The Scumbags of the Day today are the legacy media (with some noble exceptions) and especially the New Zealand Herald. Of course, they’re the scumbags of any and every day, but yesterday they absolutely outdid themselves at scraping rock-bottom, as they danced with barely disguised glee on the still-warm body of Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk, who was fatally shot at a US university today, was the eloquent spokesman for a younger generation of Donald Trump’s hard-right Republican movement.
Note the well-poisoning in just that first line: “Donald Trump” and “hard-right”. Not only is that conditioning their readers, from the very lede, to a Pavlovian response of Orange Man? Bad!, but what follows is unconscionable.
“Hard-right”? This is tantamount to calling Kirk a Nazi or a Fascist. Don’t take my word for it: Dictionary.com defines hard-right as “the most extreme political beliefs”. An AI overview tells us that it includes “elements of neo-fascism, neo-Nazism”, “anti-democracy” and “racism and xenophobia”.
That is what the New Zealand Herald, parrotting AFP, chose to smear Kirk with in their very first line.
It got worse.
He backed the US President’s false claims of fraud when he lost the 2020 presidential election and used his heavyweight influence to lash out at migrants and transgender people.
Except the claims of fraud in the 2020 election were not “false”. While it is far from established that electoral fraud ‘stole’ the election, that electoral fraud took place is hard fact – as evidenced by multiple criminal convictions. The same sentence also uses the standard legacy media lie of conflating illegal immigrants with “migrants”.
The only – only – positive thing the Herald had to say about Kirk was this:
In speaking gigs at American universities, he invited students to debate with him in quick-fire exchanges that often went viral online – especially those with progressives opposed to his views […]
When Kirk addressed a university crowd in Nevada last October, some in the audience told AFP he was a breath of fresh air on campuses that the political right complains are dominated by liberal ideology.
“He brings different ideas to the table,” said Eric Hansen, 22. “Ideas that some of us believe in, but are sometimes afraid” to voice.
That was as close as the legacy media could get to admitting the truth about Charlie Kirk: that his whole raison dêtre was respectful debate. Kirk died doing what he has always done: inviting people with opposing views to come forward and engage in debate. Kirk regularly cautioned his audience against booing people down and was always unfailingly polite to his opponents. He didn’t give ground easily, but he was always up for respectful debate.
And for that, he was gunned down in cold blood.
That should have been the focus of any decent journalist’s obituary.
Instead, the Ferald swung right back into smearing the murdered.
He fed listeners an unmediated diet of half-truths and conspiracies, boosting Trump’s “stolen election” claims and riffing on Covid-19 theories that struck a chord with many on the right.
His conspiracy theories sometimes percolated right to the top. For example, in September 2024, Kirk was among the first to share allegations that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio.
Days later Trump repeated the claim – for which there was never any proof – during his televised presidential debate with Democrat Kamala Harris.
That is, quite simply, a bald-faced lie.
There was plenty of proof – which, as the dictionary tells us, is evidence or argument establishing a fact or the truth of a statement – that it was true. There were eyewitness accounts, photos and even police reports.
The only people peddling “half-truths and conspiracies” here are the legacy media who are desperate to traduce the memory of a decent man dedicated to respectful debate rather than violence – and viciously murdered for it.
Not all legacy media were so low.
“I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry” – Charlie Kirk.
Credit where it’s due: the Melbourne Age remembered what decency and respectful disagreement means.
The assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk is a shocking tragedy and an awful, scary reflection of the extreme political violence that now afflicts the United States of America [...]
He put himself out there to be opposed, heckled, pilloried, criticised – but not shot. Not killed. Not assassinated. The man was 31, with a wife and two young children.
And indeed, the very event Kirk was conducting when he was murdered was based on promoting free and open civic discourse.
Unlike AFP and the NZ Herald, the Age refrained from the smears and weasel words. It stuck to describing Kirk, accurately, as a conservative and “prominent MAGA activist”.
But the Age also went to great lengths to undermine Kirk’s commitment to debate, not violence.
“My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” he was quoted as saying.
“This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”
The Age also had strong words for their fellow leftists.
But staying angry is what too many Americans seem to be doing. And in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, there was more evidence of that continuing, with people on social media happily making light of the shooting, cracking jokes or saying he had it coming […]
[I am] not scared for myself, but for the fabric of this country and its many fine people. They really deserve better.
They won’t get it, so long as disgusting left-media vultures smear the innocent slain.
