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Open in TheBrain

KIRK5bak

estb 7 25 bak

ESTB 1 15 GINORMOUS FUCKTARD trifecta FASCIST LA ICE 6 25

ENFORCER THUGSWARM EG ED MARTIN // FASCISM NJ MAYOR

SEE CRM 4

SEE WAR ON XIAN BS WHITE GREIVANCE RACISM

CONSTANTLY BOASTS ABOUT HIS WH ACCESS/CLOUT?

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HEADERS FROM FOUR:

merri ok not now tbl

SEE 2025 FUNDERS ALEX EPSTEIN

shivved ronna --> gotv = enforcer hit man trumpista?

see ariz fake elector bowyer indicted felony

only poso kirk defend jok on real am voice

see RW radio talk

esca amplify on mandella bs

see ziklag dirty trick on ~ johnson amend C &S evang

punked RT tenet media

hub?! 3 23 see tag

crm regular mma EVERY FREAKIN DAY?!

yikes see teneo hub

see islamophobe

SEE HYPE FEAR CONSPRACY

see rfk vaxx covid bs

see xian nat'list am founders xian BS

influencer incentive structure? is there an escalator hierarchy in right sphere?

see roadshow conf

SEE RACISM

see misogyny roadshow tradwife bs

see incubator

gen zz

see salem radio

SEE VIOLENCE CIVIL WAR SPIRITUAL WAR 1984 ~ 1776

rww Tags: Charlie Kirk Jack Hibbs Christian Nationalism Turning Point USA

MMA Tags: Charlie Kirk

freq on mma // ben shapiro

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On Tuesday, a federal judge issued a 128-page ruling striking down President Donald Trump's ban on asylum applications for immigrants crossing the Southern border of the United States that he issued earlier this year via executive order. Some of Trump's most outspoken supporters are furious over the decision.

U.S. District Judge Randolph Moss — who former President Barack Obama appointed to the District of Columbia in 2014 — ruled that Trump's asylum ban violated the Immigration and Naturalization Act (INA) and was an illegal attempt to install an "extra-statutory, extra-regulatory regime for repatriating or removing individuals from the United States." He added that "nothing in the INA or the Constitution grants the President or his delegees the sweeping authority asserted in the Proclamation and implementing guidance."

According to Politico legal correspondent Kyle Cheney, Judge Moss also designated asylum seekers as a protected class. This would appear to insulate his ruling from the recent Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) decision that prevented lower court judges from issuing nationwide injunctions.

READ MORE:'Can anyone spell recession?' Trump slammed as jobs report stuns economists

Moss' decision was met with widespread outrage by Trump supporters on social media. MAGA influencer Gunther Eagleman characterized Moss' ruling as "ordering President Trump to reopen the border," adding: "Ignore this political HACK!" Charlie Kirk, who is the founder of far-right group Turning Point USA, also blasted the decision in a post to his X account.

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"There are a lot of conservatives who recklessly call for judicial rulings they don't like to be ignored. I have fought against that; it would be hugely destructive to throw out our constitutional balance of powers for the sake of a temper tantrum," Kirk tweeted. "But it is 100% not acceptable for a traitor on the federal bench to side with invaders in abolishing America. Period."

Far-right influencer Chaya Raichik's LibsofTikTok X account, which has more than four million followers, also piled on after Moss' decision was announced. She accused Moss of being an "activist judge who wants to turn the US into a Biden-era open border disaster."

Even though Moss has been a member of the D.C. District Court for more than a decade, his legal career stretches back nearly 40 years, when he was a clerk for U.S. District Judge Pierre Leval (an appointee of Democrat Bill Clinton) in 1986 in the Southern District of New York. He then clerked for SCOTUS Associate Justice John Paul Stevens (an appointee of Republican Gerald Ford) in the late eighties.

READ MORE:Republicans 'facing real general election problems' over Trump Medicaid cuts: ex-GOP rep

Click here to read Moss' full ruling.

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mma

[## Charlie Kirk condemns Zohran Mamdani for how he “disgustingly” eats rice: “We in the West value cleanliness. We have utensils.” 07/01/25

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mma

Half of the top 10 online shows spread misinformation or false narratives about Hurricane Helene in 2024

The videos have 5.7 million combined views on YouTube and Rumble

Special ProgramsClimate & Energy

Written by Ilana Berger

Published 06/26/25

Media Matters found that popular online shows also pushed right-wing misinformation about hurricane recovery efforts after reviewing episodes from the 10 programs with the largest followings (based on a previous Media Matters study) that were streamed or uploaded in the two weeks between September 27, 2024, when Hurricane Helene made landfall, and October 11, 2024. These shows continue to stream as this year's extreme weather season progresses.

For this study, we reviewed all 62 original long-form audio and video content streamed or published by the top 10 online shows in the two weeks between September 27, 2024, when the storm made landfall, and October 11, 2024, for discussion about hurricanes, particularly Helene or Milton (which made landfall in Florida on October 9, 2024), as well as related government response and recovery efforts. While Helene was the focus of the study, our scope did include incidental mentions of Milton because of its timing.

We found that 5 of the top online shows adopted right-wing media talking points and misinformation about Hurricane Helene: The Joe Rogan Experience, The Ben Shapiro Show, The Charlie Kirk Show, Stay Free with Russell Brand,and Candace. (The top shows we reviewed that did not contain relevant hurricane misinformation during this period were: The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast, This Past Weekend with Theo Von, What Now? with Trevor Noah, Full Send Podcast, and The Dr. Phil Podcast.)

Nearly one-third of the episodes these programs posted during the study period — 15 of 48 in total, or 31% — spread misinformation or amplified misleading narratives during the two-week period following Hurricane Helene. As reported in our previous study, these five shows had a combined reach of 121 million total subscribers across streaming platforms (YouTube, Spotify, Rumble, Twitch, and Kick) and social media platforms that are used to amplify and promote these shows (Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok): The Joe Rogan Experience (39.9 million), The Ben Shapiro Show (25 million), Stay Free with Russell Brand (22.5 million), The Charlie Kirk Show(18.6 million), and Candace (15 million).

According to Kirk, the fact that “all the outskirts of western North Carolina are some of the reddest parts of the country” proved that “the more conservative that you are, like East Palestine, the more Trump you are, your federal government just doesn't care about you.” Kirk later claimed that “Democrats don’t care — they hope that everyone there is disenfranchised” because “this could flip North Carolina, by the way, to a blue state. Maybe that’s why they’re doing this.”

“They wonder why Trump is so popular,” Kirk said. “They wonder why our movement is ascendant. This is an elementary breakdown of why government exists. Government exists first and foremost to serve its citizens.”

Ben Shapiro spoke with then-presidential candidate Donald Trump on October 8, 2024, who proceeded to attack the Biden administration’s disaster relief efforts and tout his own campaign.

“I'm leading in all of the swing states,” Trump said. “The incompetence of what they're doing with the hurricane and we have another coming. I mean I think Ron's going to do a very good job and maybe save them but they're not going to do anything, they're just incompetent.”

Shapiro also used the storm to attack Harris’ campaign, claiming that Trump’s presence “on the ground in Valdosta, Georgia, … was making Kamala and Joe very upset, so they had to stage some photo ops” in order “to pretend that she actually does something for a living, and then she ran away.”

On Candace, host Candace Owens read from a viewer’s email asking, “Have you heard anything about people committing suicide in the hurricane-struck areas that Kamala and Biden have completely neglected? She is evil and it starts from her hidden roots.”

Owens responded by claiming she had received other “emails from people that are in the military saying that they were supposed to go around and help in the hurricane — now they’re being sent overseas to the Middle East.”

“That’s your tax dollars at work,” she told her audience. “Americans are suffering — nothing. Sorry, feel the hurricane, the flood. We’ve got to go defend the borders and the people of foreign nations.” Owens concluded that “our politicians have completely sold us out. They lie to us about everything.”

By leaving out important context about how the government appropriates funding for disaster relief and the process for states to receive federal aid, these programs deceptively painted a vivid picture of government leaders who were deprioritizing America and could not be trusted.

Discussions on top online shows largely mimicked the misinformation being pushed by the right, repeating inaccurate claims about the hurricane’s cause and jumping to extreme and unsupported conclusions about recovery efforts.

Fact: Federal assistance includes substantial aid beyond the initial $750 payment

As the federal response began to unfold following the storm, Fox News amplified false claims that hurricane victims were eligible for only $750 in aid for all damages. In reality, this amount was just the beginning of available assistance.

The White House confirmed at the time that emergency aid “can include a one-time $750 payment to help with essential items like food, water, baby formula and other emergency supplies. After registering for disaster assistance, individuals may also qualify to receive disaster-related financial assistance to repair storm-related damage to homes and replace personal property, as well as assistance to find a temporary place to stay.” But online shows spread the same misinformation:

Fact: FEMA’s disaster relief program is separate from its immigrant assistance programs

On the campaign trail last October, Trump said, “The Harris-Biden administration says they don’t have any money” for hurricane relief. “They spent it all on illegal migrants,” he claimed. “They stole the FEMA money just like they stole it from a bank, so they could give it to their illegal immigrants that they want to have vote for them.”

A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson categorically denied the accusation that the money was spent on “illegal migrants” instead of hurricane victims. “These claims are completely false,” they said, clarifying that the Shelter and Services Program, which provides assistance to migrants, “is a completely separate, appropriated grant program that was authorized and funded by Congress and is not associated in any way with FEMA's disaster-related authorities or funding streams.” But the same misinformation was repeated online by The Charlie Kirk Show.

Fact: There is no evidence to suggest that disaster aid was distributed based on race

In 2022, a clip of Vice President Kamala Harris discussing Florida relief efforts in response to Hurricane Ian caught the attention of right-wing media and GOP figures, who accused her of planning to allocate resources based on race. The clip was from an interview with actress Priyanka Chopra, who asked the vice president about relief efforts and what the Biden administration was doing to combat climate change, specifically given that people in the poorest countries are most affected by the climate crisis.

Harris responded that “we have to address this in a way that is about giving resources based on equity, understanding that we fight for equality, but we also need to fight for equity; understanding that not everyone starts out at the same place. And if we want people to be in an equal place, sometimes we have to take into account those disparities and do that work.” At the time, The Associated Press assessed the claim that Harris planned to distribute aid based on race as “false” — but it still reappeared during top online shows’ coverage of Hurricane Helene.

Fact: Hurricane relief funding requires congressional approval and is separate from foreign aid spending

In the wake of Hurricane Helene, right-wing media complained about the Biden administration’s pledge to give $157 million to Lebanon, incorrectly claiming that the foreign humanitarian aid was being taken from funds that would otherwise be used for domestic disaster relief. Fox News host Sean Hannity misleadingly suggested foreign aid is competing for funding with disaster relief. Top online shows spread similar misinformation in the storm’s aftermath, suggesting the federal response was tied to military assistance for Ukraine.

The Department of Homeland Security, which houses FEMA, does not directly fund Ukraine’s military like the Department of Defense does, though it does provide some relief for Ukrainian nationals who come to the U.S. The aid package that was passed by Congress in 2024 had been vetted for months before the hurricane occurred, and passed with bipartisan support. American military aid for Ukraine, which has largely come in the form of weapons and equipment, has faced criticism from the right and the left. Defense funding is unrelated to disaster relief, however, and no government programs were cut to pay for the aid to Ukraine.

At the end of May, FEMA “denied North Carolina's request for the agency to match 100% of the state funds for Helene cleanup.” On June 10, Trump announced plans for states to “wean off of” FEMA aid and “bring it down to the state level” after the 2025 hurricane season, which started at the beginning of the month. Just a few days later, the head of FEMA’s crucial National Coordination Response Center resigned.

Not only has the Trump administration further weakened emergency response mechanisms that top online hosts and right-wing media previously complained about, it has set the stage for more misinformation to interfere with relief efforts over the next few months.

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AHA STRICT FR MACHO BS FASCISM

ice PROTESTS LA

mma

  1. ### Sean Hannity says Gavin Newsom “should be arrested”

:{:{06/09/25 }:

  1. ### OutKick's Dan Dakich says Simone Biles “showed her stupidity” by defending trans inclusion in sports

:{:{06/09/25}:

  1. ### While calling for the military to be deployed to Los Angeles, Charlie Kirk uses a chart sourced to a white nationalist website

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While calling for the military to be deployed to Los Angeles, Charlie Kirk uses a chart sourced to a white nationalist website

Written by Jason Campbell

Published 06/09/25

During his June 9 broadcast, Charlie Kirk used a chart sourced to the white nationalist organization American Renaissance.

The graph shows the decline of the white population in Los Angeles over multiple decades. Kirk displayed the graph after claiming, “This is the great replacement theory” — referring to a white nationalist conspiracy theory — and while saying, “You can see the white population collapse in L.A. That's intentional. They've wanted it that way.”

Kirk has a history of promoting the replacement theory and other racist myths.

The Southern Poverty Law Center labels American Renaissance a hate organization, saying it “promotes pseudo-scientific studies and research that purport to show the inferiority of blacks to whites.”

During this segment, Kirk also called on President Donald Trump to “fully deploy the military in the streets, take back the streets of LA.” Earlier in this show, he said, “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807.”

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From the June 9, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): We haven't even talked about reforming our legal system. We need a shutoff of all immigration in this country. Period. End of story. Moratorium. This right here should be a five-alarm fire. We knew that this was here, but my goodness, it's gonna keep on bubbling up. It's gonna keep on continuing. Because what we have here is not just the bandits of the Democrat Party, but then you have Gavin Newsom and you have Karen Bass defending what is happening in the streets. You have Gavin Newsom suing Donald Trump because he is so in favor of this.

What do you see all those different foreign flags? You have the Black liberation flag. I don't know what that is. Is that the Argentinian flag? Great. And then you have the Palestinian flag. Understand there is intersectionality here. If you want to properly understand the left, you must understand intersectionality. What do the Palestinian pro-Hamas people have to do with the white, liberal, purple-haired jihadis and then also with the La Raza folks with BLM? They all hate Christendom. They hate Western civilization. They hate what we have built. This is a global movement of freaks and misanthropes. Anti-Israel, anti-West, anti-America, anti-capitalism, anti-law, anti-order, and it all comes together. The same people that are doing the Gaza encampments are the same people that are now waving the La Raza Mexican flag. It is order versus anarchy. It is chaos versus structure. It is against everything that we believe in in the West. Everything.

And we're not gonna put up with it. I think President Trump should fully deploy the military in the streets, take back the streets of LA. Do it and do it fast. We're not gonna allow Floydapalooza happen again. Civilization's on the line. Because you know what happened in 2020? So many Black and Hispanic people got unnecessarily killed because of the rise in crime. If this mob broke into your home and killed your family, they won't defend it as a cry of protest.

This is the great replacement theory. Remember we talked about how they wanna replace white Anglo-Saxon Christian protestants with Mexican, Nicaraguans, with El Salvadorians. You have seen the result of the great replacement. In California, one in four people have been born outside the U.S. Let me say that again. One in four people in California have been born outside the U.S. You can see the white population collapse in L.A. That's intentional. They've wanted it that way.

These are not protests. These are riots. And the leaders — Karen Bass and Gavin Newsom, which I'll talk about more, are being held hostage by these insurgents. We want our country back, and we have a big heart. We have that open — you know, oh, yes. We're gonna take care of everybody. But as it says in the Bible, we're gonna build the wall like it says in the Book of Nehemiah, and we're gonna build it strong, and we're gonna build it high. And if you do not assimilate, and if you are an agent of disorder, of chaos, and confusion — adios, hasta la vista, baby. We will find you and your family, and we will return you. All 20, 25, 30 million. Every single one of you are going back.

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RWW

06/18/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, allowing states to ban abortion, the justices have decided to let states ban another politically controversial form of health care—this time, gender-affirming medical treatments for minors.

As coverage of the horrific shootings in Minnesota has unfolded, the focus has turned to the alleged murderer’s time at a little-known Bible school in Dallas called Christ for the Nations Institute (CFNI). Most simply refer to it as a “Christian school,” a “religious college,” or a “theology school”—all of which are, strictly speaking, correct—while others, like Mother Jones’s Kiera Butler, more accurately describe it as “a Bible college popular among Christian nationalists.” Yet even that doesn’t fully describe the school’s ties to recent episodes of political violence. Because despite CFNI’s insistence that “this is not who we are,” we should not be surprised that a violent murderer came out of this school. While it was once considered a fringe establishment, CFNI is far more mainstream now than at any point in its history.

About halfway through the Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Grapevine, Texas, I got a talking to from Turning Point USA comms.

Andrew Kolvet, the organization’s chief spokesman, peeled me away from the line of young women I was speaking to warn me that he had gotten complaints about me, though he couldn’t name what they were beyond “weird questions”, and if I kept interviewing attendees under 18, I’d be removed from the conference. “I’m very familiar with your work,” Kolvet said. He reminded me these girls are “innocent,” and to lay off.

Tucker Carlson brawled with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and humiliated the senator for old time’s sake in a wild exchange during an interview set to be released on Wednesday.

Far-right activist Laura Loomer has slammed “fake” MAGA supporters in a series of posts on X claiming her conservative critics are using an antisemitic slur against her.

The “Appeal to Heaven” flag, a popular symbol for Christian nationalists that was waved by January 6 rioters, was raised over the Small Business Administration headquarters last week.

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After Israel launched airstrikes at Iranian nuclear and residential infrastructure on June 12, right-wing media figures rushed to fearmonger that supposed Democratic “open border” policies allowed Iranian “sleeper cells” into the country that might now execute terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.

Israel announced it had initiated a series of strikes aimed at Iran’s nuclear facilities and missile factories which have reportedly killed top Iranian military commanders and civilian scientists. In response, Iran vowed retaliation against what it called the country’s “foolish act.” President Donald Trump called the attack “excellent” and warned that there would be “more to come.”

Some right-wing media figures have already started fearmongering about the possibility of Iranian sleeper cells committing terrorism on U.S. soil in response to the Israeli strikes. Several have also blamed former President Joe Biden for this threat due to his alleged “open border” policies.

Right-wing figures fearmonger about the possibility of “terror attacks” from Iranian sleeper cells supposedly let into the U.S. under Biden

Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk warned his followers: “Keep your head on a swivel. Biden let millions of people into America. Iran might activate some sleeper cells against Americans. Stay armed.”

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Trump ally and self-proclaimed “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer urged people to be “very careful today and this weekend in American cities and tourist locations” because “Iran has many sleeper cells in the US. Iranian proxies from HAMAS and Hezbollah will likely retaliate on US soil to kill Americans in acts of Islamic terror as a form of retaliation to the Israeli air strikes.” She also claimed “there are millions of jihadi sleeper cells in our country thanks to the Democrats open border polices.”

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On former Trump adviser Steve Bannon’s War Room, MAGA media influencer Jack Posobiec also suggested that the U.S. is “very vulnerable” to attacks planned inside the country because “under four years of the Biden administration, … the border was completely open,” adding later that the U.S. is “vulnerable to this type of attack from sleeper cells from any of our adversaries or potential sabotage teams around the world.”

Video

Citation

From the June 13, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

On The National Report, Newsmax host Jon Glasgow said, “We’ve had millions of people pour in over the borders. Is there a possibility of some sleeper cells here in the United States that Iran might try to activate?” Newsmax host Rob Astorino replied, “There's no question. I mean, that's been their plan the whole time.”

Appearing on Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt Tonight, retired Army Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer claimed that Israel “could well have essentially limited all options that the Iranians have, except for potentially some sleeper cells, which we are definitely still worried about here in the United States.” Newsmax host Bianca de la Garza responded, “As we have to be. Joe Biden opened borders for four years.”

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MMA

Right-wing media call for “overwhelming force” and arrests in LA protests

Written by Chloe Simon & Reed McMaster

Published 06/12/25

Protests in Los Angeles have been ongoing as Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids continue to target migrant communities. In response, right-wing media have urged the Trump administration and law enforcement to crack down harder on protesters, called for Democratic officials to be arrested, and suggested the protesters were funded by outside groups.

Fox News host Laura Ingraham and others encouraged President Donald Trump to employ the Insurrection Act against protesters while Daily Wire host Matt Walsh said Trump should use “overwhelming force.” Fox host Sean Hannity and War Room host Steve Bannon have called for arrests of Democratic officials, and The Daily Caller blamed a “Pro-Chinese Communist Millionaire” for funding the protests.

Protests erupted after the Trump administration conducted ICE raids in LA and sent in troops

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  1. ### Theo Von calls AI provision in GOP's One Big Beautiful Bill “really sketchy”

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  1. ### Laura Loomer praises Chinese government for recognizing “the threat of Islam”

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  1. ### Charlie Kirk responding to protests in Los Angeles: “We must be unafraid to declare the Insurrection Act of 1807”

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  1. ### Steve Bannon calls for the arrest of Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass

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  1. ### Sean Hannity calls for mandatory military service for every American

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mma

## harlie Kirk guest host says Pride Month is “cultural tyranny” and “we should just get rid of it altogether” 06/03/25 3:01 PM EDT

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6 25

'My tolerance with the American Jews' has 'completely run out': Charlie Kirk

https://www.rawstory.com/charlie-kirk-jews/ "'My tolerance with the American Jews' has 'completely run out': Charlie Kirk")

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mma

May 29, 2025, edition ofThe Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): Let me see if my story is in here. The Wall Street Journal. Let me see. It might be here because it's a great segue way. I actually meant to see — there was a whole story that they did on Harvard, or just that school in Boston. I went to school in Boston. Yeah. You're not fooling anybody. OK? Doesn't have the allure it used to. Trying to find this story here. I think it's here somewhere. Let me see. Anyway, it should be on the front page tomorrow. Front page story.

In the story, which is online, it will soon be printed in the print copy, I am quoted by saying, Charlie, every time he sees President Trump, reminds him to, quote, crush these universities with every power that he has. That is true. That is not fake news. In fact, yesterday, when I was with President Trump — I mean, he was already there. I'm not taking credit for it. But I was certainly affirming it. I said, you need to crush Harvard in its current form. And he says, oh, I am, and I plan to. Make an example out of them.

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AN 5 25

MAGA is outraged today after a three-judge panel struck down the brunt of President Donald Trump’s "Liberation Day" tariffs. The panel ruled that the tariffs Trump imposed under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act (IEEPA) were "unlawful” and that the power to impose tariffs lies with Congress. The three-judge panel also ruled that the president cannot usurp the power of Congress in this matter by invoking an emergency.

The panel from the Court of International Trade consists of judges appointed by Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and Donald Trump.

Nevertheless, right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk called the people behind the ruling “activist judges.”

“What is even the point of having a president?!” Kirk posted. “FACT CHECK: While the Constitution grants Congress the power to impose tariffs, Congress delegated much of that power to the Executive Branch in the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, which allows for adjustments to tariff rates without needing Congressional action. Courts have given the executive branch broad authority to negotiate trade, that is until now.”

READ MORE: 'Everyone is afraid to tell him': Trump brutally mocked following 'meltdown' with reporter

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“Judicial activism strikes again,” posted another X user, who was quick to point out that the three judge panel ruled from a “New York-based Court.” “Three unelected judges apparently wield more power than the President of the United States.”

Most of the negative reactions decried the corruption of “activist” or “unelected” judges.

“The federal court’s decision to block Trump’s tariffs exposes judicial overreach at its worst,” wrote X user Jesse Cohen. “Unelected judges overriding executive authority to protect globalist interests? Classic D.C. swamp behavior.”

“OMG, THE JUDICIAL TAKEOVER IS ALMOST COMPLETE!” wrote right-wing podcaster Mark Levin.

READ MORE: Donald Trump finally faces his reckoning

But while reaction from MAGA accounts burned with anger, other business-minded conservative accounts said either nothing or accepted the ruling with composure.

The X account of best-selling author Dave Ramsey, who built a prolific career on offering financial advice had nothing to say about the judicial panel decision.

Other pro-business accounts, including ruby-red Republican strategist Russ Latino, asked audiences to see the upside of the ruling.

“A few positives: 1. Your daughter can have more than 2 dolls. 2. Small businesses in your community that rely on imports, with tight margins, may not have to declare bankruptcy. 3. One day, when someone you don’t like is in the Oval Office, their power will be limited,” Latino posted.

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Charlie Kirk says David Hogg looks like “a survivor from a concentration camp”

05/27/25

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MMA

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “Maybe we just got to make an example out of Thom Tillis”

05/16/25 2:52 PM EDT

  1. ### Right-wing media use a controversial geoengineering program to undermine tried and true climate solutions

05/16/25 2:43 PM EDT

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says “I think we gotta keep SALT out of the way” of the budget bill

05/16/25 2:42 PM EDT

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “I was just texting with the White House staff today. ... I want to get my marching orders, and they were really quick to respond.”

:{:{05/16/25}:

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  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “I was just texting with the White House staff today. ... I want to get my marching orders, and they were really quick to respond.”

05/16/25 2:25 PM EDT

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spoke at sjsu

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MMA ODD TO ADMIT DEFEAT? SURE TO IMPLODE? HE IS ON WEAPONIZ TEAM BS

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “I did everything I could to make [Ed Martin] the permanent D.C. US attorney, but Thom Tillis from North Carolina had other plans”

05/15/25

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MMA

“It needs to stop.” Ben Shapiro calls out Trump's “skeezy stuff” like the crypto scheme and accepting a plane from Qatar.

05/12/25

Charlie Kirk: “These are members of Congress that stormed into a federal ICE facility despite warnings. They should absolutely be charged for this.”}:

05/12/25

May 12, 2025, edition ofThe Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): This is a very easy one for my friend, Kash Patel and Pam Bondi. Very easy. They went after American patriots for peacefully walking into the United States Capitol building, nonviolently, while being invited, while doors were opened, and they stayed within the lanes, the little rope lines. These are members of Congress that stormed into a federal ICE facility despite warnings. They should absolutely be charged for this, without a doubt. No one is above the law, is what we've always been saying. No one is above the law.

...

KIRK: And that's exactly what should happen. You see, the Democrats have a big problem with Immigration Customs and Enforcement. But if you assault ICE, you get consequences. If you storm an ICE facility, there will be consequences. Rob Menendez complained that they had put their hands on a member of Congress. Oh, I must have missed the memo that he was an untouchable. He thinks they should be invulnerable, that he is royalty. And by the way, his dad is literally a traitor. Bob Menendez sold our country out to Egypt for gold bars while on the Senate foreign intelligence committee, selling out American secrets for cash. And did — he also had multiple instances of near misses with the law. This guy was a disgusting person.

...

KIRK: Throw the book at them. Kash and Pam, you got all the details you need — charge these members of Congress. The facts are there. They stormed the facility. They assaulted our ICE officers. They think they are above the law. They tried to put President Trump in jail for 700 years for something he did not do. They are begging you to indict them and do it. Don't make a big show of it. Indite them. Charge them. The only way that we end the lawfare chapter in this country is reciprocity. They came after us, they assaulted ICE officers, and we will go after them.

  1. ### Fox’s comically pathetic spin for a foreign government gifting Trump a $400 million plane

05/12/25

  1. ### Steve Bannon: “Certain members of Congress should be arrested this afternoon for their activities on this situation up in Newark”

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May 12, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

STEVE BANNON (HOST): This hurtling towards a constitutional crisis, which we are hurtling towards, it must be resolved by the end of June. When the Supreme Court leaves for the summer, they're not back until October. This cannot fester over the summer. This issue, particularly about the deportations.

Something else, I believe certain members of Congress should be arrested this afternoon for their activities on this situation up in Newark. The mayor was already arrested.

I think Stephen Miller, as we started here on the show with Rogan O'Handley, DC Draino, to talk about the suspension of the writ of habeas corpus like President Lincoln did during the Civil War, that this is something that has to be on the table.

I believe that this is going to be even a bigger part of the controversy. I think it's gonna become part of the conversation. I know Stephen Miller and the crack team over there, he's deputy White House counsel — chief of staff for policy, I think Stephen and his team are all over this. Remember Stephen ran America First Law, which is outstanding, did so much of the great work.

This is the convergence of the crises, right? You have the constitutional crisis on the mass deportations and really President Trump's power under Article 2. The judge in San Francisco on Friday said he doesn't have the ability to either cut costs of personnel at 21 separate federal agencies, so the whole Article 2 powers of the president now being challenged by, let's face it, radical Marxist — neo-Marxist, a judicial supremacists in the federal judiciary, it's got to be taken care of.

They asked me at the Financial Times situation on Saturday night, what happens to the Supreme Court's rules? I said, hey, we're going to see at the time. It's that open a question.

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rww

05/06/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

The odds that President Donald Trump’s controversial nominee to serve as US attorney for Washington, DC, reaches confirmation are rapidly diminishing as he faces public pushback from a key Republican on Capitol Hill.

President Donald Trump ordered the Department of Justice to “take all necessary action” to help free former Mesa County Clerk Tina Peters, who is serving a nine-year sentence in Colorado for breaching election equipment security in a bid to uncover voter fraud.

On Monday, Daily Wire contributor Matt Walsh used his show to defend Shiloh Hendrix, a racist woman accused of calling a Black child the N-word. After lauding the people who contributed to her online fundraiser, Walsh complained that it’s not socially acceptable for white people to say the N-word.

As the College of Cardinals prepare to vote on a new pope this week, conservative U.S. Catholics are trying to woo them with expensive meals and donations if “the right pope” is selected.

This general embrace of the culture war stands in stark contrast to the administration’s low-key triangulation on abortion. That mutedness was a feature of the 2024 campaign and has, somewhat surprisingly, continued into the early months of Trump’s second term.

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AN 525

TILLIS ~ ED MARTIN

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05/05/2025 rww

by

Kyle Mantyla

The president complained that due process rights are interfering with his mass deportations.

President Donald Trump attempted to take credit for parts of the economy which he considers “good,” while blaming former President Joe Biden for other parts he considers “bad.”

President Donald Trump offered a message of support to the Jan. 6 insurrectionists when he met with a former Proud Boys militant in Mar-a-Lago over the weekend.

State Superintendent Ryan Walters bypassed oversight to push Christian Nationalism and right-wing conspiracies into public classrooms.

In this segment, I examine the notion that there was something exceptionally Christian about America's founding era. Last week, I fact-checked Charlie Kirk's viral video defense of the belief that America was founded as a Christian nation in the legal sense. Most of what Kirk had to say was irrelevant or incorrect.

The 9/11 truther denounced Trump’s nominee for U.S. surgeon general and claimed the COVID-19 vaccine is “killing millions of people.”

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mma

WSJ pundits demolish right-wing talking points defending Hegseth: “It all comes back again to this basic point that something's wrong at the top levels”}:

04/24/25

fox stars pass on defending Hegseth amid Pentagon “chaos”

Written by Matt Gertz

:{:{Published 04/25/25}:

Fox News’ biggest stars have stopped defending Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth amid the weeklong firestorm over their former colleague’s dysfunctional management of the Pentagon and his potentially illegal handling of classified information.

Three months after Vice President JD Vance broke a 50-50 Senate tie to install the historically underqualified Hegseth at the Pentagon, journalists routinely describe a department in “chaos.” Five top Hegseth aides have left the department since last Friday amid reports of “vicious rivalries,” and a “leadership vacuum.” Reporters further revealed that Hegseth had shared details about U.S. strikes in Yemen in a second unsecured Signal chat, potentially endangering U.S. service members, and had the app installed on his Pentagon computer.

Hegseth responded to his growing list of scandals with a combative Tuesday appearance on Fox & Friends, whose hosts defended his conduct.

But other Fox hosts have been silent, even after rallying to support Hegseth when his nomination came under fire and again following the first revelation of his use of Signal to share attack plans.

Fox’s evening lineup of The Ingraham Angle, Jesse Watters Primetime, Hannity, and Gutfeld!have ignored Hegseth’s struggles this week (a passing remark from guest Jimmy Failla to host Laura Ingraham was the only mention of the story on any of those shows).The Five, the Fox panel show which features Jesse Watters, Greg Gutfeld, Jeanine Pirro, and Dana Perino, also has not covered the subject.

Even Will Cain, who spent years sharing the couch with Hegseth as co-hosts of Fox & Friends’ weekend edition, hasn’t mentioned his former colleague’s name on his afternoon show this week. (He did not comment on Fox correspondent Kevin Corke’s report about the Signal story during Monday’s program.)

As Fox’s stars take a pass, full-throated defenses of Hegseth’s leadership are coming from the likes of MAGA stalwarts like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Laura Loomer, while their corporate cousins at The Wall Street Journal editorial board savage his handling of the Pentagon.

Two explanations seem plausible for why Fox’s biggest stars have gone silent as their former colleague comes under fire:

Either way, this disaster was the predictable result of President Donald Trump putting a former Fox weekend host with little relevant experience in charge of the Pentagon. The secretary of defense oversees a massive budget and bureaucracy and has the authority under certain circumstances to launch nuclear weapons and end human civilization. The risks of handing the position over to someone because of their takes on TV are almost incalculably high.

Hegseth is currently struggling to manage the Pentagon when its biggest problem is a costly, ineffective, and apparently unending bombing campaign in Yemen. How will he respond if India and Pakistan start trading fire?

  1. ### Fox stars pass on defending Hegseth amid Pentagon “chaos”

04/25/25

//

  1. ### Trump used Fox to vet his defense secretary. It isn’t going well — but now the network is fighting back.

:{:{12/04/24}:

  1. ### Fox propagandists scramble to explain former colleagues texting war plans to a reporter

:{:{03/25/25}:

  1. ### The Pete Hegseth debacle was inevitable

04/23/2

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---

mma

Trump proposed sending US citizens to a foreign prison. Even his sycophantic supporter Charlie Kirk opposes the idea. 04/23/25

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rww

04/04/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

Charlie Kirk says that with Trump back in office, he no longer has to fear being hauled out of bed by the FBI in the middle of the night: "For 4 years, we lived under a Soviet-style sword of Damocles that was kind of hanging over us, that could drop at any time."

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MMA March 21, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): I think — and let me let me interrupt you because we're running out of time here, and that's a great question. I live in an amazing medical freedom state here in Arizona, so I take this stuff for granted.

I want to try to work with Bobby Kennedy and President Trump to use some sort of federal money to say that you cannot force these extra vaccines on kids, especially those in religious environments. It's a serious issue, and I know producer Andrew's dealing with this right now in the free state of California. And anything beyond the 1980 schedule. And that is with — so I mean, you're talking about a — they're mandating the COVID shot now for six months old. And this is outrageous stuff, and so I think there has to be a role for the federal government. And my other piece of advice, David, we gotta go to a break, is try to work through the courts. There has to be some decision somewhere. It used to be ten vaccines. Now it's 72 shots for our babies. Something's not right, and our kids are sicker than ever.

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Charlie Kirk: “What you see in the markets could be best described as a little bit of expulsion”](https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-what-you-see-markets-could-be-best-described-little-bit-expulsion)

03/13/25

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this is foray into mano? // bernie in red state town hall

Charlie Kirk has a history of violent and bigoted rhetoric. He was the first guest on California Gov. Gavin Newsom’s podcast.

Special ProgramsLGBTQ

Written by Vesper Henry

Research contributions from Alyssa Tirrell

Published 03/10/25 mma

California Gov. Gavin Newsom has launched a self-titled podcast billed as “real talk about what impacts listeners most” with “no spin” and “no script.” His first guest was one of right-wing media’s most incendiary talking heads – Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. Kirk, who has attacked Newsom and his policies on his own show several times, has a history of espousing violent and bigoted rhetoric.

:

===

Right-wing media cheer Trump's anti-Christian bias task force after years of laying the groundwork

Right-wing commentators have spent years claiming that the Biden administration was “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity” and that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square”

Written by Payton Armstrong

Published 02/27/25 mma

A task force created by President Donald Trump to eradicate alleged “anti-Christian bias” is drawing praise from right-wing media figures — some of whom have spent years baselessly claiming that Christians are a persecuted group in the United States, even though experts say there’s no such widespread bias.

Right-wing commentators celebrated Trump’s task force as “a cultural resurgency” and declared that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.”

In one instance, Christian nationalist media figure Lance Wallnau joined Steve Bannon’s podcast to praise the task force as the first step in the “recapturing of institutions,” naming education, media, business, and government among the institutions he wants to infuse with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” This appears to be a reference to the Seven Mountain Mandate popularized by Wallnau, which instructs Christians to impose fundamentalist values on American society by conquering the “seven mountains” of cultural influence in American life: government, education, media, religion, family, business, and entertainment.

Experts have argued “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society" and that Trump’s anti-Christian bias task force is actually “enshrining Christian privilege in our society.”

Trump issued an executive order on “eradicating anti-Christian bias,” but experts say “there is no widespread anti-Christian bias in our society”

The Associated Press reported that “critics said Trump is claiming to see persecution in distorted case descriptions, a calendar coincidence and other situations that, while raising concerns, don’t add up to a pattern.”As noted by the Associated Press, “Christianity is by far the largest faith in America, and Christian conservatives have a strong grip on the levers of government.” The Associated Press, [2/13/25]|}:

* When Transgender Day of Visibility coincided with Easter in 2024, right-wing media figures — especially on Fox News and Newsmax — claimed that the Biden administration was attacking Christians.Right-wing media used the day to warn Christians that they were under attack after Biden’s statements recognizing Transgender Day of Visibility, with Fox’s Jesse Watters arguing that Biden is “waging spiritual warfare against Christianity.” Between Fox and Newsmax, the networks combined aired more than 4 hours of coverage and nearly 80 segments, slamming Biden for his “demonic” remarks which they said amounted to an “attack on Christian faith.” Media Matters, [4/2/24, 4/2/24]

Carlson again falsely claimed that Vaughn was facing felony charges “from the Biden administration for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns,” adding that “from the perspective of the people who run the country there’s really just one enemy, and that’s faithful Christians.”During a Tucker Carlson Uncensored clip posted on X, Carlson said: “If you’re interested in who they really hate, well, look at what's happening. So Christian churches across the country have been burning and no one in the government is doing anything about it. Look at how Christian churches were treated during Covid … we talked the other day to a guy who is facing 11 years in prison, federal felony charges from the Biden administration, for praying at an abortion clinic and daring to sing hymns. So if you are a faithful Christian — not a fake Christian, David French Christian, but an actual Christian, of the kind this country has always had, of the kind this country was created to harbor actually — you are seen as an enemy by the people who run it.” Twitter/X, [4/18/24]|}:

Fox host Laura Ingraham repeatedly lamented the supposed anti-Christian bias of the Biden administration, including in an interview with Vaughn where she suggested that “singing hymns and peacefully expressing your traditional Christian beliefs can get you thrown behind bars.” During the interview, Ingraham’s show displayed a chyron that read: “Liberals fighting to wipe out Christian values.” FoxNews.com, [1/31/24]|}:

Following a deadly shooting at a Christian private school in Nashville, Tennessee, Ingraham claimed the Biden White House and “the left” had been “ginning up anti-Christian sentiment” by allegedly teaching kids “to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.”Ingraham told her audience: “Isn’t it also the case that the left in America — and even this White House — is ginning up, without saying the words necessarily, but ginning up anti-Christian sentiment by referring to trans activists as heroes and their bravery for standing up against the intolerant class, the haters. So these kids are learning to treat Christians as haters and mortal threats to their existence.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [4/11/23; Media Matters, 4/12/23]|}:

Sean Davis, CEO of The Federalist, argued that by charging anti-abortion protesters under the FACE ACT, “the Biden regime clearly desires to make being a pro-life Christian a crime.” As documented by Media Matters, anti-abortion figures baselessly accused the Biden Department of Justice of weaponizing the FACE Act against protestors convicted of harassment at abortion clinics. Twitter/X, [6/21/24; Media Matters, 6/11/24]|}:

While hosting Jack Phillips — a Colorado baker who had been sued for refusing to make a trans-themed cake — Fox’s Laura Ingraham declared that “the left wants to drive Christians out of the public square.”Ingraham added: “You don't even have a right to have a small business if you're a Christian today. You certainly don't have any conscience right, you have no religious rights, you have no First Amendment rights, if you clash with what they believe to be, you know, the supremely protected among us.” Fox News, *The Ingraham Angle*, [1/30/23; Associated Press, 10/8/24]|}:

Turning Point USA’s Charlie Kirk has relentlessly claimed that Christian values in the U.S. are under attack, claiming that they could be thrown in prison.At a 2023 TPUSA pastor’s summit, Kirk warned pastors that “if we continue theological disputes and don't focus on liberty, then we're going to be having those theological disputes from prison.” Ahead of the 2024 election, Kirk claimed that pro-choice Democrats would “create a secret police that will audit, intimidate, raid every single” pregnancy center in the U.S., saying that when that happens, “we'll be like, wow, I really wish that we Christians would have bought ourselves a little more time so that our nonprofits, our leaders, wouldn't go to federal prison.” NPR, [10/24/24; Media Matters, 4/27/23; Real America’s Voice, The Charlie Kirk Show, 8/16/24]|}:

Tucker Carlson suggested that the “trans movement is targeting Christians,” citing the Covenant school shooting.Carlson claimed that “the trans movement is the mirror image of Christianity and therefore its natural enemy,” declaring that “Christianity and transgender orthodoxy” are on a “collision course” and claiming that “one side is likely to draw blood before the other side.” Rolling Stone, [3/28/23]|}:

On Fox News, Oklahoma state superintendent Ryan Walters lamented that a Harris/Walz administration would “trans the kids“ and “push all faith out of the public square,” as now-White House faith director Paula White-Cain bragged that Trump was “promising in his second term to do even more for Christians as he shares the same values.”White-Cain called for national “revival” and “turning our hearts back to God” and Walters declared that a Harris/Walz administration would be the “most anti-Christian administration in American history.” FoxNews.com, [8/10/24; Religion News Service, 2/21/25]|}:

On Sebastian Gorka’s Salem Media podcast, Breitbart’s Thomas Williams said that the U.S. is a “post-Christian society, but in many ways an anti-Christian society.”Gorka — who is now the counterterrorism chief in Trump’s administration — replied, “right,” and Williams added, “We are a Judeo-Christian nation by its foundation, and in the value system that understands what the family is, what society is.” Salem Media, *America First with Sebastian Gorka*, [6/14/23; CBS News, 1/7/25]|}:

* Fox host Emily Compagno labeled the U.S. an “anti-Christian, anti-Judeo-Christian society.”Compagno cited backlash to a graduation speech from Kansas City Chiefs kicker Harrison Butker that reportedly attacked the LGBTQ community and told “women to forget about a career and serve their man instead.” Fox News, *Gutfeld!*, [6/11/24; OutSports, 5/13/24]

Former Trump DOJ official Jeff Clark told Bannon that a second Trump administration needed a “beefed up” religious liberty task force to fight anti-Christian sentiment in the U.S., citing a story he heard about a “school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia.” Responding to a campaign speech where Trump pledged to create an anti-Christian bias task force if elected, Clark said: “That's wonderful to announce, especially in an increasingly anti-Christian world. I mean, I'd seen a story about a school district that was prohibiting bus drivers even from wearing Christmas regalia to entertain the students a little bit. I mean things have gone into bonkers land. And look, in the first Trump term, we did have a religious liberty task force. And I think we need an even more beefed up one.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [12/20/23; Fox News, 12/19/23]|}:

* Charlie Kirk applauded the task force’s creation, declaring that “this is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020.” He said, “We are proudly defending our heritage as inheriting the values of the Bible,” adding, “This is a cultural resurgency. No longer should you be afraid to share your faith. No longer should you be afraid to share your political values. This is the counter-revolution against their color revolution that occurred in the summer of 2020, and it is ascendant.” Real America’s Voice, *The Charlie Kirk Show*, [2/6/25]

Steve Bannon celebrated the announcement and hosted media figure Lance Wallnau — a “prophet” and self-described Christian nationalist — with the two discussing right-wing Christians’ “recapturing of institutions” including “education, of media, of business, of government.”Bannon and Wallnau discussed how the task force can be used “to seize the institutions of the federal government” with “the ideas of Western civilization, which is the ideas of Christian civilization.” Wallnau said that “there are three arteries that make this happen: legislation, litigation, and the shaping of public opinion,” adding, “because people like you, as long as we can shape the public opinion, the secret sauce is you've got to work with the awakening that's happening and move with it in such a way that you litigate and you legislate, but never get too far ahead of public persuasion.” Real America’s Voice, *War Room*, [2/7/25; Media Matters; 9/27/24; Rolling Stone, 9/29/22]|}:

Video

Citation

From the February 7, 2025, edition of Real America's Voice's War Room

Fox host Jeanine Pirro praised the task force’s creation and attacked the FBI and the Biden administration for supposedly targeting Catholics, a claim that was found to be baseless after an internal investigation.Pirro noted that Trump “went to two prayer breakfasts this morning and he talked about eradicating anti-Christian bias,” and complained about “when the FBI director Christopher Wray came out and really told us no one at the FBI was targeting Christians and Senator Hawley came out and they found that leaked memo that the FBI was investigating Catholics and priests were gone to so they could then inform on parishioners who were considered domestic terrorists.” The New York Times reported that “Republicans claimed the bureau’s memo was evidence of an anti-conservative strain among F.B.I. ranks, but an internal investigation failed to uncover any ‘malicious intent.’” Fox News, *The Five*, [2/6/25; New York Times, 4/18/24]|}:

//

  1. ### Trump and his MAGA allies increasingly embrace extreme prophetic media

05/30/24

  1. ### Trump scheduled to address right-wing media “prophets” and pastors who claim he’s “anointed to be King”

10/18/24

  1. ### Oklahoma state superintendent says pastor and right-wing commentator suggested his new Bible mandate in public schools

07/08/24

---

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02/10/2025 RWW

by

Kyle Mantyla

There’s little about the White House’s hiring practices that appear normal. For example, asking applicants, "Was Jan. 6 an inside job?” is ludicrous.

Musk and Trump say they promote free speech. They seem to only defend racist speech.

Collecting donors, voters, TikTok viewers and high-powered friends on his way into Trump’s inner circle.

Recently, Montana state Rep. Lukas Schubert took to X to warn that “South Africa stands as a reminder of what’s to come in America” if Democrats “implement their explicit anti-white discrimination policies.” But Schubert has spread other far-right, racist talking points on X, including the claim that diversity as a “code word” for “anti-white.”

Kanye West made a Super Bowl ad on his phone to promote a website he’s currently using to sell t-shirts with swastikas on them.

Usually, when Republicans want to push Christian Nationalist legislation, it’s through bills promoting the Ten Commandments in schools under the guise of “history and tradition” or attacking LGBTQ people using the rationale that they violate God’s preferences as expressed in the Bible. But sometimes they just take the hoods off and dispense with even trying to come up with a secular-sounding justification for their religious agenda.

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REF

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A portrait of Charlie Kirk.

NO LNX

How Charlie Kirk Became the Youth Whisperer of the American Right

Collecting donors, voters, TikTok viewers and high-powered friends on his way into Trump’s inner circle.

By Robert Draper

Robert Draper covers politics for The Times. For this article, he interviewed Charlie Kirk four times and attended a donor meeting and a ball celebrating Donald Trump’s inauguration.

Feb. 10, 2025

About an hour before Donald J. Trump took the oath of office, Charlie Kirk was sitting in the Capitol Rotunda when he glanced down at his iPhone. What the 31-year-old conservative activist and media personality saw caused him to swallow laughter. A reporter for The Daily Beast had posted on X: “‘Charlie Kirk has better seats than every member of Congress. Tells you how little Trump thinks of Congress,’ one GOP lawmaker tells me.” Twenty minutes later, Kirk saw that a Republican senator from Indiana, Jim Banks, had posted a rebuttal of sorts: “Charlie Kirk has done more than most members of congress combined to get us to this point today.”

Kirk found himself wondering how everyone would have reacted had he taken the much-closer seat he was originally offered. Instead, because the event had been moved inside, he and his wife were seated a couple of dozen rows from the stage. Kirk lives in Scottsdale, Ariz., but brought his wife and two young children with him to stay at the sleek Salamander hotel in Washington for 10 days in January as the Trump administration took power, just as he had uprooted his family three days after the election and installed them for a two-month stay in a condo in Palm Beach, Fla., near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate.

Like so many others in the MAGA ecosystem, Kirk is acutely attuned to wherever the Trump-related action is. The difference is that Kirk always seems to find his way to the center of the action whenever he shows up to it. During Trump’s first presidency, Kirk told me, he visited the White House “a hundred-plus” times. And within days of Trump’s victory in November, Kirk had become one of an intimate group of advisers vetting prospective White House appointees to determine whether they had shown unflagging loyalty to Trump. On more than one occasion, according to two sources with knowledge of the events, Kirk was in the room with the president-elect to discuss potential cabinet nominees.

Kirk’s proximity to Trump is especially notable when you consider that he has never held office, worked in the White House or held a campaign staff position. He draws his value elsewhere. Kirk is the head of Turning Point USA, the nation’s pre-eminent conservative youth organization, which he started when he was 18. It has chapters at more than 850 colleges that register students to vote, bring conservative speakers to campus and organize a nationwide network of right-wing student-government leaders. Turning Point’s half dozen or so annual events, featuring the biggest names on the right from Trump on down, are slick productions that draw enormous crowds.

But perhaps most important is that Kirk’s dominant voice, via his podcast and his ubiquity on social media, has earned him credibility among conservatives as a die-hard Trump devotee. He has become a close friend of the president’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., with whom Kirk traveled to Greenland on Jan. 7 — wearing a “Charlie”-embroidered flight jacket for the occasion — to publicize Trump’s proclaimed intent to acquire the Arctic territory. And Kirk was an early champion of JD Vance as Trump was deciding whether the senator would be his running mate.

ImageCharlie Kirk at a desk with his name on it.

Charlie Kirk temporarily moved his podcast studio to Palm Beach, Fla., to be close to Donald Trump’s transition team.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

Kirk was among a select group at Trump’s private party two days before the inauguration at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia. The night before Trump was sworn in, Turning Point hosted a black-tie gala at which some 1,500 attendees paid from $5,000 to $15,000 (with some V.I.P.s paying more) to be in the company of Trump luminaries including Vance; Trump’s nominee for director of the F.B.I., Kash Patel; and Don Jr., who described Kirk onstage as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.” The following evening, an S.U.V. ferried Kirk from one inaugural ball to the next. Two days later, he was visiting the 47th president in the White House — and again the day after that.

During the Trump years, Kirk’s two nonprofit entities, Turning Point USA and the political-action organization Turning Point Action, have grown from a total revenue of $4.3 million in 2016 to $92.4 million in 2023, a vast majority of it from donations. Through his podcast, his many speaking appearances and the books he has written, such as the 2020 best seller “The MAGA Doctrine,” Kirk has become a millionaire.

Trump, in turn, has come to view Kirk as one of his closest allies. Kirk visited Mar-a-Lago in early February 2021, during the ex-president’s nadir, and was photographed smiling alongside him. Four years later, at the president-elect’s golf-club party, Trump singled out Kirk for praise. “Charlie Kirk, what he’s done with the young people,” he said in a video I obtained. He went on to boast about his campaign’s sharp uptick among such voters. “Actually, other than Hispanic, that was probably our biggest swing. So, Charlie, I appreciate what you did.”

Image

:{:{Kirk visited Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago in a display of loyalty in February 2021, when support for the former president in the Republican Party was sagging:}:

I asked a major donor to both Trump and Turning Point, Doug Deason, the president of a family investment management firm, how Kirk had achieved such prominence at so young an age. “People see him,” Deason replied, “and they just want to help, because he has the best of intentions and the abilities that none of us have seen in one person.” Deason expressed awe for Kirk’s oratorical prowess, for his “genius-level intelligence,” for his expertise in history and the Bible and for his acute political instincts. “Trump won,” he said. “But would he have won it without Charlie? I don’t know.”

Unmentioned by Deason was one more rare skill: Kirk’s mastery at promoting his indispensability while never appearing crassly boastful in the manner of, say, Trump himself. I saw a vivid illustration of this in December while attending Turning Point’s annual donor meeting, held at the Four Seasons Resort in Palm Beach. Kirk’s two-hour presentation that morning to several hundred moneyed conservatives in the ballroom was more like a Hollywood screenwriter’s movie pitch than the year-end financial summation it happened to be. Spoken without notes and accompanied by splashy videos (many of them juxtaposing Kirk with Trump), his message was unambiguous: Turning Point’s benefactors had gotten more than their money’s worth in the 2024 election cycle and might therefore see their way to one last donation later that evening, when they would all gather at Mar-a-Lago for a Turning Point gala.

Early in his presentation, Kirk gravely informed his donors, “I do not do hyperbole.” Coming from someone who labeled Kamala Harris “Kamala the Communist,” this remark seemed to be a tell, with other hyperbolizing likely to follow. “For the first time in my 12 years of doing this, the bad guys are finally on defense,” Kirk told his listeners, adding, “High school boys are the most conservative that they have been in the last 50 years.” He referred to exit polls showing that compared with 2020, Harris lost from 2 to 24 percentage points of support among voters under 30 in six of seven swing states, enough to steer each state to Trump. “The youth vote won Trump the White House,” Kirk declared flatly.

And who exactly had won the youth vote for Trump? Kirk’s statements at the presentation — “We registered tens of thousands of new voters and delivered the youth vote in record numbers” — encouraged only one plausible explanation. Kirk also recited a flurry of mostly inferential data to suggest that Turning Point Action was crucial to flipping Arizona and played a major role in Trump’s eight-point gain in support among Black men.

After he finished, an elderly man near the back of the room stood up and said: “You are the most extraordinary young person I have ever met. And what you’ve accomplished — you helped save us.”

At the front two tables sat several of Turning Point’s megadonors — among them the Houston software entrepreneur Mike Rydin; the Florida philanthropist Rebecca Dunn; and Stacey Feinberg, who inherited a fortune from her father, the sports agent Bob Woolf, who represented the basketball legends Julius Erving and Larry Bird. A couple of weeks after the donor presentation, while touring Turning Point’s five-building campus in Phoenix, I noticed that three of the buildings were named for those three donors.

I also realized I’d seen one of those names recently. It was in a statement from Trump emailed by his transition team. “I am pleased to announce Stacey Feinberg will be our next United States Ambassador to Luxembourg,” it read.

I texted Kirk to ask if he had played a hand in the selection of Feinberg, who was not a major player in Trump’s world but certainly was in Kirk’s. He wouldn’t say. He didn’t have to.

Image

Kirk accompanied his friend Donald Trump Jr. to Greenland in January, as the president-elect was expressing his desire to acquire the Danish territory.Credit...From Charlie Kirk.

Over dinner in Palm Beach in December, Kirk confided the new mission he had assigned to himself: making an example out of some Republican senator who was not reflexively obedient to Trump — perhaps Joni Ernst of Iowa, Mike Rounds of South Dakota or Mike Crapo of Idaho — by backing a primary challenger.

“At least one successful primarying,” he said as he picked at his salmon. (Kirk does not drink, avoids gluten and lactose and carries a bottle of olive oil and his own branded hot sauce with him to impart flavor to otherwise austere meals.) Kirk explained that he was only talking about Republicans in safely red states who, in his view, “have taken advantage of Republican primary voters far too long. It’s an objective fact. They’re not in line with what those voters want. They’re sending money to Ukraine. They’re not strong on immigration. So this is not a veiled threat. I see no good reason not to go after Crapo or Rounds.” As Kirk saw it, “The behavioral and voting patterns of Senate Republicans would change with one successful primary.”

At the time, Trump’s first choice to be attorney general, Matt Gaetz, had already withdrawn his name from consideration when it became evident that he was unlikely to secure enough support from Senate Republicans to be confirmed. Now it was Trump’s nominee for secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, who seemed to be facing opposition from Ernst over his stance against women serving in combat and allegations that he had committed sexual assault.

Kirk had circulated a clip on social media of the Iowa senator, a veteran, offering supportive words to transgender individuals serving in the military, with the ominous warning: “People in Iowa have a well-funded primary challenger ready against her. Her political career is in serious jeopardy.” About six weeks later, Kirk gleefully announced on X, “BREAKING: Iowa Senator Joni Ernst has announced she is officially backing Pete Hegseth for SecDef.”

But Kirk’s goal of MAGA-fying the Senate came with an ulterior motive, which he alluded to during our dinner by bringing up Ronna McDaniel, the former chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, whom Kirk played a key role in ousting. In the wake of the disappointing 2022 midterm elections, Kirk sent an email to every committee member of the R.N.C., asserting that McDaniel’s organization had underperformed while pointedly adding, “In my position, I interact with more large donors than almost anyone in the movement.”

McDaniel then committed a fatal error. She not only defended herself on Fox News Radio but also insinuated that Turning Point had failed in its mission of turning out young voters. Kirk informed his staff that they were at war. His relentless yearlong campaign against McDaniel — from attacks branding her a “loser” to encouraging Republican county chairs to withdraw their support for her — finally paid off last February, when Trump said he wanted McDaniel out; his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, became co-chair until she stepped down in January. (McDaniel did not respond to a request for comment.)

“We got Ronna, and now we want a senator,” Kirk said with a satisfied smile, all but spelling out what he also wanted: to be feared. ENFORCER

“I started listening to Rush when I was a junior in high school,” Kirk recalled with a nostalgic glint in his eyes, referring to Rush Limbaugh, the godfather of conservative talk radio who died of cancer in 2021. “Listening, I was like, This guy is unbelievable! Because you’re looking for someone in high school to affirm your beliefs. I would never forget: on my lunch break, from like 12:17 to 12:55, I’d listen. Just me. I went all in on Rush.”

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:{:{Kirk, an early convert to Tea Party conservatism while still in high school, gave his first speeches in 2011 at Illinois Tea Party rallies.Credit...From Charlie Kir.}:

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The adolescent Charlie Kirk — a lanky high school basketball player in the affluent Chicago suburb Prospect Heights — could not possibly foresee Limbaugh befriending his future self, headlining the young man’s events and, in 2019, sending his organization a check for $1 million. Still, before Kirk had fully developed a worldview of his own, he possessed a gift for stirring the affection of older people, many of them inordinately wealthy.

In 2010, the year Kirk discovered Limbaugh, the reactionary Republican wave calling itself the Tea Party took back the House from the Democrats. Young Charlie, then a high school junior, caught the fever. In 2011, he and a classmate formed Wheeling High School Against Cookie Inflation to protest escalating prices in the school cafeteria. By early 2012, Kirk was smitten with the astringent libertarian worldview of Ron Paul and speaking at local Tea Party rallies. “Some of my best friends are liberals,” he declared at one event, adding: “They’re liberals that voted for Obama and said: ‘You know what? I’m tired of trillion-dollar deficits. I’m going to step up. I’m going to say I was wrong and join your cause.’” That year, he wrote an op-ed for Breitbart lamenting the influence of the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in Kirk’s A.P. Economics textbook.

The Breitbart screed led to an appearance on Fox News to discuss the national debt, which in turn led to a speaking gig at Benedictine University. Standing in the audience was a 71-year-old local restaurateur and Tea Party activist named Bill Montgomery. After the speech, Montgomery approached Kirk and urged him to spread his message to college campuses rather than attending college himself.

Kirk had been rejected by West Point and then accepted by Baylor University, but he was coming to wonder whether college life was for him. Kirk says his parents were not happy to hear this. His mother was a counselor at a mental-health clinic, and his father was an architect whose firm designed Trump Tower in New York. They did not envision a career in campus politicking for their son. He requested 90 days to prove them wrong.

“He was 18 going on 46,” recalled Joe Walsh, an Illinois Tea Party congressman at the time who was an early political mentor until the two became estranged over Kirk’s embrace of Trump. “And his mission, to go on college campuses and introduce the idea of free markets, was a slam dunk for getting money from old Republican farts.”

Kirk’s father came up with the name Turning Point USA, which Montgomery, the Tea Party activist, then registered in July 2012. (Montgomery remained affiliated with Turning Point until his death in 2020.) The next month, Kirk managed to score an appearance on Neil Cavuto’s Fox News show, broadcast from the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla. Kirk used the temporary convention-hall pass given to him by Fox to wander the corridors. In a stairwell, he spotted a man in a cowboy hat and recognized him as the conservative investment manager Foster Friess, whom Kirk had just read about in a Politico article about megadonors. The 18-year-old introduced himself, laughed at Friess’s folksy jokes and explained the mission of Turning Point — to be to young conservatives what the progressive organization MoveOn.org was for the left. A few days later, a $10,000 check from Friess arrived in his parents’ mailbox.

Kirk’s knack for making an indelible first impression served him well a year later, when he spoke at a local event hosted by the Job Creators Alliance, founded by the Home Depot chief executive, Bernard Marcus. In the audience was Allie Hanley, a resident of Palm Beach and the wife of the brick magnate Lee Hanley. She implored the 19-year-old speaker to come to Palm Beach and meet her circle of friends, even offering to pay for his flight and put him up in their guest bedroom. Kirk ended up staying in Palm Beach for several months. Walsh, who served on Turning Point USA’s advisory board, recalled visiting Kirk in Palm Beach during this period, at dinner with several new donors. “They treated him like an adorable puppy,” he said.

Just after the November 2014 midterms, in which the Republicans retook the Senate, Kirk spoke at one of Palm Beach’s most prestigious conservative events, the Restoration Weekend hosted by the nativist David Horowitz Freedom Center in the palatial Breakers hotel complex. Senator Jeff Sessions and his top aide, Stephen Miller — both men two years away from becoming top Trump administration appointees — were among those in attendance. So were several prominent Florida Republican donors, including Rebecca Dunn. Within a month, Turning Point would receive a profusion of six-figure donations from Dunn and others.

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:{:{The night before Trump was sworn in, some 1,500 guests paid a minimum of $5,000 to attend a black-tie gala hosted in Washington by Kirk’s organization.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times.}:

Kirk was, at 23, the youngest speaker at the Republican National Convention in July 2016. A California donor, Carla Sands, then put him in touch with Doug Deason, the president of a family investment management firm in Dallas with over $1 billion in assets. Just before Kirk was to fly to Dallas, Deason informed him that he had a fund-raising luncheon to attend that same day in Fort Worth and that Kirk could be his plus-one. The honoree at the event was the Republican presidential nominee, Donald Trump.

Kirk had yet to meet Trump. A late convert like many other Republicans, he had initially supported Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin and then Senator Ted Cruz. At lunch, Kirk sat at a table with Trump but did not get a chance to have a conversation with him. The highlight of the day instead turned out to be when Deason introduced him to two other well-heeled Dallasites, Gentry Beach Jr. and Tommy Hicks Jr., both of whom happened to be close friends with another Junior, the nominee’s eldest son. The two men asked Kirk’s thoughts on how the Trump campaign could better attract young voters. Most of Kirk’s suggestions — more campus events, a more aggressive presence on social media — were standard-issue. But he added a novel thought. “The kids need to go out there and advocate,” Kirk said of Trump’s own children. “You’d have this Avengers squad of Trumps everywhere.”

Shortly after the Fort Worth event, Hicks and Beach took Kirk to Trump Tower to meet Don Jr., who told me: “I was pretty reluctant to bring on another so-called campaign expert, especially when I learned how young he was. I said, ‘We don’t need another person who doesn’t know anything — we’ve already got plenty of those.’ But within five minutes of listening to him, I said, ‘Congratulations, you’re on my team.’” Don Jr. confessed that his campaign schedule was slapdash and that he hadn’t given much thought to how to use Twitter. By the end of their meeting, the 22-year-old Kirk decided to take a three-month hiatus from Turning Point to become Don Jr.’s scheduler, social media coordinator and steady provider of diet Red Bulls.

Following Trump’s astonishing victory over Hillary Clinton, Kirk returned to duty as the MAGA movement’s campus organizer. He drew a modest $49,000 salary from Turning Point USA, still stayed in the homes of donors and still wore a shabby wardrobe, until Don Jr., Deason, Deason’s father, Beach and Hicks chipped in to buy Kirk a $10,000 gift certificate at a men’s clothing store in Trump Tower as a Christmas gift. But things were about to change.

In 2017, he experienced the frisson of a sitting president’s retweeting his 140-character outbursts. He eagerly signed on to every available Fox News slot, cognizant of the channel’s faithful viewer in the White House. At the end of the year, Kirk attended Don Jr.’s birthday party at Mar-a-Lago. There, for the first time, he felt the stare of the president, then saw his hand motion for Kirk to come sit beside him. The two spoke for 40 minutes. At the end of their conversation, the president’s son-in-law and top adviser, Jared Kushner, walked up to their table.

After Trump made the introduction, Kushner and Kirk discussed how the administration had been getting hammered by right-wing media ever since the former Breitbart publisher Steve Bannon was pushed out of his job as White House senior adviser. Kirk assured Kushner that he was well acquainted with the journalists in question and could help broker peace. Kushner told me recently that Kirk would prove himself useful in many ways. “The thing about Charlie is that he always delivers,” he said. “When I first met him, he started out with this ambitious goal of trying to explain Trumpism to the younger generation — which, back then, popular culture and the media were against. But he was willing to take that on. And the ideas he always came to us with were good ones. He was professional, easy to deal with. Nothing ever leaked to the press. He just got stuff done.”

After that evening at Mar-a-Lago, Kirk had no difficulty gaining access to the Oval Office, and his calls to Trump were regularly patched in by the White House switchboard operator. Now and again, the president called him on his cellphone. “He came to gain the trust through consistency, loyalty, intelligent commentary and building a spectacular network,” Don Jr. told me. “He earned that seat at the table.”

Still, amid the Darwinian maneuvering in the Trump orbit, Kirk’s growing influence seemed to escape notice. “I was known as the youth guy,” he told me with evident amusement. “I was seen as harmless. So no one attacked me.”

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Kirk and his wife, Erika (right), at Turning Point’s preinaugural ball.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

By this time, Turning Point was well on its way to muscling aside the pre-existing conservative youth groups, Young America’s Foundation (started by William F. Buckley Jr. in 1960) and Young Americans for Liberty (founded by Students for Ron Paul in 2008). The memberships of the older organizations were once proudly curated — bow-tied intellectuals for Y.A.F., libertarians for Y.A.L. — but they were seeking relevancy in the new zeitgeist of the right. Y.A.F. sponsored provocative speeches on campuses by conservative personalities like Ann Coulter and Ben Shapiro, while a member of a Y.A.L. chapter at Iowa State University invited the white supremacist Nick Fuentes to speak on campus in 2018. Kirk was one step ahead of them: Turning Point had become an advocacy arm for Trump.

Kirk’s competition did not recede quietly. In 2017, the Y.A.L. chairman, Jeff Frazee, circulated an email in which he accused Turning Point of stealing a Y.A.L. chapter’s email list. The following year, Y.A.F.’s general counsel, Kimberly Begg, wrote a 12-page memo detailing instances where Turning Point had exaggerated its reach on college campuses. (Kirk denied these claims. Frazee did not respond to an email seeking comment. Begg, in an email, would not address her earlier assertions but instead praised “the great work of TPUSA.”)

Turning Point, meanwhile, was playing an entirely different game on college campuses. While other conservative youth groups had contented themselves with offering up celebrity speakers, Kirk’s group was training and even funding student-government candidates, as a kind of PAC for youngsters. While its predecessors merely scolded liberalism in academia, Turning Point established Professor Watchlist, a project to expose “radical” academics, including those who were critical of Turning Point. And where Y.A.L. and Y.A.F. might host happy hours, Turning Point threw high-production national gatherings raucous enough to draw a police response.

Kirk had arrived at a time when #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter were met with Trump’s own denial of sexual assault and porn-star-payoff allegations and his revanchist defense of Confederate statues. A post-truth era of performative hyperbole was unfolding. At the end of 2017, with the help of Deason and a few other donors, Kirk hired Turning Point’s first breakout star, Candace Owens, a controversial Black conservative who had gained notoriety for her YouTube comments playing down the white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Va., that year. (Owens left Turning Point in 2019, amid an uproar over her comments seeming to defend Hitler, for a more lucrative deal with Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire. She left The Daily Wire last year following a string of antisemitic comments. Both Owens and Shapiro continue to be featured speakers at Turning Point events; The Daily Wire is distributing a documentary produced by Turning Point USA called “Identity Crisis,” about what it refers to as gender ideology.)

But Kirk was fast becoming a celebrity in his own right — an heir to Limbaugh, his staccato monologues casting liberal views as evil and savaging sacred icons like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (“a bad guy”) and the Civil Rights Act (“a mistake”). “I think Charlie made his transition when he became more of a media figure rather than just a college-campus guy,” said the Republican political consultant and Trump adviser Alex Bruesewitz, who first came to know Kirk in 2014. “He developed a connection with his audience that very few people in the media have. It’s given him tremendous power.”

“When Foster Friess first started going on about this kid Charlie Kirk who hadn’t gone to college and was so incredibly brilliant, I remember thinking, Well, Foster got scammed by some smart-talking kid,” Tucker Carlson told me during a recent phone conversation. “The reason I’m such a fan of Charlie’s is that I was proven wrong. It’s almost a paradox how young people tend to be more ossified than older people in their thinking, less willing to be disabused of their illusions. But I’ve seen Charlie’s willingness to reassess his assumptions, and that’s, like, amazing to me.”

Carlson was mainly referring to Kirk’s harsh reappraisal of the Iraq war and the national-security state. But the same tendency applies to Kirk’s assessment of religion’s role in American politics. For years, he was reticent on the subject. That changed, he told me, during the pandemic lockdowns — “the stupidest thing ever,” in his view. He was equally appalled by the refusal by most church leaders to lead the charge against lockdowns. “That really got me asking the question: What is the church? What is its role? And it brought me on a journey, a very serious period of studying our first principles, our beliefs.”

Kirk spent the lockdowns and the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in Phoenix as a guest of the parents of his future wife, Erika Frantzve, a former Miss Arizona who now hosts a podcast and has a line of faith-themed streetwear. “I did a lot of reading on postmodernism,” he recalled. “And I started realizing that what was happening was a slow-motion cultural revolution fulfilling the hopes and ambitions of Angela Davis, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. This was their contention, that in order to usher in something new, this culture must be incinerated. That, I think, is a very objective reading of it. What they were saying was actually the same thing a religious person would say, that everyone lives by some agreed-upon code of conduct. The question is: What code? And by what inheritance do we acknowledge what is good and evil, what is right and wrong?”

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At the Turning Point ball, Donald Trump Jr. described Kirk as “one of the true rock stars of this movement.”Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times.

The preferred code, Kirk decided, was the canon of Western values that — as he learned from reading the British historian Tom Holland — had their roots in Christianity. Kirk told me he then turned to the writings of Dr. Larry P. Arnn, the president of Hillsdale College, where Kirk had been taking online courses. From Arnn’s 2012 book, “The Founders’ Key,” Kirk concluded “that Western Christian morality gave us these two documents, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” While expressing great admiration for Kirk as “a serious-minded person” who “built a great thing,” Arnn told me that this was a slight misrepresentation of his view. Thomas Jefferson, he pointed out, “was probably not an orthodox Christian” and was more influenced in his writing by the laws of nature than by the notion of a Christian God.

A third intellectual, the conservative author Christopher Caldwell, supplied Kirk’s final eye-opener. “I take the Caldwellian view, from his book ‘The Age of Entitlement,’” Kirk told me, “that we went through a new founding in the ’60s and that the Civil Rights Act has actually superseded the U.S. Constitution as its reference point. In fact, I bet if you polled Americans, most of them would have more reverence for the Civil Rights Act than the Constitution. I could be wrong,” he added, “but I think I’m right.”

He went on. “Covid for me was a lot of thinking and reading time, while the whole civilization was collapsing. And I saw the wokies appealing to a moral order that they said was true and good. And I said, Well, we think ours is.”

Kirk emerged from the lockdowns a Christian nationalist culture warrior determined to fuse his new ideology with MAGA populism. In 2021, he founded TPUSA Faith, whose stated mission was “empowering Christians to put their faith into action,” in part by encouraging pastors “to join in civic, social and cultural discussions.”

That February, he became one of the first conservative leaders to see the political potential in JD Vance. The extent of Kirk’s role in Vance’s ascent, which has not been previously reported, was especially significant because of the Ohio Senate candidate’s earlier view of Trump as an “idiot” and an American version of Hitler. Kirk texted Don Jr.’s political adviser, Andy Surabian, “Andy, I’m telling you, he’s had a conversion, he’s one of us.”

Kirk lent his imprimatur by hosting Vance on his podcast, where Vance suggested that people without children should pay higher taxes than parents. (“I totally agree,” Kirk replied.) That September, Kirk’s political arm, Turning Point Action, officially endorsed Vance. Surabian, meanwhile, took Kirk’s recommendation to Don Jr., who was a fan of Vance’s best-selling memoir, “Hillbilly Elegy.” Don Jr. befriended Vance, while Surabian became a senior campaign adviser. Two weeks before the Ohio primary in April 2022, Trump himself endorsed Vance, ensuring his victory.

“There were few louder voices constantly advocating for JD down in Mar-a-Lago than Charlie,” Surabian said. “His support was particularly important because he’s very much viewed by Team Trump as an avatar for where the MAGA base is.”

Two years later, Kirk was again in Trump’s ear talking up Vance — this time as his optimal running mate. As Kirk recalled to me: “I saw JD as someone who would crush it with high-propensity suburban Republicans. People in Scottsdale, Ariz., or Highland Park in Dallas, or Buckhead in Atlanta. They read The Journal. They hate the left. They don’t like Trump, but they like his policies. We’re talking about a couple hundred thousand voters that could determine the future of the election.”

Kirk pitched the 39-year-old Ohio senator to Trump as a fresh-faced MAGA torchbearer who would serve as “a convert on the ticket,” uniquely positioned to sway Trump skeptics since Vance had been one himself. “My father’s always going to come to his conclusions,” Don Jr. said, “but Charlie and Tucker and I and a few others went all in for JD.”

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Among the many right-wing media personalities at the Turning Point ball was Ben Shapiro, a frequent speaker at Kirk’s events. Shapiro’s company, The Daily Wire, is distributing a documentary produced by Turning Point USA.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

Trump’s decision to select Vance is one for which Kirk has been careful not to claim credit. To maximize his influence on the 2024 election, Kirk sought territory all his own. For some time, his digital team had been advising him to make full use of TikTok, the social platform with ties to the Chinese government and known for its punchy video snippets. Kirk was hesitant. A TikTok account run by Turning Point staff members had been taken down more than once for violating community standards, and he refused to engage in self-censorship. But in early 2024, as legislators on both sides of the aisle contemplated a ban on TikTok, Kirk sensed that he had leverage.

Last March, he posted on X: “TikTok says it’s not a Chinese propaganda arm and shouldn’t be banned by the U.S. Congress. Well, let’s put it to a test. I am going to make another attempt at starting an official Charlie Kirk TikTok account. We’ve been kicked off the platform several times even while maintaining and growing successful channels across all other social media. If the account thrives without garbage bans, strikes, and throttling I will consider changing my position on the platform.”

What happened next has not been previously reported. Within days of posting his offer, Kirk received a call from Tony Sayegh, a former Trump administration Treasury official who was now lobbying for a group that represented the major TikTok investor ByteDance. “We want to prove to you that we’re for free speech,” Sayegh recalled telling him. After their conversation, Kirk’s digital team began to meet over Zoom with TikTok officials, who described how to avoid A.I.-generated content moderation.

Kirk’s TikTok account, @RealCharlieKirk, went up in April. Almost immediately, he realized that the engagement numbers eclipsed those on Instagram. Kirk began to record videos on campuses for a series titled “You’ve Been Brainwashed,” flying from one to the next on a private plane leased by his donors. He engaged in rapid-fire debates with liberal students 10 years younger than him, demanding that they answer questions like “Do you think men can give birth?” and, regarding Harris, “What’s her greatest accomplishment as vice president?”

The debate snippets went viral, some garnering as many as 50 million views, according to TikTok data. Kirk’s account would end up drawing more followers than the accounts of Fox News, Carlson, Vance and the Harris campaign. According to a national survey done by TikTok, the platform’s users under 30 who voted for Trump trusted Kirk more than any other individual. Still, the viewers were not just young voters. Kirk began to realize this in June, when, he says, Black concession workers at Turning Point’s three-day event in Detroit, the People’s Convention, approached him and asked to take selfies, saying they had seen him on TikTok. It was a revelation of which Washington consultants and even Kirk’s own digital team was unaware: The platform made famous by Taylor Swift fans was also a favorite of the working class.

But Kirk’s most audacious move of the 2024 cycle was one that was well out of his traditional youth lane. That summer, he announced that Turning Point Action would invest $108 million in a Chase the Vote program aimed at turning out low-propensity Republican-leaning voters — those who liked Trump but hadn’t always gotten around to voting for him, or voting at all — in the battleground states Arizona and Wisconsin. Central to the effort would be encouraging early voting.

This amounted to an about-face for Kirk. When I first heard him speak in person at a Republican fund-raiser in Goodyear, Ariz., before the 2022 midterms, he equated the practice with fraud. “And look, I’m going to go out on a limb,” he told his audience. “If we don’t get declared as the winner this November, I will go back and I’ll say it’s because the moderates in the state did not ban mass mail-in voting and they did not ban the drop boxes.”

Kirk learned the hard way from that election, in which his entire slate of far-right statewide candidates was defeated, not to discourage any legal method of voting. Many other conservative leaders remained skeptical of voting by mail and early voting in general.

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Kirk and his wife, a former Miss Arizona who hosts a podcast and has a line of faith-themed streetwear, arriving at the gala.Credit...Dina Litovsky for The New York Times

In the end, according to data published by The Times, Kirk was onto something: Roughly 30,000 Arizona Republicans who hadn’t voted since at least 2018 did so in 2024, about 10,000 more than the same type of voters who cast their ballots for Harris. This margin by itself all but closed Trump’s shortfall in 2020 of 10,457 votes.

At the donor presentation, Kirk claimed that Turning Point Action had identified, contacted and ultimately persuaded 220,000 Arizona voters to cast their ballots. “Look at the numbers,” he told his donors by way of comparing Trump’s totals in 2020 with those of 2024. “You fall 10,000 votes short. You win by 187,000. And we chase 220,000. It just about fits, right?”

I spoke with several Arizona Republican election officials and consultants who found Kirk’s deductive leap to be self-aggrandizing in the extreme. Low-propensity voter chasing wasn’t a new concept. It was used to successful effect in 2020, well before Turning Point Action began playing a role in Arizona turnout. The officials listed several organizations — the R.N.C., the National Republican Congressional Committee, Elon Musk’s America PAC and American Majority — that were all engaged in Arizona ballot-chasing in 2024.

For that matter, said Shelby Busch, the vice chair of the Maricopa County Republican Party, “the counties and state party played a critical role in turning out the vote. In my county, we had the state’s voting data, and we built our own operation to turn out voters who hadn’t voted in 2022. I can’t speak to what Turning Point did or didn’t do, because they wouldn’t coordinate with us. But to suggest they were solely responsible discredits thousands of precinct committee persons who worked very hard on this election.”

Moreover, in deep-red Yavapai County, the election recorder, Michelle Burchill, told me that after the election, her office received hundreds of calls from voters who had been erroneously told by Turning Point Action door-knockers that their mail-in ballot hadn’t been counted and that they needed to have their ballot cured. When a Turning Point Action worker handed Burchill a list of 39 such voters, the election recorder quickly determined that 38 of their ballots had been legitimately invalidated because they had already been cast early and in person.

“It was a waste of our time, the voters’ time and really of Turning Point’s time,” Burchill told me. “Turning Point is very popular here in Arizona. I think their resources could have been better used in other areas.”

The day after the inauguration, Kirk met me in the lobby of the Salamander hotel for a late lunch. A few aides hovered around him while Monica Crowley, a former Fox News contributor now awaiting confirmation as a senior State Department official, chatted on her cellphone at a nearby table. Kirk was palpably wired. He apologized for descending into clichés like “surreal” and “incredibly satisfying” in an effort to describe his hours in the Capitol Rotunda for the inauguration. Things would only get more discombobulating in the days to come: a return to the Oval Office, Turning Point’s obtaining White House press credentials, Kirk’s riding aboard Air Force Two with his friend the vice president. For the first time since I met him, Kirk seemed to be about what one expects of a 31-year-old who has suddenly found himself ringside to the unfolding of his imagined “American renaissance.”

In our previous conversations, Kirk hinted that Turning Point’s success owed at least as much to its aesthetic appeal as it did its ideological aims. Its events were fun. Its participants were attractive. The Democrats’ royalty — the Kennedys, Obama — were cool. Kirk wanted that for the conservative movement. I thought about this at his preinaugural gala as he introduced the event’s two main acts: Kid Rock, the 54-year-old metal rapper and Trump enthusiast, and a remodeled version of the ’70s-era disco group the Village People, “President Trump’s favorite band,” as Kirk described them onstage.

In the end, Taylor Swift and Cardi B’s candidate had lost. But, I asked Kirk in the Salamander dining room, was Kirk really content just to create a parallel universe in which conservatives subsisted off whatever cool they could muster? Or was it his aim to seize the entire culture and bend it to conservatism’s will?

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From left, Donald Trump Jr.; Vice President JD Vance; Sergio Gor, the director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office; and Kirk dancing at the gala with members of the Village People to their song “Y.M.C.A.,” a staple of Trump rallies.Credit...From Charlie Kirk

“We want to transform the culture,” Kirk immediately replied.

“How?” I asked. “Beyond just electing new leaders, I mean.”

“I mean,” he said, with a vague but expansive gesture, “more high school chapters, more college chapters. Obviously digital social media. The podcast plays a big role in that. The influencer kind of army.”

Sitting up straighter, he went on. “And beyond that, I think a lot of it’s going to be happening organically. Like, to have every major tech C.E.O. standing up behind President Trump. Yes, President Trump wanted them there. But they also wanted to be there, too. And that is a signal! I mean, you had Apple, TikTok, Amazon, Google, Meta, Elon, all the major communication companies. And they were giving tacit approval of this new administration. Giving standing ovations. It’s politics now influencing culture.”

Weren’t these guys really just currying favor so that Trump didn’t punish everyone but Musk for being late to the party?

“Of course that’s right,” he said. “Do I think they’re, like, adherents to MAGA? No, that’s not the thing. Though I think actually some of those tech C.E.O.s are more right-wing than they would let on.”

Regardless, there they were — just like the Republican senators would soon be there to confirm Trump’s nominees, under threat of being primaried by Turning Point Action. And, Kirk said, “one of the biggest complaints we’ve always had as conservatives — and it was warranted — is: Give us a fair shot on your platforms, and we’ll win the culture.”

He leaned back in his chair with a faint smile. “Well,” he said, “we were right.”

A correction was made on Feb. 10, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the role of the Chinese government in the social platform TikTok. While the government has ties to the platform’s parent company, it does not own TikTok.

When we learn of a mistake, we acknowledge it with a correction. If you spot an error, please let us know at nytnews@nytimes.com.Learn more

Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades. More about Robert Draper

See more on: U.S. Politics, 2024 Elections: News, Polls and Analysis, Turning Point USA

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February 4, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): 8 US code 1324 says it is a federal law to harbor an illegal alien. It is a crime punishable up to five years in prison. The law defines, quote, harboring an illegal alien is considered a felony and can carry serious penalties. If convicted, the individual can face five years for every — each instance of harboring and ten years if it was done for financial gain. Encouraging or assisting illegal immigration, 8 US code 1324 sub-dash 1a part 4 — it is also illegal to encourage or assist someone in entering or remaining in the United States illegally. Penalties for this can also include significant prison time depending on the nature and the scope of the offense. Yesterday, a clip surfaced of the deeply unpopular governor of New Jersey, Governor Phil Murphy, who was in some sort of a interview and was bragging. He was bragging that he is breaking a federal law. Governor Phil Murphy is breaking 8 US code section 1324. So smug, almost taunting the federal government to come after him.

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KIRK: So we don't quite know what that means. An immigration status, not where she wants it to be. Is it someone illegal, someone waiting for paperwork? We don't quite know. But it sure sounds like the way he ended that statement that he is taunting federal authorities saying, I'm breaking the law, what are you gonna do? I'm the governor of New Jersey. Well, Tom Homan had some very sharp words in response to this.

...

KIRK: We have no choice. If Governor Murphy is breaking federal law and taunting and provoking the feds, just file an indictment. You don't have to raid the governor's mansion. You don't have to make some big spectacle, but you have no choice. You don't get to selectively choose which immigration laws you're going to live under. And I would do a wide-sweeping indictment of everybody involved in such circumstances. Either we're a nation of laws or we are not. And if you do not like 8 US code section 1324, then go to the House of Representatives and have them change the law. Change the law. Don't say I'm not going to live under those laws.

Remember they were telling us under President Trump, no one is above the law? Well, here you have a governor admitting that he's breaking federal law. And in a non-dramatic way, very matter of fact, very business, you don't need to do a big press conference. Investigate it. If it is true that the governor of New Jersey is indeed harboring an illegal alien, file an indictment. Make him stand and say, hey, you can turn yourself in whenever you want. You can go bring your state troopers. You will come in for processing. You have a week to do so. We're not gonna go raid the governor's mansion. We're not gonna go make a big spectacle out of it. We're not gonna go do the Mar-a-Lago thing, But we've investigated it, you're breaking the law. You have one week to turn yourself into the Southern District of New York — or the New Jersey US attorney's office, and thanks for playing. And then Governor Murphy is gonna have to — he's gonna try to make himself to be some martyr, a martyr for harboring an illegal alien against federal law.

---

mma

  1. ### Charlie Kirk suggests removing chickenpox and hepatitis B from childhood vaccine schedule

01/29/25 5:11 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “For any Republican senator out there, if you vote against Bobby Kennedy, there will be primaries”

01/29/25 3:34 PM EST

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MMA

Charlie Kirk praises Trump's tariff threats against Colombia as “masculine”

01/27/25

===

mma

After Trump sets January 6 rioters free, Fox News changes its tune on pardons for violent offenders

During a stretch of Fox programming full of backtracking and excuses for Trump’s pardons, Laura Ingraham hosted two pardoned rioters to rewrite their stories

Written by Alicia Sadowski, Jane Lee, Isabella Corrao & Helena Hind

Published 01/22/25

President Donald Trump has issued pardons or commuted the sentences of all January 6 offenders, violent and nonviolent, flouting the advice of Fox hosts who previously urged him to grant a narrower pardon. With this day one action, Trump has freed over 1,500 offenders, including “violent offenders who went after the police” and “some of the most notorious participants in the attack,” individuals convicted of conspiracy, a rioter who carried a firearm, and a rioter who faced a long list of assault charges.

Fox News hosts maintained for years that violent offenders should not be pardoned

In the immediate aftermath of January 6, Fox News personalities spoke out against the insurrection, with some privately begging the administration to stop the Capitol attack. Even after Trump changed his tune on January 6 offenders and began suggesting pardons for them, Fox News maintained that those who had physically attacked law enforcement should not be among the pardoned.

Even though these Fox hosts argued against pardoning violent offenders from January 6 as recently as December, since Monday, Fox hosts have clearly and at times explicitly supported Trump’s decision to pardon all offenders.

On her Fox News show, Ingraham hosted two people who were issued pardons by Trump and allowed them to rewrite their offenses. During the attack on January 6, Ingraham texted then-Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, imploring him to get Trump to take action, writing: “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home. This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.” Four years later, she’s hosting participants and defending Trump’s blanket pardons.

Video

From the January 21, 2025, edition of Fox News' The Ingraham Angle

LARGE STEEL SCREW

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commute peltier

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During the final hours of his presidency — with President-elect Donald Trump's inauguration only hours away — Joe Biden announced his last-minute preemptive pardons, making it clear that he was determined to shield those he pardoned from frivolous prosecutions under the new administration.

The pardons included Dr. Anthony Fauci, former director the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID); Gen. Mark Milley, ex-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and former members of the January 6 Select Committee, including ex-Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and ex-Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois).

Biden, in his announcement, stated, "Our nation relies on dedicated, selfless public servants every day. They are the lifeblood of our democracy." In certain cases, some have even been threatened with criminal prosecutions, including General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony Fauci, and members and staff of the Select Committee to investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol…. These public servants have served our nation with honor and distinction and do not deserve to be the targets of unjustified and politically motivated prosecutions."

READ MORE:Biden preemptively pardons members of January 6 panel and other Trump targets

The outgoing president emphatically added that "the issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense."

On X, formerly Twitter, far-right Trump supporters were quick to attack Biden for the pardons, from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) to Fox News' Laura Ingraham.

Greene tweeted, "Pardoned because they are guilty of CRIMES. Never forget what they did and who the Democrats are. The mask is completely OFF."

Ingraham posted, "With the Fauci and Milley pardons, Biden shows that he is the one who will violate any norm. Good riddance to him, his puppet masters and all those who enabled The Lie. ("Biden's as sharp as ever.") A new dawn is here!"

READ MORE:Trump’s second term could face the 'same disastrous end' as Grover Cleveland’s: presidential historian

Infowars host Alex Jones remarked, "Biden issues 11th hour pardons of globalist crime syndicate members! The DEEP STATE is running scared!"

Turning Point USA's Charlie Kirk wrote, "Biden just preemptively pardoned Fauci, Liz Cheney, Adam Kinzinger, Mark Milley and all staff of the J6 Committee. They know at noon everything changes. This is a provocation. Shock and awe time. High noon is almost here."

Kylie Jane Kremer, executive director of Women for America First, tweeted: "F**K YOU to the Deep State & the Staffers who are lying & pretending Joe Biden is pardoning anyone. Joe Biden DOESN'T HAVE THE MENTAL CAPACITY TO PARDON ANYONE! An investigation needs to be opened on these treasonous pigs who just pardoned the J6 Committee, Milley, & Fauci TODAY."

But other X users have applauded the preemptive pardons.

The conservative Republicans Against Trump posted a statement from Milley.

The ex-Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman stated, "After forty-three years of faithful service in uniform to our Nation, protecting and defending the Constitution, I do not wish to spend whatever remaining time the Lord grants me fighting those who unjustly might seek retribution for perceived slights. I do not want to put my family, my friends, and those with whom I served through the resulting distraction, expense, and anxiety."

CNN's Dana Bash tweeted that Fauci said he is "very appreciative" of the preemptive pardon he received and added, "As (Biden) said, we did nothing wrong, but the baseless accusations and threats are real for me and my family."

MeidasTouch's Ron Filipkowski argued, "I personally am not a fan of the preemptive pardons for many reasons, but I will say the manic, unhinged and furious reactions of MAGA Republicans, which include calling for state court prosecutions and MORE congressional investigations, proves Biden's point on why he did it."

KrassenCast's Ed Krassenstein tweeted, "If you’re upset about Biden pardoning individuals Trump is likely to target with a weaponized justice system, let’s not forget what happened during Trump’s first term. Trump literally used his pardon power to reward people for trying to obstruct a criminal investigation into himself. Trump pardoned Michael Flynn, who was convicted of lying to the FBI during its investigation into TRUMP."

Krassenstein continued, "He pardoned Paul Manafort, who was convicted of witness tampering and obstructing the DOJ's investigation into Trump. And he pardoned Steve Bannon, who was charged with defrauding Trump’s own supporters through a fundraising scheme."

Liberal firebrand and former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann posted, "Breaking: Biden preemptively pardons Liz Cheney, Fauci, Milley, J6 officers Good. Screws Trump, overshadows his inauguration, ruins his day, protects American heroes."

Olbermann also tweeted, "Should pardon millions including all media. Should pardon Megyn Kelly for once pissing Trump off. Pardon everybody It ain't Sun Tzu here but when your opponent goes farcical, out farce him."

:==

omg // maui fire BS? MMA

Jesse Watters says “there’s a good chance the homeless started” the California fires

01/09/25 6:21 PM EST

  1. ### On CNN, Rep. Jasmine Crockett pushes back on baseless right-wing media claims that DEI has hindered the LAFD wildfire response

01/09/25 1:46 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk says Donald Trump should threaten to withhold federal assistance to California

01/09/25

january 9, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): And when California, in a couple of weeks, comes crawling back for federal assistance, Trump should say, listen, I'm not gonna give you a dime unless you fire the lesbian Kristens. You mandate the proper forest management and stop controlled burns that Newsom has stopped. You cut it out with California's failed diversity, equity, inclusion homeless spending. You require water capture instead of flushing it into the ocean. We're not gonna pay for this anymore. This is your own making.

When Florida gets hurt by a hurricane — hit by a hurricane, FPL, Florida Power and Light, has power coming back in a couple days. They also build their homes in a certain way to be hurricane proof. California, they're so left-wing, they're so liberal, they're so out of touch, they're so earth worshiping, and now entire neighborhoods are gone as if an atomic bomb was dropped. In 2020, Pacific Palisades voted 70% for Joe Biden. So it's 70-30.

This looks like Ukraine, not our own country. Oh, but it's funny you mentioned that. Because Joe Biden and Senate Republicans have sent a lot of money to Ukraine. A lot. In fact, we just we spent $250 billion to Ukraine. This is the current ruling class regime. And just oh, by the way, didn't didn't you know this? The Los Angeles Fire Department just donated surplus supplies to Ukraine.

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  1. ### Charlie Kirk says California Democrats are “living in the tragedy of your own making”

01/09/25

January 9, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): And I do not wish harm on anybody because of their politics. I don't. However, for every person that has advocated, raised money, bundled, and donated to Democrats, you are living in the tragedy of your own making. And you guys were told by The New York Times, The Washington Post, right-wing people like Elon Musk and right-wing people like Charlie Kirk are making it seem like woke ideologies doesn't harm you, and now you don't have a driveway. And now everything you own is gone. We were fearmongering.

We were pouncing. Republicans pounce. We're too divisive. Turns out we were right. It turns out all of you in this audience were right. It turns out that every single one of us. And I gotta be honest though, there's a lot of America First and Patriots that no longer have homes too. I know of fifteen conservative people, some of which that work on our team that I mentioned yesterday, their entire home is gone. And again, I do not take delight in anybody's suffering. I do not take joy in people's misery. But the Democrat Party has been wanting America to commit suicide over the last decade. And now they don't have a home. And I do feel sorry for them.

But I hope some of these Democrats, that now everything they own is gone — look at that. So, and look, I don't wanna overly politicize this. Blake, can you pull up the precinct map of how Pacific Palisades voted? Let's just go straight at the third rail of this whole thing. It's 80-20 Democrat. Am I right? Let get the precinct map. Let's make sure we get it right. I want The New York Times precinct map. No one deserves to suffer because of their politics.

However, if you have voted a certain way, this is what you wanted. This used to be a conservative area back in the 1950s. Eight out of ten of those houses you're seeing are left-wing Democrats. Eight out of ten. And that's a tragedy. They don't deserve it. They're American citizens. They deserve help. But they advocated for this. They donated for to Joe Biden. They raised money for Kamala Harris. And this is why politics matters.

---

Charlie Kirk: “I sure hope that Pam Bondi and President Trump open a robust criminal investigation into Gavin Newsom and Mayor Bass”

01/09/25

January 9, 2025, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): So you have this kind of perfect storm of wokeism, and that is what you're seeing. Let's see more b-roll, by the way, of all the burning. What you are seeing right there is a perfect storm of wokeism. We can't take the water because of the Delta smelt. We can't clean up the brush because of the grasshoppers. We can't put out the fire because guess what? When you start to prioritize diversity and sexuality over merit, things tend to not go well. This is exactly what we have been warning about as conservatives.

For, as conservatives, we've been warning about this for years. Hey, when a tragedy strikes, it doesn't matter how many diversity points you have. Remember Pete Buttigieg trying to figure out the flight crisis, that disaster? And what is the response from Gavin Newsom? The same thing that they'll say anytime that there is a police killing.

Oh, systemic racism.

They just say climate change. Define the term, Gavin Newsom. Define the term. What do you mean by climate change exactly? Was it climate change that put the trio of lesbian Kristins in charge of the fire department? Was it climate change that decided not to capture the water and put it into a reservoir? Was it climate change that decided not to clean up the brush? Or no, instead it was the opposite. It was the cult of earth worshiping environmentalism. Your ideology is why your people are suffering. This is a choice. This is not an act of God. It is an act of man.

And Gavin Newsom, you better preserve your documents because I sure hope that Pam Bondi and President Trump open a robust criminal investigation into Gavin Newsom and Mayor Bass. Because in 10 days and 23 hours, you might be facing a very serious federal criminal investigation because you deserve it. This is beyond gross negligence. You might be complicit for the murder and arson of your own citizens. So preserve your documents, Gavin Newsom.

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Right-wing media figures baselessly claim LA wildfires are burning out of control because the fire chief is an LGBTQ woman who supports DEI

01/09/25

===

  1. ### Charlie Kirk calls for eliminating sign language interpreters during emergency briefings: “It's a distraction”

01/08/25 2:08 PM EST

  1. ### Charlie Kirk: “I've had a chance to sit down with Mark Zuckerberg. I'm getting to know Mark Zuckerberg.”

01/08/25 mma

===

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rww

01/08/2025

by

Kyle Mantyla

How the onetime Christian student organization convinced pastors to turn their flocks into GOP voters.

Major MAGA figures are set to attend the black-tie event, hosted by a publishing house whose marquee author has advocated for a “dictator” to run the U.S.

I watched the Jan. 6 defendants’ daylong press conference. It revealed an alarming trend.

Mr. Musk has fallen out with prominent right-wing Americans who say they are worried that their agenda may be sidelined in favor of his own — and that he is willing to silence them on X.

Apparently, Eric Metaxas has changed his mind again about the relatives of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Just over two weeks after Metaxas apologized for saying that Bonhoeffer’s descendants were Jew-haters and pro-Hamas, he did it again.

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12 24 conf gaetz homan trump greenland panama canal?

===

rww

12/23/2024

by

Peter Montgomery

Dominionist leaders attending the youth-focused Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference in Phoenix over the weekend portrayed Donald Trump’s election as a spiritual warfare victory, and urged Christian-right activists to “occupy” more territory by building a bigger Republican majority in Congress.

The AmericaFest speaker lineup included Trump, other MAGA politicians, right-wing commentators like Tucker Carlson, and dominionists like Lance Wallnau. House Speaker Mike Johnson cancelled a planned appearance after becoming the target of MAGA rage over a bipartisan budget deal that was attacked by Elon Musk.

In recent years, TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk has made a public shift from promoting a kind a snarky, irreverent libertarianism to embracing an aggressive Christian nationalism that characterizes much of the MAGA movement today.

Broadcasting from AmericaFest’s media row on Thursday night was “FlashPoint,” a show launched by televangelist Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel in the fall of 2020 that has been a platform for pro-Trump propaganda and prophesying. One panelist was Pastor Rob McCoy, a spiritual mentor to Kirk, who told viewers that he had been at TPUSA’s headquarters on election night, and that when Pennsylvania was called for Trump, Kirk started weeping and said, “All glory to God.”

A recurring theme from the show’s host Gene Bailey and his panelists was that Trump’s victory is no reason for the church to relax. Wallnau said that conservative evangelical Christians are the key to keeping the political pendulum swinging to the right in the midterm elections two years from now:

It’s a spiritual battle…The swing to the right is going to impact the midterms if we seize the moment. And the secret is 40 million evangelical Christians, who know apocalyptically that America is right now in an early phase of an awakening. We have to push that issue, and all we’ve gotta do is flip about 20 seats, and we could see the sustained reformation Trump is attempting for 48 months continuously.

“Advance! Advance! Advance!” urged Wallnau, a promoter of Seven Mountains Dominionism who believes that right-wing Christians are meant to take control of every sphere of influence in society. Leading up to the 2024 election, Wallnau partnered with the America First Policy Institute, a think tank founded by former Trump administration officials, to merge revival-style worship and pro-Trump voter turnout in a “Courage Tour” of key swing-state counties.

One aspect of the increasingly dominionist religious-right movement in America is hostility toward Christians who do not share their religious and political “biblical worldview.” Joining Wallnau and McCoy on FlashPoint was Lucas Miles, senior director for faith at TPUSA. “We’re going to eradicate wokeism from the American pulpit,” Miles vowed. He said TPUSA’s American Pastor Project would pressure pastors to make a commitment to what TPUSA considers “primary historical biblical Christianity doctrine” and encourage congregants to leave churches that don’t sign on. He called it a plan to see “the woke church defunded.”

Joining the conversation was Pastor Keith Craft of Elevate Life Church in Frisco, Texas. Craft said that God told him in advance that Trump would win the election. He quoted a passage from the biblical book of Isaiah that “the government shall be upon his shoulder” and “to the increase of his government there shall be no end.”

Craft said that only 4 percent of Christians have a biblical worldview. The idea that very few evangelicals have an acceptable worldview is promoted by evangelical pollster George Barna, who is affiliated with the Family Research Council’s Center for Biblical Worldview. The assertion that most evangelicals and their pastors don’t meet FRC’s standard reveals just how narrowly religious-right leaders define acceptable views of the Bible.

Christian-right podcaster and producer Kylie Jean Tannehill also joined the panel, saying the Holy Spirit is the movement’s “ultimate weapon of warfare that is often underutilized.”

“The Bible is really clear: ‘on Earth as it is in Heaven,’” she said. “That means I don’t just sit around, I get to occupy…I’m not living life on Earth waiting to be in Heaven, I’m bringing Heaven to Earth.”

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mma

December 18, 2024, edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): We we hosted the president in Atlanta, Georgia, two days before. Then we hosted the president in Vegas. So the president does three events in Georgia, ours being the last one ending at 11 pm. Red eyes all the way to Vegas, does a whole tour out west. Right? Arizona. He goes up to Carson City, ends with us in Vegas.

Wakes up the next morning at 6 am, flies to Austin, does a press conference, does 3 hours sharp with Rogan, flies to Novi, Michigan, three hours late, ends at midnight, and flies down to Mar-a-Lago and holds court on the plane all the way till 3:30 AM eastern, holding court, making phone calls, waking people up, getting things going. Now we could talk endlessly about Donald Trump's life force of energy. People say it's the McDonald's. Honestly, it's hard to disprove.

The deeper question, though, is I love being able to just be able to call the president straight up. It's hard to describe how rare that is because — do you think, PBD, the more layering is a sign of insecurity? Is it a sign of elitism? What is it? Psychoanalyze people that have platoons of handlers and you can't deal direct.

===

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rww 12 24

12/18/2024

by

Kyle Mantyla

LOL. Jason Rapert of the National Association of Christian Lawmakers proudly bestowed upon Charlie Kirk an award "in honor of a lifetime of service to God and country."

===

We unraveled the $122 million web of climate denial, political extremism, and Trump ties to Project 2025

Mapped: How 6 Billionaire Family Fortunes Fund Project 2025 - DeSmog

As scrutiny of Project 2025 continues to grow, defenders of the Heritage Foundation-led initiative, which would reshape federal governance and give the next Republican president unprecedented new powers, say it’s the criticism — not the 922-page plan itself — that’s too extreme.

In a piece published last month, Fox News cited prominent conservatives who feel there’s “nothing radical” about the endeavor. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board has accused detractors of “panic-mongering” and tried to reframe Project 2025’s sprawling “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint as more boring than scary — a milquetoast white paper that simply “melds the work of some 400 scholars and analysts from an eclectic mix of center-right groups.” This echoes Heritage’s insistence that Project 2025, while conservative, is anything but fringe.

But the findings from DeSmog’s recent investigation into Project 2025’s funding sources tell a very different story. Our wide-ranging analysis of public financial disclosure forms found that the groups on Project 2025’s advisory board — whose experts largely helped to draft the plan — are heavily funded by just six family fortunes. Since 2020, foundations linked to these billionaire families have contributed over $122 million to Project 2025 groups, including at least 290 individual donations to 49 nonprofits that contributed to the Mandate for Leadership documents or are on the initiative’s advisory board. We’ve mapped the funding ties between the billionaire families and the Project 2025 individuals and organizations in an interactive graphic, below.

Groups that received funds from the six family fortunes are far from the political mainstream, according to DeSmog’s analysis, including entities that actively deny the science of anthropogenic climate change — as well as organizations that have been classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center. DeSmog’s review also uncovered additional ties between the six families and the Trump/Vance ticket, though both candidates have tried to distance themselves from the initiative in recent months. Indeed, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein — the billionaire founders of the Uline packaging company, whose charitable donations tie them closely to Project 2025 — are among the former president’s biggest donors.

Project 2025 styles itself as populist, moderate, and far from the politics of Washington. Heritage Foundation President Kevin D. Roberts hails it as a plan for the perennially downtrodden, hard-laboring folks “who shower afterwork instead of before.” Its funding sources — elite, extreme, and closely tied to the Trump campaign — suggest exactly the opposite.

The Donors

Though the Mandate pledges to “prioritize the economic prosperity of ordinary Americans” and pry influence away from “America’s corporate and political elites,” the funding that produced it comes from the upper echelons of the billionaire class.

And not just any billionaires. The six family dynasties providing significant support to Project 2025 — Bradley, Coors, Koch, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — all have long histories of fighting for financial and environmental deregulation. Three of the six families have promoted climate denial consistently enough to appear in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database, which tracks the people and organizations doing the most to undermine decarbonization efforts.

They include oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his Koch Family Foundations; the Scaife Family Foundations, which tap vast wealth from the Mellon aluminum, oil, and banking fortune; and chemicals-and-electronics industrialist Barre Seid, whose recent, record-setting $1.6 billion gift to a nonprofit controlled by Federalist Society co-chair Leonard A. Leo has been a major source of Project 2025 money.

While the Heritage Foundation suggests a diverse conservative coalition gave rise to the Mandate for Leadership, the six family fortunes’ giving patterns were remarkably similar. Of the 49 Project 2025 groups, 37 percent received funding from at least three of the six families. 70 percent of the 49 groups received funding from at least two of the families. (In a few cases, the donations were to sister 501(c)4 lobbying arms that share offices and staff.) The average donation was over $420,000.

*Related:See DeSmog’s coverage of Trump Megadonor Tim Dunn’s Plan That’s More Extreme Than Project 2025

Links to Climate Denial

For decades, oil and gas magnate Charles G. Koch and his late brother David fought vigorously for environmental deregulation, including by supporting groups that sow doubt about the science of manmade climate change. Foundations linked to Koch gave at least $9.6 billion to 15 Project 2025 groups since 2020. But four of the lesser-known families — Bradley, Scaife, Seid, and Uihlein — gave even more, and all six family fortunes helped to fund Project 2025 groups that have denied the science of manmade climate change.

:{:{Of the 10 groups that the six families funded most heavily, seven are in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database.}: That includes more than :{$11 million to the Heritage Foundation; }:

$8.3 million to Turning Point USA, which has provided a platform for well-known climate deniers like Alex Epstein;

and $4.6 million to the Texas Public Policy Foundation, which in 2015 published an op-ed claiming warming is “obviously not initiated by the burning of fossil fuels”. In total, foundations linked to the six families gave to 15 Project 2025 groups with entries in DeSmog’s Climate Disinformation Database.}:

That wasn’t the only form of extremism DeSmog uncovered. Four Project 2025 organizations that received donations from the six billionaire fortunes since 2020 are classified as hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a leading civil rights watchdog group. These include the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBTQ group that received over $1.6 million in donations from Bradley and Koch; The Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigrant group that received $650,000 from Scaife; Eagle Forum, an anti-government and anti-immigrant group that received over $100,000 from Koch and Uihlein; and Family Research Council, an anti-abortion group that received $25,000 from Seid.

Of the six billionaire families, only Coors-linked foundations — run by heirs to the Coors brewing fortune — did not donate to at least one SPLC-designated hate group.

Links to the Trump Campaign

For months, Donald J. Trump has publicly disavowed Project 2025, claiming to know nothing about the initiative. That stance conflicts with subsequent media reports, including resurfaced video of the former president and current Republican presidential nominee saying, as a keynote speaker at a 2022 Heritage Foundation event, that Heritage would “lay the groundwork & detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.” The Washington Post reported that Trump flew in a private plane to the event with Heritage President Kevin Roberts.

Trump’s running mate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, has also been the subject of intense scrutiny for numerous ties to Project 2025 — including writing the foreword to Roberts’ forthcoming book. DeSmog’s investigation also uncovered numerous ties between Vance and Project 2025 advisory groups, including a previously unreported 2017 keynote speech at a Heritage event.

But while the candidates continue to downplay any Project 2025 connections, one link is unavoidable: a billionaire family that heavily supports Project 2025 groups is among their campaign’s biggest donors, according to Federal Election Commission data.

In May, Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, the founders of the Uline packaging company, each donated $5 million to Make America Great Again, Inc., a super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection. That’s not including the more than $48 million Richard contributed to Restoration PAC, a pro-Trump political action committee, last quarter alone. Restoration PAC has spent over $12.9 million this year on political advertising, including ads supporting Trump and attacking his opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Since 2020, the Ed Uihlein Foundation, which is run by the Uihleins and named in honor of Richard’s father, has donated at least $13.4 million to 13 different Project 2025 groups.

The map below is interactive. Click on a donor to see the groups it funded with dollar amounts, or a nonprofit to see which of the six family fortunes made donations.

[GFX]

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===

MMA Charlie Kirk warns “primaries are going to be launched” against senators opposing Trump nominees

12/05/24

---

note NOT 50% of vote?

WANNABE ENFORCER? or just chest beat on win

Charlie Kirk guest says “there will be Armageddon for any senator who does not step in line” with Trump's appointees

11/19/24

https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-guest-says-there-will-be-armageddon-any-senator-who-does-not-step-line)

November 19, 2024 edition of The Charlie Kirk Show, streamed on Rumble

CHARLIE KIRK (HOST): The significance of this is immense. And confirming the cabinet — personnel is policy. Personnel is policy. It's going to require a pressure campaign, and all we have to do is have Republican senators actually listen to their voters. Quite a concept. And to actually fulfill the mandate. Darren, if you had to describe what is the mandate that the voters gave Donald Trump?

DARREN BEATTIE (GUEST): The mandate is to clean up our government and restore legitimacy to our government and set America — I keep saying, the stakes of this are not just a politically successful second term, which I fully expect. The stakes of this are much longer, much deeper, much more powerful. The stakes of this are if we do this right — and we need the right people to do it right — if we do this right, we're setting America up for success and freedom into the end of the century. This is setting America up, which was so close to the bottom of the trash heap.

We've been brought so far down into the sewage pit by people like Biden, by people like Harris, by people like Merrick Garland, and I can go on and on and on, to the point that we're on a trajectory to being worse than a third world country because — it's like we don't even have some of the freedoms of third world countries. We have the squalor, but none of the freedom, worst of both worlds. That's where we were headed. This is a singular opportunity to set America aright, not just for this term, but for the remainder of the century and beyond. That's what's at stake, and that's why it's so critical to have the right people for the job. But you have people like Elon Musk, Vivek, Matt Gaetz, Tulsi Gabbard, it's actually a possibility. And that's why we need to be a 100% committed. No compromises, not wavering on anything. There will — we need to make it very clear, there will be Armageddon for any senator who does not step in line.

===

aha short window for shock and awe smash and grab, recess appt in maj sen; bannon beat chest, to puff up signif of win and his role in it; push advantage/ big mo?

//

Fox News’ Jason Chaffetz threatens Republicans who refuse to confirm Fox & Friends weekend co-host Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense

11/12/24 MMA

Charlie Kirk threatens to remove Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as majority leader

11/13/24

---

YIKES TRUMP ADMIN

MMA Trump defense secretary pick Pete Hegseth said in 2020 that the United States should “just get rid of the U.N.”

11/13/24 2:02 PM EST

Charlie Kirk threatens to remove Sen. John Thune (R-SD) as majority leader}:

11/13/24 1:07 PM EST

  1. ### Project 2025 leader Kevin Roberts says he's “escastic” over Trump's cabinet picks: “This is exceeding our expectations”

11/13/24 12:57 PM EST

  1. ### Steve Bannon calls for a military tribunal to try retired General Mark Milley for treason

11/13/24 12:50 PM EST

  1. ### Trump picked Fox & Friends Weekend co-host Pete Hegseth to be secretary of defense. Here's some of what he's said on the air.

11/13/24 12:22 PM EST

  1. ### A comprehensive review of the revolving door between Fox and the second Trump administration

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