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.
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 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:
- January 6th. If you had told me that right wingers would be sharing a message from Bernie Sanders denouncing January 6th as unacceptable, I would have thought you insane.
- Paul Pelosi
- Governer Whitmer
- Melissa Hortman
- Josh Shapiro
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 a audience of people not “ride or die” with MAGA and a lot of conservatives that 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.
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.
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.
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.
Basically all us do not shoot people we disagree with. 300,000,000 million citizens and a glut of weaponry, doesn’t he get what Charlie Kirk meant by this is the price we pay? You will never plug all the holes, and we massively increase the chance a gun slips through along with the killer, and this is what will happen for as long as our culture and laws stay the same.
Take all the people Charlie Kirk has debated. Consider the surface area. All the people who must have had guns. And yet essentially every single person didn’t kill him.
There were more people debating him peacefully that day than trying to assassinate him. He was having his ideas dismantled by simple logic, as always, and ignoring it, as always. He just happened to be shot that day. They act like life is a simulation that’s meant to bend the rules for them rather than subjecting them to the same roll of the die as everyone else.
Yeah there’s a ton of main character syndrome from the lot of them. None of them feared gun violence. The women seemed to never care that their side was pushing for the Christian version of Iran and that they personally would suffer in that situation.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
The paradox of tolerance is a philosophical concept suggesting that if a society extends tolerance to those who are intolerant, it risks enabling the eventual dominance of intolerance; thereby undermining the very principle of tolerance. This paradox was articulated by philosopher Karl Popper in The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945),[1] where he argued that a truly tolerant society must retain the right to deny tolerance to those who promote intolerance.
Yes, I agree with this. That doesn’t say take away democracy to preserve it though. That’s talking about tolerance and censorship, which I agree with. If we believe in democracy, we must put our faith into it. I’m not suggesting we ignore great evils, but I am suggesting we don’t become evil to fight evil, because becoming the thing you hate just to fight it means you end up fighting yourself. You’ve lost. You’ve proven your ideal is no ideal at all.
What you’re saying is shit we’re fed by comic books and Hollywood. In the real world when you’re dealing with real psychopaths and where they have overwhelmingly taken control of government via decscdes of surpression lies and propaganda, the comic book logic doesn’t work.
In the movies, the bad guy always pays for his transgressions.
In the real world a child rapists, treasonus piece of shit has been re-elected. Twice…
“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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
They are just all worried.
“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.
I watched this yesterday, and I agree that it was a very good speech.
Trump is a pedophile
its not a democracy and you can’t debate these guys. next.
No! You’re the puppet. Wrong! Our president’s debate prowess.
