r/bestof • u/vastros • Sep 11 '26
[PeterExplainsTheJoke] User explains Kirkmas
/r/PeterExplainsTheJoke/comments/1wd7tm9/why_are_people_angry_peter/p93to24/253
u/TheIllustriousWe Sep 11 '26
Charlie was well-known for being a bad-faith debater, but even before that, he got his start making those shitty memes that were spread all over the internet in the early-mid 2010s. And now a meme is all he will ever be. We may be a year removed from Charlie's death, but it took considerably less time to see that he will only be remembered for how he died so violently and abruptly, with any and all discussion firmly centered around whether or not it was funny.
Something tells me he would have leaned left on gun control a little sooner than he did, if he knew this would be his only legacy.
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u/SDRPGLVR Sep 11 '26
South Park even made fun of him like two weeks before he died, and he took it well. The fucked up and ironic thing is he probably would have actually liked all the memes about his death. Probably would have enjoyed his wife eye-fucking JD Vance onstage a little less though. What a sad joke of a person he ultimately ended up.
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u/Epistaxis Sep 11 '26
He would be one of the most prolific meme-reposters if he was alive and someone like Hasan Piker was murdered.
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u/rynokick Sep 11 '26
Writer needs to change “conservatives who adored him” to “conservatives found out he existed”
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u/baardvark Sep 11 '26
I am around conservatives most of my workday and never heard his name until his blood was on the ground.
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u/Eric848448 Sep 11 '26
I only knew who he was before he died because of this godforsaken hellhole of a website. Normal people had never heard of him before that.
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u/StuTheSheep Sep 11 '26
I knew who he was because he sent 6 busloads of supporters to DC on Jan 6, 2021. He was heavily involved in trying to overthrow the government on behalf of the orange pedo.
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u/Epistaxis Sep 11 '26
Yeah he had more financial backing than actual influence. The right's funders wanted a Reverse MLK Jr. to be the more moderate respectable face of their youth movement, instead of the militant fringe like Nick Fuentes, but the militant fringe is what was getting clicks and views. When he was murdered they thought they finally had the missing piece of the Reverse MLK Jr. and could sanctify him into an abstract ideal of Practicing Politics the Right Way that was more influential in death than he had been in life, but unlike original MLK Jr., the internet made it impossible to conceal all the immoderate things he actually said and did.
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u/thegreatself Sep 11 '26
The peak irony of absolute-freeze-peach-warriors DEMANDING everybody else post a tearful in-memoriam for an authoritarian-propagandist-sentient-haircut that engaged in and made an entire career out of performative polemics, and inflammatory, politically divisive rhetoric basically requires anybody with conviction to mock the absolute joke that Charlie was in life and then became immortalized as in death.
Unfortunately there is no hell for him to burn eternally in, which is a shame only because he seemed to be such a big fan of the concept.
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u/Elliott2030 Sep 11 '26
I got a "memorial" email after his death from a Democratic women's group I was considering joining and I blasted them about treating a Nazi like someone worth mourning. I can't believe how many otherwise sensible people fell for that bullshit at the time. (and no, the women's group is forever off my radar after that).
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u/pinkocatgirl Sep 12 '26
These people don’t actually care about the decorum or morality of celebrating a person’s death, they just jumped on a chance to browbeat the other side for behavior they know they themselves would do. The hard core right wingers have been making jokes involving the death of liberals for years. It’s all cynical, all they care about is scoring points over the other side by any means necessary.
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u/verendum Sep 12 '26
I just toss their cultural grenade back at them and say it’s very woke of them to enforce cultural submission, especially since I’ve never heard of this guy until he died.
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u/total_looser 21d ago
I will keep explaining this to you all until it becomes learned behavior.
- The hypocrisy and "irony" of right wing politics is by design, it's on purpose.
- Hypocrisy is a concept to you, someone who believes words and actions should have some kind of meaning, a movement towards something.
- This does not exist for these people. They will do or say anything. They are only interested in winning.
- Pointing out or decrying their hypocrisy is reinforcement, it's what they crave. "Liberal tears".
- Stop winning the game for them. The only proper reactions are to ignore them or beat them.
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u/Petrichordates Sep 11 '26
The idea that Theo James looks anything Charlie Kirk is more absurd than this entire thing.
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u/Borgmaster Sep 11 '26
In the guys defense he said if you squint. He even states it was only because he was white with brown hair.
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u/ThePedanticWalrus Sep 11 '26
There's a really strong resemblance if you're only looking at the fact that they're both homo sapiens
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u/yeah-yeah-yaya Sep 11 '26
Right??? Greek stud vs milquetoast loser
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u/X-Himy Sep 11 '26
Thank you for spelling milquetoast correctly. In my madness I considered creating a bot to correct people when they type "milk toast" or "milktoast."
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u/TheArmchairSkeptic Sep 11 '26
Funnily enough, the comic character from which we get the word milquetoast (Caspar Milquetoast, from The Timid Soul) was actually named for the dish milk toast (a slice of buttered toast in a bowl with milk poured over it, typically served to sick people). The author chose the name because of how terribly bland the dish was, and his adapted spelling entered the lexicon as a word to describe people of a similarly bland and inoffensive demeanour to that character.
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u/bandswithgoats Sep 11 '26
I have one quibble. The attempt at forced canonization as a martyr wasn't from "conservatives who adored" Charlie Kirk. Nobody adored Charlie Kirk. He had haters on the left, haters on the far(ther) right, and to everyone else, he was a non-entity or a useful sponge for right-wing money.
He had no ideas and there was no mourning that wasn't a pantomime to either try to force agendas associated with him into cultural salience, or to punish random internet users who spoke ill of him. Not for the speaking ill, but for existing while left of Ronald Reagan.
People who were adored have followers, people dedicated to the legacy, to continuing their work or ideas. Charlie Kirk had a swarm of vultures picking apart his corpse for personal profit from the moment he got shot.
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u/njbeerguy Sep 11 '26
Hell, even most conservatives didn't know he existed until he died. You had to be real plugged in, especially on the youth side of things, to know who he was.
Following his death, they've tried to turn him into a much bigger and more influential figure than he actually was.
In fairness, he was influential - mostly in that he helped popularize the idea that memes = political discourse.
That's it. That's the sum total of his contributions to the world.
The attempts to canonize him are sad and pathetic.
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u/hotdoug1 Sep 11 '26
To literally think any and all mentions of a "neck injury" on September 10th are references to Charlie Kirk, especially by an account not based in the US, is insane.
If there's proof that we as a species won't make it, this might be it.
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u/portlandobserver Sep 12 '26
The cynic in m wonders if he actually believes what he posted or if he's just doing it for viral attention. More likely Kevin Sorbo has a social media manager to handle this for him?
This whole idea which the internet has created that every thought needs to be posted, and every comment deserves attention may be one of the worse things designed by humanity.
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u/Borgmaster Sep 11 '26
Of all the people to try and rally behind Kirk was easily the most shamelessly problematic and it really showed how open republicans were about how much they hated women, immigrants, and non-christians as a class. Ive never seen it that bad, there has never been a time in my time living where there was such a shameless pageantry of hate so openly committed to by so many people in power. Thats when i knew there was no hope for the republican party. They need to be destroyed outright as a party with any kind of power.
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u/Maldevinine Sep 11 '26
Ok, but these guys are missing the funnier event from the day.
The entire Sniper Elite franchise on Steam was massively discounted.
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u/I_Peed_on_my_Skis Sep 11 '26
Sure Kevin 🙄. I remember when my girlfriend who lives in Canada told me about it.
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u/explicitlarynx Sep 11 '26
When Charlie Kirk died, you could hear a "pop" followed by another "pop". That was the two champaign bottles I opened to celebrate.
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u/Deadbreeze Sep 13 '26
Motherfucker! Here I heard this last night in a game and just thought it had something to do with captain Kirk from star trek! That's how little I care about Charlie kirk.
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u/Thebobjohnson Sep 14 '26
I opened this and was very disappointed to find out we weren’t celebrating Costco Kirkland Xmas style.
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u/Epistaxis Sep 11 '26
I would rather live in the world where this guy's senseless murder led only to a day or two of critically appraising his short career, and within a month (let alone a year) he just wasn't in the media at all, instead of the world where we're still making jokes about how he died. Unfortunately the US government and news media basically declared a national mourning period and banned everyone from criticizing him. Against that kind of conceptual authoritarianism and (self-)censorship, transgressive humor is probably a healthy response.
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u/RusskiJewsski Sep 14 '26
First...its the anniversary of Charlie Kirk's death today. In the moment after his assassination there was a brief, mildly insane period where conservatives who adored him tried to basically culturally enforce a universal period of mourning for the man
ohh like the summer of floyd?
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u/theangrypragmatist Sep 12 '26
I can't believe it's only been a day since the one-year anniversary of the worst thing to ever happen in September.
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u/1beachedbeluga Sep 11 '26
You can tell a lot about a person by how they react when someone dies.
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u/hauntedhotdogg Sep 11 '26
You can also tell a lot about a person by how others react to their death.
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u/jas07 Sep 16 '26
Agreed. Trump has proven he is a POS many times over the years by making fun of the recently deceased.
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Sep 11 '26
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u/CapoExplains Sep 11 '26
Well you don't have to agree with the assassination itself, or assassination in general, to admit that it's deeply ironic for him to have famously said a few gun deaths every year are "worth it" to protect the second amendment and then become one of those gun deaths mid-sentence as he was in the middle of telling a racist lie about gun violence. The irony is staggering even if, as I do, you firmly stand against murdering someone for being a loud racist asshole, no matter how much of a loud racist asshole they are.
And I mean, at this point what's being mocked is far more the Conservatives who lost their absolute fucking minds over this (very quiet about the other 40,000 gun deaths in the US in 2025 though, including a school shooting the same day Kirk was killed) trying and dismally failing to turn it into their "Reichstag Fire" moment. It's very worthy of mockery even if you stand firmly against the killing itself.
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u/portlandobserver Sep 11 '26
Oh, I agree it was ironic. I just don't think we should assassinate people we don't agree with. The next day, that someone who gets disagreed with may be you.
The conserative (and performative) reaction to his death was pretty overblown and definitely didn't start a movement or a reaction like they hoped.
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u/CapoExplains Sep 12 '26
Well, the issue people took with Kirk is not that they disagreed with him, that's frankly childishly simplistic, the issue people took with Kirk is that he was a virulent racist homophobic transphobic white nationalist who was trying to make the world a worse place for marginalized people.
I don't think that justifies killing him, but it's not just "someone we disagreed with" it was "someone who is trying to do material harm to marginalized groups."
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Sep 12 '26
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u/CapoExplains Sep 12 '26
You know, you make yourself difficult to take seriously when you accuse me of doing things I absolutely did not do and then complain that "no one stops me, no arrests" as if I should go to prison for the Reddit comment I posted above.
And as a defense of your position that conservatives didn't lose their fucking minds over it. This is why people mock you idiots. This right here.
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u/explicitlarynx Sep 11 '26
I'm not saying I'm okay with what happened to Charlie Kirk. I'm saying Charlie Kirk was okay with what happened to Charlie Kirk.
(Also, I lied, I'm very much okay with what happened to Charlie Kirk.)
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u/Kakyro Sep 12 '26
Motherfucker made his bank calling for my genocide. Violence was met with violence. I'm not about to call for more deaths but I'm also not going to pretend I don't get a chuckle at the irony of his death and the right's pathetic failed attempt to turn him into their casus belli.
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u/bookslayer Sep 11 '26
It's an anniversary of the last time Charlie said something racist too.
Been a whole year, how time flies