Tag: mainstream media

NPR’s Luse: Kirk ‘Said Some Extremely Bigoted Things’ and That’s Why Some on Left Downplay His Death

On Friday’s edition of NPR’s “It’s Been a Minute,” host Brittany Luse stated that Charlie Kirk “said some extremely bigoted things. Because of that, I have seen and heard some folks who are saying something like, this type of violence shouldn’t happen, but I’m not mad that it did happen to this person, meaning Charlie Kirk.”

Luse said, [relevant exchange begins around 12:55] “[L]ooking to the left, Charlie Kirk was undeniably a polarizing figure for his, at times, extreme conservative views. He said some extremely bigoted things. Because of that, I have seen and heard some folks who are saying something like, this type of violence shouldn’t happen, but I’m not mad that it did happen to this person, meaning Charlie Kirk. What would you say to someone who takes that kind of stance in this politically-charged moment?”

Guardian Reporter Abené Clayton responded, “I think that’s a tough one, you know what I mean? Because it’s like, even that comes with its own dangers. You know what I’m saying? I’m a black woman. To me, the things he was saying [were] like, no, this just does not work for me, this is racist, this is trifling. And I also think there’s a little bit of pressure from other folks on the left to see Democratic lawmakers say, like, this person was horrible, this is bad, yes, but also look at what he said. I think that’s what people want, but that’s not super advisable if we’re trying to create an environment of, like, peace, safety, and justice for everyone.”

At the beginning of the show, Luse stated, “America is divided on how to respond to this moment. I have seen some people on the right calling for revenge. I’ve seen some people on the left indifferent or even cheering that this right-wing pundit, who frequently spouted bigoted views, was killed. I’ve also seen people of all political backgrounds fearing for what the shooting and the reaction to it mean for this country’s future.”

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Maher: ‘Racist’ for Dems to Be Soft on Crime to Cater to Black Voters

On Friday’s broadcast of HBO’s “Real Time,” host Bill Maher said that it is racist for Democrats to think that they need to adopt soft-on-crime policies in order to cater to black voters, and “It’s kind of saying we think the black people are the criminals.”

The Atlantic Staff Writer Tim Alberta stated, “Traditionally, Bill, Democrats representing urban areas had taken these sort of soft-on-crime policies, in part because they were afraid of alienating a core constituency, black voters. What’s interesting is that, even as polling has shown, clearly, that more and more black voters have advocated for tougher policing policies, many of these same Democratic politicians have remained very reluctant to get tougher on crime. Why? Because they’re afraid of alienating a different demographic, white liberals in the suburbs.”

Maher responded, “It’s so racist. It’s kind of saying we think the black people are the criminals. Some are. Not most.”

Daily Wire co-founder and “Ben Shapiro Show” host Ben Shapiro then stated, “Implicitly, the argument that we have to be soft on crime in order to get black votes, like black people want crime.”

Maher then cut in to say, “It’s racist.” Which Shapiro agreed with.

Maher added that incarceration is “certainly part of the solution.” But he doesn’t agree with using the National Guard.

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Matthew Dowd Blames ‘Right Wing Media Mob’ for His MSNBC Firing, Defends His Bizarre Comments

Fired MSNBC political analyst Matthew Dowd claims it wasn’t his own inappropriate comments about the Charlie Kirk assassination that got him fired but the result of the liberal network caving to a “Right Wing media mob.”

“The Right Wing media mob ginned up, went after me on a plethora of platforms, and MSNBC reacted to that mob,” the analyst wrote on Substack Friday.

Dowd argued that his initial comments that ultimately appeared to blame Kirk and the conservative movement for the shooting came before it was confirmed that Kirk had been shot during his speaking appearance at a campus event in Orem, Utah Wednesday afternoon.

Dowd led off his analysis with one of the more absurd comments made on any network that day.

He told anchor Katy Tur that Kirk may have been killed by a “supporter shooting their gun off in celebration” — as if the college age attendees were acting like a bunch of drunken cowboys in a B Western.

His commentary went downhill from there, as Breitbart News reported.

“But following up with what was just said, he’s been one of the most divisive, especially divisive younger figures in this, who is constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech, or sort of aimed at certain groups,” Dowd told the MSNBC audience. “And I always go back to hateful thoughts, lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.”

MSNBC fired the analyst before the day’s end, network president Rebecca Kutler issuing an apology that his comments were “inappropriate, insensitive, and unacceptable.”

Dowd wrote that he’d made nearly “1,000” appearances on the network and “consistently condemned gun violence and political violence of any kind no matter where it came from.”

However, in his Friday treatise, Dowd still appeared clueless about the demeaning nature of his portrayal of the young supporters who attended the event. They were not there to fire guns “in celebration ” but to listen to Kirk take questions from the crowd, including from those with opposing opinions, in his “America Comeback” tour.

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Ilhan Omar, Mehdi Hasan lie about Charlie Kirk’s message favoring ‘civil debate,’ call it ‘rewriting of history’

Left-wing pundit Mehdi Hasan spoke to Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on his podcast, with the two saying that it is a “rewriting of history” to say that Charlie Kirk’s legacy focused on having a “civil debate.” Kirk was literally assassinated as he was debating college students at Utah Valley University.

The two were speaking on a podcast when Omar said, “Charlie was someone who was willing to debate and downplay the death of George Floyd in the hands of Minneapolis Police.”

Hasan interjected, “I think you called him a scumbag,” to which Omar agreed.

“Right, have no regard. Downplay slavery and what black people have gone through in this country by saying Juneteenth should never exist. And I think you know that there are a lot of people who are out there talking about him just wanting to have a civil debate,” Omar added.

Hasan again interjected, and said that the way Kirk was being remembered, for encouraging civil debate, was a “complete rewriting of history.”

Omar agreed and said that it was “effed up” to “completely pretend that you know his words and actions have not been recorded, and in existence for the last decade.”

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Gaza and the death of conscience

There are moments in history that strip away every illusion we carry about ourselves. Gaza is one such moment. For nearly two years, the world has witnessed a genocide live on its screens. We have seen children pulled from rubble, families starving in tents, hospitals turned to dust. We cannot say we did not know. Every image, every cry, every number has reached us in real time. And yet the killing goes on, the silence goes on, life goes on.

The truth is unbearable but undeniable: we have failed Gaza, and in doing so, we have failed ourselves as human beings.

Frantz Fanon once wrote that colonialism is not a machine but a human reality, and when confronted, it responds with naked violence. Gaza is the purest proof of this truth in our own time. Israel’s colonial war does not speak the language of justice or dialogue; it speaks through bombs, siege, and starvation. Genocide today does not come only with the slogans of hatred but with the bureaucratic jargon of “security,” “collateral damage,” “military necessity.” Western governments supply the bombs while speaking of peace. The United Nations counts the dead while doing nothing to stop the dying. Media outlets repeat official lines while children are buried under rubble.

As Talal Asad reminds us, secular modernity has perfected this art: to kill massively while convincing itself it remains moral. To dress violence in legality, to turn blood into statistics, to make atrocity look like policy. Gaza has become the stage where this moral corruption plays out openly.

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Vox Website Urges Readers to Be ‘Honest’ About Charlie Kirk’s Death — Warns Tributes Whitewash His Far-Right Extremism

The sickos over at Vox magazine are urging Democrats to be “honest” about the life, legacy, and death of Charlie Kirk.

Tributes continue to pour in from around the world for the political activist, who was brutally assassinated while hosting an event at Utah Valley University in Orem.

Vox’s senior correspondent Zach Beauchamp published an article on Friday entitled “Let’s be honest about Charlie Kirk’s life — and death.”

Needless to say, the article portrayed Kirk as a far-right extremist who had irreparably damaged American democracy.

Beauchamp wrote:

The other side argues that this portrayal leaves out crucial context. Kirk’s political activities, they argue, were often destructive of the democratic process he’s been suggested to embody.

He wasn’t just a guy who went around debating, but a plugged-in political operative close to the Trump White House who actively promoted extremism. Mourning him uncritically whitewashes his role in the degradation of our politics.

Kirk vehemently defended Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election and sent seven buses of activists to the January 6 rally that culminated in the storming of the Capitol. His organization, Turning Point USA, maintained a “professor watch list” designed to chill left-wing speech on campus and lionized vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse.

He endorsed authoritarian policies, demonized his political opponents, and said a tremendous amount of objectively bigoted stuff — warning of “prowling Blacks [who] go around for fun to go target white people” or that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

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All The Companies That Advertised On The MSNBC Segment Blaming Charlie Kirk For His Own Death

Numerous companies, including Pfizer, The Economist, and P&G brands, ran advertisements on Katy Tur Reports on MSNBC Wednesday, during which Tur and one of her guests smeared Charlie Kirk following the news that he had been shot. These and other companies did not commit to pulling their advertisements from MSNBC in response to a Federalist inquiry

Analyst Matthew Dowd was sacked from the network after his implication on Tur’s program that Kirk’s assassination was a natural response to his rhetoric. “I always go back to: Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions. … [Y]ou can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have, and then saying these awful words, and not expect awful actions to take place,” Dowd said.

The Federalist reached out to the companies (or their parent companies) listed below, asking whether they would publicly condemn the inappropriate comments made on Tur’s program, and whether they had plans to pull their advertising from MSNBC. Only one responded to the questions.

Pfizer, Kenvue (Listerine), The Economist, Pharmavite (Nature Made), Renewal by Andersen, P&G (Nervive and Zevo), AbbVie (Ubrelvy), Bayer (Aleve), Spectrum News 13, Spectrum Reach, Quincy Bioscience (Prevagen), GSK (whatisshingles.com), singlecare.com, Safelite, AliveCor (kardia.com), Morgan and Morgan law firm, Custom Ink, Bausch + Lomb (Blink NutriTears), Dexcom, Balsam Hill, Lipo Flavinoid, and Atlantis Consumer Healthcare (Senokot) were among the companies the Federalist contacted regarding their products’ advertisements.

P&G’s Herbal Essentials did not specifically condemn the comments but claimed “we don’t get to see the final program content, or indeed placement, before our adverts are aired.” They maintained “we support responsible broadcasters with our advertising” and said the matter “will be passed on to our brand team for consideration in the future.”

The Federalist was unable to get in contact with a media representative for Greenway Kia, who also ran an ad during the Katy Tur Reports segment.

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NYT Forced To Issue Correction After Making Egregiously False Claim About Charlie Kirk

The New York Times issued a correction on Thursday after falsely accusing Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk of making an antisemitic claim on his podcast.

The Times falsely accused Kirk of stating on his podcast in 2023 that Jewish communities are “pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites” that they want people to stop using against them. However, Kirk cited a tweet making that claim and critiqued it, causing the Times’ correction to be made.

“An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement,” the correction reads.

In actuality, Kirk clarified that not all Jews are pushing hatred onto white people. He stated that certain communities have pushed it by supporting left-wing causes such as Black Lives Matter.

“Now let me just say, this is not a very well-written tweet. It’s very confusing. I’ll go through what they’re basically saying here. Half of this tweet is true, half of it, I don’t like. You want the truth said to your face. There it is. Elon responds, and he says you have said the actual truth … But the first part is absolutely true. Let’s go to this. Jewish communities have been pushing the exact kind of hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them,” Kirk said.

“Now I don’t like generalizations. Not every Jewish person believes that. But it is true, the Anti-Defamation League was part and parcel with Black Lives Matter. It is true that some of the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes have been Jewish Americans,” Kirk said.

After his death, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu referred to Kirk as a “lionhearted friend of Israel” who “stood tall for Judeo-Christian civilization.”

The entirety of the article appeared critical of Kirk’s conservative views, such as his belief that teachers should not push gender ideology onto children. It also noted that Kirk criticized society’s fixation on race and George Floyd, who factually had a lengthy criminal history before his death on May 25, 2020.

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Fox News host on mentally ill people who commit crimes: “Just kill them”

LAWRENCE JONES (FOX HOST):  We don’t have to — we feel so compassionate because you see the mental health crisis happening.

AINSLEY EARHARDT (FOX HOST): You just get — exactly.

JONES  But it’s not our job — we shouldn’t have to live in fear while they figure out what is going on right there.

EARHARDT: Right, right.

JONES: Put him in a mental institution, put him in a jail, and you guys figure it out. But people having to duck and dive on the trains and the buses, walking through the street, this is one case, but this is happening all across the country, and it’s not a money issue. They have given billions of dollars to mental health and the homeless population. A lot of them don’t want to take the programs, a lot of them don’t want to get the help that is necessary. You can’t give them a choice. Either you take the resources that we’re going to give you and — or you decide that you are going to be locked up in jail. That’s the way it has to be now.

BRIAN KILMEADE (FOX HOST): Or involuntary lethal injection.

JONES: Yeah.

KILMEADE : Or something. Just kill them.

EARHARDT: Yeah, Brian, why did it have to get to this point?

KILMEADE: Right, I would say this, we are not voting for the right people. In North Carolina, wake up. You can’t put — keep putting these people in power. They woke up in Los Angeles, they got a stronger D.A. They woke up and they got rid of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco. Hopefully they will get rid of this terrible guy Alvin Bragg in New York. And now it’s up to the people in the election which is whoever is up in November and that Senate seat that belongs to Thom Tillis who by the way yesterday said I don’t want any help from the federal government to bring crime under control in cities like Charlotte. That’s your decision. But Michael Whatley or you could have Governor Cooper. Governor Cooper gave you these terrible laws. Mike Whatley wouldn’t. And he ran the RNC. These are the people in North Carolina. Purple leaning red state. They got a big choice. On this element, it is political. Because it’s political because politics has to change this.

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New York Post Publishes Photo of Rifle Allegedly Used in Kirk Assassination

On Thursday, the New York Post posted a photo allegedly showing the rifle that law enforcement believes was used to assassinate Charlie Kirk.

Earlier Thursday morning, FBI Special Agent Robert Bohls indicated that they found a rifle in “a wooded area,” and they believed it was the gun used in the assassination.

He described it as a “high-power, bolt-action rifle.”

The New York Post published a photo, which they claim is the rifle recovered, describing it as a “30-06-caliber Mauser bolt-action rifle.”

A 30.06 bolt action is a popular big game hunting rifle and typically has an internal, fixed magazine, holding four or five rounds. The bolt must be manually lifted, pulled back, then pushed forward into battery, between shots, as each round must be manually loaded into the chamber.

Breitbart News noted that Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D) reacted to the assassination by pushing for more gun control.

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