It often seems like insincere virtue signaling.
this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2025
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I am sure some of it is virtue signaling, or at least people restraining themselves from saying what they really think to not be cancelled or whatever. Prominent figures do still need to worry about censoring themselves so they maintain their platform, or at the very least that they aren't easily strawmanned by taking them out of context.
But I think most of it is sincere anyway. You can dislike someone, even think the world would be a better place without them in it, and still feel bad about them suffering a tragedy. You probably know someone who is annoying to interact with, but that doesn't mean you want them to be publicly gunned down. Because even if they behave in such a way that befits some sort of karmic retribution, you recognize a punishment can be overly cruel and not justified by the associated "crime".
And honestly, you could even coldheartedly criticise the strategy of it. Killing someone like this makes them a martyr and gives them and their cause a great deal of public sympathy. They are immediately cemented in the public consciousness and forever added as a historical figure instead of simply becoming forgettable when their influence wanes. Before this, me and my friends would probably recognize the name Charlie Kirk but wouldn't know much else about him. But now it's given everything he's said a lot more attention to us and others and made it harder to be able to criticize things he said that really do deserve a lot of criticism.
In the political commentary I've listened to, it's like there's a feeling of winning on a technicality, or by cheating, or something similar. You did not beat him in the marketplace of ideas and have been robbed of the opportunity of ever doing so. If it is indeed a victory, then it is a hollow one.
No, no, no. Stop this. He was a horrible person, I'm glad he was gunned down, and he deserved to be gunned down.
Look, if he did some actually criminal shit that I don't know about, he should have been arrested, tried, and sentenced accordingly. That would have been justice. An individual simply choosing to kill him is murder from a vendetta. No accountability. No argument for others as to why he deserved it. It means he can't be made into an example of a villain that we overcame as a society. He is instead made into a victim, so him and everything associated with him is treated with sympathy it should never have.
But as far as I know, he was hated for spreading ignorant shit ideas. Those can't be defeated with a gun, and that is the real danger he represented. Bad ideas need to be identified as such to establish the person giving them as ignorant and not worth listening to. Gunning him down like this bolsters his arguments instead of dismantling them.
Celebrating the murder legitimizes it as a valid response for saying things that people don't like, and that's a dangerous precedent for anyone trying to change the state of things for the better.