domain:felipec.substack.com
jake
1m ago
Had Kirk survived the attempt this might have been appropriate.
This is highly eloquent sneering. You are grasping at straws to justify your smugness over a man who was in every way your better. If I were to give you credit, it would have been for the subtlety of your actual message that has eluded those responding to you: "He deserved it and I'm glad he's dead."
I admit I expected to get modded on moderately unfair grounds
No credit; if you were as sharp as you think you are you wouldn't have admitted it.
zoink
2m ago
I didn’t express this online, so I guess it's not documented, but I did warn some people on the right that they should be careful running too far with the reporting on the writing on the casing. The Annunciation Catholic Church shooter, Robin (Robert) Westman, had a little something for everyone. The problems of instantaneous, constant news consumption are hardly unheard of, and I fall to it all the time. Now that Tyler Robinson has been captured, the culture wars are combing over his life, and while I think many would acknowledge the problems with Reddit, I still use it as a barometer. If it’s popular on Reddit, it represents a non-negligible minority. With bots and AI, at some point that might need to change. As I maybe should have posted a warning for the right about a rush to speculate before Tyler Robinson was apprehended, maybe the left should hold up? It took some archive shots [1] [2] /r/all. The current top post is titled:
Charlie Kirk’s Killer Tyler Robinson Raised in a Republican Household and It’s Bad News for the MAGA Media Machine.
Another post with 50k net upvotes has:
Ain’t No way in HELL that boy was raise “far left”.
Like… what? I don’t think him being raised in a conservative family really would surprise people. Isn’t the mantra been that schools and colleges are indoctrinating kids (I’m not claiming this happened in this case) one of THE big culture war talking points? It’s just a really odd thing to plant a flag on, to me.
dev
2m ago
This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.
Yes, this is it. Personally, I might have the talent for it, or been able to develop the talent, and perhaps once was on that path, but I don't have the guts to put myself out in public and go around debating leftists in person at venues across the country. In terms of virtue points, maybe I get 8 for honesty and he gets 5 points, but he gets 10 for courage, and I get like 2, so he beats me.
cynical apparatchik
Russell conjugation: I'm a team player, you are a PR spokesperson for the movement, he is a cynical apparatchik/propagandist.
He was a charismatic and courageous movement spokesperson. He was not a first-class intellectual; nor was he a paragon of truth-telling virtue/disagreeable autist.
If Kirk basically trusts Trump, there isn't anything necessarily cynical about changing his tune on Epstein when Trump did. I'm basically the same way, and I don't have anything to gain for changing my opinion. I assumed there was a deeper conspiracy behind the Epstein thing, like he was running a blackmail ring. But if the Trump people have looked into and not found anything, then that increases the probability that there wasn't actually a blackmail ring. I don't think Trump is hiding is own deep guilt, because if Trump was guilty of anything more than bad taste with regards to Epstein, I think the Biden administration would have revealed it.
pigeonburger
3m ago
Middle class. In my age range, I have a salary that's around the 80th percentile in my country, but I do live in big city which skews it. I rent a relatively large 2 bedroom apartment in a safe, quiet neighborhood. Though our finances are stressed from doing so while trying to maintain a middle class lifestyle, I am able to support my wife studying full time. Inheritance aside, on my own, I would be able to afford an unimpressive house in the exurbs. With my wife's help, assuming she has a 50th to 75th percentile salary, we would be able to buy a pretty nice house in the exurbs or an unimpressive house in the suburbs. While I don't have a higher education degree (college didn't agree with me), I fit in culturally with people who do. My parents had higher education degrees, my mother a college graduate, my father a university graduate. My job is in the same field as my father, and I would estimate my career level to be roughly comparable to his at the same point in his life.
I mean, give Kirk some credit for absolutely practicing what he preached. Guy was married, two kids, clearly devoted Christian, didn't even use foul language which a lot of the right indulges in. When South Park started ribbing him, he leaned into the joke!
And of course he put himself out there, he was the guy sitting down and talking directly to people, face to face, not 'hiding' behind a camera, only talking through the screen.
Maybe calling him "The Conservative Mr. Rogers" is a bit much. BUT. This is an example of the sort of role model that males might actually find appealing and would pull them away from, e.g. the Andrew Tates of the world.
And one thing I learned in the wake of this is that Kirk was WAY more popular, including among young people, than I anticipated Despite his flip-flopping on Tiktok, he had 9 million followers on the platform.. Turning Point USA was a LARGE Org, well funded. And, as we can now see, pretty well-liked among normies.
And no, being 'better' than Andrew Tate doesn't qualify you for sainthood, but... I will actually make the claim he was at least a steps above ANY left-leaning commentator you could name.
I looked around and realized that the left doesn't have a real Charlie Kirk equivalent. There is no lefty figure who actively seeks out havens of conservative thought to openly challenge their consensuses, to their face.
I mean, you have Sacha Baron Cohen, he goes into right-leaning spaces... but he's doing it explicitly to mock and parodize them, not to have dialogue.
You have your Jon Stewarts and John Olivers that use their platform to preach without permitting response or critique to them, just endless lecturing and jokes.
Your Hasan Pikers who interact with a self-selected audience in chat, and rarely allow a single contradicting thought to penetrate the bubble.
Your AOCs, your Bernie Sanders', and Mamdanis who WILL go out in Public, and kivee to do photo ops and heap criticisim on the right from the heights of their podium... but once again will not enter any arena where they don't have a clear popular or numerical advantage.
No, Charlie Kirk wasn't just unique on the right, he was something that ONLY appears on the right.
I don't know of any lefties who ever put themselves in "the lion's den" and attempted to make the case for their ideals directly to their ideological opponents.
What's that say about the state of the left's intellectual honesty? I dunno. I never credited them with much. The lefties who found their way into this space, (Anyone remember Darwin?) they haven't fared well when pressed on their ideas without the ability to falsify a popular consensus.
I think Charlie Kirk is a better man, more deserving of national honor on his popularity alone, and certainly a more consistent and principled man (even if one of said principles was 'don't openly contradict Trump') than literally any lefty you could name.
If we want to start pulling people down, we know that there's ample material with which we could smear, e.g. Martin Luther King Jr.. But that wouldn't erase their positive accomplishments.
And probably the least deserving of being killed for his speech than most of the righty commentators.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5m ago
This is exactly the kind of disingenuous argumentation I'm talking about.
Your wording is very precise, yet weaselly: "a high up political figure." It implies much but says nothing. Because "high up political figure" implies a politician, or a government official, or at least someone with major influence over the government. But Charlie Kirk was mostly known for debating college students on YouTube and getting out the vote for Donald Trump. Sure, that makes him a public figure with some political influence, but he wasn't the chair of the Republican Party. He was a commentator. A gadfly. That's not what you meant when you tried to equate him with, say, a Hezballah commander or an Iranian state official.
It is a legitimate moral argument to make that the US or Israel should not target the latter with drone strikes. We can debate that. We can disagree about that. But show me the US assassinating a YouTuber.
So once again, let's be clear here: you are arguing that any US public figure, like, say, Ben Shapiro or Ezra Klein, would be legitimate targets because of US policies in the Middle East?
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
7m ago
Do you really fight for that out of some inherent admiration for a higher value or because tolerating those views is a price you pay for advancing good ideas in hopes that they flourish? I'll take the heat for my own stance on this but I don't regard free speech as an absolute value even though it's virtually impossible to overstate it's importance. It doesn't give you the right to harass people. It doesn't mean freedom from the consequences of your actions or statements. And I don't regard free speech as a value so high that it means we should burn the whole house down so one person can have his right to say something he's highly attached to.
I don't think there's a difference really. Rights aren't prayers, they are tools we use to protect society. I do think free speech and expression is the most important right, but that's because it is the last line of defence against the tyrannical - even if they lock you up, if you can talk you have the opportunity to convince your captor to let you go. Sure in practice that is very rare, but the potential is better than nothing. In abstract I can agree we shouldn't burn the whole thing down just because one guy can't shout obscenities at passers-by, but in practice that historically means I'm next. Unlike many on the right these days I will still defend the right to speak of people I find abhorrent, which is why that congressman annoys me. But fighting for it, that is fighting for your own demise.
The sad part, in my view, is that many of those who will suffer the consequences of 'belittling' speech will have been indoctrinated into it and raised in an environment where their speech didn't have consequences. They are victims of a zeitgeist shift, but to them, unaware of history, it will look like right wing authoritarianism run rampant. The cycle will begin anew. I'd be worried about that if I didn't think it inevitable.
Then you're fighting for a near non-existent number of people who feel the same way that you do. Unfortunately that isn't what most people want. More people will fight for privilege than principle. Inside of everyone (and especially where it concerns ideological lines) you're never going to coax the majority of people out of their friend/enemy distinction; whether they'll admit it to you or not.
Oh man, I know. And looking back, my life would have been much easier - and better - if I'd embraced the friend/enemy distinction. I used to feel like a poster child for 'here's why you shouldn't live by your principles.' But I think I'm just meant to stick to a smaller community, once I started focusing more on improving my community on the local level my life improved immeasurably. Liberal democracy is not entirely stable in a polarised society I think, it tilts back and forth. People like me will never be in power, but we remind those in power that their righteousness is false, and they can and should do better, which - up to a point - is useful imo. It is also probably cope, but it works for me.
YoungAchamian
10m ago
It doesn't really matter. FC's point is that he is being oppressed. I shared that I feel like I am also being oppressed. A very large chunk of the country feels oppressed and that isn't good.
What's the solution? FC feels oppressed, you feel oppressed, I feel oppressed. We all support the ending the oppression. But when FC's tribe gets into power they go around oppressing everyone who isn't them. So I now still feel oppressed. The Right had the moral majority in the 80s and they went around oppressing everyone with their Christian morality. The lefties felt oppressed and did something about it, they took over. Now everyone feels oppressed by the woke feminist instead of the church lady. Is the solution really just to give it back to the right so they can go back to oppressing everyone?
It really seems like the majority of people can't live with the idea that other people want to do different things with their lives and you shouldn't go poke sticks in their eyes because they are different.
Bartender_Venator
12m ago
One man's excessive laissez-faire in finance is another man's government strangling every other industry. But that was largely baked in by the time Thatcher came to power.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
15m ago
Second, neither Kirk nor Patel have any military or law enforcement experience, so there's also the cringe multiplier of framing yourself as a kind of very online wannabe[] badass.
I wonder to what extent military slang and terminology and such like changes over time as it drifts into public use by non-soldiers. An in-joke starts as a status symbol telling others in the know that you had seen the elephant, then becomes known to the public and becomes a symbol to everyone, then begins to be used by members of the public to signal support, then drifts out of use with soldiers.
Kind of the same way about half of men's fashion starts with elite units in the military, then regular infantry units adopt the look from the elite units, then veterans continue to wear it as a symbol of service, then it just runs into civilian use.
TournamentFishing
15m ago
That clip confirms the interpretation in King's apology.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
17m ago
I'm... really not sure what you're trying to prove with any of this.
oats_son
18m ago
Once again, the rules of this site are extremely tiresome at times. I know you're sick of reading this same complaint, and I'm sorry for that. But this news was going to get posted here one way or another, and forcing people to jump through hoops to talk about current events while they're happening right now is bad. /r/moderatepolitics relaxes its topic ban about transgenders when a relevant court case with immediate political consequences comes around (Skrmetti was the last time, I think), and this website, too, needs to chill out during tumultuous times like this. He did not damage the quality of the discussion or the mission of the website. This was a bad ban.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
21m ago
Hey gramps, do you remember anything about this episode in history (the psychosurgery bit, not the trans bit)?
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
22m ago
There's a rapidly congealing hagiography surrounding Charlie Kirk in the wake of his shooting. Before his assassination, I was only vaguely aware of him as just another political commentator like Destiny, Bannon, Yiannopoulos, Fuentes, etc. I don't recall anyone trying to lionize him as one of the greats or anything like that. Of course, the political calculus changed the instant the bullet entered his body. Cynically, if Kirk looks better and more virtuous, then the more effectively he can be treated as a martyr, and, if need be, used as a cudgel against the left. And of course, it's best to strike while the iron is hot and the outpouring of support is at its greatest. Right-wing rhetoric once again bears a striking resemblance to the woke left of old, with the main retort being some version of "how DARE you!?!" I've seen plenty of conservatives assert that any criticism of Kirk at this moment is tantamount to saying "He deserved to get shot. Also, I 100% support political violence against people who disagree with me". This is flatly nonsense, as it's obviously valid to decry political violence while simultaneously believing Kirk was just a mundane political operative like any other.
In case you're wondering how far the hagiography is going, I'll provide some examples. Yesterday, Trump called him a "martyr for truth" and promised to award him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor that can be bestowed. Congresswoman Luna compared Kirk to previous political martyrs, tweeting a photo that placed him between MLK and Jesus while circulating a letter calling for a statue of Kirk to be erected in the US Capitol. Congresswoman Mace introduced a resolution for Kirk to lie in honor in the Capital Rotunda, and there's a decent chance he'll get a state funeral or a close equivalent. Others have angrily noted how Kirk's Wikipedia page doesn't have identical wording to MLK's assassination -- "assassination by gunshot" vs "gunshot wound" -- as if Kirk's death "was a hunting accident".(?)
I dug into some of the things Kirk has said, and I've found him to be little more than a cynical apparatchik that rapidly changed his views to align with the dominant Republican zeitgeist on several occasions.
@DaseindustriesLtd puts it like this:
Kirk was not a child, he was a cynical propagandist in the job of training unprincipled partisans, ever changing his tune precisely in alignment with the party line and President's whimsy (see the pivot on H1Bs). I admit I despised him and his little, annoying gotcha act of "debating" infantile leftists, milking them for dunk opportunities. They deserved the humiliation, but the pretense of "promoting dialogue" was completely hollow, and the massive number of shallow, cow-like people in the US for whom it is convincing depresses me.
And yeah, after doing a bit of research, that's basically what I've found as well.
One of the most steelmanned takes comes from, of all places, Ezra Klein in the NYT. He writes that Kirk was "practicing politics the right way" by being willing to "talk to the other side". This is a ludicrously hagiographic way of saying "he was a political commentator that did not actively advocate for violence". I suppose that, sadly, that last part is becoming an increasingly high bar these days.
In terms of the flip-flopping, there are several examples. Michael Tracey goes into some of them.
First, the Epstein stuff:
Perhaps most notoriously, after taking a personal phone call from Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk hopped on his podcast the next day and proclaimed, “Honestly, I’m done talking about Epstein for the time being. I’m gonna trust my friends in the administration. I’m gonna trust my friends in the government.” He then bizarrely tried to deny that he said this, or insist it had somehow been taken out of context — which it hadn’t. The context was that Trump got annoyed that a bunch of people had criticized him over Epstein at Kirk’s “Turning Point USA” conference, and then Trump called up Kirk, and then shortly thereafter, Kirk announced he was going to do the government’s bidding. That’s just what Kirk was, and the role he played in US political affairs — notwithstanding how people might now want to exalt him as a paragon of truth-telling virtue because of his untimely death.
Second, in foreign affairs:
His conduct was even more egregious in the run-up to Trump bombing Iran in June. During that episode, he pretty much served as a blatant government disinformation agent. Harsh as that might sound after he was brutally gunned down yesterday, it’s simply true. His mission was to demand uncritical faith in the US government, during a time of war — which is totally inexcusable for anyone who would consider themselves anything even remotely approximating a “journalist.” But that’s clearly not what Charlie Kirk considered himself. He instead considered himself a government media mouthpiece. On April 3, he said “A new Middle East war would be a catastrophic mistake.” Then by June 17, as drumbeats for the joint US-Israeli war against Iran were intensifying to full volume, Charlie changed his tune to mollify Trump, whom his whole identity was built around sycophantically serving. “It is possible to be an extreme isolationist,” Charlie Kirk warned his massive audience. “President Donald Trump is a man made for this moment, and we should trust him.” This was just pathetic. Turn off your critical thinking skills and place unquestioning “trust” in the US government to wage a war on false pretenses! What awesome, noble “truth-telling”!
Beyond these two bits, I've found a few more.
Third, on TikTok:
At first he was in favor of banning TikTok, saying "It's way past time to ban TikTok. It is a cancer on America." But then, after talking with some investors Trump changed his tune saying "I will never ban TikTok if re-elected, and Kirk dutifully followed. Shortly before Trump's inauguration Kirk ran a story saying TikTok was encouraging gen Z to become more conservative, and thus that Trump should "save TikTok".
Fourth, on Ron DeSantis:
DeSantis had a good burst of publicity in 2021 and 2022, and so Kirk started singing his praises as "the future of conservatism". That changed when Trump entered the primary in 2024. Soon it became clear that Trump was the frontrunner, and so Kirk changed his tune and started saying that DeSantis should drop out "for the heroes of our nation."
Fifth, on mail-in ballots:
At first, Kirk parroted the Trump line mail-in ballots were fake and easily manipulated and so everyone should vote in-person. By 2024, Turning Point Action rolled out “Chase the Vote” and a “Commit 100” early-vote/ballot-chasing machine mirroring the Trump/RNC pivot to embrace early and absentee voting (“Bank Your Vote,” later “Swamp the Vote USA”).
Finally, on political violence (and this is especially relevant given the context in which he died):
Kirk mostly gave anodyne anti-violence answers when questioned, but that didn't stop him from amplifying conspiracy theories when the shoe was on the other foot. When Paul Pelosi was attacked with a hammer, Kirk smiled, laughed, and suggested a "patriot" go bail out the person who perpetrated it so they could "ask questions". This was almost certainly in reference to the notion that Paul Pelosi was attacked by a gay prostitute, and that the whole episode was little more than a lover's quarrel.
Changing your mind is not a crime, but I start to wonder about political figures who conveniently do so exactly when public opinion shifts. Kirk was almost slavishly loyal to Trump when Trump was the avatar of the conservative movement, but was more than willing to toot DeSantis' horn when it seemed like he might be the next big thing -- despite that DeSantis was always going to have to compete against Trump in a zero-sum race for the nomination.
There's probably more I've missed, but at this point it feels like beating a dead horse.
oats_son
25m ago
Reading what you said, I agreed to the point that I would put down a (virtual) bet, but thinking some more, I've seen some crazy, crazy deflections and downplayings from people I thought were normies. I think certain leftists are extremely uncomfortable with the facts that are being put forward here, and they refuse to accept the framing of right wingers at all. In these circumstances, I could easily see many of them try to redirect in the fashion he means, similar in the ways that his image is tarnished - on this very site! - with out-of-context quotes in a mad attempt to make this seem more like a natural outcome of the line of work he was in, rather than the pure evil murder it was. Will anyone buy it? I'd argue probably a lot of people. The left was willing to swallow anything to ignore all the utterly insane activists calling for the police to be defunded during 2020.
gattsuru
25m ago
Dayton, Ohio 2019 spree shooter. Very heavily themed his online presence around Canti and Atomsk.
Yeet_far
31m ago
So, domestic partnerships really aren't the same thing; they're not recognized by the Federal Government, so they don't give a lot of rights. I've had a domestic partnership as a straight couple, and it's not really anything like marriage. You do get some rights! But hardly 'equal'. You only get health insurance from your spouse if their company is nice and allows it, for instance. It's not required.
Theoretically Civil Unions should have actually been "marriage minus the religious aspect". However, that was never really the case in practice: Civil Unions were never recognized by the Federal Government either. This meant that (for example) you can't get a spouse visa with a Civil Union. And still can't file taxes jointly. And if you ended up hospitalized in a state that didn't honor your civil union, you were just as boned as if you didn't have one.
Theoretically if there had been federally recognized Civil Unions that actually had all of the same benefits as marriage, Obergefell v. Hodges would probably have gone very differently. If the anti-gay-marriage people really wanted to preserve marriage for straight couples only, they really ought to have pushed for this, but clearly they didn't.
I strongly suspect if proper, recognized-by-the-federal-government-and-all-states Civil Unions had existed in the 90s (to be clear: Civil Unions have never been recognized by the Federal Government or all states. Not then and not now), we wouldn't have gay marriage today.
As for the religious aspect, there's the simple matter of religious freedom. I am fully on board saying that churches that don't want to marry gay couples shouldn't have to. However, that goes both ways -- churches that do want to marry gay couples should have the right to do so.
gattsuru
31m ago
Barring bad soap operas, no. But prosecutors will want to bring witnesses, have to question the target, and (while I'd argue shouldn't) handle the media, and all those things are more expensive when the first question is 'did you know she had a dick'.
miras_chinotto
certified low iq
31m ago
I think that chain of thought is very likely. Would maybe have made more sense to avoid being in that rhetorical corner to begin with where all your options are bad.
TheDemonRazgriz
31m ago
First the violent nutjobs took FLCL references
Wait, when did this happen?
TournamentFishing
35m ago
The seal of confession isn't a universal feature across all Christian denominations.
Grew up in an upper middle class family (to parents who grew up as literal peasants themselves), currently living as what I can best describe as "expat class". Earning money that would make me upper middle class in this country easily, but without easy access to most channels this normally opens up in life.
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