Quote Originally Posted by Omegstrat6 View Post
That Kirk was assassinated for his expressing his beliefs and opinions is truly appalling but please let's not buy into Trump's eulogy of him as some kind of great American martyr. Sure, he wasn't wrong about everything but then no-one is and, despite all the "Jesus is King" BS he liked to spout like some kind of latter day Billy Graham, his views didn't seem terribly Christian to me and he spread and incited a lot of hatred.

At heart, Kirk was a bigot, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic and racist. Until he realised that it didn't play too well with Trump's political ambitions, he was also pretty anti-Semitic. Ingratiating himself with Ivanka, his skill at using social media to spread the MAGA message to young people made him very useful to Trump and this, in turn, also made him very rich.

To claim, however, that Kirk was some great defender of freedom and free speech is almost laughable. Trump and the MAGA leadership consistently accuse the UK of allowing wokeness to erode our free speech and it is undeniable that a lack of clarity in some of our laws coupled with overly self-entitled and vocal minority groups have enabled a degree of cancel culture -but the irony is that Trump is doing far worse in the USA.

This is a POTUS who hates criticism so much that he actively seeks to remove and replace individuals in the military, the judiciary and within government who might disagree with him and who doubles down on any media he doesn't like ( "fake news"). This is about control and that inevitably means censorship. MAGA aren't interested in debate. Why should they be? Outright lies, wild conspiracy theories (Q-anon/ Pizzagate) and mis-information are so much more fun- and tell them often enough and loud enough and there are plenty of people who will fall for it. Kirk was fully part of this.

He was apparently well read and a skilled debater but, given some of his entrenched views, I wonder how well Kirk might have done against a Hitchens or an O'Brien in a public debate.

I personally believe that Hate speech should have consequences but those consequences certainly should not be to be gunned down and those that celebrate his killing are as sick as some of the beliefs they protest against.
Really well reasoned post. There are a lot of conmen in the western world at the moment, being led by the master conman Trump. All to change the narrative culturally around what the problems are, why they are caused and create victimhood.

The biggest difference now is that they are not only infiltrating platforms, they own them! They control a lot of what you see and dont see in the world.

Its not too dissimilar to what the moustache man did in Germany. Just different victims, different platforms and different fools to follow their narrative.