The Daily Parker

In the day since a yet-unknown sniper assassinated far-right activist Charlie Kirk, people across the political spectrum have reacted with anger and horror. Most--at least, from the center-right to the center-left--decried the violence itself, even when they found Kirk's politics reprehensible:

• Former presidents Biden, Obama, Bush, and Clinton soundly condemned the killing, with Obama posting, "We don't yet know what motivated the person who shot and killed Charlie Kirk, but this kind of despicable violence has no place in our democracy."
• Former US Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL): "Elected officials and public figures should set the tone by rejecting inflammatory language, by calming rather than exciting our worst instincts. Media outlets and online platforms must take seriously their power to either inflame or cool tensions. And each of us, in our conversations at home and online, has the chance to model a politics that is fierce but never violent. Democracy is not passive. It asks every citizen to participate, to stay engaged, to keep faith that peaceful change is still possible even when it feels slow or frustrating."
• David Graham in The Atlantic: "[E]employing force is actually an admission of defeat. A person who resorts to violence has concluded that he cannot change the terms of debate with words or arguments. Might may not make right, but it can end the conversation."
• Comedy writer Jeff Maurer doesn't think it was funny: "People who don’t appreciate the awfulness of this event aren’t just lacking empathy — they’re naive. They apparently don’t realize that political violence pushes us backwards on the civil society evolutionary timeline. People on the right who seem to be steeling themselves for a second civil war are making the same mistake, except that the far right hears “go backwards” and thinks “great idea”. But anyone who values the hard-earned progress that humanity has made separating political power from physical power should view this as a tragedy on a human and a societal level. This is the type of shit that we just don’t do anymore, and let’s hope that we’re not about to enter an era in which that statement is less true."
• Stephen Colbert had a similar response: "I’m old enough to personally remember the political violence of the 1960s, and I hope it is obvious to everyone in America that political violence does not solve any of our political differences. Political violence only leads to more political violence, and I pray with all my heart that this is the abhorrent action of a mad man and not a sign of things to come."

Unfortunately, the difference between centrists and the extremes has followed a predictable and depressing pattern, starting with the psychologically-damaged and demented man heading our government.

• The OAFPOTUS went with projection and vitriol: "For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now."
• Josh Marshall points out that the OAFPOTUS may have the attribution backwards: "Right-wing violence, both of an organized paramilitary sort and by radicalized loners, has become such a scourge in recent years that on the extremes you hear voices for things like armed versions of Antifa and the like as some sort of counter. ... Fascists do civil violence better than civic democrats. It’s a foundational element of their political philosophy. It’s the verdict of logic and history."
• Jen Rubin takes right-wingers to task for only expressing outrage when someone from their side of the aisle is targeted: "Sadly, [the OAFPOTUS] and the MAGA troops reserve outrage only when Republicans are targeted (compare the near-silence when Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro was targeted, the mockery when Paul Pelosi was nearly killed, and the snide remarks when two Minnesota Democrats were assassinated). As we saw yesterday, Democrats condemn political violence whoever is targeted, as such acts have no place in a democracy. Nor does selective outrage or scapegoating broad swaths of the country for violent attacks."
• Jonathan Chait also calls out the OAFPOTUS for failing, once again, to be the President of the United States: "Every political movement in history, including the most bloodthirsty, has condemned political violence by its opponents. The only real test is whether you also oppose political violence by your allies. This is a test Trump has repeatedly failed."
• Other far-right voices called for more violence and retribution: "We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and podcaster Matt Walsh on X. “This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country."

Kirk's assassination was reprehensible. As much as I wanted to see him discredited, ridiculed, exiled, and bankrupted, he didn't deserve to die.

Neither did the school kids shot in Colorado yesterday while all this was going on. I hope their stories don't get lost in the noise.

Kirk, who founded the far-right youth organization Turning Point USA, has died after being shot on the campus of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah:

Kirk, 31, emerged as one of the most prominent voices on the right, gaining an audience of millions of listeners between his daily talk show and social media channels. He rose to prominence in conservative circles largely by holding events on college campuses at which he debated liberal students. He developed a close relationship with Trump in recent years and was a regular presence at Mar-a-Lago in the winter during Trump’s transition to his second presidential term.

It was only about 10 minutes into the conservative activist’s appearance at the university. Kirk had just welcomed the students with remarks of gratitude for their political involvement and taken one question about religion, said [student Sarah] Heywood, 19.

Then, the second person began asking about gun violence. It was clear, Heywood said, that they were ready to have a heated conversation with Kirk. Still, she didn’t think anything of it. She just listened.

The audience member was midsentence when a bullet struck Kirk in the neck, Heywood said. She’d barely registered the “pop” of the gunfire before she saw Kirk’s head swing backward and blood spew from his neck, she said.

In an appearance in April 2023, Kirk said that gun deaths are "unfortunately worth it" to preserve an absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment.

The thoughts and prayers of thousands are with Kirk's family today, who, like millions of other Americans, may not think it "worth it." For my part, I'm thinking more about the deeper meaning of Matthew 26:52.

I believe the precipitating event that led to the OAFPOTUS winning re-election was President Biden's decision to run for re-election—something he promised, in 2020, he would not do.

This evening the news comes that he has pardoned his son Hunter for the crimes he went to jail for, crimes that we can state with some certainty he would not have committed or been charged with had his dad not been president.

[President] Biden said that he came to the decision this weekend, which coincided with the family being together in Nantucket, Massachusetts, for Thanksgiving. Hunter Biden’s attorneys this weekend also mounted a vigorous public defense, releasing a 52-page paper on Saturday titled “The political prosecutions of Hunter Biden.”

“I believe in the justice system, but as I have wrestled with this, I also believe raw politics has infected this process and it led to a miscarriage of justice,” Biden said in his statement. “… I hope Americans will understand why a father and a President would come to this decision.”

There's a lot to untangle here, but bottom line, I think this was a bad move on principle. Yes, Hunter Biden was only prosecuted (by an OAFPOTUS-appointed US Attorney) because his dad was president. And yes, the actual offenses he was convicted of were not even in the same league as the offenses the OAFPOTUS pardoned Charles Kushner for in 2020.

But we're going to spend the next four years opposing an unprincipled horse's ass. We have to be better than that. It's literally what we are fighting for.

Chicago-based humor magazine The Onion has won the bankruptcy auction to acquire Alex Jones's InfoWars Media:

The Onion said that the bid was sanctioned by the families of the victims of the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, who in 2022 won a $1.4 billion defamation lawsuit against Mr. Jones and his company, Free Speech Systems.

The publication plans to reintroduce Infowars in January as a parody of itself, mocking “weird internet personalities” like Mr. Jones who traffic in misinformation and health supplements, Ben Collins, the chief executive of The Onion’s parent company, Global Tetrahedron, said in an interview.

While the alliance between Everytown and The Onion may seem like an odd fit, the two organizations share an interest in curbing gun violence, said John Feinblatt, president of Everytown. Mr. Feinblatt said that mission was underscored with depressing regularity in the aftermath of mass shootings, when The Onion goes viral with its oft-shared headline: “‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.”

The Onion, of course, spun the purchase in its own way:

Founded in 1999 on the heels of the Satanic “panic” and growing steadily ever since, InfoWars has distinguished itself as an invaluable tool for brainwashing and controlling the masses. With a shrewd mix of delusional paranoia and dubious anti-aging nutrition hacks, they strive to make life both scarier and longer for everyone, a commendable goal. They are a true unicorn, capable of simultaneously inspiring public support for billionaires and stoking outrage at an inept federal state that can assassinate JFK but can’t even put a man on the Moon.

No price would be too high for such a cornucopia of malleable assets and minds. And yet, in a stroke of good fortune, a formidable special interest group has outwitted the hapless owner of InfoWars (a forgettable man with an already-forgotten name) and forced him to sell it at a steep bargain: less than one trillion dollars.

As for the vitamins and supplements, we are halting their sale immediately. Utilitarian logic dictates that if we can extend even one CEO’s life by 10 minutes, diluting these miracle elixirs for public consumption is an unethical waste. Instead, we plan to collect the entire stock of the InfoWars warehouses into a large vat and boil the contents down into a single candy bar–sized omnivitamin that one executive (I will not name names) may eat in order to increase his power and perhaps become immortal.

Alex Jones, according to my social media feed, vowed to keep broadcasting until a court ordered him to stop.

Well played, Onion. Well played.

You'd think no one would say this out loud, especially 56 days until the election, but JD Vance is a special kind of asshole:

Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance on Thursday called school shootings a “fact of life” that he dislikes, saying in the wake of the Apalachee High School killings in Georgia that stricter gun laws are not the answer and that schools must beef up security.

“I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life,” Vance said at a rally in Phoenix where he offered prayers for the victims. “But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets and we have got to bolster security at our schools.”

His comments echoed what other Republicans have argued: that U.S. gun violence results primarily from mental health problems and not insufficient gun legislation.

I would agree only insofar as the fetishization of guns, prevalent in the Republican Party, is evidence of mental health problems.

No other rich nation has this problem. Australia, with its wide-open spaces and things that can kill you lurking under every bush in the Outback, got rid of most civilian-held firearms in 1998 and has had no mass shootings since. The US can't seem to go a day without one.

I'm not against people owning firearms; I know many people who own them, locked in gun safes and only taken to the range.

No, I'm against having more firearms in the US than people. I'm against children getting shot in schools. I'm against narcissist infants who think they have superpowers and can stop an armed assailant in a public place with the bare-minimum training required to get a concealed-carry permit. I'm against a judicial branch that has usurped the power of state legislatures and city councils to set reasonable limits on where and when you can have a gun.

And I'm against troglodytes like Vance thinking that what's good for the 19th-century Wild West moral universe he inhabits is in any way appropriate for the 21st-century city I live in.

I spent 56 minutes trying to get ADT to change a single setting at my house, and it turned out, they changed the wrong setting. I will try again Friday, when I have time.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world:

• James Carville lays out a strategy for Vice President Kamala Harris to win the White House in *ulp* 62 days.
• Arizona officials continue to deal with the election-denier loony fringe despite (or maybe because of?) reality winning every time it's tested.
• A Federal judge in Rockford, Ill., has ruled that the Supreme Court's asinine, ahistorical, motivated reasoning in Bruen means that four schmucks from the suburbs can legally carry concealed guns on Chicago trains.
• A new report has come out that once again shows the US spends hundreds of billions too much on roadbuilding, and would benefit from removing highways instead of building them.
• A UK commission has found that all 72 deaths in the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire were preventable, likely leading to criminal actions in future.
• CVS has started using really stupid-annoying robots to prevent people loitering in front of their stores, a trend in retail that will obviously backfire.
• Lyft plans to sell parts of its public bike system (Divvy here in Chicago) to cut costs. Uh oh.
• An Illinois state government program can help you get solar power on your house.
• What's with this tunnel to nowhere in the North Carolina hills? I might have to check it out.

Finally, Slow Horses season 4 came out today, so at some point this evening I'll visit Slough House and get a dose of Jackson Lamb's sarcasm.

Time for another reminder. If you see something on social media that:

• seems to confirm something you already believed about the "other side,"
• comes from someone claiming to have inside knowledge, and
• makes you angry

...then it's almost certainly fake*.

The Economist prominently featured a story on the onslaught of conspiracy theories today, as did NPR. Will those stories help? Probably not. After all, "men willingly believe what they want," as Julius Caesar once (may have) said. But let's review anyway.

The FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police aren't going to leak information about Saturday's shooting on Facebook. They're going to make sure they have it right, then hold a press conference, where journalists from real news organizations will ask them questions and report what they said. I can't believe people have trouble understanding this. "Officer Krupke" was posting bullshit to TikTok from an industrial park outside Minsk on Sunday morning, not hearing the latest secrets about the investigation from his higher-ups at the incident response center outside Pittsburgh. And you almost certainly know that, but you reposted the meme anyway.

What we do know about Saturday makes the event no less horrible but a lot less surprising. All of the public evidence points to a pathetic post-teen white incel with too-easy access to near-military-grade weapons deciding to become famous in the worst possible way. It was similar to almost every other time someone has shot at a US president throughout history. This pathetic boy will be remembered in the long list of similar nutters that includes Hinckley, Fromme, Schrank, Oswald, Guiteau, Booth, Czolgosz, Zangara, and the dozens who never got the chance because the USSS or their local cops got to them in time.

The worst part about Saturday isn't its effect on the election or that the convicted-felon XPOTUS got nicked in the ear; it's that two people died, and absent the immediate actions of the best-equipped, best-trained armed guards in the history of the world, many more would have. Two more Americans are dead because a trade group has convinced a huge swath of the country—and an overwhelming percentage of those at Saturday's rally—that buying their member-organizations' products is a God-given right.

Because of those policies, promoted by the Republican Party and enshrined in Pennsylvania law, this postpubescent hobgoblin obtained a military-style rifle, loaded it, and got it to within 150 meters of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, all completely legally. Until he pointed the rifle at the XPOTUS, he hadn't committed a crime.

In fact, as Josh Marshall laments, this wasn't much different than a school shooting. He makes good points, including that it doesn't really matter what flavor of mass shooting it was. He also notices that Republicans office-holders were the first to politicize the event. Well, of course they were, because otherwise someone might connect their rhetoric and their policies with the increased frequency of shootings.

I don't think this event will move the needle on the election, not one little bit. We're too entrenched in our candidates. That said, I fully expect the next four days in Milwaukee to showcase exactly how deranged the rapist XPOTUS is—but no one will change his mind because of it. Tonight, in fact, we get to find out who he's picked to be his panegyrist running mate, and we can all feel a little sorry for that person when he or she gets kicked to the curb in a year or two. (Update: it's US Senator JD Vance (R-OH), one of the only people in US politics who is possibly less genuine than the XPOTUS.)

The next 113 days will suck. Probably the two months after that will suck, too. And there's a real possibility that the XPOTUS could win, making the next few years after suck as well, at least until 78 years of Big Macs and rapidly-advancing frontotemporal dementia catch up to him.

But enough with the misinformation. Seriously.

* Unless it's the New York Times telling you that a corrupt Federal judge dismissed a criminal case against an unrepentant felon on a theory so batshit crazy that not even Sam Alito signed on to it when he had the chance. That actually happened this morning.

Three celebrities from my youth died yesterday, but for obvious reasons none was the top story on any news outlet this morning.

No one should politicize the attempt on the XPOTUS's life yesterday at a rally outside Pittsburgh. We have no idea why the assailant shot the XPOTUS and three other people; the FBI and the Pennsylvania State Police are investigating, and with the shooter killed by the Secret Service, we won't have to wait for a criminal trial for the full story. I trust both agencies to investigate thoroughly and report honestly on what they find.

We need to wait until those facts are in before drawing any conclusions. Predictably, some people have already said some horrible things and made ridiculous accusations, and equally predictably, others have reported on those horrible and ridiculous things. I'm not going to do either. And I'm going to examine my own dark thoughts to get a handle on why people are saying what they're saying.

Violence is reprehensible. Political violence doubly so. This is not how civilized societies function.

Finally, I want to acknowledge the passing of Shannen Doherty, Richard Simmons, and Dr Ruth Wesheimer. All three were at their peak celebrity in my teenage and young-adult years. All three dying on the same day is just...weird.

The last three days—i.e., the first three days of Summer—have shown us most of the weather we can expect this season. It rained most of Saturday, yesterday we had cool, sunny, and eminently walkable weather, and today it's hot and sticky with thunderstorms on the way. At least Cassie and I got to spend most of yesterday outside.

In other news:

• David French argues that Justice Sonia Sotomayor's (I) recent opinion defending the National Rifle Association "reinforced the constitutional wall of protection against vengeful government leaders, including Trump."
• A former US State Dept official warns that the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this August is "read meat to Russian intelligence services."
• Traffic engineer Wes Marshall has released a new book blaming his industry for the carnage on American roads.
• Monochrome Brewing opened in Pilsen this weekend in the former Lo Rez Brewing space on Carpenter St.

Finally, a really fun video from Berlin setting an old German tongue-twister to a beat has garnered more TikTok views than Beyoncé. Apparently Germans, especially those named Barbara, really love their rhubarb pies.

Now that Cassie's poop no longer has Giardia cysts in it, she went back to day camp today, so that I could go to my downtown office for the first time in nearly two weeks. To celebrate, it looks like I'll get to walk home from her day care in a thunderstorm.

Before that happens, though:

• Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar warns that our 2024 election looks eerily like the 1996 Russian election that eventually led to Vladimir Putin becoming dictator.
• New Republic's Thom Hartman lays out how the "mud-sill theory" of a permanent economic underclass explains so much of the right wing's horrible policy agenda.
• The Beeb examines why so many popular tourist destinations seem not to want tourists anymore.
• A homeowner on the 400 block of Sheridan Road in Winnetka, Ill., the 9th wealthiest suburb in the US, shot at three men trying to steal his Ferrari this morning. (No people or cars were hurt.)
• Skidmore, Owings & Merrill released renderings of the planned O'Hare Airport satellite terminal that could open as early as 2027.
• Unions have banded together with people who live near railroads to restrict the operation of remote-controlled trains after multiple deaths.

Finally, the MLB's least-popular umpire, Ángel Hernández, has announced his retirement, to much rejoicing. The Post has a retrospective on his worst calls over the years.