Please Tell Curmie This Is the Worst Case of Police and Prosecutorial Overreach This Year. Please.

 

Seriously, posting this is what generated a felony charge.

You will recall, Gentle Reader, that in the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, there was a flood of backlash against anyone who dared to suggest on social media that the late Mr. Kirk might not have been the Second Coming.  Curmie wrote specifically about Darren V. Michael, who was fired by Austin Peay State University for having the temerity to point out the irony that someone who proclaimed that “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment” should himself be the victim of gun violence.  There were plenty of other cases, as well, of course, but punishing a tenured theatre prof who sometimes says things that administrators don’t like sorta resonated at Chez Curmie.

Curmie, a retired tenured theatre prof did, after all, write that he “is not ‘celebrating’ the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.”  That comment might have gotten him in big trouble had he still been employed at a state university in a red state at the time. 

Anyway, revenons à nos moutons… APSU officials backed down, a little, when it became clear that their action was not within hailing distance of due process.  Michael’s termination was changed to a suspension; Curmie has been unable to find any more details.  [UPDATE: Michael sued and settled out of court for a hefty chunk of change.]  He did learn that a substantial majority of Faculty Senators voted “no confidence” in the university president, Mike Licari.  The motion “failed” because the vote was 23-12; a two-thirds majority is required for such resolutions.  Curmie is well aware that such votes have only symbolic significance, anyway: the Faculty Senate, Chairs Council, Deans Council, and Staff Council at Curmie’s former employer all voted “no confidence” in a president unanimously, and the Regents kept him around… until they let him go a few months later with a fat buyout and a promise to totally lie say good things about him to prospective employers. 

As it happens, however, Mike Licari isn’t the biggest freaking idiot in Tennessee, and Darren Michael’s suspension isn’t even close to the harshest and most illegitimate punishment for obviously protected speech.  Curmie only found out a couple days ago about the case of Larry Bushart, a retired police officer (!) who was incarcerated for 37 days with a $2,000,000 bond for posting a meme.  Yes, really.

The specifics: Bushart, who posts a lot of memes, some of them in rather poor taste, posted one to a message thread about a vigil for Charlie Kirk of then-candidate Trump saying, a day after a school shooting in Iowa, that “We have to get over it.”  Bushart, who was as unimpressed as Curmie was of the orgiastic keening over Charlie Kirk, appended a note: “This seems relevant today…” (That’s the post at the top of this page.) Bushart’s son notes the obvious: that his father was pointing out “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”  That can get you arrested in Tennessee, of course.  Sixth-graders are expendable, after all.  Sleazy millionaire podcasters are important!  The official charge was Felony Insufficient Sycophancy “Threatening Mass Violence at a School.” 

That’s a result of an overbroad law that only grandstanding Republicans could support.  Children’s advocates opposed the legislation.  The ACLU argued that “This legislation is worded so broadly that it could potentially criminalize a wide range of adults and children who do not have any intent of actually causing harm or making a threat -- people who are actually just exercising their constitutionally-protected right to free speech.”  But this is Tennessee; of course, this inanity became law.

So… this case…  You see, Gentle Reader, in what passes for a brain in Sheriff Nick Weems (what a delightfully Dickensian name for this buffoon!) and Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”  Uh, no.  No reasonable person would conclude that.  

The good news is that there are, apparently, precisely zero people in the community who interpreted the meme the way these bozos did.  Indeed, as Liliana Segura writes for The Intercept article linked above, “there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools.”  FIRE requested the school district for any communications pertaining to the case, including the terms “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.”  The response: no records.  Nada.  Zip.  Zilch. 

The most succinct encapsulation was this, from a local resident commenting on the story on radio station WOPC’s page: “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”  Weems was still trying to spin it that Bushart created “mass hysteria to parents and teachers,” and that he did so intentionally.  That makes the sheriff both an incompetent idiot and a liar.  Curmie awaits Donald Trump’s appointment of Weems to a high-level position in the FBI, ICE, or ATF.  He has all the credentials that seem relevant to Dear Leader, after all.

OK, two things in the category of “the best Curmie can do to excuse this idiocy”: 1). Mr. Bushart is, at least at times, a self-described “asshole.”  2). The meme references “Perry High School”; one of the local schools is Perry County High School.  You will note, however, Gentle Reader, that as even the arresting officer declares, assholitude “is not illegal,” absent legitimate threats of violence or similar intentions of criminality.  And the high school referred to in the meme is, as noted above, not in Tennessee, but in Iowa.  Bushart’s comment makes it clear that he was referencing that event from over a year earlier.

OK, Curmie’s distaste for Charlie Kirk is evident.  That doesn’t mean that his murder was anything but abhorrent, or that those who idolized him and mourned his loss publicly shouldn’t be allowed to do so.  But posting a meme shouldn’t get you fired, and it sure as hell shouldn’t get you arrested.  What’s worse, of course, is the active collusion of multiple figures in the (in)justice system.  True, Nick Weems would come in third in a battle of wits with a broken stapler and a corn dog.  Hell, he’d even lose to Mike Licari.  

But there’s also an unnamed prosecutor who not only didn’t laugh in Weems’s face but actually requested a delayed hearing in response to Bushart’s lawyer’s reasonable claim that bail of $2 million for a nothingburger case like this might be un peu de trop.  And there’s General Sessions Judge Katerina Moore, who granted that request.  Someone should have stopped this absurdity before it embarrassed everyone involved.  They didn’t, at least until the coverage went viral.

This case is so ridiculous, it’s almost inevitable that FIRE got involved.  Charges against Bushart have now been dropped, but that’s clearly not enough.  He lost his post-retirement job, was confined for over five weeks on an absurd charge because bail was set at a level no normal person could afford,  and missed the birth of his granddaughter.  He’s going to sue, with FIRE’s assistance, and he’s going to collect.  Bigly.  

Chris Eargle, who created the “Justice for Larry Bushart” Facebook page, posted on the “Re-Elect Weems for Sheriff” page, “Unwise persecution of people for their political views will cost the taxpayers millions of dollars.  He should never be allowed near public office again.”  He’s right, of course, on both counts.  If only the problem were limited to one boneheaded sheriff in a jerkwater county in Tennessee…

More Censorial Hijinks in the Kirk Shooting Aftermath

Darren Michael

Regular readers of this blog will understand that Curmie is likely to take the side of theatre professors against The Man unless they’ve done something really appalling.  So it should come as no surprise that when Curmie heard about the case of Darren V. Michael, who was fired by Austin Peay State University for posts on social media, he set fingers to keyboard rather promptly.  You will, one hopes, forgive Curmie for choosing this particular manifestation of institutional censorship to highlight.

Michael had been employed by APSU since 2007, and is referred to as a “professor” in all the accounts Curmie has seen.  That may be simply a term for a faculty member at a university, but it seems to be applied as an academic rank, meaning that he almost certainly had tenure.  What he appears to have done would be protected speech even if he were a part-time adjunct, but tenure carries with it an even broader protection… or, rather, it does at institutions that aren’t run by partisan morons.  And the fact that APSU is a state school means that the First Amendment applies, irrespective of what the administration might think.

OK, so what did he do?  The university won’t say, specifically, only that he “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death. Such actions do not align with Austin Peay’s commitment to mutual respect and human dignity. The university deems these actions unacceptable and has terminated the faculty member.”

The local news, both TV and newspaper, covered the story, but didn’t dig very far.  KZTV makes no attempt to determine what Michael said or did; ClarksvilleNow.com mentions that Michael reposted a headline from a 2023 Newsweek article: “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.”  The irony that it was Kirk himself who suffered because of the nation’s infatuation with guns ought certainly to be worth noting, and no reasonable person would suggest that it’s other than protected speech.  (This is not to suggest, of course, that everyone out there is reasonable.)

Primetimer did a little better in their coverage.  First, they identified Michael’s remarks as “insensitive,” which they no doubt were, although that’s a damned low bar to clear before a right to censorship kicks in.  They also found a post on X by T.R. Sartor (@dripchud), which includes a meme of a conversation between two well-known fictional characters:  “‘Is he dead yet?’ asked Piglet.  ‘No,’ said Pooh.  ‘Fuck,’ said Piglet.” 

OK, that’s perilously close to celebratory, if it hasn’t in fact crossed the line.  But Curmie notes two things.  First, that meme has been around since the first Trump administration, and the pronoun in question has always referred to POTUS.  Indeed, Michael clearly intended that reading: Sartor’s post is on the 10th, the day of the shooting, but the meme had been posted six days earlier. It’s completely irrelevant to the Kirk assassination except as an indicator of Michael’s general political philosophy.  It’s certainly crude and more than a bit tasteless, but, importantly, it’s still protected speech.  There is no “true threat,” no “intentional incitement to immediate violence.”  Oh, and the often over-zealous Secret Service didn’t show up on Michael’s doorstep.

There’s also, of course, the matter of timing.  Michael’s post of the Newsweek headline was on Wednesday evening.  He was fired Friday morning: not a lot of time in there for due process.  [EDIT, just as Curmie was formatting: the university has changed the dismissal to a suspension, admitting they hadn’t followed due process.  Go figure, right?]  Rather, this was a typical over-reaction by a narcissistic and authoritarian university president, one Mike Licari.  He claims that APSU suffered “significant reputational damage” because of Michael’s posts.  Well, that’s utter crap.

APSU, after all, is named for the segregationist Tennessee governor who is best known nationally for signing the bill outlawing the teaching of evolution, leading to the famous Scopes “monkey trial.”  Of course, those positions were considerably more acceptable a century ago than today, but still there’s a sort of “only in Tennessee” feel to the whole business. The university accepts virtually everyone who applies, and it graduates only 27% of its students.  While Curmie is confident that there are some excellent faculty and students there, APSU is not exactly going to be confused with an elite institution.  There is not a lot of “reputational damage” to be done.

You know what does cost the school, though?  An idiot president who fires a tenured professor for posting something ironic online.  As far as Curmie can tell, there was no accompanying text to Michael’s post, no “Hate begets hate.  ZERO sympathy” like what got an assistant dean at another Tennessee state university fired.  (Hers was protected speech, too, of course.)  Unless there’s something we don’t know about, nothing Michael did was enough to spawn a raised eyebrow, let alone a dismissal without due process... or a suspension, for that matter.  (Also, of course, Curmie’s willing to bet there aren’t a lot of people in Clarksville, TN with the skillset to teach what had been Michael’s classes, either.) There is no such thing as free speech if a state employee can be fired for saying something someone in power finds distasteful.

Oh, Curmie sees that look on your face, Gentle Reader: “Curmie’s a liberal, so he’s going to side with them.”  Nope.  Curmie was a career educator and remains a passionate defender of free speech: of an Israeli guest lecturer at Michigan State most recently, of a law professor at Ohio Northern who opposed his school’s DEI policy, and of a conservative prof at North Carolina State, to name but a couple of cases.  There are plenty of examples on both sides of the political fence.  For the past couple of weeks, the oppressors have been almost exclusively on the right.  That will change in time: not because they’ll stop being censorial, but because the left will find their opportunities.  Alas.

One thing is certain: there are some university administrators out there who are about to get sued.  That brings us to the best Facebook comment Curmie has seen in a while.  The honor goes to Leslie Skrzypczak, responding to a story about l’affaire Michael posted by Cape Cod Women for Change: “They’ve tried to reach him [Michael] for comment but his lawyer’s eyes were twinkling and they laughed and laughed.”

What she said.

On the Dilemma of House Bill 719

Politicians are, in general, an unsavory lot.  They’re more about winning than about doing the right thing, and winning is often defined not by accomplishing something good, but by embarrassing the opposition.  This applies to those on both sides of the aisle, of course, but, at least recently, the GOP has dominated the field.

Charlie Kirk was, of course, a master of the form: “debating” (i.e., arguing with) college kids, interrupting them, and releasing deceptively edited videos designed to make himself look smart but especially to make the other side look stupid.  Most of his stuff was straight out of the James O’Keefe playbook.  However much his acolytes (and MAGAs who’d never heard of him until he was shot) might choose to lionize him as a champion of respectful disagreement, free speech, and Christian virtues, he was none of those things. 

True, he was longer on smarminess than on Trumpian reckless vituperation (Gentle Reader, can you believe what 47 said about hating those who disagree with him politically?), but that doesn’t change the fact that if you weren’t a white cishet Christian (preferably evangelical) male, he had no respect for you.  He pretended to care about Constitutional values, but, for example, openly despised Muslims (so much for freedom of religion).

Now, in addition to the rest of the multiple hagiographic indulgences, we get House Bill 719, introduced by the creepiest and most sycophantic of GOP Congresscritters, Mike Johnson himself.  It is, of course, a trap.  The string of “whereases” includes a series of descriptions that bear little resemblance to reality: “respectful, civil discourse,” “respect for his fellow Americans,” “commitment to civil discussion and debate,” “worked tirelessly to promote unity,” and so on. 

Of course, equally if not more importantly, there were no such encomia to, say, Melissa Hortman, and certainly no recognition that literally every study of political violence, including the report of the Cato Institute (!) shows the preponderance of such attacks come from the right.

Still, the average person could stomach most if not all of this out of respect for the dead.  The real problem is the resolution:

Resolved, That the House of Representatives—

(1) condemns in the strongest possible terms the assassination of Charles “Charlie” James Kirk, and all forms of political violence;

(2) commends and honors the dedicated law enforcement and emergency personnel for their tireless efforts in finding the suspect responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk and urges the administration of swift justice to the suspect;

(3) extends its deepest condolences and sympathies to Charlie Kirk’s family, including his wife, Erika, and their two young children, and prays for comfort, peace, and healing in this time of unspeakable loss;

(4) honors the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk, whose steadfast dedication to the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth inspired a generation to cherish and defend the blessings of liberty; and

(5) calls upon all Americans—regardless of race, party affiliation, or creed—to reject political violence, recommit to respectful debate, uphold American values, and respect one another as fellow Americans.

Yeah, no.  Curmie doesn’t want to know anyone who doesn’t support the odd-numbered parts, at least assuming a secularized definition of “prays” in #3.  #2 is a little more problematic, as Kash Patel’s FBI bungled the case enormously, detained two innocent people, and only got around to Tyler Robinson when his family turned him in.  If they hadn’t narked on him (Curmie does not mean to suggest that they were wrong in doing so), the killer might well still be at large.  Still, this is the kind of generic praise that often accompanies this kind of resolution.  Curmie would still vote for the bill except for #4.

Ah, #4.  Curmie, and he suspects that he is not alone in this, does not “[honor] the life, leadership, and legacy of Charlie Kirk,” who was, in Curmie’s opinion, one of the most reprehensible human beings on the planet.  He did not have a “steadfast dedication” to any of the three items listed: “the Constitution, civil discourse, and Biblical truth.”  This statement goes beyond the pro forma fluffing of the deceased and enters into the realm of outright prevarication.

Moreover, the unmodified phrase “Biblical truth” should never appear in a resolution in the House of Representatives.  Never.  Ever.  Use it on the floor if you must, but not in a bill.  Of course, if “Biblical truth” is defined to be the actual teachings of the Bible—you know, Gentle Reader, welcoming the stranger, feeding the poor, stuff like that—then it would indeed be welcome.  Fat chance of any of that happening in Trumpistan, of course.

But the bill forces those who have not quaffed the neo-Fascist Kool-Aid either to vote for a resolution that specifically and mendaciously idolizes a despicable person, or to be seen voting against a measure condemning political violence.  Even a number of otherwise intelligent conservatives are pretending that this dilemma doesn’t really exist, and are therefore hurling metaphorical brickbats at anyone who didn’t vote for the resolution.

That’s because they cannot (or choose not to) believe that it is possible to hold two thoughts simultaneously.  But one really can believe that illegal immigration is a legitimate issue (it would be less of one if Trump hadn’t scuttled a bi-partisan bill that would have at least somewhat stemmed the tide because he’d rather have a campaign issue than attempt to solve a problem) and still oppose ambushing people at apparently routine meetings to renew work permits or even to finalize the paperwork for citizenship.  Due process still matters, and ICE’s deliberate avoidance of confronting the real “worst of the worst” is craven, dishonest, and, alas, predictable.

It is possible to despise Hamas and everything they stand for and still think that innocent Palestinians shouldn’t be intentionally starved to death by an authoritarian bigot like Bibi Netanyahu.

It is possible to regard Charlie Kirk as a horrible person and still condemn his murder and his murderer.

How does Curmie know these things?  Because he’s describing himself.

Of course, Curmie also saw a meme shortly after Kirk’s assassination urging Democrats in Congress to introduce the “Charlie Kirk Gun Control Bill,” just so the Republicans would have to vote against it.  The difference is that the suggestion was intended to be ironic if not humorous, and no Democratic pol did anything more than indulge in a sardonic smile.

"Lola" and the Week's Headlines

Curmie was 14 when the Kinks released their classic song, “Lola.”  It was the perfect age at which to revel in the delicious naughtiness, certainly for the time, of a title character who “walked like a woman and talked like a man.”  The most quoted lyric from the song, no doubt, is “Well, I’m not the world's most masculine man / But I know what I am and I’m glad I’m a man / And so is Lola.”  There’s a hint of ambiguity there: is Lola a man, or is Lola also glad that the narrator is a man?  Not that those ideas are mutually exclusive, of course.  Any way you look at it, that sequence had a considerable impact on a rather sheltered lad in the throes of puberty.

The sequence that sticks in Curmie’s mind the most, though, comes a little earlier in the song: “Girls will be boys and boys will be girls / It's a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world / Except for Lola.”  That word “except” has continued to intrigue for well over a half century.  Lola, whatever terms of sexual identity might be used to describe her, becomes the narrator’s bulwark against the confusions of the world.  There’s a lot to unpack there.

Curmie has always liked the song, and he’s pretty sure he owned it on 45 back in the day, but it has seldom crossed his mind for decades except when it comes around on Spotify or the local classic rock radio station.  But it has risen to the top of his consciousness of late when encountering two Facebook posts.

The first was this one, by Aaron Terr, the Director of Public Advocacy at FIRE (the Federation for Individual Rights and Expression.  His excoriation of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s boast that “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech”  is impressive:

The Attorney General is just flat wrong here…. She’s not the first politician to say that hate speech isn’t free speech, but this is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer.  She really should know better, and this is the type of thing that’s going to chill public debate.  It’s going to make people afraid to say things that the current administration might consider hateful, lest they actually be prosecuted for it.

Curmie notes that a representative of FIRE (accurately) calls Bondi a politician rather than a lawyer and makes the obvious point that the Attorney General, of all people, ought to know the freaking laws she’s supposedly upholding.  Bondi is either profoundly ignorant or too big of a political hack to care that she’s advocating the evisceration of Constitutional protections.  Or both, of course.

But it’s what Terr says next that intrigues Curmie:

What’s also incredible about this video is that usually the argument that hate speech isn’t protected speech is something that you would hear from the left side of the political aisle.  But now we hear a top Republican official saying it.  And I think that just goes to show that censorship rationales, once they’re on the table, they’re a loaded gun just waiting to be used by any political party that takes power.

Terr is right about this, too.  Curmie has made the point repeatedly (most explicitly here and to a lesser extent here) that neither of the two principal political parties in this country are much interested in upholding First Amendment protections.  But whereas the right was more likely to engage in political censorship (books in libraries or in school curricula, for example), it was generally the left that sought to deny constitutional protections to hate speech.

Now, we’re living in a mixed up, muddled up, shook up world, with the GOP, and especially the MAGA wing thereof, bellowing from the proverbial rooftops about how hate speech should be prosecuted.  Bondi is worse than most—hardly surprising, that—but even she isn’t the most insane right-winger out there.  Remember this guy, an actual Congresscritter Curmie mentioned a few days ago?

Right now, the same people who cheerfully described moderate Democrats as “communists” for arguing that someone who works a 40-hour week ought to be able to afford to pay for essentials, or that programs that help the general population (FEMA, Medicaid, the CDC, the FAA, etc.) ought not to be sacrificed so those poor destitute billionaires can get a tax cut that balloons the national debt—these people are getting righteously indignant that anyone would dare call a racist, sexist, jackass like Charlie Kirk, well, a racist, sexist, jackass.  And they want people fired or even arrested for speaking their truth.  Most of what they’re objecting to isn’t even hate speech by any reasonable definition, but we’ll antiphrastically let that pass for now.

The other Facebook post Curmie wants to mention was this one, which Curmie reposted on his page a couple days ago.  It reads, “Reminder: Fox News host Brian Kilmeade said homeless people should be put to death by lethal injection and they didn’t even take away his morning donut.”  The obvious context was the propinquity of Kilmeade’s comment and the firing of Jimmy Kimmel by ABC for his on-air comments about the aftermath of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

What Kimmel actually said, of course, wouldn’t as much as raise an eyebrow on a reasonable observer.  There were some jabs at both President Trump and Vice President Vance, but the killer, apparently was this: “The MAGA Gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”  That, Gentle Reader, is simply a statement of fact.  Trump blamed “radical left political violence” long before there was any evidence either way, and there remains little if any evidence from a credible source that Tyler Robinson was indeed influenced by leftist politics.

Was Robinson a leftie ideologue?  We still don’t know, and for these purposes it doesn’t matter.  There was, at the time Kimmel was on the air, some evidence emerging that perhaps Robinson was a Groyper, and the fact that his grandmother says his politics were shifting to the left could simply be deflection (“we’re a Trump-loving family, so the assassin in our midst obviously wasn’t like us”).  Were Curmie of a cynical disposition (perish the thought!), he might even suggest the possibility that Robinson was pretty much a Nancy Reagan Republican: dismissing the concerns of others until, in his case, he entered into a same-sex relationship, and Kirk’s homophobia was placed in a different perspective.

The point is that for these purposes, none of this matters.  (Nor does it matter that Curmie has never found Kimmel even moderately amusing.)  Did the MAGA world make a concerted effort to place the blame on someone other than themselves?  Of course, they did!  It doesn’t matter if they were “right” about Robinson’s motivations; they just didn’t want him to be one of theirs.  (To be fair, the left was spinning just as hard in the other direction, but that doesn’t change the fact that Kimmel was absolutely accurate.)

It’s also worth mentioning that Kimmel, like a host of leading Democrats, expressed shock and horror at the news of Kirk’s death, calling it a “senseless murder” and condemning those who seemed to be celebrating it.  Contrast that with the deafening silence (well, there was that one bit of sneering from Mike Lee) of every Republican you can name about the murders of Melissa Hortman and her husband by a right-wing nut job.

Note: the key words here are “nut job,” not “right-wing.”  What MAGA in general is attempting to do is to define the entire group—liberals—as guilty in Kirk’s murder because Robinson might have been a leftist with respect to one particular aspect of his politics.  This is the scam JD Vance is trying to pull off, with outright lies about the relative frequency of political violence perpetrated by the left and the right.  C’mon, JD, only the stupidest MAGA believes that “While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the Far Left.”  Even the report of the hard-right Cato Institute calls that claim bullshit.  Well, that’s not exactly a direct quote, but you see the point, Gentle Reader.

But Curmie reverts to his inner Confucian.  Even if there is some correlation between affiliation X and action Y, we can’t assume that one implies the other.  Curmie quotes himself from a post in 2013 about that gunman in Aurora, Co, at the opening of the new Batman movie.  Just substitute “Robinson” for “Holmes” in the following:

The fact is, Gentle Reader, this guy Holmes doesn’t represent me even if we’d vote for the same person or worship at the same church. If he turns out to be an atheist, that doesn’t mean that atheists are the problem, any more (or less) than Baptists are the problem if that’s what he is. His politics can be from the left, right, or center, and he doesn’t represent any of the good people some of whose views he shares. Even if he had help, he’s a lone wolf. Our society lives on, saddened but intrepid.

OK, one more point, since Curmie knows there are people out there ready to rant about how corporations have a right to hire and fire whomever they choose.  Yes, that’s true, even when Nexstar and Sinclair, the two distributors who refused to air Kimmel’s show in the future, are notoriously and rather proudly right-wing.  It’s the intervention of FCC Commissioner Brendan Carr that’s the real problem.  Carr, appointed in the first Trump administration, has apparently now gone full sycophant, as anyone who wants to stay employed in that administration is likely to do.  Oh, and an administration so openly venal is going to be a lot more amenable to proposed mergers and such-like if you, ABC, suck up appropriately.  Not all bribes are monetary; some just censor alternative voices.  As the singer in “Lola” says, “I got down on my knees…”

Anyway, Bobby Schroeder, a valued longtime reader of Curmie’s page (and a conservative, by the way), responded to Curmie’s post of the meme about Kilmeade, with this: “ABC comedy is more conservative than Fox News?  What in the hell is happening in this world?”

And that prompted Curmie to respond with the line about the “mixed up, muddled up,  shook up world.”  And here we are, Gentle Reader.

Reacting to the Reactions about Charlie Kirk's Assassination

A few quotations from the Dear Departed

Curmie was going to write about the assassination of Charlie Kirk as part of a larger discussion about the rule of law, also discussing things like the attack on that Venezuelan boat, the co-opting of the National Guard to <checks notes> spread mulch and pick up trash, and the absurd SCOTUS ruling allowing ICE and DHS to forgo anything in the same area code as obeying Fourth Amendment protections, enabling those assholes to engage in practices that far exceed mere racial profiling and would be called unconstitutional by anyone except a political hack supporting authoritarianism.

That essay may yet be written, but the response to the killing of Kirk has taken on a life of its own, both among the yammering politicians and the complacent media.  We haven’t seen this level of coverage since the murder of another loathsome rich guy, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson… and most of that was about how Luigi Mangione, the (technically still “alleged”) killer is a rather handsome young man.

Noteworthy in the previous paragraph is the fact that the intervening attacks on Minnesota legislators and their spouses, leaving two people and a family dog dead and two other people seriously injured, received far less coverage: some, but nowhere near as much.  Those murders were, of course, clearly politically motivated, and we knew that early on.  The relative lack of coverage is attributable at least in part to the fact that the victims weren’t obscenely wealthy.  However liberal the media are alleged to be, the fact is they’re all controlled by the uber-rich, and those folks think wealth translates into importance… and that killing a rich dude is far worse than killing a poor one.

Please note, Gentle Reader, that Curmie is in no way endorsing any of these murders.  He is not “celebrating” the death of Kirk, although he does believe the world to be a better place without his racism, misogyny, trans- and homophobia, Christian nationalism, mendacity, and general assholitude.  Well, at least until and unless the right-wing ideologues are successful in their attempt to make Kirk into a “moderate” and therefore even more of a martyr.  He was neither, of course.  His sole attribute was his ability to sell every conceivable variety of hatred as if it were a heavenly elixir.

Curmie and Beloved Spouse are fans of murder mysteries, and we not infrequently watch a film or a TV show in which the victim is a truly horrible person, thereby providing potential motives for a number of suspects.  When this occurs, one of us (usually Curmie) sometimes adopts an exaggerated Texas drawl and proclaims that the deceased “wanted killin.’”  But we’re well aware of the fictiveness of what we’re watching.  Real life is different, and no one, not even Charlie Kirk, deserves to be shot in cold blood.  There may be little in the way of mourning at Chez Curmie, but there is precisely zero celebration.

It now appears that the suspected shooter, Tyler Robinson, did have a political, or at least quasi-political, motive.  He disagreed with Kirk on some issues.  But no one knew that when the invective started to fly.  To be fair, it was a reasonable guess, but it didn’t at the time come close to a certainty.  Moreover, although Robinson is said to have become more political of late, he is not registered with a political party and has not voted recently.  He seems to have grown up around guns, and he comes from a Republican family.  [EDIT: It now appears that Robinson may have thought Kirk was insufficiently right-wing for Robinson’s taste.  Yes, the shooting could have been political, but not in the way it was described by Trump, et al.  Go figure, right?]

Curmie has long decried the media’s prioritization of getting the story first over getting it right.  One example was that attack at a cinema in Aurora, CO; another was the (perhaps staged) attempt in Butler, PA, about which Curmie suggested that the motive may never be known, but “perhaps there’s a latter-day Jodie Foster to impress out there somewhere.”  And, of course, DJT has always been quick to blame someone unlike himself, evidence be damned: witness his screed on New Year’s Day against “criminals coming in” when the New Orleans terrorist actually turned out to be a Texas-born Army vet.

Let’s take as given that Robinson was the shooter and that the reason for the attack was that he objected to Kirk’s politics.  That rationale would have been a reasonable, even probable, surmise before Robinson’s apprehension.  But it was certainly insufficient to claim as fact.  There was the possibility of a “false flag,” of an internal division in the right-wing power structure (Kirk had been accused of insufficient obeisance to Dear Leader, after all), or the gunman had some other motive altogether.  Curmie even saw a post that suggested that since it would take military-style training to be able to shoot that accurately, and since the military is comprised mostly of conservatives… well, you get the point, Gentle Reader.  Yes, that’s a rather strained argument, but until this morning it was at least possibly accurate.

Of course, the vituperation started emanating from the White House long before any real information became known.  Donald Trump, in his usual reckless manner, bypassed any attempt at national unity and blithely accused the “radical left political violence,” and deplored “demonizing those with whom you disagree.”  A more ironic and hypocritical utterance has seldom if ever occurred in all of human history.  Demonizing political opponents is, of course, Trump’s stock in trade, to the extent that when someone else does it, we’re surprised he doesn’t sue them for copyright infringement.

Of course, all this hand-wringing and pearl-clutching casually ignores the attacks on Paul Pelosi, Josh Shapiro, and Melissa Hortman, and the kidnapping plot aimed at Gretchen Whitmer.  But it’s only those on the left we need to worry about, correct?  What utter bullshit!  True, we expect this kind of crap from the usual suspects: Trump, Vance, Miller, Musk, Loomer, Mace, et al.  They are uniformly devoid of actual ideas (or at least good ones) and have nothing but rage and self-righteous hypocrisy to offer.  But it is terrifying that even once reasonable conservatives are buying into this nonsense.  (There’s a reason Curmie abandoned Ethics Alarms, for example.)

Name a nationally-known Democrat—Obama, Biden, Harris, Newsom, Whitmer, Ocasio-Cortez, Mamdani, the list goes on and on—and you’ll find a message of sorrow, empathy, and sometimes outrage about the murder of Charlie Kirk.  Of course, some of them may have been pro forma or even insincere, but Curmie’s challenge on his Facebook page remains: name a prominent Republican who offered similar sentiments over the death of Melissa Hortman, who was an actual legislator as opposed to a talking head. 

One more thing crossed Curmie’s mind when he woke up in the middle of the night.  A little over 50 years ago, Curmie was a freshman in college, taking a course called “Political Ideals.”  One of the key differences identified in that course was the tendency of conservatives to think in terms of the individual and liberals to think of groups with something in common (race, gender, economic class, etc.).  It’s an over-simplification, but it isn’t, or at least wasn’t, inaccurate.

But when it comes to these attacks on politicians or quasi-politicians, those characterizations no longer hold.  There is little if any attempt by liberals to blame all conservatives for the deaths of Hortman or the torching of Shapiro’s home, but all of a sudden all liberals are responsible for Kirk’s death.  There are even insane, and yes, Curmie does mean that term literally, rantings from the likes of Congresscritter Clay Higgins, who wants to violate the First Amendment and censor both individuals and corporations because some people think Charlie Kirk wasn’t all that great a guy, after all. 

We’re already seeing a variation on the theme, as the list of people—teachers, state university administrators, restaurant employees, writers, coaches, even firefighters— fired or suspended for what clearly should be protected speech is long and growing.  FIRE, which Curmie criticized only yesterday, is actually all over this one: here’s a list of literally dozens of incidents, already (!).  This is, as FIRE’s headline rightly points out, the embodiment of “cancel culture”: you know, Gentle Reader, that horrible plague the right always complains about… except, of course, when they’re the ones doing it.

But we aren’t talking about the jobs report, or Russia attacking Poland on Trump’s watch, or the Epstein files, so at least there’s that.

There are problems here, and the solutions aren’t easy.  The political right will cheerfully abandon the 1st and 4th Amendments to bolster the 2nd, but the kind of gun control labelled by liberals as “common sense” wouldn’t have saved Charlie Kirk, at least if, as seems likely, Tyler Robinson was indeed the perpetrator.  He had no record of mental illness or criminality, and the weapon was neither a handgun nor a semi-automatic rifle. 

It is sadly ironic that one of Charlie Kirk’s most famous lines was “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”  But even calling attention to that quote is seen by some of the more fragile snowflakes of the right as a firing offense.  Yet another reason Curmie is glad he’s retired.

Note: one particularly unfortunate outcome here is that the Tyler Robinson Foundation, named for a different young man, will probably take a hit because of this because, in the words of a beloved former student, “people are stupid, y’all.”  The TRF is a charity offering support to families dealing with pediatric cancer.  Seems like a great cause, especially if you’re also a fan of the band Imagine Dragons, who have been involved with the foundation since its inception. Maybe send them a few bucks if you’ve got some to spare, Gentle Reader?