I rejected a number of possible image choices for this post, one of which was a photo of the shitgibbon from today where it is very, very clear that half of his face is drooping in a way that absolutely screams “I’ve had strokes recently, and might be having one now.” I never ended up posting about the weird collective hysteria of a couple of weekends ago where the Internet all at once decided he’d died, and conspiracy theories and other forms of nonsense absolutely abounded for a few days. I myself got drawn into a conversation about whether a bunch of closed roads around Walter Reed Army Medical Center meant anything (answer: no) although I managed to avoid most of the really nutty shit.

Anyway, I wanted to take a moment to make what ought to be a really obvious point clear: that it is perfectly okay to be happy when absolutely fucking terrible people die, especially if said really terrible people die in the exact method that they have long suggested that it is perfectly acceptable for other, non-them people to die. My wife and I had a nice little moment together when it was confirmed that Charlie Kirk was dead, and accidentally viewing the video of him being killed a few minutes later (I don’t recommend looking, if you haven’t seen it) made it really clear that he’d been alive for maybe a few seconds after being shot and no longer than that. He could have been in the hospital with the trauma team standing next to him and already prepped for surgery and that shot would have killed him.

I feel bad for his kids. That’s it. And the truth is, I don’t even feel that bad for his kids, because they’re 3 and 1 and they will be better off without his awful influence in their lives, as will the entire rest of the world. I felt bad for them when he was alive, too. He literally died in a way that he had said was just fucking fine for other people to die. He had just said something racist and obnoxious seconds before dying. And he thought empathy was a personality flaw. So, cool. Fuck you, Charlie, I hope you’re in Hell.

(I’m having to be careful, as I’ve discovered that Kirk and Ben Shapiro are more or less the same person in my head. Shapiro is the one whose wife has never had an orgasm. Kirk is the “your body, my choice” guy, and someone else made a choice about his body today. I don’t care.)

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And now, let’s engage in wanton speculation. No doubt me writing this and putting it on the internet will lead to being proved wrong immediately on most counts, so you can all look forward to that.

This was clearly an assassination; that’s not the speculative part. This was a deliberate and targeted shooting and was obviously planned carefully in advance. The shooter fired once, from a distance indicating at least some skill with his weapon, killed his target, and escaped completely undetected. Apparently the rifle has been found, but I genuinely don’t think Kash Patel’s FBI has enough institutional competence left to catch this guy and I’m also not convinced they’re trying very hard.

I do not have any trouble believing (which is not quite the same as saying “I believe”) that someone set this guy up to 1) give a nice little excuse for even more right-wing violence and fascism and 2) as much as I hate to say it, continue to try and knock the Epstein Files out of the news. Trump? Maybe not. Stephen Miller? Absofuckinglutely.

Dude got shot in Utah, which is not well-known as a bastion of liberalism, at a college that had not only invited him to speak in the first place but got what looks like a nice-sized crowd to hear him. It’s difficult to imagine why someone would deliberately target Charlie Kirk absent a specifically political motive, but I also have no trouble believing that he was killed because he wasn’t batshit enough for the shooter. I’m not interested enough in the rabbit hole this will take me down to do much research, but apparently he wasn’t super popular with some of the further reaches of the fever swamp for some reason. Feel free to enlighten me if you like.

And finally, if it was a leftist of any stripe who shot him, Kirk is not going to be the only one, and I’ll bet it’ll be no more than a few weeks until there’s at least another attempt. If you decided to start killing right-wing figures and were as successful as this guy was, would you stop with one? I kinda doubt it. I can’t wait to see the fucking nickname the press drops on the shooter if it happens again.