After Kirk's death, allies choose conspiracies, opportunism, and hate

Sigh. All right. Let's do this thing.

I've been reluctant to weigh in on the murder of Charlie Kirk, mostly because the world doesn't need it. The world does not need endless incantations that attempt to bludgeon senseless violence into magical narratives. If the killer's motive is ever fully revealed, which is unlikely, then history suggests it will be incoherent gibberish; the only thing we appear to know with certainty, at this point, is that the killer etched four separate terminally online memes on his shell casings, memes steeped in the far-far-right circles of the "groypers," online white nationalists who hated Kirk's own brand of extremism for not being racist and violence-promoting enough.

"Notices bulges, OwO what's this" — a copypasta meme (an online meme intended to be trolling/unsettling in nature) meant to imply the recipient is a "furry," gay, or both.

"hey fascist—CATCH! ↑→↓↓↓" — A meme from the video game Helldivers 2; the arrows are what needs to be pressed on the game controller to drop a gigantic bomb on your enemies.

"Bella Ciao" — an antifascist song trollingly adopted by groypers as their own, and which is most known as an anthem of the "groyper wars," the online and offline battles groypers waged against Charlie Kirk and his supporters.

"if you read this you are gay lmao" — self-explanatory sexual trolling.

That, coupled with a past Halloween photo in which the killer dressed up as the tracksuit-wearing frog of an omnipresent groyper meme, is evidence enough that the 22 year old had fully submerged himself, seemingly obsessively, in "groyper" culture and grievances.

What are we to make of his supposed motive, if he himself thought the only important message to convey during a murder was a series of shitposting-based far-far-right memes? Everyone will have an opinion, but what we know for certain was that his brain was a jelly of the obsessively online and the far-right. He painted the murder of another human being as a real-world extension of trolling. He may or may not have had any thought deeper than that.

Past killers have had, as their motives: attempting to gain the attention of a movie star; attempting to start a race war; a fixation on Cather in the Rye; attempting to start a religious purge; attempting to outdo the last mass murderer; unintelligible gibberish; even more unintelligible gibberish.

A killer who kills because he has deluded himself into believing his particular online friends and personal fixations are willing him to do it would not even rise to the level of unusual. If the only manifesto that can be mustered is a series of bottom-rung far-right memes, then we should take "bottom rung far right meme" to be the man's motive until proven otherwise.

But it doesn't matter. That's the thing. That is what The Narrative does, because The Narrative is an overpowering, hopelessly greedy thing that attempts to exploit and monetize every worst thing that happens. The Narrative cannot stand uncertainty, because the illusion of certainty is what it sells.

Both victim and killer have already been rendered insignificant in the eyes of "the narrative." The narrative is that Charlie Kirk was quite possibly a saint, but one whose most famous words must never actually be quoted or referenced, and that he was killed by a "they" that cannot be described except as an amorphous blob of whichever human beings the speaker hated far in advance.

I cannot emphasize this enough: Nobody who actually knew Charlie Kirk appears to give a damn about why he was murdered. It is astonishing, but it is true. They do not care, you cannot make them care, they will send you death threats if you try to make them care. It is just an unending primal shout of they, forever.

How convenient. The man's dying wish was to foment the same strange, obsessive hatreds Stephen Miller has devoted his life to, and no matter who killed him or why the answer is to deliver retribution to the people Stephen Miller most wants to target.

There was a moment, far back, which Mike Lee was considered principled. Not by most people, but by someone. And then people heard him talk and realized that he was and will never be more than this. Lee, like Trump, could not wait to crack jokes when attackers hurt or killed supposed enemies. Now he spreads equal disinformation and bile about another murder, and nobody expected him to do better because we know he cannot.

I want to give a special shout out to the New York Post, because I have had multiple left-of-center people muse at me that what conservatives need is to look at places like the New York Post and mimic their style and framings. And those people are human turds, because if the path to media success is to Radio Rwanda your way through every news cycle with whatever headline will produce the most anger and hate, you should be devoting yourself to condemning and disassembling that cycle, not pantomiming it.

From the first moments of the shooting, far-right conspiracy influencers were flooding online media with claims that the shooter or shooters was assuredly something something "leftist," or something something "DEI," or something something "trans." And murderous fuckwits like the New York Post ran with that, and you will note that because there aren't enough trans Americans in the country to form a proper, satisfying target, the claim quickly started to include the all-encompassing and allies. The enemy is anyone who believes trans people are allowed to exist—anyone who is not willing to purge one version of they gets lumped into the new, broader version of they.

Fight back against who? Do we think Elon Musk is urging the world to "choose violence" against groyper shitposters? Does he finally understand, the shitposting dullard, that right-on-right violence is coming, because the first stages of any fascist regime involve purging not just ideological opponents, but ideological allies in order to cement authoritarian power completely?

No, clearly not. Elon Musk will never understand anything.

But mostly, I think, we should single out Sen. Lindsey Graham. What a fool this man is. What a coward. What an utter tool.

It was not even half a year ago when an alleged Turning Point member murderer killed two people at Florida State University, and you cannot pay anyone to care. A far-right murderer executed Democratic state lawmakers and that was, presumably, the "just traditional political violence" that Graham and his friends didn't think rose to something worth fretting about.

When it was his enemies, Graham was ready with thoughts and prayers and a motivation to act that lasted about as long as it takes a senator to drain a shot glass.

When it was his ally of convenience—now that made his ears twitch. that was no longer just traditional political violence, but a genuine outrage. Repeat that, throughout the nation. Repeat that, from the New York Post to Stephen Miller to Elon Musk to your half-delusional Fox-watching uncle.

I cannot believe our nation is to be destroyed by such malevolent, hollow-eyed dullards. But I should have. We all should have. We can chart American democracy's demise point-by-point as a graph of what Lindsey Graham decided he was willing to tolerate, and embrace, and defend.

I do believe America is on the cusp of a new era of political violence—and if we are lucky, it will only be the just traditional political violence of the Oklahoma City bombing, the Olympics bombing, abortion clinic murders, political assassinations, and thug-on-thug infighting among the various groups who want to claim dominance as the personal shadow army of a dying god-king. If we are not lucky, it will involve military violence against Americans, and then military violence against the military, and other things too easy to imagine and too horrible to contemplate.

The reason is simple: There are no shared truths in America. There are no laws, not ones that the Supreme Court cannot brush aside for movement convenience. There is no news, only an endless stream of chattering heads who can and will be removed for daring to even hint at facts that their corporate master-of-the-moment would prefer they not say.

And when political assassinations take place, nobody in media or government or in the unwashed masses appears to give a flying shit about why it happened, or how it happened, or whether it might happen again. It is only an excuse to find a they, somebody that angry people can "choose violence" against, as the world's richest man would have it.

The day after Kirk's murder, Turning Point USA (or a group claiming it) began peppering an ancient email address of mine with new fundraising messages—despite never, to my own remembrance, bothering to contact me before. The latest purports to be from Kirk's widow, and I hope sincerely it is merely someone else's fundraising scam. I hope it is a scam from the bottom of my heart.

[T]he evildoers who took Charlie’s life? They have NO idea what they have done.

They didn’t just try to silence a man...

They tried to silence his message — a message of patriotism, of faith, and of God’s merciful love.

Instead, they ignited something even greater.

They. They. They. They. Who is they? Who are the evildoers? Which shadowy group conspired here to write OwO what's this on the killer's bullet?

It doesn't appear to matter. The "real" killer will be whoever Kirk's allies (and enemies) declare it to be, because that's what fascism is. That is how it operates. That is what drove lynchings and what drives political assassinations themselves, this notion that there is a secret they that is so powerful they can turn your children against you, and destroy American cities, and whenever anything bad happens in your town it is because an ever-shifting, never definable cabal of they somehow engineered it to happen.

I have no desire to weigh in on whether Charlie Kirk lived a mostly good or mostly bad life. I have no interest in teasing out the "real" motives of a murderer, because I do not give a shit what a murderer thinks or what a murderer wants the rest of us to think.

But we can judge the people who watch the murder of their supposed ally and who react not with horror, but with opportunism, and self-satisfaction, and public manipulation, and a renewed clawing for power, and more power, and finally so much power that those who have thoughts that are not their own thoughts can be barred from so much as existing. We can judge those people, and we should.

Look; we found them. We found the omnipresent they who believe that freedom, and speech, and even life itself should be dependent on whether you do or do not believe the same things they do. We have found they, the people willing to commit violence and destroy whole democracies if that is what it takes to defeat the other they. They took over Charlie Kirk's own podcast, and did it before the man was even buried.