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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'll add my own experiences with Kirk to the posting.
So as a terminally online right-wing Zillenial I had of course heard of Charlie Kirk. That's just the algorithm picking up on my demographics/beliefs, you're going to see Charlie Kirk. Up until 2024 though I hadn't ever really engaged with his content. I'd seen a few clips, and honestly I more-or-less threw him into the box of "generic right-wing commentator pwns teh libs lolxd." Might be dating myself a bit with that one but oh well. I'd developed a strong distaste for that kind of video as early as high school, so I never really revisited Kirk until recently. Enter election night 2024. Me and a group of friends are hanging out in discord, gorging ourselves on information. We're looking through half a dozen electoral streams, we have the NYTimes election meters up on everyone's screens, twitter screencaps are flying, the comments are coming thick and fast. The main question we have though, is who do we watch? CNN and MSNBC are out, Fox news is boring, TYT commentators are annoying, BBC has one token conservative getting ganged up on by six liberals and that's kinda fun to watch for a bit because he seems to be holding his own, but nothing really captures us. Then we try Louder with Crowder, and it's awful. Screaming, shouting, buzzer noises, just disgusting. Finally I turn on Charlie Kirk, fully expecting more of the same. And it is hands-down, without a doubt, the single best election coverage I have ever seen. It was masterful. Calm deliberate discussion, a clear right-wing bias of course but that doesn't bother us. It was... amazing. He was talking over the issues with people who seemed genuinely intelligent, he had a wonderful manner of speaking, it was just genuinely a joy to watch. We never switched away, not even after the election was called for Trump. That's how gripping it was. I think it was 4am Eastern before we finally switched him off and all went to bed.
The first I heard of Kirk's assassination was when I was in the gym on the treadmill. I have my phone turned off at work, and don't really check it until after I get home and am in the gym. So it was about 5:30pm. The first notification I had was one of my friends from that night saying "we're never going to get to watch Charlie's election stream again." I didn't understand at first, not until I started looking.
I'm usually one of the people decrying parasocial relationships with media figures. They don't know you, they don't care about you in the same way you care about them, and they never will. But despite myself I had grown attached to Charlie Kirk, if only for the fact that when every other podcast, streamer, and what-have-you was desperately trying to grab viewers by being as loud and aggressive as possible, Charlie Kirk was doing actual reporting. I am truly saddened by his loss, not just for the obvious reasons, but because he was acting the way I'd want commentators to act in an ideal world. We are lesser for his passing.
Yes, this is much of the same experience I had. I expected him to be the same type of irreverent, obnoxious right-winger like Crowder, or the Hodge Twins, or those videos from PragerU, or whatever other person with spicy-sounding one-liners gets posted to Facebook, judging from what I had heard of him from all those TPUSA memes. Unlike the others, I don't feel like he put out useless platitudes with no thought behind them. He actually had a masterful understanding of when an argument would or wouldn't apply, based on the reasoning put forward by the debaters. That's part of what made it shocking even reading right-wingers posting here on The Motte, with people downplaying him as being some milquetoast guy who didn't believe in anything. Even the right-wingers here had not watched him and had no idea who he was.
I notice a similar dynamic with Joe Rogan. People who listen to Joe Rogan know that he's not particularly political. He's an MMA weed smoker who is genuinely curious about all kinds of things, making him an excellent interviewer. But some former acquaintances from college said they would never listen to him because of how extreme he is. I fear that this is one of the most damaging ways that the "lefties don't understand righties but righties understand lefties" study can take effect. Just learn about who people are from osmosis, what could go wrong?
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I had also always put him in the same bucket as Crowder and Shapiro, one of these generic “own the libs/facts don’t care about your feelings” debate bro types. Strangely after his death I discovered my wife had frequently watched him on TikTok and thought very highly of his intelligence and eloquence.
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