The recently assassinated right-wing activist Charlie Kirk built his celebrity around a table, a sign—“Prove me wrong”—and a formula. On campuses across the United States, he invited students to debate him. But what was styled as debate, with its promise of intellectual openness and the possibility of persuasion, was in practice something rather different: a carefully staged theatre of domination. The students sat opposite him were less partners in inquiry than foils, often left flustered or humiliated. The endgame? Meme-worthy clips viewed by millions on TikTok, serving up a spectacle of victory for “us” over “them”.
This style of engagement thrives on our highly polarised social media because it satisfies a hunger for politics-as-entertainment, where crushing victories are depicted over opponents who are not just wrong but foolish, contemptible, even evil. Genuine debate is hard. It requires patience, humility and a willingness to admit uncertainty. Kirk’s format seemed to exclude all of that by design. What remained was not so much dialogue but its simulacrum, a spectacle that replaced the risks of thinking together with the cheap rewards of viral domination.
This is what the American philosopher Judith Butler has called “performativity”: the way repeated acts, gestures and words don’t just reflect reality but help create it. Kirk’s “debates” performed a vision of politics as zero-sum combat. And online, that performance became power. Viral clips didn’t just mirror Kirk’s authority as a formidable right-wing operative and star—they built it.
Tragically, Kirk’s alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, may have been trying to play a similar game. We search for ideological explanations—was this the act of a radicalised opponent, an attack on conservatism, on Kirk’s particular views? But early evidence suggests another driver: the desire to go viral, to seize attention, to matter. On the internet, depictions of violence are a mind-bogglingly fast way to do that. Robinson has reportedly described engravings found etched on the bullet casings as “mostly a big meme”.
Unsurprisingly, videos of the shooting did go viral. Replayed millions of times, the footage circulates like a meme, endlessly consumed, commented on, reinterpreted, even joked about. If Kirk instrumentalised college students for his own virality, his killer—in the most grotesque way possible—may have in turn instrumentalised him. If this is right, then Kirk’s assassin may be less an ideological opponent and more a mirror: each turned others into instruments for extending their own viral reach.
None of this would absolve Kirk’s killer or mean Kirk was in any way to blame for his own death. But it does reveal something important about a world they inhabited, one where violent domination—whether real or rhetorical—of one’s enemies is the ultimate clickbait through which power is first performed digitally and then consolidated or enacted in the flesh. In this place, virality becomes the supra-ideology before which traditional political differences fade.
Of course, there is a vast gulf between rhetorical humiliation and actual killing. Yet a culture that relentlessly celebrates one may, in the minds of some, seem to justify the other. When domination gets clicks and cruelty becomes currency, the boundary between online performance and reality begins to dissolve. The political arena turns into a stage where the most spectacular gestures—verbal or physical—are what count. And in such a culture, violence may be less a rupture than an extension of the script.
Donald Trump and his allies mastered this logic long ago. The AI image of Trump as Apocalypse Now’s Colonel Kilgore, promising an assault on Chicago, is a recent example. Such violent fantasies circulate as memes—playful, deniable, yet deeply threatening. Online performance bleeds into real power: domination enacted digitally is then enacted politically, socially, physically.
Kirk, to his credit, recognised that politics requires something more than clicks. He sought face-to-face interaction, even if he distorted its spirit. Real politics requires empathy, the courage to listen, the willingness to be wrong. None of these virtues go viral. And yet they remain democracy’s lifeblood.
What we face now, however, is a political economy of virality underwritten by an alliance of billionaires. Tech companies are free to profit from their rage-bait algorithms so long as Trump & Co get to turn that rage to their autocratic ends. The circle is complete when the president and his entourage stand at Kirk’s funeral and rail against supposed radical left networks promoting violence. No evidence is produced, because such networks, as they imagine them, do not exist. The irony is stark: in seeking enemies in the mirror, they describe themselves. If we’re not careful, I fear we will soon see our democracy reflected only as a fading image in that distorted glass.
