- How the right sees enemies everywhere;
- How Trump depicts immigrants as monsters;
- Remember what Charlie Kirk said about Simone Biles?
- Brief items;
- NYT’s Ross Douthat tries to explain the conservative principles behind the Kimmel suspension.
Perhaps a synonym for conservative, in the sense of the political attitude, might be cautionary. For the moment.
The New Yorker, Jonathan Blitzer, 20 Sept 2025: Seeing Enemies Everywhere
Subtitle: The government’s working definition of “hate speech” now seems to include anything that offends Donald Trump personally—including late-night comedy.
The right seems to think that criticizing Charlie Kirk’s positions is the equivalent of “celebrating” his death.
Following the tragic death of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the line between eulogy and blame wore swiftly and predictably thin. By Monday afternoon, five days after Kirk’s murder, it was threadbare. If the encouragement of political dissent is a part of Kirk’s legacy, as his supporters have insisted, the actual practice of it isn’t tolerated much at the moment. His podcast continued, on schedule, with a series of guest hosts. One was Vice-President J. D. Vance, who declared that national unity wasn’t possible while people were “celebrating” Kirk’s death. The available evidence suggests that Kirk’s alleged killer, a twenty-two-year-old man from Utah without any clear political affiliation, acted alone. But Vance already had a unified theory of the case, and he brought on Stephen Miller, the White House’s most fervent ideologue, to help him lay it out. The killing, in their telling, was the direct result of a coördinated and well-financed network of leftist organizations that “foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” Vance and Miller spoke as if this were a truism. It is now apparently up to members of the Trump Administration to decide who, in criticizing Kirk’s lifework, might somehow be condoning his death.
With examples. And how the DOJ study that found how most domestic terrorist attacks came from right was removed from the department’s website.
The first nine months of Donald Trump’s second term have been a breakneck exercise in rebranding those disfavored by the White House as enemies of the state. Such enemies can have many faces, and the government has gained increasing latitude in picking them out to serve its agenda.
Followed by more examples.
The legal underpinnings of Trump’s threats have always been dubious, but his bullying, as a tactic of intimidation, is succeeding spectacularly. Trump hates being laughed at, and comedians who once enjoyed the armor of celebrity are finding that their corporate employers would rather sacrifice the First Amendment than risk retaliation. The late-night host Jimmy Kimmel had offered his condolences to Kirk’s family and called the shooting “horrible and monstrous.” But, on Wednesday, ABC suspended him indefinitely for a segment in which he likened Trump’s conspicuously detached response to the murder to how a “four-year-old mourns a goldfish.” Aboard Air Force One the next day, Trump told reporters that TV networks on which he is criticized are “an arm of the Democrat Party” and could have their broadcasting licenses revoked.
I wrote yesterday about “two truths of Trumpism” that included blamelessness — whatever is going wrong with the country, it’s not MAGA’s fault — and how MAGA (and conservatives in general) are “obsessed with contamination and contagion.” This concern with purity makes sense in the context of humanity’s base human nature, evolved over millennia in the primitive environment, as Jonathan Haidt discussed.
The current idea here, that there are enemies around every corner, signals the essential paranoia, again born of extreme caution, that characterizes the conservative mindset. As I’ve noted repeatedly, conservatives think in basic ways, with all issues identified in black and white, right and wrong manners; thus their reaction to anything disruptive of this simplistic mindset must be blamed on someone — some enemy — and not the essential complexity of society, or the universe.
But this attitude is becoming increasingly obsolete, even counter-productive, as humanity fills the globe and faces existential threats.
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And similarly:
RawStory, Alexander Willis, 20 Sept 2025: ‘Get them the hell out of our country!’ Trump threatens immigrants in ‘monsters’ attack
In a fit of rage, President Donald Trump demanded thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in the United States to “get [the] hell out of our country,” accusing the Venezuelan government of sending “monsters” to American shores.
This is the essence of conservative xenophobia — the idea that everyone but white Americans are icky “monsters”. And this aligns with the fear of contamination, and the potential disruption of American norms. (Never mind American history.)
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Let’s recall what Charlie Kirk said about Olympic athlete Simone Biles. From 2021:
Newsweek, 28 Jul 2021 (updated 18 Sept 2025): Charlie Kirk Brands Simone Biles ‘Shame to the Country’ After Olympics Exit
Charlie Kirk has launched a stinging attack on American gymnast Simone Biles after she withdrew from the women’s team final at the Tokyo Olympics.
The conservative activist branded the four-time Olympic gold medalist a “sociopath” and a “shame to the country” after she withdrew from the event, citing mental health issues.
Because conservatives like Kirk have no idea what athletes like Biles go through.
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A few headlines.
NBC News, 20 Sept: ‘No evidence’ found yet of ties between Charlie Kirk’s shooting and left-wing groups, officials say (via)
But you can be sure they’re looking.
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JMG, 20 Sept 2025: Pentagon To Ban Reporters Who Commit Journalism
Only authorized press releases are allowed.
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Politico, 19 Sept 2025: Trump: ‘It’s no longer free speech.’, subtitled “The president doubled down on his claims that critical media coverage of him is ‘illegal.'”
Of course it’s not illegal. It’s the essence of the free press.
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One more deep piece. NYT actually does have conservative commentators.
NY Times, opinion by Ross Douthat, 20 Sept 2025: The Conservative Principle Behind the Kimmel Suspension
Conservatives in particular seem given to intellectual arguments, often abstruse, to justify their cautionary/reactionary principles. (While the rest of the world moves on.)
So I’m trying to find the essence of his argument.
The argument starts with the assumption that America’s leading cultural institutions — broadcast networks, movie studios, major universities — are private enterprises but also a kind of public trust, with civic as well as commercial obligations. (On this point, at least, many liberals would agree.)
It’s possible to be a good, civic-minded steward without being perfectly politically neutral. Most cultural institutions have been staffed primarily by liberals since time immemorial (or at least since the 1960s), and while this has always been a source of conservative complaint, it’s something the right learned to live and work with — and even profit from, through the talk radio and Fox News alternatives.
Well, but this is because society always moves “forward.” Then this:
This, then, is the arguable civic purpose of the Trump administration’s culture war. Sometimes it takes a systematic form, like the efforts to induce universities to change the way they admit and hire and handle speech issues. Sometimes it seizes on targets of opportunity, like a late night host bizarrely and offensively attacking “the MAGA gang” for correctly recognizing that the man who assassinated a conservative icon was probably left-wing. But in each case the purpose is to give cultural institutions a reason or an excuse to row back toward the great American middle.
I think this perspective has merit, but it also has a crucial problem: The president of the United States does not share it. Or rather, he would happily go beyond it, toward a world where most cultural institutions are simply subservient to his personal interests, his reputation, his amour-propre. Where journalists are guilty of “hate speech” if they’re mean to him. Where this newspaper has to pay him big, big reparations for underrating his celebrity and genius. Where the culture war is a way to empower and enrich his friends.
I can’t find the clear idea here about what should be done. I’ll revisit it tomorrow.
