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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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Neither Omar nor Hasan said Kirk deserved it. They basically said they thought he was an asshole with abhorrent beliefs, and then Hasan called the killing "horrific" and "inexcusable" and Omar said "my heart breaks" for his family. Whether they're really all that broken up about it, probably not, but they're going through the expected motions, and right-wingers would not be all that sad if somebody shot some left-winger of Kirk's stature either.

Piker does not represent the Democratic Party, either its leadership or its base. He's a self-proclaimed socialist who supports the Houthis, which puts him far out of step with both. He's certainly not comparable with people like Tucker Carlson or Kirk himself, who was a personal friend of Trump's and close to the heart of the GOP. He has about a fifth as many twitter followers as Kirk. Destiny has a fraction of that following.

And all that said, neither of them said Kirk deserved it either. Piker told his fans to stop laughing on stream, and called it "horrific." Destiny refused to "disavow" on the grounds it would be an admission of guilt.

What seems to be happening is right-wingers taking examples of people saying "Kirk was an asshole, but he shouldn't have been killed" and pretending like they're saying "Fuck yeah, more of this, give that guy a medal." It's not enough to condemn the Kirk assassination, you have to be sad about it and talk about what a great guy he was too.

Omar effectively said no one really gives a shit about Kirk and everyone is just pretending to be afraid and outraged. Her stance is pretty abhorrent. The rest of what she said was a deflectionary attempt at reframing the conversation around why right-wing politics are bad.

It was a terrible comment she gave.

Would you extend this grace to anybody murdering people who look Mexican for being Mexican?

"Well yeah of course, of course we condemn murder...but what did these Mexicans expect? They maybe have been here illegally. Even if they weren't they kindof looked like some people who are!"

The things Destiny, Ilhan, etc. are saying are reprehensible.

Didn't some of the testimony for the DC sniper case suggest they were targeting white people for being white people?

Robinson shot Charlie Kirk for being Charlie Kirk specifically, rather than as a randomly selected conservative (otherwise he might have shot any one of the people in the crowd). Crusius shot his victims for being non-white immigrants generally, since he didn't know who any of them were personally. So the equivalent to leftists badmouthing Kirk as a man after his murder would be right-wingers badmouthing non-white immigrants as a group after several of them are murdered, which they absolutely do

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I wonder if there's a deeper interaction with left-wing ideology here. Leftists have to believe that the masses would totally want social democracy/communism if only they were educated and knew what was good for themselves. In this framework the individual propagandists are themselves the ones responsible for reactionary sentiment amongst the population at large. Right-wingers see the core problem as the undesirable demographics directly, so cheering targeted assassinations doesn't really fit.