[RD] Charlie Kirk assassinated

[Birdjaguar]

Makes you wonder why there's this sudden need to list everything bad he ever said, when there apparently wasn't a need at the time he said them.

Because prior to being shot he was just another evangelical Christian Nationalist with a following. After he was shot, he was lyingly promoted as a martyr, a victim of antifa and the leftist, communist conspiracy for world domination. The reality was he was shot by a gun toting, fading conservative who felt threatened by Kirk's hateful Christian rhetoric.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I myself didn't jump in until it was proposed (311, and 319) that we should positively celebrate the guy = JFK, MLK.

That almost seems like the polar opposite of the Hitler claim, hagiography.

Ok, that requires an assessment of the things he said: are they worth celebrating?

So then I started bothering to track down his previous statements.

 

[danjuno]

Makes you wonder why there's this sudden need to list everything bad he ever said, when there apparently wasn't a need at the time he said them.

Pretty sure people were criticizing the guy when he was alive.

 

[Angst]

Makes you wonder why there's this sudden need to list everything bad he ever said, when there apparently wasn't a need at the time he said them.

fwiw the people listing it do so using archives already existing. the dirt was dug continuously back as kirk ran his podcast. or, like, it was thrown by him. (and don't goalpost this one; i know what the "wonder" here has of implication. people aren't making kirk look bad in retrospect; they already knew what he was.)

not being mentioned on cfc, maybe not i guess. but, importantly, cfc isn't particularly representative of how people behave and information circulates online. it has doesn't actually have that much traffic. that it hasn't been listed here isn't particularly relevant. i have personally talked about him extensively elsewhere.

 

[SemiLazyGamer]

Sinclair Broadcasting's ABC syndicates pulled out of airing a Charlie Kirk tribute over Jimmy Kimmel Live!'s timeslot.

https://www.reddit.com/r/television/comments/1nlpcm4/sinclairs_abc_stations_back_out_of_airing_charlie

 

[Gori the Grey]

Family Feud instead.

With a note that if you want the Kirk memorial, you can view it on YouTube.

I wonder if one can get # of viewers for local affiliates in a particular time slot. I would like some random night of Kimmel, last night's Family Feud, and if any affiliated did air the Kirk tribute, then that.

The ad rates that a station can charge are based on viewership. I wonder to what extent 1) pushing Kimmel out, 2) airing/not-airing Kirk tribute hurt or helped those numbers.

 

[Lexicus]

Pretty sure people were criticizing the guy when he was alive.

We were indeed, he was a popular meme character! It's true that we're talking about him now more than we did when he was alive, but that complaint should really be directed more towards the US Senators who voted for Charlie Kirk Day next month than toward us rascally, yet lovable forum characters.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Pretty sure people were criticizing the guy when he was alive.

We were indeed, he was a popular meme character! I

Nope. Do a search: "Kirk," this forum. Nothing but posts in this thread comes up.

CFCOT seems never to have mentioned the guy prior to his death.

Edit: This has turned out to be incorrect, based on a misunderstanding of how the search function on the site works. My bad.

 

[Lexicus]

Nope. Do a search: "Kirk," this forum. Nothing but posts in this thread comes up.

I didn't mean "we" on this forum. Memes that exaggerated his facial features were a fairly common sight out in the wild.

 

[Gori the Grey]

"The left" made fun of him all the time.

But that makes it a kind of significant fact that we here did not.

Mostly our cultural commentary doesn't descend to that level of specificity unless some news story drives it.

Nick Fuentes, e.g., has only been mentioned a handful of times.

 

[Manfred Belheim]

Pretty sure people were criticizing the guy when he was alive.

The context it literally right there in the post you quoted for this reply. Am I really expected to have to deal with this nonsense?

 

[GenMarshall]

Nope. Do a search: "Kirk," this forum. Nothing but posts in this thread comes up.

CFCOT seems never to have mentioned the guy prior to his death.

In an anecdotal note, this is practically the only thread that has the bulk of mentions of Charlie Kirk with the Trump thread taking a second place in a few scattered posts. Any other incidences of "Kirk" would depend on a particular topic (A Thread about Star Trek would have Capt. James T. Kirk picked up by the search, for instance).

Outside CFC and within the ecosystem of places like Twitter/X, YouTube, and Reddit; It's basically a global flood. Even prior to his assassination.

 

[Cloud_Strife]

Charlie kirk, You mean the debater from Illinois [snip]Moderator Action: Edited by Birdjaguar. No need for that comment.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I'm trying to find info on his ratings.

In July, his podcast was rated fifth, mostly after some NPR programming in active weekly downloads, but with no figures given.

Turning Point itself says half a million downloads per day all of 2024.

So he does seem to have been meaningful to the right even before his death.

In the course of my investigation, I turned up this

A February 2023 Brookings Institution study found Kirk's podcast contained the second-highest proportion of false, misleading, and unsubstantiated statements among 36,603 episodes produced by 79 prominent political podcasters.

And I bet, if they sorted it, it was almost all "misleading," rather than flat out "false."

I'll give an example of his sly mendacity, from among the cases we've been examining here. In his little riff on how Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, etc had made testimonials to the impact of affirmative action in their lives, he slips in an "only": they themselves are saying that they "only" succeeded because of affirmative action. No. None of them said that. The Brown Jackson video I posted explicitly said that black women before her had been qualified to serve on the Supreme Court (and so she's implicitly calling herself qualified as well); they had just been prevented by racism from doing so, and that affirmative action had removed those barriers against her own succeeding. That's not "only" succeeding because of affirmative action; that's being allowed to show yourself qualified because of affirmative action, and then succeeding because of those qualifications.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Nope. Do a search: "Kirk," this forum. Nothing but posts in this thread comes up.

There's a Star Trek Thread on this forum. That alone makes me know this claim incorrect without even searching.

CFCOT seems never to have mentioned the guy prior to his death.

OK I searched. I think that what is going on is that there as so many recent posts in this thread that mention "Kirk" that it overloads the search and there is no room left for older posts that possibly reference him (or James T. Kirk ftm). The search function only allows 10 pages of posts before cutting itself off.

As an aside "Kirk" came up for me in one of the Star Trek threads, as expected.

 

[Gori the Grey]

There's a Star Trek Thread on this forum. That alone makes me know this claim incorrect without even searching.

It treats Off Topic as a forum.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Just like you can't name (without Googling) who it is that broadcasts in Rush's timeslot, or anything they've said in the last year.

I will gladly (proudly even) admit to this.

EDIT: Although there was a time, decades ago, when I was driving a truck all day in rural Georgia and I would listen to conservative talk radio all day sometimes, partly because that was what stations came in the clearest... back then I could tell you who was on before and after Rush and what ol' Rush's bugaboo-du-jour was (a recurring one back then was "Operation Chaos", his self-styled call-to-action to pit Obama supporters against Hillary supporters in the primaries).

 

[Gori the Grey]

The search function only allows 10 pages of posts before cutting itself off.

I think you're right. But there might be a way to override it using advanced functions. brb

 

[Sommerswerd]

I think you're right. But there might be a way to override it using advanced functions. brb

Proof of concept: I searched "turning points usa" and this came up:

https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/coronavirus-3-the-resurgence.659928/post-15860157

TL;DR - Its a post by @FriendlyFire mentioning Charlie Kirk back in 2020.

 

[Gori the Grey]

Why, there's this fellow, e.g.

Post in thread 'Zohran Mamdani'

Jul 5, 2025

MAGA will echo on without Trump, but it is all Trump and its power dies with him.

Future fascists will need a new four letter acronym for their red banner. spqr

I disagree, especially if the Democrats choose folks like Mamdani and AOC to be the standard bearers. Some of the pillars of Trump's brand are anti-diversity, anti-immigrant, anti-foreigner, white-nationalist, Christian-evangelical... Having someone like Mamdani become transcendent in the Democratic party will fuel that fire, because he will represent to MAGA supporters what all those pillars are against.

More and more...

• Sommerswerd

• 

Yeah, Search only gives ten pages of results. (But Advanced search lets you specify before a particular date, so I just used before 9/9). So, apologies everyone. Now I gotta go see what we did say about him before he was shot. And whether it constituted an anti-Kirk "movement."

Edit: Ok, in this forum (Off Topic), in the year before his being shot, Charlie Kirk was mentioned in ten posts, for statements he made on his podcasts or at his events. Each post was discrete, and simply mentioned the Kirk comment in question without commentary. No post in which he was mentioned garnered more than a single reply. So I'll stand by my initial claim that there has been no "anti-Kirk movement" on this site. He just occasionally made news (He's the one responsible, for example, for saying that Haitians were eating the pets of people in Springfield OH) and that news got reported here.