Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:

Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.

But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every “rest in piss” meme, every “fucked around and found out” joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.

Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.

The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.

His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.

Ohhh! I love Starship Troopers! The book, not so much, but the movie I adore.

Let’s dig into your choice to respond with this scene.

That’s the moment where Verhoeven shows us ‘Federation Victory’! The good guys have won! They’ve captured the Brain Bug! It’s afraid! Humanity wins!

Except what’s actually happening is fascists celebrating the torture of a sentient being. One that extracted human minds just as they’ll now extract from its mind; each side justifying their horrors by pointing to the other’s. All while convincing themselves they’re heroes.

The Federation doesn’t attempt communication or diplomacy. They literally probe its brain for intel while cheering its terror. The troops cheering ‘It’s afraid!’ aren’t the good guys. They’re Verhoeven’s mirror showing us how righteousness becomes the very tyranny it claims to fight.

NPH’s character literally becomes a full SS-uniformed intelligence officer who feeds his best friends into an endless meat grinder. The bugs were defending their home. The Federation manufactured its own eternal enemy. And everyone cheering becomes complicit in forever war.

You’ve sent me a scene about people so drunk on their enemy’s fear that they can’t see they’ve become the monsters.

So either you’re agreeing that celebrating suffering makes us indistinguishable from what we oppose, or you’ve accidentally proven my point by quoting the villains as heroes.

Either way, I couldn’t have picked a better metaphor myself.