Yves here. To state what may seem obvious, the assassination of Charile Kirk has the potential to considerably deepen already large schisms in American politics. Kirk, as the circumstances of his death show, made a point of going to college campuses and as a youngish man, was a “relatable” figure. Even though he stood for conservative ideas that many abhor, he was opposed to the war in Ukraine and even though he had been a staunch Israel supporter, he had started questioning Netanyahu’s conduct. But what set him apart from most political commentators and activists in the US was that he was willing to speak across doctrinal lines and (by reputation, I have not watched him enough to have an independent point of view) remained civil and would even concede that the other side had a point. He was also apparently genuinely outgoing and solicitous and was extremely well-liked by media professionals and elected officials; their grief about his death is apparently genuine.
Despite, as we’ll see below, calls from many prominent conservatives to punish the “radical left,” as in domestic enemies, the workings of the right wing hive mind may be diffusing this impulse. Early report focused on markings on the bullets found with the assailants gun. For instance, see the most recent Wall Street Journal headline: Early Bulletin Said Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved With Transgender, Antifascist Ideology; Some Sources Urge Caution. The reason for the later Journal caveat (earlier headlines weren’t qualified) was that the information on the markings came via an internal police report.
But the bigger reason is a lot of conservatives aren’t buying it. It seems too tidy even in light of Kirk’s final exchange with the crowd. From the Independent:
[Kirk] responded to a question from an audience member who asked: “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
Mr Kirk responded “too many”, which resulted in some cheers from the crowd. After the individual said there had been five, they then asked the conservative political activist how many mass shootings there had been in the US in the last decade.
Uttering his last words, Mr Kirk asked: “Counting or not counting gang violence?” before a sniper’s bullet hit him in the neck.
A conservative contact who monitors its media intently focused on the fact that Trump and others almost immediately depicted the shooting as the involving more than one person (and this was separate from condemnations of lefties as stokers of “terrorism”). The emerging consensus in right mass opinion seems to be that the shooter was a foreign operative, The fact that as of this writing, he remains free suggests a certain level of tradecraft. At this point, he could have gotten to Mexico. If this belief gets traction, it will take some of the air out of the campaign to use this tragedy to the advantage of authoritarians and censors.
Ken Klippenstein provides confirmation:
Today on 9/11, it occurs to me that both the attack 24 years ago and the one that took Charlie Kirk’s life yesterday are plagued by many of the same wild allegations. Foreign intelligence involvement, federal coverup, a manufactured false flag; the parallel conspiracy theories are surreal.
Before the assassin has even been identified, countless people (including the president) have concluded it must have been a group effort, with Fox News alluding to unspecified “foreign intelligence” involvement. Others on the left, meanwhile, insist that the killing was orchestrated by Donald Trump to divert attention away from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
The reason behind the insta-theories is simple: nobody trusts what the authorities have to say. That’s understandable. Consider how almost a quarter of a century after the 9/11 attacks, there are still key documents that haven’t been declassified. This despite Trump’s repeated promises to declassify them (and even references to a Saudi Arabian role in the attack).
For instance, if you click through to the comments on this video clip, you’ll see a lot of questions about it:
— Ali (@MerruX) September 12, 2025
At the same time, the usual suspects are not letting this crisis-of-sorts go to waste. From Chris Hedges:
The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.
His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.
Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.
“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”
“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.
“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”
Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk…” He further states “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
There’s more of that sentiment in Hedge’s post, and even more in the wild. Doxxing has begun, along with threats to the DNC (soon deemed “not credible”) and some historically black colleges.
Now to the main event.
By Julia Conley. Originally published at Common Dreams
Despite the fact that the murderer of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk remained unidentified and still at large, President Donald Trump declared the “radical left” as “directly responsible” for the assassination in remarks from the White House on Wednesday night—comments that critics say shows Trump is more than willing to exploit the killing for his own purposes while sowing more, not less, political violence in the future.
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that criticism of Kirk from the left was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
The president didn’t specify which opponents of Kirk he believed contributed to his killing; over the years the influencer, who frequently visited college campuses to debate students, clashed with and was criticized by supporters of abortion rights, gun control, and immigrants’ rights. But Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
Trump did not detail how the White House would determine what groups “contributed” to Kirk’s killing.
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” he asserted, though he did not mention any of the political violence—which is statistically more pervasive—on the political right.
Trump: "For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of… pic.twitter.com/dQwhTv52a9
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 11, 2025
The president was echoing sentiments expressed by far-right influencer Laura Loomer who has played a key role in shaping the Trump administration, lobbying for the hiring and removal of certain aides.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single leftist organization,” Loomer said Wednesday, even before Kirk was publicly pronounced dead. “We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.”
In a Thursday op-ed for Common Dreams, author and journalist Christopher D. Cook laments how “Kirk had barely been declared dead when President Trump hideously used his killing to falsely blame and attack the left.”
The president, writes Cook, “seized the moment of widespread mourning to spread more hatred and division, in a reckless, angry televised speech that hurled blame at the left despite not a scintilla of evidence about Kirk’s assassin or their politics.”
Trump named a number of victims of political violence in recent years, including US Rep. Steve Scalise (R-La.), who was shot in 2017 by a man who opposed the president; and Trump himself, who survived two assassination attempts last year.
The president did not mention the killing earlier this year of Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman, a Democrat. The suspect in Hortman’s killing was an evangelical Christian who strongly opposed abortion and LGBTQ+ rights.
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
The comments from Trump and Mace, wrote Cook, only show that these are “not the people who are going to lead us out of this ugly toxic pit” of political violence now pervasive in the United States.
At Zeteo, journalist Mehdi Hasan listed several other recent acts of political violence in which the suspected or confirmed perpetrators held right-wing ideologies, including the attempted assassination of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro earlier this year; the assault of then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband in 2022; and the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020.
“There is no equivalent or even similar list of Obama or Biden supporters who have carried out murders, attempted murders, or violent attacks against Republicans or conservatives in recent years,” wrote Hasan. “In fact, according to statistics compiled by the ADL’s Center on Extremism, 2024 was the third year in a row in which all of the extremist-related killings in the United States were carried out by… right-wingers.”
On the social media platform X, Texas Monthly senior writer Robert Downen pointed out that some far-right white supremacists had also “reviled” Kirk.
“I’m not speculating about the shooter,” said Downen. “I just have been stunned how quickly people have jumped with certainty to partisan conclusions. Because in extremism spaces, the Charlie Kirk Hater-to-Nazi pipeline is canon. It’s how we got a generation of antisemitic extremists.”
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) was quick to rebuke the suggestion that Democrats or left-wing groups are to blame for the rise in politically motivated attacks or the emergence of violence as a commonplace, acceptable occurrence in American culture.
“Oh, please,” she said when a reporter asked her whether Democrats should tone down their rhetoric. “Why don’t you start with the president of the United States, and every ugly meme he has posted, and every ugly word.”
In a podcast put together Wednesday evening in the wake of Kirk’s assassination, journalist David Sirota said that “what we desperately need right now in this country are leaders who lower the temperature, leaders who will try to pull us back from the brink.”
Instead, Sirota warned, “we have a president right now who seems mostly interested in using the bully pulpit to actually bully people. Inflaming every cultural conflict he can stick his nose into—all for the cause of grabbing more power and money for himself and his family.”
In place of more anger, hatred, and calls for political retribution, Sirota told his audience he wanted to offer a different message.
“It’s a simple message whether you are a leftist, a liberal, a centrist, a conservative, or a MAGA fan,” said Sirota. “Your life has value and your political opponents’ lives have value too. You can hate your adversaries’ ideas, and you can fight hard for your cause, but the moment we stop seeing each other as human beings and we start concluding that violence is the answer, that’s the moment we let the soulless corporations, the ruthless authoritarians, and the sociopathic demagogues win.”
The “nihilism” and “greed” of too many, he added, “are creating the conditions for a civil war—one that we must all do our part to stop. Before it becomes unstoppable.”
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Apologies for the side track.
Starting a short time ago, NC asks for my consent (I’m in France) at each and every page.
Earlier the site asked it once, stored the response in a cookie (I think) and I could read for the next few days, weeks, .. until the cookie got removed.
Now Admiral requires to ‘read additional information’ to have enlightened consent. So I need to click twice each time I want to read an article: once for the ‘more info’ and once for the consent/no consent option.
But that answer is not saved. If I dare to refresh the page or post a comment, I need to consent again (2 clicks).
So one needs to be motivated to keep on reading NC from Europe.
I didn’t change anything on my PC, mobile, or Firefox settings, and I only have this issue with NC.
Are others seeing the same?
I am having the same issue on an Android phone in the UK.
Same
And what, dare I ask, is the enlightened consent?
Writing this from Switzerland on PC, no such problem here. Ever.
From the ad service:
I’m not clear why they have to consent in the first place. This has not happened to me in South America, either in Columbia or Uruguay. I’m not currently using a VPN. But at any rate, I’ve never seen a request for consent.
It’s required by law in the EU.
this is happening to me in italy–and it’s every time i go from one link to another on n.c. site (having to click twice). enfuriating, though i try to calmly click.
btw the recent 140 update to Chrome has disabled previous cookie consents and responses (along with a lot of very useful extensions)
I am still working on how to deal with it. I’ve been able to manage Chrome as a pretty much ad free, paywall bypassing browser – through workarounds – for 20 years now and it’s looking like I might abandon it soon
The contrast between various unhinged MAGA subsets and more traditional brands of conservatism that Yves drives at is very astute. The problem is, as has been pointed out here before, the right is far more sensitive and responsive to its [rapidly radicalizing] base than the Dems are. So whether cooler conservative heads will prevail and lower the temperature is very much in question. Especially since Elon’s Twitter and Trump are driving the escalatory rhetoric. Twitter is awash with “testimonials” about how Kirk’s murder has driven the testifier to renounce dialogue with “the left” as a viable path going forward. Very unfitting tribute to what they otherwise insist is Kirk’s legacy.
So I return to my tinfoil hat question from yesterday: qui bono from Kirk’s murder?
Living in the information silos already did the renouncing of dialogue for them.
And nobody has really been standing in the way of the trantrum going especially since the beginning of the year.
OIFVet: Indeed. Welcome to the U.S. version of the Anni del Piombo, the Years of Lead. And who profited from the upsurge in violence in Italy? The U S of A. The extra-parliamentary right and left, awash in murky funding, were trying to prevent the “historic compromises” between the Christian Democrats and the Communists, who together at that time were getting 60 percent of the vote. The possibility of further reforms was just too dangerous for the hard right and the leftists of the Red Brigades types.
The U S of A is now in its Years of Lead, likely initiated by the unresolved financial crisis of 2008, which generated the Naked Capitalism blog and Occupy Wall Street. Unlike the CD and PCI in Italy, both of which were highly functional political parties, the U S of A now enters its Years of Lead with a rapacious mono-party, a predatory top 5 percent, a serious maldistribution of income, police forces with reputations in the toilet (FBI, ICE, many local police forces) and a deliberately non-functional health-care system.
Further, what I am seeing in many of the names that come up as “MAGA” is not the kind of conservatism exemplified by our beleaguered friends at The American Conservative — opposed to foreign adventures, committed to the legal framework, skeptical of big business, leery of concentration of political power — and more reminiscent of the Ku Klux Klan.
Yes, the Klan. Many of these influencers espouse toxic U.S. religion, that national Calvinist cargo cult. They oppose immigration on the grounds that it dilutes the Nation. The impulse, it seems to me, is a long-standing U.S. tendency that has never been curbed, related to race.
(As a side note, it is, errrr, fascinating to watch J.D. Vance, Catholic convert of convenience who thinks that Catholicism will validate his authoritarianism, and how he is behaving during this event.)
Who benefits? During the Anni di Piombo in Italy, there were assassinations that seemed to serve no purpose. They were murders for the sake of murders so as to cow the populace. What of the two dead whistle blowers at Boeing? What of the AI whistle blower? Who benefits?
In short: The danger here is that the U S of A will enter a cycle of violence without sturdy institutions to pull the society out of waves of violence. In Italy, eventually, the carabinieri and the court system dragged in hundreds of mafiosi, members of the Brigate Rosse, and various Masons with extremely dubious right-wing extremist pasts. In Sicily, I landed at the Falcone / Borsellino airport, a reminder of two slaughters of magistrates and law-enforcement officers, and I am not sure that there are comparable people in the U S of A.
With the moral collapse of U.S. institutions, who pulls the populace forward? A bunch of liberaloids are passing around the latest stylings by Rebecca Solnit, one of the sloppiest thinkers around. Is that the best that anyone can do?
With your last questions in mind I went to see what the reaction has been from a liberaloid like Gavin Newsom. His institutional statement is in my opinion fair enough. This is the relatively easy part. Liberaloids, if anything, are public relations experts.
Now I see by the comments on the video posted by Yves Smith that the main preoccupation by the people at large is the identification and arrest of the killer(s) and subsequent investigation on the motives. So, here, police officers, FBI, etc, whoever is in charge, face the hell of a responsibility to clear this case and offer credible information that keeps most conspiracies at bay including Trump’s inflammatory statements. If the case is not cleared but obscured then anni dei piombo will indeed be.
Most people in the USA never heard of the guy before yesterday.
Mid-term elections are coming up and some want to get a base of voters to overlook a host of other politcal fumbles.
Maybe it could also be about time for financial bubbles to do a big pop.
Also, when countries are arming for war, establishments have to produce categories to throw dissenters into that reduces their legitimacy and threatens them.
Please use a search engine.
He was THE mobilizer of young Americans for Trump:
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-charlie-kirk-helped-shape-a-conservative-force-for-a-new-generation
And:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09-12/assassinated-right-wing-influencer-charlie-kirk-views/105766340
So he was very important to a large group of politically engaged voters. And a lot of them would probably prosleytize.
Here is a local story from Arizona where Kirk was based.
https://www.arizonaagenda.com/p/the-life-and-death-of-charlie-kirk
Thanks for pointing that out.
I also would date the genesis of our current outbreak of “political violence” to the election of Obama and subsequent refusal of that administration to honor the will of the electorate and act like elections had consequences. Not only due to the lack of reform measures after the worst financial crisis since the 30’s, but also the continuation of the GWOT, and expanding wars (Libya, Syria.)
The pre-2008 years were the last time that we had any sort of effective anti-war movement. Remember Cindy Sheehan? We are on the verge of WWIII, and I hear nothing but crickets chirping from the left.
People resort to violence when they feel disempowered and impotent. I am not naive about the role of big business in controlling everything in this country, but at least in the not-too-distant past our political leaders would at least give reform measures an honest try.
ChrisFromGa: You bet that I remember Cindy Sheehan, who was trying to make sense of the senseless death in Iraq of her son Casey Sheehan.
She’s still around!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cindy_Sheehan
And, heck, I remember the poster: War Is Not Healthy for Children and Other Living Things by Lorraine Schneider:
https://www.politicalgraphics.org/post/war-is-not-healthy-poster-of-the-week
1965.
I’d argue that the Patriot Act also has created the crisis. And as someone here noted, I believe that it was the esteemed commenter Pat, commemorations of the Twin Towers event should have gone private years ago instead of being turned into an annual festival of patriotic gore.
Wikileaks also exposed a ton of corruption that was never addressed through reform.
Well, other than torturing and imprisoning Julian Assange for years. Then there was the pandemic, with zero serious effort from Congress at getting to the bottom of the causes, including illegal gain of function research by Fauci.
I’d throw those two into the mix for “kill-fest-o-genesis!” or as you put it, the Years of Lead.
I remember a bitingly satirical National Lampoon poster from that period. It said: ” War is healthy for profits and other growing things”.
Unfortunately, the closest I can find is this image of another more tepid National Lampoon poster which is here:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/314425448249
Thank you for your insightful post. I was unfamiliar with the phrase Years Of Lead and looked it up. Disturbingly apt.
While I like the Year of Lead, IMHO the Klan comparison is overdone. The US has an extensive and much less well acknowledged history of violence against labor, which included lynchings. Pinkertons was a private army and I suspect its numbers were bigger than of the Klan. Henry Ford and I suspect others had their own private armies. But it still gets you to a similar place: vigilantes that the local police give a free pass.
So it turns out there was no secret plot, just a 22 year old with a gun. Thoughts and Prayers, eh?
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/09/12/us/charlie-kirk-news-suspect?unlocked_article_code=1.lU8.XeeP.8cC2PLKMJHun&smid=url-share(NY Times)
Yves Smith: You make an intriguing contrast. I’d say that both the Klan and the violence against organizing labor may come from the same place: A lingering feudal and race-based mentality + plus plain old greed + oppression of the work force. I will think more about the “toil and trouble” of U.S. labor history.
It is estimated that 10 percent of the 1920’s population of Michigan were Ku Klux Klan members, during the same period that Harry Bennett was recruiting for his Ford Motor Company Service Department, a private army dedicated to suppressing organized labor by violence. I suspect that these tendencies were intertwined. https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2021/08/07/kkks-legacy-hate-mid-michigan/5490422001/
I was in Italy near Bologna the day that Falcone was murdered. People were sick of the Anni di piombo, but it continued for many more years.
My concern is that an America atomized into 50 states lacks the institutional capacity to resist in the way that the national carabineri and magistrates finally were able to in Italy. Also, the DC and PCI weren’t the only game in town and other parties had access to the ballot. Not so in America, where nativist demagoguery has been normalized.
Excellent analysis.
True story: my freshman year in college, a black kid from the South Side of Chicago and the grandson of a Grand Wizard of the Michigan KKK were roommates. They got along fine.
The Years of Lead is an arresting description of the times we are in but more useful than Anni del Piombo analytically is the related Italian term, la strategia della tensione: the strategy of tension.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategy_of_tension
The powers that be keep the pot simmering with violence, so that the people crave the government to keep a lid on things, by any means necessary….
So far, this tension has been mainly geopolitical in Europe and domestic in the USA. But mass migration and Zionism in Europe both threaten to create domestic political tension. And perhaps the failure of war in Russia and the blowback from Zionism will create geopolitical tension within the USA.
As a digression, there was an excellent children’s book series about alien enslavers of Earth, the tripods, and one of the books is entitled City of Lead and Gold. I have always thought of Washington DC when I think of that title.
This “Strategy of Tension” was of course Osama bin Laden’s impetus for the 9/11 attacks — he had spent the 1970’s as a teenager in Europe. We must be careful not to over-state its operation here in 2020’s America. Most of the current crop of assassins appear to be lone wolves popping Adderall and sitting up all night staring at their screens.
The Brigate rossi, the Mafia, Camorra, and ‘Ndrangheta, like al Qaida, the Klan, and the Pinkertons, were well-organized and ideological. It was only with great difficulty that the Arma dei Carabineri and the magistrates were able to tamp down their violence. Weak American institutions may have the gumption to keep our solo night-owls from metastasizing into organized violence.
Trump does appear to adhere to the “Strategy of Tension” as his personal Shock Doctrine. He seems to be trying to create the illusion of a national emergency that will justify dictatorial powers that he can use to satisfy his pathetic need for self-aggrandizement in compensation for a long-ago maternal abandonment (hat-tip Mary Trump).
The Black Legion in the ‘20’s and ‘30’s Midwest exemplified the clear overlap between the Klan or its equivalents, and anti-labor vigilantes/private armies of the time: it was integral to the violent struggle to keep the UAW out of the the auto shops in Michigan and elsewhere.
Jim Crow and Right-to-Work (or The American Plan, as it was known then) are first cousins, if not brothers.
Yes, this … Historic.ly did a substack post on this once, but there are plenty other great sources on anti-labor violence by capitalists and their privately armed goons.
One of my Italian colleagues and I have bonded over a shared love of the Italian serie Romanzo Criminale, which is tangentially about the weird alliances between state actors and Italian mafiosi during the Years of Lead. I love the vintage technology sequences where the state agents are erasing data to undermine criminal cases. It is based loosely on real events and several real events, like Moro’s kidnapping and murder and details from the P2 trials like using Italian government buildings as stores for mafiosi arms, are present.
Regarding your question as it relates to the US, I’m not sure there are currently any extant organizations at the national level who can pull us back from the ledge but I think that was also the case in Italy for the first half of their experience. I have always seen the era as a crucible that forged a different path than the country had been on previously, neither what the Italians nor what the state actors interfering wanted, and I expect the same to happen in the US. But completely up in the air at this point how it will go or even what potential trajectories are seriously on offer.
raspberry jam: See bassmule’s NYTimes free link to the capture of suspect Tyler Robinson.
I think that he fits in with what you suspected in your earlier comment as to the rifleman’s profile.
Meanwhile: This is in the NYTimes coverage / updates below the main article:
One of the suspect’s unfired casings was adorned with the words “Bella ciao,” said Gov. Spencer Cox of Utah. That’s an apparent reference to an Italian song adopted by the anti-fascist resistance during World War II. It is still sung by the Italian left to commemorate the end of fascism.
Blame it on the Italians. Ahinoi.
Christ alive, we’re never going to hear the end of the ‘antifa supersoldier’ bs now, because this kid was a gamer trolling for the lolz and the meme he chose had an overlap with Italian WW2 anti-fascism. I had deeply hoped whatever they found would be enough to tone down the red scare bloodlust but I think this is just going to make it worse.
Edit: just realized I accidentally did my name as ‘raspberry pi’ after correcting you on raspberry jam.. sigh.. what a day
one of the things I’m reading about the shooter says he was into Helldivers 2? Isn’t that the game that is basically where you play as a soldier in the world of Starship Troopers?! Just to add another insane layer on to this. We are fully through the looking glass!
Well, you can dismiss whoever wrote that as a complete maroon (as Bugs would say), just like everyone else trying to blame vidya games for a society rotten to its core. They don’t even bother finding a proper scapegoat any more. Blaming Putin sounds more plausibe.
This is very good: Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme | Garbage Day
Explains the meme references on the bullet casings. Also this:
Wow …
#TYVM
Thanks again for this great comment, DJG.
Yes, I like the #YearOfLead analogy, especially because of what you identified as the randomness of it. If what we are seeing early on about Tyler Robinson is true, he is an agent of an intra-MAGA war between followers of Kirk and Nick Fuentes. Indeed, today I learned about the term “Groyper”. Thanks to our wonderful Nat Wilson for leading me down a rabbit hole from his retweets to this (via x.com). Trump’s and the right’s chaos is literally beginning to feed on itself. What a time to be alive! But also, stay safe, everyone in the lower fifty. A lot of impotent rage is festering and the outlets for it are going to be as chaotic as that which birthed it.
When a mentally disturbed young man assassinated an official at the German consulate in Paris, it became the pretext for the pogrom of Kristallnacht (Night of the Broken Glass) which then kicked anti-Jewish repression into even higher gear in Germany, leading to the Holocaust.
Most Americans didn’t know who he was until yesterday – especially the people who right-wing politicos are trying to draw attention to.
Ridiculous and also a sign of this information silo age.
See my comment above. You are revealing yourself as the one who is siloed.
Or just not paying much attention to the media and online circus. I never heard of him either. But I don’t watch mainstream news and this is one of the very few social media sites I visit. For the most part when I do expose myself to the rest of the social media ecosystem and news sites like BBC or Reuters, the stories are blatant propaganda and lies, so why bother keeping up with this so-called news? The fact that they can talk wildly about a mass “radical left” in the US, a completely concocted fantasy about a nonexistent social phenomenon and certainly one that the right-wing neoliberal Democrats would have nothing to do with, is enough evidence that most of what is spewed over the wires is garbage.
I scan many major media publishers left right and in the middle. I don’t need subscriptions to read headlines and synopsis. The headlines often betray gov’t stenography or editorial slant. When I do read a story it is evident even the most rigorous reporting can contain a slant. I take everything with the knowledge that even without an agenda any reporting is written by someone with incomplete information. It doesn’t matter so much if an opinion or report is more or less true or false as to gain insight into where the body politic is leading and following. It takes the temperature. That’s why I bother. My idea of patrotism is raise your children well and stay informed not as a matter of pride but of self preservation. When they come for my ilk I will know they are on the way with the full knowledge they are us.
I run in leftist circles and many people thought he was an asshole, but he wasent a Nick Fuentes.
Those accusing the left for his death have been looking for a reason to go nuclear already and are now going to use it as their catalyst.
All that to say – could the shooter have been a leftist? Maybe.
It’s more than likely we will find out they were not affiliated with a defined political group and just wanted to set off a powder keg.
What we should be focusing on is how the gutting of the FBI (they removed the head of the SLC office earlier this year) and it’s clown show leadership are too inept to solve this.
Same here. Lifelong avowed anarchist, and I openly admit that I believe we are to a point in our society that necessitates violent insurrection. I have long predicted a nascent era of Propaganda Of The Deed and so the assassination of Oligarchs and business leadership (such as United Health CEO and the Blackstone VP) were no surprise, but Kirk did not register on my radar for such things, nor does Fuentes. They are simply propagandists that are well compensated to run their mouths. Their paymasters on the other hand…..
But I digress. People like Kirk, Fuentes, Shapiro, and their liberal analogs are deserving of a punch in the nose, and/or public derision, not assassination. I’ve been in more than a few encrypted chat rooms where insurrectionary strategies were discussed among people with military/insurgency/COIN backgrounds/training, and nothing of this nature was ever floated (and believe me, many ideas were discussed), so I have a hard time believing any serious leftist who accepts violent tactics saw getting Kirk as a good tactic supporting any overall strategy- indeed, were this act carried out by the left, it is already proving to be counterproductive, so cui bono is very much the right thing to ask.
Could it have been a leftist? Sure. Every movement/ideology has cranks, but no leftist that put any serious thought into it could see this as achieving anything positive, and I would include potential left-wing accelerationist goals in that assessment.
There are a great many things that stink about this event- things that make me believe it is entirely possible that there might be some “there” there when it comes to state, or organizational involvement in this assassination. I suppose we will see what turns up, with the fullness of time.
I, a European, had heard no more than the name Charlie Kirk, before the assassination. I suspect I was the norm in that respect rather than the exception. Which is why I find it remarkable, and verging on the ridiculous, that the EU parliament, for example, sought to hold a 1 minute silence in his memory. A silence not unreasonably interrupted by various factions finding the whole matter idiotic. That the BBC went into total over the top coverage, including additional documentaries and wall to wall reporting in its news output. Pushing pretty much every other news story aside. Something is seriously skewed in the way Europeans and Brits embrace their vassalhood to the US. This can only get worse, it would appear.
The US president just murdered a boat full of people and bragged about it, and Israel murder people every day, so it can’t be that they object to murder
Maybe if an american is murdered, it is serious. No wait, that doesn’t hold for all americans. Not Rachel Corrie, not Gonzalo Lira, not those the US has droned as terrorists, nor the many Palestinians with US citizensship Israel has murdered.
New attempt, if an american is murdered in the US, it is serious. But then again the many murdered americans with more melanin in their skin isn’t treated very seriously.
But if a young, charismatic american is murdered in the US, then it is serious. No wait, among the many young americans that were murdered in Evergreen High School about the same time as Kirk, no doubt some were charismatic and their deaths are treated as far less important.
Maybe it is if they are politically engaged? Then again the US politician in murdered in Minnesota in June is apparently already forgotten. The many local activists in Ferguson who has turned up dead for mysterious reasons also comes to mind.
If we turn it around and instead look at murders that are apparently important, the shot health CEO comes to mind. Apparently murders that threaten the economic-political structure of the US are important.
So I guess Kirk and other propagandists in traditional or new media are important. And if important people are shot all the empire must mourn, including the vassals. Cloth must be rendered and political violence (against important people) must be condemned!
Hypocrisy is our national pastime. From Conley, above,
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) also asserted without any evidence that critics of the far-right agenda that Kirk embraced were to blame for his killing, specifically suggesting that her Democratic colleagues were implicated in the assassination.
“Democrats own what happened today,” she told reporters. “Some raging leftist lunatic put a bullet through his neck.”
Mace added that it was “ridiculous” to suggest that by her logic, Republican lawmakers “own” Hortman’s assassination.
One of the main duties of the office of the President of the United States is to show leadership in times of trouble. To set the moral tone of how the nation reacts and to promise that the full force of the justice system be used to find any guilty parties and to bring them to a court of law of justice for judgement. Also to tamp down any dangerous overreactions that might pervert the course of justice so that people of all factions know that he will do right for the themselves and the nation.
Instead Trump decides to splash gasoline and lit flares all over the place and accuses up to half the nation of being in on it before the killer is even identified much less captured.
Nothing has probably annoyed the politicos around Trump more than the lack of over-reaction or any sustained reaction from what they perceive as “left-wing”.
For one thing, before anyone could check such a reaction they would have to *define* “left-wing.”
If I had a nickel for every time I’ve seen the words “radical left” over the last 48 hours I might be able to replace Elon Musk as the world’s richest man. Though nothing good will come of this murder, the idea that there might actually be a “radical left” in the US cheered me up for a minute. But then I snapped out of it. Where is this “radical left”? Who would it be? When right-wing agitators like our President use that phrase, they are usually referring to woke liberals in the media or academia. Do those milksops even know how to use a gun? Recently this label has been used to target anyone, but especially vulnerable students, who are protesting the ongoing genocide in Gaza. Is *this* the definition of “radical left” – opposition to genocide? Or perhaps “anti-Zionist”? No doubt this is a major target of the fascistic repression called for by the Laura Loomers out there. But what are the “radical left” organizations that these people want to shut down? There seem to be a lot of “radical right” groups and orgs, but aside from “Antifa” (which is really a boogie-man term for various groups of anarchist protesters more than an “organization”), I can’t think of any on the “radical left” these days. Is there an organization of late-blooming trans people with mental illness willing to murder little kids in school that I don’t know about? Maybe they are the “radical left.”
In other words, “radical left” is just the latest incarnation of “terrorist” or “communist”; a scare word to justify whatever the administration wants to do. Someone like Dick Cheney could use that word to accomplish a lot. Someone like Trump immediately and instinctively uses it for demagogic purposes with his followers. We’ll see how much more damage is done with this word.
I sure hope the shooter is found to be from the “radical right.”
It seems many of those who’re commenting from the right can’t imagine anything further to the left than the decidedly right wing Dem party. From here on the left, I wish them success in crushing that party.
Someone like Kirk wasn’t even a political figure; he was a symbolic figure; and its only for those mistaking the finger for the moon that such people are worth ruining lives over. Adventurists making life harder (and more interesting) for the rest of us.
Could it be that trump is just borrowing a page from (shudder) hitler’s playbook? While the nazis actually fought street battles with real socialists and communists, and since they apparently don’t exist in any substantive numbers here in the usa, trump, and his followers, continually make them up out of thin air. This creates another political bogeyman for the fascists to attack, and the saddest thing to understand is that a leftist, anti-capitalist economy is probably the most reasonable way out of this mess that (greed) capitalists have created.
The problem is that “the Trump” doesn’t exist either. The real Nazis had militias numbering in the thousands, including many people with serious combat experience whom they could call on to make trouble. Trump has a large, varied, and disorganized coalition of supporters of varying degrees, of whom many are loose cannons not exactly under his control. The situation is a lot more fluid and unpredictable.
My little granddaughter somehow set my radio to an AM.station that is full Christian nationalist, so I got to hear a bit of Charlie Kirk most days before I turned it off (too lazy to find the manual and figure.out how to undo what she did lol). While I agree with Yves that his tone and style was genial and even open, his purpose was primarily to invite questions in order to refute and prosyletize. And much of what he espoused is not compatible with a democracy that values religious freedom. Like many right wing citizens, he very much enjoyed the pose of being an underdog who spoke truth to false believers in positions of undeserved power. He was undeniably a chauvinist and thought there was a hierarchy of races in terms of mental capability. To such a person, diversity can only be a source of corruption while equality refers only to the rights that the deserving citizens should share. He and his followers did and do seem to feel they are crusaders. But their casus belli all too often strikes me as being a straw dog. I’m not the target audience, to be fair. But I wonder how deeply that audience is actually in thrall to this politics. Frankly, I often got the feeling that the attraction lay in the very invitation to argue, the “prove me wrong” shtick. Men, particularly young ones, love that.
I checked some of his stuff out, like many another he was pretending to use the Socratic method but perverting it to mould the minds of those who would argue with him. Not much sign of strengthening the reasoning power of those he was instructing through argument.
He was more an official interlocutor to gauge the temperature and weak points of the faithful.
He also kept lists.
Turning Point Watchlist and encouraged action in the form of hate mail, at least.
Not sure if the list will stay up,Prosessor Watchlist, but there it is and it’s not like Kirk was using his beer money to pay for this all by himself.
I know partisan bickering is part of politics in particular, and social discourse more broadly, pretty much everywhere on earth, but from my faraway perch on the southern tip of Africa, I observe that America takes it to a whole ‘nother level. In the popularity contest that is American politics, tough posturing and pummeling your opponent into submission, by whatever means necessary (and the means menu is increasingly adding killing to the list) appears to be what is celebrated (and what gets you elected). Actions grounded in pragmatism, mutual respect, and empathy, like reaching across the aisle to find common ground, de-escalating and diffusing tensions to are seen as weak acquiescing. It must be said that many a foreign nation that has been at the sharp end of the hallmarks of American foreign policy, ie subjugation, violence, brutality, plunder etc are watching curiously as their experience being preyed on, being turned against their against their neighbours etc by Uncle Sam becomes that of ordinary Americans. Throw all this into the mix of a civilian population that’s armed to the teeth and in the chokehold of declining living standards and it’s not hard to see how this Kirk thing can be a catalysing event to something far more catastrophic.
The press is doing their best to make it catastrophic.
So is President Trump.
” ‘I Couldn’t Care Less’: Trump Rejects Chance To Unify Country In Wake Of Kirk Death
Marco Margaritoff
Fri, September 12, 2025 at 2:02 PM EDT
2 min read ”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/couldnt-care-less-trump-rejects-180240676.html?fr=sycsrp_catchall
Politics = secular religious for many of all politics
We in America do love throwing those imperial boomerangs.
There was an awful lot of rhetoric from the Joe Biden administration on the dangers of MAGA extremists and the far right contingent. So, to portray the Dems being “thoroughly” pure, or clear of conscience is to stretch my next analogy…. Pontius Pilate washing his hands was merely symbolic in nature.
I won’t go on a miniature ranting and what about isms but Oh come on man. There’s a guarantee of a sort in this polarized state, civil discourse is growing more uncommon on large national or regional matters with huge implications. Despising a person or group is not equivalent to disagreement. Common sense varies “according to me and myself”. Just an a*hole with an opinion.
I’m interested in what a true centrist has to say, by example Michael Smerconish was briefly on CNN yesterday afternoon and was cluing into what the latter paragraphs are saying. Turning down the rhetoric also means shutting down idiots the way, oh a Matthew Dowd was shut down for his insensitive comments.
Charlie Kirk was a husband and father. I kinda knew of him but an early 50s American male is really no one’s target audience. College campus outreach was a non starter for conservatives 15 years ago. SMH this tragedy is still fresh but the grandstanding by Trump, and by others as well….all too easily expected.
Kudos to Yves for reading up a bit on Charlie Kirk and realizing that “Yeah, um, maybe he WAS kind of a big deal…”
This as opposed to comments in links yesterday (just now read them) were almost everyone said some version of “Never heard of the guy” and said it as though that was some badge or honor, or some kind of intellectual superiority.
All it was was a demonstration that many here are as silo’ed as anyone.
The comments by Trump, Vance, Musk, Walsh et al are right in line with what I heard on 9/10 when talking with friends and family, some one whom are sorta “mini-Maga” – not moronic, but “Yeah, I held my nose and voted for Trump because i prefer some of his policies over what the Dems offer (anti-illegal immigration, anti-globalist, some pro-life, etc)”
They are no longer the same people they were on 9/9. They are now fully radicalized. They are no longer just bemoaning being called racists because they’re not pro-riot, or nazis because they want immigration laws to be applied – they, like the Musk quote, now feel that they are at war with all of the people who have been slurring them so casually.
A Rubicon has been crossed.
Trump loved Kirk more than he loves his own family. This is personal. His vague sounding threat of going after everyone who contributed to Kirk’s assassinaton wasn’t his usual talkng out of his butt – that was crafted, and means exactly what he said. Whatever restraint has had is now gone.
The threat of Congressman Higgiins – ““I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.” That isn’t an isolated view – that is where my conservative friends and family have shifted to, overnight.
Appeals from Dem politicians to “turn down the heat” are laughable. They are not only p*ssing into the wind, they’re p*ssing into a hurricane of rage, and it will be a sustained hurricane.
This is a shift that will not be unshifted. Might be a good time to familiarize yourself with Kirk and what he did and who he was and what he accomplished – as that may give you a sense of why this shift has happened, and what this shift is. Cuz the country is as different after 9/10/2025 as it was after 9/11/2001. It’s a good time to get the lay of the new landscape, so events that happen will not leave you too baffled.
Then simply tell them they should be killed for not respecting private property. These dumb little drama addicts need to be spanked into adulthood and told to keep their “feelings” mental illnesses to themselves.
This hearkens me to echoes of vaccine proponents claiming to not care about the “fee fee’s” of said folks…”throw em down and give them the jab I say!”. Claims I heard many times.
Does one actually get spanked into adulthood?
“Never heard of the guy” and said it as though that was some badge or honor, or some kind of intellectual superiority.”
Or maybe, just simply, that many people never heard of him
Right.
Another comment on this seems to have disappeared into the ether but personally I don’t believe anything of significance is going to happen and don’t even believe MAGA is much of a real thing given the fast fading signs and banners (and lack thereof) in my neck of the woods.
But it’s pointless to speculate really. Guess we’ll see what happens.
Fair point, I cannot be bothered to keep tabs on most Dem “influencers” either.
I had never heard of the guy until a short while back. One of the brethren here at NC posted a link to his interview on Tucker Carlson. What I took away from the interview was, “Here is a guy who is apparently listening to young people.” He went off for a long stretch about the danger of many of the young folk are being reduced to debt servitude. He came across as bright and amiable…maybe he was on his best behavior.
I guess because this is domestic it’s going to stay in the news longer than “Russians murdered Navalny!!” (another made-up marionette for the ruling class). But ultimately anyone’s death is going to be sad to some people, even if only a few, and maybe welcomed by a few others. How it gets blown up by the media is another matter. Those of us that never heard of Kirk are in our own media-restricted info zone, I guess. But a lot of people I knew that expressed aghastitude over Navalny never heard of Gonzalo Lira. So even the big silos in the US filter out a lot of stuff. What I hope nobody can say is “never heard of this genocide in Gaza business”. I have a bad feeling about that though.
Seems like your relationship with the president is a bit too parasocial to give the rage felt by many people on all sides the credence it deserves. Another missed opportunity for useful insight.
and it will be a sustained hurricane.
Me thinks you overrate the collective American attention span. The political class will attempt to bale as much hay as possible, and authoritarians will shake their pointing fingers. But that is just business as usual.
72 hour virgin news cycle drives all. What will happen next to divert attentions?
– “Cuz the country is as different after 9/10/2025 as it was after 9/11/2001.”
I seriously doubt that, but if you are correct then where do you think this change will lead? We saw where 9/11/01 led. That massive chaos and destruction was based on lies. One result was the significant expansion of our internal security and surveillance state here in the “Homeland,” so if the right-wingers get their wish it just sounds like more of the same. And it would similarly be based on lies. In fact the lies would be even more outrageous: at least there were “terrorists” of some sort in the world when the neocons unleashed their imperial “Global War on Terror.” As I commented above, there is no such thing as a “radical left” in the US. Any major “shift” in the country because of this murder would be based on vapid propaganda, and it would serve the interests of most of these good people you mention just as little as the shift that occurred 24 years ago.
If you are urging clueless liberals to start listening to these people, then you are preaching to the choir. If you are trying to argue that pseudo-populist demagogues like Trump are actually sincere in their desire to serve these people, then I would respectfully, but strenuously, disagree.
I was only vaguely familiar with Kirk until he got shot. I knew he was a conservative, and for some reason thought he was much older. I’ve learned quite a bit about him over the last couple days.
The first history on him I saw was a clip of him saying that it was acceptable for some people to die as long as the 2nd amendment was preserved – wasn’t a big fan of that one. But then I saw him starting the question the Zionist entity after witnessing their atrocities. I learned he wasn’t a fan of the Ukraine war. And I was reminded of an NC post that featured an interview between him an Tucker Carlson talking about the insidious ways young people get tricked into going into debt. I found I had some common ground with the guy. So I’m grateful to NC and the commentariat for bringing these things to light. I wonder if others around the interwebs are having a similar experience, leading to some sympathy?
I sincerely hope so. I wasn’t old enough to understand what was going on during the US’ own “years of lead” during the 60s and 70s with all the political assassinations, Kent St, various bombings, etc. – I remember thinking Watergate had something to do with alligators when I was first absorbing the TV news as a 5 year old. Clearly the assassins of those times had political motivations, but did the public at large go after each other, rushing to determine which political party the killers belonged to, and trying to blame the entirety of the other side? I don’t think so from the history I’ve read – if anything the death of JFK seemed to be unifying, even at the time. MLKs death has arguably become so as well, although maybe not at the time it happened. These assassins were considered killers, not necessarily the tip of the spear of some larger movement that one’s neighbor might secretly be allied with. I know we have a lot of older commenters who were adults at the time, or close to it. Serious question – did the country seem so polarized then as it does now? Was the media itself inflaming people against each other? There was a lot more violence then than there has been in recent decades, but it feels more dangerous today. Maybe I was just too young at the time to understand what was going on – seems like you had to be there to really get it. Thoughts?
I just had this conversation with my wife this morning. I’m old enough to have experienced the turmoil of the 1960s and remember it pretty well, though I was too young and ignorant to really *understand* it. I was 9 years old when Kennedy was killed; my memories of that are crystal clear. By 1968 I was fourteen. From my vantage point as a naive youth in a small Midwestern town the country – and the world – seemed on fire; assassinations, riots, protests, bombings. And extreme political polarization, perhaps more generational than today (though as the Gaza protests show, the young often still lead the way, their idealism not yet jaded by reality). Later I would go back and revisit this period in history for both personal and professional motives.
I don’t think you could claim that things are more polarized or violent now than they were back then. But I think a larger percentage of the population are alienated and insecure (both materially and culturally), and almost no one trusts their government or other major institutions today. The media was also much more centralized and uniform back then, of course. Back then there was a “silent majority” that actually believed in the myth of America, and resisted those who challenged the dominant ideology as “true believers” (for many that included the “liberal media” once it turned against the Vietnam War). Today people don’t know who or what to believe. They still fall for demagogues like Trump who promise to return us to an idealized past, as insecure groups always do.
Here is an article titled: ” Charlie Kirk’s Controversial Comments About Taylor Swift & Travis Kelce Resurface Following His Death
The Turning Point USA founder previously gave relationship advice to Swift following her engagement. ”
https://parade.com/news/charlie-kirk-advice-taylor-swift-travis-kelce-resurface
How many young women were favorable to Mr. Kirk’s outreach mission and content? If the Swifties manage to viralize and spread this article to every young woman that each Swifty knows, how many young women will be attracted to Kirkism in the future?
I suspect Kirkism will lead its millions of young male followers into a life of bitter incelhood once all the young women they know or know of or might ever meet have been thorougly briefed on this article about Kirk’s advice to Taylor Swift. And that could lead to all kinds of murders of sexual frustration.
I was 13, a freshman in high school in a small-ish town in the suburbs of Portland, Oregon. I remember my classmate walking into English class holding her radio and crying (she was returning from the girls’ room). We were all about to ask what was happening when we heard over the loudspeaker that “The President of the United States has been shot.” We were stunned; the room went absolutely quiet, except for the loudspeaker, which said they didn’t know whether he was still alive but we should all hope for the best. The teacher tried to resume teaching, but failed. No one could think of anything but the assassination. After a while the loudspeaker said that school was closing and we should all go home. I remember very clearly standing by my locker, holding the open door for support, and crying as I got my books and coat.
My small-ish town was definitely not liberal and mostly, I think, anti-Kennedy and his policies. (It was a very white place, with no Black people at all, no Jews that I know of, and only two Asian families; we discriminated against Catholics for lack of anyone else.) But everyone was shocked; there were no statements that I know of, among townspeople or on TV or radio, that expressed anything but shock and grief. Everyone was glued to TV, where the announcer (Walter Cronkite, I think) wept on camera and tried to support a grieving nation, without attacking anyone. Even after Jack Ruby was shot. Everyone watched the funeral. It was a long time before anyone said anything bad about Kennedy, though eventually politics resumed.
It wasn’t just my town, either. LBJ, who was already an advocate of the civil rights movement who had managed to get early (weak, but a foothold) civil rights legislation through Congress, took up the cause of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that JFK had begun, using the assassination as a major tool to get it through. He succeeded, which was amazing, as it was his own party (the southern Democrats) who opposed it and the Republicans who endorsed it. A good version of the story is in the National Archives at https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2004/summer/civil-rights-act.
It wasn’t the same country then. In many other ways too–not even my kids understand how much it’s changed.
Sorry: Jack Ruby shot and killed Lee Harvey Oswald on live TV. Ruby died years later. (My memory for names, never good, has only gotten worse over the years. But I did remember eventually.)
So many prime examples of dehumanizing speech. Guess what, that rage and speech didn’t just sprout overnight due to a personally traumatic event. Rather, the event gave them license to express them. So let’s not pretend that people like Kirk didn’t play a role in planting and cultivating that rage and worldview. It didn’t start with Kirk, he was nowhere close to being the worst of the hatemongers and many prominent and less prominent liberals are also guilty of creating hate and polarization. But we won’t begin solving any of these problems that are tearing apart the fabric of society if we wash Kirk’s part just because he was killed, or anyone else’s part for that matter, regardless of which “team” they are on. All we will get is more of the same, evidenced by what you describe – people who no doubt firmly believe that Kirk was a “moderate” who was genuinely trying to reach across and create a genuine dialogue. He wasn’t, his style was manipulative and demagogic.
I had heard of the guy, but what I had heard consistently disqualified him from further consideration. A self described “Christian” who knows not of the beatitudes is instantly forgettable. A man who can blame Great Society programs for the ills of the black community while taking no notice of the carceral state that decimated their communities is not worth listening to. I don’t actually care whether or not he had moderated his views on Ukraine and Gaza because I had already relegated him to the scrap heap of the right wing Wurlitzer griftoverse long before he got there.
He reaped as he had sown, and that is really all I need to know about him.
Here’s what Ian Welsh has to say
https://www.ianwelsh.net/should-you-kill-or-mourn-nazis-and-commies/
My favorite Charlie Kirk quote is:
“I can’t stand the word empathy, actually, I think it’s a made up new age term, and it does a lot of damage.”
But Charlie wasn’t just a one-note ideological thinker.
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
Kirk was, needless to say, all for the Gaza genocide, but he was for it by lying about it. Most famously, he denied starvation in Gaza.
So there’s a few of his views for those of us who are out of the loop.
“I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
This quote should be on his tombstone. I’m not into blaming victims, but one could make a case that Kirk was practically asking for it.
Yep:
https://x.com/Ronxyz00/status/1965872119604289791?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1965872119604289791%7Ctwgr%5Ec29933c363d528be8cf5894ac57fff118079f507%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.snopes.com%2Ffact-check%2Fcharlie-kirk-gun-deaths-quote%2F
Loved this:
“As for Kirk, I’m glad he got a death in line with his beliefs: making the ultimate sacrifice for the right of Americans to bear arms. It was “worth it” and I will assume he meant that, and if he still exists he’s at peace, having died for what he truly believed.”
AFAIAC, he claimed to live by the book and he should have been pleased to die by it. He asked, he received, and there really isn’t much more to say about it.
But it truly is wild how, to my knowledge anyway, there are no communists or radical leftists in this country for them to be endlessly fulminating against. If there were a black panther party I would surely vote for them, if only for a sense of political balance. If there was any there there such as they might be worth listening to, but that is patently not the case. It is hard to take people seriously that lack the ability to look shit up before opening their mouths and start endlessly braying inanities.
But that is just me. RIP, Kirk, and I hope his kids get a better step father than their actual one was.
One could almost read the above, and have an impression of “well he earned or deserved his assassination.”. I hope that , like his tombstone does read more simply as Husband and Father ( and no more ).
It’s hard to take these comments seriously at any depth. His very young kids lose their Dad and neither of us qualify to comment on his skill as a parent or as a husband.
And people wish to wonder why it is that conservatives are wired that way, in light of an important and very visible death in public.
Very politely done. Now suppose that the person who assassinated him actually had turned out to be the trans/communist/blah, blah, blah that Trump and Mace were so hoping for him to be? Have you seen what his death was being used to promulgate?
But being tactful should correct that, right? If it hasn’t worked since the days of Reagan’s elimination of the Fairness Doctrine and Clinton’s deregulation of the media so that Murdoch could hold on to his illegal ownership of entire media markets, why would you assume that it will work now? He is just another in a long line of Gingrich’s and Coulters, and at this point I lack empathy for them. By their fruits they shall be known.
We live in a world where people are shot by the police in their beds and have their backs broken over the selling of loose cigarettes. People just like Charlie Kirk are the ones who got us here, and that is not something that I can find forgiveness in my heart for.
But, again, maybe his kids will do better next time.
People lose children to the altar of the 2nd amendment every time there is a school shooting in this country. As far as I am concerned, Kirk died for his beliefs.
When candidate Trump was shot in a similar fashion, survived and the whole thing was caught on TV, it almost looked surreal and like a movie scene. And the most astonishing thing to date is how this hardly gets discussed.
The assassination of Kirk seems to be too surgical and professional and again made for TV . This was done to incite civil unrest is my view. When I hear Fox news talking heads use words like “rats” to describe fellow Americans, it makes me think of the build up to Rawandan genocide and this is the sort of language used on radio months before the final savagery took place.
here’s a shocker….when you get shot at jnwar as an infantry soldier, much like air crashes, the odds are with you as incredulous as it sounds.
Just as Trump was extremely lucky, Kirk was extremely unlucky. 1 shot, to the neck at 140 yards can be done by a casual or expert shooter, but it is not a certainty.
as with most disasters, there were multiple nodes of failures…in this case, no fire alarm activation when a roof stairwell-door is opened. I thought that would be standard safety-lawsuit measure, universally (people have died getting lost and stuck on roofs, due to being drunk and exposure)
No Making Shit Up. A not-terribly-good hunter could have made that shot.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/arizona/2025/09/12/was-charlie-kirk-shooter-trained/86100160007/
Shooting a human (even if it’s a solder of an enemy nation-state) is not like shooting an animal or a paper target—-unless a person is a a genuinely dissociated psychopath.
The (theoretical) stress of that; the danger of getting caught, time pressure, etc.
Shooting a human is more than mere target practice, in my opinion. Maybe I’m just not a psychopath and too empathetic for this world
As a clumsy 19-year-old in boot camp (with no previous firearms experience), I had no trouble hitting the 150 yard targets on the Fort Knox firing range. And that was with the standard iron gunsights, after a few days of training. With a telescopic sight and aiming downwards, it would have been even easier.
Re stress: only a psychopath would choose to commit such an act (and then coolly walk down the street afterwards, as per the video), so I wouldn’t expect him to feel ordinary human empathy.
Side note from the grassy knoll: Oswald to JFK was a mere 80 yards, though at a moving target.
It was a simple shot, 140 Yards from a rest and a stationary target with no wind is something a novice could be taught to do in an afternoon.
Modern rifles and ammunition are accurate, a scoped AR15 from any of the major manufacturers will put 5 shots into 1 inch center to center with good ammunition all day long and so will most bolt action rifles.
And I am talking about hunting loads, not match ammo.
You would have to be a little nuts to do it, but that’s a significant percentage of the population.
Hard to opine when the make and model of the weapon is unknown. Yet a bolt-action rifle is very stable, pared with a high velocity round with its resulting flat trajectory, a simple scope dialed in for the range of 150 yards in advance, its basically a bucket of fish to hit center mass.
The major thing for a shooter like me is the persons ability to control his mind and body for a one shot hit. It was broad daylight, had to move to firing position with the rifle, take up his firing position which was by the look of it very exposed, all of this would be very stressful, yet then be able to lower his heart rate and clear his head so he could just be focused on the shot without thinking about anything else – zero thinking about egress.
That said I don’t know where he had his crosshairs but, it seems by video that he hit Kirk in the left upper chest [off center mass], shock wave suggests a hyper velocity round due to the big impact shock wave even with a vest on. BTW what is up with that[?], anyone making public speaking events in the U.S. now has to ware vests lest some random or fundamentalist wants to make a name for themselves. Anywho …. the ricochet to the neck is something else too see. So much energy was absorbed before it hit his neck and the round would have been deformed. Just a red hole and I did not see anyone behind him get splattered by tissue with its exist.
There is some noise about a ring on his finger in the videos changing location and some guy behind him to the right with a phone up to take photos or video and tipping his hat as a signal.
Also the shooters egress was something to behold, way they move across the roof, came off it, trotted across the grass, and then came very close to just being a normal person strolling down the sidewalk and across the road. Defiantly not a pro or well trained operative but, very bold anyway.
He was hit in the neck, where the left jugular vein and carotid artery are. That’s why the “fountain of blood”. He wore nothing under his t-shirt. There is video shot from his left side where all this could be clearly seen, but I don’t want to post the link here, because most of people don’t really want to see it.
I personally did not see signs of impact to the chest area, but only level IV armor will prevent penetration by .30-06 (and he definitely was not wearing level IV- it would have been very visible under his shirt- most US military troops and tactical police units only wear level III), so I do not see how the neck would could have been the result of a ricochet or spalling. Judging by his limb and hand posturing, plus the collapse of his head to the side, I believe that the projectile hit his brain stem and likely hit his cervical spine. This could explain the lack of a substantial/visible exit wound. I would not rule a ricochet off body armor, but to me the video evidence suggests this was very unlikely.
Besides aforementioned video, there is also a higher resolution photo on Larry Johnson’s blog, that can be zoomed in.
https://sonar21.com/is-there-something-more-nefarious-behind-the-murder-of-charlie-kirk/
The thin shirt folds inbetween his pectoral muscles. Besides flattening that part, a kevlar vest would also create visible lines on his shoulders and upper back. I would like to know what expert came up with the idea that he had an actual chest plate there somewhere.
Just to be clear, brainstem is higher, in the skull. I do wonder what exactly happened to the bullet.
My comment was base on one of the first videos, its chatter, and before the rifle was identified. The frame of the video was very tight on Kirk, even used a slow-mo clip. Seems now most videos have been removed and only pulled back clips of the event are now on offer.
Yet it seems the shooter got lucky one way or the other as it was not center mass. A .30-06 hitting the neck should have punched through even if hitting the spine with lots of stuff flying backwards. Then again the shooter popping up after the shot giving a full silhouette of himself.
Sniping 101
You aim at head or chest, not neck.
Well, the ‘rats’ still have a chance to gun up and ammo up and train up and be ready for the Intrumpahamwe Militia violence to come whenever the Miller-Hegseth (trump) Administration decides to turn it on.
The potent significance of the event itself combined with the lack of the killer and plot details frees us to express our interests and priors. So it was also in the case of St. Luigi, which revealed a class divide and the power of class to displace culture war divisions at least for a while. Otoh afaict Kirk was a professional class warrior so it’s no surprise some people are starting with that.
The interesting part is that Trump appealed to conspiracy theorists skeptical of federal government and he brought conspiracy theorists and ct-adjacent people into his team. So far he hasn’t delivered much meat to that constituency and has instead been dishing out lots of culture war. It will be interesting, if rather scary, to see how this plays out.
its true that a lot of people here are like “who even was charlie kirk” but the NC commentariat and the demographic for charlie kirk dont have a lot of overlap. charlie kirk’s whole thing was bringing back open debates in the digital age, creating a new modern town hall for students to debate in. he also promoted conservative viewpoints on college campuses, which are notoriously liberal spaces. i feel like among young people, even if you don’t recognize the name “charlie kirk,” you at least have seen one of his clips on reels or whatever. watch a few of his college campus debate videos if you want an idea of the guy
charlie kirk also founded Turning Point USA. for those who don’t know, it’s a conservative youth organization that provides resources for young conservatives on college campuses. think of kirk like a younger ben shapiro.
i am a college student on a college campus. i have overheard conversations in the dining halls about this. it is a genuine topic of conversation among the youth. i’m mostly staying out of debates (am a senior engineering major and have other things to worry about) but i cannot wait to pull up to church on sunday and see what my school’s catholics have to say about this.
one last thing. my favorite rapper has had a few people wearing his merch show up to debate charlie kirk. people in the fan communities online were immediately posting memes about charlie kirk and discussing it. if that counts as a litmus test, this is news among the youth, youth are paying attention to this, a lot of people are watching the video of him getting shot, etc. i’d pay attention to how young conservatives respond to this, and to how young leftists respond to this.
Thanks, it will be interesting to compare campus reactions (and “authority’s reaction to those actions) to the pro-Palestine actions and reactions.
Yesterday being 9/11, there were a lot of dancing israelis on-screen. With the Harrison Smith tweet ‘Charlie thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against them,’ this may be the moment that evangelicals resolve some inconsistencies. I know our small-town church has struggled with not being able to really address the burning babies. Babies are innocent.
A lot of people watched Trump being shot, the “audience” with stronger opinions was far wider, and the sentiment of shock and dismay was far wider. Now, Trump did not die, true, but the idea of a once and future president who also happened to be (whether one likes the characterization or not) a genuinely persecuted political dissident with widespread support being shot under dodgy circumstances was a huge thing. Well, I was genuinely stunned that not a whole lot came out of this. Notwithstanding how controversial Kirk is, I’m pretty skeptical that anything really sustained will come out of this–heck, not a whole lot happened as the immediate consequence of JFK being shot, did they?
In the grander scheme of things, I think we want to place this in perspective of other recent politico-social assassinations: the shootings of politicians in MN, of the schoolchildren at the church in the same state, UHC CEO, etc. (I was tempted to add Gabby Giffords shooting, although it’s some years in the past, as it seems to have come out of the same millieu. Mysterious deaths of Boeing whistleblowers or Balaji probably are a bit different.). All these were “political” in the sense that the shooters seem to have had some “political” agenda (defined broadly). They also generally featured, I think it’s fair to say, people who are/were without coherent and well-defined “conventional” ideologies either yet will be championed, villified, or both by those who do. All in all, however, it’s also a sign that both sides, to the degree that the sides can be defined, are creating enemies who consider themselves morally justified in taking extreme measures to stop them. I wanted to name drop John Brown, but the more likely analogues are the crazies from both sides who went to KS but never became as famous. Yes, I think we are approaching Bleeding Kansas and will surely reach it if we don’t sober up soon…except it won’t be just Kansas. Just that it won’t be just one killing. (Remember that Harper’s Ferry was after Bleeding Kansas, and Brown was already famous/infamous for the murders he committed there.)
I knew of Kirk because of an interview he gave to Tucker Carlson. He didn´t sound like a right wing nutcase at all. In his criticism of predatory lending he sounded even like an economic leftist. So I heard of him but then I am a politics junkie. Imagine my utter surprise when my teenage son who is not overly interested in politics had not only heard of him here in Germany but even watched some of his videos.
His “open debates” where he performed “dialogue with the opposition” were, from what I have read and seen in the past, carefully managed. He had people in his organization carefully screen those who were given a microphone to ask him questions. They supposedly made every attempt to prevent those who were capable of debate were prevented from doing so, and favored those with weak debating skills, particularly if they were young, frivolous appearing women, did not conform to gender stereotypes, etc. This made it easier for Kirk to to make them look foolish, and if he failed to do so live, they utilized editing for his videos. Part of the beef between Kirk and Fuentes was that Fuentes’ followers were supposedly carefully (mis)representing themselves at these campus events in order to make it past Kirk’s screeners in order to “debate” the topic of Israel (in reality, this was never an honest debate by either Kirk or Fuentes’ adherents because neither had honest motives- both chose their position due to bigotry. Islamophobia on the part of Kirk, and genuine anti-Semitism on the part of the Fuentes adherents). Anyway, my point is that people are trying to paint Kirk as some moderate who was engaging in debate, and that could not be further from the truth. I did not closely follow his activities, but I saw enough several years ago to make my own assessment, and wrote him off as just another (likely well-paid) manipulative propagandist for the powerful, and after that I tended to just scroll past anything about him whenever I saw it
Yes, I will also agree that young people are very engaged regarding Kirk, and I will add that a large number of them, if not a majority of them, are aware that he was simply a propagandist. I found out about the attack from both of my daughters- both separately, and within minutes of the attack, seemingly. One texted me from her college campus, and one sent me a text between high school classes.
I will say this also- One night a year or so ago during a conversation in the kitchen, my eldest daughter and several of her friends thanked me for taking the time to educate them politically, because, and I quote, if I had not they “would probably have been sucked down the Charlie Kirk rabbit hole”. I have never told my kids what they should believe in (nor had I ever brought up Kirk with them), but only that they should be able to describe and defend their beliefs using sound logic, taught them definitions and descriptions of different ideological terms and schools thought, and I took the time to actually describe how the US economy and government actually work (as opposed to the fairy tales taught in school). Kids are very capable of learning this stuff- and they actually want to learn in my experience, because they know full well they are being lied to at every turn.
Rabbi Shmuley wasted no time on immediately capitalizing on Kirk’s death with a personal fundraising opportunity apparently for his own safety
I am still at a loss on how he knows all these political figures and can meet all these world leaders
https://xcancel.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1965883872056402275
https://xcancel.com/RabbiShmuley/status/1965886133063094311
Can’t they just raise the cost of a plane ticket for him to Israel instead? It would be a lot cheaper. Just make sure that it is a one way ticket.
That might hinder his networking activities
He got hidden-cam videos of them using his wares.
I thought the reposted article pushed divisive neoliberal talking points. Quoting Mehdi Hassan at this point in time is flat out journalistic malpractice but I think that was what was intended.
I’ve bolded two outright lies used by Hassan. It’s been obvious for some time that Paul Pelosi had a history of picking up male prostitutes. His attacker did not break into his house, had no political agenda and in fact was only there because Paul Pelosi had solicited his sexual services and brought him home with him. No I cannot prove this, but the more you study that case the more obvious it was that they covered up a sexual liaison that went bad.
Is anyone at NC so siloed they don’t know that the Whitmer kidnapping case was an FBI entrapment scam in which the FBI literally did ALL the planning?
At this point it doesn’t make any difference who killed Charlie Kirk: we are about to reap the whirlwind. And if you’re still not sure who he is, google up his recent hour long interview with Tucker Carlson. I dare you to watch the whole thing. I took lots of cheap shots at Kirk in my blogging days, but the man Carlson interviewed earned my respect and based on that interview, I expected him to become President some day. I can think of no one on the Left with half his gravitas or sincerity. Don’t make this worse by pretending he was something he wasn’t or that he wasn’t something he most obviously was: a sincere and highly motivated man with consistent beliefs, many of which I disagreed with.
Thanks, I also noted Hassan failed to mention the two assassination attempts on Trump.
And that whirlwind we are to reap is a registered Independent.
People who claim to be informed but who didn’t know who Kirk was should probably take a break and think long and hard about what else they don’t know.
The ignorance of the so-called progressive left is stunning in this regard, as is the notion that there is a “hive mind” on the actually existing right, or that Kirk was a pipeline to white nationalism. The mob that is the American right is a crab bucket which constantly complains of its inability to organize itself.
One 8-hour day spent actually reading what is written at Counter-Currents, American Rennaissance, the Z-blog, the Unz Review, the Occidental Observer and a half-dozen other sites will dispel the notion that Kirk was a Nazi or that the right is unified about anything. In this regard, the ADL is a perfect guide of what not to avoid reading if you want awareness of our situation. Simply scrolling through the last few years of Stonetoss comics will get you started.
Kirk was a well-paid gatekeeper. His job was to steer young heads full of mush towards the Zio-friendly “hive mind” of failing boomer conservatism, and away from anything like taking their own side — that is real rightwing, anti-Enlightenment positions. If you don’t understand this, you don’t understand the struggle you are taking part in.
It is true that Kirk had lately appeared to be shifting his positions. But he had done this before on issues like homosexuality, where he once celebrated Botswana’s decriminalization of sodomy. Was this sincere? Possibly. But I believe it was being driven by his target audience, which now arrives at college much closer to an ethnically conscious nationalist or even third position mindset than it did ten years ago. Such are the fruits of anti-white woke and social justice insanity.
Another thing going on here is that the broadly defined left does not appreciate the extent to which it enjoyed cultural dominance for the past half-century, and so cannot understand the degree that this is now gone everywhere except legacy media, academia and entertainment. Not understanding this, and rebelling at the very notion of it, goes along with not know who Charlie Kirk was or why his murder is a big deal… and far worse for the left than the right.
The dominance of broadly left liberal ideas produced a situation which students of colonialism will recognize: the colonized understood the colonizer much better than the latter understands the former. And themselves.
The broadly defined right is now no longer captive to milquetoast conservatism and more importantly is using tactics the left pioneered. Among these are the politicization of everything, a reflexive friend/enemy distinction, instant iconization and subsequent canonization of politically suitable deaths, and maniacal unconscious projection. The fact that many on the left actually believe they do not do any of this underscores their problem.
What all this means is that the left is now facing an opponent that operates much more like itself, but cannot see this because it cannot see itself clearly.
With Kirk gone, the only figure occupying a similar role is Ben Shapiro. But the bloodthirsty Zionist Shapiro is even more out of step with Kirk’s audience that Kirk found himself. This situation is akin to what the GOP faced after Rush Limbaugh was no longer there to keep people on the boomer conservative reservation.
Finally, it does not matter much in the long run who shot Kirk. Reports that trans paraphernalia was recovered should be viewed much like the finding of an intact passport at the 9/11 site. The right has beaten the left to the punch in the framing of this murder — something that would have been impossible ten or fifteen years ago.
What does matter is that a gatekeeper has been removed, and in a spectacularly gruesome fashion that ensures some degree of radicalization is going to occur among TPUSA members and the audience. That some of these young people are already well-familiar with how to fight their perceived enemy is something progressives ought to think about before they continue to do and say stupid things.
This was a great comment and I wholeheartedly agree with the bulk of it, I just wish you had not engaged in the common practice of conflating liberals with leftism. The left (your various flavors of avowed socialists/anti-capitalists) is and has been very aware of what has been going on. I very much agree that this act, which looks to me like it was performed by a 4chan obsessed Fuentes adherent, is likely going to be quite harmful to the left, as a movement, given the way it is being leveraged by the various competing right-wing factions.
The America First base is restless. It didn’t sign up for stagflation and war. That portends ill for the midterms. Nor are Multiply All Grifts Again elites likely to give up on state terrorism and tariffs. What then? Answer: scapegoat domestic “threats.” Intensify the culture war. The base likes that. Therefore that is what to expect.
A turn toward intensification follows not only the logic of demagogic politics but also that of the attention economy. You don’t dominate that with the thoroughly considered, the nuanced, or the quietly tentative. You get clicks and views by shrieking about good vs. evil, with us or against us. Like warmongering and financial markets, the attention economy has escalatory spirals and bubbles. To some they are profit opportunities.
Remember what Madeleine Albright said: “What’s the point of … this superb military … if we can’t use it?” You can bet the MAGA curators feel exactly that way about ICE. What they will use it for should give even nativists like Macgregor pause. Be careful what you wish for.
Listen to any racheal maddow rant from the past two or three years and realize that it’s clear that it’s a kayfabe (h/t lambert greatly missed) between gorgeous george and andre the giant. There is not a good side. Be careful what you wish for is a canon for the entire ruling class and it’s attendants in the psychosis inducing media.
Suspect in custody, a 22yo local. Who is Tyler Robinson, Charlie Kirk shooting suspect identified after major manhunt?, Hindustan Times
I just watched the official presser. Tyler Robinson was local, had learned to hate Charlie Kirk, mentioning how he spread hate and fascism, shot him dead quite intentionally and with careful planning, then confessed the crime to his family who turned him in. Cash Patel at the end of his remarks said, “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now brother we have the watch and I will see you in Valhalla.” As far as fuel for the culture war goes, this doesn’t look promising.
Will his dad be crass enough to claim the reward $100,000 was it, for dobbing his son in?
How expensive are eggs in Utah?
Many of those white nationalist, “BAP” and Roman statue x accounts have turned out to be run by Indians and now it is being reflected in reality with Kash Patel himself invoking Valhalla.
I don’t think this bodes well either
Indians thinking they are “white” will never cease being absolutely hilarious to me … read a book you f***ing numpties. LOL
ChrisRUEcon: Or is Kash Patel, with the Valhalla reference, advertising his knowledge of Wagner.
Or, and more likely, is he a plain old vulgar thinker?
I would rather wager the latter but really I think he’s an opportunist stirring the pot. He had no meaningful information to offer at the presser. Mostly thanks, and mostly to his boss.
DJG, Reality Czar:
LOL … neither … it is a form of appeasing, essentially. Patel and his ilk draw power from adjacency, but will never gain full admittance. No different for African Americans in MAGA, but I must admit it would have been more cringe if an AA said that … :)
… then again, remember when Idris Elba played Heimdall in “Thor: Ragnarok”, and many aspiring Valhalla dwellers lost their minds (via The Hollywood Reporter)?!
Bwaaahahahahaa!
People like Kash invariably see themselves as being able to play that role without there being any backlash … “because dey white”. #LOLNO
Yeah, that reference made me blanch.
I don’t know much about Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox. He’s sounding like an adult here.
Utah’s governor, in impassioned remarks, urges Americans to find ‘off-ramp’ from political violence, Yahoo.
“You are inheriting a country where politics feels like rage. It feels like rage is the only option,” he said.
But, Cox said, there’s a different path: “Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now.”
amen to that.
I watched that interview this morning. You can sense he is running on fumes but is determined to provide an erudite, adult response to soothe the citizens of his state and more broadly Americans across the country.
Granted that Utah is a very conservative state, but I got the sense he very much wanted to offer a response that wasn’t all fire and brimstone. Counter to what governor Cox said, I could have done without how Mr. Patel ended his remarks. You’re in senior leadership of an important federal agency…
“amen to that.”
Yes. I appreciate your bringing my attention to Governor Spencer Cox’s remarks. This is exactly what I needed to hear/read.
Me too J, me too. A glimmer of sanity, maybe.
Inscription on the shell casings, as best I could transcribe from the presser:
Notices bulges WOW what’s this?
Hey fascist! Catch! ↑→↓↓↓
O bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao ciao
If you read this you are gay LAMO
All 4Chan crap- all of it. Memes, video game quotes, and even Bella Ciao was corrupted there. This is just insider jokes from that community, and it is infused with the unique flavors of the Fuentes faction, who himself has been calling Kirk a fascist (which…..just wow, but he has been stating this repeatedly). Fuentes’ group of adherents is supposedly heavily infiltrated with FBI informants, so I have no doubt future discussion of this topic will become very interesting and difficult to sort through, as I am sure there will be real or imagined claims that the shooter was cultivated.
I only cursorily paid attention to Kirk’s voice – an arrowhead at the tip of one of the many centrifugal forces in US society, aligned with one oligarchic faction – in a sea of deaf-ear virtue signaling masquerading as political discussion. US Institutions and the underlying geopolitical and economic strengths/weaknesses are far weaker, brittle, and less resilient than in the 1960s, when similar events and forces were at play.
Hat tip to the Duran, who quoted Yeats, yesterday:
“The Second Coming”
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43290/the-second-coming
Thank you. I keep Gramsci’s ‘Interregnum’ chestnut close. It gives me a kind of peace.
‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.’
-Antonio Gramsci
Maybe Yeats’ last lines are better known—
. . . A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
What links Venezuela, Qatar, and Charlie Kirk? The method is the message. The US bombs a Venezuelan boat full of people in international waters. Israel attacks peace negotiators (again) in Qatar.
The method is the message.
But Charlie Kirk’s assassination will be perverted into Narrative (the overriding force of this young century).
In the case of Charlie Kirk
the method is the message,
but wound into a Narrative
that will be used
to finish off civil liberties.
saludos
Maybe a decade ago I was very interested in the Years of Lead as a historical topic and read a number of books on the events of the period. I think even then I had an idea that the US was headed that direction in at least a superficial way (societal polarization, state actor interference, widespread social violence and upheaval as a mask/distraction from extreme government corruption). There are so many interesting parallels even in the cultural arena; my entry into the topic began through giallo fillms, which were entirely a product of the social paranoia and precarity of the time. The US has been dealing with the popularity of bad horror, much even giallo-inspired, for at least 5 years now.
One of the big differences though is that when the P2 trials occurred (which I strongly recommend the readers here who do not know anything about the era start with as it will provide a great unintentional summary of the era’s many interconnected players) it was discovered just how much of Italian government and business society was involved in secret societies (in that case it was Masonic) and I don’t think that is at play in the US currently. However there are almost certainly analogues in the Christian nationalist and business/chamber of commerce organizations which adds a whole uniquely American flavor to all of this.
An interesting paper to read on the P2/Masonic aspect in the Italian Years of Lead can be found here.
Taking bets on how long before some Nashville hack releases the MAGA equivalent of the Horst Wessel Lied…
Is Toby Keith still around? Updating ‘Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue’ should be a child’s play.
Nope, TK died from cancer early 2024. Even Stephen Colbert managed a poignant tribute to the man known as Big Dog. Seems likely other country / country rock acts will pick up that mantle and RIP Toby Keith….damned cancer.
Added, apparently Bob Seger managed a tribute to Kirk at a recent overnight concert.
I am not cynical enough at the blatant attitude towards an assassination coming out of those convenient keyboards owned by fellow Americans. You sir, OIF, I can exclude from that grouping but others are not. Others are just not very measured, as Kirk’s children have been suddenly orphaned and his wife is a young widow. But please dance on that grave. Conservatives are going to be watching it.
Every family of a father who is a tragic victim of gun violence, suffers similar fates.
‘when’s daddy coming home, mommy?’
I reserve my empathy for those who suffer and die (though murdered is more appropriate) due to people and policies supported by the likes of Kirk and the crazies on the neoliberal “left.” They also have spouses and children who grieve, but their grief has been hijacked and misdirected by the Charlie Kirks towards people much like themselves rather than the true villains. Now we see that the quote that’s been misattributed to Stalin does have a point: “The death of one man is a tragedy. The death of millions is a statistic.” As long as one man’s tragedy remains another’s statistic, this cycle won’t end. Perhaps those conservatives ought to think about how they would feel holding their dying father, dying from treatable disease for lack of universal healthcare, or because a warmongering cabal far away instigated a war for profit. Same for those from the neoliberal Dem establishment and their “Abundance” re-brand. I know that my personal experiences have made me very jaded, but sparing the truth about who and what Kirk was just because he has a grieving widow and kids is not moderation, it’s a form of consent manufactured by emotional manipulation.
Besides, given Kirk’s view on empathy, having none for him is a tribute he would have appreciated.
Now do Eric Garner and George Floyd. Both of whom were parents.
Charlie Kirk responded to the BLM protests initiated by those murders by calling them all scumbags.
Conservatives aren’t the only ones with eyes to see. Maya Angelou said that “When someone tells you who they are, believe them the first time”, and he, as a self professed Christian, should have been able to tell you how the Golden Rule works. We saw how he treated others in life, and that should guide us in how he should be treated in death.
Fairly said. I probably get stricken from the records with this response anyway, so there that. I’m debating with the genial host on what is permitted and what is not.
Murder should not be celebrated. I was far too busy or self involved in 2020 but did see that the Floyd murder was highly controversial and unnecessary….FWIW.
I see plenty of hypocrisy of conservative ideology, whether or not that matters. Likewise on the left or liberal leaning parties there is also hypocrisy.
I think these sentiments push us towards the land of the blind, to paraphrase Gandhi, and once we are there, we will double down on persecuting those who can see even a little (and, no, I would not expect I will be exempted from such fate should we get that far).
Never look a gift Horst in the mouth. Or a grift Horst either, for that matter.
OK. I think I’ve got this right.
Charlie Kirk was a charismatic monster. Now he’s a fascist martyr. He gets assassinated literally while blathering about how school mass shootings are just fine because brown people, at a podunk state college next to a giant shopping mall that is literally a) two miles south of where I used to live in Orem, and b) two miles west of where my aunt and uncle lived when we went there for Christmas every year, and c) one mile east of the tech startup where I used to go to work every day.
The killer is a nice 22 year-old Mormon college student from Cedar City named Tyler who gets away clean in his grey Dodge Challenger, then drives home and blabs about it to his family, then asks his college roommate on Discord to go recover the murder weapon he dropped. His dad immediately blabs to their bishop (a full-time cop), who instantly drops the dime on him (so much for minister confidentiality).
My brain hurts. This is history as farce.
Washington County where the killer resided was a super voting bloc for Trump, he won by a margin of 74.7, to Kamala’s 23.7.
Much different in the rest of the state where Trump won by a 59.1, to Kamala’s 38.5~
This summary is ::chef’s kiss::
#TYVM
In a random sampling of YT videos on the topic of the suspected shooter’s background they are increasingly starting to reference someone named Nick Fuentes. Here is one of them that seems to cover the bases pretty well thus far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NKp756uJj8o
It will be interesting to see how Trump explains this away now that his argument is shorn of the “radical leftist” narrative.
Remember the great film In the Loop that satirized the run up to the Iraq war? There was a great line in it by the US senator who needed the fake intel from the UK on exactly this topic that was something like, All that is required is a single fact. In the land of the blind the man with one fact is king. That is what will happen here. The fact that the kid went through the trouble to inscribe something on the bullets that could even remotely be tied to “the left” will be amplified out of all proportion to the many other salient facts. The fact that it has nothing to do with the putative political left gives the worthless Democrats room to punch left harder. Can’t wait for the antifa show trials of 2026 starring Twitter posters who said they refused to mourn a guy who advocated for stoning gays to death.
In the land of the blind, the seeing man (one eyed, two eyed, one facted) is a heretic deserving of expulsion or death. It was the heretic who thought he deserved to be the king…and that’s exactly why he would be burned.
The right could argue for vetting all gun owners and confiscating weapons from left-wing radicals. Yet, to them, gun control is worse than terrorism.
There have been many calls from the right to strip transgender people of gun rights for some time now, and let us not forget that the sight of armed Black Panthers in the 60’s were the impetus for the Reaganite gun control push.
Hatred.
Is it possible to have a discussion about it not in an abstract sense but in the sense of how much hatred has and continues to be an important part of each of our own beings?
Can we discuss our own hatred without sounding loud, aggressive, and hateful?
I’m in a group where this is being attempted but the topic is explosive and quite unpredictable. It may or may not destroy our group (just 8 neighborhood guys originally trying to understand what motivates us.)
Thank you, Guag. You’ve given me the nudge to revisit my own inner beast. I do hope your group manages to stick together; it’s a worthy effort, I think.
Italian communist theorist Amadeo Bordiga wrote that the worst product of fascism was anti-fascism, and this is what he meant.
Thank you, Vicky Cookies.
Did he predate Huey Long? “Will fascism reach America?” “Sure, and we’ll call it anti-fascism.”
I’m afraid the Americans might get to find out what the worst product of anti-fascism is…
They might get to find out the taste of their own medicine. Causing instability overseas was fun & games, but now the empire is coming home. I wish them all lots of luck in shooting at their own friends & family.
I saw Yeats quoted above, so I’ll try some “Easy Rider.” George Hanson’s stoned speech about “freedom” and “fear” seems apropos today.
Nobody really knows much of anything yet (except that Trump will seek to take political advantage of the killing), yet you’re so morally that you can project some statements on the Internet onto anyone who opposes Trump.
You’re stretching so far to blame the Left that your tendons are about to snap, and it shows.
Is it just a coincidence that NYT posted this on 9/9/25; and it’s not behind a paywall:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/09/us/politics/nick-fuentes-trump.html
Those of us observing from outside the US note wryly, “what left?” Your country is a turkey with two right wings.
LOL
#HarshButFair