Lies, Damned Lies, and The Narrative™

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The most popular blog on Substack is run by a tenured history professor at Boston College named Heather Cox Richardson. She has 2.7 million subscribers and reportedly makes millions of dollars a year feeding them a steady stream of credentialed lies. 

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Richardson is one of the people who create The Narrative™ that trickles down through the credentialed classes to Pravda, and it is her task to curate reality for people who want to feel they are informed, enlightened, and on the right side of history. 

Richardson is, by any measure, a star in the midwit world. They throw money at her through subscriptions, feature her on their podcasts, blogs, and on the pages of The New York Times, Richardson is not a midwit herself--she is a propagandist par excellence. 

Heather Cox Richardson, the liberal historian whose wildly popular Substack newsletter earns her millions of dollars a year, told her 2.7 million subscribers that accused Charlie Kirk assassin Tyler Robinson was "not someone on the left" and had instead "embraced the far right." It’s a false claim—contradicted daily by mounting evidence—but one that Richardson, a tenured history professor at Boston College, has yet to correct.

Writing on Sept. 14, four days after Kirk’s murder, Richardson accused "the radical right" of "working to distort the country’s understanding of what happened" to Kirk, who was fatally shot while speaking at Utah Valley University at an event for his conservative activist group Turning Point USA. Richardson took umbrage with Republicans blaming Democrats and leftists for the murder, and pushed the conspiracy theory that Robinson was driven by dark forces even further to the right on the political spectrum than Kirk.

"But in fact, the alleged shooter was not someone on the left," Richardson wrote in her newsletter, which consistently ranks among the top five most read politics newsletters on Substack. "The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, is a young white man from a Republican, gun enthusiast family, who appears to have embraced the far right, disliking Kirk for being insufficiently radical."

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Sound familiar? If you wonder where Jimmy Kimmel, a true midwit, got his talking points, it is likely a filtering down of Richardson's well-credentialed and very well-read pieces. Slap a Ph.D. on an opinion, and the left will swoon. 

Even after all the excruciating details have come out, Richardson is committed to her narrative:

In an interview with the anti-Trump Bulwark podcast, Richardson said "we just don’t know" about Robinson’s motive. Richardson objected to podcast host Jonathan V. Last's statement that the evidence so far suggests Robinson was upset over Kirk's statements on transgender issues.

"But you even can't say that," said Richardson. "Anyone who studies history will tell you that sometimes the things that seem like they fit pretty clear patterns simply don't."

"It certainly looks one way, but it could be somebody he cut off in traffic for all you know," she added.

And she complained that conservatives who criticized her article were acting "in bad faith" and engaging in a "perverted attack on participation of the public sphere."

"Yesterday was a complete nightmare in my life," she said.

In the end, it is all about her, you know. 

I bring this up because the Pravda machine is still very much in overdrive, trying to muddy the message of the past couple of weeks. Since Charlie Kirk's assassination, radical left violence has struck multiple times, and we keep getting fed the "no known motive" claims. A man shoots up a TV station that was filled with people over the Jimmy Kimmel suspension--a lobbyist for a teachers' union who made lots of anti-Kirk and anti-Trump comments on X--and we have been told that there was no known motive. 

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A "Free Palestine" shooter in Vermont? No known motive. 

The New York Times has published two pieces this weekend regarding the Kirk murder that are striking--one in which the author literally suggested that killing Kirk was just like killing a Nazi in the 1930s--and another, which declared that any connection between transgender issues and Kirk's assassination is dangerous slander. 

Liberals don't have the same capacity to create a Narrative™ out of whole cloth now, as with COVID or the Russia Collusion hoax, both because the flow of information is much greater and they are way behind the curve--people began to see a picture before the left could curate what they saw. 

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So their strategy is to tell multiple stories at once, throw a lot of crap against the wall, and some will stick. Midwits will pick either the "both sides" argument or simply swallow the 'MAGA did it" claims that Richardson and Kimmel were selling. Others will buy the claims that Kirk was a bad guy, so while not approving of his murder, they will deprecate its importance. 

Unfortunately, I expect to see more violence like this in the coming weeks and months. The left has been on a roll until the past year, and they are fully committed to their cause. One out of four very liberal people say they believe violence is justified to achieve political goals, and all the energy on the left rests with the far left. 

If the former legislative director of one of the largest teachers' unions is radicalized so much that he shoots up a building full of people over Jimmy Kimmel getting suspended, there are others even more deranged waiting in the wings. 

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When will the fever break? I haven't a clue. I expect it to get worse before it gets better. And the only people who can make it get better are the thought leaders on the left. I suspect that the power brokers in the Democratic Party are worried enough to pressure those who are liable to listen to at least tone down the celebrations when conservatives or other innocents are targeted--PLEASE DON'T PRAISE LUIGI MANGIONE!--but the rage machine they built is not to be stopped cold. 

The left-wing narrative is built on feeling victimized, and if a winning leftist coalition is filled with rage, imagine how they feel when they are losing. 

Still, the New York Times, the historians, the midwit podcasters, and their followers will keep finding ways to blame you and me for the violence of their compatriots. It is all they can do for now. The genie is out of the bottle. The bonfire of rage has been set to the torch. 

Still, there is room for a lot of hope. Charlie's impact is so much larger than we could have expected. Liberals may flock to the Times or Richardson to be comforted that it is all MAGA's fault, but millions of others have seen through the lies and have awakened to the lies. 

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