The Nasty Losers Who Celebrated Charlie Kirk's Murder

Social media gives them the voice they never had. That's the good news. It's also the bad news.

Just a few hours after Charlie Kirk was murdered, my wife and I went to dinner with another couple we know from the neighborhood. They’re nice people. Smart people. Generous people. But both of them suffer from a severe mental disorder — Trump Derangement Syndrome.

Because these people play deep left field, my wife and I decided not to bring up what happened to Kirk earlier that day. I wasn’t in the mood for an argument if they said something really offensive. And for most of the dinner, they didn’t.

Then they did.

The wife, a very left-wing woman, said, “I assume you heard about the shooting today.” We said we had — and that’s when she pulled out her phone, and said I want to read you something Kirk once said.

“I think it's worth it,” Kirk had said. “I think it's worth 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.”

She had a kind of smile on her face when she finished reading those words, a smile that suggested that maybe someone who talks like that deserves what he got.

So I said to her: “But we can agree, right, that what happened was inexcusable?” She agreed but quickly pivoted to talk about “gun violence” in America. I said I knew what she meant by the term “gun violence” but it annoyed me nonetheless. And I explained why.

“Let’s assume,” I said, “that we gave 20 assault rifles and another 20 handguns to everybody on our street. A month later,” I said, “there’d be no criminal acts committed by anyone on the street who suddenly had an arsenal of guns at their disposal.”

This told me that guns per se weren’t the problem — that the problem was with the violent people who used guns to kill innocent people.

There are too many guns in America, she told us — to which I replied, “The Supreme Court ruled on that a while ago.”

She had an answer to that. “The Supreme Court got it wrong.” Her husband agreed. “So the Supreme Court got it wrong and you two are smarter than the justices who ruled on the matter.”

Another quick response from the wife: “Yes,” she said with no hesitation.

But this wasn’t only about “gun violence” — it was really about their visceral hatred of Donald Trump. After complaining that he stacked the Court with justices who do his bidding, she played the “Trump is Hitler” card. “You can’t tell me that what Trump is doing isn’t just like what the Nazis did in Germany,” she said.

I reminded her that Hitler killed a lot of people. I don’t remember her exact words, but her message was clear: Trump might do the same thing. He’s just like Hitler.

This is what TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome looks and sounds like. At least they agreed, sincerely or otherwise, that the murder of Charlie Kirk was inexcusable. But in the dark corners of the hyper-partisan social media sites, Kirk’s murder brought out the ugly fringe.

Here are some of what they posted:

“LOL Someone Shot Charlie Kirk.”

“Hope the bullet’s okay after touching Charlie Kirk.”

“Thank you Chaos Gods.”

“If you ask me it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.”

“If you’re a fascist who is literally responsible for untold numbers of deaths it’s good actually.”

“Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor? Reap what you sow.”

“Sorry to his kids, your dead was a fucking cult member and a loser.”

The real losers, of course, are the people who aren’t ashamed to post stuff like that. The good news is they’re a minority. Most Americans, regardless of who they vote for, aren’t like that. Most Americans accept the reality that their side doesn’t always win, but that just because our side loses, just because we’re angry, we can’t resort to violence.

But according to a poll from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a poll published one day before Charlie Kirk was murdered, 34 percent of college students said they supported using violence in some circumstances to stop a campus speech. Since 2021, that share has risen from 24 percent, which was already depressingly high.

As the New York Times put it in an editorial, “The intensity of our political debates will not disappear. The stakes are too high, and the country disagrees on too many important questions. But we Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years. We too often wish ill on our political opponents. We act as if people’s worth is determined by whether they identify as a Republican or a Democrat. We dehumanize those with whom we differ.”

One last thing to consider from the Times editorial: “When societies lose the ability to argue peacefully and resort to violence to resolve their political debates, it usually ends very badly.”

It just did … on a college campus in Utah.