Charlie Kirk shooting comes in an age of extreme nihilism that threatens us all
Charlie Kirk’s alleged gunman, the shooter who targeted Trump, and the accused killer of a US healthcare boss are men whose motivations have no discernible theme other than a loathing of the system, a love of chaos and a lust for attention.
You could write the story of America bullet by bullet, via that febrile and gun-addicted country’s history of political assassination. When John Wilkes Booth leapt from the presidential box at Ford’s Theatre, having fired his pistol into the back of Abraham Lincoln’s head, he was heard to cry “sic semper tyrannis”, a Latin tag deriving from Republican Rome meaning “thus always to tyrants”.
The messages inscribed on the bullets carried by the alleged assassin of American YouTuber Charlie Kirk imply a falling-off even in the misbegotten idealism of America’s villains: “If you’re reading this you’re gay lmao” and “notices, bulges, OwO, what’s this”, an internet sex joke so recondite in its origins I could spend the rest of this column trying to elucidate it.
Perhaps the theories floated by Kirk’s allies, that his killer was motivated by some combination of communism, wokeness and trans ideology, have something to them.
But the stupid slogans on his bullets – memes, in-jokes and video game references – suggest an underrated factor is the strain of bitter, ironic nihilism ubiquitous on the more fetid reaches of today’s internet.
Thomas Matthew Crooks, whose bullet clipped President’s Trump’s ear at a rally last year, was not, as was widely expected, an aggrieved Democrat but the proponent of an idiosyncratic ideology, remembered by bewildered former classmates as apparently “conservative”.
Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of the United Healthcare chief executive, was similarly indecipherable: an anti-porn, anti-woke, anti-pharma, pro-climate, social democratic, Joe Rogan-loving, Jordan Peterson-hating aficionado of the traditional Japanese religion, Shinto.
“Post-political” and “anti-system” are the terms bandied about. To interpret such politics as “left” or “right” reflects a 20th-century mindset largely irrelevant to the infinitely fractured, infinitely ironised online world of trolls and attention seekers in which such malice incubates. These are men whose motivations have no discernible theme other than a loathing of the system, a love of chaos and a lust for attention.
This year the FBI announced it was keeping an eye on a new genre of terrorist: the “nihilistic, violent extremist”.
For all the ink that has been justly spilt on the dangers of partisanship and polarisation, this mood of nihilism may be the most underrated and perhaps most poisonous force in our politics today.
These gunmen are only the most extreme symptoms of a wider discontent, the desire to smash things up out of despair or ennui; to see the world aflame for the sake of the spectacle – as the ardently MAGA congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene once observed: “It’s boring without Trump.”
Pollster Luke Tryl has charted the rise of “burn it all down” sentiment, prevalent in America and now spreading to Britain. In a recent survey of UK voters, 38 per cent agreed with the statement: “When I think about our political and social institutions I cannot help thinking ‘just let them all burn’.”
It is no accident that this is an age of violent protest across the political spectrum.
This is politics in the age of the so-called meaning crisis, in which, according to one recent survey, 58 per cent of young adults find “little or no purpose or meaning” in their everyday lives. Many citizens see only a future of establishment failure, economic stagnation and eroding living standards. The lonely, atomised screen age has deprived them of the human connections essential to purpose. What can you live for, or fight and die for, if you are a young man without community, without religion, without comrades, without a family, without a house and without a job?
And so the community-based mass-movement politics of the 20th century is giving way to a toxic and meaningless politics of narcissism. The frenetic, endlessly distractible atmosphere of social media rewards not earnest policy proposals or dutiful adherence to a party line – on TikTok such dull stuff sinks without trace – but endless competitive look-at-me outrage. Increasingly, the only way to have a political voice is to attract attention by espousing the most deranged views possible.
Women belong in the kitchen, my opponents deserve to die. Hence Russell Brand, Laurence Fox and entire ecosystems of more exotic characters.
The resulting atmosphere is terminally lacking in sincerity. If you’re young and your entire political world is dominated by loudmouths and show-offs willing to say or do almost anything to be noticed, how could you ever really believe in anything? Kirk’s assassin may have been an extravagant outgrowth of this world. Analysts have suggested that the jokes engraved on his bullets were aimed at the niche online communities where he had once competed for status via outrageous jokes and memes.
The peculiar recklessness of the present moment derives from the fact that, for all our rage, despair and isolation, we are still living in a cosseted corner of history, far removed from the world wars, revolutions and famines that gave 20th-century politics its existential stakes. As Francis Fukuyama prophetically warned in his 1992 book, The End of History, when people are so peaceful and prosperous they have nothing to fight for, they may eventually fight against peace and prosperity itself, simply for the sake of fighting. Nihilists kick at the pillars of our civilisation because they can’t ever quite believe the roof will fall in. Such is the consequence-free unreality of those who spend their life in the virtual worlds of video games and social media.
Well, chaos may beguile dull hours online. But nihilism answers nothing and proposes no solutions. One day, if the roof does fall in, many will find they wished they had believed in something – anything – after all.
The Times
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