My favorite poem, my -- my favorite poet was Aeschylus. And he once wrote:
"Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."
What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is not violence and lawlessness, but is love, and wisdom, and compassion toward one another, and a feeling of justice toward those who still suffer within our country ...
We can do well in this country. We will have difficult times. We've had difficult times in the past -- and we will have difficult times in the future. It is not the end of violence; it is not the end of lawlessness; and it's not the end of disorder.
But the vast majority of [people] in this country want to live together, want to improve the quality of our life, and want justice for all human beings that abide in our land.
And let's dedicate ourselves to what the Greeks wrote so many years ago: to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world. Let us dedicate ourselves to that, and say a prayer for our country and for our people.
Bobby Kennedy, 1968
Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968.
So perhaps a better excerpt in light of recent events would be
>> And another reason that I'm happy to live in [the second half of the 20th century] is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn't force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it's nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.
In the context of the 1960s, governments and nuclear weapons. But more broadly the same holds true for individuals.
Either we learn to live together despite our differences, or we use our newfound great power to annihilate each other.
35% of americans are happy with how the current administration has been handling immigrants
https://news.gallup.com/poll/692522/surge-concern-immigratio...
approval of ICE is around 40%
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2025/08/27/republicans-...
edit: it's funny to see my post above offended(?) people who want to believe that americans are kind and loving, despite uh being on a post where everyone is arguing about how bad the political violence and polarization situation is in the US
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkivebeentothemou...
GP is currently the highest comment, and on other sites I've visited, while too many people cheer this or call for violent retaliation, most of the highly-upvoted comments (both liberal and conservative) condemn it and argue for de-escalation.
Anger and fear are powerful emotions, but so is hope. Barack Obama campaigned on hope and became President, winning his first election with the highest %votes since 1988. Donald Trump also became President in part due to hope; his supporters expected him to improve their lives, while most of Hillary Clinton's and Kamala Harris's supporters just expected them to not make things worse. Now lots of people desperately need hope, and if things get worse more will.
Irrational hope can be dangerous: all the time, people make decisions that backfire horribly, and deep down they knew those decisions would backfire horribly, but they made them anyways out of desperation for an unlikely success. Perhaps this is another example, where the assassin delusionally hoped it would somehow promote and further their desires, but it will almost certainly do the opposite.
But hope can also be rational, and unlike anger and fear (which at best prevent bad things), hope can intrinsically be for causing good things. If a group or candidate that runs on hope for a better world gets enough attention and perceived status, it could turn public perception back to unity and optimism.
It’s awful that anyone dies.
Let’s not escalate this on either side. We don’t need another Hitler, and we don’t need a French Revolution either. We just need people that stop trying to outdo each other.
By historical standards we’re living is a near paradise of non violence and that’s worth persevering at significant cost.
https://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/douglasmacarthurra...
In the end there is no going forward in the current context; there are no solutions there. It requires renewed vigor to move to a higher, better frame where growth is possible.
For us americans: political identity (libs v. Trump) has no solutions. Better: the political parties need to serve us. Dead kids or abused kids by adults (Epstein) cannot stand. What can 3.5 std deviations of center left and right get together over? Kids surely. And the knowledge (as Aeschylus narrates well elsewhere with the furies) that violence begets violence surely.
It's easy to get sucked into a learned helplessness doing this, though. We know exactly why it happens - Charlie Kirk explained it himself:
"You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense, [...] But I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational."
When people push for firearms control in America, this is the polemic they argue along. You can say they're justified or completely bonkers, but denying that these scenarios exist is the blueprint for erasing causality.
But current protests aren't revolts nor violence anyway. There is side/peripheral violence but that is not the point of the protests
the state cannot only respond with more violence from police force forever
I am not claiming this is true. But merely that if I was employed to destabilize the US, I would claim to have been responsible for a number of recent events in order to please my boss.
I am hoping the possibility of a joint common enemy can perhaps unite people in America a bit.
it's not, poor parents can't feed their children with hope
That too says something about our times. Maybe a few things. From being unable to trust things without verifying, to people’s willingness to alter the truth to make a point, to how people fear discussing race and gender loud even in passing.
Frankly I find creating an analogue between the death of MLK and Kirk in bad taste only magnified by scrubbing race from an MLK tribute.
Kirk would have celebrated MLK's death as he did the Pelosi hammer attack. Kirk called MLK "awful" and "not a good person" and the Civil Rights Movement "a huge mistake.".
https://www.wired.com/story/charlie-kirk-tpusa-mlk-civil-rig...
That isn't possible without bio-warfare. I sometimes hear people foolishly speak of a shooting "race war" in the USA but always remind them that the active phase of such an event would last about 15 minutes.
EDIT: It’s particularly funny to imagine that First peoples somehow only became a thing in America sometime after Dr. King’s time.
Given his comments on the Pelosi attack, it's clear that he didn't believe that people should be safe from violence for their political beliefs. Given his comments on trans people[1], it's clear that he didn't believe that they should be safe from violence for the crime of... Being trans.
He would fail to meet the standards of civility set for this thread, or for this forum.
Politics is a barrier that protects us from political violence. The worst practitioners of it know this, and act to encourage escalation that will obliterate that barrier. So far, they've been rewarded by wealth and power for their efforts.
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[1] Charlie Kirk has called for "men to handle" trans people "the way they did in the 50s and 60s."
Is this how someone just harmlessly opening up a civil dialogue behaves?
https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha...
What saddens me is people take different political views as hatred, and medias run with it. I can't remember how many times a person is labeled fascist or communist just because their views are different.
Some political views are hatred, and ignoring that doesn’t serve any useful purpose.
I for one read this and assumed RFK was just discussing gun control in general, only weeks before he was killed. Adding in the context the speech was regarding MLK gives it a whole different meaning. Still powerful, but different.
Attributing “The only thing we [experience] is fear itself” to FDR suggests he said something a little different. That FDR needs to see a therapist for his anxiety.
The whole idea of intersectionality makes it hard to build coalitions and turns everything into a problem that’s impossibly complex to solve and difficult to build a coalition around.
It’s the basic reason many leaders who the majority of a country dislike rise to power. Because that majority can’t put their differences aside.
The guy who shot Trump in the ear had (arguably) no particular ideology or goal, just an interest in assassinations and a possible depressive disorder.
Charlie Kirk speaking about a trans athlete: "Someone should've just took care of it the way we used to take care of things in the 1950s or 60s[0].
And [1]:
> America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
And [1]:
> The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
0. https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/this-must-stop-tpusas-cha...
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
Charlie Kirk's assassin is still at-large and fired from a standoff distance, with a conventional long-barrel firearm.
Make of that what you will.
Unguarded. Scattered around the country. Any oil leaks potentially destroy them. Manufacturing backlogs of multiple years.
https://www.energy.gov/oe/addressing-security-and-reliabilit...
The only thing that's kept domestic terrorism to a minimum is that anyone smart enough to do it well has better economic opportunities.
He didn't advocate for but against. He advocated against people who weren't his version of correct. He advocated for suppression, not liberation.
I don't think you're saying he advocated for the struggles of any marginalized group, but your comment could be read as such.
Charlie Kirk was a bigot who wanted his political "enemies" to suffer.
There's a side that is genuinely, factually, deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis and it plugs into Fox News. This isn't a political statement. It's documented up and down.
When people are so pissed off that millions of people take to the streets governments fall.
It is funny that every side believes that the other side is genuinely, factually and deliberately misled by their politicians on a routine basis.
He never suppressed or oppressed anyone like what DEI has been doing by openly discriminating against people based on their skin color (and therefore presumed financial status).
He had no version of correct and he didn’t want anyone to suffer. He merely spoke and wrote his opinion and for that “crime” and that alone, someone decided to hate him so much that they decided to silence him forever.
This is sad and shameful (as have been the attacks and assassinations of any elected official or public figure in the past many months).
You said it yourself that the shooter is still at large... despite the involvement of the FBI and other agencies.
Is there something I'm missing here?
> despite the involvement of the FBI and other agencies.
Many such cases. We're still looking for D. B. Cooper, aren't we? Did the FBI ever dig up Hoffa's body? The feds are hardly a panacea with these things.
But still: murder is murder.
Really?
"Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge." [1]
"...he didn’t want anyone to suffer."
Really?
"We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately." [1]
"He had no version of correct..."
Really?
"The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white." [1]
1. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk...
And you need more context and the training required to take such a shot and then evade the local cops and FBI, with a solid escape plan from a fuckton of witnesses and so forth. And I did not mention that most people would probably panic and mess up, let alone take the shot and escape. It is much more complex than that. When you look at the pattern fit, it no longer looks like a spur-of-the-moment act by a "typical gun owner".
They gave us some 22 years old kid as the person who pulled this whole operation, allegedly, and acted alone. Even if someone had been shooting since childhood, the rooftop selection, escape route, and casing inscriptions suggest deliberate operational planning and situational awareness, not just trigger skill. Shooting skill alone doesn't cover the logistics and environmental awareness. Plus a 22-year-old who "trained since childhood" might have technical skill, but most young adults still lack the composure and foresight to execute a high-stakes assassination with minimal mistakes, especially under the psychological pressure of killing a person in a public setting.
FWIW, some cases remain unsolved for decades because of scarce evidence, degraded scenes, or lack of witnesses, which does not come into play here at all. Modern investigations, by contrast, often benefit from immediate CCTV, cell-data, social media, and so forth.
...thus I remain skeptical.
RFK probably studied Aeschylus in the original Greek, and did an on-the-fly translation. A more literal translation is:
"Zeus, who guided men to think, who has laid it down that wisdom comes alone through suffering. Still there drips in sleep against the heart grief of memory; against our will temperance comes. From the gods who sit in grandeur grace is somehow violent."
There's no "turning the other cheek here." It claims violence does indeed beget violence, and there's no human way around that.
To be clear, I'm not advocating violence, or even criticizing RFK. I'm simply defending the purity of Aeschylus.
> but most young adults still lack the composure and foresight to execute a high-stakes assassination with minimal mistakes
This is conjecture, unless you can back it up with a source. The history books are filled with 22-year-old kids shooting politicians and getting away with it, famously the Red Guard uninstalled an entire government with this strategy. With a bunch of riled-up students.
I spent a lot of time at the range when I was a kid - hitting a 200yd shot from an elevated platform is not difficult with a M1903. A modern 63mm loading can easily push 3,000fps in a long-barrel rifle and if you reloaded the cartridge for a single-use assassination, I see no reason you couldn't push 5,000fps if the barrel doesn't explode from overpressure. With those kinds of ballistics its not a very tough shot unless you're shooting into a hurricane. All you need then is a hunting scope, and that can be bought for $170 in cash at Cabelas.
> Modern investigations, by contrast, often benefit from immediate CCTV, cell-data, social media, and so forth.
This I absolutely agree with. It sounds like the only reason they found him is because his friend turned in his Discord DMs, he might still be on the loose if not for the digital breadcrumb trail he left behind.
Bit of a harrowing precedent for online privacy, but I presume that will fall on deaf ears.
> This is conjecture, unless you can back it up with a source. The history books are filled with 22-year-old kids shooting politicians and getting away with it, famously the Red Guard uninstalled an entire government with this strategy. With a bunch of riled-up students.
Sure, it is, and I cannot back it up. He was operating alone, which is much different from doing it as a team, I believe.
> It sounds like the only reason they found him is because his friend turned in his Discord DMs, he might still be on the loose if not for the digital breadcrumb trail he left behind.
I thought it was his dad that turned him in, but regardless, the Discord messages are suspicious, because he went to great lengths as to successfully complete the mission, but he would talk about it on an online platform? Something makes me skeptical about it, but who knows. It is just pure speculation from me at this point, but it does not align well with the rest of his behavior, IMO.
I get that criminals make mistakes, and perhaps it was just that. We will never truly know.
In that light, does it really matter what tier party the assassin belonged to? The joint common enemy you allude to is already inside the white house, and as long as that is still up for debate, the country has no future.