#conservative bullshit

[lumpen-alchemist]

“Sex bad (cooties), rules bad, hand washing is bad, making me wear appropriate attire (masks) bad…” you’re definitely onto something here.

its funny that a lot of conservative cultural sticking points right now are just slightly more advanced versions of what they believed as somewhat dull children, like "teachers are evil actually" and "vegetables are poison"

[talkingpointsusa]

In an unhinged episode of his show, Charlie Kirk calls Tim Walz a "Marxist" and tells his audience to withhold their kids college tuition unless they vote for Trump.

Right-wing media has really been struggling to figure out their stance on Kamala Harris' new VP pick Tim Walz and who can blame them at this point? Their sides pick for VP, J.D. "Childless cat ladies" Vance, hasn't exactly been working out all that well and the public opinion seems to be leaning rather left as of late.

That being said, Charlie Kirk in particular seemed to struggle with how to handle Tim Walz. I'll offer up a bit of my thoughts on why towards the end but lets hear what Charlie has to say. Spoiler alert: it's Obama's birth certificate levels of nonsense.

08:06, Charlie Kirk: "There's a lot of backstory here about how Kamala Harris came to her selection of Governor Walz. You see, Kamala Harris was going to chose Josh Shapiro. All of the Democrat machinery was heading towards Josh Shapiro, the betting odds had an 80% chance that Josh Shapiro's gonna be the nominee, he cancelled events in the Hamptons, he was telling his closest friends that he was going to be the vice-president selection, it looked as if that no one could disagree."

You can see what's going on here. If Charlie had some actual information that he could use to smear Tim Walz with he absolutely would have ran with it at the beginning of the show. Unfortunately, Charlie seems to have settled on "this pick was unexpected, must have been some kind of shadowy conspiracy!".

Tim Walz was pretty much instantly embraced by progressive voters and Democrats alike. There is a very united positive view of Walz and there isn't really much dirt on the guy, unlike J.D. Vance who has been a flaming disaster of a pick for the Trump Administration. So instead of explaining why this pick is bad news or why we should be concerned about governor Walz it's just "he's a commie, they snubbed Shapiro because they're antisemites!".

09:20, Charlie Kirk: "There was an advertisement that was dropped by 'mistake' (his air quotes, not mine) by the Philadelphia mayor where they announced the Josh Shapiro decision pre-emptively because everything was almost a signed, sealed, and delivered deal. Now, mind you the media has done almost no coverage of this because they are carrying the water of Kamala Harris, they don't want to try to do the inside story of how Kamala Harris didn't want to have a Jewish person on her ticket."

As we've seen in the past, a lot of the more mainstream right-wing media like Charlie Kirk expect nothing but unflinching praise of Israel lest you get labelled an antisemite. A lot of the more fringe stuff like Candace Owens goes in the opposite direction and cloaks their antisemitism in faux-criticism of Israel that really acts more like a Trojan Horse to try and trick disaffected progressives that support Palestinian rights into thinking that we're on the same side. I am a supporter of Palestinian rights and I also reject antisemites like Candace Owens, Stew Peters, and Nick Fuentes. They are all far-right assholes who deserve to be called out at any available opportunity.

No, Kamala Harris didn't drop Josh Shapiro because he was Jewish and pretty much everybody who resides in reality agrees with that. The right has been trying to lay that line of attack before the nomination was even announced. In an interview, J.D. Vance stated that if the Democrats didn't pick Josh Shapiro it would be out of antisemitism in their own caucus. This has became a well established talking point and needs to be called out as BS.

As a matter of fact, Tim Walz has already received support from Pro-Israel groups and politicians and Walz has expressed support for Israel multiple times in the past. If they snubbed Shapiro for his support of Israel, why tap Walz? Walz has mellowed out a bit in recent years and is expressing a bit more sympathy towards the Pro-Palestinian cause, something which we as progressives should encourage, however he's still way more Pro-Israel than people like Charlie Kirk would have you believe. I also don't think that this is a place that Charlie wants to go since out of the 36 Jewish people in Congress, 34 are members of the Democratic Party.

If Charlie Kirk is so concerned about antisemitism you'd think he'd have something to say about Donald Trump's recent interview with Sid Rosenburg where he agreed with the host when he said that Doug Emhoff is "a crappy jew" and attacked Jewish voters who are planning to vote for Kamala Harris. How about Donald Trump's recent interview with antisemitic streamer and Nick Fuentes associate Adin Ross? You would think that Charlie Kirk, a guy who's absolutely not an antisemite as long as you ignore all those comments about Jewish people pushing "Anti-white hatred" and "Jewish dollars funding cultural Marxism" that he makes on his show, would have something to say about that antisemitism since he's oh so concerned about the Democratic Party. It's almost as if Charlie Kirk doesn't really care about antisemitism.

As for this story about the ad in Philly, it's a big load of nothing. This is about a video posted on Twitter by Philadelphia mayor Cherelle Parker that endorsed Josh Shapiro for VP that some people interpreted as an accidental reveal of Harris' running mate. It was just a video that was supposed to endorse Shapiro if he was tapped for VP. I'm sure that most politicians do this so that if a person from their city or state who's a contender for president or vice president gets the nomination they can show their support online.

This isn't proof that the Democrats enacted a shadowy plan to oust Shapiro and that the script was set beforehand, it's just an endorsement video that was made so that if Shapiro did get tapped the Mayor of Philadelphia would have something to post after the fact. It's not that deep.

09:59, Charlie Kirk: "It became as if a very certain fact that Josh Shapiro's gonna be the VP and the Democrat base lost their mind. The Democrat base took to Twitter, they took to social networks, and said 'we are not gonna put up with a Jewish American who is Pro-Israel to be on the ticket'. The Jew hatred and the Antisemitism in the Democrat Party unleashed like a volcano."

Yes, one of the criticisms that progressives have of Shapiro is that he is extremely Pro-Israel but criticism of the government of Israel's war crimes in Gaza is not antisemitic just like how criticizing the Vatican for covering up sexual abuse in the church isn't bigoted towards Catholics. It's simply holding a government/organization accountable for its actions.

Shapiro has other baggage though. For example, the National Woman's Defense League issued a statement before the nomination urging Harris to drop Shapiro as a contender. This is because of the way he handled a sexual harassment complaint against one of his aides Michael A Vereb. The state agreed to pay $295,000 last September to settle the complaint but the damage was already done. Tim Walz also has more experience as a governor.

But again, this shows that Tim Walz doesn't really have much for these losers to run with. This is just weak dumb attacks on the fact that he was nominated in the first place with no talk about where Walz stands on the issues. If you were someone who watches Charlie Kirk the only takeaway you'd have is "Well, nominating him was antisemitic and also MARXISM!".

11:25, Charlie Kirk: "Obama always liked Walz because Walz is a party loyalist. Walz is someone that will do the bidding of whatever the party tells him."

Charlie Kirk blames everything on Obama. Tim Walz is the nominee? OBAMA! Joe Biden decided not to run for re-election? OBAMA! The coffee shop burnt his breakfast bagel? OBAMA!

12:08, Charlie Kirk: "Now, there are some negatives with Shapiro. Shapiro would have caused the DNC to be bedlam because the Democrat Party can't stand Jews."

That's why the Democrats constantly pal around with Nazi's like Nick Fuentes while the Republicans have 34 Jewish members of Congress....oh wait, it's the other way around. My mistake, Charlie is just full of shit again.

12:26, Charlie Kirk: "More than anything else, reporting shows that Kamala Harris did not trust Josh Shapiro because he was too ambitious. He wanted it too much and she went with the safe pick."

Alright so Tim Walz was the safe pick, got it. Here's Charlie literally two seconds later creating just a *slight* contradiction to what he just said in the quote above.

12:39, Charlie Kirk: "Now on paper you would think that a midwestern governor like Tim Walz, he's like a folksy midwesterner. Loyal party guy, served as a member of Congress, a former teacher, governor of Minnesota, he's the safe pick. He's the safe pick if you want to now be described as the most liberal ticket in American history."

Woah! Wait....wasn't Tim Walz the safe pick just a couple seconds ago? So, let me get this straight because this is starting to get a bit confusing; Tim Walz is a loyal Democrat who will do whatever Obama tells him but he's also a secret communist and he's the safe pick but he also isn't. Gotcha, now that my necks been broken from the whiplash I have a directional understanding of Charlie's position.

13:28, Charlie Kirk: "This idea of Democrat base leakage, I think they blinked far too much and they said 'Well, Walz is gonna be able to consolidate the ticket because he's a party loyalist. He's a Soviet'. It's effectively like choosing Bernie Sanders and that's not an exaggeration."

Ah yes, famed mainstream Democratic Party loyalist Bernie Sanders.

The funny thing that I've been noticing about right-wing media's coverage of Tim Walz is that their criticisms keep making me like this guy more and more.

So blah, blah, blah, Tim Walz is loyal to the party but is also a Soviet and a communist, this makes a lot of sense to Charlie and literally only Charlie. Charlie cuts to the ad break and comes back with this absolutely galaxy brained take.

25:15, Charlie Kirk: "So, Tim Walz is the vice-presidential selection for Kamala Harris. I want you to think back to your high school days, I want you to think of the most liberal, obnoxious, social studies teacher. The one that would tell you things that have no applicability to reality, someone who's never had to run a business or had to shower before work or after work, someone that lives in the clouds and constant abstractions, someone that would always tell you that communism hasn't been totally tried and socialism is just about being a neighbor to one another, that is Tim Walz."

"Someone who is paid by oil billionaires to lie into a microphone all day and say dumb crap that doesn't really make any sense."

Seriously, by Charlie's own metric he's a complete failure who should never be taken seriously by anybody ever. Just switch "socialism" with "failed right-wing ideas" and that's Charlie to a T! He's never done hard blue-collar work and literally lives on a multi-million dollar country club in Arizona! Charlie Kirk looks like someone who'd be afraid of changing a tire because he might break a nail!

26:28, Charlie Kirk: "So, who is Tim Walz? Well, it's time we make sure America knows who you are. Tim Walz helped ignite the George Floyd riots, the worst the country had seen in decades."

Charlie Kirk, huge supporter of January 6th, is now mad at riots that weren't really riots. In terms of crime, it's been down in every major category in Minneapolis since 2023. Oopsie.

27:37, Charlie Kirk: "Tim Walz has the most radical abortion laws in the country. Zero limits. Did you know every year five or six babies are born alive and then murdered legally under the laws that he supports?"

Absolutely zero citation for this claim outside of Charlie Kirks extremely vivid imagination. Killing a baby that was born alive after an abortion is legally homicide, for example an abortion doctor named Kermit Gosnell was found guilty in Pennsylvania for killing three babies that were born alive in his abortion clinic. Absolutely nobody is legalizing "post-birth abortion", late term abortions are extremely rare, and the publics opinion is widely pro-choice.

Charlie does another ad break, comes back, plays a long speech from J.D. Vance, and proceeds says the exact same things he said in the last segment. Really gotta drill those talking points into the heads of his audience without giving them a break to think about whether they make any sense or not.

41:11, Charlie Kirk: "So, Tim Walz also signed into law giving drivers licenses to illegals regardless of their immigration status. He will enshrine Biden's invasion, he will make it permanent."

Charlie then plays a clip of Tim Walz signing this bill followed by him receiving massive amounts of applause from the people around him. Hmmm...almost as if bills like this are actually pretty popular and Charlie is just a dick invoking the white nationalist great replacement theory because he doesn't have anything else to run with.

This bill makes sense. Undocumented immigrants are human beings too and many of them have jobs to travel to and kids to send to school meaning that many of them will be driving either way. It's clearly safer to have them driving with a license than without one. When New Mexico passed similar legislation the rate of uninsured drivers dropped by 24%. Charlie than plays another clip from J.D. Vance and then whinges about everyone calling J.D. Vance weird.

45:57, Charlie Kirk: "And just so we're clear, the weird one is that creepy person Tim Walz. Tim Walz gives you very creepy vibes. He's the one that mandated tampons to be in boys bathrooms at the age of ten, true story."

Spending this much time thinking about middle school bathrooms is weird Charlie.

So, this tampon thing is the right-wing medias big attack on Tim Walz and it's a truly bizarre one. As governor of Minnesota, Walz signed a bill that requires schools to stock menstrual products in all girls and boys bathrooms with no charge to students. I don't understand how these guys think that this is a bad thing. "Oh no, he's making life easier for kids going through a difficult and confusing time in their lives. The horror".

These are the people that are supposed to be all about helping children, the GOP cares about the children they tell you (mostly when they're trying to advocate making life harder for trans kids and LGBTQ people). Yet when it comes to things like this and Tim Walz' policy around school lunches they clutch their pearls in horror and shock. It's almost as if they don't really care about kids at all.

If you guys are wondering why there are pretty pronounced time skips in this post, outside of the extremely long ad breaks for the radio here's the stuff that I'm skipping. You truly don't understand the degree of how repetitive an episode of the Charlie Kirk Show is. People are not meant to listen to this for the full two to three hours.

46:36, Charlie Kirk: "The reason why Tim Walz was selected, he was not the first pick. He was the radical kind of I guess not (sic). Is because the Democrat Party hates Jews. Van Jones admits that Kamala picking Walz was her caving to some of the darker parts of the party, as appeasing the anti-Jewish bigots that have gotten marbled into the party, Van Jones knows and he's saying the quiet part out loud. If you are a Jew in America just remember this, Democrats hate you."

What is Van Jones supposed to be admitting here exactly? Van Jones is a pundit, he doesn't know what the inner workings of the Democratic Party look like and is just speculating. What he's saying is just as dumb and weird as what Charlie's saying. Again, it makes zero sense to say that the Democrats "hate Jewish people" if you look at the basic facts about the party.

Charlie does an ad and then comes back and plays that Van Jones clip. He then interviews a guy named John Gay and it's pretty boring and uninformative. We have one last quote, here's Charlie after the interview telling families in his audience to extort their kids into voting for Trump.

01:26:24, Charlie Kirk: "If you do not get 100% turnout from your own house you're doing it wrong. Let me be very clear, guys. If you do not get one hundred percent turnout from your own house, you're doing it wrong. If you are a parent that has 18 or 19-year-old kids, you gotta get them out to vote. And by the way, if you are paying your 18, 19, or 20-year-old kid's tuition and they go vote for Kamala Harris, you should tell them you guys could pay for your own college. You're gonna go vote for Kamala Harris and our house here is working our tail off and we're going into debt to help you go through college, you guys can pay for your own college."

What an absolute POS. He's basically saying that parents should use financial abuse to force their children to vote the way that he wants them to. Charlie Kirk's a real cool guy, if this is the way he treats his own kids than I hope he has some nursing homes in mind for the future.

However, I also take a strange amount of comfort from this. Yeah, it's gross as hell and if anybody in his audience does this it would be extremely abusive behavior but it also shows how desperate Charlie is. He knows that the youth of America are extremely progressive and fed up with his parties BS, he knows that student debt relief plays well with younger voters, and he's scared. So while this is a totally disgusting thing to advocate for, you've also got to love how nervous this goon is.

Conclusion:

None of these guys know what to do with Tim Walz and it's so blatantly obvious when you watch shows like Charlie Kirk. It's just "The Democrats are antisemitic because they didn't pick Shapiro, Barack Hussein Obama, and Tim Walz is a Marxist".

Charlie Kirk is a guy who is only capable of communicating in talking points. He's really good at memorizing things and then repeating them so many times that they get bludgeoned in as gospel. That's why his show is so freaking repetitive, it's a feature not a bug. But even for Charlie the talking points were weak in this one. It's obvious that he was prepared to direct his BS at Shapiro and doesn't really know what to do with Walz. It'll certainly be interesting to see how these right-wing narratives evolve in the future but for now it's certainly fun to laugh at dumb dumbs squirming for content.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Original Video:

Charlie Kirk. “Kamala’s Commie Running Mate + the Iran Situation | Gay, Collin | 8.6.24.” Rumble, 6 Aug. 2024.

Sources:

Gardner, David. “J.D. Vance Says “Antisemitism” behind Tim Walz Pick as Harris Running Mate.” The Daily Beast, The Daily Beast, 6 Aug. 2024.

Olmsted, Edith. “Republicans Desperate to Blame “Antisemitism” for Kamala’s V.P. Pick.” The New Republic, 6 Aug. 2024.

Kilgore, Ed. “The Dumbest Attack on Walz Pick: Democrats Are Antisemites.” Intelligencer, Intelligencer, 6 Aug. 2024.

Alfonseca, Kiara. “Trump’s Comments on Jewish Democrats, Second Gentleman Doug Emhoff Spark Criticism.” ABC News, ABC News, Aug. 2024.

Klee, Miles. “This Streaming Superstar Met Andrew Tate -- and Started Platforming White Supremacists.” Rolling Stone, 2 Apr. 2023.

Tenbarge, Kat. “Adin Ross Interviews Trump, Gifts Him a Cybertruck and a Rolex.” NBC News, NBC News, 5 Aug. 2024.

“Speculation Runs Wild after Philadelphia Mayor Appears to Leak Harris’ Vice President Pick.” The Independent, 3 Aug. 2024.

LaFraniere, Sharon. “Shapiro Faces Scrutiny over Sexual Harassment Complaint against Aide.” The New York Times, 3 Aug. 2024.

Ingraham, Christopher. “Crime Fell in Every Major Category in 2023, according to Early Data • Minnesota Reformer.” Minnesota Reformer, 18 Jan. 2024.

“Driver’s Licenses for All.” ACLU of Minnesota, 24 Oct. 2023.

[troythecatfish]

[wolf-tail]

Worst conservative argument against diversety in media is shit like:

"Well I'm not white and I related to White Character XYZ which means that you should never be upset about not seeing anyone darker than a paper bag on TV ever"

[icarus-suraki]

I've noticed an odd pattern in recent op-ed pieces from conservatives lately and I'm not posting this as a scare tactic, but I am saying that you might want to pay attention.

The conservatives and right-wingers are hung up on Christian heterosexual marriage again. They really want everyone to be in a nice 50s-style marriage and this is not good.

Brad Wilcox had a piece in The Atlantic and then David Brooks had a piece in the NYT and I've since come across a couple of others behind paywalls.

What you need to know is that these pieces are all pushing that 1. rich people keep experimenting with polyamory and that's bad and 2. poor people need to get married a lot more. They are 100% pushing the 1950s "nuclear family" model.

Brad Wilcox dragged out some statistics--like how much more likely it is that a child born "out of wedlock" to a low-income mother will remain in poverty. And, yes, that's statistically true, but maybe it's because the social and community structures that used to support parents and children have either been (purposefully) broken down or removed. Extended family, for example, have been pushed aside in favor of the "nuclear family" model. To say nothing of the cost of childcare and how nobody's getting paid enough.

His big argument is a kind of "life plan" of... graduate from high school -> work full time -> marry -> have children. And, sure, in the current socio-economic situation, that would give someone some greater stability (if the work is paid well enough) because there's no systems in place to help. Two incomes and two people in a household could make raising children easier (in theory).

But I'm left wondering how much of what he thinks can be solved by marriage and marriage-before-children when a lot of it can be solved by better income and better support. But that's not what conservatives want to see.

David Brooks just makes me want to throttle him sometimes. His argument is the old saying, "happy wife, happy life."

His statistics suggest that people who are married are happier than people who are single (if the marriage is happy, I guess???), especially in middle age. So his argument is that everybody is thinking too much about their careers and not enough about who they're gonna marry.

No really: he wants everyone to put more thought into marriage than into career. Because a happy marriage makes life better even if you have a crappy job.

Now that might be true if you have a crappy job that pays really well. But the economic climate really dictates that you have to think about career/work first because otherwise you're just going to be married but starving. There is no certainty of survival without income because there are no safety measures anymore. You have to think about survival before partnership or marriage. And nobody is getting paid enough except for a very, very few in the upper echelons.

He also suggests reading Jane Austen's novels to get a "positive" view on marriage. Jane Austen, a woman who herself never married and whose novels point up the problems women of the era have with being unable to inherit or own and instead have to marry to literally survive. Good plan.

Oh and Mr. Brooks has been divorced and remarried. For the record. I wonder what his first wife's opinions on this article are.

So what they want is a lot of nicely 1950s married heterosexual couples (ideally Christian, probably white or at least acting white) when the real issue is that all the social and community structures that we really need have disappeared. They're trying to replace large community with "traditional" marriage and that idea is faulty at best.

So heads up: don't fall for their tactics. The economy is more of an issue. Rights are more of an issue. This is some tradwife propaganda here, as written by two cis men.

[tuberculosis-lover-69]

I think this is the funniest first message I've got on Grindr

Like ok bro

[lady-asbestos]

so back in junior high in my repressive, mormon-ass town, I had to take a health class whose sex ed section was essentially “sex is only there for reproduction, queer people don’t exist, contraception doesn’t exist, and if you ever have sex before marriage you’ll explode at the speed of light”. then they gave us this slip where if we signed our name promising to never have sex before marriage we could get a free pizza from dominos, and I just kind of laughed a bit and then signed it because free fucking pizza and like what were they gonna do?

flash forward to now. it’s been like 10 years. i’ve since realized I’m ace. i’ve transed my gender. i’m just generally full of gay. anyways, a memory of that stupid little no-sex coupon i signed popped into my head out of nowhere  and i realized that i have 100% earned that free pizza i got when i was like 13. and you know, i’m sure that this is just exactly what those repressive ultra-mormon curriculum writers had in mind when they made that a part of their repressive sex ed classs.

[plague-vulture]

according to conservatives and anti-autonomy activists, these 2 are the same thing

apparently these are both babies. identical.

[o-the-mts]

With all the right wing panic over drag queens I was thinking of watching the Thanksgiving Day Parade as a kid in 1982 and seeing Milton Berle dressed like this. And at the time Berle was a comedian popular with older, conservative people and no one had any problem with him in drag for a kids’ parade.

[talkingpointsusa]

Charlie Kirk tells British anti-immigrant extremist Tommy Robinson that he "loves his work" and gives him an uncritical platform to spread white nationalist disinformation

I mentioned to you guys that I might be doing a blog post on the recent anti-immigrant riots in the UK. Well, here we are. I didn't really want to do another Charlie Kirk post so soon after the last one but since islamophobia and right-wing extremism seem to be the theme of the week on the blog, given my most recent post on alt-right provocateur Laura Loomer, I figured that this interview that Charlie Kirk did on his August 8th show was something that I just couldn't ignore.

Charlie Kirk decided that in the wake of violent anti-immigrant riots in Britain it would be a great idea to provide an uncritical platform to one of the far-right extremists that led to the whole thing starting in the first place, Tommy Robinson. This booking is an absolutely shameful display on the part of Charlie Kirk and deserves to be held up for what it is: providing an extremist a platform to stoke a major scale crisis. I'll explain in greater detail as we go along but for now lets start the interview.

01:37:02, Charlie Kirk: "Joining us now is Tommy Robinson who can talk all about what's happening in the UK. Tommy, welcome to the program. Tommy, I've been following you for years, for whatever reason the oligarchs of western society tell me I'm supposed to hate you but I've followed you for years, I think you do great work, introduce yourself to our American audience."

I'm not an "oligarch" but I can tell you all about how much of a piece of shit Tommy Robinson is and how Charlie Kirk endorsing him is a damning indictment of everything that Kirk stands for.

Tommy Robinson, born Steven Yaxley-Lennon, is an anti-immigrant propagandist and pathological liar with a history of violence who's currently hiding out in Athens after he violated a court order that barred him from repeating false allegations against a teenage refugee named Jamal Hijazi. Robinson falsely claimed that Hijazi was assaulting girls at his school, he wasn't and this was a clear cut example of a teenager getting put on blast by a bigot to further a narrative. Hijazi sued Robinson for libel after he was assaulted outside of his school and the court barred Robinson from repeating the false allegations.

That didn't stop Robinson from screening his "documentary" Silenced in Trafalgar Square which repeated the lie about Mr Hijazi. The court ruled Tommy's behavior as an injunction because, well, it was. Before his hearing, Robinson fled to a five star resort in Cyprus like the lionhearted manly man that he is. However, Tommy did leave the resort after the press found his location leading to him recording a video in Athens where he whinged that journalists ruined his little holiday by revealing his location.

This guy has incited violence against innocent people and is currently inciting riots in the UK but heaven forbid that we infringe on his little vacation/attempt to flee from the consequences of his actions. Tommy's the real victim here, he claims. Just ignore the lives of the people in vulnerable communities that are being ruined by the violence that he incites against them.

Robinson also had a huge hand in the current anti-immigrant riots that we're currently seeing in Britain due to him spreading lies about the identity of the person who carried out the recent tragic stabbing in Southport. Initially the police concealed the identity of the stabber since he was seventeen years old, legally a minor in the United Kingdom, however that didn't stop Tommy from falsely claiming that the stabber was an "undocumented immigrant". This is false, the stabbers identity was later revealed to be Axel Rudakubana, who was born to Rwandan parents in Whales. Disinformation like this eventually led to violent anti-immigrant riots across the UK and that's where we are right now.

Tommy Robinson is a truly vile individual and if we got into all of the monstrous things that he's done we'd be here all day. Charlie endorsing him like this gives up the game about his own extreme belief system and he should be ashamed that he's giving Robinson a platform to spread this crap.

01:37:21, Tommy Robinson: "The names Tommy Robinson, I'm a journalist and author from the UK. I tell the stories that the government don't want you to see."

Those stories are false, that's why the "mainstream media" doesn't cover them. Because they actually fact-check what they're saying instead of just going "Muslim bad" and inciting violence against vulnerable communities.

Robinsons lies are well documented online for everyone to see and for him to get up here and claim that he's some kind of journalist is an insult to actual journalists. In case you can't tell, I really do not like this Tommy Robinson guy.

01:37:26, Tommy Robinson: "The problems with mass immigration, with open boarders, I'm from a town thirty miles north of London. When I was born there was one mosque, there's now forty five. I've seen the attack on freedom, I've seen the cultural change, right now in Great Britain we are fighting for our survival."

As you can see here, Tommy's rhetoric is steeped in white nationalist fear-mongering and paranoia against the Islamic community. His entire schtick is basically saying "Us whites are going to take back Britain" without saying that explicitly.

Also, there aren't forty-five mosques in Luton (where Tommy was born). Not even close. Luton has 25 mosques and 47 churches. In short, it's basically the opposite of what Tommy's saying but that doesn't really matter to Charlie and Tommy. For them, even one mosque is a sign of their culture being "attacked".

01:37:54, Tommy Robinson: "I face two years in prison for creating a film."

That contained a claim that you knew was defamatory but you repeated anyway yes. It’s pretty clear that Tommy aired that documentary because he knew that he would be violating his contempt order and now he gets to pretend that he’s the persecuted journalist on shows like Charlie Kirk and Alex Stein while he parades around luxury resorts in the Mediterranean.

Speaking of defamatory claims, here's Tommy trotting out a particularly disgusting one.

01:38:05, Tommy Robinson: "An entire generation of British daughters were raped at the hands of Muslim gangs. It was something the UK calls grooming, they give it a pretty name. I think in India they call it love jihad. In Holland they call it loverboys. What that is is groups of predominantly Pakistani Muslim men torturing, raping, and murdering young English girls."

The "grooming gangs" myth is something that's been pushed by British white nationalists to fearmonger about Islamic immigrants for ages. The problem of course is that it's a lie.

According to data from the Home Office of the UK, group based child sexual exploitation based on the limited data available is predominantly carried out by white offenders. Furthermore, according to the Centre of Expertise on Child Sexual Abuse 89% of child sex offenders in the UK are white.

This exploitation of the very real problem of child sexual abuse to demonize minorities is a very common move in the white nationalist playbook and it's one of the most disgusting ones out there. Things like this not only dilute the response to real cases of sexual abuse by reducing it to a racial issue but also incite violence against innocent minorities by priming people to believe that they are inherently predisposed to sexually abusing minors.

01:38:27, Tommy Robinson: "Ninety percent of the convictions for assault crime in the UK are by Muslim men. 30 percent of the men convicted are named Muhammad."

The only source for those numbers that I could find was Tommy Robinson who pushes them a lot. In reality, Muslim men in the UK don't commit a lot of crime seeing as how the arrest rates for predominantly Muslim groups such as Arabs (who have an arrest rate of 4.8%) is actually quite low. The rate for hate crimes against Muslim's in the UK however is extremely high with 3,400 hate crimes against Muslim's being reported in 2022 and 2024, the highest of any religious group in the country with Jewish people coming in at second with 1,510 reported hate crimes. But yeah, Tommy's the one fighting for his life while cruising around five star resorts in Cyprus.

Tommy sucks as you probably figured out but lest we forget that Charlie Kirk also really really sucks.

01:40:53, Charlie Kirk: "Everything you said I have no disagreement, in fact I have total agreement with and the only difference between what I do and what you do is in my country my government can't put me in jail for making a movie."

Oh piss off Charlie.

As I've stated before and I will keep stating every time it gets brought up, Tommy wasn't charged with "making a movie", he was charged with defaming a teenager which led to the kid getting violently assaulted. Tommy knew exactly what he was doing when he aired that documentary in Trafalgar Square and now the right-wing media is embracing his narrative as gospel.

Nobody forced Tommy Robinson to make a film that repeated a defamatory claim about a teenager that he knew was a lie and yet he did and is now facing the consequences. I have zero sympathy for him whatsoever.

01:41:40, Tommy Robinson: "Charlie, the head of prosecution just came out today and they said they will prosecute and convict people who share footage of the riots if the footage they share may incite racial hatred."

Lying again. The prosecutor wasn't talking about "sharing footage of the riots", he was talking about messages and posts that incite racial violence. Obviously you can post videos from the riots as dozens of people have but when you start inciting dangerous racial violence that's when you might get charged.

In fact, Tommy's whole schtick is proof that this narrative is a lie if you're paying attention. Tommy only got charged when he intentionally defamed a teenager, his incitation otherwise has gone relatively unchecked. We're literally looking at him being interviewed on one of the largest right-wing media outlets in the country for heavens sake.

Charlie proceeds to build on Tommy's narratives and push his own form of white nationalism because these guys suck so hard.

01:42:42, Charlie Kirk: "So, I wanna get to this because I think it's very important. You talk about the mass Muhammad invasion of the United Kingdom and the lack of rebellion against that or response against that. Help me understand why that happened cause it's so obviously self-destructive, it's self-evidently suicidal."

"The mass Muhammed invasion". When I said in my last post that there's very little separating alt-right figures like Laura Loomer and more mainstream figures like Charlie Kirk in terms of rhetoric these days I wasn't joking. This is a prime example of that. That quote wouldn't be out of place on Laura Loomer, Stew Peters, or Alex Jones and it's pretty disturbing to watch.

01:43:20, Tommy Robinson: "It effects us, the working class and the UK is a very classist country."

Nothing helps solve classism quite like going on a conservative radio show. Tommy's so working class that he can afford to hobnob around the Mediterranean in luxury resorts and live in a million pound home, give me a break.

01:43:32, Tommy Robinson: "It's our towns and our communities that were effected where all these migrants were brought in. And they were brought in originally by the labor party which is democrat party to rub the rights nose in and basically to replace the working with lower voters because the working class decided to vote conservative."

And there it is, the great replacement theory. By the way, in the UK the population is 82% white so this "replacement" is truly something that only exists inside Tommy's bigoted little imagination.

So, these two tools go to radio break and then complain about Muslim "no go zones" which have been debunked so many times that I'm shocked that they can mention them with a straight face. Whatever, it's just more dumb crap that's derivative of the same rhetoric that they've been pushing throughout the interview.

Conclusion:

I cannot stress enough how dangerous and disgusting this is. Considering that Tommy's rhetoric literally started riots in the UK, you'd think that Charlie and the right-wing media ecosystem would be just a *smidge* more careful about booking him so that he can continue to pour fuel on the fire and incite further violence.

These riots in the UK have exposed how key anti-immigrant bigotry and the white nationalist great replacement theory are to the right-wing media machine in the United States. Instead of pausing and thinking "Hey wait a minute, maybe our rhetoric may be causing real world violence and we should cut it out before somebody gets hurt" the right-wing media has broadly responded by doubling down like they always do. It is the responsibility of progressives everywhere to push back against this dangerous rhetoric in whatever way we can before another teenager gets assaulted or the hate crime number increases to 4,000 because the Tommy Robinson's and Charlie Kirk's of the world will not stop and people in the real world are getting hurt in the process.

Cheers and I'll see you in the next one.

Original Video:

“Reagan” + the Truth about Britain + AMA | Dennis Quaid, Whatley, Robinson | 8.8.24.” Rumble, 8 Aug. 2024.

Sources Cited:

“Tommy Robinson Moans Luxury Cyprus Holiday Ruined after Stoking Riots from Abroad.” The Independent, 9 Aug. 2024.

Specia, Megan. “How Disinformation Fed a Far-Right Riot after a Deadly Stabbing in England.” The New York Times, 31 July 2024.

Waterson, Jim. “Braverman’s Claim about Ethnicity of Grooming Gangs Was False, Regulator Rules.” The Guardian, 28 Sept. 2023.

Karsna, Kairika. Child Sexual Abuse in 2020/21: Trends in Official Data. 2022.

“Repost Hateful Messages about Disorder Online and You Could End up in Court.”” The Independent, 7 Aug. 2024

GOV.UK. “Ethnicity Facts and Figures.” Www.ethnicity-Facts-Figures.service.gov.uk, 2021

“Religious Hate Crimes in England and Wales 2023, by Religion.” Statista.

GOV.UK. “Arrests.” Www.ethnicity-Facts-Figures.service.gov.uk, 24 Oct. 2023.

[abloodychicken]

Can't stop thinking about this dream I had a few years ago where fox news threw a temper tantrum that someone on Twitter made a 420k follower joke then they got hacked to have 420k followers

[thegoosetyrant]

Maybe if we told conservatives that climate change was ruining the traditional Christmas celebration then they would actually start doing something about the environment.

Christmas as a cultural icon is starting to get really dystopian in a climate sense, december has historically been a time of year in which there would be snow in a significant portion of europe and north america, and the fact that its not even icy this time of year and all the christmas songs and decorations reference a time of year that will likely never exist in the same way again in my life time is so strange.

[queerism1969]

[talkingpointsusa]

Matt Walsh's ignorant bigotry about Imane Khelif shows just how little he knows about the subject he claims to be an expert on

I'm back from DC folks! I saw Mike Johnson in person (true story, didn't have tomatoes to throw sadly) and got to flip off the Heritage Foundation Building. Now I'm back to talk about lighthearted topics like....transphobia and....misogyny. God, writing this blog is going to be the death of me.

So, Matt Walsh is one of the worlds top experts on transgender issues....or at least he thinks he is. In reality, Matt Walsh is an ignorant and loud-mouthed bigot who mostly shoots from the hip based off of his preconceived notions about minority groups whose existence he hates. Naturally, he decided to weigh in on the latest completely BS controversy about the Olympics that right-wing media made up seemingly to make the first day I got back from DC and checked in on what they’re doing as miserable as possible. In all seriousness, lets see what Matt's yapping about this time.

01:04, Matt Walsh: "One of the most common arguments you'll hear in defense of gender ideology is that some people are intersex and therefor the gender binary is a myth."

At the very least the existence of intersex people proves that the construct of gender isn't as black and white as Matt Walsh likes to portray it as on his show. Matt likes to claim that gender is binary but he's completely wrong. For example, Matt would tell you that a woman is a biological female whilst ignoring that some people are born intersex or born with heightened levels of testosterone, which in Matt's world doesn't make them female. Matt would tell you that a woman is defined by the ability to give birth because "men can't get pregnant" but some women are born infertile. None of these rhetorical games really matter since gender is a social construct whereas sex is biological but they are certainly worth noting.

The truth is that Matt doesn't know jack shit about biology nor sociology and is simply a bigot using distorted versions of those concepts to camouflage his hateful rhetoric. Matt is not somebody who has a lot of respect for science, he regularly disregards the scientific evidence for climate change as nonsense and ignores the mountains of scientific evidence that validate trans and queer identity. However, when he feels like he can use it to validate his weak arguments Matt will gesture vaguely towards "the science", not cite anything, and proceed to act as if he's made some kind of salient point that debunks the scientific community. He's not using evidence, he's using his gut and he'd look like a complete idiot if he actually debated someone that isn't a college freshman without media training.

01:21, Matt Walsh: "You often hear wildly inflated numbers from gender activists about how many intersex people there are in the world. You also hear various definitions for what it means to be intersex, those definitions are often tailored to that -- so that they can inflate the number of people who qualify as intersex."

Matt Walsh has no idea what he's talking about. According to the World Population Review, nearly two out of 100 babies in the United States are born intersex. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, an intersex person is somebody born with sex characteristics including genitals, chromosomes, etc that do not align with the traditional male/female gender binary. Intersex is an umbrella term which is probably where Matt's getting those "varying definitions" from.

Matt seems to think that there's some bizarre conspiracy to artificially inflate the number of people that qualify as intersex but the truth is that some things just don't have a hard definition. However, I understand how this might be confusing for somebody who seems to reduce the human condition down to what genitals you were born with.

01:39, Matt Walsh: "Here's the only definition that has any meaning, as Leonard Sax framed it. Being intersex means that your phenotypic sex, meaning your primary sex characteristics, is inconsistent with your chromosomal sex. For example, someone with Y chromosomes is biologically male and normally has male genitalia but if that person develops female genitalia or genitalia that appear female than that person would be a biological male that suffers from intersexuality."

This definition is widely considered to be pretty outdated. For example, that definition would exclude people with Klinefelter Syndrome which is a condition that is widely considered by modern scientific organizations as a variation of intersexuality that isn't covered by Sax's definition.

Leonard Sax himself isn't a very credible source. Sax is an advocate for single-sex education, the practice of segregating education by gender, and his claims around said topic have been refuted as pseudoscience based off of gender stereotypes while ignoring the children that don't necessarily fit the black and white definition that those stereotypes box children into. Sax has also pushed the antisemitic conspiracy theory that Hitler was actually Jewish, a conspiracy theory that was originally started by Adolf Hitlers own attorney. Historians agree that Sax's evidence was complete ahistorical nonsense. In short, not only are this guys findings on the definition of intersexuality at odds with the broader scientific community but he has a documented record of pushing conspiracy theories and pseudoscience. In short, this guys a wingnut.

02:09, Matt Walsh: "On the other hand, if someone is born with Y chromosomes and then chooses to remove his male genitalia through surgery that individual would not suddenly become intersex."

Absolutely nobody on the planet is claiming that being trans is the same thing as being intersex and there are multiple articles explaining the difference. The issue that Matt seems to be having here is that intersex people are often brought up as an example of how the black and white view of sex and gender brought up by people like him doesn't really make any sense due to the fact that even if you ignore the existence of trans people there are still outliers in even the biological binary. The only person who interprets that as "Ha! You're saying that trans people and intersex people are the same thing!" is Matt Walsh who doesn't seem to understand that everything isn't black and white and that you actually have to look at things with nuance sometimes.

02:50, Matt Walsh: "At the Olympics the other day that confusion led to a male, somebody with XY chromosomes, pummeling a woman in the face at a woman's boxing event on live television."

For those who have been living under a rock, in which case I envy you, this story concerns an Olympic boxing match that took place between Imane Khelif and Angela Carini where Khelif won.

Khelif is a cisgender female and has been for all her life. There is no publicly available evidence that Khelif has XY chromosomes at the time of writing and even if she did that would legally make her an intersex woman due to the rest of her physical characteristics being female.

"But she failed a gender test!", cry the transphobes. Yes, she did in fact fail a gender test but the methodology for this test was never disclosed nor was a copy of the results. The IBA, the organization that gave Khelif the test, is an organization with deep ties to the Russian government that once elected a businessman with deep ties to heroin trafficking and Russian organized crime as their president. Conversely, the IBA only disqualified Khelif after she beat a Russian boxer in the ring, funny how that works. Furthermore, the International Olympic Committee has cut ties with the IBA over concerns of corruption and has denounced the test on Khelif as illegitimate.

Basically, this is another instance of right-wing media running with Russian propaganda to justify their hatred for others. It's disgusting and clear-cut bigotry.

03:01, Matt Walsh: "This male, an Algerian named Imane Khelif, was reportedly DNA tested at the Woman's Olympics World Boxing Championships in New Delhi last year by an organization called IBA and officials at the time disqualified Khelif from the competition because testing confirmed a Y chromosome which means again, that Khelif is a male. There are reports of some sort of disorder affecting the primary sex characteristics, I can't verify those either way."

Hey Matt, I looked this up and I verified it extremely quickly. At the very least it is Matt's responsibility as somebody presenting themself as a journalist to disclose the fact that the legitimacy of this test is in question.

03:42, Matt Walsh: "Intersex is just a word we've come up with to describe people who suffer from certain conditions and deformities. Intersex is not a third sex, it's not an exception to the rule of the sex binary. There are no exceptions. Everybody is either male or female, everyone."

There's that black and white thinking again. The thing is that this argument doesn't make sense because the primary definition of intersexuality is people that don't fit that exact black and white binary that Matt's laid out here. This entire topic invalidates that black and white approach to gender and Matt doesn't even realize it.

04:08, Matt Walsh: "However, the International Olympic Committee, which is overseeing the boxing competition at the Paris Olympics, apparently doesn't care about Chromosomes. According to the Washington Post, the IOC doesn't test for gender. Now, it's not really clear what that means. Does that mean that they'd let Lebron James compete in the woman's basketball tournament?"

I don't know where he's getting that from, this is the full article and I can't find the quote Matt's talking about anywhere but some twitter thread that claims that this article has it in there somewhere. I have a funny feeling that Matt just read something on Twitter and ran with it without checking.

So, Matt's mad at testosterone testing which is something that it doesn't make sense for him to be mad at but go off I guess.

04:27, Matt Walsh: "What it appears to mean based on reporting that I've found is that the IOC allows different events to implement some testosterone guidelines, not rules but just guidelines which can vary event by event. And if that's the case, it obviously would be completely useless for a few reasons. One of them is that even if you have low levels of testosterone now, you might have had very high levels in the past which would contribute to increased muscle strength, bone growth, etc."

Except that testosterone levels peak during your late teens-20's and the current average age for an Olympian is around 27 years old, which by the way is a record high meaning that for most of the history of the Olympics it's been significantly younger. The average healthy male will only start to see a marked decrease in testosterone levels when they're significantly older.

But yeah, good thinking Matt, you really showed them. Truly a man of science over here.

04:56, Matt Walsh: "The other reason is that having high levels of testosterone doesn't make you a man in and of itself, having a Y chromosome doesn't make you a man and a man with low testosterone, even a man with very low testosterone, is still a man."

"And by the way, this doesn't apply to women with high testosterone who are men." - probably also Matt Walsh given his track record when it comes to that group of people.

05:48, Matt Walsh: "Now, one of the things about all these gender tests and DNA tests is that it really, for the most part, they're not even necessary. Like, looking at that footage anyone can instantly tell that Angela Carrini was fighting a male."

And here's where the misogyny comes in. In Matt's eyes, women who are physically strong are naturally men because surely there's no possible way for a woman to actually be that strong without some kind of tieback to masculinity. I guess by his own logic, Matt's also for banning basketball players for being too tall.

06:59, Matt Walsh: "Now, trans activists have claimed that the fact that this male boxer apparently isn't trans, that's the claim anyway I don't know for sure, the fact that Khelif is allegedly intersex, that that somehow proves the point about the woman's sports issue but of course it does the opposite because those of us on the side of common sense have always said that segregating sports based on sex has nothing to do with transgenderism."

It absolutely does! For example, in England trans people were banned from competing in the female category of professional darts. How exactly do trans people have a "biological advantage" in throwing a tiny sharp stick at a target? That story and many others like it show the absurdity of this whole "debate" around woman's sports. It's not about protecting women, it's about bigotry.

This entire thing doesn't really matter though because it ignores the fact that trans athletes go through years of hormone therapy and oftentimes surgery which take away whatever "advantage" they might have possessed. Lots of transwomen have won in women's sports and lots of transwomen have lost in women's sports. Mainly because that's just how sports work!

Oh well, we now know Matt's for discriminating intersex people as well as trans people. At least his bigotry is....consistent I guess? God, I hate this guy. Next clip!

08:43, Matt Walsh: "But if you think that, you know, violent episodes like this are gonna make the trans activists admit that they're, you know, wrong and so wrong that now actual women are being endangered and of course actual women have been endangered by this for a while now, you should know that there is precisely zero chance of that, they're not going to admit anything."

This is just dehumanizing bigotry meant to paint trans people as "the other" and as some evil group trying to endanger women for kicks. This kind of rhetoric is how hate crimes end up happening and Matt knows it.

Matt's also mad at JK Rowling because her particular form of transphobia calls transphobia a "men's rights movement", which is a clear effort to erase trans identity but Matt's too thick to get that she's on his side, but since a big part of Matt's whole identity is whinging about how men are "oppressed" he basically throws a little tantrum about how she's being mean to the manosphere.

11:02, Matt Walsh: "The problem with Rowling's attempt to blame this on the mens rights movement, whatever that is, is that first of all there is no men's rights movement, at least not one with any degree of power right now."

The manosphere is a thing that exists. Just look at the success of Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, and even the subject of this post Matt Walsh who regularly parrots manosphere talking points on his show. These people exist and have a lot of influence on the internet which in turn gives them influence in the real world. Essentially, Matt has totally missed the point of what Rowling is saying, which is also disgusting bigoted garbage but the point still stands, I guess this is what happens when you're so wrapped up in your "masculinity" that you become blinded to reality.

I also think that this is definitely something that shows how BS JK Rowling's whole "feminist" schtick is. Never mind that delegitimizing transwomen is inherently misogynistic at it's core, the people that Rowling's allying herself with because of her obsession with trans people hate feminism and women's rights. Here we have a "feminist" allying herself with misogynists and for what? Is the existence of trans people that much of a threat? Don't believe me? Here's Matt Walsh saying that he hates feminism and women's rights literal seconds after the last clip.

11:42, Matt Walsh: "Instead what we saw in Paris this week is a natural consequence, not of mens rights or the patriarchy, it's a natural consequence of the ideology that feminists have been pushing for decades. It was feminists who argued that sex differences are mostly social constructs that are exploited by patriarchal oppressors. Feminists are the ones who laid the groundwork for the idea that there's no job a man can't do that a woman can't do better, OK? They came up with that! Men and women are equal, they can do the same things, genders a social construct, that came from feminism and once you believe that lie you get this. You get women in the boxing ring with men getting violently assaulted."

There's so much wrong with this that it's hard to unpack in one go. The disgusting transphobia, the blatant misogyny, the fact that he handwaved men and women being equal as a "lie". If anything, this is more proof that transphobia and misogyny are directly intertwined.

On a smaller scale, it also goes to show you how much of an absolute douche-canoe Matt Walsh is. However, that particular topic is a recurring theme on this blog so regular readers probably won't be too surprised by that.

Conclusion:

Boy oh boy, starting off with a bang after my holiday ended. Matt Walsh sucks, JK Rowling sucks, that weird antisemitic guy that Walsh cited as a source sucks, this whole discourse around Imane Khelif sucks, everything about this sucks.

While we definitely did approach some of this from Matt's own terms by looking at the actual definition of intersexuality and the stuff about Khelif's gender test, it's important to look at what guys like Matt Walsh actually mean when they talk about stories like this.

Matt doesn't give a crap about Olympic boxing nor does he give a crap about the "sanctity of women's sports". The dude literally stated in his show supposedly about defending women's sports that men and women being equal is a lie. Matt Walsh is just a bigot with a microphone using this story to spew hatred towards a group he's built his career around othering and the thing that he's actually saying is that he wants those groups that he hates so much excluded from the public life.

Original Video:

“Ep. 1414 - Wokeness Turns the Olympics into a Farce.” Dailywire.com, The Daily Wire, 2 Aug. 2024.

Sources:

Halpern, D. F., et al. “The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling.” Science, vol. 333, no. 6050, 22 Sept. 2011, pp. 1706–1707.

World Population Review - Intersex people.

The UN Commission for Human Rights' definition on intersexuality.

Article refuting false claims about Hitler's Jewish Heritage

“What Is the IBA? Governing Body behind Olympic Boxing Storm Has Russian Ties, Troubled History.” PBS News, 4 Aug. 2024.

"IBA gender tests on two boxers were flawed and illegitimate, says IOC." Reuters, 5 Aug. 2024.

“Testosterone Therapy: Potential Benefits and Risks as You Age.” Mayo Clinic

Hansford, Amelia. “Trans Darts Player Left “Broken” after Tournament Ban.” PinkNews.

[megankoumori]

The historian in me would like to be objective, but the reactionary wants to drag Martin Dies and Joseph McCarthy from their graves by the throats and give them exactly what they deserve.

....Oh, what the hell. Get in line, Schlafly.