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I just drew the above. What does it say to you? Curious how it is interpreted.
No doubt about it, the news is stressful right now. It feels like our country is in a blender and it’s hard to know what we will get when the mixing stops. There have been times in our history when this kind of jostling happened—post-Civil War comes to mind. But I do believe that we can be the ones who control it, it is not hopeless. Staying informed is key, and talking to others about what is right and true is fundamental. And speaking out.
Washington Post opinion writer Karen Attiah said she was fired for posting Deceased Charlie Kirk’s own words. Attiah said she was dismissed over her posts that were deemed to be “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and that endangered the physical safety of her colleagues.
From the Guardian:
“They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” Attiah wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”
In her only post directly mentioning Kirk, she quoted the Turning Point USA founder’s comments that Black women lack “brain processing power.”
“I made clear that not performing over-the-top grief for white men who espouse violence was not the same as endorsing violence against them,” Attiah said. Here is the report from the NY Times.
Attiah did not celebrate Mr. Kirk’s death, exercizing “restraint even as I condemned hatred and violence.” One post cited Kirk’s remarks about Ketanji Brown Jackson, the Supreme Court justice, and Sheila Jackson Lee, the former congresswoman Texas, saying they did not have the “brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”
“My only direct reference to Kirk was one post — his own words on record,” Attiah wrote.
From his office at the White House, Vance (wanna-be influencer) served as a guest host on Kirk’s podcast today, inviting senior members of the administration, including Stephen Miller, the president’s top policy adviser, to praise Kirk while also detailing their plans to crack down on what they called “leftist nongovernmental organizations.” The show was broadcast on the television screens in the White House. Steven Miller said,
“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”
Trump and his people are using Kirk’s death to try to galvanize supporters and scare people. After the murder, Trump immediately blamed the radical left and said he wants to end violent crime, claiming that the left does not want to stop crime. This is absurd.
The midterms can’t come soon enough.
Maureen Comey has sued the Trump administration, challenging her abrupt termination as politically motivated retaliation against her father, former FBI director James Comey. Ms. Comey was a federal prosecutor in the Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell sex trafficing case.
Jessica Valenti, who writes the Substack Abortion Every Day, wrote that the Trump administration is claiming that birth control is abortion. In a statement about the administration’s plan to destroy $10 million in birth control meant for women abroad, U.S.A.I.D. offered this statement: “President Trump is committed to protecting the lives of unborn children all around the world. The administration will no longer supply abortifacient birth control under the guise of foreign aid.” This is clearly false: birth control prevents pregnancy, it does not end it.
We are watching all of the different factions of the far right scramble, as each group positions itself either in lock-step with what they think Kirk was supposed to stand for, or against. Kirk is like a chameleon (I purposefully use the present tense even though he is dead), everyone takes from this influencer what they want. Social media and the internet are inflaming this, spreading lies and conspiracy theories; we are seeing the negative side of social media come to fruition in a huge way. It’s always had a negative side, but I have in the past liked social media for the connecting value of it. It allowed us to hear others’ voices, and hear the voices of those who have not typically been heard. But now the mangling and twisting and lying is erasing all that.
I am almost completely off social media now, and although I have the accounts, I don’t use them (except Blue Sky for some news, IG for sharing my art, and FB to connect with old friends). I basically just post what I write here.
A good post once again from opinion writer Jamelle Bouie:
I hope you have a good Monday. Tomorrow I plan to draw in my studio, so stay tuned for some light drawing time. We need it. Thanks for being here.