Love Bernie, but this:
But bottom line, if we honestly believe in democracy, if we believe in freedom, all of us must be loud and clear: Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned.
They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it. That’s the core of the problem.
“A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence.”
- Max Weber
Politics and violence cannot be separated. The only relevant factor is “legitimacy”, which is determined politically.
At what point, during the incremental rise of the Nazis, would it have become “legitimate” to take action against them, and how would this legitimacy be determined? Too early, and it would have been seen as illegitimate murder or “political violence” - too late and… Well, we know what happened.
Yeah, while I agree with the sentiment, the fact that he didn’t call out that Republicans are explicitly calling for political violence extremely loudly and not condemning Republican leadership for not tamping that shit down right now is disappointing.
Dude’s always been too weak to call out evil when he sees it. He’s still peddling that “Israel has a right to defend itself” bullshit when no it never has and never will.
Yep, same people on the right who are pissed and talking shit…talked shit when the 3 dems in Minnesota were attacked and one killed.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jun/17/minnesota-lawmaker-killings-misinformation-rightwing
Shit isn’t even 6 months old.
Meanwhile, the Confederates are targeting anyone that they say celebrated Kirk’s death. Some people have already lost their jobs, the Confederates may be planning even darker things.
But we do, and we must insist upon democratic ideals until the very last. Even when our boots hit the streets and the lines are drawn. If we sink to their level, we’ll lose. They’ve been there a long time, they are seasoned pros. The problem is they use that against us, so we need to play a smarter game. Not dumb ourselves down to their level.
Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned.
Love ya Bernie, but I gotta disagree on this one. What he’s saying is pretty much just more ‘paradox of tolerance’ that leads to the ratchet clicking further right.
People keep shunning what happened to Kirk as a crazy extreme response to a “difference of opinion” as though we’re discussing a budget proposal for a new bridge or something. And yeah, with shit like that there’s a justifiable argument to be made by both sides.
When the ‘opinion’ being advocated for is one that seeks to deny life or liberty because of their skin color or gender or w/e, it stops being a debate and instead becomes a fight for survival. That person is literally an enemy combatant spending their life trying to kill you. And when someone is trying to kill you, violence is absolutely a justifiable response.
…and I know that’s not why the shooter killed Kirk, but even if it was a dark skinned /gay/trans/muslim/<insert target of right wing bigotry here> who shot Kirk in response to his vitriol toward them, that’s still fucking justified because he spent his life promoting violence to those people.
So no, if your ideology is that you hate people because of what’s in their pants or the color of their skin or w/e, then you’re a piece of shit; if you act on that ideology, then you’re an existential threat to those people, and if that culminates with a bullet in your carotid artery then your death will mark a sudden reduction of evil and hatred - and that is worth celebrating.
Evil fuckers like Charlie Kirk should never be tolerated.
Paradox of tolerance is resolved when you view tolerance as a treaty. If one side breaks it, they no longer benefit from it.
If two factions are fighting and call a truce, and then one side starts fighting again, it’s nonsense to tell the first side not to fight back because there’s a treaty. The treaty has been broken.
Exactly. Nothing stops fascism except the death of the fascists.
Where did he state he was denying life of other races?
Yeah he didn’t literally say “go kill black people,” therefore he wasn’t spewing violent racist rhetoric.
A two day old account who’s first and only comment is questioning the extensive very well recorded history of a neonazi.
Tad sus m8.
On the off chance you aren’t a right wing troll, look up “charlie kirk bigotry” on your preferred search engine, and scroll to your heart’s content.
Why is every politician pretending this dude’s entire platform wasn’t just vitriolic hate?
Controlled opposition.
Because the moment they say that, the other side stops listening and dismisses them or worse, decide to target them.
Remember, politicians are people that go out in public spaces and speak to people and they themselves are terrified of the same event happening to them.
They want the other side to hear them denounce this unequivocally because otherwise, they become targets.
It doesnt help though. All it does is justify Charlie’s actions during his life and serves to sanewash him. The move would have been to not defund public education all those decades ago. Doing this now just legitimizes hate speech
That’s the problem with assassinating people. It makes the dead a martyr and helps legitimize their message because supporters get to memorialize the dead, but for opponents it becomes politically difficult and socially inappropriate to criticize. It’s why I always think assassination largely backfires and is not a smart political move. To build a political movement in a democracy, you want to accumulate grievances you can use against the other side, not inflict them so the other side can use them against you.
I guarantee you everyone will forget about Kirk dying a couple weeks from now, far from martyrdom. Facts don’t mean anything to these brainwashed morons, one of their “grievances” is the “stolen election” for Christ’s sake. Personally I’ll endure a couple weeks of hypocritical crocodile tears from the right to never hear another racist/transphobic/moronic utterance from that puckered asshole he called a mouth for the rest of my natural life.
Yep. This won’t meaningfully raise the temperature, they will keep doing what they always do. However, this might actually improve things in the long run. He routinely targeted kids for indoctrination, without his influence things will improve.
Yeah like when Rittenhouse murdered two people, am I right?
Rittenhouse is an idiot, but that wasn’t an assassination. His victims weren’t well known political voices.
It’s so fucking clear he went there when the intent to murder someone.
They canonized him, gave him a speaking tour, turned him into a folk hero.
Did the two Minnesota legislator get turned into heros? Yeah I don’t think so either.
You have a downvote but you aren’t wrong. Though I do have to say it seems to be largely ineffective using grievances against the current Republican diaspora.
I think that is largely because the democrats are weak and terrible messengers.
You can both denounce Charlie Kirk and everything he stood for and also denounce political violence.
Both can be valid stances.
I’m just frustrated that very very few people including Sanders are remarking on that first part. He spread hate speech and misinformation. He and Trump’s rhetoric and actions are what led to this point.
Was so pissed off at Daily Show’s coverage last night when Kosta attacked Warren and the guy from msnbc calling a spade a spade.
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“A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views,”
You can’t debate with “Black people are inferior genetically”. Thats not a good faith argument. It drags the entire country down. Charlie Kirk was not debating or sharing valid views. Democracies do not survive with the populace is uneducated and fed hateful viewpoints. So, no, I cannot denounce his killing. No more than I can denounce the killing of Mussolini or the suicide of Hitler. He caused death and havoc in the exact same way.
Because they’re in on it.
“I have a point of view that is different than yours — that’s great. Let’s argue it out.”
Unfortunately it doesn’t work out that way with these people. They almost always argue in bad faith, don’t shy away from lying and are happy to falsely smear people with shit just so that they can win political points. They know that even if their lies are discovered it won’t have any consequences for them but the stink of the shit that they hurled at their opponents will remain for a long time.
There’s a Sartre quote about that.
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
“A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views,”
Except that’s not what America is today…
There’s nothing wrong with working towards a better America, it’s what we should all be doing…
But a war has never been won with hugs. And whether we want to be in it or not, we’re in a war against fascism.
I’ve been saying it a lot lately, but it bares repeating:
Work for the world you want to live in, prepare for the world you already live in
Why include ‘humiliated’ as something people should be protected from for expressing their political views? Fascists should absolutely be humiliated when they spew their vile in public. The first amendment is supposed to protect you from state censorship, not social pressure or ostracization.
I’m not Bernie Sanders…
Question wasn’t directed at you, I was just putting it out there.
Question wasn’t directed at you
I mean, it literally was…
That’s how replies work.
But Id be really surprised if explaining helps.
We use social media a bit differently, there’s no need to be rude. Replies on a public forum are a one-to-many communication. I replied to your comment to establish the context, but the question was directed to no one in particular. It was intended to foster discussion.
Were the British soldiers killed in the Revolutionary War, or the Rebels Killed in the Civil War, or the Nazis killed in WW2 victims of political violence?
Sometimes a political spectrum becomes stretched so wide that there can be no middle ground. No amount of “spirited debate” is going to reach a compromise about who is due their life and freedom. The wolf and the sheep are never going to agree on what is for dinner.
Charlie Kirk absolutely leaves a legacy of misery and death. He shares blame for Jan 6, mass shootings, and numerous hate crimes. He may have never pulled a trigger himself, but the right wing terrorism he encouraged leaves the blood on his hands just the same.
Well said.
Unfortunately I don’t believe a single politician would be willing to tell it how it actually is when it comes to Charlie Kirk and shitheads like him.
The leftist politicians have to play it safe to not hurt the fragile fee fees of the liberal voters.
Liberal politicians historically and currently vastly prefer Nazism over basic common sense pro-labor policies of any kind.
And the Nazis are Nazis.
Meanwhile, the president says he “couldn’t care less” about uniting America
American people at the local, state, and federal levels, and we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want
Sorry Bernie, you’re out of touch. We don’t have elections anymore, we have gerrymandering, and tampering, and intimidation.
“Cmon guys, talk it out! Now is not the time to enact political violence against Nazis who are continually stripping you of your rights and freedoms! Actually the fact you haven’t talked to them enough and changed their minds means you’re weak!”
🤨 OK Bernie.
Well, yeah, if you reframe what he actually said into something totally different, obviously it’s not going to make a lot of sense.
American people at the local, state, and federal levels, and we hold free elections in which the people decide what they want
Do you think elections are what the people decide? I love Bernie, but he is out of touch now.
Bernie is defusing a highly explosive situation and doing that very well. Good work, I say.
A centrist would agree with him. Bernie has accomplished nothing to stop fascism. More cheap talk, no successes.
Maybe he’s accomplished nothing to stop fascism with this specific quote, but to suggest that he hasn’t for his entire career is a little silly.
Hey, you’re right. We do need to urgently work to improve the systems of media and education so that people have some idea of what the fuck is even happening, so that they won’t elect open fascists to power and think that they’re doing a good thing. We have some urgent problems now that can’t really wait for that, of course, since that whole vital apparatus has been deliberately destroyed by the rich people over the course of about the last 50 years. But yes, the elections aren’t the only piece. If we could have a Mamdani level event in even one out of every ten elections that happens, that would be fuckin’ fantastic, instead of just letting one open socialist get within a hair’s breadth of the literal US presidency in 2016 and then giving up because the rich people cheated him out of power. It almost fuckin’ worked. Also, gerrymandering, mail in voting, open fraud enabled by Trump and his allies, et cetera. There are a ton of problems that we will never in a million years vote our way out of.
I’m glad you said that. It would have been absolutely nuts if you were agreeing with my parent comment which more or less to me could be interpreted as “Let’s bring political assassination by random nuts into the mainstream of the US political spectrum as a way of making change, that’ll help and the left will definitely win that game in the end.”
But none of that “working on” stuff is or will ever happen. It’s 2025, we should not be backsliding into fascism. Clearly the methods the people are using are failing.
I will be donating to Tyler’s fund just like I did for Luigi—and anyone else who has the stones to stand up against fascists and their cronies.
You should donate (and volunteer) for the people organizing against ICE, or legal defense for people in their crosshairs. That can develop into an actual resistance as things get worse and steadily worse (which they probably will). Donating to encourage random assassination will instead make things exponentially worse, it will basically hand it over to the Charlie Kirks of the world.
I disagree. While I certainly empathize with the people who are being targeted by ice, the immigration topic is not going to be something that sways politics away from fascism. Too many people on the left don’t want illegal immigration. I don’t want illegal immigration. But, I really am disgusted with how it’s being handled now (and in the past too).
The people need to go on the offensive instead of just constantly defending ourselves (in court or otherwise). Now, I don’t mean we should all go shoot people—but those politicians and “influencers” promoting hate and fascism need to feel deep down that they are truly unsafe.
Action can have many forms. But action is not asking them to stop while standing on a street corner holding a sign. We need to make them stop—with escalating intensity that stops when they stop.
1 (please stop) — 10 (death)
“Pick a number that works for you!”
(*Not you, them)
Too many people on the left don’t want illegal immigration. I don’t want illegal immigration. But, I really am disgusted with how it’s being handled now (and in the past too).
Jesse what the fuck are you talking about
I personally don’t care about “illegal immigration.” I’ve had good friends who came here “illegally,” and ones who’ve experienced some extremely severe consequences because of it. Fuck that. But even regardless of all that, what ICE is currently doing has absolutely 0 to do with enforcing immigration law. They’re actually breaking immigration law left and right and violating a bunch of different court orders. If you care about “legal vs illegal,” which again in this case I couldn’t possibly give less of a fuck about, you should be extremely upset against ICE right now, and agitating to stop them.
Now, I don’t mean we should all go shoot people
Good, glad we agree on that part.
but those politicians and “influencers” promoting hate and fascism need to feel deep down that they are truly unsafe.
I don’t necessarily disagree. But, there is a way to do that that can escalate into a real revolution of the people that will still maintain a working country. There is also a way to do it that can escalate into AOC and Bernie being the first up on the assassination list, along with Hasanabi, Paul Pelosi, the local mayor if he tries to put in bike lanes, fuckin’ whatever.
This particular way of “fighting” for improvement is guaranteed to make things worse.
We need to make them stop—with escalating intensity that stops when they stop.
This part, I completely agree with. Is your impression that shooting Charlie Kirk will make them stop? I think it will make them accelerate. There is no number of Charlie Kirks that you can shoot that will ever make them stop.
They have a lot more money for security than Elizabeth Warren does. There is one side and one side only that will be disproportionately impacted by this.
Nah, fuck Bernie for this.
A free and democratic society, which is what America is supposed to be about, depends upon the basic premise that people can speak out, organize, and take part in public life without fear, without worrying that they might be killed, injured, or humiliated for expressing their political views,
And who was it that was undermining that? Charlie Kirk.
Political violence, in fact, is political cowardice. It means that you cannot convince people of the correctness of your ideas, and you have to impose them through force.
And what if you can’t convince people of the correctness of your ideas because they don’t care about correctness, they only care about hating you? What then, Bernie? What if they keep pressing forward in complete denial of all logic and facts? I suppose that punching a Klan member is cowardice? I suppose when people rise up against oppressors it is because they are cowards? He’s right that it MAY be cowardice that leads to violence. It may also be absolute obstinate stubbornness of the other side. What do we call that?
this chilling rise in violence has targeted public officials across the political spectrum
Ah, I guess that’s why you, as an official on the political spectrum, are so convinced that it is evil. What a charming coincidence. What about the chilling rise in violence targeting thousands of normal people, perpetuated by Charlie Kirk? If I order my lackeys to execute someone, do we say I’m not a murderer? Do we say I was merely exercising my free speech? What if I constantly depict John Doe down the street as the root of all evil? When someone else kills John Doe, am I truly blameless? Stoking hate to get other people to kill on your behalf, now that’s political cowardice, Bernie.
The more Bernie talks the less I respect him. I agree with your points.
As much as Bernie is a good man he still came up in an age of American politics that were relatively peaceful, at least compared to the 1940s and earlier. This means he has a lot of out of date halcyon views on these types of things.
Bro
He marched with MLK. He called the Vietnam War a genocide in 1972, lol
You’re right, but the people defending Kirk are the same kind of people who killed MLK. Not sure how much Bernie has realized it.
A bust of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., once prominently displayed in the Oval Office, has been removed under Donald Trump’s presidency amid a broader rollback of civil rights iconography, military tributes, and diversity initiatives across federal agencies.
At the same time, Trump continues to court far-right figures like Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, a vocal critic of Dr. King’s legacy. Kirk, who has called the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake” and questioned the existence of Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
The push to erase these figures coincides with a wider campaign by the Trump administration to dismantle what it deems “woke” programs.
That’s all true, but what I’m referring to is basically pre-ww2 political violence like the county and union wars or how local level politics was basically just gang warfare. Most of that settled down before Bernie’s time and was largely forgotten on a grander cultural level, frankly speaking in many ways increased political violence would be a return to historical trends. Personally I’m rather a fan of tar and feathering, it’d be funny to do it to Boebert.
its not a democracy and you can’t debate these guys. next.
No! You’re the puppet. Wrong! Our president’s debate prowess.
Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned.
Apparently Bernie makes an exception for institutionalized political violence, since he did not mention capital punishment, abortion bans, the targeting and murder of queer people, school shootings by right wing radicalized youths, or more… only politicians. Political violence is more than targeting someone for political speech, it is villainizing minorities, depriving them of opportunities and needs, suppressing/oppressing/excluding them from normal public life, or even implying they are “other” by roundabout means. Violence is more than a bullet, knife, or bomb. Violence can be indirect. Violence can take the form of hateful, fearful words and ideas. It can foment and spread.
None of it can be tolerated, but when the victims are out of options what are they to do? Talk? Bullies don’t communicate with words but with fists. Are we to submit? To lie down and die? To give up?
I reject this blind idealism that includes no constructive action to back it up. It’s little more than a plea to voluntarily lie down while the steamroller runs us over.
Words have repercussions, always have and always will.
Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from the consequences of that speech. Freedoms come with responsibilities, and the freedom of speech comes with the responsibility - the obligation - to use your words wisely.
The murder of Charlie Kirk is part of a disturbing rise in political violence that threatens to hollow out public life and make people afraid of participating. From the January 6th, 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, to the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, to the attack on Paul Pelosi, to the attempted kidnapping of Michigan Governor Whitmer, to the murder of Minnesota Speaker of the House Melissa Hortman and her husband, to the arson attack on Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, to the shooting of United Health Executive Brian Thompson, and the shooting several years ago of Representative Steve Scalise, this chilling rise in violence has targeted public officials across the political spectrum.
Sadly, this is not a new phenomenon. We all remember the assassinations of President Kennedy, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Senator Robert F. Kennedy, John Lennon, and Medgar Evers, and the attempted assassinations of President Ronald Reagan and Alabama Governor George Wallace.
Kinda sounds like this has been a problem in the US for decades. Maybe the government should look into that.
But bottom line, if we honestly believe in democracy, if we believe in freedom, all of us must be loud and clear: Political violence, regardless of ideology, is not the answer and must be condemned. Thank you very much.
Ah, that should solve it! Well done, Bernie!
