American flags with handwritten notes among items left at a makeshift memorial for Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, where he was assassinated last week, in Orem, Utah. Photo / Loren Elliott, The New York Times
Moments into a news conference announcing the apprehension of a suspect in Charlie Kirk’s killing, the Governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, began to read aloud the phrases reportedly engraved on the assassin’s bullet casings:
“Notices bulges OWO what’s this?”
“Hey fascist! Catch!”
“Oh bella ciao bella ciao bella ciao ciao ciao.”
“If you read this you are gay lmao.”
These cryptic words were read tentatively by Cox, who seemed to have little idea of their meaning and provided no further context.
The Governor also relayed how the suspect, Tyler Robinson, 22, communicated his actions to friends on the Discord group chat platform.
The only thing that can be said conclusively about Robinson, at this moment, is that he was a chronically online, white American male.
The internet’s political communities and the open-source sleuths currently scrambling to place Robinson into a coherent ideological camp certainly won’t be content with any of this.
Nor will they be satisfied with the other likelihood awaiting us: that Robinson, the son of a seemingly content Mormon family, probably possesses a mishmash of ideological stances.
Some held dearly. Others not so much.
They also will not be satisfied that this horrific, society-changing act of violence was most likely committed both as an ironic gesture and as a pure political statement.
If your head is spinning from the internet’s attempts to read into Robinson’s alleged choices and political identity, that’s understandable.
We’ve fully stepped into a different historical moment: the age of brain-poisoning meme politics.
Despite mounting evidence that the toxic energies of the internet have begun to spill over into our real lives, there has been a reluctance to take the things happening online very seriously.
The revolting death spectacle that took place at Utah Valley University is a new kind of political event.
While the internet’s rot once felt safely bottled, or fire-walled, within a digital realm, this act of political violence may have punctured whatever barrier once existed.
We can no longer ignore that we live in an era where the online and the lived are indistinguishable.
Today’s internet for most Americans, but especially for those like Robinson, who came of age on social and streaming platforms, is an immeasurably potent vibes machine.
One powered by a complex fuel of negative emotions — hatred, rage, hopelessness, nihilism, grievance, cynicism, paranoia, discontent and addiction.
It’s a machine more than capable of constructing false realities and corroding our lived experiences.
Intent, meaning, and sincerity are near-valueless concepts in this realm, while things like knowledge, understanding, and good faith — critical elements to any healthy public sphere — have been gradually distorted beyond the point of recognition, or abandoned completely.
To exist in this machine is to exist in a realm dominated by what the writer Anton Jäger termed “hyperpolitics”, for the “low-cost, low-entry” politics with little ties to political institutions or clear political outcomes.
To be a young person on large areas of the internet, in other words, is to exist in a state of perpetual conflict, where every action, every event, is coded with political significance, couched in irony or presented in a combative posture, starting from the moment one goes online.
It’s rapidly driving a generation mad. And the rest of us, as well.
Governor Cox made a blunt declaration at Friday’s press conference. “Social media is a cancer on our society,” he said. “Go outside and touch grass.”
The beliefs flourishing in these online political spaces are fringe ideas — from conspiratorial thinking about the 2020 US election, paranoia about white replacement, the glorification of political violence and moral panics built on stereotypes about minority groups.
And they are fed to people on an algorithmically driven conveyor belt in the form of grotesque memes, viral streams, images of death and destruction, ironic posturing and trolling.
It’s likely that the influence of this machine, and its ability to drive young people to the radical fringes, would be diminished if American life today wasn’t governed by a sense of chaos and collapse.
Economic insecurity, increasing unemployment, the inability to start families or buy homes, coupled with a livestreamed parade of death emanating from Gaza and the Trump Administration’s deployment of the National Guard into American cities, are just a few obvious factors driving these feelings.
Figures like Kirk, along with other right-wing influencers, including Ben Shapiro, Laura Loomer and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes, have thrived in this new landscape.
They’ve used the internet’s reactionary machinery to great profit, building mass followings and influence in the process.
Kirk, who had one of its loudest and most recognisable voices, was an avatar of the new political species moving through this machine.
A type of political entity, combining elements of celebrity, demagogue, shock jock, thought leader, content creator, and activist.
Turning Point USA, the campus activism group he co-founded, operated less like an organised political movement and more like a curious followership or fandom.
The message propagated by Kirk, in his regular livestreams and during his famous campus debates, has been strangely labelled “moderate” in the immediate aftermath of his death.
Conservative media and traditional outlets alike have celebrated his reputation for a willingness to foster open dialogues and the exchange of free ideas.
This characterisation is out of step with the reality of Kirk’s activism, which was defined by a pugilistic bigotry and dehumanising political rhetoric.
He warned white Americans to be on the lookout for “prowling blacks” and described George Floyd as a “scumbag”.
He promoted the “great replacement” theory, accused Jewish philanthropists of funding “anti-whiteness”, and claimed that, if President Trump lost the 2024 election, Alabama would be overrun by “hundreds of thousands of Haitians”.
A young internet user following just Kirk could offer a fairly accurate glimpse into the atmosphere of perpetual rage-baiting that is today’s internet.
Kirk lived to pick apart cotton-mouthed college freshmen at his signature campus debate events, each noted on his social channels with some belligerent title: “Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies”; “Charlie Kirk Hands Out Huge Ls”; “Charlie Kirk vs the Washington State Woke Mob”.
And regularly, he lashed out at his perceived political foes, like Zohran Mamdani, the New York mayoral candidate whom he recently described as a “self-righteous, narcissistic parasite” who “should be expelled from politics”.
To be clear, Kirk’s ideas, however distasteful and problematic, are no justification for murder.
What’s apparent, looking back on his ideas and the style in which he expressed them, is that Kirk used his platform to coarsen our political discourse, draining it of that vital bulwark against real-world violence: empathy.
While much has been made of his ability to connect with Gen Z, there has been little effort to hold his legacy to account for failing to impart this critical human quality to his young audiences.
“The Youth Whisperer of the American Right,” as this paper once called him, may have been precisely that, a showman who attracted disaffected young Americans into the conservative movement with fantasies of white replacement or racial grievance.
The combative and rage-bait style that Kirk pioneered has become the dominant mode for the right.
And it’s probably more accurate to say this is how many young Americans as a whole exist on the internet today, trolling and provoking anyone who crosses their paths.
Back in July, in an essay about the trolling style of politics infecting conservatism, I wrote that “conflict itself is the high-voltage current that powers online engagement and amplifies messages”.
Kirk was a master architect of political conflict, engineered for maximum reach.
That his killer might have been in pursuit of a similar moment of viral conflict is a grim encapsulation of the nightmare cesspit we’ve entered.
The internet machine is now operating out in the open, in front of everyone’s eyes, and as long as that continues unchecked, our ability to make meaning of the world will continue to deteriorate.
Empathy, as a human quality, will be snuffed out for those who are chronically online.
The memes, and the memetic violence, will continue to proliferate.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Nathan Taylor Pemberton
Photographs by: Loren Elliott, Kenny Holston
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