Of Course There Will Be No Apologies

 from the right-wing nutjobs, high profile and not, who promoted the bullshit that anybody to the "left" of the Aryan Nations was responsible for the murder in Utah of racist and sexist podcaster and political operative Charlie Kirk Wednesday.  Now we find out that the accused shooter, Tyler Robinson, is himself a right-wing extremist though of the Nick Fuentes stripe.  As people who follow the antics of the extremist right know, Fuentes despised Kirk.  Both are/were grifters, but Kirk was way more polished than Fuentes, and no doubt Fuentes was envious of the fortune Kirk was amassing. Lots of money has been made off hate from the gullible, but the zillionaires who helped start up these hatemongers were raking in the money, too, via distraction so they could buy politicians and steal further from the public.  However, I am one who was never convinced Fuentes actually believes one word of what he spews. He comes across as satirical, not as sincere at all.   You watch or listen to Kirk, though, and you know he was way off the deep end thanks to his whack job religious beliefs and that he actually  believed in what he spewed.  The money was secondary to his notion he was going to "Christianize" this country.  He was on a power trip as much as a money trip.

Somebody on the discussion board Democratic Underground had an interesting take on the Kirk murder.  The reason so many of his followers were devastated is they believed he was the great hope of the MAGAs once Trump finally departs from the scene in a pine box or in an insane asylum.  He was to be their JFK, and they felt and feel grief when Kirk was murdered.  Their hopes for a MAGA (read fascistic) future are slipping away.

Of course, Kirk will be forgotten in six months or a year or at least when Robinson's trial is over and done with.  There are hundreds of people equally or even more vile to take his place.  Kirk offered nothing positive to society, just hate, just cynicism, and the world is frankly a better place without him here.  It is tragic he had to die young in such a horrible manner, though.  He will be a martyr for a little while, but he will wind up in obscurity like the thousands of other murder victims in the United States every year.  He is just a statistic of gun violence, the very thing he felt there was little to be done about it because, you know, his twisted reading of the Second Amendment, the Harlon Carter interpretation of it and which some of the idiots on the Roberts court actually believe.

Snip from AP article:

Robinson mentioned Kirk’s upcoming visit to Utah Valley University — located about 3 1/2 hours from the family’s southern Utah home — at a recent dinner, kicking off a conversation about how he didn’t like Kirk’s viewpoints, family told authorities. A full picture of his political leanings was still emerging. Utah state records show he is registered to vote, but that he is not affiliated with a political party and is listed as inactive, meaning he didn’t vote in the two most recent general elections.

__

Robinson reportedly scores in the 99.9th percentile in tests, which only goes to show standardized tests don't mean much of anything.  

Sign of the Times

 Obit:  Right-wing activist and co-founder of the ubiquitous Turning Point organization Charlie Kirk, only 31, was shot dead in Utah of all places today.  He made a great living as a podcaster or talk show host extolling, among other things, the virtues of not being a college graduate.  He was a junior college dropout, but, like so many other young people on the right, he hitched his star to the gravy train and made a bundle of money along the way.

However, there is a price to be paid for being way off the beam politically, and he found out today how big a price.  He leaves behind a wife and two small children.

Perhaps the biggest shock of all is that more of these radical rightists haven't been killed.

Report:

He had a huge following.

Media Matters noted this from Kirk from two years ago, which turned out too ironical for words:

Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price -- 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That's a price. You get rid of driving, you'd have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving -- speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you're not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

\

The absurdity of the statement regarding fathers cannot be overstated in light of the fact so many of these "fathers" wind up being murderers even to the point of annihilating their own families. Kirk obviously had no concept of irony here.