The Washington Post, MSNBC, and ABC have all fired commentators for insufficiently respecting the life and death of a vile man. So have the “liberal” law firm Perkins Coie, the Broad Institute research program at MIT, and Clemson University. And also the Nasdaq, the NFL, Walmart, Office Depot, American Airlines, Delta Airlines, and United Airlines, to name just a few of the more than 30 white establishment employers who have fired or sanctioned people who have said things about Kirk. Before it was taken down, the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation promoted a list that included the names of 63,000 people they wanted fired for posting about Kirk online.

For each one of these reprisals, there are countless others. An unknowable number of people have been bullied and intimidated into silence and complicity.

And the white wing wants more. It wants more sanctions, more firings, and more repression. Vice President JD Vance (who guest-hosted Kirk’s talk show, which is a wild thing for a sitting VP to do) urged Americans to snitch on their neighbors and coworkers, and try to get them fired from their jobs. The House moved to censure Representative Ilhan Omar for her accurate comments about Kirk, and it is now considering a resolution to “honor” him. Of course, the feckless leadership of the Democratic Party is willing to play along.

When I was in middle school, I was bullied by a kid named Lewis. Usually, I ran or hid from him. But people, including my parents, told me that it would never stop unless I “stood up” to him. So one day, I did. I didn’t run, I didn’t hide, I dug my heels in and prepared to fight. Lewis punched me dead in the mouth. Then, he and his boys took my bicycle and somehow wrapped it around my shoulders. I had to walk all the way home (waddle, really) from school with my bike wrapped around me, and when I got home my dad had to take me to the bike shop to cut it off of me. It was almost a year before my parents could afford to buy me a new bicycle.

I did not “win.” I did not “make it stop.” I did not “earn the respect” of my peers.

What I did learn, however, was that I’m the kind of person who can live with the choices that lead me to getting punched in the mouth. The beatings continued, but I never ran from Lewis again. I’m not about to start now.

• FCC chair Brendan Carr suggested that Jimmy Kimmel should be taken off the air, and Disney President Bob Iger obliged like a little punk. At this point, I’m pretty sure Iger would euthanize Pluto in the middle of the Magic Kingdom if the Trump administration asked him to.
• The Washington Post had the audacity to write a story about all the people who have been fired for saying things about Kirk but didn’t mention Karen Attiah, whom the newspaper fired for saying things about Kirk and the white permissiveness of violence.
• Ezra Klein doubled-down on his whites-only response to the Kirk murder on his podcast this week, during a conversation with (wait for it) Ben Shapiro. Nothing says “I lack courage” quite like defending a white supremacist, and then running to Shapiro to cry about the reaction you’ve received.
• Pam Bondi said the Department of Justice was going to crack down on “hate speech,” and then a lot of the white folks who support the Trump administration through the promulgation of hate speech collectively freaked out, including Trump himself. Evidently, Bondi was not sufficiently clear that she meant “Black speech” to the ears of her MAGA supporters.
• Trump said that he plans to designate “Antifa” as a “terrorist organization.” This made a bunch of white people, like David Axelrod, worry that Trump will use an overly broad definition of “Antifa” to target any left-wing organization he doesn’t like. This is where I point out that Trump has never defined what “DEI” means but has been using the moniker to defund anything associated with Black folks since he retook office. Welcome to the club.

• I don’t think you need me to tell you to read Ta-Nahisi Coates but, he has graced us with a column on Kirk’s murder, and I think you should read it.
• Perry Bacon Jr., formerly of The Washington Post, writes about the Post’s firing Attiah, who was the last Black columnist at the publication.
• Professors who are still on Kirk’s watch list are wondering if that’s going to be taken down now that Kirk is apparently a hero of free speech. I’m being facetious, of course. Nobody thinks the anti-speech movements Kirk started will go away now.

Trump claims he was harmed by the Times coverage of him before the 2024 election. He invents $15 billion in “reputational” damages by estimating that his personal brand is worth $100 billion.

Most of the conversation around Trump’s lawsuit focuses on its abject stupidity, and it certainly is stupid, but there’s been less talk about how the lawsuit itself is illegal. Florida (where Trump filed the suit) and every other state has some version of an Anti-SLAPP statute. The acronym stands for “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation” and it is designed to protect people (and especially the press) from frivolous lawsuits intended to stifle free speech. Florida’s Anti-SLAPP statute prohibits lawsuits brought against “concerned citizens, bloggers, journalists, businesses, and other entities” that are “involved in speaking out on issues of concern to the public.”

The New York Times should countersue Trump under the Anti-SLAPP law. It might not win; anti-SLAPP lawsuits are hard to win, and Florida is run by one of Trump’s henchmen and would-be inheritors of the MAGA throne. But it should still try.

Honestly, what else can Trump do to the Times? Punch them in the mouth?

YouTube is generally a black box in terms of how it pushes content out to users, and even people who rely on YouTube for their livelihood don’t fully understand how the algorithm works. One of my favorite content creators, Josh Strife Hayes, did a thorough investigation based on reports for 86 different YouTube channels, and he believes he’s figured out a likely culprit: ad blockers. His best guess is that an unannounced change to popular ad-block software a couple of months ago caused YouTube to stop counting views from users who accessed the site from a desktop or laptop using ad-block software, while views from phones or tablets still went through.

This may seem like a small thing, but views are basically the incentive structure of the modern Internet. Views are what drive the choices creators make, not just for video game channels like I watch but for political content as well. Whether we’re talking about Charlie Kirk’s show or Tucker Carlson’s or MeidasTouch, views are what tells those people to do more of what they’re doing, or less. Having a major yet unknowable change ripple through the entire YouTube echosphere, right at the moment when there is a major news story concerning the white manosphere, cannot be good.

If Hayes’s insight is correct, it has a particularly skewing effect on what content seems to pop right now, because people who are accessing YouTube through desktops with ad-blockers tend to be older users. I, for instance, generally watch YouTube on my desktop (often in another window while staring at a blank word document waiting for the magic to happen) instead of on my phone. I don’t use an ad-blocker (as a content producer, I believe I should have the same viewing experience as most of my readers, so when people complain “your ad blocks the whole page!” trust me, I hear you, I hate it too, and having that same experience makes me a more effective advocate for “dear God, please let people read my stuff”). But if I were  using a blocker, none of the content I’ve clicked on this past week would “count” for the creators I am supporting through this craziness.

I feel like I keep waiting for the day when the Democratic Party and liberals more generally accept the idea that what’s happening on YouTube is “real” and what’s happening on CNN is Kabuki. We’re losing on YouTube (and TikTok and Twitch), and it’s one of the main reasons we’re losing the whole country.

Every social media platform treats its algorithms and methods for counting and tracking engagement as proprietary trade secrets. That is bullcrap. If I were made philosopher-king for a day, the first thing I would do… well, the first thing I would do is restore the Voting Rights Act and end gerrymandering so people could remove me from power. But the second thing I would do is force companies to release their algorithms and methods for pushing content. The people, including the people making the content, should have a right to know how and why content gets distributed to the wider audience. Parents have a right to know how content gets recommended to their children. I have a right to know why Fortnite streamers keep ending up in my feed even though I haven’t played the game in over two years and regret every single second my friends made me play it.

Sadly, I’m writing this down like a boomer, not putting it in a three-minute video while an AI Cheetara from Thundercats models jiggle physics in Unreal Engine 5. The people who need to see this message never will.

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