I find it very frustrating that we highlight one event like this and call it a new era of violence in a country with regular mass shootings, where police murder people of color with impunity, and state violence is carried out regularly. It's not a new era of violence at all. It's just that we don't classify all the violence happening as violence. There were more stories about Charlie Kirk in the last 24 hours in mainstream press than every story about the US financing a genocide in Palestine over the last year. The US invades and overthrows leaders. It causes mass disruption and chaos in regions that lead to more mass death. The US murdered a million Iraqi human beings and threw an entire region into chaos for the last 20 years, causing unknown amounts of related deaths. This is a country of violence. Why is it some new era of violence just because someone famous was assassinated? We've had presidents assassinated. The atrocities committed in Vietnam because the us wanted to protect colonial interests involved setting babies on fire. The school of the Americas trained south American guerilla fighters to kill children with machetes. You bring up the years of lead in Italy? That goes back to the gladio operation with the leave behind networks after WWII.
the crimes if this empire are too numerous to count and that violence always comes home. What's new about this?
America was founded on violence against the indigenous, built with violence on slavery, sustained with violence domestically and around the world. America's culture is subconsciously violent.
Well stated. Political violence in the USA is as American as apple pie. From the Hamilton and Burr duel through today - in between a slave revolts, abolitionist revolts, the Mexican American War, the Civil War, Presidential assassinations, Jim Crow lynchings, Native American genocide, FBI assassinations of communists and Black Panthers, Manifest Destiny and Monroe Doctrine, the Vietnam War and EVERY conflict since, law enforcement brutality against Blacks and Hispanics, and union leaders. A thousand years from now the USA will be judged as a violent society that was led by malignant narcissists aka white colonizers and their corporate masters who utilized slavery and serfdom to gain wealth and power. Who knows how it will end or evolve from today.
James Baldwin, 1971: “What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.”
“This is not America”- This has been America since 1776. If the legend holds true, it was Crispus Attucks, a Black man, who was the first to die for the revolution. And after it was over and the British were defeated, America was kind enough to let all the Blacks who were enslaved (Attucks was a free man) stay that way. Oh, but you don’t have to look way back into those “ancient” times. Charlie Kirk was a supporter of the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. “There are hundreds of peaceful people that went into the Capitol on January 6. They did not touch a police officer. They didn’t smash a window, but they have been charged federally for trespassing and called insurrectionists for the rest of their life.” Capitol police officers were assaulted, maimed and some died in the aftermath. But the phrase Charlie’s folks often use is “back the blue”, right?
“violence has no part in our political system”-straight capping! Out of our 46 presidents so far, four have been assassinated. John F. Kennedy, William McKinley, James Garfield and Abraham Lincoln, to be more precise. Ronald Reagan survived the assassination attempt by John Hinkley. Other presidents to also survive assassination attempts include Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford.
“This is not who we are”- Yes it is. Even when you look outside of presidents, any number of political figures have met their maker thanks to someone holding a gun. Civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton. Senator Robert F Kennedy. Oh, and going way, way back, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. (folks have seen the play, right?)
“Guns have no place in America”- knock it off. Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last year and not a single Republican voted to support meaningful gun-reform legislation. Not a single one.
The killing of Charlie Kirk can rationally and morally be condemned. But the choice—and it is a choice—to simply look past the cosigning of violence he was responsible for is hypocritical. It’s more important to call these people out for what they were, regardless of the circumstances of their departure.
Charlie Kirk was a bigot.
Charlie Kirk was a misogynist.
Charlie Kirk was the real life version of the Christian Bale character in American Psycho.
Charlie Kirk’s American dream is not mine. It never has been. It never will be. I don’t aspire to the aesthetic of a Charlie Kirk. In his ideal world, someone who looks like me isn't supposed to be on equal footing with him.
Kirk’s legacy is one of unashamed racial vitriol—underneath which is an existential fear at the gradual “browning” of America, belligerence disguised as folksy talk, and, yes, policy murder. It is not completely unpredictable that he met his fate in a way that he decried was no big deal.
May he rest in peace, but damn—he could have at least cleaned up behind himself before he left.
I found the essay thought provoking but your comment is the best summation of the historical context and truth behind the Kirk event I have read. Quite brilliant and has made my day.
Guns kill people! If you do not have access to a gun, then gun violence is impossible! What i resent is insisting that Kirk's death was the fault of the left. Let us find the suspect FIRST & the decide!
Let me just say…the hype of this event, even here, is part of the malady of self aggrandizement and the sickness that prevails in the white supremacist psyche of both sides of the aisle of American exceptionalism. Add it to the feigned analysis of “political violence” from a country built and maintained by violence and subjugation of the “other”. Spare me the nonsense. Any of us with a level of human consciousness and critical thinking understands the American moral corrosion that we find ourselves in; but what I need, is to find the light in this dark tunnel that is US society.
It is so painful, witnessing the violent polarisation and social atomisation being created by social media, every day. As the violence of colonialism continues to rip our fragile world apart.
I guess all any one person can do in this current capitalist made Maelstrom is to be kind to yourself and others and holdfast to your truth.
It is so painful, witnessing the violent polarisation and social atomisation being created by social media, every day. As the violence of colonialism continues to rip our fragile world apart.
I guess all any one person can do in this current capitalist made Maelstrom is to be kind to yourself and others and holdfast to your truth.
This current darkness covers not just American society. Its postwar mass media hegemon, shared equally with the UK through its special relationship, means that their cultural choices affect and direct all on our planet. Such a powerful influence could so easily be deployed by the visionary and altruistic interested in enabling social collective egalitarianism. But that would necessitate a revolutionary sea change in our global colonialist capital politics.
I couldn’t agree with you more. I presently live in Europe, with my heart in Gaza and my mind wrapped in this increasingly dystopian world. The malady emanates from centuries of plunder and exploitation and settler colonial states like US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel! It’s that today, the brutality and genocidal acts are shown in live segments as the human degradation accelerates to annihilate all sense of humanity. As an elder, while aware and savvy to use it, I see what social media and AI is doing and it is all to continue the subjugation of the “other” and the complacency of the W masses to buy into their myths and paradigms. We have little trumps mimicking the worst of immigration policy in the mythical place called democracies (Britain, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy…US).
DOJ Assembling Unprecedented National Voter Database
As reported by the NYT(https://bit.ly/46j2Ib0) and covered by MSNBC the DOJ is “compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.”
This is part of the Nazi attempt to rig future elections by having registered voter information so as to challenge voters ability to vote in upcoming elections This is conjunction with the concerted effort by the DOJ to get hold of the states’ voter rolls
Cheeto and the Nazis successfully rigged the 2024 by vigilante challenges that Greg Palast estimates gave Cheeto the electoral win by 1.5m votes Had it not been for the 40,000 Nazis who challenged voters Palast estimates that Harris would have won by 3.5m votes So there is reason to believe that the Nazis will be doing something similar in strategy to mess with the 2026 midterms
You make me laugh when you say; New Violent Era !!
The Americans (Europeans)have been very violent from the very time they stepped onto the land belonging to the Native Indians.
They massacred 100 million Indians and have spread their violence to the rest of the world, killing billions of people so far and they continue their violent genocide of the Palestrinans as we speak.
Unless and until the USA is bombed vilontly as what they have done to Gaza and Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Hiroshima and Naga Saki before, these vilont scums never stop carrying out genocides everywhere.
The only issue I take up with this article is that we don’t know for certain yet if Luigi Mangione is guilty. Yes he’s a symbol of shooting the United health care CEO but he hasn’t gone to trial yet and speaking about him as if he has already been found guilty hurts his case and is probably exactly what the ruling class would like us to do.
This article states clearly what has been on my mind for weeks. We will see political violence used as an excuse for further state control over areas that are considered to be a threat to the right's continued hold on power over the country. Troops are being sent into blue-voting areas to intimidate citizens, suppress voting... I truly believe that the Trump government hopes to see violent reactions against troops and ICE in order to provide an excuse to continue to expand the use of the military in American cities.
Random acts of violence, political instability and murder could eventually result in a totalitarian government. That is entirely possible. The same thing happened in 1930's Germany, and also Japan, which we all know eventually spread to almost every country on earth in the form of a World War.
We don’t have armed left wing groups unlike Italy and Germany in the aftermath of fascism. We only have this kind of organized violence on the Right from the Klan to the Proud Boys. Even the FBI says almost all violence comes from the Right. We don’t even have significant calls for violence by the Left. We have a few enraged young people re Gaza in a group that claims to support Hamas but no left wing or anarchist group that corresponds to right wing militias. Burning cop cars is not the same as the Jan 6 attack. These false but beloved by mainstream media equivalences between Right and Left play into the hands of the oligarchs and their right wing takeover. Then the media wring their hands when they see the result of their compliance.
Thank you for the lovely meeting of the minds. I am presently hiding in the Iberian Peninsula as close to the sea as possible. I find your comments gratifying and duly resonantly inspiring. Let’s connect as I am from the West Coast to your East Coast in the US and from the Southern tip of Europe to your northern tip of the same continent now!
Thank you for your clarity and honesty. This is sobering and aligns with my views of the state of the United States now. The reference to Italy in the 60s and 70's was new to me, as I was not paying attention to Italy then. I have been thinking about the cycles of nature and the cycles of countries. I am curious about how this is going to unfold and what it will take to begin the country's renewal. How shattered do we have to become before we say NO MORE?
I find it very frustrating that we highlight one event like this and call it a new era of violence in a country with regular mass shootings, where police murder people of color with impunity, and state violence is carried out regularly. It's not a new era of violence at all. It's just that we don't classify all the violence happening as violence. There were more stories about Charlie Kirk in the last 24 hours in mainstream press than every story about the US financing a genocide in Palestine over the last year. The US invades and overthrows leaders. It causes mass disruption and chaos in regions that lead to more mass death. The US murdered a million Iraqi human beings and threw an entire region into chaos for the last 20 years, causing unknown amounts of related deaths. This is a country of violence. Why is it some new era of violence just because someone famous was assassinated? We've had presidents assassinated. The atrocities committed in Vietnam because the us wanted to protect colonial interests involved setting babies on fire. The school of the Americas trained south American guerilla fighters to kill children with machetes. You bring up the years of lead in Italy? That goes back to the gladio operation with the leave behind networks after WWII.
the crimes if this empire are too numerous to count and that violence always comes home. What's new about this?
America was founded on violence against the indigenous, built with violence on slavery, sustained with violence domestically and around the world. America's culture is subconsciously violent.
Well stated. Political violence in the USA is as American as apple pie. From the Hamilton and Burr duel through today - in between a slave revolts, abolitionist revolts, the Mexican American War, the Civil War, Presidential assassinations, Jim Crow lynchings, Native American genocide, FBI assassinations of communists and Black Panthers, Manifest Destiny and Monroe Doctrine, the Vietnam War and EVERY conflict since, law enforcement brutality against Blacks and Hispanics, and union leaders. A thousand years from now the USA will be judged as a violent society that was led by malignant narcissists aka white colonizers and their corporate masters who utilized slavery and serfdom to gain wealth and power. Who knows how it will end or evolve from today.
James Baldwin, 1971: “What the world does to you, if the world does it to you long enough and effectively enough, you begin to do to yourself. You become a collaborator, an accomplice to your own murderers, because you believe the same things they do.”
“This is not America”- This has been America since 1776. If the legend holds true, it was Crispus Attucks, a Black man, who was the first to die for the revolution. And after it was over and the British were defeated, America was kind enough to let all the Blacks who were enslaved (Attucks was a free man) stay that way. Oh, but you don’t have to look way back into those “ancient” times. Charlie Kirk was a supporter of the insurrection of January 6th, 2021. “There are hundreds of peaceful people that went into the Capitol on January 6. They did not touch a police officer. They didn’t smash a window, but they have been charged federally for trespassing and called insurrectionists for the rest of their life.” Capitol police officers were assaulted, maimed and some died in the aftermath. But the phrase Charlie’s folks often use is “back the blue”, right?
“violence has no part in our political system”-straight capping! Out of our 46 presidents so far, four have been assassinated. John F. Kennedy, William McKinley, James Garfield and Abraham Lincoln, to be more precise. Ronald Reagan survived the assassination attempt by John Hinkley. Other presidents to also survive assassination attempts include Andrew Jackson, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Gerald Ford.
“This is not who we are”- Yes it is. Even when you look outside of presidents, any number of political figures have met their maker thanks to someone holding a gun. Civil rights activists like Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Fred Hampton. Senator Robert F Kennedy. Oh, and going way, way back, Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton. (folks have seen the play, right?)
“Guns have no place in America”- knock it off. Donald Trump survived an assassination attempt last year and not a single Republican voted to support meaningful gun-reform legislation. Not a single one.
The killing of Charlie Kirk can rationally and morally be condemned. But the choice—and it is a choice—to simply look past the cosigning of violence he was responsible for is hypocritical. It’s more important to call these people out for what they were, regardless of the circumstances of their departure.
Charlie Kirk was a bigot.
Charlie Kirk was a misogynist.
Charlie Kirk was the real life version of the Christian Bale character in American Psycho.
Charlie Kirk’s American dream is not mine. It never has been. It never will be. I don’t aspire to the aesthetic of a Charlie Kirk. In his ideal world, someone who looks like me isn't supposed to be on equal footing with him.
Kirk’s legacy is one of unashamed racial vitriol—underneath which is an existential fear at the gradual “browning” of America, belligerence disguised as folksy talk, and, yes, policy murder. It is not completely unpredictable that he met his fate in a way that he decried was no big deal.
May he rest in peace, but damn—he could have at least cleaned up behind himself before he left.
I found the essay thought provoking but your comment is the best summation of the historical context and truth behind the Kirk event I have read. Quite brilliant and has made my day.
Guns kill people! If you do not have access to a gun, then gun violence is impossible! What i resent is insisting that Kirk's death was the fault of the left. Let us find the suspect FIRST & the decide!
Let me just say…the hype of this event, even here, is part of the malady of self aggrandizement and the sickness that prevails in the white supremacist psyche of both sides of the aisle of American exceptionalism. Add it to the feigned analysis of “political violence” from a country built and maintained by violence and subjugation of the “other”. Spare me the nonsense. Any of us with a level of human consciousness and critical thinking understands the American moral corrosion that we find ourselves in; but what I need, is to find the light in this dark tunnel that is US society.
It is so painful, witnessing the violent polarisation and social atomisation being created by social media, every day. As the violence of colonialism continues to rip our fragile world apart.
I guess all any one person can do in this current capitalist made Maelstrom is to be kind to yourself and others and holdfast to your truth.
It is so painful, witnessing the violent polarisation and social atomisation being created by social media, every day. As the violence of colonialism continues to rip our fragile world apart.
I guess all any one person can do in this current capitalist made Maelstrom is to be kind to yourself and others and holdfast to your truth.
This current darkness covers not just American society. Its postwar mass media hegemon, shared equally with the UK through its special relationship, means that their cultural choices affect and direct all on our planet. Such a powerful influence could so easily be deployed by the visionary and altruistic interested in enabling social collective egalitarianism. But that would necessitate a revolutionary sea change in our global colonialist capital politics.
Monnina,
I couldn’t agree with you more. I presently live in Europe, with my heart in Gaza and my mind wrapped in this increasingly dystopian world. The malady emanates from centuries of plunder and exploitation and settler colonial states like US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Israel! It’s that today, the brutality and genocidal acts are shown in live segments as the human degradation accelerates to annihilate all sense of humanity. As an elder, while aware and savvy to use it, I see what social media and AI is doing and it is all to continue the subjugation of the “other” and the complacency of the W masses to buy into their myths and paradigms. We have little trumps mimicking the worst of immigration policy in the mythical place called democracies (Britain, Germany, France, Portugal, Italy…US).
The folks at Zeteo have done some decent journalism.
This superficial dribble is not among that body of work.
Do better.
DOJ Assembling Unprecedented National Voter Database
As reported by the NYT(https://bit.ly/46j2Ib0) and covered by MSNBC the DOJ is “compiling the largest set of national voter roll data it has ever collected, buttressing an effort by President Trump and his supporters to try to prove long-running, unsubstantiated claims that droves of undocumented immigrants have voted illegally.”
This is part of the Nazi attempt to rig future elections by having registered voter information so as to challenge voters ability to vote in upcoming elections This is conjunction with the concerted effort by the DOJ to get hold of the states’ voter rolls
Cheeto and the Nazis successfully rigged the 2024 by vigilante challenges that Greg Palast estimates gave Cheeto the electoral win by 1.5m votes Had it not been for the 40,000 Nazis who challenged voters Palast estimates that Harris would have won by 3.5m votes So there is reason to believe that the Nazis will be doing something similar in strategy to mess with the 2026 midterms
You make me laugh when you say; New Violent Era !!
The Americans (Europeans)have been very violent from the very time they stepped onto the land belonging to the Native Indians.
They massacred 100 million Indians and have spread their violence to the rest of the world, killing billions of people so far and they continue their violent genocide of the Palestrinans as we speak.
Unless and until the USA is bombed vilontly as what they have done to Gaza and Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Hiroshima and Naga Saki before, these vilont scums never stop carrying out genocides everywhere.
The only issue I take up with this article is that we don’t know for certain yet if Luigi Mangione is guilty. Yes he’s a symbol of shooting the United health care CEO but he hasn’t gone to trial yet and speaking about him as if he has already been found guilty hurts his case and is probably exactly what the ruling class would like us to do.
This article states clearly what has been on my mind for weeks. We will see political violence used as an excuse for further state control over areas that are considered to be a threat to the right's continued hold on power over the country. Troops are being sent into blue-voting areas to intimidate citizens, suppress voting... I truly believe that the Trump government hopes to see violent reactions against troops and ICE in order to provide an excuse to continue to expand the use of the military in American cities.
Random acts of violence, political instability and murder could eventually result in a totalitarian government. That is entirely possible. The same thing happened in 1930's Germany, and also Japan, which we all know eventually spread to almost every country on earth in the form of a World War.
Charlie Kirk was an active stochastic terrorist, that's it.
We don’t have armed left wing groups unlike Italy and Germany in the aftermath of fascism. We only have this kind of organized violence on the Right from the Klan to the Proud Boys. Even the FBI says almost all violence comes from the Right. We don’t even have significant calls for violence by the Left. We have a few enraged young people re Gaza in a group that claims to support Hamas but no left wing or anarchist group that corresponds to right wing militias. Burning cop cars is not the same as the Jan 6 attack. These false but beloved by mainstream media equivalences between Right and Left play into the hands of the oligarchs and their right wing takeover. Then the media wring their hands when they see the result of their compliance.
Charllie Kirk was popular because he delved into passive violence. with a passion,
He was clearly excited when talking down black americans, with a smile on his face.
Passive violence is insidious, A pre-emptor to physical violence. thats what its used for.
He had no problem with the Nashville school shooting. That was colatteral damage for Charlie.
He was shot at a school.
He wouuld therefore have had no problem with that.
He is now a school stastistic, Well done charlie. You've served a pourpose.
lauriemillerjade.com
Thank you for the lovely meeting of the minds. I am presently hiding in the Iberian Peninsula as close to the sea as possible. I find your comments gratifying and duly resonantly inspiring. Let’s connect as I am from the West Coast to your East Coast in the US and from the Southern tip of Europe to your northern tip of the same continent now!
Thank you for your clarity and honesty. This is sobering and aligns with my views of the state of the United States now. The reference to Italy in the 60s and 70's was new to me, as I was not paying attention to Italy then. I have been thinking about the cycles of nature and the cycles of countries. I am curious about how this is going to unfold and what it will take to begin the country's renewal. How shattered do we have to become before we say NO MORE?