Charlie Kirk shot during a debate about trans people

[feministmom4ever]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15086277/Charlie-Kirks-final-words-assassinated-Utah-dead.html

I didn’t agree with many of his political views, but I liked how he interacted with college students who couldn’t answer the question “what is a woman?”.

From my perspective here in the US it's definitely coming from both sides in this instance, and I've seen a lot more from the right on targeting left-wing politicians and people on mass, as opposed to specific individuals.

It died down significantly once the shooter was identified. But the right wing spin now is that he was radicalized by left wing professors at university so I'm sure it will ramp up again with targets painted on universities and their staff.

No we don't. We have one more homicidal nutter amongst billions of normal people.

As another brown women I say something different. I feel more at risk from racism right now, than TRAs.

I used to visit FWR quite alot but got sick of the minimising of racism and the hero worship of those that hate brown people and TRAs alike, like we are seeing in this thread with the "I liked him" BS.

I'm mixed race. My general sense is that this thread is more left wing than right wing.

Of course if you go on a thread like this you will get people sticking up for someone who might be racist. Idk the details. People who don't like him stay away. I support free speech.

But also there's been a lot of support for BAME cases on here.

Mostly BAME nurses who have been penalised for gender critical views or wanting to change away from transwomen.

I agree that racism is a massive concern right now, however it's possible to be concerned about multiple things!

R.e. white feminism I don't agree. See i.e. JK Rowling also raising awareness of the plight of Afghanistan women and girls.

I think there are two different sides to this.

There is absolutely an element of perceived racial superiority from a small but vocal cohort of white people, which no doubt is fortified by institutional power mostly carried over from previous generations. And there are a less vocal but still significant cohort of white people that consider themselves superior but have enough sense to uphold a public image (whilst still no doubt discriminating in many other ways such as in who they employ and prioritise etc).

However, the other side is the association of white people with slavery, for example, which is usually a reference to the transatlantic slave trade. In reality there are over 3x more slaves in the world today than were trafficked over the entire 300-400 years of the transatlantic slave trade.

Last list I saw had 9/10 of the worst offending countries being majority non-white, with Russia in 10th place. So not a single western country in the top 10 worst offenders for modern slavery. And genocide, FGM, child/forced marriage, honour killings, homophobia, religious extremism, oppression of women, etc, are generally also more prevalent in ethnic societies. Even in the UK over 50% of British born Muslims stated the belief that homosexuality should be illegal when surveyed by Channel 4. Only 65% were strongly against stoning unfaithful women to death and 40% believed a woman should always obey her husband.

However, it's generally considered taboo/poor taste to discuss this so it's only the staunch right wing types who already have xenophobic views that will discuss this. This then causes some to see them as 'the only ones speaking the truth', which in reality they often are but for the wrong reasons (to demonise rather than understand/tackle the issues).

I don't mean this offensively. I feel like the inability to have adult discussions about a lot of this stuff plays into the hands of the right wing Tommy Robinson/Reform types.

The Extremely Online thing... I don't claim to understand chan culture, and don't really want to, for that way madness lies.

Violence being carried out by Extremely Online young men is going to be so larded with memes and in-jokes and layers of irony that we'll end up with a resurgence of those incredibly out of touch judges who used to make headlines by asking "Who is Gazza?", and it would be funny if it weren't for the violence that will lead to it.

I mean for several years respectable society in Utah has been in a panic about #DezNat or Deseret Nation, with boomer Republican politicians and 95-year-old LDS church leaders issuing solemn warnings against "the far right", as if they were faced with something like the 1970s National Front. But it seems that really #DezNat is mostly young online edgelords who've discovered that they can wind up their elders by using quotes and iconography from 19th century Mormonism that current year church leaders find embarrassing. Some of it is quite witty, like the Brigham Young "All Wives Matter" meme.

If internet edgelord culture is a problem, and I'm not denying that it is, I'm not sure the solutions will be found in "anti-extremism" strategies designed by people who came of age when Michael Jackson was black and Elton John was straight.

That wasn’t what you were saying 15 hours ago, but okay. You were all for him being a TRA with a grudge. He’s more than likely a right-wing Nick Fuentes Groyper type. Donʼt listen to me though!

Only 65% were strongly against stoning unfaithful women to death

Actually the survey question (from 10 years ago) was about stoning men and women, so not sure why you’ve made it about women.

It’s a high % but I’m not aware of any stonings taking place in the UK.

What’s more concerning to me is a third of all UK men (of any colour, race) surveyed said it would not usually be considered rape if a woman had flirted on a date.

I can't see what is the "That's what" that you think people are missing? Seriously want to know.

That’s a very simplistic view given available evidence that these sites are a hotbed of extremist views,

Remember Eliot Rodgers who was heavily into incel culture on the internet and killed several people.

Also Alex Minassian, who drove into a crowd in Toronto and killed 10 people, was a self-identifed incel. Before the attack he posted “the Incel Rebellion has begun,” referenced Elliot Rodger.

And the UK’s Plymouth shooter who killed 5 people in 2021 was heavily into incel culture.

Dismissing it as one homicidal nutter is naive.

You’re entitled to feel racism is more of a threat than sexism - it would be weird if we all had the same experiences and priorities. That’s why I took issue with “there are bigger issues troubling black/brown women today, bigger than a man in a skirt” as it didn’t chime with me and I wanted to point out (as you obviously know) that no group is a monolith.

ETA I also don’t see hero worship or minimising or racism, more a despair at people celebrating someone’s murder because they disagree with his opinions, on other threads and parts of the internet though, not on this specific one.

what the actual fuck.

No I wasn’t. Don’t lie about what I said. I just said it wouldn’t surprise me. Which it wouldn’t, given the nature of TRA rhetoric online. Throughout this thread, I’ve mainly talked about the online reactions to Kirk’s murder and the glee people took in it.

He isn’t “more likely” to be a right wing groyper, that’s just what internet sleuths you personally agree with have decided. There is no evidence of this. The actual reported evidence is that people who knew him (family and class mates) said he was left wing. His family were republicans and apparently he was the only one who wasn’t. As I said, your own bias is clear. But maybe try a bit of critical thinking for once.

Yes. People on this thread want to talk about the murder. They don’t have to focus on Kirk as a person or be smeared as racists or phobes of whatever kind just because that isn’t the point they came here to discuss. Most people don’t necessarily know who he is or what’s fake news and what isn’t. But they know a man was murdered by a sniper on a university campus and that people are cheering it on.

Yes I agree with you that online radicalisation is a problem. I’m not sure what the solution is.

Indeed.

I know nothing about groypers. I’ve seen this about meme culture. I’ve sympathy for the commenter who says, “I can no longer have opinions. There is too much I don’t know”. Understandable, but that’s a phenomenon Arendt describes in The Origins of Totalitarianism and a prerequisite for it taking hold.

https://www.tiktok.com/@roterotemedia/video/7549367413486161174?_r=1&_t=ZN-8zgWcSVMVso

Case in point: Aaron Bushnell, the young US Air Force personnel member who committed suicide in February 2024 by setting himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy in Washington. For a couple of days my SM was full of people bigging up "Comrade Aaron" before they realised that glorifying suicide wasn't a good idea.

For a short space of time - maybe less than a day - Bushnell's Reddit account was still visible before the platform nuked it. I looked at it. I expected someone who would be obsessed with Israel/Palestine, because for some it does become an obsession.

There was hardly any mention at all of the Middle East. His first post was about fatphobia, believe it or not. There was stuff about animal rights, the usual brickbats about Trump and Republicans but not even much of that. He was most active on the "antiwork" subreddit complaining about how much he hated his job in the Air Force. (I don't believe it was a glamorous Top Gun job, I assume it was boring routine work.)

So what we had was: the average Reddit user with average Reddit opinions, who hated his job, hated his life, obviously something tipped him into suicidality but that's always very mysterious. He doesn't seem to have cared much about Gaza, but he wanted his suicide to be a Grand Gesture, so he glommed onto Gaza as being the biggest news story at the moment.

There's a lot of very confident speculation about the shooter in this case. It's better to be a little cautious and sceptical and double check anything that confirms your biases because it might just be too good to be true.

An extremely perceptive comment from r/technology subreddit, I thought:

That's pretty much how I explained him in a conversation this morning. He is a chronically online socially awkward gen z kid that was essentially raised by the internet. He is desensitized to violence because it has been a simple click away his entire life. He doesn't give a shit about 95% of what politicians are saying even today after he was arrested.

The extremists within the gen z generation are going to do some seriously heinous shit in our lives and we have no one to blame but ourselves. Millennials are the last generation that will remember life both with and without the internet. For us it was fucking disturbing to see 2 girls one cup. We saw that Nick Berg beheading video and it fucked us up. That type of shit was frightening and new to us because we grew up on Saturday morning cartoons and an era where you couldn't even say shit on TV. When South Park came out our parents lost their minds because it was considered vulgar perverted filth. Gen Z have grown up only knowing American war in the middle east. They've lived through the proliferation of daily school shootings. They have been able to see murder in 4k online with a simple search. They've been fed social media algorithms since the day they were first online.

Hmm. Okay. This is somewhat disingenuous. I’m not assuming he is a right-wing groyper, but that is one of the leading theories (and not from internet sleuths). If you think a person like this is left-wing, your own bias is showing. Not mine.

He’s certainly more likely to be a right-wing groyper than trans.

I suspect that trying to put Tyler Robinson into the Right wing box or trying to put him into the Left wing box are both mistakes.

That's especially the case with the information we have so far being sparse and seemingly contradictory in parts.

Both the Right and Left wings are going to try to put him into the box of the opposing side and they might not like that it doesn't work as they'd wish.

That is true, I agree with that.

“A leading theory” from all the people who repeat exactly the same crap that someone they agree with online came up with, and here are you, despite not having a clue whether it’s true, repeating it uncritically. 😂 that’s exactly how fake news spreads.

I’ve read quite widely on all sides, and as far as I can see there is no actual evidence to suggest this Fuentes link, just online speculation based on those bullet markings and what they mean.

Agree.