This was much better than I feared, having watched Jesse’s Twitter page these past few days.
I do think there is one thing that needs to be said: people are allowed to be upset about someone being assassinated. LET THEM be upset about it. All of this nitpick-y “well, actually. . . “ misses the point. People need to be able to grieve for something massively traumatic like watching a young man get shot in the neck at a college campus debate. As long as they’re not hurting anyone else (and so far they haven’t), they should be permitted to do so. It reminds me of how Toby Keith’s song “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” got so much criticism from the left back in the day for being “ignorant.” Who the fuck cares if it’s ignorant? People are allowed to be upset about a massive terrorist attack that killed 2,000+ people. Getting told “you’ll get a boot in your ass” is small potatoes by comparison. As human beings, we need catharsis.
Thank you for saying this. As someone who disagreed with Charlie Kirk vehemently, I was incredibly disturbed by this event, and I even found myself feeling incredibly angry. Let people grieve how they must. This happened in my backyard. My daughter was at BYU down the street, and her campus was shut down because people were so incredibly upset. I just feel so sad. None of this is okay.
Oh geez. I'm sorry this was so close to you. I'm up in Salt Lake and felt super on edge. I can't imagine how nerve-racking it must be to have been in Orem or Provo.
And agreed. I don't think anyone was really prepared to deal with what a strange, disturbing crime this was, much less if you were a fan of him.
I'm guessing you meant to say "campus was shut down because there was an active shooter at another school very close by so administrators took precautions for the physical safety of students, faculty and staff".
Your wording (I'm sure unintentionally) seemed to convey that campus was shut down solely due to distress.
Either way it must have been traumatic for everybody in the area, especially during those hours when the shooter was on the loose.
BYU remained open the day of the shooting- there was no literal campus shutdown or safety related lockdown, but most events and deadlines were canceled or rescheduled because it was deemed students might be upset, confused and distracted by the event.
Yes, thank you for the clarification. I spoke to my daughter briefly, but she like so many other students, was in a daze of disbelief and confusion. She had mentioned so many people around her were devastated, and that all her classes had been canceled.
I really think we need to emphasize the point you made about ,"as long as they're not hurting anybody else,"
It shouldn't go unnoticed that after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the assassination of Charles Kirk, there was absolutely zero rioting.
As opposed to the death of a criminal meth head turned martyr turning cities into hellscapes.
There seems to be a disturbing pattern among these shooters (looking at this one and the guy who shot Trump at least) where they’re awkward boys who grew up in rural conservative families (and therefore know how to shoot well) that are then radicalized as leftists after finishing high school. So you get the terrible combination of a loony lefty who also knows how to wield a gun.
The guy who shot at Trump was not a radicalized lefty, what are you on about? He was a registered Republican and had social media accounts where he posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant stuff. His actual political views with regards to left or right remain unknown. This is all very easy to google.
The fact that your comment was liked so much shows how delusional the right is in thinking that political violence is somehow a "left" issue when it's overwhelmingly the opposite.
I would not characterize the people responsible for the Tulsa Massacre, the Brown v. Board of Education riots, or the Wilmington massacre as "deeply left-leaning." Rioting is the behavior of the politically radicalized, it is not unique to one political party, one country, or even one period of history. It is important to understand the root cause if we wish to prevent these things.
FYI, that just made me want to riot HARDER lol Philly fans are like that.
(I've never actually rioted a day in my life, but my boys didn't deserve that stray. They haven't been the Broad Street Bullies in decades, much to my dismay.)
Within the context of the full scope of American history, sure I’d agree. My post (which was mostly tongue in cheek) was not accounting for such events as those you mentioned plus the draft riots as well as Shay’s and whiskey rebellions. One must not also forget bacon’s rebellion of 1676. I’ll be sure to always include innumerous examples going forwards.
Even after Trump lost in 2020, there weren’t any riots for the first few months (and this was after the Summer of Hell). I think it’s really disingenuous for the “both-siders” to ignore this.
Why does it matter what 'color' the cities might have been? The literal U.S. freaking Capitol building was encircled and penetrated by a raging mob of idiots, supported by a President who couldn't psychologically accept that he lost, seeking to inflict real violence against members of Congress for doing their duty to the American people. That more than cancels out the above "well there weren't any riots for a few months".
I was going to include the word towns but I figured I didn't need to distinguish that. What populated area that voted majority Trump burned when he lost in 2020?
Trump wasn't even shot for starters. Don't try to gaslight us. And I'll bookmark this for when we find out Kirk was shot to protect Cankles McFuckhead from facing the consequences of his pedo activities l with Epstein.
Well him being a blight on society doesn't mean he should have been killed, I didn't say that. But it does mean it was perhaps not a tragedy worth the whole country flipping out about.
Remember when conservatives used to say "Don't tread on me" and actually mean it? I didn't realize constitutional and civil rights only mattered if you weren't an addict, or if you happened to be white. Maybe it was tragic not for the person he was but the example of police brutality and continued unfair uses of violence and power on any American.
I mean, I’m also a blight on society. I don’t do anything besides produce abstract intellectual stuff that doesn’t feed anyone, yet I am allowed to eat.
Well him being a blight on society doesn't mean he should have been killed. But it does mean it was perhaps not a tragedy worth the whole country flipping out about.
Exactly. Even if every smear of Kirk was 100% accurate, I still would be horrified by the fact that (a) political violence seems to be normalizing by the week and (b) so many people I know are cheering this sort of thing on.
Ya, the people cheering Kirk's death are disgusting. When I see people celebrating his death, my mind goes to a dark place about THEM, which is really bad. I don't want there to be retribution from the Right, it won't help anything, two wrongs don't make a right, but I understand how people can become enraged by both the assassination and the response to it from some.
I'm more or less on the Right, but I wasn't a Charlie Kirk fan; i didn't like or dislike him, he just wasn't my thing. I can only imagine how enraged those who loved him feel.
My friends who were huge fans are ACTIVATED right now. I’ve never seen internet churn like this. My very online friends who are plugged in on X send me screenshots and it’s like a fire ant mound over there right now.
Because nobody calls individuals out. Instead of engaging we keep scrolling. Not enough normies are calling out our friends who regurgitate the same bullshit about words being violence and labeling everything fascism. I saw a quote on substack yesterday that was translated from Italian to English. It said "They don't kill you for being a fascist. They call you fascist so they can kill you." Their intentional obfuscation of language is being used to justify and permit violence. This shit needs to be called out publicly. I don't want someone who thinks such vile things as a friend anyway.
The problem is that that "catharsis" was the political justification for a myopic, pointless invasion that killed at least a hundred and fifty thousand people and wasted three trillion dollars of tax payer money. You're allowed to be sad, but you have to be careful not to allow your emotions to compromise your better judgement. The emotions over this man's death are already being used to curtail freedom of speech and justify authoritarian impulses.
Also Toby Keith's music sucks, and post-9/11 macho jingoism ruined country music.
There was no way we weren’t going to war after 9/11. The issue was that the Bush administration didn’t know what they were doing and completely botched it. One angry country song wasn’t the deciding factor in any of that.
I agree that it was likely to happen either way. Re-read what I said. They were looking for a political justification, the implication there being that this is something they already wanted to do long before 9/11. I never blamed the stupid song for the Iraq war, good grief. If that's the level of bad faith you're going to engage in, we're done here.
It’s not “bad faith” simply to disagree with someone. We were discussing the song as something that was symbolic of the country’s catharsis. You were saying that being too emotional led to disastrous decisions after 9/11; I was saying that it was largely out of the public’s hands, and therefore irrelevant.
I also disagree that the Bush administration was looking for an excuse to invade the Middle East prior to 9/11. Bush ran against the interventionist foreign policy of the 1990s in 2000. Maybe some people think that was a feint and that this was his real plan all along, but nothing that we’ve seen of George W. Bush has led me to believe that he’s one for long, complicated schemes.
Implying that I was blaming the entire Iraq war on a single song was bad faith and you know it. That's not just you disagreeing with me, that's you deliberately misconstruing what I said as a means of insulting my intelligence.
Yes, people showing too much deference to logic over emotions resulted in a lot of incredibly dumb decisions in the years following 9/11. The Iraq war is not purely a result of that, but various types of emotional bias did inform the overall trajectory of polices related to and downstream of 9/11. The Bush Administration's rationale for the war was incredibly weak, and was buoyed by bad intel and a desire for retribution. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and no ties between Al Qaeda and the state of Iraq. Deposing Saddam Hussein and securing more access to oil reserves were the real purposes of the invasion, but those objectives (which both predated 9/11) didn't garner enough political support on their own. In spring of 2001, there were a lot of people in Dubya's cabinet (and in Washington generally, mainly on the right) who wanted him to "finish" his father's work when it came to Hussein.
The emotions following 9/11 were very easy for the Bush administration to use to their benefit. They wanted Saddam Hussein dead, so they got consent from the public to expend resources on that endeavor by telling them that Iraq was culpable for 9/11 and Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
I’ve never blocked anyone on here before (not even Z****) but Richard comes off like such a douche that I decided to just bite the bullet rather than try to argue with him.
Edit: Since someone asked (then deleted it), I didn’t post this comment to “own” anyone. I was actually feeling a little weird about blocking someone and wanted to hear how other people feel about this sort of thing. People disagree on here everyday without things getting nasty.
Blocking to preserve sanity is wise. Whenever I see someone post something I want to argue with, I just block them. Life is far too short to give in to the outrage buttons!
I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken to him before, but me calling Christopher Hitchens an edgelord was clearly very triggering for him. I started to reply but he was already spamming all my comments with nasty replies, so I figured it was pointless.
I don’t even think I know which OT primo you’re referring to but yeah, any bad faith nonsense is just an immediate block from me. I like the OT and my literal cousins here, and if this board gets ruined THE INTERNET IS OVER, man.
I block anyone who’s nasty. Whether I agree with them substantively or not, if they’re rude and nasty to me or others they get blocked. Life is too short and so is my temper. If I can control myself, bite my tongue (or finger ;) and be civil so could they… if they wanted to. They can spew their venom into the wind.
I'm sorry this happened, and it's terrible for him, his family, and everyone who watched it happen. Truly, and the leftists who are supporting it, tacitly even, are ridiculous and childlike...
But I'm also not going pretend he wouldn't be making making fun of political violence on the other side. (see: his reaction to Paul Pelosi). That doesn't justify making fun of him, but it also kinda does. I won't do it though, at least not in public.
[insert hot dog guy, "I think you should leave meme."]:
"We're all looking for the guy that inflamed political discourse in this country 🤷"
I started watching Charlie debate people on college campuses a couple of years ago. I tried listening to his podcast but it was a little too religiousy for me, and as a pro-choice atheist I disagreed with a lot of his opinions. But damn I admired the wealth of information he could recall at the drop of a hat. That's what I liked and miss about Hitchens.
I’m also pro-choice and non-religious and an admirer of Kirk. I deeply respected his commitment to open debate, his command of facts, and his fundamental politeness.
I think it says a lot that many of his younger debate sparring partners (ex. Dean Withers) have spoken in his defense since he died. Honestly, I think some of them enjoyed showing up at his events to argue with him.
Very well said. Give the guy credit especially for willingness to debate. I didn't follow him closely but I never got the sense that he was a troll or grifter.
I'm cringing that you mention the likes of Hitchens with Kirk. They don't deserve to be in the same paragraph. Kirk used extremely simple argumentative rhetoric, he would respond to any given argument with a question and try to force his opponents down a pre-set discussion. As soon as anyone escaped this mold, Kirk looked lost.
The Cambridge debates were the best evidence of this, Kirk had absolutely no ability to think on his feet or recall information outside of these simple algorithms he used to argue barely literate college students.
I don't think I should have to make the case for why Hitchens so clearly doesn't fit into the above mold.
To be fair he wasn’t just saying that, he wrote a whole book making the case she wasn’t the saint she was made out to be. Seems like a reasonable subject for a journalist.
The New Atheism movement has aged so poorly, to the point where atheists themselves cringe at the memory of it, that it’s tarnished the legacy of someone like Hitchens. I don’t think many people remember him fondly, to the extent that they remember him at all. Even Bill Maher, who used to mock religion regularly, has basically just stopped talking about it.
Like, Stephen Fry is also an avowed atheist, but he also does other stuff. Hitchens’ whole career seemed to be devoted to just trying to make people miserable.
Many people remember Hitchens fondly, don't you worry about that. Fry and Maher among them. The 'New Atheist movement', such as it was, has actually aged very well precisely because it was never a movement as such but rather an exchange of ideas that have become more and more mainstream. Almost a third of Americans now no longer affiliate with any religion, and that's almost 40% for younger Americans. This trend will keep going.
Right. Instead they profess religious-like devotion to social and political movements, complete with mob violence and assassinations. Such an improvement!
And being unaffiliated isn’t the same thing as being an atheist. I am the former without being the latter.
Christopher Hitchens was at least a funny edge lord. Whereas Kirk was an edge lord precisely because the things he said was provocative but wrong (like saying the civil Rights act was a mistake.) The mother Theresa but was not only accurate but absolutely hilarious.
Christopher Hitchens' writing is memorialized, he still has written some of the heaviest hitting journalism on the middle east in perhaps the most important time to do so, and beyond that his personal writings stand on their own merit.
Beyond all of that, as others have pointed out, atheism is winning in the west fairly starkly everywhere outside of MAGA USA where Christian fasco-nationalism seems to have taken hold. Mind you this happened long after Hitchens died, and I genuinely wonder the kind of cultural impact Hitchens could have had on the current discourse given his insatiable appetite for debate.
I don't think Hitchens meets the definition of edge lord. Edge lords say something purely to get a rise out of people. They'll spout Nazi rhetoric one day and Stalinist the next depending on who they're talking to. They're KKK, no they're Super Woke.
Hitchen's was certainly polemical, but principled in his opinions. He just didn't shy away from calling someone an idiot if he thought they were idiotic. Or a terrible person if he thought their actions warranted it (e.g. Mother Theresa noted below).
It’s so awesome to find a few other non religious pro choice folks on here who could and can respect and disagree with CK and even admire how he used words to change young hearts and minds. Even if some of that change wasn’t something we fully agree with. Words are not violence. Violence is violence.
A thing I was hoping would get more coverage here is the way that Kirk’s style has been (mis) represented in the mainstream media.
While Jesse described Dowd’s comments that he was (wrongly) fired for on MSNBC as nuanced, I disagree. Dowd said Kirk was responsible for pushing hate speech, the New York Times suggested that Kirk was antisemitic in their obituary of him leading to this retraction
“A correction was made on Sept. 11, 2025: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement.”
Stephen King tweeted than retracted a bit about Kirk supporting the stoning of gay people, The Nation has been trying to make Kirk seem as hateful as possible & there are a host of liberal commentators suggesting he had this coming.
I disagree with Kirk on almost everything but he wasn’t pushing hate speech. Kirk was aggressive & certainly participated in his own watchlist cancel culture but that makes him at worst an equivalent of a lot of lefty social justice warriors just more charismatic & popular & persuasive than almost all of them.
The need on the left to make him responsible for his own murder is really horrifying to me and I feel it is important to highlight this aspect of this story. The right is turning him into a free speech martyr—it’s all so awful & predictable.
Media figures who want less polarization have to become serious fact checkers on their own side. They've utterly failed to be consistent, but instead will fact check right wing conspiracy theories accurately, but with the authoritative air they haven't earned with that crowd.
Where they actually have respect (on the left), they could use their trust to at least tone down the distortions and misrepresentations of quotes.
At every opportunity, they shirk their awesome responsibility. Not one authoritative media entity has done a thorough job correcting the numerous tortured and twisted misquotes or out of context clips of their opponents. Instead they boost these quotes and, even with Snopes, often "fact check" them as "True" and not out of context.
Above is one example. He was referring to specific women, but they rated the tweet true which claimed he said this about "black women", explicitly changing the meaning to cover an entire group.
When I've emailed feedback about this kind of thing to Snopes, they don't respond.
Kirk said he doesn't think black people are smart enough to be pilots. YMMV as to whether that's "hate speech", which is usually in the eye of the beholder, but "hateful" is pretty on the nose for a lot of his rhetoric.
No he didn't. He was lamenting the fact that standards were dropped for DEI reasons. This was during a debate about DEI. A story that Trace from the pod broke actually.
Charlie Kirk: “You know, look, I don’t want to be a racist. But now I have a new thing when I get on a plane. And I look at the pilot, and if it’s a white guy, like, oh, great. And if it’s a black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’ That’s the whole point of what I was saying is that I now look at everything through a hyper-racialized diversity-quota lens because of their massive insistence to try to hit these ridiculous racial hiring quotas. Of course I believe anybody of any skin color can become a qualified pilot. But now I have this—it’s like, oh, great, another DEI hire, another diversity quota hire. That’s the point. They’re ruining things.”
I hear this as Kirk vulnerably confessing something most normies think and are reluctant to admit: we sometimes question the qualifications of POC when we know they could be DEI hires.
I’ve heard black conservative pundits opine that they resent having had to labor under the suspicion that they might have been diversity hires, and that being the reason why they think AA, quotas and the like are pernicious.
I had the great good fortune to have Shelby Steele as a Professor as an undergraduate. Somehow I heard him complaining about how affirmative action undercut the merit of everything he did as an academic.
Of course he was so accomplished (and an intimidatingly tough teacher) it’s hard to imagine he had this worry but his feelings about this could never be construed as hate speech and yet this is being misapplied to Kirk continuously.
BTW, this was an eye opener to me as I had always assumed that affirmative action was a complete good and only a bad person would object to it.
Well since that story was about air traffic controllers I think you’re either mistaken or Kirk was bringing up pilots for unrelated but probably racist reasons.
So let me get this straight. Kirk hears about lawsuit *alleging* that in 2014 there was a program to hire black ATCs despite low test scores*. He then extrapolates this to assume that black *pilots* are unqualified and you think “sounds right to me! pilots, air traffic control, what’s the difference?”
But I’m acting in bad faith? Sure.
*people really always miss this detail. Trace didn’t do any original reporting on this. He just summarized claims from a lawsuit.
It's incredibly important to look up context, in its full and unedited form, before choosing to believe and repeat an accusation of racism. If the accusation is true, then the full context should only strengthen your belief in it; there's no downside to having more information.
That isn't what he said and the big affirmative action moves in the pilot world are absolutely a reason to be shy about black pilots. Something that is umm common knowledge in the pilot world (especially in the military and the big airlines).
If you have a test for lifeguards that says they have to swim 2 miles nonstop to be one. Then you say "eh those requirements mean there aren't enough blacks we will make them have a different lower standard", there would be every reason to be worried about black lifeguards.
That is absolutely the situation in a lot of cockpits and in several industries. Notably medical schools for example.
If you think that worrying about that is racism you are a fucking idiot.
Doctor here. Notably you're making shit up about concerns in our cockpits. My black colleagues provide excellent care and there's no evidence that black doctors are specifically substandard.
So medical schools haven't changed standards on the basis of racial equity concerns? Because it is on record they have. And that absolutely is 100% evidence.
And as far as "making shit up about cockpits", what does that have to do with you being a doctor? Do you know any pilots? I do, father was in the Airforce, I was born at an airbase. Aunt was a VP in an aerospace firm, and her husband an aircraft designer. I have spent a lot of time around pilots. The grumbling about the DEI stuff impacting the quality of both ATC staff and the people making it into cockpits, particularly in the military has not exactly been quiet, nor only recent. It stretches back decades.
Or to put it another way I will believe the candidates meet the same standards when the fields stop bragging about their DEI successes and the ways they stack the deck.
Produce studies that show black doctors have worse outcomes. This discussion is explicitly about black pilots having worse ones, and I'm not gonna touch it because I'm not an aviation expert, but I am a medical expert.
Well do they even do such studies? I expect not because they don't want to know.
You really think relaxing standards on DEI grounds has no impact on quality? That is really your position? e aren't talking about your specific colleagues, we are talking generally.
It sort of strains credulity, and because it is such an ideological axiom one suspects there is a really dearth of truthfullness.
In case you are interested in context, this person, who knew Kirk, made a video giving context to the more prevalent out-of-context quotes going around in the media.
see that's what i thought. what would even be the context that justified him making such a statement at all? especially if he was talking about DEI. i don't doubt some of his quotes are taken out of context to some degree but some of the things he said....the "misrepresentation" of his words can't really be that far from what he really meant or believed
He didn’t say that. There is context for what he did say. If you are interested you can find it below. It was part of a very typical argument against DEI and affirmative action, even amongst people who are not conservative, namely that lowering standards to elevate under-qualified people will lead to questions about whether people are there based on merit or based on some immutable characteristic.
Again, that wasn’t his exact quote. He was speaking specifically in the context of a conversation about racial quotas put in place at an airline.
KIRK: You wanna go thought crime? I'm sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I'm gonna be like, "Boy, I hope he's qualified."
KOLVET: But you wouldn't have done that before!
KIRK: That's not an immediate … that's not who I am. That's not what I believe.
NEFF: It is the reality the left has created.
KIRK: I want to be as blunt as possible because now I'm connecting two dots. Wait a second, this CEO just said that he's forcing that a white qualified guy is not gonna get the job. So I see this guy, he might be a nice person and I say, "Boy, I hope he's not a Harvard-style affirmative-action student that … landed half of his flight-simulator trials."
KOLVET: Such a good point. That's so fair.
KIRK: It also … creates unhealthy thinking patterns. I don't wanna think that way. And no one should, right? … And by the way, then you couple it with the FAA, air-traffic control, they got a bunch of morons and affirmative-action people.
“I’ve heard about affirmative action, therefore black pilots are unqualified” is a racist argument. I’m being as fair to Kirk as he was to his opponents.
He was literally slaughtered while engaging in the act of free speech.
Whether you agree with him or not, or even whether you think he was arguing in bad faith or not, he was silenced because he expressed his opinions.
The term “martyr” has its roots in a Greek word meaning “witness.” Sadly appropriate in this case.
Having said that, I do think that there is this tendency in society to flatten people who get killed in this manner into one-dimensional cardboard cutouts who, during their lives, could do no wrong. And according to my read of his belief system, Charlie himself would not want his life to be construed or interpreted in this light.
Something I think people in the heterodox space are misinterpreting is the extent of influence conservatives have. Yes, the president is a Republican who has a bunch of big supporters in the podcasting world. That’s still only a small portion of the media ecosystem, as the examples you gave show. The “resistance left” still dominates most cultural institutions. We’re all just so online that it can be easy to forget that sometimes.
Its interesting Katie sensed something shifted with Kirk's death. Im a Christian and a lot of my fellow Christians sensed a shift, culturally and spiritually. We all wondered why we were so cut up over the death of someone we don't know. Its more or less because Charlie was a representative of (some of) what we believe and he was taken out because of it. Im sure its deeper than that and I'm still processing it. But the fact that non-christian Katie also sensed the cultural impact of this event, is significant.
i'm quite an anti-religion atheist (privately because I don't shame or denigrate people's faith) who utterly despises Kirk, but the killing still really disturbed and upset me. Like we're all on a big ship together and we just heard something big and ominous go "thunk".
I think it mostly disturbed me because I unwittingly saw the video and it seemed pretty obvious he had a moment where he clearly knew what happened as he grabbed his neck. I obviously wish it never happened, it was horrible. However, I find it hard to be overly charitable after his numerous comments about being okay with some shooting victims each year to preserve the second amendment. Other victims of gun violence are also someone's parents and children, which he didn't seem the least bit concerned about.
So many individuals felt as you did, but they have looked up the actual talk and found the context enhanced their understanding and shifted their views. You might want to do the same.
Of course there are. And there also are a tiny number of people whose deaths would even make me celebrate. Being disturbed by this assassination isn't a matter of being all gooey and easily flustered - This was a very brazen incident of public political murder. There are potential political and cultural consequences of this that are concerning.
And also, I hold utter contempt for murderers, especially stupid school-shooter types, which it seems Tyler Robinson is.
He was a low-iq provocateur who made a career out of debating college freshmen. I'm not condoning the murder of anyone much less a father but you need to get over it and try not to read too much into it.
I strongly suggest expressing your humane and thoughtful opinion over at the BaRPod Wednesday open thread. There you will get respectful engagement, rather than the juvenile trolling often found here on the episode threads.
Not a troll - meant everything I said above. Watching all the pearl-clutching and the right having their own BLM type moment over Charlie Kirk is pathetic.
The best thing about this community is that we don’t ( usually!) take cheap shots at each other. It’s way more fun to toss ideas around.
Emma is obviously a person of faith. She’s allowed to be one, and shouldn’t be subjected to mockery. We can’t have anything approaching free speech or a free society if we have evil fools murdering people who say shit they don’t like.
There are a lot of other online places you can go if you are entertained by being a jagoff to strangers.
this feels like a comment from someone who doesn't normally listen to the podcast. The thing I like about this community is that it doesn't sound like a dumb reddit fight.
I mean, sounds like you aren't able to articulate as to why you feel that way about this guy for a reason better than that? So I mean what he said is just as valid as what you said. We're all entitled to our opinions and feelings, but others are alloeed to call us out, even if he is being a little crass.
Charlie Kirk was a huge asshole and critics who have been pointing out that he wasn't some great truth-teller are right. At the same time, his assassination is a very large escalation into the descent into political violence in the USA currently. That's not reading too much into it, that's just a diagnosis of a real problem.
This feels like a litmus test for your liberal bonafides similar to Skokie Case.
I was listening to one of the FIRE guys about the history of free speech. They pointed out in the U.S. that it's never been a left vs right issue. That the side that supported free speech would shift depending on who held political power.
Those who hold power tend to shift to control of speech. Since they have the means to do so. While those who do not hold power are more likely to be very pro free speech since it's their opinions that are marginalized.
Important to note that "power" isn't just who won the election, but social power in general. In that context, it's not surprising that the progressive left is anti-free speech. But also provides insight into how the MAGA right "feels" disempowered right now. Contrasted with the 80's and 90's when it was the left that was socially marginalized.
Total tangent, but judicial Originalism/textualism follows the same pattern. With the new conservative dominance, it would predict a slow drift away from originalism by conservative judges and to originalism by progressive ones. Originalism is, essentially, an appeal to authority that lends weight to minority legal opinions.
I think a lot of ppl fancy themselves very high IQ individuals who could start a #1 podcast if they just wanted to, but in reality rhetoric and persuasion is actually hard, bc because they have never actually tried, have no idea how hard it actually is. People like CK made it look easy. It's easy to think they are dumb because we often disagree with people like him. But To say he was low IQ or dumb is just a cop out.
I'm not sure charisma is tightly coupled with intelligence. I don't have a read on his intelligence, don't know enough other than a few first impressions on his talks over the last few days.
But being very persuasive doesn't require high IQ. Some of the most unlikeable people I've known were very high IQ. And some of the most persuasive / likable were just regular folks.
Like I don't think they're any more related than being an elite endurance athlete is to the length of your index finger.
" Female Olympic athletes had a lower 2D:4D ratio, possibly reflecting a higher prenatal androgen exposure, than sedentary controls."
I'm going to gently put forward to you that I think you are wrong about both points you made regarding intelligence, and finger size correlation to athletic endurance.
I watched one or two after this to get a feel for his style. I was a pretty successful debater once upon a time.
He didn't strike me as a good debater fundamentally. Seems to me his key insight was that almost everyone is a terrible debater who does not hold their views for any rational, well thought out reason.
So he would just ask a lot of questions of them and sit back while they made themselves look like idiots. Also seemed he put some effort into having a bag of questions that were most effective at doing this for each topic. But not a lot of underlying substance as far as promoting the alternative ideology.
In that sense, it was a very King of the Hill version of Socrates vs the Sophists approach.....
No...I think it's completely acceptable to not "get over it" when it comes to the cold blooded assassination of a fellow citizen just because there were those who disagreed with him.
You're not "condoning" his assissination, but you're sure as fuck doing all you can to minimize the reality of it.
Dude, I am a socialist, and see the way the media can clip you out of context, smear you, provide the basis for your dehumanization, and low information mobs consuming ragebait will cheer when someone shoots you over misrepresentations.
I fear the online left. And not just left, I think the yard sign libs are caught up in this ragebait too, with TV news and mainstream press goading them along.
Most of us have one too many spicy views to feel safe amidst these people now.
I'm a Christian as well and really horrified about any public murder or act of violence, this one definitely included.
It is certainly not for me to judge Kirk's soul; only God can and will do that.
And I think Kirk should *not* be held up as a good representative of the Christian faith, given the abhorrent things he believed and said that do not match my understanding of Jesus Christ's ministry and call at all.
Sounds like the murderer might have been into the com network or similar (worth googling), which, if true, means Kirk wasn’t killed not so much for any specific ideas but for general nihilism.
I’m discounting the pushback against the casing with the “gay” reference on it entirely. Some on the left have LONG used gay shaming against conservatives they don’t like. Lindsey Graham anyone? David French has frequently been targeted by online leftists along the same vein.
I KNOW that K&J have to keep up the whole “preferred pronouns” thing in order to continue being treated as mainstream (or almost-mainstream) journalists. But I fucking hate it sometimes. This Gretchen guy’s behavior is the behavior of a crazy MAN. “She” wrote violent pornography about Jesse? No, fucking no. Stop laying men’s crimes at our feet.
I really agree with you. I don’t think they need to go so far as to say “he”, either. They can just refrain from saying “she”. It’s not so hard to restructure sentences just a bit to avoid the issue.
It absolutely boils my piss when they do this. It feels forced and self-conscious, and gives “we’ve chosen to die on this hill and can’t climb down this far in”. They see using correct pronouns as giving in to Graham Linehan, I reckon. Sorry, but he’s right about a lot of things🤷♀️ and this is one of them.
That's hardly a crime, and if you look her up she looks more feminine than even most trans women these days, if a little chubby. She's probably mentally ill for sure, but she seems to have actually properly transitioned. If that's not a reason to call someone by preferred pronouns, I don't know what is...
I always took them at their word when they said this community was very friendly and welcoming, but reading through this thread, it's about as toxic as any place on the internet circa 2015. Maybe by today's standards it's welcoming, but this seems to be a very toxic thread to say the least.
The person they’re discussing is a man, doing something that is both awful and distinctly male.
A person concerned with truth is likely to have a problem referring to a man as “she,” because that’s a form of lying. And a feminist who understands male violence as a problem in this world is likely to have a problem with male-typical aggression being attributed to women.
Those are two real objections to using wrong-sex pronouns that have nothing to do with being cruel.
If you haven’t yet, maybe take some time to investigate your assumption that using wrong-sex pronouns is kind.
I see Buck as a woman. (Because she is one.) But re Buck and other trans people for whom I have respect, I just avoid using a pronoun altogether. I won’t lie about someone’s sex.
FTMs only pass well when they’re not standing next to real men. Have you ever seen gigapassoid Buck Angel standing next to Laverne Cox? It’s funny as hell.
I thought FdB made some interesting points on this being violence in search of ideology, rather than ideologically driven violence. The ‘reveal’ about this guy’s politics (erratic and meme-ified) seems to confirm it. He’s no more a creature of “the left” than the murderers of democrats are creatures of the right. He and others like him (assassins, school shooters etc.) don’t really believe in anything; they’re nihilists seeking meaning in the most repugnant, meaningless way possible.
Sure, but the fact that the left has embraced the killing so enthusiastically (not the politicians, maybe, but the rank and file) says a lot. Something has changed
I think that's just your feed. It's the same shit as the "Lefties are mad about Sydney Sweeney" thing; randos online aren't "the left"'s rank and file. I'm a normie dem who is surrounded by normie dems and has worked in Democratic politics. No one is happy about a husband and father getting shot like this. There absolutely are, though, people who 1) fairly point out the differences between how this and the Minnesota cases are treated by government (an obvious point) and 2) point out, again fairly, that Kirk's own views on gun control explicitly said that innocent people getting shot was worth it for the second amendment. I don't think that's "embracing" killing.
Kirk, imo, made a living selling outrage and fear. He died as he lived, right down to his snuff video getting sprung on everyone in 4K when none of us were looking for it. I don't think he deserved to get shot, because I don't think anyone does, ever, and no "rank and file" lefty or dem thinks so either.
At this point, all of the moderate-to-lefty people (centrist Canadian liberals) in my circles I have read commentary from think the assassination was one of: justified because Kirk was evil and deserved it, ends-justifies-means because his ideas are evil, or "fuck around and find out." Of course, most people I know are not talking about it publicly, but so far the ones who are entirely fall into these categories.
I think it's funny/ironic that he said the thing about innocent deaths + gun rights, which moves him towards the "fuck around and find out" / schadenfreude territory area.
You're commenting, on a podcast about the myriad ways in which internet drama has caused real-world change, that the leftists gleefully celebrating Kirk's death don't matter because they're online.
That's clearly not what I said. You said "rank-and-file", which implies regular, average people in the democratic party embracing the killing. I pointed out that's not true, and that the very small minority of people saying stuff like that aren't 'rank and file' in any meaningful sense of the term. They're a small contingent, most of whom would probably rather eat glass than actually vote for democrats. Remember, your algorithm is crafted to outrage you. But considering that sitting United States Senator Mike Lee mocked the killing of Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her golden retriever, I can see how you might assume that Democrats embrace and enable horrible behavior because Republicans do. We don't.
What does “he died as he lived” mean? My gut instinct is to push back hard on this, but I’m not willing to do that if I don’t know exactly what you mean. Don’t want to straw-man you.
On a college campus, filmed from multiple angles in 4K, as viral content on every platform, provoking strong reactions and with the words "gang violence" on his lips. It's distasteful, as his whole schtick was, but it's true. I would find it too on-the-nose if it were scripted in a TV show. That's not a moral judgment on the correctness of killing which as a Catholic and a person with basic morality I always, always oppose.
I would say that he died in the spotlight that he himself dominated. So I guess we are in agreement there. But that’s where the similarity ends. It did not include pointing firearms at and shooting other people, or even threatening people with violence.
I’m not American so US politics is impenetrable to me, but it seems like the people celebrating it are not people who even vote Democrat - they abstain because they think Democrats are too right wing 🤷🏼♀️ They are to “the left” what Groypers are to “the right”, with the difference that the revolting extremes on the right are almost literally the rank and file of the Republican Party now.
We're talking 100s of thousand of upvotes and likes, verging on millions. It's not isolated extremist Discord servers at any rate, or splinter sites like Kiwifarms. The front page of Reddit, for instance, had thousands of posts celebrating day of and the day after.
Yeah, it’s a massive country that’s increasingly extreme on both ends of the political spectrum. I just think 1000s of sick reddit posts after this is the same as 1000s of sick X posts after Pelosi and the Minnesota politicians 🤷🏼♀️
Which “revolting extremes” would those be? When talking about rank and file Republicans, those probably number in the 10s of millions. If you’re going to paint with a broad brush, you might as well show us the color of paint being used.
Sure, I’m probably using the term inaccurately - I don’t mean Republican voters so much as Republican leaders and the people being put in positions of real power. I’m referring to Trump of course but also openly racist people employed by DOGE, Governors who joke about home invasions and murders etc.
"the Left", "the right". Yes, there clearly are a lot of those who say they are left who are disgustingly celebrating this horrible murder, just there was a lot of horrible celebrating of October 7 by those who think they are left because, I don't know, antifa or some other such stupidity.
They are not the only ones on the left - it's vast and varied. I am sure - in fact I know, because my whole family is on the right - that the right is as varied, too.
Here's a resource from the left that is NOT celebrating this murder.
I think almost all political violence is violence in search of an ideology. These are damaged, lost people with broken moral compasses and they grab on to whatever garbage is floating by.
I see your point, but I think there are also historical examples of ideologically driven violence - the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Charlotte Corday’s assassination of the Jacobin leader, etc. Violence has been a tool for people with coherent, reasoned, understandable belief systems, that they felt was more effective than other means or perhaps the only means.
Oh really? I didn’t get that from what I read. Can you fill me in on what I might be missing? I don’t remember reading that he was violent or unstable.
I see where you’re coming from. I read it as “Look, go read the book. I can’t really recapitulate all the reasons here but you can read my motivations in this book.”
I am firmly post liberal and have become more traditionalist after becoming a mother and more appreciative of traditional and conservative values - that being said I am a never Trumper and I thought Kirk’s debates on college campuses were akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
Yesterday I watched his debates at the Oxford Union and… I think he won those debates too.
I know he has a history of inflammatory rhetoric and I don’t think his tactics were generous or morally executed, but he was very good at arguing for conservative values, even against more worthy opponents than college aged leftists.
And I regret that he didn’t debate with more decorum and honor and I also grieve that we don’t have the opportunity to disagree better.
I’m just upset. I feel like the culture is a run away train headed for whatever happens to run away trains.
Part of my religiosity is letting go of blame and control and taking responsibility for myself and preparing my family to live the best we can come what may. It’s still very scary though to watch our culture implode.
“Kirk’s debates on college campuses were akin to shooting fish in a barrel” — I agree, and IMO it’s one reason the debates were important. Clip after clip revealed to viewers that campus leftists’ arguments are COMPLETELY unhoned. These are smart kids for the most part, and when they debate Kirk it’s clear they’ve never had to actually support their claims with argumentation. What’s important about that is it shows us that college campuses are political monocultures. Which is a serious problem.
That is severe sampling bias though. The type of kid happy to show up and try to debate a guy like Charlie Kirk is not representative. There’s a reason the majority of students go about their day, often unaware he was even there. He was good at what he did, and made a ton of money doing it. I’m not so sure we’re better off as a country with that type of content (including the left wing version) being popular
One of my favorite bits that I don't think had anything to do with Kirk, but is just about the general idiocy and lack of information on the left was one where they walked around big cities and campuses and asked people about tax policy.
And generally the consensus was bleed the rich dry and fuck the billionaires and the tax policy needs to be much more progressive.
And then when asked to set up a tax policy and tax brackets they almost to a person picked brackets that are *less* progressive than the ones we have because any more would be unfair. Just a great example of an issue where the general public tends to have very firm opinions and almost no actual mastery of the facts.
A lot of "someone making $50,000 should be paying like $3,000 not $15,000". Umm sir the average person making $50,000 has a net tax liability near zero. $3,000 would represent a huge tax increase for them.
Ah, I forgot the standard deduction. Duh. That changes quite a bit. $2,621.88
Interestingly close to the amount these folks would hypothetically find reasonable, and a 5% pre-tax contribution to a 401k could shave another $300 of tax liability off, but for totally non-personal reasons I'm still wondering how you get that down to your near-zero counterpoint.
It would be pretty easy to repeat this for right-y audiences and try to get them to explain exactly why abortion or taxes are bad. Debating ideas in real time is very difficult.
I feel like I have some pretty nuanced opinions, but when I actually get into it with my lefty friends, you just get caught up in the weeds. Becoming a skilled debater who knows every inefficient corner around each talking point is hard, or wilfully ignoring some piece of nuance you're aware of, but doesn't help your point.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea that young people or universities are politically monocultureish. Debate-me-bro culture is good, but I don't think it should be trusted as the only test of ideas. Conservatives aren't correct because someone can't beat them in a debate that particular day :)
When I’ve watched Charlie Kirk clips, I’ve always been surprised that the kids aren’t more prepared. I see that a some of them have notes on their phone… I think, Why hasn’t this kid practiced more for this moment? Of course it’s going to be stressful. You can see that the kids are nervous.
Related to the issue of Kirk shooting fish 🐟 in a barrel: we should remember that these are kids in college — a good college, often — and Kirk was a community college dropout. On any campus, there should be *someone* who can take him on. The fact that there’s not is an indictment of the education the kids are getting, IMO.
I'm a highschool dropout and have a good job and stuff so the college thing is mostly irrelevant. The past 30 years has pushed 100% of people who could afford college into college, meaning that all of the midwits have gone to college to live out their parents' vicarious Animal House dreams :)
They really have! The average IQ of a college student now is just… the average IQ. Which IMO is a problem. A generation ago, college was for the smart kids.
Well said. Another thing that people who criticize him debating college students don’t consider (I believe). Is that having your beliefs challenged and not being able to defend your opinion is part of intellectually growing and maturing. Perhaps some people don’t learn from it but most people will.
Apparently he liked it and joked about it a lot. I found this snip of him talking about it. Maybe he was a fan as a kid? I don’t know much about him but he reads proud of it to me.
Can we get a podcast episode on the racist n bomb dropping neighbor and his gay magician son? It’s the least you could do. Plus, Bremerton needs a bit more sunshine on it.
Did you hear that Katie? No more personal details about your life. No more Moose or Jana comments and I don’t want to hear about you crashing bicycles drunk and lighting your balcony on fire! No more! Stick to just the serious news topics and berating Jesse.
Glad to hear that Jesse is taking the potential danger to himself seriously. Yes, most of the people online are just online bullshitters - but not all.
Speaking of which, Hasan Piker deserves no praise. I watched the video of him finding out and all I saw was a man realising that *his* words might one day have consequences too. Self-preservation is not a virtue.
You mean like the scene in Titanic where Billy Zane grabs a random kid, and tells the crew that the kid is his so he can secure a spot on the lifeboat reserved for families.
"If we ignore the millions of rank-and-file in favor of my preferred center-left prestige media pundits, the left's reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination has been completely reasonable."
Such a disappointing, typical Jesse take. The reaction to the assassination on Reddit, Bluesky, TikTok, leftie Twitter, and elsewhere has been shocking in the extreme.
Take for example the Reddit post, by a doctor from Texas, about uncorking the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle he had saved for Trump's death to celebrate the assassination. Hundreds of thousands of upvotes! The entire website was dedicated to gaudy celebration from the moment the bullet hit Kirk's neck.
We just came out of the 2010s when GamerGate and wokeness were incubated in echo chambers on 4chan and Tumblr respectively, then spilled out to subsume the entire nation. The notion that we should ignore what normal people are doing because the cathedral's Elect don't agree with them is pretty asinine coming from a guy who made his career covering the fallout of populist online uprisings.
So in from your view, random people on social media espousing radical views represent normal left wing voter? And how do you regard the right wing reaction from politicians and mainstream pundits who are now advocating for infringement of civil liberties and/or civil war on their ideological enemies?
> We just came out of the 2010s when GamerGate and wokeness were incubated in echo chambers on 4chan and Tumblr respectively, then spilled out to subsume the entire nation
I think this sums up my interest in watching what is happening in the weird places online. In the 2010s, people thought that the subcultures they disagreed with were bad; and didn't hear about, or didn't mind, the subcultures they might have agreed with.
My wife was a fan, in the sense that she likes to “show” me things while I’m trying to peacefully listen to country music. I confess I saw Charlie Kirk as a bulwark against truly vile people like Nick Fuentes. I didn’t have to agree with everything he said to admire and appreciate his position within that movement.
It is totally fair to call him a champion of free expression. I think Michael Tracy is playing bait and switch with champion for truth. No one owns the truth, no one is correct all the time, and nobody goes about finding it the right way all the time either. But Kirk did open up the debate stage to talk to whoever wanted to come up and get a word in and that in and of itself is admirable.
You don’t have to scratch the paint on any other cultural icon to find more human flaws beneath. MLK, Ghandi, etc were not as people what they are remembered as as icons. They had flaws, but as I’ve gotten older I don’t think flaws are all that remarkable. Everyone is flawed and has done something fucked up. The remarkable thing is when someone does something that’s at all good or admirable, and I think Kirk deserves to be remembered for that.
Your point about MLK and Gandhi seems like a nonsequitor to me. Yes, they were flawed individuals, but their causes were just. What does that have to do with Kirk? By all accounts he was a perfectly fine person in private, but his cause was “humiliate college students dumb enough to engage with him”. This is where anyone who argues he was anything other than a GOP propagandist loses me. What else did he do? Seriously, I’d love to know.
It’s children’s birthday party weekend but high level: the total of all the policy positions they held over the course of their lives weren’t always stellar. King was a communist. Ghandi a racist. We don’t remember the men. We remember the ideal of the good part.
I know Darryl Cooper isn’t popular around here, but I did find it funny when during the Iranian controversy a few months ago, he tweeted at Michael Tracey something like, “Michael, I feel like you want Iran to nuke us just so you can say I told you so.”
I had only somewhat heard of Charlie before this event but have likewise been shaken up by it. At least a few of my friends were in the “good riddance, he was hateful” camp, so I went back to listen to some interviews. I listened to him on Bill Maher in April and Megyn Kelly in November. He seemed to me a very Christian but mostly normie if not provocative Republican.
Tried to share that sentiment with a liberal friend and was reprimanded like I was a child.
So far, the moderate-to-lefty people I know have been in one of the categories: good riddance (this guy was bad), ends-justifies-means (conservatives are bad), or "fuck around and find out" / schadenfreude.
It feels like people who project their opinions publicly seem to think that they are exclusively correct and people who disagree with them are incorrect, thus it's hard to see that people can have different ideas without being stupid or evil.
I'm not sure who the left-wing equivalent of Charlie Kirk is, but I would put some of my retirement savings on people who are happy that Kirk is dead would be equally unhappy if someone on their political side got assassinated.
I'm sorry you were treated that way, but I think your investigation into Kirk was not very deep or representative of his career. You can't really judge him based on a Maher or Kelly conversation. Please watch his speeches at conservative rallies/events, his podcast rants, his 'own the naive college radical' takedowns. He was a radical Christian nationalist (he would proudly call himself that, by the way) and a fawning dishonest mouthpiece for the authoritarian Trump administration. But, on the other hand, I suppose the Overton window on what constitutes a "normie" Republican has shifted so far to the radical right, that I guess you essentially are correct. Sadly.
I agree, two interviews is not enough to make a full judgment. I’d argue the various out of context clips circling on social aren’t a great measure either.
I’ve recently watched another long form debate, one of the round tables he did with 20+ college students. I don’t agree with a lot, but he came across as respectful and civil and not the bigot he’s been painted as. And yes, he loved Trump and yes was very Christian. But so are most on the right.
I guess my sentiment is, continuing to say he was hateful gives more credence to what happened. And that’s what’s been bothering me.
My honest guess is that he has a whole soup of ideologies and probably started going schizo in college, didn’t realize what was happening, and just fell into this hole.
Can we please get some more radically non-extreme centrists on campus to get young people into the idea that both left and right make some pretty good points/ideas and also each have some pretty bad ones, and that with civil discourse between both and that very unpopular but necessary thing we call "compromise", we might find our way out of this mess?
Great idea but keep in mind that on any given campus, 20% are loudmouth leftists; 5% are loudmouth right-wingers.
And 75% want to do enough to graduate, drink, get some "action", and come out with a job on the other end. This last group is nearly impossible to mobilize.
And thank god for it, because if that 75% - the future normies of America - fell into radicalism, we’d be super fucked.
I grew up with the adults on my street sharing a beer in one or another driveway at the end of the day. I thought adult conversation was so boring, and now it seems foundational to a civil society. CK was right about this: we have to talk to each other.
There was a large, funded, concerted protest of my college (a religious one) in the spring of my senior year, and while I've always been interested in culture wars, I said, "I have papers to write!" and skipped the protest and all the related events.
Theoretically yes - but I'm not sure how many college kids think long-term beyond their own post-graduate education, career and family formation goals.
You seem to taking a Braver Angels/Andrew Yang approach, which I think usually requires some maturity and perspective that comes with age.
I really think there’s a public/private divide. Public schools are less elitist by nature. (Or maybe it’s just because I majored in history. You can’t really become a history professor if you hate old white guys.)
This was much better than I feared, having watched Jesse’s Twitter page these past few days.
I do think there is one thing that needs to be said: people are allowed to be upset about someone being assassinated. LET THEM be upset about it. All of this nitpick-y “well, actually. . . “ misses the point. People need to be able to grieve for something massively traumatic like watching a young man get shot in the neck at a college campus debate. As long as they’re not hurting anyone else (and so far they haven’t), they should be permitted to do so. It reminds me of how Toby Keith’s song “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue” got so much criticism from the left back in the day for being “ignorant.” Who the fuck cares if it’s ignorant? People are allowed to be upset about a massive terrorist attack that killed 2,000+ people. Getting told “you’ll get a boot in your ass” is small potatoes by comparison. As human beings, we need catharsis.
Thank you for saying this. As someone who disagreed with Charlie Kirk vehemently, I was incredibly disturbed by this event, and I even found myself feeling incredibly angry. Let people grieve how they must. This happened in my backyard. My daughter was at BYU down the street, and her campus was shut down because people were so incredibly upset. I just feel so sad. None of this is okay.
Oh geez. I'm sorry this was so close to you. I'm up in Salt Lake and felt super on edge. I can't imagine how nerve-racking it must be to have been in Orem or Provo.
And agreed. I don't think anyone was really prepared to deal with what a strange, disturbing crime this was, much less if you were a fan of him.
I'm guessing you meant to say "campus was shut down because there was an active shooter at another school very close by so administrators took precautions for the physical safety of students, faculty and staff".
Your wording (I'm sure unintentionally) seemed to convey that campus was shut down solely due to distress.
Either way it must have been traumatic for everybody in the area, especially during those hours when the shooter was on the loose.
BYU remained open the day of the shooting- there was no literal campus shutdown or safety related lockdown, but most events and deadlines were canceled or rescheduled because it was deemed students might be upset, confused and distracted by the event.
Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, thank you for the clarification. I spoke to my daughter briefly, but she like so many other students, was in a daze of disbelief and confusion. She had mentioned so many people around her were devastated, and that all her classes had been canceled.
I really think we need to emphasize the point you made about ,"as long as they're not hurting anybody else,"
It shouldn't go unnoticed that after the attempted assassination of Donald Trump and the assassination of Charles Kirk, there was absolutely zero rioting.
As opposed to the death of a criminal meth head turned martyr turning cities into hellscapes.
There are two groups of people who riot usually:
1. Deeply left leaning people
2. Philly fans.
There seems to be a disturbing pattern among these shooters (looking at this one and the guy who shot Trump at least) where they’re awkward boys who grew up in rural conservative families (and therefore know how to shoot well) that are then radicalized as leftists after finishing high school. So you get the terrible combination of a loony lefty who also knows how to wield a gun.
The guy who shot at Trump was not a radicalized lefty, what are you on about? He was a registered Republican and had social media accounts where he posted anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant stuff. His actual political views with regards to left or right remain unknown. This is all very easy to google.
The overwhelming majority of political violence in the US is perpetrated by the political right.
The trump government is already trying to censor this information but it was in their own OJP reports:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Political_Revolution/s/faR7XssaPk
Reuters also reports it here:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-politics-violence/
The fact that your comment was liked so much shows how delusional the right is in thinking that political violence is somehow a "left" issue when it's overwhelmingly the opposite.
Nope!
Facts>Feelings :'(
Well, the “loony lefty who knows how to wield a gun” was also meant to be a bit tongue in cheek, but perhaps it was a bit too soon for that. . .
I would not characterize the people responsible for the Tulsa Massacre, the Brown v. Board of Education riots, or the Wilmington massacre as "deeply left-leaning." Rioting is the behavior of the politically radicalized, it is not unique to one political party, one country, or even one period of history. It is important to understand the root cause if we wish to prevent these things.
That said: Fuck the Flyers.
FYI, that just made me want to riot HARDER lol Philly fans are like that.
(I've never actually rioted a day in my life, but my boys didn't deserve that stray. They haven't been the Broad Street Bullies in decades, much to my dismay.)
The Flyers fan is the natural enemy of the Penguins fan. This is one of the basic laws of the universe.
Ooooooh, yes, fuck the Pens for sure. But if we're both Primos maybe we can still get along.
I really don’t know how to respond to the first part is this being sarcastic?
The whole thing is sincere. Rioting is the behavior of the radicalized, it does not exist solely in a left-right political framework.
Within the context of the full scope of American history, sure I’d agree. My post (which was mostly tongue in cheek) was not accounting for such events as those you mentioned plus the draft riots as well as Shay’s and whiskey rebellions. One must not also forget bacon’s rebellion of 1676. I’ll be sure to always include innumerous examples going forwards.
Even after Trump lost in 2020, there weren’t any riots for the first few months (and this was after the Summer of Hell). I think it’s really disingenuous for the “both-siders” to ignore this.
This is so nakedly partisan it's hardly worth replying to, but your 'for the first few months' is doing so much heavy lifting it's hilarious.
Which red cities burned because Trump lost?
Why does it matter what 'color' the cities might have been? The literal U.S. freaking Capitol building was encircled and penetrated by a raging mob of idiots, supported by a President who couldn't psychologically accept that he lost, seeking to inflict real violence against members of Congress for doing their duty to the American people. That more than cancels out the above "well there weren't any riots for a few months".
Which blue cities burned because Harris lost?
There are no red cities.
This is what I was going to say lmao
I was going to include the word towns but I figured I didn't need to distinguish that. What populated area that voted majority Trump burned when he lost in 2020?
There was the pesky insurrection and the big fat orange baby who wouldn't concede that he lost for four years though.
Neither the shooting of Kirk or Trump were carried out by government actors. It wouldn’t have made sense to protest in those situations.
Trump wasn't even shot for starters. Don't try to gaslight us. And I'll bookmark this for when we find out Kirk was shot to protect Cankles McFuckhead from facing the consequences of his pedo activities l with Epstein.
Trump was shot. What are you talking about?
I have eyes and a brain. He was no more shot than I was.
Meth head?
I believe he meant fentanyl addict.
Who is he talking about?
George Floyd
I think they meant career criminal and drug addict who was a blight on society.
Kirk shouldn't have been shot.
Floyd shouldn't have been asphyxiated.
Well him being a blight on society doesn't mean he should have been killed, I didn't say that. But it does mean it was perhaps not a tragedy worth the whole country flipping out about.
Remember when conservatives used to say "Don't tread on me" and actually mean it? I didn't realize constitutional and civil rights only mattered if you weren't an addict, or if you happened to be white. Maybe it was tragic not for the person he was but the example of police brutality and continued unfair uses of violence and power on any American.
I mean, I’m also a blight on society. I don’t do anything besides produce abstract intellectual stuff that doesn’t feed anyone, yet I am allowed to eat.
Well him being a blight on society doesn't mean he should have been killed. But it does mean it was perhaps not a tragedy worth the whole country flipping out about.
Exactly. Even if every smear of Kirk was 100% accurate, I still would be horrified by the fact that (a) political violence seems to be normalizing by the week and (b) so many people I know are cheering this sort of thing on.
Ya, the people cheering Kirk's death are disgusting. When I see people celebrating his death, my mind goes to a dark place about THEM, which is really bad. I don't want there to be retribution from the Right, it won't help anything, two wrongs don't make a right, but I understand how people can become enraged by both the assassination and the response to it from some.
I'm more or less on the Right, but I wasn't a Charlie Kirk fan; i didn't like or dislike him, he just wasn't my thing. I can only imagine how enraged those who loved him feel.
My friends who were huge fans are ACTIVATED right now. I’ve never seen internet churn like this. My very online friends who are plugged in on X send me screenshots and it’s like a fire ant mound over there right now.
What if we just don't give a shit about him? That's most of us.
Splitter!
Because nobody calls individuals out. Instead of engaging we keep scrolling. Not enough normies are calling out our friends who regurgitate the same bullshit about words being violence and labeling everything fascism. I saw a quote on substack yesterday that was translated from Italian to English. It said "They don't kill you for being a fascist. They call you fascist so they can kill you." Their intentional obfuscation of language is being used to justify and permit violence. This shit needs to be called out publicly. I don't want someone who thinks such vile things as a friend anyway.
It definitely is hard to maintain a friendship--at least an active one--with someone who shrugs over public executions.
The problem is that that "catharsis" was the political justification for a myopic, pointless invasion that killed at least a hundred and fifty thousand people and wasted three trillion dollars of tax payer money. You're allowed to be sad, but you have to be careful not to allow your emotions to compromise your better judgement. The emotions over this man's death are already being used to curtail freedom of speech and justify authoritarian impulses.
Also Toby Keith's music sucks, and post-9/11 macho jingoism ruined country music.
Also, the idea that Toby Keith was experiencing personal and unique grief over 9/11 that liberals (?!??) weren't experiencing is just very stupid
I didn’t say that. I said that particular song received a ton of backlash from the left.
There was no way we weren’t going to war after 9/11. The issue was that the Bush administration didn’t know what they were doing and completely botched it. One angry country song wasn’t the deciding factor in any of that.
I agree that it was likely to happen either way. Re-read what I said. They were looking for a political justification, the implication there being that this is something they already wanted to do long before 9/11. I never blamed the stupid song for the Iraq war, good grief. If that's the level of bad faith you're going to engage in, we're done here.
It’s not “bad faith” simply to disagree with someone. We were discussing the song as something that was symbolic of the country’s catharsis. You were saying that being too emotional led to disastrous decisions after 9/11; I was saying that it was largely out of the public’s hands, and therefore irrelevant.
I also disagree that the Bush administration was looking for an excuse to invade the Middle East prior to 9/11. Bush ran against the interventionist foreign policy of the 1990s in 2000. Maybe some people think that was a feint and that this was his real plan all along, but nothing that we’ve seen of George W. Bush has led me to believe that he’s one for long, complicated schemes.
Implying that I was blaming the entire Iraq war on a single song was bad faith and you know it. That's not just you disagreeing with me, that's you deliberately misconstruing what I said as a means of insulting my intelligence.
Yes, people showing too much deference to logic over emotions resulted in a lot of incredibly dumb decisions in the years following 9/11. The Iraq war is not purely a result of that, but various types of emotional bias did inform the overall trajectory of polices related to and downstream of 9/11. The Bush Administration's rationale for the war was incredibly weak, and was buoyed by bad intel and a desire for retribution. There were no weapons of mass destruction, and no ties between Al Qaeda and the state of Iraq. Deposing Saddam Hussein and securing more access to oil reserves were the real purposes of the invasion, but those objectives (which both predated 9/11) didn't garner enough political support on their own. In spring of 2001, there were a lot of people in Dubya's cabinet (and in Washington generally, mainly on the right) who wanted him to "finish" his father's work when it came to Hussein.
The emotions following 9/11 were very easy for the Bush administration to use to their benefit. They wanted Saddam Hussein dead, so they got consent from the public to expend resources on that endeavor by telling them that Iraq was culpable for 9/11 and Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
Sigh. I wasn’t implying you were blaming a song for the Iraq War. If that’s how it came across, then I apologize.
I’ve never blocked anyone on here before (not even Z****) but Richard comes off like such a douche that I decided to just bite the bullet rather than try to argue with him.
Edit: Since someone asked (then deleted it), I didn’t post this comment to “own” anyone. I was actually feeling a little weird about blocking someone and wanted to hear how other people feel about this sort of thing. People disagree on here everyday without things getting nasty.
Blocking to preserve sanity is wise. Whenever I see someone post something I want to argue with, I just block them. Life is far too short to give in to the outrage buttons!
I don’t know if I’ve ever spoken to him before, but me calling Christopher Hitchens an edgelord was clearly very triggering for him. I started to reply but he was already spamming all my comments with nasty replies, so I figured it was pointless.
I don’t even think I know which OT primo you’re referring to but yeah, any bad faith nonsense is just an immediate block from me. I like the OT and my literal cousins here, and if this board gets ruined THE INTERNET IS OVER, man.
I love Hitchens but he was a bit of an edgelord lol
I’m glad we’ve found common ground haha
And for what it’s worth, I also think Chris Hedges is a miserable edgelord.
I block anyone who’s nasty. Whether I agree with them substantively or not, if they’re rude and nasty to me or others they get blocked. Life is too short and so is my temper. If I can control myself, bite my tongue (or finger ;) and be civil so could they… if they wanted to. They can spew their venom into the wind.
I still found it flippant, but maybe I’m too sensitive.
I'm sorry this happened, and it's terrible for him, his family, and everyone who watched it happen. Truly, and the leftists who are supporting it, tacitly even, are ridiculous and childlike...
But I'm also not going pretend he wouldn't be making making fun of political violence on the other side. (see: his reaction to Paul Pelosi). That doesn't justify making fun of him, but it also kinda does. I won't do it though, at least not in public.
[insert hot dog guy, "I think you should leave meme."]:
"We're all looking for the guy that inflamed political discourse in this country 🤷"
Awww. Are people sad debate-me-bro Goebbels was killed by someone who was even more extreme right that he was? Aww.
I started watching Charlie debate people on college campuses a couple of years ago. I tried listening to his podcast but it was a little too religiousy for me, and as a pro-choice atheist I disagreed with a lot of his opinions. But damn I admired the wealth of information he could recall at the drop of a hat. That's what I liked and miss about Hitchens.
I’m also pro-choice and non-religious and an admirer of Kirk. I deeply respected his commitment to open debate, his command of facts, and his fundamental politeness.
I think it says a lot that many of his younger debate sparring partners (ex. Dean Withers) have spoken in his defense since he died. Honestly, I think some of them enjoyed showing up at his events to argue with him.
I’ve now heard many of them recall how polite and warm he was.
It was really warm of Charlie to call for the death of Joe Biden, that made me all fuzzy inside.
Very well said. Give the guy credit especially for willingness to debate. I didn't follow him closely but I never got the sense that he was a troll or grifter.
I'm cringing that you mention the likes of Hitchens with Kirk. They don't deserve to be in the same paragraph. Kirk used extremely simple argumentative rhetoric, he would respond to any given argument with a question and try to force his opponents down a pre-set discussion. As soon as anyone escaped this mold, Kirk looked lost.
The Cambridge debates were the best evidence of this, Kirk had absolutely no ability to think on his feet or recall information outside of these simple algorithms he used to argue barely literate college students.
I don't think I should have to make the case for why Hitchens so clearly doesn't fit into the above mold.
Hitchens was also a miserable edgelord, so surely he loses some points for that.
Yeah, I remember Hitchens calling Mother Theresa a twisted Albanian dwarf or something like that.
To be fair he wasn’t just saying that, he wrote a whole book making the case she wasn’t the saint she was made out to be. Seems like a reasonable subject for a journalist.
The New Atheism movement has aged so poorly, to the point where atheists themselves cringe at the memory of it, that it’s tarnished the legacy of someone like Hitchens. I don’t think many people remember him fondly, to the extent that they remember him at all. Even Bill Maher, who used to mock religion regularly, has basically just stopped talking about it.
Like, Stephen Fry is also an avowed atheist, but he also does other stuff. Hitchens’ whole career seemed to be devoted to just trying to make people miserable.
Many people remember Hitchens fondly, don't you worry about that. Fry and Maher among them. The 'New Atheist movement', such as it was, has actually aged very well precisely because it was never a movement as such but rather an exchange of ideas that have become more and more mainstream. Almost a third of Americans now no longer affiliate with any religion, and that's almost 40% for younger Americans. This trend will keep going.
Right. Instead they profess religious-like devotion to social and political movements, complete with mob violence and assassinations. Such an improvement!
And being unaffiliated isn’t the same thing as being an atheist. I am the former without being the latter.
I can't even begin with how wrong you are.
Christopher Hitchens was at least a funny edge lord. Whereas Kirk was an edge lord precisely because the things he said was provocative but wrong (like saying the civil Rights act was a mistake.) The mother Theresa but was not only accurate but absolutely hilarious.
Christopher Hitchens' writing is memorialized, he still has written some of the heaviest hitting journalism on the middle east in perhaps the most important time to do so, and beyond that his personal writings stand on their own merit.
Beyond all of that, as others have pointed out, atheism is winning in the west fairly starkly everywhere outside of MAGA USA where Christian fasco-nationalism seems to have taken hold. Mind you this happened long after Hitchens died, and I genuinely wonder the kind of cultural impact Hitchens could have had on the current discourse given his insatiable appetite for debate.
He was totally right, and one of the few people brave enough to say it. While being funny too!
I don't think Hitchens meets the definition of edge lord. Edge lords say something purely to get a rise out of people. They'll spout Nazi rhetoric one day and Stalinist the next depending on who they're talking to. They're KKK, no they're Super Woke.
Hitchen's was certainly polemical, but principled in his opinions. He just didn't shy away from calling someone an idiot if he thought they were idiotic. Or a terrible person if he thought their actions warranted it (e.g. Mother Theresa noted below).
It’s so awesome to find a few other non religious pro choice folks on here who could and can respect and disagree with CK and even admire how he used words to change young hearts and minds. Even if some of that change wasn’t something we fully agree with. Words are not violence. Violence is violence.
🙌🏼
A thing I was hoping would get more coverage here is the way that Kirk’s style has been (mis) represented in the mainstream media.
While Jesse described Dowd’s comments that he was (wrongly) fired for on MSNBC as nuanced, I disagree. Dowd said Kirk was responsible for pushing hate speech, the New York Times suggested that Kirk was antisemitic in their obituary of him leading to this retraction
“A correction was made on Sept. 11, 2025: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement.”
Stephen King tweeted than retracted a bit about Kirk supporting the stoning of gay people, The Nation has been trying to make Kirk seem as hateful as possible & there are a host of liberal commentators suggesting he had this coming.
I disagree with Kirk on almost everything but he wasn’t pushing hate speech. Kirk was aggressive & certainly participated in his own watchlist cancel culture but that makes him at worst an equivalent of a lot of lefty social justice warriors just more charismatic & popular & persuasive than almost all of them.
The need on the left to make him responsible for his own murder is really horrifying to me and I feel it is important to highlight this aspect of this story. The right is turning him into a free speech martyr—it’s all so awful & predictable.
Absolutely!
Media figures who want less polarization have to become serious fact checkers on their own side. They've utterly failed to be consistent, but instead will fact check right wing conspiracy theories accurately, but with the authoritative air they haven't earned with that crowd.
Where they actually have respect (on the left), they could use their trust to at least tone down the distortions and misrepresentations of quotes.
At every opportunity, they shirk their awesome responsibility. Not one authoritative media entity has done a thorough job correcting the numerous tortured and twisted misquotes or out of context clips of their opponents. Instead they boost these quotes and, even with Snopes, often "fact check" them as "True" and not out of context.
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fact-check-charlie-kirk-once-170000805.html
Above is one example. He was referring to specific women, but they rated the tweet true which claimed he said this about "black women", explicitly changing the meaning to cover an entire group.
When I've emailed feedback about this kind of thing to Snopes, they don't respond.
Kirk said he doesn't think black people are smart enough to be pilots. YMMV as to whether that's "hate speech", which is usually in the eye of the beholder, but "hateful" is pretty on the nose for a lot of his rhetoric.
No he didn't. He was lamenting the fact that standards were dropped for DEI reasons. This was during a debate about DEI. A story that Trace from the pod broke actually.
Charlie Kirk: “You know, look, I don’t want to be a racist. But now I have a new thing when I get on a plane. And I look at the pilot, and if it’s a white guy, like, oh, great. And if it’s a black pilot, I’m gonna be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified.’ That’s the whole point of what I was saying is that I now look at everything through a hyper-racialized diversity-quota lens because of their massive insistence to try to hit these ridiculous racial hiring quotas. Of course I believe anybody of any skin color can become a qualified pilot. But now I have this—it’s like, oh, great, another DEI hire, another diversity quota hire. That’s the point. They’re ruining things.”
I hear this as Kirk vulnerably confessing something most normies think and are reluctant to admit: we sometimes question the qualifications of POC when we know they could be DEI hires.
I’ve heard black conservative pundits opine that they resent having had to labor under the suspicion that they might have been diversity hires, and that being the reason why they think AA, quotas and the like are pernicious.
I had the great good fortune to have Shelby Steele as a Professor as an undergraduate. Somehow I heard him complaining about how affirmative action undercut the merit of everything he did as an academic.
Of course he was so accomplished (and an intimidatingly tough teacher) it’s hard to imagine he had this worry but his feelings about this could never be construed as hate speech and yet this is being misapplied to Kirk continuously.
BTW, this was an eye opener to me as I had always assumed that affirmative action was a complete good and only a bad person would object to it.
Well since that story was about air traffic controllers I think you’re either mistaken or Kirk was bringing up pilots for unrelated but probably racist reasons.
I know it was about controllers, but its not like the two are worlds apart.
"Unrelated but probably racist reasons"
That's bad faith leaking out of your keyboard.... you should fix that.
So let me get this straight. Kirk hears about lawsuit *alleging* that in 2014 there was a program to hire black ATCs despite low test scores*. He then extrapolates this to assume that black *pilots* are unqualified and you think “sounds right to me! pilots, air traffic control, what’s the difference?”
But I’m acting in bad faith? Sure.
*people really always miss this detail. Trace didn’t do any original reporting on this. He just summarized claims from a lawsuit.
If an airline is instituting racial quotas then it follows logically that it would apply to all positions.
Yes its bad faith to assume motive when you dont know it.
You've been given the full context, in which the quote makes perfect sense.
Read Trace’s reporting on it. It’s exhaustive and eye-opening. And maddening and depressing.
It's incredibly important to look up context, in its full and unedited form, before choosing to believe and repeat an accusation of racism. If the accusation is true, then the full context should only strengthen your belief in it; there's no downside to having more information.
That isn't what he said and the big affirmative action moves in the pilot world are absolutely a reason to be shy about black pilots. Something that is umm common knowledge in the pilot world (especially in the military and the big airlines).
If you have a test for lifeguards that says they have to swim 2 miles nonstop to be one. Then you say "eh those requirements mean there aren't enough blacks we will make them have a different lower standard", there would be every reason to be worried about black lifeguards.
That is absolutely the situation in a lot of cockpits and in several industries. Notably medical schools for example.
If you think that worrying about that is racism you are a fucking idiot.
Doctor here. Notably you're making shit up about concerns in our cockpits. My black colleagues provide excellent care and there's no evidence that black doctors are specifically substandard.
So medical schools haven't changed standards on the basis of racial equity concerns? Because it is on record they have. And that absolutely is 100% evidence.
And as far as "making shit up about cockpits", what does that have to do with you being a doctor? Do you know any pilots? I do, father was in the Airforce, I was born at an airbase. Aunt was a VP in an aerospace firm, and her husband an aircraft designer. I have spent a lot of time around pilots. The grumbling about the DEI stuff impacting the quality of both ATC staff and the people making it into cockpits, particularly in the military has not exactly been quiet, nor only recent. It stretches back decades.
Or to put it another way I will believe the candidates meet the same standards when the fields stop bragging about their DEI successes and the ways they stack the deck.
Produce studies that show black doctors have worse outcomes. This discussion is explicitly about black pilots having worse ones, and I'm not gonna touch it because I'm not an aviation expert, but I am a medical expert.
Show your work.
Well do they even do such studies? I expect not because they don't want to know.
You really think relaxing standards on DEI grounds has no impact on quality? That is really your position? e aren't talking about your specific colleagues, we are talking generally.
It sort of strains credulity, and because it is such an ideological axiom one suspects there is a really dearth of truthfullness.
He didn’t say this.
In case you are interested in context, this person, who knew Kirk, made a video giving context to the more prevalent out-of-context quotes going around in the media.
https://youtu.be/N14ywRyTWVI?si=AojVXqUNnku4djoX
see that's what i thought. what would even be the context that justified him making such a statement at all? especially if he was talking about DEI. i don't doubt some of his quotes are taken out of context to some degree but some of the things he said....the "misrepresentation" of his words can't really be that far from what he really meant or believed
He didn’t say that. There is context for what he did say. If you are interested you can find it below. It was part of a very typical argument against DEI and affirmative action, even amongst people who are not conservative, namely that lowering standards to elevate under-qualified people will lead to questions about whether people are there based on merit or based on some immutable characteristic.
https://youtu.be/wl3UwsNZ544?si=FNq5c_E34KwpaiQ3
Yes that is a common argument. That’s not what Kirk said. His exact quote was “when I see a black pilot, I get nervous”.
Again, that wasn’t his exact quote. He was speaking specifically in the context of a conversation about racial quotas put in place at an airline.
KIRK: You wanna go thought crime? I'm sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I'm gonna be like, "Boy, I hope he's qualified."
KOLVET: But you wouldn't have done that before!
KIRK: That's not an immediate … that's not who I am. That's not what I believe.
NEFF: It is the reality the left has created.
KIRK: I want to be as blunt as possible because now I'm connecting two dots. Wait a second, this CEO just said that he's forcing that a white qualified guy is not gonna get the job. So I see this guy, he might be a nice person and I say, "Boy, I hope he's not a Harvard-style affirmative-action student that … landed half of his flight-simulator trials."
KOLVET: Such a good point. That's so fair.
KIRK: It also … creates unhealthy thinking patterns. I don't wanna think that way. And no one should, right? … And by the way, then you couple it with the FAA, air-traffic control, they got a bunch of morons and affirmative-action people.
“I’ve heard about affirmative action, therefore black pilots are unqualified” is a racist argument. I’m being as fair to Kirk as he was to his opponents.
He was literally slaughtered while engaging in the act of free speech.
Whether you agree with him or not, or even whether you think he was arguing in bad faith or not, he was silenced because he expressed his opinions.
The term “martyr” has its roots in a Greek word meaning “witness.” Sadly appropriate in this case.
Having said that, I do think that there is this tendency in society to flatten people who get killed in this manner into one-dimensional cardboard cutouts who, during their lives, could do no wrong. And according to my read of his belief system, Charlie himself would not want his life to be construed or interpreted in this light.
The Daily had a story on him on Thursday that I think was really respectful and fair.
Something I think people in the heterodox space are misinterpreting is the extent of influence conservatives have. Yes, the president is a Republican who has a bunch of big supporters in the podcasting world. That’s still only a small portion of the media ecosystem, as the examples you gave show. The “resistance left” still dominates most cultural institutions. We’re all just so online that it can be easy to forget that sometimes.
Its interesting Katie sensed something shifted with Kirk's death. Im a Christian and a lot of my fellow Christians sensed a shift, culturally and spiritually. We all wondered why we were so cut up over the death of someone we don't know. Its more or less because Charlie was a representative of (some of) what we believe and he was taken out because of it. Im sure its deeper than that and I'm still processing it. But the fact that non-christian Katie also sensed the cultural impact of this event, is significant.
i'm quite an anti-religion atheist (privately because I don't shame or denigrate people's faith) who utterly despises Kirk, but the killing still really disturbed and upset me. Like we're all on a big ship together and we just heard something big and ominous go "thunk".
I find this metaphor very apt.
I think it mostly disturbed me because I unwittingly saw the video and it seemed pretty obvious he had a moment where he clearly knew what happened as he grabbed his neck. I obviously wish it never happened, it was horrible. However, I find it hard to be overly charitable after his numerous comments about being okay with some shooting victims each year to preserve the second amendment. Other victims of gun violence are also someone's parents and children, which he didn't seem the least bit concerned about.
So many individuals felt as you did, but they have looked up the actual talk and found the context enhanced their understanding and shifted their views. You might want to do the same.
I read the context. It did not change my impression of his comment.
I'll try to find it.
We still let people drive cars with certain knowledge that it will result in people being maimed and killed.
We could ban cars tomorrow and save about 40,000 lives per year in the United States.
Yet as a society we’d rather not suffer the loss of freedom and economic value that a car ban would entail.
Yeah that's a dumb analogy. We need cars to get from point A to point B. Very few people need guns to get through their day, they just want them.
I second what Elle said: Listen to the entire clip re: hun deaths and see if you still feel the same.
Is there anyone whose death would not elicit an emotional response from you?
Of course there are. And there also are a tiny number of people whose deaths would even make me celebrate. Being disturbed by this assassination isn't a matter of being all gooey and easily flustered - This was a very brazen incident of public political murder. There are potential political and cultural consequences of this that are concerning.
And also, I hold utter contempt for murderers, especially stupid school-shooter types, which it seems Tyler Robinson is.
I’m not Christian and felt the same. My reaction has been unexpected. Things feel precarious.
Agreed.
For the first time I felt the fear of what would likely happen if someone went after Trump. Unlike those 'assassination attempts' he staged.
Ah, okay, you're a loon! I get it now.
OMG thank you sweetie, what a nice compliment. 😘
He was a low-iq provocateur who made a career out of debating college freshmen. I'm not condoning the murder of anyone much less a father but you need to get over it and try not to read too much into it.
Thanks I'll base how I feel spiritually about the death of a brother-in-Christ on some random internet opinion 👍
"how I feel spiritually about the death of a brother-in-Christ"
lol listen to yourself. The Woke Right everyone. Calm down and take some deep breaths FFS.
Woke right? What, am I trying to cancel the left for their opinions? Am I unabashedly MAGA? No and no.
I'm just a Christian babe. There are a lot of us around. Calm your farm.
It strikes me that you are not presently interacting with someone who engages in good faith debate.
I strongly suggest expressing your humane and thoughtful opinion over at the BaRPod Wednesday open thread. There you will get respectful engagement, rather than the juvenile trolling often found here on the episode threads.
Not a troll - meant everything I said above. Watching all the pearl-clutching and the right having their own BLM type moment over Charlie Kirk is pathetic.
The best thing about this community is that we don’t ( usually!) take cheap shots at each other. It’s way more fun to toss ideas around.
Emma is obviously a person of faith. She’s allowed to be one, and shouldn’t be subjected to mockery. We can’t have anything approaching free speech or a free society if we have evil fools murdering people who say shit they don’t like.
There are a lot of other online places you can go if you are entertained by being a jagoff to strangers.
Anyone is subject to mockery, especially the religious.
this feels like a comment from someone who doesn't normally listen to the podcast. The thing I like about this community is that it doesn't sound like a dumb reddit fight.
I mean, sounds like you aren't able to articulate as to why you feel that way about this guy for a reason better than that? So I mean what he said is just as valid as what you said. We're all entitled to our opinions and feelings, but others are alloeed to call us out, even if he is being a little crass.
Charlie Kirk was a huge asshole and critics who have been pointing out that he wasn't some great truth-teller are right. At the same time, his assassination is a very large escalation into the descent into political violence in the USA currently. That's not reading too much into it, that's just a diagnosis of a real problem.
This feels like a litmus test for your liberal bonafides similar to Skokie Case.
I was listening to one of the FIRE guys about the history of free speech. They pointed out in the U.S. that it's never been a left vs right issue. That the side that supported free speech would shift depending on who held political power.
Those who hold power tend to shift to control of speech. Since they have the means to do so. While those who do not hold power are more likely to be very pro free speech since it's their opinions that are marginalized.
Important to note that "power" isn't just who won the election, but social power in general. In that context, it's not surprising that the progressive left is anti-free speech. But also provides insight into how the MAGA right "feels" disempowered right now. Contrasted with the 80's and 90's when it was the left that was socially marginalized.
Total tangent, but judicial Originalism/textualism follows the same pattern. With the new conservative dominance, it would predict a slow drift away from originalism by conservative judges and to originalism by progressive ones. Originalism is, essentially, an appeal to authority that lends weight to minority legal opinions.
Do you really think so? Have you watched a lot of his debate? I judge him to be fairly intelligent.
I mean, he’s not Ben Shapiro, but few people are.
I think a lot of ppl fancy themselves very high IQ individuals who could start a #1 podcast if they just wanted to, but in reality rhetoric and persuasion is actually hard, bc because they have never actually tried, have no idea how hard it actually is. People like CK made it look easy. It's easy to think they are dumb because we often disagree with people like him. But To say he was low IQ or dumb is just a cop out.
I'm not sure charisma is tightly coupled with intelligence. I don't have a read on his intelligence, don't know enough other than a few first impressions on his talks over the last few days.
But being very persuasive doesn't require high IQ. Some of the most unlikeable people I've known were very high IQ. And some of the most persuasive / likable were just regular folks.
Like I don't think they're any more related than being an elite endurance athlete is to the length of your index finger.
People with longer ring finger relative to index finger tend, on average, to have slightly better endurance and athletic performance.
Sources:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5227311/
"findings showed that low digit ratio possibly linked to better sports performance. "
https://www.news-medical.net/news/20240216/Study-links-finger-length-ratio-to-oxygen-metabolism-efficiency-in-athletes.aspx
"Study links finger length ratio to oxygen metabolism efficiency in athletes"
https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/10.3389/fendo.2020.00292/full
" Female Olympic athletes had a lower 2D:4D ratio, possibly reflecting a higher prenatal androgen exposure, than sedentary controls."
I'm going to gently put forward to you that I think you are wrong about both points you made regarding intelligence, and finger size correlation to athletic endurance.
lol I was like "huh. Probably something to do with testosterone".
We have to resist feeding the trolls.
Ugh- you’re right! I think i just gave him a hearty meal.
Sorry!
I watched one or two after this to get a feel for his style. I was a pretty successful debater once upon a time.
He didn't strike me as a good debater fundamentally. Seems to me his key insight was that almost everyone is a terrible debater who does not hold their views for any rational, well thought out reason.
So he would just ask a lot of questions of them and sit back while they made themselves look like idiots. Also seemed he put some effort into having a bag of questions that were most effective at doing this for each topic. But not a lot of underlying substance as far as promoting the alternative ideology.
In that sense, it was a very King of the Hill version of Socrates vs the Sophists approach.....
Low IQ?
I doubt it.
But anyway, is that how we measure someone’s worth?
No...I think it's completely acceptable to not "get over it" when it comes to the cold blooded assassination of a fellow citizen just because there were those who disagreed with him.
You're not "condoning" his assissination, but you're sure as fuck doing all you can to minimize the reality of it.
Dude, I am a socialist, and see the way the media can clip you out of context, smear you, provide the basis for your dehumanization, and low information mobs consuming ragebait will cheer when someone shoots you over misrepresentations.
I fear the online left. And not just left, I think the yard sign libs are caught up in this ragebait too, with TV news and mainstream press goading them along.
Most of us have one too many spicy views to feel safe amidst these people now.
I'm a Christian as well and really horrified about any public murder or act of violence, this one definitely included.
It is certainly not for me to judge Kirk's soul; only God can and will do that.
And I think Kirk should *not* be held up as a good representative of the Christian faith, given the abhorrent things he believed and said that do not match my understanding of Jesus Christ's ministry and call at all.
All three of these can be true.
It must be deeply meaningful to have such a prominent champion for the sexist, homophobic teachings of Christianity. :(
Don't be so self important. It's not about you.
Sounds like the murderer might have been into the com network or similar (worth googling), which, if true, means Kirk wasn’t killed not so much for any specific ideas but for general nihilism.
I’m discounting the pushback against the casing with the “gay” reference on it entirely. Some on the left have LONG used gay shaming against conservatives they don’t like. Lindsey Graham anyone? David French has frequently been targeted by online leftists along the same vein.
My 16yo son says it’s just a funny thing to write on a casing and suggests nothing about the politics of the assassin.
It was a big thing for boys to say to each other on the playground in the late 70s and 80s
There’s homophobia on all sides and it’s all hot to me
Dan Savage did it too, which is certainly ironic coming from him.
I was called a f*ggot by a very leftist trans woman once. There is absolutely homophobia from all sides.
I KNOW that K&J have to keep up the whole “preferred pronouns” thing in order to continue being treated as mainstream (or almost-mainstream) journalists. But I fucking hate it sometimes. This Gretchen guy’s behavior is the behavior of a crazy MAN. “She” wrote violent pornography about Jesse? No, fucking no. Stop laying men’s crimes at our feet.
I really agree with you. I don’t think they need to go so far as to say “he”, either. They can just refrain from saying “she”. It’s not so hard to restructure sentences just a bit to avoid the issue.
I agree that it’s not that hard to restructure sentences to avoid the pronoun. I do it. Also, just replace the pronoun with the person’s name.
It absolutely boils my piss when they do this. It feels forced and self-conscious, and gives “we’ve chosen to die on this hill and can’t climb down this far in”. They see using correct pronouns as giving in to Graham Linehan, I reckon. Sorry, but he’s right about a lot of things🤷♀️ and this is one of them.
Every damn time I think “Wait, this doesn’t sound like a wom—oh.” Never fails.
That's hardly a crime, and if you look her up she looks more feminine than even most trans women these days, if a little chubby. She's probably mentally ill for sure, but she seems to have actually properly transitioned. If that's not a reason to call someone by preferred pronouns, I don't know what is...
I always took them at their word when they said this community was very friendly and welcoming, but reading through this thread, it's about as toxic as any place on the internet circa 2015. Maybe by today's standards it's welcoming, but this seems to be a very toxic thread to say the least.
The person they’re discussing is a man, doing something that is both awful and distinctly male.
A person concerned with truth is likely to have a problem referring to a man as “she,” because that’s a form of lying. And a feminist who understands male violence as a problem in this world is likely to have a problem with male-typical aggression being attributed to women.
Those are two real objections to using wrong-sex pronouns that have nothing to do with being cruel.
If you haven’t yet, maybe take some time to investigate your assumption that using wrong-sex pronouns is kind.
That's cool that you think that bro. Why don't you refer to Buck Angel as she and see if it makes any sense.
I see Buck as a woman. (Because she is one.) But re Buck and other trans people for whom I have respect, I just avoid using a pronoun altogether. I won’t lie about someone’s sex.
FTMs only pass well when they’re not standing next to real men. Have you ever seen gigapassoid Buck Angel standing next to Laverne Cox? It’s funny as hell.
I thought FdB made some interesting points on this being violence in search of ideology, rather than ideologically driven violence. The ‘reveal’ about this guy’s politics (erratic and meme-ified) seems to confirm it. He’s no more a creature of “the left” than the murderers of democrats are creatures of the right. He and others like him (assassins, school shooters etc.) don’t really believe in anything; they’re nihilists seeking meaning in the most repugnant, meaningless way possible.
Sure, but the fact that the left has embraced the killing so enthusiastically (not the politicians, maybe, but the rank and file) says a lot. Something has changed
I think that's just your feed. It's the same shit as the "Lefties are mad about Sydney Sweeney" thing; randos online aren't "the left"'s rank and file. I'm a normie dem who is surrounded by normie dems and has worked in Democratic politics. No one is happy about a husband and father getting shot like this. There absolutely are, though, people who 1) fairly point out the differences between how this and the Minnesota cases are treated by government (an obvious point) and 2) point out, again fairly, that Kirk's own views on gun control explicitly said that innocent people getting shot was worth it for the second amendment. I don't think that's "embracing" killing.
Kirk, imo, made a living selling outrage and fear. He died as he lived, right down to his snuff video getting sprung on everyone in 4K when none of us were looking for it. I don't think he deserved to get shot, because I don't think anyone does, ever, and no "rank and file" lefty or dem thinks so either.
At this point, all of the moderate-to-lefty people (centrist Canadian liberals) in my circles I have read commentary from think the assassination was one of: justified because Kirk was evil and deserved it, ends-justifies-means because his ideas are evil, or "fuck around and find out." Of course, most people I know are not talking about it publicly, but so far the ones who are entirely fall into these categories.
I think it's funny/ironic that he said the thing about innocent deaths + gun rights, which moves him towards the "fuck around and find out" / schadenfreude territory area.
You're commenting, on a podcast about the myriad ways in which internet drama has caused real-world change, that the leftists gleefully celebrating Kirk's death don't matter because they're online.
That's clearly not what I said. You said "rank-and-file", which implies regular, average people in the democratic party embracing the killing. I pointed out that's not true, and that the very small minority of people saying stuff like that aren't 'rank and file' in any meaningful sense of the term. They're a small contingent, most of whom would probably rather eat glass than actually vote for democrats. Remember, your algorithm is crafted to outrage you. But considering that sitting United States Senator Mike Lee mocked the killing of Melissa Hortman, her husband, and her golden retriever, I can see how you might assume that Democrats embrace and enable horrible behavior because Republicans do. We don't.
What does “he died as he lived” mean? My gut instinct is to push back hard on this, but I’m not willing to do that if I don’t know exactly what you mean. Don’t want to straw-man you.
On a college campus, filmed from multiple angles in 4K, as viral content on every platform, provoking strong reactions and with the words "gang violence" on his lips. It's distasteful, as his whole schtick was, but it's true. I would find it too on-the-nose if it were scripted in a TV show. That's not a moral judgment on the correctness of killing which as a Catholic and a person with basic morality I always, always oppose.
I would say that he died in the spotlight that he himself dominated. So I guess we are in agreement there. But that’s where the similarity ends. It did not include pointing firearms at and shooting other people, or even threatening people with violence.
I’m not American so US politics is impenetrable to me, but it seems like the people celebrating it are not people who even vote Democrat - they abstain because they think Democrats are too right wing 🤷🏼♀️ They are to “the left” what Groypers are to “the right”, with the difference that the revolting extremes on the right are almost literally the rank and file of the Republican Party now.
We're talking 100s of thousand of upvotes and likes, verging on millions. It's not isolated extremist Discord servers at any rate, or splinter sites like Kiwifarms. The front page of Reddit, for instance, had thousands of posts celebrating day of and the day after.
Yeah, it’s a massive country that’s increasingly extreme on both ends of the political spectrum. I just think 1000s of sick reddit posts after this is the same as 1000s of sick X posts after Pelosi and the Minnesota politicians 🤷🏼♀️
Which “revolting extremes” would those be? When talking about rank and file Republicans, those probably number in the 10s of millions. If you’re going to paint with a broad brush, you might as well show us the color of paint being used.
Sure, I’m probably using the term inaccurately - I don’t mean Republican voters so much as Republican leaders and the people being put in positions of real power. I’m referring to Trump of course but also openly racist people employed by DOGE, Governors who joke about home invasions and murders etc.
Some on the Left have embraced him, not everyone.
"the Left", "the right". Yes, there clearly are a lot of those who say they are left who are disgustingly celebrating this horrible murder, just there was a lot of horrible celebrating of October 7 by those who think they are left because, I don't know, antifa or some other such stupidity.
They are not the only ones on the left - it's vast and varied. I am sure - in fact I know, because my whole family is on the right - that the right is as varied, too.
Here's a resource from the left that is NOT celebrating this murder.
https://jacobin.com/2025/09/charlie-kirk-murder-political-violence
I think almost all political violence is violence in search of an ideology. These are damaged, lost people with broken moral compasses and they grab on to whatever garbage is floating by.
I see your point, but I think there are also historical examples of ideologically driven violence - the attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament, Charlotte Corday’s assassination of the Jacobin leader, etc. Violence has been a tool for people with coherent, reasoned, understandable belief systems, that they felt was more effective than other means or perhaps the only means.
Oh really? I didn’t get that from what I read. Can you fill me in on what I might be missing? I don’t remember reading that he was violent or unstable.
I see where you’re coming from. I read it as “Look, go read the book. I can’t really recapitulate all the reasons here but you can read my motivations in this book.”
Btw, I wonder how the author of that book feels?
I am firmly post liberal and have become more traditionalist after becoming a mother and more appreciative of traditional and conservative values - that being said I am a never Trumper and I thought Kirk’s debates on college campuses were akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
Yesterday I watched his debates at the Oxford Union and… I think he won those debates too.
I know he has a history of inflammatory rhetoric and I don’t think his tactics were generous or morally executed, but he was very good at arguing for conservative values, even against more worthy opponents than college aged leftists.
And I regret that he didn’t debate with more decorum and honor and I also grieve that we don’t have the opportunity to disagree better.
I’m just upset. I feel like the culture is a run away train headed for whatever happens to run away trains.
Part of my religiosity is letting go of blame and control and taking responsibility for myself and preparing my family to live the best we can come what may. It’s still very scary though to watch our culture implode.
“Kirk’s debates on college campuses were akin to shooting fish in a barrel” — I agree, and IMO it’s one reason the debates were important. Clip after clip revealed to viewers that campus leftists’ arguments are COMPLETELY unhoned. These are smart kids for the most part, and when they debate Kirk it’s clear they’ve never had to actually support their claims with argumentation. What’s important about that is it shows us that college campuses are political monocultures. Which is a serious problem.
That is severe sampling bias though. The type of kid happy to show up and try to debate a guy like Charlie Kirk is not representative. There’s a reason the majority of students go about their day, often unaware he was even there. He was good at what he did, and made a ton of money doing it. I’m not so sure we’re better off as a country with that type of content (including the left wing version) being popular
One of my favorite bits that I don't think had anything to do with Kirk, but is just about the general idiocy and lack of information on the left was one where they walked around big cities and campuses and asked people about tax policy.
And generally the consensus was bleed the rich dry and fuck the billionaires and the tax policy needs to be much more progressive.
And then when asked to set up a tax policy and tax brackets they almost to a person picked brackets that are *less* progressive than the ones we have because any more would be unfair. Just a great example of an issue where the general public tends to have very firm opinions and almost no actual mastery of the facts.
A lot of "someone making $50,000 should be paying like $3,000 not $15,000". Umm sir the average person making $50,000 has a net tax liability near zero. $3,000 would represent a huge tax increase for them.
Payroll taxes aside, I went over to the IRS website to check the current rates, and a single person making $50k would owe $4,892.66 by what I can see. https://www.irs.gov/filing/federal-income-tax-rates-and-brackets
How do you get near-zero?
People generally get tax credits, and deductions, and some other transfers.
like don't look at the calculations, look at actual data regarding what actual taxpayers pay at various points in various years.
That isn't even getting into if you include the direct transfer payments, in which case huge numbers of people are net negative.
Ah, I forgot the standard deduction. Duh. That changes quite a bit. $2,621.88
Interestingly close to the amount these folks would hypothetically find reasonable, and a 5% pre-tax contribution to a 401k could shave another $300 of tax liability off, but for totally non-personal reasons I'm still wondering how you get that down to your near-zero counterpoint.
It would be pretty easy to repeat this for right-y audiences and try to get them to explain exactly why abortion or taxes are bad. Debating ideas in real time is very difficult.
I feel like I have some pretty nuanced opinions, but when I actually get into it with my lefty friends, you just get caught up in the weeds. Becoming a skilled debater who knows every inefficient corner around each talking point is hard, or wilfully ignoring some piece of nuance you're aware of, but doesn't help your point.
I'm not disagreeing with the idea that young people or universities are politically monocultureish. Debate-me-bro culture is good, but I don't think it should be trusted as the only test of ideas. Conservatives aren't correct because someone can't beat them in a debate that particular day :)
When I’ve watched Charlie Kirk clips, I’ve always been surprised that the kids aren’t more prepared. I see that a some of them have notes on their phone… I think, Why hasn’t this kid practiced more for this moment? Of course it’s going to be stressful. You can see that the kids are nervous.
Related to the issue of Kirk shooting fish 🐟 in a barrel: we should remember that these are kids in college — a good college, often — and Kirk was a community college dropout. On any campus, there should be *someone* who can take him on. The fact that there’s not is an indictment of the education the kids are getting, IMO.
I'm a highschool dropout and have a good job and stuff so the college thing is mostly irrelevant. The past 30 years has pushed 100% of people who could afford college into college, meaning that all of the midwits have gone to college to live out their parents' vicarious Animal House dreams :)
They really have! The average IQ of a college student now is just… the average IQ. Which IMO is a problem. A generation ago, college was for the smart kids.
Exactly right.
Well said. Another thing that people who criticize him debating college students don’t consider (I believe). Is that having your beliefs challenged and not being able to defend your opinion is part of intellectually growing and maturing. Perhaps some people don’t learn from it but most people will.
Right? The style of discussion Kirk had with students is similar to what I’d hope any college students would have with their professors.
I actually think Charlie himself joked about the south park episode. He was saying they nailed it with him and the water bottles.
Apparently he liked it and joked about it a lot. I found this snip of him talking about it. Maybe he was a fan as a kid? I don’t know much about him but he reads proud of it to me.
https://www.tiktok.com/@thecharliekirkshow/video/7535846573972917517?
I like that he signed off asking his followers to become "master-debaters". Pretty good sense of humor about it.
Can we get a podcast episode on the racist n bomb dropping neighbor and his gay magician son? It’s the least you could do. Plus, Bremerton needs a bit more sunshine on it.
That's a terrible idea. I don't really care about Katie's personal life
My educated guess is that the poster was being facetious.
Boo!!
Did you hear that Katie? No more personal details about your life. No more Moose or Jana comments and I don’t want to hear about you crashing bicycles drunk and lighting your balcony on fire! No more! Stick to just the serious news topics and berating Jesse.
remember the goat she rescued, that was a great story too
Yes! I loved that goat story.
and the 'Japanese' redesign. Nothing cheers me up more than misunderstood cultural adoption design. I love a decapitated buddha head pot plant.
Someone should stitch together all of Katie’s stories about him into one compilation.
Is this the same estranged son who the neighbor had asked Katie to write to a year ago or so?
It has to be unless she has two old white racist neighbors she knows. Somehow he escaped his final dirt nap for now.
Or perhaps the guy has multiple sons?
Maybe. We need Katie to chime in here. Katie, please fill in the details, or better yet, do a podcast on him!
Glad to hear that Jesse is taking the potential danger to himself seriously. Yes, most of the people online are just online bullshitters - but not all.
Speaking of which, Hasan Piker deserves no praise. I watched the video of him finding out and all I saw was a man realising that *his* words might one day have consequences too. Self-preservation is not a virtue.
"Self-preservation is not a virtue".
You mean like the scene in Titanic where Billy Zane grabs a random kid, and tells the crew that the kid is his so he can secure a spot on the lifeboat reserved for families.
🔨 nailed it!
"If we ignore the millions of rank-and-file in favor of my preferred center-left prestige media pundits, the left's reaction to Charlie Kirk's assassination has been completely reasonable."
Such a disappointing, typical Jesse take. The reaction to the assassination on Reddit, Bluesky, TikTok, leftie Twitter, and elsewhere has been shocking in the extreme.
Take for example the Reddit post, by a doctor from Texas, about uncorking the bottle of Pappy Van Winkle he had saved for Trump's death to celebrate the assassination. Hundreds of thousands of upvotes! The entire website was dedicated to gaudy celebration from the moment the bullet hit Kirk's neck.
We just came out of the 2010s when GamerGate and wokeness were incubated in echo chambers on 4chan and Tumblr respectively, then spilled out to subsume the entire nation. The notion that we should ignore what normal people are doing because the cathedral's Elect don't agree with them is pretty asinine coming from a guy who made his career covering the fallout of populist online uprisings.
So in from your view, random people on social media espousing radical views represent normal left wing voter? And how do you regard the right wing reaction from politicians and mainstream pundits who are now advocating for infringement of civil liberties and/or civil war on their ideological enemies?
I think Brad Polumbo had a good take:
https://x.com/brad_polumbo/status/1966141329253023890?s=46
> We just came out of the 2010s when GamerGate and wokeness were incubated in echo chambers on 4chan and Tumblr respectively, then spilled out to subsume the entire nation
I think this sums up my interest in watching what is happening in the weird places online. In the 2010s, people thought that the subcultures they disagreed with were bad; and didn't hear about, or didn't mind, the subcultures they might have agreed with.
My wife was a fan, in the sense that she likes to “show” me things while I’m trying to peacefully listen to country music. I confess I saw Charlie Kirk as a bulwark against truly vile people like Nick Fuentes. I didn’t have to agree with everything he said to admire and appreciate his position within that movement.
It is totally fair to call him a champion of free expression. I think Michael Tracy is playing bait and switch with champion for truth. No one owns the truth, no one is correct all the time, and nobody goes about finding it the right way all the time either. But Kirk did open up the debate stage to talk to whoever wanted to come up and get a word in and that in and of itself is admirable.
You don’t have to scratch the paint on any other cultural icon to find more human flaws beneath. MLK, Ghandi, etc were not as people what they are remembered as as icons. They had flaws, but as I’ve gotten older I don’t think flaws are all that remarkable. Everyone is flawed and has done something fucked up. The remarkable thing is when someone does something that’s at all good or admirable, and I think Kirk deserves to be remembered for that.
Your point about MLK and Gandhi seems like a nonsequitor to me. Yes, they were flawed individuals, but their causes were just. What does that have to do with Kirk? By all accounts he was a perfectly fine person in private, but his cause was “humiliate college students dumb enough to engage with him”. This is where anyone who argues he was anything other than a GOP propagandist loses me. What else did he do? Seriously, I’d love to know.
It’s children’s birthday party weekend but high level: the total of all the policy positions they held over the course of their lives weren’t always stellar. King was a communist. Ghandi a racist. We don’t remember the men. We remember the ideal of the good part.
I know Darryl Cooper isn’t popular around here, but I did find it funny when during the Iranian controversy a few months ago, he tweeted at Michael Tracey something like, “Michael, I feel like you want Iran to nuke us just so you can say I told you so.”
I had only somewhat heard of Charlie before this event but have likewise been shaken up by it. At least a few of my friends were in the “good riddance, he was hateful” camp, so I went back to listen to some interviews. I listened to him on Bill Maher in April and Megyn Kelly in November. He seemed to me a very Christian but mostly normie if not provocative Republican.
Tried to share that sentiment with a liberal friend and was reprimanded like I was a child.
So far, the moderate-to-lefty people I know have been in one of the categories: good riddance (this guy was bad), ends-justifies-means (conservatives are bad), or "fuck around and find out" / schadenfreude.
It feels like people who project their opinions publicly seem to think that they are exclusively correct and people who disagree with them are incorrect, thus it's hard to see that people can have different ideas without being stupid or evil.
I'm not sure who the left-wing equivalent of Charlie Kirk is, but I would put some of my retirement savings on people who are happy that Kirk is dead would be equally unhappy if someone on their political side got assassinated.
I'm sorry you were treated that way, but I think your investigation into Kirk was not very deep or representative of his career. You can't really judge him based on a Maher or Kelly conversation. Please watch his speeches at conservative rallies/events, his podcast rants, his 'own the naive college radical' takedowns. He was a radical Christian nationalist (he would proudly call himself that, by the way) and a fawning dishonest mouthpiece for the authoritarian Trump administration. But, on the other hand, I suppose the Overton window on what constitutes a "normie" Republican has shifted so far to the radical right, that I guess you essentially are correct. Sadly.
I agree, two interviews is not enough to make a full judgment. I’d argue the various out of context clips circling on social aren’t a great measure either.
I’ve recently watched another long form debate, one of the round tables he did with 20+ college students. I don’t agree with a lot, but he came across as respectful and civil and not the bigot he’s been painted as. And yes, he loved Trump and yes was very Christian. But so are most on the right.
I guess my sentiment is, continuing to say he was hateful gives more credence to what happened. And that’s what’s been bothering me.
At the end of the day, they killed a YouTuber. This is what our world has come to.
So, I asked my 16yo gamer son to analyze the casing inscriptions. A couple things he told me:
- re: the Helldivers arrows: “Helldivers is, in its entirety, a criticism of American imperialism.”
- The oWo inscription could be anti-furry or a pro-furry ironic reclaiming.
- re: “If you read this you are gay lmao”: “That one doesn’t need any explanation. It’s just a funny thing to write on a bullet casing.”
Based just on the inscriptions, his first guess for the assassin’s politics was antifa. Second guess was alt-right.
My honest guess is that he has a whole soup of ideologies and probably started going schizo in college, didn’t realize what was happening, and just fell into this hole.
Psychosis was one of my first guesses, but I haven’t yet seen evidence for it.
I think, if anything, this is just another case for horseshoe theory.
Can we please get some more radically non-extreme centrists on campus to get young people into the idea that both left and right make some pretty good points/ideas and also each have some pretty bad ones, and that with civil discourse between both and that very unpopular but necessary thing we call "compromise", we might find our way out of this mess?
Great idea but keep in mind that on any given campus, 20% are loudmouth leftists; 5% are loudmouth right-wingers.
And 75% want to do enough to graduate, drink, get some "action", and come out with a job on the other end. This last group is nearly impossible to mobilize.
And thank god for it, because if that 75% - the future normies of America - fell into radicalism, we’d be super fucked.
I grew up with the adults on my street sharing a beer in one or another driveway at the end of the day. I thought adult conversation was so boring, and now it seems foundational to a civil society. CK was right about this: we have to talk to each other.
There was a large, funded, concerted protest of my college (a religious one) in the spring of my senior year, and while I've always been interested in culture wars, I said, "I have papers to write!" and skipped the protest and all the related events.
The anti-Israel protests died down much faster at MIT than at other schools. Problem sets were due and exams were coming up
That's all true, but aren't more or less all of them at least somewhat interested in, y'know, having a future?
Theoretically yes - but I'm not sure how many college kids think long-term beyond their own post-graduate education, career and family formation goals.
You seem to taking a Braver Angels/Andrew Yang approach, which I think usually requires some maturity and perspective that comes with age.
I’d say that the vast majority of professors on any college campus are normie democrats, center-left.
A small minority are insane leftists but they are the ones students are scared about and give profs a bad name.
I really think there’s a public/private divide. Public schools are less elitist by nature. (Or maybe it’s just because I majored in history. You can’t really become a history professor if you hate old white guys.)
I’m also in the sciences fwiw.
Start with the gay Republicans (Brad Polumbo, Link Lauren, etc.) Their inherent contradiction makes them centrist by nature.
Then they become hated by the progressives because they don’t check all the boxes.