CULTURE FILES // JULIA WALD // WHY YOU'RE THINKING OF THE CHARLIE KIRK ASSASSINATION ALL WRONG
Charlie Kirk Sticker on the University of Pennsylvania Campus, 2005, by Julia Wald.
Shockjocks and Cheerleaders
Why You’re Thinking of the Charlie Kirk Assassination All Wrong
Volume 7 // Issue 2 // Fall 2025 // Conservation
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Sometimes I’m convinced we’re living in some sort of simulation.
When the lines start to blur between the digital fantasy realm and tangible reality, it’s easier to believe that we really are characters trapped in a giant computer game being played by our robot overlords—and not organic organisms capable of being the masters of our own destinies.
According to Forbes Magazine, AI chatbots now account for just over half of all internet traffic globally. So-called “bad-bots” may be responsible for a third of the 51 percent figure, which has not assuaged my fears that humans are, in fact, living as pawns in a robot-controlled, 4D-chess cyber prison.
In addition to the disturbing notion that we might unassumingly be chatting with hostile, faceless bits of code masquerading on internet forums as people, around six months ago, a small controversy involving an unethical computer science study confirmed what many of us terminally online types suspected was already a pervasive problem on social media sites: In May of this year, the University of Zurich had to make a public apology to a community on Reddit, a social media platform that blends the curious wormholes of obscure subcultures with the accessibility of a “townsquare” feel on the internet. On the subreddit r/ChangeMyView or CMV, the university had experimented on the users of this niche region of the platform—without their consent.
What the university found using their digitized dummy accounts is that the machines were more effective than other people at getting research subjects to change their views on a variety of contentious topics—including political subjects. According to the study, the University of Zurich’s large language model1 surpassed human performance substantially, and achieved persuasive rates between three and six times higher than the human baseline.
Besides the obvious moral failings of not telling your research subjects that they are part of a small social experiment, there are also glaring issues with the way data was collected and categorized. The biggest unanswered question is, How was the university confident that its chatbots weren’t just talking to other bots online? If the 51 percent statistic is to be believed, this number would also pertain to chatbots talking to other chatbots. Another obvious failing is the human nature of computer science. We carry around our own biases, prejudices, and affinities, which we feed into large language models, which then influence how the bots online interact with us.
In July of 2025, Elon Musk’s Grok, a large language model used by the more conservative-leaning populace, faced a public relations nightmare. The LLM was spewing racist, sexist, and antisemitic bile all over X—the social media site formerly known as Twitter, also owned by Musk. Grok’s posts about Hitler, the Holocaust, rape, and “white genocide” were hastily deleted, and apologies were swiftly issued. However, the main issue at hand is that Grok’s large language model vomit was not a one-off, or an accident: It was a direct result of an algorithm that scans the internet for common topics in website chatrooms and comment threads on social media.
Thus, Grok was not just “hallucinating,” a term that is used to describe self-referential AI “slop” or content generated by an LLM that becomes more muddled and nonsensical with time. It was lifting narratives and conversations from real people across the online space and spitting it out and projecting it back to us. The issue with internet discourse and online robots is not that the machines will finally conquer us and take over our universe—it’s that our new digital world is a mirror reflecting back at us the sickest parts of our society.
Normies, you are not in Kansas anymore
The toxicity of online discourse, particularly surrounding political issues, has already become a dangerous problem infecting our offline lives. Recent school shootings, including the tragic incident in Minneapolis, were perpetrated by young people who were radicalized in online chatrooms to murder in order to send a political message to their perceived ideological opponents and enemies.
Groups like the Order of Nine Angles (O9A), a satanic Neo-Nazi cult, have utilized platforms such as Discord, Telegram, and 4Chan to spread their messages of violent racism and anarcho-fascist ideologies. In addition to using the internet to radicalize people, O9A and others have also used these forums to push vulnerable individuals into carrying out violent acts in real life.
Young people infected with violent, hate-filled narratives disseminated by some of the most dangerous people on the internet have gone on to commit mass murder in supermarkets, schools, and places of worship. And while O9A are far-right accelerationists—those who want to speed the fall of our society—this sickness is not exclusive to right-wing ideologues. Sites that peddle in left-wing discourse—and their own brand of accelerationism—are just as culpable.
Websites such as Bluesky—the left-wing answer to Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter—have become a hotbed of hate-mongering by left-wing and progressive users. After the attempted murder of President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania, users across the platform celebrated the act—many lamenting the fact that the shooter didn’t finish the job. And since Trump’s assassination attempts, videos have been uploaded across platforms such as TikTok and Instagram in which users plead with their audience to “just do it,” insisting that “whoever does it will be supported and lauded as a hero,” which are thinly veiled references to assassinating the sitting president.
Charlie Kirk, a conservative Christian commentator and father of two, was murdered by the internet.
His death is the direct result of online discourse bleeding into the real world. His suspected killer, Tyler Robinson, seems to have been radicalized in the dimly lit chatrooms of Discord and propagandized by talking heads on Twitch and YouTube. Robinson didn’t take his political notes from chatbots on Reddit or LLMs like Grok, but from other people, conversing through their screens and feeding their thoughts, fears, and hatreds into online spaces for others to consume as “content” for clicks, likes, money, and political power.
Hasan Piker is a left-wing socialist and one of the wealthiest and most powerful streamers on Twitch—a website that gained notoriety with online gaming prior to being bought by Amazon due to its popularity during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Piker and his orbiters have turned Twitch into more than a website for gaming nerds. It’s now also a platform where increasingly provocative political content is discussed, and incitement to violence is not uncommon.
People like Piker and Kirk have become political celebrities by taking advantage of the convenience of online platforms such as Twitch, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. The para-social relationship they have with their hordes of online fans has also made them targets. After Kirk’s death, Piker, who was supposed to debate Kirk on September 25, 2025, canceled upcoming in-person events and speaking engagements and announced that he was also afraid for his own personal safety.
Most older Americans remain blissfully unaware of this alternative online universe of Hasan Pikers, Charlie Kirks, and Tyler Robinsons, where gaming platforms and 30-second videoclips on Chinese Communist Party-controlled phone apps can sway the political opinions of millions of young adults (thank you, TikTok).
However, many people in their 40s and beyond are old enough to recall the decades when seeing CNN or Fox News on television screens was ubiquitous and when talk radio dominated the airwaves. They were alive when Bill Clinton played saxophone on MTV and were old enough to remember Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton’s 2008 pre-election MySpace profiles.
Newt Gingrich, a polarizing partisan senator from the southern U.S., has been universally regarded as the first political figure to take advantage of livestreaming as a way to gain cultural capital. Starting in the early ’80s, Gingrich would use the nonprofit cable news channel C-SPAN to make televised speeches. Gingrich wasn’t just speaking his mind to an empty chamber of Congress. He was also advertising his brand by being bombastic and hyperbolic on live television, where he connected with a captive home audience of critics and of sycophants.
Gingrich’s mastery of this new medium for catering to the American public—the world of the 24/7 cable news cycle—may be one of the first times that the worlds of politics and entertainment crossed over in our modern era. Cable television and the 24-hour news cycle also evolved in conjunction with the birth of political talk radio.
While television was a medium that could only be consumed at home, radio was portable. It was the media you consumed in your car, or had on in the background at work. The emergence of talk radio as a dominating cultural force in the 1980s, together with the era of the shock jock—a radio host who uses crass, offensive, and extreme material to attract listeners and controversy—were the proto-podcasts of the day. Hosts such as the brash-talking conservative Rush Limbaugh, as well as Alan Berg, an outspoken liberal radio host from the Midwest, paved the way for many figures in our current political media landscape.
Kirk and Piker have both credited Limbaugh with inspiring their career trajectories in online political commentary. Limbaugh’s approach to talk radio, offending liberals and entertaining conservatives, has become the established roadmap to follow for gaining notability and notoriety as a political pundit—delight your supporters and demonize your detractors.
However, it was Alan Berg, the divisive left-of-center radio host, then based in Denver, who became the first talking head martyr for free speech. Berg was killed by The Order, a neo-Nazi terror cell, for barbed comments Berg had traded with one of his future assailants on his show.
While Charlie Kirk held many opposing views to those espoused by Alan Berg, echoes of Berg’s murder radiate from the Kirk killing. Both men were targeted for speech made in the public spheres of new media.
Shooting our mouths and guns off
Who was Charlie Kirk?
To his detractors, he was a Bible-thumping Boy Scout and a Trump White House apologist whose talking points hearkened back to a more regressive era of American history.
To his followers, he was the future of the Republican Party: a young man who was becoming a faith-forward leader and an example for other young men of how to be a provider, patriot, and Christian—and now, perhaps, a Christian martyr.
While the nation’s perception of Kirk is different depending on what side of the political divide you stand on—and what you think you know about what he said or didn’t say—there are some facts about Charlie Kirk that are not up for debate. Kirk was a Christian, a conservative activist, a 31-year-old father of two, and the co-founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, which has an annual budget of about $80 million. According to ValueWalk, his estimated net worth was over $12 million. It’s verifiable that he celebrated, for instance, the violent attack on Senator Nancy Pelosi’s husband, and also that he showed great sympathy and grace with some of his interlocutors. I’ve come to think that if Kirk had lived long enough to see his 40s and 50s, his perspective, tone, and style would probably have evolved into something more mature. He had it in him somewhere.
Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University on September 10, 2025. A single shot ripped through his neck from a rifle allegedly fired by 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, a video-game enthusiast who led a dual life. On the outside, Robinson was a promising student from a conservative-leaning family who was going through a rough patch. Online, Robinson was enmeshed in virtual communities where rhetoric from right-wing or even just right-of-center provocateurs was seen as justification for ending their lives.
Charlie Kirk had been keenly aware of violence and radicalization bleeding into sections of American politics. In a post on X from April, he wrote: “Assassination culture is spreading on the left. Forty-eight percent of liberals say it would be at least somewhat justified to murder Elon Musk. Fifty-five percent said the same about Donald Trump.”
‘Musk must die’ graffiti at the University of Pennsylvania, 2025, Julia Wald
Kirk may have been young when he died, but he was a political figure on the right for well over a decade. In 2012, an eighteen-year-old Charlie Kirk would make his public debut on a university campus. Standing onstage, preaching to an audience of bored undergrads, Kirk was able to perform a miracle by entertaining and engaging the crowd a mere 20 seconds into his pre-rehearsed speech. Kirk allegedly roused the group of students, awakening them from their malaise, arguing onstage at the small Catholic Midwestern school that conservatives needed a youth-led answer to the Occupy Wall Street protests that galvanized young progressives a year prior in 2011.
Not everyone in the audience that day was a student. Kirk also made an impression on the adults in the room, who noticed his sway among his peers as a talented orator. Bill Montgomery, a former activist with the libertarian-affiliated Tea Party movement, was so impressed by Kirk’s performance that he suggested a partnership with Kirk in a new conservative grassroots organization. He also told Kirk that he shouldn’t go back to school, because speaking at schools and connecting with young Americans on the ground was his true calling. Together, Kirk and Montgomery would form Turning Point USA.
It’s interesting that Kirk chose to talk about the Occupy movement at Benedictine University that day, because Occupy followed the Tea Party movement, and in some ways emulated its organizational strategies, such as utilizing microblogging and virality to gain traction. This is also how Turning Point USA and Kirk became household names in conservative circles and eventually well-known brands on a national scale—the ripple effects of which have arguably helped Donald Trump get elected as president twice. Kirk became a figurehead for a conservative political ideology that, prior to his emergence as a social media star, had no visible leader.
This is the real legacy of our 24-hour cable news cycle and talk radio diet: politics as reality television with its shock, showdowns, and shouting. The result is our reality-TV president and a culture that is obsessed with being entertained 24/7 by our political commentary class.
Social media has exacerbated this trend because the dysfunction is now in our hands, all the time. But who is trustworthy, who is manipulative, and who is just spouting shit for fun? As the lines have blurred online, it’s been harder to take hard-hitting journalism seriously as well.
Journalists such as Taylor Lorenz have regularly blurred the lines among political pundit, social media influencer, and writer-of-newspaper-articles. Adding to this confusing new ecosystem, where being entertained by the news is just as important—if not more important—than being informed, print media has been dying, and ad revenue for papers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post is increasingly married to clicks, likes, and shares.
The fight for American eyeballs has become an existential fight for what is true. How adept are you at determining if divisive content online was generated by a large language model created for a university study, or propaganda from a hostile foreign government?
Are we in high school again?
On the day Charlie Kirk died, a video went viral on TikTok. In the 30-second clip, the young woman featured in the video can barely contain her jubilation, exclaiming that the killing was a good thing, and that it was beautiful that Kirk would not be remembered or missed—a non-event left out of the history textbooks.
But, of course, Kirk’s assassination has caused ripple effects throughout the world, with Charlie Kirk remembrance events as far away as Seoul, South Korea, where a crowd of mourners chanted, “We are Charlie Kirk.” The U.S. federal government has recently called the shooting “an act of domestic terrorism.” The president, vice president, and half the cabinet spoke at his football stadium funeral.
‘Luigi Mangione’ poster at the University of Pennsylvania, 2025, Julia Wald
The now infamous young woman wasn’t alone. A cadre of anti-Kirk cheerleaders, many of them young women, celebrated his assassination. I watched too many of these video montages. It’s clear they are performances. People jubilantly danced, screamed, and sang for the cameras—and they wanted applause from the home team. Young progressive women are also sending love letters to Luigi Mangione, the suspected UnitedHealthcare CEO killer—with one woman even claiming she is “married to his AI.” And while I would like to think this is a fringe opinion, I work at the University of Pennsylvania, where I see images of Luigi Mangione pictured as a saint, a political prisoner, and a sex symbol on a regular basis.
Young, troubled men and boys may be the ones committing most of the acts of political violence—but it is overwhelmingly leftist women on TikTok and Bluesky cheering it on. On these platforms, popular people to wish death upon are British novelist J.K. Rowling (for being a gender-critical feminist),2 American investigative journalist Andy Ngo (for telling uncomfortable stories that run afoul of progressive sacred cows), and the President of the United States, Donald J. Trump (pick your poison).
The video of the Kirk assassination got millions of views within the first hour of Kirk being shot, and it’s alarming the pace at which Americans, in particular, seem to be numb to the political violence broadcast to them via their various screens. We have bored ourselves into fighting for revolution and drumming up political instability for entertainment. Our internet proclivities have gotten so extreme because of our insatiable need to be stimulated and online for more and more hours of the day. And this craving—to be constantly distracted—has led us to watch more disturbing forms of entertainment online, including viewing violence and murder for fun.
And there are internet influencers who are keenly aware of our need to be stimulated all the time. They know that America’s tolerance of political violence is changing and are taking advantage of this opening to encourage a further destabilization of societal norms.
‘Democracies Don’t Have Billionaires’ sticker at the University of Pennsylvania, 2025, Julia Wald
Hasan Piker, socialist shock jock and your (very) online boyfriend
Hasan Piker, a social media darling of the left, is the perfect example of a social media political pundit who exploits our need to be educated and entertained at the same time. Piker has dubbed himself a “propagandist,” and he regularly pushes misinformation and outright lies as news. He is a self-proclaimed Marxist-socialist who lives in a $3 million home in Los Angeles County and does plenty of product placements as he streams for eight to twelve hours a day. In September of this year, Piker pushed a “24-karat gold Labubu” on his stream; and if you’re too old (like me) to know what a “Labubu” is, just plug the name into Google search and see what comes up.
Piker got his start on his uncle Cenk Uygur’s media company program, The Young Turks, where he hosted a segment called “BroTip.” The Young Turks, named after a Turkish political faction that perpetrated the Armenian Genocide in the early 20th century, began as a Sirius XM satellite radio show in 2002 before launching a YouTube web series in 2005, and later landed on Twitch, a platform popular with Millennial and Gen Z gamers.3 There, Piker would eventually garner an even larger following for his own personal channel.
Twitch, Piker’s current main medium of communication, is now a videostreaming subsidiary of Amazon. Video content on the platform can be either viewed live or on-demand, making the website the internet equivalent of public access television and call-in radio, where the audience can interact with the hosts of various livestreams by leaving notes, comments, and questions during broadcasts.
Piker has dressed up in skimpy Japanese maid outfits before to appeal to his anime-obsessed and sex-starved audience. He’s one part dumb jock, one part anime character, and one part your hot—and, according to him, intellectually superior—Marxist boyfriend.
Piker leans into this identity, and he is very aware of how he looks, as he admitted in a recent New York Times interview that proclaimed, “A Progressive Mind in a MAGA Body.” Piker also knows that political violence sounds more sexy and appealing when it’s said by a man whose image is curated to be your cool friend, or your fantasy of a romantic companion. On a recent podcast with Taylor Lorenz and MattXIV (legal name Matt Bernstein, an online influencer with cartoonishly long nails and even more cartoonish political opinions), Lorenz, a frequent Hasan Piker orbiter and cheerleader, gushed on air about Piker’s inevitable rise to notoriety and fame based on his physical appearance alone.
Unfortunately, hot people such as Piker regularly get a pass for saying and doing ugly things. Piker has waved a gun around on stream, and has proclaimed with regard to landlords that he wanted to “kill them, murder them, let the streets soak in their red capitalist blood.” Piker has also interviewed a Houthi terrorist on his stream, and he has called for the death of Florida Senator Rick Scott.
He’s been suspended by Twitch for brief stints of time for the above and for calling for the deaths of the life partners of his social media enemies: A month prior to Kirk’s death, Piker was in deep water once again for allegedly calling Hila Klein, the wife of onetime friend and now rival Ethan Klein—co-hosts of the H3H3 YouTube channel—a “valid military target” because of her former service in the Israeli Defense Forces. In a recent interview with The New York Times, journalist Ross Douthat has called Piker a “hypeman” for the glorification of a specific flavor of political violence.
Piker insists these flirtations with violent revolution are overblown and has recently compared himself to a left-wing version of an old-fashioned shock jock radio host—mirroring rival Charlie Kirk’s and Limbaugh’s pop cultural legacies. But there are also fans of Piker who have caused real-world violence. Jarrett Maki, 25, from Detroit, met with Piker a month prior to Maki allegedly making bomb and active shooter threats to businesses in East Alton, Illinois. Maki was clearly excited about meeting Piker in person—we know because it was livestreamed. Piker has also doxxed people on his stream, sharing their home addresses by flashing them across his Twitch screen “accidentally.”
Luigi Mangione may be locked up behind bars, but Piker is still hanging out in his room, talking to you about his day, sharing terrorist propaganda, and collecting his ad revenue.
Not left versus right. The internet versus everybody
While terms such as conservative, right-wing, Nazi, and fascist used to have distinct definitions in history, the goalposts have shifted in recent years. For the progressive left, as political rhetoric has become more hostile, “conservative” has morphed into “right-wing” and “right-wing” has now morphed into “Nazi.” A similar evolution of speech has occurred with the words liberal, leftist, socialist, and communist.
This world of changing language and shifting terminology is most concentrated in the sorts of online circles that Tyler Robinson frequented. In that world, Kirk’s killing was warranted because Kirk’s speech was already violence—Kirk was a conservative who helped get Trump elected, and to many, Trump is seen as a fascist, which makes Kirk a Nazi collaborator. Therefore, anything Kirk says in the public sphere is akin to hate speech, which to some is violence. Therefore, the reasoning goes, Kirk’s words alone were enough of a provocation to warrant shooting him.
Regardless of my own shifting opinions of Kirk, I understand that his words have hurt people’s feelings. My oldest friend, Bradley, a fellow debate team alumnus, was particularly upset as a black man regarding Kirk’s rhetoric surrounding affirmative action, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Civil Rights Movement. I also know friends who saw Charlie Kirk as a hero for free speech. Simon, a newer friend, is a Hispanic, bisexual Jewish man in his 20s who at one point thought he was transgender. I have read several pieces depicting Charlie Kirk’s funeral as a “Nazi rally.” I would politely like to ask the writers of these articles why, then, were there so many Jews and gays and bisexual men and women in attendance that day, mourning his death—including Simon?
Simon has routinely gone against the grain, initially by his trans identity in high school and then publicly coming out as de-trans in college, and he saw Kirk’s bravery and unconventional professional life as things to aspire to. But Simon was far from the only person I know with a fluid sexual orientation who mourned Kirk’s death. Many people in the gender-critical homosexual and bisexual networks4 that I am a part of respected Kirk for advocating for their issues, including worrying about the gender transition of minors, even though they may not have agreed with him on a majority of other subjects.
The fact that he was killed for speech made it very personal, and made the violence feel very real, for me and many of my colleagues. Talking to a possibly hostile crowd is something we do on a regular basis.
“Arm the Dolls’ graffiti in Cal Anderson park, Seattle, WA,2025
In May of 2025, I attended an event in Cambridge Massachusetts produced by the LGB Courage coalition, a nonprofit organization run by gendercritical homosexuals and bisexuals. The event, “Born in the Right Body: Law and Learning Forum,” was targeted by the ACLU of New Hampshire, in coordination with protesters from MIT. They forced us to change venues for the panel and targeted the restaurant where the post-panel fundraising dinner was being held. There were protests at the entrance to harass guests. Our colleagues were also sent multiple threatening messages over social media, which described, for instance, how exactly we were to be raped. A week after my harrowing weekend in Boston, two employees of the Israeli consulate were murdered outside of the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, DC—they had also been attending a panel discussion and fundraiser.
‘Zionism is Racism’ sticker at the University of Pennsylvania, 2025, Julia Wald.
Several days after Kirk’s passing, I participated in a Zoom call. Ninety percent of the people in our meeting were lesbian women over the age of 40. The rest of us are a ragtag collection: parents with gender non-conforming kids who are against the medicalization of their children, feminine gay men who want the freedom to express themselves without being asked for their pronouns, and those of us who oppose the restrictions on free speech and assembly placed on us by the authoritarian whims of the gender ideology movement.
All of us came together for this call to express our fear. The kind of violence that was perpetrated against Kirk is something we’ve been scared of at events we regularly attend and host. Our causes mark us to be tarred and feathered, and many accuse us of being “far-right Nazis,” vulnerable to the same fate.
Tyler Robinson, whose alleged partner is trans-identifying, believed, at least from the letters and statements unearthed thus far, that he was committing a heroic act. By silencing Charlie Kirk the individual, Robinson seemed to believe he was also permanently muting his ideological voice—and sending a warning to others. To my friends and colleagues. To me.
But instead of frightening Americans into submission, the assassination appears to have woken us up to the fact that we’ve entered a new phase of political violence.
This isn’t about right versus left. It’s the internet versus everybody. //
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