Charlie Kirk was the founder of Turning Point USA.
Charlie Kirk. Had to say that name and get it out of the way—Charlie got shot down on Monday, September 10th by a guy we still don’t know much about yet–the news about the shooter is being pretty carefully doled out.
Even Wikipedia names Kirk as a right-wing political activist. The guy racked up $12 million this year from investments—his salary as founder of Turning Point USA was $286,000, which he is handing off to his widow, who is now running Turning Point.
In the meantime, the Trump Administration has announced his plans to unleash a rampage against Democrats and others considered Left the minute he gets back from his trip insulting the British monarchy.
Charlie Kirk doesn’t seem nice and wasn’t much in the way of a beacon of hope for immigrants or people of color of any stripe. He supported mass deportations; was a fan of The Great Replacement theory that says Latinos are out to outnumber white people, but he did see the benefit of courting Latino votes.
Love the votes, hate the voter.
“America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years.” Charlie Kirk.
Here’s a Charlie Kirk quote from an excellent report and analysis from Jorge Rodriguez-Jimenez on the website mitu: “America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever,” Kirk said. He added, “I’m sure some of them [immigrants] are ones that I know, but we’ve got to take a step back and say, guys, that you’re no longer a nation. You’re something else. You’re a colony.”
When someone shows you who they are, believe them.
Meanwhile, recognizing here that not all Latinos are immigrants, racism seems to apply across the board in the current immigration practices.
Non-Latino car wash owner and US citizen, Rafie Shouhed, was evidently brown enough for ICE to go after him. Shouhed got slammed to the ground by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (fondly known as ICE) when they raided his business in Van Nuys, in Los Angeles this past week.
The ICE public servants dislocated Shouhed’s elbow and cracked some ribs during a raid at his car wash. Shouhed is 80 years old, with a heart condition, a naturalized citizen but nevertheless got shipped to the Metro Detention Center in downtown Los Angeles, released a few hours later.
He was just showing up to defend his employees, according to an MSN report. “They grabbed one of my guys, and I told them, hold on, some of these people they have papers, they have the documentation here. And the only thing they said was, ‘You don’t F with ICE. We are here,’ and they threw me on the floor … and three of them, they jumped on me and they were sitting on me,” Shouhed said.
The Fourth Amendment Protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
The justice landscape has gotten a bit more disheartening at the Supreme Court, whose conservative majority did a nice take down of the 4th Amendment.
For those who ignored that Constitutional lesson in high school or it got by you or you just plain forgot it, the 4th Amendment protects against unreasonable search and seizure.
Maybe like the unreasonable search and seizure that took down Mr. Shahoud at the Van Nuys carwash—who is, we will repeat, a naturalized citizen.
So, back at the Supreme Court, another step backwards–a decision on September 8th put the brakes on a lower federal court’s temporary order which barred Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents from questioning and detaining people based solely on their ethnicity, language, occupation or presence at a particular location.
The ruling was good news for the Trump Administration, which had filed an emergency appeal against the ruling by U.S. District Judge Maame Ewusi-Mensah Frimpong which prevented agents from making stops based on appearance or language.
Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three Supreme Court votes against the decision allowing ICE agents to detain people based on their ethnicity.
The recent Supreme Court ruling only applies to the Los Angeles and the Central District of California area. That region includes a population of 20 million people, so there’s plenty of potential damage to be done to brown people in that territory.
As reported by NBC news, Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three Supreme Court votes against the decision along with justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Janet Kagen summed up the harm:
“We should not have to live in a country where the Government can seize anyone who looks Latino, speaks Spanish, and appears to work a low-wage job. Rather than stand idly by while our constitutional freedoms are lost, I dissent.”
As we’re trying to buck up this week, it’s worth noting that a federal judge in Washington DC successfully blocked the Trump Administration from deporting some 76 Guatemalan children.
This Administration has been a long time in building its repression—check out Plan 2025, the immigration parts tidily summed up here.
You no doubt know that Jimmy Kimmel got kicked off the air because of his very funny riffing on The President. But not really—of course there was money behind the move.
Kimmel’d show aired on ABC. Nextstar Media Group, based in Irving, TX, operates 28 ABC affiliates.
As Variety reports, Nexstar is currently awaiting FCC approval on a pending deal to acquire another broadcast company, Tenga, for roughly $6.2 billion. Per Variety, “A Nexstar spokesman declined to comment on whether that pending deal played a role in the company’s decision making.”
Ya think?
The Other Network’s Jimmy Fallon had a sadly funny analysis.
Jimmy Kimmel got kicked off the air because of his riffing on The President.
In the meantime, there is resistance in many forms out here. Maybe we are all so shell-shocked it’s still hard to figure out effective push back, but No Kings Day is coming up October 18th—people will show up in the streets across the nation.
You know that slogan: if you see something, say something. So maybe yell it outside.
The American Civil Liberties Union certainly soldiers on—an exhausting march for sure. The summary of their legal efforts here is worth a look, especially the part about mass deportations.
People in the Los Angeles area—and probably in your neighborhood– are organizing networks to buy and distribute groceries to families nervous about stepping out of their homes to shop. CIELO, which has a mission to support indigenous people, packs and delivers food to some 1,200 families.
Irony is a word overused, but guess who does the harvesting and processing of all the food everyone buys? Immigrants, although not specifically those who are now afraid to come out of the house to buy food.
The Los Angeles Times reports other efforts to support raza in urban areas. It’s a good bet that if you googled organizing in your area you could find and support them—here’s a pro-tip on Googling– immigrants ICE grocery delivery was an effective search term, although you’ll no doubt have to brave an Instacart pitch on the top line. Soldier through.
Wish we all had the power to say it out loud to millions, Jimmy Kimmel style. Of course he DID get fired, so there’s that…
We’ll show up where we can.
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Copyright 2025 by Bobbi Murray. Turning Point logo used under the “fair use” proviso of he copyright law. Illegal immigration graphic copyrighted by Barrio Dog Productions Inc. All other photos in this blog are in the public domain.