Trump declared antifa a terrorist organization. Within 48 hours, ABC pulled Jimmy Kimmel’s show indefinitely. Nexstar preempted it on their stations. Sinclair went further—airing a Charlie Kirk tribute in Kimmel’s time slot and demanding he donate to [Kirk’s conservative nonprofit] Turning Point USA. No one forced them. Both Nexstar and Sinclair have mergers pending before the Trump administration. Both need FCC approval. They’re competing to demonstrate who’s more aligned with the new order. What took four months in 1933 is happening in 48 hours in 2025.
Text accompanying Todd Stoermer’s podcast (below)
Twelve days have elapsed since Charlie Kirk, a social conservative who – rather like that other social conservative, Tucker Carlson, had begun to question the nature of US-Israel ties 1 – was murdered, seemingly by a young man of gun-toting and staunchly MAGA family. None of which caused the 47th POTUS a moment’s hesitation before calling the slaying the work of The Left (a descriptor frequently stretched by conservatives to include the “woke” 2 ) and declaring war on that disturbingly ill-defined entity, antifa.
Two days later, talk show satirist Jimmy Kimmel poked fun at Trump’s weird response to being asked how he personally was taking the loss of a friend. That response being to point across the White House lawn to where work had started on a new ballroom, Kimmel wisecracked that the president was in the “fourth stage of grief – construction” …
… leading two days later, to Kimmel’s show being pulled by ABC and its Disney parent, as per my opening quote.
A few days later, Johns Hopkins historian Todd Stoermer made a nine minute podcast spelling out parallels with the first few months of 1933, after Hitler was appointed chancellor. The gist being that, as with Disney and ABC last week, almost all of Germany’s media, corporate, legal and academic institutions – i.e. the pillars of civic life – did not wait to be censored or banned. In their panic and desire to survive, they threw themselves into what we’d now call a race to the bottom, vying to outdo one another in self-abasement.
Stoermer focuses on the narrowly political conditions in which an entire society may sleepwalk – or in an age of social media, sleepsprint – into fascism. Part 2 will examine socio-economic conditions of that trajectory.
* * *
- I note Kirk’s criticisms of US-Israel ties because they are on the record and run counter to packaging of the accused as “of the Left”; not because I’ve seen evidence of Mossad involvement. Should that change I’ll post accordingly.
- It’s a sign of the narrowness of the West’s Overton Window – and of the minds of men like Donald Trump – that ‘wokeness’ can be deemed a thing of The Left; an entity once defined by its understandings of class in an oppositional or at least socio-economic sense.
“It’s a sign of the narrowness of the West’s Overton Window – and of the minds of men like Donald Trump – that ‘wokeness’ can be deemed a thing of The Left; once defined by understandings of class in its oppositional or at least socio-economic sense.”
Possibly not only men like Trump.
Jonathan Pie, in this recent interview on Sky TV……
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHz3FfmLCGg&ab_channel=SkyNews
…..seems to suggest with the argument that the pendulum of ‘cancel culture’ has now swung from the “woke left” to the (woke?) right that the whole phenomena he describes, along with its features, began about ten years ago and was invented by the ‘left’.
Forgetting/ignoring/oblivious to (?) the House of Un-American Activities Committee from the late 1940s through the entirety of the 1950’s…………
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/20/red-scare-echo-kimmel-tv-00574226
…….to the Gleichschaltung described by Sturmer in 1930’s Germany, the Economic League (founded 1919) and their employer ‘cancel culture’ blacklists, right back to the workers of Tolpuddle transported to Australia for forming a trade union.
Starting history at a particular point in time – October 7th 2023 springs to mind – seems to be something of a general trend?
In respect of footnote 1: One does not have to be a ‘conspiracy nut’ to see the gaping holes in the narrative – particularly from the FBI.
The released video, for example, of the alleged shooter fleeing across the roof carrying no visible rifle immediately after the shooting is not congruent with the FBI statement that they found suspect number three’s screwdriver, used to re-assemble/dis-assemble the rifle, with his DNA left behind on the roof. Which raises the question as to exactly how he dis-assembled the rifle, stuffed it in his backpack with his alleged (FBI) change of clothes and ran across the roof to the point of climbing down – all in the space of six seconds – and then manged to re-assemble the rifle to be left in the woods without the screwdriver needed to carry out that task?
It is also interesting that although the FBI have publicly stated that suspect number three’s DNA was found on the towel in which the alleged murder weapon was wrapped, no statement appears to have been made in relation to the suspect’s DNA being found on the actual rifle.
There’s also a lot of ‘chatter’ about the calibre of the round and why no exit wound is apparent. And whilst former CIA analyst Larry Johnson has a valid point……
https://sonar21.com/a-charlie-kirk-update-while-trump-is-playing-with-fire-in-venezuela/
….in respect of “frangible” 30-06 rounds which are “designed with a compressed metal powder core that disintegrates into tiny fragments upon striking a hard surface, such as metal [or], bone”, the notion that even in the gun happy US culture some twenty two-year-old sprog with no military service could make that shot from 150 yards out is unconvincing.
I passed every TOET (Test of Elementary Training (weapon proficiency)) I took on SLR’s and SMG’s in the three years I spent in the services, and I could not have made that shot at that age. Not that I could claim to have been anything other than competent at the time.
Like many other similar events – Kennedy, 9/11, 7/7 et al. – the chances of ever finding out what really took place and why in a context in which the narrative is so controlled is probably zero. The only certainty is that whatever The Official Narrative is, it is most certainly going to be the equivalent of a fairy tale.
“It’s a sign of the narrowness of the West’s Overton Window – and of the minds of men like Donald Trump – that ‘wokeness’ can be deemed a thing of The Left; once defined by understandings of class in its oppositional or at least socio-economic sense.”
The propagandising classes (i.e. all of them, really) in the USA have practised equating ‘Liberalism’ and ‘Leftism’ for the past 70 or so years. It’s convenient for Republicans to associate the hated ‘Liberals’ with the even more hated but irrevocably tarred-with-a-stick evil Communists/Socialists. The fact that such equation bears no resemblance at all to either reality or normal political theory or indeed practice is neither here nor there to propagandists. The fact that it is meaningless is no barrier to repeating it ad nauseam.
As for the ‘similar events’ as Dave points out, this too has been going on for years. There is a timeline of assassinations, bombings, terrorist attacks and similar events in the last 60 or so years of US history. Most of them are distinguished by (deliberate?) confusion, multiple suspects, numerous strands of contradictory evidence, far-fetched and not so far-fetched theories, the intervention of the FBI and CIA, the ascribing of convenient but multiple political motivations, and, most pointedly, no final verifiable and proved explanation. There is a pattern here, and it is not, to say the least, healthy for a functioning society. Of course, in a non-functional society like the US, it (presumably) serves to postpone the inevitable collapse.
Further to the above, Larry Johnson writes in his current post: “Creating a number of false stories and false leads is something that an intelligence organization does in order to misdirect a law enforcement investigation.”
Quite.
The problem is in identifying them.
Law enforcement agencies under pressure for quick results in high profile cases can be easy marks for such false leads.
Point being that Tyler Walker could or could not be a false lead.
Regardless, the damage is now done in terms not only of the murder but also, as has been observed, the martyrdom and the way what has become a media consumer event is being used.
Check out this 4:01 segment on that aspect with particular emphasis on the clip shown from the US Department of War featuring Hesgeth leading US combat troops in the Lords Prayer alongside US forces in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1DafpzP4Ks&ab_channel=JudgeNapolitano-JudgingFreedom
A clip which reinforces just how rapidly this descent into Fascism is accelerating.
1. Agreed: equating IdPol with socialism is not confined to MAGA.
2. The Jonathan Pye short featured in yesterday’s post.
3. There’s no smoking gun tying Israel to the murder but GrayZone’s Max Blumenthal was early in with a motive along the lines I alluded to, though the idea that Kirk turned down AIPAC money seems to hang on hearsay.
4. Yes, there are many unanswered questions here and, yes, they’ll likely stay unanswered.