General Discussion

What you heard depended on where you were on the political spectrum and how engaged you were. My hypotheses are:
1. There were two groups whose opinions did not change at all. One was the group of people who followed Kirk, the other the politically active people on the left, including DU. These plus the further right are the people who already knew of him and had an opinion.

2. For the majority of the people who had no or little opinion of him, it depended on where their information came from. That could be social media, people they speak to or public media.

On my own social media, I saw mostly information from the left, including many obnoxious things Kirk actually did say. I responded with thumbs up, care, etc but no written comments.

However, what surprised me was one woman I know is basically a conservative Catholic, shared a video where he was responding to a questioner "proving" Jesus is God - using the Bible! Despite the obvious, he appeared reasoned, calm and "nice". Easy to do when you control the editing. The comments were of people seeing him almost as a martyr. One said they lost a future President.

What Trump is fighting for is this middle group that previously did not know Kirk. I have no idea whether there were more people whose first major exposure was the laundry list of hateful positions or more people seeing him as a saint or at least a good man.

To some degree, the decency of most elected Democrats long believing it is wrong "to speak ill of the dead" eliminated many of those who are usually our strongest voices speaking to those not on the committed left.

As usual, the MSM really did try to show both sides of the issues Kirk raised, while the right deified Kirk and demonized the "radical left" which now seems to be not just those to the left of Reagan, but even those who identified as Reagan/Bush Republicans.