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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.

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 Lavine’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 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.

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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5 comments

  1. 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

    Reply ↓
  2. 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”.

    Reply ↓
  3. 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?

    Reply ↓
  4. 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.

    Reply ↓
  5. 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.

    Reply ↓

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