Until he was assassinated, the only thing I knew about him is that he was a Conservative media personality of some sort.

Exactly... one in a long line of right-wing personalities with shows/podcasts/platforms who seem to be in a contest amongst each other to keep things stirred up in America via their provocative views... meanwhile they laugh all the way to the bank pocketing the money: Bannon, Patel, Bongino, the recently murdered Kirk... I could go on and on.

Obviously, not a single person in America should be murdered for exercising their First Amendment right to voice their provocative views (regardless of political ideology), but it should be noted that no one owes anyone else a platform on which to voice hatred and that freedom of speech does not equate to freedom from the consequences of free speech.

Now he's a martyr.

I suppose he's a martyr to the crowd who made fun of Paul Pelosi and endless jokes while generally ignoring the murders and attempted murders of state representatives (as you mentioned) and multiple Democratic governors and who whitewashed the events of January 6 and repeatedly call for civil war. The fish rots from the head.

How many times has Donald Trump attempted to make a martyr out of Ashli Babbitt, the woman who was killed by a police officer on 1/6, who warned her and multiple others repeatedly? Expect Trump and the right wing to whitewash Kirk's language and attempt to make a Christian martyr out of him and martyr for their political agenda... similar to Horst Wessel. Those who don't know who Horst Wessel was, do yourself a favor and look him up.

Exactly. I'd barely heard of this guy before he was shot, and now he's the nation's martyr or something.

Now, the same could be said of other cases of political murder or oppression - we'd "never heard of them" before the fatal event: George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, etc. could be examples from the left side. It's the death and its circumstances, not the status or fame of the victim, that can activate a national reaction.

But along with the violent death I feel we should reckon with the ethics and context of the crime and its victim. Was he/she "innocent"? Was the perpetrator/murderer standing for a larger cause or party, and if so which one, to whom blame might be assigned?

With Kirk, the immediate reaction of his fans on the right was that the perpetrator was on the left, symbolizing the left's unending resort to violence and murder, etc. etc. There was no evidence yet, but that was the universal reaction from the president on down, through the FBI and the Congress, to the right-wing media.

And now, as it seems, ... well, it's not so clear. Pending further revelations, the murderer seems to have been on the right, so far to the right he saw Kirk as 'not right enough' and so deserving of death.

A martyr? If so, perhaps a martyr to some demented definition of 'moderation' - 'moderation' in the sense of not being completely, utterly, fanatically devoted to the cause of White Christian nationalism despite any number of bigoted, racist, and violence-endorsing statements!

JL

The guy grifted on hate. I'll give him the exact amount of consideration he gave members of the left who suffered violence...

Live by the sword, die by the sword.

I'm weary of this gun insanity. The media barely covered the school shooting yesterday.

And Repugs being insincere is somehow a problem for these guys? Heck, the concepts of shame and hypocrisy are not words in the Republican vocabulary anymore. Nor law and order. They don’t care what the majority thinks anymore because they want to rule not represent.

Yeah? You’re saying that both sides are to blame when Repugs going back to Newt Gingrich have embraced scorched earth politics (and now with Trump, political violence)? Are Dems supposed to soft pedal the Nazi shit going on just because it might distress the whackos on the far right? News flash: the whackos don’t need provocation and likely never listen to the blue side in the first place. I wonder why the 2024 Dems didn’t remind America of Covid (bodies in refrigerated truck) and January 6th.