Right after Charlie Kirk’s assassination on Sept. 10, 2025, the internet started showing me his videos. This was, initially, disappointing. After a decade of companionship, I had hoped my phone would have been able to guess that I would find his politics repulsive, his schtick shlocky. But I underestimated the algorithm.
Like any good friend, sometimes it knows what you need better than you do yourself and, much to my surprise, I soon found myself pleasantly entranced whenever one of Kirk’s confrontations with some hapless student would pop onto my screen. “Name the five books of the Torah,” he’d demand, smugly sitting back as his interlocutor’s face flushed red, their mouth agape, incomprehensible drivel eventually spluttering out.
Most of the conversation surrounding Kirk’s legacy has focused on his politics, i.e. were the things he said good or bad. Ta-Nehisi Coates, taking the latter view, argued that Kirk “reveled in open bigotry,” and that his politics “amounted to little more than a loathing of those whose mere existence provoked his ire.” This, while true, is probably the least interesting thing about him. Kirk’s politics were conventional throughout his career because his “activism” depended on the largesse of wealthy conservative donors. Two decades ago, when all the energy flooded in from the libertarian wing of the Republican party, Kirk blathered incessantly about free markets and limited government. After Trump won in 2016, Kirk underwent a convenient metamorphosis, adopting nativist-populist branding. The transformation was relatively painless, as Kirk was never really interested in ideas. (In all the videos I’ve watched, he’s never once mentioned any book besides the Bible.) To criticize his ideas, then, is just to bemoan the overall state of conservative politics.
Ezra Klein was on a (slightly) better track when he encouraged us to skip past the nitty-gritty of Kirk’s beliefs and examine him abstractly as a political practitioner. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” he wrote. “He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him.” Klein’s analysis, however, fatally falters because it can’t see past the illusion that concealed Kirk’s trick: While it looked like he was going around talking to other people, what Kirk was actually doing was talking to a machine. At every college he visited, he recorded his conversations and posted them online — this was the entire point of his campus tours. Kirk was never trying to communicate with other people in real life so much as simulate a particular performance for consumption online.
The simulation is what Kirk was actually good at. Whether consciously or not, he appealed to viewers across the entire ideological spectrum. (From the perspective of an influencer, words like “conservative” or “liberal” refer more to complementary market segments than dueling political ideologies). For conservatives, the consumptive experience was vicarious: a chance to own the libs, to bask in the crowd’s adulation while your opponent’s argument falls apart like wet paper. For liberal viewers, the pleasure was a bit murkier. Partly, it was cathartic: a small dose of ragebait, a chance to purge the guilt you feel for thinking all those nasty and bigoted things about the nasty bigots. Beyond that, Kirk’s clips managed to feel transgressive while subtly reinforcing the archetypal professional-class-liberal’s twin tendencies toward self-flagellation and self-flattery: Maybe diversity is a weakness, maybe immigrants don’t have a “right” to come here — maybe the problem is that I’m too nice. Kirk, too, got off on these encounters. You don’t need to be Freud to grasp the psychoanalytic implications of a college dropout wandering from one university to the next, humiliating the students in order to demonstrate the scaminess of their education.
There was a cost to all of it, though. To be heard online, Kirk had to speak in a way that was easily legible to the machine. Luckily, it’s easy to learn how to do that: Every time you talk to it, the internet spits back instant, quantifiable feedback. If the goal is to maximize engagement, you optimize yourself.
One million views when I call undocumented immigrants “criminals”; not so many when I say everyone who smokes weed is lazy. Without even realizing it, everything you want to say becomes what the machine wants you to say; you think you’re speaking through it when it’s speaking through you. This is why it’s inane that the people most eager to canonize Saint Charlie do so on the grounds that he was some paragon of “free speech.” Kirk commodified himself and, in doing so, became an object shaped by an incentive structure he didn’t control. As Karl Marx pointed out two centuries ago, this is the antithesis of freedom: “The primary freedom of the press lies in not being a trade. The writer who degrades the press into a material means deserves as punishment for this internal unfreedom the external unfreedom of censorship, or rather his very existence in his punishment.”
Today, we might say: The political influencer who simulates themselves deserves the loss of it. The world becomes unable to distinguish between the synthetic product on the screen and the person it was scooped out of. Soon, neither can the influencer. Charlie Kirk, the creature of light and pixels, became just as real as Charlie Kirk, the human of flesh and blood.
If you look closely, you can sometimes see the moment when a victim feels the merging of these two entities and frantically tries to escape. Just look at many of Charlie’s friends, the other online right-wing propagandists, who have begun hysterically shrieking about literal demons. Tucker Carlson believes he was physically attacked by one. Candace Owens hasn’t had any personal encounters but knows they control Israel, Hollywood, and maybe Turning Point U.S.A. That thing on the screen isn’t me, they’re trying to say. It’s possessed. But of course that’s you. Your very existence is your punishment.
They say when Charlie died, he looked happy, a knowing half-smile on his face. Like God rescued him. That wouldn’t surprise me.
