The Kirk Circus

Everybody has a take. Everybody is deploring, threatening, scribbling cringeworthy hagiographies, lowering flags to half mast, offering up thoughts and prayers.

Charlie Kirk got what he deserved. He got what he’d already said he’d be willing to accept, if not endorse, as collateral damage in pursuit of what he considered to be a vigorous and necessary defense of the second amendment.

He never imagined that he’d be the one with a fatal bullet hole in him. Those would be reserved for Jews, immigrants, black and brown people, gay people, women who refused his benevolent instruction, empathetic people, people who’d read the wrong books, and above all, people who’d had a belly full of his trumpeted triumphs of the will to come, the triumphs that he and his equally deluded buddies were peddling to anyone stupid enough to take them at face value.

Civil society is in abeyance in the US. This was never our fault, but restoring it is nevertheless our duty. We can start by not shedding any tears for this sad, sick, puer aeternus, whose intelligence matured tragically earlier than his wisdom.

Unbidden Bits—September 9, 2025

Does Stephen Miller really not realize that in painting targets on all our backs, he’s also painted one on his own? I can’t imagine being thrilled at the moral certainty that millions of people are wanting me dead. Despite all Miller’s public bravado, I have no idea how he can either.

I suppose sadomasochism has its own logic. I’m grateful I’ve never felt the urge find out how that logic works.

Trumpism’s Unspoken Antecedents

Joachim von Ribbentrop for foreign policy
The East India Company for economic policy
Joseph Stalin for scientific policy
The Taliban for social policy
The Spanish Inquisition for jurisprudence
Louis XIV of France for taxation
The Eastern Roman Empire for internal staffing and administration

The End Of the Beginning….*

The Supreme Court has finally finished booby-trapping every legal exit from our national fascist nightmare. For the moment at least, Trump’s Gleichschaltung appears complete. In a country of 340 million people, though, that’s almost certainly an illusion. Only the profoundly ignorant can rejoice in what comes next. Does Tommy Tuberville, for example, realize what his bodyguard bill is likely to look like from now on? Does he imagine that the Republican Party or the Trump administration is going to pay it for him?

*A previous version of this text appeared in the comments section of the Crooked Timber post The end of US democracy, by John Q

Unbidden Bits—June 12, 2025

Checking my web links this morning, I find that J.D. Vance has also been demanding that Governor Newsom do his job. Unfortunately he thinks that a governor’s job is to lick President Trump’s boots, express contrition for not doing it earlier, and to look the other way while the President conducts a Nazi-style armed invasion of his state, sends the most vulnerable of his people to concentration camps outside the country, and gets his propaganda minister to brag about it on Fox News.

No, J.D., that’s not Governor Newsom’s job, that’s not any state governor’s job. As Trump’s Vice-President, that’s your job. You’re the Toady-In-Chief. My advice to you is to stick to your knitting, and let Governor Newsom get on with the job of defending his people against the sociopath you work for.

The Hillbilly Pygmalion

George Packer seems to think J. D. Vance may still have a future.* I’m not so sure about that. J. D. made his bid early on, trading his shuck for Donald Trump’s jive, but he may not find it so easy to reverse the process when he needs to, and given the current state of US politics, at some point he’s definitely going to need to.

Not so many years from now, when Peter Thiel is safely tucked away in his New Zealand bunker, Musk is on his imperial pilgrimage to Mars, and the Donald is dead, the Sons of Trump will surely have no further use for J. D. He’s smarter than they are, to be sure, and he seems to have convinced the MAGAsphere that he’s as big an asshole as they are, but in the end he lacks the Trump boys’ financial resources.

Besides, even Fox News seems to have noticed that a Julio-Claudian-style War of Assassins may already be more in vogue in Washington than the fascist frenzy of Trump’s first hundred days. J. D.’s currency is still good at the Times, the Post, and—Packer’s stylish hit piece aside—The Atlantic, but there’s still many a banana peel left between him and the White House, every one of them with a Trump logo stamped on it right next to the Chiquita sticker.

*The Talented Mr. Vance, in the July, 2025 issue of The Atlantic

Rat Leaves Sinking Ship…

From the online edition of The Atlantic, May, 2025:

I SHOULD HAVE SEEN THIS COMING

When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.

By David Brooks

Everybody you’ve been sneering at for the last 40 years saw this coming. Everybody who could tell the difference between Edmund Burke and William F. Buckley Jr. saw this coming. I gotta say, you’re as stupid and full of yourself now as you were 40 years ago. You’ve always been a joke as a bully, you’re even more of a joke now as a victim.

The Dumbfuck(ery) Marches On

Whatever I could think of to say, there’s always someone out there who can say it better. For example:

From Jay Kuo’s Newsletter The Status Kuo, April 3, 2025—

“Economist Justin Wolfers pulled no punches in his assessment: ‘Monstrously destructive, incoherent, ill-informed tariffs based on fabrications, imagined wrongs, discredited theories and ignorance of decades of evidence. And the real tragedy is that they will hurt working Americans more than anyone else.’”