DEFUND 2
ESTB 10 25
SEE TERROR BS 3
Defund the left
SEE RETALIATE DEFUND
SEE KIRK 5 6 REICHSTAG FIRE ~ SOROS, INDIVISIBLE FORD FDN ACTBLUE
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NEGLECTED UPDATE: TRUMP XO ACTBLUE; EARLIER ARABELLA 1630
this is a catchall term for RW offensive (see also crytpo-) operations:
find a blueprint? powell a start?
but also related to RW Big picture long term SYSTEMIC strategy, eg gerry? -> capture of states --> eco-terror, abortion, voter suppress ...[see below ALEC model grabbed by barton wallbuilders
capt 2/18 bathtub?
no merri
bak capt 9 25
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aka defeat the left
aha: unions are collective action in the workplace/economic world, but class action is collective use of courts (legal vs economic power). both are under attack, defund the left. kochs undermine democ eg voter fraud BS to deprive we the ppl of political power, trifecta game over.
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AN 10 25
More than a month has passed since the fatal shooting of MAGA activist and Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk in Utah, and the murder continues to inspire an abundance of discussion on both the left and the right.
A long list of liberals, progressives, moderate Democrats and right-wing Never Trump conservatives are making it abundantly clear that while they had major disagreements with Kirk, they wholeheartedly condemn the killing. Progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), for example, was critical of Kirk's politics but is vehement in condemning the attack and saying that progressives need to debate those they disagree with — not resort to violence.
Many in the MAGA movement, however, are blaming Democrats and Never Trumpers for his murder despite the fact they condemned it in no uncertain terms.
In an article published on October 11, The Guardian's Peter Stone warns that MAGA Republicans are using Kirk's murder as a pretext to silence their political opponents.
"Donald Trump and MAGA allies have capitalized on the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk to expand attacks on liberal groups, donors, Democrats, and others by tarring many critics as the 'enemy within' and 'radical left' in a move that legal scholars and historians call authoritarian and anti-democratic," Stone warns. "Kirk's killing by a lone gunman spurred Trump and top allies to quickly launch conspiratorial charges against a bevy of political foes and an investigation of billionaire liberal donor George Soros. They also threatened legal action against TV network ABC after their late-night star Jimmy Kimmel's suspension over clumsy comments about Kirk ended."
Stone emphasizes that Kirk's murder has "provided cover for a sprawling retribution drive by the president and MAGA world that endangers civil liberties against an array of critics in the media, universities, non-profits and other parts of American civil society, say scholars."
Steven Levitsky, a professor at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts outside Boston and author of the book "How Democracies Die," described MAGA's response to Kirk's murder as an example of "Page 1 in the authoritarian playbook."
Levitsky told The Guardian, "You use political violence as a pretext to go after your political enemies. Some of them have been chomping at the bit to do this. They're going after mainstream opponents and other critics. They're defining unacceptable behavior as broadly as possible….. The goal is to tilt the playing field by going after anybody in civil society who could challenge them. One way to weaken them is to go after the funders using a false pretense by linking them to violence or illegal behavior."
Former federal prosecutor Paul Rosenzweig is highly critical of MAGA's push for a federal racketeering investigation of billionaire Democratic donor George Soros following Kirk's murder.
Rosenzweig told The Guardian, "Trump’s invocation of RICO to investigate Soros is frivolously wrong-headed. It is yet another example of his weaponization of the law to target his enemies."
Russell Muirhead, chairman of the Department of Government at Dartmouth University told The Guardian, "Since Charlie Kirk's murder, President Trump has amplified and extended his penchant for leveling conspiracy charges. The target is 'domestic terrorist organizations,' which seems to include such peaceful pro-democratic anti-communist entities as George Soros' Open Society Foundations. The effect is to describe the entirety of 'the left' as a conspiracy, bent on destroying the country, including the Democratic Party."
Muirhead continued: “The risk here is clear: conspiracy charges convert peaceful political opponents into enemies. Once that is accomplished, they no longer need to be respected or tolerated. They can be folded into shadowy 'domestic terrorism networks' and imprisoned — or worse."
Read Peter Stone's full article for The Guardian at this link.
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// BONDI ON HATE SPEECH
Trump’s AG scrambles to do 'damage control' after conservatives rage against free speech threat
AN 9 25
Senior Trump administration officials on Monday made fresh threats to crack down on a nonexistent left-wing “domestic terror movement” following last week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk—a move that critics called an attempt to exploit the far-right firebrand’s murder to advance an authoritarian agenda targeting nonviolent opposition.
Even as investigators work to determine the motive of Kirk’s killer, members of Trump’s inner circle and supporters have amplified an unfounded narrative of a coordinated leftist movement targeting conservatives.
According to The New York Times:
On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that Cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.
Appearing on the latest episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast—which was guest hosted by US Vice President JD Vance—White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that “we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people.”
“It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” Miller vowed.
Vance said during the podcast that he wanted to explore “all of the ways that we’re trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream.”
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech,‘” the vice president said. “We’re going to go after the network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
Vance, who like Trump and numerous supporters claim to champion free speech, also took aim at “people who are celebrating” Kirk’s killing.
Another unnamed administration official told the Times Monday that government agencies would be investigating people, including those accused of vandalizing Tesla electric vehicles and dealerships and allegedly assaulting federal immigration agents, in an effort to implicate US leftists in political violence.
Vance and Miller’s threats ignored right-wing violence—which statistically outpaces left-wing attacks—including the recent assassinations of Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, who were murdered in June by a right-wing masked gunman disguised as a police officer.
Investigative reporter Jason Paladino reported last week that the US Department of Justice apparently removed an academic study previously published on the National Institute for Justice’s online library showing that “since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives” versus “42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives” committed by “far-left extremists.”
Responding to Miller’s remarks, New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent noted on social media that “Stephen Miller was directly involved in one of the largest acts of organized domestic political violence the United States has seen in modern times, the January 6 [2021] insurrection.”
Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) weighed in Monday on Miller’s attempt to exploit Kirk’s murder, writing on the social media site Bluesky that “it’s never acceptable to kill someone for their political beliefs. But the Trump [administration] exploiting the shooting of Charlie Kirk to follow their authoritarian instincts and crack down on the left is incredibly disturbing.”
“We must end any form of political violence—and reject those who try to exploit it,” she added.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom noted Monday on social media that Miller “has already publicly labeled the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization.”
“This isn’t about crime and safety,” Newsom added. “It’s about dismantling our democratic institutions. We cannot allow acts of political violence to be weaponized and used to threaten tens of millions of Americans.”
The progressive Working Families Party (WFP) said Monday on social media that “JD Vance and Stephen Miller want to use the horrifying murder of Charlie Kirk to target and dismantle pro-democracy groups.”
“Their comments call to mind some of the darkest periods in US history,” WFP continued. “They’re dividing people based on what box we ticked on our voter registration.”
Vance and Miller “want to stoke fear and resentment to justify their un-American crackdowns on free speech, mass abductions of working people, and military takeovers of our cities,” WFP added. “This isn’t going to fly. We’ve survived crises like this before as a country, and we can choose to live in a place where our political freedoms are protected, where we settle disagreements with words not weapons, and where no one has to fear losing a loved one to gun violence.”
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DEFUND LEFT SOROS PAID PROTESTERS
mma
On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response
Written by Matt Gertz
Published 09/12/25
Charlie Kirk, a powerful right-wing activist, popular podcaster, and close friend and ally to President Donald Trump, was shot and killed while speaking at a college in Utah on Wednesday. Politicians of both parties and commentators across the spectrum, including myself, have responded with condemnations of the act as both the tragic murder of a young husband and father and an act of political violence that must be anathema if we hope to preserve our country as a liberal democracy.
Rational people on all sides of the political spectrum abhor political violence and want to ratchet down the temperature, but this requires an honest assessment of what is happening: There have been far too many cases of political violence in recent years, and the targets are not limited by party, ideology, or creed.
Yet within the right-wing media bubble, long before there was even a suspect in custody, commentators cited Kirk’s killing as proof the left is at war with them. Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) on Thursday called out right-wing pundits who took Kirk’s death “as an opportunity to say we're at war so that they could get some of our conservative followers lathered up over this.” He added: “It seems like a cheap, disgusting, awful way to pretend like you're a leader of a conservative movement.”
Tillis cited two commentators in particular, but such rhetoric has been a staple throughout the right-wing media ecosystem since news broke that Kirk had been shot. It is what right-wing audiences are hearing right now — and what they have been hearing, to one extent or another, for quite some time.
“They are at war with us!” Fox News star Jesse Watters said on The Five, his network’s most-watched show, shortly after Kirk’s passing was announced.
“Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us,” he continued. “And what are we gonna do about it? How much political violence are we going to tolerate? And that’s the question we’re just gonna have to ask ourselves.”
“THIS IS WAR,” posted Libs of TikTok. “Civil war,” was Andrew Tate’s take. “This is war,” commented Ian Miles Cheong. “This is a war, this is a war, this is a war,” Alex Jones said on his livestream. According to Steve Bannon, “We are at war in this country.” “We’re not supposed to say this,” posted Shaun Maguire. “But the truth is we’re at War.”
Many on the right were Kirk’s friends and are mourning his death. Some of them may fear for their own safety. But the narrative they have constructed relies on ignoring the recent spate of attacks targeting Democrats, the gruesome contemporaneous response to those attacks from some of the most influential voices on the right, and the chorus of Democratic officials who have condemned Kirk’s assassination.
There is no war, no righteous, violent struggle between a “left” and a “right.” A man was killed. His killer deserves to be brought to justice. Turning that into a “war” can only make the situation worse.
Terrorists have targeted political leaders of both parties
It is not true, as Eric Trump and
both claimed in right-wing media interviews since Kirk’s slaying, that violence is “only going one way,” or, as right-wing radio host Dana Loesch put it on Watters’ prime-time show, that “it's not the right killing the left, it's the left killing the right.”
It seems both pointless and morally inappropriate to try to weigh attacks against one another to determine who has it “worse,” but it’s impossible to have a conversation if we can’t agree that political violence goes both ways.
The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attackon the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category.
It’s worth revisiting how right-wing media covered those domestic terror attacks, as it speaks to how its audience likely interprets them in an increasingly fragmented media landscape in which people can pick and choose news sources that confirm their biases.
After a man broke into the Pelosi residence and attacked Paul Pelosi with a hammer, MAGA influencers claimed based on effectively no evidence that the attacker, who turned out to be a deranged individual steeped in right-wing fever swamp conspiracy theories, had actually been let into the speaker’s house by her husband for the purposes of sex and subsequently attacked him as part of a lovers’ quarrel.
Donald Trump Jr. posted a photo of a pair of briefs and a hammer on a bed with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready.”
For months afterwards, Fox hosts including Watters alluded to such wild claims on their nationally broadcast programs, undeterred by body camera footage from the scene of the attack or basic human dignity.
Prominent MAGA social media influencers likewise responded to the Minnesota shootings by spinning up a false profile of the killer — in reality a Trump supporter who railed against abortion and the LGBTQ community — as a far-left supporter of Gov. Tim Walz. Laura Loomer and Mike Cernovich even suggested Walz might have orchestrated the attacks as political hits.
Fox’s right-wing propagandists, meanwhile, all but buried that story. There were no soul-searching reflections about political violence targeting the left on the programs of Watters, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, or Greg Gutfeld — instead, discussion on those shows the week after the attacks was limited to correspondent reports and headline reads. The week after the CDC shooting, those programs didn’t cover it at all.
Looking further back, the leading lights of the right-wing media aggressively sought to minimize and sanitize the Trump mob’s assault on the U.S. Capitol in 2021, and they alternatively blamed “incivility” from the left for a Trumpist sending mail bombs to a host of left-wing and Democratic targets and suggested those attacks were a “false flag.” And that’s to say nothing of other attacks apparently fueled by right-wing extremism that targeted Jewish, Latino, and Black Americans in Charleston, South Carolina; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Buffalo, New York; and El Paso, Texas.
If you downplay right-wing violence against left-wing targets, it’s much easier to convince your viewers that the violence is all going in the other direction.
- ### MAGA wants “the Left” to be “crushed with the power of the state”
While the repeated declarations that they are at “war” with a murderous left are obviously corrosive, there have not been widespread direct calls for retaliatory violence from prominent right-wing media figures. But many are urging President Donald Trump, his administration, and congressional Republicans to respond with widespread political repression of the left and the Democratic Party.
“We can honor him [Kirk] and honor his memory and make it a living thing that we use this to take down the apparatus that's well-funded that is at the core of this anti-Americanism,” Steve Bannon said on his streaming show Friday. “It has to be a all-of-government approach. ... Let's go kick down some doors and perp walk some folks today.”
Laura Loomer, a conspiracy theorist and streamer who has Trump’s ear and regularly gets federal officials fired for insufficient demonstrated fealty to the president, declared Wednesday, “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization.” She later added: “All of the Leftist groups that pay for these radical protests need to be prosecuted. … More people will be murdered if the Left isn’t crushed with the power of the state.”
MAGA influencer Mike Cernovich demanded “congressional hearings now” on Wednesday, which he said should include “every billionaire funding far left wing extremism,” naming George Soros, Bill Gates, and Reid Hoffman. He also called for “massive RICO investigations now” to scrutinize “every dollar” and tagged Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel.
Former GOP Senate candidate Blake Masters echoed Cernovich, adding, “Either we destroy the NGO/donor patronage network that enables and foments” violence, “or it will destroy us.”
Sean Davis, co-founder of The Federalist, posted Wednesday that “the Democrat party is a domestic terrorist organization” and “terrorist Democrats will not stop. … And until they are stopped—until every single nutjob inciting this madness and cheering it on is held accountable and removed from civil society—it will not stop.” His outlet published a piece which declared that Democrats “need to be treated like the domestic terrorists they are.”
“The last time the radical Left orchestrated a wave of violence and terror, J. Edgar Hoover shut it all down within a few years,” Manhattan Institute senior fellow Christopher Rufo said. “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.”
YouTuber Benny Johnson claimed that “the modern Democrat party is a terrorist organization” and that the left-wing movement must be “ripped root and stem from our American republic and thrown into the fire where it belongs.”
Some are even suggesting that because the threat to the right is so clear, if Republican leaders don’t respond with such steps, the result will be some on the right taking matters into their own hands.
Davis posted on Thursday that if congressional Republicans don’t take “proper action” to protect “a population being hunted for sport,” then the result would be “improper reaction,” which he described as “a response that cannot be contained once it is out.”
Likewise, Cernovich wrote: “I’m choosing my words mindfully, don’t twist them. This is a prediction, not a preference. If Congressional GOP and Trump don’t act swiftly and ferociously, there will be retaliatory actions due to lawful means not being used. This is always what happens. RICO these fucks now!”
Trump appears to be responding to these demands for political retribution.
- ### The elephant in the room
It is impossible to have a rational conversation about topics like lowering the political temperature and pushing back against the spread of political violence when the president of the United States is interested in those issues only as a cudgel against his political opponents.
On Wednesday evening, the editorial board of The Wall Street Journal urged Trump, himself the victim of two assassination attempts, to take advantage of “an opportunity for leadership” by seeking to lower the tenor of political rhetoric.
Any other president would not need to hear such advice — but Trump’s previous responses to attacks on Democratic targets demonstrate his lack of interest in bringing the country together. He mocked the brutal assault against Pelosi, said following the Minnesota shooting that it would be a “waste of time” to call Gov. Tim Walz because he is “so whacked out,” and completely ignored the CDC attack.
In an Oval Office address a few hours after Kirk was killed, Trump characteristically ignored the Journal’s counsel. He offered a testament to Kirk’s life and promised that the shooter, who at that point had not been publicly identified or taken into custody, would be brought to justice.
But he also attributed blame far beyond the person who took Kirk’s life, saying that the “rhetoric” of “the radical left” was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.” He went on to promise that his administration would go after the individuals and organizations he said “contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence,” adding that “radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives.”
Trump did not name the targets of the action he promised to carry out. But a “straightforward reading of his rhetoric,” as The Atlantic’s Jonathan Chait noted, is that “the president of the United States is treating the political opposition as accessories to murder and threatening to use the full power of the government to attack it.”
On Friday, Fox & Friends co-host Ainsley Earhardt pointed to “radicals” on both the right and left and asked the president, “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?”
Trump’s response made clear that he is uninterested in doing so. He excused “radicals on the right” as people who “don’t want to see crime,” saying, “They don't want these people coming in, we don't want you burning our shopping centers, we don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.”
“The radicals on the left are the problem, and they are vicious and they are horrible and they are politically savvy,” he added, before running through a litany of grievances with his critics.
That message is echoing across MAGA media, a powerful information apparatus with a rare and unmediated grasp on its audience. It will fuel more vitriol, making it harder, not easier, to have honest conversations and reduce the threat of political violence in this country.
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9 8 25
NIXON PROF = ENEMY
JDV DEFUND THE LEFT
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