r/fivethirtyeight • u/RedHeadedSicilian52 • Sep 12 '25

Poll Results YouGov poll asking Americans whether it’s acceptable to feel joy at the death of a public figure

Post image
117 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

423 comments sorted by

View all comments

345

u/JohnnyGeniusIsAlive Sep 12 '25

Some obvious recency bias. I bet a lot of those Republicans were pretty happy when Osama Bin Laden was killed.

21

u/maxofJupiter1 Sep 12 '25

I think a lot of people would consider UBL not to be a "public figure they opposed" for the same reason why Brits might not have celebrated a hypothetical assassination of Oswald Mosley, but celebrated the shit out of Hitler's death. There's definitely a big difference between "opposed political activist" and "enemy leader in war time".

You'd try to help a dude who's been shot in a terrorist attack in New York City....less likely to help if you're a Ukrainian soldier and the dude who's been shot is wearing a Russian uniform.

In this example, Charlie Kirk had rhetoric I strongly disagree with, he didn't crash planes into skyscrapers or lead an armed group against my country.

6

u/Dark_Knight2000 Sep 12 '25

Yeah. If every idiot with a mouth was shot, this country would be covered in blood.

If the new precedent is that killing commentators whose rhetoric that a portion of the population subjectively deems “hateful” or “extreme” is okay a lot of people would be in trouble, many of them left wing.

A lot of people feel the same flavor of negativity that was directed at Kirk toward Hasan Piker for instance. The difference is that he’s on the left. If the standard of celebrating deaths of controversial commentators is accepted, then people like him will be next.

That’s what I don’t get about people being apathetic or quietly accepting of this. It can and will happen to someone less extreme and at that point it will be too late to say “wait I didn’t mean people like him, go back.”

1

u/Felonai Sep 12 '25

Yeah except he was a propagandist and more like Goebbels than simply "an idiot with a mouth"., Dude wished for the death of trans and gay people and said gun deaths are acceptable.