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Love Bernie, but this is one more example of the Dems offering MAGA an excuse to continue to misbehave.
He speaks as if BOTH sides have responsibility for political violence when it is almost entirely the Right. When he talks like this, all MAGAs hear is him admitting that the Left is committing political violence, which gives them an excuse to retaliate against the Left for imaginary political violence committed by the Left, or even actual political violence committed by the Right.
Because if there's one thing the extreme right has been needing it's an excuse from Bernie Sanders to act they way they do.
There's no version of a message from Bernie that would sway the extreme right. His message managed to get right wingers to endorse and share a message that cited the following events as unacceptable:
Even among the incidents where a right wing figure was the target, most were committed by a right wing perpetrator or apolitical motives, with only one or two of them credibly left-wing in origin.
So you have an audience of conserveritives that are not "ride or die" with MAGA but might have considered the Nick Fuentes types a bunch of useful idiots that can advance their perspective and be a risk only toward the people they don't like anyway. I think this is just the event and message for those folks to realize just how dangerous these extremists are to them that they try to weaponize on their behalf. Maybe it can't work, but a message from Bernie Sanders coming out hard against the right wouldn't have done anything vaguely productive.
Great take.
Left of center to far left have become too hobbled by perfect ideology. Towards the center, they refuse to entertain more progressive ideas (fairness this has been going on far longer). The more progressive factions, refuse to compromise.
Any other take deepens the divide, we can't let that happen. Trump and the billionaires want civil war, so they can throw out our government and install a dictatorship.
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.
That's the problem with the Democratic leadership - they honestly still believe that the MAGAs still have a good-faith belief in Democracy, and want to preserve it.
We ALL recognize that it is no longer true. Clearly, the MAGA leadership no longer embraces Democracy. Worse, they are enthusiastically hostile towards Democracy, and are actively working to subdue, subvert, and ultimately end Democracy.
It is OBVIOUS to ALL of us, why isn't it obvious to our elected Democratic representatives?
If we're talking about the Democratic Leadership, I'd go further and say they don't believe in democracy either, judging from the response to Mamdani's primary win in the NYC mayor's race.
Valid.
"A government is an institution that holds a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence."
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.
Damn that is excellently put.
Very understandably, most reasonable people are uncomfortable with violence* but then we seem powerless at the state level to stop the gradual rise of violent ideology that everyone knows will end in classes of vulnerable people who are no longer protected by the prohibition on non-state violence.
* state violence that is part of the script of life isn't scary for some reason though.
Saving your comment.
They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it.
I would make the argument here that they don't know what democracy is, at least not in terms that they can directly make applicable to their lives, their homes, their immediate concerns. To most Americans, not just the right, terms like "democracy" carry a negative connotation now.
This is also by design, we have so many conflicting ideologies screaming at each other through bot-wars and large-scale social manipulation efforts and psy-ops that people have pretty much tuned out, and there are plenty of factions who want that result as well and have worked to amplify the worst ideas and thoughts from every angle of every issue.
The last three election cycles saw the highest voter turnout in American history, so it's not that people aren't involved in politics, they just don't really have any idea what's going on. Exit polling showed most people were almost ambivalent towards either candidate and didn't really have a clue who to vote for and just went with their concerns over grocery prices and whatever their facebook feed was showing them.
People don't believe in democracy because they don't believe we have a working government because everyone, everywhere is locked into their own feeds, their own perspectives of the world, they are not sharing realities and not talking to each other.
Conservatives are largely dumber than dirt, you can sway most of them to believe in socialism and freedom of identity and ANY other issue you care about if you engage them directly and know how to push their emotional buttons in specific ways. But we don't do that anymore because we have no shared spaces, no shared perspective, no single source of truth that we can even debate or engage with each other about anymore, so the nation is splintering into a million shards that hate each other.
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.
Yeah, go after those that he opposed, instead of the rot on the inside that is eating away at MAGA. Good plan.
I've said it from the beginning - ultimately, MAGA will be brought down by their own virtuosic incompetence.
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.
I get the frustration, but he managed to get a bunch of right wingers to share and endorse his message. He got right wing people to commend a message that included calling out January 6th.
The outcome did more for getting right wing people to work toward tamping that down than focusing on calling them out ever would. Call them out when they are their most scared and they get defensive and escalate. Recognize their troubles right alongside their sins and you get a more productive response.
This is why I'd be a bad politician. I couldn't stomach pretending that the party leadership cares about democracy or fair play
Why is every politician pretending this dude's entire platform wasn't just vitriolic hate?
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
If he wants to engage the right in any meaningful way, he has little choice because Charlie was made into a martyr.
The best practical outcome may be messages like this and recognition the killing was infighting, not a leftist move. Maybe the broader conservative movement figures out you can't stir up violent extremism and expect it to consistently point in the direction you would want.
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.
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.
The thing is everyone that would ever be inclined to believe that of Charlie Kirk already knows. To call him out posthumously doesn't tend to sway people that listened to him, it makes those people double down.
Ironically, this strategy probably makes the most of his death. People get to see the risks his behavior incurred while also seeing a peaceable path to de-escalation.
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/ 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.
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.
"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
Sorry Bernie, you’re out of touch. We don’t have elections anymore, we have gerrymandering, and tampering, and intimidation.
"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.
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.
Barf. Politicians constantly promote violence and genocide, but only complain about "poltical violence" when it's directed against their class.
Great example of worthless libs collaborating with fascism. That's how we got here.
Meanwhile, the president says he "couldn't care less" about uniting America
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.
It's certainly better than some statements I have seen, but it ignores the commonplace violence inflicted on non-elites every day.