Tuesday, September 16, 2025
D+315/240/-1224
1920 The "Wall Street bombing" occurred at 12:01 when a horse-drawn wagon exploded on Wall Street, New York, killing 38 and injuring 143
1974 US President Gerald Ford announced conditional amnesty for US Vietnam War deserters
1976 American Episcopal Church approved the ordination of women as priests and bishops
2014 Ellis Kevil was born
2018 US Supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh accused of sexual assault in the 1980s in "The Washington Post"
In bed at 10, up at 5:55. 63°, high 77°, sunny day.
Meds, etc. Morning meds at 8:30 a.m. Again at 2 p.m. after reloading pill boxes. Losing my marbles.
There is a spectre haunting America, the spectre of assassinations, gun violence, and the Right persecuting the Left.
Will Kirk's killing be Trump's Reichstag fire?
Stephen Miller: “We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot this terrorist network. The organized doxing campaign, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaign of vilification, or dehumanization, posting people's addresses, messaging designed to trigger and facilitate the violence in organized cells. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network [of the 'Radical Left'] and make America safe again for the American people.”
DHS, 2025 Homeland Threat Assessment: "Looking into 2025, the threat of violence from US-based violent extremists—including DVEs who are motivated by various ideologies and FTO-inspired homegrown violent extremists (HVEs)—will remain high. The threat will continue to be characterized primarily by lone offenders or small cells motivated to violence by a combination of racial, religious, gender, or anti-government grievances; conspiracy theories; and personalized factors."
Donald Trump, yesterday: "It looks like he was radicalized over the internet and he was radicalized on the Left. He's a Left. A lot of problems with the Left and they get protected and they shouldn't be protected."
J. D. Vance, yesterday: "People on the Left are much likelier to defend and celebrate political violence. The is not a both sides problem. One side has a much bigger problem, and that is the truth that must be told. And while our side certainly has its political crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far Left.
Clay Higgins, (R-La) yesterday, re people who 'belittle Kirk's assassination": “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked out from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’m starting that today.”
Laura Loomer, on X, Sept. 13: "“I have to say, I do want President Trump to be the ‘dictator’ the Left thinks he is, and I want the right to be as devoted to locking up and silencing our violent political enemies as they pretend we are.”
Stephen Miller, on X, Sept 14: "“In recent days we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority — child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees — have been deeply and violently radicalized.”
From "The Kirk Crackdown is Underway" in this morning's NYTimes, by
The most recent study of political violence is the Sept. 11, 2025 report, “Politically Motivated Violence is Rare in the United States, by Alex Nowrasteh, the vice president for economic and social policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute.
“Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 percent of those murdered in attacks on U.S. soil since 1975,” he writes. “Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total.”
Because the 9/11 attacks “obscure other trends and are plausibly distinct,” Nowrasteh recalculated the data excluding the attacks. Doing so “reduces the number of murders to 620 from 3,599.”
The exclusion raises the right-wing share of murders in terrorist attacks ”from 11 percent to 63 percent (391), the left-wing share from about 2 percent to 10 percent (65), and the unknown/other share to 1 percent.”
Terrorism since 2020, Nowrasteh wrote,
paints a slightly different picture. Since Jan. 1, 2020 (total 81), terrorists have murdered 81 people in attacks on U.S. soil. Right-wing terrorists account for over half of those murders 44), Islamists for 21 percent (27), left-wingers for 22 percent (18), and 1 percent had unknown or other motivations.
Nowrasteh did not include the deaths associated with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol for the following reasons:
Ashli Babbitt was an attacker/terrorist. I didn’t include her because I only count those who murder victims. One attacker/terrorist from a drug overdose. He wasn’t a victim. One police officer died of a stroke the day after. The official report was that his death wasn’t a homicide. Four police officers died by suicide afterward. I didn’t count them.
Katarzyna Jasko, a professor of psychology at the Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland and lead author of a 2022 study, “A Comparison of Political Violence by Left-wing, Right-wing, and Islamist Extremists in the United States and the World,” emailed her reply to my questions.
She contended that the claims about left-wing violence by Trump and his allies “are not justifiable.” In recent years, she added, “far-right extremists have been responsible for more cases of political violence than far-left extremists. As our research shows, their attacks are more violent than those by left-wing extremists.” The study found that
Among radicalized individuals in the United States, those adhering to a left-wing ideology were markedly less likely to engage in violent ideologically motivated acts when compared to right-wing individuals. By contrast, we found no such difference between Islamist and right-wing individuals.
The response to the killing of Charlie Kirk, Kleinfeld argued, poses significant risks: “What is most dangerous is when violence starts to get framed as defensive — because that is when more normal people start engaging. The concern with Charlie Kirk’s murder is that it may push the United States over that edge.”
Birthday girl
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