Good morning. It is September 12th. It's a little bit overcast in New York City. And this is your Indignity Morning Podcast. I'm your host, Tom Scocca, taking a look at the day and the news. 

This morning, the Indignity podcast studio is on a short schedule. So for once, I'm going to say this is going to be a quick one and we're going to keep it a quick one. 

The breaking news of the morning delivered by Donald Trump to the hosts of Fox and Friends is that a suspect in the killing of Charlie Kirk is now in custody. All the reporting everywhere seems to be converging on the news that a 22-year-old from Utah by the name of Tyler Robinson was turned in by his own father with the help of a youth pastor after a two-day manhunt spearheaded by federal law enforcement failed to turn him up by other means. 

On the front of this morning's New York Times, the page runs left to right instead of right to left. The news story at the top is the now out-of-date manhunt story. “Officials mount hunt for killer in Kirk's shooting. Images are released. Vance flies to Utah. Trump will give ally Medal of Freedom.” 

Next to that is a five-column picture of firefighters standing by the site of the reflecting pool at the 9-11 Memorial with the new World Trade Center picturesquely out of focus, rising in the background. 

And below that, still above the fold, is the only pair of headlines you really need. “Fears of Growing Tolerance for Political Violence. Divided nation teeters on a perilous edge” is the one. 

And then on the same level, separated by a one-column news analysis about the Russian drone incursion in Poland, the dateline is Brasilia. And the headline is, “Justices Convict Brazil Ex-Leader. Bolsonaro sentenced to 27 years in coup plot.”

The left-hand story contains vague monitoring. “Even before the assassination of Charlie Kirk, an influential right-wing activist,” three byines worth of Times writers write, “there were signs of a looming political crisis. Rising polarization and the coarsening of public discourse left little room for shared understanding. Acts of violence targeting figures on the left and the right had begun piling up. But the killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus on Wednesday, shortly after he began speaking to a young crowd on a sunny afternoon, raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase. On social media, it was easy to find left-wing posters reveling in Mr. Kirk's death and suggesting he got what he deserved. On the right, initial expressions of grief and shock were overtaken by open calls for political reckoning and vengeance. There were ominous proclamations that the country was on the brink of civil war, or should be.” Both parts of that formulation are either false or nonsensical.

Was it easy to find left-wing posters reveling in Charlie Kirk's death? It's easy to find anything on Twitter. It's got a search box. Were those posts representative of sentiment on the left? Were they even coming from actual left-wing people? You have no idea. The people who scold the online left for a living, like Thomas Chatterton Williams, unambiguously made their moves to condemn the left's reaction before there was a left reaction to even point to.

As for the right, if there was an initial expression of grief and shock that got overtaken later by expressions of rage and promises of retribution, it was so brief I missed seeing it in real time. The leading figures on the right that I saw, including the president of the United States, again, as opposed to the notionally left nobodies who make up the other side of the equation, went straight into apocalyptic grievance and outrage.

Meanwhile, in the other column, “Brazil's Supreme Court on Thursday”, the Times writes, “convicted former president Jair Bolsonaro of overseeing a failed conspiracy to overturn the 2022 Brazilian election in a coup plot that sought to disband courts, empower the military, and assassinate the president-elect.” Let's see, 2022 was three years ago. So apparently, if you really care about a failed candidate trying to overthrow your government, it's possible to carry out their prosecution before they have time to assemble their next bid for election. “Four of the five justices weighing the case voted to convict Mr. Bolsonaro,” the Times writes, “and seven co-conspirators, including his running mate, defense minister, and Navy commander, in a forceful rebuke by one of the very institutions the men sought to overthrow. Mr. Bolsonaro, 70, was sentenced to 27 years and three months in prison, though his lawyers are likely to request house arrest because of his health problems. The conviction,” the Times continues, “is a landmark ruling for Latin America's largest nation. In at least 15 coups and coup attempts with links to the military since Brazil overthrew its monarchy in 1889, Thursday marked the first time the leaders of one of those plots have been convicted.” 

Then, in case any the latent parallels seem too latent, the Trump administration stepped up to make them explicit. “At the same time,” the Times writes, “the ruling will very likely escalate the conflict between Brazil and the United States. President Trump had demanded that Brazil drop the charges against Mr. Bolsonaro, saying that, like him, the former Brazilian president was being politically persecuted for trying to reverse a rigged election.” 

Down at the bottom of the page, there is praise of Charlie Kirk as a cultural and political figure. “College campuses were a conservative firebrands workshop,” is the headline, “a welcoming space for right-leaning men.” 

“Charlie Kirk did not have to attend college or even believe it was worthwhile,” the Times writes, “to attract fervent followings on campuses throughout the country. Widely considered liberal bastions, campuses were Mr. Kirk's primary workspace, and he arrived with a message of conservatism. He found young people navigating a maelstrom of political and cultural forces that sometimes caused extreme turbulence on university grounds. His clear, if occasionally caustic, answers to the country's most vexing problems cut through, particularly for young men coming of age at a time of social isolation, when lives are increasingly lived online.” Then they talked to someone from the event where Kirk was assassinated, saying how important it was that Kirk gave him permission to be anti-trans. And then the Times writes, “Mr. Kirk would arrive at colleges ready for rhetorical combat, willing to engage on the thorniest topics from abortion rights to race. the topic of race.” Ah, that “topic” of race. Right. His opinion on the topic of race was that black people were inherently mentally inferior to white people and only owed their current position in society to organized efforts to disadvantage white people.

The Times writes, “his campus visits regularly provoked impassioned protests from students who disagreed with Mr. Kirk's stances, like his criticism of transgender rights and endorsement of the so-called Great Replacement Theory, which claims that non-white immigrants will displace white Americans.” Yes, that would be the Great Replacement Theory that has inspired multiple massacres. But you know, the important thing is the healthy exchange of opinions. The story does not get into the ways in which Kirk translated his beliefs into action, such as his central role in organizing the Stop the Steal movement and the January 6th coup attempt, which extended to arranging for a busload of people to be brought in to take part in the attack on the Capitol. One way that Charlie Kirk would still be alive today would be if he had spent the week in prison, where some countries put people who try to overthrow the government. 

And in one more quick epitomization of our current situation. Inside the paper on page A7, down at the bottom, the headline is, “U.S. officials push Europeans to buy more gas.” 

“Energy Secretary Chris Wright and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum defended the Trump administration's pivot away from renewable energy in Italy on Wednesday, saying their plans to sharply expand U.S. fossil fuel exports were crucial to peace and prosperity.” And then the story gets into the real meat, describing how Europe has stringent regulations to reduce fossil fuel consumption and then saying, “Mr. Bergman said that such climate ideology had infiltrated Western policymaking and required reversal if Western countries were to compete with adversaries on artificial intelligence, which he cast as a more pressing concern than climate change. ‘What's going to save the planet is winning the AI arms race. We need power to do that and we need it now,’ he said. ‘We need to worry about the humans that are on the planet today. The real existential threat right now is not one degree of climate change.’” 

And that is as nice a summation of the AI moment as you could come up with simultaneously a cynical ploy and an actual psychological coping mechanism by which the people who are destroying the planet have picked out something else to get excited about. Something that just coincidentally will not require them to take any responsibility or to sacrifice their business model. 

That is the news. Thank you for listening. The Indignity Morning Podcast is edited by Joe MacLeod. The theme song is composed and performed by Mack Scocca-Ho. You, the listeners, keep us going through your paid subscriptions to Indignity and your tips. Keep sending those along if you are able. And if nothing unexpected gets in the way, we will talk again on Monday.