Bart Bonikowski

Reporters should be talking to Esper, Kelly, etc about what Trump wanted to do to protestors in the first term.

I feel like this photo of masked, armed men pepper spraying a pastor protecting his community is going to be a defining picture of this moment in America for a long, long time.

Opinion | Trump’s ‘Compact’ With Universities Is Just Extortion

"This is extortion, plain and simple.... The only solution is solidarity and collective action against this effort at federal control over higher education."

A sobering analysis of the illegality of the administration's "compact" and its stakes for higher ed. 🎁🔗

www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/o...

History offers many examples of leaders willing to say this sort of thing becoming leaders willing to order unspeakable things.

The Supreme Court Just Rewrote the Constitution to Give Trump Terrifying New Powers The conservative supermajority's lawless shadow docket decision let the president unilaterally cancel $4 billion in foreign aid.

Today’s shameful shadow docket decision from the Supreme Court—allowing Trump to unilaterally cancel $4 billion in aid—is not behavior that any healthy democracy tolerates of its judiciary. It is a sign of constitutional rot that precedes the rule of law’s collapse. slate.com/news-and-pol...

Join IPK on September 29th for a discussion with @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social. She will discuss When the Wolves Came, a new documentary podcast spotlighting evangelical leaders resisting political extremism in their church & country, with Delia Baldassarri & @bartbonikowski.bsky.social.

the biden administration spent nearly four years refusing to take any victory laps. they allowed the right to dominate the storyline and bs filled the vacuum. their biggest accomplishments they added dumb "bipartisan" language to. so the public was left w the impression biden wasnt doing anything.

YouTube video by Jimmy Kimmel Live Jimmy Kimmel is Back!

As I was saying…

Canceling Jimmy Kimmel show is not about Charlie Kirk, just like going after universities was not about antisemitism and occupying DC was not about fighting crime.

Scholars once assumed that countries w state-owned media were most vulnerable to the authoritarian capture of the public sphere. Hungary proved that wrong. By leveraging licensing, private media can be brought to heel—all the more so w high concentration of ownership. Trump has learned from Orban.

A reporter just asked the U.S. president a perfectly legitimate question about his attorney general's vow to prosecute people for constitutionally protected speech.

He responded by threatening to prosecute the reporter.

The threat itself is an abuse of power. It ought to be an impeachable offense.

at the center of the efforts to destroy civil society in russia, hungary, georgia and elsewhere is the stigmatization, harassment, & criminalization of NGOs. that's what this is about, a full-on assault on democratic debate & freedoms.

this is not hyperbole. it's right here.

They wanted to pin Kirk’s death on the left to orchestrate an authoritarian crackdown. Reality didn’t cooperate: shooter was not a leftist. Option 1: move on, wait for another day. Option 2 (from the autocratic playbook): brazenly lie & bend reality to your will. They seem to be choosing the latter.

Very fascist-y.

Trump Just Went on Fox and Issued an Unnerving Threat Against Liberals At a time when right-wing extremists are calling for open season on liberals and the left, the president of the United States just told them: Hey, go for it.

“When certain far-right voices vow retribution in response to Kirk’s murder, they’re seizing on it as a bad-faith pretext to wage open warfare on liberals and leftists who are not guilty of any political violence at all.” @gregsargent.bsky.social absolutely nails it

newrepublic.com/article/2004...

The bullets had “trans markings”!! Oh wait, they didn’t? Well the killer was secretly trans!! Wait, he wasn’t? Well the killer had a trans girlfriend!! I mean roommate! Or he once walked by a trans person on the street!! Or heard “trans” on TV!! Trans!! Trans!! Trans!! (F’ing shameless monsters.)

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy Deserves No Mourning The white Christian nationalist provocateur wasn’t a promoter of civil discourse. He preached hate, bigotry, and division

The Nation pulls NO punches, from @espiers.bsky.social

"There's no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign. Refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”

Well since I can’t use Kirk’s murder to attack my political opponent I guess I’ll move on

The pivot from rage to empathy and sorry is like 50 times too brazen to even be funny, it's just the most crude and evil demonstration possible that none of these people genuinely care about any of this shit

Can we please stop lionizing the dangerous, radical, and morally odious victim (who obviously didn’t deserve this fate), now that the narrative no longer fits the Trumpists’ bad-faith preconceptions? Placing him next to national heroes is appalling. (Disclaimer: political violence is unacceptable.)

It is pretty amazing to see people go from “the left is the enemy of democracy and must be purged” to “who can really know why good kids do bad things?”

headline from The Telegraph featuring a smiling, clean cut photo of the alleged killer The scholarship student with an all-American upbringing accused of killing Charlie Kirk Tyler Robinson, 22, grew up in a middle-class family in Utah, with both parents registered Republicans Connor Stringer Deputy US Editor Connor Stringer Related Topics Utah, Crime 12 September 2025 9:34pm BST

Pivoted so hard they affected the earth's rotation

Political violence is toxic and unacceptable in a liberal democracy. But what is even more toxic and unacceptable in a liberal democracy is the hypocritical and rabid vilification of half of the country—including its most vulnerable groups—by the gun-loving party in power, and the president himself.

‘Radicalized’ Evergreen High School shooter appeared to hold antisemitic, violent views in online accounts Armed with a revolver, the 16-year-old shooter systematically reloaded and fired as he wandered the school, trying to find new targets, police say.

We don't yet have any idea what the ideology of the Kirk shooter was.

But we do know that the Denver school shooter was a far-right white supremacist.

www.denverpost.com/2025/09/11/e...

The ATF hasn't even verified that any markings related to trans people were found on the recovered ammunition and doesn't match other evidence descriptions. Why did WSJ rush to report otherwise?

VIA NYT: “But a senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted. In fast-moving investigations, such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information.”

VIA NYT

The whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s toxic legacy is underway Conservative activist and pundit Charlie Kirk was shot and killed on Wednesday, becoming another victim of America’s epidemic ...

here is the truth the mainstream media doesn't want you to see

The whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s toxic legacy is underway www.dailykos.com/stories/2025...