I was only vaguely aware of Kirk before this, and I could easily see most "normies" being even less aware, but according to reddit, he was practically Goebbels[1] or Himmler, and we collectively dodged a bullet by him taking one. Leftists would really do well here to just shut up. Normal people aren't going to be convinced by your quote mining that Kirk deserved what happened to him, especially in the presence of his wife and kids, and when he was offering dialog. Hasan Piker, for example, said America deserved 9/11--do you think he deserves to die for that?
To put it bluntly, the average terminally online reddit/bluesky leftist should realize that they're not normal, and that to a normal person, Kirk will come off as a decent, rightwing (but not overly so) Christian family man, even a bit boring. Meanwhile transgendered people (elated at his death) are generally perceived as "weird" and "gross"--a perception their grave-dancing isn't helping. The optics are really bad.
I think it's lame to go after people livelihood over their comments regardless of where you stand from it, unless these comments are direct calls to violence or threats against someone.
The cherry on top is that it's being done in the name of someone who seemed to spend a great deal of time talking about children. Having someone's livelihood taken away disrupts lives, wrecks marriages and ruins childhoods. Why someone would feel good about doing that is beyond me.
I disagree when it comes to people like teachers who are openly advocating for political violence.
The reaction of a significant portion of the radical left wasn’t condemnation of this horrific act, but celebration and calling for others to be murdered. That just isn’t the way to handle things in a liberal democracy. We are supposed to solve our problems with ballots, not bullets.
I encourage everyone to go watch Charlie Kirk’s actual interactions with students in full and with context instead of just taking what you’ve heard about him at face value. He did nothing to deserve this.
I’ve listened, in context… there’s a reason he had a security team, and not for nothing but when any teachers don’t feel bad for you when you’re straight up murdered in front of a crowd that’s specifically come to see you speak, you’ve probably said something that could be construed as pissing otherwise reasonable people off.
Also, if your death gets Alex Jones crying, there’s a more than reasonable chance that, whatever that something was you said, it may have been less than sensible.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and hopefully folks on both sides of the aisle are finally understanding why the power to take someone's livelihood over their constitutionally protected speech is such a bad thing.
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire-a... "In 2021, 213 sanction attempts occurred, more than in any other year. This was partially due to Turning Point USA calling on parents and students to contact the institutions of 61 professors featured on their Professor Watchlist website." TPUSA was founded by Kirk.
How is "the power to take someone's livelihood over their constitutionally protected speech" distinct from "freedom of association"? Is freedom of association a bad thing? Or do you just want to limit it with respect to firing? How about hiring? Is it ok not to hire people who have values I deplore?
What does that bullshit non sequitur have to do with the post you responded to? Is there some reason you feel compelled to interact in such an abjectly dishonest way?
It's not a non-sequitur - people are calling for death [1] (somehow this doesn't get a mention in the NPR article - an honest oversight, I'm sure!), while the post claimed they were being fired for constitutionally protected speech. So it makes sense to ask if calls for death are protected.
To answer that question, I think it's close? It's not imminent lawless action or a true threat, which are the usual criteria for when the 1st Amendment doesn't shield speech. But it could be interpreted as instructing someone to commit a crime. But since it could be argued the posters have no reasonable expectation their instructions will be carried out [2], that means it's probably (speculating, I don't know of any precedent on this) protected. In the USA - most other countries are not nearly so permissive.
Charlie Kirk himself had a list of academics he was trying to hound out of their jobs as part of his career as a grifting propagandist. He is currently being praised as a champion of free speech.
The shoe is not on the other foot. Just the right foot is, as usual, projecting and being dishonest about their own well documented problems.
Just as they did before they found out that Kirk was shot by one of their own.
The report from his “friend” (who didn’t actually know him at all) that was subsequently retracted as bullshit? Why continue to push things you know aren’t true?
Well I went to the updated Guardian article that is the original source [1], and it now states:
This article was updated on 12 September 2025 to remove quotes after the verified source who attended high school with Tyler Robinson said after publication that they could not accurately remember details of their relationship.
That reads more like "there's too much room for doubt for us to be willing to publish it", and not at all like "known-untrue bullshit". But it's a nice argument we're having - any uncertainty debunks my position, even when nobody has even disputed my strongest evidence, the shell casing messages, while the position I'm arguing against is simply taken as true without any evidence.
Hey why don't we flip things around? Why don't you give a source for "didn't know him at all", as well as for the "retracted as bullshit" (specifically the as bullshit part, not just "source was unreliable"). And if you can't find a reliable source, we'll assume the opposite is true. That's how you're making me argue, so it's only fair the same rules apply, isn't it?
Is this where you get your news from? Wikipedia says:
> Pamela Geller (born 1958) is an American anti-Muslim, far-right political activist, blogger and commentator.[1] Geller promoted birther conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama, saying that he was born in Kenya[4] and that he is a Muslim.[5]
Well you're not disputing the shell casings, and you're not disputing he shot someone on the right, which are both strong evidence of left-wing motivation on their own. Additionally, the Geller article you so distrust cites its sources, which you are free to verify. So I'll ask you again - on what are you basing your assertion that he was right-wing?
Edit as reply: You have not offered a single source. I asked what you were basing your claims on, and instead of justifying them, you just repeated them.
The source they cite was retracted, just as the WSJ had to retract their similar reporting.
The shooter is a Groyper, a far right sect that has been "warring" with Kirk for a while and disrupting his appearances because they disagree about exactly how openly Fascist they should be.
A far right killer from a hardcore MAGA family.
The other school shooting that day was also far-right, btw.
> he shot someone on the right, which are both strong evidence of left-wing motivation on their own.
I think the idea that there are two sides is one of the most toxic ideas in our politics. We associate with teams and anyone on our side must be good, and ignore things like the tyranny of small differences - the far left hates the center left more than they do the right. And there are similar dynamics on the right. Especially in obscure conspiracy filled corners of the internet.
This doesn’t mean all people on the right are bad, or the right is inherently violent! But to ignore the complex breakdown of political ideologies is to ignore the crazy ways things actually happen, not to mention the fact that generally speaking, people who commit random acts of violence like this are not coming from a politically rational place.
I should clarify that I don't think there's much merit in the guilt-by-association smearing that happens after such events (or the stripped-of-context quote-mining character assassination the article engages in), and by "left-wing motivation" I did not mean to imply blame should fall on the left as a whole.
Unfortunately such smearing is very effective propaganda, so most people, including journalists, only take this position when it is their side getting smeared.
My specific point is there are people in this world with “right-wing” motivation to kill Charlie Kirk, social media has been full of it in just recent weeks, just like if a prominent left winger died there would probably be evidence of left-wing motivation to kill them. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that even!
It would be productive to our discourse if we didn’t automatically see it as two sides.
If a given action is ethical, then it shouldn't be done, even as a tit-for-tat. This merely exposed the hypocrisy of the self proclaimed free speech absoluists.
If the authors had bothered to read past the title of their own source, they would know his actual position was:
The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. [..] 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.
I had created some comments on Charlie Kirk and I immediately deleted them because of this concern.
Mind you, I am in high school and am not even american but I just felt like this is such a high profile case that it might result in finally utilizing the spy machine that is social media. Everyone has kissed the ring.
As someone who comments on internet a lot. its disheartening because this type of thing can only be extended. Freedom of speech can sometimes be used to restrict other people's freedom of speech in some messy ways like making them lose jobs.
For all the america that boasts about its freedom of speech and freedom, frankly the option for most things becomes just this echo chamber esque X or Y and no agreement between anyone. Your freedom of speech on one topic makes you get a label that you then have to live through and that it can impact your lives.
I don't know what this phenomenon is called but I just feel like extremism is being spread in the name of freedom of speech from both sides of america in some sense. We have created a system where people have to agree to a political party on all of its opinions and you can't have disagreements and agreements at the same time.
So we've have had people just give up in the political process and felt as if the only thing that matters is competency. Frankly, competency is being curbed in the sense that things are being cherry picked now. Stock market is doing good when from what I know the job market is doing absolutely bad.
This is meta commentary on politics itself. If such polarization makes democracy give power to people who can look "competent", and the voting choices are limited and you are influenced 24x7 by algorithms you can't control.
I guess its not good. I feel as if nobody is commenting on the social issues except bernie and mamdani yet are talking about everything else.
What I like about mamdani is that his campaign was built on the idea of true competence in the sense that he shows how he would actually fix the issues instead of just wishy washing that he's going to do it.
Trump's epstein's files competence comes to my mind lmao.
I think you're being overly paranoid, but I do like the idea of someone in HS being prudent enough to NOT use their real name (or something that can be tied back to it) when trolling or edge-lording online, or just doing stuff online in general.
I was only vaguely aware of Kirk before this, and I could easily see most "normies" being even less aware, but according to reddit, he was practically Goebbels[1] or Himmler, and we collectively dodged a bullet by him taking one. Leftists would really do well here to just shut up. Normal people aren't going to be convinced by your quote mining that Kirk deserved what happened to him, especially in the presence of his wife and kids, and when he was offering dialog. Hasan Piker, for example, said America deserved 9/11--do you think he deserves to die for that?
To put it bluntly, the average terminally online reddit/bluesky leftist should realize that they're not normal, and that to a normal person, Kirk will come off as a decent, rightwing (but not overly so) Christian family man, even a bit boring. Meanwhile transgendered people (elated at his death) are generally perceived as "weird" and "gross"--a perception their grave-dancing isn't helping. The optics are really bad.
[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/Music/comments/1nfv81d/coldplay_fan...
There seems to be a lot of hypocrisy in the different treatment of the killings of Melissa Hortman (and husband) and Charlie Kirk.
I think it's lame to go after people livelihood over their comments regardless of where you stand from it, unless these comments are direct calls to violence or threats against someone.
The cherry on top is that it's being done in the name of someone who seemed to spend a great deal of time talking about children. Having someone's livelihood taken away disrupts lives, wrecks marriages and ruins childhoods. Why someone would feel good about doing that is beyond me.
I disagree when it comes to people like teachers who are openly advocating for political violence.
The reaction of a significant portion of the radical left wasn’t condemnation of this horrific act, but celebration and calling for others to be murdered. That just isn’t the way to handle things in a liberal democracy. We are supposed to solve our problems with ballots, not bullets.
I encourage everyone to go watch Charlie Kirk’s actual interactions with students in full and with context instead of just taking what you’ve heard about him at face value. He did nothing to deserve this.
> I disagree when it comes to people like teachers who are openly advocating for political violence.
Do you think that's a fair characterization of who's getting fired?
Was Matt Dowd advocating violence? How were his remarks so offensive that it merited his dismissal?
And the reaction of a significant portion of the moderate right was to call for war against the left. We all need to calm the fuck down.
> He did nothing to deserve this.
Deserve? No. Never. Invite? Sure. Definitely.
I’ve listened, in context… there’s a reason he had a security team, and not for nothing but when any teachers don’t feel bad for you when you’re straight up murdered in front of a crowd that’s specifically come to see you speak, you’ve probably said something that could be construed as pissing otherwise reasonable people off.
Also, if your death gets Alex Jones crying, there’s a more than reasonable chance that, whatever that something was you said, it may have been less than sensible.
Now the shoe is on the other foot, and hopefully folks on both sides of the aisle are finally understanding why the power to take someone's livelihood over their constitutionally protected speech is such a bad thing.
https://www.thefire.org/research-learn/scholars-under-fire-a... "In 2021, 213 sanction attempts occurred, more than in any other year. This was partially due to Turning Point USA calling on parents and students to contact the institutions of 61 professors featured on their Professor Watchlist website." TPUSA was founded by Kirk.
How is "the power to take someone's livelihood over their constitutionally protected speech" distinct from "freedom of association"? Is freedom of association a bad thing? Or do you just want to limit it with respect to firing? How about hiring? Is it ok not to hire people who have values I deplore?
Is advocating for the murder of people constitutionally protected free speech?
I think so? If it’s not a specific threat of imminent harm. (Just, to answer your question, I don’t advocate such behavior)
What does that bullshit non sequitur have to do with the post you responded to? Is there some reason you feel compelled to interact in such an abjectly dishonest way?
It's not a non-sequitur - people are calling for death [1] (somehow this doesn't get a mention in the NPR article - an honest oversight, I'm sure!), while the post claimed they were being fired for constitutionally protected speech. So it makes sense to ask if calls for death are protected.
To answer that question, I think it's close? It's not imminent lawless action or a true threat, which are the usual criteria for when the 1st Amendment doesn't shield speech. But it could be interpreted as instructing someone to commit a crime. But since it could be argued the posters have no reasonable expectation their instructions will be carried out [2], that means it's probably (speculating, I don't know of any precedent on this) protected. In the USA - most other countries are not nearly so permissive.
[1] https://thatparkplace.com/bluesky-users-call-for-death-of-do...
[2] Carried out specifically because they issued them, and not because someone was going to kill Rowling anyway.
Why would people learn that? Clearly what people are learning is it’s an effective tactic.
Charlie Kirk himself had a list of academics he was trying to hound out of their jobs as part of his career as a grifting propagandist. He is currently being praised as a champion of free speech.
The shoe is not on the other foot. Just the right foot is, as usual, projecting and being dishonest about their own well documented problems.
Just as they did before they found out that Kirk was shot by one of their own.
> shot by one of their own
You are basing this on.. the shell casings with Antifa slogans? Or the high school friend who claims he was "pretty left on everything" [1]?
[1] https://gellerreport.com/2025/09/tyler-robinson-was-really-l...
The report from his “friend” (who didn’t actually know him at all) that was subsequently retracted as bullshit? Why continue to push things you know aren’t true?
Well I went to the updated Guardian article that is the original source [1], and it now states:
This article was updated on 12 September 2025 to remove quotes after the verified source who attended high school with Tyler Robinson said after publication that they could not accurately remember details of their relationship.
That reads more like "there's too much room for doubt for us to be willing to publish it", and not at all like "known-untrue bullshit". But it's a nice argument we're having - any uncertainty debunks my position, even when nobody has even disputed my strongest evidence, the shell casing messages, while the position I'm arguing against is simply taken as true without any evidence.
Hey why don't we flip things around? Why don't you give a source for "didn't know him at all", as well as for the "retracted as bullshit" (specifically the as bullshit part, not just "source was unreliable"). And if you can't find a reliable source, we'll assume the opposite is true. That's how you're making me argue, so it's only fair the same rules apply, isn't it?
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/12/charlie...
Is this where you get your news from? Wikipedia says:
> Pamela Geller (born 1958) is an American anti-Muslim, far-right political activist, blogger and commentator.[1] Geller promoted birther conspiracy theories about President Barack Obama, saying that he was born in Kenya[4] and that he is a Muslim.[5]
Well you're not disputing the shell casings, and you're not disputing he shot someone on the right, which are both strong evidence of left-wing motivation on their own. Additionally, the Geller article you so distrust cites its sources, which you are free to verify. So I'll ask you again - on what are you basing your assertion that he was right-wing?
Edit as reply: You have not offered a single source. I asked what you were basing your claims on, and instead of justifying them, you just repeated them.
The source they cite was retracted, just as the WSJ had to retract their similar reporting.
The shooter is a Groyper, a far right sect that has been "warring" with Kirk for a while and disrupting his appearances because they disagree about exactly how openly Fascist they should be.
A far right killer from a hardcore MAGA family.
The other school shooting that day was also far-right, btw.
> he shot someone on the right, which are both strong evidence of left-wing motivation on their own.
I think the idea that there are two sides is one of the most toxic ideas in our politics. We associate with teams and anyone on our side must be good, and ignore things like the tyranny of small differences - the far left hates the center left more than they do the right. And there are similar dynamics on the right. Especially in obscure conspiracy filled corners of the internet.
This doesn’t mean all people on the right are bad, or the right is inherently violent! But to ignore the complex breakdown of political ideologies is to ignore the crazy ways things actually happen, not to mention the fact that generally speaking, people who commit random acts of violence like this are not coming from a politically rational place.
I should clarify that I don't think there's much merit in the guilt-by-association smearing that happens after such events (or the stripped-of-context quote-mining character assassination the article engages in), and by "left-wing motivation" I did not mean to imply blame should fall on the left as a whole.
Unfortunately such smearing is very effective propaganda, so most people, including journalists, only take this position when it is their side getting smeared.
My specific point is there are people in this world with “right-wing” motivation to kill Charlie Kirk, social media has been full of it in just recent weeks, just like if a prominent left winger died there would probably be evidence of left-wing motivation to kill them. Or maybe it’s more complicated than that even!
It would be productive to our discourse if we didn’t automatically see it as two sides.
[dead]
[dead]
If a given action is ethical, then it shouldn't be done, even as a tit-for-tat. This merely exposed the hypocrisy of the self proclaimed free speech absoluists.
It's never about freedom; it's always about power - regardless of how people dress it up.
That's why a powerful and independent judiciary is so important.
> He [..] said that some gun deaths were worth it to have the Second Amendment (cites https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-its-w...)
If the authors had bothered to read past the title of their own source, they would know his actual position was:
The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. [..] 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.
Anyway, Rolling Stone has a different opinion: Why Cancel Culture Is Good For Democracy - https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-commentary/opin...
I had created some comments on Charlie Kirk and I immediately deleted them because of this concern.
Mind you, I am in high school and am not even american but I just felt like this is such a high profile case that it might result in finally utilizing the spy machine that is social media. Everyone has kissed the ring.
As someone who comments on internet a lot. its disheartening because this type of thing can only be extended. Freedom of speech can sometimes be used to restrict other people's freedom of speech in some messy ways like making them lose jobs.
For all the america that boasts about its freedom of speech and freedom, frankly the option for most things becomes just this echo chamber esque X or Y and no agreement between anyone. Your freedom of speech on one topic makes you get a label that you then have to live through and that it can impact your lives.
I don't know what this phenomenon is called but I just feel like extremism is being spread in the name of freedom of speech from both sides of america in some sense. We have created a system where people have to agree to a political party on all of its opinions and you can't have disagreements and agreements at the same time.
So we've have had people just give up in the political process and felt as if the only thing that matters is competency. Frankly, competency is being curbed in the sense that things are being cherry picked now. Stock market is doing good when from what I know the job market is doing absolutely bad.
This is meta commentary on politics itself. If such polarization makes democracy give power to people who can look "competent", and the voting choices are limited and you are influenced 24x7 by algorithms you can't control.
I guess its not good. I feel as if nobody is commenting on the social issues except bernie and mamdani yet are talking about everything else.
What I like about mamdani is that his campaign was built on the idea of true competence in the sense that he shows how he would actually fix the issues instead of just wishy washing that he's going to do it.
Trump's epstein's files competence comes to my mind lmao.
I think you're being overly paranoid, but I do like the idea of someone in HS being prudent enough to NOT use their real name (or something that can be tied back to it) when trolling or edge-lording online, or just doing stuff online in general.