«But I’ve seen two forms of reaction that are misguided, however comprehensible the rage or horror that provoked them. One is a move on the left to wrap Kirk’s death around his views — after all, he defended the Second Amendment, even admitting it meant accepting innocent deaths. Another is on the right, to turn his murder into a justification for an all-out war, a Reichstag fire for our time.

But as the list above reveals, there is no world in which political violence escalates but is contained to just your foes. Even if that were possible, it would still be a world of horrors, a society that had collapsed into the most irreversible form of unfreedom.»

(gift)

«But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.

Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade.

….

One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You’re everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we’re watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.”

….

At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023. 

“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.”»

https://www.404media.co/charlie-kirk-was-not-practicing-politics-the-right-way/

Yglesias thinks we need to be less pure about social & cultural issues, and he has evidence.

«… in most countries, there is a large minority bloc of voters with extreme right-wing views that are echoed by few if any M.P.s, especially from mainstream parties.

In proportional systems, that creates an easy space for new parties to fill. In the U.S., it created space for Donald Trump to remake the G.O.P. I don’t think “the center-left should become more right-wing on crime and immigration” is the only possible conclusion to draw from this data, but I think that everyone ought to take the data seriously and consider the tradeoffs involved in their own choices.

….

If decent people decide to shun everyone who fails to embrace certain progressive cultural values, then we end up with a bunch of very indecent people winning elections and everyone standing around wondering what happened.

….

The only way to beat authoritarianism, though, is with actual democratic politics. And I think that requires elected officials who take the vocation of politics seriously enough to represent the authentic values of the electorate, rather than ceding all power to people who disdain democracy.»

https://www.slowboring.com/p/a-boring-theory-of-the-populist-right

It occurs to me that ending vaccination requirements is like cutting education funding: the consequences won’t be noticeable until the politician(s) who did it are long gone and have already profited. In the case of vaccinations, consequences will probably also be highly deniable.

No, I’m not linking to the stupid opinion piece at the stupid op-ed page of the stupid Republican newspaper.

Reading about tariffs and vaccinations and immigration round-ups and museum interference, and….

The damage will become apparent in years to come, but the real verdict of history will come in at the same time scale that it did on Ulysses Grant as a President. And Trump and his sycophants will be long gone by then.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/27/us/politics/trump-sandwich-assault-indictment-justice-department.html

Jokes about grand juries indicting ham sandwiches aside, THIS is why we have grand juries, going way back to English common law even before parliamentary law. Dictators have been dealt with before. (I’m not advising complacency, obviously.)

https://www.thedailybeast.com/yes-it-is-a-police-state-and-yes-you-can-do-something/

«Which raises the question, what is to be done? Can anything be done? In the short term, the answer must be to use what tools remain to fight back—even at the risk of becoming the targets of the next wave of retribution. Use the courts. Speak out. Take to the streets. Record the actions of the administration’s thugs and share the videos of what is happening. Work hard to try to maintain enough of democracy to regain some control of some aspects of our government as soon as possible.

And when that control is achieved, do not make the mistake of the last administration, of pundits or experts who took this threat too lightly. There must be consequences. Those who seized and warped and debased our system must pay a price for it. The illegality of their actions must be met with real penalties or they will take it as acceptance of such tactics and the American experiment in democracy will be permanently over.

Isn’t that just another form of retribution, you might ask? But the answer is no. There is another word for it if we do what is right in a way that is consistent with our laws and our true national interests. And that is justice.»

https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/anti-zionism-among-jews#google_vignette

I like this position, from a “theological” viewpoint (as a Christian) (it’s too bad we don’t have a better word than that in common usage for this mode of thinking):

«Before the inception of Herzl’s Political Zionism, the Reform movement opposed Zionism on theological grounds. Wiener Cohen explains:

According to Reform theology, Judaism was a religion with a universal message. The mission of the Jews, the bearers of this message, was to propagate the universal religion of the prophets throughout the world. Dispersion was, therefore, a vital condition in Reform thinking, and even the Messianic era, which was envisioned as the realization of the prophetic ethics as taught by the Jews, precluded the traditional belief of a mass return to Palestine.
In 1845, the Frankfurt Conference eliminated references to a return to Palestine and a Jewish state from prayers. American Reform Jews adopted the European attitudes; hence, the movement’s Central Conference of American Rabbis, organized in 1889 and led by Isaac M. Wise, opposed Zionism. At its 1885 conference in Pittsburgh, the organization declared, “We consider ourselves no longer a nation, but a religious community, and therefore expect neither a return to Palestine, nor a sacrificial worship under the sons of Aaron, nor the restoration of any of the laws concerning the Jewish state.”

In 1917, after Political Zionism had taken root, the Conference issued a resolution saying, “We look with disfavor upon the new doctrine of political Jewish nationalism, which finds the criterion of Jewish loyalty in anything other than loyalty to Israel’s God and Israel’s religious mission.”

Sounding much like the American Council for Judaism today, early Reform leaders worried that “Zionism would endanger their position as loyal Americans,” according to Wiener Cohen.

In response to the San Remo Declaration reaffirming the Balfour Declaration, Hebrew Union College, the American Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary, issued a statement that said:

We declare that no one land, Palestine or any other, can be called “the national home for the Jews,” as has been done by the Supreme Council. Each land, whereof Jews are loyal citizens, is the national home for those Jews. Palestine is not our national home, since we are not now and never expect to be citizens of that land.»

https://apnews.com/article/texas-redistricting-democrats-police-california-3459806da6c593d5ffcbe6891551fd7e

«A Texas Democrat opted to stay in the state House chamber overnight and into Tuesday rather than allow a law enforcement officer to shadow her while Republicans try to prevent further delays to redrawing congressional maps that President Donald Trump wants.»

Amazing. I can’t believe what Republicans are willing to do (I can totally believe what Republicans are willing to do).

I would love a good explanation for why the Dems came back. I bet they could have found funding.