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Would you count journalists? A lot of these are personal, or credibly "wrong place wrong time," but there are a couple that stand out. Especially if you don't rule out mass killings. I guess I could imagine someone with a (real or, more likely, imagined) grudge against Kirk.
Commenters are going to say they hated him because he told the truth. Because he was somehow uniquely "dangerous" to a nebulous leftist project. But if that were enough, this wouldn't be so unusual.
Possibly? Most of the deaths on that list look like interpersonal grudges, accidental deaths, warzones, etc. Robert Stevens (casualty in the Amerithrax attacks) looks like the most recent cleanish fit, to me--but he didn't quite have the political notoriety, I think. @professorgerm's identification of Alan Berg as a candidate looks like a better fit, to my eyes, and even there Berg does not seem to have been at Kirk's level.
The longer I think about this the more I find myself puzzling over the relative rarity of political celebrity without other celebrity (in particular, political office, but also e.g. Hollywood fame). I remember in the early 1990s there was a lot of "Elect Rush Limbaugh" merchandise floating around, to the point where Rush finally had to very publicly say (to the best of my recollection) "I'm an entertainer, not a politician, I'm not seeking office." It's not like there are no people out there who fall into the "professional political celebrity" bucket, but they're so few and far between that it probably shouldn't be a surprise that there aren't a lot of historic examples. Who else is arguably on Kirk's level? Cenk Uygur, Matt Walsh, Ben Shapiro? It's probably more common at the level of local or even perhaps state politics, but then people who take it upon themselves to become assassins do not generally prioritize "low value targets," so to speak. Well, depending on their level of derangement?
I think both things can be true. If reports of trans and antifa slogans on the weapon are true, then "they hated him because he told the truth" looks like a pretty straightforward explanation of events. And no--of course that's not enough by itself. I think a person has to have pretty significant underlying mental and emotional derangement to go down the path of murder. But I'm increasingly concerned that we have not taken adequate account of the ways in which our cultural approach to politics now channels such derangement. Reading the comments on reddit celebrating Kirk's assassination is doing super effective damage to my hopes for America's future.
Destiny(Steven Bonnell), Hasan Piker, Ethan Klein, Vaush(Ian Anthony Kochinski)
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