The Murder of Charlie Kirk.

Obviously the right wing media ecosystem and their overlords are a bit frothy right now as one of their chief promoters of hate was felled by a bullet. There’s no parallel outrage on the right over prior public displays and I won’t bore you with a hot take on political violence, hate speech and left/right narratives. Instead I want to pull together a coherent take on what this means for the country and address something we might be missing.

This event will likely remain in the headlines as more is revealed about the shooter’s intentions and motivations. Officials are beginning to leak some details but without a proper manifesto, we’re left to piece together clues about this young man. Of course this is fueling the most insidious speculation pretty much everywhere you look.

To set us up, take a look at this Mother Jones piece. I think it’s a really important read because there’s more than a left/right disconnect to this story. There’s a generational disconnect that we haven’t fully explored in society.

The article talks about the importance of the surprise Netflix hit Adolescence, which garnered worldwide attention for its performances and continuous shot style that was truly groundbreaking. But as the article points out, it only scratches the surface of the psychological trauma that many in this next generation experience in secret spaces and dark corners online and in their minds.

Fallout

We’re entering the fallout phase that comes on the heels of high profile political violence. We move through these phases more rapidly these days because we have so many tragedies to respond to and promptly forget. But this one will endure a bit longer given it was a public execution.

The visceral response and confusion phases are now behind us so we’re officially in narrative mode. Left, right and middle narratives are emerging along the uniquely American murder spectrum. And this is where we’re about to reach peak Americana with deep state conspiracy meeting official government narrative in real time. And it’s going to be ugly.

Was the shooter an alt-right “groyper” who left dark web gamer clues or a recently radicalized trans rights leftist seeking to destroy the formative doctrines of his youth? Longtime friend of the show and collaborator Bobby McD reached out to me from across the pond with a chilling question that I’ve since seen repeated. Was this America’s Reichstag Fire moment? With the President taking to the airwaves to declare a public mourning reserved for the most prominent of public figures and dignitaries while simultaneously decarling war on the amorphous “radical left” whom he deemed responsible for this tragedy, it certainly begs the question.

On Monday the 15th of September, officials gathered in the White House to announce on Charlie Kirk’s podcast that they were coming for left terrorists. Stephen Miller said, “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”

I cannot overstate the seriousness of their words and the capacity of this administration to weaponize every agency at its disposal to silence dissenting voices. We have indeed reached a Turning Point.

The right to privacy, counsel, representation and due process has all but disappeared in the few short months since Trump regained control of the White House. So why wouldn’t free speech be next? And since there is no such thing as the organized “left” then his declarations are open to interpretation. America proved in the wake of 9/11 that we are prone to legislatively overreacting. Barbara Lee was the only one at the time with the courage and foresight to understand that once a liberty is taken away, it really never comes back. And that’s where we are right now.

With no manifesto to publicly digest it’s hard to imagine any sense of clarity on the horizon. Considering the head of our government is a reality TV star who publicly stated he has no desire to bring the country together and the head of law enforcement is a conspiracy theorist whose top deputy is a podcaster, I wonder how reliable the flow of information will be from the deep state, er, government.

Whether Kirk’s alleged shooter was radicalized by the left or the right, the fact remains that this type of violence is radical. Moreover, just scant information we have about him reveals that gaming and weapons are very much a part of his mindset and life. There is a sliver of this generation coming of age that has been left alone in the online wilderness to make of it what they will. And some of these unformed brains are making a mess of it.

Something Awful. 4chan. 8kun. Groyper. Swatting. Depression Quest.

These terms might be totally foreign to you and me but to that sliver of Gen Z, they are terms of art and points of reference for an incel community that was indoctrinated into violent culture during “Gamergate.” There is an entire online world dedicated to committing violence against wokeness and feminism in particular. And there’s an even deeper world committed to planting misinformation about Jewish people. That’s why you’ve likely heard everything from Tyler Robinson being Mossad to being in love with a trans person. Whatever his motivation, there are two throughlines that connect Robinson to this dark online universe: violence and dogma.

The Tao of Kirk

Charlie Kirk was more than just an activist. He was a prolific and effective organizer. His organization, Turning Point USA, which he founded at the age of 18, now has chapters at over 850 colleges nationwide. It’s not a stretch to suggest that his organization did more to cultivate the increasing devotion to Trump’s Republican Party among young white Americans than any other. This would have been his legacy. Now we face the far more dangerous prospect of martyrdom and the collapse of protected speech.

Kirk’s gift was in communicating heteronormative and often extremely virulent, bigoted, antisemetic, sexist and racist politics that have come to embody the white nationalist sentiments of the youth MAGA movement. His secular political cause evolved over his short but powerful career to incorporate more conservative Christian viewpoints as he increasingly spoke out against abortion and other hot button issues. Sometimes he was humiliated in his now infamous ‘Prove Me Wrong’ pop ups, but more often than not he would appear to get the upper hand on students who were either ill-equipped to argue with his style or too angry to get their points across.

No matter the outcome, there were thousands upon thousands of viral clips that stoked the fire on both sides of the political spectrum.

As we enter the controlled narrative phase and move past the platitudes of social posts condemning political violence of any kind in this country, we’re in dicey territory. Will we get clarity on the killer’s motives? Will either side even believe him if we do? It’s hard to know who to trust. And that’s the point. Regardless of what eventually comes to light, it’s hard to imagine anyone dislodging from their entrenched bias.

Of course, at the center of it all is the life of a person. Now, Charlie Kirk’s life was no more valuable than a wrongfully detained immigrant who died in one of our newly converted concentration camps. And then again, it was no less valuable. That’s the thing about human life. There are more than eight billion of us now and we’ll all meet the same fate someday, just not in such a violent, public and spectacular way. And as much as we hope for cooler heads to prevail and that this will somehow bring us together, Charlie Kirk’s life work practically guarantees that we cannot come together.

He divided us in life, so there’s no reasonable expectation that we would somehow come together because he died.

The really complicating factor, of course, is that there are more guns than people in the United States. Reasonable people know that children shouldn’t have access to this kind of weaponry and the skill to murder someone in cold blood from hundreds of yards away. But if nothing changed after the brutal massacre of children in Sandy Hook, then nothing will ever change. Because the prescription for what ails us, the gun violence that has made the Second Amendment second nature in America, is of course to get rid of them. It’s clear we can’t be trusted. Charlie Kirk himself famously said that death by gun violence is an unfortunate but necessary byproduct of our constitutional rights.

The right is grieving and angry. But many of us are all out of tears. Out of tears and out of answers. And we’ll retreat once again to our corners and snipe at one another online. Public events will be more heavily secured and anyone who represents a political worldview will be even more despised by the opposition than before. Yes, we will grow further apart in the aftermath of this shooting because the nature of it was entirely political. And the thing about politics is that there’s no barrier to entry. No test. We all have access to it and we all have a platform to share our ideas. The veil of civility has already slipped in certain spaces and it will just disintegrate in no time.

Kirk’s organization will live on. And likely thrive. But he will be a footnote. Charlie Kirk left behind a world more divided than he found it and to a certain extent, he did that. I think about all of the time and capital spent on abusing the trans community, othering Black people, demonizing immigrants, violence against women, not protecting our children in schools, making sure that we put more guns than diplomas in the hands of young people. Such tremendous energy. Just to turn a buck. To hold onto some outdated vision of a prosperous white America. Where a guy who says abortion is worse than the Holocaust and questions the capacity of Black people to be pilots is uplifted in life and more so now in death in certain circles.

Then again, this is what we’ve always been. Our nation was forged in the genocide of Native people. It was built on slavery. The men who we lionize as the framers built an enviable system but were clearheaded that this thing of ours was intended to protect the opulent minority from the tyranny of the masses. The economy and all the trappings of the legal protections were intended to preserve the interests of white male land owners. Precisely the America that Kirk and his ilk were desperately trying to preserve.

It has taken us not decades, but centuries to move past this legacy and yet the stains and remnants of it exist in our body politic and every so often a movement comes along to dredge it up, repackage it and sell it to us with the promise that it will make America great again. This is the doom loop that we’ve committed ourselves to.

Monsters Under the Bed

What frightens me most about this next phase is what is unseen. We know there are militias in the woods training for some woke apocalypse. We can see the campus debate bros like Charlie Kirk and Ben Shapiro. PragerU, Sinclair Broadcasting, Fox News, Brietbart, Daily Wire, Laura Loomer, Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, and on and on. These are the monsters hiding in plain sight that soak up the attention and provoke us into responding. They’re corrupt and coordinated, which makes them dangerous enough.

But it’s the monsters we can’t see. The ones hiding under the bed and in the dark corner of the room when the lights go out. The ones even the other monsters are afraid of because they can turn on their own kind in an instant. These monsters are online and being left unattended. Brought in by gateway content from the likes of a Charlie Kirk then encouraged by Breitbart to do their own research. And then, they’re gone. Lost in a world that very few of us can see or understand. Growing more dogmatic and violent with each passing day. Losing touch with themselves and their humanity.

What makes this precarious is that the people in charge of the country are the ones who generated the gateway content and conspiracies to begin with. From Peter Navarro to Kash Patel, the administration is rife with lunatics and conspiracists who are wholly incompetent and unaware there are even monsters under the bed. The very people we need to shine a light under the bed and in the corner and bring these lost souls back into the real world are the ones who are determined to put more of them there.

The dark web is the island in Lord of the Flies and young people are creating their own vision for the world. The only way to salvage their adult years and protect them is for grownups to rescue them.

Image Sources

• KSL News Utah, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.
• CCTV / Released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.