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Ding ding ding.
There is virtually no way to paint him as a 'valid target'. Oh he said things you disagree with? He came into your ideological havens and confronted you directly? Boo fucking hoo get better ideas I guess.
He didn't invite nor go looking for violence, wasn't responsible for any decisions that might have caused any harm on a political level.
And what the lefties celebrating his death don't seem to get.
A) Charlie was WAY more popular among normies, especially young ones, than most thought.
B) A lot of those normies can tell that Charlie got killed for espousing opinions that they, themselves hold. He wasn't some out-and-out radical and he didn't run in radical circles.
Killing a basically normal guy, in his early 30's, with a lovely wife and two young kids. Christian. Didn't even curse. Debated civilly, but (and this was his true sin) was VERY EFFECTIVE at spreading righty ideas and demonstrating that lefty ideas were not universally accepted, even in colleges.
It breaks, I daresay, every single social norm that undergirds a 'liberal' (in the classic sense) society.
If merely "said things most people believe but that lefties don't like to hear" is enough to mark him for death, well, who precisely ISN'T fair game to the other side?
Is there a significant number of those? I mean, of course there must be, polarization and all. Let me rephrase that - are there really many leftists publicly stating that this is a good thing?
Well, enough to fill multiple threads on twitter.
The thing that does get me is how many of them are doing it happily with their own name and face attached.
https://x.com/EndWokeness/status/1966009268819186132
Crazy enough, people will also do it IN PERSON:
https://x.com/DineshDSouza/status/1966130048882414006
Why is that guy saying "WE got Charlie in the neck," btw? I see complaints about righties lumping all lefties together, but it sure looks like that's what they WANT.
https://x.com/saras76/status/1966112944112156696
https://x.com/DrewPavlou/status/1966272838534574119/video/1
You have to explain why these people would feel bold enough to do this within punching range if they're not actually reveling in the outcome.
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Yes.
The prominent ones are keeping their mouths shut, but the ones who think they're too small to be noticed are openly celebrating.
In a just world their sentiments would be sent to their employers, and the police.
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Could this be a glowie op to create a Conservative/Christian martyr? What for, you might ask. Evangelicals are some of the hardest supporters of Zionism, so if they can get them fired up and optionally convert some more they would get what they wanted and some more wars in the middle east.
Who is "they"?
One of the stated purposes of this place is for testing your shady thinking so if you want to concoct conspiracy theories and throw them against the wall to see if they stick, that's allowed, but you should put more effort into making them plausible enough to be worth debating. There's a difference between "testing your thinking" and "posting shower thoughts." And say what you mean directly.
They in this context is the neocon/neolib fusion shadow government that has been pushing for a hot war with Russia and more bombing in the middle east. They are not directly Israel, but they are aligned with them on foreign policy.
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At least one (now former) MSNBC political activist sure tried:
Edit: Dowd also speculated that Kirk might have been accidentally shot by "a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration" (because that's totally something conservatives do on college campuses, right?).
This is what I fuckin' mean.
If the liberals aren't willing to rein in their own side, get them to at least SHUT UP for a few days before pulling this stuff, who will?
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Had me fooled for a second. I would have thought Ezra Klein wrote this shit.
That weird softvoice "and so i think" type of offensively gentle call to action is quite characteristic of ezra klein, but klein wont even have the balls to explicate the implicit castigation of kirk that dowd exhibited. klein is, if anything, a catastrophist who sees the progressive order of his vox days breaking down internally and instead of progressivism drifting towards his chosen island of centrist stability he is finding that the new island he calls home is itself fracturing. there was a email leak at one point that showed klein did have balls to say mean words, so maybe in the background klien and proximates like shor are screaming "dont you all see how fucking bad this is for us"
Actual Ezra Klein posts on X, for the record, include:
and
I agree that Klein didn't condone the killing, as I stated in my parent post. I meant to largely point out that Klein scthick is mainly trying to eke out a defensible progressivism and the new ground he staked as abundance ish deliverism is where hes finding out is shaky.
But jesus those tweets don't help. The replies there are basically "im actually celebrating have have to pretend i'm not".
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It’s like Trump said “They’re not after me, they’re after you! I’m just in the way.”
If you’re understandably skeptical of that coming out of Trump’s mouth, it’s ten times more credible when you shift the subject to Charlie the relatively milquetoast debate bro.
All over social media seems to be the common refrain; “If leftists wanted Charlie Kirk dead, they want you dead, too, they just don’t know your name yet.”
If people are asking Charlie Kirk of all people to defend their views, they've got problems much more fundamental than that. Charlie Kirk was good for the establishment right. He wasn't good for philosophical conservatism. He was a polished product marketed to people, in the same way Ben Shapiro was the "cool kid's philosopher."
Allow me to rephrase;
“If someone is glad that Charlie Kirk, a moderate conservative squish, is dead and deserved to be killed for what he believed, they’d be ecstatic if I or people like me died / were killed based on what I believe.”
This thought occurred simultaneously to maybe tens of millions of people all at once yesterday.
Kirk apparently said the following:
This is, in fact, as far as I've understood, a very, very radical view in the American political sphere on a key issue, one which some might call the defining issue of American politics. It's not the one that would have been shared by the Trump admin: when Trump issued his anti-affirmative-action EO, the framing was that CRA was good and that the things he was banning were going against its spirit. And as the quote says, Kirk himself calls it a radical opinion!
Of course, for many or even most of the leftists celebrating Kirk's demise, the point is not any of the race-based stuff but his strong Christian conservative opinions, such as opposing abortion including for rape and underaged kids, but the people doing that stuff do not do it because they believe Kirk to be a moderate.
I've also seen a number of far right types on social media saying that Kirk was a moderate when he started his career but had been evolving rightwards towards being "/ourguy/" before his tragic death.
Which is strange. As a european who never had much contact with blacks outside of hollywood movies, when I first learned what the Civil rights law actually was, I rejected it. Why can’t they have their own diners? It goes against the basic right of freedom of association. If whites are so oppressive and racist, why would you want to sit next to them? I don't try to get into gay bars or irish bars, because I know they'll taunt me. And if they were known to take away my voting rights and lynch me, it'd be even weirder to suggest attending their bars and schools at the solution to my problems.
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For these things I've learned to go straight to the video. Especially after the NYT had to release a revision because they quoted Kirk as saying something he was actually rebutting.
From what i can tell, the article is referencing the event TPUSA's "America Fest 2023". I have watched the video and couldn't find the quote. I have tried to find other videos of this event with Kirk but couldn't. I asked Gemini to help but still can't find the quote on video.
If he said it, based on other things he said that day on the video I could find, the context was probably something like "The Civil Rights Act didn't go far enough to protect all people of all races, whites included." Because on camera that day he's decrying racism against all peoples.
There's a video where he confirms that the quote is true. He says that they talk about why the Civil Rights Act was a mistake once a week. He also confirms that he thinks MLK is a bad guy, which is also a radical view - the latest polling I could find indicates that 81% of Americans think that MLK had a positive impact on the country, with polling division indicating that at least some of the other respondents (for some reason Pew doesn't indicate how many of the others answer in the negative and how many say they don't know) would be black people who think that MLK wasn't radical enough.
If the meaning was as you speculate, why would he call that a very, very radical view?
Because from Elementary School on kids are indoctrinated into treating MLK Jr. as an American saint who saved us from our sins of racism. We study his pastoral letters and speeches while teachers coo about how enlightened he was. Even saying, "he was a good man, but not perfect," would be radical. And he wasn't perfect. He plagiarized his PHD dissertation and a lot of his speeches. He cheated on his wife with multiple women, one of whom he struck. He still likely had a positive impact on the country, because most of these pecadillos were not widely known during his life or even today. But if more people knew these details about him, I don't think it would become a very radical thing to say that MLK Jr. was not a good man.
Thank you for turning up more than I could, but I wish I could watch a video where he actually goes into what his beef is with the Civil Rights Act so I don't have to strongman him myself.
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This is a pretty silly way of trying to paint him as a radical. Comparing a summary of his position to answers on a poll is a terrible measure of disagreement, and "I disagree" and "this is too radical" are two completely different things.
They are at least material against the claim that Kirk can be best described as a "moderate conservative squish".
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That's part of it, though, isn’t it? Most people I see celebrating lump him firmly into the far right. Not saying their perception is correct, but that's where he lines up in their view.
... Don't ask me what they'd consider a moderate conservative to be; they might very well say there is no such thing, or that it's someone with the social views of circa 2018 Obama.
I suspect to the people who label Charlie Kirk as a “far right white nationalist” (apparently that’s what it says or has said in the past on Wikipedia) whatever constitutes a “moderate” conservative is purely functional; it’s just by definition a conservative that plays within their framework and they can control and don’t feel threatened by.
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It's always been in poor taste outside of the ghetto to celebrate over someone's death, but I'd be lying if I said the reports of someone's passing has never made be smirk before.
Sure, there’s gradients to this whole thing.
When I learned Osama Bin Laden died I went out and had a celebratory beer and enjoyed it in quiet, satisfied contemplation. He was unambiguously and directly responsible for the mass murder of thousands of my fellow citizens, and I was glad he was dead. But even then I didn’t gloat or grab a megaphone and shout it from the rooftops.
The behavior I see from leftists en masse from the death of even the mildest right wing figure is so routinely ghoulish that I’ve come to expect from them that I struggle to think of these people as actually human. This isn’t new, either, it’s been this way basically my whole life.
I’m not expecting his political opponents to theatrically shed a tear for him, just not acting like literal demons cackling with glee would suffice to temper my rage towards them. I consider it well earned at this point.
You're thinking of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but yeah.
I grew up in an environment where you either become desensitized to everything or you learn to develop a very thick skin. Leftists can have their parades and celebrations if they like. It doesn't bother me, nor should bother anyone who bought into the "leftist snowflake" or "lispy pussy" rhetoric. On a personal level there are days I feel like Christopher Hitchens did on the debate stage, "Love and peace? Very very overrated in my view." Call me immoral or immature if you like. Likewise I'll celebrate internally when one of theirs gets knocked off and they shouldn't have the gall to complain about it for the same reason I didn't complain about them. I’ve had a couple of moments in my life where I’ve felt a little too good about the death of some people who were truly assholes.
Civility is one thing. Moral policing is another. When I was growing up people just seemed to have so much more of a thicker skin than they do today. Nowadays you call someone faggot here, they act like a pearl clutching moron who looks at you like you just pulled out a gun and shot their dog. Which is odd because that's what the left-wing of old used to attack and criticize the right-wing for, because the stereotypical image of them was of a bunch of straight-laced white people that behaved like soccer moms. We didn't call that "being offensive," we called that "letting off," and most of the community kept quiet in the knowledge that sometimes people really did deserve it and had it coming to them. And it actually toughened those people up and caused them to shift their behavior for the better. I actually miss those days sometime.
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