"This guy is reaching out to his mortal enemy saying, we need to be gentlemen, sit down together and disagree agreeably. And the next day, he's killed."

Says Van Jones about the message Charlie Kirk sent him on September 9th, which he didn't open until the next day, after Kirk had died.

Jones appears broken up about it — on camera, on CNN, interfacing with Anderson Cooper. If it's political theater, it's good political theater. If Van Jones is experiencing a true change of heart, I hope he is one of millions:

JONES: "Everybody knows we were not friends, okay? At all. But you praise the good when it’s time to memorialize somebody and what he did. And I didn’t even know it was good. He was not for censorship. He was not for civil war. He was not for violence. He was for dialogue, open debate and dialogue. Even with me. Even with me."

COOPER: "Would you have gone on his show?"

Terrifying home invasion by the police in the UK.

You might think this is not possible. I hit the Grok icon and asked if this really is what it appears to be and was told yes:

What the HELL have I just watched?!

Two police officers visit a family home to seize a child's phone for *viewing a social media post*.

If she doesn't comply, they threaten to 'escalate'.

This is terrifying.
The police are out of control.pic.twitter.com/Tn83kV8zIn

— Lee Harris (@addicted2newz) September 21, 2025

"This is an outrageous assault on our free speech and ability to educate each other. It’s just bonkers to me that the federal government is imposing these kinds of restraints..."

"... that we’re taking away valuable information from our citizens who visit this park, and that we are trying to dumb everyone down and pretend real weather events don’t happen by not letting you read a simple sign."

Said Rep. Chellie Pingree (D-Maine), quoted in "National parks remove signs about climate, slavery and Japanese detention/The removals come after President Donald Trump issued an executive order in March seeking to remove 'improper partisan ideology' from federal institutions."

You have beautiful places, the best land and rocks and trees and waters of America, and because people want to come see these wonders of nature, you see it as opportunity to interpose human messages — negative, downer messages, propaganda — on eyesore signs. Let visitors think their own thoughts, read their own books, and speak to each other about what they think. That's the better free speech and shared education, not the speech by the government that is installed in the form of inert signs. 

Pingree complains that the new policy is "trying to dumb everyone down and... not letting you read a simple sign." But if I'm here for the landscape and the government has put up a political education sign, it's not letting me not see the government's speech.

Should the widow stand back and know that her place is to quietly mourn and to express no opinions?

I'm reading The Washington Post: "Erika Kirk emerges as vocal public figure, redefining role of political widow/Vocal and stridently determined to advance her husband’s work, she has embraced her public role" (gift link).

In modern times, the number of women who have found themselves in this unenviable and tragic situation in the United States is small. The group is largely limited to the widows of the men slain in the tempestuous mid-1960s. Some biographers who chronicled the lives of those men — Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and John F. and Robert F. Kennedy — are wary of drawing historical comparisons that might by extension elevate Charlie Kirk, who made numerous disparaging remarks about Black people...

Inflammatory characterization casually inserted. 

... to the stature of an iconic civil rights leader or a president. But they see important distinctions between the ways the widows of the ’60s acted in their unwanted roles and the ways Erika Kirk is defining it.

“It’s such a different era and the partisanship is so much more extreme now,” said David Margolick, who wrote a book on the relationship between Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy, and whose journalism is being turned into a documentary about Coretta Scott King and the Kennedy widows flying RFK’s body home after he was killed. “And people are all in their respective political communities and have very little interaction with people on the other side. In [the era of the earlier widows], as partisan as it was — and some people really hated the Kennedys — there was respect for the presidency that crossed party lines. The mourning wasn’t red and blue.”