How can we navigate the minefield of feeling (?), demanding (?) empathy for an infamous figure like Kirk who died violently while advocating for gun rights and publicly ridiculing empathy himself. On one hand, millions will feel only schadenfreude—relief that a voice of division has gone silent. On the other, the faithful will rush to turn his death into a parable of sacrifice, perhaps even a battle hymn. But in the shadows of both reactions are the families, left with the impossible work of mourning a man who belonged not just to them, but to the brutal theatre of this American public life. Kirk is survived by his wife Erika Frantzve, whom he married in 2021, his three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son.

The Ambivalence of Empathy

To feel for Kirk’s family is to wrestle with ambivalence. We can condemn what he stood for and still acknowledge the innocent suffering of those left behind. That tension—between justice and mercy, rage and compassion—creates a psychic dissonance. It is easier, in fact, to dehumanize everyone connected to him, to write the story cleanly: villain dies, curtain falls. But families are stubborn facts. They remind us that even the most polarizing actors have human circles who never signed up for the show. But then again questions arise, who are the “innocents” left?

• The parents? Did they form his racist worldview? Are they innocent?

• The wife? Erika Frantzve, the former Miss Arizona accepted the life of a tradwife of a young man who made a lot of money peddling hate and division. Charlie’s shocking death sees him leave behind a fortune. According to Celebrity Net Worth, Kirk had a net worth of $12 million at the time of his death. Just recently Kirk accepted an offer of $5.25 million on his home in Scottsdale, Arizona.

• The children? Here, there is no ambivalence - every normal human being empathizes with the fate of Kirk’s three-year-old daughter and one-year-old son. We do not choose our parents… We instinctively feel for them.

The Humanization of the Unchosen

When Nazis mythologized Horst Wessel after his 1930 death, they didn’t care about his mother’s grief. They cared about the utility of her grief. They scrubbed away her private loss and turned her son into a national sacrament. What’s happening now is more subtle, but the risk is the same: to transform Kirk’s death into a political relic, while erasing the ordinary pain of those who simply lost a loved one.

Being Liberal - Reality Has a Well-known Liberal Bias

When Tragedy Becomes Theatre - Don’t Let Them “Horst Wessel” Charlie Kirk

What just happened in Utah. Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old head of Turning Point USA and a key Trump ally, was shot during a campus event at Utah Valley University and later died, according to multiple outlets and Trump’s public statement. Details are still shifting…

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7 months ago · 80 likes · 12 comments · Being Liberal

Empathy toward the family resists that erasure. It insists that children are not guilty of fathers, that grief does not belong to parties or campaigns. It prevents us from collapsing into the fascist logic of collective blame.

The Fatigue of Holding Two Truths

But empathy comes at a cost. To care for the innocent survivors of infamous men is to invite empathy fatigue. How do you hold compassion for the widow while remembering the damage her husband helped cause? Is she an innocent victim? As a tradwife she supported him and benefited from his fortune. How do you honor her tears without forgetting the harm his words inflicted on millions of strangers? This is moral distress in its rawest form, the difficulty of remaining human in a world that rewards caricature.

The Call to Compassionate Justice

Charlie Kirk is gone. What remains is the contest over his memory. Trump and his allies will try to sanctify him. Some on the left will want to dance on his grave. Neither honors the deeper truth: that the dead leave behind real people, with real wounds, who deserve neither our hatred nor our exploitation.

Still, the effort matters. Empathy for families differentiates between the guilty and the innocent. It reminds us that justice must not metastasize into vengeance.

- The Obituarist

Welcome to Advanced Obituaries, a safe space for those who understand that the end of a life can be the start of a bigger story—especially when that life held power, corrupted it, or got tangled in the machine of history.

An advanced obituary isn’t just a prewritten death notice for a VIP sitting in a newsroom drawer. It’s a lens. A way to look at the living dead—tyrants, technocrats, billionaires, and other permanent fixtures—through the obituary they deserve but will never get.

We’re here to write the send-offs the world is already preparing for, emotionally if not officially. Not because we wish death on anyone—but because some lives cast such long shadows, it’s necessary to imagine the light that might follow.

And let’s be honest:
We all know there's a BIG ONE coming. The one obituary people have been refreshing the news for—daily, hourly, ritualistically.

As the old Soviet joke goes:

“Every day, a man walks into a kiosk, picks up the newspaper, and checks the front page.
The vendor says, ‘The obituaries are on the last page, comrade.’
The man replies, ‘The one I’m waiting for will be on the front page.’”

Exactly.

So stay tuned.
Because when it hits—if it hits—you’ll want the right obituary.
Not the sanitized official one. Not the state media one.
But the advanced one.

Coming soon.

The Death of Stalin — A Harbinger of Trump’s Aftermath

There’s a film you should watch now, before it turns from satire into prophecy: Armando Iannucci’s The Death of Stalin (2017). On the surface it is a farce about the Soviet politburo scrambling to seize power after the dictator’s sudden demise. Scratch the laughter, though, and you see the anatomy of authoritarian succession: backstabbing, cowardice, sycophancy, and the grotesque theater of men who served the tyrant now pretending they were always his equal.

Replace Moscow with Washington, 1953 with 2025-or-so, and you begin to see the problem. Trump’s death - whenever it comes, and mortality is the one term limit no man can cheat - will not end Trumpism. It will trigger a scramble. His heirs, cronies, and opportunists, from Mar-a-Lago courtiers to Capitol Hill clowns, will claw at the rotting throne. The MAGA movement, like Stalin’s inner circle, is a coalition of people too cowardly to challenge the leader in life and too greedy to let go of his corpse in death.

The Iannucci’s film is famously “inaccurate,” as many historians have pointed out. And the director himself admits: It’s not a documentary, it’s a fiction inspired by the truth of what it must have felt like at the time. But that’s the point. Feelings matter more than facts in the shadow of tyrants. The paranoia, the absurdity, the desperate improvisation of men caught without their master — that is the truth. That is what the death of a despot looks like, whether in Kremlin halls or gilded Mar-A-Lago golf resort.

In The Death of Stalin, ministers argue over the dictator’s body while doctors, prisoners, and generals are used as disposable props in the performance of power. In Washington, expect the same: sycophants competing for inheritance rights, rivals leaking kompromat, children feuding over the golden calf, and media hagiographers producing a gospel before the embalming fluid has dried. Trump will not get a state funeral; he’ll get a blood sport, with Fox News as the ring announcer.

See the film. Laugh at the chaos. Then look again — and recognize that the comedy is a dress rehearsal. When Trump finally goes, America will learn that the death of a strongman is not the end of the nightmare. It is the beginning of the brawl over his bones.

In our next article - Obituarist’s casting call: The Death of Stalin: The MAGA Remake. we will present each figure in Trump’s orbit mapped onto their Soviet doppelgänger in Iannucci’s film (and history).

This phrase is the editorial spine of Advanced Obituaries:

• "Legacies don’t lie" means history will strip you down, whether you like it or not. No matter how loud your branding, the record remains.

• "Tap out honestly" is a challenge—not just to the dead, but to the living. Own your legacy before someone else writes it for you. Or we will.

Because when the final bell rings, there’s only one thing left to write: the truth.

Subscribe now

On July 24, 2025, Terry Gene Bollea—better known to the mass-market hallucination as Hulk Hogan—was finally counted out. Heart failure, say the reports. We’re still waiting to confirm if it was metaphorical.

It is, however, a poetic coincidence that demands acknowledgment: Hogan died exactly ten years to the day after the National Enquirer and Radar Online exposed him as a racist, in his own words, caught on tape:

“I mean, I’d rather if she was going to f*** some n*****… I’d rather have her marry an 8-foot-tall n***** worth a hundred million dollars!”

That’s what Terry said. Not in character. Not under duress. Just… off the cuff, in private, like it was casual wisdom from a sun-damaged philosopher.

Read it yourself, unfiltered:
👉 The 2015 Radar Exposé - Hulk's N Word Racist Rants Caught On Tape –– Foul, Disgusting Tirade Leaks.

This wasn’t just a career scandal. It was a mask-off moment. And in true American fashion, we shrugged, then sold him back to ourselves, less ashamed, more nostalgic. After all, what is Hulkamania if not the musclebound denial of moral consequence?

Let’s be honest—Terry Bollea didn’t die today. He died the moment the costume fused to the corpse. The rest was just brand maintenance and tanning oil.

But This Is Not Our First Official Obituary.

Not yet.

This is a first draft. A scratch pad. A toe tag with room for annotation.

Because over at AdvancedObituaries.org, we’re launching something a little different:

🎭 The National Obituary Contest
Opening soon. The first subject? Donald J. Trump.
$1000 First Prize. Eternal Shame Optional.

More Info Coming Soon

But before we eulogize the nation’s chief grievance merchant, we’re warming up the scalpels. Hulk Hogan offered himself on the altar of irony, forcing us to launch this website sooner than we’ve planned.

And irony, friends, never dies.
Unlike Hulk Hogan.

🕯️
The Obituarist

Trump’s Online History: (2009—2025)
The Comprehensive List Of His Social Media Post

May 2009: First Twitter Account Launch

Started his Twitter account with @realDonaldTrump, initially promoting appearances on shows like David Letterman, beginning what would become a 12-year prolific social media presence. 1

September 2012: Kate Middleton Topless Photo Comments

Tweeted disparaging comments about the Duchess of Cambridge's privacy, saying "Who wouldn't take Kate's picture and make lots of money if she does the nude sunbathing thing. Come on Kate!" displaying early pattern of inappropriate comments about women. 1

October 2012: Relationship Advice to Robert Pattinson

Offered unsolicited relationship advice to Twilight actor Robert Pattinson about Kristen Stewart, tweeting "Everyone knows I am right that Robert Pattinson should dump Kristen Stewart. In a couple of years, he will thank me. Be smart, Robert." 1

November 2012: China and Global Warming Conspiracy

Tweeted the false claim that "The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive," demonstrating early pattern of promoting conspiracy theories. 1

May 2013: Intelligence Boasting

Posted "Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest," exemplifying his pattern of self-aggrandizement and insulting perceived critics. 1

2013: Peak Insult Year

Reached his highest annual tweet count with over 8,000 tweets, including systematic attacks on various public figures, averaging 22 tweets per day. 2

2014-2015: Pre-Campaign Insult Barrage

Systematically used Twitter to attack opponents with repetitive insults, with "failing" used 66 times, "lightweight" 37 times, "dishonest" 36 times, and "dumb/dummy" 33 times.3

August 2015: Megyn Kelly "Blood" Comments

After Kelly questioned him about calling women "fat pigs," "dogs," and "slobs," Trump tweeted about Kelly having "blood coming out of her wherever," launching a sustained attack on the Fox News host. 4

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