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I saw a post (I think on Substack) making the point that the way progressives talk about Kirk parallels Umberto Eco's observation that, in fascism, the enemy must be seen to be both strong and weak. When Trump wants to name a street after Charlie Kirk, progressives tend to roll their eyes and say that he's undeserving of the accolade because he was just some guy with a YouTube channel. But when people are saying that it was bad that Kirk was assassinated, progressives will turn around and say that it was justified, because he was a powerful and dangerous demagogue who used his platform to invite violence against [minority du jour].
Obviously, it cannot be the case that Kirk was both an insignificant YouTuber and an influential demagogue: only one of these things can be true.
That's because "Everyone I don't like is extremely dangerous and must be destroyed. But they're also, like, a total loser, man." is a general feature of human psychology.
(Very effective tactic too. Great way to get your lynch on when that needs doing. Justice, consequences, accountability, you know the drill.)
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The point is reasonable enough, but my observation is that Umberto Eco's writings on the nature of Fascism are straightforwardly bullshit. A supermajority of those engaged in conflict at any scale are going to see their opponent as a threat ("strong") and also both deeply flawed and weak enough to be defeated ("weak"). There is no contradiction here; "Strength" and "Weakness" are not objective criteria, but rather meta-poles in a fuzzy, highly-multidimensional space.
From what I've seen, the rest of his analysis is shot through with similar problems.
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