General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsEU Parliament refuses moment of silence for Charlie Kirk
FINALLY.
— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T01:43:33.863Z
https://www.politico.eu/article/chalie-kirk-eu-parliament-declines-minute-of-silence/
One thing that bothers me most is the quickness and willingness of the extreme Far Right parties worldwide to make sure theyâre in unison. Theyâre all rising at the same time in a coordinated effort to support white supremacy and Christofascism. Itâs a frightening network. A Peter Thiel spider web.
— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T04:58:04.612Z
Kirk was nobody. But he was Far Right and a full on white supremacist . The moment he died Elon and Trump were both yelling, then worldwide leaders with the same ideologies also took up martyring him.
— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T05:00:26.361Z
To the rest of us itâs ridiculous as well as gross. To them itâs worshipping Far Rightâs racism and Christofascism ideologies using Kirk as tool.
— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) 2025-09-13T05:02:55.180Z
This was eye opening. The ones who gave condolences and asked for recognition for his death exposed theyâre part of the same fascist movement as Trump.
niyad
(134,035 posts)Response to demmiblue (Original post)
Chasstev365 This message was self-deleted by its author.
2naSalit
(103,811 posts)Putting up with the shit. We need a LOT more of that here.
K&R
niyad
(134,035 posts)desks and yelling were actually the far-righ types throwing a tantrum because that insane request was refused. Europeans get it, understand what a menace he was.
Dulcinea
(10,313 posts)Plenty of people in this country didn't care one way or the other, so why would anyone else? He wasn't that important.
marble falls
(72,534 posts)... of his leaving, but I am glad he's gone.
Response to demmiblue (Original post)
Random Person This message was self-deleted by its author.
twodogsbarking
(19,353 posts)mountain grammy
(29,218 posts)Kid Berwyn
(25,109 posts)Thus sprach Chuckie, the frustrated future Führer.

Trump allys stunning request: 'If this election doesnt go our way the next day we fight'
by David Badash
Alternet.org, March 21, 2024
Christian nationalist and far-right political activist Charlie Kirk, a top influencer and Trump ally, urged supporters at a faith-based event on Sunday to fight if Donald Trump doesnt win the 2024 presidential election.
I want to make sure that we all make a commitment that if this election doesnt go our way, the next day we fight, Kirk told the audience at Freedom Night, hosted by Pastor John Randall.
Its a very important thing, Kirk added before saying, a lot of people dont want to hear that. They say, What do you mean it doesnt go our way? It has to go our way. We have to win. I agree.
Kirk is a member of the highly-secretive Council for National Policy, a purveyor of Donald Trumps Big Lie, and has repeatedly promoted the false claim that U.S. elections are rigged.
Continues...
https://www.alternet.org/trump-charlie-kirk/
Image source: https://www.cltampa.com/tampa/photos-neo-nazis-gather-outside-turning-point-usa-summit-at-tampa-convention-center/Slideshow/13849084
DFW
(60,437 posts)Last edited Sat Sep 13, 2025, 06:56 PM - Edit history (1)
A right wing opportunist who feed off the anger and ignorance of people to sell them his "religion," his simple hate and his merchandise? Definitely. But a full-blown National Socialist? He didn't seem that sophisticated in my quick once-over. The early writing of Göbbels, or Hitler's rantings in Mein Kampf seem a little above his level. A Trumpanzee? Absolutely. But a Nationalsozialist (Nah-tsee-oh-NAHL-zo-tsee-ah-LIST, or NAH-tsee for short)? He may have wanted many of the same things, but he didn't seem to me to rise to the level of sophistication of their propagandists.
Just because they might like to fly the backwards swastika of the Third Reich doesn't mean they know anything about being a full-blown Nazi, beyond proudly claiming their name. It's like Republicans calling themselves "conservative." If they look up the definition of "conservative" in a dictionary of English, their most likely reaction would be, "so what has all that to do with me?"
To honor such a piece of filth with flags at half-mast is perverse. To ask allied non-fascist countries to do the same is an insult to their history, their society, their intelligence, and their people.
Kid Berwyn
(25,109 posts)...but he sure knew his place in the pricking Order. The banner below was the marketing image Kirk was using to promote his college tour.

Note the "A" in "American Comeback" resembles a dagger. Similarly, the "K" echoes a NAZI salute.


ETA: Also noticed how the red, white and blue electric bolt resembles the "S" in "SS."

When Trump ordered the US flag to fly at half-staff for that guy he showed the MAGANAZIGOP know exactly what they are doing.
DFW
(60,437 posts)Trump probably wasn't aware that flags can fly at half mast. And adopting the raised flat hand salute no more makes you a Nazi than raising a fist makes you a Bolshevik. It's one thing to imitate a symbol or repeat a slogan. It is quite another to be able to explain the meaning behind your gesture. Trump raised his right hand when he took the oath of office. He didn't much know (or care) the significance of that, either.
Kid Berwyn
(25,109 posts)
How John Roberts Got to the Top
The Spectre of White Affirmative Action
By LINN WASHINGTON, Jr.
September 28, 2005, CounterPunch
EXCERPT...
Bush's selection of John Roberts for Chief Justice is a glaring example of white affirmative-action irrespective of Roberts' respected legal acumen elevating him above the ranks of an inadequately prepared candidate.
The bigot Bush designated Roberts to replace, the late William Rehnquist, at least spent fourteen years as a Supreme Court Justice before his elevation to Chief Justice.
Roberts has less than three years experience as a federal appeals court judge, getting that lofty position without having any prior judicial experience.
SNIP...
Roberts landed a plum clerkship with a federal appeals judge after his Harvard Law School graduation, followed immediately by a prestige elevating clerkship with US Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist who never hired a black law clerk.
CONTINUED...
http://www.counterpunch.org/2005/09/28/the-spectre-of-white-affirmative-action/
WHY a 20 Year-old article is still news to most everybody in the United States of America.
Many of whose members were put on the bench by corrupt Nixon and even more corrupt Poppy Bush -- which go back to November 22, 1963.
The truth about what has happened to democracy in the name of national security may as well be science-fiction to 99% of America. Today's Nazification goes back to the assassination of President Kennedy.
Two members of the Warren Commission also, coincidentally sure, played key roles in the rise of post-war fascism. Allen Dulles, as a top official of the OSS and CIA, incorporated NAZI war criminals into the CIA from its founding. John McCloy, as High Commissioner for Germany, allowed Klaus Barbie, Alfred Krupp, eight members of his board, and who-knows-who-else to escape justice. Of course, Dulles and McCloy also were barons of Wall Street and Beltway Insiders, at the heart of the military industrial complex, chums with Prescott Bush n Poppy. So, we can see what that has meant for the United States today.
Background:
The American who let the Nazis rebuild Germany
https://thecritic.co.uk/issues/november-2021/the-american-who-let-the-nazis-rebuild-germany/
CIA and NAZI War Criminals
https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB146/index.htm

The Real McCloy
THE CHAIRMAN: JOHN J. McCLOY; The Making of the American Establishment,
By Kai Bird (Simon & Schuster: $30; 800 pp.)
By ROBERT SHERRILL
APRIL 19, 1992, The Los Angeles Times
EXCERPT...
When McCloy took over as high commissioner of defeated Germany, he talked a tough line about crushing the many still- active Nazis. But he promptly turned to mush, permitting Chancellor Konrad Adenauer to fill his cabinet with notorious antisemites and Nazi war criminals (some of whom became McCloys personal friends). McCloy also vastly expanded the shameful programs begun before he got to Germany, of letting some of the worst war criminals off the hook.
He commuted two-thirds of the death sentences of mass murderers (such as the SS officer who personally executed 1,500 Jews) and radically reduced the prison sentences of doctors who had conducted experiments on death-camp inmates, of high-ranking Nazi Judges who had administered Gestapo justice, and of industrialists who had built the Nazi war machine.
McCloy freed some immediately, including Alfred Krupp, whose munitions factories had worked thousands of slave laborers to death. Krupps original sentence had included loss of all property; McCloy canceled that punishment and within a few years Krupp was again one of the richest industrialists in the world. Obviously McCloys obsequiousness toward money and power made him the wrong man to reform Nazi Germany. Though he could understand the special culpability of the big Nazis, Bird writes, when it came to a wealthy and politically well-connected man like Krupp, he suspended his good judgment.
As high commissioner, McCloy dabbled disastrously in the intelligence business, setting up a network of agents in Germany that included the likes of Klaus Barbie, who had shipped 78,000 French Jews to the gas chambers, and Gen. Reinhard Gehlen, who had been responsible for some of the grisliest mass killings on the Eastern Front. Not surprisingly, many of the intelligence operations carried out under McCloy were, says Bird, fiascos.
CONTINUES...
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1992-04-19-bk-588-story.html
Mr. McCloy was joined by another Mr. Establishment type with extensive ties to wealthy NAZI industrialists and anti-communist NAZI spy rings, former CIA Director Allen Dulles, in service on the Warren Commission. Coincidentally. Their colleagues kept faith in the Almighty Dollar.
CIA Chief Bush Suppresses the News
By Robert Gardner
FAIR Exclusive
May/June 1999
Documents obtained by FAIR, released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), show that George Bush, as head of the CIA in 1976, tried to bottle up a news story that exposed the apparent duplicity of another former CIA chief, Richard Helms.
The story, broken on Oct. 1, 1976, by David Martin (now CBS Pentagon correspondent, then with Associated Press), revealed that Helms had given misleading testimony to the Warren Commission investigating the assassination of John Kennedy. Helms testified that the CIA had not "even contemplated" making contact with Lee Harvey Oswald, the accused assassin. Through the FOIA, Martin obtained CIA memos showing that in 1960 the agency "showed intelligence interest" in Oswald and "discussed...the laying on of interviews" with him.
When Bush saw the AP story in the Washington Star, he asked for an internal CIA review to see if the story was true (it was) and if it would "cause problems for Helms." (Helms had lied to a Senate committee about the CIA's role in subverting Chilean democracy and would later be convicted of contempt of Congress.)
After investigating, Bush assistant Seymour Bolten reported back that the exposure of Helms' false testimony to the Warren Commission would probably cause Helms "some anxious moments," though not "any additional legal problems." But Bush was assured that a "slightly better" story had resulted from an Agency phone call to AP protesting that Martin's story was "sloppy." Additionally, Bush was told that an unnamed journalist had "advised his editors . . . not to run the AP story."
Bolten complained to Bush: "This is another example where material provided to the press and public in response to an FOIA request is exploited mischievously and in distorted form to make the headlines." One might more accurately describe it as an occasion where George Bush's CIA pressured one news outlet to back away from an accurate story while using an asset in the press corps to suppress it in another.
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=1491
I dont think US citizens should be considered Enemies of the State for upholding the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
Angus Mackenzie: "Secrets: The CIA's War at Home"
EXCERPT...
A month later someone at the CIA leaked the news of MHCHAOS to Sy Hersh at the New York Times. The story, while sparse, made public the fact that the agency was spying on its citizens. Gerald Ford, in office for less than five months, directed William Colby to issue a report on MHCHAOS to Henry Kissinger. As Mackenzie writes, evidently Ford was not informed that Kissinger was well aware of the operation. He adds:
Because of MHCHAOS and Watergate, Congress began to investigate the CIA. On September 16, 1975 Senators Frank Church and John Tower called Colby to testify at a hearing about CIA assassinations. Colby showed up carrying a CIA poison dart gun, and Church waved the gun before the televison cameras. It looked like an automatic pistol with a telescopic sight mounted on the barrel. Producers of the evening news recognized this as sensational footage, and just as surely Colby recognized his days as director were numbered. He had not guarded the CIA secrets well enough.
Colby was fired on November 2, 1975. His successor was George Herbert Walker Bush.....
Mackenzie's account of Bush's rise and and his fall when Carter assumed office is brief, but intriguing. There is much, much more in Secrets about CIA efforts throughout the years in guarding their work from the public in this under-recognized work. The epilogue is entitled "The Cold War Ends and Secrecy Spreads." Mackenzie closes by writing:
Only recently in the history of the world's oldest republic has secrecy functioned principally to keep the American people in the dark about the nefarious activities of their government. The United States is no longer the nation its citizens once thought: a place, unlike most others in the world, free from censorship and thought police, where people can say what they want, when they want to, about their government. Almost a decade after the end of the cold war, espionage is not the issue, if it ever really was. The issue is freedom... Until the citizens of this land aggressively defend their First Amendment rights of free speech, there is little hope that this march to censorship will be reversed. The survival of the cornerstone of the Bill of Rights is at stake.
Succumbing to brain cancer before he turned fifty, Mackenzie sadly did not live to see the meteoric rise of the internet, nor did he live to see 9/11 and the current Bush Administration and their obsessive devotion to secrecy.
This work has relevance to the current situation regarding the agency's efforts to keep George Joannides' records secret.
SOURCE: http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=10617
Jimmy Carter tried weaning the US off fossil fuels. So the Petrodollars got together with the former spooks to dump Carter and foist a half century of Trickle Down on the nation.
From...
The State, the Deep State, and the Wall Street Overworld
By Prof Peter Dale Scott
Global Research, March 10, 2014
The Asia-Pacific Journal, Volume 12, Issue 10, No. 5
EXCERPT...
The Safari Club Milieu: George H.W. Bush, Theodore Shackley, and BCCI
The usual account of this super-agencys origin is that it was
the brainchild of Count Alexandre de Marenches, the debonair and mustachioed chief of Frances CIA. The SDECE (Service de Documentation Extérieure et de Contre-Espionnage) . Worried by Soviet and Cuban advances in postcolonial Africa, and by Americas post-Watergate paralysis in the field of undercover activity, the swashbuckling Marenches had come to Turkis father, King Faisal, with a proposition . [By 1979] Somali president Siad Barre had been bribed out of Soviet embrace by $75 million worth of Egyptian arms (paid for by Saudi Arabia) .95
Joseph Trento adds that The Safari Club needed a network of banks to finance its intelligence operations, With the official blessing of George Bush as the head of the CIA, Adham transformed the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), into a worldwide money-laundering machine..96
Trento claims also that the Safari Club then was able to work with some of the controversial CIA operators who were then forced out of the CIA by Turner, and that this was coordinated by perhaps the most controversial of them all: Theodore Shackley.
Shackley, who still had ambitions to become DCI, believed that without his many sources and operatives like [Edwin] Wilson, the Safari Cluboperating with [former DCI Richard] Helms in charge in Tehranwould be ineffective. Unless Shackley took direct action to complete the privatization of intelligence operations soon, the Safari Club would not have a conduit to [CIA] resources. The solution: create a totally private intelligence network using CIA assets until President Carter could be replaced.97
Kevin Phillips has suggested that Bush on leaving the CIA had dealings with the bank most closely allied with Safari Club operations: the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI). In Phillips words,
After leaving the CIA in January 1977, Bush became chairman of the executive committee of First International Bancshares and its British subsidiary, where, according to journalists Peter Truell and Larry Gurwin in their 1992 book False Profits [p. 345], Bush traveled on the banks behalf and sometimes marketed to international banks in London, including several Middle Eastern institutions.98
Joseph Trento adds that through the London branch of this bank, which Bush chaired, Adhams petrodollars and BCCI money flowed for a variety of intelligence operations99
It is clear moreover that BCCI operations, like Khashoggis before them, were marked by the ability to deal behind the scenes with both the Arab countries and also Israel.100
It is clear that for years the American deep state in Washington was both involved with and protected BCCI. Acting CIA director Richard Kerr acknowledged to a Senate Committee that the CIA had also used BCCI for certain intelligence-gathering operations.101
Later, a congressional inquiry showed that for more than ten years preceding the BCCI collapse in the summer of 1991, the FBI, the DEA, the CIA, the Customs Service, and the Department of Justice all failed to act on hundreds of tips about the illegalities of BCCIs international activities.102
Far less clear is the attitude taken by Wall Street banks towards the miscreant BCCI. The Senate report on BCCI charged however that the Bank of England had withheld information about BCCIs frauds from public knowledge for 15 months before closing the bank.103
CONTINUED...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-state-the-deep-state-and-the-wall-street-overworld/5372843

George Bush Takes Charge: The Uses of Counter-Terrorism
By Christopher Simpson
Covert Action Quarterly 58
A paper trail of declassified documents from the Reagan‑Bush era yields valuable information on how counter‑terrorism provided a powerful mechanism for solidifying Bush's power base and launching a broad range of national security initiatives.
During the Reagan years, George Bush used "crisis management" and "counter‑terrorism" as vehicles for running key parts of the clandestine side of the US government.
Bush proved especially adept at plausible denial. Some measure of his skill in avoiding responsibility can be taken from the fact that even after the Iran‑Contra affair blew the Reagan administration apart, Bush went on to become the "foreign policy president," while CIA Director William Casey, by then conveniently dead, took most of the blame for a number of covert foreign policy debacles that Bush had set in motion.
The trail of National Security Decision Directives (NSDDS) left by the Reagan administration begins to tell the story. True, much remains classified, and still more was never committed to paper in the first place. Even so, the main picture is clear: [font size="5"][font color="green"]As vice president, George Bush was at the center of secret wars, political murders, and America's convoluted oil politics in the Middle East.[/font color][/font size]
SNIP...
Reagan and the NSC also used NSDDs to settle conflicts among security agencies over bureaucratic turf and lines of command. It is through that prism that we see the first glimmers of Vice President Bush's role in clandestine operations during the 1980s.
SNIP...
NSDD 159. MANAGEMENT OF U.S. COVERT OPERATIONS, (TOP SECRET/VEIL‑SENSITIVE), JAN. 18,1985
The Reagan administration's commitment to significantly expand covert operations had been clear since before the 1980 election. How such operations were actually to be managed from day to day, however, was considerably less certain. The management problem became particularly knotty owing to legal requirements to notify congressional intelligence oversight committees of covert operations, on the one hand, and the tacitly accepted presidential mandate to deceive those same committees concerning sensitive operations such as the Contra war in Nicaragua, on the other.
The solution attempted in NSDD 159 was to establish a small coordinating committee headed by Vice President George Bush through which all information concerning US covert operations was to be funneled. The order also established a category of top secret information known as Veil, to be used exclusively for managing records pertaining to covert operations.
The system was designed to keep circulation of written records to an absolute minimum while at the same time ensuring that the vice president retained the ability to coordinate US covert operations with the administration's overt diplomacy and propaganda.
Only eight copies of NSDD 159 were created. The existence of the vice president's committee was itself highly classified. The directive became public as a result of the criminal prosecutions of Oliver North, John Poindexter, and others involved in the Iran‑Contra affair, hence the designation "Exhibit A" running up the left side of the document.
CONTINUED...
CovertAction Quarterly no 58 Fall 1996 pp31-40.
The Receipts:
History Lesson missing from post-Dallas curricula...
George H. W. Bush was in Dallas on November 22, 1963. I know so because AFTER THE ASSASSINATION he phoned the FBI to report a name he heard threaten JFK:

TO: SAC, HOUSTON DATE: 11-22-63
FROM: SA GRAHAM W. KITCHEL
SUBJECT: UNKNOWN SUBJECT;
ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT
JOHN F. KENNEDY
At 1:45 p.m. Mr. GEORGE H. W. BUSH, President of the Zapata Off-Shore Drilling Company, Houston, Texas, residence 5525 Briar, Houston, telephonically furnished the following information to writer by long distance telephone call from Tyler, Texas.
BUSH stated that he wanted to be kept confidential but wanted to furnish hearsay that he recalled hearing in recent weeks, the day and source unknown. He stated that one JAMES PARROTT has been talking of killing the President when he comes to Houston.
BUSH stated that PARROTT is possibly a student at the University of Houston and is active in political matters in this area. He stated that he felt Mrs. FAWLEY, telephone number SU 2-5239, or ARLINE SMITH, telephone number JA 9-9194 of the Harris County Republican Party Headquarters would be able to furnish additional information regarding the identity of PARROTT.
BUSH stated that he was proceeding to Dallas, Texas, would remain in the Sheraton-Dallas Hotel and return to his residence on 11-23-63. His office telephone number is CA 2-0395.
# # #
Of course, we didnt know any of that until decades later when another FBI memo mentioned Mr. GEORGE Bush of the CIA popped up when Poppy was running for preznit.

Date: November 29, 1963
To: Director
Bureau of Intelligence and Research
Department of State
From: John Edgar Hoover, Director
Subject: ASSASSINATION OF PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY
NOVEMBER 22, 1963
Our Miami, Florida, Office on November 23, 1963, advised that the Office of Coordinator of Cuban Affairs in Miami advised that the Department of State feels some misguided anti-Castro group might capitalize on the present situation and undertake an unauthorized raid against Cuba, believing that the assassination of President John F. Kennedy might herald a change in U. S. policy, which is not true.
Our sources and informants familiar with Cuban matters in the Miami area advise that the general feeling in the anti-Castro Cuban community is one of stunned disbelief and, even among those who did not entirely agree with the President's policy concerning Cuba, the feeling is that the President's death represents a great loss not only to the U. S. but to all of Latin America. These sources know of no plans for unauthorized action against Cuba.
An informant who has furnished reliable information in the past and who is close to a small pro-Castro group in Miami has advised that these individuals are afraid that the assassination of the President may result in strong repressive measures being taken against them and, although pro-Castro in their feelings, regret the assassination.
The substance of the foregoing information was orally furnished to Mr. George Bush of the Central Intelligence Agency and Captain William Edwards of the Defense Intelligence Agency on November 23, 1963, by Mr. W. T. Forsyth of this Bureau.
# # #
And the country today is set up with a Supreme Court majority that sides with a traitor installed by Putin, leading a kakistocracy comprised of plutocrats, oligarchs and a horde of murderous thugs who answer to Putin's boss, the boss of bosses, Semion Mogilevich.
yellow dahlia
(6,487 posts)yellow dahlia
(6,487 posts)tonekat
(2,569 posts)For not being exactly like him? He should have moved to Hungary.
Ocelot II
(131,241 posts)For that matter, why should we? We can deplore that he was shot, but's with all the honors? He was a professional troll who offered little but hate and divisiveness. We need more moments of silence for kids shot at their schools - there would be a lot of silence.
Torchlight
(7,066 posts)even the American ones.
58Sunliner
(6,417 posts)mgardener
(2,405 posts)Than all of the kids killed in school shooting in the US?
Because he parroted conservative, right wing, dogma?
We should all be working towards a solution so gun violence does not happen frequently in this country.
Nobody deserves to be shot at and killed.
Nobody.
Javaman
(65,979 posts)moondust
(21,352 posts)You might want to also consider moving the headquarters of the United Nations from the U.S. to a location somewhat more committed to morality and equality--like maybe Europe that has a better understanding of where fascism can lead. Perhaps hold a vote on it.
CoopersDad
(3,369 posts)Rec.
Kick in to the DU tip jar?
This week we're running a special pop-up mini fund drive. From Monday through Friday we're going ad-free for all registered members, and we're asking you to kick in to the DU tip jar to support the site and keep us financially healthy.
As a bonus, making a contribution will allow you to leave kudos for another DU member, and at the end of the week we'll recognize the DUers who you think make this community great.