Must-Reads and Some Thoughts About Who Gets to Think and Feel in Public
"It is unconscionable that trans people are being targeted for their irreverent responses to the death of a man who actively called for violence against the trans community."
Greeting friends,
I’ve got some must-reads for you and some thoughts on who’s being punished for thinking and feeling in public.
Must-Reads
- Charlie Kirk in His Own Words: ‘Prowling Blacks’ and ‘the Great Replacement Strategy’ by Chris Stein. “Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.”
- This Back-to-School Season, Teachers and Parents Are Fighting Back Against ICE by Mike Ludwig. “As a result of Trump’s crackdown, children are afraid to leave home, parents are making plans in case they are disappeared, and teachers across the country are adopting protocols in case of an encounter with ICE.”
- Israeli Forces Bomb, Loot, Vandalize Our Homes in Gaza. We Long for Normal Life by Taqwa Ahmed Al-Wawi. “We are not just mourning lost buildings or material possessions. We long for the quiet comfort of days when we did not have to count the seconds between bombs.”
- Herbal Abortion Is Making a Comeback. So Are the Dangers by Julia Sonenshein. “Like coat hangers or knitting needles, these edible options are often sought in desperation—and they come with a cost.”
- Discrimination Against Trans People is Bad—Yes, Even When it’s About Gun Control by Katelyn Burns. “I found myself last week having to reconcile my belief that guns are simply too easy to get with another very targeted—and frankly—bigoted restriction on trans lives.”
- Cognitive Scientists and AI Researchers Make a Forceful Call to Reject “Uncritical Adoption" of AI in Academia by Brian Merchant. “Preliminary research indicates that AI encourages cognitive offloading among students, and weakens retention and critical thinking skills.”
- HHS Asks All Employees to Start Using ChatGPT by Jason Koebler. “The agency has also said it plans to roll out AI through HHS’s Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that will determine whether patients are eligible to receive certain treatments. These types of systems have been shown to be biased when they’ve been tried, and result in fewer patients getting the care they need.”
- You Really Need to See Epstein’s Birthday Book for Yourself by Charlie Warzel. “The Epstein birthday book is full of contributions from wealthy and powerful people who appear fully aware of Epstein’s attraction to ‘girls.’ In fact, they seem to celebrate it and, in some cases, allude winkingly to Epstein’s predatory lifestyle.”
- The Guatemalan Children’s Case and the Judicial Learning Curve by Anna Bower. “At key moments, [Judge] Sooknanan—her eye clearly on what happened before Judge Boasberg—made different decisions, put things in writing, and monitored compliance with her orders to make sure the children were not removed behind her back, or over her objections.”
- Heatwaves Linked to Carbon Emissions from Specific Companies by Jeff Tollefson. “A study published today in Nature shows that around one-quarter of the heatwaves recorded over 2000–23 can be directly linked to greenhouse-gas emissions from individual energy giants.”
- Another Way Out: Hiding and Obedience Won’t Stop Fascism by William C. Anderson. “By being obedient to the point of giving up all self-determination, we’re poised to go back to conditions that many before us fought long and hard to overturn.”
ICYMI
This week, I talked to counter-recruiter Rory Fanning about how we should communicate with National Guard troops deployed in US cities, and how we might counter ICE's current recruiting blitz.
Eyes on Chicago
As some of you know, Trump pivoted (again) this week on the subject of sending troops to Chicago. This is a positive development, but our city is still under attack. As I recently explained on social media, and discussed during a mass call, our migrant neighbors are still being harassed and hunted by waves of federal agents. Amid everything else that’s happening this week, our city still needs your attention and your support. Please continue to talk about what’s happening in Chicago, and please continue to organize and support networks of community care and defense in your cities. This crisis is still unfolding, and we can’t let it fall off the radar.
On Daring to Think and Feel in Public
On Wednesday, bigoted millionaire podcaster Charlie Kirk was shot dead at an event at Utah Valley University. The aftermath of that shooting has brought a torrent of consequences for people who posted their reactions to Kirk’s death on social media. Gretchen Felker-Martin, an American horror author and critic, who is best known for her novel Manhunt, was suspended from Bluesky and saw DC Comics cancel her Red Hood series. After learning that Kirk had been shot, Felker-Martin, who is transgender, made several sarcastic comments on Bluesky, including a post that read, “Thoughts and prayers you Nazi bitch.” Regardless of whether you approve of those comments, it is unconscionable that trans people are being targeted for their irreverent responses to the death of a man who actively called for violence against the trans community and other marginalized people.
In 2023, Kirk referred to trans identities as "a throbbing middle finger to God." He has also likened queerness to drug addiction, suggesting that queer and trans people require treatment. In 2024, he advocated for "Nuremberg-style" trials for doctors who perform gender-affirming care. He has called trans people "sick," and blamed them for “the decline of American men,” adding, “Someone should’ve just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s and 60s." Whether this statement was a nod to lynchings or other acts of bigoted violence that were more prevalent in the 1950s and '60s is unclear. These remarks are a mere sampling of Kirk's contempt for trans people. One could easily fill an entire piece (and some have) with Kirk's hateful rhetoric directed at Black people, disabled people, immigrants, women, and others living in the margins.
In death, Kirk has been exonerated and even venerated by Democrats like Gavin Newsom, while the people he has fomented violence against are being plunged into greater jeopardy. And for what? For expressing their feelings about the death of someone whose career was built on bigotry, anti-Blackness, transphobia, and the normalization of violence.
In the wake of his death, Kirk’s expressions of hatred and incitement have been characterized as “practicing politics the right way” by abundance advocate Ezra Klein. But for those who would dare to interrupt such historical rewrites of Kirk’s legacy with honest expressions of disdain, punishment awaits.
Unsurprisingly, a website has been created to dox individuals who have expressed positive feelings or made jokes in the wake of Kirk’s death, in an effort to promote professional and academic penalties against those people. Several articles have been published highlighting specific posts, thereby directing harassment at the authors of those posts. (I am not linking the website or those articles, so as not to further that harassment.) A wave of suspensions on Bluesky has included accounts that merely expressed apathy, or in some cases, simply quoted Kirk’s own damning words. Some observers have reported that these bans have disproportionately impacted trans people, indicating a targeted reporting campaign.
The Wall Street Journal published an article suggesting that a rifle recovered by police near the scene of the shooting bore markings indicative of “transgender and anti-fascist ideology” before later walking back that claim as potentially unreliable.
Thursday night, a white cis man named Tyler Robinson was arrested in connection with Kirk’s murder.
Democratic officials, and former officials such as President Obama, have made a spectacle of mourning Kirk’s death and the prevalence of “political violence” (an elastic term that never seems to encompass systemic violence). Some of these Democrats have said far more about Kirk’s death than the murder of their colleague Melissa Hortman, a member of the Minnesota House of Representatives who was assassinated alongside her husband in June. Some have characterized lamentations of Kirk’s death from the Democratic elite as class solidarity. While it’s likely that the killing of a white millionaire unsettles the powerful by challenging assumptions about who is insulated from violence, I believe some Democratic leaders view their actions as damage control, or as an opportunity to demonstrate their ability to reach across the aisle. Regardless of their intentions, the fawning remarks of Democrats like Newsom have only compounded a narrative of fascist martyrdom around Kirk, whose death Trump has already sought to exploit toward violent ends.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker and Senator Elizabeth Warren have notably made remarks blaming Trump and Republicans for creating a more heated and violent political atmosphere when questioned about the situation.
Among the many questionable journalistic offerings around Kirk’s death is a New York Times piece titled, “After Kirk Killing, Americans Agree on One Thing: Something Is Seriously Wrong.” The piece quotes Americans saying that the United States feels “broken” and that it feels like we are “living in insanity.” I find the framing of this specific incident as a signpost that the United States has lost its way utterly fascinating. Why is it the death of a far-right millionaire influencer that marks our spiral into madness and uncertainty, rather than the president declaring war against an American city; or putting troops on the ground in L.A. or D.C.; or the state-sanctioned murder of eleven people in a boat the South Caribbean, or the ongoing genocide in Palestine, where children are starving to death; or the erosion of our fundamental rights and bodily autonomy; or the looting of government services, which will kill thousands of people in the United States; or the destruction of USAID, which will kill millions of people in the Global South? Why is this the moment that reflects our undoing?
As someone who pays regular attention to the news, my assessment of this moment is that the world is on fire, and an arsonist got burned. There are monsters among us, and I am under no moral obligation to weep when one of them falls.
Democrats who have indulged in compulsory expressions of grief are indulging a culture that demands we prove our humanity by mourning the deaths of people who wanted us dead. While I know some people are pained by Kirk’s death, in spite of his hatred for them, it is also completely human to smirk when someone who wanted people like you enslaved, brutalized, or wiped from the earth, exits this mortal coil. The callous culture of the right celebrates harms against marginalized people—in February, the White House referred to the sound of rattling chains shackling kidnapped migrants as “ASMR.” We must recognize the hierarchy at work in their demand for reverence in the wake of Kirk’s death. To them, Palestinians, Black people, disabled people, trans people and many others are ungrievable. They are not demanding a world where all life is cherished, but one in which violence against the white, wealthy and hateful is universally mourned and denounced. Trump has promised reprisals and threatened violence in the wake of Kirk’s death, saying “we just have to beat the hell” out of “radical left lunatics.” Joining their chorus of grief for a bigot they’ve declared a martyr will not make us safer—nor will it make us human in their eyes.
On Friday, Professor Corey Robin wrote a social media post responding to a message distributed to all public employees of the state of Virginia, urging a moment of reflection and prayer for Kirk's family, and compared Kirk's death to the tragedy of 9/11. Robin said:
Over the years, I've read countless articles and books about the Redemption period after Reconstruction, how previously reviled and odious figures—slave masters, Confederate politicians, southern generals—were canonized by, first, the white South and ultimately the white power elite of the nation as a whole.
I suddenly have such a visceral sense of what it must have felt like to be a formerly enslaved person, an abolitionist, a Union soldier, the families of Union soldiers who lost their sons or husbands or brothers, a radical founder of the Republican Party, to see this happening. It's stupefying, shocking, as I said, to see a version of it now, in real time, right before my eyes. It's like I'm seeing Birth of a Nation getting made right in front of me.
Regardless of their intentions, Democrats like Gavin Newsom and centrists like Ezra Klein are participating in a political project that paints Kirk as a martyr and a saint—a project that has already spawned calls for violence against leftists and other political opponents of Trump and the far right. Punishing people like Gretchen Felker-Martin for their honest expressions of disdain only reinforces the hierarchy of the right, which normalizes white bigotry and the incitement of violence, while seeking to control and punish marginalized people for daring to think and feel in public.
Much love,
Kelly
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