Originally published at: Charlie Kirk Takes Manhattan - TPM – Talking Points Memo
[Essay] We Carry the Flame You can hear it in the viral and almost certainly AI generated refrain: “We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.” That bit of digital slop has never proved more true than over the past week when our total Kirkification was on display in the beating heart of the American…
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Charlie didn’t start the fire. It’s been always burning since the world has been turning.
“We are Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame.”
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Charlie Kirk is almost completely forgotten outside of the shrinking MAGA fascist cult.
Soon the few times the name is said the response of almost everyone will be “Charlie who?”
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The Trash Future podcast has an ongoing segment called the Charlie Kirk Memorial Fund for people who were wrongly fired or punished in the feverish aftermath of his death. I don’t know what the grand total is currently, but there are many examples of people getting $10,000+ payouts from their former employers after committing the grave crimes of quoting Kirk’s own words or simply writing that they wouldn’t lose sleep over his absence. The Right tried so hard to make Kirk a martyr, but the reality is the economy of right-wing personalities is utterly cutthroat and none of them is irreplaceable.
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Th Frank Stallone reference made me miss Norm MacDonald.
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Heard this the other day…“The way you die doesn’t excuse the way you lived.” It does to MAGA.
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1 John 5:21: “Little children, keep yourselves from idols.”
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He just stuck his neck out
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Conservatives used to blame video games like Grand Theft Auto for increasing gun violence. Now they complain that it is too woke.
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Saturday’s Heather & Paul:
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While this is what’s happening, it’s not how it started. Right now this has overtones of Czechoslovakia in 1938. And yes, I don’t think Orange 
is smart enough to understand that the ultimate failure would be even quicker.
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Based on his website, [Furnari’s] signature projects include ornately painted swimming pools.
Obviously, this is the “pool guy” they should have hired instead of Atlantic Industrial Coatings.
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They can use the dough for a gallon of diesal and a diaper
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No one will ever see a thin dime, of course. Trump knows his marks are incurably stupid.
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Sort of reminds of me of people being famous for just being famous. What did Kirk build? What problem did he solve instead of create?
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The RNC Midterm Convention in One Word
“ruuuuuUUUUUP” — RFK Jr.
DALLAS — The Republican Party’s “Trump-a-palooza” midterm convention in Texas concluded on Thursday night with the president of the United States playing a meme video about how “God gave us” Donald Trump and then leading the crowd in swearing a loyalty pledge to him, adding that they’d “go to Hell” for violating it. The crowd absolutely gobbled up the cultish Dear Leader performance artistry, and the president basked in the glow of a two-day party he threw for himself to feed his mammoth ego, not to aid his party in the high-stakes 2026 midterm elections.
But by nightfall on Thursday, members of Team Trump started feeling the gnaw of reality, rather than the good vibes that Trump and his party were trying to present to the public. After Trump’s Thursday speech wrapped, several administration officials, Trump advisers, and other longtime associates of the president’s – including some who were in Dallas for the GOP convention – privately relayed to Zeteo their concerns that Trump’s Iran war was further spiraling out of control.
Several of the sources said it was a terrible split-screen to have President Trump throwing a two-day, Trump-worshipping bash for himself in Dallas – where he defended launching his failed war in Iran, and dismissed voters’ complaints about higher gas prices – at the same time that the Iranian government and its allies were mounting a startling new level of attacks and operations in the regional war that Trump recklessly started.
“It looks bad, I am willing to admit it,” a Trump adviser told Zeteo late on Thursday.
One Trump administration official said they viewed recent days’ developments as Iran and the Houthis in Yemen launching a “Tet Offensive” on the world economy – the exact kind of assault that the U.S. government has claimed for months that Iran could no longer pull off – with the goal of causing as much economic pain to the Americans and others as they can muster. And right now, the offensive is working, as Americans already know or will soon find out at the gas pump…
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Things don’t always turn out that way. We’re talking about an already cultish group, whose internal machinations we can’t really glimpse. Personally, I’m expecting Charlie Kirk to be the John the Baptist character. It doesn’t matter how their messiah dies, he’ll have been persecuted and Charlie will have been the precursor and profit.
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