they had not been able to identify him through facial recognition or other technology and needed the public’s help.
The grainy images show a man in a stairwell wearing a black shirt, a baseball cap and dark sunglasses. The authorities have described him as a person of interest. State and federal officials also said they had found a bolt-action rifle used in the attack, as well as imprints of a forearm, a palm and a shoe.
Investigators were able to track the gunman’s movements as he climbed onto the roof of a campus building, said Beau Mason, Utah’s public safety chief, at a news conference. Mr. Mason added that officials would release the images of the person they were tracking only if they could not identify him through other means.
The weapon used to kill Mr. Kirk, a close ally of President Trump, was a “high-powered bolt-action rifle” that investigators later found in a wooded area near the campus of Utah Valley University, where Mr. Kirk had been speaking to a large crowd on Wednesday afternoon, said Robert Bohls, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s Salt Lake City office.
Officials referred to the person they were hunting as a man throughout a news conference on Thursday morning. Mr. Mason said the person being sought “blended in well” at the campus because he appeared “to be of college age.”
He arrived on campus shortly before noon and used a stairway to make his way to the roof of a campus building overlooking the site of Mr. Kirk’s scheduled appearance, according to Mr. Mason. After the shooting — a single shot that hit Mr. Kirk in the neck — the person jumped from the roof and fled to a nearby neighborhood.
Most of the videos of the murder on X have been taken down, and I’m not sure why since you don’t have to watch them. I always think that if you see an incident, it can potentially give you more insight into what happened and to the reaction. If you want to see a not-too-gruesome video tweet, you can go here, but it’s still disturbing. What makes it more disturbing is that apparently Kirk’s wife and two kids saw it, too, and you can imagine the trauma they experienced. More on this later today.
Here’s the “person of interest” from the WSJ. The FBI is trying to trace the gun (“an older-model Mauser 30-06 caliber high-powered bolt-action rifle”) and presumably will try a match with the bullet that killed Kirk
Note the American flag tee-shirt. But we don’t know if this is the perp.
*More on the murder, which is dominating all the headlines. MSNBC fired a commentator for speculating about the murder:
MSNBC has fired Matthew Dowd, a political analyst whose on-air comments after Charlie Kirk’s death drew criticism, according to a person at the network briefed on the decision.
During a back-and-forth with the MSNBC anchor Katy Tur on Wednesday, Mr. Dowd remarked that Mr. Kirk had been pushing hate speech, adding that “hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”
Rebecca Kutler, MSNBC’s president, apologized for Mr. Dowd’s remarks, calling them “inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable.”
“There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise,” she said.
Mr. Dowd issued an apology on social media, saying that he did not intend for his comments “to blame Kirk for this horrendous attack.”
Mr. Dowd wasn’t the only person facing professional repercussions for statements following Mr. Kirk’s death. Sidney A. McPhee, the president of Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro, said that the university had fired an employee who made “inappropriate and callous comments on social media” after the shooting.
See below for some horrible social media comments. But what Dowd said is normal fare on places like Pharyngula, especially in the comments. Here’s Dowd making the statement that got him fired:
*Here’s a WSJ op-ed called, “University trustees have their heads in the sand” (archived here; h/t Bill). Of course, with a title like that I read it. It turns out that it’s about a tendentious and misguided Nature article urging decolonization of universities that I criticized three weeks ago. (You read it here first!).
As professors and students are returning to campus, the journal Nature has published another culture-war screed masquerading as academic critique.
In “Decolonize scientific institutions, don’t just diversify them,” eight scholars representing multiple fields declare that “Western science” is “rooted in colonization, racism and white supremacy.” The task of the scientist is thus no longer the dispassionate pursuit of objective truth—the scholars dismiss the whole idea as a myth—but rather the passion-filled, “anti-racist” work of “decolonizing” the disciplines and promoting “Indigenous research methodologies.” The scholars also advance something called “citation justice,” which takes the diversity, equity and inclusion ideology to a new stratosphere. They would even sort footnotes by race, sex and sexuality.
Loony jargon sloshing out of our universities isn’t new. But this particular provocation comes as many campuses are in crisis mode. The Trump administration has moved aggressively against grotesque antisemitism tolerated by elite schools. Universities have fought back, accusing the administration of extortion in pursuit of political sound bites. But the locus of the problem—and of eventual reform—is neither the faculty lounge nor the Oval Office. It’s the boardroom.
Most trustees by disposition aren’t fighters; they’re consensus-builders. They want to celebrate events that bring students and faculty together, like homecoming and graduation. Few joined their boards to patrol intellectual boundaries or invite scrutiny for asking too many questions. Many have written big checks in support of scholarships. Others are nostalgic for their own formative college experiences. They expect in return only football tickets and sympathetic consideration from admissions officers when their children or grandchildren apply. They have time and money, and they benevolently want to “give back.” They didn’t come to fight.
That’s too bad, because the radicals have already brought the fight to universities—and somebody in charge now needs to decide if this kind of work counts as credit toward tenure. Does activist scholarship entitle one to promotion from assistant to associate to full professor—with the attendant raises? At the most basic level, does spending professional time like this entitle scholars to relief from teaching obligations? The norm at top universities is to offer such relief for the performance of actual research.
That work doesn’t count for tenure or even scholarship here–at least not purely ideological work, though we’ll see what happens in Chicago’s new Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity. To me it seems that if any department blurs the boundary between activism and scholarship, it would be this one. At any rate, here is author Ben Sasse’s solution (he was president of the University of Florida as well as a U.S. Senator:
Boards need to take two immediate, concrete steps. First, demobify the campus. Lay out policies for both speakers and hiring that encourage greater intellectual diversity. American higher education is the world’s best—but radicalism and hyperpoliticization are endangering that.
Second, decide what to fund, and explain why. Merely repeating last year’s budget isn’t leadership. At most universities, two-thirds of all expenditures are personnel costs. So what is the cost of teaching each major, and the core curriculum, and other elective courses? Can it be broken to a credit-hours-generated level? And for research: What kinds of scholarship is the school subsidizing, to what types of measurable outcomes, and why?
The first one can and will happen; the second one won’t. Keeping budgets secret is what universities do.
*According to the AP, the Mars Rover has detected some features of rocks that may indicate the presence of life:
NASA’s Mars rover Perseverance has uncovered rocks in a dry river channel that may hold potential signs of ancient microscopic life, scientists reported Wednesday.
They stressed that in-depth analysis is needed of the sample gathered there by Perseverance — ideally in labs on Earth — before reaching any conclusions.
While acknowledging the latest analysis “certainly is not the final answer,” NASA’s science mission chief Nicky Fox said it’s ”the closest we’ve actually come to discovering ancient life on Mars.”
Roaming Mars since 2021, the rover cannot directly detect life, past or present. Instead, it carries a drill to penetrate rocks and tubes to hold the samples gathered from places judged most suitable for hosting life billions of years ago. The samples are awaiting retrieval to Earth — an ambitious plan that’s on hold as NASA seeks cheaper, quicker options.
. . . .Hurowitz said it’s the best, most compelling candidate yet in the rover’s search for potential signs of long-ago life. It was the 25th sample gathered; the tally is now up to 30. The findings appeared in the journal Nature.
The alternative plan involves sending back, somehow, 30 titanium tubes of samples, and it will cost $6-$7 billion dollars. A bit more:
[Lead researcher] Hurowitz said it’s the best, most compelling candidate yet in the rover’s search for potential signs of long-ago life. It was the 25th sample gathered; the tally is now up to 30. The findings appeared in the journal Nature.
. . .Collected last summer, the sample is from reddish, clay-rich mudstones in Neretva Vallis, a river channel that once carried water into Jezero Crater. This outcrop of sedimentary rock, known as the Bright Angel formation, was surveyed by Perseverance’s science instruments before the drill came out.
Along with organic carbon, a building block of life, Hurowitz and his team found minuscule specks, dubbed poppy seeds and leopard spots, that were enriched with iron phosphate and iron sulfide. On Earth, these chemical compounds are the byproducts when microorganisms chomp down on organic matter.
“There is no evidence of microbes on Mars today, but if any had been present on ancient Mars, they too might have reduced sulfate minerals to form sulfides in such a lake at Jezero Crater,” Bishop and Parente wrote in an accompanying editorial.
There’s no evidence of present-day life on Mars, but NASA over the decades has sent spacecraft to Mars in search of past watery environments that might have supported life way back when.
Here’s the article; click title to read for free. I couldn’t find any photos of the suggestive “poppy seeds and leopard spots,” either in the article itself or the Nature News & Views piece.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili asks a hard question:
Hili: Will the Enlightenment return someday?
Andrzej: It’s already coming back, through underground classes.
In Polish:
Hili: Czy Oświecenie jeszcze kiedyś wróci?
Ja: Już wraca, na tajnych kursach.
*******************
From Brainy Monkey. This appears to be true!
From Meow, a cat with a ‘stache:
From Give Me a Sign:
Masih has no tweets today, but JKR retweeted one that’s sensible on the Kirk murder:
We are appalled by the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
Words are words.
Violence is violence.Charlie Kirk believed in dialogue and he has paid for it with his life.
We condemn this despicable act in the strongest terms.— LGB Alliance (@AllianceLGB) September 11, 2025
Some of the hate that arose on Bluesky connected with the Kirk murder. (And Bluesky is supposed to be the “polite” site!) Look closely at all the people these morons want murdered:
Despicable.
I stumbled on some here too: pic.twitter.com/B7nTHtTM7W— Jayn, Doodles & Co. (@jaynlab) September 11, 2025
From my feed: a call for peace from John Lennon’s son:
I am against violence. I am against celebrating violence. I’m praying for peace. I’m praying for healing. I’m praying for the family, especially the children. I know what they’re going through. I’ve been through it.
I’m deeply scared for this country. The way some people are…
— Seán Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) September 11, 2025
I asked Luana to find me a video of the murder of Ukrainian Irna Zarutska on a Charlotte, NC train,, as I don’t know how to look for stuff on Twitter. Luana sent me this. DO NOT WATCH THE FOLLOWING VIDEO IF YOU DON’T WANT TO SEE THE MURDER. Some people did try to help, but there was little that they could do, and they did take a long time to approach the injured woman. As the murderer leaves the train, you can hear him say, twice, “I got the white girl.”
The murder of Ukrainian Irina Zarutska in the United States,new footage of the attack 1009025
There were new footage of the attack on 23-year-old Ukrainian Irina Zarutskaya on the Lynx Blue Line train in Charlotte, North Carolina. pic.twitter.com/M18QMyZIbX— john l (@Maeestro) September 10, 2025
Some relief from reader Malcolm: the product of photosynthesis (oxygen gas) in real time:
Fun fact: you can see photosynthesis in real-time.
This is an aquatic plant producing oxygen.pic.twitter.com/TLtPHjQgog
— Massimo (@Rainmaker1973) September 2, 2025
Another from my feed. I love videos of baby elephants. But what is he eating from the box?
— Amazing animals (@amazinganiamals) September 10, 2025
One I reposted from The Auschwitz Memorial:
This French Jewish girl was gassed to death immediately upon arriving at Auschwitz. She was eleven.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-09-12T10:13:27.745Z
And one tweet from Dr. Cobb, who’s in Oslo. Something to ponder from George the Station Cat:
Good morning and welcome to Tuna Tuesday If there’s even the smallest chance of finding something that makes you truly happy, take it. Life’s too short, and happiness is too precious to waste.
— George The Station Cat (@george-station-cat.bsky.social) 2025-09-09T04:47:14.788Z
Just to note that the set of screenshots in the first Tweet below that are all on Bluesky (which is way worse than Twitter for anger and hatred, though Twitter also has plenty of it).
I’ll fix it, thanks.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
Moral certainty is always a sign of cultural inferiority. The more uncivilized the man, the surer he is that he knows precisely what is right and what is wrong. All human progress, even in morals, has been the work of men who have doubted the current moral values, not of men who have whooped them up and tried to enforce them. The truly civilized man is always skeptical and tolerant, in this field as in all others. His culture is based on “I am not too sure.” -H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (12 Sep 1880-1956)
These are powerful words from Mencken. They remind me of the final scene in Jacob Bronowski’s ‘Knowledge or Certainty.’ He is standing in ankle-high muck at Auschwitz, reaches down and takes a handful of symbolic ashes, and speaks the words of Oliver Cromwell: ‘Please, in the bowels of Christ, consider that you may be mistaken.’
“The best revenge is to be unlike him who performed the injury.”
Marcus Aurelius
And/or:
“Living well is the best revenge”
(George Herbert, 1651)
“We cannot repeat too often that men do not lead the Revolution; it is the Revolution that uses men.”
Joseph de Maistre
Considerations on France
1796
“Your target’s reaction is your real action.”
-Saul Alinsky
Rules for Radicals
Random House
1971
” ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution! ‘”
-SDS radical as quoted by David Horowitz in:
Barack Obama’s Rules for Revolution: The Alinsky Model
2009
“Radical” is from Latin radix, meaning “root”.
I looked at the link to your new department at uchicago. Thanks for calling it to our attention. “Interruption” is explicit in its mission statement. Your president AND the board that selected him surely share the blame of creating the seed of the possible demise of what has been a great university for many years. I think that developing arguments through the “investigation and challenge” of the existing state of affairs is certainly fair game and a needed contribution to discussions, but those in the critical theory and post modernist camp, to the extent that I can even understand their arguments with my enlightenment trained mind, have already made up their minds that the objective modeling of the world and the technology it has provided all of humankind, is wrong…but rather some subjective aberration of dominant societies. To encourage the active “interruption” of the university is just plain performative at best and dangerous at worst. The WSJ is absolutely correct in putting blame at the boardroom door.
To my dismay, that department was created by an overwhelming vote of the faculty in the Faculty Senate. But of course it had to be approved by the President.
This has to hurt, boss. You devote your academic life to an institution that does this kind of stuff.
I read
https://rdi.uchicago.edu/
Not impressed. Amazing how the left who was so anti walls and borders and separation between people (see J. Lennon’s “Imagine”) today is so hard set on division. Racial division no less. Can nobody see this absurdity? Is The Emperor really clothed and we missed it?
best,
D.A.
NYC
+1
We don’t need no steenkin’ “Enlightenment”, we have moral certainty (see #2 above).
Clearly this was planned. The venue. The sniper’s nest. The getaway. So we can assume that he’d also been to the shooting range and zeroed his scope.
But he was no pro. I assume he thought the public assassination could best be served with a head shot. But he wasn’t an experienced enough marksman to take into account the bullet drop over 200 yards and the unusual high/low trajectory not found on shooting ranges.
He aimed for the head, but hit the neck. A target at 200 yards with a decent rifle and scope is trivial to hit.
Let’s not forget the Progressive trope that speech is violence. As long as people believe that, we can only expect more violence against people who are enjoying one of our fundamental rights: free speech. Of course, those same people hate that concept.
Beyond that, though, this sort of violence is just stupid. They’ve silenced Charlie Kirk, but his ideas can’t be silenced. The wars of the Reformation, the French and Russian and Chinese revolutions, they have never been able to kill enough to stop people from understanding that they were getting the shaft. Monarchs and great empires and People’s Republics die and fail. As Gore Vidal once said through one of his characters, “There are no ends in politics, only means.”
I saw someone post yesterday, “Je suis Charlie.”
I think it was Claire Berlinski, an American living in Paris, in her substack ( https://claireberlinski.substack.com/p/je-suis-charlie?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=16235&post_id=173334813&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=ua6o4&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email ) saying she did not know Charlie Kirk but that this situation is like that with Charlie Hebdo some years ago and she must say “Je suis Charlie”
I actually saw it on some guys tumblr. I wonder if he saw hers or if it was a case of convergence. Thanks, Jim.
I agree DrBrydon. When I heard of the murder of Kirk I thought “This is absolutely terrible.” and then I thought of the slogan “Words are violence.” I thought of this article:
Then I thought of an article by a Washington Post columnist (I could not find an archived copy):
The two New York Times columns Jerry mentions (from yesterday), one by progressive journalist Ezra Klein and the other by conservative columnist David French are very good: Anybody with some sense realizes that political violence is contagious. All the underhanded and despicable tactics used by left-wing extremists can and will, and have been used by other extremists. In fact, Kirks murder is just the latest in a recent string. Ezra Klein serves us a reminder:
The academics who have taught students that words are violence are absolutely responsible for the violence coming today from the extreme left. (Of course, I know that the twentieth century was full of violence from the extreme left. Communism, as it was actually practiced, was a very bloody affair.) And the unhinged rhetoric from the Democratic Party is partly responsible too.
It’s good to see that MSNBC fired that political columnist, given that has first instinct upon hearing about the murder of Kirk was not to unequivocally condemn it, but to give a statement that came uncomfortably close to justifying it.
Very VERY contagious, Peter (violence that is) – and most people don’t get this.
Particularly relevant with political violence. and suicide actually.
Plus… it dissuades quality people from running for office so the 2nd order effects are terrible.
D.A.
NYC
Jonathan Rauch‘s sequel, “The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of True”, is also excellent (tho’ not short).
* “of Truth”
I don’t see why Mr. Dowd was fired for saying ““hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” That is not a statement of endorsement. It’s simply a statement of what happens, and it also reads as a condemnation of these things. So the firing is an over-reaction in sensitive times.
If Dowd had prefaced what he said by an unequivocal rejection of political violence, he would probably not have been fired. The problem is that the left recently has failed to distance itself from political violence as a means of conducting politics (You can think of the left recently having tightened the chain of causation you mention: hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. See my response to comment # 7 here.) That’s why it is now necessary to lead with an unequivocal rejection of political violence before you get down to explain it.
I hope they catch the murderer of Kirk and that when they put him on trial the prosecutor goes for the death penalty (as the prosecutor in the Luigi Mangione case should do).
I dunno Mark. He also said; “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.” That sounds an awful lot like, “if you wear a dress like that, you shouldn’t be surprised if you are assaulted. “
There’s a paragraph with several consecutive links about calls to violence by university professors but I can’t tell where one link ends and the next one begins. Perhaps the WordPress guru can add the following (or similar) CSS rule:
a:hover
{
color: color-mix(in srgb, red 70%, currentColor);
}
What this does is mixes in a little red to the link when I hover my mouse over it so I can see it more clearly. Apologies for my pedantry!
There are some mentally ill people on Bluesky that are happy about this horrible murder. I deliberately follow people there whose views are unhinged. I like to have some idea of what their critics say. Other than that, I follow people that left Twitter after the election. The second group of people have widely condemned what happened. I also have a Twitter account where I spend most of my time. There is something very asymmetric about how decency is being evaluated across the political spectrum. All Democratic leaders I have seen have widely condemned this political violence. I definitely have not heard any of them say, “maybe the second amendment people can do something about it”. But when Paul Pelosi was bludgeoned with a hammer, people like Musk promoted a conspiracy that Paul was having sex with a man. Today I actually watched a video where Kirk himself was smiling after Pelosi was attacked. In the video he encouraged a “patriot” to bail out the psycho that attacked him. Paul was not murdered and that is a major difference from this tragedy, but Kirk hardly seemed a paragon of decency. The murder was disgusting and for someone I did not know much about until two days ago, I’m genuinely sad for his family. There are freaks, but I don’t think that a large fraction of Democratic voters are gleeful about a bullet ripping through a guy’s neck and separating him from his wife and two kids forever. I suspect they are upset like me. I’m not sure there would have been as much empathy had Hillary been killed, Whitmer kidnapped, or Shapiro dead in a house fire. There was also something about trying to overturn an election, but my memory is hazy.
Apologies if the post is too long.
Of course, John you are right that extremists on the left and the right feed off each other. And that Musk’s Twitter reaction to the attack on Paul Pelosi was deranged. Likewise, it is deranged to now try to rehabilitate the January 5th rioters, and financially compensate them for having been prosecuted …
Agree. Kirk had plenty of obnoxious views. He was no saint. Read his political views from his Wikipedia page:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_Kirk
Need I add: violence is not the answer and is wrong.
Frau, I don’t know enough about Charlie Kirk to defend him against all charges, but I do know enough about Wikipedia to realize that on hot button topics and personalities, it has become about as reliable, woke, and distorted as much of the rabble-rousing press. I know of many conservative figures who no longer even bother trying to correct demonstrable distortions.
How about news reports?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/us/charlie-kirk-views-guns-gender-climate.html
The Guardian?? The Guardian is about as woke as papers can get.
I no longer trust the NYT because they’ve been caught out in lies way too many times. The latest is their claim that Kirk was an antisemite when in fact he was as strong a supporter of Israel and Jews as you could find. (The NYT subsequently apologized for their “error”.)
After decades I unsubscribed to my hometown newspaper the NYT 3 years ago.’
The Guardian is almost a parody – both readers and writers there – of alcoholic middle aged overeducated middle aged females who know enough to hate themselves but not enough to understand how the world works.
Don’t miss “female” as a skew there – woke is a female coded pathology unfortunately.
The Guardian is a total joke.
D.A.
NYC
While I disagreed with many, but not all, of Charlie Kirk’s positions, I appreciated his stance on one issue the most.
Charlie Kirk was a brave, outspoken, and ardent supporter of Israel who, imho, saw the conflict in the ME clearly and objectively. He participated in debates on the topic often, including at Cambridge University.
His efforts to get the younger generation to prove their dogmatic assertions with facts – instead of with emotional bluster or blunt disengagement – was the essence of true education.
pictures of the mars rock seeds and spots https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/videos/meet-the-mars-samples-sapphire-canyon-sample-25/
Yesterday, after the terrible assassination of Charlie Kirk, several readers on this site wondered what Kirk had stood for, making him sound like a very fair and reasonable person who was just asking questions.
Yes, Kirk toured with his “Prove Me Wrong” banner, but was he truly a “humble seeker after truth”? Or was he trying to promote his own particularly narrow perspective?
I think it is the latter. For example, as John above wrote, Kirk’s reaction to Paul Pelosi’s assault was disgusting. Here are a few of his quotes, that can be found here: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs?CMP=oth_b-aplnews_d-1
If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024
Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
– Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025
The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024
There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
– The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022
Did Kirk have a right to say these things? Yes. Should he have been murdered for saying them? No. Should he be now be remembered as a fair-minded person who did not have a very specific agenda he was promoting? No.
Plenty can be taken out of context by slapping quotes on a page. Debates/argumentation are not done in a sentence. Charlie might have had some whacky ideas, but he was a conversationalist and treated others decently.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FhzqKQzueKU
What he said about doubting black pilots was in a larger discussion about DEI hires.
Considering that there likely are tens of thousands of hours of Charlie Kirk speaking on tape, your list of statements – which are without context – seems to me to be very short.
And what about Kirk’s statements that would demonstrate the opposite – that he was, in fact, fair-minded? Did the Guardian – not exactly a neutral observer – include any of those? No?
Beware accusatory post mortems. How many of us could survive scrutiny these days?
Were these comments taken out of context? Certainly there is no context given, but neither do I think that these are Charlottesville-type quotes where their meaning depends upon what was said right before or after. I understand that the Black pilot comment was DEI-based, but it still sounds very sketchy to me. Kirk was clearly implying that the competence of people of color should be doubted because they are people of color. Am I misinterpreting what he was saying?
Too few examples of bad things Kirk said? More could be found.
No examples of good things Kirk said? They could be found.
But my reason for writing what I did was not to exhaustively evaluate the person, but to point out that Kirk espoused some wrongheaded and even odious views. He was not a Diogenes wandering around school campuses searching for truth: in my opinion, his mind was already made up, and he was promoting a worldview that I think is wrong and inimical to the health of our country.
Here he his talking about the pilot/DEI issue.
I’d seen a couple hours of his stuff over the last few months and he always spoke courteously when defending his ideas. Never mocking or condescending or outright rude. I remember Hitchens got away with those three rather well.
Thanks for this. As you say, Kirk was courteous, and the stats he gave checked out. Although such a venue is not the time or a place for an in-depth discussion, this is how such matters should be talked about.
And as you point out re: Hitchens, even if Kirk were discourteous, that wouldn’t make his points wrong, not anymore than his being polite makes them right.
Yes, I think you are.
The reason we doubt the competence of coloured people in high-demand jobs is because DEI exists. We are entitled to assume that the only reason they got the job (over white and Asian competitors) was because they are coloured, because employers proudly trumpet their DEI efforts and, more dangerously, expect results. In the recent past, coloured candidates would have been kept out of that job because, being coloured, they hadn’t achieved sufficiently to be considered. In the more distant past it would have been because, being coloured, they were the victims of racism, a social system where we are asked to believe that an employer would perversely deny himself the benefits of a highly skilled worker just to keep the workforce white.
In a world without DEI, a coloured pilot would signal that he had achieved enough to make the grade and you might in your heart congratulate him for having overcome whatever barriers were in his way to doing so. But in a world with DEI, we grumble, “Diversity hire…” even if that particular person had got the job purely through merit. That’s what they say they wanted, though, so….
From above, taking into account 2nd order effects you mention Leslie, DEI looks the worst thing to happen to black people in a century.
THere’s a pall and suspicion over any (legit) achievement of black people bc they’re automatically assumed to be “DEI hires”. How terrible.
BLM is the same, but murderous to boot.
)
)In all these calculations you need to consider “2nd order effects.”
Which people don’t do.
D.A.
NYC
+1
Thanks. The guy was not a suitable candidate to be lionized. See also his Wikipedia page.
“Charlie Kirk was killed for doing what civilised people are supposed to do”.
Excellent piece about Kirk from Stu Campbell. It shows Kirk had warned about assassination culture back in April.
https://wingsoverscotland.com/monster-zero/
Regarding the elephant episode:
“Another from my feed. I love videos of baby elephants. But what is he eating from the box?”
Google the product Infacare. It is apparently a breast milk substitute.
It was nice to see the man rescue the baby dolphin and then kiss it for good luck.
And the rest of the news is, well, bad.
Today is indeed depressing. I worry a lot about JK Rowling.
On a lighter note, everyone should celebrate Blackberry Day because blackberries are the very best berries (with wild blueberries a close second). And unsurprisingly, blackberry pie is far and away the best pie.
I worry about her too. That kooky fraction of the left is aggressive and seems capable of violence.
We’ve got to hope JKR and her fortune is specifically devoted to her personal safety, even in gun unfriendly England.
Were I her I never leave the house!
D.A.
NYC
JKR lives in Scotland,or, my preference, the UK.
About that WSJ editorial and “loony jargon sloshing out of our universities”, I’m in a conversation with friends about this really choice bit by one of my colleagues on the other side of campus:
“The Carceral Logic of Female Eligibility Policies: Gender as a Civilizing Narrative, the Science of Sex Testing, and Anti-Trans Legislation”
journals.humankinetics.com/view/journals/ssj/41/3/article-p213.pdf
Best citation in the references list is
Pronger, B. (1999). Outta my endzone: Sport and the territorial anus.
Journal of Sport & Social Issues, 23(4), 373–389. doi.org/10.
1177/0193723599234002
Close second
Schilt, K., & Westbrook, L. (2015). Bathroom battlegrounds and penis panics. Contexts, 14(3), 26–31. doi.org/10.1177/15365042155969
Should such “scholarship” be the basis for tenure and promotion (and a big raise)? Should anyone be hired on the basis of such past scholarship as a qualification for joining the university as a teacher (let alone as a researcher)? What would the board of governors of my university think if they saw such articles, or its citations, all pretending to be research on par at some intellectual level with the work my friends do on human origins, evolutionary medicine, or wildlife conservation? I don’t think so.
If I were to talk “outta my endzone”, I would not advertise that fact in the title of my academic article…
Just as the wordplay works in the original title, yours works (better) in your comment.
😁
As has been discussed here before, the academic publishing and citation business/racket is, as they say, “problematic” in many ways; quantity over quality is one of them.