When Lauren Vaughn, a kindergarten assistant in South Carolina, saw reports that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah, she opened Facebook and typed out a quote from Kirk himself.

Gun deaths, Kirk said in 2023, were unfortunate but “worth it” if they preserved “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given Rights.” Following the quote, Vaughn added: “Thoughts and prayers.”

Vaughn, a 37-year-old Christian who has taken missionary trips to Guatemala, said her call for prayer was sincere. She said she hoped reading Kirk’s words in the context of the shooting might prompt her friends to rethink their opposition to gun control.

#CsncelCulture #CancelCultureCK #CharlieKirkShooting #LaurenVaughn
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB

Word of the day vocabulary expansion 😲
> Joyce Carol Oates: "No matter if you are ecstatic about the new NYC mayor or plunged into despair, one thing is crucial: Mamdani overcame establishment politicians & emerged unscathed from an unusually feculent sewer of rightwing propaganda of the kind that has overwhelmed many candidates for public office (like K. Harris). if he did it, others can hope to as well."

"Feculent sewer"!
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB

Things of Life
For Life to Be
With
Things of Life
Live On.
命あるものはいのちあるために命あるものと生きていく。-　鹿児島オーガニックフェスタ
> I could never get along with greed. A mafioso is a human being who embodies the best of capitalism: greed, and I am the opposite, a lover of life and therefore a millennial warrior for life. Greed flees from us, because life is more powerful.
#GustavoPetro
> Gustavo Petro's response to Trump's invective against "Columbia" and vow to cut remaining US aid to the country...
/HT #JeffreyStClair

> + More signs the South finally won the Civil War: Troops from the slave state of Texas are now being sent to occupy Abe Lincoln’s Illinois. It’s Reconstruction in reverse.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/10/10/roaming-charges-121/
#uspol #USCivilWar #JeffreyStClair #ReconstructionInReverse destruction?

Poetry not as safe as you'd think... We could get Yeats: "a sterner conscience and a friendlier home" ^1

Seamus Heaney: “A populace that is chloroformed day and night by TV stations like Fox News could do with inoculation by poetry. Obviously, poetry can't be administered like an injection, but it does constitute a boost to the capacity for discrimination and resistance.”
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/9927294-a-populace-that-is-chloroformed-day-and-night-by-tv
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB #SeamusHeaney #Yeats #SternerConscience #PoetryVsTV #PoetryVsFoxNews
^1
https://sacred-texts.com/neu/yeats/lpy/lpy111.htm

> + On the night John Lennon was gunned down, Howard Cosell was ridiculed for briefly interrupting a Monday Night Football game of little consequence to break the news of his murder outside the Dakota. Yesterday, all but four NFL games held a moment of silence for rightwing podcaster Charlie Kirk and the four teams that didn’t are now under fire for not doing so…
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/09/15/an-occurence-in-orem-on-the-murder-of-charlie-kirk/
#JeffreyStClair #JohnLennon v. #CharlieKirkShooting #uspol #USFootballPol

Headline, "Trump ally Laura Loomer ridiculed for swinging from Charlie Kirk attacks to leading backlash against detractors"
> ... replies to her plea for the president to pursue US liberals in Kirk’s name were inundated with screenshots of a lengthy post from 13 July in which she criticized the slain 31-year-old as a “charlatan” and “political opportunist” who engaged in “mental gymnastics” and “stabs Trump in the back”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/12/laura-loomer-charlie-kirk
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB post comment on FB
#LauraLoomer #CharlieKirkShooting #LoonyLauraLoomer

"He's a martyr" --- Peter Gabriel
"... born to die by the gun... " --- Ry Cooder

I can see humorless rightwingers made livid...

> Charlie Kirk (2023): "I think it's worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can have the 2nd Amendment. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a completely alternate universe."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m6luqWM8qgc

/HT #JeffreyStClair FB feed
#CharlieKirkOnGuns #BornToDieByTheGung

With friends like these who needs war criminals ?
"You got gangsters in power and lawbreakers making the rules" --- Bob Dylan Wake Up

In 2019, Trump impulsively ordered Navy SEAL Team Six on a covert raid into North Korea to a listening device. Before landing, the SEAL team believed that a nearby boat had spotted them, so, naturally, they killed everyone onboard. Then they sank the boat and used knives to puncture the lungs of the Koreans' bodies so they would sink as well. Then the SEALS aborted the mission. The crew of the boat were civilians who'd been diving for shellfish. There were no weapons on board the fishing boat. Leading members of Congress were told about this entire botched affair and said nothing for four years...

Members of Congress who've known about this since 2021 but never told the public:
- Chuck Schumer
- Nancy Pelosi
- Adam Schiff
- Mark Warner
- Kevin McCarthy
- Mitch McConnell
- Devin Nunes
– Marco Rubio

thedailybeast.com/donald-trump…

nytimes.com/2025/09/05/us/navy…

/HT #JeffreyStClair FB #USAWarCriminals
#NotAtWarMurderCriminals

Fruitcaketocracy: the New American Experiment Supporters must see him as a grandmother 👵 off her rocker mumbling nonsense. I mean, you don't let anyone mess with her, that I understand, but you hand her the nuclear football either. Ya know?

Just absolute madness from beginning to end. Trump: “Newsom didn't allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. You know they have tremendous amounts of water in California, which most people don’t know. They send the water out into the Pacific Ocean. So I demanded that to be open. If that were open during the fire, you wouldn't have had the fire because all the sprinklers would've worked in the houses. They had no water. They had no water in the fire hydrants. They wouldn’t have had the fires. They would have been put out after one house, two houses. But he stopped the water from coming in. And I had to send in the military to have that water opened, after the fires. And now that water, but he should have more, because they still restrict it. There’s something wrong with these people. There’s something really wrong.” There’s something really wrong with Trump’s brain…

facebook.com/share/1C91BBFL2h/
#JeffreyStClair #FruitCakeTocracy #TrumpsBrain #TrumpsMadness #CaliforniaWater

Maybe the neckties cut off the blood flow to the brain just enough to make things awful not enough to make things calmer.
> "I’m about to launch America’s first-ever AI threat detection platform built for law enforcement. It scrapes the internet 24/7 using Israeli-grade ontology... routes it to local law enforcement... a 24/7 detective that never sleeps and it’s going to get us ahead of these attacks.”
Of course, the "Israeli-grade ontology" might also call in a drone strike on your own kid…
#JeffreyStClair FB
IB/ Inspired By
https://www.facebook.com/share/1JC54HL5Vw/

Armed Thug State Crime
> "No justification for these atrocities is offered and none is demanded by Israel’s arms suppliers. Instead, the victims are insulted as the authors of their own misery. To be killed, starved, or maimed, your wounds left to rot from lack of antibiotics, is proof of your guilt. It’s genocide as spectacle, a spectacle the world watches and acquiesces to with passive horror"
https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/08/16/evil-under-the-sun/
#Israel #GazaGenocide #UsPol
#JeffreyStClair

"Psychos writing the news..."
should be a line in Bob Dylan's
_When you gonna wake up_ ....

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/17/opinion/interesting-times-allie-beth-stuckey.html

#ToxicEmpathy #AlliBethStuckey
#PsychoNews
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB

_Neither Victims nor Torturers/Executioners_ --- Albert Camus

Monger Miller should be put in a nice little sandbox not policy positions..

> ... I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely We’re not a barbaric people. We respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is the celebration of life and human dignity. Ha, ha...
> ..from a video.. by Breakthrough News
https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/1945531629037850656
#JeffreyStClair #StephenMiller #HateMonger #uspol #NeitherVictimsNorExecutioners #Camus
https://www.facebook.com/612626517/posts/10163997680746518/?rdid=ayE05SHd91SScrRU&share_url=https://www.facebook.com/share/1B1eZbrQYh/

Neither Victims nor Torturers/Executioners --- Albert Camus

Hateful Monger Miller should be put in a nice little sandbox not put into policy positions..

... I don’t think it’s necessary to kill them entirely We’re not a barbaric people. We respect life. Therefore torture is the way to go. Because tortured people can live. Torture is the celebration of life and human dignity. Ha, ha...

It's from a video that was posted on social media yesterday by Breakthrough News
https://x.com/BTnewsroom/status/1945531629037850656

#JeffreyStClair on #StephenMiller #HateMonger #NeitherVictimsNorExecutioners #AlbertCamus
facebook.com/share/1B1eZbrQYh/

> On June 1, 32 Palestinians were killed and more than 250 wounded near the Rafah aid station, in what became known as the “Witkoff Massacre,” after Trump’s Mideast envoy Steve Witkoff.
> On June 3, at least 27 Palestinians were killed and 184 were injured by an Israeli airstrike on the road leading to the Rafah distribution center.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/07/04/when-the-helping-hand-holds-a-machine/
#JeffreyStClair on #WitcoffMassacre #SteveWitcoff #TrumpIsrael #uspol #Israel #Palestine #GazaGenocide

> He was born to an active-duty member of the U.S. Army stationed on a U.S. base in Frankfurt, Germany, in 1986. Court documents from 2015 state that "Thomas's father first entered the United States in September 1977, enlisted in the United States Army in 1979, and became a United States citizen in May 1984." Thomas' mother, who was married to his father at the time of birth, was a citizen of Kenya.

https://www.newsweek.com/man-born-army-base-us-soldier-deported-jamaica-2092017

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/us-soldier-son-deported-to-jamaica/

https://web.archive.org/web/20250630130735/https://www.austinchronicle.com/daily/news/2025-06-04/texas-man-born-to-u-s-soldier-on-u-s-army-base-abroad-deported/

#JermaineThomas #uspol #USAImmigration
/HT #JeffreyStClair FB

> + Having “complete control of the air” meant nothing in Afghanistan or Iraq. It will mean even less in Iran.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/06/20/roaming-charges-neo-conned-again/

#JeffreyStClair #AirWar #WarOnIran #AirPower #USAF

> + Mohammad Safa: “Netanyahu said that an Iranian nuclear strike on Israel would be like ‘80,000 tons of TNT falling on a country the size of New Jersey (22,610 km2).’ Yet, Israel has dropped ~80,000 tons of explosives on Gaza (365 km2) – the equivalent of 8 nukes on 1.6% of the size of New Jersey.”

#JeffreyStClair with "MohammadSafa (?) with relevant comparisons

> ... to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there's no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

> An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.

- poetryfoundation.org/poetrymag…

#JeffreyStClair's FB post on #TerryMoran's honest depiction of #StephenMiller as hate-motivated kept these parts of the poem #PrayerForMyDaughter by #WBYeats in mind.

A quick search got me to some background without the need to sift through FB..
- axios.com/2025/06/08/abc-terry…
- https://x.com/brianstelter/status/1931728449497858066/photo/1