Date: July 10th, 2026 12:17 AM Author: light adventurous abode
I've always been team Tyler, in the sense that even if he wasn't guilty, I still wanted him to be guilty. Charlie Kirk seemed like he was begging to be shot, and lost in the haze of this Candaceshit was that he was an obnoxious turd sponsored by a bank that refinances student loans. He was going to the shittiest colleges in America and telling people "your degree is worthless" while this bank's logo was printed on the backdrop behind him
Date: July 10th, 2026 12:19 AM Author: irradiated elastic band brunch
Politics is a dirty business but the message wasn't bad. I didn't listen to Kirk myself but under the politics-as-ecosystem framework of understanding it was a necessary part of the working dynamic and performing better than average on a few different metrics that I consider to be key.
Not going to compare it to the JFK assassination even in jest but TPUSA was a pretty interesting platform before the mystery widow in black and red took it over while being backed by who knows who.
Date: July 10th, 2026 12:23 AM Author: controlling a virtual character on a computer
whatever else can be said about the matter, it's clear that TPUSA as an organization is doing much less good for the world now than it did before kirk was killed
Date: July 10th, 2026 12:29 AM Author: light adventurous abode
That's not clear to me at all. It looks like it was always malignant and Tyler decapitated it. It's a fucked and dying org now, but only because Tyler took that shot
Date: July 10th, 2026 12:43 AM Author: irradiated elastic band brunch
Trump himself has become one of the less interesting parts of the Trump movement, which, as I saw it, was a sort of return to the early modern infusion of energies that brought about the great party-redefining dynamic movements of the early 1900s that wound up bringing average people into the fold of mass politics and collective class action as a tool for (probably) beneficient change in eras of intense wealth inequality and issues of land-use stagnation. TPUSA was part of a sort of a Bonapartiste or conservative revolutionary movement and whatever your feelings on it were at the time it's quite clear that the murder of dynamic youth leaders and its removal as a node in the greater ecosystem of political thought has had a needlessly reactionary and chilling effect on the direction of the political discourse and dialectic as a whole. The reasons why are manifold and probably in the realm of "trade secrets" at this point but suffice to say it's been a clear and present net negative for right and left alike on the state of things in the States.
Date: July 10th, 2026 1:00 AM Author: light adventurous abode
I think it depends on whether the left supports political violence, which I think they do. They're fine with the chilling effect. For that matter, conservatives don't seem well poised to win a civil war, if that's where this is going. Libs are just too numerous and too willing to kill
Date: July 10th, 2026 12:28 AM Author: light adventurous abode
The questions were staged. That Hunter Kozakdood was an actor who appeared at numerous TPUSA rallies. He's so bad at it that when CK said "with or without gang violence" his response was "great!"
Date: July 10th, 2026 12:34 AM Author: irradiated elastic band brunch
I thought his candor was organic and he seemed to be a good sort of spirit in it. That's like 60% of what makes a politician-adjacent political figure worthwhile to the overall fabric of a project of its sort.
I don't know about any staged questions but the practice isn't uncommon on those long road show type tours, especially in uncertain venues like college campuses; in the biz they call that sort of thing "lubricant" to get a dialogue going, but I prefer "aperitif". Those sorts of platforms are a mixture of political education and entertainment and the hybrid uses elements innate to both. The connotation of a conversation-starter type question in a TPUSA road rally show would be quite different than, say, AOC or McConnell trying to do a "town hall" and getting fixers to throw softballs as the moral criteria for what's expected of politicians proper in their interactions with the public is quite different.
Date: July 10th, 2026 1:24 AM Author: irradiated elastic band brunch
Gang violence is real and an issue but it gets a lot of play in the media solely because discussing the material conditions that produce violent outcomes is far less glamorous and difficult to deal with politically. Most of the conversation around the topic is just gloss and lacquer designed to distract from the fact that life for many of the poor in this country is impoverished in every sense of the term and wreathed in squalor. Gangs are a second-order consequence of wider phenomena.
As for Zionism, it's a difficult topic and while I am a Zionist in a sense my definition of the term is going to be something entirely different than what the median Israeli probably considers it to be. I'm not sure what Kirk's feelings on the matter were. I don't think he was a hardcore anti-Zionist from what I've seen but merely questioning what was going on in a very unpopular war. Israeli influence on US politics is real and while I think that there's some benefit there's also some malus as well. The entire topic is muddy and frankly impossible to navigate through without people taking first amendment protected speech as a greenlight to assault you.