The logical endpoint of 21st-century America

Right-wing influencer and the co-founder of conservative youth organization Turning Point USA Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, yesterday. Kirk was on stage at the "The American Comeback Tour,” a live political debate series he was taking to various colleges across the country, when he was shot in the neck. Kirk was answering a question from the audience about mass shootings and gun violence when the bullet hit him.

As public as his death was — footage of Kirk being shot spread across platforms like X and Reddit immediately, with algorithms thoughtlessly promoting the grisly videos to millions of users — we still know very little about the shooter and the motive. As of this morning, the FBI said they recovered the gun used in the attack and have video of the suspected shooter. They’ve described the suspect as college-aged and male and released photos of him. The Wall Street Journal reported that ammunition recovered from the university had bullets engraved with “transgender and antifascist ideology,” but according to The New York Times, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives has not confirmed that.

Regardless of the motive, the shooting was clearly staged to maximize impact on social media. Even though footage of mass death is an inescapable feature of the internet now, there was something especially haunting about the videos of Kirk being struck down. The uniquely parasocial terror of seeing a person who seemed so untouchable from behind their armor of internet fame be reduced to just another fragile human being. If 9/11 was the pinnacle of political violence for the TV age, Kirk’s death should be seen as an inverted mirror image, a perfect spectacle for the social media era. A darkly fitting end for the premier digital propagandist of the Trump administration. The same algorithms he relied on to create narratives for the MAGA movement now turning his death into a dizzying torrent of content. Shitposts, memes, conspiracy theories, and delirious right-wing lust for civil war have spun together online over the last 24 hours more intensely than we’ve ever seen before. The logical endpoint of 21st-century America: An influencer shot to death at a school in front of a crowd of smartphones.

The mania online that Kirk’s death has generated is best exemplified by a now-deleted video filmed by TikTok user @eldertiktok11, seconds after the shooting, which ends with the user signing off with, “make sure you subscribe to Elder TikTok.” As X user @taste_of_tbone wrote, “A disturbing synthesis: the subject, the medium, the message, the messenger — the call to subscribe between striking a pose and shouting out Jesus... His later apology and promise to ‘be a better content creator.’”

The dark new America that Kirk dedicated his life to manifesting has finally arrived. A complete collapse of the online and the offline, where political violence is simply just another opportunity to grow your personal brand if you can turn your phone on fast enough and make it out alive.

Kirk’s political journey began in 2012, when he was still in high school. He wrote an article for Breitbart about liberal bias in economics textbooks and then used the article as the basis for a speech at Benedictine University’s Youth Government Day that same year. Tea Party donor Bill Montgomery, impressed by Kirk’s speech, gave him money to start Turning Point USA. And at the Republican National Convention that year Kirk received even more funding for TPUSA and he was dubbed “the boy wonder.”

Kirk and TPUSA spent much of Trump’s first administration consolidating an audience on social platforms, building out massive YouTube and podcast operations. And in 2020, they were one of the early voices claiming that the election was stolen by Democrats. In January 2021, TPUSA chartered 80 buses to attend the January 6th “Stop The Steal” protest. Kirk then deleted his tweet advertising the buses, and pleaded the fifth when he was asked to testify about it. The convicted protesters who rode the buses would eventually call him a traitor.

As X user @OneWordPowerful wrote, “It’s hard to imagine a life more wasted than Kirk’s. Committing yourself as a teenager to spending your short time on earth producing mindless slop on behalf of old dying millionaires about Cracker Barrel culture war shit.”

But all of this is important for understanding where Kirk existed within the larger MAGA ecosystem. He positioned himself as a reasonable moderate, never veering too far into blood and soil white nationalism, focusing, instead, on laundering less extreme conservative values to young internet users, such as evangelical Christianity, the banning of gay marriage and abortion, fearmongering about black crime, free market liberalism, and, of course, open access to firearms.

Kirk’s whole schtick was best captured in his viral Jubilee debate, which was uploaded the same day Kirk was spreading the “Haitians in Ohio eating pets” conspiracy theory. Kirk’s refusal to fully embrace far-right politics made him a regular punching bag among more reactionary influencers like Nick Fuentes and his Gen Z extremist movement, the Groypers. But Kirk’s death has galvanized these disparate factions of Trump World. They clearly see this as their one big chance for blood.

Steve Bannon, on his War Room podcast last night, called Kirk “totally irreplaceable,” with co-host Jack Posobiec following that up with, “There’s never going to be another assassin to take out someone like the way they did because of what comes next will be swift, quick, and it will be retribution.” The Manhattan Institute’s Christopher Rufo was similarly careful not to go too far, writing on X, “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos.” Andrew Tate, on the other hand, simply posted on X, “Civil war.” And far-right author Matt Forney said the quiet part out loud, writing on X, “Charlie Kirk being assassinated is the American Reichstag fire.”

Right-wingers are also now building large-scale doxxing campaigns. They’ve set up a website called Expose Charlie's Murderers, where they’re collecting information on liberals and leftists “supporting political violence online.” And Chaya Raichik, the mastermind behind Libs Of TikTok, is using X to direct the Trump-controlled FBI towards random TikTok users celebrating Kirk’s death. All of this buoyed by an army of bots calling for civil war and martial law.

Automated accounts with AI-generated avatars are replying to anything on X about Kirk’s death with garbled demands for the mass execution of Democrats. And X’s Grok has also broken down, labeling videos of Kirk’s death a “meme edit” and telling users that he’s still alive. There are also plenty of conspiracy theories.

Beyond narratives that a crazed leftist killed Kirk, which, at this point, should be considered a standard response from the online right for literally everything, the major narrative that emerged this morning is that Kirk was murdered by Israel. This is being heavily promoted by figures like Info Wars host Harrison H. Smith. And clips are circulating on X claiming that Kirk was killed for promoting the conspiracy theory that Jeffrey Epstein had ties to Israel’s intelligence community. That said, leftists on X are also remarking how odd it is that major members of the Israeli government are posting about Kirk nonstop. Though, this is likely explained by the fact Kirk was a staunch Zionist. A position that didn’t seem conflict with his antisemitism.

Users have also latched on to the genuinely strange details that quickly emerged after the attack. The professionalism of the single shot execution, carried out by a gunman at least 200 yards away, FBI Director Kash Patel’s completely bungled initial handling of the investigation, the multiple false leads and mistakenly-arrested persons of interest, including 71-year-old George Zinn, who was recorded by a panicked crowd of college students being detained after the shooting. According to The Salt Lake Tribune, Zinn is known in the area for protesting and disrupting events. There are also plenty of users poring over footage of Kirk’s death and dreaming up conspiracies about armed soldiers, private jets, secret hand signals, and crypto-funded kill markets.

There’s also the very weird coincidence of Jezebel hiring Etsy witches to curse Kirk last week. They’ve since added an editor’s note “condemning the shooting of Charlie Kirk in the strongest possible terms.” That hasn’t stopped the Etsy witches from becoming very popular on Tumblr and TikTok.

Adding to the general unreality of everything, President Donald Trump posted a video to X declaring Kirk’s death an “assassination.” The video features a confounding edit around 20 seconds in that appears to be the result of splicing of two different takes together and using AI upscaling. Which has inspired rumors that Trump is using an AI avatar.

Meanwhile, Vice President JD Vance, who Kirk was early in supporting as Trump’s running mate, wrote a very long post on X mourning him. Former other vice president Elon Musk has been slightly more reserved, however, writing on X, “He was murdered.” Musk is also sharing videos of random people, claiming they are connected to Kirk’s death somehow. Which is probably the best glimpse we have of what comes next. As we wait for a response from the Trump administration that is likely to be more ferocious than anything we’ve seen so far.

Kirk has already achieved martyr status among conservatives. Trump ordered that flags fly at half mast all weekend and Kirk will posthumously receive the Medal of Freedom. Which makes fears among leftists of federally-sanctioned street violence feel not all that hyperbolic. If you place Kirk’s murder along a timeline that includes Luigi Mangione’s alleged murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, both of attempted assassinations of Donald Trump, the quickly forgotten assassinations of two Minnesota legislators this summer, the accelerationist spree shooters connected to the 764 terror cell and the Com network that emerged this year, and the endless background radiation of political violence we’ve seen since the start of the COVID pandemic, you could argue that all of this actually started in August 2020. When Kyle Rittenhouse opened fire on streets of Kenosha, Wisconsin. Kirk’s death was simply the first one to be truly optimized for our new, fractured media landscape. Impossible to ignore in a world where it’s impossible to pay attention.

Every instance of political violence, no matter the side that is carrying it out, is a tragedy. Yesterday was no different, regardless of Kirk’s views. And there is assuredly more violence to come. A fight broke out at a vigil for Kirk in Boise, Idaho, last night, as a crowd of his supporters swarmed a protester wearing a rainbow backpack. According to a spokesperson for the Democratic National Convention, Capitol police swept through DNC headquarters today after reports of a bomb threat. And half a dozen historically Black colleges went into lockdown today after reportedly receiving threats. Fox News host Jesse Watters told their audience last night, “The politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now.”

Kirk spent his final days scrambling to drum up viral energy around the stabbing death of Iryna Zarutska. Kirk’s last post on X reads, “If we want things to change, it's 100% necessary to politicize the senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska because it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her.” The Ukrainian refugee was allegedly killed by a black man named Decarlos Brown Jr. while riding the light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina. Kirk and his fellow right-wing influencers spent the weekend trying to transform the story into a national talking point. Desperate for something that could suck all of the oxygen out of the House Oversight Committee’s investigation in Trump’s ties to Epstein, the plan was clearly to use Zarutska’s death as a pretext for racial street violence and an increased federal occupation of American cities by the National Guard. And now Kirk has become the pretext he was so dutifully searching for. More content for his fellow influencers to share and comment on and monetize and fuel their endless culture war. A war that has just become a lot more literal.

Adam Bumas, Cates Holderness, Grant Irving, and Ellie Hall contributed to the reporting of this story.