Live Leak Oliver Eagan | Brooklyn, New York | September 21, 2025
Ten days ago, my roommate flagged me down and showed me a portrait-mode video of somebody assassinating the conservative influencer Charlie Kirk. Kirk was only 31, but he had proven an oddly durable and influential figure on the American right, moving nimbly through the Tea Party, alt-right and MAGA 2.0 epochs before a .30-06 round tore his neck open for millions to see. I hadn’t seen anything like it since high school, when a bored, drunk childhood friend pulled up LiveLeak.com in his kitchen and scrolled until he found a music-video compilation of Islamic State executions. Doom metal played while masked men calmly lopped off the heads of nameless victims. My friend’s expression was blithe and blank. Years later, watching this gory video of Charlie Kirk dying by the Wasatch Mountains under a banner reading “PROVE ME WRONG,” I felt the cold familiarity of being a teenager again.
I am 24 now, and I belong to a shooting-native generation. I was a high school sophomore when Donald Trump assumed the presidency and a junior when survivors of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School massacre marched for gun control. We knew who Charlie Kirk was: at my liberal high school, we knew that we hated him. My father and I would listen to The Majority Report and Chapo Trap House podcasts as we worked together at an embroidery shop. The hosts skewered people like Kirk and Ben Shapiro for their reconstructed “classical liberalism” and their hall-monitor affects. “Debate Me,” “Change My Mind” and “Prove Me Wrong” seemed more like pocket-protector bluster than anything resembling politics—what young progressives thought they were “doing right” when campaigning after Parkland.
Charlie Kirk, of course, was not just a Young Republican in a skinny polyester suit. In the intervening years of COVID, foreign wars and vaporous bull markets, Kirk built up a devoted base of college conservatives through his Turning Point USA outfit. In 2024, those young men—no longer legible as “Young Republicans”—helped return Trump to the Oval Office. Meanwhile, the Parkland brand of politics has foundered: David Hogg, a Stoneman Douglas survivor, wrote a book called #NeverAgain: A New Generation Draws the Line and founded a pillow company before being pushed out of his position as vice chair of the Democratic National Committee. Over a hundred Americans have died in mass shootings since Parkland.
There is plenty of brutality on and offline. But 26 years after Columbine, with few means of preventing random killing—gun control is a nonstarter, and “mental health” policy proposals a joke—Americans have come to focus more on anatomizing the shooter’s motives and ideologies, as if American minds were exceptionally plastic repositories of sentiment, vulnerable to the slightest informational touch. If we can find out what infected the killer, the logic goes, we can uproot the creeping vine.
Now the FBI has named a suspect: Tyler Robinson, an awkward 22-year-old from southern Utah, who snuck a rifle in his pants and killed Kirk from two hundred yards away. The day the U.S. Marshals arrested Robinson, the governor of Utah solemnly recited the meme phrases Robinson had allegedly engraved on his cartridges: “If you Read This, You Are Gay Lmao.” I felt an uncomfortable jump of memory in my chest: my high school friend awash in his clothes, showing me pictures from iFunny and 9GAG. With mournful eyes, one of Robinson’s high school classmates recorded a TikTok and described him in one word: “Reddit.” Not exactly a basement dweller, but the closest thing to an “average” kid in 2025. Utterly simple and utterly illegible. Antifa killer, Groyper assassin, trans terrorist? Feds? It doesn’t matter. Incoherence and confusion are baked in. After reading the meme messages aloud, Utah’s governor begged Americans to “touch grass.”
It seems clear enough that “touching grass”—itself a degraded reference to the physical world, as if it were a distant cultural memory—beats sitting on Discord all day. It also seems clear enough that the killer’s “ideology” and “motives” don’t service any neat ideas with a Wikipedia page. But even if not a clear-cut political assassination, Kirk’s shooting is not exactly “post-political.” Whether the shooting was the act of a confused killer or a node of a multifractal conspiracy, its consequences are destined to play out in the realm of politics. (Stephen Miller, for one, has vowed to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” left-wing organizations “in Charlie’s name.”) We search for clues to the killer’s motive because we know that the administration will bring a hammer down somewhere, and we know that we can’t do anything but try to predict how, scrying causality from a schizophrenic moment. But in this game, we tacitly accept the brutality underpinning our lighter-than-air memetic world. The #NeverAgain marches after Parkland were ineffectual, but at least they responded, endeavoring to turn the crisis into decisive action. It’s just that Hogg’s grift-like ascension through the institutions of American life came too late. Harvard and the DNC are no sure path to power; there is no generational magic that can “draw the line.”
The night before Robinson surrendered himself to the FBI, I drank wine and watched the Packers game with college friends as we free-associated the potential killer—Mormon? Military? Muslim? Mossad? Malala?—before quickly tiring ourselves out. Did the internet make somebody kill Charlie Kirk? Will Discord make you crazy? Probably. But characterizing our bumper crop of recent shootings as the product of “infohazards” and manipulation is also an expression of a kind of dark wish: for a life beyond politics, where we concede that political action is meaningless—at the ballot box, at the protest rally, from the barrel of a gun. The shooter apparently thought so: he etched his tired jokes and zeroed his scope with no vision of a future after Kirk’s death. Classifying the murder of Charlie Kirk is a fool’s errand, but the mood of passive nihilism that pervades our efforts is the same one that produces these killers. Our dreams curdle into constant useless brutality. Breaking free of these animal forces will require that we acknowledge our freedom to do something else.
Two summers ago, two colleagues and I tried to spend our lunch break in what we’d noticed was a miniature wading pool about ten minutes southwest of our office downtown. Eager and slightly embarrassed, we showed up in tankinis and one-pieces only to be denied entry by a guard: the pool, he advised, was only for children and their caretakers. We retreated, crestfallen, to Washington Square Park, where two of us ventured into the fountain at its center, ankle deep in our sandals, standing meekly in the warm crossfire.
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