Dude, I had never even HEARD of this guy’s name prior to his death. What is going on here!? Why are people freaking out. Am I that out of touch?
Even my liberal wife was aware of who this guy was. Was anyone else like me?
I know who Ben Shapiro is. But Charlie Kirk!? This entire time both the left and the right either hates or adored this guy? What are you all surfing on your cell phones!?
A lot of the engagement around him was absolutely manufactured and bot driven, kinda like the Cracker Barrel thing.
I only knew of him because South Park mocked him and his style of masterdebating by depicting Clyde and Cartman as parodies of him.
Before the assassination, I just knew him as the tiny face chud with Turning Point USA who spewed insipid talking points to “own” the left.
If you’ve seen him before, it was probably in a meme like this.
I barely knew him as the guy that said fuck the kids and let them die when school shootings happened. Picked that up randomly in the periphery. I think he’s from the Fox News idiocy, echo chamber space.
Funny enough I learned recently he was banned from fox News briefly for insulting one of the on air people
I would wager 90% of Americans had never heard of Charlie Kirk before his death. It’s just this fucking regime is SO FUCKING ONLINE!
Just called it the other day, it’s a reality TV show. That’s why they acquire all the media outlets, the viewer rates are insane.
Being a non-American, zero clue. Seems he was more useful to the regime dead rather than alive.
Ditto. I only know about Charlie Kirk from the memes, and these memes don’t paint him positively so I got the idea that he’s a right wing nutjob, which is not wrong seeing as what he spouted when he was alive.
He’s famous for creating a conservative organization while in college, called Turning Point USA. The org puts out a lot of smug memes to appeal to young conservative folks, so naturally people made fun of them and counter-memed.
He’s said a lot of very vile things, like “Black women don’t have the same kind of brain processing power” (paraphrased) when talking about how bad DEI is.
My BFF hadn’t heard of him either, but they curate their feeds to be mostly uplifting fluff, and they aren’t terminally online like I am lol. I was kind of surprised that he was the influencer that got shot though, I might have expected someone like Loomer or Fuentes
I would say Kirk’s more prominent than Loomer. His TPUSA is also very successful and Trump’s biggest youth wing
Right, I kind of expected that prominence to encourage carrying enough security to protect him. I think he skewed that a bit and thought he was untouchable because of his prominence.
The other two are just as insane, but think they have Trump’s ear despite not commanding anything near Kirk’s audience
Kirk definitely has Trump’s ear. He just doesn’t seem to use it which might be why I think he’s a lot less insane than Loomer. He’s also definitely way less insane than Fuentes who tried to brand Kirk a Fascist in the former’s “Groyper” movement to drive everything further right.
Never heard of the dude either. Didn’t care, still don’t.
I didn’t. Still trying to figure out why I should care.
You shouldn’t.
I literally had no idea who he was until the campus videos of the shooting hit Lemmy. I’m in the US but don’t regularly follow US media sources because gestures vaguely. Lemmy is also my only social media at this point, everything else has been deleted, so when something pops up here, I go digging through the Guardian or El Pais to get an idea of what’s going on.
I will say, I had the absolute delight of taking all the wind out of my deeply religious and conservative coworkers sails by innocently asking, “who’s Charlie Kirk?”, when they were discussing a moment of silence idea and a poem one of them wrote about him. Of course I knew who he was at that point, but I enjoy being an agent of chaos in a small southern town lol (send help!).
a poem one of them wrote about him
what the actual fuck is wrong with peopleHoly shit, I love you wind taking abilities. I too had no idea who he was but thankfully don’t have to deal with confronting propogandized family members.
I’d heard his name but had no idea who he was.
I looked him up and was like “I gotta join in the pile-on”
Really, I’m here for the spectacle and it’s too rich that this dude spouting gun nut nonsense took a shot to his neck. I don’t care if he lived or died, I don’t celebrate gun violence, I wish I lived in a different kind of society. But I don’t, so I’m gonna laugh
And I’m laughing even harder when conservatives clutch their pearls and demand that feel bad. Choke on my indifference, you fucking phony chuds
He was pretty irrelevant outside of online spaces and campus events. If you’ve never heard of him before it just means you aren’t terminally online, which is a good thing.
He was a ghoul and you’re right to not feel bad about him dying. Rot in piss, bozo.
Getting out of reddit and US centric socials/media does remove a lot of trash you don’t need to know from the feed. You can’t avoid some, when they get through, and filters don’t catch them, but it’s significantly better.
Lemmy and Mastodon FTW.
He used to be one of those guys that breadtube dunked on a lot, but he wasn’t as big as Shapiro or Crowder. People used to edit his face small, and make fun of him. He had a few million youtuber subscribers, but a few million less than the other big names on conservative youtube. For context, the largest communist channel on youtube is Second Thought with 1.8 million subscribers, he had more than double that.
Thank you for telling me about Second Thought!
Happy to be of help!
Second Thought even did at least one AMA on Lemmy, through Hexbear. JT’s read words I’ve written, and he’s written words in reply!
Most I knew was he was an annoying rightwinger which is enough to get on my “follow your leader” list. Once I saw the small face memes I remembered a bit, but was just happy one of these people was gone that apparently had a lot of pull online.
