BUCKNACKT'S SORDID TAWDRY BLOG
We should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in an attractive & well preserved body, but rather to skid in sideways, chocolate, bier or wein in hand, body thoroughly used up, totally worn out and screaming "WHOO-HOO, WHAT A RIDE!!!!!!"
The morning after it was reported that Rob Reiner and his wife were murdered in their Los Angeles area home, President Trump posted a reaction on Truth Social that appeared to blame Reiner's death on his dislike of President Trump. Trump's post drew criticism from multiple sides of the political aisle. Trump critical of Rob Reiner in Truth Social post. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie are both GOP reps in congress who have criticized the post by President Trump, with some comparing it to the Charlie Kirk social media environment after his murder in September 2025.
The president attributed the killing to “Trump derangement syndrome,” but his disparaging comments drew backlash even from conservative allies who said they were inappropriate.
Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, at the Kennedy Center in Washington in 2023. The Reiners’ 32-year-old son was “booked for murder,” according to the Los Angeles police chief, Jim McDonnell.Credit...Kent Nishimura/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
President Trump seized on the stabbing death of Rob Reiner and his wife to make a baseless attack on the Hollywood director less than a day after reports of his killing, suggesting that Mr. Reiner’s criticism of Mr. Trump may have led to his murder.
The attack on Mr. Reiner, so soon after his death, prompted a rare backlash against the president from some MAGA-aligned Republicans, some of whom urged the president to retract his comments.
Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday that Mr. Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
Asked by reporters later in the day whether he stood by those comments, Mr. Trump was unapologetic: “Well, I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person.” He added, “I thought he was very bad for our country.”
The Reiners’ 32-year-old son has been booked on suspicion of murder, the police said. There was no indication from the authorities that the couple’s political beliefs had anything to do with their deaths. Mr. Reiner was found dead on Sunday alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, at their home in Los Angeles.
Mr. Trump’s attack brought immediate outrage, including from close allies who said the attack undercut Republicans’ calls for civility after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Prominent conservatives called for public shaming, firings and the threat of prosecution for those who spoke ill of Mr. Kirk.
“A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT the appropriate response,” Jenna Ellis, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer who is now a conservative radio host, wrote on social media on Monday. “The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”
Over the years, Mr. Trump has shown little empathy over the deaths of perceived rivals. He criticized Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, after his death and suggested a deceased Democratic lawmaker, John D. Dingell of Michigan, was looking up from hell.
His attack on the Reiners came as many were still in shock over their violent deaths.
Sage Steele, the former ESPN host and Trump ally, responded online, calling the president’s post “so disappointing.” She added: “It’s comments like this that take away from the countless great things @realDonaldTrump does for America.”
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote on social media that “regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.” He added: “I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”
Some other Republican lawmakers also condemned Mr. Trump’s post.
“This statement is wrong,” Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, wrote on social media of Mr. Trump’s post. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, said that this was no time to attack one’s political rivals. “This is a family tragedy, not about politics or political enemies,” she wrote on social media.
The Reiners’ son, Nick Reiner, was arrested on Sunday night and held in a jail in Los Angeles County on $4 million bail, according to county jail records.
Mr. Trump “knows no shame,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, wrote in response to the president’s post.
Rob Reiner (1947-2025)
Making Clear What He Believed In: In films like “A Few Good Men,” Rob Reiner’s ideas of honor and morality were stated as plainly as could be.
Movies and Shows to Stream: Reiner played one of the most memorable sitcom roles of the ’70s before going on to direct a string of enduring movie classics. Here are his career highlights.
Archie Bunker’s Foil: Reiner’s “All in the Family” role didn’t just capture the political arguments of its time. It gave us a preview of our own.
Fighting for Democrats: The Hollywood star was an unusually hands-on activist and donor, whose deep understanding of politics set him apart from other celebrities.
Hollywood Pays Tribute: Stars of Reiner’s movies, as well as celebrities who simply admired his work, have posted heartfelt tributes to the director on social media.
A version of this article appears in print on Dec. 16, 2025, Section A, Page 19 of the New York edition with the headline: President Attributes Killings To Politics, Without Evidence.
The Charlie Kirk murder is that little dot on the map of gun deaths in 2025.
A message of living faith, compassion, and hope from someone who has lived and practiced right wing religion and politics and now lives and practices and teaches Christianity as he and many of us believe Christ taught us to and that we have a responsibility as Christians to do to the best of our ability. While I am horrified by charlie kirk's murder and have prayed for his family and friends as well as the murderer and his family , but having his body flown on Air Force 2, flags at half-mast, having him lie in state, putting a statute of him in the Capitol, and giving him a Presidential Medal of Freedom are all entirely inappropriate. From Sojourners.....
Killing is neither progressive nor conservative; it is simply anti-human.
Sep 11, 2025
The brazen and reprehensible murder of right-wing religious movement leader Charlie Kirk, a co-founder of Turning Point USA and a key supporter of President Donald Trump, is as tragic as it is telling about the sad state of American politics.
The 31-year-old husband and father of two died after being shot while he conducted a popular debate-style event at Utah Valley University, south of Salt Lake City. Kirk had started answering a question about gun violence in America when a single bullet struck him in the neck. Republican and Democratic spokespersons, including Trump, asked for prayers as medical professionals tried to save Kirk's life, but he succumbed to his wounds shortly after the attack.
I never had contact with Charlie Kirk, but I'm only one degree removed from him because many of my former colleagues knew him personally and supported his efforts. For over 30 years, I helped lead an aggressive protest-oriented anti-abortion movement. My fellow organizers and I intended our movement to be wholly nonviolent. Still, over time, individuals started showing up at our demonstrations eager to pick fights with reproductive rights counterdemonstrators. Before long, they were throwing punches at their ideological opponents. Then, the shootings began. During my time in leadership, four physicians were shot and killed by people from our ranks. It was only after those deadly episodes that some of my colleagues and I woke up to the fact that our increasingly harsh rhetoric contributed to dehumanizing reproductive rights advocates, leading others to believe they could inflict injury and death on them. From then on, I did what I could to reduce incendiary language, but the violence continued.
Before I abandoned the conservatism Kirk so effectively promoted, I shared many of the same platforms he exploited, from the massive student assemblies at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Va., to the Christian Broadcasting Network's popular television programming. Like Kirk, I was a young star in the Christian conservative universe, but a generation before him. More than a few people have told me, “Charlie Kirk makes me think of you when you were younger.” Maybe that’s one reason I took his death so hard; I literally bent over in grief. But there are other reasons, too.
Listening to news reports in real time, my pastoral impulses immediately went to the young family Kirk leaves behind. No one with a conscience or a drop of compassion could celebrate the life-altering anguish a young widow will experience as she tries to help her toddler daughter understand why the little one will never see her daddy again. Years from now, she will explain to her son, who was born just last year, why he never knew his father. I prayed for them and I prayed for Charlie’s parents, who, I learned, have lost their only child.
Then came my memories: assassinations, bombings, kidnappings, and airplane hijackings that played out on television as I grew up in the 1960s and ’70s. One of my earliest memories is of my family surrounding the black and white television as news broke that a gunman had killed President John F. Kennedy. Then there's the indelible image of my father weeping after Martin Luther King Jr. was slain in Memphis. These events, not to mention the massive politically motivated violence that was the Vietnam War, hang like a pall over my childhood recollections.
Wherever political violence occurs—including recent examples in Utah, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and anywhere else—it is ugly, and it reverberates through whole societies, shocking consciences, instilling fear, giving rise to pervasive pessimism and hopelessness. It is also counterproductive to the ideals that perpetrators ostensibly feel that their ill-advised, misguided actions defend—or even advance. Instead, studies show that assassinations often undermine democracy and social institutions, decrease political participation, correlate with social conflict, contribute to economic decline, and cause harmful psychological impacts across social strata.
Political commentators as different from each other as Rachel Maddow of MSNBC and Katie Pavlich of Fox News have decried the killing of ideological opponents as "anti-American." The robust public exchange of ideas and the First Amendment guarantee of free speech, including using offensive words, contribute to our country's unique freedoms of thought and expression. They strengthen our public life.
Kirk's opinions about others were regularly cruel, dismissive, and exclusionary. Still, he had a constitutional right to express his views and lead his movement—and those who oppose his contemptuous attitudes have an equal right to call out those harmful attitudes and work to defeat the policies and behaviors they produce. But silencing ideological competitors by frightening, brutalizing, or murdering them is contrary to the very foundation of our constitutional republic.
Of course, for Christians, political violence in all its forms is not only unconstitutional, anti-social, and anti-American, but it is also supremely immoral and sinful. Jesus commanded those who seek to follow him to love their enemies, bless those who curse them, and pray for those who abuse them (Luke 6:27-28). Christ did not permit his followers to harm others for any cause. Bullying, menacing, assaulting, and intentional homicide are violations of at least one of the Ten Commandments—against killing—and contradict Jesus' Two Great Commandments to love God, in whose image every person is made, and our neighbors, who, the parable of the Good Samaritan indicates, include people that are the furthest from us socially, culturally, and religiously.
It doesn't matter what side of the ideological divide commits a politically motivated murder like that of Charlie Kirk's; it is antithetical to everything Christian. It is demoralizing for anyone who champions human rights, democratic freedoms, political diversity, and general decency. It most certainly flies in the face of virtues Jesus enumerated in his Sermon on the Mount: meekness, the desire to do righteously, mercy, purity of heart, and peacemaking.
Today, I see abortion from a very different angle, and I support a woman's right to make her own conscientious decision about her reproductive health. Notwithstanding my significant and consequential differences with my one-time allies, they have a God-given right to speak, organize, and even legislate as their convictions guide them and the Constitution and the courts allow. My task is to meet that challenge by peacefully persuading a majority of constituents that my position is in the best interests of the whole.
Every religious, cultural, social, and political influencer must unequivocally reject, denounce, and condemn the murder of Charlie Kirk and all political violence, whether expressed in word or deed, whether it comes from our own camp or that of the other. At the same time, we must not let the wicked transgressions of a few discourage us from pursuing good for all. As I write this, Charlie Kirk's assailant is unknown, so we don't know their name, or even their gender, and we most certainly don't know the detailed motivation behind their abominable act, but we do know this person’s actions do not reflect a principled political worldview. Such a killing is neither progressive nor conservative; it is simply anti-human.
As people of good intention, we must not give up working together to advance the irenic, congenial, and mutually respectful, yet firm and determined contest of ideas, policy, and practices with a view toward outcomes that benefit the greatest number of people in the most significant number of ways. We must also admonish anyone tempted to exact revenge that we are not to "be overcome with evil, but to overcome evil with good." (Romans 12:21)
Now is the time to rededicate ourselves to the passionate pursuit of nonviolent social justice fueled by a powerful ethic of love and energized by a generous spirituality that celebrates rather than diminishes humanity. Let's build a safe and accepting future for everyone—and let's do it in honor of all the victims of violence, known and unknown, those who make the headlines and those who don't.
Rev. Rob Schenck is a former activist on the Religious Right who now identifies as a progressive evangelical. He holds a Doctor of Ministry from Faith Evangelical Seminary in Tacoma, Wash., and serves on the faculty of the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership, Newton, Mass. He is the author of a memoir, Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope and Love (HarperCollins, 2018).
THIS IS A QUOTE OF RIGHT WING PUNDIT MATT WALSH ON 3SEP25
Deny it they will, but calls for violence, as well as hatred, bigotry, misogyny, right wing social engineering, "christian" sharia, "christian" nationalism and authoritarianism, begins with NOT MY pres drumpf and is repeated by his administration and most of the republican party. charlie kirk was one of the most prolific at repeating this vile rhetoric. That does NOT justify his murder, though it is ironic his opinion that some gun deaths were necessary to keep the 2nd Amendment came back to him in his death. If drumpf / trump-vance and republicans want this violence to stop they need to clean up their language and act. They don't, they won't and sadly it will continue. From the Washington Post.....
Leaders in both parties react to Charlie Kirk’s slaying with fear and foreboding about the country’s direction.
A Minnesota state legislator killed in her home in June. The Pennsylvania governor’s house set afire in April. Candidate Donald Trump facing two apparent assassination attempts during last year’s campaign. And now conservative activist Charlie Kirk gunned down and killed Wednesday during a talk at Utah Valley University, horrifying a live audience and those who saw the shooting online.
America is facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s, which saw the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
“We are going through what I call an era of violent populism,” said Robert Pape, who heads the Chicago Project on Security and Threats at the University of Chicago. “It is a historically high era of assassination, assassination attempts, violent protests, and it is occurring on both the right and the left.”
He added: “This is way beyond the usual minor ebb and flow of militia group violence we have seen for 20 years. This is a different level, a different historical period of political violence, and that is what you see. This is a demonstrable fact.”
Violence has always lurked beneath the surface of a country that has seen four of its 45 presidents assassinated and a fifth, Ronald Reagan, wounded in the attempt. But political leaders of both parties on Wednesday warned that the country is headed to a place of particular darkness if it does not pull back.
“Honestly, the first thing that came to my mind was a sense of ‘Not again! What’s next?’ and asking myself, ‘How do we arrest this cycle of political violence?’” said Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minnesota). “It is a human reaction to just turn away in horror when you see these kinds of things happen, but it’s just relentless. I’m almost speechless with despair at how often it’s happening.”
When Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed over the summer — allegedly by a man who posed as a police officer and also shot another state legislator and his wife — Smith’s name was found on a hit list in the suspect’s car.
The motivation and identity of Kirk’s killer were not clear late Wednesday. But the drumbeat of violence against political figures has been growing louder for years, including the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters on Jan. 6, 2021.
In October 2022, an assailant looking for then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-California) attacked her husband with a hammer in their home. Last December, UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson was fatally shot on a Manhattan sidewalk, allegedly by a man angry about health care policy. Earlier this year, a man was charged with arson attacks on a Tesla showroom and the New Mexico Republican headquarters. In April, an arsonist targeted the home of Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, setting his residence on fire hours after a Passover seder.
That followed other disturbing events. Rep. Steve Scalise (R-Louisiana) was shot and badly wounded at a congressional baseball practice in 2017. Three years later, a group of men sought to kidnap Democratic Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. In both cases, political rage was apparently the motivating factor.
In public comments after Kirk’s shooting Wednesday, a visibly stricken Utah Gov. Spencer Cox bemoaned the state of a country he said had gone badly off course.
“Our nation is broken,” said Cox, a Republican. “We’ve had political assassinations recently in Minnesota. We had an attempted assassination on the governor of Pennsylvania. And we had an attempted assassination on a presidential candidate and former president of the United States, and now current president of the United States. Nothing I say can unite us as a country. Nothing I can say right now can fix what is broken.”
Experts who study political violence agree its frequency and seriousness is increasing significantly, as more Americans believe the system does not work for them and feel frustrated and helpless. A February poll by Bright Line Watch, a group of political scientists tracking democratic norms and institutions, found that while only 2 percent of Democrats and 3 percent of Republicans support violence against opposition party leaders in general, that rises to about 10 percent for opposition party leaders who enact “harmful or exploitative policies.”
The funeral for Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, who were fatally shot at their home in June. (Joshua Lott/The Washington Post)
While a great majority opposed political violence, that still left nearly one in 10 who were willing to tell pollsters they favored it.
“The more support there is for political violence, the more it makes actual political violence more common,” Pape said. “It creates the mantle of legitimacy for individuals who may be volatile or have their own psychosocial reasons to go over the edge.”
It is only by luck, Pape added, that the bullet aimed at Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania, in June 2024 did not take a slightly different trajectory, and that Pelosi was not home when her would-be assailant broke in. Otherwise, he said, the parallels between this era and the assassinations of the 1960s would be even more apparent.
Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, said the country’s political factions increasingly see each other as mortal enemies who threaten the country’s existence, and from there, it is not a big step for mentally unbalanced people to turn to violence. Social media, Dallek added, acts as a sort of accelerant in spreading these toxic ideas.
“We are in the most politically violent moment we’ve been in as a country since the 1960s and the 1970s,” Dallek said. “It does feel like we are in a 1960s-era cycle, and it’s really hard to get out of.”
Other experts warned that more violence may be in store, as acts like Kirk’s killing can lead to a cycle of retribution, in which each side believes that the attacks against it justify a similarly deadly response.
“We are at a very dangerous place in which an act of violence can spur reciprocal acts of violence,” said William Braniff, executive director of the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL) at American University. He added, “Rhetoric that dehumanizes different views or different orientations or different religions creates a permission structure for violence.”
Braniff, a former senior official at the Department of Homeland Security, advocates strategies such as education and “pre-bunking,” or training people preemptively to recognize manipulative or dangerous messages, to reduce the chance that they will turn to radicalism and violence.
“We’ve been in dark places before, darker than now,” he said. “We don’t have to go there.”
A precursor to this era’s violence — and a reminder that it has always been with us to some degree — occurred in February 2011, when then-Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Arizona) was shot and gravely wounded outside a supermarket where she was holding an event for constituents. Giffords has since created an advocacy group against gun violence, and on Wednesday she spoke out against the shooting.
“I’m horrified to hear that Charlie Kirk was shot at an event in Utah,” Giffords posted on social media. “Democratic societies will always have political disagreements, but we must never allow America to become a country that confronts those disagreements with violence.”
David Holt, the Republican mayor of Oklahoma City, said the 1995 bombing of the federal building in his city, which killed 168 people, shows where such violence can lead.
“I feel it’s my obligation as mayor of this city to use that as a reminder. There is no reason for anyone in America to repeat these mistakes,” Holt said. “That was political violence on a much larger scale, but it’s the same kind of motivation, and the same dehumanization and rejection of compromise, that leads to individual assassination. It’s all sort of the same disease.”
Americans, Holt added, too often forget that compromise, and even losing sometimes, is a critical part of democracy.
“We are not getting conditioned enough to understand that we are going to have to compromise, and that is part of the deal,” Holt said. “Violence is the ultimate statement that you no longer have any interest in trying to change somebody’s mind, and we as a society seem to jump to that conclusion all too often.”
Dallek noted that after the Oklahoma City bombing, President Bill Clinton traveled to the city and gave what is often regarded as the best speech of his career, urging the country to come together. It is not clear, Dallek suggested, that today’s leaders are willing or able to make a similar unifying gesture.
“To all my fellow Americans beyond this hall, I say, one thing we owe those who have sacrificed is the duty to purge ourselves of the dark forces which gave rise to this evil,” Clinton said in his speech at the time. “They are forces that threaten our common peace, our freedom, our way of life.”
Trump, in his own comments from the Oval Office after Kirk’s shooting, was more blunt in blaming one side of the political spectrum. “Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said. “Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.”
Smith, the senator from Minnesota, said the angry rhetoric that now characterizes so much political debate has to be toned down, and that is in large part the responsibility of political leaders.
“I try very hard to not use metaphors or rhetoric in my political speech,” she said. “I’m sure I make mistakes, but we all need to try not to use metaphors that cross the line. People in authority have power, and they should be using their power to stem this violence and not to fuel it.”
Cox sounded especially brokenhearted as he spoke of the accumulating bloodshed and asked what America had become. He noted that the Declaration of Independence lists “life” as the first of humanity’s unalienable rights, adding, “Today, a life was taken.”
“We just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be, to ask ourselves, ‘Is this it? Is this what 250 years have wrought on us?’” Cox said. “I pray that that’s not the case.”
Karen Tumulty and Marianne LeVine contributed to this report.
