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I think a lot of these posts are missing the horror that I am feeling.
I personally listened to this guy debating all kinds of people in the background of other things I was doing. I was impressed by how there were very few below-the-belt attacks on the interlocutors, and multiple bouts of praise from Charlie Kirk for the debaters being brave enough to step up and be material for content. I wished I was as skilled as he at setting up such angles of argument so quickly.
When I heard he was shot, it was like I was punched. I couldn't believe it. I still can't believe he's dead. It got even more unbelievable with the second video showing blood flowing out of him like a fountain. I wept upon seeing this. This murder is the closest thing to pure evil that I've seen in my life, ala No Country for Old Men. It makes absolutely no sense, he was making arguments that I genuinely agreed with, he was so young, he had kids, he was a good Christian, you've almost certainly heard all this before. He was upholding the values of this country by engaging in such public discourse. Democracy does not die in darkness, it dies in broad daylight in front of thousands of people, in front of its family, viewed by millions online, everyone powerless to do anything as it bleeds out.
None of what happened afterwards was what I expected at all. Immediately, celebrations, dark ironic pitiless humor, and hideous one-liners with no thought put into them started everywhere. It was official, the Hermann Cain Award logic about when it's acceptable to dance on the graves of your enemies extends about as far as certain leftists want it to. If you have certain values, and you express them, there are tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of people who would love to see you get decorated with your own blood, watch you exsanguinate, a chunk of mineral tearing through your vital structures, turning you into a pile of meat instead of a man. Your entire life will be characterized by years-old quotes picked out of a mountain of words you've spoken over the course of your short life.
Today, after gathering enough stock of public reactions, I've come to an even more disturbing conclusion: there are even more people out there who will run cover even for this awful behavior. Here's a small collection of everything I've witnessed: They're all bots. There aren't that many of them. They're only online. It's because of Trump's escalation of rhetoric. It's because this was where this would lead for the kind of life he lived. He was a white supremacist. He wanted gays to be stoned to death. He accepted gun deaths and became one, such a natural consequence. The shooter wasn't one of us. He was a groyper. We can talk about cooling the rhetoric once the 2026 elections happen. Until those go well, it's perfectly understandable why people talk this way. Let's talk about something else, let's talk about January 6th again. Let's talk about Epstein. Let's talk about the Minnesota lawmakers. Anything but this topic. Even many of the moderate lefty politicians couldn't muster up much other than "political violence is bad", saving face in an easy way. Almost none of them did the difficult thing that Gavin Newsom or Cenk Uygur did and confronted the real issue at no small cost to their own image. Some of them even used it to forward their own agendas. AOC put something out in favor of gun control. That's right: we shoot you, and then we use your death to try to convince you to lay down your issues and let us win. Ilhan Omar doesn't believe that anyone genuinely liked the man or is being genuine. After seeing all the downplaying, I have no doubts that she will lose barely any support, because it's tacitly approved.
So many of my own friends, too. I've tried to reach across the aisle for years. I've even discounted some of my true beliefs to coax out some admission that I really wanted to see. I've always tried to model fairness in my political arguments. It got me nothing. All that goodwill, swallowed up, like water falling on the dusty ground.
I thought such a clear case of senseless murder would make people snap out of the usual sanewashing, but no, and in fact, there's so much on this website, too, even among people who are much better than the median social media poster at understanding arguments and taking context into account. I am incredibly sad that there's actually nothing that could happen that could get people to agree with each other without clearing their throat before doing it. The entire internet is a /r/watchpeopledie thread. There's video, and then there's the awful comments under the video. There's no good ending to this. It's painful. This discourse is a grueling journey to the ugliest end of the country imaginable. This discourse is the cumulative societal hangover from more than ten years of a cancerous outgrowth of the most toxic kind of politics, and just like a regular hangover, the world doesn't stop for you. You have to go back into work in the morning and do it all over again. It's unbearable. I was not willing to believe a large portion of the other side was evil up until now. I hope someone cooler-headed than me can make some headway on this issue somehow, because I will go insane if I think about this any more.
I understand how difficult it is to see the gloating and then still see the person. I do for many, not all, but for many, what helps is the numbers. @Magusoflight mentions the "Charlie's Murderers" website has having totaled 20,000 entries; that's a rounding error, that's several orders of magnitude below lizardman constant. It could be a hundredth of the total who hold the sentiment and that total is still below the lizardman constant among Americans. It's noise.
The same is true for posts on X. I've seen lamentations of the number of likes on some very cruel posts and I've been surprised at how few people in the comments understand the likes are botted are else mostly originate in non-Americans. I do not live in a country where such a degree of callousness is present in enough leftists to total 500,000 likes on a snipe at his daughter. This country would look completely different if the leftist fringe were that numerous.
This doesn't make it not a problem that certain people are gloating. There are instances, specific to categories of profession, where they should face immediate termination. A doctor, as happened on reddit whereupon he was swiftly doxxed, should be fired and his license suspended pursuant to a lengthy readmission process that isn't so much about making him kiss the ring as it is browbeating him with the knowledge of "now any time there's an issue with a patient we're going to have to rule out willful misconduct" -- I'm deeply ignorant on this but I guess I just assume if you asked your hospital's lawyers "How bad would it be if I got caught publicly gloating about the assassination of a political figure?" you'd get Ted's thousand-yard stare. Obviously same for nurses and pharmacists, same for cops, minus being allowed to be a cop again, and same with teachers. I'll explain.
I have close leftists friends to whom I assume I come across as something like a highly contrarian perfectly-line-straddling libertarian with socialist leanings, probably because that's what I am in the strictest sense. It's meant since this happened I've been able to engage them in clear air, non-combatively. I was able to gently chastise those who mentioned Kirk and began to express positive feelings about his death. For each, I got them to take back their words, and though for each they said some variation of "Well . . . I don't know that I can feel bad about him" none of them said it as a petty retort. These were calls and face-to-face, I heard their understanding in their voices, I saw in some the actual moment of realization on their face, and I wasn't asking them to mourn the man, but perhaps mourn the state of things, to realize it's bad, and they did. This all because I can talk to them honestly because I know how to talk to them, and yes, because I don't raise flags as an enemy soldier. I shouldn't! I'm their friend, I love them dearly, it's part of why I felt so heartsick Wednesday and the psychic hangover Thursday, fear that my friends are going to get themselves killed.
These friends, some of them still live with their parents, or else are renting an apartment or a house, often with a sibling. Not one of them owns a house. They work service industry jobs, or similar, at best nice and proper careers but nothing critical, nothing where lives are in their hands directly or effectually. They're single and at most dating but nothing serious, obviously no kids, and altogether, no meaningful expectations in their lives. They are stunted, they are immature, and they've been let down by so many people in their lives. I don't want to say they were let down by their parents, but they were, they were let down by their schools, and they were let down by their leaders. Their leaders do know better, their leaders do act from the conflict side, but just as I know that with certainty, I know my friends act from mistake. They don't understand what they're saying because they are still, essentially, children.
A doctor can't be a child, you can't have that level of trust invested in you and be a child. A doctor must know better, his thoughts must be adequately ordered in, if truly nothing else, understanding you can't out yourself as having such beliefs for goddamned upvotes. Children can be trusted with guns, some of them, in very specific circumstances, they don't get to arrest criminals, and we don't let children lead classrooms of other children. You could say it's exactly this last case that is responsible for so many problems in modern education. I don't disagree.
It would be wrong for me to treat this as all so certain. It is incredibly inflammatory, necessarily, in being maximally patronizing and almost maximally denying of agency when I say, oh, that's fine, they're just stupid kids, only kids could find such ideas compelling. I'll square this as best I can:
I think each position in their platform has some essential truth and reason it it. If they were correct about the world, their behavior would, largely, be in congruence with the Christian moral paradigm on which western civilization was raised. If policing in fact caused the problems it was purported to solve, it would make sense to abolish policing. If it were a racist justice system and racism-originating disparities in socioeconomic conditions, progressive "equity" based policies would make sense. If we were certain that tabula rasa was our objective reality and anybody could be an American if you raised them right, it would make sense to be extremely lax about immigration, though still to an extent, as moderated by the simple logistical problem of it all. If we were correct about the etiology of gender dysphoria and that self-harm and suicide occurs in such numbers solely because of a lack of social acceptance, it would make sense to treat it as quickly as identified and implement a measure of structural protections for such people. And if there really were a problem with fascism and neonazism among the right, it would make sense to come down hard against it, though what I mean by "hard" and what they mean by "hard" are very different.
Preemptive violence is not justified inside that Christian paradigm or outside in the at least idealized postwar order. Here I will put my foot down. It is maximally charitable and good faith to consider celebrating the death of a man who simply talked to college students as the behavior of a child. It is the behavior of a child to consider words as ever constituting violence and so respond to those words with violence. It is the behavior of a child to throw tantrums and threaten self-harm over real or perceived slights; it's also the most classic behavior of an abuser to threaten self-harm and suicide over real or perceived slights. It is the behavior of a child to outsource their thinking to the group and say whatever the group says to fit in. Children don't, or shouldn't, understand real violence. Adults do.
It's also charitable because of the alternative. I think the left needs to purge itself, and should probably be adequately coerced into it, but that ultimately it should still exist and be permitted to rebuild around its traditional strengths. If this is a movement where the majority of its adherents are agentic and have arrived individually and organically at the support for assassinations, the appropriate conclusion is the movement doesn't get to exist anymore.
I'm currently watching Center Left Twitter (Ryan Grim, Zaid Jilani, etc) run with the euphemism of "criticism". These people in positions of trust over others aren't being fired for cheering the murder of someone like me whom they will be in a position of trust over. It's criticism. Mere criticism. That's all. That sure sounds unfair, doesn't it? No mention of what they are saying, no mention of their specific jobs where harboring hatreds that deep makes them fundamentally unsuitable for the role.
As things stand, even now, the reward for these commentators is the next decade of watching powerlessly as their political party fades to nothing. At best their names will be remembered for when their presence is ejected from a reborn left that has wholly excised its bond with identitarian politics. These commentators themselves will fade into nothing and die in irrelevance. The punishment has been imposed, their deserts ever-coming.
At worst, for them not everyone, the violence continues, and each new perpetuation will be cause to take more scalps. The punishment then will also not be death, it will be what Stephen Miller wants, as he understands what is both the most effective and the most righteous punishment: exile.
Last I saw, Democrats are still projected to win the 2026 midterms. (See Brookings here and Politico here.)
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