Opinion
By Jeff Childers
9/14/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Saturday! It’s time for the Weekend Edition, which is bigger than normal given the great big basket of news to cover. It’s reckoning day: Erica Kirk vows to carry on in a tearful and heart-rending address to the Nation; more information emerges about the assassin and more progressive perils become clear; a reckoning comes for rabid progressives celebrating Charlie Kirk’s assassination online in the form of firings, visa revocations, and military separations; legal analysis of First Amendment issues; Elon updates famous doodle; high-level Epstein reckoning begins to emerge; Bloomerg exclusive reports vast new tranche of never-seen Epstein emails; and first UK top pol goes down with the Lolita Express.
🌍 WORLD NEWS AND COMMENTARY 🌍
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Without comment, I present Erica Kirk’s address to America. She begins speaking around 16:00.
https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/_nvJq1nN6Wo?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0
Read the video’s comments for encouragement.
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By all appearances, it is a parent’s worst nightmare. The New York Times ran a very carefully worded story this morning headlined, “The Police Found Messages After Kirk’s Killing. What They Mean Is Unclear.” If the Times concludes a shooter’s political affiliation is unclear, what does that suggest?
Charlie Kirk’s assassin surrendered to Utah police at 11pm on Thursday, September 11th.
Earlier that day, Utah father Matt Robinson saw what looked like his son’s picture appear everywhere in the media. He also knew his son had recently raged about hating Charlie Kirk. His blood froze in its veins.
Matt immediately drove two hours to his son’s apartment in a nearby city, and confronted lanky gamer Tyler, 22. “Tyler, is this you? This looks like you,” Matt frantically asked.
Despite initial resistance, Tyler finally confessed.
Matt pleaded with his son to surrender. At first, Tyler insisted he preferred to kill himself rather than be captured. Matt recruited help from a youth pastor from the Washington, Utah family’s local LDS church, who convinced the young man to give himself up, and ultimately accompanied Tyler and his father to a police station in St. George.
In other words, the FBI was not required to hunt Tyler down. His family did the right thing.
🔥 Based on released police reports, the four messages Tyler scratched into his shell casings —messages the Times concluded were politically hard to pin down— are all leftist slogans and antifascist video game references, as follows:
- Fired casing: “Notices Bulges OwO what’s this?” (a transgender/furry culture meme about expressing surprise at erotic arousal while costumed)
- Unfired: “Hey fascist! Catch! ⬆️➡️⬇️⬇️⬇️” (an antifascist slogan and reference to a game controller code that unleashes the “Eagle 500kg bomb” in the video game Helldivers 2; the code itself appears to be a reference to the antifa logo, consistent with antifascist themes from the game)
- Unfired: “Bella ciao, Bella ciao, Bella ciao ciao ciao” (a song of the Italian antifascist resistance)
- Unfired: “If you read this, ur gay, lmao” (a joke about making someone think about an undesired topic, often used in LGBTQ+ online communities)
Tyler was the only member of his family not registered as a Republican. He was registered as “unaffiliated,” consistent with antifa’s disdain for the Democrat party. But we do not yet know for sure.
Reports suggest that the FBI now has Tyler’s online messaging, so, to the extent that there remains any “question” about his political radicalization, it seems likely to be cleared up soon.
We are nearing the end of the hot takes phase, but the fog of misinformation still surrounds us. But one thing appears clear: Tyler Robinson was raised in a conservative home— but was radicalized by the far left in college and/or on Internet gaming forums to hate everything his family stood for.
We’ll know much more soon. And soon, we’ll have a lot more to say about who is radicalizing our children and teaching them how to be assassins.
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As I suggested yesterday, the bigger story continued to be the left’s unhinged, violent celebration of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Late last night, the Washington Post ran a story headlined, “Workers are getting fired, placed on leave over Charlie Kirk posts.” Well yes, “workers”— but mostly they work as teachers. Like hyphenated Assistant Dean of Students at Middle Tennessee University, Laura Sosh-Lightsy:
And that did it. Effective yesterday, Ms. Sosh-Lightsy will no longer be counseling students about how to feel about political violence at Middle Tennessee, or about anything else, really:
All across the country, a vast network of radical domestic terrorists were busily outing themselves, throwing caution to the wind and documenting their reprehensible beliefs on the Internet. Karen North, a journalism professor of digital social media at the University of Southern California, told WaPo, “it’s not surprising that some people blurted out their reactions online impulsively, right when the action happens, almost like a fear of missing out.”
Ms. North inadvertently put her manicured finger on the problem: Impulse control.
Office Depot/Max fired a clerk who refused to make copies of a poster advertising a Charlie Kirk vigil “because it’s propaganda.” No impulse control. Office Depot’s impulse was to fire the clerk:
Government employees’ impulses were likewise uncontrolled. Like (former) FEMA Data Analyst Gavin Sylvia, who could not control his OwO impulse to ratify Kirk’s killing and encourage even more:
Gavin is now on leave. (BFFR is internet slang for “Be for F-ing Real.”) Coincidentally, Gavin’s father is a 3-star Major General working at the Pentagon (Biden awarded his third star). Just saying.
Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau suggested that foreign visitors in the U.S. who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination could have their visas voided:
It does not appear to be an empty threat. Landua responded personally to many of the initial submissions, and when it became a flood, said he was directing consular authorities to monitor the thread:
ABC reported that the State Department is using AI to help locate violations. (I guess that means they asked Grok.)
🔥 Yesterday, the Hill ran a story headlined, “Pentagon ‘tracking’ employees who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination.” War Secretary Hegseth tweeted yesterday, “We are tracking all these very closely — and will address, immediately. Completely unacceptable.” Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell ominously said, “The Department of War has zero tolerance for it.”
Navy Secretary John Phelan warned sailors and marines to control their violent impulses:
The Coast Guard’s official account gave the same warning to Coasties.
Yesterday, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Stephen Miller cited teachers and government workers celebrating the assassination, and then declared “there is a radical domestic terror movement in this country:”
CLIP: Stephen Miller says “we will not live in fear, but you will live in exile” (1:47).
There is a reckoning beginning.
🔥 Over the previous four years, the Biden Administration was generous —you might say “liberal”— in naming or suggesting a steady succession of conservative groups were “domestic terrorists”— a threat that Biden’s DOJ identified as the gravest peril facing our nation since, well, ever.
You remember: It was one damned thing after another. A leaked January 2023 FBI Richmond Field Office memo —sent to over 1,000 FBI personnel— suggested that “radical-traditionalist Catholic ideology” could attract religious violent extremists (RMVEs), which presented the FBI with “mitigation opportunities” for infiltration or monitoring in Catholic churches. People who criticized mask and vaccine mandates were labeled as potential anti-government or anti-authority violent extremists. In October, 2021, Attorney General Merrick “Grandma” Garland opined in an official letter that moms who complained to school boards were potentially radical domestic terrorists. Like these dangerous-looking scofflaws:
And don’t even get me started about how the DOJ treated people who tweeted about January 6th.
Is it finally time to name antifa —along with its allies and funders— as domestic terrorists, too? Or is it past time. You tell me.
🔥 But not according to Democrats and their progressive allies. While top Democrats remained silent, rank-and-file progressives whined about invasions of their First Amendment speech. In other words, they implicitly argued that, even if their words were hateful, they should still enjoy constitutional protection.
That is legally false.
First of all, the Supreme Court has long and repeatedly held that speech intended to incite violence is not protected by the First Amendment. There are boundaries, of course; to be considered “inciteful,” the speech must meet certain conditions and not simply reflect some general sentiment. “Let’s fight back!”, for example, is not inciteful speech.
But that’s not what we’re looking at here, is it?
Second, and maybe more important, employees generally do not enjoy any First Amendment protection, even for their private words posted to social media. Private employers aren’t constrained by the First Amendment. Only the government is.
In early 2021, I consulted with many employees who’d been fired for posting things on social media questioning the legitimacy of the 2020 election. In one case, a woman who’d worked at a commercial real estate broker’s office for 22 years was fired after posting a meme on her private Facebook page amusingly captioned, “Joe and the Hoe.”
I had to sadly inform her that, since she was an “at will” employee, there was nothing that could legally be done about it.
Government employees do have some arguments about speech, since their employer is subject to the First Amendment, and since they enjoy statutory protections for political speech. But as we learned during the pandemic, many courts held that, when it comes to employment issues, government employers should enjoy the same flexibility that private employers do. In its tightest form, the courts’ argument holds that government employees do not, for example, enjoy the right to wear t-shirts with obscene slogans to work, if doing that would get them promptly fired in a private setting.
🔥 Not only that, but Democrats have no problem firing government employees for speech that they don’t like. In 2022, Reuters ran a long, rambling story about Professor David Clements, who was fired by New Mexico University for his videos alleging cheating in the 2020 election and for questioning the vaccines:
And then there’s Colorado election clerk Tina Peters, who was fired and imprisoned for “unauthorized access” crimes, after she provided journalists with evidence of voting irregularities in Dominion voting machines.
Since Democrats cheered the cancellation of election deniers, anti-maskers, and anti-vaxxers, not to mention people who compared covid to the flu, it will be hard for them now to object to the firing of folks who don’t just express unpopular political opinions, but actually cheer for and incite political violence.
And we really need to talk about how many people being fired this week are teachers and university academics. See my comment above, wondering who is radicalizing our children.
🔥 Related: this morning Elon Musk posted a darkly amusing update to Colin Wright’s famous “political spectrum evolution” doodle:
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Though totally eclipsed by Charlie Kirk’s assassination, this week’s news delivered two stories showing the first tender roots of an emerging Epstein Reckoning. It is coming. Two days ago, Bloomberg ran an exclusive story below the headline, “Jeffrey Epstein Email Trove Reveals Ghislaine Maxwell’s Secrets.”
Bloomberg isn’t saying where they got them. But the paper reported it had reviewed “a cache of more than 18,000” emails from a particular Yahoo email account “which haven’t been previously reported.” As you might guess, the emails also apparently included scads of salacious attachments.
One of the most intriguing questions —yet unanswered— is who gave Epstein’s private Yahoo account to Bloomberg? Bloomberg didn’t say. And … what was in the other emails that Bloomberg reported were “obviously deleted?”
The article was packed with scandalous and tantalizing new details. For example, Bloomberg cited a “gift spreadsheet” that includes names and lavish spending on big-ticket things from a $35,000 watch for a “former Bill Clinton aide” and a Lexis for his attorney Alan Dershowitz, down to various items of “lingerie” for teenage girls and a series of “Massage for Dummies” books:
Let’s see the spreadsheet! Anyway, Bloomberg added:
Let see those emails, too!
🔥 Bloomberg says it didn’t find any actual smoking guns. “The emails do not provide complete answers for some of the most persistent questions surrounding his case,” the paper reported, “including how Epstein amassed his fortune, and no evidence that prominent public figures were sexually abusing minors.” I would argue there is some evidence of that, but set that aside for now.
But the emails do “offer new insight into how he leveraged his unaccountable wealth and his powerful social network, from Wall Street to Washington to Westminster, to beat back grave criminal allegations.”
In other words, the emails name politicians who helped Epstein avoid criminal prosecution (although Bloomberg didn’t, not this time).
Apart from the intriguing buffet of new hints and fascinating details, what must be the article’s biggest news was buried two-thirds of the way through the lengthy story. In over 18,000 emails, Bloomberg only found three references to President Trump.
“Except for three minor instances,” Bloomberg said, “the emails do not mention President Donald Trump.” In a 2006 email, Maxwell asked Epstein to review a list (for an unknown purpose) of 51 “politicians, business executives, and Wall Street powerbrokers.” Epstein responded with two words: “remove Trump.” In a 2007 email —a month before Epstein brokered his non-prosecution agreement— Maxwell told Epstein, “you have to assume they went to donald trump, then gossman, the docs in wpb, paschow etc.”
It’s just three emails, but based on those, one can fairly assume Epstein considered Trump to be a dangerous enemy.
The article did name some names, but there were no major new revelations, just more details. For example, in one email, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (D) (deceased), asked Maxwell to use Epstein’s private jet for an upcoming peace mission to Sudan. (He wound up using a different billionaire’s plane.)
The salacious, exclusive story is morbidly fascinating— and that’s perhaps the most interesting point. Prior to this year’s controversy over Trump’s “coverup,” it is hard to imagine that Bloomberg would have invested the resources to review 18,000 Epstein emails and attachments and write an exclusive article for their progressive readers about them.
That was just the week’s first big Epstein story.
🔥 Also two days ago (not coincidentally, as it turns out), the UK Guardian ran a story headlined, “Keir Starmer sacks Peter Mandelson over Jeffrey Epstein ties.” (What we really need to figure out is how a notorious pedophile like Jeffrey Epstein managed to infiltrate layers of governments all over the world, but I digress.)
The short version is that one of the most influential, well-entrenched British deep state overlords’ career is finished. He refused to resign, so Prime Minister Kier Starmer was forced to sack him, which in British English means “fired with extreme prejudice.”
Lord Mandelson was most recently appointed as the UK’s top diplomat to the U.S., and was preparing to meet with President Trump next week in London. But before that, he has advised any number of British Prime Ministers. He has dined with the King and consulted with the Queen, probably many times. He’s known as a “political fixer,” and has held dozens of top appointments in the UK government. Including once —ironically, as it turns out— serving as the country’s top prosecutor (like our Attorney General).
I say it was “ironic” because emails and a newly released photo (above) from Epstein’s “birthday book” show Mandelson was, wait for it, close friends with Jeffrey Epstein. One begins to wonder just how many “close friends” the international man of mystery collected, in between all those massages. Thousands, it seems. Anyway, not only did Mandselson call Epstein “my best pal,” he expressed feelings of “grief” over Epstein’s 2007 conviction, strategically advised him how to get out of it, and kept being best pals anyways.
According to the Guardian, Lord Mandelson’s 2003, handwritten, 10-page birthday note opus gushed:
“Once upon a time, an intelligent, sharp-witted man they call ‘mysterious’ parachuted into my life … you would spend many hours just waiting for him to turn up … And often, no sooner were you used to having him around, you would suddenly be alone again … Leaving you with some ‘interesting’ friends to entertain instead … Or just some dogs to keep you company (he wasn’t always so keen on them) … But then he would parachute back in … Very occasionally, taking you by surprise in some far off places … Or in one of his glorious homes he likes to share with his friends (yum yum) … But wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!”
Get this: The emails that sank Mandelson for good were not part of any government archives. Instead, they came apparently from Epstein’s personal Yahoo account, which was just acquired and vetted by Bloomberg “using established digital investigative journalistic practices.” BBC, yesterday:
In another email, on the day before Epstein reported to jail in 2008, Mandelson advised the mysterious billionaire: “You have to be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can. The whole thing has been years of torture and now you have to show the world how big a person you are, and how strong.” Mandelson lovingly finished, “Your friends stay with you and love you.”
I bet they loved him. Mandelson practically begged to go to Pedo Island:
Epstein responded by offering to pay for Mandelson’s tickets. In another email, not any quid pro quo, perish the thought, Epstein asked Lord Mandelson to seek a pardon for him as to the state charges from Florida’s Governor Charlie Crist, who was visiting the UK at the time. (Crist says he recalls no contact from Mandelson.)
Epstein’s emails to the British fixer mentioned other prominent US politicians, like President Bush and John Bolton.
In an interview with the UK Sun, Mandelson admitted the birthday note and the emails were legit. He warned that there are more coming. “We know they’re going to come out, they’re going to be embarrassing,” he cautioned.
Bloomberg’s original exclusive didn’t mention Mandelson, though a later Bloomberg article after his firing did, in delicious detail. But the paper’s exclusive review, plus the House Committee’s disclosure of the birthday book, just took down one of Britain’s most powerful and protected players.
Think about that. Lord Mandelson’s Epstein connections were no secret. Some earlier emails emerged during the 2023-2024 JP Morgan case. But because —and only because— of the “controversy” over President Trump, Epstein is in the global spotlight.
🔥 This is an even bigger story than it might look. The timing is terrible. Britain is currently in Trump’s geopolitical doghouse. Not only did Christopher Steele, the UK’s former MI-6 (like our CIA) spy, pen the fabulous “pee-pee” fiction that drove the RussiaGate hoax and Trump’s impeachment, but the UK sent teams of hundreds of current and former Labour Party officials to the US during the 2024 election season to help elect Kamala Harris.
In other words, foreign interference. No bueno.
So Prime Minister Starmer appointed Lord Mandelson —the well-connected fixer— to repair the relationship between Trump and the UK. Instead, with Mandelson’s career now having sunk into the icy waters of the North Atlantic because of Epstein, Kier Starmer’s entire Prime Ministership is in jeopardy of being pulled into the vortex. GB News poll, today:
In other words, the new Epstein disclosures could topple the British government, even though the story had been largely ignored until two months ago. What are we to make of all this?
🔥 Lord Mandelson is not any bit player. He’s the head of Britain’s deep state, connected to royalty and legions of foreign dignitaries. Whether by blackmail or by animal lust, Epstein controlled him. Now, just over the last two days, previously unseen emails and a brand new birthday book— generously seasoned with Trump derangement— permanently ended the long-time political fixer.
Who gave Bloomberg those emails?
Is Lord Mandelson’s sudden and unexpected defenestration actually the first tender ripples of a great tsunami of reckoning, whose waves are only now beginning to swell, and beginning on the other side of the Atlantic?
Be hopeful. Be very hopeful.
Have a wonderful weekend! And get back here on Monday morning for more, since there’s a mountain of pent-up news and commentary we need to get to. See you then!
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida
