Trump ally and conservative pundit Charlie Kirk shot at Utah event [now reported deceased, same date 10SEP2025]

It’s been pretty successful so far for them. They’ve hurt and killed plenty of people, after all; Kirk was just one guy. And their violence has had no noticeable negative effects on their agenda and if anything appears to have helped, for all the speech-making about how “violence doesn’t work”, it certainly seems to have worked for them. Of course, having the police on their side no doubt helps with that.

But really; we do seem headed into a situation where we can expect ever-increasing violence from the non-right wing parts of society for the simple reason that nothing else will be allowed to matter. If votes don’t matter, protests don’t matter (or get you killed), and laws don’t protect you people tend to eventually disregard all the lectures about “violence doesn’t work” and pick up a weapon. To lash out, if nothing else. And it’s not like the rest of us being non-violent has ever convinced the Right to return the favor.

Charlie Kirk was an evil, hateful, genuinely destructive man who actively worked to make life worse for people he didn’t like. His organization collected enemies lists and used them to attack and doxx those they saw as the opposition. These are not mere beliefs; these are actions coordinated by a sociopathic cultural arsonist. He was a talented grifter and fundraiser who had rapidly built an advocacy group and who had a bright future in the coming American dictatorship.

His death means the elimination of the next forty or fifty years of that work.

Also, I reject outright the handwringing that this will set off a powderkeg of authoritarian reprisal. The United States is already on a rocket-sled downhill to the end of democracy. This assassination does not enable anything that was not already on the agenda. At best it might accelerate events a little bit, but it does not make possible anything that was previously impossible. More likely, this assassination will just be a brief milepost, a burning trash can that is glimpsed out the window of the speeding bus a few seconds before it plunges off the cliff it was already heading toward.

Finally, a thought experiment:

Let’s assume some right-wing nutjob now tracks down and murders a left-wing grift-adjacent mouthpiece loosely equivalent to Kirk. Say, Seth Abramson.

Does the Foxosphere respond by amplifying their mournful condemnation of the rising bloodshed? Do they continue repeating the platitudes against political violence, and reserve criticism of the victim in the name of appealing for calm and peaceful dialog?

Or do they crow and pump their fists and bellow in approval? “That’s what you get, libruls, this is payback, he deserved it”?

No points for peeking at the answer in the back of the book, but you don’t need to. You already know the truth.

So. An evil man is dead. It won’t make any major difference to anything, but an evil man is dead. How is that not a good thing?

Chucklefuck was shot at the same time as three children were losing their lives to gun violence in Denver. Feeling bad about his death is, to quote Der Dumbass, “a waste of time”. He didn’t care that this happened to others, so I’m going to assume he went out happy he got to experience the same thing.

This.

I’m going to repeat what I’ve said before: I don’t celebrate anyone’s death, but sometimes I mourn that they lived in the first place.

Kirk’s death doesn’t erase all the damage he did during his lifetime. He actively worked to make the world a worse place and for what? Fame, money and influence? It is a hideous legacy to leave behind.

It always was gonna get worse. Whether it was Kirk or someone else, we’re on the blood path. Like a runaway train, we’ve been heading down that track for years. Even a national emergency/disaster like COVID, instead of uniting us, drove us further apart with Ivermectin & Hydroxychloroquine believers and oppositionally-defiant anti-masker sentiment.

It’s hard enough to agree on how to run a country, how to solve problems. When we can’t even agree on what is true, then it becomes that much more difficult. When I try to talk to my conservative friend about how Trump is making end-runs on the constitution, he doesn’t believe the executive order cites I have and brings up alleged DEI hiring outrages (with no cites) as a counter, as if, even if they were true, they were remotely on the same level. When one group has been brainwashed against believing anyone else but their in-group, been brainwashed into believing the other group is evil, then it becomes impossible to find common ground.

Now, one group cannot compromise with evil, and the other cannot compromise with batshit fascism, and they both get their reality from different news sources. This should never have been allowed to get to this point. I don’t know quite how to have stopped it, but despite all evidence to the contrary, I like to believe there are greater minds than mine to solve these things. . .somewhere.

This shooting doesn’t surprise me in the least. This follows the attack on Nancy Pelosi’s husband at their house, and the shooting of two Minnesota politicians There were more before that, and still more will follow. There will be gunfights in the streets. Lone gunmen on both sides will assassinate again. This is the same path we’ve been on for years, we’re just getting closer to the end.

The only reason I’ve heard of either him or Kirk is because YouTube keeps trying to figure out my political bubble by throwing both hard-right and hard-left content creators at me. In reality, I have no desire for either in my YouTube feed. I watch YouTube mainly for tips on crafts, particularly obscure fiber crafts, and funny bird videos. Alas, the algorithm seems most unhappy with me begin non-political in that venue.

I’m surprised by that, because I never get recommended left wing political content in my youtube feed and I’m open to it, but god forbid I watch a 12 second clip of Jordan Peterson by accident, it will be trying to shove that shit down my throat for 4 years.

Given how rapidly it appears he lost blood pressure to the brain, I don’t think we can presume any awareness or consciousness at all. He died doing what he loved (getting destroyed by the libs).

I would actually be able to take some pleasure if he momentarily thought he was going to die, without actually suffering physical harm. It would be good for all these bastards to feel some fright, but not to the point where anyone could wave the bloody shirt or claim revenge.

But Kirk will now become a cause celebre. It won’t just be conservative speakers who have to worry. Everyone of every political stripe will need to watch their backs. A liberal commentator will be shot before very long, it’s just a matter of time. We’re in a different world now.

I’m starting to wonder if the shooter was just a hired gun. He hit Kirk with such precision and then just disappeared. Like a pro.

What color crosswalk will Kirk get in Utah? And I wonder what would happen if hypothetically it was someone like Barron Trump (by which I mean someone so solidly in Trump’s camp) who did it? The contortions to justify it among MAGA would be hilarious.

I highly doubt it was any kind of pro. It’s too much of a low-reward high-risk job.

Reddish-brown? (Too soon?)

It was either somebody who was a pretty good long-range shooter or someone who got very lucky. And if it was a pro (and I admittedly have no idea), the reward would be “lots of money”.

Yes, but people with near-death experiences have reported that seconds can drag on for a very long time as the brain goes into time dilation in time of extreme distress/crisis. So even if Kirk was conscious for just a few seconds after being shot, it may have felt like minutes to him.

They had had a moment of silence at Yankees stadium before last night’s game, with a picture of Kirk up on the scoreboard. I feel like I’m going to puke.

Possibly because Trump has been scheduled to attend the Yankees vs Tigers game on 9/11 (today). So they know he is watching them and want to avoid having to include it as part of the 9/11 ceremony. Not that Trump won’t seize it as a political opportunity anyway to tie Kirks assassination to 9/11 terrorism.

Apparently, it’s South Park’s fault ..

Seriously, I first read that as “with a picture of Kirk up on the dartboard” and had to read it again to get it right.

You know it’s funny that we have about 1900 movies about professional hit men, but you almost never see actual stories about them in real life. Maybe some are good enough to cover their tracks and make it look something else, but the ratio of how much hit men exist in tv/movies to real life seems about about 10,000:1

Oh, I don’t think it was a professional hitman. I don’t really believe such a thing really exists. When I said “pro” I really meant just that it was well planned and efficient. Kind of like a guy with lots of experience in a deer stand.

Some part of me really is impressed by the cleanness and efficiency of the shot. It seems like all the attempts at such murders we’ve seen in the last decade plus have been a gunman going spray and pray.

Yeah, whoever this was, as I noted to somebody else, it wasn’t a weekend warrior with delusions of adequacy and a fetish for assault weaponry