​1. So this guy with two American flags mounted to the bed of his pickup drove it into a church near Flint and killed at least 4 people before dying in a firefight with police. Explosive devices were also found on site.

2. The man was a former US Marine who served in Iraq.

3. It happens that the place of worship's form of worship was the exaltation of Latter Day Saints.

4. So, a Mormon church. Just like the one that the shooter of Charlie Kirk attended in Utah, which is widely known to be as much of a hotbed of liberalism as Flint. No word yet from Kash Patel as to whether or not the shooter had a trans partner, or was part of The Radical Left, or if there was a mysterious note that was mysteriously destroyed, just like the one in Utah asserting these things, but that Kash Patel somehow got to read prior to its destruction, and also no word from the shooter's mom if he'd recently veered hard left in widely disseminated and unverified/unquestioned quotation marks.

5. With the usual deep display of empathy and a selfless attempt to knit a devastated community together, something he is both known and beloved for, Donald J. Trump said, “This appears to be yet another targeted attack on Christians in the United States of America."

6. Which, of course, implies that the shooter was part of a larger liberal (likely based in Portland) conspiracy to drive trucks into Mormon churches in order to hasten a Pagan Takeover of the Most Christian Nation on Earth.

7. Which seems both an unnecessary statement to make as a Leader Of People, as opposed to a Leader Of Specific People Who Pass Muster, and absurdly speculative, even if it were not manufactured out of whole and demented cloth. Just like every daily utterance of The Grifter. But to be fair, part of The Grifter's genius is to grift so endlessly and repeatedly that you become inured to it. Or are ground down by its plumbless stupidity, which is basically the same thing since we all just need go on with our live or start Doordashing vodka by the crate.

8. It appears to me, conjectured with the exact same amount of knowledge that the President of The United States himself is currently privy to, as just another act of gun violence by a white male in a pickup truck with American flags mounted to the bed, pointedly bearded and comically rotund, whose motive will likely be conflicted, convoluted, substance-addled and/or mentally compromised, with no clear or convincing final purpose.

9. Also, is it worth asking if Mormons are in fact Christian, Christian-adjacent, or Not Christian By Design, if only to discern how widespread the intent of this false-flag Fringe Left attack?

10. While Joseph Smith did receive his revelation through a bedsheet (hung from the ceiling) as delivered by the Angel Moroni in a boarding room in Upstate New York in 1823, and was subsequently notified by the Angel Moroni about the existence of Golden Plates detailing the history of the Lost Tribes Of Israel, who once roamed America freely and with semi-Christian intent, there is otherwise a fairly wide divergence in doctrine.

11. After the fourth visit from the Angel Moroni in his modest boardinghouse room, Smith located The Golden Plates, which were buried in stone box containing many other interesting artifacts. The plates were written in "Reformed Egyptian", which is a language that does not, or at least no longer, exists. Luckily the box also contained a Seer Stone which could be used to translate them. And although Joseph Smith was desperate to immediately show local clergy, police, scientists, and teachers his amazing and possibly world-changing discovery, the Angel Moroni insisted that no one but Smith use the stone. He reluctantly agreed, and once the plates were translated, Moroni reclaimed them. Location of The Golden Plates and/or their overall market value is currently unknown.

12. Smith's translation ended up becoming The Book Of Mormon, which is plagiaristically not that much different than The New Testament, with the exception that it granted Smith the right to marry many of the women who lived in the same modest Palmyra boarding house that he did, and also a slight variance in dogma claiming that Jesus would one day return to Jackson County, Missouri to found a New Jerusalem. It's strange that speakers/writers of Reformed Egyptian were able to name Jackson County, Missouri so specifically, given that the America as we know it, with various states, borders, capitals, and interstates upon which one could drive a pickup truck with American Flags mounted on the bed to, did not yet exist.

13. Also, a big part of Mormon doctrine is the existence of the planet Kolub (called Kobol in Battlestar Galactica), which is sort of like a celestial B&B that hovers near the Throne Of God, which is next to another planet called Oliblish, which exists beyond the reach of telescopes in the Metagalatic Center. During The End Times, it is foreseen that Earth itself will be plucked from the Milky Way by God and returned to its rightful place next to Kolub and Oliblish.

14. Here's a true fact: The Mormon Church, entirely untaxed, is the single largest private landowner in America. They hold paper on nearly 3% of Florida, which, interestingly, is slightly larger than their massive Utah holdings. Their investment arm, Ensign Peak, controls nearly $300 billion in wealth.

15. So the question we need to ask ourselves now is, exactly how many hours is it going to take for Kash Patel to discover, in a mysterious stone box buried in the toxic soil of Flint, the shooter's Antifa Uniform, Antifa Handbook, Antifa-Branded Suicide Notepad, and signed 8" X 10" glossy of Greta Thunberg?
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15. My money is on fifteen.

1. I once posted this in relation to Henry Kissinger, about whom I said many things that, to be fair, weren't very nice while nevertheless being true, but it feels particularly germane on this rainy yet beautiful San Francisco morning in which a world with an astonishingly high level of ambient fascism continues to argue over the merits of glossing over the lack of merits of Charlie Kirk.

2. I used to chide people for using the term "fascism" so blithely. It's not fascist when the doorman won't let you into the club, or the insurance company yanks your coverage. It's actually brute capitalism. But I have come full circle on this, because I say with zero rhetoric or polemic intent - we are now living under fully Fascist rule. It's not a placard or a slogan or a bumper sticker, it's 2025 American Reality.

3. From any side of the political spectrum you could argue whether or not that is technically true, but it's an argument you'd lose. Or at least one in which you'd unwittingly be contending that fascism, in the end, is good for us.

4. So what is fascism, now that we've just branded and seared it into the hide our increasingly bovine leader? (If you're wondering, by "bovine" I literally mean dimwitted, increasingly laden with toxic milk, a cud-chomper, easily distracted by any blade of adulating clover, and very likely suffering from Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy.) Let's use a few totally non-partisan definitions, which were basically the foundation of The Greatest Generation and everything it fought for, and see if it checks any current boxes.

5. For fascist governance to be accurate named, it has to involve Ultranationalism. See: mass deportations, pay-for-play visas, the demonization of Ukraine, the support/encouragement of fellow worldwide ultranationalists, sweeping tariffs, the shunting aside of NATO, border walls, and rampant pet-eating.

6. It requires an All-Powerful Charismatic Leader who demands obedience, compliance, sycophancy, subordination, ductility, self-abasement, and constant praise. See: any given day, Mike Johnson, the sidelining of Congress into a wet bar napkin, packing the Supreme Court, and The Atrophied Mind Of Susan Collins.

7. It glorifies militarization and colonial/imperial expansion. See: Greenland, Canada, the Gulf of America, The Secretary Of War, the annexing of Gaza to turn it into a theme park, the Hegsething of the armed forces, unneeded/unattended tank parades, occupation of cities in clear defiance of Posse Comitatus laws, and the fact that ICE is 50k signing-bonusing its way into soon becoming larger than the Marine Corps.

8. A rise of totalitarian behavior, which is more or less asserting government control of any and all aspects of society thought to be inherently independent as part of the tenets of that society. See: Jimmy Kimmel, Harvard, Voice Of America, PBS, the Smithsonian, the Kennedy Center, National Parks, the Nexstar-Tegna merger, endless lawsuits, reporting restrictions, school curriculum mandates, Good Elon & Bad Elon, and the bootlicking acquiescence of Big Tech leaders, such as Washington Post owner Mr. Jeff Bezos, Facebook Sunglasses Dork Mark Zuckerberg, mouse-flogger and Disney apologist Bob Iger, and Ayn Rand fetishist Peter Thiel.

9. A Cult Of Personality fueled Propaganda Machine/Blatant Firehose spewing 24/7 resentment, division, and misinformation sharing a distressingly incenstual relationship with the Personality itself and not bothering to masquerade as journalism any longer, if it ever did. Plus, Rupert Murdoch: immigrant.

10. An all-access stratospheric moneyed class, including Dear Leader/Less-Dear Family themselves directing state, foreign, and economic policy toward self-enrichment. See Trump Coin, Trump NFTs, Trump playing cards, Qatari Trump Plane, Trump Golf Courses, Trump Secret Service invoicing at Trump Hotels, Trump Son Japanese/Indonesian business deals, Trump Daughter Chinese business deals, Trump Son-In-Law Saudi Billions, etc.

11. Ignoring, denying, or contravening court orders without consequence.

12. Mass incarceration, calls for increased punishment, the establishment of Big Business Penal Systems, holding centers, Alligator Alcatraz, El Salvador, Uganda, flouting Due Process, the FEAR SYSTEM of impenetrable lockdown bureaucracy.

13. Revenge and state power retribution personally directed toward political rivals. There's a thousand words, but two will suffice: Jim Comey.

14. The one central and grossly essential component without which fascism cannot exist: scapegoating of minorities/foreigners and casting them as directly responsibly for virtually all social ills, but in particular convincing the very dumbest/most easily swayed/least educated/least informed/most desperate/most socially closed/most religiously infatuated/most insular/most conspiratorial/most deeply afraid segment of society enticed by the candy that Mexican laborers are responsible for their impotence. See: MAGA.

15. Despite my tendency toward grim, adjective-laden cynicism under the guise of posts full of so many sentences even my family no longer reads them, you can be certain that we ARE under a fascist kleptocracy at the moment. You can be sure of it regardless of your personal politics simply by considering that the Donald J. Trump bogeyman of the moment is not only War Ravaged Portland (have you ever been to tiny, serene, hippie, wonderfully gourmand, music-crazy Portland? If not, you have no idea how demented the notion that it requires a few weeks of National Guardsmen occupation/trash pick-up to cure its arty-heroin ills), and (sigh) once again ANTIFA, an organization that doesn't exist, has no membership or leaders, raises no funds, spams you with no texts, and is basically a meaningless phrase standing into for a widespread disgruntled counter-cultural feeling that in some way threatens the stability of Donald J. Trump's incessant self-enrichment. Because he couldn't care less otherwise if black-hoodie dudes throw rocks through North Face windows during random protests. What bothers him is the name itself: ANTI FASCIST. Which, to be fair to Donald J. Trump, is sort of a ringing call to duty that does not particularly jibe with rape (metaphorically and literally) or embezzlement.

16. I am siempre antifascista, and have been in a general way since cognizant of the term, but more specifically since I read George Orwell's "Homage To Catalonia" while smoking pot on a sheetless mattress on the floor of a dorm, way back in Olden Times when our literary and cultural heroes did things like volunteer to go to Spain and risk their lives fighting pig-sodomizing Fascists.
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17. Can anyone with a straight face tell me these conditions aren't already being met, and have been more or less across the board for quite a while now? Friends, why don't we all volunteer to stay exactly where we are, right here and now, to gang together intellectually to fight the fascists bobbing like apples among us?

1. This morning I was cruising along Park Presidio Avenue, which, unsurprisingly, cuts through Golden Gate Park on the way to the infamously spectacular bridge that I now have the pleasure of crossing almost daily. I often giggle at how lovely it is, the luck and gratitude I feel just soaking in the Florentine light and beach-side cliffs and endless vistas.

2. Park Presidio is three lanes and heavily trafficked, one of the major north/south arteries in the city, so you could set a metronome and switch lanes without signaling every third beat and still not arrive at the toll plaza any quicker. There’s simply no benefit, except as an expression of masturbatory chaos tumbled like dice into the karmic universe, to drive aggressively.

3. Which is generally a nice thing, in an automotive sense, this inability to hustle or force the action. The commute is smooth. I have the window down, pleasingly polyrhythmic music accompanying the sound of tires on asphalt. It’s a chance to embrace (culturally appropriate) your inner Zen and consider a few lines of poetry without the unnecessary distractions of modern technology or the need to whinge about all the things life fails to provide.

4. And yet (you saw this coming like an anvil falling onto the head of a desert coyote) on this particular commute I was being heavily crowded by a black Audi. It roared up from behind, veered, ran a light, cut me off before the next, hemmed and hawed between a succession of cars and trucks and an Amazon van driven by what appeared to be Washington Post owner Mr. Jeff Bezos participating in an Employer’s Work Day event.

5. Yeah, you get this every once in a while in The City: some character hopped up on crank or estrogen or stock options or gaping emotional difficulties or a just-collapsed relationship, and it’s the sort of behavior one has to not only expect but be resigned to in a cosmopolitan area full of lunatics (in a mostly good way).

6. Therefore, it didn’t cause my atrial pressure to rise a single diastolic.

7. Until I noticed homeboy’s personalized plates.

8. What, I wondered, is SHEEXTRA trying to say? Is Dude a pimp letting you know it’s $500 an hour, but if you want kissing the full grand? Is it snippy parlance intimating sexy male fabulousness? Is it Melania, reminding the world about the unquantifiable limits of her prenup? A young woman asserting pride in having substantial back? Extra obvious? Extra tedious? Extra additionally supplementary? Could it be a veteran of the film industry who has posed in a million backgrounds on the sets of the films of Claire Danes?

9. Is SheExtra someone deeply, seriously, almost dangerously into olive oil and its imperceptibly virgin specifications?

10. I’m always wrong about modern slang, as my daughter has made a career of pointing out, but my understanding is that “extra” is not something one aspires to.

11. I have a curious nature, often to distraction, and as we crossed the bridge, SheExtra mashed the pedal and took off in the diamond lane.

12. Now, as I may have mentioned previously, I drive a very powerful and highly-tuned performance automobile of vaguely Teutonic associations.

13. SheExtra had it up over a hundred roaring past Sausalito, and by the time I found a clear lane, I was hovering around 118 just to make up ground, while also weighing the court-ordered penalty differential when clocked by radar above or below the arrestable Maginot Line of 120 mph.

14. Fourteen exists solely in order to affirm that I did indeed make up enough lost ground to take the pictures below.

15. In a moment of relative sanity, I decided it was unwise to snap a candid of the driver at speed, but I did get a good look.

16. Dude was possibly of Levantine extraction, had likely shaved an hour earlier and already had stubble, wore a black V-neck shirt that looked so luxuriously comfortable I’m guessing it was made of strands of woven fetal alpaca, and rocked cheap mirrored aviators.
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17. So, he could easily have passed as Carlos The Jackal if it had been 1974, which I suppose is Extra if viewed in a certain light.

18. Nothing really said “She” about the driver, except if he was 2025 Richard Gere doing the American Gigolo thing in Lauren Hutton’s Audi.

19. To be fair, he did have an undeniably Extra look on his face as I was forced to cut back across him to make my exit, and then power-slide down the ramp and up to the light in a clicking, steaming, screeching, somewhat sideways fashion.

20. I gave a guy sitting on a backpack at the intersection a five spot for doggedly continuing to revere the Grateful Dead.

21. I love California.

Nine FACTS, One LIE
the Cycle Of History edition
Issue #26

1. The only legitimate response to gun violence is to denounce it. The only legitimate continuation of such denunciations is to work to enact social and political change in order to reduce the likelihood of it happening again. Anyone actively celebrating murder, let alone a public execution, is very much due for a silent monastic retreat in the hopes of reconnecting with their humanity.

2. Killing Charlie Kirk was a deeply cowardly act, as is supporting or leveraging that killing for political ends, especially through the skinless abstraction that is social media, with any purpose other than to recognize the madness of the ways we continue to invent to end life.

3. Political Murder cannot be processed as having later justification. From Julius Caesar (how did that work out for the Roman Senate?) to William McKinley (how did that work out for the Anarchists?) to Fred Hampton (how did that work out for J. Edgar Hoover?), political murder is anti-democratic regardless of the accretion of anti-democratic views the person is seen to have held, or regularly disseminated. In the end, the indecency of heartlessness is apolitical, and there are no sentences that can be typed to cleverly analogize the fact that a man was shot in public with a high-powered rifle.

4. Even so, it is exactly the horror of that violence that demands we speak clearly and rationally about the context in which it happens, without apology or amelioration.

5. Charlie Kirk’s murder is not the random tragedy it has been repeatedly cast as in the last forty-eight hours, being neither random nor a tragedy in the sense that it was unforeseeable. Charlie Kirk’s killing was an unfortunate (for every single one of us) but cruelly mathematical outcome of a system of clickbait rhetoric and deliberate agitation that Charlie Kirk himself cynically manipulated.

6. That system, which Donald J. Trump has improbably turned into his only successful business venture ever, is Formulaic Divisiveness as Corporate Strategy with a heavily diversified portfolio of Hate for Profit. Charlie Kirk was salaried upper management, with a generous bonus structure of unearned notoriety that came as a direct result of consequence-free incitement.

7. The grim irony of Charlie Kirk’s statements about his willingness to accept (smirkily dismiss) “A few deaths” as an acceptable cost in exchange for the retention of his Second Amendment rights (which, incidentally, are not now and have never been in peril) does not warrant the glee it has inspired in his enemies, but remains the imbecilic utterance of a provocateur who, like all provocateurs throughout history, assumed that fame would keep them safe from those provoked by their words.

8. Cheering the ugly death of someone you disagree with politically is not the same thing as experiencing a certain Schadenfreude that, during this second endless presidency, there has just been a very public consequence to the many unforgivable actions of Donald J. Trump and the string of performative lackeys his words have given rise to. It’s only human. That doesn’t mean it’s good. And it also means, as usual, it is a Trump marionette who pays the price for The Man Who Pays For Nothing.

9. Charlie Kirk, a devout Christian, chose to overlook all the painfully evident failings of his leader - pedophile, rapist, thief, grifter, pathological liar and possibly The Least Christian Man To Ever Walk The Earth (and that includes Buddha, Pontius Pilate, and Charles Manson), in order to coattail unto power, and even worse, use his (highly successful) organization, Turning Point USA, to entice students with angry cheese beneath the spring of that irresolvable contradiction. This behavior, in places like Florida and Texas, is often called “grooming”. Charlie Kirk, it must be said, for ego and profit, was a political groomer of children.

10. You can make a lot of money in 2025 America by turning resentment into Dogecoin, but resentments do not simply fade away as the next profitable outrage presents itself, they burrow in like ticks, usually beneath the hide of the conspiratorial and imbalanced.

11. Articulating MAGA comes with a potential cost, namely that someone will take you at your word. Free Speech is not the constitutional right to angrily flail in public without retribution. MAGA, in the end, is an assertion by 33% of the American public of their right to have unsupported, plainly false, and demonstrably moronic opinions without acknowledging the legitimacy of others (elites, experts, Left Coasters, those who read and consider, the CDC, those who traffic in nuance, scientists, those aware of recent and past history) to contradict those opinions. Particularly with facts. Unthinking acceptance is MAGA scripture, and Charlie Kirk is an object lesson in the notion that every American has the ability, but not the bestowed right, to be incoherent in public.
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12. MAGA, when distilled down to its oleaginous base, is about creating a Post-Responsibility America. Which is okay, sort of, while you’re in power. But it is also why (claims of rigged elections, Jan. 6th, bald gerrymandering, voter restrictions, deportation, military occupations of cities, Hang Mike Pence, running for a third term) once having taken those steps, you can never relinquish power.

13. Frequently overlooked in the analysis of Charlie Kirk’s comments about the acceptability of gun violence in exchange for 2nd Amendment rights is that, at the end of that oft-edited sentence, he refers to those rights as “God-given”. The fact that Charlie Kirk may have been under the impression that there exists an interactive deity holding an identifiable position on access to the tools that most effectively end the lives of those it created in its own image, makes me think that Charlie Kirk was, in fact, completely insane.

14. Charlie Kirk was racist in the way of Donald J. Trump - confidently, effortlessly, continuously. He was also a purveyor of the Great Replacement Strategy conspiracy, along with Steves Bannon and Miller and other race-mongers justifying their own fears and impotence. This is worth mentioning in the context of flags being at half-mast this morning, and what the man stood for, and who exactly some of the nation is mourning.

15. Which is to say a smug advocate for an America that is no longer a Grand Experiment, but a casual list of grievances.

16. As the widely misunderstood and mistakenly fetishized left-hero Ché Guevara proved, you cannot line up and shoot enough peasants against a fence to change the course of cultural or political events to your liking. Only courage and truth and an unstinting rejection of hypocrisy can do that. Coincidentally three things that exist in an apposite dimension to the one Donald J. Trump occupies.

17. Apparently a twenty-two-year-old Utah man shot Charlie Kirk, at first glance seeming ripe for exactly the sort of influence that Turning Point USA peddled. His family had a dedicated Youth Pastor, and was turned in by his father. Does it need to be said that this man is no one’s hero, martyr, deep state operative, or tool of furtive political ends? He was almost certainly, as all assassins turn out to be, a contradiction, easily swayed and unhappy, who has learned well, from repeated Second Amendment examples, the one sure way to appear on Wikipedia forever.

18. Will Donald J. Trump now send the National Guard into Salt Lake City? Will he begin deporting Mormons to Samoa? The one thing we can be sure of is that he will suck as much personal benefit out of this death as he can, and milk the memory of Charlie Kirk for all he was worth, which in terms of functional government or healthy culture wasn’t much, but he will use Charlie Kirk like he uses everyone and everything he touches, as just another opportunity to capitalize upon.

19. Charlie Kirk made himself famous by being famously divisive, and also made a lot of money by taking stances that drove clicks and hatred in equal measure. For someone who purportedly loved Jesus, he did everything possible to contradict the central messages of Jesus as I understand them. He did not participate in civil debate, but worked extremely hard to paint himself that way. He essentially ran anti-intellectual hits on people who disagreed with him using a social media doxxing mob and anonymous threats. He was a calculating propagandist who, however unintentionally, ended up pouring the concrete of his own demise. The one thing we can all learn from the violent death of Charlie Kirk is that it’s a stark object lesson on why not to act like Charlie Kirk.

20. All that being said, Charlie Kirk’s family and friends no doubt loved him, and he might have been okay to grab coffee with if he winkingly turned off the schtick and was willing to simply discuss a few things. I would have liked to have done so. Was he as capable of listening as orating? Would he surprise and even amuse me? Would I learn far more than I imagined possible from him? Would he convince me that I was the one who needed a Point to be Turned?

21. Probably not, but in the end, if anything in this fractured, collapsing empire is ever going to change for the better, people need to acknowledge the person Charlie Kirk purported to be as well as the person who eventually walked off stage, while also remembering that he, like all of us, was theoretically capable of evolving.

He didn’t deserve, at the tip of a bullet, not to have the chance to.
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*As I finished typing this, it seems the shooter was a Far Right Nick Fuentes fan and gun enthusiast who killed Kirk because he wasn't racist/conservative enough. Go figure. I imagine right now a lot of people are deleting their retribution posts, for instance old pal Elon Musk, who yesterday called the democrats "The Party Of Murder