Permission Structure for Political Violence.canvas (file not included in this release)

People

Below is a thorough public-source research list of people, organizations, institutions, and social-media dynamics connected to either:

1. celebrating, mocking, justifying, or trivializing Charlie Kirk’s assassination, or
2. helping create an environment where political violence, retaliation, or punitive political pressure became normalized.

I am not including random private citizens’ names, home locations, screenshots, or employer details unless they were already named in mainstream reporting or were public-facing institutional actors. Reuters reported that more than 600 Americans were fired, suspended, investigated, or otherwise disciplined for comments about Kirk’s killing, so a literally complete list of every individual is not realistically possible from public reporting alone. The list below is the most defensible version: public figures, named reported cases, institutions, official actions, and major trends.

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1. Core source hub

Use these as your main source base.

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2. Categories for your list

A good list should separate very different kinds of speech and conduct.

Category A — Direct celebration or mockery

This includes comments like “good riddance,” “rest in piss,” jokes about the bullet, jokes praising the shooter’s aim, or meme references implying the shooter did something good.

Category B — Justification or rationalization

This includes claims like “he brought this on himself,” “a taste of his own medicine,” or arguments implying Kirk’s politics made the killing understandable or deserved.

Category C — Political violence escalation

This includes posts calling for other people to be killed, such as “do Trump next” or similar violent memes. After the assassination, some Bluesky users reportedly posted or reposted memes such as “do Trump next” or “Elon next please,” prompting Bluesky and other platforms to warn users against glorifying or inciting violence.  

Category D — Platform trend / meme normalization

This includes transforming the assassination into TikTok audio, outfit-transition memes, ironic jokes, or “content.”

Category E — Retaliatory environment

This includes official or quasi-official pressure to expose, fire, deport, investigate, or punish people for comments, including some comments that were offensive but not actual incitement.

Category F — Overbroad / ambiguous punishment

This includes people punished not for celebrating murder, but for criticizing Kirk, quoting his own comments, criticizing gun politics, or saying the public response was hypocritical.

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3. Public figures, media, entertainment, and cultural workers

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4. Academia and education cases

This is where the largest number of cases appear. Reuters found educators were disproportionately targeted, with hundreds punished or investigated.  

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5. Government, politics, and official pressure

This section is important because “environment of political violence” goes in two directions: some people celebrated the assassination, while others used the assassination to justify sweeping retaliation, censorship, deportation, or investigations.

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6. Companies and institutions that disciplined workers

This is not a list of every employee, but of public-facing organizations reported to have fired, suspended, investigated, or disciplined people over comments about Kirk’s death.

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7. Social-media platforms, mobs, and “list” projects

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8. International cases

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9. “Created an environment of political violence being acceptable” — who fits?

This needs careful framing. There are two different kinds of “environment creation.”

A. People normalizing the assassination itself

These are the strongest examples:

B. People normalizing retaliation, collective blame, or state punishment

These are not “cheering Kirk’s death,” but they contributed to a different kind of violent/punitive political environment:

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10. Cases I would mark as “do not overstate”

Some cases were swept into the backlash but should not be described as “cheering assassination” unless there is direct evidence.

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11. Most defensible “final list” for your project

If you want a concise “named and documented” list, I would organize it this way:

Direct celebration / praise / mockery

• Gretchen Felker-Martin — DC Comics writer; mocked Kirk’s shooting; Red Hood canceled.  
• Ricardo Barbosa — Brazilian physician; praised shooter’s aim; fired.  
• Guilford Technical Community College instructor — joked about praising shooter’s aim; reported as a firing case.  
• Anna Kenney — Emory professor; reportedly wrote “Good riddance”; fired and later sued.  
• Fiona Wild — Burnley Borough Council; “good riddance” and “brought this on himself”; resigned.  
• George Abaraonye — Oxford Union president-elect; comments appeared to celebrate the assassination; Oxford Union condemned and referred evidence for discipline.  
• Texas State University student — mocked the neck wound and mimicked the assassination; expelled.  
• Texas Tech University student — mocked Kirk’s death during a confrontation; expelled and arrested.  
• Drew Harrison — Sucker Punch / Sony developer; posted a Luigi/Mario assassination joke; fired.  
• Bob Vylan frontman — hostile stage comment about Kirk; Netherlands show canceled.  

Justification / rationalization

• Salvador Ramírez — Mexican congressional staffer; said Kirk got “a taste of his own medicine”; resigned.  
• Fiona Wild — also fits here because of “brought this on himself.”  
• University of Toronto professor — violent anti-fascist comment; placed on leave.  
• Eduardo Bueno — said the world was better without Kirk; appearances canceled.  

Meme / platform normalization

• Bluesky users posting “do Trump next” / “Elon next please.”  
• TikTok users making videos with assassination-related audio.  
• Kent State “neck gushers” incident.  

Retaliatory / punitive environment

• JD Vance — urged people to call employers.  
• Stephen Miller — framed left-wing organizations as a network to be destroyed.  
• Trump — blamed the left and threatened investigations / media-license consequences.  
• Marco Rubio / State Department — visa revocations for derisive comments.  
• Christopher Landau — encouraged reports of non-citizens glorifying violence.  
• Pete Hegseth / DoD — military purge/investigation direction.  
• Brendan Carr / FCC — regulatory pressure connected to Kimmel.  
• Laura Loomer / Libs of TikTok / Scott Presler-style networks — public identification and employer-pressure campaigns.  
• “Charlie’s Murderers” / “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” — doxxing-style database of alleged offenders.  

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12. Bottom-line analysis

The cleanest argument is not simply “the left celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.” That is too broad and would be easy to attack. The defensible argument is:

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, a visible subset of users, academics, cultural workers, and public figures mocked, celebrated, rationalized, or trivialized the killing. Some went further by praising the shooter or calling for other political figures to be killed. At the same time, right-wing influencers, politicians, and government officials turned the backlash into a mass exposure and punishment campaign that sometimes targeted genuinely vile speech, but also swept in criticism, quoting Kirk’s own words, and non-celebratory political commentary. The result was a two-sided degradation of civic norms: assassination became content for one group, while retaliation and state-adjacent punishment became acceptable to another.

That framing is much harder to dismiss because it acknowledges the real ugliness of the celebratory posts without pretending every punished person was celebrating murder.

Explanation

1) What “permission structure” means in this context

• In political communication, a permission structure is a set of cues and narratives that make a behavior feel morally acceptable or socially safe for people who might otherwise refrain from it.
• Shapiro adapts that concept to political violence: not direct incitement (“go do violence”), but frames, hedges, and social validations that communicate “this violence is understandable, maybe even justified.”

2) His core thesis

• Some ideologies are intrinsically more prone to produce violent actors because they contain a three-step intellectual pattern:
  1. Conspiratorial worldview: a powerful, shadowy “they” is causing your suffering.
  2. Existential threat: your group (or you) is being targeted for destruction.
  3. Violence as self-defense: if opponents’ “arguments” are just masks for power, then counter-violence is justified as protective.
• He claims this pattern creates fertile soil for violent outliers, and when elites/media affirm parts of that pattern or excuse outcomes, that becomes a permission structure.

3) The mechanisms he says build “permission”

Shapiro points to recurring moves that, in his view, legitimize violence without explicitly calling for it:

• Speech-as-violence frame: reclassifying opponents’ arguments as literal harm; if words = violence, then physical retaliation becomes “self-defense.”
• Dehumanizing labels & moral absolutism: branding targets as bigots/monsters whose very presence is violent, making attacks feel deserved.
• The “I oppose violence, but…” hedge: condemn the act, then immediately argue the victim’s views or a system “really” caused it.
• Selective empathy / celebration: public happiness at a foe’s death, or conspicuous indifference, signals that the target “had it coming.”
• Platforming & prestige: giving prominent space to figures who (he says) fantasize about or rationalize violence normalizes that rhetoric.
• Double standards: excusing certain riots or threatening slogans as “understandable,” while harshly judging other episodes, communicates which violence is tacitly acceptable.

4) Which movements he says fit the pattern

• He lists five ideologies as tending toward the three-step pattern:
  Trans activism, Marxism, white supremacy, BLM, and radical Islam.
• Then he asks which of these has mainstream permission (elite validation, institutions, media cover).
  • He argues white supremacy lacks mainstream acceptance on the right.
  • He argues trans activism, Marxist class rhetoric, BLM, and pro-Palestinian/radical Islamist framesreceive mainstream validation on the left, thereby developing permission structures.

5) The evidence/examples he cites to illustrate “permission”

(These are his exhibits; I’m not vouching for their accuracy—this summarizes his argument.)

• Shooter motive & identity claims: statements from public officials, press tidbits (e.g., Axios, New York Post) about the suspect’s politics, online subcultures, and relationship; etched slogans on ammunition; alleged texts about targeting Kirk.
• Prior incidents: a short list of high-profile shootings where the attacker identified as transgender or cited identity-based grievances.
• Media & cultural signals:
  • A New York Times op-ed by Hasan Piker that, in Shapiro’s telling, reframes the murder as a product of capitalism, U.S. foreign policy, and social decay—he calls that a permission narrative.
  • Past clips of Piker using language that (Shapiro says) celebrates or imagines violence.
  • University/debate remarks and a concert shout-out he presents as valorizing violent “retaliation.”
  • Polling: a YouGov item on whether it’s ever acceptable to be happy about a political opponent’s death; he reads partisan gaps as evidence of asymmetric tolerance for “celebratory” reactions.
• Coverage asymmetries: his claim that riots framed as “racial justice” or “resistance” were excused or minimized (e.g., during COVID restrictions), which, to him, signals a green light.

6) How he distinguishes “permission” from “incitement” and from “cancel culture”

• Not direct incitement: he’s talking about norms and narratives that excuse or reinterpret violence after the fact, or that pre-justify it via speech-as-violence logic.
• Not “cancel culture”: Shapiro argues that firing someone who openly celebrates a murder is a legitimate exercise of association, not retroactive pile-on for an old, mild offense.

7) The prescriptive takeaway he’s pushing

• Name the asymmetry: refuse “all ideologies are equally violent” neutrality.
• Call out hedging (“violence is bad, but…”) as permission.
• Withdraw prestige from figures/institutions he says normalize violent frames.
• Re-center norms that treat opponents as legitimate participants in debate.

8) Analytic notes (limits and contestable moves)

• Causation vs. correlation: showing that a violent actor used an ideology’s language doesn’t prove the ideology (or media about it) caused the act.
• Category breadth: “trans activism,” “BLM,” or “Marxism” each contain many strands; inferring an entire movement’s character from violent outliers can be overbroad.
• Evidence mix: he leans on quick-turn reporting, partisan outlets, and selected clips; some underlying facts may evolve or be disputed.
• Speech norms trade-offs: treating harsh rhetoric as disqualifying can chill expression; tolerating it risks normalization—reasonable people will disagree on where to draw that line.
• Poll interpretation: being “happy” at a foe’s death ≠ endorsing murder; the measure is attitudinal and doesn’t map cleanly onto “permission for violence.”

TL;DR

Shapiro uses “permission structures” to describe narratives and social cues that, in his view, make political violence feel justified without explicitly calling for it. He says certain ideologies follow a conspiracy → existential threat → violence as self-defense logic, and that parts of the left have mainstreamed this logic (via speech-as-violence, dehumanizing labels, hedged condemnations, selective empathy, and prestige/coverage), thereby signaling tolerancefor violence against figures like Charlie Kirk. He presents contemporaneous media reactions, past rhetoric from prominent personalities, and a poll on reactions to a foe’s death as evidence. His prescription: name and refuse these “permission” narratives, treat opponents as legitimate adversaries in speech—not enemies to be harmed.

Engel’s ‘Social Murder’

Engels used “social murder” in The Condition of the Working Class in England to argue that a society can kill people indirectly through its economic and political arrangements.

His basic argument was:

When one person knowingly causes another person’s death, we call it murder. But when society knowingly places workers in conditions where they will predictably die early—through poverty, starvation, disease, unsafe housing, dangerous labor, and lack of necessities—that is also murder, even if no single individual directly kills them.

Engels’s key passage says that when society puts “hundreds of proletarians” in conditions where they “inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death,” deprives them of what they need to live, and then knowingly allows those conditions to continue, “its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual.” He calls it “disguised, malicious murder” because the killer is not visibly present and the death appears “natural,” even though it is socially produced. Source: Marxists Internet Archive, The Condition of the Working Class in England, ch. 7: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch07.htm  

In context, Engels was writing about industrial capitalism in 1840s England, especially Manchester. He argued that the bourgeoisie and the political order knew that workers were living in conditions that produced disease, malnutrition, early death, and misery, yet permitted those conditions because they were profitable or convenient.

So “social murder” does not mean ordinary murder in the legal sense. It means foreseeable, preventable mass death caused by social systems, especially when those in power know the consequences and do not change the conditions.

A concise formulation:

Engels also says English workers themselves called this “social murder” and accused society of committing it continually. Source: University of Notre Dame excerpt: https://sites.nd.edu/world-politics-2017/friedrich-engels-condition-of-the-working-class-in-england-184/  

The important distinction: Engels was not saying every bad policy or unjust institution is literally the same as stabbing someone. He was making a moral and political argument that omission, neglect, exploitation, and knowingly tolerated lethal conditions can carry murder-like responsibility when they predictably produce premature death.

Examples

Hasan Piker: millions understood murder of United Healthcare CEO, Brian Thompson | RISING
Sick Luigi Mangione Fangirls Say Murdered CEO Brian Thompson’s Children Are ‘Better Off Without Him’

Handwritten Notebook Pages

Source

• Open Permission Structure for Political Violence notebook pages — start at notebook p. 7 (file not included in this release)
• Open Permission Structure for Political Violence notebook pages — start at notebook p. 60 (file not included in this release)