Charlie Kirk’s murder and its celebration tied up in web of hate
Sadly, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer cannot be dismissed as a deviant psychotic loner, living in a fantasy world of his own. The 22-year-old suspect arrested last Friday in the US was part of a sizeable online community that shared his belief that Kirk was so dangerous he needed to be silenced with a gun.
The countless social media posts applauding Kirk’s assassination crossed a line beyond bad taste. Their authors weren’t just sick, they were complicit in an evil act. They, too, had broken the moral law that human life is sacred. Their gleeful endorsement normalises an abhorrent act and grants permission to anyone thinking of doing the same.
This is a frightening moment for a nation that has settled civil disagreements peacefully since 1865. Social media has illuminated the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt described the complicity of ordinary Germans in Adolf Hitler’s crimes. Now we know there are nurses, teachers, military personnel and journalists who think it’s OK to settle an argument with a bullet.
That is why Kirk’s assassination will never be last week’s story, much as we may wish it was.
American college campuses have been primed for violence by the influence of cancel culture. A 2024 survey found 63 per cent of students thought it was acceptable to shout down a speaker to deny them a platform, while more than a quarter (27 per cent) thought it was right to use violence to stop a campus speech. Roughly one in five (21 per cent) strong Republicans endorsed violence compared with one in three (31 per cent) of strong Democrats. Of those who identified as “a-gender”, 71 per cent endorsed political violence.
We cannot say it couldn’t happen here, although we have reason once again to thank John Howard for gun restrictions. The same morally complicit supporters appeared on social media in Australia within minutes of the shooting.
They saw the death of a young father as a chance for mockery, humour and cheap political gibes.
Others, while not endorsing this shooting in particular, were not prepared to condemn political violence per se. MP Zali Steggall “liked” a post by Cheek Media co-founder Hannah Ferguson arguing political violence was sometimes necessary and then “unliked” it when it started to make headlines. A dangerous level of moral confusion appears to be lurking, even among our elected representatives.
Last week’s attack has more in common with 9/11 than we might care to imagine. Both al-Qa’ida and the radical left see US power as inherently malignant, the root cause of global injustice, instability and personal threat. Each has an all-encompassing ideological framework that interprets events through the lens of US domination. Both cultivate grand conspiracy narratives. Radical Islamists believe a Zionist-Crusader alliance is controlling global events. The radical left speaks of shadowy corporate, military and neoliberal forces conspiring to sustain oppression.
Each portrays US power as an existential danger to ordinary people’s lives. For radical Islamists, it is Muslims in the Middle East. For the radical left, it is minorities, the poor and the environment. Both reject compromise.
Seen in this light, the alliance between the radical left and the Palestinian freedom movement isn’t so surprising after all. When pro-Palestinian activists in the West play down or even applaud the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, they make the same moral leap as those who shared their delight at Kirk’s shooting. Murder is no longer murder but an act of service to a higher good.
It is not the first time the American left has resorted to political violence. Suspect Tyler Robinson’s formative years in an all-American home mirrors the story of Merry Levov, in Philip Roth’s novel American Pastoral. Merry is an intelligent, idealistic but slightly awkward loner whose father, Seymour “Swede” Levov epitomises the post-war American dream. His life is shattered when Merry plants a bomb to protest against the Vietnam war, killing a local doctor. The plot is closely modelled on the Weather Underground, a left-wing student organisation active in the late 1960s and early 70s that bombed symbolic targets such as the Pentagon, the Capitol and police headquarters.
The difference with today’s radical left is scale. There were never more than a few hundred in the Weather Underground’s core, which allowed the FBI to bring it under control.
Social media has changed everything. Grooming potential converts is no longer the patient task it once was. All the radicals need to do is release the meme and let the algorithm go to work.
Social media is the perfect recruiting ground for radical causes. Solitary and resentful young people with underdeveloped prefrontal cortices tend to be over-represented. Conversations become performances staged for an invisible audience and friendships are reimagined as assets in a personal publicity campaign. The self that emerges is not the one tempered by human interaction but a distorted mirror image validated by the number of likes and followers.
The same YouTube model that created a generation of content creators has been adapted for content destruction; the permanent silencing of disagreeable voices.
Like computer games and online pornography, the only check against wider social harm is an individual’s moral boundaries. Cognitive compartmentalisation, the ability to hold two conflicting codes of behaviour at once, applying each only in its proper context, typically does not fully mature until a person reaches their mid-20s.
The words inscribed on the assassin’s bullets derive from social media and online gaming. “Hey fascist, catch this” is part of the banter in Helldivers, a game set in a parody of a dystopian universe in which the meaning of words is inverted along Orwellian lines.
Authoritarianism is inverted as “managed democracy” in which citizens vote within rigidly controlled structures, and dissent is crushed. “Freedom” means enforcing conformity with approved values. Peace is achieved through total annihilation of alien enemies. “Heroes” are people die for the cause, regardless of whether their actions make sense or succeed.
Who knows what depraved, socially sanctioned mission Kirk’s killer imagined he was carrying out. Suffice to conclude that it has taken the death of a great man to wake us up to the potency of the forces lurking within.
The war against terror was frequently characterised as asymmetric. The frontline was hard to define, and even if it could be drawn you couldn’t be certain which side the next threat would come from.
As for the frontline in the war against socialised radicalism, where do we begin to start?
At the press conference to announce Robinson’s arrest, Cox revealed he had been praying that the killer might come from another country. “I thought it would make it easier on us if we could just say, ‘Hey, we don’t do that here’,” he said. “Sadly, that prayer was not answered the way I had hoped for … it was one of us.”
It is only now with Kirk’s death that we can fully appreciate his precocious wisdom, enriched by a Christian faith anchored to eternal truths. As with Billy Graham, his influence will live on in the countless men and women whose lives his mission has filled with a deeper purpose.
If Western civilisation is to be pulled back from the edge of this precipice it won’t be through violence but by rescuing young people from the effects of the dangerous nonsense taught at school and university that has made them primed for radicalisation, the work to which Kirk dedicated his short adult life.
In search for a redemptive note at the end of a sombre news conferences, Cox paraphrased Kirk: “Turn off your phone, read scripture, spend time with friends, and remember internet fury is not real life. It’s going to be OK.”
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