After the world was struck by the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk in the heart of Utah’s “Happy Valley,” the state’s governor told the nation to go touch grass.
His point was that what you experience online is not reality.
What makes Kirk’s murder different from the political assassinations of the 1960s is that within seconds of it taking place, millions around the world were able to watch the gruesome scene on social media.
Over and over and over if they wanted.
Yes, it was real that Kirk was murdered, but what Cox emphasized was that viewing it on social media and then casually swiping to the next video is not how humans are meant to process information, especially something this vicious.
“Social media is a cancer on our society right now,” he said.
While some information has been released pointing to the motivations behind the alleged killer’s actions, there is still more to be discovered. Charging documents depict a troubled 22-year-old who believed Kirk was full of “hatred” and that this was enough to justify ending the young father and husband’s life.
“Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson, texted his roommate, per the documents.
Perhaps not a true nihilist — a person who believes life is meaningless and holds no foundational principles like religion, family or nationalism — but there appears to be an all-consuming nihilistic force in American culture today, one that is being used to justify violence. In the case of Kirk, that violence took place in the presence of children and students at an American university where freedom of expression should be encouraged without fear for one’s life.
An eerie symbolism given Kirk’s platform, as arguably one of the most impactful conservative voices for young people, he died doing what he loved: debating with America’s youth on a college campus.
Learning about evil before seeing it
Until the morning of Sept. 10, I wasn’t familiar with the term nihilism. My editor asked that I look into what a ‘Nihilistic Violent Extremist’ is, a new category of criminal according to the FBI.
I sat in the UVU library, waiting for Kirk to appear as part of his “The American Comeback Tour," going down a dark rabbit hole of crimes connected to nihilism — modern mass shootings, like the recent attack on the Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis that killed two children and the 1999 Columbine, Colorado, High School massacre.
In both events, the shooters carried out their attacks and then turned their weapons on themselves, leaving behind either online posts or journal entries that described existence as pointless, society as irredeemable and morality as a sham.
“People like this — people who hunger to sow destruction and death — form a decentralized network of lone wolves spread across screens and feeds and chat rooms across America," The Free Press writer Peter Savodnik wrote in a piece on nihilism that I read the morning of the shooting.
“America has a long and torturous history of political violence,” Savodnik wrote. “But over the past several years, that violence has morphed into a more amorphous nihilism detached from any clearly defined agenda or principle.”
As I walked to the event, with this evil at the forefront of my mind, I texted my boyfriend, “Hopefully no one hates Kirk enough to bring a gun.” I sent it, mainly because I had been knee deep in nihilism for two hours, but also because I think I knew deep down that there were people who would do that.
When Kirk finally took the stage, he opened by addressing God, then spoke warmly about the Latter-day Saint community in Utah, noting his admiration for their strong family values. He also highlighted his deep sense of patriotism. Listening to him, I thought, This man embodies the American ideals that inspire millions.
Less than 10 minutes later, I watched the personification of those ideals die before my very eyes.
It was like watching what I had just read come to life.
Lessons from a dark rabbit hole
From what is being discovered about Robinson’s background, a bright student who grew up in a two-parent household in a southern Utah suburb, a lesson can be learned that — if the allegations against him are true — there is no criminal mold. No one size fits all. Anyone can end up at a violent destination.
Rather than name Robinson’s political ideology, Savodnik told me at a Salt Lake City coffee shop a week after the shooting that bringing attention to his involvement in “online nihilistic culture” is more productive.
The information released so far into Robinson’s behavior ahead of his alleged involvement in the shooting show he used the social media platform Discord to send messages about the rifle he owns and the engraved bullets he reportedly used in the shooting. FBI Director Kash Patel recently said at a congressional hearing that more than 20 people were part of the online chat.
Officials have so far been tight-lipped about what exactly allegedly put Robinson over the edge regarding Kirk, but FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino described Robinson on Fox News as having “some obsession” with him based on his “digital footprint.”
Savodnik’s running hypothesis with Robinson is that he’s split into “bifurcated personalities.” Meaning there’s his offline, his so-called real world, and then his digital world. Over time, though, the online realm became his reality. A growing concern of Savodnik’s is that this is happening to many young people.
When a shooting occurs, typically the political right blames mental illness and the left points to guns. But in a piece published last month in The Spectator World magazine on how nihilism is destroying young minds, Katherine Dee argues that a dark underbelly in society needs to be confronted before the hot political takes capture the narrative.
“The media environment that oscillates between numbness and panic, the economic system that tells the young they have no future, the culture that produces people primed for violence,” she wrote, should be prioritized. After interviewing a boy who had fallen into the dark world of “the furry subculture,” Dee said his interests led him to view “violent, animal-torture pornography.”
“It should be a warning to all parents everywhere that this boy wasn’t a troubled or traumatized kid. His parents were inattentive, not criminally neglectful,” Dee said. “There aren’t many practical case studies of what falling down an internet rabbit hole looks like, so his experience and the conversation we had matters. It shows how these online communities can potentially mutate and hurt people, and how some of those offshoots can draw people toward obsession, alienation and harm.”
A turning point — or just another tragedy?
Since Kirk’s death, many of his fans and fellow conservative personalities have said the tragedy should be a catalyst for change — a national turning point, echoing the name of Turning Point USA, the nonprofit Kirk co-founded in 2012.
Time will tell if Kirk’s murder will be a pivotal moment or if it will remain just a dark day in American history, Savodnik said. “That depends on whatever happens next.”
“If it is the case that there are no more major political assassinations over the next few months or years ... then yes, this will have been a turning point. But if we see just an uptick in political assassinations, then sadly, this will not be that,” he said.
“We still talk about September 11 with these kinds of, almost like reverential overtones,” Savodnik continued, “whether we talk about Charlie Kirk’s murder that way, in the future will depend on whether there are more Charlie Kirks,” meaning political assassinations. “We certainly hope not.”