Honestly great article that summarizes my thoughts on this exactly. I live in the south and I am seeing a lot of people I really respect lose their fucking minds about this and start frothing at the mouth mourning this guy that they didn’t know existed two weeks ago because all they know was that he was a “Christian activist” shot for his beliefs, either not realizing or not caring that the dude was racist as fuck and spent his whole life being a right wing internet troll but in real life.
Several of my colleagues did the same thing and I told them I have zero sympathy because Josef Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler had children too.
The added “correction” at the bottom is gold. Im glad someone, somewhere, didnt pull punches. The media response to this has been sickening.
And got paid lottery jackpot sums at age 31
The same insane bullshit is happening all over the UK. The amount of family I hessian these aren’t quite rich in the head is staggeringly sad.
The best thing about events like this is it helps me identify more or less trustworthy news sources by how they react to it. The Luigi case culled many
The nation seems to be the only big paper with any rationality.
more articles like this should include the bit about how “[Biden should get the death penalty]”
the dude openly stated that a political figure he disagreed with should be killed. the right must acknowledge this statement while they whitewash his legacy of hate.
Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.
lol
Full sentence for anyone who is confused by the comment:
It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”
Heinrich Himmler too and his fucking Naz daughter believed in the asswipe until her death.
And like any loving father, when faced with defeat, he murdered them all
then he had them all killed…because of shame. HA!
This is the only sane reaction to the situation by any media outlet I have seen so far
Every civilized country on earth has figured out that there needs to be acceptable limits to free speech and that freedom of speech does not equal freedom from the consequences of saying something.
freedom from the consequences of saying something.
Freedom of speech in the US protects you from consequences from the government, not anyone or anything else. You can still get fired, or at, for your free speech.
No because that would be murder.
Reread that comment and not seeing how anything in it can be considered murder
The fired at part
Murder isn’t a violation of the US definition of free speech, unless the government does the murdering.
Still a crime, but not a constitutional free speech violation.
Op implied that free speech does not protect you from being murdered, which is technically true, but it’s nonsensical unless he believes murder to be an acceptable response to free speech. It might happen, and in fact it did happen, but it’s not ok so why even bring it up? Unless you think it’s ok, in which case you are an absolute moron.
Nowhere( in response to your post ) did anyone say murder was an acceptable response, just that if you murder someone , nobody is charging you with a violation of free speech because that would be nonsensical.
And the only reason they had to say that much is because your argument was incorrect.
If you want to argue proportional response, have at it, but you didn’t, you argued :
no because that would be murder
freedom of speech does not equal freedom from the consequences of saying something.
Exactly.
I’ve seen it summed it up thusly: “If your speech incites violence, don’t be surprised when people use violence in response.”
So I guess fights at professional sports games are justified violence, since someone probably incited it by insulting an opposing player.
You’re confusing incitement and provocation.
Incitement involves actively encouraging action.
“you’re bad at hockey and your mother is large” might be provocation
“It is time for us to take up arms against the enemy” is incitement
I think a lot of people are confused about what constitutes incitement.
“It is rude of me to say all of this, because we live in a culture where manners are often valued more than truth.” This is a really good quote actually
Except that it’s not entirely accurate. The right in particular only believes in manners on the left. They are perfectly comfortable saying truly vile shit, then feigning moral outrage if they get a tenth of the same energy back. The Alt-Right Playbook sums it up neatly: “You Go High, We Go Low.”
Except that this generally applies to life and not just politics. Another thing is that a lot of times it is the left that imposes this on their own and not even the right.
Well-written and surprisingly thoughtful commentary given the heat so far
De mortuis nil nisi bonum. But still…
I do not believe anyone should be murdered because of their views, but that is because I don’t believe people should be murdered generally, regardless of who they are or what they’ve done. I am against the death penalty, pro–gun control, and believe war is a failure of humanity, not a necessary byproduct of it. Kirk was fine with murder as long the right people were dying.
Well said, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t enjoy a bit of schadenfreude at his passing.
specifically, pleasure from his death, or pleasure that he is no longer alive?
the angry right wingers on the internet seem unable to understand the difference between the two
More that I won’t have to hear any of his nonsense any more. Even the people eulogising him don’t seem to be actually quoting him because they can’t find anything he ever said that wasn’t stupid.
see that’s perfectly valid. how he died is irrelevant to that feeling.
I also enjoyed this perspective, a bit long form as its a substack post, but well written. Authored by Fear and Loathing: Closer to the Edge.
A couple of months ago, Laura Loomer was shrieking into her phone that Charlie Kirk had stabbed Donald Trump in the back. MAGA’s attack dog had him marked as a traitor, an apostate, another soft-boy conservative who wasn’t vicious enough for the blood cult. Then Kirk gets shot, and suddenly Laura is draped in black, clutching pearls, wailing like a widow at a mob funeral. That’s how fast the MAGA spin cycle runs: enemies are canonized, heretics become martyrs, and yesterday’s punching bag is today’s sacred cow. Loyalty isn’t about consistency. It’s about whatever Trump’s mood demands.
PETE HEGSETH, HALL MONITOR OF THE REPUBLIC
Now comes Pete Hegseth, a man who wears the title Secretary of Defense but operates more like the comment-section sheriff. Instead of worrying about actual defense — China, Russia, Iran, cyberwarfare — Pete’s priority is disciplining soldiers for making snide jokes about Charlie Kirk.
Yes, the Pentagon is now a glorified Facebook moderation team. Hegseth isn’t projecting strength; he’s enforcing pity. Soldiers aren’t preparing for war — they’re purging their timelines, terrified Laura Loomer will screech their names into his ear. This isn’t civilian control of the military. It’s civilian coercion, where MAGA influencers call the shots and the brass salutes like nervous interns.
THE BLACKLIST WITH A SEARCH BAR
Enter the grotesque centerpiece: CharliesMurderers(dot)com. A site so dystopian it makes J. Edgar Hoover look subtle. A searchable database of Americans whose “crime” is failing to sufficiently mourn Kirk.
They claim it’s not doxxing, it’s “education.” Bullshit. This is McCarthyism with HTML. It’s a digital scarlet letter, a witch hunt in the cloud. Post the wrong meme, roll your eyes at the wrong martyr, and congratulations: you’re on the list. Employers can search you, neighbors can shame you, trolls can harass you. Your livelihood isn’t safe because Laura Loomer needs another dopamine hit.
CANCEL CULTURE WITH A MAGA LOGO
Remember when these people howled about “cancel culture”? When they cried that a comedian losing a Netflix special was tyranny? Now they’ve built the most efficient cancellation machine in modern America. Only this time it’s not corporations doing it — it’s the government, the Pentagon, and a mob of red-hat lunatics demanding loyalty tests. You don’t just lose a sponsor. You lose your job, your security clearance, maybe your entire career. And it’s not because you committed violence. It’s because you laughed at violence. Thoughtcrime, MAGA edition.
GRIEF AS A WEAPON
This isn’t mourning. It’s weaponized grief. Kirk spent his career spitting on empathy, mocking victims of shootings, and treating compassion like weakness. Now the same movement that rejected empathy is demanding you show it on their terms — mandatory, performative, unquestioning. Don’t mourn? You’re purged. Don’t post a sad-face emoji? You’re dangerous. Cruelty has always been the point, and now grief is just another tool of cruelty. Charlie Kirk didn’t believe in empathy, and his allies are proving they don’t either. What they believe in is obedience.
THE BLUNT EDGE OF FASCISM
Let’s stop pretending this is theater. It’s not play-acting, it’s raw authoritarianism. Trump is the wannabe strongman. Loomer is the megaphone of madness. Hegseth is the hall monitor with a badge he didn’t earn. Together they’ve taken the death of a professional troll and spun it into a loyalty purge. They’ve turned the Pentagon into an instrument of political grievance and a martyr into a weapon. And they want the rest of us to treat this clown show like sacred history.
The only thing sacred here is the grift. The only thing holy is the purge. And the only thing growing is the list of Americans marked as enemies because they refused to cry on command. This isn’t about honor. This isn’t about respect. This is about power — stupid, brutal, authoritarian power clawing for control under the guise of grief.
Yep, fuck these nazis, I don’t really need any more reasons to hate them, but they keep coming up with them
At this point it’s not just the Nazi leadership … it’s the citizenry that just sits on the sidelines waiting for it all to go away.
The country needs to stand up and shut things down. Not violently or to cause a civil war … strike, stop work, refuse and picket everything and everywhere until things change or are brought under control.
I think the thing that terrifies them about communism the most is that the people wouldn’t be so beholden to neo slavery via technocracy. It would be communities helping one another, mutual aid. Instead the greediest motherfuckers have sucked so much down that the people are getting wise to it, so they have to grasp at the straws they can. Don’t get me wrong, it’s working very well for them, but I’m seeing the house of cards getting higher every day.
I think you’re right, but they’re wrong. Trying to establish a communistic regime was never any obstacle for the elite when it came to turning it into a slavery - it can be uses as a tool and guise to do exactly that, as we’ve seen many times before.
You’re not wrong, the soviet Union has become the scapegoat of how communism doesn’t work, but I think that they missed the part that it was the authoritarian regime that gave it the bad name
Yes, authoritarian regimes are the problem, and there’s no system that’s really immune from potentially becoming one. It’s terrifying.
You are a Master of words and logic ! All too grim but true.
There is no requirement to take part in this whitewashing campaign, and refusing to join in doesn’t make anyone a bad person. It’s a choice to write an obituary that begins “Joseph Goebbels was a gifted marketer and loving father to six children.”
that nazi trash got what he deserved
even more to the point, he got what he wanted.
Wanted it for others, got it for himself. Poetry.
So I guess he wasn’t proven wrong, good for him, right all the way to the grave
Of course he was proven wrong. He shouldn’t’ve been afraid of the left, when the far right are the extremist terrorists responsible for almost all domestic terror the over 20 years.
He was a nazi shouting about you should kill a peaceful gay hippie because they’re so dangerous, when a nazi killed him.
That’s called being very fucking wrong
Exceptionally so. It may even qualify as some of the most divine irony I’ve probably witnessed
You were there? 😱
we all were. i got the feed of his uncensored murder basically live, and from all media all at once.
Promoting hate just to get rich. Conservatives are ugly on the inside & the outside.
it’s not to just get rich. They hate you, and want you to die. Things like that make them happy. Your suffering, pain, and those of your family. You’re either them, or you deserve to die for not being them. That’s how nazis work. The religion doesn’t matter, but we’ve all seen how catholic nazis work in nazi Italy, and how christian nazis work in nazi Germany. All nazis fully supported by their hate churches, of course.
Except that one guy, who was fine with the hate against communists, labor unions, romani, jews, and disabled people. Until they came for him, and then he was really upset that nobody stood up for him. He was a church person too, but eventually became the wrong type of church person. Many such cases.
