I use just as likely in the manner of it's just as likely to be sunny tomorrow as not, ie. of approximately similar likelihood, not exactly 50/50.

You may be underestimating how much the Nick Fuentes aligned segment of the far-right hates the Charlie Kirk aligned segment of the far right. The recent split over the Epstein files coverup has exacerbated this.

But politically-motivated assassinations in the US are very rare, and almost exclusively lone actors (not part of a movement).

The assassination attempts (whether successful or failed) on prominent political figures in this country have almost all been carried out by people with personal reasons to want to kill them, not politically motivated killers killing people they don't agree with.

Two right-wingers can disagree with one another to pretty extreme degrees.

This is like thinking Christian-on-Christian violence over religion is implausible and claiming someone suggesting it’s in-fact plausible is being “disingenuous”—surely it can only be someone from a different faith entirely.

In what way do you think I'm being disingenuous?

What outlets do you trust?

Yeah, it's one of the oldest newspapers in the US (founded by Hamilton in 1801). What's your point?

Can you walk me through how the engravings lead you to conclude he's a "groyper"? I don't follow.

Weren’t pretty much all the engravings game related?

Was there like a song in a playlist that had like 50 followers the only link?

So was your issue with hyperbolic use of the word "literally", or are you rejecting the premise all together, because you would have to try really hard to deny that there has been an unrelenting crackdown on pro-Palestinian protests on college campuses in the name of "anti-semitism"?

Do you mean ‘The 1st amendment absolutely gives people the right to boycott these employees if they see fit’.

Sorry, I’m not American so have little idea how it works.

> "Great Replacement Theory" is an inherently racist ideology

No, it is neither racist (edit: as described by Kirk) nor an ideology.

It's an accusation about the intentions of others, in a "the purpose of a system is what it does" kind of way (faulty logic — as I've argued on HN before — but not bigoted), based on observing demographic trends, the rate of immigration etc.

It is deeply conspiratorial thinking, but it does not claim that the people being "replaced" are inherently superior. Thus it is not racist even if we establish that the ingroup-outgroup distinction is racial, which already requires a quite broad conception of "race". (And Americans really are strange about that, in my opinion. There have been multiple occasions where I have been told that Americans generally consider a specific person to be "black" and I have deeply struggled to understand how that could be.)

It is perfectly legitimate to suppose that the existing population of a country has a greater right to continue to exist on that land, and for their offspring to live there, than those who are petitioning from abroad to live there. In fact, it's hard to argue that a legitimate nation exists, in a place that lacks a government trusted to determine questions of citizenship. Besides which, one individual's use of a term does not necessarily carry every other user's intent.

In brief, Kirk never argued that someone should be extradited, or lose citizenship, on the basis of race. Nor does that argument follow from anything he said.

And note that you have not at all addressed the point about "words that support killing people".

> In general, I haven't seen people making the hard assertion online that his words justified his death

I have been shown many people outright celebrating. This is not something that can be feasibly done by someone who has normal psychological aversion to death and doesn't consider the death justified.

> But I have seen plenty of "I don't think Charlie Kirk should have died, but the philosophy Charlie Kirk espoused shouldn't care if Charlie Kirk died"

I've seen plenty of messages that included the second part without the first part. But regardless, this reflects a plain misunderstanding of that philosophy.

Again, no pro-killing ideology here, outside of e.g. support for potentially-lethal police force to apprehend criminals in the act.

I have read one page into your responses in threads on HN and found no clarification as to how my rephrasing misses the point.

I respect your lack of desire to engage on the topic and will not ask it of you, but FWIW: if you believe you are making the point that Charlie Kirk did not assert that the tradeoff of protecting the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms was an acceptable tradeoff for the deaths of Americans in mass shootings (which implies the ones lost are expendable, at least expendable enough that we won't change the society's norms to prevent those deaths)... You are not.

Nb this was said when this was breaking, and they didn’t even know anyone had been shot yet.

It wasn’t her hearing he got shot in the neck and going “lol maybe it was celebratory gunfire and bad luck?”

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I disagree. If he had 15 years earlier, maybe. He just escaped the Nuremberg Trials.

If somebody says "when you jump off a cliff, you fall," that's not "justifying" anything. That's just explaining cause and effect. You're bending over backwards to come up with an excuse for shutting down speech for purely ideological reasons.

Justify policies enabling gun violence, and you make the world a more dangerous place, including for yourself. Sow hate and violence, and you end up creating people who hate you back. Why is that so hard to understand for some people? Why on earth do some people interpret that as a call for violence? None of it makes any sense.

That? That reads like “if you put a lot of hateful words out in the world you should expect it to lead to hateful action”. If anything this would be more relevant if Kirk inspired someone to kill any of the various groups he encouraged violence against. It doesn’t read at all like a justifying for killing him.

I spoke too briefly in spite of myself. Consider standard exemptions to apply: war combatants, people actively threatening your life, etc. I personally oppose the death penalty, but not strongly enough to deny other jurisdictions the right to impose it.

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For all we know they were just roommates.

It's possible. I keep hearing terms used interchangably on different YT channels and all of that could be people just projecting their preferred narratives so I guess we will have to wait for the Discord and cell phone text message transcripts assuming those ever drop. They so rarely do. Either way at least we know the roommate was involved to some extent. The Discord transcripts may be the most telling of the relationship.

Oh my God, they were roommates!

Republicans still have abortions

The last real nazi's were either burnt, buried or relocated to South America shortly after WWII. Today Nazi, Fascist and all other terms like it are just inflammatory ways to say: "someone I disagree with".

I use the Firefox addon Foxreplace [1] to display that word as such. Others should do the same.

[1] - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/foxreplace/

The bullet engravings are well known (and people pushing the groyper theory seem to believe the engravings support their theory just as well).

There is a claim circulating that Robinson had a transgender/transitioning (MtF) roommate/partner. A simple web search will easily find multiple sources for this claim, but most of them aren't exactly what you'd consider authoritative or journalistic.

Many sources similarly assert that Robinson's father "recognized" him in photos and "encouraged him to turn himself in" (see e.g. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/09/12/tyler-rob...). However, I don't know anything specific about his "testimony".

Your post prompted me to reread everything after perviously reading social media processed information, and you are right, it's not clear cut. Especially once they redacted/not-redacted (actually read both in the same article) the bullet engravings story. (https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/09/charlie...)

However from what did seem credible I think this still looks left-wing motivated

You're saying you don't believe giving orders is a form of speech. Can you justify that in more detail?

My purpose in this post is not to convince you of anything (because I don't believe this is possible at this point), but to make the logical fallacy in your rhetoric as clear as possible to onlookers. This problem is a matter of basic logic, not of opinion; thus you cannot change my mind about it. It's clear that this is not a discussion (https://thoughtcatalog.com/brandon-gorrell/2011/03/how-to-ha...) so I will not reply further.

> of course he was talking about the "Unite the Right" protestors.

There were many protestors with a wide variety of views on many topics among them, who conducted themselves in a wide variety of ways. (All the same is true, of course, of the counter-protestors). To say "there were many fine people on both sides" is to say that each group contained people who were worthy of praise.

You say they were "a group of racists, anti-semites, KKK and neo-Nazis", but not all of them were racists, not all of them were anti-Semites, not all of them were KKK members, and not all of them were neo-Nazis.

Your initial claim was:

> when right wingers killed Heather Heyer, Trump called them "very fine people"

This means that you are saying that he described murderers this way; and then you went on to conflate "right wingers" with a variety of other terms of abuse.

This is blatant and flagrant logical fallacy (the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_composition). It is not logically valid to take a statement made about people "being on a side" (i.e. in a group) and represent it as a judgement of the "side" in general, nor of other people on that "side".

James Alex Fields Jr. killed Heather Heyer. "Right wingers", objectively, did not. "Unite the Right protestors", similarly, objectively, did not.

Donald Trump did not call James Alex Fields Jr. a very fine person. He did not refer to racists as "very fine people". He did not refer to anti-Semites as "very fine people". He did not refer to KKK members as "very fine people". He did not refer to neo-Nazis as "very fine people". He did not describe murder, racism, anti-Semitism, KKK membership or neo-Nazism as virtuous.

He also did not refer to "right wingers" as "very fine people", although of course he presumably believes there is nothing wrong with being politically to the right.

As said by Snopes even in the article headline, Trump did not "call neo-Nazis and white supremacists 'very fine people'. As explained in the article, he explicitly "condemned neo-Nazis and white nationalists outright and said he was specifically referring to those who were there only to participate in the statue protest." As shown in the original quotation, he explicitly described the violence as "vicious and horrible and it was a horrible thing to watch". Immediately before the pull quote, he explicitly said "and you had some very bad people in that group" (meaning the Unite the Right protestors). He explicitly elaborated the point: "But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists, okay? And the press has treated them absolutely unfairly." When the reporter went on to ask a rhetorical question hinting at the same fallacy of composition, Trump explicitly distinguished the people he was praising from those he was criticizing: "The following day it looked like they had some rough, bad people. Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, whatever you wanna call them. But you had a lot of people in that group that were there to innocently protest". Which is to say, he explicitly agreed that neo-Nazis and white supremacists are "rough, bad people", which is in fact the opposite of calling them "very fine people".

You use this as a talking point because you are trying to paint Trump as someone who praises murderers. But you know, or at least reasonably ought to know, that your narrative is contradicted by the evidence, because the evidence has been shown to you multiple times. The plain meaning of what Trump said is very nearly the opposite of what you're presenting it as.

I and the other poster looked at the transcript in its entirety, and called upon you to do so as well.

The argument being used to rebut you depends on understanding the transcript in its entirety. Yours depends on taking a few words out of context and misrepresenting the party to whom they refer.

> responding to false glorifications of him

That is not a fair characterization of what they are doing, no. (Besides which, "glorification" is subjective. People thinking Kirk was a virtuous person because of things they consider virtuous but you don't, is not "false".)

> These comments obviously aren't directed at the family but the news publications and media's handling of his passing.

None of the example comments I have been shown reference supposed news or media bias. Many of them have straight up described the murder as a good or morally just action. Some have even expressed a desire for the same to happen to others in Kirk's orbit.

> I'm curious how standard this "standard" is, did you (and the rest of America) mourn the death of Osama bin Laden? Did you express condolences to his family and try to remember him by the positive things he did in life?

Perhaps I missed the part where Charlie Kirk organized a group of guys to hijack a bunch of planes with civilians on board, and then crash them into buildings.

On a serious note, if you cannot see a difference between these two, I have no idea what to say.

Even if he believed that himself, anyone who came to the stage to dispute him would receive death threats. Read the audience. He knew what he was doing.

Let me document five very serious lies from him:

1. On Facebook, YouTube, and Rumble, Kirk repeatedly promoted the false claim that the medical examiner who performed the autopsy declared Floyd had died of an overdose.

2. Ahead of the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Kirk spread falsehoods about voter fraud, and immediately after Trump lost the 2020 election, Kirk promoted false and disproven claims of fraud in the election.

3. Kirk called the public health measure of social distancing prohibitions in churches a "Democratic plot against Christianity".

4. In the 2020s, Kirk was a Christian nationalist who called the separation of Church and state in the United States a "fabrication".

5. Appearing at a Trump campaign rally in 2024, he said: "This is a Christian state. I'd like to see it stay that way."

There are innumerable more. For the record, the 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. [1]

Contrast it with the way in which truth is actually spread; it is by citing good-quality references.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/09/technology/podcasts-steve...

> hearing it from a host on the most popular “news” station in the country, with neither of his co-hosts even pausing to go “uh, haha, wait now” is… something else.

Meanwhile, another Fox News host has been promoted to Secretary of "War", and is busy drone striking random boats and straight up murdering people.

While yet another Fox News host has been charging people with crimes that juries refuse to indict because they're so preposterous.

It seems we have a serious problem with Fox News hosts and podcaster bros running this government and directing policy. Remember, Fox News isn't just talking to its audience -- it's talking to the President, he watches religiously. He pays more attention to them than all his cabinet and advisors combined.

    If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

    If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

    Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

    If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because of affirmative action?

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024

    If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racists. Now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us … You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 13 July 2023

    Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.

    – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

    The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.

    – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

    We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024

    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

    America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

    The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

    The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024

    America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

    We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.

    – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025

    Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.

    – Charlie Kirk social media post, 8 September 2025

– The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022

Having strongly held opinion on who lives and who dies are petty heavy opinions one might say, correct? Like just pushing the opinion on whether Palestine should or should not be wiped out means that you are advocating for the lives/deaths of one group of people or another?

I'm not saying people should necessarily die for their opinions. But it shouldn't come as a surprise that if your opinion, and the political policies you push for, literally result in the life or death of someone's family members, then those people may have very strong reactions to that.

Like if there was an entire town of purple people and I went around saying I want all people purple people to be killed, should I be surprised if purple people might want to cause violence towards me? I mean, I'm just debating and using words, right? But those words an debates are literally about the lives and deaths of other people.

His material’s all over the internet. So. May everyone go see for themselves.

you're still burying your head in the sand.

you realize it too.

Let's not kid ourselves here. The arguments being made were often opinions on whether one set of people should be killed and another side being saved. For example, by stating the opinion that we should cut funding for Ukraine means that Ukrainian will die as a result. Saying thousands of people should be fired from their lifelong jobs in the federal government means you have had major and long-standing impacts to entire families (and there have been many suicides as a result. You can go on and on like this (Israel/Palestine for example).

Yes, these are just opinions and debate. But these are opinions and debates about the lives and deaths of real people. That doesn't justify him being killed, I don't support his killing in any way. But you can't just debate who lives and dies and push policy one way or another and then be shocked that the people being impacted by those opinions or decisions are going to want to cause violence towards you.

Yes, Kirk advocated for a violent solution due to the election not going his way. It's also standing in stark juxtaposition to how Brazil handled similar issues with a much greater level of integrity.

"Expect perhaps" now seems as only so much weasel words. Whipping? What manner of government monopoly on violence needs to include whipping?

What could “fight for this President” possibly mean when you’re sending people to the capital, after the election’s over, while telling them the election was stolen, on the very day that the election is to be formally certified? The election was over, the contest had ended… so far as legal options that follow the usual route for the peaceful transfer of power. What does “fight” mean here? What is someone using that kind of language around an event like that trying to accomplish?

I think it’s prodding people to do something dangerous and illegal and a risk to democracy herself, and I’m not really sure what else it could be.

(Why… would Trump hold a rally in DC on that particular day to begin with? And why did he and other speakers choose to say what they did? None of this is mysterious, it’s easy to read, but it still seems to be eluding a lot of folks in ways that it don’t think it would in any analogous situation that didn’t involve partisan politics)

> I don't think the median person in the 50s and 60s even had any mental concept of "being transgender" in the first place.

Oh, the people he's referring to had no problem understanding the simple mental concept that the best way to deal with a f** or a cross-dresser was to beat the shit out of them, while the authorities look the other way.

If you disagree, do tell me, pray tell, what do you think he meant by that statement? How does his well-documented history of playing identity politics that explicitly attack trans people fit into your interpretation?

(Which was certainly a bit better than the 40s, where a large number of people felt that the best way to deal with them was chemical castration or an extermination camp.)

> Even after taking the quote that far out of context, coming up with that meaning requires extensive, uncharitable interpretation.

I'm getting rather tired of the expectation that far-right media personas saying sick shit requires us to bend over backwards to take the most charitable view of them and their attacks and dogwhistles, while random nobodies griping about them are held to a Caesar's Wife standard of civility that the targets of their ire don't even try to meet.

Just look at what happened to Brian Kilmeade the other night - nothing. But heaven forbid someone says a harsh word about him or someone else equally repugnant...