Not only that, it doesn't look like a very safe spot to be signaling.
US continues to go backward...
- Thread starter PF5
- Start date
I'm agreeing with you...
So I understand this "leader" calling for apology:Literally no clue who the shooter is yet or motive
Markwayne Mullin said Democrats should apologize for the hatred and the lies they’ve fed their base, claiming it led to Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
The Vivlia (@thevivlia) on Threads
Markwayne Mullin said Democrats should apologize for the hatred and the lies they’ve fed their base, claiming it led to Charlie Kirk’s assassination. The GOP spent years feeding their base stolen election rage, but sure, it’s the Dems’ memes.www.threads.com
When a bunch of right-wing insurrectionists storm the capital, that is EVERYONE's fault.
Mullin: Democrats, Media Share Blame For Insurrection
In a newly released interview about his experience inside the House chamber during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President…
www.publicradiotulsa.org
When some still-unknown person killed a right-wing media personality, it is the DEMOCRATS fault.
I don't think anyone has ever accused Markwaynewayne of being very intelligent.So I understand this "leader" calling for apology:
When a bunch of right-wing insurrectionists storm the capital, that is EVERYONE's fault.
Mullin: Democrats, Media Share Blame For Insurrection
In a newly released interview about his experience inside the House chamber during the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by supporters of then-President…
When some still-unknown person killed a right-wing media personality, it is the DEMOCRATS fault.
PF5
Sheriff
He did not spew hate politely...I know what is dividing this country...and it starts with the ´leader´...
If the current political left has a massive wave of change that is similar to the change in the right, everyone might as well gather every gun you have because we will no doubt have civil strife or war. Look at the words of republican leaders throughout our lives compared to Trump and the current republicans. I have posted videos of McCain calling Obama "my friend" and Clinton and Bush honestly joking around with each other. Now that Trump exists, that is gone. Democrats are called evil, enemy and "hate America." Is this the fault of the republicans or the democrats? Who gives a sh!t! That is wasted opinion. The fact is that it has happened, and neither side stopped it. You would be an idiot to deny that the extreme divisiveness has been a huge political winner but a serious harm to the country. If the democrats become what the republicans have become, this is over.
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Maybe you could point out where you have been condemning the side that you support for the hate it spews. So easy to throw blame, much less easy to accept it for identical behavior. We are learning from our elected representatives. And they, generally, suck at being humans.
The fact is, at times he did spew hate. And of course there are many people on the left that do the same damn thing. Interesting that your post says that it is "claims" of spewing hate about him. But you removed the word "claim" when you discussed the left and just wrote "while spewing hate."
Gross hypocrisy indeed.
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If looking for respect for famous dead people, a message board is a really bad place to be. Arguing about righ vs left seems equally disrespectful as promoting conspiracy theories.
The really disrespectful thing that will happen is when the shooter/shooters are found, the message boards will talk about every detail of their lives. We will know the last time he took a sh!t before killing an innocent man. This has been shown to increase the likelihood of further killings, but people don't care. THAT is disrespectful.
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One observation:
Compare the reaction on the right to Kirks assassination to their reaction from the democrats in the Minnesota house assassination a couple of months ago. Both acts are clear political violence mind you.
This is why I think we are screwed. It takes two to tango but one of the two doesn't even think they are dancing.
Compare the reaction on the right to Kirks assassination to their reaction from the democrats in the Minnesota house assassination a couple of months ago. Both acts are clear political violence mind you.
This is why I think we are screwed. It takes two to tango but one of the two doesn't even think they are dancing.
I am sure we could find some common ground on a lot of topics, but I honestly don't have the mental capacity to want to have a days long discussion on a message board. Too easy to take things out of context on here. I respect your opinions as I read them, even though I may disagree on some.
I think it's a scary situation for everyone, and both sides need a hard look in the mirror. We are all guilty of some sort of hatred and hateful rhetoric. We have to change. And that starts with everyone. We have to have open discussions, we have to find common ground on situations and not just scream and yell at each other until we can't breathe anymore. And definitely not go and kill someone for having a different opinion that you. I will always be willing to listen to anyone's opinion with hoping the respect is shared that they'd listen to my opinion. That is how conversation is supposed to work. Unfortunately, we've lost that in our country right now. If everyone starts it back up, maybe we can find our way back to some sort of normal.
The statement you made of "If the democrats become what the republicans have become, this is over" is a scary statement. Because I know republicans are saying the same thing about democrats right now. It's not right vs. left. It's humanity vs humanity. Decency vs. Evil. You don't need to support a right or left side to be a good human being.
I will again state that we have a severe mental health crisis in our country right now that is being severely overlooked, celebrated, and encouraged at times. I won't deter on that point of view because it is extremely obvious and prevalent in our every day lives.
I wonder what percent of Republican voters aren't even aware there was a Democratic politician assassinated.
Charlie Kirk’s Murder Is a Tragedy and a Disaster
By
Ben Burgis Meagan Day
The killing of Charlie Kirk seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. (Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)
Charlie Kirk has never received a warm welcome in the pages of this magazine. It doesn’t matter now. The assassination of Kirk is a tragedy. Morally, it is unjustifiable. Politically, it is cause for serious alarm. A larger spiral into political violence would be a catastrophe for the Left.
As of the time of this writing, no one knows the shooter’s ideology or motivations. But some key points are clear enough.
No one should be killed as punishment for political expression, no matter how objectionable. In addition to our basic abhorrence of violence, we are also proponents of democracy, which depends on free speech and open inquiry. Without them, collective self-governance is impossible and tyranny becomes inevitable. Imposing silence on political opponents by brute force, whether in the form of state crackdowns on dissent or lone-wolf assassinations of leaders, undermines a principle that democratic socialists have always held dear.
Furthermore, the prospect of a descent into tit-for-tat political violence is an ominous development that threatens to narrow the space for meaningful political action. This augurs poorly for the political culture writ large, and in particular for the Left. We say things that others find extremely objectionable all the time, and we expect to be met with strenuous counterargument — not violent reprisal. While political violence has always existed around the fringes, this has mostly proven to be a reasonable expectation. It seems we have been living through a fragile consensus: in our otherwise extraordinarily violent culture, political leaders and commentators went mostly unharmed. Now the consensus appears to be unraveling, with chilling implications.
Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable people. While this type of violence originates from all across the political spectrum, the Right has been responsible for vastly more of it than the Left for several decades. In the last few years, assailants increasingly seem to hail from the politically muddled, mentally disturbed, and heavily armed elements of the American populace whose general paranoia and disorientation have become enmeshed with an incoherently but viciously polarized political culture. Even garden-variety American mass gun violence has an increasingly political valence to it; where the school shooters of old were given to a kind of totalizing, depoliticized nihilism, today they scrawl contradictory political slogans on their weapons.
The killing of Charlie Kirk already seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. This toxic combination threatens to badly corrode democratic norms and extinguish any hope of left-wing progress.
Potential Crackdown
Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists” — he rarely bothered to make fine distinctions — were ruining the country. Colleges were insidious left-wing indoctrination factories. America was being overwhelmed by violent immigrants. Women should devote themselves to the domestic sphere. America was a Christian nation and should stay that way. Donald Trump was a force for good.
Four years ago, one of us (Ben) did a debate with Kirk on “Democratic Socialism vs. Conservative Populism.” His politics have trended in an even worse direction over the years since, flirting with much uglier forms of nationalism and xenophobia, but even in 2021, the substance of Kirk’s side of the conversation was indefensible. While claiming the mantle of “populism,” he defended a series of positions that would have been at home on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He was steadfastly opposed to even baby steps toward a more equal society like universal health care and building a stronger labor movement.
At the same time, he didn’t descend into personal attacks. He stuck to the substance of the arguments, largely steering clear of cheap gotchas and giving Ben the space to hammer home the contradiction between Kirk’s populist rhetoric and the ugly inegalitarian substance of his politics. In a country where substantial numbers of our fellow citizens unfortunately agree with Kirk’s perspective, discussions like that are absolutely necessary. The shooting yesterday points the way toward a much uglier path, and one that won’t and can’t end anywhere we should want to go.
The fundamental premise of left politics is that ordinary people are capable of self-government, at their workplaces and in society as a whole. That goal is only a coherent one if we trust our fellow citizens to be exposed to every point of view, even the worst ones, and to make up their own minds. And our democratic goals can only be achieved by democratic means. We seek to overturn deeply entrenched structures of wealth and power. There’s no realistic way to do that except by winning over the vast majority of the population to our side. What we have going for us is precisely that the working-class people who would benefit from our platform make up the bulk of the population. In other words, the compelling ideas and the numbers are both on our side.
But the inevitable effect of the introduction of tit-for-tat violence into politics is to dramatically reduce the salience of both of those factors. In scenarios dominated by factional bloodshed, it no longer matters who has the most appealing political program or the largest potential constituency — only who has the most militant and heavily armed ideologues with the least reluctance to kill. The Left will not win that battle.
Additionally, Kirk’s murder will almost certainly work against the Left in other ways. First, the Trump administration could very well use it as a pretext to crack down on left-wing activists. Immediately after Kirk was shot, the Right began calling for precisely this response. Their demands to purge and censure the entire left in retaliation for Kirk’s murder were swift, ubiquitous, and severe.
Before the night was over, Donald Trump had addressed the nation, saying, “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” The assailant has not yet been identified, and no motive has been confirmed, but that did not stop the president from laying Kirk’s murder at the feet of the entire left and vowing retribution.
If history is any guide, the Left faces serious dangers from this development. The theory that acts of individual political violence will somehow spark mass movements for justice (what used to be called “propaganda of the deed”) has been tested, in a variety of circumstances around the world, for centuries. It’s very consistently been a disaster, almost always leading to enhanced repression of the Left and attacks on democracy writ large. The aftermath of Kirk’s murder could easily follow this familiar, grim pattern. Whether or not the shooter even turns out to be left-wing, there are good reasons to worry that the assassination could be used as a pretext for new crackdowns against dissenting speech from an administration that’s already shown itself willing to engage in a degree of authoritarianism we haven’t seen in recent American history.
In the last eight months, green-card holders have been arrested and locked in detention for attending protests or even writing op-eds critical of Israel, federal troops have been sent to cities over the protests of mayors and governors in response to small-scale riots or even street crime, and immigrants merely suspected of crimes have been sent to dungeons in El Salvador without a whiff of due process. It’s not a stretch to imagine that anything that even looks like left-wing violence (whatever the motivations of the shooter turn out to be) could lead to extreme reprisals from the Trump administration.
Martyr in the Making
In the years since Bernie Sanders’s second and more decisive defeat in 2020, the Left has suffered major setbacks. Where, a few short years ago, we were contesting for political power, now we’re often reduced to impotent rage by the depravities of the Trump administration, the fecklessness of the hegemonic liberal opposition, and the outright genocide being perpetrated in Gaza.
Recently there have been hopeful signs that we could once again be gaining a foothold in American politics — most notably, Zohran Mamdani’s inspiring campaign in New York. At this moment, that spark of revived democratic socialist politics is precious and fragile. A new wave of political repression could be particularly disastrous at a time when we’re only beginning to rebuild our forces.
And Kirk’s murder is likely not to demoralize but to embolden the conviction of the far right, who will no doubt turn Kirk into a martyr for their cause. Indeed, the use of that term by figures in the right-wing press has already begun. He’s highly eligible for such mythmaking, given that he never laid a finger on anyone and was shot in cold blood while in the process of articulating his political views.
Kirk himself played a leading role in pushing Gen Z toward the Right, especially young men. If the killer hoped to snuff out his influence, their actions will almost certainly have the opposite effect. Kirk’s murder at age thirty-one will no doubt convince many of his millions of viewers and listeners to dedicate themselves to his cause, thus hastening the coherence of a militant right-wing political bloc that will be an obstacle to our own project for decades to come.
In the short time since Kirk was slain, most on the Left have rightly condemned his murder. A not insignificant number, however, have reacted with an almost competitive lack of empathy. Not only is their anti-moral posturing likely to turn off ordinary Americans, who abhor political violence, but it is also politically misguided and strategically naive. There is nothing to celebrate here. Indeed, there is much to fear.
By
Ben Burgis Meagan Day
The killing of Charlie Kirk seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. (Angela Weiss / AFP via Getty Images)
Charlie Kirk has never received a warm welcome in the pages of this magazine. It doesn’t matter now. The assassination of Kirk is a tragedy. Morally, it is unjustifiable. Politically, it is cause for serious alarm. A larger spiral into political violence would be a catastrophe for the Left.
As of the time of this writing, no one knows the shooter’s ideology or motivations. But some key points are clear enough.
No one should be killed as punishment for political expression, no matter how objectionable. In addition to our basic abhorrence of violence, we are also proponents of democracy, which depends on free speech and open inquiry. Without them, collective self-governance is impossible and tyranny becomes inevitable. Imposing silence on political opponents by brute force, whether in the form of state crackdowns on dissent or lone-wolf assassinations of leaders, undermines a principle that democratic socialists have always held dear.
Furthermore, the prospect of a descent into tit-for-tat political violence is an ominous development that threatens to narrow the space for meaningful political action. This augurs poorly for the political culture writ large, and in particular for the Left. We say things that others find extremely objectionable all the time, and we expect to be met with strenuous counterargument — not violent reprisal. While political violence has always existed around the fringes, this has mostly proven to be a reasonable expectation. It seems we have been living through a fragile consensus: in our otherwise extraordinarily violent culture, political leaders and commentators went mostly unharmed. Now the consensus appears to be unraveling, with chilling implications.
Attempted and successful assassinations of political leaders are on the rise, as are politically motivated killings of less notable people. While this type of violence originates from all across the political spectrum, the Right has been responsible for vastly more of it than the Left for several decades. In the last few years, assailants increasingly seem to hail from the politically muddled, mentally disturbed, and heavily armed elements of the American populace whose general paranoia and disorientation have become enmeshed with an incoherently but viciously polarized political culture. Even garden-variety American mass gun violence has an increasingly political valence to it; where the school shooters of old were given to a kind of totalizing, depoliticized nihilism, today they scrawl contradictory political slogans on their weapons.
The killing of Charlie Kirk already seems further proof that America’s violent mania is colliding head-on with our political culture’s dehumanizing tribalism. This toxic combination threatens to badly corrode democratic norms and extinguish any hope of left-wing progress.
Potential Crackdown
Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists” — he rarely bothered to make fine distinctions — were ruining the country. Colleges were insidious left-wing indoctrination factories. America was being overwhelmed by violent immigrants. Women should devote themselves to the domestic sphere. America was a Christian nation and should stay that way. Donald Trump was a force for good.
Four years ago, one of us (Ben) did a debate with Kirk on “Democratic Socialism vs. Conservative Populism.” His politics have trended in an even worse direction over the years since, flirting with much uglier forms of nationalism and xenophobia, but even in 2021, the substance of Kirk’s side of the conversation was indefensible. While claiming the mantle of “populism,” he defended a series of positions that would have been at home on the Wall Street Journal editorial page. He was steadfastly opposed to even baby steps toward a more equal society like universal health care and building a stronger labor movement.
At the same time, he didn’t descend into personal attacks. He stuck to the substance of the arguments, largely steering clear of cheap gotchas and giving Ben the space to hammer home the contradiction between Kirk’s populist rhetoric and the ugly inegalitarian substance of his politics. In a country where substantial numbers of our fellow citizens unfortunately agree with Kirk’s perspective, discussions like that are absolutely necessary. The shooting yesterday points the way toward a much uglier path, and one that won’t and can’t end anywhere we should want to go.
The fundamental premise of left politics is that ordinary people are capable of self-government, at their workplaces and in society as a whole. That goal is only a coherent one if we trust our fellow citizens to be exposed to every point of view, even the worst ones, and to make up their own minds. And our democratic goals can only be achieved by democratic means. We seek to overturn deeply entrenched structures of wealth and power. There’s no realistic way to do that except by winning over the vast majority of the population to our side. What we have going for us is precisely that the working-class people who would benefit from our platform make up the bulk of the population. In other words, the compelling ideas and the numbers are both on our side.
But the inevitable effect of the introduction of tit-for-tat violence into politics is to dramatically reduce the salience of both of those factors. In scenarios dominated by factional bloodshed, it no longer matters who has the most appealing political program or the largest potential constituency — only who has the most militant and heavily armed ideologues with the least reluctance to kill. The Left will not win that battle.
Additionally, Kirk’s murder will almost certainly work against the Left in other ways. First, the Trump administration could very well use it as a pretext to crack down on left-wing activists. Immediately after Kirk was shot, the Right began calling for precisely this response. Their demands to purge and censure the entire left in retaliation for Kirk’s murder were swift, ubiquitous, and severe.
Before the night was over, Donald Trump had addressed the nation, saying, “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” The assailant has not yet been identified, and no motive has been confirmed, but that did not stop the president from laying Kirk’s murder at the feet of the entire left and vowing retribution.
If history is any guide, the Left faces serious dangers from this development. The theory that acts of individual political violence will somehow spark mass movements for justice (what used to be called “propaganda of the deed”) has been tested, in a variety of circumstances around the world, for centuries. It’s very consistently been a disaster, almost always leading to enhanced repression of the Left and attacks on democracy writ large. The aftermath of Kirk’s murder could easily follow this familiar, grim pattern. Whether or not the shooter even turns out to be left-wing, there are good reasons to worry that the assassination could be used as a pretext for new crackdowns against dissenting speech from an administration that’s already shown itself willing to engage in a degree of authoritarianism we haven’t seen in recent American history.
In the last eight months, green-card holders have been arrested and locked in detention for attending protests or even writing op-eds critical of Israel, federal troops have been sent to cities over the protests of mayors and governors in response to small-scale riots or even street crime, and immigrants merely suspected of crimes have been sent to dungeons in El Salvador without a whiff of due process. It’s not a stretch to imagine that anything that even looks like left-wing violence (whatever the motivations of the shooter turn out to be) could lead to extreme reprisals from the Trump administration.
Martyr in the Making
In the years since Bernie Sanders’s second and more decisive defeat in 2020, the Left has suffered major setbacks. Where, a few short years ago, we were contesting for political power, now we’re often reduced to impotent rage by the depravities of the Trump administration, the fecklessness of the hegemonic liberal opposition, and the outright genocide being perpetrated in Gaza.
Recently there have been hopeful signs that we could once again be gaining a foothold in American politics — most notably, Zohran Mamdani’s inspiring campaign in New York. At this moment, that spark of revived democratic socialist politics is precious and fragile. A new wave of political repression could be particularly disastrous at a time when we’re only beginning to rebuild our forces.
And Kirk’s murder is likely not to demoralize but to embolden the conviction of the far right, who will no doubt turn Kirk into a martyr for their cause. Indeed, the use of that term by figures in the right-wing press has already begun. He’s highly eligible for such mythmaking, given that he never laid a finger on anyone and was shot in cold blood while in the process of articulating his political views.
Kirk himself played a leading role in pushing Gen Z toward the Right, especially young men. If the killer hoped to snuff out his influence, their actions will almost certainly have the opposite effect. Kirk’s murder at age thirty-one will no doubt convince many of his millions of viewers and listeners to dedicate themselves to his cause, thus hastening the coherence of a militant right-wing political bloc that will be an obstacle to our own project for decades to come.
In the short time since Kirk was slain, most on the Left have rightly condemned his murder. A not insignificant number, however, have reacted with an almost competitive lack of empathy. Not only is their anti-moral posturing likely to turn off ordinary Americans, who abhor political violence, but it is also politically misguided and strategically naive. There is nothing to celebrate here. Indeed, there is much to fear.
That is a good point. No matter who it is, everything about this will be talked about in detail. That is if they find the shooter.
If someone just reversed it and said, "Democrats never spew any hate and if you feel they do that is just your own hate spewing forth" I suspect you would not accept that as true.
They apparently found the rifle with prints, and have clear video for facial recognition, which is a pretty good start to finding him.
We're not talking about a political party, we're talking about one human being who did nothing wrong except follow his personal beliefs while engaging peacefully with those who believe differently.
And I have witnessed equal hate from both sides and don't particularly care for any of it.
Ok. The way this went down I figured the guy would be smarter than that. It doesn't sound like it was an easy shot.
Kirk's assassination is a tragedy his speech does not justify violence. Period.
This opinion you are espousing is an unserious opinion at best, and is telling at worst. He said some very hateful things. Do you think any of these comments are hateful?
“I'm sorry. If I see a Black pilot, I'm going to be like, 'Boy, I hope he's qualified,”
"I have a very, very radical view on this, but I can defend it, and I've thought about it," he said. "We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s." He claimed that the law brought about a "permanent" bureaucracy which promoted diversity and inclusion. He also labelled civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr "awful" and said he was "not a good person".
Kirk was adamantly against Juneteenth being declared a federal holiday. He stated that “anti-American” sentiment that supported “a neo-segregationist view” that aspired to replace Independence Day was the driving force behind the decision to move the date ahead.
In February 2024 he posted that ‘The Great Replacement’ was a "reality" and not a theory. It is based on the idea that undocumented immigrants are entering the US to replace white Americans
In March 2020, he used the phrase the "China virus" in an argument about border control with an accompanying clip of him giving a speech. It was adopted by Trump afterwards when referring to Covid.
"No, Israel is not starving Gazans," amid reports from humanitarian organizations to avert further starvation and famine in the region on July 28th.
Kirk proceeded to deadname Thomas, saying she is an “abomination to god” before adding trans identities are “against the natural law”
200 yards with a bolt action high powered rifle isn't all that difficult when you consider a lot of big game hunters make clean kills at up to 750 yards. I'm confident you or I could make that shot with a bit of range time. I also question the intelligence of anyone who would do this at a crowded campus.
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