Why is every politician pretending this dude’s entire platform wasn’t just vitriolic hate?
You can both denounce Charlie Kirk and everything he stood for and also denounce political violence.
Both can be valid stances.
I’m just frustrated that very very few people including Sanders are remarking on that first part. He spread hate speech and misinformation. He and Trump’s rhetoric and actions are what led to this point.
Was so pissed off at Daily Show’s coverage last night when Kosta attacked Warren and the guy from msnbc calling a spade a spade.
The thing is everyone that would ever be inclined to believe that of Charlie Kirk already knows. To call him out posthumously doesn’t tend to sway people that listened to him, it makes those people double down.
Ironically, this strategy probably makes the most of his death. People get to see the risks his behavior incurred while also seeing a peaceable path to de-escalation.
Controlled opposition.
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“A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views,”
You can’t debate with “Black people are inferior genetically”. Thats not a good faith argument. It drags the entire country down. Charlie Kirk was not debating or sharing valid views. Democracies do not survive with the populace is uneducated and fed hateful viewpoints. So, no, I cannot denounce his killing. No more than I can denounce the killing of Mussolini or the suicide of Hitler. He caused death and havoc in the exact same way.
Love Bernie, but this:
But bottom line, if we honestly believe in democracy, if we believe in freedom, all of us must be loud and clear: Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned.
They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it. That’s the core of the problem.
Yep, same people on the right who are pissed and talking shit…talked shit when the 3 dems in Minnesota were attacked and one killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/minnesota-lawmaker-killings-misinformation-rightwing
Shit isn’t even 6 months old.
Meanwhile, the Confederates are targeting anyone that they say celebrated Kirk’s death. Some people have already lost their jobs, the Confederates may be planning even darker things.
Yeah, while I agree with the sentiment, the fact that he didn’t call out that Republicans are explicitly calling for political violence extremely loudly and not condemning Republican leadership for not tamping that shit down right now is disappointing.
I get the frustration, but he managed to get a bunch of right wingers to share and endorse his message. He got right wing people to commend a message that included calling out January 6th.
The outcome did more for getting right wing people to work toward tamping that down than focusing on calling them out ever would. Call them out when they are their most scared and they get defensive and escalate. Recognize their troubles right alongside their sins and you get a more productive response.
This is why I’d be a bad politician. I couldn’t stomach pretending that the party leadership cares about democracy or fair play
But we do, and we must insist upon democratic ideals until the very last. Even when our boots hit the streets and the lines are drawn. If we sink to their level, we’ll lose. They’ve been there a long time, they are seasoned pros. The problem is they use that against us, so we need to play a smarter game. Not dumb ourselves down to their level.
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance.
Yes, I agree with this. That doesn’t say take away democracy to preserve it though. That’s talking about tolerance and censorship, which I agree with. If we believe in democracy, we must put our faith into it. I’m not suggesting we ignore great evils, but I am suggesting we don’t become evil to fight evil, because becoming the thing you hate just to fight it means you end up fighting yourself. You’ve lost. You’ve proven your ideal is no ideal at all.
What you’re saying is shit we’re fed by comic books and Hollywood. In the real world when you’re dealing with real psychopaths and where they have overwhelmingly taken control of government via decscdes of surpression lies and propaganda, the comic book logic doesn’t work.
In the movies, the bad guy always pays for his transgressions.
In the real world a child rapists, treasonus piece of shit has been re-elected. Twice…
You get the country you fight for. People drive policy. It was allowed to get this bad because people were too busy and distracted to care about what was happening “over there”. Now it’s all come home to roost. Movies, comic books and plain old books teach us these things because they are what humans do, not in fantasy, but in reality. They tell us truths we don’t want to see, and the blue prints for how to fight this kind of injustice are there too, even in your own goddamn history books. Organized protest and civil unrest are your main options. Hit them where it hurts, in their pocket books. “They” are nothing without “us”.
They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it.
I would make the argument here that they don’t know what democracy is, at least not in terms that they can directly make applicable to their lives, their homes, their immediate concerns. To most Americans, not just the right, terms like “democracy” carry a negative connotation now.
This is also by design, we have so many conflicting ideologies screaming at each other through bot-wars and large-scale social manipulation efforts and psy-ops that people have pretty much tuned out, and there are plenty of factions who want that result as well and have worked to amplify the worst ideas and thoughts from every angle of every issue.
The last three election cycles saw the highest voter turnout in American history, so it’s not that people aren’t involved in politics, they just don’t really have any idea what’s going on. Exit polling showed most people were almost ambivalent towards either candidate and didn’t really have a clue who to vote for and just went with their concerns over grocery prices and whatever their facebook feed was showing them.
People don’t believe in democracy because they don’t believe we have a working government because everyone, everywhere is locked into their own feeds, their own perspectives of the world, they are not sharing realities and not talking to each other.
Conservatives are largely dumber than dirt, you can sway most of them to believe in socialism and freedom of identity and ANY other issue you care about if you engage them directly and know how to push their emotional buttons in specific ways. But we don’t do that anymore because we have no shared spaces, no shared perspective, no single source of truth that we can even debate or engage with each other about anymore, so the nation is splintering into a million shards that hate each other.
“A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views,”
Except that’s not what America is today…
There’s nothing wrong with working towards a better America, it’s what we should all be doing…
But a war has never been won with hugs. And whether we want to be in it or not, we’re in a war against fascism.
I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but it bares repeating:
Work for the world you want to live in, prepare for the world you already live in
Why include ‘humiliated’ as something people should be protected from for expressing their political views? Fascists should absolutely be humiliated when they spew their bile in public. The first amendment is supposed to protect you from state censorship, not social pressure or ostracization.
I’m not Bernie Sanders…
Question wasn’t directed at you, I was just putting it out there.
Question wasn’t directed at you
I mean, it literally was…
That’s how replies work.
But Id be really surprised if explaining helps.
We use social media a bit differently, there’s no need to be rude. Replies on a public forum are a one-to-many communication. I replied to your comment to establish the context, but the question was directed to no one in particular. It was intended to foster discussion.
Were the British soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War, or the Rebels Killed in the Civil War, or the Nazis killed in WW2 victims of political violence?
Sometimes a political spectrum becomes stretched so wide that there can be no middle ground. No amount of “spirited debate” is going to reach a compromise about who is due their life and freedom. The wolf and the sheep are never going to agree on what is for dinner.
Charlie Kirk absolutely leaves a legacy of misery and death. He shares blame for Jan 6, mass shootings, and numerous hate crimes. He may have never pulled a trigger himself, but the right wing terrorism he encouraged leaves the blood on his hands just the same.
Well said.
Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned.
Love ya Bernie, but I gotta disagree on this one. What he’s saying is pretty much just more ‘paradox of tolerance’ that leads to the ratchet clicking further right.
People keep shunning what happened to Kirk as a crazy extreme response to a “difference of opinion” as though we’re discussing a budget proposal for a new bridge or something. And yeah, with shit like that there’s a justifiable argument to be made by both sides.
When the ‘opinion’ being advocated for is one that seeks to deny life or liberty because of their skin color or gender or w/e, it stops being a debate and instead becomes a fight for survival. That person is literally an enemy combatant spending their life trying to kill you. And when someone is trying to kill you, violence is absolutely a justifiable response.
…and I know that’s not why the shooter killed Kirk, but even if it was a dark skinned /gay/trans/muslim/<insert target of right wing bigotry here> who shot Kirk in response to his vitriol toward them, that’s still fucking justified because he spent his life promoting violence to those people.
So no, if your ideology is that you hate people because of what’s in their pants or the color of their skin or w/e, then you’re a piece of shit; if you act on that ideology, then you’re an existential threat to those people, and if that culminates with a bullet in your carotid artery then your death will mark a sudden reduction of evil and hatred - and that is worth celebrating.
Evil fuckers like Charlie Kirk should never be tolerated.
“I have a point of view that is different than yours — that’s great. Let’s argue it out.”
Unfortunately it doesn’t work out that way with these people. They almost always argue in bad faith, don’t shy away from lying and are happy to falsely smear people with shit just so that they can win political points. They know that even if their lies are discovered it won’t have any consequences for them but the stink of the shit that they hurled at their opponents will remain for a long time.
Words have repercussions, always have and always will.
It’s certainly better than some statements I have seen, but it ignores the commonplace violence inflicted on non-elites every day.
The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual, crime.
Unfortunately I don’t believe a single politician would be willing to tell it how it actually is when it comes to Charlie Kirk and shitheads like him.
The leftist politicians have to play it safe to not hurt the fragile fee fees of the liberal voters.
Liberal politicians historically and currently vastly prefer Nazism over basic common sense pro-labor policies of any kind.
And the Nazis are Nazis.
Since when has America been about a free and democratic society?
Or are we just taking platitudes as fact now?
Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned.
Apparently Bernie makes an exception for institutionalized political violence, since he did not mention capital punishment, abortion bans, the targeting and murder of queer people, school shootings by right wing radicalized youths, or more… only politicians. Political violence is more than targeting someone for political speech, it is villainizing minorities, depriving them of opportunities and needs, suppressing/oppressing/excluding them from normal public life, or even implying they are “other” by roundabout means. Violence is more than a bullet, knife, or bomb. Violence can be indirect. Violence can take the form of hateful, fearful words and ideas. It can foment and spread.
None of it can be tolerated, but when the victims are out of options what are they to do? Talk? Bullies don’t communicate with words but with fists. Are we to submit? To lie down and die? To give up?
I reject this blind idealism that includes no constructive action to back it up. It’s little more than a plea to voluntarily lie down while the steamroller runs us over.
Any other take deepens the divide, we can’t let that happen. Trump and the billionaires want civil war, so they can throw out our government and install a dictatorship.
We don’t know why this happened so why are we calling this political violence?
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Still technically speculating though
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Don’t know? Don’t be daft.
We don’t know. It is likely it is political but for all we know he didn’t think Kirk was racist enough.
Basically all us do not shoot people we disagree with. 300,000,000 million citizens and a glut of weaponry, doesn’t he get what Charlie Kirk meant by this is the price we pay? You will never plug all the holes, and we massively increase the chance a gun slips through along with the killer, and this is what will happen for as long as our culture and laws stay the same.
Take all the people Charlie Kirk has debated. Consider the surface area. All the people who must have had guns. And yet essentially every single person didn’t kill him.
There were more people debating him peacefully that day than trying to assassinate him. He was having his ideas dismantled by simple logic, as always, and ignoring it, as always. He just happened to be shot that day. They act like life is a simulation that’s meant to bend the rules for them rather than subjecting them to the same roll of the die as everyone else.
Yeah there’s a ton of main character syndrome from the lot of them. None of them feared gun violence. The women seemed to never care that their side was pushing for the Christian version of Iran and that they personally would suffer in that situation.
