Charlie Kirk is the spark this tinder box has been waiting for
a steadfast response to this seismic moment, please
I don’t normally wade in on Big News Events that have already been drenched in positions and takes by the online commentariat. Too much squalor! But I am feeling compelled to say something about the Charlie Kirk shooting - an angle that I don’t think I’ve yet seen expressed fully, if at all.
My feeling is that the shooting represents far more than we think - that it could well be the trigger that sets off a far bigger tragedy, the magnitude of which I doubt we can comprehend yet.
You might have the same ominous sense.
I also feel it’s equally going to have to be the trigger for everyone here to double down on their solidity and sanity. You know, to get a radical grip.
There is more than enough information and comment out there about who Charlie Kirk was, and about all the deplorable racist, misogynist, divisive, bigoted things he said and stoked. There is now emerging a lot of information (and countless positions and takes) about Tyler Robinson, the, sigh, white, young, disaffected, very online, Christian-Right, male with a gun who allegedly killed Kirk, including the details of the Groypers movement that he appears to have belonged to. To save you wading into the realm too deeply, Groypers are an ultra-radicalized, nihilistic group of young white males led by rabid extremist Nick Fuentes who has declared things like,“Being Right-Wing is all about ‘hating women, being racist, being Antisemitic’” and is probably best known for coining the vile “Your body, my choice” online battlecry.
I don’t want to get tied up adding more to this granular noise, nor will I fumble and stumble about making watered down statements and sharing how murder is always wrong, as many on the Left are feeling they must do in their (justifiably) confused panic1.
Instead I’d like to look squarely at some different kinds of truths. And suggest some ways to get steadfast (or ṣumūd, per the Palestinian word for such a form of resistance) among them.
Many of you had possibly never heard of Kirk before his death last week. And might be wondering why this one gun shooting - amidst the 125 gun deaths each day in the US, the hundreds of thousands of murders in Gaza since October 7 and the shooting of two kids at a high school in Denver at around the same moment as Kirk’s2 - has attracted so much attention.
The answer, to my mind, is that Charlie Kirk’s death just happens to be perfectly calibrated, and to have landed at exactly the right time in history, to be weaponised to far larger ends.
There is a long history of major wars and revolutions that were sparked by the assassination of some minor figure. It was the seemingly inconsequential death of the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne that sparked World War l. The French, American and Russian Revolutions, and countless other major inflection points, were started when a random bureaucrat or journalist or priest was tossed from a window or shot. The thing is, each such “minor” figure served to justify the release of the floodgates of tension at just the right juncture.
This is how Kirk’s death is also being used. Before there was any indication of who the assassin was and what their motive was, Trump and many other Republicans and right-wing influencers were blaming the Left and “declared war” on “them”. Elon Musk called for mass violence against “the Left”. “We have to fight,” he wrote on X. “The Left is the party of murder.”
After the alleged killer was identified as Robinson (the young, white, Groyper with a gun), none of these figures felt obliged to go back on their accusations, and perhaps pick away at a bit of humble pie. Quite the opposite. It’s almost as though, sensing the righteous relief from “the Left: that the killer was not, in fact, a trans Muslim immigrant, they were incited to double down on their polarising convictions, morphing Kirk into a symbol, a martyr for something greater.
Perhaps one of the most harrowing expressions of this weaponisation comes from Kirk’s wife Erika. She recorded a public statement the day after 22-year-old Robinson was publicly identified as her husband’s alleged killer. However, in her address to…what, the nation?… she stares steelily-eyed into the camera and openly declares that Kirk’s death will be used for the larger cause, directly referring to him as a martyr. She references a “they” who are to take the blame and threatens what some might interpret as retribution. “To the evildoers who took my husband’s life, you have no idea what you have unleashed. You thought you could silence him, but you have awakened millions who will carry forward his mission with even greater strength.”
It’s a hazy logic: The Left are still the murderers - they kill freedom of speech and the rights of everyday (white, Christian) Americans and that’s why Kirk died. It becomes more hazy and conflated - or perhaps clearer? - when you consider Kirk himself repeatedly insisted that the price of freedom had to be paid in human lives: “It’s worth it,” he said, “to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment.” I mean, if we were to be literal, he was not a victim of political violence but of “freedom”.
You could say the whole lot is also further confused by the fact a raft of progressive writers in the US, possibly in an attempt to grip at the crumbling higher moral ground, came out arguing something similar, putting the sanctity of freedom of speech ahead of most everything else. Ezra Klein published an op-ed - "Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way"- for The New York Times within 24 hours of the killing, declaring that “You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.”
In Australia, 800 students showed up for a Charlie Kirk vigil on Sunday night at The University of Queensland in Brisbane3. They wore “I am Charlie Kirk” bits of paper pinned to their backs. The ABC interviewed some of the participants. To their mind, Kirk’s pro-freedom (for the white privileged mostly male class) message was really about “tolerance and acceptance”. But, in fact, Kirk was known for his violent intolerance of views that differed from his and for deriding empathy: “I can’t stand the word empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new age term that does a lot of damage.”
So what is actually going on?
Some thoughts…
Straight up, this is what collapse looks like. To draw on material from The Collapse Book, it’s classic “sixth stage” stuff - the age of decadence, in which:
“Frivolity, aestheticism, hedonism, cynicism, pessimism, narcissism, consumerism, materialism, nihilism, fatalism, fanatics and other negative behaviours and attitudes suffuse the population. Politics is increasingly corrupt, life increasingly unjust. A cabal of insiders accrues wealth and power at the expense of the citizens, fostering a fatal opposition of interests between haves and have nots. The majority lives for bread and circuses; they worship celebrities instead of divinities…. throw off social and moral restraints — especially sexuality; shirk duties but insist on entitlements.”
Again, from my book, civilisations topple when the traditionally “elite class” becomes disaffected and feels the pain as inequality starts to really hit them. Young, white men are at this juncture. The assumed privilege that was promised to them is dissolving. Rather than blame the new breed of oligarchs (the Tech Bros) above who are conducting the largest wealth transfer the world has ever seen, they reach for lowly scapegoats.
It’s also how facism and authoritarianism goes. The masses step into line, parroting lines, hypernormalising the doctrines of the supreme leaders.
I can’t avoid feeling supremely sad for both Kirk and Robinson. Both young men embody (Kirk now in martyred form) the inevitable fall-out of a culture that glorifies the individual, exploits nature, other people and planetary boundaries and binds everyone in a race to the bottom. Both men were funnelled into this alienated, inhumane way of existing. Both men were force-fed the bible from youth and indoctrinated into the warped, illogical and ideological belief in “freedom of speech” as a goal that trumps all else, including the values that we know induce belonging and comfort (such as collectivism and cooperation). They were also injured by the mad, lonely-making obsession with protecting one’s sovereign being… with weapons.
Both men felt threatened in a collapsing culture.
In many ways, Kirk and Robinson are the tragic expression of the collapse of America, and the idea of the West.
We could extrapolate things further: We all are. As we struggle to fathom what is going, as we find ourselves reverting to confused, revengeful, frightened responses, I can’t help but think that those Queenslander vigil holders were not far off: I am Charlie Kirk.
A few more thoughts, still…
As some of you here know from reading The Collapse Book, we can go in circles speculating about the risk of AI singularity, nuclear threat, climate calamities and the rest. But, truly, the threat that exists regardless (as all risks mount) is mass civil unrest, particularly among the disaffected former elite as their rights and privileges dissolve. Angry, very online, indoctrinated, white young men with guns and/or platforms that have algorithmic support from those with a vested interested in stoking unrest among the masses, are, right now, possibly our biggest threat.
Indeed, gun violence and civil unrest is spiking in the US and beyond4.
It might seem bonkers and so strangely 2025 that Kirk was effectively killed by “one of his own”. But again, this is what happens in as complex systems fold in on themselves. As historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, “Civilisations don’t die by murder, they die by suicide”.
In terms of how we get steadfast amidst all this, some more ideas…
We can stop declaring that this is all just “insane”. When we do this we are suggesting what is occurring is an anomaly and things will return to the old normal shortly (you know, when Trump gets voted out with that election in 2028 that the US will still be having). This is a form of unhelpful, distracting denial.
We are also distancing ourselves from the dynamic when we say things like this. We are all in this, we are all implicated. Manifestations of the Kirk/Robinson/Left/Right clusterfuck are all around us. To be steadfast we have to be in this, bearing responsibility and the pain of it all.
I find it helpful to remind myself that what is going on is bullshit, not lying. Trying to respond to what is happening with linear, fact or “truth”-based logic will tie us in knots. I explain this here….
I also find it helpful, per all the above, to frame it through a complex systems collapse lens. I try not to force-fit. It’s more of a gentle “sitting a bit further back from the cinema screen” so I can respond without nose-to-the-action defensiveness. This really does allow me the softness to not lose my mind.
I will write more on how I actually do this in coming weeks…I’ve gone over my usual word limit here and will hand things over to you and your thoughts…
Sarah xx
Republicans and right-wing influencers have assembled a Expose Charlie’s Murderers doxxing list of anyone who has posted content critical of Kirk and/or that in any form celebrates (and does not show enough sympathy for) the death. The list currently has 30,000 submissions and there are hundreds of reports of everyday people having lost jobs, being trolled and receiving death threats as a result of the exposure. The list emulates Kirk’s Turning Point USA “Professor Watchlist”.
Thousands also turned up at a similar vigil in South Korea, of all places.
I dug these facts up from a Guardian piece for some context: In the first six months of 2025, more than 520 plots and acts of terrorism and targeted violence occurred, affecting nearly all US states and causing 96 deaths and 329 injuries. This is a nearly 40% increase over the first six months of 2024, according to data from the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland. Mass casualty attacks, where four or more victims were killed or wounded, increased by 187.5% in the first six months of 2025 compared with the same period last year. Michael Jensen, the research director at START, wrote on LinkedIn in late August that “the warning signs of growing civil unrest in the US are evident” in the group’s data.
I had exactly the same thought - that the Kirk' killing was the straw that broke the polarized camel's back, a tipping point the fascists will use as a justification and a rallying cry for anything and everything they will now do to finish off Murica's sham democracy. Charlie the martyr.
One other thing: Charlie is being lionised for "conducting politics the right way." In one very limited sense he did; he went out and spoke to people. But that's it. He also debated almost entirely in bad faith, using every rhetorical trick in the book - but particularly false premises and switching goalposts - in an attempt to belittle those he "debated."
He clearly had no interest in learning new perspectives, changing or even slightly modifying his views when presented with contradictory evidence or superior arguments, nor striving to find a middle ground. He debated FOR SHOW and to "win", not to learn or include or find concensus.
A friend of mine commented in his legendary brevity: "The Horst Wessel of the US. Next exit: Reichstagsbrand."
It is just so excruciating to observe how the US are ticking one box after the other on the road to fascism. In the same order as 95 years ago in Germany. From this point of view, to me this is more than that undefined feeling Sarah describes: It's just the next step in a chain of events we can easily extrapolate.
Back then, we Germans luckily lost by some margin - but at what expense of human lifes and unprecedented crimes against humanity? It's so dark. We will now inevitably find out what we would have done in our grandparents shoes.