The strangest fucking thing about right wingers and Charlie Kirk is that somehow they think we are still in the "polite discussion" phase of this "culture war" they kicked off/invented.
It tells you how goddamn fucking comfortable they are and how few marginalized people are in their lives.
That is to say Charlie Kirk only *said* things apparently. And apparently saying things can't lead to very real violence that people experience.
He was *only* talking. He *only* made a Watchlist of professors to inform people about who had liberal viewpoints, and if those people got horribly harassed & threatened, that's not on him.
They are "only" words.
Looks like Kirk got shot by a groyper honestly, so it's really a matter of infighting amongst themselves.
But when they get around to memorializing Kirk, they want to remind you, it was "only" words, only debate.
No, it wasn't. He hurt people.
He. Hurt. People.
I mean...
The right wing got their President & their Supreme Court & their Legislature. They are out there doing whatever they please.
But it's only words. "Why are you people so upset? It's just debate!"
No, it fucking isn't...not when the debate is accompanied by State violence it certainly isn't!
They think it's a game. They think we're trying to score points.
Charlie Kirk is apparently the first time it's becoming real to people that this isn't just a game...that they could get hurt.
They're shocked and aghast. "How can you be so callous?"
We've already lost so many to their violence, & they are scared *for the first time* & don't understand why we shrug & say "oh, this is just how the world IS now. You didn't know?"
This, I think, is at the heart of a lot of what I see right now from people who think of themselves as "free speech" champions: they didn't actually believe that real world violence underlies the things they say & do, because it's only violence when it happens to *them*.
They've been playing with no stakes while imagining they are courageous heroes, & now someone has introduced stakes. They didn't ever think that THEY would have actual skin in the game.
It's the reality that violence begets violence that has apparently got them shook.
"Oh, I didn't think MY violence would ever come back on ME!"
Charlie Kirk was most likely shot by a right wing troll... It was EXACTLY his violence coming back to him. It wasn't a queer person or a Black person... It was most likely a straight white kid who has been listening to guys like Kirk his whole life.
I had a Facebook discussion with a former friend about Kirk and it was frustrating but also—as I think about it now—enlightening.
I really do think she's legitimately shocked & horrified by Kirk's death. It's terrifying, & it makes her feel unsafe ... because up until this point, she DID feel safe, actually.
And it's mind-blowing to me, the idea of a person walking around this country, NOT feeling unsafe. It's hard for me to even enter that mindset.
But a lot of people on the fash side of things have not been scared this whole time. They make a lot of noise about gang violence & this & that, but they haven't actually pictured themselves as potential victims of violence.
It's really scary to look at someone who died a sudden, violent death & think "it could be me," but that's what Black Lives Matter was about, right? It arose out of people saying "that could be me."
And these right wingers didn't care about that ...they don't care that some people live under constant threat as long as they personally feel safe.
No fucking wonder this excites them so much. No wonder they find our lack of sympathy ghoulish. Violence isn't supposed to happen *to them*.
That's fucking it. That's what's fucking killing me in a nutshell.
A few years ago, we had people in the streets all over this country crying out for justice & the end of racialized violence like what happened to George Floyd, and according to people like Charlie Kirk, that was a bad thing, & we should shut up & let the violence continue.
Fine. Shutting up. I guess we don't care about pointless, meaningless death. It's just the cost of doing business, apparently.
@artemis i think there was a post-vietnam generation that got this on a visceral level due to their collective experience being outside the mainstream from the late 60s to the 80s. few of them were left in the early 2000s and fewer now.
looking back, the loss of them could be part of why white culture forgot that violence doesn't discriminate as much as some believe.
@artemis The same people who are out there saying shit like this and thinking *nothing* of it.
2,287 likes, 229 comments - dannyfuckingprice on September 13, 2025: "The very people who tried to declare war on us - because we weren't upset enough when a right-wing dude shot another right-wing dude - are literally on live tv suggesting we murder homeless people. "What happened to the tolerant left?" They say. "We have to look after our own" They say. It's bollox. They're literally a murderous country. They enslaved and tortured millions of black people. They stole the land of the Indigenous. They invade and massacre the middle east. Now, they openly call for the murder of the people they have failed. THIS IS WHERE WE'RE AT. Fuck America.".
@artemis I'm seeing all these ridiculous elegies saying how Kirk was a great debater. I saw the man "debate." He was the great interrupter. If you never let the other side finish a thought, that's not debate. Also, he was "debating" college kids, not wonks. He was going up against amateurs, not people who did it for a living, of course he came off looking more polished.
The man wanted to take us back to dark days and the people who are now lamenting his death make me sick.
@artemis The NYT ran an opinion piece today with 6 short essays by "editors of conservative-leaning campus publications or writers of conservative columns in student newspapers."
I have gift linked it above, but the screenshot below had me hollering, "good cats, she ALMOST has it!" How does she not see that we say the same fucking thing about them??? Where is the middle ground when the call is only for your removal from society?
@DejahEntendu @artemis Ethan there is almost correct, being so Right, for possibly the first time in his life.
He also said "In the eyes of leftists on campus, the view that there are only two genders is a call for violence against L.G.B.T.Q. people. If I speak out against abortion, I am a misogynist who wants to take away women’s basic human rights. If I defend President Trump’s calls for mass deportations and securing the border, I am a xenophobe who wants to torture immigrants in concentration camps."
And I can't disagree with what he says there.
He is all those very sorry, shitty things. I'm 100% he's called for violence against all 3 of those groups more than once, despite never having heard of him before in my life. They always casually forget the violence they call up for others.
@Dss @DejahEntendu @[email protected] oh thats all they want, okay explain what the actual real world implications of "only can be one of 2 genders", "banning abortion", and "securing the borders" actually entails?
how do you "secure the border" what does doing that actually look like ? what does it look like to immergrants seeking to enter or stay in the country?
what does "be against abortion" entail ? especially for those who arent interested in you demanding they give birth, and have an abortion anyway?
and how do you exactly plan on making there be "only two genders" what does that look like to the people who arent either?
im pretty sure that all of these simplfy down too "the government should commit systemic violence on these people", and id care alot less if it didn't.
@Dss @DejahEntendu it technically could not mean that,
you could for instance for abortions, one could go " i want to improve living conditions and make having a child easier so less people want to have an abortion" .. and for immergration you could go; "i want to improve living conditions and options overseas, and foster working together with eachother, so they dont feel the need to leave.",
for hating trans people, tbh yeah nothing i can say there, that's just variance in humans & identity; its not an indication anything is really "wrong" .. it being suppressed is, it shows theres an issue with bioessentialism, misogyny and gender norms. without those no one would care what gender you are. just like they dont care what your name is,
but they dont do that -- they arent anarchists, their not interested in harm reduction, no they want an excuse to deliberately cause more harm to more people and nothing more. :-;
@Li @DejahEntendu They purely want "rules for thee, not for me".
They cry on about "the great replacement", but offer nothing at all to mothers, parents, women... Besides threatening promises they will be sex slaves! It's insane.
the biggest problem is that the past has shown, whoever is left standing has absolute power.
The problem with reactionary movements funded by wealthy fossil fuel fascists like Koch Network, Charlie Kirk's patron billionaires, is that the donors are indifferent to the costs of violence, even to their own paid supporters.
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/04/06/trump-young-conservatives-college-charlie-kirk-turning-point-usa-217829/
They made little effort to assure Charlie Kirk's safety & security because he was equally useful, dead or alive. Martyr is as good as paid malign influencer, from their perspective.
1/
2/
The competition between the stans of Nick Fuentes vs Charlie Kirk is an example of how naturally & inevitably these fascist movements become schismatic and prone to internal squabbling that drags everyone else into their feuding.
https://m.economictimes.com/news/international/global-trends/us-news-after-charlie-kirk-shooting-tyler-robinsons-alt-right-links-to-nick-fuentes-spark-outrage-activist-breaks-silence/articleshow/123869902.cms
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/charlie-kirk-tyler-robinson-memes-meaning
Republicans have built a coalition rife with internal divisiveness because they have conflicting goals.
There's not enough government pork to go around.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/06/elon-musk-gop-donald-trump-midterms-00391246
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2025-06-23/trump-doctrine-coalition-contradictions
Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from Utah, has been arrested for the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk. Following the arrest, speculations arose online linking Robinson to the Groyper movement led by Nick Fuentes, known for his far-right and white supremacist views. Nick Fuentes has responded to these claims in a social media post.
@artemis As ever, the sons or nephews of rich men who will never wear a uniform extol the manly virtue of violent enforcement of order to which the nation must be returned - by other, poorer men. Poor men should risk consequences. Wealthy men “inspire.”
America, for many white settlers, has always been about cosplaying the upper classes of Europe; the saber-rattling and noisy bearing of arms comes from the same spirit as land ownership with a home perched on a useless and disused lawn: “we have seized what George didn’t want us to have!” (“Seized from whom” is impolite to ask.) For *wealthy* young men that means having a lot of bold words and the best arms and armor, and also a paid guard of the sons of poorer men to bundle them out of harm’s way at the first sign of trouble, to be summoned to enforce violence on those they provoke.
In some ways you could just simplify it and say that breed of patriarchal colonial white supremacy hasn’t caught up with the technology they introduced a hundred years ago, that they think they’re untouchable because the century of modern rifles with scopes was also the century of enormous strides toward diminished inequality, which is the much more real safeguard of their heath and position they’re now trying to erase.
@artemis 100% applies to handwringing liberals too, including ones who are quite nice in many other ways
they don't believe the words do things
@artemis I think there's also a component of noticing what the online trolls sincerely believe.
Those who are in on the grift know that in some essential way it exists to advance the status quo; the thing they've created believes a lot of the last two generation's excuses are divine will. If loot gets you wealth and loot requires murder, murder is virtue. (And it's only murder when it's people, and "people" is narrowly defined.)
If your everything depends on the status quo, this is alarming.
@artemis Your thoughts tie in perfectly with what I wrote yesterday:
A thought I had … Kirk’s murderer appears to be the kind of young male who is driven to gain fame in his online community by being increasingly crass, and who finally decides on murdering a very influential person for lolz and glory (yes, that is totally insane). (1/6)
@artemis
This is such a good way of putting this.
One of the arguments I've heard time and again against the efficacy of leftists being armed is that the right wing has so many guns that there's just no point. I can never seem to convince people how wrong that assumption is. I've faced off against armed neo Nazis a couple times (which is a couple too many). The first time I was not armed (though thankfully some comrades around me were). After that, I was. And in every case, they were fucking cowards. They *run* from anything that even resembles a fair fight, every time. Just the presence of firearms - not using them, not pointing them, just comfortably having them - is incredibly effective against them. They're babies who are terrified of anything that isn't the very softest target.
@artemis This was the thing that surprised me most about my own reaction: that there wasn't horror or disgust.
I burned out all my horror and disgust when it was my own mother-in-law that caught two in the lungs and one in the spine. Those nerves felt until they died. Had to die so I could keep functioning.
So when it happened to a relative stranger, my immediate response was "oh. Yeah. That makes sense." And that response startled me, but it didn't horrify it disgust me.
Those neural paths are gone. Trod to dust.
@artemis Unfortunately, in two days they'll go right back to thinking gun violence only happens to the people they hate, because that's a core part of their belief system.
Remember when HUNDREDS of innocent mostly white Republican men, women, and children got shot by a mass shooter in Las Vegas? They don't.
Same with all the school shootings. It's just not a thing they can let themselves think about as a real thing. Because then they'd have to admit something ought to be done.
I agree this is what will happen with the average Republican. They only remember the latest talking points (and holy fuck is it frustrating trying to converse with one side has such selective short-term memory wirh aggressive conviction in the moment). Most won't have this Kirk guy's name in their face next month.
But the fascist oligarghy won't let this go. This shooting is what they were planning for. They will try to us this event as an excuse to push for arresting or threatening the Americans on their agenda that weren't in their first, ongoing wave.
Is anyone in Congress or mainstream news doing anything to push back? I've been too tired to check.
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