The craziness of the left remains at full volume. Today, the lies are that the man arrested for the assassination of Charlie Kirk was a conservative Republican. I’m not sure who they are marketing this nonsense to, but you’d have to be beyond stupid to believe it. I guess I just answered my own question. This captures the way I see it succinctly:
The social media wasn’t all crap. Here’s a tribute song by Rhianna that sets the right tone:
Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I posted the above video on my Facebook and said, “Put away the hate for a moment.” Here’s the first comment I received:
Your the one putting the hate out! Jesus, you’re thick, and brave! Retired postman living overseas calling for war and violence! Pathetic, letting others do the fighting again i see.
You can’t fix stupid.
Meanwhile, here in my Asian paradise, life goes on just as it always does.
Here are some photos from the Friday group hike:
Things went a little askew when we lost the trail and had to bushwhack through a jungle of sticker bushes for a bit.
We kicked off our Friday evening out at It Doesn’t Matter. For dinner, we visited Jewel Cafe.
Some after-dinner beverages at Red Bar followed, then we closed out our evening with a nightcap at Jumpin’ Jacks.
We stayed at Jumpin’ Jacks a little later than usual because Swan wanted to hear the live music that began at eight.
No complaints; it was a good day and a good night.
Here’s some interesting news about things going on in Subic Bay militarily. Also, the shipyard across the bay (which is visible from where I sit writing this post) has now opened for business.
My journey through the LTG archives has arrived in May 2013. In this post, I talk about my first (and only) trip to Disney World. I grew up just a few miles from the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, and I also share memories from those long-ago days of my youth.
Time to check in with the Filipina Pea for today’s YouTube video. In it, Pea discusses issues that may arise in older-younger relationships, which are so prevalent in the Philippines. Well, there’s only a thirty-year gap between me and Swan, so I don’t foresee any problems. My record is a fifty-year difference, and that was enough even to freak my perverted self out.
Here we go with this lame shit again:
And so it goes. Until next time.
Nobody said Tyler Robinson is a Republican. Every article I’ve seen states he comes from a Republican family, but that although he registered to vote, he didn’t sate a preferred party. Even his grandmother said in an interview that nobody in her family is a Democrat. I know it’s hard to admit that you and most of the right were wrong with this one, everyone jumped on the bandwagon seconds after the shooting but now that the facts are coming out, most of the internet has become eerily quiet except for those that despite the facts, still refuse to believe. Like you LOL. Sorry to disappoint, but he wasn’t a democrat, he wasn’t trans, he wasn’t an immigrant, or person of color. Just a screwed up white kid who disagreed with the message Kirk had. There are some theories he was affiliated with Nick Fuentes’ group but so far I haven’t seen anything factual on that, just theories and speculation.
From Heather Cox Richardson:
Since a gunman murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, both social media circles and the political sphere have been alight with accusations that “the Left” was responsible for the shooting. Prominent right-wing social media accounts called the Democratic Party “a domestic terror organization” and declared “WAR.” Billionaire Elon Musk posted: “The Left is the party of murder.”
From the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
Without any information about the shooter, the media got in on the game, with the Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that “[a]mmunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology was found inside the rifle authorities believe was used in Kirk’s shooting.” Bomb threats targeted Democratic politicians—primarily Black politicians—and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).
Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as someone embracing the reasoned debate central to democracy, although he became famous by establishing a database designed to dox professors who expressed opinions he disliked so they would be silenced (I am included on this list).
Meanwhile, it was not clear the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was up to the task of finding the killer. FBI director Kash Patel and deputy director Dan Bongino were both MAGA influencers without law enforcement experience when Trump put them in charge of the agency. Once there, they focused on purging the agency of those they considered insufficiently loyal to Trump or “DEI hires.” In early August, they forced out the leader of the Salt Lake City, Utah, field office, Mehtab Syed, a decorated female Pakistani American counterterrorism agent.
Meanwhile, David J. Bier of the Cato Institute reported that one in five FBI agents have been diverted from their jobs to conduct immigration raids with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and just hours before the shooting, three former top officials at the FBI filed a lawsuit against Patel, the FBI, Attorney General Pam Bondi, the Department of Justice, and the president accusing them of unlawfully politicizing the FBI, purging it of anyone who had ever worked on a criminal investigation of Trump. The lawsuit suggests Bongino had an “intense focus on [using] his social media profiles to change his followers’ perceptions of the FBI.”
As Quinta Jurecic reported today in The Atlantic, hours after the shooting, Patel’s personal social media account posted a picture of himself and Kirk; minutes later, Patel’s official FBI account posted that the shooter was already in custody and then, an hour and a half later, said the suspect had been released. Both Patel and Bongino appeared to be focused more on posting than on doing the work to find the shooter.
This morning, Trump announced on the Fox News Channel’s Fox & Friends that he had just heard “they have the person that they wanted.” That person turned out to be 22-year-old Utah native Tyler Robinson, who turned himself in to authorities after his father urged him to. Robinson’s parents are registered Republicans; he was not affiliated with a political party and was an inactive voter. Over the past years, Robinson’s mother posted a number of pictures of him and his brothers posing with guns.
Robinson had recently had a conversation with a family member about why they didn’t like Kirk’s viewpoints. Robinson appears to have admired the “Groypers,” led by Nick Fuentes, who complain that more mainstream organizations like Kirk’s Turning Point USA are not “pro-white” enough and have publicly harassed Kirk in the past.
Allison Gill of The Breakdown explained that the rumors the shooter had engraved anti-fascist rhetoric on some of the bullet casings found at the scene turned out to be a misunderstanding of terms from the video game Helldivers2. The claim that he had used “transgender ideology” was apparently a misreading of the headstamp “TRN” that marks ammunition as the product of Turkish manufacturer Turan.
Almost as soon as Robinson was identified, the tone of MAGA leader’s conversation about the shooting changed. Representative Nancy Mace (R-SC), who had used a slur to refer to the shooter as pro-transgender, posted on social media: “We know Charlie Kirk would want us to pray for such an evil, and lost individual like Tyler Robinson to find Jesus Christ. We will try to do the same.”
For his part, Trump seemed to have lost interest in Kirk even earlier. Yesterday evening, a reporter offered the president his condolences on the loss of his friend Kirk and asked Trump how he was holding up. The president answered, in full: “I think very good. And by the way, right there, you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get, as you know, for about 150 years, and it’s going to be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure. And I just see all the trucks. We just started so it’ll get done very nicely and it’ll be one of the best anywhere in the world, actually. Thank you very much.”
Re: politcal discourse
I know you like to keep politics to a minimum on your blog, so I will try to keep this brief :). I do think that you are isolated and a bit siloized (probably not a word LOL) in your corner of the PI. I spend the majority of my time in the US and have yet to experience in real life the kind of vitriol that seems to exist on social media, and this is true of both deep red and deep blue territories. If social media and similar things are where a person gets the majority of their information on the pulse of the US, then they are getting a very distorted look at reality. And the algorithms from the social media companies push a person further and further into that silo, which only compound the problem.
The whack jobs who are 10-20% on BOTH sides are the ones that get clicks and views. However, in no way do they represent the vast majority of the US population. A reasoned middle of the road response gets quickly lost.
Tyler Richardson does not represent the majority of Democrats any more than President Trump sexualizing his daughter on the Howard Stern show represents the majority of Republicans. (okay, that last is a bit of a cheap, but true, shot. 😛 )
Re: Friday walkers
Kind of cool that even after all this time, there are still “new” trails to forge!
Steve, thanks for weighing in. This is the type of quote I was referring to in my post:
The point is Kirk was killed for expressing opinions the shooter didn’t agree with. If it turns out that the killer was to the RIGHT of Kirk and didn’t approve of his not being extreme enough, so be it. Somehow, I don’t think that is the case. And now I am reading that the sniper had a trans roommate/lover. Hmm, does it get more MAGA than that?
Brain, good to hear that you don’t have to deal with the extremists in your daily life back home. I know I’m glad not to be there. There is no excuse for the celebration of anyone’s murder. There are many on the left that I absolutely despise, but I don’t want them killed. Being exposed for the idiots they are is enough.