I experienced two great shocks this morning upon looking at the news.
The first, felt by so many across the world, was at the news of the calculated murder of Charlie Kirk, which leaves America a poorer place and a wife and two young children grieving. The second was brought about by the depraved manner in which no small number of people celebrated Kirk’s death, much of it emanating from the liberals’ digital refugee camp, Bluesky.
Many of you will probably have forgotten about Bluesky, remembered only as the place the great and the good departed X for in droves after Elon Musk bought it back in 2022, followed by a smaller wave of departures after Trump won re-election last year. As that chronology makes clear, Bluesky was – and is – seen by liberals and progressives as the cyber city on a hill, set apart from other social media sites, especially X, by the tolerance and kindness of its users.
Contrast that self-perception, then, with the reactions to Kirk’s death that made their way over to X this morning via screenshot:
A few more posts to that effect and I decided to go and have a look for myself over on Bluesky. Conveniently for my investigative self, “Charlie Kirk” was trending, so I clicked that to see what people were saying:
“I feel like Charlie Kirk might have lost that debate on gun control he was having,” wrote one user I saw immediately.
“The bullet is what stopped Kirk’s political violence,” reads another.
“KNOCK KNOCK WHO’S DEAD CHARLIE KIRK,” wrote another.
“Without glorifying violence I can say the following: Charlie Kirk was a racist, homophobic, transphobic, regressive, elitist, coward. The world would be marginally better had he never been in it. The only reason he’s being mourned is fear. Fear that the rich are finally the ones getting shot,” wrote yet another.
I saw those three posts within about 30 seconds of scrolling the trending tab, and many more besides.
By chance, the contribution of one of Ireland’s leading intellectual lights, Gender Studies Director at UCD, Mary McAuliffe, came up in the trending tab, in which she ticked the required I hate seeing deadly political violence like this box before adding, “but let’s not whitewash what an awful, racist, transphobic, misogynist Charlie Kirk was”.
You get the idea. Bluesky is a platform on which even the moderate posts are far to the left of the average person’s, and where the extreme takes display a degree of radicalisation that isn’t generally found on other sites – X included.
This isn’t to say that you won’t find such extremism elsewhere, but you won’t find it so abundantly or so readily. Whereas on other sites you get balance, X included, even if it’s weighted in a certain direction, on Bluesky you get only the moral superiority of the left, and the demented thuggery of those warped by the full adoption of its ideology.
Bluesky’s deadly edge has already been picked up on by scholars, the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI) producing a report earlier this year on a growing “assassination culture” on the left, which highlighted the “significant and predictive” role the liberal platform had to play in boosting “radical expressions”:
“Cyber-social platforms—particularly BlueSky—play a strong predictive role in amplifying this culture. References to Luigi Mangione now function as coded endorsements of political violence, cloaked in irony, memeification, and plausible deniability. In these ecosystems, violence is not just justified—it is stylized, gamified, and embedded within a broader ideological narrative. Combined with psychological drivers such as external locus of control, these dynamics create a permissive environment in which users feel morally licensed to advocate or celebrate extreme acts.”
Well, there was a political assassination of a prominent conservative in the US yesterday, and there’s much celebration of it and, as alluded to by the months’ old report, joking about it on Bluesky today. Have a look for yourself if you don’t believe me.
I would say that, all of that being as it is, it’s astonishing that Bluesky’s radical nature isn’t seeing more discussion, but it isn’t a surprise at all.
It was academics, journalists, local politicians, celebrities and more who stood up on their soapboxes to tell the rest of us that they were leaving, en-masse, “to that place where the skies are blue”. The views of many of those who still, despite growing pushback, hold the cultural and political levers of power in the US, Ireland, the EU and further afield are perhaps best summed up by Professor McAuliffe’s post quoted above: yes, yes, political violence bad, but can we please remember how bad that nasty conservative was?
As long as that remains the case, expect Bluesky and its zealous user base to continue getting a free pass, while for all of its flaws, the home of free speech – X – will continue to take fire for the shelter it provides those who don’t toe the line.