We all know that people are losing their jobs, and possibly their careers for criticizing Charlie Kirk, and sometimes for merely quoting Kirk in his own words!
I want to quote parts of this article by Charlie Pierce. The actual title is shown below, but it’s important to not that it shows up as “thought crimes” in the URL itself.
Charlie Kirk’s Assassination Has Taken Us Down a Dark, Orwellian Path (paywalled)
by Charles Pierce
What the hell is going on in this country? If the authoritarian Right wants to make a cult of martyrdom out of an unforgivable act of public murder, it should go ahead and do so. But there is absolutely no reason for them to drag the rest of us into their rituals. Flags at half-staff and threats against local officials who decline to do so? Tributes at major league ballparks? A memorial service at the Kennedy Center? Professors fired over their reactions to the event on social media, most of which paled against the things that Kirk said, as a matter of course, that made him rich and influential.
From NBC News:
Even worse, the members of the Cabinet have signed onto the scouring of social-media posts in search of (once) protected speech that they deem disrespectful. Pete Hegseth is leading the way at the DoD. He’s already got one head on his wall.
From USA Today:
Nice to see who’s advising the defense department these days on personnel matters. Unsurprisingly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has joined the parade, turning the visa process upside down and into even more of a mess than it was before.
Returning to the situation with Karen Attiah, the game was given away with that line about how Attiah’s posts “endangered” her colleagues. That’s the real thing here, isn’t it? To threaten reprisals against thought crimes and then follow through by any means, fair or foul. I’ve lived through how conservatives used the suicide of Vince Foster as a truncheon on the Clinton administration, and before that they used the suicide of a woman named Susan Coleman for the same purpose. That’s how the infamous “Clinton Body Count” was born. Its reach extended all the way to the 2016 murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose corpse was used as a club on Hillary Clinton. So, frankly, coerced conservative demands for respect for the dead ring a little false to me.
I was about to write “scary times”, but it’s worse than that.
Dangerous times. And they are not just dangerous, they are disingenuous. Hell, they are lying liars who lie.
Open thread.
I thought it was 2025, but it’s really 1984Post + Comments (58)
