The Charlie Kirk Thread

[ChileG]

He's an adult and in a position of leadership.

He’s referring to the Nazi comments made by 24 - 37 year-old “young republicans” who were forgiven by party leadership due to their youthful ages.

I agree with Oxford club kicking this dude out, fwiw.

 

[nycfan]

“… In Tennessee, a wave of firings and suspensions took place across the state, with numerous public employees and college and university staffers punished for their posts. A high school science teacher was suspended after being targeted by the right-wing website The Federalist for an Instagram story calling Kirk a “POS” and quoting his reaction to the 2023 Covenant School shooting in Nashville, which left seven dead, including three 9-year-old students. “It’s worth to have, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights,” Kirk had said. And, under pressure from Republican Sen. Marsha Blackburn, who is running for Tennessee governor, a university fired a theater professorfor posting an old article about Kirk’s comments, issuing a statement explaining that the professor had “reshared a post on social media that was insensitive, disrespectful and interpreted by many as propagating justification for unlawful death.”

But Bushart’s case is in a class of its own. He is almost certainly the only person who was arrested and held on a serious criminal charge for a Facebook post in the wake of Kirk’s death — a charge that seems clearly divorced from reality.

… In Bushart’s case, the warrant affidavit contains a short narrative summarizing the ostensible evidence against him. “At approximately 1900 hours,” writes Perry County Sheriff’s Investigator Jason Morrow, “I … received a message from Sheriff Nick Weems regarding a Facebook post Larry Bushart made on the What’s Happening in Perry County, TN Facebook page stating ‘This seems relevant today…’ with an image of Donald Trump and the words ‘We have to get over it.’”

Morrow quotes the rest of the meme and notes that it was posted “on a message thread regarding the Charlie Kirk vigil.” He then writes: “This was a means of communication, via picture, posted to a Perry County, TN Facebook page in which a reasonable person would conclude could lead to serious bodily injury, or death of multiple people.”…”

“… The post invoked a school shooting at a “Perry High School.” The local high school in Linden is called Perry County High School. Moreover, just one month earlier, Weems had reported an alleged threat against the school, prompting administrators to cancel all classes “for the safety of our students and staff.” Still, it was easy to discern that, apart from the name “Perry,” there was nothing connecting the meme to Linden.

… [sheriff] WEEMS HAD BEEN happy to publicize Bushart’s arrest at first. In the earliest news story on September 22, local radio station WOPC published Bushart’s mugshot along with a statement from the sheriff, who said that Bushart’s meme had alluded to “a hypothetical shooting at a place called Perry High School.” According to Weems, “That message caused considerable concern within the community and we were asked to investigate.”

Readers found this perplexing. “I’m confused,” one woman wrote on Facebook after the story was posted on the station page. “He was talking about shooting up the school or shooting up a vigil. How are the two things connected?” Another reader speculated that Weems hadn’t heard of the Iowa shooting and misinterpreted the post as a threat. “A man is in jail because the sheriff didn’t use google.”

… Weems insisted that Bushart wanted to sow panic, telling The Tennessean that “investigators believe Bushart was fully aware of the fear his post would cause and intentionally sought to create hysteria within the community.”

… Yet there were no public signs of this hysteria. Nor was there much evidence of an investigation — or any efforts to warn county schools. Although the Perry County Schools District did not respond to messages from The Intercept, attorneys with the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression filed a series of open records requests with the school district asking for any communications to or from staff pertaining to the case — including terms like “shooting,” “threat,” and “meme.” In response, the director of schools wrote that there were no records related to Bushart’s case. “The Perry County Sheriff’s Department handled this situation,” he wrote.

… Bushart’s wife declined to speak on the record on the advice of the attorney. But Bushart’s son defended his dad on social media, calling the prosecution “an egregious violation of his 1st Amendment rights” and spelling out what has been clear from the start: The meme he shared was meant to show “the hypocrisy in honoring Charlie Kirk while ignoring other tragic incidents of mass violence.”

For now, Bushart faces the prospect of spending Thanksgiving in jail. …”

 

[nycfan]

Man charged with making threats after Charlie Kirk death to have December bond hearing

A new hearing is set for the ex-police officer charged in Perry County with threats after Charlie Kirk's death.

www.tennessean.com

“… The Tennessean cross-referenced the photo and found it was posted numerous times across multiple social media platforms, not connected to Bushart going back to 2024.

But Weems said Bushart posted the picture “to indicate or make the audience think it was referencing our Perry High School.”…”

 

[rodoheel]

he wore the socks depicting policeman as cartoon pigs. Violates NFL rules.

Oh yeah man, it's totally because of socks Kapernick wore in practice and had nothing to do with the kneeling during games that started a media firestorm, LMAO

 

[StrangePackage]

This is what I find so confusing about Ram. Earlier in this very thread he said that he would be lying if he said that he didn't enjoy the suffering of others, and I assumed that he thought lying was bad - worse than enjoying the suffering of others.

But now we see that he's willing to lie about a lot of things. You'd think that he would lie about things where the truth makes him look like a terrible person, but instead he lies about things to justify being a terrible person.

 

[ZenMode]

You're trying to draw some arbitrary line between "bowing to pressure from an online mob" (bad) and "internally evaluate the situation and make a decision" (good) but the two things you're talking about don't happen independently of each other. The pressure from the "online mob" is part of the internal decision making, and you can't isolate those things from each other and try to group every firing into one of those two buckets. You are just sort of arbitrarily deciding that this decision must have had more to do with "interna; deliberation" than "outside pressure" with absolutely zero awareness of what happened inside the group.

I think we know now that the online mob is largely irrelevant either because a) they're a very small # of squeaky wheels or b) they're a small # of squeaky wheels trying to impersonate a large number of squeaky wheels.

I think Trader Joes telling the "mob" to go pound sand exposed the reality of the mob "influence". That doesn't mean that there are NO situations that need to be addressed as a result of public outcry, but it's not nearly as prominent as we were made to believe in a few years ago.

In the case of Charlie Kirk, I'd hope that businesses ignore social media when making their decisions. I think that is not impossible.