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Posts posted by wildcat09
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Jamelle Bouie, as always, is great:
QuoteVirtually every person of note in American politics has, rightfully, condemned the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk and expressed their deep concerns about the growing incidence of political violence in the United States. Wherever we stand politically, we all agree that he should still be alive.
There has been less agreement about Kirk’s life and work. Death tends to soften our tendency to judge. And sudden, violent death — especially one as gruesome and shocking as this one — can push us toward hagiography, especially in the immediate wake of the killing.
So it goes for Kirk.
“Charlie inspired millions,” President Trump said in an Oval Office speech on Wednesday. “He championed his ideas with courage, logic, humor and grace.”
“The best way to honor Charlie’s memory,” Gov. Gavin Newsom of California declared, “is to continue his work: engage with each other, across ideology, through spirited discourse.”
Kirk’s approach, wrote the editors of Politico’s Playbook, “was to persuade, to use charm and charisma and provocation and the power of argument to convince people of the righteousness of his cause.”
There is no doubt that Kirk was influential, no doubt that he had millions of devoted fans. But it is difficult to square this idealized portrait of Kirk as model citizen with the man as he was.
Kirk’s eulogists have praised him for his commitment to discourse, dialogue and good-faith discussion. Few if any of them have seen fit to mention the fact that Kirk’s first act on the national stage was to create a McCarthyite watchlist of college and university professors, lecturers and academics. Kirk urged visitors to the website to report those who “discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.”
The list, which still exists, is a catalog of speech acts in and outside the classroom. The surest way to find yourself on the watchlist as an academic is to disagree, publicly, with conservative ideology, or even acknowledge ideas and concepts that are verboten among the far right. And the obvious intent of the list is made clear at the end of each entry, where Kirk and his allies urge readers to contact the schools and institutions in question. Targets of the watchlist attest to harassment and threats of violence.
The Professor Watchlist is a straightforward intimidation campaign, and you can draw a line directly from Kirk’s work attacking academics to the Trump administration’s all-out war on American higher education, an assault on the right to speak freely and dissent.
To speak of Kirk as a champion of reasoned discussion is also to ignore his frequent calls for the state suppression of his political opponents.
“‘Investigate first, define the crimes later’ should be the order of the day,” Kirk declared in an editorial demanding the legal intimidation of anyone associated with the political left. “And for even the most minor of offenses, the rule should be: no charity, no goodwill, no mercy.”
Speaking last year in support of Trump’s plan for mass deportation, Kirk warned that the incoming president would not tolerate dissent or resistance. “Playtime is over. And if a Democrat gets in our way, well, then Matt Gaetz very well might go arrest you,” he said.
It is also important to mention that Kirk was a powerful voice in support of Trump’s effort to “stop the steal” after the 2020 presidential election. His organization, Turning Point USA, went as far as to bus participants to Washington for the rally that devolved into the Jan. 6 riot attack on the Capitol.
And then there is Kirk’s vision for America, which wasn’t one of peace and pluralism but white nationalism and the denigration of Americans deemed unworthy of and unfit for equal citizenship.
On his podcast, Kirk called on authorities to create a “citizen force” on the border to protect “white demographics” from “the invasion of the country.” He embraced the rhetoric of white pride and warned of “a great replacement” of rural white Americans.
“The great replacement strategy, which is well underway every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different,” he said last year. “You believe in God, country, family, faith, and freedom, and they won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.”
Kirk also targeted Black Americans for contempt. “Prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people — that’s a fact,” he said in 2023. Kirk was preoccupied with the idea of “Black crime,” and on the last episode of his show before he was killed, he devoted a segment to “the ever-increasing amount of Black crime,” telling his audience, falsely, that “one in 22 Black men will be a murderer in their lifetime” and that “by age of 23, half of all Black males have been arrested and not enough of them have been arrested.”
Kirk told his listeners that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson of the Supreme Court “is what your country looks like on critical race theory,” that former Vice President Kamala Harris was “the jive speaking spokesperson of equity,” and that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “was awful.”
“I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I’ve thought about it,” Kirk said at a 2023 event. “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.”
This is just a snippet of Kirk’s rhetoric and his advocacy. He also believed that there was no place for transgender people in American society — “We must ban trans-affirming care — the entire country,” he said in 2024 — and has denounced L.G.B.T. identities as a “social contagion.”
It is sometimes considered gauche, in the world of American political commentary, to give words the weight of their meaning. As this thinking goes, there might be real belief, somewhere, in the provocations of our pundits, but much of it is just performance, and it doesn’t seem fair to condemn someone for the skill of putting on a good show.
But Kirk was not just putting on a show. He was a dedicated proponent of a specific political program. He was a champion for an authoritarian politics that backed the repression of opponents and made light of violence against them. And you can see Kirk’s influence everywhere in the Trump administration, from its efforts to strip legal recognition from transgender Americans to its anti-diversity purge of the federal government.
We can mourn Kirk. We can send prayers to his friends and family. We can take stock of the gravity of this event. We can — and should — do all of this and more without pretending he was something, as a public figure, that he was not.
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16 minutes ago, aggie08 said:
Is Anonymous still a thing? Pretty sure I saw where he/she basically said, "Holy shit, he's a confirmed Groyper. Nick is fucked."
Not that I'm trying to pass that off as a source--obviously not--just wondering if Anonymous is still in the exposing fools game.
I think most 4chan account names just appear as "Anonymous." It's not the same as the hacker group.
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40 minutes ago, TwiceHorn said:
We're still in the danger zone in that department, but various sources seem to be converging on fairly accurate information. The inscriptions on the casings seem fairly accurate at this point. Although I'm curious about "Catch this fascist" or "Catch this, fascist."
You probably already saw that this is from the video game Helldivers. In Helldivers, you play basically as Starship Troopers infantry and the game world's propaganda says you're fighting for managed democracy against fascist bugs and robots, the joke being that you're obviously a fascist foot soldiers and you die all the time. You can call in airstrikes and orbital bombardments and a bunch of other stuff, and "catch this, fascist!" is something you might say before calling in an airstrike if you're kind of LARPing like you're taking it seriously. There's plenty of video game YouTube channels that make silly little videos goofing on the gameplay and that might even be a line from a specific one. Something like this:
ETA: dahobbs beat me to it. It's possible that he was a groyper and personally took the "irony" of the game to align with how "ironic" he saw it that a further right fascist would kill Kirk, but more likely it's just a joke the mass shooter fandom community already memefied and by using it in the shooting he's basically referencing a reference of a reference of a reference of... etc. They do this frequently now in attacks (e.g. the shooter who shot up that Catholic school recently wrote the Loss meme on the gun). Sometimes there's some sort of alignment with alt-right shit, but usually it's just nihilistic "jokes."
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We've recognized that propagandists should at least sometimes be held responsible for the effects their words can have since we executed Julius Streicher at Nuremburg.
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Man, normal journalists are so ill-equipped to report on shit like this:
That’s the Guardian, not Fox or CNN or the NY Times. They’re not looking for shit to blame on the left for no reason, but still fell for what may well have been a lie from some alt-right friend of the shooter.
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On 9/11/2025 at 12:07 PM, wildcat09 said:
One thing that's really gnawing at me today is the response from notable liberals to Kirk's murder. It's not that it's bad for public officials and other notable liberals whose voices carry weight to speak out against political violence. But there was an immediate rush for them to get statements out yesterday like we've never seen before. I'm pretty sure Obama never even made a public statement about Melissa Hortman's assassination, but he had a statement out within like 30 minutes yesterday. Hortman was an elected representative and literally someone Obama had met and hosted at the White House. But her assassination and the attempted assassination of another elected representative by a right winger with a hit list with like 70 more liberals on it (including Obama) didn't merit anything. That was just a fucking Tuesday, or whatever. And look at Ezra Klein's opinion today, just straight up lying to his audience that Kirk did politics "the right way." And I'm sure there's plenty of other similar statements/articles from liberal commentators pretending that Charlie Kirk was a great guy with whom they just had normal political disagreements.
There's only two explanations I can think of for this, neither of them good. First, it could just be conscious or even subconscious pre-emptive surrender on their part. Maybe they just think the fight has already been lost and they've resigned themselves to fascism dominion over America and don't want to endanger themselves. But if that's the case, I find it absolutely ridiculous. Yeah things are bad and everyone here knows I've been saying this shit is going to get very bad for a long time. But like I said yesterday, I don't know that this really gives them any ammunition to ratchet their propaganda up further because their reaction to this is virtually identical to their reaction to a million trivial things. There's already a fire raging, and this doesn't help, but I don't know that it really pours any substantial amount of gas on the fire and I still think there is a chance the fire can be contained, if not quickly extinguished. Just look at how incompetent they've been at so much of their attempt to consolidate power. Look at how fucking old and worthless Trump looks. Look at Republicans begging Pritzker to let them invade Chicago a little bit just as a treat. They are not a vigorous, unstoppable movement, and for liberals with real platforms to treat them as if they are is fucking embarrassing.
The alternative, and I don't know if it's worse or better, is that they simply view Kirk as one of "them" in a way that a lowly state representative isn't, and that they just fundamentally think people of their social status matter more than a lowly state representative, much less us normal people. That they just see it all as a game and think the players on the other side are as Good as they are, regardless of what they say or do.
I uh, think I hit the nail on the head with option 2. David Brooks isn’t exactly a liberal, but I think this is probably pretty representative among liberal and centrist pundits:
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I think it should be noted that, while groypers are definitely something most posters here are unfamiliar with, Johnny absofuckinglutely knows who they are. He's knee deep in groyper internet and has been for years. That's why he threw his little hissy fit earlier today pretending like he didn't know exactly what those memes indicated.
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1 hour ago, SydneyCarton said:
Can someone, anyone, explain what this means to me as well?
The shooter was a loner who spent all his time on the worst parts of the internet (probably including Texags) and never went outside to touch grass.
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11 minutes ago, ImNotMarkinson said:
still very wide open in my opinion
Scorecard in my opinion: "die fascist" = +1 lefty
Raised in MAGA family = +1 righty
If you're reading this you're gay = +1 righty
Caio Bella = +1 lefty
UWU what's this = +1 righty, if i had to assign a score to it given the very inane online presence it suggests that i associate with incel memeworld that trends righty.
"Kirk is too hateful" comment = +1 lefty.
The fascist line was a joking reference to a video game that's essentially Starship Troopers in which the characters calling their enemies fascists are the actual fascists. It's all just edgy ironic internet meme shit. He could be a groyper or he could be more of a nihilistic mass-shooter fan. Some people call this the true crime community, but that's a motherfucker to research because any googling will just find true crime podcasts and that's not the way the phrase is meant when describing the mass shooter fans. I'm leaning toward him being a true crime-type, though wouldn't be surprised if he liked groypers and bought into their rhetoric about Kirk to an extent and was partially motivated by that. There's likely a lot of overlap between the two groups.
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I posted this a few years ago after the Highland Park July 4th parade shooting:
I'd say it's held up pretty well.
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10 minutes ago, MNLonghornFUKM said:
Swing and a miss for 4chan
No shit? I'm stunned, truly, that 4chan got it wrong.
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That definitely sounds like a fucking groyper.
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Lol so he’s back to pretending he’s not Icono. Amazing shit.
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3 minutes ago, 'stache said:
It's like everyone forgets that the guy who mowed down 20+ Hispanics in the El Paso Walmart expressly said he did it in response to the president's constant theme of invasions and immigrants "poisoning the blood" of America. A direct fucking link there and here we are, being told that we're at war with "libruls" because a hateful asshat was murdered and we don't even know who did it and what their motive was at this point. Fucking infuriating.
The guy who shot up the 4th of July parade in a Chicago suburb a few years ago was maga. So was the Tree of Life synagogue shooter and the guy who shot up a grocery store in Buffalo. That’s just a few of the ones I remember off tbd top of my head.
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17 minutes ago, Bozo_Casanova said:
Interesting idea. I wouldn’t agree that it’s a class thing per se, but Ezra Klein directly called Charlie Kirk one of “us,” in a list that included Ben Shapiro, and said he wanted Kirk to be safe for his project for the sake of his (Klein’s) own project.
For the record I found Charlie Kirk‘s politics appalling (no surprise) and even dangerous on basically every level. But I agree with Ezra Klein about how he conducted them: in the open, transparently, with words. In a healthy Republic you don’t die for that.
in any case there’s no getting around the fact that he’s a martyr now and the convergent narrative on the right is that they tried to reason with the rest of America, and his murder is just another sign that the time for civil disagreement is coming to an end.
And if I’m being honest it’s hard to disagree, which is why this feels like a pretty big deal. Going back to my previous point- it doesn’t really matter if the assassin was a “ radical leftist” who wanted to shut up Charlie Kirk, or if it was a right winger who wanted him to be a martyr, or a rogue element who wanted to accelerate chaos as a pretext for authoritarian crackdown, or even just a lone nut. The direction of travel is the same.
I agree with this. I don't agree that that's an accurate characterization of what Kirk actually did though. He wasn't a right wing Ezra Klein, he was much closer to Joseph Goebbels. He actively encouraged harassment and threats against his political opponents and even helped organize transportation for insurrections to the capitol on January 6th. To see guys like Klein pretend otherwise is fucking bizarre.
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10 minutes ago, LonghornSean said:
Too lazy to look it up but Obama had to have made a statement about the Hortman murder.
I didn’t look for long but I did google it and I couldn’t find anything.
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Just now, Macanudo said:
Thom Tillis can suck it.
Arsonist decries fire he helped start. News at 11.
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Just now, Mdhorn said:
If it turns out that he is, think they’ll be labeled a domestic terrorist organizatio?. My thoughts are nope, just like all the other actual domestic terrorist orgs.
No, they'll call him a lone shooter and pretend he was just disturbed.
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6 minutes ago, Macklemore said:I voted for Gary Johnson in 2016 and Biden in 2020. I had qualms about voting for Trump because I am a Christian. You won’t find any posts of mine supporting Trump in those 2 prior elections.
You dickrode Trump for 4 years, cheered for kids in cages, and talked about wanting to shoot immigrants. Then you realized that all sounded bad and nuked that account and started this alt pretending to be someone else entirely. Nobody has a single reason to believe anything you say and many reasons not to.
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1 minute ago, GSU&UT said:
Man shut your baby back bitch ass up, your brain has left your body and you should ask UT to refund your tuition money if you actually went there. Did Jesus call for gay people, or sinners, to be stoned to death?
You're talking to a guy who posted that he wanted to go to the border to shoot immigrants.
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Charlie Kirk Assassinated [Shooter in custody]
in Daily Texan
Posted
Seems to me Ana is happier than anyone here about Kirk's murder, as he thinks it gives him another opportunity to dunk on those he hates.