The assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk is a catalyst of chaos that even its own creator—the American superstructure—can no longer control
When we talk about America, we always approach it from two perspectives, and in that sense, it is probably unique in the world—those are, of course, its external and internal faces. Likewise, there are two worlds in this world: the American one, and the one outside of America. Most of us who live in this outer world are generally interested in its external “engagements.” The world—Europe in particular—is so saturated with American influence that it’s almost negligent not to stay updated on its ambitions and plans. This is especially true today in the context of the war in Ukraine because, despite everything happening in Europe, America remains perhaps the single most influential actor in shaping the course of that war—sometimes even more than Kyiv or Moscow.
In the case of Donald Trump, we unfortunately learned that his position is not a position at all—just a recalculation of interests, a constant recalibration. The potential outcomes of the war (which remain elusive) seem to mirror that same fluidity.
America’s internal situation, however, we follow from one escalation to the next—and those are coming at ever-shorter intervals. The recent assassination attempt on Charlie Kirk comes as the crest of a wave of escalation that has now lasted—comfortably—we can say, for years. A far more dramatic peak would have occurred if the attempted assassination of now-President Donald Trump last year had been successful. But some sixth sense (or “God’s will,” as he claims) saved him—he moved his head just as the bullet was whizzing toward him.
Young Charlie Kirk (31) wasn’t as lucky—or divinely protected. The bullet hit him in the neck, to the shock of several thousand attendees at Utah Valley University. That shock soon spread like an earthquake across the world.
There is something deeply sinister—not just visually disturbing—about this deadly act. And yet, it’s wise to restrain curiosity, as the scene has a tendency to linger in one’s mind. The inclusion of the actual footage in countless news articles—where blood, far more real than on TV, spurts out in its real color—is a largely unnecessary and morbid move. At the same time, it is intimately tied to the nature of this story. Violence has been aggressively normalized and consumed—there’s hardly any “well-rated” TV content today without an absurd amount of violence, as if we had for too long suppressed a primal human tendency that now demands to be fed. Violence is now treated as raw stimulation for the remaining animal instincts in homo sapiens—consumed for quantity, with evolutionary regression as a side effect.
So why is this scene still shocking?
Why does the bullet that hits Charlie Kirk’s neck strike deeper into our collective consciousness than the infinitely more horrifying daily massacres and dismemberments (often of children) on the shores of the Mediterranean? It’s not that we’ve become desensitized to the most horrific massacre of the 21st century, still carried out with impunity by the state of Israel against the dispossessed Palestinian people in the locked-down Gaza Strip—we haven’t yet gone fully numb, to that Stalinist distinction between “a tragedy and a statistic.” But we do recognize when a bullet carries massive consequences.
And when those consequences are directly tied to America, to which we are all in some way linked, the attention becomes different—however morally wrong that may sound.
Fate would have it that today is September 11—one of those dates on the calendar that will, for who knows how long, always be associated with that day in 2001 when we watched the unreal destruction of the WTC towers in New York. Those towers were among the most famous buildings in the world—a symbol not just of New York but of America itself. But the world is full of fascinating architecture, and the destruction of almost any other structure wouldn’t have carried that same lasting impact (does anyone remember the exact date when Notre-Dame de Paris nearly burned down? The year?). The difference was that we knew on that day—9/11 was a turning point. We’ve been living in a post-9/11 world ever since—a world more brutal, more violent, and more filled with war crimes (led by the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan).
Today’s assassination attempt, clearly, is not on that level. In fact, many who don’t closely follow American domestic affairs may have only just heard of Charlie Kirk for the first time. But within the internal structure of America, this is an earthquake with few precedents.
Once again, it’s about symbolism.
Shooting Charlie Kirk is something like a “make-up” attempt for the failed Trump assassination—in terms of consequences. Because if Trump had been killed, the raw pressure building inside the American pot would have erupted from coast to coast. That pot has been boiling for years, and now no one can shut it off.
Why not? Because the American people already live in a post-inclusive era.
Barack Obama was the last (false) hope. He briefly revived the idea of “we” during a time when polarization already seemed inevitable. But as president of a capitalist superpower that had already economically passed the point of no return, he could only screw things up—which he did.
Trump, then Biden, then Trump again—nothing changed direction. Internal contradictions have only grown and are now becoming unfixable. The only unifying line that once existed—class solidarity—has been dismantled in thoroughly deliberate ways. That’s clearest in the total departure from what the term “left” even means.
In America (and increasingly around the world, where American toxic political standards are exported with a delay), what is today labeled “left” has not grown out of class struggle or dreams of a better world beyond capitalist exploitation—but out of an ideology crafted by America’s own superstructure to create a kind of unified code of “universal values”centered around the American “beacon of democracy.”
Cold War-era America was propagandistic—but more careful, since it had to lure the world against the Soviets. Later, with no opposition, there were no limits. But what America had prepared for the world slipped from its control and morphed into the woke distortion—its final stage. Perhaps in a year or two of absurdity, it might have collapsed on its own—like the bureaucratic excesses of the Soviet and socialist blocs. But that didn’t happen.
Before disintegration came a reaction in the form of a “natural” opposition: the rise of American conservatism.
A clash of worlds in a country that once wanted to control the world. Hatred is no longer just an emotion—it’s a form of identity. Liberals and conservatives—both, in practice, ordinary workers under the same machine—have allowed themselves to be turned into two warring tribes. Some will immediately call this divide et impera, but increasingly, it’s just divide—to the point where impera (rule) no longer has meaning.
The assassination attempt is just a catalyst of the inevitable. In that context, Charlie Kirk—although an individual—is, in an inverted Stalinist interpretation, more statistic than tragedy.
He was very successful at what he did. He likely convinced millions of young people to vote for Trump, often selling them a toxic, self-serving vision of the near future that thrilled them. In the end, one could say he died the way he lived. He once said it was expected that there would be “a few casualties of gun violence” in America if the right to bear arms was to be preserved.
Kirk quite literally died by his own ideals.
Both the glorification of violence and the glorification of this victim are wrong. Kirk, like his spiritual mentor Trump, had a terrible position for every smart one—calling for an end to the war in Ukraine, while simultaneously giving full support to Netanyahu’s hell in Palestine, for example.
As an ideological activist, Charlie Kirk was by no means a hero, and even less is the shooter—especially if it turns out to be a “radical leftist”—who, with that same bullet, may have blown the lid off the pressure cooker. Both sides will suffer—on this and the other side of the divide.
There’s little left for us to do, except—as always—to keep watching America.
Because its consequences will inevitably be ours.
And judging by recent events, it seems we may already be living on its cursed path.
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