Posted by Geekette 9 hours ago
If you say "Democrats suck", don't expect them to buy your product. If you say "God doesn't exist," don't expect Christians to come to your business. If you say "I hate gays", expect to get fired from your medical clinic job.
Have free speech, but use it wisely.
Having free speech serves to diffuse social tension. It ensures we don't wind up as cattle, like in 1984. Just don't expect that you can praise the death of certain people and expect everyone to love you for it.
Maybe above all you should be kind. Regardless of your politics. Articulate what you don't like with your free speech, but don't be an asshole.
Unfortunately social media encourages fast engagement with little nuance, so we see a sewer instead of a noble land of open thought and debate.
But we shouldn't throw free speech out with the bath water.
"Offend" is subjective, and US Citizens should not have punitive governmental consequences as a result.
But private organizations, should be able to make their own decisions on all the above.
By the government? I doubt that “speech is violence” comes from the government.
2. People getting fired for simply pointing out that Kirk is a victim of a system he helped build are getting fired, which is a completely different situation.
3. The Trump admiration openly going after people is infringing on freedom of speech.
Trump orders all flags in the nation at half mast and Kirk is being treated like a fallen statesman and hero, the State Department claiming it will revoke the visas of any immigrant who speaks negatively of Kirk, the breathless media coverage, Trump ranting about "leftist violence", the right wing's endless calls for violence and war on social media (going entirely unclamped-down upon,) and the narrative being created that Charlie Kirk was a peaceful intellectual scholar and activist of the likes of MLK Jr and Jesus Christ.
It's obvious a stage is being set here. And of course when whatever happens happens, it will be blamed on the left.
We all have to fight to undo the Obama Smith-Mundt Modernization Act that allowed the executive branch to create domestic propaganda.
The interface makes it feel like you're having a polite conversation among like-minded folk. In reality, you're like one of those folks on a street corner with a megaphone and most of the time the rest of the world isn't listening to you. But they can tune you in anytime they want, and there can be consequences for holding a strong opinion incompatible with the strong opinion of other people you will be wanting to do business with.
... That of course includes this medium. Watch what you say today everyone, your future and current employers are reading Hacker News.
The people getting fired have shown themselves to be exactly the types of people Popper warned about in his Paradox of Tolerance: they "begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
These vigilantes are just socially (and constitutionally!) doing what Popper said to do when faced with those that teach people to answer arguments with bullets: "We should claim that any movement preaching intolerance places itself outside the law and we should consider incitement to intolerance and persecution as criminal, in the same way as we should consider incitement to murder, or to kidnapping, or to the revival of the slave trade, as criminal."
Freedom of speech is not freedom from consequences. It's called being a decent human being. As we say in America, if there’s a terrorist at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 terrorists.
Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.
Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45234112 and marked it off topic.
The full quote said that instead of empathy one should think about sympathy. However, with the full quote the argument looks weak.
Edit: here is a link https://m.youtube.com/shorts/vojXvj2B6RI
I actually have witnessed the concept of empathy used on many occasions for a sort of rhetorical abuse, by alternately demanding it of people and then denying that they are fundamentally capable of it in a given situation due to identity differences. In the literal sense, empathy requires (https://www.simplypsychology.org/sympathy-empathy-compassion...) a deeper understanding of negative emotions based in "putting oneself in another's shoes"; but many will argue that this simply can't be properly done.
A simple example is that men are accused of lacking "empathy" for women who feel endangered in social/dating circumstances where the man might feel empowered. But we simply cannot spontaneously change our perspective on a given circumstance. (And, of course, it is treated as offensive to turn the example around; but that's another discussion.)
Indeed, your empathy is not being expected here by anyone. But your sympathy is. You are being expected to treat murder as a crime and the loss of a healthy adult life as a tragedy. Kirk had many ideas about how people should go about their lives that you might strongly disagree with, or even consider unconscionable. He also had many ideas about the reality of how businesses and other institutions operate, or about what is fair in that context, similarly.
But from what I can tell, nothing he ever said rose to the level of supposing that ending someone's life is an appropriate response to that person having the wrong ideas. (And the bit you're quoting is so incredibly far from that, that it's hard to assume good faith when people make this argument.)
His killer apparently disagreed. And many people on social media also seem to disagree, although they haven't taken action on it.
I would also like to point out there is a very large difference between firing and killing. So no, people getting fired is not somehow equivalent to a killing.
There are incredible numbers of people who support, even celebrate deaths. And we're not even talking about the other difficulties, like perspective (e.g. the death of a Russian father fighting in Ukraine, do you celebrate or mourn?)
He also somehow supported the president "saving" TikTok, and was one of the most prominent influencers on the platform.
Seems really easy to solve this problem. Follow the law. The president must love the CCP or something.
This seems like you are feeling quite offended -- to judge (now ex?) friends as "inhuman", and to further alienate them by labeling them as "liberals".
That's certainly over-stating the situation, no?
Is it worth it to have a cost of some deaths every year so that we can have the Bill of Rights? Yes, it is. If you think that makes me callus, you need to develop a thicker skin.
Since GP also made the typo, I don't know if/to what extent a joke was intended here.
(The adjective, here intended to mean "emotionally hardened", is "callous". A callus (noun) is a region of literal thickened skin. Although "callous" can also literally refer to skin which has calluses.)
Note: I believe the 2nd Amendment is really the proof that the founding fathers weren't the super geniuses the mythology has them as, but hey, too late now.
The founding fathers had vastly different ideas for drafting the 2nd.
"...cost of unfortunately..." Is that not clear? The context was he was responding about a question about the 2nd amendment. clearly the first order thinking would make it clear it's not the rule, it's the purpose of the rule that's important.
The purpose is so you don't get arrested for some social media comment or other rights, like what is happening in the UK right now.
So, basically, what you are saying is "it is bad to celebrate the death of people, but...".
So, you have to choose what to be: a person who is fine with political violence, or someone who is against any sort of political violence.
I have a nice little trick for it: when you go to a funeral of a person in your family, or close to your family, who was an asshole, I bet you won't be saying to other people "yeah, sad, very sad. But, please remember, he was an asshole". Right? I would not -- not the time, nor the place.
Yes, Kirk is not a family (probably not yours, and definitely not mine), but the same standard of being polite and reasonable person should apply.
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.
How much before it's okay to party on the streets after learning about their death?
Clearly there's a difference in magnitude between Kirk and bin Laden, but both were merchants of hate and violence, so where's the line?
If people are whitewashing his history then it's to be expected that other people will speak out to set the record straight. That's how free speech works and trying to silence it on the basis of "decorum" is dishonest and manipulative.
To answer this question, we would have to first agree on the term "hate", and what does it mean to be a "merchant of hate". Then, we examine the evidence, and arrive to the conclusion.
So, what is "hate"? What is "merchant of hate"? Why Kirk, in your view, was one?
The canonization effort around an only-known-in-certain-circles propagandist has been utterly bizarre to watch. Air Force 2 escort? What, pardon me, the fuck.
[edit] I’ll add that the fawning wall-to-wall treatment and coverage has been especially wild to watch when it occurs so close, time-wise, to a murderer with a kill-list shooting two democratic politicians in their homes, killing one of them plus a spouse (and a dog, as everyone always seems to add) before being stopped, which news was so barely-covered and left the news cycle so fast (and saw the same kind of callousness from the right that they’re now perceiving from the left, including, as always when it’s this guy, from the President of the United States) that, when I’ve brought it up or seen it brought up after this event, it’s been easy to find people who didn’t even know it happened.
Again, morally reprehensible and it doesn't fucking work. It only shows 'the other side is just as bad/worse', turns the messenger into a martyr, and galvanizes support.
Unlike many others, he invited anyone to the mic to prove him wrong. Hardly qualifies as lying. Anyone could have gotten to the mic and debate him. Sure, you may don't like his beliefs, but there is a huge difference between lying, and defending (even incorrect and unfounded) claims in public.
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...
This is far fetched. People who have sent the death threats are lunatics. If the number of people who are sending death threats is our new standard for the quality and importance of debates, then we should simply stop the debates. There are always unhinged people around. Where does it leave us?
> Let me document five very serious lies from him:
Sure. Some are maybe lies, some are his opinions, some are misleading claims, and the rest are his own beliefs. Still, anyone could have went in front of the mic and debated him for it. In my opinion, someone is a liar when they have a platform to lie, and no way for the public to engage, debate, and correct them. While Kirk's beliefs are very far from my own (e.g., I do not believe that election was stolen), I still think that what he did is needed today: speaking your mind, and being open to be challenged in public.
It is bewildering how the Republican voters don't realize that the party cares exclusively about those who fund the party, not about those who vote for it. The votes are gained exactly on the basis of lies. If the party actually cared for its voters, it would send all the non-immigrant work-visa employees back home immediately if they don't have a PhD degree in their field of work.
In effect, politics is ruled and ruined by money.
Apply it to current US politicians. Who is doing this, how do you stop them?
Where do you think this comes from, and, rather than arm ourselves with similarly martial language, we should be expected simply to lie flat?
Ridiculous.
Then Kilmeade (multi-decade Fox News host) just casually dropped “we should lethal inject homeless people who refuse help” a day or two ago, and his co-hosts didn’t even miss a beat.
I mean, that’s literal Nazi shit. They say literal Nazi shit, this isn’t isolated. What do you call it? WTF. Elon sieg-heils twice at the inauguration and they don’t disown him. What is it going to take before we get folks who still think calling them fascists is the problem, actually, to blame the party that twice elected a guy president who told his supporters they could shoot his opponent if she won?
See:
* https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-news-host-menta...
Granted, you’ve been hearing little suggestions like this for a long time from ordinary republican voters, if you’ve been in their spaces much, but 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.
He was going into generally extremely liberal areas and willing to openly debate and discuss his generally conservative and Christian values in 'real time', while encouraging his opponents to use the internet, chat bots, and whatever else they might like to try to get a zinger off on him. And it was real debate - not the media/talk show nonsense where two people just scream at and interrupt each other, with no real debate happening. He happily let people go off on their monologues before responding, and without resorting to typical fallacies you see online like ad hominem, straw-manning, etc.
I don't really agree with a lot of his values, but I think he is an absolute icon in terms of how political discussions should happen. This is how democracy, debate, and more broadly - an Open Society should work, and he was killed for pursuing this. If this isn't the path forward for debate in society, then what is?
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
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.
Can you show me a video/article/blog post where he said that Palestinians should be wiped out? I would like to see/read it myself.
This one looks like a rage bait more than anything. Pretty equivalent to taking a phrase out of context, and then claiming whatever suits your narrative.
You asked for evidence of this. I provided you an example of him literally telling someone from Palestine that the place they live doesn't exist and was not owned by him or his people.
I mean, do you think the follow up to this conversation results in the gentleman he is "debating" to walk away happily and change his views on whether Palestine exists? Because that seems to be what you're insinuating. You seem to be saying, that either his debates really weren't about the lives and deaths of others. Or that his opinions and policies were really "the right thing to do" and people on the other side just didn't understand that yet.
You took a part of the conversation and showed it to me. Show me the whole thing, and not a rage bait piece potentially taking out of context.
For you it seems like unless there is a video where Charlie Kirk is telling a soldier to pull the trigger and kill somebody directly, you won't be convinced. It's the same argument that Charles Manson shouldn't be guilty because it was just his opinions that caused people to be killed.
None of it has given me any reason to believe he had the intent of inciting rage.
The specific quotes people are spamming in these discussions especially don't convince me.
Can you provide an example of his material where he incites rage? I am curious to see.
The are a dozen or so here.
He promoted 2020 election denial conspiracies. Moves to mess with due process for voting, or to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power (say, promoting coup attempts) are some of the gravest threats to peace possible in a democracy, as far as speech goes. Lying about such, is right up there.
[edit] sources easily searchable if you have the topics, letting people pick their own works better if search turns them up pretty easily, that way there’s no worry that I’m choosing clips out of context or something.
So, you made a claim. I asked you for an example of a material that you based your claim on, and instead of backing up your claim you are sending me to find a source that will prove it?
> letting people pick their own works better if search turns them up pretty easily, that way there’s no worry that I’m choosing clips out of context or something.
What is the source material, a video, or a text, that you based your claims on? Is there a chance that you actually never saw the source material yourself?
I assume you never seen anything like that yourself, but rather read a tweet or two that claim that it happened, and you go off of it.
It shows me a bunch of links to various websites. So, which one was the one that you've read/watched to inform your opinion?
You have to click on the links and read, HTH.
You see, I can find some link and read them, but then I may come back and challenge you on what you've said. However, since I've read a different source (not the one you've read/watched), then we are going to find ourselves in a situation where we arguing about different things. To avoid this, people typically cite their references. So, you are not willing to do so, which makes me believe that you never actually read/watched a source material yourself, and best case scenario it was a tweet.
I have no idea why you resort to name-calling, it does not look good on you.
you realize it too.
Disagreeing with you is not avoiding anything.
To "realize" something, it would have to be true.
Not going to engage, but you are absolutely burying your head in the sand, bud.
Then commenting to repeat yourself is obnoxious and unproductive conduct.
> Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive.
> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
By siting in a tent with "Prove me wrong" poster, inviting people to debate him, and then posting it on the internet?
How is that "inciting rage"?
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.
I am a bit confused. Are you saying that now we should stop debate hot topic because opinions/claims we voice during those debates can impact people and cause them to commit violence towards us?
Are you serious?
If I use my words and political influence to support say genocide, is that a bad thing? Because you could say it is a debate we should have, right? It's just words. But topics like this mean people are literally dying. Having an opinion, especially have a strong public opinion, that people in Gaza should me evacuated, starve to death, etc. Isn't really just words. You're literally arguing those people should be displaced, eradicated, starved, etc.
You are expecting people who are the victims and supporters of death and destruction to be rational. To use words to "debate" their points. That's like arguing Israel/Hamas should be debating until there is a "winner" and the other side concedes. When in reality, there are generations of hate and anger. Neither side is really interested in a debate. And there is likely no realistic solution that either side with peacefully support. But make no mistake, this debate result in the deaths of others. People are literally dying and starving. Just because you in particular are not in that position doesn't mean you words about have no meaning. This is a person using influence to change political policy and elections. To literally choose who lives and who dies.
If you dropped into Gaza right now and tried to "debate" someone that Israel is correct, you might get some resistance, no? It's even highly likely you would meet some violence. This is pretty obvious to most of us. Didn't your parent tell you not to discuss religion or politics in certain settings? These are heated topics with histories of violence. It's disingenuous to think you can make strong public statement on those topics and not meet strong resistance in the least, and violence at the worst.
Now, it shouldn't be this way. And I wish it wasn't. But as long as military's exist and you have people willing to kill to make their points instead of debating, then that is just reality. It's like trying to debate a hornets nest and being surprised that bees aren't particularly interested in debates.
I think you are. Opinions are opinions. Incitement for violence is incitement to commit violence.
Completely different things.
I am a bit confused. An opinion that states that a violence towards particular group should happen is an incitement for violence.
> Tell the male that in your opinion his wife/girlfriend is ugly. Surely you're not going to incite any violence. It's just your opinion man, you should just be debated.
This is a silly example: beauty is subjective. Thus, what you are doing you are insulting a person, and of course there are consequences for that.