Here’s a brief summary, if you’re asking in good faith and actually want to know: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/9/11/2342963/-The-whit... but there’s plenty of others as well.

I’m not justifying anything, just pointing out he made a lot of different groups of people angry, and so it’s hard to tell which group the shooter may have belonged to.

> The critique is that academia is not only instilling blind faith in perpetual economic growth but also shaping values so that young people see serving corporations as more worthwhile than serving their families. Kirk’s main message was pushing back against that hierarchy—saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.

I mean, I suspect it's the cost of university education in the US that's driving much of the observed behaviours, that seems like a more parsimonous explanation than what you've given above. And speaking as a former university lecturer, the notion that academia tells students what to think does not match my experience at all.

> saying family, community, and personal meaning should matter more than being a cog in the corporate machine.

Wow, to be fair this is the first statement of Charlie Kirk that I've wholeheartedly agreed with.

Thank you for taking the time to develop your viewpoint in spite of my mildly aggressive reply. I'll try to reciprocate:

I completely agree on the issues you bring up but I disagree on their causes and what should be done to address them.

I don't believe Academia is to blame for all of this. Not any more than the rest of our shifting culture. Hyper-individualism is a symptom/goal of neoliberalism, the dominant ideology in the west for the past 50 years.

What you describe has a name in leftist theory: worker alienation. Workers are alienated from the purpose of their work, from their community and even from themselves. In these conditions, it becomes very hard to find meaning in one's life and even harder to get the will to do anything for the community.

The right has sold Americans on the idea of the self-made man, on self-reliance. They have basically destroyed syndicalism in the country and told workers they should simply perform better if they want a better life.

Everyone has internalized these precepts: that one's success and happiness in life are pure results of one's grit and dedication. You see it everywhere, in gym culture, in dating culture, in eutrepreneurship... "No empathy should be spared for the unemployed, they are all lazy and deserve nothing", or "Your coworker got fired? Good, one less to compete with".

And so, years after years, Republicans (mainly them, Democrats also helped) unwove the threads of our society one by one. Cutting into social security, healthcare, infrastructures... Slowly the country is crumbling under a severe lack of care.

All of this makes me grin when I hear Charlie Kirk speak of rebuilding the family and our communities. Why is he siding with the party that sold our country for tax cuts to the wealthy, then? Even now, huge tax cuts to the rich and defunding of important government programs are the centerpieces of Trump's economic policy. (See his so-called "Big Beautiful Bill.)

Trump and Kirk both support massive businesses extracting money from local communities. They both support this atomization of workers, this weakening of regulations in favor of employers. They both drank the Kool aid on exponential growth, which is why they reject the very real fact of climate change.

Now, what's the actual solution? Rebuild society's safety nets: stop people from being afraid of the future. Shame this culture of "grindsets" and "mogging": bring back kindness and empathy. Redistribute wealth, even if just symbolically: show this country's values actually mean something, and meritocracy is not just a lie invented to justify massive wealth inequalities.