The Devil’s Advocates

There’s a scene in the classic 1997 horror film “The Devil’s Advocate” where Charlize Theron finds herself in a changing room with the other wives at the high-powered law firm that just hired her husband. A darkness lurks behind all of the luxury and hospitality since the founding partner of the company is actually Satan in the form of Al Pacino. As the women try on couture and sip champagne, they reveal themselves as demon hellspawn when their faces begin to morph and twist into distorted grimaces. 

It’s truly a fantastic movie, and I have thought of the shopping scene many times over the years when attending various Trumpworld parties in Washington and New York. There is, of course, a darkness lurking among the very ‘90s rococo, dated, black tie fetes popular with President Donald Trump and his cronies. It is beyond disturbing to find yourself clinking glasses and sharing hors d’oeuvres with the people who are dropping bombs, disappearing families, persecuting their political enemies, and looting the public coffers on a daily basis. The prevalence of “Mar-a-Lago face” and garish pancake makeup among the women (and men) at these ghastly events only makes the resemblance to Pacino’s demonic hordes hit harder. 

In today’s Washington, these types of hellish scenes seem to be playing out at one of the capital’s most terrifying places: the home of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and his wife, Katie. 

Earlier this month, Vanity Fair published a fascinating look into how Katie is “becoming MAGA DC’s premier hostess” at the couple’s home. The story noted their parties have featured Cabinet secretaries, law enforcement officers, and other White House staffers. Recent bashes included a celebration of the confirmation of ethically challenged Attorney General Todd Blanche and a birthday-slash-farewell party for outgoing White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt before she dipped out through the administration’s revolving door into Fox News. Leavitt’s grand goodbye at the Miller manse featured cookies decorated in icing that spelled out MAGAworld’s aversion to transparency, reading “No More Questions.” 

Katie Miller has refashioned herself as a podcast momfluencer after stints working for Trump’s Department of Homeland Security — which oversees ICE — and for race-obsessed billionaire Elon Musk. She has also seemingly used her party-planning cachet to land guests and distribution for her show despite its middling traffic numbers. The spectacle of all the dealmaking and schmoozing against the backdrop of rampant corruption and cruelty that has defined Trump’s second term is made all the more grotesque since the Millers are two of the most extreme figures in the president’s orbit. 

Stephen Miller has long been known as the mastermind of many of the sickest aspects of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. He is also one of the White House advisers who most frequently and openly engages in borderline white nationalist rhetoric with bromides about the supposed cultural supremacy of native-born Americans. Just this week on X, Miller posted that low school test scores in the Golden State were due to children who were not “California kids.” That type of comment suggesting there is some population inside America that is inferior and un-American is something of a MAGA and Miller specialty. It is almost certainly an attack on minorities and immigrants that’s stated just indirectly enough to offer the thinnest degree of plausible deniability. 

Since stepping into her new role as an influencer, Katie Miller has  gotten far more explicitly racist. Along with dabbling in the debunked New Age conspiracies that have become a staple of the MAHA wing of the Trumpian right (Vanity Fair pointed out the Millers’ parties have featured chefs that cater to the pro-raw milk and anti-seed oil preferences of the RFK Jr. set), Katie has used her platform to espouse blatantly white supremacist “Great Replacement Theory” rhetoric.

“In America, foreign-born women … they’re having 25% of the births in the United States. Foreign born have more children than that of native born,” Miller said in one appearance this week where she railed against the “rape of Europe” and “unfettered migration” both here and abroad. 

“That is what happens when you have this replacement of civilization,” Miller added. “For societies to grow and societies to flourish and for there to be bonds to be between you and I … it has to have this common culture and, unfortunately we’ve lost that.”

The accounts of the festivities at the Millers’ home shows how common and accepted these racist views are  in the upper echelons of the Trump administration. 

To add to the dystopian vibe, Vanity Fair noted the Millers are among the Trump officials who have taken to living on military bases around Washington, D.C. These moves have been made to avoid public anger, protests, and the threats that come along with them. As a result, all of the crudites, Hibachi chefs and pizza trucks being enjoyed at Katie and Stephen’s parties are being shared behind barbed wire. 

In the article about the scene, Vanity Fair noted Trumpworld has operated under a sense of victimization and siege mentality, particularly in the diverse and largely liberal confines of Washington. These are people who see one of their own being turned away at a fancy restaurant as an outrage far worse than inhumane immigration detention camps. 

“It’s hard for anyone in the Trump administration,” Leavitt somehow told the magazine with a straight face. “So why not just create our own parties with our own friends?”

This article exposed the sick world of extremist parties taking place under high security in America’s center of power. Even some of the old elite seem turned off by the scene. Whenever there is a discussion of Washington society, reporters tend to seek out a quote from the quintessential Georgetown doyenne Sally Quinn. In this story, the famed hostess once again espoused the perhaps mythical idea of a bygone bipartisan party scene in the city. 

“When the five o’clock bell rang on the Hill, in the old days, that’s when they’d get out the bottles of bourbon and start drinking together,” Quinn said. 

Even Quinn, whose desire to paint the ancient political class as a bastion of civility has always seemed out of touch, recognizes things have changed now. 

“When Trump got elected the first time, that’s when the whole thing fell apart,” Quinn told Vanity Fair. “That’s when people stopped talking to each other.”

Things are different at the Miller home. It’s spooky season. The people sipping champagne are demons. Their faces are morphing and distorting before our eyes. 

The Rise of Rationalist Media

The day after federal agents raided Ilhan Omar’s D.C. residence, I received an email from the prediction market Polymarket with the subject line: “World War Eleven.” If your brain hasn’t been fizzled by X fumes, “World War Eleven” is a reference to Omar’s misreading of the roman numeral in World War II while promoting the “Neighbors Not Enemies Act.” Naturally, it became a right-wing meme and then, of course, the Trump admin’s nickname for its operation targeting Omar’s immigration status. That Polymarket would use provocative right-wing framing for its daily newsletter was hardly surprising. The previous day, their newsletter’s subject line was: “The Texas Flu” — a reference to the MAGA conspiracy that Texas Senate Candidate James Talarico had been absent from the campaign trail because he was in a mental hospital in Ohio after a nervous breakdown (in fact, he had the flu). The body of the email featured a post from a user named Gaetan Dugas (not even going to attempt to unpack that one) who claims to be a top 1% trader on the prediction market Kalshi and whose tweet jokingly promoted the mental hospital conspiracy. To the extent that Polymarket editorialized the issue, it was to explain that regardless of whether Talarico had the flu or had suffered a mental breakdown, the big news was that a few points had been shaved off his lead in the Texas Senate race.

For months now I have been receiving Polymarket’s newsletter, Polygraph, and the examples above are far from outliers. Likewise, on X, Polymarket has been semi-secretly running accounts like NewsWire which often features headlines designed to excite a right-leaning audience. While it’s tempting to dismiss Polymarket as part of the online right’s milieu of gambling apps, crypto schemes, conspiracy culture, and try-hard transgressive politics, it might not be that simple.

As with gambling and crypto, prediction markets depend on a certain amount of what writer Max Read calls “suckerification,” where young men who hang out in right-wing spaces like X aren’t just the target audience, but the mark. What makes prediction markets, and particularly Polymarket, different from gambling and crypto is that they appear to have an objective beyond merely separating (primarily) young men from their money. As many before me have noted, and Katie Knibbs reported recently in Wired, Polymarket has clear ambitions to expand into a media company. And although they regularly post right-coded headlines to drive engagement to their markets, the push into media isn’t about promoting right-wing ideology, but rather the new ideological bogeyman on the block: rationalism.

By now you’re probably tired of hearing about the rationalists — the Silicon Valley pseudo cult best known for its embrace of polyamory, furry conventions, and believing that AI is a sentient God that may end humanity yet spending billions of dollars to be the first to build it anyway. That much of the recent discourse has focused on their weirdness (an understandable impulse when a group of people keep telling you they are building a doomsday machine) unfortunately misses the more salient point that a large and growing part of the population has already adopted the rationalists’ core concept of making decisions based on probabilities. While few of us are likely to think that software could have a soul or that effective altruism is the best way to deliver live-saving aid, many of us are comfortable making choices probabilistically. This may seem natural, and in some cases, it is. Statistical analysis has obvious social benefits, and plenty of industries and services couldn’t function without it. But we also need to draw a line between acting instinctively or according to internal values and/or judgement and opting to outsource our decisions to applied mathematics. Rationalists want us to keep blurring that line, and that’s where the prediction markets come in. 

It’s not a coincidence that prediction markets align with rationalists’ values. While the rationalists didn’t invent them, they’ve played a central role in building and popularizing modern iterations. Each year, the rationalists hold the Manifest conference at their Lighthaven headquarters in Berkeley, where they discuss the state of prediction markets and debate things like whether sports should have any place in them. Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan has deep ties to the rationalist community and describes the prediction market as a “truth machine” that uses a wisdom-of-the-crowd mentality to overcome personal or media biases (a big no-no among rationalists). He has also cited as inspiration the rationalist-endorsed concept of “futarchy,” in which the government essentially operates on the precepts of prediction markets. But in order for prediction markets to be useful at the scale necessary to run something as big as the government, you need considerable engagement from the populace.  

One way the prediction markets looked to drive engagement was to take a page out of the gambling industry’s capture of sports media and partner with legacy news outlets desperate for new funding to replace the ad revenue gobbled up by the tech industry. This may have worked to mainstream the prediction markets, but the portion of the population most likely to speculate on essentially a new form of gambling has mostly tuned out traditional news media. To reach this demographic, as John Herrman at New York mag explained, prediction markets filled the news and information vacuum created when traditional media left X. Using provocative right-coded headlines to garner attention, Polymarket then pushed the idea that prediction markets were a method of news consumption where you could have “skin in the game.” In practice, this meant that you could bet money on the outcome of a news event like whether the Strait of Hormuz would open by the end of the year. At a deeper level, it appealed to a desire prominent among young, alienated men on the internet not to be a passive observer or non-player character (NPC) in events they mostly engage with by scrolling on their phone. The darkest interpretation is that it teaches people to only care about news that can be understood, and bet on, through probabilities. And while consumers of traditional news media dwindle, adoption of prediction markets is increasing rapidly. 

As with most things coming out of the rationalist community, it’s hard to know how much true belief there is in the promise of prediction markets and how much is motivated by good old-fashioned profit motive. But considering that the primary obsession of the rationalists is aligning AI with human interests, it’s not crazy to think that if the rationalists can’t figure out a way to make the machines think like humans, they might try to get humans to think like the machines instead.

Kacey, 1. Kristi, 0.

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which Trump ambassador was forced to resign this week after a series of damning reports in the Wall Street Journal?
2. How many days did White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia last? a) 5 b) 4 c) 3
3. Which single individual has spent the most money on the 2026 midterms elections, and how much has this person spent?

Answers below

We’re Begging You to Stop Mainstreaming Christopher Rufo

From Haitian immigrants eating people’s pets to the Great Replacement theory, there’s hardly a far-right anti-immigrant talking point that conservative operative Christopher Rufo won’t contemplate. Yet he’s welcomed on New York Times podcasts and given Big Serious Profiles as a conservative thinker — someone whose ideas should be given real consideration. 

TPM’s Chris Mathias doesn’t see it that way. In an appearance on On the Media, Chris said, “I don’t believe that you can do a polite sitdown interview with someone like Rufo without him really advancing his agenda, and I would argue that that agenda is a white nationalist agenda — and that he is someone who deserves, I think, a lot more of our disdain and scorn than he does our respectability.” 

Listen to the full interview below and check out Chris’ recent coverage of Rufo’s fretting over the so-called “Indian question,” i.e. whether Indians can ever really assimilate to American society.

Beware the Witches of TikTok

I guess he’s hoping no one watches the clip. Ty Masterson, president of the Kansas State Senate and Republican nominee for Kansas governor, accused his Democratic opponent of engaging in “witchcraft” in her bid to win the election. “They’re doing witchcraft spells on TikTok so she can win the governorship,” Masterson said of Sen. Cindy Holscher (D) at an event at Praise Chapel Wichita. “It’s like demonic stuff that they’re doing. Just in your face that way.” 

He was apparently referring to a TikTok video in which Holscher’s smiling 21-year-old daughter waves her hands around to a trending audio clip talking about “brujas” while her mom looks on indulgently. The text on the screen reads “Summoning a spell so my mom wins the governorship.” According to Masterson, this is evidence that the race is a “spiritual battle” in which “evil is maturing.” Think he’s onto something.

When Even Trump Thinks You’ve Gone Too Far

It’s hard to stand out as particularly ghoulish in the second Trump administration, but Pete Hegseth is doing his damndest. The defense secretary championed the idea of livestreaming the execution of the Army officer convicted for the 2009 Fort Hood shootings. “People need to understand that there’s serious consequences for these types of things,” Hegseth said in an interview promoting the broadcast of Maj. Nadal Halik Hasan’s execution. The proposal was met with bipartisan disgust, and even vice president JD Vance expressed skepticism. President Trump eventually intervened to cancel Hegseth’s gruesome Pentagon ceremony, saying, “Many very good and well meaning people would rather not watch him die, through streaming, or through any other visual device. He will die, as scheduled, by firing squad, but this event will not be streamed.”

A Hideous Precedent

Donald Trump’s ability to jail millions of people without even a bond hearing depends on what the Supreme Court thinks about one man’s case. TPM alum Matt Shuham returns to explain the Trump admin’s ghoulish mass detention policy, and how it goes beyond even the Japanese internment camps and 19th-century law requiring hard labor from Chinese immigrants found to be in the U.S. illegally.

Caption This…

This category is called No Words, but c’mon…what a rich visual! Weekender readers, send us your best caption ideas.

Trivia answers: 1) Kimberly Guilfoyle, ambassador to Greece 2) a. 5 days 3) Elon Musk, of course. He’s shelled out some $366 million so far.

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 empire. 

For a brief moment this week, New York City’s Times Square played host to a misshapen monument to Charlie Kirk. The statue was part of a half-baked plan to raise a million-dollar sum that was cooked up by Sergio Furnari, an eccentric artist and self-described scientist. The statue’s unveiling was a gaudy display of scams, attention seeking, and hatred that was truly in keeping with Kirk’s real legacy. 

And, when I sought out the spectacle, it was clear the grift and grotesqueries were not confined to the makeshift memorial. 

Thursday marked one year since Kirk was shot while doing the thing that made him famous: Trying to draw college students into the far-right culture war. Kirk was a walking internet comments section who became rich and loud thanks to a dark money war chest. Among other things, Kirk pulled in clicks and dollars by staging live versions of the angry, misinformed, and pithy sparring that has defined our digital discourse. He was arguably shot down by the very forces he riled up: his alleged shooter was an extremist with apparent left-wing leanings who was enraged by Kirk’s trolling and took the fury offline with scrawled references to memes on the bullets. 

Since that moment, President Donald Trump and others on the right have tried to use the awful circumstances of Kirk’s death to turn him into a martyr and talismanic proof their movement, which has taken over national politics for the better part of a decade, is somehow entitled to victimhood. As we have already chronicled in this newsletter, the disingenuous veneration of Kirk has spawned a wave of AI slop souvenirs and songs. It also inspired a purge in which dozens of people who dared to point out that Kirk was a hatemonger who almost certainly encouraged violence were doxxed and fired from their jobs. 

Online, young people have responded to the awkwardly forced (and painfully enforced) efforts to sanctify Kirk by turning him into something else: a meme. They’ve made their own avalanche of AI slop with bizarre caricatures, inserting exaggerated versions of Kirk and his prodigious forehead into other scenarios and celebrity bodies. The phenomenon has been dubbed “Kirkification.”

Sergio Furnari’s sculpture reveal in Times Square was ostensibly a more earnest tribute to the slain right wing activist. It proved no less absurd. 

Furnari calls himself a “master in sculpture and painting.” Based on his website, his signature projects include ornately painted swimming pools. Furnari also has some kind of vision to help Elon Musk get us to Mars based on his supposed expertise as a “scientist of thermal tile surfacing.”

Furnari’s Times Square event was apparently part of a broader effort to bring in cash. According to an online fundraising page, Furnari hopes to raise $1 million to erect a “colossal monument” to Kirk. 

“Sadly none of the politicians/entrepreneurs/supporters have contacted him,” the page says. “Sergio has sold his own apartment to fund this project.”

Faced with these issues, Furnari seems to have downsized. His fundraiser has currently set a more modest $150,000 goal and the statue, that he showed off in Times Square on the anniversary of Kirk’s death is a smaller version of his dream Kirklossus. 

That prototype features Kirk sitting at his debate table as he was in the moments before his death. While the setting is clear, the attempted likeness evokes the warped memes of Kirk’s face more than it does the man himself. As of this writing, the distorted Kirk and its associated fundraiser have only raised $12,950.

At the event, Furnari was joined by Jake Lang, a far right influencer, Jan. 6er and erstwhile Republican candidate with a fondness for giving Sieg Heil salutes who has spent the past couple years staging theatrical demonstrations targeting Muslims and Jews. Based on his own social media, Lang and the band of “crusaders” at Furnari’s Kirk event were in the Big Apple for a Sept. 11 march to “stop Zohran Mamdani from going to Ground Zero.”

Lang provided a vivid example of the types of people who see Kirk as a fellow traveler and icon for their cause. He also showed how much Kirk and the supposedly more respectable, official side of MAGA share an agenda with extremists. The blatantly Islamophobic push to exclude Mamdani from the annual commemoration 9/11 Memorial was also amplified by former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, a close Trump associate, and a slew of MAGA media outlets.

TPM’s invitation to the event was lost in the mail. I tried calling Furnari a few times right after the event as clips were spreading online. It didn’t exactly yield a coherent conversation. First, he told me the statue was in Rockefeller Center, adjacent to Times Square. I rushed there to see the Kirk for myself. Upon arrival, I called Furnari again. He couldn’t tell me where he was but promised to share his location. About a half hour later, he called back and said he didn’t know where he was. 

At that point, I gave up. 

During that fruitless wander through midtown Manhattan, the streets were filled with heinous AI merch. Walking through the Diamond District, I overheard dubious entrepreneurs taping podcasts. As I passed through the center of Times Square, it was clogged with passersby taking pictures of themselves. Vendors hawked more elaborate photo opportunities with vintage cameras and polaroids. Dingy costumed characters including superheroes and at least one Labubu ambled around offering to join the shots for a price. 

Everyone wants to be part of the feed. America’s heroes have been reduced to shoddy renditions of themselves. Our world has been Kirkified. 

Like it or not, now, we are all Charlie Kirk. We carry the flame. And everything is on fire. 

Making the Falklands Great Again

Argentina’s wild-haired “anarcho-capitalist” president, Javier Milei, has in recent months been getting a lot of help from Donald Trump. His effort to conduct a full overhaul of his country’s government and economy — think DOGE, but ongoing for years, not months — has hit some rough patches. His current approval ratings are similar to, but not quite as bad as, Trump’s. Perhaps their experiences of governance have prompted some fellow feelings between the two men, with Trump doing Milei such favors as importing tons of Argentinian beef, pissing off American cattle farmers in the process. 

They’ve also decided to restart the Falklands War. I’m joking — or, rather, they’re joking … but also maybe not.

The Falklands War began in 1982 when Argentina, then under a military dictatorship, invaded the Falklands, an archipelago in the Atlantic 300 miles off the coast of Argentina and 750 miles north of Antarctica. The islands have been a territory of the UK since the mid-1800s. The war ended after 74 days in a humiliating defeat for the Argentines, a key factor in the collapse of its autocratic government and the return of democracy to the country. 

Now, Milei, whose administration has winked and nodded in various ways to last century’s junta, is stirring the pot again. The islands are ”Argentine, by history and by right, there is no debate about it,” he said last week. His government then barred oil companies that operate in the Falklands from also drilling in Argentina, and sued at least one. 

But, oddly, Trump is also getting in on the action — seemingly not because of any true interest in the Falklands dispute and more out of a desire to troll the UK, and liberal governments in Europe more generally. Last week, he complained to a British news outlet that the UK and NATO were “not there to help me” when he declared war on Iran, and suggested he likewise would not help the UK were Argentina to invade. The U.S. then sold Argentina some Black Hawk helicopters. 

The whole thing feels a little bit like a weird joke sustained by the two eccentric right wing leaders, reminiscent of Trump’s Greenland news cycle. But the line between trolling and official policy can be thin in the U.S. in 2026 — a fact the British, perhaps, recognize, as they are taking this all very seriously. Milei’s position “tells us more about domestic politics in Argentina than it does about the Falkland Islands,” the UK’s Secretary of State for Defence said on X. “The Falklands are British because Falkland Islanders choose to be British. Our commitment to the Falklands is absolute and unshakeable.”

The RNC Midterm Convention in One Word

“ruuuuuUUUUUP” — RFK Jr.

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Rep. Chris Pappas (D), who this week won the New Hampshire Senate Democratic Primary, hails from Manchester where his family owns the Puritan Backroom restaurant. Which popular pub food does the Puritan claim to have invented?
2. When he was working as a doctor, Kansas senator Roger Marshall (R), took what action against more than 700 of his patients, leading to 81 arrests?
3. “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” decided to place its interview with this Senate candidate on YouTube instead of airing it during the broadcast — the latest sign of a network muzzling itself in the face of FCC chairman Brendan Carr’s pressure campaign to punish networks that broadcast things Trump doesn’t like.

Answers below

The (Pet) GOAT

When President George W. Bush was first informed of the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he was famously sitting in an elementary classroom in Florida. The president listened and followed along as the children read aloud from “The Pet Goat.” When White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card whispered into Bush’s ear that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center, Bush stared like a deer in headlights and waited a full seven minutes for the children to finish reading before taking action. Whatever he was thinking in those seven minutes, the moment would become an indelible image of his presidency, and his subsequent actions would lead Americans on a disastrous course of war, surveillance and xenophobia. 

Now, 25 years later and having retired from public life to pursue his passion for painting, W. is unveiling a new collection of paintings reflecting on the anniversary of 9/11. In one of the paintings, he depicts that moment in the classroom with Card leaning over him. It’s a faithful enough depiction, but no more a window into what he is thinking in this moment than the original imagery was to what he was thinking in that moment. Maybe W. painting one of his more embarrassing moments is a sign that he is doing some soul searching; perhaps he is contrite, sees the role he played in leading us to this current moment and wishing he could go back and do things differently. However, if we learned anything from his presidency it’s that “There’s an old saying in Tennessee — I know it’s in Texas, probably in Tennessee — that says, ‘Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.'”

The Other Post Warning That AI Will Be Humanity’s Ruin

WNBA Culture Wars and the Overblown Panic About Leftists

Kate Explains Why the Right Is Pretending to Care About Women’s Sports

Kate joined the excellent Cancel Me, Daddy podcast to talk about the intersection of her two main interests: reporting on the far right and obsessing over the WNBA. As a five-year season ticket holder for the Washington Mystics, Kate has been closely tracking the bad-faith anti-Black and anti-trans crusade that right-wing media is waging against the W. 

“I think these ‘culture war’ kind of issues are necessary to keep their base in marching formation with a party that has always primarily sought to enrich the wealthiest Americans,” Kate points out. “You’ve always kind of needed the bigotry to keep these camps together.”

Hunter Wishes Everyone Would Chill About Hasan Piker

Hunter joined MS Now’s The 11th Hour with Ali Velshi to talk about the New Hampshire primaries and how the two parties are faring in the final countdown before the midterm elections. He expressed frustration with the ongoing media obsession over podcaster Hasan Piker’s support for a handful of progressive candidates, pointing out that, “the top donor in the GOP, Elon Musk, is a man who is basically spewing white nationalism every other day on Twitter.”  

25 Years Later

Trivia answers: 1) Chicken tenders 2) Sued for outstanding bills 3) James Talarico

Get Ready for Peak Trump II

It’s all happening. Next week, the hollow moral rot of the Trump II era will be on full display in a string of convergent events: the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the 25th anniversary of 9/11, and the RNC’s first-ever midterms convention in Texas, headlined by President Trump. 

On Sept. 10, the Turning Points USA crew will descend on Utah Valley University’s campus for “Freedom Built to Last,” a memorial event honoring Kirk. Then they’ll embark on their “America: Love It or Leave It” tour of college campuses, in which students will be challenged to “discuss why America remains the greatest country on Earth,” and, if they disagree with this premise, explain why they don’t move elsewhere. In a testament to the thrumming xenophobia undergirding this tour, one of the speakers will be anti-immigrant YouTuber Nick Shirley, whose racist videos about Somali immigrants spurred the deadly ICE crackdown on Minneapolis. 

These themes will carry over to the RNC’s first-of-its-kind midterms convention, too. Vice President JD Vance is slated to give a speech on Wednesday, Sept. 9, while Trump himself will speak on Sept. 10. Anonymous Republicans have grumbled that the “Trump-a-palooza” is perhaps ill-advised at a moment when the president’s approval ratings are underwater. But Trump himself seems to have no qualms about pulling candidates off the campaign trail and forcing House members to shell out $25,000 to attend this event in the final weeks before the election. Some 45 congressional Republicans and candidates told Politico they’re not bothering to show up. The convention is slated to take place in Texas because of the must-win Senate race there, but the location is fitting since the Lone Star State was the launching pad for the GOP’s Islamophobia-centric midterms strategy. The party can’t run on affordability since Trump’s trade war in Canada and bombing war in Iran have driven up prices, so they’ve opted to fall back on classic fearmongering about creeping Sharia. 

Anti-Muslim hysteria has been similarly unavoidable in coverage leading up to the 9/11 anniversary, which will take place next Friday. The New York Post has spent months pumping out stories about 9/11 families supposedly pushing for New York City’s first Muslim mayor, Zohran Mamdani, not to attend the memorial events because of his “anti-American agenda” and association with “terrorist sympathizers.” CBS New York soon joined in. (Popular Information has reported that the number of families cited in the Post and CBS’ coverage is wildly inflated, and that another group of 9/11 families is publicly pushing for Mamdani’s attendance.) These same outlets are also going after Abdul El-Sayed, with CBS publishing a bizarre article claiming that Michigan’s Muslim Democratic Senate nominee is “facing the risk of renewed scrutiny and fresh political attack” in light of the anniversary. (We’re all trying to find the guy doing this scrutinizing and attacking!) At issue are two old tweets in which El-Sayed compares the loss of life on Sept. 11 to that from the pandemic, and laments that more was not done to address the catastrophe of COVID. Meanwhile, Trump opted to skip the Ground Zero memorial that Mamdani is attending because organizers are maintaining their existing policy prohibiting political speeches at these events; instead, he’ll go to the Pentagon service, where he’ll be able to make an address. 

So expect to return from Labor Day to a week-long, flag-draped orgy of casual racism and chest-thumping nationalism, with Trump at the very center.

MAGA Is Mourning Charlie Kirk With Ridiculous AI Slop Merch

Charlie Kirk is gone, but, in the world of MAGA politics and the related field of incredibly tacky merch and souvenirs, he is not forgotten. 

Next Thursday marks the first anniversary of Kirk’s death at the hands of an apparently politically motivated gunman. Ironically, those dark circumstances have played into the disingenuous schtick that Kirk made his life’s work. Kirk presented himself as someone who just cared about free speech and dialogue. His main bit involved showing up at college campuses to “debate” young students and package viral clips. This conceit meant that, in death, Kirk’s far right allies could cast him as an open minded martyr whose efforts to foster dialogue led a killer to silence him. 

All of this obscured Kirk’s role as a purveyor of hate with a massive platform. Kirk’s Turning Point USA focuses on radicalizing young people and deploying massive sums for the MAGA agenda of mass deportation, transphobia, and white rage. Away from his more polished clips, Kirk mainstreamed some of the same ideas espoused by white nationalists, declaring that “America was founded by Anglo-Saxons and based upon Anglo-Saxon laws and traditions.” In one 2023 tweet, Kirk managed to simultaneously defend South Africa’s apartheid regime, the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, and even the internet code for “Heil Hitler.” 

“Multiculturalism is un-American,” Kirk wrote in another screed, adding, “If you don’t assimilate you are disgracing this country and you can kindly leave.”

Another lowlight was this bit of anti-trans paranoia that feels like a bigoted fever dream take on the “Ghost In The Shell” anime franchise.  

“The Trans Agenda is being used to condition people to eventually merge with machine and abandon their humanity,” Kirk wrote. 

Political violence is simply abhorrent. However, the awful facts of his death don’t erase his hateful words. All of which make the post-assassination canonization of Kirk, which will once again take center stage next week, especially ridiculous. That absurdity is particularly apparent when you peruse the aisles of internet retailers and their offerings for Kirk’s MAGA mourners. 

There are multiple t-shirts and other souvenirs casting Kirk as some type of Civil Rights icon. One shop is even selling “FREEDOM” shirts for $33.27 with a portrait of Kirk alongside Martin Luther King, Jr.. It doesn’t seem like a comparison that even the grandiose Kirk would have made. In his life, he referred to King as “disliked” and the leader’s legacy as a “myth” with “flaws” that needed to be exposed. 

Over on TikTok, sellers have made a bizarre blanket featuring likenesses of Kirk and George Floyd, the man whose death inspired the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, as angels looking down from heaven. Here in the real world, Kirk called for the officers who were later convicted of federal civil rights violations for Floyd’s death to be “released immediately.” 

Following his death, due to some mix of his own grossness and pure brainrot irony, Kirk became a Gen Z and Alpha internet meme. It can be difficult to parse some of the weirder pro-Kirk merch available online from the items meant to mock him. For example, there’s this “CHARLIE KNIRCK” shirt that evokes pop star Taylor Swift’s attention-seeking New York Knicks NBA Finals merch. That seems like an item that could appeal to Kirk fans and haters alike. 

For the purposes of this story, we have tried our best to stick to the seemingly earnest pro-Kirk stuff. It’s all pretty weird and much of it seems to have been churned out with AI. 

The worst of the Kirkslop includes another blanket featuring Kirk as an angel clutching American and Israeli flags. Kirk was indeed a staunch advocate for Israel, a position which separated him from the more blatant neo-Nazis who might otherwise have been his fellow travelers. However, in this case, the angel’s face looks more like a stock photo model than Kirk. This coloring book from Etsy that purports to tell the story of Kirk’s life and share the “Positive Reflections and Inspirations of a Great American” also seems to feature generic AI art that looks nothing like Kirk. 

Prayer candles, which were a staple of cringey Trump Resistance activism, are now being lit for Kirk. You can also bake bread with a Kirk-themed mold or fill the cupholders of your car with coasters that seem to replicate the scene of Kirk’s killing. 

One common thread through much of the Kirkslop is word art. There’s so much word art like this mug featuring FBI Director Kash Patel’s over the top remarks. The pro-Kirk word art also includes even more questionable quotes like this t-shirt that falsely attributes a line from the fantasy author George R.R. Martin to Kirk.  

Much of the merch relies on familiar right-wing iconography. One particularly special piece is this hat, which basically combines three types of patriotic MAGA imagery in one hectic package. You have red, white, and blue flames, a gothic script Constitutional “We The People,” and, of course, a hint of Kirk word art. 

Despite his efforts to sow hate and division, Kirk presented himself as a devout Christian. Religious elements are a major Kirkslop theme. While Kirk arguably did little to embrace the teachings of Jesus Christ, there are countless fantasy art pieces that picture him physically embracing the Christian savior, like this commemorative coin. Along with Jesus, it features Kirk alongside a somewhat disembodied fist and set of praying hands on the reverse side. 

Not all of the Kirk memorial merch seems like mass-produced AI slop. Some of it is decidedly homespun, like this crochet pattern designed to help knitters make dolls of Kirk and Christ to sit side by side. The description for that item includes a note that could be read as offering an unintentional commentary on how the supposedly Christian MAGA base may be putting their various cults of personality before religion.

“You will get the patterns for both dolls,” the description says. “The Charlie Kirk doll is slightly larger than the Jesus.”

Amen. 

Party All the Time

How Much of This Week’s News Do You Remember?

1. Which former congressman was permanently banned from prediction market Kalshi over evidence he engaged in insider trading?
2. This Trump Cabinet member vehemently dismissed recent reports that he’s considering a 2028 presidential run.
3. Republican Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-NC) was censured by his House colleagues this week. Describe the conduct that led to this.

Answers below

Why Retire When You Can Boost the GDP?

“If we could just get the average American to feel so healthy, so with it, so vibrant that they want to work just one extra year, that’s worth $1 trillion to our GDP every year.” – Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz

Jan. 6 Never Ends 

Hunter Explains How We’re Still Living in the Shadow of Jan. 6 

Pardoned Capitol rioters are terrorizing anti-ICE protesters. A former federal prosecutor who marched with the crowd on Jan. 6 is now running Trump’s DOJ task force to root out supposed left-wing political violence. Others who attended Jan. 6 are running for Congress. 

As Hunter Walker told Ali Velshi on MS Now’s The 11th Hour, “Something that we’re adamant about at Talking Points Memo is that January 6 never stopped.” Hunter shared more about the roots of the “Stop the Steal” conspiracy and how it’s loomed over every federal election since Trump first emerged on the scene in 2016. “The [Jan 6] conspirators never really left the Hill, and now we’re bringing them back,” he said. 

We Can’t Rename Lake Ontario ‘Cause of…Hamas

Former Republican Congressman Trey Gowdy — best known for leading the House Select Committee on Benghazi and Alan Cumming-esque array of hairstyles — surprised the hosts of Fox News’ The Five last week when he announced that he was on the fence about Trump’s attempt to rename Lake Ontario. Gowdy’s particular concern is not that renaming the lake is pointless, pathetic, demonstrates a complete lack of historical understanding of the names “Ontario” and “America,” and can have no effect other than to inflame an already tense situation, no; Gowdy is worried about Hamas. In a segment titled “Syrup Slap,” he told the hosts of The Five:

Here’s what troubles me. So, it took me 12 years to remember that acronym to learn the great lakes, it’s HOMES, right. Alright, the “O” changes to “A,” that’s close to HAMAS. That’s what bothers me about changing the name from Ontario to America is how close that acronym is to Hamas. It’s going to confuse a lot of kids. That’s why I haven’t made up my mind on it yet.

HOMES → HAMES → HAMAS (?) 🤯. If you’re looking for more delightful wordplay and logic-be-damned plotting, Gowdy has a new novel out titled, “The Sound of Regret” (seriously). 

Markey’s Win Proves You Can’t Run on Generational Change AND Transphobia

Trivia answers: 1) Rep. George Santos (R-NY) 2) Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth 3) Sexually harassed two young women staffers (by reciting them poetry, buying them lavish gifts including personalized handguns, and inviting them to social outings, including an Adam Sandler show).