> I think he was one of the first to realize that you could take regular YouTube videos that are several minutes long and turn them into skippable pre-roll ads, and some people would watch the whole thing.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
He would pay to have his videos as ads on other people’s videos.
E.g., I’d go to watch a video of SmarterEveryDay, and Tai Lopez would show up as an ad, telling me all about his Lamborghinis and bookshelves of books he’d never read. And people would just watch the full ad, even after they could’ve skipped (5s).
This is an example of the fact that while only 1% would watch the whole thing, they just raised their hands as the marks, to be worked on through the whole funnel.
There are armies of bad parents or babysitters that just hand baby an Ipad, not on child or restricted mode, and just let youtube literally Clockwork Orange a human being.
It's not against YouTube's ToS to run pre-roll ads of any length, of course. But I think he was just selling get-rich-quick schemes or something. At the time YouTube ads were more rare and generally short, like 15 second TV commercials, so it was weird to see long-form content as ads. He absolutely saturated the site with this ad for a while to the point that it became a meme. I'm guessing a significant percentage of YouTube's user base at the time was served that ad at least once.
You're not making a strong point. He didn't say that the person's own children should watch it, and his own children are under 12. Finally, he was talking about the death penalty, which is different from murder by most people's understanding of the terms.
It's a very blurred line between a death penalty and murder if the courts are politically motivated to produce a specific outcome regardless of the facts of the matter.
I doubt there were many (if any) legitimate (as in, not bots or sockpuppets) Bluesky accounts celebrating either of those things, so I don't see why a warning would be necessary.
It sounds like your point is when left wing politicos are targeted and people celebrate it, those are obviously sock-puppets and bots. But when right wing celebrities (for lack of a better word) are targeted, it's the democratic base that comes out in force to celebrate.
So only right wing commentators who advocate political violence deserve protection?
[Also... Do you have any data supporting this hypothesis?]
I'm not who you are replying to but the demographics of bluesky is heavily left wing. The users are significantly less likely to make fun of people on their side being attacked.
Also, I've seen more comments in the last 24 hours saying Kirk deserved it than comments about Shapiro despite his attack happening months ago.
Lastly, I don't know much about Kirk, but I haven't seen a single comment he made where he advocating for political violence. Would you mind sharing a few?
With the trans one, it is not clear if he was advocating for violence or to put them in a mental institution. It sounds more likely he is advocating for violence, but you can't tell.
With the Pelosi one, I don't think he was condoning violence, but wanted him free so there could be an interview with the attacker. "Bail him out and then go ask him some questions". I think this is due to conspiratorial views that there was a fallout between gay lovers.
Neither of these are great, but it is not clear that either are actually advocating for violence.
Forcing someone who is not mentally ill into a mental institution is an act of violence. It’s not much different than throwing someone in jail even though they haven’t committed a crime.
Kirk: “Joe Biden is a bumbling dementia filled Alzheimer's corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.”
>> Lastly, I don't know much about Kirk, but I haven't seen a single comment he made where he advocating for political violence. Would you mind sharing a few?
That is not advocating for violence anymore than saying a rapist should be jailed or a murder should be given the death penalty. He is not calling for some sort of extra judaical punishment, but to work within the legal system and execute the law.
How would it be appropriate for Biden to be given the death penalty under U.S. law? That sounds to me like extra-judicial punishment that was specifically being called for by Kirk.
I'm just here to answer your direct question. As a general rule, I don't carry opinions on celebrities, Charlie Kirk included. So this is a relatively objective summary of what a critic of him who goes digging would be most likely to find. In my own personal opinion, you generally won't find "smoking guns" in terms of black-and-white obvious calls to violence from Charlie Kirk.
Critics would likely point to:
- Helping organize January 6th, claimed that "The team at Turning Point Action are honored to help make this happen, sending 80+ buses full of patriots to DC to fight for this president."
- Glorifying Kyle Rittenhouse: “You’re a hero to millions, it’s an honor to be able to have you.” as well as supporting the man who attacked the Pelosi household.
- At an event in Nampa, Idaho (Oct 25, 2021), an audience member posed an alarming question during Kirk’s Q&A session. Kirk did denounce the idea of shooting political opponents – but notably, he did so on strategic grounds rather than moral ones. The man in the audience asserted “this is tyranny” and asked: “When do we get to use the guns?... How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?” – referring to Democrats purportedly stealing elections. The crowd cheered and applauded this direct call for political violence. Kirk’s response has been controversial. Kirk immediately urged the audience not to resort to violence “because you’re playing into their plans, and they’re trying to make you do this”. He warned that any violent uprising would give the left a pretext to crack down: “justify a takeover of your freedoms… the likes of which we have never seen”.
- During a special livestream of The Charlie Kirk Show on March 30, 2023, Kirk vented fury at Democrats and the “tyrannical” Biden administration. He claimed those pursuing Trump were “acting like Stalinists” and warned “we must make them pay a price and a penalty”. Referring to Trump’s indictment, Kirk declared, “They crossed the Rubicon… They have declared quote-unquote the Roman Civil War.” Media Matters characterized Kirk’s post-indictment monologues as “noticeably more incendiary and alarmist” than usual, reaching a “dangerous new level” of extremist rhetoric. Calling political opponents “Stalinists” and alluding to civil war was seen by critics as flirting with incitement, even if Kirk was ostensibly talking about legal retaliation. Commentators warned that such language – framing routine legal processes as a literal war – could egg on unhinged followers to view political conflicts in apocalyptic, violent terms.
- On his March 31, 2023 broadcast, he told his audience: “We are living in an enemy-occupied country. They have taken over the government and we have to think as dissidents." Describing fellow Americans in power as an “enemy” occupier is the kind of dehumanizing language that often precedes or incites political violence. Critics noted that this phrasing encourages listeners to see themselves as insurgents in their own country.
Charlie Kirk didn't really issue direct/unambiguous calls for people to commit specific acts of political violence. But critics would generally agree that his body of work created a comprehensive "permission structure" for such actions. This was achieved through a three-pronged rhetorical strategy:
1) He provided an ideological justification for lethal force as a necessary and rational political tool, primarily through an absolutist and insurrectionist interpretation of the Second Amendment.
2) He engaged in the systematic dehumanization of his political, racial, and religious opponents, casting them not as fellow citizens with differing views but as existential threats to the nation, Christianity, and "Western civilization" itself. He described the political landscape as a "spiritual battle" and a "war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist". During an appearance with Donald Trump, he claimed that Democrats "stand for everything God hates". In another segment on his show, he asserted, "The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse". Also objectifying/dehumanizing along racial lines: "Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that's a fact". He publicly referred to George Floyd, a man whose murder by police sparked a global movement for racial justice, as a "scumbag". In a tweet shortly before his death, he wrote, "Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America". "We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately"
3) He offered explicit endorsements of specific violent acts and issued calls for extra-judicial retribution, which served to normalize violence as a legitimate response to political and cultural disagreement. Kirk advocated for "bailing out" David DePape, the man convicted and sentenced to life in prison for the brutal hammer attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. Praising Kyle Rittenhouse as a “hero”. Critics argued that by hailing a shooter as a hero, Kirk was sending a message that “taking up arms” against perceived opponents is admirable.
One of TPUSA's most notorious initiatives is the "Professor Watchlist," a website launched in 2016 that lists the names, photos, and alleged offenses of academics Kirk's organization deems to be promoting "leftist propaganda" or discriminating against conservative students. While TPUSA framed this as a tool for transparency, its practical effect was to create a digital blacklist. The criteria for inclusion were broad, often targeting professors for their scholarly publications, social media posts, or any discussion of race and politics. The predictable and documented result of being placed on this list was subjection to "campaigns of online harassment".
To critics, the watchlist is an example of how Kirk built, deployed, and maintained over the long-term an infrastructure to enact his political will through mob dynamics and intimidation.
Thank you for the list. I agree there are no smoking guns here. I think, as a matter of charity, you could interpret them in a nonviolent way pretty easily.
For example, with the Jan 6th, as far as I can tell he was bussing people to a rally not to the insurrection. With Rittenhouse, he was defending himself from being attacked so self defense, not a call to go engage in violence. With the election one, he could have been advocating for arresting people, holding a trial and then using the death penalty, not some sort of extra judicial sort of killing.
I don't feel like addressing the rest since it seems like you don't think he really has explicit calls to violence.
I can't understand your summary of the post you're responding to. The man organized and constructed an empire that promoted hate through mob violence and decried Democrats (and anyone not straight white) as non human enemies, and you don't see violence? It's as if saying Hitler wasn't violent because there's no video of him killing anyone. Before it was reported he died, the MAGA cult leader guy explicitly called for violence in his name.
IDK much about the late man other than what I've read in the past couple days. Regarding Dems he's made many remarks that I can't quote precisely.
I asked ChatGPT.
Prompt: charlie kirk statements that dehumanize democrats
How those statements can be seen as dehumanizing
Framing as enemies: Saying liberals “hate” America or “want to destroy it” sets them up as antagonists, not just political opponents. It’s about moral character in extreme terms rather than policy disagreements.
Defining identity reductively: Labeling groups as “dependent on government,” or “living in tragedy of your own making,” etc., strips away nuance and reduces people to blame or shame‐oriented traits.
Assigning malicious intent: Some statements assume that Democrats act with ill will or deliberate harmful goals rather than simply having different philosophies or policy priorities.
Us vs. them polarization: These sorts of remarks deepen divides by denying any shared ground or possibility of good faith.
I didn't post any statements, but a summary of chatgpt's conclusions. Again, I'm not familiar with the man and DON'T wish to learn no more. He was obviously a hateful provocateur who was apparently murdered for not being evil enough.
None of the things you quoted involve him claiming Democrats aren't human or asking that they should be killed. Some involve him saying not to do that.
Hitler's manifesto included in it a promise to kill all the capitalists, so there's no comparison to be made here.
First, I didn't mention anything. I read the well crafted comment you replied to and was repulsed to learn about Kirk's hateful beliefs, then equally shocked by the lack of compassion in a reply. It seems the context is now missing. The comparison is Kirk dehumanizing anyone he disagrees with. And being super racist and bigoted in the process. The isolated statements I've read indicate a resentment for non-heterosexual, not white people. This is inherently a violent worldview. Just like Nazism and just like Nazism, it can't be tolerated. It's quite a paradox.
You are correct, I didn't notice you were different to nerdsniper.
> The isolated statements I've read indicate a resentment for non-heterosexual, not white people. This is inherently a violent worldview.
This is probably the root of the divergence in replies. It is possible to both dislike a behavior or group of people engaging in a behavior, to speak out about those groups and not want to do violence against them. This is arguably the default state. Merely disliking a group isn't an inherently violent worldview and it can be tolerated, very easily.
After all we have all for decades tolerated feminists who openly dislike men, people who openly dislike whites, people who openly hate the rich, and so on. It isn't OK to go from "that person says they hate the rich" to "therefore they are automatically violent" and from that to "we cannot tolerate their existence". It's sufficient to just argue back. Or even dislike them back, as a group.
Some on the left struggle with this concept because they don't distinguish between words and acts. As far as they are concerned, saying "black people commit a lot of crime" is no different to physically boxing a black person's head in, but this belief is wrong (and actually is an inherently violent worldview).
It's fine to dislike people and normal. It's not fine to dislike people because of their race or sexuality. It's much worse to spend your entire adult life spreading bigotry ... in the name of God. His beliefs were inherently violent toward women, non-hetero, and non-white people. I don't want to learn anymore about this guy. I've learned enough this week. He spent his young adulthood intentionally provoking people, pushing right up to or past the limit of what's considered acceptable in the MAGA era. What happened to him is awful, he was awful.
Bluesky is 99% people who left twitter because Elon Musk took over. I don't have any hard data but I can't think of any reason why a Bluesky user would celebrate someone on their side being attacked or murdered.
> It sounds like your point is when left wing politicos are targeted and people celebrate it, those are obviously sock-puppets and bots. But when right wing celebrities (for lack of a better word) are targeted, it's the democratic base that comes out in force to celebrate.
When left-wing politicos are targeted, my experience is that right-wing people have a playbook of possible responses:
1. It didn't even happen
2. It happened, but it wasn't one of our guys (with zero evidence to support that claim) - e.g. J6 was antifa, Paul Pelosi was attacked by his gay lover, etc.
3. Tasteless jokes, but nothing rising to the level of "it's good that this happened" or "he deserved it because of his political beliefs". Happy to be corrected on that one.
When right-wing politicos are targeted, my impression is that "the left" is much more celebratory. Maybe that's just my own bias/filter bubble.
If your assertion is "a bunch of people got on Bluesky to talk about the election..." well, did you notice there were two candidates? I think what you're saying is "DEMOCRATS left TWITTER to go to Bluesky," which may be true, but that is a hypothesis for which data would confirm or refute.
Is the title supposed to say "(How) I solved a distributed queue problem 15 years ago"? As it stands it makes it sound like you've been working on this problem for 15 years and just solved it.
If you're on here, you probably work in tech, and if you work in tech, you're probably pretty affluent, which means you don't need to signal that you're affluent.
Portland OR is trying to do something similar ("Preschool for all") and is running into the exact problems OP identified, to the point that the Democratic governor is sending warning messages to the county: https://www.opb.org/article/2025/06/26/kotek-multnomah-count...
Yes, but can you find any that work well when the branch of the government that’s running it refuses to process paperwork from daycare providers or issue checks to pay those providers, and where its leader has prioritized getting the system shut down on the grounds that it’s “broken”?
(Not strawmanning; just summarizing the situation in Oregon, according to that linked article.)
Governance is hard. People are hard. I can show you examples across the world where policy works, and where it doesn't. Success is not assured, but if we're not willing to try, why even get up in the morning? If it sucks in Oregon, my apologies; states are where experiments can take place, and there are 49 other states we can give it a go in.
No, clearly, if it doesn’t work when 100% of the people administering it are intentionally sabotaging it from within, it must be a bad idea. /s
(I didn’t link the Oregon article, and don’t know much about it other than what the article says. Just pointing out it might not be the best case study to generalize from.)
> We test the symmetry of this finding by studying the persistence of a sizeable negative shock to noncognitive outcomes arising with the introduction of universal child care in Quebec
This preening moralizing is precisely the problem. When you tell people they are "white supremacist-coded" they simply do not care. You are like an evangelical Christian telling me that if I don't accept Jesus I will go to hell. I just...don't care. I'm not mad. If anything I feel bad for you; I look at you and wonder how someone could devote so much of their mental hardware to this. Your statements do not make me feel guilty and like I need to change my ways. I am trying to convey to you that I do not share your moral worldview, and that your moralizing is completely ineffective. If you think that makes me a bad person, and you don't want to associate with me, that's fine. I don't care, in the same way that I would not care if a devoted vegan decided that he could not associate with people who use animal products. Why would I want to associate with someone who thinks I'm a bad person?
Trump got a higher percentage of the Black vote than any Republican since Gerald Ford. He nearly won an outright majority of Latino voters. How did a white supremacist candidate manage to do that? False consciousness? Marc Maron: "Progressives have really got to figure out how to deal with this buzzkill problem. You do realize we annoyed the average American into fascism."
> If there's a dichotomy that I can't really reconcile politically, it's the fundamental idea that people coming here is bad. That we cannot allow anyone else in. We can't even allow things from other countries to come here.
"People coming here" is not inherently good or bad. Some people would be good for the country, and some people would be bad. I'm speaking of individuals here, not groups. The issue is that the electorate at large feels like it has been given a choice between two extremes: "Effectively allow ANYONE to come here and stay as long as they want" and "Don't let ANYONE come here". If you give a people a choice of two extremes, don't be surprised if they choose the extremism you don't like.
Reconceptualize MAGA as voting AGAINST what the Democrats are offering, instead of FOR what Trump is offering, and it might make more sense.
I want to make it clear that we're not having an object-level discussion about this. This is not about "the actual stated policy" of the Democratic party. This is also not about "are those policies good or bad". It is not about my own views on those topics. So when I tell you my perception of other people's perception, please don't come back and say the equivalent "that's not actually what they said" or "yeah but that's a good policy." You might think that my perception of the electorate at large is inaccurate, and that's fine - it's purely based on vibes and anecdotal conversations with people.
The issue is trust. Why should voters trust that Kamala Harris will implement immigration policies they want? Why should they expect her not to yield to the most extreme elements in her party, which believe that borders are a fiction and should not exist? Look at Barack Obama's "evolution" on gay marriage over the course of his political career. Now take an issue that is far more important than gay marriage - how is she going to stop unlimited unskilled immigration? How is she going to stop fraudulent claims of refugee status? How is the whole immigration problem itself going to be solved, if you posit that every one of the 10 million "unauthorized immigrants", and every one of the refugee claimants, needs multiple appearances in court to resolve their situation?
I mean, doing what they do in the UK, where you need to provide proof of your right to work on day one of your job would help a lot.
It seems to me that many US people want their cake and also eat it. Cheap workers are good, but also illegal immigration is bad. You kinda need to pick one.
>I mean, doing what they do in the UK, where you need to provide proof of your right to work on day one of your job would help a lot.
Every job (as an employee) I've ever had has required me to submit IRS form W-9[0] on my first day of employment (or before). It's a standard part of the on-boarding process. To clarify, the W-9 form is to provide your "Taxpayer Identification number" (TIN) to those who will be handling payroll/tax withholding (that is, your employer).
If you cannot provide a TIN, you are not allowed to begin working. If you don't have a TIN, presumably you don't have the right to work. Or is there something about the UK's processes I'm missing?
What the Dems say doesn't matter, what matters is the consensus opinion of their position. E.g. If Harris said 'I don't want to pass gun control' I probably wouldn't believe her because that's a singular drop in a river of pro gun control rhetoric and action by her party.
People apparently feel that the Dems are pro 'letting everyone in' -- an understanding created not just by what the Dems say and do on the topic (and others) but what their opponents say too.
If they don't want people to think they aren't pro-immigration then the Dems have dropped the ball on their messaging and actions.
For a similar and reasonably concrete example, the 'Harris is for they/them' ads and their impact is a worthy case study.
I'm struggling to understand what this means. He put lots of ads on his videos? Or something else.
reply