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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 8, 2025

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I just went on Bluesky with a fresh new account and searched for Kirk and sorted by top and scrolled by around 30 posts before I found one saying the death of Charlie Kirk was wrong and it was still accompanied by "And Charlie Kirk was a horrible, hateful man who spent his life radicalizing young people to embrace their worst demons by targeting women, people of color, immigrants, and the marginalized."

Gavin Newsom did create a series of post trying to lower temperature and denouncing it. The top reply is calling this sympathy stupid because Gavin Newsome had something nice to say about Charlie Kirk. Most of the top replies are talking trash about Charlie Kirk.

We should expect politicians to denounce political violence, as they have skin in the game. The lack of top posts from non politicians showing any sympathy is pretty telling. I scrolled around 100 posts and found 4 sympathetic messages from top democrat leaders/politicians, 2 from people I don't know stating celebrating his death is wrong, like 7-8 news articles and the rest is a mix of gleeful, critical, or who cares messaging. " 80-90% of the top 100 posts celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk is about as close to all as you can in how the word "all" is used colloquially. Although yes I guess jarjarjedi could've been more precise in his speech I don't think it's far off from the truth.

I just went on Bluesky with a fresh new account and searched for Kirk and sorted by top and scrolled by around 30 posts before I found one saying the death of Charlie Kirk was wrong and it was still accompanied by "And Charlie Kirk was a horrible, hateful man who spent his life radicalizing young people to embrace their worst demons by targeting women, people of color, immigrants, and the marginalized."

I consider myself a dissident rightist harboring no illusions about this entire matter but I do sort of wonder – is there any school of thought that is not of the third/fourth wave lipstick feminist / liberal / ‘progressive’ variety that these posters would ever be willing to not categorize as horrible, hateful, radicalizing (whatever that word even means in their minds) and demonic?

Islam when considered as a distant belief system of oppressed people

Interesting. I don't doubt you but I don't use blue sky. My reddit feed is not filled with anything I'd call celebrating. Many sarcastic "thoughts and prayers", and many pointing out supposed ironies about his stance on gun control, lots of " this is a bad for the country".

I don’t use Reddit, but I’ve been checking /r/politics periodically over the past 24 hours to see the reaction there. The reaction from the mods has been to delete every post about his death. Most of the comments I saw before the posts were deleted were either celebratory or smugly satisfied.

I don't either, which is why I took a few minutes to check, and I'm sure if I dig deep enough I can find more people on bluesky who at least has the ability to acknowledge this is not something to be celebrated. I think this just means your feed consists of Subreddits with higher quality users, which I would not be surprised for someone who has come to the motte.

Yeah I clicked over to the "popular" feed on reddit, but, same thing? Maybe I am in a weird filter bubble

I have heard that reddit admins were rapidly purging anything celebrating his death from the site. There were apparently entire popular posts from /r/politics that were removed.

I don't think they'd be dumb to be concerned that this will kick off congressional hearings and summon them personally to testify under oath about the practices of their site. Not saying that it will or that they deserve it, but if it the killer was, say, a site moderator (low, but nonzero chance) or frequent poster, it seems possible.

Not to mention that corporate leadership are public-ish figures (see Brian Thompson), so it makes sense to cool it for self-preservation a bit too.

And also a third possibility, which I'll assume charitably is the most relevant: that they see the killing of political speakers as abhorrent.