Batya Ungar-Sargon: The Political Left Intentionally Cultivate Real Life Violence

Batya Ungar-Sargon makes a strong case that the violent killing of Charlie Kirk is not a "both sides" issue:

I'm finding myself very caught between, on the one hand, wanting to honor his legacy of unity through debate and coming together to take down the temperature, and then wanting to honor his legacy of telling the truth. And the truth is this is not a both sides issue. The killer killed him, according to police reports, because he found Charlie Kirk to be spreading hate. This is a view shared by every single prominent Democrat.

Yes, there are people on blue sky advocating for violence, but what actually caused this was the utterly quotidian, utterly ubiquitous demonization of the political opposition from the left, and it has just led to violence because they said the other side were Hitler and Nazis. They said that speech is violence. To combine those two things together is to sign the death warrant of prominent conservatives, and that is what we are seeing again and again and again.

And it is utterly facetious to suggest that there is any comparison between political violence on both sides. Every example they bring is not actually showing that, whether it's Governor Shapiro whose attempted assassination was from a free, Palestine leftist, or whether it was the Minnesota assassinations, which were from somebody who said he was operating at the behest of Democrat Governor Tim Walz. There is a culture among Democrats at the highest level to suggest that their political opposition are a danger, and that suggests that their lives are forfeit.

And I want to come together. I do. I love what Shanks said. It brought tears to my eyes. I reached for a tissue while you were playing Charlie's words. But at the same time, we cannot unite with people who are lying to our faces about who we are, who will not take responsibility for the fact that they suggested that we are Nazis because of totally legitimate views that reflect the majority of Americans.

So what I say is, let the left say we were wrong. It is legitimate to vote for Donald Trump. It is legitimate to be pro life. It is legitimate to believe that there are only two genders, and we were wrong to suggest that that was not the case. We were wrong to say that that is hateful. When they say that, I am waiting with open arms to take down the temperature.

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Eli Steele is Over it

Eli Steele (son of Shelby Steele) is "over it":

We are over black power

We are over white guilt

We are over white privilege

We are over respectability politics

We are over white fragility

We are over white-adjacent

We are over inclusivity/belonging

We are over BIPOC

We are over victimhood

We are over oppressor vs. oppressed

We are over cancel culture

We are over antisemitism

We are over cultural appropriation

We are over systemic racism

We are over Black Lives Matter

We are over DEI

We are over systems of oppression

We are over reparations

We are over Uncle Tom

We are over performative allyship

We are over ideology

We are individuals.

Who is Eli Steele?

[From Grok] Eli Steele is an award-winning American filmmaker, writer, and commentator known for his documentaries that critically examine race, identity, and social issues in the United States. Born around 1974, he is Black, Jewish, and deaf (relying on cochlear implants and lip-reading), and he lives in Los Angeles with his two children. He is the son of Shelby Steele, a prominent Black conservative author and senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, with whom Eli has frequently collaborated on projects.Background and HeritageSteele's family history reflects resilience and diverse experiences: his paternal great-grandfather was born into American slavery, while his maternal grandmother escaped Nazi persecution in Europe before returning to rescue her family. These roots inform his perspective on identity and freedom, often framing his work around themes of individual agency over group-based ideologies.

I'm not over the modern versions of these things because I immediately recognized these things to be the grifts they are, performative grabs for money and power.

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Michael Shellenberger: The Political Left Needs to Renounce Violence

Michael Shellenberger, at Public:

"Why did they engage in so much dehumanization for so long? In large part, the reason is because Kirk challenged left wing mythology on gender, race and modern feminism. One cannot change one's sex through drugs, surgery or magical thinking. Kirk and other conservatives noted. There is no epidemic of police officers killing black men. In fact, the numbers declined dramatically from the 1970s to the birth of black lives matter. Black Americans commit crimes at numbers clearly disproportionate to their share of the population, and some research does, in fact, suggests that liberal, secular women report more mental health issues and lower life satisfaction than conservative, religious women who are more likely to be married and to have children.

The left cannot tolerate these challenges to its worldview, and so it resorts to censorship and silencing. The share of college students who support using violence to stop a campus speech rose from 24% to 34% between 2021 and 2025 poignantly, in April, Kirk himself posted on x about rising support for violence on the left. Assassination culture is spreading on the left. He noted, 48% of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. 55% said the same thing about Donald Trump.

In California. It's simply not good enough now for Democratic politicians like Newsom and news media outlets like the New York Times, who spent the last decade dehumanizing millions of their fellow citizens, including Trump and Kirk, to simply say that they shouldn't be killed. If they truly oppose political violence, they should apologize for their relentless false accusations of racism and bigotry, and they should try to make amends by humanizing conservatives.

The media Democrats and the wider left must stop portraying MAGA supporters who have Christian nationalist and conservative views as equivalent to Nazis and fascists through the use of loaded terms like "Far Right."

Let us all come together and condemn violence of any kind. Said former MSNBC commentator Dowd, in his apology. Well, if he really means that, then he and others at MSNBC, The New York Times, the Democratic Party, must go further and renounce their own demonization of Kirk, Trump and other conservatives, We have little confidence that the Left will apologize or change its behavior for many of the same reasons the Left dehumanized Kirk in the first place. The mainstream view of the left today, as represented by everyone from Democrats in Congress to the New York Times to NPR and PBS, is that Western civilization itself is corrupt and evil. The Democratic Party of the last roughly 12 years has lost any semblance of being a Liberal Party and has become an overtly illiberal radical Left one

From the Left's reaction to the assassination, more Americans and people around the world will see that the Left hated and still hates Kirk precisely because he loved Western civilization and fought to conserve it. If any Democrats and progressives really want to end political violence, they would stop encouraging fanaticism and instead embrace dialog and debate. They would go beyond simply writing articles, and instead go to colleges and universities and start having honest conversations about race, sex, gender and other issues essential to discussing it openly, if we were to move forward as a country.

They would stop accusing their political opponents of spreading hate or misinformation and instead listen to what they actually have to say. That's what is so important to our country, is to find our disagreements respectfully because when people stop talking, said, Kirk. That's when violence happens. Thanks for listening."

Continue ReadingMichael Shellenberger: The Political Left Needs to Renounce Violence

NYT Decides to Pull Back the Curtain on the Ukraine Debacle

The Biden administration needlessly risked my life and yours and the lives of everyone on the planet over who would govern a handful of provinces in eastern Ukraine. They claimed that risking nuclear war was no big deal. They orchestrated the killing of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian and Russian soldiers. They refused to explore ways to stop the killings of soldiers. They showed no mercy for the families of those soldiers. The Biden administration lied about almost everything. Truly almost everything. They showed no respect for human life. I am disgusted by what the NYT has now decided to reveal (as analyzed by Matt Taibbi). And keep in mind that this evil charade would have continued on had Harris been elected, which would have kept Biden's neocons (including Anthony Blinken and Victoria Nuland) in power.

Excerpt from Matt Taibbi's article: Biden Lied About Everything, Including Nuclear Risk, During Ukraine Operation Sourced to tone-deaf "U.S. officials," a massive New York Times exposé reveals an unprecedented betrayal of American voters, but also Ukraine. Excerpt from Taibbi's article:

When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky visited the White House nearly a month ago, the New York Times packed its pages with stories denouncing Donald Trump and J.D. Vance for abandoning Ukraine, and the impolitic “dressing down” of a friendly foreign leader. The Times like most Western news outlets for years suggested that anything short of a full-throated expression of support for war was a betrayal of the “democratic world order” that would lead to instant battlefield deaths.

Now that the war appears lost, and newspapers abroad (conspicuously, not here) are full of news about an apparent bombing of Vladimir Putin’s motorcade, and the future of NATO hangs by a thread, the Times has run a 13,000-word “Secret History” that shows the same U.S. officials who denounced Trump and American voters for saying it out loud long ago concluded that they, too, should probably “walk away.”

The piece is also an extraordinarily comprehensive betrayal of Zelensky and Ukraine, exponentially worse than the “dressing down” by Trump. Authored by longtime veteran of controversial intel pieces Adam Entous, it’s sourced to 300 American and European officials who seem to be responding to their apparent sidelining via a shameless tantrum, exhibiting behavior that in the field would get military men shot.

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While We Take a Break from Fighting Wars, We Fight Proxy Wars Cheered on By the News Media

Dave Smith:

I just I hate them so much and I really think they deserve it. And it's not just that they lie about everything. It's like they lie about everything and then they have the nerve to morally judge us. If you just watched even just the last few weeks of the Trump election, they're not in the business of reporting the news. They're totally just in the business of making you feel like you're a bad person if you don't fall in line with the regime.

America has this giant war machine, right? We're always at war. We're the most war-hungry country in the world. Even if we're taking a little bit of a break from a war, we'll fight two more proxy wars while we do that. America looks back at the 90s--Bill Clinton--as the time of peace and prosperity. We call it peace because we only fought a war in Serbia and had a blockade around Iraq, and we're bombing the crap out of Iraq, with a few other military interventions in there too. You know, the UN estimated that Bill Clinton's sanctions and bombing regime of Iraq--everyone just thinks of George H.W. Bush's war and W's war--but Bill Clinton was bombing Iraq and he had a full blockade around the country. The UN estimated that 500,000 children died of starvation or malnutrition due to the blockade. Now, I've heard people argue, by the way, that that number is exaggerated. Maybe it wasn't 500 that maybe it was only 100,000. So that's the time that we consider "peace" when we were just starving 100,000 children to death in Iraq. And everybody in the corporate media are in the business every single one of those wars. You've sold them. Everyone. My entire life. The media sold those wars and you're gonna morally look down on me. You're gonna judge me, motherfucker? You're in the business of baby murder. Get the fuck out of here. You're looking down, judging an American because maybe I'm going to vote for Donald Trump? Or maybe I dare to question the results of the last election? Fuck you!

Continue ReadingWhile We Take a Break from Fighting Wars, We Fight Proxy Wars Cheered on By the News Media