Charlie Kirk, one of the most prominent voices of the MAGA movement and the founder of Turning Point USA, was assassinated last Wednesday during a public event on the Utah Valley University campus. His death resulted in massive amounts of controversy regarding his legacy, political violence, and of course, the shooter’s political persuasions.
In the hours after Kirk’s death, many prominent Republican politicians began trying to dispel any inkling in their supporters’ minds that Kirk’s killer was anything but a member of the so-called “radical left.” This rhetoric, in large part spread by Donald Trump, began on the day of the shooting, days before Tyler Robinson, the suspect in question, was publicly identified or charged with Kirk’s murder earlier this week. Exacerbating this speculation, multiple news outlets irresponsibly engaged in discussion about the shooter’s political agenda early on in the news cycle. The Wall Street Journal published an article with the headline “Ammunition in Kirk Shooting Engraved with Transgender, Antifascist Ideology” less than 24 hours after the assasination. The WSJ has since retracted this headline, without apology.
The left is intensely feeling the fallout, with invocations of the need for respectability politics in response to celebrations of Kirk’s death. To many, Kirk’s death was an instance of ironic justice, an example of “the chickens coming home to roost,” as Malcolm X put it. Individuals who abhor gun violence under all other circumstances have basked in Kirk getting exactly what he called for when he said, for example, “I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
These perspectives have been criticized not only by right-wingers but also by Democrats and other members of the left for being hypocritical. For Kirk and his compatriots, the idea that gun deaths were a necessary and acceptable trade-off for the right to own guns was completely rational. For some left-wingers, rationality lies in remaining steadfast in their opposition to gun violence under all circumstances. For others, rationality lies in their belief that Kirk’s rhetoric led to incredibly ironic retribution.
Across the map, politicians and the general public are using the language of rationality and order in an attempt to police each other’s reactions to Kirk’s death. Herein lies the fundamental issue with taking an analytical, judicious approach to the irrational and erratic thinking and behavior of violent individuals and the groups that influence them. In America, we have become so accustomed to gun violence that we have forgotten how abnormal it truly is. We have lost sight of the fact that the perpetrators of gun violence are most often senseless and irrational. In its regularity, we have begun to think of it like we do other basic facts of life: constant and inevitable.
So the story goes: if something is repetitive, there must be a rational reason for why it keeps happening. If something appears inevitable, all we feel we can do to reckon with it is to rationalize it. We have made a fatal mistake here by relegating sensational instances of violence to their own categories, forgetting the more subtly violent nature of American culture at large. People have become obsessed with the minutiae of shootings: is Tyler Robinson’s roommate transgender? Does Nikolas Cruz have fetal alcohol syndrome? Do Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris love me? Luigi Mangione, the alleged killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, has become beloved in many online spaces. This fact might fuel the flame for some already-unstable individuals, as carrying out a politically-motivated assassination has now been proven to gain you both fans and critics on the internet — the place where these young and vulnerable people spend a majority of their time and find a majority of their friends. In becoming enraptured with the details of the shooters behind gun violence, we have lost the perspective that these events are only microcosms of America’s culture of violence.
I am troubled by the way we speak about violence in America. The division it sows not only enables but actually incentivizes its recurrence. We have allowed gun violence to persist as a regular event, but have also allowed instances which are deemed more impactful (killing an important figure or a large number of people, especially) to be endlessly analyzed. This has persisted for so long now that it has become engrained in the minds of many young Americans that carrying out an event like this is a way to gain fame and notoriety.
Tyler Robinson, formerly unknown, is now one of the most talked about names in this month’s news. In the American tradition of attempting to rationalize the event, everybody is asking: why did he do it? Many theorize that Robinson was a member of the Groyper scene, who had often criticized Kirk for being too moderate. Nick Fuentes, the Groypers’ figurehead, has pushed back on these claims, “disowning” any of his supporters who “take up arms.” However, there is no barrier for entry; these online communities are amorphous to a large degree, and are not negligible in size or influence. Fuentes cannot disavow the very real possibility that his and his followers’ incendiary language and behaviour can and does lead to real political violence.
Even if Robinson wasn’t a Groyper, he sure did speak their language. From dressing up as Pepe the frog back in 2018 to engraving references to trolling motifs into the bullets he was armed with, it seems that if Robinson wasn’t a Groyper, he was either aspiring to be one or vying for their attention. Furthermore, I am not so concerned with Robinson as an individual, but by the systems and communities that so clearly led him to do what he did. This is not the first time, and it will almost certainly not be the last time, that Groyperism and its incendiaries have participated in violence: take their participation in Jan. 6, 2021, or the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017, for example. Groyperism is neither new nor latent, and it is only going to become stronger from here as online political factions become increasingly disparate and strong, and as people become more and more isolated.
The bullets alone were cloaked in so many layers of irony that, at face value, each seems to suggest a different motive; some can be initially interpreted as anti-fascist in a manner that might suggest he was a leftist of some sort (“bella ciao”), while others are straight-up shitposts (“if you read this, you are gay, LMAO”). Robinson thoroughly understood what he was doing when he chose these messages, and he got exactly what he wanted in the aftermath: chaos across the board. While Groypers do consider themselves to be far-right, they don’t believe that the solution to anything is the American left-right political spectrum. The central tenet of Groyperism has been called many different things — incelism, edgelordism, being blackpilled, etc. — but at the end of the day, it is nihilism at its most extreme.
This is where the alt-right fractures: not necessarily between right and further right, but between order and chaos. Charlie Kirk was a Christian nationalist and an advocate for a number of other vehemently hateful ideologies, but he still had a fundamental belief in American democracy and American bureaucracy, which Groypers and their adjacent communities lack. One thing both sides can agree on, however, is that violence (of varying degrees) is an acceptable means for achieving their goals. For Kirk this manifested in attempts to recapture pre-existing structures via the re-election of Donald Trump or the Jan. 6 riots. For people like Fuentes, this means abandoning basic structure and truth altogether.
For communities like Fuentes’, their nihilism is core to their worldview; their ideology is built atop the idea that nothing will ever get better, that they as individuals have no future, and that they will always be alone. This form of nihilism is reminiscent of and related to militant accelerationism, a movement defined by the shared ideology that society is already in an inevitable and unstoppable downward spiral, and that the only true change that can be made is to intentionally hasten its collapse.
Young people consumed by these online spaces thoroughly believe these sentiments and have understood the act of killing — especially by way of shooting — as a way to garner huge amounts of attention both nationally and within their in-groups. With all this taken into account, the thought process seems to go something like this: If you’re always going to be alone, and you have no future, why should anybody else? If things are only getting worse, why not hasten the process and make a name for yourself in the process?
Robinson not only made a name for himself, but further fractured Democratic-Republican relations in doing so. His ideology’s primary means of communication and recruitment were seemingly incoherent memes, giving way to the formation of exceedingly niche in-groups and the excuse of plausible deniability that anything insidious is baked into the messaging. His motive is being misinterpreted because many American politicians and media outlets do not have the tools or the perspective to take into account online spaces which are populated by young men and boys. This misinterpretation is exacerbated by the finger-pointing that occurred so early on in the news cycle, as well as the cultivation of informal and dangerous online spaces and discourse disguised as news by figureheads like Kirk and Fuentes who refuse to take accountability for the tangible violence that results from these niches.
Everybody is looking for order and coherence where there isn’t any; the media spectacle has taken on a life of its own, with each side of the aisle looking to the other to explain the violence that we have become so accustomed to seeing. A shocking assassination has become just another week of discourse on X.
Robinson and Kirk may have disagreed about the fundamental truths of the world we live in, but one shared goal of both parties was to whet your appetite for the violence. It just so happens that Robinson’s weapon was a rifle and Kirk’s was his mouth.
