Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Web of Hate
Nick Cater’s latest column in the Australian explores how the spread of cancel culture in the United States has led to endorsing violence to silence anyone expressing a deviant view:
Sadly, Charlie Kirk’s alleged killer cannot be dismissed as a deviant psychotic loner, living in a fantasy world of his own. The 22 year-old suspect arrested last Friday in the US was part of a sizeable online community that shared his belief that Kirk was so dangerous he needed to be silenced with a gun.
The countless social media posts applauding Kirk’s assassination crossed a line beyond bad taste. Their authors weren’t just sick, they were complicit in an evil act. They, too, had broken the moral law that human life is sacred. Their gleeful endorsement normalises an abhorrent act and grants permission to anyone thinking of doing the same.
This is a frightening moment for a nation that has settled civil disagreements peacefully since 1865. Social media has illuminated the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt described the complicity of ordinary Germans in Adolf Hitler’s crimes. Now we know there are nurses, teachers, military personnel and journalists who think it’s OK to settle an argument with a bullet.
That is why Kirk’s assassination will never be last week’s story, much as we may wish it was.
American college campuses have been primed for violence by the influence of cancel culture. A 2024 survey found 63% of students thought it was acceptable to shout down a speaker to deny them a platform, while more than a quarter (27%) thought it was right to use violence to stop a campus speech. Roughly one in five (21%) strong Republicans endorsed violence compared with one in three (31%) of strong Democrats. Of those who identified as “a-gender”, 71% endorsed political violence.
We cannot say it couldn’t happen here [Australia], although we have reason once again to thank John Howard for gun restrictions. The same morally complicit supporters appeared on social media in Australia within minutes of the shooting.
They saw the death of a young father as a chance for mockery, humour and cheap political gibes.
Cater argues that Kirk’s killing reflects a culture which regards murder as an act for the higher good:
Last week’s attack has more in common with 9/11 than we might care to imagine. Both al-Qa’ida and the radical Left see US power as inherently malignant, the root cause of global injustice, instability and personal threat. Each has an all-encompassing ideological framework that interprets events through the lens of US domination. Both cultivate grand conspiracy narratives. Radical Islamists believe a Zionist-Crusader alliance is controlling global events. The radical Left speaks of shadowy corporate, military and neoliberal forces conspiring to sustain oppression.
Each portrays US power as an existential danger to ordinary people’s lives. For radical Islamists, it is Muslims in the Middle East. For the radical Left, it is minorities, the poor and the environment. Both reject compromise.
Seen in this light, the alliance between the radical Left and the Palestinian freedom movement isn’t so surprising after all. When pro-Palestinian activists in the West play down or even applaud the Hamas atrocities in southern Israel, they make the same moral leap as those who shared their delight at Kirk’s shooting. Murder is no longer murder but an act of service to a higher good.
Cater has no doubt that social media is partly to blame:
Social media has changed everything. Grooming potential converts is no longer the patient task it once was. All the radicals need to do is release the meme and let the algorithm go to work.
Social media is the perfect recruiting ground for radical causes. Solitary and resentful young people with underdeveloped prefrontal cortices tend to be over-represented. Conversations become performances staged for an invisible audience and friendships are reimagined as assets in a personal publicity campaign. The self that emerges is not the one tempered by human interaction but a distorted mirror image validated by the number of likes and followers.
The same YouTube model that created a generation of content creators has been adapted for content destruction; the permanent silencing of disagreeable voices.
Like computer games and online pornography, the only check against wider social harm is an individual’s moral boundaries.
If Western civilisation is to be pulled back from the edge of this precipice it won’t be through violence but by rescuing young people from the effects of the dangerous nonsense taught at school and university that has made them primed for radicalisation, the work to which Kirk dedicated his short adult life.
Worth reading in full.
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How did we get here? To this state of affairs? Where did the poisonous liberal ideology originate?
And how can its adherents be deprogrammed?
It bears similarities to Soviet Russia and to North Korea – where people were/are expected and coerced by threat into expressing belief in that which they can clearly see is untrue.
The threat in those cases was/is a gun, a torture cell or a gulag. In Western society it is cancellation, sacking, social exclusion, etc., but nonetheless the effect is the same.
Barack Obama must take a large part of the blame. In a 5-minute Joe Rogan clip, Mike Benz explains how Obama repealed the Smith-Mundt Act in 2013 to allow propaganda dirty tricks to be used against the American people, supposedly part of his plan for the takedown of America. Benz says the firewall needs to be reinstated and massive fines imposed for any violations: https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1967322423529001131.
Have murders stopped in Australia after law-abiding people were prohibited from owning guns? Further, did murders happen in Australia before The Evil Internet?
If the answer to the first question is “no” and the answer to the second “yes”, as it certainly is, neither outlawing guns for law-abiding people nor controlling internet activities of law-abiding people will stop murders.
This could have been a good article had the author been able to liberate himself from his foregone conclusions about “evil guns” and “evil internet”.
Look, I think the murder of Chsrlie Kirk was horrific as much as anyone else.
But I don’t like the hysteria that is being created.
The people who gloat about his death are not complicit in anything. They may be idiots, they may be heartless, but they are not complicit.
We don’t live in a politically violent world by any comparison to the past. We.actually live in an incredibly peaceful world, from the perspective of physical violence.
What we clearly are living in is a far.more hysterical.and histrionic world.
It’s basically a far more feminine world, with less physical violence but with everyone being much more vocal and at each other’s throats all time.
Saying that someone who celebrates a death is complicit in it is a perfect example of that.
People who celebrate or welcome political murder may lack the backbone to actually walk the walk, that is, murder those they’d like to see dead, but that’s not just being “idiots” or “heartless”. It’s a declaration that they’re perfectly happy for serious crimes to be committed provided the consider the outcome useful to their politcal cause.
They’ll probably find other opportunities where their contempt for the rules of civilized society insofar they get in the of what they’d like to have will find a less personally risky way of materialzing itself in the real world.
Eg. do you believe they could be trusted to count votes? Or sit on juries having to come to verdicts about their political opponents?
Nobody can be trusted to count votes. That is why we have a system which doesnt rely on trust.
I have to admit that in my darkest moments I would not have been at all upset, quite the contrary, if some misfortune had befallen Fauci, or Hancock, or any of the strong advocates of the dracinian measures that contributed to the severe limitation of my life during covid. Of anyone who forcefully called for forced vaccinations, for sure.
And if it had happened, I would not have for a second contributed to it.
In fact, I am pretty sure I remember the odd comment on here regarding the death by vaccine of some strong advocate for jabs that was, let’s say, not entirely charitable. Blood on their hands? Of course not.
And I remember the comments getting plenty of upticks.
If Im honest, I expected commenters on this site to be a bit more self aware and more able to recognise histrionics.
That’s not comparable for two reasons:
When Whitty got everyone locked-up over Christmas because of The Kent variant!!1 he wasn’t only argueing in favour of something completely-useless-but-harmful but was also knowingly doing so in bad faith because everything mutates during reproduction and has done so since the dawn of time and everybody who ever did so much as to read a popular science book about microbiology knew that.
“The people who gloat about his death are not complicit in anything. They may be idiots, they may be heartless, but they are not complicit.”
You mean like the German people were not complicit in what was done to the Jews in the 1930s/40s?
Of course they are complicit – they give encouragement, support, they enable, and worse, they don’t try to stop violence.
The events you refer to were part of a state organised program carried out by a totalitarian regime, which is not really the same as this fairly isolated incident. Of course people who celebrate the murder of Kirk are complicit in a wider sense for contributing to the shutting down of debate and support state censorship and speech control- I find that in some ways more reprehensible and certainly more harmful
I suppose celebrating a death implies a wish that one had been complicit in it. That anyone could believe Kirk deserved that level of hate beggars belief.
Well, I agree it beggars belief. But it all begins with hysterical, hyperbolic and misguided reactions.
As I put in a previous post, the day after CK’s murder I spoke with half a dozen people who had never themselves heard a word he had spoken but were telling me that he had to some degree brought it on himself.
Too many people react without really thinking too much about their reaction and whether they might be misguided.
That includes people who say that just because someone is glad someone else is dead means they have blood on their hands. For starters, by definition, they are saying it after the fact, so that makes no sense. So then they are doing the same as the half dozen half wits I spoke to, which is make assumptions about what may or may not have beeen said previously and their intentions and the effect of their words.
But look, let’s all carry on reacting to each other’s reactions and getting progressively more heated up without thinking too much about what we’re saying or what others mean or why they say what they say. I’m sure it’ll end great.
I broadly agree. I don’t think celebrating politically motivated murder is very likely to add to a huge increase in it.
They are essentially signalling that they are OK with political violence to silence and indeed kill voices who express opinions they disagree with.
Anybody who expressed that murder was a suitable way to deal with political disagreement to my mind IS complicit even if remotely is that vile act.
My money is on the clinton/Obama dem grandee axis.
Lee Harvey oswald style.
The below mini clip just sums up Charlie Kirk, what he stood for and the total BS and crackerjacks he had to contend with on a regular basis. The hateful, maniacal Leftards are just beyond ridiculous. A 70yr old prat challenging him to a fight because he’s incapable of debating him.🤦♀️
Still the conspiracies are circulating that this Tyler guy isn’t the actual killer because he hit Kirk first time from a decent distance. People saying the actual kill shot came from much closer. Who knows? I keep an open mind. There is something to be said for the meme that’s going round, though: “Charlie Kirk wasn’t killed because people didn’t agree with him. He was killed because young people were listening to him.”
https://x.com/DefiantLs/status/1967553620716802465
In the clip of the alleged shooter climbing off the roof there is someone walking briskly away along the path in the background. No one remarks on it or explains who it is although that figure and the alleged killer are the only people in the film.
Farage made a good point at the press conference this morning that the police have refused to take any action over the online death threats he has received or on posts going ‘First Charlie, now for Nigel’ but you can be sure had he suggested a shoot first policy for the gender weirdos he would have had 5 or maybe 50 armed police at his door to arrest him and then gaol him.
Let’s stop blaming social media for every ill, it’s like blaming guns for every shooting.
I have been surprised at just how well Charlie Kirk was known and clearly loved and admired in the UK and other Countries.
Social media is to “blame” for that? Without it most people outside the US would not know of him or his murder.
Wholly to blame is a Marxist-Socialist cancer that has metastesised throughout the institutions among the bien-pensant, elitists and useful idiots in the so-called free democracies, which aims to destroy us socially and economically in order to establish the rule of the enlightened elites over the serfs.
Social media is a means of communication open to all, which means what is communicated can be good or bad. What those receiving the communication make of it, how they act on it depends on what they are.
If the message is evil then it will only take root only in the fertile soil of the corruptible.
“Social media is the perfect recruiting ground for radical causes”
Maybe – like Covid scepticism or climate denial or opposing mass immigration, or being an anti vaxx conspiracy theorist?