Be careful what you wish for?

Well, Charlie kind of got what he wanted, in that a bunch of students at a college in Utah got to watch the public execution of Charlie Kirk himself at a Turning Point USA event there. Apparently they were actually in the middle of a debate about mass shootings when it happened, too, so the shooter’s timing was undeniably good.

So I’d just got out of bed this afternoon, went to the bathroom for a piss, and Joe (housemate) popped out of his bedroom and said “Hey dude, they assassinated Charlie Kirk”. Piss… stopped. I was too shocked by this news to even let my bladder out. In a slight daze, I then made breakfast and sat down to read the news and see the reactions. The news was kind of awful, really…

…but so was Chuckles himself, of course. For him it was worth other people dying to maintain that bit in the constitution about well-regulated militias and keep the gun industry alive. How would he be feeling now if he’d actually survived this? Was it worth it for him to be a target? Would he be defending the right of whoever shot him to own that weapon?

And who did shoot him, anyway? FBI apparently caught two suspects but let both of them go, so as far as I know the shooter’s still out there. Who would have shot him? Well, radical woke leftists, obviously, like this guy, but Kyle Kulinski was speculating on his YT channel about it being a far right job, cos apparently Kirk had been fighting some Nazis online lately… cos you know what Nick Fuentes and his ilk think of the Republicans, i.e. the latter are insufficiently racist for them. Whoever it was, though, obviously meant to do it, unlike those “attempts” on Trump last year, this guy knew what he was doing…

As for the reactions online, well, thus far California governor Gavin Newsom offered probably the least helpful idea:

That’s a lovely sentiment Gavin expresses, of course, except that Charlie Kirk did not believe in any of those things except for violence. He believed in hate, and the destruction of the people and things he hated. That would’ve included Newsom, whose death in similar circumstances he would’ve welcomed. Oh Gav, you were doing so well recently with your posts mocking Trump’s posting style on Twatter… Otherwise I think the reactions have been predictable, hysterics from the right and tut-tutting from the left about not celebrating his death mixed with a possibly greater load of “yeah, but fuck that guy, he was scum”. And he was. I’m not going to mourn him or actively celebrate his end; equally, I won’t tell anyone else that they can’t or shouldn’t.

One of my own initial reactions was “shit, a fucking martyr is all these people need now”… I don’t WANT him dead, I want the crappy far-right “news” people like him and Ben Shapiro and Tim Ghoul and the rest neutralised and removed from any position where they can influence anyone. Them being dead—especially like this—certainly stops them saying anything further, but it doesn’t really help much otherwise. I think my own initial shock at the news was that it was specifically about him. Someone targeted Charlie Kirk, as opposed I suppose to an actual political figure or even another of the MAGA media mob. I’m still wondering why him.

So yeah, objectively murder is a bad thing. Also objectively, Charles James Kirk was a titanic piece of shit and failure as a human being. And on the same day as he died there was another school shooting, and the Republicans will never give a shot about that cos they never do, and the Democrats won’t be any better, and there will continue to be mass shootings and lots of hand-wringing about “this is not what America is” and more bullshit like that even though it 100% IS, and even now that it’s happened to one of their people the Republicans will still do absolutely nothing to stop this sort of thing from happening. Fuck him. Fuck them. Fuck that country and its national psychosis with guns. But at least people stopped talking Jeffrey Epstein for a while, didn’t they? Maybe THAT was the motive, who knows…