Remember when JD Vance went to Europe and lectured all those Frankfurter School people about free speech?
By 
People say the American right wing has this or that superpower, but it has many, like [insert appropriate MCU figure here].
Shamelessness.
Hypocrisy
Ignorance
Cruelty
Most of all, it has the thing that enables all these other things, by blinding it to these other things, which is an infinite vortex/black hole at the center of their cognitive galaxy of stupidity.
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ACCIDENTALLY LIKE A MARTYR
The murder of right-wing influencer Charlie in September of 2025 led to an outburst of ferocious authoritarianism, fueled by bad faith, hysteria, and stupidity. Over the course of a few feverish days, we witnessed the practically instantaneous transformation of a hatemongering propagandist for Donald’s Trump’s ongoing attempt to destroy liberal democracy in this country into a martyr for free speech — an innocent victim of political polarization and overheated rhetoric.
Kirk was given the equivalent of a state funeral for a national hero. The vice president escorted his casket, carried by a military honor guard, onto Air Force Two. Donald Trump ordered all flags flying at federal buildings to be lowered to half mast, and even many Democratic state governors voluntarily – or “voluntarily” – complied. Trump then announced he was posthumously awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom: the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Encomia poured in not just from the right-wing propaganda machine, but from many liberal pundits. For example, Ezra Klein used his New York Times column to offer up a preposterous whitewash of Kirk’s career, lauding him for “doing politics the right way,” and criticizing, for unexplained reasons, people who were pointing out that Kirk’s stated views on gun control – that a certain amount of gun violence was an acceptable price to pay for not having any meaningful restrictions on gun ownership – now seemed ironically related to the manner of his death. Barnard president Laura Rosenbury also took to the pages of the Paper of Record, to argue that Kirk “challenged college students,” and “we need more like him.”
Charlie Kirk was a thoroughly deplorable right-wing troll, who spent his entire adult life helping to create the conditions that made Donald Trump and everything he represents possible. A massively popular social media presence, Kirk used his enormous platform in that world to regularly make unambiguously bigoted statements about Blacks, Jews, women, and gay and trans people. He was a tireless advocate for the “great replacement theory,” favored by white supremacists in America and the world over: a paranoid delusion that a cabal of elite Jews and Democrats are conspiring to flood the nation with non-white immigrants, in order to strip white people of their cultural and economic status. He accused Jews of “pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.” After embracing Christian nationalism in the wake of the 2020 election, he told women, such as music superstar Taylor Swift, that they should “submit” to a God-given patriarchal order, which requires the husband is the head of every household. And he described a passage in the Bible that calls for the stoning to death of gay men as “God’s perfect law.”
Along with the great replacement nonsense, Kirk promoted all sorts of other unhinged conspiracy theories, including but not limited to the supposed theft of the 2020 election from Donald Trump, the realities of climate change, and the nature of the Covid pandemic.
It should be unnecessary to add that Kirk’s murder was nevertheless a terrible thing, both because murder in general is a horrific crime, even when the murdered person is a terrible human being, and because in the long run the political effects of this murder were likely to be terrible as well. But mourning him, like mourning the death of any key enabler of Trumpism, should, one would think, have been an optional activity, rather than, as it seemed in the immediate wake of his death, almost a civic duty.
The reaction to Kirk’s death, much more so than the murder itself, was the really telling event. After all, what were once newsworthy attempt to commit the public mass murder of children in America, via our sacred untouchable guns, are now so commonplace that they barely merit a brief mention below the fold of our national newspapers. Minutes after Kirk’s murder — one of the tens of thousands of gun deaths that have happened and will happen in America this year — a high school just down the road from my office was shot up by a 16-year old boy with a revolver, who had apparently been “radicalized by extreme anti-Semites,” aka Nazis, online, critically wounding two of his classmates before killing himself. The only reason there wasn’t a newsworthy death toll is that the kid couldn’t get into the locked and hardened for security purposes school doors, so he shot up windows and lockers while the terrified students hid inside the building, completing the ritual that they have been trained to perform since early childhood.
Then the very next morning, here in bucolic Boulder, my wife got out of an event with a friend. The friend turned her phone back on, and found it was blowing up with 25 texts about how the high school her 15-year-old attends was on a total “lockdown,” because a man with a gun and a tactical vest had been spotted just outside.
She couldn’t get near the school because of the police cordon, so she had to wait to get the news that her son — a very bright sensitive independent-minded boy who I can picture vividly doing just this thing — sprinted out of the school when he got the emergency message to hide from the killer, just as he had been taught since he was five years old (run, hide, fight), running, running, running for his life on a ethereally beautiful sunny early fall morning at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, all the way to a friend’s house a mile away, where he finally stopped to call his mother. (I was a third-hand participant in all this as I searched the internet trying to find information that my wife could convey to our friend about what the exact odds were that her son was going to be murdered that morning.)
It turns out the putative mass murderer was a runner wearing a weighted vest, who was carrying his cellphone in his hand. So, I suppose, “nothing happened.” The more than one thousand children who spent an hour or two hiding darkened classrooms, wondering if they were going to be massacred, were released to the outside world, so they could resume their formal educational activities the next day.
But, unlike our now normalized to the point of banality schoolroom murders, the death of Charlie Kirk was supposed to be a moment both of genuine national trauma, and an occasion for political reckoning, even though it seems doubtful that even one American in a hundred had previously had more than a vague idea, if that, who exactly this person was. One political commenter dryly summed up this reckoning with the observation that “Charlie Kirk was a champion of free speech, and anyone who says otherwise will be fired.”
And indeed the firings, of people both prominent and obscure, came fast and furious.
MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd – an O.G. Republican establishment figure, whose impeccable credentials included running George W. Bush’s second presidential campaign – was fired within hours for the crime of making the wholly unexceptionable observation that the climate of hate that Kirk helped foment had likely played a role in his own murder.
Right-wing influencer, close Donald Trump confidante, and increasingly unhinged lunatic Laura Loomer proclaimed on the very day of Kirk’s death that she would do everything she could to ruin the professional careers and aspirations of anyone who “celebrated” Kirk’s death. (It became almost immediately obvious that “celebrating” Kirk’s death meant criticizing Kirk, or indeed merely quoting his own words, in the course of taking a less than reverential attitude toward the passing of this heroic figure in the battle against human decency).
Journalists across the country were fired or suspended for asking impertinent questions on social media regarding whether Kirk was as admirable figure as the overwhelming waves of revisionist propaganda were now insisted that he had been. A prominent writer for DC Comics lost her job; sports reporters and public relations officials found themselves suddenly unemployed for raising even mild notes of dissent regarding the posthumous canonization of someone who, until approximately fifteen minutes earlier, had been widely recognized to be a noxious internet troll.
A website sprung up, dedicated to “exposing Charlie’s Murderers,” and asking people to offer tips about people who were supposedly “supporting political violence online.” Thousands of such tips were duly offered up by the cybermob. (All this was before anyone had any idea who was responsible for the murder).
By that weekend, the only Black woman op-ed columnist in the Washington Post’s long history had been fired from Jeff Bezos’s favorite toy, apparently for the crime of posting a verbatim quote from Kirk, in which he had claimed that Black women didn’t “have the brain processing power to be taken seriously,” and that they could only get prominent positions in society by “stealing a white person’s slot.”
This initial wave of repression culminated in the firing of ABC late night comedy host Jimmy Kimmel, after the network and its corporate parent Disney had been threatened with the loss of government broadcast licenses by Trump’s remarkably thuggish head of the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel hadn’t even said anything negative about Kirk: he had merely pointed out how desperately people in MAGA land were to deny the possibility that anyone on the right had had anything to do with the murder.
Ingenuous journalists looked upon this amazing outburst of hysteria, bad faith, and willful stupidity, and puzzled over the evident fact that nothing remotely like this had happened just three months earlier, after the murders of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, by a right wing fanatic, or when House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband was injured seriously by a hammer-wielding maniac. Indeed, in the latter case, the same propaganda machine busily firing people for failing to be insufficiently devastated over the death of a professional right-wing troll had spent days ginning up bogus rumors that the latter attack was the product of a spat between gay lovers.
Kirk’s martyrdom almost instantly took on various classic features of the genre, including the confabulation of wholly fictional last words, offered to the faithful by our newest pseudo-saint.
So it was that former Utah congressman Jason Chaffetz, who was sitting near Kirk when he was shot, told Fox News that he wanted Kirk’s “wife and the country to know [that] the last question he took, the last thing he talked about . . . was one of love, of Jesus Christ, of his belief in prayer. And he talked about that from his heart.”
Here is the transcript of Kirk’s actual last words:
ATTENDEE: Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?
KIRK: Too many. [Applause]
ATTENDEE: In America, it’s five. Now, five is a lot, right, I’m going to give you — I’m going to give you some credit. Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America over the last 10 years?
KIRK: Counting or not counting gang violence?
A shot then rings out.
Chaffetz had been a member of Congress for eight years, much of which he spent ginning up fake scandals about Hillary Clinton.
It seems odd that the tradition of fabricating the martyr’s final words can be continued in the age of the internet’s panopticon. Nevertheless, the whole right wing “news” apparatus is built on the apparently valid assumption that people will swallow the most blatant and easily disprovable lies, if you just tell them what they want to hear.
Indeed, in the wake of Kirk’s death it became professionally dangerous merely to mention such awkward facts as that Kirk had done a radical — and suspiciously convenient — pivot, from an aggressively secular version of right-wing ideology, to a zealous embrace of Christian nationalism.
For many years, Kirk had criticized Christian evangelicals for mixing religion with politics, especially when it came to issues related to sexuality. He characterized Jesus as a welcoming and tolerant figure, and condemned Christians’ “sanctimonious approach” to same sex relationships and related issues. He argued explicitly for a “secular worldview,” and deplored efforts by right wing evangelicals to “impose” their version of morality “through government policy.”
Yet as the Christian nationalist essence of the MAGA movement – and therefore of Kirk’s own income stream – became increasingly evident, Kirk apparently underwent a profound conversion experience. In 2021, shortly after Joe Biden’s election, Kirk started claiming that the supposed separation of church and state was a myth, invented by “secular humanists.” He began to preach against what he called “the LGBTQ agenda,” which he claimed harmed children. And he promoted the Seven Mountains Mandate, a radical position taken by many of Trump’s most fanatical supporters, which calls on conservative Christians to take key positions of power in government, media, business, and education. In a surreal gesture that had become mandatory among Christian nationalists, he argued vociferously that the return of Donald Trump to presidency was crucial to restoring Christian morality in America.
“I worship a God that defeats evil,” the erstwhile critic of mixing religion and politics said in 2024, while introducing presidential candidate Trump at a rally at an Arizona megachurch. “And we worship a God that wins in the end,” the newly pious Kirk announced.
What was particularly telling about this contemporary conversion narrative is that it didn’t feature any sort of confession or repentance on the part of the prodigal son. It’s not as if Kirk publicly disavowed his previous explicit embrace of secularism, let alone his strikingly tolerant attitude toward neo-Nazis and — even worse from the perspective of Christian nationalists — gay and trans people. Rather, Kirk offered up a perfect imitation of his master Donald Trump, by simply starting to act one day as if he had always embraced Christian nationalism in its most extreme forms, without the slightest acknowledgement that this silent and indeed completely invisible conversion flew directly in the face of what both men had previously spent their entire lives saying and doing.
The striking lack of skepticism that enabled Kirk’s sudden transformation into a fanatical Christian nationalist, and then a martyr for that cause, was made possible ultimately by our culture of stupidity, in which facts and logic must both give way to zealous idiocy. Consider how, within hours of the identification of Tyler Robinson as Kirk’s accused killer, the entire right wing media apparatus was spewing forth the astounding and fantastically stupid lie that Robinson must have been transformed by the invidious effects of American higher education, from a nice boy from a nice conservative (white, Mormon, upper class) family into a leftist radical, who killed Kirk out of hatred for Kirk’s Christian conservative advocacy.
“I’d like to know the names of the professors who radicalized this young man,” prominent right-wing propagandist and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza announced. “I wonder if they too could be charged with abetting this political assassination. “Higher ed is a scam,” tweeted Katie Miller, wife of Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, responding to a post that alleged Robinson was “brainwashed” in college. “From a regular middle class [sic] family. Good grades. Went off to college. Became an extremist antifa killer,” declared the popular right-wing social media account “End Wokeness.”
All this was vomited forth at a time when what scant information was available about Tyler Robinson suggested that he might well be a fan of Kirk’s even more reactionary rival in the right-wing media ecosystem, Nick Fuentes. As for Robinson’s college experience, it consisted of attending Utah State, one of the most conservative universities in America, for all of one semester before dropping out.
But facts are rarely inconvenient for lying propagandists like D’Souza and Frau Miller, who know that their lies will be received enthusiastically by people for whom, in Hannah Arendt’s words, “the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
The proffering of the brazenly stupid lie that Robinson was converted by one semester of classes at a deeply conservative institution into some sort of leftist assassin illustrates the extent to which Donald Trump’s Republican party, and much of America as a whole, has lost all grip on reality. And that loss allows an apologist for fascism dwelling in the depths of our cyber-sewers to be transformed – and not just by the endlessly mendacious Fox Cinematic Universe, but by the “liberal” media –into a martyred “moderate” Republican, assassinated by a “political extremist” of some conveniently unspecified type.
I went to college between 1978 and 1982, and in all that time the only thing resembling actual political indoctrination I ever encountered in a classroom was a history professor who devoted one entire class period to explaining why Marxism was a ridiculous theory of history (fair enough), and all of the next class to why Ronald Reagan should be elected president.
Nevertheless, to those who exploit and profit from America’s increasingly fanatical worship of stupidity, all my classes featured political indoctrination, to the extent they taught mental habits such as empiricism and critical thinking. That’s the actual indoctrination that happens in America’s universities, which is why people like Donald Trump and Charlie Kirk dedicated their political careers to destroying them.
From The Triumph of Stupidity
Vol. 1 apparently.