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PaperclipPerfector  30d ago (text post)   41404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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Well, when you thought the week was boring...

Charlie Kirk was just shot at an event, shooter in custody. There's apparently a video going around of the attack, but I haven't a desire to see it. People who have seen it are suggesting he was shot center mass in the neck, and is likely dead. That makes this the second time that a shooter targeted a conservative political figure at a political event in two years. If Trump hadn't moved his head at the last second, it would've been him, too.

I've never followed the young conservative influencers much, but Kirk always seemed like the moderate, respectable sort -- it's wild that he would be the victim of political violence and not someone like Fuentes.

I fear this is what happens when the culture war is at a fever pitch. Political violence in the US is at heights not seen since the 1970s, from riots in the 2010s and especially 2020 over police-involved shootings, to the capitol riot in 2021, to the attempted assassination of Trump in Pennsylvania, to the United Healthcare killing, to finally this murder of a political influencer. I fear for my country when I look at how divided we are, and how immanently we seem to be sliding into violence.

I guess I just find politics tiring nowadays. I vote for a Democrat and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. I vote for a Republican and they do stupid things that conspicuously harm the outgroup. Whether J.D. Vance or Gavin Newsom wins in 28, there will be no future in which Americans look each other eye to eye.

I actually believe things are much better in this country than people think: our economy is surprisingly resilient, we've never suffered under the kind of austerity that's defined post-colonial European governance, our infrastructure, while declining, actually functions in a way that most of the world isn't blessed with, our medical system is mired in governmental and insurance red tape yet the standard of care and state of medical research is world-class, our capacity to innovate technologically is still real and still compelling, and one of our most pressing political issues, illegal immigration, exists solely because people are willing to climb over rocks and drift on rafts simply to try and live here.

We have real problems. And intense escalations on the part of our political tribes are absolutely in the top five. We also have a severe problem with social atomization -- and these two things are related -- which has led to our intimate relationship and loneliness crisis, the rapid decline in social capital, and the technological solitary confinement of the smartphone screen which dehumanizes people like real solitary confinement while confining them to the most intense narrative possible. "If it bleeds, it leads" means that many will be led into bleeding.

I don't know how we rebuild the world, or come to a point where Americans of different views can view each other as well-intentioned. But Kirk is just the latest victim of a crisis that I don't know if there's any way to solve.

The amount of handwringing in this thread as if this is the moment that we've passed some sort of threshold as a society makes me really believe that a lot of people here are quite desperate to witness an event that allows them to declare that a threshold has been passed. Accelerationism and extremism. We know nothing of the shooter, or their motivations. Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota? The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.

Also, I mentioned it elsewhere in the thread. Don't rely on the algorithms to feed you the opinion of those who you believe are your outgroup. The algorithms have two focuses: (1) create a bubble for the ingroup to feel comfortable, and (2) create ragebait for the outgroup to feel enraged. Reflect on how you've interacted with social media in the past 24 hours with this in mind. Touch grass and talk to a human - because I definitely know you haven't had the chance to talk to more than a few people since this event happened.

Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?

There was minimal uproar over that assassination because the assassin was a former colleague of the victims who appears to have gone very unambiguously and very publicly crazy in the runup to the shootings. We had considerable discussion of the assassinations at the time, including a number of people, myself included initially, claiming it appeared to be ideological and was a very big deal. Only, by the next day he was in custody and we could read excerpts of his ramblings, and had testimony from his friends and neighbors showing that he had very clearly gone crazy.

People are ringing their hands in this thread because one of the most prominent political activists in Red Tribe just got very publicly murdered, and leftists were visibly celebrating his murder within literal seconds of the shot being fired. I understand that people pointing out this reality might distress you for a number of different reasons, but this is, in fact, very direct and undeniable culture war.

Further, it seems to me that Red Tribe does in fact pretty clearly have the moral high ground here. As I mentioned above and can substantiate at some length, there does not appear to be any substantive evidence that the Minnesota killings were ideological, and there was no widespread public celebration of the sort we are seeing even before that became clear. This is not me attempting to gerrymander definitions, this is the plain facts as I see them.

The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade. They have repeatedly and communally celebrated political murders over that time, have grown increasingly shameless at doing so, and they are again doing so at this moment, all over the internet. This does not appear to me to be a "both sides" problem. It is not going to be resolved by "touching grass".

As much as I denounce Kirk's murder, especially if it was politically motivated, and denounce any celebration my tribe is engaging in, I have a hard time with the pearl clutching going on in conservative circles about this, and especially statement like "The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."

For the right, it seems that the acceptance of political violence as a potential solution is just baked in. Many on the right love their guns, and they love to make ""implications"" or even more outright statements that they are willing to use their guns against "tyrants". But if you spend 5 minutes around these types you will see that their definition of "tyranny" is not far from "a liberal policy I don't like". This has been a key pillar of conservative politics going back far more than a decade.

I can rest easier knowing that these things generally stay at the level of fantasy. But it IS a consistent conservative fantasy. If we are comparing like to like, liberals "celebrating" by making bluesky posts and conservatives making gun memes about "the tree of liberty", "ten cent solutions", "kill em all and let God sort em out", or shooting targets with Hillary's face on them, do not strike me as having significantly different moral valence.

"The American left has been fomenting violent radicalism ceaselessly for more than a decade."

I'd say much longer than that, since the Days of Rage were famously mostly committed by leftists. Then they went on hiatus for a while. Restarting in the 10s we had assaults on conservatives speaking on college campuses (ahem), probation for multiple counts of assault with a deadly weapon, followed by a year of excusing or celebrating arson, looting, and riots.

It’s true the right definitely does have its revolutionary fantasies but the form is very different (and less realistic) than what you see on the left. The right wing fantasy of political violence seems to be informed by experiences in American history where we fought the British, or the Indians, or each other in the civil war. Cases where there were clear out groups, often uniformed. There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of appetite on the right for random killings of people in their own country for peacefully disagreeing with them. Or for working a job they think is negative utility (Luigi.) Whereas the far left seems to understand that this is what a modern civil war/years of lead/troubles type event looks like.

A good left wing equivalent to Charlie Kirk would be Cenk Uygur. If he was murdered I could definitely imagine some groypers or anime avatar types being smug about it. But I don’t think your normie conservatives would be posting mockery under their real names on Facebook as I’ve seen dozens of leftists do. If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse

If a right wing equivalent to Luigi happened (perhaps something like a high level and very woke partner at a law firm getting killed) I don’t think the reaction would be nearly as positive as it was for Luigi. I also think it’s pretty clear these things are less likely to happen in the first place than the reverse

If an assassin killed, say, George Soros, or a higher-up in the DEI/ESG program at Blackrock, I could absolutely see the very-online right gloating and joking about it.

I can too. I don’t know if I would see literally dozens of people I knew in real life gloating and joking about it under their real names on Facebook though…

Soros, I'll grant you. I can add a few other cartoon-villainesque people like Klaus Schwab, Yuval Noah Harrari, Ursula von der Leyen or Christine Lagarde. But a noname DEI Blackrok patsy? I doubt it.

The right understands the gravity of using violence for political reasons, and so they don't do it.

The left just murdered a 31 year old father of two little girls who's crime was trying to engage them rhetorically, and a substantial number of the left are cheering it on.

I'm sick of hearing this both sidesism. The left is violent, the right simply isn't. It's not both sides. They're different ideologies.

Would you describe a statement claiming that your side is good and peaceful and the opponent's side is bad and violent, with no evidence to back it up, as waging the culture war?

Right wingers tend to have more nuanced understandings of violence. Left circles it's either nothing or 10000000% full blast 5 minutes of hate upon approved targets such as Racists, whatever'phobes' are under the lens, MAGA or whatever. One's a childish black-white moral scope and the other's a bit more informed.

Your view contrasts interestingly with the usual view (which I favor) that leftists see violence as a dial that can be turned up or down at will, while right wingers see it as a switch: either fully on or fully off.

I think these are 2 different phenomena. One is preference on where and how to apply violence, i.e. 100% at people I dislike, -100% at people I like. The other has to do with the life that violence takes on when you start it. That when you escalate to the next level of violence, it has a tendency to spiral to the next level and then to the next level and so on, since people rarely like to take violence sitting down, and it's not that common that you have such overwhelming force that not even your victim's friends couldn't come after you in the long run. There seems to be an overestimated belief in the ability of combatants to titrate and control violence, and it's a common leftist misconception IME that it's plausible for a cop to shoot-to-injure a suspect in a firefight. Heck, I've even encountered a real human adult who actually complained about some armed suspect being shot to death by cops instead of having his gun shot out of his hand. And it's not uncommon that I see leftists complaining about some suspect being riddled with dozens of bullets when one or two should've sufficed.

It might be mostly an artifact of differences in experience with guns or physical combat.

I never bought into that one. There's clearly a difference between a skirmish in the ol' fistycuffs after some heated words have been exchanged in a bar, "oi mate, you better give me your wallet", and what you'd do to some fool that just broke into your house. Political violence might be more of an on/off switch, as for a right-winger, you're not really supposed to do it, unless you're in war, but once you're there...

FWIW, the left also used to be constantly looking for excuses to start the revolution, where if not here when if not now. This has admittedly faded in the last decades as the left attained mainstream cultural dominance and seemed to no longer need drastic revolution to achieve its goals, but I suppose with their recent setbacks and the general heating-up of the world and the Right growing louder, we're getting back there. Polarization leading to political violence is, as far as a quick look at history tells me, the rather natural course of things. It will either continue to simmer until the underlying causes are obviated by the changing times, or escalate until one side destroys the other. But nobody will turn back the clock. We won't - neither the Americans nor us Europeans - find our way back to some more cooperative state of affairs in which we sudddenly realize that the guys on the other side want the same thing and the whole conflict is just an unfortunate mistake. The 20th century has taught us enough, I think, about ideological conflict resolution. The nazis didn't give up after realizing that actually, there was a reasonable compromise to be made with their neighbors. The soviets didn't release their vassal states because of successful arguments in favor of national independence. China didn't moderate its communism until several generations after eradicating all opposition.

I am, as usual, not saying that this is a good or a desirable thing. Instead, doomsaying. Things will either remain bad for a long time until civilization itself changes, or get worse until dramatic and destructive things happen. I don't think the threshold for the latter has been passed by now, or that it will be soon - there's still a lot of endurable bad times between now and then. And maybe if we manage to endure for long enough, we'lll all be dead of old age and hitherto unborn generations can open up entirely new lines of conflict that make them forget about ours.

Or maybe there will be no future ideological conflicts because the current left-right divide really is entirely fundamental and its outcome will conclusively lock in the path of humanity for the rest of time. I wouldn't know.

Tribes pick stories that suite their narrative all the time. This is not particularly insightful commentary. Furthermore, the comparison to the Democratic senators in Minnesota has key differences that need to be considered.

How popular was Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman? You didn't even mention their names. I couldn't recall it either. I had to look it them up. Are they effective targets for assassination to advance your cause? Suppose you're a radical planning to assassinate someone. Why would you target a non name senator over someone more high profile? There is some evidence indicating Vance Boelter's reason was due to a call from Tim Walz which to me sounds like he was just an insane person. Melissa Hortman has 14K followers on Twitter. Also, Hoffman who was the senator survived, Hortman who died was a legislator.

In contrast, Charlie Kirk was extremely popular. He has 5.5 million followers on Twitter. He was popular enough to be parodied on South Park. His appearance on Jubilee "debating 25 liberal college students" has 31 million views, making it one of their most popular videos. I'd argue Charlie Kirk was extremely effective in getting people behind the agenda he supported, and killing him is a huge blow to that movement. The guy was 31 and had decades ahead of him to accomplish whatever he wanted to accomplish in the political space. Even if you think he's just a mouthpiece for a machine pushing an agenda, killing serves the purpose of warning anyone else who wants to spread ideas through popular open dialogue. If you're a political-motivated assassin, he seems like a good target. I bet if some random Republican senator got killed, there also wouldn't as big of an uproar.

Actually, there is a case similar to that of the democratic senator and legislator being attacked. The closest equivalent would be Steve Scalise a Republican politician, who like Hoffman, also survived an assassination attempt in 2017. I'm gonna do some lazy research here so bear with me, but I don't think the Scalise shooting even got half as much traction as the Hortman shooting. Looking at the most viewed videos from a news channel on YouTube, the most popular news channel video on Scalise is around 330k, while John Hoffman is at 771K views.

Where did the assassination attempt take place? Charlie Kirk was shot in a public event with hundreds of university students attending. Hortman and Hoffman were attacked in their homes at night. The context of their assassinations are vastly different. The irony of the situation is that Charlie Kirk was actually discussing mass shootings right before getting shot. Some people are trying to spin this as evidence that the assassination was staged or a psyop, personally I think it was just a coincidence considering how many violent stories this week have gone viral but what a darkly poetic scenario to be killed literally as you are talking about political violence.

How did the "other" side react to their deaths? Are there endless examples of people celebrating their deaths? Even in fairly nonpolitical spaces and discords I'm in, there are people celebrating and making fun of the death of Charlie Kirk. These are people I play games with and outside of politics I would consider fairly normal people. You don't need to search hard on Twitter or TikTok to found people gleefully posting themselves expressing enthusiasm of Charlie Kirk. Who was celebrating the death of Hortman? Do you have friends and know people celebrating the deaths of people on the other side of the political spectrum?

What was the general political and cultural climate where these assassinations took place? People on the extreme left openly call for violence all the time with little chastise and repercussion. I dare you to openly call for the death and killing of all leftists on reddit or X or Facebook and see how long it takes before your post gets deleted and you get banned. One side consistently says speech is violence and that the other side are nazi fascists. Extreme leftism is openly supported or at the very least quietly ignored by the moderate left. The demand to be a victim is so high that time and time again people have to make up fake racist hoaxes to create the supply that simply doesn't exist.

Meanwhile, extreme rightists have little place to call home. Even a place like 4chan, which is considered the cesspool of the internet, has plenty of people on both sides now. Last time I went to pol there were just as many pols supporting extreme left wing views as there were right. Simply holding a moderate right wing view makes you an extreme rightist white Christian nationalist in many circles.

We're at a point where people are afraid to openly state their beliefs. From 2023 to 2025 88% of the 1452 interviewed students pretended to hold more progressive views than they believe to succeed social and academically. 78% said they self censor about gender identity, and 72% of students stated they self censor politics. People are self censoring because they are afraid of the repercussions of stating what was once normal, everyday beliefs. The majority is afraid to speak up because a loud minority keeps attacking and harassing people with little repercussion. And I can speak from experience, because it hasn't even been 10 years since I graduated from university and I too self-censored most of my views and beliefs. I engaged in dialogue with my peers who got angry and passionate about women's rights and trans rights. I doubt they were self censoring. Charlie Kirk was a driving force giving university students a place and a chance to not pretend to be more progressive than they actually are.

I actually think a better comparison is George Floyd, on grounds of what event creates "hysteria" as you call it. Police were defunded, cities burned and looted, statues and murals and paintings created to martyr a guy who could be argued to have died to fentanyl. Floyd was also by no accounts a good person. He had been jailed eight times for numerous crimes including armed robbery. So many modern martyrs of the left consistently happen to be individuals with extreme criminal history. The left also reacted in "hysteria" around the Rittenhouse case, which was decided to have been done in self-defense. And here, again, is an example where the victims are people with a history of child molestation and other criminal behavior. The misinformation was so bad, people thought Rittenhouse killed an unarmed black man. Or what about the shooting of Michael Brown, known for "hands up don't shoot". Except that was a lie. That didn't stop the left from engaging in "hysteria". So far the red tribe "hysteria" is just a lot of words; granted it hasn't been a day so we shall see what the future holds but something tells me we won't be seeing mass riots and burning and looting from the red tribe.

I keep thinking back to idea of a scissor statement, a statement so divisive it tears people apart. But I don't think you can provide example of stories that server as scissor statements that only occur if one side willfully ignores relevant facts in the case. When both sides agree something is bad the story doesn't go viral because there is no anger to fuel the algorithmic machine. You can't keep arguing with someone that agrees with you. But if you're engaging in dialogue with someone that has no intention of good faith discussion, who openly dismisses facts and pushes what you believe are outright lies, your only options are to eventually walk away or get mad. You cannot reason with someone that does not use reasoning. If this was just a debate on the internet then whatever, you can walk away easily. But when these stories are used to push policy changes, make excuses for bad behavior, and make people feel guilty of things they should have no guilt for, it's hard to not be filled with rage.

(As a side note, perhaps I too am blind of the facts of the cases of outrage of events from the right, and maybe trying to use the concept of a scissor statement here is inappropriate. If I had to pick something that could be considered a scissor statement where I might biased or the right is the side that deliberately ignores facts, it might be in the area of gun control and the 2nd amendment, abortion, or climate change.)

Even if one were to think Charlie Kirk as a faggot, nazi facist, (terms I have heard people refer to him very recently) who only debates unprepared college students and an intellectual hack, he wasn't a wife beater, thief, murderer, or a felon. He also wasn't a politician, or a CEO, or a billionaire, anyone in position of real power. He didn't hold any radical extremist ideas that so many on the left think he did. He engaged in open discussion and wanted to pursue change through dialogue. And now he's dead.

You're right that we don't know who the killer is or what the motive is. But you have to deliberately ignorant to not think an assassination at an open political event is not political motivated. This is not a passion killing. This is pre-meditated and cold and deliberate. If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night? Why would you choose to assassinate someone in a place where there are thousands of people that could potentially spot you and stop you, unless there was some kind of goal in making a statement?

This event is tragic because now it serves as yet another example of how trying to engage in open dialogue with people who have no willingness and desire to do so is a bad idea. I'm here in the motte because I want to believe in the pursuit of truth through open dialogue and debate. But what do you do when people refuse to engage in open honest dialogue? Is it even worth holding a principled stance with people that spit all over it and only use it against you? Enough stories like this and you start to get people wondering if they should become the monsters they keep being accused of. We take so many of the concepts that hold up our modern society for granted, ideas about human rights, human decency, free speech, democracy, equality, these are all espoused as univeral truths and moral goods (at least in America)... and in doing so allowed a poison to come into the public consciousness that continues to threaten and erode all of these values.

Also, is there any event or series of event that could convince you we've passed some sort of threshold? We've already had multiple public assassination attempts on the president with one nearly succeeding. Now a public figure who isn't even a politician is assassinated in daylight. Touching grass doesn't change that, and trying to normalize assassinations as things that always just happened that we are only just now noticing due to the algorithm doesn't make things better. It doesn't matter if political assassinations had been a part of human history, or if they are common in other places. They had become rarer in the USA in recent times and we ought to try to keep it that way.

If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night?

Somebody like you or me? Yeah, sure. Rich people who get death threats all the time tend to live in places with better security. Yeah, Boelter pulled it off, but it took some frankly-masterful subterfuge on his part to get through that security.

Don't get me wrong, this murder was almost certainly politically-motivated; there are far more people who'd want him dead for political reasons than personal. But this particular thing isn't really corroborating evidence.

You're right that we don't know who the killer is or what the motive is. But you have to deliberately ignorant to not think an assassination at an open political event is not political motivated. This is not a passion killing. This is pre-meditated and cold and deliberate. If it was something like a personal grudge, wouldn't you rather shoot someone in a quiet place, such as at night? Why would you choose to assassinate someone in a place where there are thousands of people that could potentially spot you and stop you, unless there was some kind of goal in making a statement?

You could have said the same things about the Trump shooting, and many people did. But it turned out that the shooter was a disgruntled Red Triber with no discernable political motive.

You want to believe that "they" are engaged in a pattern of political violence, and you want it enough not to wait for confirmation where there is an obvious alternative theory that turned out to be correct last time. Why do you want to believe this? The world where the people who shoot politicians are crazies is a better, safer, happier one.

The absence of a discernable political motive is not proof of no political motive. I acknowledge it also isn't proof he did have a political motive, nor that such proof currently exists. But you aren't convincing me he didn't have a political motive without a stronger argument. The act of shooting a political figure in a political event is political in and of itself.

My point is about the reaction to the political violence. I don't doubt mental illness played a major role. However, you cannot deny the reaction and behavior of people to these events. One survey finds over 50% of people left of center say murdering Donald Trump or Elon Musk would be justified. Do you think I'm choosing to believe more people are okay with the use of violence for political purposes because I want to?

Who do you think I think "they" are? I stated the left engaged in burning, looting, and rioting after several high profile culture war events. Perhaps you believe this is an unfair assessment of the left, and you might have a point, but they certainly did not condemn such actions or downplayed it. How the right will react to this event, we shall see.

The world where nobody shoots politicians is a better, safe, happier one.

That survey has been linked a number of times, but isn't the research methodology rather sus here? They are not asking a binary question on "Do you think that the murder of [Musk/Trump] is justified", they're asking on agreement on a scale of 1-7 and then counting all the answers that aren't 1 ("Not at all justified") on the "justified" side. One can do that, it tells of something but it's still an odd way to do a survey unless one is specifically intent on getting a sensationalized result. There are people who, when encountering a scale like that, instinctively avoid answers 1 and 7 on account of being "extreme", even though of course in this case that's hardly the correct way to go on about it.

This is a valid criticism of the survey, but I suspect if it had been done the other way one could argue it creates no room for nuance and then try to argue for why the percentage of people that would say it is justified is actually smaller for one reason or another. I don't think the research methodology is sus in as so much as the interpretation of the results, since these are self reported answers. Maybe the collection methodology or their sampling of the population is flawed.

Regardless, if we were to grant anything 4 or under to be on the not justified side, that's still 22% for killing elon and 31% for killing trump of those left of center that believe there is justification for political murder. That's still not an unsubstantial amount, although to be fair it is also far from 50%. The amount of justification for the assassination of a non politician I've seen even in small niche non-political discord servers with people I am friends with, let alone in the wider web certainly does lead me to believe these stats. I'd like to see some surveys giving contrary results.

Agreed. I'm not sure I've heard of him before today, and I read here religiously. I absolutely could not have told you anything about him.

I'm not sure how much to trust themotte's search box, or site:themotte.org google searches, but there's not a lot on either prior to today.

Best comment in this thread. Thanks for injecting some sober clear headedness amongst the angst

Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?

Where was the celebration of it? Did National Review Online use the opportunity to insult them (the way The Nation did to Kirk)? Did Fox (or the Daily Caller or Breitbart) suggest they brought it on themselves, the way MSNBC did?

ETA: it's not the shooting of Kirk that moves the needle. It's the reaction from the mainstream left (and no, declaring MSNBC and NROs first reactions, plus Reddit, as all atypical extremists is not convincing) that moves the needle. Reacting to the death of Kirk as if he were Osama bin Laden makes it quite clear that the situation is not opposition, it is enmity.

Of course, this is not the first time, though it may be the first for a murder of a right wing figure (I don't count the US Healthcare guy, as health insurance executives are kinda the designated villain now that everyone's forgotten about tobacco company people). What was the response to Margaret Thatcher's (natural) death? "Ding, dong, the witch is dead". How about Antonin Scalia's death? I sure remember open celebration. I remember because I called someone out on it and they said it was OK because he was against gay marriage.

Where was the celebration of it?

A sitting Republican senator initially reacted to it by posting "This is what happens When Marxists don't get their way" and "Nightmare on Waltz street".

That's not a celebration.

You're right, I misread the Marxist comment.

If you keep in eye on the e-influencer sphere, they are all shellshocked. Even those who are political adversaries of Kirk, like Ethan Klein, were brought to tears- obviously not due to love for the man himself but realization that their profession and status as C-list political celebrities makes them the highest ratio of political value / target hardness for anyone who would want to do something like that. And Pandora's box has been opened.

There's definitely a threshold had has been crossed and it wouldn't surprise me if these sort of events completely disappear as a result. Is Crowder going to keep doing his campus debate thing after this?

Ethan Klein

I can not even begin to describe the level of hatred I have for Ethan Klein, why did the fates decide it was Charlie Kirk's time instead of Ethan Klein.

Does Klein even have relevance? I honestly dont know if any eceleb outside of titty streamers would gather enough people to care about even harming them. Hasan kicked out Klein for failing to slob Hamas knob, and Hasans relevance is only within that circle of DSA revolutionary cosplayers who hope for someone else to pull the trigger (like whoever did to kirk) so that the dirty work of clearing the way for the chosen vanguard is done without sullying their hyperallergic hands.

Asking you because you're the poster here I'd trust the most to be aware of this particular issue, but I've seen rumours on social media that Charlie was actually concerned about assassination recently because he'd been pissing off the Israelis. Do you think or have any evidence that this particular aspect is potentially a factor?

The motive doesn't really make sense, despite Kirk's recent mild criticisms he was probably the most pro-Israel Gen-Z influencer. Kirk's audience being set adrift, and it being likely Fuentes will posture to capture some of that market share, doesn't seem to provide a clear benefit in relation to the risks. So my prior is low and there's no evidence. The only evidence I'm aware of is Fox News mentioning foreign Intelligence being somehow related to the manhunt, but that can mean a lot of things.... and apparently some old guy falsely confessed to the crime in police custody which is strange.

Nick Fuentes though has talked pretty soberly recently (even before this) about his life being in danger, if he gets killed the priors are much different. But now political commentators from all sides of the aisle are considering the possibility of this happening to them.

Edit: I didn't really follow Kirk's content, but apparently he got closer to very substantive criticism of Jews than I had realized. Doesn't really change my analysis, and I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk but it remains far more likely to have been some amateur. It's really not hard to accurately shoot a rifle.

I do think it's significant that Kirk reportedly associated criticism of Israel with personal risk

This is exactly why I was curious - after seeing this tweet https://x.com/HarrisonHSmith/status/1955705962964111425 I wanted to know what the anti-semitic right's perspective on it was (forgive me if that's not how you identify yourself), so thank you for the heads up.

and apparently some old guy falsely confessed to the crime in police custody which is strange.

This is the part I've been wondering about today. I saw a video of them taking that old guy into custody and he was yelling "SHOOT ME!" over and over. Maybe he's just a random crazy, but part of me wondered if he wasn't in cahoots with the shooter as a willing patsy designed to take the fall and/or run interference long enough to allow the real shooter to escape.

edit: found this X thread which seems to really flesh out my hypothesis, complete with a getaway plane and everything

Yeah. He'd wandered a little bit off the company line but it's top-tier JOOS posting to suggest that he'd be assassinated for that. The Palestine-Israel nonsense has just broken so many brains in the political discourse sphere.

Someone connected to him claimed that Charlie had personally been worrying about his life being in danger over this specific topic - I agree that it has broken a lot of brains, but there's a difference between someone just arbitrarily blaming the jews for everything and being curious about a murder victim's recent thoughts about who wants to murder him.

Where was the uproar when Democratic senators were assassinated in Minnesota?

Because, as bad as that is, we have not seen a closeup video of those people being shot to death, and that means something. That Senator's death could have been gruesome. Being shot to death in your own home is a gruesome enough picture, and it carries weight, but it simply does not have anywhere near the same impact that the imagery today had.

The red tribe does not have the moral high ground, and some sort of grim moral imperative, simply because a red tribe figure was assassinated. Hysteria.

You are not the arbiter of moral high grounds. Even if you were it will fall on deaf ears.

I don't know who the shooter was, or what their motivations were. There's a chance it's another mentally ill person who has no real political affiliations. Maybe it's a far right winger with accelerationist goals. Maybe they had personal beef with Kirk.

None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er, or the careful framing our left leaning mainstream outlets will use to report and cover this story. That, while not as disturbing as the violence, will have a larger impact on broader non-left society and discourse down the road. It's been like this for over a decade. People are tired of it and they were looking for a reason to get pissed because they were already pissed off to begin with.

None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er

Try being on Tumblr right now.

Yeah, saw several Tumblr reactions today, and while it is perfectly predictable, I'm saddened how many people are celebrating political violence against a non-politician on there. There's a lot of people who don't have any sense of decorum, or respect for people with opposing viewpoints.

None of that changes the sheer giddiness and overt schadenfreude of the anonymous leftist redditor or tiktok'er

Yes. Browsing Reddit today has been eye opening, if not entirely surprising. The open glee upvoted across every subreddit is only really comparable to the Mangione murder. At this point it hardly matters to me who actually did the shooting

Reddit is not representative of the left as a whole, just like X and 4chan are not representative of the right as a whole. All these sites heavily over-represent highly online, highly ideological people.

According to this, an actual majority of Americans (57%) are on Reddit. X is half that, and 4chan is 1/20th.

Given that Reddit is A) left of center, and B) bigger than the entire left wing of the country, are you sure that Reddit isn't representative of the Left?

Very impressive numbers, much more than I expected.

I assume 95% are lurkers which I think is the normal ratio. That gives you 5% of 60% as regularly posting redditors, about 3% of America.

Which broadly passes my sniff test but may not do so for others.

Not sure, but pretty convinced of it, since a large majority of leftists I've met in person have not been like Redditors. Granted, that's just another kind of bias, and some might say "well they were just hiding it around you". Maybe, but by the same token I could say that for some people their Reddit use is just them blowing off steam and it's not really representative of their entire personality. It's hard to say.

I dunno about that. I think the mental frictional cost of using social media purely off the popular page is so high that you either get off the site entirely or create an account to curate out trash. Anyone who uses reddit but doesnt actually see a problem with /r/politics or /r/pics slop is someone to be wary of for either being uncritical of the opinions presented or too dim to be aware that he is being propagandized.

...a large majority of leftists I've met in person have not been like Redditors.

See section III of I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup:

...half the country.

And I don’t have a single one of those people in my social circle. It’s not because I’m deliberately avoiding them; I’m pretty live-and-let-live politically, I wouldn’t ostracize someone just for some weird beliefs. And yet, even though I probably know about a hundred fifty people, I am pretty confident that not one of them is creationist. Odds of this happening by chance? 1/2^150 = 1/10^45 = approximately the chance of picking a particular atom if you are randomly selecting among all the atoms on Earth.

It's not necessarily that they're hiding it around you. It could be that you aren't dealing with the full range of leftists.

...I could say that for some people their Reddit use is just them blowing off steam and it's not really representative of their entire personality.

You're kind of damning them with faint praise there.

How do we know this? I'm skeptical about taking your word for it.

Reddit is a mainstream, corporate-owned forum. They purged all sorts of subfora and people on the grounds of how offensive they were, how advertisers might pull out, etc. etc. They don't get to pull the "teehee, we're just a bunch of shitposters" card now.

I thought only chapotraphouse on the left got purged. Everything else that was axed were either unmoderated dead subreddits or narrative breakers like /r/gendercritical or hell this very subreddit /r/themotte.

I mean, technically Reddit didn't axe /r/themotte, only siteban some of the witches and threaten to axe the subreddit if Zorba didn't start cracking down on witchcraft. But that's splitting hairs.

They couldn't fire us, we quit!

subfora

Bro, I'm pumped you got to use this word in a sentence.

I'm... happy I could make your day. I suppose it is important to enjoy the small pleasures.

Is national polling representative of the left as a whole?

Probably, although I'd be curious to see the exact questions asked in the poll and to compare the data against what right-of-center people would say about the justifiability of killing equally divisive left-wing figures. Here's some information: https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/04/lets-kill-the-republicans.php.

One thought experiment I had was to read the to reddit Mangione (who in my opinion while crazy probably deserves to be executed for his lack of remorse) comments/apologetics and imagine if they were instead written about the Minnesota killings. It was really quite sickening. I really think Reddit allowing those comments and that response for essentially a vigilante lynching, is opening the overton window for copycat behavior of all stripes.

Hard to imagine a Left-wing figure getting shot with this sort of reaction from the Right. There's just not anybody as strongly divisive enough, and being Left Wing is kind of 'inherently sympathetic' in the sense that you may not agree with them, but also it's hard to hate most Left-wing figures since it's a position originating from an excess of empathy.

Obviously the Kirk shooter hasn't been found yet and it's hard to predict where the shooter will land on the political spectrum. But the Minnesota shooter seemed more pro-life/random doomsday Christiany than hugely pro-Trump. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/14/us/politics/minnesota-shootings-gunman-suspect.html

I'm definitely team "Nothing Ever Happens" most of the time, and I suspect the same will be true of today. This is very unlikely to be the straw that broke any particular camel's back.

But it is different, I think, in important ways that do increase the feeling that this one could lead somewhere.

My only prediction is that this just removed the last bit of sympathy for the 'victims' of any further head-cracking tactics Trump uses.

If they catch the perp and he happens to fall down six flights of stairs on the way to the courthouse, ain't nobody batting an eye.

Nobody will hand wring over the next boat of drug runners Trump blows up.

He drops mustard gas on rioters, approval goes up six points.

The national guard gets sent into Chicago and opens up a M240 on a carful of gangsters, people just nod along.

I think that, historically, this is what happens when you make 'normal' civilians feel like they're subject to being lethally victimized by random violent criminals and/or politically motivated assassinations in otherwise 'safe' spaces.

This and Charlotte has done something to me. I’m not ready to put it into words yet - but my worldview has been solidified in a permanent way over these two incidences.

I think the usual joke goes "And then one day, for no reason at all..."

Yeah, like I've said before, America actually has a very very low level of direct political violence (assassinations, bombings, etc.) considering how much political anger there is in America and how heavily armed Americans are.

If the murder of Charlie Kirk does tip the country over the edge, it will be because of the narratives around it, not because of the event itself. America has almost unbelievably few assassinations for a country that is so politically polarized and heavily armed.

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