• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    13 hours ago

    In what universe is Charlie Kirk at all comparable to MLK?

    They’re both famous guys who were in the news for things they said.

    Release the rest of the Epstein files.

    Didn’t we get a big data dump that journalists are actively sifting through? FFS, the UK ambassador to the US just got sacked yesterday over the latest news.

    At least take a minute to chew and swallow before you ask for another bite.

        • Catoblepas@piefed.blahaj.zone
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          12 hours ago

          If your understanding of why there are any statues of MLK boils down to “he was a famous guy who said stuff and then got shot,” your history teachers have failed you. And if that’s not your understanding, then it’s a terribly dismissive way to describe one of the greatest social traumas for Americans in the 20th century.

          • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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            11 hours ago

            If your understanding of why there are any statues of MLK boils down to “he was a famous guy who said stuff and then got shot,” your history teachers have failed you.

            If we want to get down to the nut of it, he was an icon of a large and very successful social movement who was cut down in his prime by his political opponents.

            But that does technically also qualify for Kirk. Also, for any number of Confederate General statues we’d thrown up across the nation in the wake of Jim Crow. Statues don’t go to the “Good Guys”, they go to the people whose movements have the wealth and the influence to build them.

            If your history teacher hasn’t conveyed that message, you might need to ask her why we’ve got Andrew Jackson’s face on our money and a pedophile carved into Mt Rushmore. Monuments and statues aren’t handed out objectively. They are propaganda works erected by the wealthy and powerful to venerate historical icons. Very real possibility we end up tearing down the MLK memorial under our current President in order to clear a space for these goons, sycophants, and freaks.

            • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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              10 hours ago

              One was fighting for a better world, one for a worse one.
              One of them deserves a statue, the other one not so much.
              I just hope that those who want to have a statue of that hateful, spiteful, horrible person get what they deserve.

                • zergtoshi@lemmy.world
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                  13 minutes ago

                  That’s right, but not what I was focussing on. I was talking about the people who want statues for people who (morally) don’t deserve them.

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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              10 hours ago

              a pedophile carved into Mt Rushmore.

              Wait, I know trump was SAYING he was going to put his face on…but I never heard news that he DID it!

    • AreaSIX @lemmy.zip
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      10 hours ago

      Mandelson was sacked because of the release of the birthday book by Epstein’s estate, not by the government. The government did a “release” before that, but it looks like just a couple per cent was anything new. When people call for info to be released, they’re probably most likely asking the government that’s supposedly working for the people, not the paedo king’s estate.

      The assumption is perhaps that the estate has zero interest in releasing stuff damaging to themselves, while the government theoretically should be different.

      Theoretically is the operative word here, at least for me. The government is staffed by the paedo king’s associates, and they are never releasing anything. So there’s never going to be anything released worth chewing and swallowing.

      But it is entertaining to watch Trump not be in control of the narrative and squirm

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        9 hours ago

        Mandelson was sacked because of the release of the birthday book by Epstein’s estate, not by the government.

        What? He’s an ambassador. Of course he was sacked by the government.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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      12 hours ago

      We got a Google Drive dump of data after thousands of fbi agents spent months redacting trumps name

        • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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          10 hours ago

          https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2025-08-01/epstein-files-trump-s-name-was-redacted-by-the-fbi

          That included a mountain of material accumulated by the FBI over nearly two decades, including grand jury testimony, prosecutors’ case files, as well as tens of thousands of pages of the bureau’s own investigative files on Epstein. It was a herculean task that involved as many as 1,000 FBI agents and other personnel pulling all-nighters while poring through more than 100,000 documents, according to a July letter from Senator Dick Durbin to Bondi.

          In preparation for potential public release, the documents then went to a unit of FOIA officers who applied redactions in accordance with the nine exemptions. The people familiar with the matter said that Trump’s name, along with other high-profile individuals, was blacked

          And while that one is new

          Instead, Bondi’s big Epstein files party was a bust. It turned out the documents she called declassified, which included pages from Epstein’s infamous “black book,” had been previously released, most recently during the criminal trial of Ghislaine Maxwell four years earlier.

          Their latest release also was almost entirely published info.

    • hopesdead@startrek.website
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      12 hours ago

      There is a big difference between. Most people who aren’t actively engaged in this type of discourse like you and I, or don’t pay meticulous attention to conservative media outlets, likely don’t know who Kirk is, let alone care.

      MLK Jr. got historically important exposure on television with the broadcast of the March on Washington, D.C. This was one of the first civil rights events to be televised. When you have a new medium to disseminate news that for the first time gives you not just the voice but the image of the people involved, I think that has a huge impact. Prior to this, MLK Jr. was a highly respected religious leader.

      Most people today, would probably have to seek out non-governmental sides of political discourse, to even know who Kirk is. I have no doubt your average conservative that watches Fox News has been exposed to Kirk, but they likely won’t recall any talking points. He wasn’t in an elected office. Today, that would probably be the only reason any lay person would listen to them.

      • UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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        11 hours ago

        Most people who aren’t actively engaged in this type of discourse like you and I, or don’t pay meticulous attention to conservative media outlets, likely don’t know who Kirk is, let alone care.

        Kirk’s had his face plastered all over the news, his voice jammed into podcasts and radio shows, and his physical form injected into college campuses for over fifteen years running. You don’t need to be an academic to know who he is, any more than you needed to be a wrestling fan to know Dwayne Johnson or a pop music obsessive to recognize Taylor Swift.

        I have no doubt your average conservative that watches Fox News has been exposed to Kirk

        That’s tens of millions of people. And then you’ve got the average liberal who watches MSNBC or tunes in to Colbert’s Late Night. They can spot him, too. And then - again - anyone on a major college campus over the last fifteen years knows this guy purely because of his reputation as National Debate-Me Bro. The man did the college circuit hundreds of times. He’s been a popular meme for at least a decade. He died running his mouth at a C-list university in Utah, ffs. That’s how prolific the man was.

        I would gamble that more people could recognize Charlie Kirk on sight than any of the last three Vice Presidents.