I was aware of the “change my mind” meme. I put it down to being British, so less aware of USA political figures.

The amount of posts and discussion about him getting shot is way out of proportion to his level of fame/influence, especially over here.

I literally had no idea who he was until the campus videos of the shooting hit Lemmy. I’m in the US but don’t regularly follow US media sources because gestures vaguely. Lemmy is also my only social media at this point, everything else has been deleted, so when something pops up here, I go digging through the Guardian or El Pais to get an idea of what’s going on.

I will say, I had the absolute delight of taking all the wind out of my deeply religious and conservative coworkers sails by innocently asking, “who’s Charlie Kirk?”, when they were discussing a moment of silence idea and a poem one of them wrote about him. Of course I knew who he was at that point, but I enjoy being an agent of chaos in a small southern town lol (send help!).

I was vaguely aware that he was one of those ghouls who uses the aestethics of “debate” as a shield to spews hatred and turn the knife in culture war wounds, a person who used their platform to foment selfishness and evil in the heart of millions while saying “it’s just free speech bro” as if that made him innocent.

And of course, that it exactly WHY he was doing all this, this duplicitous abuser of free speech true goal is the destruction of free speech, by saying things so heinous as to provoke the condition in which free speech could be abolished so that his vampiric masters can finally silence the discordant mobs forever.

Getting out of reddit and US centric socials/media does remove a lot of trash you don’t need to know from the feed. You can’t avoid some, when they get through, and filters don’t catch them, but it’s significantly better.

Lemmy and Mastodon FTW.

I saw him in a debate once. Thought he was clever at using fallacies, but an incredibly stupid, hateful, insufferable know-it-all (who didn’t know that much)… So never gave him any attention.

I knew him after he dressed up in kink gear a decade ago to “own the libs”(?) on some college campus, and his second in command got catastrophically drunk, passed out, and shit her pants like a horse at a college party that same year. I assumed they never recovered from the double bout of extraordinary cringe, but apparently they did?

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock, or the guy was deep underground.

I was well aware of him but I hadn’t heard anything about him in a long time. The right-lib/subtle fascist niche seems to have really died off over the last few years, in favor of more overtly fascist commentators mainly

I also did not know of him at all. I did know who Ben Shapiro is. This week has been an educational one: I have learned about Nick Fuentes and ‘groypers’, Candace Owens, and that the change my mind meme guy is called Steven Crowder (I first thought it was this guy when I saw the video of Kirk).

The US political commentator that I do watch some times is Hasan, but not too often. The US lore goes too deep and moves too quickly, hard to keep up.

I heard that George Floyd day is on his birthday, maybe they will have some thoughts and prayers on George’s Day.

Yeah, I believe I watched a video or snippet of his or Steven Crowder and stopped. You can tell that they edit all the good arguments out and only publicize online the ones where they get destroyed in.

Also has that ingenious tactic of speaking loud, proud, and stopping the other person so that the other person can’t even get their point across.

The only defense against stuff like this is not engaging at all. These people set up a stand on sidewalks and school campuses hoping to get some good content, and these people just line up for him

I watch leftists who occasionally covered him. He was extremely popular on TikTok with children to college-age people. He was also close to Trump, and I think Trump sent him to Greenland a while back with the VP on that “diplomacy” trip.

Being a non-American, zero clue. Seems he was more useful to the regime dead rather than alive.

I knew about him vaguely just from staying in the loop with politics casually since 2016 or so. But I haven’t heard of him in a long time.

I had no clue who he was until he was shot. They always target the nobodies.

Before the assassination, I just knew him as the tiny face chud with Turning Point USA who spewed insipid talking points to “own” the left.

If you’ve seen him before, it was probably in a meme like this.