Charlie Kirk and his killer were spawned by the same dark soul of US politics

A declining US superpower needs to rationalise its failures – glaring, monstrous crimes abroad, economic collapse at home – as a war against homegrown terrorists

[First published by Middle East Eye]

Predictably, the killing of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week has sparked a wave of commentary about the growing dangers of political violence in the United States – debate that is itself bound to stoke yet more political violence.

The Trump administration has made clear it wants to weaponise Kirk’s killing, making the case that his assassination reflects something inherently violent about what it calls "leftist" ideology.

That just happens to be the exact reverse of what the statistics show: the right is historically far more prone to using political violence than the left.

Even the two men alleged to have tried to assassinate Donald Trump last year, before the presidential elections, had at best confused political agendas. Neither could realistically be described as “leftists”.

But nuance is not what this administration in interested in, as it prepares to ratchet up other forms of political violence against anyone it labels as “the left”: critics, opponents of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, the transgender community, Muslims, non-white immigrants and asylum seekers.

On Monday Vice-President J D Vance and a senior Trump aide, Stephen Miller, both vowed vengeance against this amorphous group they are characterising as a left-wing “domestic terror movement”.

Hosting Kirk’s podcast in his stead, Vance said the administration would "work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country".

On the same podcast, Miller promised "to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks."

Meanwhile, social media tycoon Elon Musk framed the future in more graphically apocalyptic terms as he rallied crowds of Tommy Robinson-led, flag-waving white nationalists in London at the weekend. Speaking to them via video link, he warned: “Whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die.”

Draconian response

Early targets of this “war”, as former Trump aide Steve Bannon calls it, have already been selected.

Those who refuse to canonise Kirk – and his Christian white nationalism and bigotry towards women and minorities – are being sought out and punished.

A leading right-wing analyst, Matthew Dowd, was sacked from his post at MSNBC for noting the obvious: that Kirk’s own vocal intolerance of others contributed to the politically charged mood that led to his killing.

More draconian measures are clearly in the pipeline. The direction of travel is highlighted by a new legislative proposal to strip US citizens of their passports over political speech disliked by the administration.

This week, Trump's attorney general, Pam Bondi, vowed to make a First Amendment exception for "hate speech" – which is certain to open the door to prosecutions of any speech, such as criticisms of Kirk, that the administration objects to.

And after a popular TV show host, Jimmy Kimmel, was summarily sacked for noting that free speech was being curtailed in the wake of Kirk’s killing – reportedly following huge pressure from the Trump appointee heading the Federal Communications Commission – Trump himself warned that networks could be punished for covering him “negatively”.

In death, Kirk is being moulded into a saint for the right, largely by suppressing the things he actually said, to foment the right's sense of grievance and anger. His presumed assassin, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is being similarly turned into a caricature.

Robinson’s backstory is barely known, though the one clear thing is that he was raised in a strictly Mormon, and Republican, family. Instead there is a scramble to find any connections that can paint him as a “leftist” hate figure, one useful in crafting a revenge narrative for the right.

Utah’s Republican governor, Spencer Cox, has been central to shaping the narrative about Kirk’s killing so far.

He was among those “asking” where Kirk’s assassination leads next: “The question is, what kind of watershed? That chapter remains to be written. Is this the end of a dark chapter in our history or the beginning of a darker chapter in our history?”

This is really a non-question posing as a question. The MAGA right views Kirk’s death as the firing of a starting pistol: it will legitimate a rapid escalation of more political violence from the emerging US fascist right for whom Trump is the figurehead.

It will provide the far right with the grounds to rationalise for itself ever greater legal and social repression of its opponents – repression it wanted from the outset.

Bubble of denial

Kirk’s killing is an alibi for the fascist right to tell itself its own political violence is nothing more than "self-defence".

This is a tried-and-tested formula.

Israel has been flogging this strategy to death these past two years by claiming that its slaughter and maiming of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian civilians in Gaza is "self-defence".

That makes sense to Israelis only because their political and media class have erased the preceding decades of Israeli state violence – apartheid, ethnic cleansing and a brutal 17-year siege of Gaza – that directly led to the attack on 7 October 2023.

Israelis inhabited that same bubble of denial this week as the United Nations concluded unequivocally that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza.

Trump’s MAGA movement has been busy doing much the same in the US, erasing its own forms of violence that preceded Kirk’s assassination. It has, of course, lost no time in scrubbing from the record the right’s January 2021 insurrection at the US Capitol that marked the end of Trump’s first term as president.

In power for less than a year, the second Trump administration has also been chipping away rhetorically and materially at the bedrock of the country’s constitutional and legal safeguards to smooth the way to more heavy-handed repression.

That includes disappearances into detention by ICE immigration officials of domestic opponents vocal about Palestinian rights. It includes the deportation of immigrants and asylum seekers to third countries, often in defiance of court rulings.

It includes a move to end birthright citizenship for children born in the US to undocumented immigrants. And it includes savage funding cuts to universities to incentivise them to further crack down on students protesting Israel’s genocide in Gaza.

These forms of structural oppression are far more politically dangerous and violent than anything a gunman could achieve with a single bullet.

Surface narrative

Perhaps understandably, those trying to counter the push for harsher legal and social repression are keen to find plot holes in the administration’s narrative.

That task is being made significantly easier by the way the FBI is publicly putting together its case.

Robinson supposedly wrote a note confessing to the crime – one that FBI head Kash Patel has quoted from – even though Patel also says the note was destroyed. He has not explained how it was destroyed or how he is able to quote from a document that no longer exists.

The FBI’s account of how Robinson prepared for and carried out the killing is so unnecessarily labyrinthine it beggars belief that anyone would behave that way unless they wanted to be caught.

And yet Robinson not only carried out a remarkably precise assassination from 200 yards away, but also successfully evaded law enforcement until his family reportedly turned him in.

All of this smacks either of gross incompetence by a highly politicised FBI under Patel, or a convenient, manufactured narrative produced by a highly politicised FBI under Patel keen to implicate "the left" and trigger a further, more violent round of culture wars.

In such circumstances, it is not surprising that some observers – looking to a spate of assassinations of political leaders identified with the left in the 1960s, such as President John F Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy and civil rights leader Martin Luther King – are less than ready to believe the official narratives being promoted.

But there is one thing that the mainstream left and right do seem able to agree on. They readily blame the "dark corners" of the internet – a dehumanised, video-gaming culture, and faceless, polarising interactions on social media – that appear to be especially harmful to disaffected, aimless young men often seemingly with poor mental health.

Certainly, it is satisfying to ascribe a deteriorating civic fabric to this group’s increasing flight from the real world into online seclusion or anonymised exchanges. But even this way of understanding the rise of social and political disharmony serves to skate over deeper truths, and to prioritise another surface narrative.

Violence baked in

Overshadowed by Kirk’s killing, there was yet another school shooting in Denver, Colorado, on the same day. A 16-year-old, reportedly known for espousing neo-Nazi views, critically injured two fellow students with a handgun before turning the gun on himself.

The data show that gun violence is a uniquely US phenomenon, not replicated in other countries that have a similar or even greater video-gaming culture to which these young, lone gunmen are so often drawn.

Conveniently, our gaze is directed at these damaged individuals, not the wider political context they and we inhabit.

Some wish to argue that the reasons for their violence can be found in their individual behaviours. Others seek to attribute guilt along largely meaningless, partisan dividing lines – political divisions manufactured for us by a state apparatus equally served by the two main parties that control Congress.

Kirk’s killing is neither the opening nor the closing of a “dark chapter” of domestic political violence. It is a continuation of a violence baked into the US political system.

Most obviously, violence has long been normalised in Washington’s bipartisan “shock and awe” foreign policy.

In just the past few years, the US has materially supported Saudi Arabia in its years-long bombing of Yemen into the dark ages. The US has denied aid to Afghanistan, still reeling from a recently ended, two-decade US military occupation, that is now producing mass starvation among the country’s children. And the US has supplied the bombs and diplomatic cover for Israel to erase Gaza and engineer the starvation of its people.

The impact of this relentless, all-too-visible violence inflicted by Washington on large parts of the globe, and a media coverage that so readily celebrates and sanctifies it, cannot be ring-fenced from a watching US public.

Where would Robinson have gotten the idea of etching meme-like hate messages on to his bullet casings? Could it have been from seeing former Republican governor and failed US presidential candidate Nikki Haley scrawl “Finish them” on artillery shells to be used in Israel’s genocide on Gaza?

Such depraved glorification of mass violence by the US political establishment barely raises an eyebrow. And yet our focus is firmly directed at Tyler Robinson, as though his suspected lone act of violence is some sort of watershed moment that only now requires serious soul-searching – and, predictably, only from “leftists”.

Fuel on the fire

Our real focus ought not to be on damaged individuals so much as the political, social and economic systems that damaged them, and that provided them with the means and motives to carry out their twisted agendas.

Video gaming and social media aren’t the cause of the problem. They are the fuel being poured on to a fire that was already raging among a section of alienated, nihilistic youth across the US.

That nihilism – a sense that the world and its values are utterly meaningless and our lives without purpose – cannot be explained simply by the escape into a world of video games. Such addictions are where the nihilist seeks solace, fleeing from a reality that has become too much of a burden.

The cauldron for the nihilistic worldview of these lone gunmen is the unique role the US has taken for itself in shaping the world over the past 80 years – both as an imperial hub for the reinvention of western colonialism and as the chief exporter, and rule-enforcer, of a turbo-charged neoliberal capitalism.

Exemplified by the current genocide in Gaza, US foreign policy not only requires a constant campaign of racist intimidation and violence towards the Global South, but celebrates this violence as a moral value and as a duty, one championed by the right and figures like Charlie Kirk.

Meanwhile at home, the MAGA right extols the excesses of neoliberal capitalism while ignoring the exploitative abuses of the weakest and most marginalised, the ravaging of the planet’s health, and the resulting threats to the future of the human species.

None of this is a sane political environment in which to grow up.

Charlie Kirk’s Christian nationalism took as its premise – against all evidence – that America was doing God’s work in promoting "values" at home and abroad that serve only the narrow interests of a billionaire class represented by Donald Trump.

Although it is impossible to yet know Tyler Robinson’s reasoning, it seems likely he had lost that kind of unthinking faith.

Who is to say which of them harboured a darker vision of reality?

Raised as a devout Christian no less than Kirk, maybe Robinson could no longer buy into the narrative sold by Kirk’s Christian nationalism of God’s will, Trump’s will and Israel’s will being identical.

All guns blazing

What is much clearer is that a growing section of disaffected youth in the US are ever less ready to stomach a system of bipartisan values that require permanent wars and genocidal starvation abroad, their own impoverishment and marginalisation at home, and a bleak future in which a suicidal neoliberal capitalism, premised on infinite growth on a finite planet, runs out of quick fixes.

If those are the only values on offer, some – like the school shooters and Kirk’s killer – choose no values at all. They choose to go down all guns blazing.

Why was Charlie Kirk selected by his killer? Because most likely they were not so different.

Kirk’s flight from reality into a world of violent American exceptionalism, supposedly justified by the Bible, was every bit as nihilistic as his killer’s flight into the world of memes and video games.

Both were tied to a system where meaning derives chiefly from the ability to inflict violence on others. Kirk through existing, oppressive power structures; his killer through the barrel of a gun.

Kirk exercised his influence through the internet, stoking resentment and anger online. His killer’s nihilism and alienation were fed by screens where a dark, life-is-cheap world of video games merged with a dark, real world where starving babies to death has become normal.

That kind of parallel-drawing, of course, is not one the MAGA right can abide. Because it indicts not some imagined “left” but the right’s own vision of an ultimate dog-eat-dog America, one in which models of solidarity and shared values have been stripped out. One where might alone is right.

“The left” will be blamed for Kirk’s killing, whatever the truth. Because the logic of a US political system predicated on structural violence towards others at home and abroad, long predating Trump’s arrival in the White House, necessarily excludes real soul-searching.

A US empire, one rapidly running out of steam and legitimacy, needs its scapegoats. For decades, those have been supplied on foreign fields, where the US has chosen to export its violence in a supposed war against the “terrorists”.

Now, a declining US superpower needs to rationalise its failures – its glaring, monstrous crimes abroad, and economic collapse at home – in similar terms, as a war against homegrown terrorists.

The real terrorism is inflicted by a bipartisan US political establishment that cares only for its own enrichment, and is ready to use whatever violence is needed to protect its position and wealth.

Make no mistake, that means a lot more political violence – precisely from those claiming to be bringing it to an end.

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