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Coffee Break: Doomscrolling the Influencer Apocalypse

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We are in the midst of America’s biggest moral panic since 2001. I call it the influencer apocalypse because it was triggered by the assassination of influencer Charlie Kirk, but also because it’s the death of innocence for the young influencer class.

And because there is a truly apocalyptic collision between generations who communicate in utterly different mediums and have very divergent politics from that of their elders.

Now that the U.S. is running out of money, power, and moral standing, the empire is boomeranging home.


UPDATE [9-15-25 10:30PM ET]
Max Blumenthal, Candace Owens, and Infowars’ Harrison H Smith are reporting that Bill Ackman “convened stormy Israel ‘intervention’ with Charlie Kirk.” Political blender in action. Ackman’s response. It will be key to see how Tucker Carlson handles this.

Kirk was ‘hammered’ at Hamptons meeting this August for his growing criticism of Israeli influence”

The Trump administration is seizing on the moment to proscribe speech as Yves Smith warned earlier at Naked Capitalism.

The MSM and the GOP are encouraging a revival of the cancel culture of the 2010s, but this time aimed at their enemies.

They are combining the online cancel culture tactics of the 2010s with an attempted mainstream media clampdown reminiscent of the post-9/11 build up to the Global War on Terror.

The timing was perfect as Americans are in the habit of working themselves up into a frenzy in the autumn. 9/11 has been drained of cultural power by two decades of strident jingoism and once forbidden counter-narratives have enduring power.

Time will tell if the murder of a social media influencer will give the right comparable license for abuse as the most spectacular terrorist attack of the millennium thus far.

Outlets like The Wall Street Journal, the Guardian, CNN, and the New York Post didn’t wait to find out, they just dove right in, credulously reporting misinformation direct from anonymous law enforcement sources and the Republican Governor of Utah.

The retractions were plentiful but always tastefully limited to updates on older posts so as not to distract from the narrative.

The centrists lept in to provide moral support too. At least two Democratic governors (Shapiro in Pennsylvania and Polis in Colorado) announced flags would be flying at half-mast on September 11 “in memory of 9/11 and Charlie Kirk.”

Of course 2028 presidential front runner Gavin Newsom, who hosted Kirk on the first episode of his podcast, had to get in on the action.

Head Abundance Bro Ezra Klein lauding Kirk for “Practicing Politics the Right Way” on the op-ed pages of The New York Times.

But Klein’s own readership resisted his praise for Kirk’s style of politics.

I first realized things were serious when former George W. Bush pollster Matthew Dowd was fired by MSNBC for his remarks on Kirk’s passing.

None of the coverage that I’ve seen mentions Dowd’s resume beyond MSNBC pundit.

They however, do link to his Bluesky apology though. Of course he’s on Blueskey.

Along with Karl Rove and fellow wayward Texas Democrat Mark McKinnon, Dowd architected both of the younger Bush’s presidential elections.

Dowd’s shrewd and cynical poll-reading drove the divisive “base strategy” that helped Bush win re-election by focusing on culture war issues designed to bitterly divide the electorate.

Dowd, a titan of the cable television era of politics, rode the wave of the 2001-2003 moral panic and now he’s been washed out by the moral panic of 2025.

Kirk, for his part, is an avatar of a more recent, but equally spent era: the social media 2010s, the age of woke.

As Slate’s Luke Winkie wrote in “Charlie Kirk Was a Trump Force Like No Other. It’s Clear What Comes Now”

It’s impossible to overstate Kirk’s influence. The Republican Party’s unlikely rebrand into a movement of anti-institutionalist outsiders challenging the supposed groupthink of the liberal orthodoxy can be traced in some ways back to Kirk, who got his start as a teenager during the tea party movement. The version of conservatism he inherited was defined by cranks and nerds in the waning years of the Obama era, and it was surprisingly pliable to his touch.

Kirk was a victim of the neo-liberal Silicon Valley alliance that powered cancel culture in Trump’s first term.

Matt Taibbi is as lost in that bygone era as Kirk, but he’s still posting about it.

Brian Merchant of Blood in the Machine wrote a eulogy for the communications era just past, “The killing of Charlie Kirk and the end of the “global town square”:

it was a clarifying event with regard to the current State of Social Media, three years after Musk’s takeover of Twitter, its remaking as X, and its subsequent balkanization into various platform fiefs. It dispelled some curiously persistent delusions in the process, and zealously introduced the new elements that seem to me to be poised to limit the further effective simulation of a user’s participation in history.

…
Elon Musk’s X has become a case study in how a social media network with tens of millions of users can be remade in the image of the man behind the control board, by removing content moderation, restoring users banned for hate speech, introducing pay-to-play incentives, and routinely signaling, by personal example, what kind of content the platform is for.

Yesterday, at 12:27, Musk tweeted “The Left is the party of murder,” before there was any evidence at all about the killer’s identity, or regarding his motives or ideological leanings, or that “The Left” is in fact a political party. Nonetheless, it helped pave the way for a stream of vitriol and calls to violence from some of X’s biggest accounts.

In an essay that now seems quaint despite being published just weeks ago, the editor of a new liberal magazine, The Argument, inaugurated the publication with a call for its new readers to stay on X, for the sake of debate: “Twitter is — without question — the most influential public square we have… Those who leave Twitter are sacrificing their ability to advocate for the change they seek.” Scanning the posts above, from some of the largest accounts on the platform, as well as from its owner, I hope it’s obvious enough that the only reason these folks are taking to any kind of public square is to assemble a firing squad.

Right-wing activists are now taking the social posts of people they believe to be “celebrating” Kirk’s death—many are just posting the activists’ own past quotes—entering them into a database, and posting their personal details online.

There was no meaningful debate, besides perhaps between fellow traveler liberals, and certainly no detectible impulse towards democracy. Whether or not it’s *ethical* to stay on X is another question, but the aftermath of the Kirk killing shows us why we’d do well to dismantle our model of X as a place where debates are had, needles are moved, and political progress is possible.

Yasha Levine’s “The Spectacle Made Flesh” explains why Kirk’s death is sending such shockwaves through the elite of old-line media and the younger generation alike:

The hit did something I haven’t seen before. It spooked the political influencers. They are scared. Many of them spent last night issuing lengthy, serious statements on X about the gravity of the situation. Some of them are calling it a 9/11 event — a 9/11 for the influencer class.

Political assassinations are one thing. Killing a president, however horrible, was seen as within the rules of “the game.” But influencers? Political commentators? They were supposed to be a protected class. Their free speech was supposed to matter. It was supposed to be protected by “the rules.” Many of them see themselves in Charlie Kirk. And they are clearly afraid for their lives. The world — their world — has turned upside down. Nothing will be the same to them. And it’s not just the influencers on Charlie Kirk’s team. The liberal and left wings of the influencer class are panicking, too. If a righty influencer can be whacked, so can they. The rules have changed.

…

The political influencer is a relatively new phenomenon. Bigger and more numerous and more visible as a class than the talk radio guys and a lot more unhinged than the cable news personalities, they’ve risen to the top of the Spectacle — made possible by the monopolistic communications technologies that we all now inhabit. Many of them are completely self-made, talented, coming from “the people” with a gift for sensing what their people want to hear and projecting emotional connection. They are kings and queens of the Spectacle now — agitating the mass psychosis, exploiting the alienation, pain, and anger that’s surging through the population. They’ve been stirring the psychic oceans, working up surges and storms, and then riding these waves to fame and money and political power.

Throughout their short existence, they have been insulated from the psychic madness they’ve pumped into the Spectacle. They’ve been secure in their nice neighborhoods and big houses and elite institutions, certain that the people they’ve trapped with the Spectacle are too distracted, too enchanted, too zombified… But this Charlie Kirk assassination changed something for them. It’s dawning on them that the Spectacle is not just an abstract entity. They are realizing deep down inside that the Spectacle can be made flesh. And that flesh can be killed. And that this flesh can be theirs.

Taylor Lorenz tries to remind her readers of recent history in Let’s talk about ‘political violence’:

As countless people on X have pointed out, political violence is America’s default setting.

When political leaders and the media wring their hands about “political violence,” they’re not actually talking about violence in any universal sense. They’re usually only talking about violence against elites or people who maintain existing power structures.

The violence that is already a daily feature of life for poor, Black, immigrant, disabled, and queer communities is invisible to them. This double standard has always been there, and it’s why so many people, especially in countries that we’ve inflicted horrific levels of violence upon abroad, hate the American government. But cell phones and social media have finally made this hypocrisy crystal clear to more and more average Americans. The reality is that political violence has escalated over the past five years, but not in the way politicians are characterizing it.

When the pandemic started in 2020, violence against marginalized people accelerated. Immigrants, people of color, and the poor were (and are still!) being sent into deadly workplaces with no airborne disease protections. Prisoners, nursing home residents, and hospital patients are still being left to die of COVID in facilities with zero airborne disease mitigations.

When Joe Biden took office, rather than mitigate the violence of an ongoing pandemic, he forced people back to work and gave COVID funding to the police. He successfully convinced liberals (and even leftists!) to completely devalue the lives of people around them. The government got the American public to dehumanize each other so successfully that many people today believe that it’s morally neutral to infect and kill, or permanently maim, those around them by spreading airborne disease because they don’t like wearing a mask. Killing and disabling millions of Americans by furthering the spread of an airborne vascular disease is also violence. The ongoing pandemic is violence.

After George Floyd was brutally murdered in 2020, millions of people took to the streets to demand an end to racist police killings. What they were met with, was an unprecedented wave of state-sanctioned violence.

The Department of Homeland Security deployed tactical teams into cities. Police kettled, beat, and arrested journalists. Protesters were shot point blank with “less-lethal” munitions, losing eyes and sustaining permanent injuries. People died in protest-related incidents. Yet none of those deaths were mourned by the mainstream media as martyrs of democracy.

Lorenz also chides the MSM.

It’s also important to note that Charlie Kirk has faced a challenge from his right in recent years from Nick Fuentes and his Groyper movement.

There is every reason may be some reason to believe the accused assassin was a groyper, despite the right’s relentless effort to blame trans-furry-Antifa-Islamists to push their authoritarian agenda.

Got to admire their audaciousness, though.

Although the effort to blame the killing on the left is slipshod enough to get pushback from centrist Bill Maher, who invited Ben Shapiro on his show to demonstrate centrist-MAGA solidarity:

Historian of the American right, Rick Perlstein posted on Facebook:

In 2019 Nick Fuentes’ neo-Nazi “Groypers” engaged in a systematic campaign to harass Charlie Kirk at his events for not being racist enough. He responded by becoming more racist.

Some other preliminary thoughts:

Kirk succeeded because he was astonishingly talented. His speech at the 2024 Republican convention was the most effective by far, in my judgement. It articulated with great clarity and passion, and in apolitical terms, the feelings of dispossession and alienation a typical young person can be expected to feel today, and then, with rather astonishing skill, offered fascism as a road to relief. It was spellbinding.

In Naomi Klein’s Doppleganger, the best political book read I’ve in quite some time, she very effectively explains how good Steve Bannon is, as well, at speaking vulnerable people’s feelings of dispossession. The Democrats with the skill at doing this, like Mamdani and AOC, are rendered anathema by the gerontocrats running the party.

I’ll add, finally (for now), that the way he’s being memorialized, as someone who welcomed “dialogue with those of different views and not just people shouting at each other” is also testament to his malign genius.

For his part, Nick Fuentes claims he is being framed:

This stuff is confusing to everyone so it’s no wonder the FBI can barely establish a coherent narrative.

The cultural moment is far too chaotic and grimly ridiculous to support an overwhelming authoritarian narrative.

This video essay on TikTok explains both the Kirk vs Fuentes, Christain nationalist vs groyper split and the memetic communication style of the latter fairly well:

@cybelecanterel

A quick crash course in blackpill accelerationism: the memes are the ideology.

♬ original sound – Cy Canterel

Partial transcript:

Two families on the right keep getting mashed together in coverage. There’s the main line far right Christian nationalism, and then the groyper scene, especially its black pill accelerationist.

They overlap in rhetoric and enemies, but they don’t want the same future and they don’t use the internet in the same way.

Groypers refers to a youth driven online far right scene that’s associated with the America First brand, which is LED by Nick Fuentes.

Blackpill comes from Incel Forums and signals fatalism, so no improvement in humanity is possible and thereby despair is rational. Acceleration in extremist context means stoking crises to hasten societal collapse.

You can think of this as builders versus burners.
And so for Christian nationalism in its hard right form, it’s still builder energy. It insists that the nation is or should be explicitly Christian, prizes hierarchy, order, and a return to rightful social roles. But the strategy is institutional.
…
And even when their rhetoric gets apocalyptic, the plan is still state power.

The groypers world orbits a completely different sun. It’s youth heavy. It’s a coalition that includes a lot of streamers and online personalities. And it borrows from incel forums, gamer chat, crypto cynicism, edge lord comedy, and a lot of terminally online irony.

Here’s the core distinction.

The blackpill wing does not believe in reform, not of institutions, not of culture, and not of people. The blackpill is the conviction that decline is irreversible.If nothing can be redeemed, then the only creative act is negation.

And that’s where accelerationism comes in.
In this context, acceleration means pressing on every social fault line, race, gender, religion, class, until something breaks.

It is not policy,it’s physics.

The expectation is collapse followed by nothing. Unlike some white supremacist or apocalyptic Christian variants that at least fantasize about what comes after, mainstream Blackpill content rarely sketches a constructive post collapse order. It’s entropy worship. Speed the unraveling and enjoy the spectacle.

A quick detour so that we don’t mix wires here.

Black pilled accelerationism is not the same thing as tech bro AI accelerationism. The latter is a Futurist, albeit doomy, faith about speeding technological progress even at humanity’s expense. Black pill is a social political fatalism that invites breakdown. Different crowds, different goals.

Aidenetcetera on TikTok has a similar explanation from the Zoomer-native. perspective.

It’s also very important to note that, despite his fervent genocidal denialism, Kirk had recently veered into heresy about Israel.

Ironically, this moved him slightly in the direction of Fuentes, who has made opposing Israel a core brand value.

“Laura Loomer, a key informal advisor to Trump who has been influential in key national security personnel decisions, has deleted this post deciding in light of Kirk’s murder that it was perhaps inflammatory or a bad look,” Matt Yglesias (ironically) tweeted and deleted:

This moral panic is very different than GW Bush’s moral panic. It seems to be outside the control of those trying to capitalize on it.

Although they are pushing as hard as they can:

The influencer apocalypse may not have ripped open the seventh seal yet, but it’s well on its way.

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104 comments

    1. Eclair

      You and me both, old ghost! And here I consider myself ‘well informed!’ My 20-something granddaughter wandered into my room that morning, while I was drinking my morning tea and wondering who this guy was that The NY Times had headlined, and announced that social media was abuzz like she had never seen. She at least had heard of him.

      Is this how the internet siloes me? I can quote chapter and verse on foreign relations, MMT, the genocide in Gaza, the decline of the West and the results of the latest BRIC meeting. But ….. Charlie Kirk? Not a peep.

      1. principle

        Or maybe, he was not important enough for people outside the specific group to know about him. No one knew about that poor Ukrainian girl, until she got killed in subway, on camera. Now, everyone is trying to use her death for their own agenda.

  2. leaf

    This is not complete without Trump’s bizarre AI photo he posted on to his Truth Social depicting him and Kirk in an embrace, with the US and Israeli flag in the background. Note that the US flag is draped while the the Israeli flag on Kirk’s side is waving in the wind. Below the text of THE GREAT CHARLIE KIRK R.I.P is rather bizarrely written ‘Shlomo perl’.

    Some rather quick skimming of Solomon Perel’s Wikipedia page and some NYT article, whose name appears when you search Shlomo Perl, describes him as a Jew who posed as a Hitler Youth to survive in German occupied territory during WWII before being rescued by the Allies and then he made his way to the then Mandatory Palestine where he participated in the 1948 war.

    What on earth did Trump mean by sharing this? The ‘groypers’ as it were on Twitter, did not take kindly to this as expected.

    https://archive.is/rQxfE

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      I almost included that one. The volume of stuff that got cut from this post is easily another 4 posts.
      I cut some of Ted Cruz’ psychotic kitsch-posting at the last minute too. Overwhelming insanity.
      I even cut the part about “your boy Eldertiktok” coming back to steal all the merch that was left behind.

  3. Bazarov

    The tiktok essay about groypers and the “black pilled” meme army I think misses what’s most important: memes are fascist. Among fascism’s many corrosive effects is the aestheticism of everything; what was once mass politics becomes a series of poses to mimic–even to sacralize–and identify with, often bringing out very passionate emotions in the process (which is why, to me anyway, fascism seems highly idealistic and romantic). The swastika, after all, was a great meme. It “memeified” the flag.

    Among the far left–the real left, the Marxists–the impulse rather than to aestheticize everything is to politicize everything and subject it to critique. It’s why Marxists analyze and argue so much. There’s no use arguing with a fascist. They’re beyond good faith, their arguing just another pose, a pose that in modern times can be instantly repackaged as a meme and broadcast online.

    I’ve always liked the way Sartre put it, though I’m not an existentialist. What he claims about anti-semitism is true of fascism generally: “Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Hmm, memes may well be inherently fascist. Some of these folks — Taylor Lorenz, Brian Merchant — are angry at the attacks on “online culture” but at this point I’m not even sure if I’m willing to defend television as a good idea. Let’s go back to cunieform!
      Your take does gibe with my north star of fascism, Umberto Eco’s Ur-Fascism essay although as he pointed out, tabloid newspapers did the job in the Mussolini era. Maybe the medium isn’t always the message?

    3. Balan Aroxdale

      I think the majority of reasonable people within and without the system have quietly made for the exits, or been shown them. The dregs and lunatics are running the asylum.

  5. Donald Obama

    Just a note to admins – maybe this is a known issue – but using the Print to PDF to save the article as a PDF does not preserve the embedded tweets, at least not on Firefox.

    I enjoyed the article and wanted to save a “hard copy”.

  6. pjay

    Thank you for this. It is easily the best attempt I’ve seen to map the convoluted crazy quilt of interests and ideologies relevant to the Kirk phenomenon. Almost from the beginning I thought Robinson appeared to be closest to what is termed a “blackpill” follower here. Of course the right-wing will define such nihilistic accelerationism as “radical leftist.” All the better if he can be linked to a “trans” lover, since this has also been labeled as part of a “radical left” agenda. So let’s protect the legacy of “free speech” advocates like Charlie Kirk by criminalizing opposition to genocide in Gaza! (I’m looking forward to learning more about this supposedly trans room mate who is being “extremely cooperative” in the investigation.)

    The right-wing split over Israel and Kirk’s role in it is very important as well, even if Robinson does prove to be a “lone nut” (I mean “dangerously indoctrinated by the radical left”) assassin. Quashing this uncomfortable issue is as important to the neocon spin machine as painting the assassin as a “radical leftist.”

    I was quite surprised by one aspect of this post: who would have thought that *Taylor Lorenz,* of all people, could make such a sane and relevant statement about political violence?

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Thanks. I wasn’t sure if I was making a point or just flinging poop at the wall of the cage by the time I hit post.

      1. JohnnyGL

        No, there’s a picture that’s been painted…it’s a blurry picture, because it isn’t finished, yet, but we’re seeing it start to take shape and you’ve given a nice summary of the current state of play.

        I’ll note two things.

        1) the dissidents on the right understand that they’re getting run over by a lawnmower and that the threat is existential. When Democrats crushed Bernie, it was swift, decisive, and the surrender was immediate. It was over before it started. The right, by contrast, is up for the fight, at least for now. I’m heartened that tucker and candace and the array of online influencers haven’t backed down from the ‘israel did it’ message. In fact they’re doubling down.

        2) This really feels like the taisho democracy era of pre-war japan. Factions of militarists/fascists competing/cooperating with each other in a bid for power.

        However, what made the whole thing stick together was early war success against a weakened China. What happens when the US starts a war and it fails???

        1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

          What if it even fails to get the war started? Guiado’s debacle in the first Trump term was one thing, but what if Rubio fails in a similarly spectacular way?

  7. lyman alpha blob

    Opening the Hinkle tweet, there are these bullet points –

    > Before 9/10, unusual people visited ‘shooter’
    > The visitors had out of state license plates
    > The visitors ‘did not give off a good vibe’

    Hadn’t heard these rumors before – anybody know the source of this?

    3. ChrisRUEcon

      This is, I believe, based on conversations some journalists/newscasters had with neighbors from the apartment complex where the shooter was apparently living with a roomate.

    4. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      I’m not endorsing Hinckle’s tweets,just trying to chronicle what he’s posting as it’s big enough for Israel to attack him over. Also not saying his “reporting” is bad just have no bandwidth to try to process.

      His feed has his sources for most of these things if you’re willing to plow through it. I had a dozen or more of his posts I considered including but went with the summary instead. He’s got an agenda and isn’t someone I trust although he is anti-war and anti-genocide.

      I didn’t even get into the entire sub-stream of “grassy knoll/Warren commission” style posting about other shooters, suppression of witnesses, suspicious manipulation of the crime scene stuff. Lots of rabbit holes, some the kind you don’t climb out of.

    2. barefoot charley

      Yes, for we who didn’t know or care about Kirk she’s a veritable Rosetta Stone for young online babble, or rather babel. Fascinating and informative, a pretty amazing job of distinguishing very different groups with overlapping memes. What a wacked out world these kids find themselves in. She almost makes me feel better about semiotics.

  9. DMK

    Nat, this is too much. We don’t need a minute of silence, we need everyone to shut the
    f *** up for a week, month or year. Too many people posting ignorant, violent and inane thoughts that synapse in their heads without a moment of reflection. Give silence a chance.

    1. IM Doc

      Thank you – I could not agree with you more. 90% of the above tweets and comments are classic examples of what I am going to share below.

      As I pointed out this AM in my post, our entire extended family is dealing with the fallout of our younger left-leaning family members posting horrific things online. It was so bad that one of them has been fired, and the rest of us are left with the horrible feeling that we do not know these people that we have watched growing up since they were babies. They were at one time happy awesome kids – they are now all three wrathfully angry, lashing out all the time, often when political talk comes in they begin frothing at the mouth. To be fair, there are also about 8 right leaning 20 somethings in the family that post stupid stuff online. The difference between the two groups – not really violent and the right-leaning ones appear much more happy and do not give off the vibe of demon possession. We are all deeply aware this could turn in the blink of an eye with the right stimulus. We elders are all deeply concerned and we are also all emotional wrecks. I wish I could show these messages they wrote, it chilled me – but not nearly as much as when all three of them announced the jubilation that erupted in their work places when this was announced. And then the excuse from all 3 – “Everyone is doing it.” We older ones may think this is all OK – but it is not – this is causing serious spiritual and emotional issues for these kids. Being the PCP – the family looks to me for support – and this is the very long message I sent on email this weekend as an opening salvo. This email comes from about 12 of us desperately trying to help our young ones. I have no idea what the solutions are…….

      The photos described can be found on Wikipedia – under Grace and Gratitude.

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grace_(photograph)

      __________________________________________________

      For those of you not old enough to have known them, let me tell you something about my great-grandparents. I have been thinking about them a lot this week and even though they passed away decades ago, the memories are still with me.

      We moved into a house right down the street from them when I was an older kid. I remember them both very well. I spent many afternoons listening to stories from them both. Above their dining room table were framed prints of these two photos. For a long time, as a child, I was a bit confused because I thought it was actually them – the lady really resembles my grandma, the man not so much. Years later did I learn from my mom that this was art work.

      These two photos were very popular home decor items in the early 20th Century. The man‘s photo is called Grace. And the woman’s is called Gratitude. They are true cultural icons from the years of the Depression and World War II.

      What I remember about my grandparents is that they did indeed frequently stop, close their eyes, meditate for a few moments and then continue on. I have seen them on many occasions in what I would call a prayer-like stance.

      They never ever talked about their “issues”. They always seemed to be happy warriors. Little did I know as a kid what they actually went through in life. It quite frankly blows away all the little indignities we whine about today. Your food delivery put cheese on your hamburger – go bitch on Reddit for 5 hours about it. Now try having your house taken away from you and eating beans and cornbread for 5 years. Our behavior today is really something to behold.

      As a primary care physician now of more than 30 years, I think I now really have a much better idea of the actual concept of meditation. I also grow ever more deeply concerned about the role of the electronics in our lives and how they are deeply disrupting this aspect of our minds.

      We have now all seen the innumerable videos of our own kids but also all the others celebrating an assassination this week. This is largely being done by young people who have grown up with social media all their lives. As a primary care doctor, I have all of my life seen this kind of behavior in my office right in front of me, long before social media. You see people work things out in their minds – an internal dialog. They often work through very primal desires and directives. They are often afraid of them. It is not that they suppress things, it is that they give their brains quiet time to evaluate each and every input – long before they ever go public. This is called being a human. I am certain that was a lot of what I was seeing with my great-grandparents. They meditated. They did not have computers and social media. What we are seeing this week is an entire generation who has been robbed of this meditative behavior. They use social media instead. Their feral instinctual thoughts get put online before any internal deliberation is done. Now just imagine what this is all going to be like with AI telling them how they should feel with their inputs. There is a reason for the confession booth, the pastor’s office, the doctor’s office, the therapist. These types of things are found in every culture on Earth. What are we doing to ourselves?

      It now turns out that this Utah kid was very likely radicalized into some very bad thoughts by both video games and online chat groups like Reddit. Place a 16 year old man, testosterone raging, in front of a computer and let him blow stuff up for hours, all the while having other young men rage in his earphones about how everything sucks, and what do you expect is going to happen? No meditation or thinking allowed. Just kill kill kill hate hate hate. I see these 20something young men every day of my life. I teach them in Sunday School. We have a national crisis. I really do not think we appreciate the level of the problems. We have spent so much time on lifting up everyone else, we totally forgot about our little boys.

      I will reiterate again – in our world in the area we live are all kinds of families of tech executives. To the one, their children are not allowed anywhere around screens. Mine are only allowed on their computers if either parent is right there watching. They have a very specific research goal and that is all they are allowed to do. We have no video games in the house and neither kid will have a cell phone until they can pay for it and they are 18. We have immense negative peer pressure here with regard to screens. Screens are just not that important. But I know it is exactly the opposite in American cities.

      What are the tech executives trying to tell us? I really think we should ask ourselves that question. What are we doing to ourselves and most importantly our kids?

      1. Steve H.

        Your email seems much like the John Robb video from the other day. It was done on a moment’s notice, so quick Robb was unshaven, and I had the impression that his friend Brian had called him with his head popping off and the video was an agent of therapy.

        Robb says, don’t be a RedShirt/ping-pong ball/roadkill. ‘Think strategically.’ I’ve used STFU, and ‘what does that have to do with your practice.’ For those that have a practice.

        Aurelien’s recently wrote ‘For the western ruling class, then, defeat is literally unthinkable: the required neurones are not present.’ That’s relevant to brain plasticity, which is why advanced education is long enough to lock things in. My thirty-year old friends are saying that younger adults, who were affected by covid lockdowns, have a different social and motivational framework. The friend set is often far away online, and fractally niched. That, and because markets, and leadership that polarizes for grift, means that they have not assimilated to the common culture. If there is still one.

        Please note, the STFU is for my circle of love. This venue would die with silence. You can’t do critical thinking and suppress data.

          2. Dwight

            Concerning to hear Robb agree with other guy’s call for designation of leftist groups as domestic terrorists.

            1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

              yes, Robb’s calm affect and calls for resisting blind tribalism made his matter-of-fact planning for civil clampdown even more alarming.

      2. Li R

        IM Doc, regarding the “celebration” you are seeing from your left-leaning grandchildren, I had a conversation with a family member who was also wondering the same, and I think we narrowed it down to the following causes:

        1) Left-leaning young people have become desensitized to violence due to a near constant stream of videos from the Gaza strip.
        2) Everyone under 40 grew up in a post-Columbine world. Gun violence is not a hypothetical to them. Charlie Kirk took a fairly cavalier attitude towards gun deaths. There’s a video that has been constantly playing on social media of Kirk at one of his public appearances in which he says (this is an exact quote): “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the second ammendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.”
        3) From a purely narrative standpoint, the way he died is very, very ironic. Almost too on the nose, even. He died from a single shot to the neck, while having a debate on gun violence, defending the side of the guns.
        4) The inscriptions on the bullets indicate that the assasin was probably a right-leaning young person with a severe case of brain rot and irony poisoned politics. This means, someone who was probably radicalized by the alt-right pipeline that Kirk had helped create over the past decade. Again, narrative irony. (“Live by the sword, die by the sword,” and also “You were destroyed by a tragedy of your own making.”) The shooter could still turn out to be a leftist, but right now everyone is running with the “groyper” theory.

        The sheer irony of the event, the fact that people have become used to seeing death on their social media feeds, and the fact that it happened to someone in the establishment and not to some random middle eastern child, means that people are feeling schadenfreude more than sadness or anything else. The ones who are very concerned (as the article above points out) are the influencers, who for the first time have to consider that what they say online might have fatal consequences.

        1. Danco

          Bingo! Plus the fact he had actively used his position to make the lives of already oppressed minorities even worse. And the sheer hypocrisy of it all.

        2. AV_Guy

          Please read the full quote from Charlie Kirk:

          AUDIENCE QUESTION: How’s it going, Charlie? I’m Austin. I just had a question related to Second Amendment rights. We saw the shooting that happened recently and a lot of people are upset. But, I’m seeing people argue for the other side that they want to take our Second Amendment rights away. How do we convince them that it’s important to have the right to defend ourselves and all that good stuff?

          CHARLIE KIRK: Yeah, it’s a great question. Thank you. So, I’m a big Second Amendment fan but I think most politicians are cowards when it comes to defending why we have a Second Amendment. This is why I would not be a good politician, or maybe I would, I don’t know, because I actually speak my mind.

          The Second Amendment is not about hunting. I love hunting. The Second Amendment is not even about personal defense. That is important. The Second Amendment is there, God forbid, so that you can defend yourself against a tyrannical government. And if that talk scares you — “wow, that’s radical, Charlie, I don’t know about that” — well then, you have not really read any of the literature of our Founding Fathers. Number two, you’ve not read any 20th-century history. You’re just living in Narnia. By the way, if you’re actually living in Narnia, you would be wiser than wherever you’re living, because C.S. Lewis was really smart. So I don’t know what alternative universe you’re living in. You just don’t want to face reality that governments tend to get tyrannical and that if people need an ability to protect themselves and their communities and their families.

          Now, we must also be real. We must be honest with the population. Having an armed citizenry comes with a price, and that is part of liberty. Driving comes with a price. 50,000, 50,000, 50,000 people die on the road every year. That’s a price. You get rid of driving, you’d have 50,000 less auto fatalities. But we have decided that the benefit of driving — speed, accessibility, mobility, having products, services — is worth the cost of 50,000 people dying on the road. So we need to be very clear that you’re not going to get gun deaths to zero. It will not happen. You could significantly reduce them through having more fathers in the home, by having more armed guards in front of schools. We should have a honest and clear reductionist view of gun violence, but we should not have a utopian one.

          You will never live in a society when you have an armed citizenry and you won’t have a single gun death. That is nonsense. It’s drivel. But I am, I, I — I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal. It is rational. Nobody talks like this. They live in a complete alternate universe.

          So then, how do you reduce? Very simple. People say, oh, Charlie, how do you stop school shootings? I don’t know. How did we stop shootings at baseball games? Because we have armed guards outside of baseball games. That’s why. How did we stop all the shootings at airports? We have armed guards outside of airports. How do we stop all the shootings at banks? We have armed guards outside of banks. How did we stop all the shootings at gun shows? Notice there’s not a lot of mass shootings at gun shows, there’s all these guns. Because everyone’s armed. If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?

      3. Palaver

        Before, I used to advise young people to use social media responsibly or help them self-diagnose their emotional maturity. These are impossible asks. What teen can limit themselves to one drink at a house party? What good is a vegan cleanse before a heroin binge?

        Now, I only recommend disconnecting from social media. People seek out their triggers and are often in denial about doing it. They’ll delete one app and restart their behavior or obsession on another app. It’s so disheartening to find victims of bullying online stalking their bullies.

        Though AI has many nefarious uses and it hampers intellectual development in children who rely too much on it, I do hope it can fulfill the desire for connection that social media provides without the very toxic and unpredictable interactions between anonymized strangers. Though humans are more entertaining, I notice myself in a better headspace when interacting with chatbots: From judging, reacting, and asserting to asking, listening, and investigating. Who are people going to shoot if the AI assistant says something offensive? The driving force behind punishment, retaliation, and social media aggression in general is that the “other” feels punished, silenced, or shamed.

      4. AV_Guy

        IM Doc – I’m re-reading “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt and it lays out in pretty stark terms what smartphones + social media + allowing children to use them has done to rewire GenZ’s brains. I don’t know if there is an un-wiring. I’m dealing with some of the same with my high school senior stepdaughter — very smart but no ability to think critically or be challenged on what she believes / has heard / some video has told her. She told me yesterday that Charlie Kirk’s beliefs were “hateful” because she disagreed with them, specifically that he was pro-life. She also admitted that she’d never listened to a full video exchange of Kirk speaking, just short clips that probably left out context. This is discourse for some (most?) of GenZ – another person’s beliefs / statements / convictions are “hateful” because you don’t share them. It’s also hateful to ask someone of GenZ to defend or articulate why they believe the way they do.

        From a bigger technology standpoint, the anonymous communication through apps allows people to never have to see the human behind the other screen and therefore makes it far easier to dehumanize them.

        1. Neutrino

          Back in the day, the New Yorker cartoon line was On the internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.

          Now it devolves all around into On the internet, nobody everybody knows you’re dogs**t.

          The era of quick takes could stand a few deep breaths, even some meditative moments and reflection, along with consideration of viewpoints.

    2. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Not sure how to respond to this. I’d love to STFU and turn off the interwebs, but people are being fired for quoting Charlie Kirk so this stuff is relevant whether we like it or not.

      I’m also trying to bridge our old people MSM/blog world (I’ll be 60 soon) with the Twitter world which is my window to the TikTok/Reddit/Discord/Twitch world of the youngs with guns (and those without).

      IM Doc, I share your concerns with the online media but the underlying material conditions — joblessness, environmental crisis, no social cohesion, wars, etc — would all be there without the web.

      1. Jason Boxman

        It’s amazing how much is just Discord today. In my day it was IRC and you needed tech competence to run your own and being on computers was nerdy and antisocial anyway. And you dialed up.

      2. DF

        “IM Doc, I share your concerns with the online media but the underlying material conditions — joblessness, environmental crisis, no social cohesion, wars, etc — would all be there without the web.”

        I think the two feed into each other. Being isolated, broke, and semi-employed means you a) you have lots of free time to spend online; and b) you don’t have any money or friends to do real-life things with, so you just go online instead.

        1. Iridescent Erudite Armadillo

          This relates to the whole idea of the Spectacle further up in the post proper. The Situationists thought boredom was a social pathology. I wouldn’t go quite that far. Boredom can lead you to doing something productive with your time, like it did with many people who made zines and formed bands back in the day. But now there is so much content on tap that people just log on like you said and don’t use the grind of boredom to make something else. Good points here.

  10. Darthbobber

    No, there is not “every reason” to think Robinson is “a Groyper”. If meant unironically, his inscriptions are consistent with antifa or black bloc shitposting. If ironically, maybe Groyper or any of several alternatives. Or maybe any of the parts of broader gamerland that all the tropes leak out to. To know, you’d have to know. Which nobody does, for all the declarations of this or that “unambiguous truth” advanced with an air of authority by various influencers of wildly disparate ideological positions.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Good catch. Sloppy on my part. I’ve struck it through and amended to a more defensible, “there’s some reason to believe.” My point was to introduce the Groyper wars, Fuentes’ defensive reaction, etc, not to make strong claims I can’t prove. Apologies.

    2. Li R

      I think people are going with groyper because the groypers are known for absolutely hating charlie kirk and harrasing him at public events. It also fits his age, the fact that he was raised in Utah, his Trump and slav pepe cosplays, and the fact that he was a good enough shot that people thought he was a professional sniper. Also, the last few assasinations/attempts on public figures where carried out by right-leaning types with incomprehensively apocalyptic politics, and groyper does fit the bill. We won’t really know, though, until the authorities find the relevant chats or forum posts.

  11. Carolinian

    Big supporter of Israel and big supporter of Trump–that’s enough for me. Do I have a right to an opinion even though never having been “influenced” by him? I think I do and here at NC we are allowed, being Americans.

    It’s the Dems who recently have made themselves obnoxious with their insistence on suppressing “hurtful” speech as though we all have a right to mental ease to go with the ones provided by the founders. This is the root of TDS. Sufferers hate Trump’s rude crude personality. Ask them about the thousands of dead in Gaza or Ukraine and many will go “eh.”

    There’s plenty of hypocrisy on all sides of the great TV show that is the USA. Which is why some of us prefer to turn off the set.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      The 2016 “Resistance” was the first chapter of a lot of this — when the Twitter files revealed that Sen. Mark Warner had gone to Silicon Valley to institute a new censorship regime it confirmed what I’d suspected since the Dems went neo-McCarthyite in the summer of 2016. Now it’s their turn.
      It’s pretty funny to watch the centrists flail about. They want to bootlick Trump now that he’s (seemingly) established in power with every fiber of their being but they already half-ass tried to destroy him with lawfare and are seemingly on the outs with both MAGA and what’s left of the Shitlibs. Boo hoo.

  12. DJG, Reality Czar

    Thanks, Nat Wilson Turner.

    The explanation by Cy Canterel is very good.

    Goya, who portrayed the horrors of war, also wrote, The sleep of reason produces monsters.

    https://museogoya.fundacionibercaja.es/en/obras/the-sleep-of-reason-produces-monsters

    The war has come home. Social media turn out to be a swirl of opinions and the spewing of the national id.

    The source of all of these untoward reactions across the limited U.S. political spectrum is fear.

    Fear will eat you alive.

  13. Henry Moon Pie

    Thanks, Nate. That was a fun ride. The Taylor Lorentz piece made me want to stand up and cheer. The Cy Canterel video was a great explanation of the various subcultures that seem to be involved in this madness. And that Jackson Hinckle tweet was quite interesting. From little bits I saw of the Sunday shows yesterday, the often ancient normies entirely avoided the discussion of groypers.

    I think Cy has it pretty well nailed about the alleged shooter. This type of accelerationism reminds me in one respect of Alexander Berkman’s “propaganda of the deed,” something connected with anarchists. The difference is that Berkman was seeking to serve as midwife to a new society struggling to be born. These “black pill accelerationists” don’t want to create or save anything They just set a fire to see it burn and destroy.

    Things were pretty wild in the 60s, but the vast majority of even radical people were seeking to build something new. SDS’s Port Huron Statement was anything but a nihilistic document, though the Weather Underground was not so pretty. The Blank Panthers didn’t just talk about a better future; they tried to make that future happen with the “Free Breakfast for Children” program. Social media and a decline in religion are sometimes offered as the causes of this growing nihilism, but part of it seems to me to come from the spreading realization that we live in a world controlled by people who do not care in the least about our welfare. In fact, the argument that a large portion of our elites would like to go full “Kilmeade” on us cannot be easily dismissed.

    1. Jason Boxman

      Indeed, witness the Pandemic response, which is basically:

      1. Because Markets
      2. Go Die

      And die people have and will continue to do so, and many more are becoming disabled every year from COVID.

      This timeline has little to recommend it.

  14. ChrisRUEcon

    Nat! You’re gonna have be up till the wee hours sifting through all this! LOL

    #TYVM

    … more later.

  15. Bugs

    Bravo Nat. I was waiting for your analysis, sensed it building in your tweets, and I was not disappointed. Magisterial post. Thanks for bringing your point of view to Naked Capitalism.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Thanks much! This was a multi-day project and I wasn’t sure if I made something coherent or just a mess of memes.

        1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

          Gen X if you please. The Boomers let us watch the fun party through the glass but the house was trashed by the time we got in.

  16. David in Friday Harbor

    I subscribe to Yasha Levine’s Nefarious Russians emails and read his piece when it came out last week. I think that he gets it right.

    They are kings and queens of the Spectacle now — agitating the mass psychosis, exploiting the alienation, pain, and anger that’s surging through the population. They’ve been stirring the psychic oceans, working up surges and storms, and then riding these waves to fame and money and political power.

    It’s worth reading all the way to the end of his piece:

    DON’T SUBSCRIBE.

    DON’T SHARE.

    GET OFF THE MACHINES.

  17. Joe Renter

    Thanks for this insight. Being a boomer and really only getting news and current events from limited sources, I appreciate the post. The world and our society seems to be a big sadness failure.
    Lots of deconstruction ahead.

  18. Another Anon

    This is all way too close to some of Charlie Stross stories where he writes of “Meme Wars” fought by “Combat Epistemologists”.

  19. Kurtismayfield

    The outpouring of support for who was essentially Rush Limbaugh Jr. by the reactionaries is so strange. The fact that the VP is going to be a pall bearer for him is as close as you can get to Kirk receiving a state funeral. I doubt Ben Shapiro would get this much reverence from the administation, unless they see the death as a cynical tool to push through more authoritarian laws. Right now the base is so riled up they might overlook any loss of freedoms for others, because they think they are immune to any adverse effects of Trumpism until too late.

  20. ThirtyOne

    Posted this comment a week ago, repost seems appropriate.

    “Social Media are the Crazy Pills of the people”

    Karl Marx on Social Media

  21. Robert McMaster

    If you weren’t out early defending the many who were unjustly fired, smeared, blacklisted for their opinions about Covid, vaccines and lockdowns then you have no standing here on this matter.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Fair enough. I have no standing on this matter or many other matters.

      But also WTF does that have to do with this post? I’m trying to monitor what’s happening right now. There’s no effort at putting it in historical context.

      And of all the sites to come at with this BS. NakedCapitalism was smeared over RussiaGate in 2016, was warning that Covid was being completely mishandled as soon as the pandemic started, etc etc.

  22. hemeantwell

    Thanks for your work, Nat. After watching the tiktok on black pill accelerationism a short course in meme-based political theory is very much needed. It’s so fragmented, dispersed. I can see why Robinson is staying silent. If you don’t get it, he has nothing to say to you.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      That’s assuming he did it. For some strange reason, I don’t have any confidence in Kash Patel’s FBI, the governor of Utah, the media, or frankly, the concept of consensus reality itself at this point. Oh the lulz.

      1. judy2shoes

        Thank you, Nat, for this comprehensive article. It filled in a few holes for me and opened up some more – particularly the @cybelecanterel video, from which I gleaned enough to understand both the dynamics described, as well as the fact that I’m clearly out of the loop. For what it’s worth, I share your lack of confidence in “Kash Patel’s FBI, the governor of Utah, the media, or frankly, the concept of consensus reality itself at this point.”

        In case you haven’t seen it yet, The Grayzone just posted a new article about an “intervention” with Charlie in the Hamptons about Charlie’s going off the Israel reservation, as it were. Includes some names and bios of others allegedly in attendance.

        1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

          I was just reading that. They’ve been doing some great reporting on this. And speaking of the political blender, Harrison H. Smith of InfoWars of all things (FWIW I think Alex Jones should be in prison for blood libel and the whole channel should have been shut down years ago for his lies about school shootings) has been working along similar lines.

          1. judy2shoes

            Don’t worry, Nat. After reading a number of your posts, I have a good sense of where your compass is pointing. FWIW, I think I’ve stepped into an alternate universe in which I find myself watching people like Tucker Carlson periodically, and now, I’m going to hold my nose, dive in, and check out Harrison H. Smith. Thanks for the link.

            1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

              it’s all hands on deck when it’s time to oppose genocide, class war, ww3, biocide, etc.
              I’ve found myself following some people I deeply disagree with on almost everything, it’s a great exercise of your tolerance and critical thinking muscles

              1. Jonathan Holland Becnel

                Hell yeah bro

                Keep it up.

                The goal is to Unite the Working Class.

                Their goal is to divide & conquer.

                It is up to us to navigate these emotionally charged waters with the grace of reason and the humility of our passions both Online & IRL.

                It’s up to us to give them the Vision of a better future like those of old.

                As the Goonies said, “it’s our time now.”

                The Sleeper Has Awakened.

                Long Live the American 🇺🇸 Public!

                And thanks, NC, for bringing Nat on board. While I still miss Lamberts take on things, Nats doing it too in their own way.

    1. Carolinian

      Just out interview of Blumenthal by Chris Hedges.

      https://scheerpost.com/2025/09/15/israel-charlie-kirk-and-the-weaponization-of-murder-w-max-blumenthal-the-chris-hedges-report/

      Blumenthal says that Kirk surged to the front of conservative influencers both through talent and heavy support by the Israeli hasbara complex that wanted a voice agains BDS. He says that the Gaza slaughter eventually turned Kirk against Netanyahu and the Israelis said shape up or else.

      Max isn’t saying they shot him but rather that they plan to take charge of the postmortem media frenzy to further suppress objections to Zionism. He says Trump is also “afraid” of the Israelis but doesn’t suggest why exactly.

      By this account it was Kirk’s very religiosity that made him useful because they are using Christian Nationalists preachers to shore up waning support.

      And yes this is all very CT but, I think, worth a look.

      So Kirk….saint or sinner or both??

  24. bertl

    My impression is that Charlie Kirk was an incredibly competent public speaker and, more important, a great community organiser training other community organisers by example – and I hope people with similar talents will begin to rise on the British Left when Your Party finally gets its act together.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      I have a blazing passionate hatred for Keir Starmer and a simmering contempt for Jeremy Corbyn FWIW.

        1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

          ah of course. lol at my expense.

          Effing Corbyn, relentlessly hapless. The branding on that is so bad I forgot what the name was and just call it “the new Corbyn thing”

  25. mrsyk

    This is terrific post, thanks. I particularly enjoyed the Cy Canterel video.

    Columbine happened 26 years ago. Most Americans under the age of 45 enjoyed at least one year of of our present high school shooting era. Seems arguable that that political vigilanteism is a natural development. Consider (memory holed) Luigi.

    As an aside, I see Fox News host Brian Kilmeade, who, while on the air, said mentally ill homeless people should be executed, is still employed. Heh heh heh, No pudding ’til you eat your hypocrisy.

    1. judy2shoes

      It’s a slippery slope, this idea of killing mentally ill homeless people, and ideas like this have bipartisan support. I’m reminded of the slashing of support for institutionalized mentally ill patients early on in the Regan years, pushing them out of the institutions basically into the streets because community support was lacking or inadequate. I’m reminded of opioid deaths of despair and the deaths of nursing home seniors who died when Cuomo told hospitals to send covid patients to nursing homes. Lt. Col. Anthony Aguilar (retired) said, as he was being led in handcuffs out of a congressional meeting at which he and another service member were protesting the genocide in Gaza, that Americans need to wake up – that what’s happening in Gaza will be coming home to the u.s. That is one brave man, who has been in the service his entire career. Frankly, I worry for his safety because he’s been spreading his message anywhere he can get an audience. He’s had little time during his adulthood (I surmise) to grasp what’s been going on here since he started fighting the empire’s wars in the early 2000s. I think he’s shocked by what he is seeing now that he is back here; it’s almost like Rip van Winkle waking up after a 20-year sleep. Heck, I’m shocked myself, and I’ve been around a while.

  27. Palaver

    This quote has been stuck in my mind recently: “Digital media was an escape from reality. Now, reality is the escape from digital media.”

    Should our nation address the political crimes of passion on a university campus ahead of the widespread, inescapable material deprivations of economic insecurity or the geopolitical instability killing thousands of people?

    In this age of the “attention economy” and algorithmically served political sensationalism, my only remaining power is in refusing consent and not consuming or being distracted by this slop. I now know the length of a Mauser rifle and the inseam measurements of some alleged shooter’s pants when I should’ve said no and let be what it is: A historical footnote to these turbulent times that I would sooner see in a rearview mirror. Most people are better off eyes forward, hands steady on the wheel, doors locked, and pressure on the gas pedal.

    But our very serious politicians are also online political rubberneckers! Yes, because digital media is also their escape from real world accountability and governance. The people are without bread, shelter, and healthcare but they quickly serve up memes, safe/censored spaces, and terminal mass psychosis.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      “But our very serious politicians are also online political rubberneckers!” great insight.

  28. Ben Panga

    Nice article Nat, thank you. Appreciate you swimming the social media sewers for us. From previous experience, I know it’s a sanity challenging experience.

    Also this throwaway line is gold:

    Matt Taibbi is as lost in that bygone era as Kirk, but he’s still posting about it.

    On Kirk, my money is it’s the same group (Mossadish with American Thielish friends) that has been fairly openly pulling shit for the last year or so – the 1st (and maybe 2nd) Trump assassination attempt; maybe the Saint Luigi thing, some of the drone related weirdness. Epstein obviously. And a whole load we’ve mostly forgotten during the election.

    Btw Nat – are you a reader of James Ellroy? These times feel very like his American Tabloid to me

      1. Geo

        Got a chuckle from me as well. Sad to see the guy get mired in a swamp of grievance politics. He was definitely done dirty during the Russia-gate hysteria but sadly that experience seems to have broken his brain.

    2. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      missed the Ellroy question. I read his Black Dahlia book and the book about his mom in the 90s. Agree that we’re in an Ellroy-esque era in many ways.

      1. Ben Panga

        American Tabloid was the book I’m thinking of:

        American Tabloid is a 1995 novel by James Ellroy that chronicles the events surrounding three rogue American law enforcement officers from November 22, 1958, through November 22, 1963. Each becomes entangled in a web of interconnecting associations between the FBI, the CIA, and the Mafia, which eventually leads to their collective involvement in the John F. Kennedy assassination.

        Amazing book!

  29. Ben Panga

    Does anyone know if Nina Illingworth still posts anywhere?

    She was always very astute and plugged into RW meme culture.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      Oh wow, thanks for reminding me of her. I haven’t seen her posting in years. She had many bangers!

  30. dingusansich

    An impressive exposition by Canterel, reminiscent at once of a scholarly survey of doctrinal nuances among 19th-century Russian anarcho-nihilists and a 21st-century alt-right rendition of The Official Preppy Handbook.

  31. Frank

    I never heard of Kirk until now.
    Given the rending of fabric and gnashing of teeth it looks to me like he was a “conservative” swamp creature who recently got cold feet about sorta defending a holocaust.
    I’m skeptical about the guilt of the suspect.
    But that’s just me.

  32. none

    Here is an interesting blog post,. It says maybe the shooting is the US’s Reichstag fire (though I first heard of that in context of the WTC attacks):

    https://kristindumez.substack.com/p/things-are-different-now

    And:

    The problem with being a historian is that we know how scripts like this tend to play out. Almost always play out.

    In the days after Kirk’s killing, many of us who study political violence and reactionary movements checked in with each other—historians, journalists, sociologists, political scientists. We were all seeing the same thing.

    A week or so ago (before the shooting), I had rabbitholed on the topic of “political ponerology”, a theory that we end up getting psychopaths in charge of the government. The book that introduced the phrase is a bit weird and the publishing house is run by a nutcake (the nutcake is not the book author though). So tread a bit carefully, but there is good stuff to find. The Rationalwiki article is pretty informative:

    https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Essay:Political_Ponerology

    I haven’t tried reading the book itself so far, though its text is online. Some of the stuff definitely seems apropos though.

    1. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      both very interesting angles, thanks.

      I think things are a bit too weird and there’s too big a split between the youth and the elders to pull off a 1930s style movement but Stephen Miller is trying his best as is Bibi.

      Agree about Ponerology.

    2. Nat Wilson Turner Post author

      thank you! The kitsch one made me think immediately of the straight cringe that Ted Cruz has been posting.

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