The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Sunday, October 19, 2025

Readings: Le Monde, the French daily, on Oct. 12 ran an extensive piece on the Charlie Kirk effect across Europe. Note the directness: “On Wednesday, September 10, Europe learned of the death of an unknown man. That day, at 12:23 Mountain Time, 8:23 PM in Brussels, a 31-year-old man was shot in the throat by one of the approximately 400 million firearms in circulation in the United States, whose free possession and use he had so often defended. … Charlie Kirk was one of the most strategic propagandists of the American counterrevolution. A debate organizer and podcast host with a smooth face and affable manner, Kirk targeted young people. Radical, openly racist and sexist, he had managed over the course of his career to rally powerful Christian nationalist donors, soon gaining the trust of Donald Trump. His assassination would provide the American president and the new power in Washington with the “martyr” he needed. In death, Kirk helped divide America in two: the followers of “Charlie” on one side, and his enemies on the other. To these, the enemies of truth, the homeland, and God, at the religious and political ceremony organized in Arizona to honor him on September 21, the White House’s chief ideologue, Stephen Miller, would declare: “You are nothing!” […] But on the night of September 10-11, less than five hours after the murder, an email arrived in the inboxes of the President of the European Parliament, the 719 other MEPs, and their assistants. The subject: “Minute of silence in plenary session – Assassination of Charlie Kirk .” The sender: Charlie Weimers, Swedish MEP for the Sweden Democrats (SD), a party with fascist roots. In his message, the elected representative, who calls for a tribute to the young man, denounces political violence that is becoming “systemic .” […] The following day, the minute’s silence was not observed. European Parliament President Roberta Metsola did not consider the request procedurally admissible. While Charlie Weimers was able to speak, he was interrupted when he used the opportunity to impose his tribute. This was followed by outraged statements from the far right about the supposed hatred towards her, most of its representatives having never heard of Kirk the day before. SD MEP Charlie Weimers called the Parliament’s presidency’s refusal “hypocritical ,” drawing a bold parallel with the 2020 tribute paid in the hemicycle to George Floyd, an African-American victim of police violence.” In a perverse way, it’s reassuring to know that American zealotry is not so American after all, though it remains the shitting upon a hill that Europe’s far right, and presumably the rest of the world’s far right, is collecting at bottom and redistributing. 

—P.T.

Returning home, I passed a house where they were dancing, and seeing people coming and going, I wanted to see what it was. It was a musical. A dark orgy in a place that was a true cesspool of vice, shame of the most disgusting debauchery. The very sound of two or three instruments that formed the orchestra plunged the soul into sadness. A room stinking of the bad tobacco that was smoked there, of a stench [v] of garlic that came from the belches of Those who were dancing, and who were sitting with a bottle or a pot of beer on their right side, and a hideous whore on their left, presented to my eyes and my reflections a desolate image which showed me the miseries of life, and the degree of degradation to which brutality could lower pleasures. The assembly which animated this place was entirely composed of sailors, and other common people to whom it seemed a paradise which compensated them for all that they had suffered in long and painful navigations. Among the public women that I saw there I did not find a single one with whom it would have been possible to amuse myself for a single moment. A man of bad appearance, with the air of a tinker, and the tone of a peasant, came to ask me in bad Italian if I would dance for a penny. I thanked him. He showed me a Venetian woman who was sitting there, telling me that I could take her up to a room and drink with her.

–From Casanova’s Story of My Life (1798).

The Cartoon and Live Briefing Archive.