Charlie Kirk Holds up a Mirror to American Society

And The Iron Triangle of Manufactured Consent Goes Into Overdrive

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“It's on the TV, f*k. Turn off your TV. Can you say "brainwashing?" (b-b-b-b-brainwashing)” - “Violent Pornography” System Of A Down

God I’m tired.

No, it’s not a drooping-Donald-Trump-face kinda tired, where the right side of my pumpkin visage decides to take the express elevator down to LL like it did yesterday at the 9/11 Memorial event for the lumbering lecherous lummox.

Yet, still, emotionally exhausted from the political insanity this week I talk and write about to make a living.

You know, there was a brief moment after I got my MA in International Affairs and prepared to set off for Washington to become a speechwriter, that I contemplated just saying f*k it and moving to Los Angeles to write comedy.

I had a few friends encouraging me to take that path…and I must admit when I get this gassed with our inane twenty-eight-ring DC circus…I do sometimes wonder.

But I digress! And we return to our regularly scheduled broadcast. So, look, my friends, I think every take and then some has been written about the Charlie Kirk assassination this week. I really have nothing else to offer about that specific event.

But it’s broader meaning America, 2025? Now there I have some things to say.

Honestly, there may be no better encapsulation of the mutually reinforcing trends attacking our democracy. The ones that delivered us from a golden age of change, innovation, building big things, embracing civil rights and creating the largest middle class the world’s ever known, to the increasingly necrotic democratic republic we now inhabit.

Think the Romans ever looked around and just said, WTF?

Well, with Kirk’s killing, we encounter what I refer to as The Iron Triangle of Fascism.

The original term referred to Congress, government bureaucracy and lobbyists/interest groups shaping our politics.

My take on the new paradigm—right-wing media, corporate media and weak Democratic leadership, together paving our path to perdition—has been chugging right along for anyone who cares to take a moment to look at our democracy’s true pathology.

It has corrupted our government, turned much of big business into sociopathic monopolies and deeply eroded key elements of our civil society. So what is it and how does it affect us?

Let me put it simply: a major negative event or mistake that can be portrayed as such occurs. It can be something close to home like the Kirk shooting or Hillary’s emails, or something thousands of miles away like Benghazi or Somalia (1993).

And here’s how it goes from there.

The Right and Republican Party—interchangeable today, and filled with so many cranks there are caves the world over asking for their batshit back—act in entirely bad faith, unleashing a torrent of vitriol, threats, fear, anger and hate (see Yoda) that end up, inevitably, at the level of bloodlust for the more unhinged among them.

Right wing pundits, tv hosts, social media influencers and yes, major elected officials, instead of trying to cool things down because after all we’re all Americans, right(!?), instead turn up the flame beyond Firestarter and well past napalm all the way to star going supernova.

They blame Democrats (Kirk’s assassin’s white, Christian, from a Trumper family—I statistically could’ve predicted all that) and call for some kind of generic revenge. Maybe even violence against specific groups or targets.

Which is exactly what is happening right now after Kirk’s murder.

The ingredient that’s changed from the days when jabronis like Rush Limbaugh belched out “feminazi” or Rick Santorum tossed off some brain-frothed theory related to abortion, is our President.

Today the man with the biggest mic in the land eagerly leads the digital lynch mob.

Trump, who literally never shuts his anus-lipped cakehole—except when he spends a week seemingly near death and hands blotched to hell—shows up with Semtex and C4 to add to any fire he can find.

Here is drooly, Mcdrippy face himself on Fox & Friends doing all he can to inflame everyone at a dangerous moment:

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” Trump said. “This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

My administration will 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.”

Trump’s exclusion of political violence committed by his allies was intentional. When asked about violence from right-wing radicals on Fox News on Friday, Trump replied, “I couldn’t care less.”

As we know, Trump never does any of this except when he does it all the time. From Trump’s Dollar-Tree Twitter, Truth Social, four days ago, we see Trump totally not doing anything of the sort and I’m shocked to find out there’s gambling going on in here:

I could share a ton more. But you know the story.

From bathroom cop, Rep. Nancy Mace, to right-wing activist Chris Rufo—who seemingly has “Critical Race Theory Will Kill Us All” tattooed on his buttocks right next to “I ❤️ Mom”—the calls for rounding up people they think were involved and the specific threats aimed at Democrats were swift, per usual.

All amplified by a President and the richest pile of Apartheid blubber in the world, Elon Musk, tweeting out to the many tens of millions who follow this AI-infested doofus, “Democrats are the party of death.”

So there you have Part 1 of the Iron Triangle of Fascism; the threats and unhinged blame, lacking any and all proof, has now reached, conservatively, 200 million people?

We then take our horror story to Part II of the Iron Triangle of Fascism.

By the way, did I tell you I’m tired? I did? Ok, we continue…

Now we see the histrionic bullshit that caused right-wing heads to do a 360 landing in the grasp of that choir of eunuchs known as our corporate media. Right away, they purposely choose not to provide any context or nuance. Or tell you what they know. (We, and independent media we support, do it very differently).

If it doesn’t balance Democrats with Republicans (it never does) or upsets the fascist-adjacent or tax-cut-guzzling owners of their monopoly media organizations.

So, GOP Senator Mike Lee can make a joke about the political murder of Minnesota Democratic State House Speaker, Melissa Hortman, and the attempted murder of St. Senator John Hoffmann. Both shot by the same deranged shitheel on the same night.

A murderer who had a long list of Democrats he intended to kill and had not been caught when Lee tweeted out the following:

Hilarious, Mike! Like the thought of your head not looking like a Pterodactyl egg!

And, as you’ll guess, Lee’s still in good stead to go on any network or cable channel he wishes to pontificate about politics. Helpful.

Meanwhile, Matthew Dowd, now-former analyst for supposedly liberal MSNBC (see Comcast vassals with a few lib hosts and enough Scarborough to make Homo Erectus go extinct again), simply pointed out that Charlie Kirk helped create the atmosphere of division that has seen Melissa Hortman and Kirk get murdered.

In response to a direct questions asked of him about the “environment” that led to this shooting by host Katy Tur.

Dowd was fired on the spot.

A Florida reporter was suspended for asking a whiny MAGA Congressman if he’d rethink his stance on gun control after what happened to Charlie Kirk. Seriously, that question got a reporter suspended.

Mike Lee, though, I’m sure there’s a mic at that outlet for him anytime he wants.

Because corporate media looks at one party with a leading Senator who thinks the murder of opponents is funny, plays hide the salami with genocidal man-boob-exposing maniac Putin, and is not considered a normal party in a democracy by any number of objective international observers.

And then they equate that fucking mess with the Democratic Party. Because…both sides!

Experts from the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden said the US Republican Party had become more illiberal and populist in recent decades and that its recent retreat from democratic norms has left it resembling authoritarian ruling parties like Hungary’s Fidesz and Turkey’s AKP.

“What we see is that the disrespect of political opponents, the encouragement of violence and also the violation of minority rights … they have all clearly increased with the Republican Party in recent years, since [President Donald Trump] came in the leadership but also before that,” Anna Luehrmann, V-Dem’s deputy director and one of the lead authors of the study, told CNN.

Right, so from these atavistic gangsters our corporate media picks up the story, framing it on Benghazi or Hillary’s emails or Charlie Kirk based on these “sources” and goes with it. Therein, normalizing every dehumanizing, demonizing or demagogic word Trump and other nutters utter putting Americans, and America, in mortal danger.

And that gets us to Part III, the final chapter of our Iron Triangle of Fascism. After a story has gotten into the consciousness of the public via right-wing lies and corporate-media whitewashing, Democratic leaders say…well, often, they’re off reading a book.

If we’re lucky, Chuck Schumer responds, looking at the press with his glasses hanging off the tip of his nose like he’s Mel Brooks’ 2000 Year Old Man sketch come to life.

He’ll talk in meandering sentences, express his hope to work with Republicans—no matter that that hasn’t worked the last 1,197 times he tried it. He won’t put together a strong, stinging message against the most cruel, corrupt, openly criminal and completely incompetent leader since Caligula.

Condemn them and define them by the insane things they utter and tweet.

Meanwhile, Hakeem Jeffries, who I once had much hope for…I don’t even know what he’s doing anymore. Or if he’s even in control, as Rep. Nancy Pelosi may have stepped down as Leader, but didn’t retire, and we know who controls Democratic donors.

Jeffries responded two weeks ago to a Trump presser by talking about working with him on making housing more affordable, if Trump was willing.

This was a presser where Trump said people wanted him to be a dictator. Right after he’d just had the DOJ raid his political enemy John Bolton’s home.

He had also just just armed the National Guard to enter Washington, D.C., violating posse comitatus—an 1878 law explicitly forbidding this.And he attacked the independence of the Fed.

I’m not being hyperbolic when I say this threatens to destroy our fiscal credibility worldwide. The end result could send the economy crashing faster than the right side of Trump’s face.

After we just saw the effects of Trump’s pro-recession policies in the 22,000 jobs we created last month! Which likely is right up there with Micronesia.

That is your Iron Triangle of Fascism.

A fascist Republican Party and its media wing pushing insanity, lies, slander and terrorist threats, normalized by the wusses of corporate media and then allowed to get away with it by feeble Democratic leaders scared of fighting, or their donors, or the microscopic life we just found on Mars.

Who the F knows. But whatever it is—we need real leaders yesterday.

The two exceptions here, thankfully, are that we have leaders like Govs Gavin Newsom and J.B. Pritzker in the states, and some fighters in the House and Senate who have brushed their leadership aside and stood up on their own to fight. Like Chris Murphy in the Senate and Jasmine Crockett in the House.

Also, luckily, we have a growing, more influential ecosystem of independent media, able to get the message out about GOP evil even when corporate media won’t. So as a reminder, apply to and support our Soundcheck Fund to be part of the solution!

But none of this changes my current level of exhaustion.

Because those last two factors are growing, but not fully operational yet. So we still, too often, get treated to the Iron Triangle of Fascism that currently defines the terms of American politics most often.

Here and there that cartel gets broken up by a story so salacious, like the Epstein files, they have to cover it for clicks. Even if it damages Trump.

Yet, independent-minded, elected Democrats and independent media—Let’s speed this up and get this show fully on the road!

Til then, I need a nap.