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Eugene Volokh | 9.14.2025 3:00 AM
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Charlie Kirk's death was tragic, and his family and friends deserve our heartfelt sympathy. Assassination of political figures is thoroughly unacceptable.
That having been said, the ideas he advocated were authoritarian and vile. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/13/opinion/charlie-kirk-assassination.html
Is it available anywhere not behind a paywall?
You think his message is vile, but seems to resonate worldwide:
"Thousands of South Koreans marched through Seoul on September 13, 2025, honoring slain conservative activist Charlie Kirk with chants of "We are Charlie Kirk," American flags, and MAGA hats, organized by local conservative groups to blend anti-communist sentiments with Kirk's global right-wing messages. Kirk, 31, was fatally shot on September 10 during a campus event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, in what the FBI is investigating as a potential political assassination; a 22-year-old suspect was arrested after a relative's tip, with a $100,000 reward offered for further information. Similar vigils have spread worldwide, including in London and Canberra, amplifying Kirk's advocacy for anti-immigration, faith, and family values from his recent Asia tours."
https://x.com/i/trending/1966907928344134102
Video here:
https://youtu.be/Ry57WclRVhw?si=lSR41hwE9RncaJdv
Charlie Kirk's almost last words, when asked “Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?”
"Too many".
Axios headline:
Kirk suspect's transgender roommate "aghast," may be key to motive
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/13/kirk-suspect-transgender-roommate
How so were his ideas authoritarian and vile ?
He wanted to not go full speed ahead with letting schools trans kids without their parents knowledge. What an authoritarian.
His name is Charlie Kirk. I sincerely hope nobody shoots you for your authoritarian and vile ideas.
Fronk
What idea did he advocate that offended you in particular, NG?
That mutilating children’s sexual organs to treat their mental illness is a crime and those who do it should be punished.
What should be done with the doctors and hospitals doing such procedures?
Whatever the current penalties for Assault, Sexual Mutilation are. I’m of the “Sex Organ for a Sex Organ” Philosophy but that’s just me
Tommy Robinson's Unite the Kingdom march in London Saturday was very successful:
"The rally drew an estimated crowd of between 110,000 and 150,000 people, far surpassing expectations, police said. "
""There's something beautiful about being British and what I see happening here is a destruction of Britain, initially a slow erosion, but rapidly increasing erosion of Britain with massive uncontrolled migration," he said.
Robinson told the crowd in a hoarse voice that migrants now had more rights in court than the "British public, the people that built this nation."
The marches come at a time when the U.K. has been divided by debate over migrants crossing the English Channel in overcrowded inflatable boats to arrive on shore without authorization.
Numerous anti-migrant protests were held this summer outside hotels housing asylum-seekers following the arrest of an Ethiopian man who was later convicted of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl in a London suburb. Some of those protests became violent and led to arrests."
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/13/g-s1-88663/london-protest-by-far-right-activist
Since 2015 reported rapes of more than quadrupled in England and Wales. Its not hard to see why people might be upset.
Was he able to wave an English flag?
Can we get an apology from the leftists on here who were spewing reprehensible misinformation on how the Charlie Kirk assassin was hard right Christian conservative MAGA? Botaglove? Snorkle? Mr. Somin (implicitly) yeah you heard me I'm talking to you. Let's hear it...or are you going to chicken out?
No and yes. Those people do not think, only react. They are reactionaries.
Somin, especially, harbors views not founded in reasoned words of experience or rational honored wisdom. But, everyone has their free speech ; contrary views are welcomed and can and are countered with truth, sometimes. Most times those views take too much to point out the logical mistakes, and, therefore, silence is the only response.
They are going to need a few more weeks to come to terms with it.
Not that they didn't know in all along but that is their coping mechanism.
...and then it will be a master class in denial, deflection, obfuscation and just plain outright lying.
They're never going to come to terms with it. A decade from now it will STILL be a common belief on the left that Kirk was assassinated by a right winger for being too compromising.
As shown by their continued insistence that Trump colluded with Russia to win in 2016 and the Jan. 6 was an insurrection.
They also still think Reagan had Alzheimer's while in office, and that George Bush was a draft dodger.
You can never kill these lies once they get spread, because the left is too emotionally invested in thinking badly of their political foes. And the more conscious of the people on the left understand and exploit that, practicing the big lie technique as a deliberate tactic.
and Floyd George didn't die due to his own drug addiction.
One takeaway from the Kirk assassination. The level of passive surveillance in today's modern society has ended all public anonymity in America. That lead me to wonder...Does this technological development (complete public surveillance) change our civic behavior as a society?
Put another way, will we be better behaved b/c we know we are watched?
If you’re going to shoot someone, like Michael in “1” Leave the gun, take the Canoli” and smile! smile! People won’t recognize you. Then go hide out in Sicily for a few years.
Oh, there are ways around the excessive surveillance, taking more time and preparation. No system can't be broken. But, to the point of the level of surveillance, it is troubling indeed.
A question could be whether it be used only after the fact and not in real-time. Either way it's here and it's a problem too. Single angle images are not always what they appear.
One person interviewed stated there's extra surveillance assets available for more important crimes. So, everyday mundane murders are at a loss of enhanced examination.
Damn! They’ve made it so hard to murder and get away with it!
Now it turns out Charlie Kirk’s killer was living with a Dude “ transitioning”, tell me again how he killed Charlie Kirk for “not being conservative enough”
Frank
In a recent thread at least 3 commenters bombarded me with subject changes after I had pointed out that Charlie Kirk said this:
I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
Two of those commenters accused me of hypocrisy, saying that alcohol causes more deaths than guns. That too was a subject change. I had not mentioned alcohol.
But it is a fact that the only serious car crash I have ever suffered was caused by a drunk driver running a red light in front of me, on purpose, because he was late for work. He had seen the light, but he had not seen me, so as he approached the intersection with two vans stopped in front of him, he pulled onto a broad right shoulder to pass the vans without slackening speed, and popped into the intersection in front of me as if from nowhere.
The vans had blocked my sight of his approach completely. My speed limit was 35 mph, and I was perhaps going slightly faster. With the light green, I glanced right, and saw stopped vans, I glanced left and saw an empty cross lane, and then forward to enter the intersection—that left glance had used up all the reaction time I was to have. The drunk was probably going through the intersection at 40-plus. I don’t think I had even a full second to react before the collision. I had hit the brakes, but they had zero time to take effect. There was a skid mark about two-feet long.
I was driving the small Toyota pickup, without airbags, with my 12-year-old son in the passenger seat. The drunk who caused the crash was driving a new Subaru Outback. Both vehicles were totaled. We were wearing seat belts.
After impact, the drunk’s momentum took him through the intersection, leaving my vehicle spinning down the road in the direction I had been headed. After two-and-a-half complete revolutions, the Toyota came to rest against the curb in the opposite oncoming lane, pointing back in the direction we had come. Luckily, there had been no oncoming traffic.
My son was uninjured. I had suffered some kind of knee fracture which was corrected after a full knee replacement, which I had needed anyway. The drunk was uninjured—the impact hit just behind his driver’s seat. He spent about 15 minutes afterward trying to answer cops’ questions with his head turned obliquely, to avoid breathing in their direction.
Afterwards, I tensed involuntarily whenever I saw a vehicle approach from a side street ahead of me, a bit of post-traumatic stress which wore off after a few years.
I tell that story with a purpose to rebuke the subject changers, because that was by no means the most memorable or the worst affliction drunk driving visited upon my life. That had already happened years before, and I suffered that blow only vicariously. I had working for me in my newspaper’s art department a widowed woman with an only child, a nearly-grown son. She lived for him. One day, he was walking the shoulder of a road in daylight, and a drunk driver hit and killed him. That is the whole story, except that the drunk driver did no jail time. The judge who heard his case was sympathetic. The judge was a reputed drunk himself.
The longer story above is a lark to remember, compared to the way my stomach churns when I remember that woman’s anguish. She was at work when the call came.
I had been unaware of Charlie Kirk before his murder. I had to ask my son who he was. I have since learned Charlie Kirk too was a prolific and artful subject changer. I think that to improve this nation’s prospects, we will have to learn a skill to consider more than one topic worth our attention, and to admit that in the public life of the nation there remain multiple problems to be solved.
When did "subject changer" become a capital offense?
September 10, 2025
Quit trying to change the subject Lathrop.
That monologue is actually somewhat reminiscent of Trump's "weave", which you probably haven't heard of before either.
You're confusing analogies with subject changes, frankly. We were transplanting the style of 'reasoning' you were applying to guns to something where you hopefully were less emotionally invested, so that you could see that the general form of your reasoning was invalid regardless of topic. And having realized that, stopped applying it to guns.
But you were too emotionally invested in the original topic to be willing to accept an analogy, sensing a trap. Dismissing it as a subject change enables you to avoid engaging the argument entirely, and so preserve your irrational approach to the original topic.
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Steven Kurtz | 9.14.2025 6:00 AM
C.J. Ciaramella | 9.13.2025 7:00 AM
Jeff Luse | From the October 2025 issue
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