Why was Charlie Kirk killed? According to a charging document filed last week by prosecutors in Utah, the mother of the man suspected of the shooting said that her son had become “more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented” over the past year, suddenly moving to the political left. And the shooter reportedly texted an explanation to his romantic partner — a male who identifies as a woman — for why he killed Kirk: “I had enough of his hatred.”
In the days and weeks to come, we will doubtless learn more about the suspect in Kirk’s killing. But the charging document suggests a relatively straightforward political profile and motive, especially when compared with the cryptic messages the shooter engraved on his shell casings, which were frantically mined for meaning in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. Those inscriptions, the shooter told his lover after the killing, “were mostly a big meme.” He said that if he saw a particular one of his jokes mentioned on Fox News, “I might have a stroke.”
Perhaps it’s true that the opaque messages were a joke, from which his true intentions can be clearly distinguished. But when it comes to a person like this — that is to say, a young man who reportedly spent a great deal of time holed up in his apartment playing video games and using niche social media programs — I confess I have my doubts. I wonder if a legible political motive can neatly emerge from the fragmented, self-parodying, endlessly reflexive world of perpetually online discourse.
It is easy enough to imagine that this young man was radicalized. But it is also possible to see his radicalization, if that is the right word, as something post-political, a simulacrum of motive in a fantasy world.
Consider the inscriptions on the shell casings. “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” is a joke about the so-called furry subculture, whose members are sexually attracted to anthropomorphic animals. “Bella ciao” is the title of an Italian anti-fascist folk song that the shooter is more likely to have encountered in the video game “Far Cry 6” than at an Italian trade union conference in the 1950s. A series of directional arrows is said to correspond to a sequence of button maneuvers from another video game, “Helldivers 2,” followed by the slogan “hey fascist! CATCH.” “If you read This, you are GAY Lmao” is an ambiguous provocation that simultaneously engages with and mocks traditional expressions of homophobia while reclaiming something of their crude power.
These inscriptions are the quintessential stuff of online gamer-style discourse: fragments without context, seemingly private jokes, missives designed not to persuade or even to be broadly intelligible but simply to circulate. In insular internet worlds, this style of communication is the point. And it produces an epistemic fog that can obscure the meaning of even the most intentional of gestures.
Kirk’s own work was often disseminated in the form of brief decontextualized TikTok videos. For many younger Americans he was not a thinker or an activist, but an influencer — or perhaps just a meme himself, alternately amusing or cringe.
This is why it seems to me premature, at best, to speak of Kirk’s killer as if he were a left-wing militant. Say what you will about the members of the Weather Underground — their theories of revolution were facile, their moral compasses obviously malfunctioning — but at least their relationship to public life had a recognizable shape. A few middle-class college graduates wanted to become Marxist revolutionaries, and so they did.
In the 19th century, little ink was spilled about John Wilkes Booth’s motive. Both those who mourned Lincoln’s death and those who cheered it understood that an assassin who shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” was playing the part of Brutus, who joined the conspiracy against Caesar in order to free Rome from an overweening dictator. The language of classical republicanism and its warnings about the ambition of tyrants were part of the shared cultural framework of most Americans. The question was not why Booth did it, but whether Lincoln was a tyrant.
Most subsequent American political assassins — especially during the Gilded Age — did not adopt this quasi-mythic register. But whatever else might be said for them, their motives were typically clear. Even John Hinckley Jr.’s attempt on Ronald Reagan’s life in 1981, which turned out to have nothing to do with politics, was rooted in a shared cultural reference, rendering his action more or less intelligible. However baffling it was to learn that Hinckley, inspired by the film “Taxi Driver,” had shot the president in the hope of impressing Jodie Foster, “Taxi Driver” was a kind of symbolic anchor for his actions, a common text of sorts. Even if you couldn’t fathom trying to kill someone because of a movie, it was just about imaginable that someone — a crazy person — could.
It’s not that political assassinations have vanished today. It’s that the cultural substrate that makes those actions meaningfully ideological has become barren, unable to support the germination of a coherent political idiom. Instead of Booth’s Roman theater (or even Hinckley’s cinema), there is only a dense constellation of signifiers that can be read 10 ways at once.
In the online world in which Kirk’s killer was steeped, heedlessness is rewarded. Half-thoughts are quickly replicated. It would not surprise me, in this context, if for some troubled individual, killing were to seem indistinguishable from posting — the ultimate trashpost, meant to be endlessly circulated, reinterpreted, willfully misunderstood, joked about, heartlessly recontextualized.
And when we take to online platforms ourselves, arguing, shouting, issuing mutual anathemas, are we not participating in the same debased form of communication? Within minutes of Kirk’s death — indeed, before it was even clear that he was dead — lunatic speculation was rampant. Hundreds of social media posts confidently asserted that his killer would be identified as transgender; within a few hours, it was claimed with equal certainty that the suspect was a far-right activist or a professional marksman. In the days that have followed, the discussion has not become much more edifying — or much more closely tethered to the facts.
The calls for political reprisals by many on the right — the chorus of “This means war” — and the collapse of linguistic precision into vague third-person plurals — “They are coming for us” — are further contributions to this ersatz online reality, with its indifference to truth and its algorithmic dominion over our imaginations and attention spans, threatening our capacities to reflect and to see with eyes unclouded.