Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every “rest in piss” meme, every “fucked around and found out” joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
Omg thanks for this. Far too many people are jumping on the ‘celebrate his death because he was an awful person’ bandwagon. No, the best thing the left can do at the moment is just to have as little reaction as possible. The right was already attacking us and every ‘lmao kirk died, rest in piss bozo’ comment and post just gives them more ammunition. It’s not fair, but at the moment they have the power and we do not. We need to demonstrate to the masses that we are the better people, because that’s how we’re going to get mass support and that’s how we’re going to get the right-wing fascists in power voted out.
I appreciate your level-headedness, and I definitely get where you’re coming from, but I need to point out the big gaping blindspot in your argument: the crackdowns and the facism are already here, and they’ve pretty much demonstrated they don’t particularly care for or wait for justification.
Do you see why arguing “you’re giving them ammo and justification” rings very hollow at this particular point in time?
Yeah, worried about this and the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, and too much room for his death to be weaponized, like you say.
Would have much rather him taken a few to the vest from a handgun from a pissed off obviously MAGA person. Give him some pain and a good scare to have him realize personally just how risky the hornet’s nest is that he is stirring. Something that might be a close enough call for others to see without becoming a rallying cry and a clear link to the violence of the rhetoric without a chance to blame ‘the other’.
I am happy to read at least one sane voice amongst the sea of people who don’t understand that we are doing exactly what they are accusing us of doing by celebrating his death. I honestly am taken aback by the amount of people who think this is good.
Ohhh! I love Starship Troopers! The book, not so much, but the movie I adore.
Let’s dig into your choice to respond with this scene.
That’s the moment where Verhoeven shows us ‘Federation Victory’! The good guys have won! They’ve captured the Brain Bug! It’s afraid! Humanity wins!
Except what’s actually happening is fascists celebrating the torture of a sentient being. One that extracted human minds just as they’ll now extract from its mind; each side justifying their horrors by pointing to the other’s. All while convincing themselves they’re heroes.
The Federation doesn’t attempt communication or diplomacy. They literally probe its brain for intel while cheering its terror. The troops cheering ‘It’s afraid!’ aren’t the good guys. They’re Verhoeven’s mirror showing us how righteousness becomes the very tyranny it claims to fight.
NPH’s character literally becomes a full SS-uniformed intelligence officer who feeds his best friends into an endless meat grinder. The bugs were defending their home. The Federation manufactured its own eternal enemy. And everyone cheering becomes complicit in forever war.
You’ve sent me a scene about people so drunk on their enemy’s fear that they can’t see they’ve become the monsters.
So either you’re agreeing that celebrating suffering makes us indistinguishable from what we oppose, or you’ve accidentally proven my point by quoting the villains as heroes.
Either way, I couldn’t have picked a better metaphor myself.
The Federation doesn’t attempt communication or diplomacy.
I understand where you’re coming from broadly with your thesis, and I agree with you more than I want to. The above line struck me, though, because The Left writ large at least has been trying to communicate and attempting diplomacy with our Bugs for decades, and especially lately it’s become essentially useless.
Or I used a well-known movie scene to poke at historically violent people using violence to score political points. Noting hypocrisy in a group is not to stoop to their level.
They were gonna do it, anyway. They were just waiting for an excuse. Any excuse. In a world as big and complex as ours, probability would have provided them with some pretext sooner or later. As we can see, they don’t know anything about the shooter, or his ideology. It’s just an excuse. If the world didn’t provide them one, they’d manufacture it. Walking around on eggshells and trying to avoid giving them one was never tenable.
You’re right that they manufacture pretexts, but there’s a crucial difference between forced fabrications and genuine ammunition. When they have to invent threats, their propaganda requires constant maintenance and reality-bending. When we hand them actual violence to point to, we transform their lies into prophecies. Yes, probability ensures incidents will occur, but the question is whether we contribute to that probability or work against it. “They’ll do it anyway” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that absolves us of strategic thinking. I say, let us not make the Fascist’s job easier.
Here’s the thing, though, this guy isn’t one of “us.” I didn’t egg him on, or help plan. I only knew Kirk from the tiny-face memes. The nebulous “we” isn’t responsible; the shooter doesn’t seem to have had a network radicalizing him. He’s the proverbial lone wolf. That means he’s exactly the kind of unpredictable, stochastic agent that I’m saying is out there in the world to provide the fascists their justification.
I get the impulse, truly. He spread hate and did real harm, and the anger at that is justified. But celebrating his death doesn’t hurt his cause, it builds it. The right has shown us the playbook: when left-wing leaders are killed, they shrug it off, Trump even said it ‘doesn’t matter.’ Yet with Kirk, before there’s even a suspect, they’re already framing it as the start of the left’s downfall. When we celebrate, we feed that narrative. We give the Nazis exactly what they want. The real strength is being better than them, and making sure their ideas lose.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive.
My friend, you’ve got the right stuff. You have a very smooth and relatable style of communication and I really do value when those like you say something that I espouse and would otherwise butcher.
I won’t tell people not to celebrate because I know how disliked that sort of sentiment is on a thread like this. But you’re absolutely right and it sucks. They know that they just hit the “not crying wolf” lottery and will never stop banging that drum.
Thank you for that. Even though he died, he has won. Look at the amount of hatred he has nourished. Furthermore, I don’t believe his death will bring any justice to the people he impacted with his hatred. While I see people celebrating, I’m terrified.
Terrified this is how things are at the moment. If you can celebrate the death of Charlie, it means you have it in you to celebrate anyone’s else given a motive. And I think that is The first step of the dehumanisation process he so fondly used.
You’ve identified something crucial that others miss: we don’t defeat dehumanization by becoming better at it. The moment we celebrate death, we’ve accepted their fundamental premise that political disagreement justifies violence.
Your terror is appropriate and I feel it with you. Not just at the violence itself, but at watching people you agree with politically abandon the very principles that distinguish us from what we oppose. The hardest battle isn’t against fascism; it’s maintaining our humanity while fighting inhumanity.
Of all the people I was worried about materially contributing to the mess, Charlie Kirk was pretty low on the list.
He said vile stuff, but he was not himself a wielder of power. His rhetoric and words had power, he did not. His death in this manner has given strength to that rhetoric and those words without removing any of his meaningful influence to the system.
Better that these folks suffer the fear of what they court, to have their own MAGA fanatics turn against them with violence that scares them, but leaves them largely intact to have them retreat from their position without becoming martyrs.
Now if some folks actively wielding the power in harmful ways meet some ends, I might have a little less mixed feelings about it.
I will confess to perhaps not celebrating, but appreciating the connection between his sociopathic stance on gun deaths and he himself joining a group he himself said we shouldn’t be so concerned about.
I understand finding comfort where you can, but consider: Kirk not being here to “see it through” assumes his death diminishes his impact. The opposite is true. Alive, he was one voice that could be countered, fact-checked, and eventually forgotten. Dead, he becomes eternal; forever young, forever wronged, forever useful to those who will absolutely be here to see it through. The solace is hollow when his absence strengthens everything he stood for.
Your “cool story bro” response is exactly the kind of thinking that creates space for demagogues to thrive. When someone offers strategic analysis about why celebrating political violence backfires, and you respond with a thought-terminating cliché, you’re demonstrating the same anti-intellectual reflex that makes populations vulnerable to manipulation.
Think about what made Charlie Kirk successful: he offered simple, emotionally satisfying answers to complex problems. “Your problems aren’t from complicated economic systems, it’s those people over there.” His audience loved him because he never asked them to think harder than a bumper sticker.
And here you are, faced with someone explaining why emotional satisfaction isn’t political victory, why martyrdom empowers the very ideas we need to defeat… and your response is a meme. You’re operating at exactly the level of discourse that Kirk counted on: where snark replaces strategy, where being dismissive feels like being strong, where “cool story bro” seems like a clever response to warnings about tactical disaster.
The movements that win understand complexity. The movements that lose mistake attitude for analysis. When you brush off strategic thinking with internet catchphrases, you’re not fighting against the Charlie Kirks of the world. You’re proving that their reduction of politics to tribal reflexes and emotional reactions was right all along.
The system that produces Charlie Kirks depends on people refusing to think beyond the satisfaction of the dunk, the own, the sick burn. Your dismissal isn’t rebellion; it’s compliance with the exact intellectual laziness that powerful interests count on to keep populations manageable and movements ineffective.
I said good story, because it reads a lot like you trying to convince yourself. I’m also very tired of hearing essentially “protest the right way” whenever anyone actually does something to improve the country.
Youll probably type out 8 more paragraphs of nonsense amounting to you being too afraid to admit when a bad thing results in good things.
Instead of telling me how I feel, name a single “good thing” that has resulted.
Kirk’s organization is stronger, his ideas are martyred, his followers are more radicalized. You tell me I am afraid, but I am observing reality; historical and present.
Show me the improvement, because all I see is fascists getting exactly what they want.
Here’s the frustration and why this should not be celebrated:
Charlie Kirk spent years dehumanizing people, making lives measurably worse, and profiting from hatred. The cosmic irony of him being shot while calling trans people dangerous and minimizing gun violence feels like the universe delivering a punchline he wrote himself. There’s a cathartic release in seeing someone who seemed untouchable suddenly silenced by the very violence he dismissed.
But that catharsis is blinding, vile, and destructive. Every celebration post, every “rest in piss” meme, every “fucked around and found out” joke is already being screenshot and weaponized. The worst people imaginable, those eager to exploit violence, are being handed exactly what they want: supposed proof that “they were right,” justification for crackdowns, and, most dangerously, a martyr whose blood sanctifies every awful thing he stood for.
Celebration may feel like a dunk on fascism, but in reality it accelerates it. It may feel like strength, but it exposes a movement so strategically bankrupt that it mistakes emotional satisfaction for political victory. Kirk alive was one influencer among many; Kirk dead is a rallying cry that will outlive us all.
The rage at what he represented is justified. But celebrating his death guarantees those very ideas will flourish. American democracy is dying, and a gravedigger falling into the hole is no victory when it only deepens the grave.
His ideas needed to be defeated. Instead, they’ve been immortalized.
Omg thanks for this. Far too many people are jumping on the ‘celebrate his death because he was an awful person’ bandwagon. No, the best thing the left can do at the moment is just to have as little reaction as possible. The right was already attacking us and every ‘lmao kirk died, rest in piss bozo’ comment and post just gives them more ammunition. It’s not fair, but at the moment they have the power and we do not. We need to demonstrate to the masses that we are the better people, because that’s how we’re going to get mass support and that’s how we’re going to get the right-wing fascists in power voted out.
I appreciate your level-headedness, and I definitely get where you’re coming from, but I need to point out the big gaping blindspot in your argument: the crackdowns and the facism are already here, and they’ve pretty much demonstrated they don’t particularly care for or wait for justification.
Do you see why arguing “you’re giving them ammo and justification” rings very hollow at this particular point in time?
Yeah, worried about this and the punishment doesn’t fit the crime, and too much room for his death to be weaponized, like you say.
Would have much rather him taken a few to the vest from a handgun from a pissed off obviously MAGA person. Give him some pain and a good scare to have him realize personally just how risky the hornet’s nest is that he is stirring. Something that might be a close enough call for others to see without becoming a rallying cry and a clear link to the violence of the rhetoric without a chance to blame ‘the other’.
I am happy to read at least one sane voice amongst the sea of people who don’t understand that we are doing exactly what they are accusing us of doing by celebrating his death. I honestly am taken aback by the amount of people who think this is good.
Ohhh! I love Starship Troopers! The book, not so much, but the movie I adore.
Let’s dig into your choice to respond with this scene.
That’s the moment where Verhoeven shows us ‘Federation Victory’! The good guys have won! They’ve captured the Brain Bug! It’s afraid! Humanity wins!
Except what’s actually happening is fascists celebrating the torture of a sentient being. One that extracted human minds just as they’ll now extract from its mind; each side justifying their horrors by pointing to the other’s. All while convincing themselves they’re heroes.
The Federation doesn’t attempt communication or diplomacy. They literally probe its brain for intel while cheering its terror. The troops cheering ‘It’s afraid!’ aren’t the good guys. They’re Verhoeven’s mirror showing us how righteousness becomes the very tyranny it claims to fight.
NPH’s character literally becomes a full SS-uniformed intelligence officer who feeds his best friends into an endless meat grinder. The bugs were defending their home. The Federation manufactured its own eternal enemy. And everyone cheering becomes complicit in forever war.
You’ve sent me a scene about people so drunk on their enemy’s fear that they can’t see they’ve become the monsters.
So either you’re agreeing that celebrating suffering makes us indistinguishable from what we oppose, or you’ve accidentally proven my point by quoting the villains as heroes.
Either way, I couldn’t have picked a better metaphor myself.
I understand where you’re coming from broadly with your thesis, and I agree with you more than I want to. The above line struck me, though, because The Left writ large at least has been trying to communicate and attempting diplomacy with our Bugs for decades, and especially lately it’s become essentially useless.
Or I used a well-known movie scene to poke at historically violent people using violence to score political points. Noting hypocrisy in a group is not to stoop to their level.
It appears you do not want to know more.
I get the slightly-downvoted state I found this comment in, but I thought it was a perfect reference.
They were gonna do it, anyway. They were just waiting for an excuse. Any excuse. In a world as big and complex as ours, probability would have provided them with some pretext sooner or later. As we can see, they don’t know anything about the shooter, or his ideology. It’s just an excuse. If the world didn’t provide them one, they’d manufacture it. Walking around on eggshells and trying to avoid giving them one was never tenable.
You’re right that they manufacture pretexts, but there’s a crucial difference between forced fabrications and genuine ammunition. When they have to invent threats, their propaganda requires constant maintenance and reality-bending. When we hand them actual violence to point to, we transform their lies into prophecies. Yes, probability ensures incidents will occur, but the question is whether we contribute to that probability or work against it. “They’ll do it anyway” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that absolves us of strategic thinking. I say, let us not make the Fascist’s job easier.
Here’s the thing, though, this guy isn’t one of “us.” I didn’t egg him on, or help plan. I only knew Kirk from the tiny-face memes. The nebulous “we” isn’t responsible; the shooter doesn’t seem to have had a network radicalizing him. He’s the proverbial lone wolf. That means he’s exactly the kind of unpredictable, stochastic agent that I’m saying is out there in the world to provide the fascists their justification.
Only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
He wasn’t just a racist he was a fucking Nazi.
I get the impulse, truly. He spread hate and did real harm, and the anger at that is justified. But celebrating his death doesn’t hurt his cause, it builds it. The right has shown us the playbook: when left-wing leaders are killed, they shrug it off, Trump even said it ‘doesn’t matter.’ Yet with Kirk, before there’s even a suspect, they’re already framing it as the start of the left’s downfall. When we celebrate, we feed that narrative. We give the Nazis exactly what they want. The real strength is being better than them, and making sure their ideas lose.
My friend, you’ve got the right stuff. You have a very smooth and relatable style of communication and I really do value when those like you say something that I espouse and would otherwise butcher.
I won’t tell people not to celebrate because I know how disliked that sort of sentiment is on a thread like this. But you’re absolutely right and it sucks. They know that they just hit the “not crying wolf” lottery and will never stop banging that drum.
I’m frightened for whom the bell tolls.
Thank you for that. Even though he died, he has won. Look at the amount of hatred he has nourished. Furthermore, I don’t believe his death will bring any justice to the people he impacted with his hatred. While I see people celebrating, I’m terrified.
Terrified this is how things are at the moment. If you can celebrate the death of Charlie, it means you have it in you to celebrate anyone’s else given a motive. And I think that is The first step of the dehumanisation process he so fondly used.
You’ve identified something crucial that others miss: we don’t defeat dehumanization by becoming better at it. The moment we celebrate death, we’ve accepted their fundamental premise that political disagreement justifies violence.
Your terror is appropriate and I feel it with you. Not just at the violence itself, but at watching people you agree with politically abandon the very principles that distinguish us from what we oppose. The hardest battle isn’t against fascism; it’s maintaining our humanity while fighting inhumanity.
I take a little solace from the fact that win or not, he will not be here to see it through
Of all the people I was worried about materially contributing to the mess, Charlie Kirk was pretty low on the list.
He said vile stuff, but he was not himself a wielder of power. His rhetoric and words had power, he did not. His death in this manner has given strength to that rhetoric and those words without removing any of his meaningful influence to the system.
Better that these folks suffer the fear of what they court, to have their own MAGA fanatics turn against them with violence that scares them, but leaves them largely intact to have them retreat from their position without becoming martyrs.
Now if some folks actively wielding the power in harmful ways meet some ends, I might have a little less mixed feelings about it.
I will confess to perhaps not celebrating, but appreciating the connection between his sociopathic stance on gun deaths and he himself joining a group he himself said we shouldn’t be so concerned about.
I understand finding comfort where you can, but consider: Kirk not being here to “see it through” assumes his death diminishes his impact. The opposite is true. Alive, he was one voice that could be countered, fact-checked, and eventually forgotten. Dead, he becomes eternal; forever young, forever wronged, forever useful to those who will absolutely be here to see it through. The solace is hollow when his absence strengthens everything he stood for.
Cool story bro.
Your “cool story bro” response is exactly the kind of thinking that creates space for demagogues to thrive. When someone offers strategic analysis about why celebrating political violence backfires, and you respond with a thought-terminating cliché, you’re demonstrating the same anti-intellectual reflex that makes populations vulnerable to manipulation.
Think about what made Charlie Kirk successful: he offered simple, emotionally satisfying answers to complex problems. “Your problems aren’t from complicated economic systems, it’s those people over there.” His audience loved him because he never asked them to think harder than a bumper sticker.
And here you are, faced with someone explaining why emotional satisfaction isn’t political victory, why martyrdom empowers the very ideas we need to defeat… and your response is a meme. You’re operating at exactly the level of discourse that Kirk counted on: where snark replaces strategy, where being dismissive feels like being strong, where “cool story bro” seems like a clever response to warnings about tactical disaster.
The movements that win understand complexity. The movements that lose mistake attitude for analysis. When you brush off strategic thinking with internet catchphrases, you’re not fighting against the Charlie Kirks of the world. You’re proving that their reduction of politics to tribal reflexes and emotional reactions was right all along.
The system that produces Charlie Kirks depends on people refusing to think beyond the satisfaction of the dunk, the own, the sick burn. Your dismissal isn’t rebellion; it’s compliance with the exact intellectual laziness that powerful interests count on to keep populations manageable and movements ineffective.
I said good story, because it reads a lot like you trying to convince yourself. I’m also very tired of hearing essentially “protest the right way” whenever anyone actually does something to improve the country.
Youll probably type out 8 more paragraphs of nonsense amounting to you being too afraid to admit when a bad thing results in good things.
Instead of telling me how I feel, name a single “good thing” that has resulted.
Kirk’s organization is stronger, his ideas are martyred, his followers are more radicalized. You tell me I am afraid, but I am observing reality; historical and present.
Show me the improvement, because all I see is fascists getting exactly what they want.
You are the one who made a point, so you maybe should defend that instead? If this action has caused nothing but harm, prove it.
They were getting that anyway.