• Welcome to the Internet Infidels Discussion Board.

Charlie Kirk shot at (shot?) in Utah

(I joined this thread late. Haven't read all 17 pages)
I've seen a YT vid calling Kirk a martyr. But I've not even heard of him before.
Tom Crooks should be considered a martyr.

A lot of people are saying things like 'violence is not the way'. I disagree.
Rump needs to be removed from power, Any way possable, As soon as possable. to limit his damage.
We can see in Rump that violence is the only way he is leaving power. So be it.
Yes violence is distasteful but removeing him has got to be done.
 
  • Like
Reactions: SLD
(I joined this thread late. Haven't read all 17 pages)
I've seen a YT vid calling Kirk a martyr. But I've not even heard of him before.
Tom Crooks should be considered a martyr.

A lot of people are saying things like 'violence is not the way'. I disagree.
Rump needs to be removed from power, Any way possable, As soon as possable. to limit his damage.
We can see in Rump that violence is the only way he is leaving power. So be it.
Yes violence is distasteful but removeing him has got to be done.
Trump dies. Good morning, President Vance.
Vance dies. Good morning, President Mike Johnson.
Johnson dies. Good morning, President Grassley.
Grassley dies. Good morning, President Rubio.
Rubio dies. Good morning, President Bessent.
Bessent dies. Good morning, President Hegseth. Need a drink? I fucking do.
Hegseth dies. Good morning, President Bondi.
If Noem shoots Bondi, the next 11 in line are all additional Trump cabinet members. They have thrown away their autonomy and self-respect and moral standards. If they had souls, they have long since exchanged them for Trump coins. Grassley is the only one who isn't 100% revolting.
As Pete Seeger sang, "Don't you know, you can't kill all the unbelievers/There's no shortcut to freedom."
 
This from the Grownups News Network:
Who is Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Charlie Kirk's murder?
Given his age, did he have time to form much of an ideology, one so strong it would lead him to this? He looks to be an otherwise decent kid up until. Perhaps this is more of what can happen to a 22 year old brain born in to a world of social media and god knows what on the internet. Is his reality so far removed from one of an older generation, of people who did not have all this shit invading what should have been a simple childhood? How is access to everything everywhere all at once, good and bad shaping the cognitive and emotional development of children?
 
Trump dies. Good morning, President Vance. Etc...
OK. But would they still kiss Rump's rump when he's dead? Are they ALL folowing the Project 2025 script?
Would they pretend to know everything about every subject, the way Rump does?
Do they all get along. Do any of them recognize the incompetence of the others? Would some of them get replaced by Prez-next-in-line?
Might be worth a try. Shake things up.
 
Trump dies. Good morning, President Vance. Etc...
OK. But would they still kiss Rump's rump when he's dead? Are they ALL folowing the Project 2025 script?
Would they pretend to know everything about every subject, the way Rump does?
Do they all get along. Do any of them recognize the incompetence of the others? Would some of them get replaced by Prez-next-in-line?
Might be worth a try. Shake things up.

I propose a corollary to the saying that you can’t reason someone out of a belief that they didn’t reason themselves into;
That you can’t shoot your way out of a government you didn’t shoot your way into.

If the change doesn’t come via the ballot rather than the bullet, it’s no longer America anyway.
 
Almost certainly, if the assassination and the subsequent Great War had not happened,
The Great War (or Big European Kerfuffle) would have happened with our without the assassination. I like how Edward Blackadder put it.
Serbia would have been absorbed into either the Austro-Hungarian or the Ottoman Empires; Instead Serbia outlived both by over a century (and counting). It was one of the most effective political assassinations in history.
Serbia kicked the Ottoman Turks out some time earlier, and the Empire was reduced to pretty much the present Turkish borders on the European side.
europe-1914.png

Twenty million deaths is quite a bit of collateral damage, though.
As I said, the War would have happened anyway, just with a different trigger to set the whole thing in motion. But the system of the two alliances was too unstable to hold too long.
Oh, I agree that it would've happened without the assassination. But what it did do was act as a catalyst to speed along the process. When I wrote what I wrote I referred to it as an aggravating circumstance, but didn't want to go into a lengthy sidetrack about pre-Great War history.

Now that the initial shockwave of Kirk's death has passed, I'd prefer to continue to suss out what it all means.
 
I'm concerned about the increasing view among younger people that violence like this is justifiable and acceptable. It bodes poorly for our future.
Do you have any evidence that that view is increasing?

It seems to me that violence has been declining for centuries, despite the technical means becoming more available to render violence deadly.

I think that any appearance of increasing violence (particularly amongst young people) is partly the age-old bias against youth that we have always seen from older and supposedly wiser folks who have more to lose, and poor memories of their own younger days; And partly the consequence of the 24x7 news cycle, and the Internet, which bombards us with tales of violence, many of which would have only been reported locally in the "good old days".
I for one am concerned about how the right will use this to suppress dissent, and also justify violence against the left because they wrongly believe the shooter is trans, fueled by their irrational hatred of trans people.

 
Last edited:
I watched Bill Maher last night (Ben Shapiro is so goddamn annoying) and he said it doesn't matter who started it. I interpreted that as a reference to the tension and downward spiral in norms and discourse.

The notion is appealing but it's simplistic. When your kids get into a spat about who did what first, that's when it doesn't matter. However, when we have what we have now, it's absolutely necessary to trace things back to identify when the breakdown really took off. If we don't trace it back, we learn nothing and therefore won't have anyway to deal with it in the future (see Nazi Germany, germ theory, etc.)

With respect to who started It, it was Trump who gave voice to what we see now. To one degree or another there have always been ragtag fringe groups on both extremes, but Trump and subsequently the GOP gave all of them a place to coalesce around. The Dems, as limp dicked and ineffective as they have been, didn't give a voice to hate and violence. They've helped perpetuate a lot of problems, but at least it came from a place of empathy, no matter how stupid or foreseeably hopeless it was.

Hate and ineptitude are not the same thing.

If this country ever wants to return to respectability then it has to begin with the right. They had the opportunity and many wanted to be done with the Trump era like it had been a crazy whiskey and meth-fueled weekend in Vegas. It was a fun for a while, but now it was time to go home, but they couldn't get the meth dealer to leave. They're still going and there's no indication that treatment is going to be sought.

Until the come-down hits, if it ever does, they're going to have to step up and take responsibility for starting this shit.


***Note: Yes, I understand that many believe, and I think rightly so, that Japan began WW2 in 1933.
 
I appreciate you saying that, though not so much the attitude.
I appreciate you giving me some slack.
The “attitude” (which is honest - I make no effort to hide it) is a direct outgrowth of years of frustration with people euphemizing the problem with Republican fascism.
I wonder if your own unusually even keel might be the product of a lifetime of threat evasion, necessitated by this society’s collective racism.
 
“My son, his dad, is a Republican for Trump. Most of my family members are Republican. I don’t know any single one who’s a Democrat," the suspect's grandmother Debbie Robinson told The Daily Mail.
Can you link to the whole article? I tried to find it at the Daily Mail, and I think I found it, but its behind a paywall. At any rate, the title of the article I believe you are referencing is:

Grandma of Charlie Kirk's 'assassin' breaks silence to reveal why the FBI MUST have the wrong man​

The gunman confessed to his dad to doing it, and agreed (reluctantly) to turn himself in! His writings on social media (Discord) to his roommate confirm his culpability. And he was not a Democrat or Republican. His political affliation is not stated on his voter registration info. And why are you referencing The Daily Mail, anyway?

As a general rule, do not trust everything a grandma says. Except mine. She was an :innocent2:
 
The Dems, as limp dicked and ineffective as they have been, didn't give a voice to hate and violence.
Sad indeed. Hate and violence have become right wingers’ version of virility, and there’s nothing they value above manliness. Gitcher gun, yer lifted truck, and start mouthing hatred for and violence against those gay-ass demonkratz, and you fit right in.
 
This from the Grownups News Network:
Who is Tyler Robinson, the suspect in Charlie Kirk's murder?
Given his age, did he have time to form much of an ideology, one so strong it would lead him to this? He looks to be an otherwise decent kid up until. Perhaps this is more of what can happen to a 22 year old brain born in to a world of social media and god knows what on the internet. Is his reality so far removed from one of an older generation, of people who did not have all this shit invading what should have been a simple childhood? How is access to everything everywhere all at once, good and bad shaping the cognitive and emotional development of children?
Uh, how old do you think pretty much every soldier ever has been? Just because you're old as shit now doesn't mean twenty year olds aren't adults anymore. If anything, young people are far more likely to take radical political actions. They have a lot of energy, a relatively simplistic view of the world, and less to lose.
 
I'm going to share an article that goes into a lot of detail about the shooter's life. I have wondered, since schizophrenia is almost always diagnosed in one's late teens or early 20s, if this young man was suffering from that awful disease. Who knows?

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/12/...e_code=1.lk8.Vvv_.KVDIvNBPyb9i&smid=url-share

In the conservative southern Utah city where Tyler Robinson grew up, neighbors and classmates described him as a reserved, intelligent young man raised in a Republican family who was deeply interested in video games, comic books and current events.

On Friday afternoon, people who knew Mr. Robinson struggled to reconcile their memories of him and his seemingly ordinary suburban upbringing with his notorious new image: the latest face of political violence, accused of fatally shooting the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk on a Utah college campus earlier this week in what the authorities have called a political assassination.

“It’s really sad that someone with his mind put it to that sort of use,” said Keaton Brooksby, 22, a former high school classmate of Mr. Robinson’s.

Mr. Robinson had recently spoken with a family member about the fact that Mr. Kirk was going to hold an event in Utah, according to a police affidavit, and he and his relative discussed “why they didn’t like him and the viewpoints he had.”

But as elements of the nation’s political left and right scrambled for motives, the image that has initially emerged of Mr. Robinson is not at all clear. Neither is his trajectory from a scholarship-winning high school student to an apprentice electrician to a suspect.

Mr. Brooksby said that Mr. Robinson was generally considered a quiet pupil when they were growing up in the conservative St. George area, but one day in high school, the topic of the 2012 attacks on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, came up during lunch. Few there knew exactly what had happened, but Mr. Robinson was sure of himself.

Mr. Robinson did appear to have excelled academically as a teenager. His mother posted online a photo of him when he graduated from middle school with a perfect 4.0 grade point average. In a Facebook post from August 2020, celebrating the start of Mr. Robinson’s senior year at Pine View High School in St. George, his mother proudly reported that he had been taking four college-level classes as well as Advanced Placement calculus. He graduated from Pine View in 2021.

“My brain hurts for him, but he’s so excited!” she wrote in the post.

Several of Mr. Robinson’s neighbors at the apartment complex where he had recently lived described him as withdrawn, saying that they rarely saw him, apart from when he was walking to and from a gray Dodge Challenger he kept in the parking lot.

Seems as if something had messed up this young man's brain and while I don't think anyone deserves to be murdered. I feel sadder for the shooter than I do for the victim, in this case.
 
As the father of two boys slightly older, I feel tremendous sympathy for his family, his parents in particular. They now have years of unimaginable misery to deal with.
 
Back
Top Bottom