Charlie Kirk shot at (shot?) in Utah

[unapologetic]

As a colony,

You're still a colony?

 

[bilby]

As a colony,

You're still a colony?

Our head of state is King Charles III, so I am going to go with "yes".

 

[crazyfingers]

“Bob Dylan Just Ignited a Firestorm With One Sentence About Charlie Kirk — And the World Is Watching”
He could have stayed silent. He could have deleted the post and let it fade.
But Bob Dylan didn’t. The music legend doubled down, setting the internet ablaze and sending shockwaves through concert halls, news outlets, and living rooms worldwide.
His words about the late Charlie Kirk — “If you want people to speak kindly after you’re gone, speak kindly while you’re alive” — struck like a match in a powder keg. Critics immediately circled, fans were divided, and social media erupted with debate, praise, and outrage.
Dylan’s response was simple, but unwavering: “I stand by this. Be kind — now more than ever.”
Some hail it as an act of bravery, a rare voice of conscience in a fractured culture. Others wonder if it will spark a controversy that could reshape Dylan’s legacy forever.
One thing is clear: the sentence didn’t just make headlines — it ignited a conversation about kindness, accountability, and the power of words that shows no sign of dying down. Read our full analysis in the comments.

Only it's not true. Facebook is not a reliable source for much of anything

Did singer Bob Dylan just "ignite a firestorm" with a single sentence about Charlie Kirk and was that sentence "If you want people to speak kindly after you're gone, speak kindly while you're alive"? No, that's not true: Dylan is just the latest victim in a series of Facebook posts falsely attributing the same quote to various celebrities. According to transparency information most of the pages involved with the fake quote posts are being run from outside the United States.

...

According to an earlier fact check we did in response to several other viral posts, the quote attributed to Bob Dylan ("If you want people to speak kindly after you're gone, speak kindly while you're alive") was previously ascribed to Mookie Betts, Bryce Harper, Mike Norvell, Jalen Hurts, Brock Purdy, Julian Sayin, Aaron Judge, Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson's daughter Ava, Atticus Sappington, C.J. Stroud and even Stephen Colbert.

At that time Lead Stories searched for part of the quote in combination with "Charlie Kirk" on Facebook and found dozens of quasi-identical posts (archived here):

Fact Check: Fake Bob Dylan Quote About Speaking Kindly While You're Alive Was NOT Response To Charlie Kirk's Death -- Foreign Spam Network

Did singer Bob Dylan just "ignite a firestorm" with a single sentence about Charlie Kirk and was that sentence "If you want people to speak kindly after you're gone, speak kindly while you're alive"? No, that's not true: Dylan is...

www.yahoo.com

 

[unapologetic]

Can someone with better Internetz than me,
Make a video of the Jan 6 insurrection, complete with cutaways to Trump and Hawley and such, with an overlay of this quote?

I can do stills.

 

[Bomb#20]

That makes it sound like Kirk thought gender ideology is a cult and trans people are its victims.

Kirk did not simply call gender ideology a "cult." He repeatedly described transgender people themselves as mentally ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization, advocating a return to the practices of the 1950s and 60s.

And? Do you think the people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization thought so because they hated her?

He painted them not as victims but as aggressors, linking them to mass shootings and "perversion," even though the evidence runs the opposite direction.

I'll be much surprised if you can produce said evidence running in the opposite direction re "perversion", since "perversion" is an entirely subjective pejorative. Re mass shootings, do you mean something like Elixir's Perplexity emission, "transgender people are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators"? That's true of pretty much any demographic, since one perpetrator typically has many victims.

That’s why the word "hate" is more than just semantics here. When you argue that a whole group of people are diseased, dangerous, and should be stripped of their rights, that is hate in practice--whether or not you dress it up as concern.

History gives us a clear analogy: slaveholders often claimed they were "protecting" enslaved people from the supposed dangers of liberal equality. George Fitzhugh, for instance, argued that enslaved people were "the happiest people in the world" because slavery spared them from the burdens of freedom. If you take their words at face value, it sounds like benevolence, but if you look at their actions, it was exploitation and domination.

Dude, you're making my case for me. Do you seriously imagine Fitzhugh and the rest of the slavers were motivated by hatred?!? They enslaved people because they wanted labor and didn't want to pay for it, and had the morals of Mafia dons. Calling that kind of thing "hate in practice" is like claiming a mob enforcer who beats up a merchant for paying his "protection" money late hated the merchant. It's absurd. All you're demonstrating is that abuse of the word "hate" has become so completely normalized in leftist circles that it's become a de facto synonym for "harmful" in the subculture's dialect.

The same applies here. If you only listen to Kirk’s framing--"protecting" people from a so-called ideology--you miss the reality of what his rhetoric and policy advocacy meant for actual trans people: marginalization, loss of healthcare, social demonization, and the revival of 1950s and 60s “treatments” that meant forced institutionalization, electroshock, lobotomies, or being physically forced into psychiatric prisons with 24/7 sedation.

You can nitpick the word "hate" and try to turn that into a leftist slur or whatever, but that is semantic, not substantive.

If you think it's semantic and not substantive then you don't know what the point in dispute is. What, do you think I'm defending him? I called him a dirtbag, remember? We're not arguing about whether Kirk was a bad person, or whether what he was doing was bad for trans people, or whatever the bejesus it is you think is "substantive". We're arguing about where Robinson's thinking came from. The fact that Robinson called Kirk's views "hate" is a clue. Comparing the semantics of "hate" with the facts of what Kirk said is not a nitpick! It's how one follows the clue to see where it leads. The substantive fact is that the clue leads straight to that subculture's dialect.

 

[Elixir]

Do you think the people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization thought so because they hated her?

We all could tell how much Charlie absolutely adored trans folk. He only wanted to lock them up for their own good, to protect them from people like him. Maybe execute one in front of the kids on occasion, as part of their State-sponsored pre-school curriculum.

Surely Robinson must have hated him because Robinson was Antifa. They’ll probably show his membership card in court. Nothing about trans stuff, nope.
/yuks

Chuckie was a scumbucket. Robinson is just a nutbar, apparently the SO of a trans person. Shit happens EVERY DAY. Threaten people in public with incarceration and more shit happens. Nutbars come out of the woodwork feeling threatened and acting accordingly.
Poor Charlie. He was so sincere in his godly bigotry.

 

[unapologetic]

They enslaved people because they wanted labor and didn't want to pay for it, and had the morals of Mafia dons. Calling that kind of thing "hate in practice" is like claiming a mob enforcer who beats up a merchant for paying his "protection" money late hated the merchant. It's absurd.

Well that sort of zero regard for people is hate-ish. Hate adjacent. Close enough to hate to make no diference. Worse than just indiference to suffering. That is causing suffering. You sir are trivalizing hate.

 

[Bomb#20]

Do you think the people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization thought so because they hated her?

We all could tell how much Charlie absolutely adored trans folk. <rest of drivel snipped>

What the heck is your problem? The people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization, but didn't hate her, didn't adore her either, and you damn well know it!!! So why the bejesus are you painting my pointing out the lack of evidence for Kirk hating trans folk as meaning I'm implying he adored them? I don't think you're deliberately strawmanning me -- you are really giving off a hardware-problem vibe. Are you just physiologically incapable of following an argument? So any time you see one that doesn't lead where you expect you just force-fit it onto some completely different argument for some completely unrelated contention and delude yourself that it's what you read?

 

[Spacetime Inhabitant]

I have to say, this kind of situation really does exemplify what I have been saying about how those who have been apparently merely "rhetorically cheeky" up to now only did so as a pretext to support hate and horrors being visited on people, and that this was always where they were headed.

Yes, you were always Nazis, the word Nazi always applied, and none of it was a Godwin after all (although Godwin himself admitted that sometimes, the guy calling the other a Nazi... Well, sometimes in the current climate they are right!)

We always knew that fascism would come to the world wrapped in the visage of Christianity, but representing utter mal-social selfishness. It was written over 2000 years ago describing the actions of tyrants of the day and humanity at that scale is still the same as it ever was.

The hate will be spun so that it's image confuses people as to whether it is hate; the effects of the hate will be people harmed horribly and tortured all the same, but it will be presented to everyone else confusingly.

And that is what we see... Many words used to confuse the issue that Charlie Kirk was a fascist Nazi who hated gay people and preached that hate.

Any chance your alter ego is Barbos? Sorry, bad inside joke. Kirk wasn't a Nazi. The danger with considering that everyone is a Nazi, is that you'll be continuously at war with everyone, and the real enemy will grow in power. Just a thought...

This kind of equivocation isn't helping anything. No one compares "everyone" to Nazis. People who know history compare those who espouse Nazi ideology to Nazis. Concepts like scientific racism, eugenics, anti-socialism, Aryan supremacy, and radical nationalism aren't inventions of "the left".

Also those concepts like scientific racism and eugenics were prevalent in early 20th century USA, and actually inspired some of the Nazi philosophy.

 

[Jarhyn]

Do you think the people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization thought so because they hated her?

We all could tell how much Charlie absolutely adored trans folk. <rest of drivel snipped>

What the heck is your problem? The people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization, but didn't hate her, didn't adore her either, and you damn well know it!!! So why the bejesus are you painting my pointing out the lack of evidence for Kirk hating trans folk as meaning I'm implying he adored them? I don't think you're deliberately strawmanning me -- you are really giving off a hardware-problem vibe. Are you just physiologically incapable of following an argument? So any time you see one that doesn't lead where you expect you just force-fit it onto some completely different argument for some completely unrelated contention and delude yourself that it's what you read?

Seriously, you are comparing trans people to Typhoid Mary.

That is sick. In fact, your whole post is fucking sick.

We don't need to straw-man you.

You have successfully over the course of a decade transmitted that this is who you are. You are consistent in this way.

I kind of wish we could actually record the real time experiences and emotions and sensations of the suffering that people are going to be experiencing over the next few years so that we can wire people like you down into that machine to have it replayed into your own brains without harming you any other way just so that you can grow some goddamn fucking empathy.

 

[Elixir]

Seriously, you are comparing trans people to Typhoid Mary.

smh

That is sick. In fact, your whole post is fucking sick.

I guess B20 thinks I have made a giant unwarranted leap of faith, to believe that a guy in a relationship with a trans person killed someone who evinces hate for trans people, leaving an apologetic note for his trans partner … and making the unwarranted conjecture that these things could be related.
SHEESH!!

But it’s not a leap of faith for him to imply that since we don’t know that he’s not a boilerplate liberal gunslinger, (common as such folk are) he might well have been a Hillary-loving lib’rul murderer.

Ooookay, dude.

I think I must be missing something; B20 isn’t usually so reactionary.

Something SURELY unrelated, but to feed his confirmation bias, the MI shooter’s lifted pickup truck flying its dual ‘Murkin flags, - tha guy was probably another lib.
But we wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions, right?

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

That makes it sound like Kirk thought gender ideology is a cult and trans people are its victims.

Kirk did not simply call gender ideology a "cult." He repeatedly described transgender people themselves as mentally ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization, advocating a return to the practices of the 1950s and 60s.

And? Do you think the people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization thought so because they hated her?

He painted them not as victims but as aggressors, linking them to mass shootings and "perversion," even though the evidence runs the opposite direction.

I'll be much surprised if you can produce said evidence running in the opposite direction re "perversion", since "perversion" is an entirely subjective pejorative. Re mass shootings, do you mean something like Elixir's Perplexity emission, "transgender people are much more likely to be victims of violence than perpetrators"? That's true of pretty much any demographic, since one perpetrator typically has many victims.

Trans people are probably under-represented, but certainly not over-represented as mass shooters.

Few Mass Shooters Have Been Transgender - FactCheck.org

Q: Have many of the mass shooters been transgender? A: The number of transgender mass shooters in the U.S. varies depending on how “mass shooting” is defined, but is relatively small. The Gun Violence Archive, which uses a broader definition, lists five mass shootings by transgender or...

www.factcheck.org

That’s why the word "hate" is more than just semantics here. When you argue that a whole group of people are diseased, dangerous, and should be stripped of their rights, that is hate in practice--whether or not you dress it up as concern.

History gives us a clear analogy: slaveholders often claimed they were "protecting" enslaved people from the supposed dangers of liberal equality. George Fitzhugh, for instance, argued that enslaved people were "the happiest people in the world" because slavery spared them from the burdens of freedom. If you take their words at face value, it sounds like benevolence, but if you look at their actions, it was exploitation and domination.

Dude, you're making my case for me. Do you seriously imagine Fitzhugh and the rest of the slavers were motivated by hatred?!? They enslaved people because they wanted labor and didn't want to pay for it, and had the morals of Mafia dons. Calling that kind of thing "hate in practice" is like claiming a mob enforcer who beats up a merchant for paying his "protection" money late hated the merchant. It's absurd. All you're demonstrating is that abuse of the word "hate" has become so completely normalized in leftist circles that it's become a de facto synonym for "harmful" in the subculture's dialect.

The same applies here. If you only listen to Kirk’s framing--"protecting" people from a so-called ideology--you miss the reality of what his rhetoric and policy advocacy meant for actual trans people: marginalization, loss of healthcare, social demonization, and the revival of 1950s and 60s “treatments” that meant forced institutionalization, electroshock, lobotomies, or being physically forced into psychiatric prisons with 24/7 sedation.

You can nitpick the word "hate" and try to turn that into a leftist slur or whatever, but that is semantic, not substantive.

If you think it's semantic and not substantive then you don't know what the point in dispute is. What, do you think I'm defending him? I called him a dirtbag, remember? We're not arguing about whether Kirk was a bad person, or whether what he was doing was bad for trans people, or whatever the bejesus it is you think is "substantive". We're arguing about where Robinson's thinking came from. The fact that Robinson called Kirk's views "hate" is a clue. Comparing the semantics of "hate" with the facts of what Kirk said is not a nitpick! It's how one follows the clue to see where it leads. The substantive fact is that the clue leads straight to that subculture's dialect.

I don’t think the proof standard is whether we can get inside Fitzhugh's--or Kirk's--head. Fitzhugh insisted he was benevolent, but his language was degrading, his arguments stripped people of dignity, and his policies ensured domination. Whether he felt hate or simply justified exploitation, the outcome for the enslaved was indistinguishable from hate in practice.

The same applies to Kirk. We can’t claim he didn't hate when he used language like "perverted" and "mentally ill" in an openly insulting tone, or when he advocated policies that would have trans people institutionalized, shocked, lobotomized, or drugged against their will. But even if you bracket intent entirely, the hostile outcomes still matter.

That's also why the semantic focus misses the point about Robinson. An unstable man immersed in gun culture and online extremism did not need a settled definition of "hate" to justify violence to himself. What mattered was the substance of Kirk's rhetoric--policies and insults that signaled hostility and threat. Whether Robinson labeled that "hate" or "harm" or anything else, the danger he perceived would have been the same.

At the end of the day, your argument is clever, but it's evasive. It shifts attention away from the real-world impact of Kirk's words and policies onto a word game about whether "hate" means subjective malice or objective harm. The effect on trans people is what's substantive.

 

[scombrid]

Somebody is against male boxers punching female boxers? He hates trans people. Somebody is against illegal immigration? He hates brown people. Somebody is against affirmative action? He hates black people. Somebody is against abortion? He hates women. Somebody is against socialism? He hates poor people. Get some new material for chrissakes!

Look at the misrepresented, sanitized, positions of Kirk all to set up straw men. Creationists tend to be less disingenuous. Sure looks like the writing of someone that supports Kirk/Heritage.org or someone that is severely snowed by their propaganda.

 

[Jimmy Higgins]

Do you think the people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization thought so because they hated her?

We all could tell how much Charlie absolutely adored trans folk. <rest of drivel snipped>

What the heck is your problem? The people who thought Typhoid Mary was ill, dangerous, and in need of institutionalization, but didn't hate her, didn't adore her either, and you damn well know it!!! So why the bejesus are you painting my pointing out the lack of evidence for Kirk hating trans folk as meaning I'm implying he adored them?

You are rearranging the tables and chairs on the Titanic here. Kirk advocated for dark stuff against transgender. It doesn't matter if he "hated" them. He supported and told people to support things that would make the lives of transgenders harder.

Kirk advocated for bigotry and Christian Dominionism. There is no way to demonstrate otherwise. Whether he actually never gave a fuck and was just advocating for power, whether the source of his advocation of bigotry was honestly held, or whether he simply was awful at being caring is irrelevant. All that matters is what he did and advocated for. And what he advocated for was returning the US to the 19th Century.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

At the end of the day, your argument is clever, but it's evasive. It shifts attention away from the real-world impact of Kirk's words and policies onto a word game about whether "hate" means subjective malice or objective harm. The effect on trans people is what's substantive.

I wouldn't be that charitable. It's just typical conservative denialism/willful ignorance.

 

[Elixir]

It's just typical conservative denialism/willful ignorance.

Like all of our biases it has roots in conditioning experience. Understanding that elicits more interest than revulsion, at least for me.
The fact that it can be called “typical” of an entire segment, lends urgency to understanding.

 

[Politesse]

The idea that you could listen to an entire Kirk debate and not come to the conclusion that he hated other people is laughable. So I'm left to conclude that most of those who are valorizing him now either agree with him, or learned who he was on Sept 10 with news media think pieces and pundit commentaries as their primary source.

You ever wonder why, if he was such a powerful orator, there aren't more Great Quotes of his running around? You'd think a master debater would be producing thousands of inspiring quips every year, like an MLK or a Lincoln. Instead, people on the Right hate it when you quote Charlie Kirk on anything, because most of what he said in public belies the notion that he was a model diplomat and "hero for both sides". Even his more mild quotations were loaded with invective aimed at anyone who disagreed with him.

"I'm urging all my millennial peers and the young people coming up behind us to look for signs and symptoms of them being in a Democrat-induced delusion. Don't confuse the dream state of the socialists with any sort of reality. If you spot any signs of this politically terminal affliction within yourself, please seek help."

"For anyone who can only handle about 12-minutes-per-day of anything news related before needing to retreat into isolation, allow me to recommend spending those 12 minutes listening to the opening monologue of 'The Rush Limbaugh Show.'"

"I believe we're broken by sin upon birth."

"Democrats have long been the party of voter fraud."

"Trump is the first president in a generation who is willing to take political risks to secure our border."

"We live in a welfare state society - one that is already bloated and overburdened. We cannot continue to absorb and support an endless stream of people who will inevitably need legal residents to subsidize their lives."

He was not a centrist, or a moderate, and he did not believe in extending olive branches to anyone who was not like him. He saw no value in the Left, and credited none. He saw no value in other countries or the people who live in them. He saw no value in non-Christians. He saw no value in anyone who criticized a corporation, unless it was for being Woke. He hid none of these facts about himself while he was alive, because he was not ashamed of them. If he ever once complimented or made a concession to anyone not on the far Right, I'd be interested to hear it. Debates, for him, were about crushing the enemy, recruiting new soldiers, and watching the comments section closely to gather new names for his professor hit list. Not about learning and changing his own views, or lowering the temperature of national debates, or any of the shit they are ascribing to his body now that his mouth is no longer moving.

 

[Politesse]

I would like to re-iterate for both genuinely heartfelt and legal reasons that I do not approve of political assassinations, and that I believe what happened to Kirk, and his family, and those at the gathering, and those foolish or perverse enough to watch the snuff film afterward, was a horrific tragedy. Gunning people down solves none of our problems. Shared trauma does not win anyone over to the virtues of rational debate.

But a political assassination, however heinous, cannot turn red into blue, lies into truth, or bigots into diplomats.

 

[GenesisNemesis]

It's just typical conservative denialism/willful ignorance.

Like all of our biases it has roots in conditioning experience. Understanding that elicits more interest than revulsion, at least for me.
The fact that it can be called “typical” of an entire segment, lends urgency to understanding.

Empathy fatigue is also a thing though.

 

[Elixir]

An unstable man immersed in gun culture and online extremism did not need a settled definition of "hate" to justify violence

I don’t think B20 would disagree, except maybe about what “culture” he was immersed in. He certainly goes off though, if it is implied that Chuckie in any way brought it on himself by hating or threatening trans people.