Charlie Kirk shot at UVU in Orem

[canpakes]

Additionally, ref the trans accusation, you’ll actually see femboys fetishized routinely, it could be shock value, it could be hypocrisy, or any other number of things. There’s a whole ecosystem of Groypers and alt-Right types that are gay, pretend to be gay, engage in gay sex, and pretend to engage in gay sex. It ranges from in-group humor to outright homosexuality; it wouldn’t be the first time a far-Right persona’s life is very different from their public facing facade.

As Hound seems to be hinting that he’s well-established enough within that ecosystem to the point of preparing to share their ‘reports’, then I await with interest regarding what he and his ‘friends’ will present for our consideration.

[Doctor CamNC4Me]

I don't think so Gunnar, Ajax is cluster A for sure; not Cluster B. I think he knows he's not being honest, but it's more of a desperation thing. Ajax is very sincere in his delusions, unlike many if not most of the media personalities he admires.

I just watched a clip of a Utah official making a public announcement. You can tell he's Mormon. He says in his priesthood voice, that during the manhunt, he'd hoped it would be someone from out of state or international and not one of their own, but sure enough it was one of their own. I don't think he meant anything bad by it, but I don't think he realized the truly horrific implications of what he said.

As this began, Ajax didn't hesitate to blame those he hated most and can't psychologically deal with the fact that it might be one of his own. The degree to which many media personalities on the right have used this to call for bigger crackdowns and war and killing and the list just doesn't end makes you wonder if it was the right who were secretly hoping for something like this to happen so that they'd have an excuse to strike back.

Yep, by sharing “Catch, fascist!”, groypers signal solidarity in being persecuted and also laugh at what they frame as overzealous accusations from liberals, leftists, or “the regime.” It’s a fairly common in-group meme. He was dropping a shout-out to his online social set.

- Doc

[Gunnar]

I don't think so Gunnar, Ajax is cluster A for sure; not Cluster B. I think he knows he's not being honest, but it's more of a desperation thing. Ajax is very sincere in his delusions, unlike many if not most of the media personalities he admires.

As I said before, you may well be right, perhaps more likely so than I. I value your intellect and the reasonableness of your arguments. I looked up the differences between cluster A and B personality disorders, and I agree that cluster A seems to be a better fit, though I don't know that I would entirely rule out any trace of Cluster B. Either way, it seems both remarkable and sad to me that someone with the scientific background that an optometrist would need to have for his profession would have the kind of mindset Ajax ostensibly has.

I just watched a clip of a Utah official making a public announcement. You can tell he's Mormon. He says in his priesthood voice, that during the manhunt, he'd hoped it would be someone from out of state or international and not one of their own, but sure enough it was one of their own. I don't think he meant anything bad by it, but I don't think he realized the truly horrific implications of what he said.

It was noted that the UTAH media seemed a bit hesitant about explicitly confirming that he and his family were active LDS. They did not exactly lie, though. They just said that the family were active churchgoers and that his father was a pastor or church official, which likely meant that his father was a Mormon bishop. I can understand that they, like most people, might be inclined to downplay their relationship with a member of their group who did something so heinous.

As this began, Ajax didn't hesitate to blame those he hated most and can't psychologically deal with the fact that it might be one of his own. The degree to which many media personalities on the right have used this to call for bigger crackdowns and war and killing and the list just doesn't end makes you wonder if it was the right who were secretly hoping for something like this to happen so that they'd have an excuse to strike back.

Yes. I don't doubt that they were indeed secretly hoping something bad would happen that they could spin into an excuse to blame and demonize Democrats for. They disgraced and embarrassed themselves by so eagerly jumping to the conclusion without any evidence whatsoever that it must have be some right-wing extremist who was the perpetrator.

[Some Schmo]

The right wing in this country is all the heinous crap they pretend to fear from the left. That's just a fact. Hypocrisy and projection is their brand. ajax and idiots like him are afraid of themselves, and they should be. They're dangerous retards.

[Moksha]

Yep, by sharing “Catch, fascist!”, groypers signal solidarity in being persecuted and also laugh at what they frame as overzealous accusations from liberals, leftists, or “the regime.” It’s a fairly common in-group meme. He was dropping a shout-out to his online social set.

- Doc

So Trump can pardon him and feel good about it. Fox News can also get behind it.

[Gunnar]

The right wing in this country is all the heinous crap they pretend to fear from the left. That's just a fact. Hypocrisy and projection is their brand. ajax and idiots like him are afraid of themselves, and they should be. Their[sic] dangerous retards.

I agree that they're dangerous to all who advocate the highest ideals of democracy, freedom of religion and expression, and genuine equity and equality under the law, regardless of gender, ethnicity or place of origin. I swear that they seem to believe that Christ's ideals of dealing honestly, charitably and equitably with one's fellow beings is little more than an evil, sinister Marxist plot!

[Chap]

This article makes an important point about Kirk - in his college 'debates' he was not so much engaging in calm and reasoned debate with opponents on equal terms, with each side getting its say, but looking for 'own the libs' material to edit and put online.

An example occurred in his last few minutes of life (If I recall correctly). A questioner asked something close to "How many perpetrators of recent mass shootings have been trans people?" . A reasonable answer might have been "<number>%", or "all of them" or "I don't know - what do you say it is?". Instead he slipped past the problem by saying "too many", thus giving the impression that there were rather a high proportion of them (which is almost certainly not the case). That is not fair and open debating.

Charlie Kirk’s killing was a tragedy. But we must not rewrite his life
Moira Donegan
In the wake of horror, honest accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also become dangerous
The Guardian, Sun 14 Sep 2025 14.00 BST

Maybe it is the gruesome suddenness of his death that has made so many people forget the realities of Charlie Kirk’s life. After the 31-year-old rightwing influencer was shot dead at a college campus appearance in Utah on Wednesday, many commentators rushed to condemn political violence, on the one hand, and to issue warm tributes to Kirk’s life, on the other. The former of these is legitimate: that political policy should not be determined by force, or political disagreements settled through homicidal violence, is a baseline precondition of not just a democratic form of government, but of any functional society. The latter, perhaps, can be explained by the admirable human impulse towards gentleness and reconciliation. The horror and shock of Kirk’s assassination prompted some to offer their generosity, and their sympathy, to the dead man.

Perhaps it was these noble gestures toward generosity and sympathy that led some commentators to be more laudatory to Kirk’s memory than an honest recounting of his life would allow. In the days following Kirk’s death, several bewilderingly inaccurate postmortem hagiographies have appeared, including from prominent voices on the left and center, that seem to wish that the tragedy of Kirk’s death could retroactively have given him a more honorable life.

The most egregious of these came from Ezra Klein, a center-left columnist at the New York Times known for his ability to channel and influence elite opinion. In a piece published the morning after Kirk’s death, titled Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way, Klein made a series of strained, bizarre and outright untrue assertions about Kirk’s career and character. Kirk, Klein argued, was, if anything, an example of civic virtue. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” Klein said. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.” Klein’s point was that political persuasion – the rational debate of ideas between equals in which violence is unthinkable and good faith is presumed – is a cornerstone of liberal democracy, the kind of thing we should all be striving for, the kind of thing we need more of. “American politics has sides,” Klein continued. “There is no use pretending it doesn’t. But both sides are meant to be on the same side of a larger project – we are all, or most of us, anyway, trying to maintain the viability of the American experiment.”

Fair enough, I suppose, on its merits, but such a description of reasoned, honest, good-faith debate is so inaccurate a description of what Charlie Kirk engaged in on college campuses – in his series of large, staged events where he “debated” untrained liberal undergraduates with cameras rolling – that it reads as willfully naïve, if not outright dishonest. Charlie Kirk’s “debates” were aggressive, unequal, trolling affairs, in which he sought to provoke his interlocutors to distress, shouted them down and belittled them, spewed hateful rhetoric about queer and trans people, women, Black people, immigrants and Muslims, and selectively edited the ensuing footage to create maximally viral content in which his fans could witness him humiliating the liberals and leftists they perceived to be their enemies. This was not “debate”; it was not reasoned, good-faith discourse; it was not the kind of fair deliberation that democracy relies on. It was a mockery of those things.

If reasoned debate is a precondition of a liberal democracy, there are other preconditions as well. A state cannot be called democratic if it does not offer equal protection of the law – if not all of its citizens are awarded the same dignity by their government and the same vote, same rights of expression and same prerogatives before courts and elected officials in their attempts to influence its policies and navigate its laws. Civic equality – not just civil engagement – is central to the American experiment, too. It is not to excuse his murder to be honest that Kirk opposed that equality. Some historians and political scientists have argued that the United States did not become a democracy until the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, the laws that intended to end de jure segregation and racist voter suppression. But Kirk opposed the Civil Rights Act, calling it a “huge mistake”. He endorsed the racist so-called “great replacement theory”, in which nefarious actors (usually cast as Jewish people) are seeking to “replace” America’s white population with immigrants, saying it was “well under way every day at our southern border”. On his podcast, he hosted a “slavery apologist” and a man who said that after women “got, you know, the right to vote – after that, it all went downhill”. Kirk himself once said that Black women – he named Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson – “do not have the brain power to be taken seriously”. He condemned Democrats for supposedly wanting to make the US “less white”, and claimed: “There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution.” (It is.) And yet Ezra Klein praised Kirk’s “moxie”. One wonders what such a euphemism is meant to obscure.

In the rush to canonize Kirk and revise his history, honest accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also become dangerous. In the days since his death, journalists, media personalities and others who have not been sufficiently laudatory to Kirk in public have lost their jobs for telling the truth about his life. Matthew Dowd, a Republican political consultant, was fired from MSNBC after saying that Kirk had spoken “hateful words”. In Phoenix, a sports writer was fired for criticizing euphemistic accounts of Kirk’s beliefs. “‘Political differences’ are not the same thing as spewing hateful rhetoric on a daily basis,” he wrote in a social media post. Many of those eulogizing Kirk want to paint him as a champion of free speech, as a man who peddled in honest inquiry, uninhibited expression and the open exchange of ideas. This is a laughably inaccurate picture of the man’s work; it is in these punishments of those who oppose him that we can see a truer reflection of Kirk’s values.

I do not find it hard to condemn political violence. To me, to say that Kirk should not have been murdered is the easiest thing in the world. No one should be shot, be they rightwing influencers, or schoolchildren, or grocery shoppers, or churchgoers. It is easy for me, even, to show sympathy for the humanity of Charlie Kirk, who, for everything else he was, was a human being who has now been robbed of the opportunity to learn, grow, and repent. But such commitments – to human life, to nonviolence, to a faith in the possibility of redemption and reconciliation – need not lead us to lie to ourselves about Charlie Kirk. The same values that make us horrified at his violent death are the ones that should embolden our commitment to defeating the politics he worked for in life.

Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist

[Gunnar]

This article makes an important point about Kirk - in his college 'debates' he was not so much engaging in calm and reasoned debate with opponents on equal terms, with each side getting its say, but looking for 'own the libs' material to edit and put online.

An example occurred in his last few minutes of life (If I recall correctly). A questioner asked something close to "How many perpetrators of recent mass shootings have been trans people?" . A reasonable answer might have been "<number>%", or "all of them" or "I don't know - what do you say it is?". Instead he slipped past the problem by saying "too many", thus giving the impression that there were rather a high proportion of them (which is almost certainly not the case). That is not fair and open debating.

Charlie Kirk’s killing was a tragedy. But we must not rewrite his life
Moira Donegan
In the wake of horror, honest accountings of his life have not only become rare – they have also become dangerous
The Guardian, Sun 14 Sep 2025 14.00 BST

Thanks for posting that link, Chap! I could not agree more with both you and Moira Donegan! I think the survival of democracy and justice depends on heeding and acting on those warnings as soon and vigorously as possible!

[Doctor Steuss]

He’s alluding to “anonymous sources” stating his roommate is his transgender lover.
[...]

I'm trying to hold off on conclusions until there's some official charging documents made public, but for whatever it may be worth (and I don't like that I'm chronically online enough to know this) -- the Fuentes types, particularly those who are incels, recruit and groom "femboys."

The partner who is transitioning is actually another data point that supports him being a far-right Groyper type, just as much as being a data point for having progressive leanings. A way of thinking about it would be taking the far-right obsession with Rome, and sexuality within the Roman empire (at least how it's portrayed in media).

That said, if he had genuine feelings towards his transgender roommate/lover, it would help paint a fairly clean motive, given Kirk's long history of violent rhetoric (like his claim that killing gay people is part of God's divine law, after Ms. Rachel said she loves gay people because of Christ's words about love) towards LGBT people.

[Kishkumen]

This article makes an important point about Kirk - in his college 'debates' he was not so much engaging in calm and reasoned debate with opponents on equal terms, with each side getting its say, but looking for 'own the libs' material to edit and put online.

An example occurred in his last few minutes of life (If I recall correctly). A questioner asked something close to "How many perpetrators of recent mass shootings have been trans people?" . A reasonable answer might have been "<number>%", or "all of them" or "I don't know - what do you say it is?". Instead he slipped past the problem by saying "too many", thus giving the impression that there were rather a high proportion of them (which is almost certainly not the case). That is not fair and open debating.

I lament the lack of actual substantive debate in our media. It is easy to find "gotcha" material because the majority of venues and media mechanisms seem to be primed for "gotchas." There are few truly serious debates that are worth watching or listening to. Throwing a bunch of kids at a young guy like Mr. Kirk, who really is out doing what many others seek to do--what do we expect?--well, the results are pretty predictable. I don't think Mr. Kirk is to blame for his M.O., but I will say that I deeply disagreed with many of his opinions. College kids loved the experience of it, and I don't particularly blame them, but what does this kind of exchange really generate? Wisdom? Sound thinking? Improved logic?

I don't think so.