[Ammi]

Originally Posted by Maru

There's been a progressive rise in sociopathy that's been missed, I think. So it turns out even the meekest amongst us can morph into hardened criminals seemingly overnight.

And we may very well be interacting with good numbers of these people on the regular, without our knowledge (especially online). Those little interactions here and there add up and influence our worldview and probably not for the greater good...

…a section taken from an article that I was reading yesterday ….

The shooting comes as a series of incidents over the past year show an increased level of violence related to political disagreements or intended to achieve political goals.

Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.

Surveys have shown increased acceptance of using violence for political aims across party spectrums. Robert Pape, who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, wrote in the New York Times that a survey his team conducted in May was its “most worrisome yet”. “About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions,” he wrote.

…it’s what we have been saying and fearing for so long, though and has become now what we’re seeing…how the world has become divided and for all and any, is becoming so dangerous…and while all media’s encourage and nurture this ‘battleground’ of divide and violence, the governments are gaining more and more control ….

[Maru]

Originally Posted by Ammi

…a section taken from an article that I was reading yesterday ….

The shooting comes as a series of incidents over the past year show an increased level of violence related to political disagreements or intended to achieve political goals.

Spoiler:

Trump faced two assassination attempts in 2024. Last December, a shooter targeted and killed the head of United Healthcare. Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro’s home was burned in an arson attack in April. Judges and elected officials report increased threats and harassment. Several instances of violence have stemmed from opposition to the Gaza war. In June, a man dressed as a police officer shot and killed a Democratic Minnesota state lawmaker and her husband, and wounded another state lawmaker and his wife. A gunman attacked the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in August, killing a police officer.

Surveys have shown increased acceptance of using violence for political aims across party spectrums. Robert Pape, who directs the Chicago Project on Security and Threats, wrote in the New York Times that a survey his team conducted in May was its “most worrisome yet”. “About 40 percent of Democrats supported the use of force to remove Mr. Trump from the presidency, and about 25 percent of Republicans supported the use of the military to stop protests against Mr. Trump’s agenda. These numbers more than doubled since last fall, when we asked similar questions,” he wrote.

…it’s what we have been saying and fearing for so long, though and has become now what we’re seeing…how the world has become divided and for all and any, is becoming so dangerous…and while all media’s encourage and nurture this ‘battleground’ of divide and violence, the governments are gaining more and more control ….

Funny. I just posted an article that also listed a lot of these.

And these are just national stories. There's been local incidents like attacks or threats against judges, etc. That's one reason I started the Local News thread because a lot of things are happening, but they just don't get the same traction media-wise.

For whatever reason, the Minnesota one really stuck with me. I remember watching a clip of her addressing a vote she had just made. She was utterly terrified having to face her constituents. Then she was killed shortly after that...

[Ammi]

Originally Posted by Maru

Funny. I just posted an article that also listed a lot of these.

And these are just national stories. There's been local incidents like attacks or threats against judges, etc. That's one reason I started the Local News thread because a lot of things are happening, but they just don't get the same traction media-wise.

For whatever reason, the Minnesota one really stuck with me. I remember watching a clip of her addressing a vote she had just made. She was utterly terrified having to face her constituents. Then she was killed shortly after that...

…the horrific acts and taking of lives in themselves are so concerning but what’s also become terrifying is a public apathy of the common people for the slaughter of human life that I for sure have never known before …dependant on eho the victim is/victims are….

[Ammi]

…this doesn’t have the feel of a ‘random shooter’…the shot in itself was aimed in its deadliness …and that person must have positioned themselves so precisely in their planning…plus with all of the security resources surrounding the event and being moments away in being summoned…?…that person had their flight path planned successfully from their shooting position…doesn’t this feel very ‘professional’….

[BBXX]

I’m stunned by this. Nobody’s death should be celebrated, but I understand why some aren’t mourning him either.

Charlie Kirk had some abhorrent views, and as much as those views disgust me he has a right to have them and while others have a right to call them what they are and question him, nobody has a right to take another life.

I feel sorry for his family.

Charlie Kirk once said that we can’t let shooting victims emotionally hijack the narrative and so hopefully Trump follows through with his wishes and we can move on and let his family grieve in private without politicising Charlie’s death - because it’s absolutely what he wouldn’t want…

[Ammi]

…so the shooter wasn’t the shooter, then…and they remain out there, which obviously keeps the lives of others at risk from that same hand and that same fate…

[bots]

Originally Posted by Ammi

…so the shooter wasn’t the shooter, then…and they remain out there, which obviously keeps the lives of others at risk from that same hand and that same fate…

Some people are saying it was a shooter with a rifle on a nearby roof. I would think they could verify that fairly quickly.

I would be concerned that it encourages nutters to go out and shoot those that don't share their political opinions because america is building up to a powder keg.

[Mystic Mock]

Originally Posted by BBXX

I’m stunned by this. Nobody’s death should be celebrated, but I understand why some aren’t mourning him either.

Charlie Kirk had some abhorrent views, and as much as those views disgust me he has a right to have them and while others have a right to call them what they are and question him, nobody has a right to take another life.

I feel sorry for his family.

Charlie Kirk once said that we can’t let shooting victims emotionally hijack the narrative and so hopefully Trump follows through with his wishes and we can move on and let his family grieve in private without politicising Charlie’s death - because it’s absolutely what he wouldn’t want…

This.

[Maru]

MAUREEN CALLAHAN: Charlie Kirk's body wasn't even cold... before the fighting started again. Do these ghouls not see where this is head
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-callahan.html

Shot in the neck.

Not the head or the heart, but the neck — the throat, really, and that seems deliberate: Shut Charlie Kirk up, forever.

A self-made autodidact with no college education, a husband and father of two, 31-year-old Kirk embodied the American dream.

Through grit, hard work and ingenuity, he bypassed traditional media to become a podcasting powerhouse and an unofficial adviser to President Trump.

As the founder, face and CEO of Turning Point USA, he routinely toured college campuses — and it was at Utah Valley University that Kirk was shot in the neck while speaking.

Approximately four hours later, President Trump announced, on Truth Social, that Kirk had died.

'The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!'

Before Kirk's death was confirmed, the ghouls over at MSNBC were blaming the victim — a man shot while exercising free speech, which you'd think media pundits would understand.

Respect, even. But no.

Spoiler:

Host Katy Tur walked right up to saying that Kirk had it coming, calling him 'divisive' and 'polarizing.'

Her guest, political analyst Matthew Dowd, went further — theorizing that rednecks on the right might have shot Kirk by accident.

'We don't know if this is a supporter shooting their gun off in celebration,' Dowd said.

Let that sink in.

Dowd is a liberal elite, a fixture of establishment Democrats and media, with the temerity to call Kirk's followers reckless and dumb enough to shoot their own hero out of misguided excitement.

Of course something this awful, this preventable and tragic, was bound to happen.

One only needs to hear the cynical, sub-human rhetoric in left-leaning media — and a culture that valorizes a stone-cold killer like Luigi Mangione — to realize that we now most resemble America circa 1963-1968.

JFK, assassinated in November 1963. Martin Luther King, assassinated in April 1968. Bobby Kennedy, assassinated two months later in June.

New generations now know the fear, the panic, the despair of mortal political grievance.

Have we really learned nothing?

President Trump, himself shot in Butler, PA just months before the 2024 presidential election. A second would-be assassin arrested just two months later, in September, at Trump's golf course.

June 2025: In the early morning hours of June 14, Minnesota state senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot upon opening their door to a man dressed as law enforcement. The shooter then went to the residence of former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, Mark, and murdered them in their home in a targeted political assassination. (The Hoffmans survived.)

Her guest, political analyst Matthew Dowd (pictured), went further — theorizing that rednecks on the right might have shot Kirk by accident

April 13, 2025: An arsonist firebombed the home of PA governor Josh Shapiro, who was inside with his wife and children, by a would-be assassin who said he was motivated by what Shapiro 'wants to do to Palestine'.

October 28, 2022: Paul Pelosi, the elderly husband of then-House Speaker Nancy, is assaulted in their San Francisco home by a man wielding a clawhammer. Pelosi survived but required skull surgery.

June 14, 2017: House Majority Whip Steve Scalise is shot and critically injured in a mass shooting at the annual Congressional baseball game in Alexandria, Virginia.

January 8, 2011: U.S. Representative Gabby Giffords is shot in the head by a would-be assassin while holding a 'Congress on Your Corner' meet-and-greet outside a Safeway in Casas Adobes, Arizona.

And that's just a sampling for this millennium.

Kirk's assassination is different, of course, because he wasn't an elected official. He was a thinker, an author, a podcast host and a commentator who believed in the free expression of ideas.

Who reveled in the parry, the provocative idea, the engagement with the opposing political party.

But orthodoxy of thought no longer allows for that.

Orthodoxy of thought requires that the mainstream media falls in line when Trump is compared to Adolf Hitler or is called an authoritarian madman intent on destroying democracy.

It requires that friends and family members of good faith, in otherwise good standing, be excised and excommunicated for having different beliefs — the long hangover of COVID, lockdowns, vaccine-and-mask mandates.

We can't even come together to mourn the loss of life. It depends how you voted, just like everything else circa now: What side are you on?

When Rep. Lauren Boebert asked for a moment of silence for Kirk on the House floor, she was met with a chorus of 'NO!' from Democrats.

Will it be enough, for those who seek to excuse or explain away Kirk's assassination, that Barack Obama has outright condemned such medieval savagery?

'This kind of political violence has no place in our democracy,' he wrote on X. 'Michelle and I will be praying for Charlie's family tonight, especially his wife Erika and their two young children'.

President Trump lowered the American flag that flies atop the White House to half-mast and has ordered all flags to be lowered until Sunday night.

Rest in peace Charlie Kirk. You were an increasingly rare breed: A true believer who sought to converse — and connect — with your opponents.

[Crimson Dynamo]

[arista]

The Evil Killer fired the long-range rifle
from up high.


And got away................

[arista]

Not nice for his Wife and kids

[BBXX]

Hopefully the maniac is found and locked up, surely they would have been caught on CCTV somewhere around the campus?

[arista]

Originally Posted by BBXX

Hopefully the maniac is found and locked up, surely they would have been caught on CCTV somewhere around the campus?

Time will tell


I assume he drove away

[Niamh.]

Originally Posted by BBXX

Hopefully the maniac is found and locked up, surely they would have been caught on CCTV somewhere around the campus?

You would think. I'm sure the FBI will find whoever did it, I doubt they are some criminal mastermind

[Parmy]

The murder of Charlie Kirk is a tragedy, and a sign of the utter desperation and cowardice of those who could not defeat him in argument. Charlie Kirk has been killed not for espousing extremist views - because he didn’t. He has been killed for saying things that used to be simple common sense. He has been killed because he had the courage to stand up publicly for reasonable opinions held by millions and millions of ordinary people both in the US and Britain. The world has a shining new martyr to free speech.

Our thoughts and prayers are with his family and loved ones.


Former Prime minister
Boris Johnson

[Ammi]

Originally Posted by BBXX

Hopefully the maniac is found and locked up, surely they would have been caught on CCTV somewhere around the campus?

Originally Posted by arista

Time will tell


I assume he drove away

…or is part of the university/campus/staff or whatever and still there…’blended’ in to their surroundings before their heinous act and gone back to ‘blending in’…?…

[Crimson Dynamo]

A message from President Donald Trump

https://x.com/realDonaldTrump/status...47311718269341

[arista]

The One Good Thing about Charlie,
he would debate inside Universities

[Ammi]

Originally Posted by arista

The One Good Thing about Charlie,
he would debate inside Universities

…of course, but that’s something that is going to have to be looked at going forward…the ‘openness of speech’ is one thing but the openness of the venue which didn’t give him safety is something that needs to be addressed for all other speakers…

[Crimson Dynamo]

[BBXX]

Turning this into a left v right issue is so easy to do but the truth is, extremes of both political scales act terribly during times like this. To suggest this gross behaviour only comes from the left is disingenuous because it’s based in falsehood.

This is a man who said if his daughter was to get pregnant as a child from the product of rape he would make her carry the baby to term. To suggest he didn’t hold extremist views is wrong.

Having said all that, nobody deserves to be killed while doing their job, even if that involves spouting outlandish views that many find awful.

He once said empathy is a weakness, so I shan’t hold out any for him, but I will for his family: his wife and most of all his children.

It’s a horrendous thing to happen and is a further example of why gun control is so important.

[Cherie]

Originally Posted by BBXX

Turning this into a left v right issue is so easy to do but the truth is, extremes of both political scales act terribly during times like this. To suggest this gross behaviour only comes from the left is disingenuous because it’s based in falsehood.

This is a man who said if his daughter was to get pregnant as a child from the product of rape he would make her carry the baby to term. To suggest he didn’t hold extremist views is wrong.

Having said all that, nobody deserves to be killed while doing their job, even if that involves spouting outlandish views that many find awful.

He once said empathy is a weakness, so I shan’t hold out any for him, but I will for his family: his wife and most of all his children.

It’s a horrendous thing to happen and is a further example of why gun control is so important.

I wonder if that had actually happened that he would follow through, most of these people with extremely controversial views are more in the brigade of 'do as I say, not as I do' and I also agree with your point that both sides of the extreme are as bad as each other, that said it was just words, just his views, yes he had influence over some but that should never have ended in an assasination, I hope there wont be further tit for tat now

[Cherie]

James O Brien has just admitted on air he hadn't heard of this man or had most of his colleagues so at least I am not alone in never having heard of him or his views

[Ammi]

…a killer is a killer and that’s very person specific, let’s not wrap it up in left or right …we have no idea who Charlie Kirk’s killer is even and that’s hugely terrifying because they’re still out there with their thirst to kill…