Welcome back to TGIF, written from my new bunker. This is our weekly satirical news summary. In the likely event of my assassination, I want my entire TGIF archive deleted, and I want to be remembered only as a loving mother and a gentle, private woman. Let’s get to the news while we still can:
→ Charlie Kirk: The persuasive conservative leader Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while taking questions on a university campus this week. He was seated under a tent that read “PROVE ME WRONG” and wore a shirt that read “Freedom.” Minutes after the father of two was murdered, cable news talking heads sputtered into action.
Here’s MSNBC contributor Matthew Dowd shortly after Charlie was shot: “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” And: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place.” And also: “We don’t know if this was a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration, we have no idea.” That makes more sense, right? A right-wing gun nut pointing a gun directly at the guy talking and pulling the trigger to celebrate him—that is definitely the most likely scenario. Later, facing outrage for its coverage, MSNBC apologized for these comments and ended Dowd’s contract.
Well, that’s MSNBC. But CNN? Within a few hours of Charlie’s slaughter, CNN anchor Abby Phillip was calling for the video to be censored, and did her best to do so from her pulpit. “The degree to which the algorithm on this platform is pushing video of the shooting is incredibly disturbing. There has to be some human that can turn the dial down in a situation like this.” Odd how reporters want much, much less reporting. Funny how she didn’t say that about a situation like, I don’t know, George Floyd’s killing. It’s almost like it’s political. Tommy Vietor of Pod Save America had the same reaction the day of the shooting, saying that “pushing” the video was “sickening.” Maybe it is being pushed, who knows, but it’s far more ghoulish to slaughter a polite conservative while he’s talking to college kids than it is to fail to control the algorithm tightly enough. Funny to see where their outrage goes. Popular talking head George Conway posted the image and lifespan of a young Nazi, to imply that the two men are similar, that we should be just as sad about Charlie as we would be for a dead Nazi, like we’re in a true civil war.
And then came the New York Times obituary. A classic. The headline: “Charlie Kirk, Right-Wing Provocateur and Close Ally of Trump, Dies at 31.” Right-wing provocateur. A person trying to provoke, if you think about it. As though there’s no belief system behind it. Just a provocateur. For the sake of it. In the mainstream media worldview, there are two kinds of people: those fighting for left-wing causes, who are described as people of conviction, activists for justice, deep believers in equality. And then there are those fighting for right-wing causes, who are described as provocateurs, cynics, racists, and shills. Archconservatives. They eventually changed the headline. But here’s the New York Times’ obituary: “He was so vocal in his willingness to spread unsupported claims and outright lies—he said that the drug hydroxychloroquine was ‘100 percent effective’ in treating the virus, which it is not—that Twitter temporarily barred him in early March 2020. But that move only added to his notoriety and seemed to support his claim that he was being muzzled by a liberal elite.” Fascinating. A man is murdered in public, in the middle of the day, while practicing his First Amendment rights, and the paper of record decides this must be the perfect moment to do fact-checking about hydroxychloroquine.
What you need to know from this: If your politics are that of a standard normie conservative man, your New York Times obituary will find the various things you said that weren’t exactly right (he got into hydroxychloroquine in 2020! Can you believe that?) and they’ll paint them in the sky. My politics are lib centrist, and these people would certainly celebrate my death, highlight my many errors, and refer to my defense of the SAT as my “repeated advocacy for a return to slavery” or something. What I’m saying is: Just try to stay alive because when you die, a New York Times reporter gets to juice your corpse for likes on Bluesky. MSNBC will invite talking heads on the air to suggest that the shooter could have been your mom who forgot to turn the safety on, we simply don’t know.
Speaking of, when I clicked into Bluesky to see what was happening, I was served hundreds of posts with people celebrating (I don’t follow anyone, so this is just what the standard Bluesky algorithm wanted to show me). Also dropping this right here: 34 percent of college students think political violence is acceptable, according to a new survey, writes Angel Eduardo. On Facebook, the first thing I saw was an old journalist buddy mocking Charlie and cheering his death.
