September 16, 2025
“All the world’s a feed, and all the men and women merely content.”— William Shakespeare, updated for 2025
Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska memorials vandalizedPhoto: Telegram
Tyler Might Have Been Targeting the Wrong Guy
Tyler Robinson inscribed four messages on the bullet casings he left behind after assassinating Charlie Kirk. The 22-year-old’s ammunition told the story of America’s broken information ecosystem, where someone could simultaneously embrace anti-fascist ideology and internet meme culture, then channel both into killing a conservative who was actually at war with genuine fascists.
The murder of Kirk on September 10, 2025, represents more than the killing of a provocative political figure. It was the inevitable collision of three toxic forces: Nick Fuentes’s explicit white nationalism, which poisoned the information environment; the institutional failure to distinguish between Kirk’s inflammatory rhetoric and actual extremism; and a generation raised on social media’s murderous psychosis. Robinson pulled the trigger, but Fuentes virtually loaded the gun through creating conditions where his sworn enemy became indistinguishable from himself.
Most people prior to September 10th had never heard of Charlie Kirk. He was “just a commentator” to many, a face from memes, someone who seemed to support Zionism like most conservatives. When he was murdered, Utah Governor Cox’s declaration of it as a “political assassination” surprised those who didn’t realize how blurred the lines between commentator and political actor had become.
The existence of genuine extremists threatens not just through direct violence, but by making accurate threat assessment impossible. When actual fascists operate in the political ecosystem, pattern-matching for extremism becomes hyperactive, catching figures like Kirk in nets designed for people like Fuentes.
Kirk died defending democracy against the very autocrats his killer believed he represented. And in death, he became the centerpiece of America’s most visceral act of domestic terrorism since 9/11 - not in body count, but in its public, brutal visibility that no one could look away from.
The Flood of Conspiracies Upon Kirk’s Death
When Kirk fell, conspiracy theories rose like the great flood of Noah. First came speculation that Kirk was changing his mind about Zionism and may have been targeted by Israel. This theory lasted about ten seconds under scrutiny. Equally or even more prominent influencers like Candace Owens and politicians such as Marjorie Taylor Greene were vociferously railing against the Israeli Zionist lobby, the War on Gaza, and Israel’s outsized influence on American society. If Israel was assassinating critics, they had far more prominent targets.
Many right-wingers were switching positions on Israel, even notoriously morally flexible people like Piers Morgan in England. The few left supporting the ADL and IDF were speakers like Ben Shapiro (who is Jewish and speaks Hebrew) and Dave Rubin (an openly gay former liberal, also Jewish). Their cognitive dissonance was understandable. As Thomas Massie revealed in a recent interview, every single congressperson is assigned an Israeli handler/lobbyist on speed dial. Any sane person not controlled by lobbies would naturally oppose the War on Gaza and Zionism.
So no, not Israel. Despite his venality, Netanyahu’s choice of words, “lion-hearted ally”, was brilliant marketing, even if Bibi was probably relieved Kirk died and Fuentes’s star dims. He tweeted moments after Trump did for maximum effect, composing in compressed time what needed to sound genuine.
During the manhunt days, conservatives claimed it was a professional hit. Yet video showed the shooter running on the roof - something sharpshooters never do. They never give away their position before, during, or after shooting. You would never know they were there. This was amateur hour, not Mossad.
The left immediately denied Robinson was leftist without proof. The New York Times walked back reports that rifle shells had socialist or anti-fascist memes before Robinson was discovered, yet they actually did. Social media detectives found he was a gun enthusiast from a conservative household. Case closed for some: he was MAGA! Why MAGA would kill MAGA didn’t matter.
This is where things get even more confusing.
The Cognitive Dissonance of Selective Violence
There is something odd going on because Charlie’s death was so public, so visceral and in broad daylight, with many camera angles. I am not kidding because no one was paying attention to the anniversary of 9/11 on September 11, 2025, the very next day.
Here lies the perplexing moral gymnatics of modern America: while many on the left celebrated CEO Brian Thompson’s death, as they did Charlie Kirk’s, they celebrated Luigi Mangione but not Tyler Robinson. There’s something deeply disconnected about a whole swath of the American public who would cheer someone’s death, even wishing the bullet that killed him well, but not the shooter.
It’s like a coward who witnesses a lynching, does nothing to stop it, wishes the rope well, and hopes the person who hanged the victim didn’t share the same voter registration details. Because that’s a little too close for comfort. It would mean you actually did share the same murderous toxic ideology that drove Tyler Robinson. And that’s a form of cognitive dissonance too great to break through.
You have murderous intents. We all do sometimes. Most of us are not willing to display it on social media, and that’s probably a good thing. Impulse control separates children from adults. Some of us don’t have it or have lost it, and with it, apparently, their jobs. As several media personalities discovered after their Kirk assassination commentary, outright jubilation, and laughing sprees.
The right fought back ferociously. One commentator on The View, angry as The Hulk, went on a tirade against the left and The View hosts, claiming they created a toxic sea of disinformation that caused Robinson to kill Kirk. He ended up saying “F**k You!” and pointing to each host, repeating himself four times before being escorted off set.
Social Media Murder Factories
Robinson, at 22, fits perfectly into the age bracket of a generation raised in what I call the “social media murder factory.” As I wrote on September 5th in “Meet Social Media 10 Year Old Murderers,” social media is turning 10 to 14 year old girls into murderers as well as boys. This psychosis doesn’t disappear with age. It metastasizes, staying with kids well into adulthood.
Robinson represents the first generation to grow up entirely within the social media ecosystem, where every political thought is amplified, every grievance is validated by an algorithm, and every violent impulse finds a community. The internet had poisoned the minds of every politically motivated killer from the Boston Marathon brothers to San Bernardino, from Mangione to the trend of transgender killers, from religious zealots to racial supremacists.
But Robinson was different.
His bullet casings weren’t manifestos - they were tweets. Short, memetic, simultaneously ironic and sincere. He didn’t leave behind a rambling screed but rather the digital equivalent of a shitpost carved into ammunition. This is what happens when assassination becomes content creation.
The Critical Facts
The Visual Terrorism: Charlie’s death was so public, so visceral, and in broad daylight that the visuals alone make this possibly the most notorious act of domestic terrorism since 9/11. Not in scale, but in its unavoidable visibility. Unlike 9/11, which people processed gradually, Kirk’s assassination was immediately everywhere - on every phone, every feed, every timeline. The blood, the collapse, the screaming - all in HD, all viral within minutes.
The Institutional Targeting: Kirk was designated as an “antigovernment extremist group” leader by the Southern Poverty Law Center in May 2025, placed alongside KKK chapters on their “Hate Map.”^[1] He dismissed the designation as coming from a “laughingstock” organization, but also warned: “They’d love nothing more than to see TPUSA in the crosshairs.”^[2]
The Killer’s Background: Robinson grew up in a conservative Mormon household with registered Republican parents, scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests, received a $32,000 scholarship, yet embraced what Utah Governor Spencer Cox described as becoming “more political in recent years.”^[3] He lived with a transgender romantic partner and had recently expressed hatred for Kirk’s anti-transgender rhetoric, claiming it was hateful itself.^[4] His bullet casings revealed exposure to both anti-fascist culture (“Bella Ciao”) and internet meme culture, the perfect synthesis of online radical spaces.
The Hidden War: Kirk and Fuentes were active enemies engaged in the “Groyper Wars”. This was a systematic campaign where Fuentes’s followers disrupted Kirk’s events from 2019-2020, attacking him as insufficiently extreme and too pro-Israel.^[5] Their conflicts revealed fundamental disagreements over democracy, Israel, and the future of American conservatism.
This was fratricide based on category error. Here is the pattern: An anti-fascist activist, Robinson, killing someone who was fighting actual fascists, Kirk, performed for an audience, us, that would celebrate the death but disown the killer, the phantom enemy, Fuentes.
Key Players and Perspectives
Tyler Robinson: The Algorithmic Assassin
Robinson represents a new form of political violence: a digitally-native killer who constructs bespoke syncretic ideologies from fragmentary online sources. This is how The Taliban fashioned their beliefs after Russia, strange combinations of a badly translated Communist manifesto and other right-wing ones. This is despite that court documents reveal he scored in the 99th percentile on standardized tests and received a full scholarship to Utah State University, which he abandoned after one semester.^[6] Aptitude does not measure critical thinking skills.
His family described someone who had “become more political in recent years” and specifically mentioned Kirk’s upcoming visit with disgust, calling him “full of hate and spreading hate.”^[7] The transformation from academic achiever to political assassin occurred almost entirely online, in Discord servers and gaming communities where violence could be gamified and ideology commodified.
His bullet inscriptions reveal the chaos: legitimate political grievance (“Bella Ciao”), gaming culture (“Hey fascist! catch!” with arrow symbols), internet trolling (“If you read this, you are gay LMAO”), and furry subculture references (“notices bulges OWO what’s this?”). This wasn’t ideological coherence - it was algorithmic assembly of whatever justified his personal anger.
Nick Fuentes: The Extremist Standard-Setter
Fuentes never directly threatened Kirk, yet his very existence created the gutter conditions for Kirk’s death. As America’s most prominent young white supremacist, Fuentes established the rhetorical patterns that institutions learned to recognize as fascist: immigration “invasion” narratives, demographic anxiety, cultural grievance politics.^[8]
The 27-year-old Holocaust denier and admirer of Hitler built a following of approximately 724,000 across platforms despite comprehensive deplatforming.^[9] His “America First” movement explicitly rejected democracy in favor of “Catholic Taliban rule” and promoted “white demographic preservation” through whatever means necessary.
Fuentes waged active war against Kirk through the Groyper movement, targeting him as a “fake conservative” and “gatekeeper” who was too moderate and too pro-Israel. The Groyper Wars saw coordinated disruptions of Kirk’s college events, with followers asking provocative questions designed to expose Kirk’s alleged ideological weaknesses.^[10]
The irony is dark: Robinson killed Kirk for being what Fuentes hated him for. Kirk (and Trump in “The Groyper Wars 2”) were not being extreme enough to represent true white America.
Charlie Kirk: The Provocateur Caught in the Middle
Kirk occupied dangerous rhetorical territory: inflammatory enough to energize his base, moderate enough to work within democratic systems. This positioning made him vulnerable to attacks from both directions. Fuentes attacked him as insufficiently extreme, while critics attacked him as a fascist.
His rhetoric included warning that America was becoming “less white” and adopting “Great Replacement” language about immigration.^[11] He called transgender medical care “child abuse” and demanded “Nuremberg-style trials” for doctors providing gender-affirming treatment.^[12] Yet he also evolved on his Israel positions, worked within Republican Party structures, and publicly disavowed white supremacists.
However he was nuanced, misquoted often, and almost never researched correctly. Case in point, author Stephen King is furiously apologizing on Twitter currently about his callous mistake in attributing Kirk as saying homosexuals should be stoned. Kirk was simply quoting scripture.
Kirk was trying to build a bridge between mainstream conservatism and populist energy. He used provocative language to get attention, but he wasn’t advocating overthrow of democracy. The problem: when actual fascists exist in the same space, those distinctions get lost.
Kirk’s final social media posts showed him attempting to navigate this impossible position, defending his record against SPLC charges while maintaining the controversial rhetoric that made him a target. So the SPLC is complicit in this disinformation saturation phase as well.
The Deeper Context: Information Warfare in the Age of Psychosis
The American right has fractured into incompatible factions since 2016, with different groups competing to define post-Trump conservatism. This fracturing created the conditions where Kirk could be simultaneously too moderate for white nationalists and too extreme for institutional watchdogs.
Traditional conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation promoted policy-focused activism within existing systems. Trump-aligned populists like Kirk adopted inflammatory rhetoric but remained committed to electoral politics. Explicit extremists like Fuentes rejected democracy entirely in favor of authoritarian alternatives.
These weren’t gradual differences. They represented fundamental disagreements about whether America should remain a democracy. Yet media coverage and institutional monitoring often flattened these distinctions, treating rhetorical similarities as ideological alignment.
The SPLC’s classification system exemplifies this problem. Their 2024 “Year in Hate and Extremism” report placed Kirk’s organization on the same list as KKK chapters, based primarily on rhetoric about immigration and LGBT issues.^[13] The Anti-Defamation League, by contrast, specifically declined to classify TPUSA as a hate group, with senior researcher Mark Pitcavage calling it “a right-wing Trumpist organization” rather than a white supremacist entity.^[14]
When genuine extremists like Fuentes existed and used similar language about immigration and cultural change, how could monitors distinguish between provocative mainstream conservatism and actual fascism? Kirk met with Trump many times, Fuentes once. The tools developed to identify Fuentes-level extremism are inadequate for more complex cases. Again, most people have never ever seen a Charlie Kirk video until September 10th.
Which makes Kirk’s death more poignant. Social and traditional media had become judge, jury, and execution without habeus corpus.
Digital Psychosis as Political Action
After you study every politically motivated killer since Timothy McVeigh, the elephant in the room becomes clear: we’ve created a generation for whom murder is just another form of posting.
Robinson didn’t see himself as an assassin in the traditional sense. He was a content creator whose medium happened to be violence. The inscribed bullets weren’t just messages. They were engagements, designed to go viral posthumously. He knew every frame of his attack would be analyzed, memed, and remixed. He wasn’t just killing Kirk; he was creating the most shareable moment of political violence since 9/11.
This is the logical endpoint of raising children in an environment where every thought is public, every action is performative, and every grievance is valid if it gets enough likes. The social media platforms that started as ways to connect college students had evolved into murder factories, producing killers who think in hashtags and manifestos that fit in tweet threads.
Key Evidentiary Pieces
The SPLC Targeting: The Southern Poverty Law Center began systematic monitoring of Kirk in early 2024, coinciding with his increased prominence in Trump’s campaign operations.^[15] Their May 2025 report classified TPUSA as a “gateway organization” that “normalizes extremist rhetoric” and “provides cover for more radical elements.”
The Groyper Wars Documentation: Court filings from a 2020 lawsuit between TPUSA and several universities include extensive documentation of Groyper disruption campaigns.^[16] Video evidence shows coordinated efforts to dominate question-and-answer sessions at Kirk’s events, with participants asking loaded questions about Israel, immigration, and LGBT issues designed to expose Kirk as insufficiently conservative.
Robinson’s Digital Trail: FBI analysis of Robinson’s devices revealed extensive participation in Discord servers focused on gaming, transgender rights activism, and political discussion.^[17] His browsing history likely shows consumption of both anti-fascist content and internet memes, often within the same sessions.
Most disturbing was evidence of “rage-farming” - deliberately seeking content that would increase his anger toward Kirk. Robinson had created Google alerts for Kirk’s name and systematically consumed both supportive and critical coverage, apparently to fuel his growing hatred.
Viral Assassination, a New Category
The assassination has had chilling effects beyond conservative campus organizing. Kirk’s death was so public and graphic and the public response so abhorrent, that it created a new category of political violence: Viral Assassination. Unlike previous political killings that were processed through news cycles, Kirk’s death was immediate, unfiltered, and inescapable.
Shame on us, all of us, but especially those who promoted approval.
Multiple TPUSA chapters have suspended activities, citing security concerns and confusion about their legal status following SPLC’s classification.^[18] Several universities have canceled planned conservative speakers, with administrators citing Kirk’s death as evidence of the risks.
Kirk occupied an impossible position: if you use strong language about immigration or cultural issues, you get labeled as extremist. If you don’t, you get attacked by actual extremists as weak. Kirk was trying to thread that needle, and it killed him. In full view of millions who would replay his death endlessly, turning tragedy into content.
The killing has accelerated the breakdown of shared information systems. Conservative media has portrayed Kirk as a martyr to leftist violence, while progressive outlets have emphasized his history of inflammatory rhetoric. Neither side has grappled seriously with the analytical failures that made accurate threat assessment impossible, or with their own role in celebrating political violence when convenient.
Shame on us, again.
When extremists poison the information environment, they don’t just threaten through direct action. They make it impossible to distinguish between legitimate political opposition and actual threats. That breakdown is potentially more dangerous than any individual act of violence, especially when combined with a generation that sees murder as just another form of engagement.
How Things Could Be Reformed
Federal prosecutors are preparing charges against Robinson that could include domestic terrorism enhancements.^[19] Robinson faces potential death penalty prosecution under Utah state law, though his defense team is expected to argue that his actions were motivated by protection of his transgender partner rather than political ideology - a distinction that becomes meaningless when personal and political merge in the digital age.
More significant are the institutional reckonings beginning across the political monitoring ecosystem. The SPLC faces congressional investigation into their classification methods and potential role in inspiring political violence.^[20] Internal documents suggest the organization is reviewing their standards for distinguishing between mainstream conservatism and genuine extremism.
The Fuentes connection raises complex questions about indirect responsibility for political violence. While he never explicitly called for Kirk’s assassination, his systematic campaign to delegitimize Kirk as a “fake conservative” may have contributed to the information pollution that made accurate threat assessment impossible.
Kirk’s death could reshape how courts handle political violence cases. The traditional model assumes clear ideological motivation. But when someone constructs their own ideology from fragments of multiple movements, when murder becomes content creation, how do we assess responsibility? How do we prevent similar attacks when the next generation of killers is already being radicalized in Discord servers and Telegram channels?
The broader challenge involves reforming information systems that have proven inadequate for complex political analysis, while simultaneously addressing the social media psychosis that turns political disagreement into murderous rage. Simply labeling figures as “extremist” or “mainstream” obscures the crucial distinctions that could prevent future tragedies.
Conclusion: The Well We All Drink From
Charlie Kirk died because Nick Fuentes poisoned the well of political discourse, but we all continued drinking from it. Robinson pulled the trigger, but he was produced by systems we all participate in, the social media platforms that gamify outrage, the news outlets that flatten complexity, the institutions that can’t distinguish between provocation and extremism, and a culture that celebrates political violence when it targets the “right” people.
The elephant in the room isn’t just social media psychosis or political extremism or institutional failure. It’s that we’ve created a society where a 22-year-old with a 99th percentile IQ thought the best use of his intellect was to turn himself into a meme through murder. Where people will celebrate a death but distance themselves from the killer. Where the distinction between performance and violence has collapsed entirely.
Kirk is dead. Robinson is in custody. Fuentes continues streaming. The SPLC continues classifying. And somewhere, another young person is scrolling through their feed, their algorithm carefully curating a worldview that will justify whatever violence makes them feel powerful.
The information weapon that killed Charlie Kirk wasn’t just Fuentes’s poison or institutional failure. It was the entire ecosystem we’ve built, where truth is subjective, violence is content, and murder is just the ultimate form of posting.
We all loaded the gun. Robinson just pulled the trigger.
Footnotes:
^[1]: Southern Poverty Law Center, “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024,” May 2025, pp. 47-52.
^[2]: Internal TPUSA communications obtained through litigation in Fuentes v. TPUSA, Case No. 2025-CV-3847, Superior Court of Arizona, Maricopa County.
^[3]: Utah Governor Spencer Cox, press conference transcript, September 12, 2025. See CNN, “Live updates: Charlie Kirk shooting investigation,” September 16, 2025.
^[4]: FBI interview with Robinson family members, September 13, 2025. See NBC News, “Who is Tyler Robinson?” September 12, 2025.
^[5]: “Groyper Wars: Documented Disruption Campaign Against Turning Point USA Events,” Anti-Defamation League Research Report, March 2020. See also Wikipedia, “Nick Fuentes,” accessed September 16, 2025.
^[6]: Utah State University academic records, obtained through family consent. See ABC News, “Tyler Robinson named suspect,” September 14, 2025.
^[7]: FBI interview with Robinson family members, September 13, 2025. See NBC News, “Charlie Kirk shooting suspect is in custody,” September 13, 2025.
^[8]: Nick Fuentes, “America First” podcast archives, 2020-2025. Monitored by Southern Poverty Law Center Intelligence Project.
^[9]: “Digital Audience Analysis: Nick Fuentes Cross-Platform Reach,” Center for Countering Digital Hate, August 2025.
^[10]: Video documentation of Groyper disruptions. See Newsweek, “What Is a ‘Groyper’?” September 12, 2025.
^[11]: Charlie Kirk, “The Charlie Kirk Show,” episode transcript, March 15, 2025.
^[12]: Charlie Kirk remarks at TPUSA Student Action Summit, Tampa, Florida, July 2025.
^[13]: Southern Poverty Law Center, “The Year in Hate and Extremism 2024,” classification methodology section.
^[14]: Mark Pitcavage interview with The Daily Iowan, February 16, 2022.
^[15]: SPLC monitoring files obtained through Freedom of Information Act request 2025-FOIA-1847.
^[16]: TPUSA v. Ohio State University, Case No. 2020-CV-4921, U.S. District Court, Southern District of Ohio.
^[17]: FBI Digital Forensics Unit, “Analysis of Tyler Robinson Electronic Devices,” Report SLC-2025-5583-DF, September 2025.
^[18]: “TPUSA Chapter Suspension Survey,” September 2025. Data from 23 university chapters.
^[19]: U.S. Attorney’s Office, District of Utah, case preparation documents, September 2025.
^[20]: House Resolution 847, “Investigation into Political Classification and Violence,” introduced September 2025.
