Seven Lessons from the Kirk Assassination

We have grown accustomed to the craziness of the American political discourse, the heated debates, the social media skirmishes, the fierce disagreements. But we have always stopped short of assassination. That fragile barrier was shattered last week when Charlie Kirk, a commentator with immense influence was murdered on a college campus, an event so shocking it reverberated around the world. News outlets from France to Germany to Korea carried the story.

Influencers don’t expect a bullet for a hot take. But it was carried live on video to millions, a stark testament to the power and horror of the short-form video age.

Kirk was a huge political influencer. His numbers put him at the top of the politics game, 500,000 radio listeners, 4.3 million YouTube subscribers, 5.3 million on Twitter, 7.8 million on TikTok. Kirk was also an organizer, he turned his company Turning Point into the defacto youth wing of MAGA, trained thousands and mobilized supporters and had chapters in most colleges around the country. He did this all in his 20s. He was a bit of a political savant and an expert in his domain.

There is more going on underneath the surface that a lot of people are missing.

Seven Observations on The Charlie Kirk Assassination

1) Invisible Risk of College Debates

2) The Problem with Being Too Online

3) How Many Lives Has Obesity Saved?

4) Free Speech is a Fragile Exception

5) Why I’m Worried About the Unemployment Rate Rising For Young Adults

6) The Death of Monolithic Youth Culture

7) Cancel Culture and the Corporate Enforcers

1) The Invisible Risk of College Debates

Charlie Kirk rose to fame began with leveraging the viral 2010s "debate me bro” college format to become very popular and raise large amounts of money. Essentially, go to universities, engage students in heated debates, and packaging those confrontations as content. It was effective, shareable, and massively popular.

This is how Jordan Peterson originally got his fame and fortune as well. It was because he was on YouTube between 2017 and 2019 engaging in campus debate with students. The rest is history.

However, this campus debate strategy carries a deep and often overlooked risk.

The audience is constantly changing. Students graduate, new ones arrive on campus. The people attending in 2018 aren’t the same in 2025, they’re gone. Someone else is there now. There’s an entirely new youth cohort.

The demographic entering college today is not the same as it was five years ago. This generation came of age post-COVID. Their media diet is dominated by TikTok, not long-form YouTube. They exhibit higher rates of anxiety and depression, and are more susceptible to online radicalization. They have shorter attention spans and less interest in traditional debate.

Also, some groups that were small in 2018 are now much larger. Take the LGBT group as one example, which seemed to motivate the killer to strike down Kirk. This same person was 14 when Kirk initially started doing campus debates. It’s a new generation.

They changed changed. In 2024 9.3% of U.S. adults identified as LGBTQ. This figure has nearly doubled since 2020 and significantly increased from the 3.5% recorded in 2012. The rise is largely among young adults, with 21% of Generation Z adults identified as LGBT.

Also, the wider public is different now as well. We saw the aftermath of another gen z assassin, Luigi Mangione, of the healthcare CEO. Many people made him into a folk hero. It wasn’t like he was universally condemned by the public. It was a little shocking. This makes assassinations a little more acceptable than before.

Knowing this, should Charlie Kirk’s security team have held the event indoors and done an extensive security check of every audience member? Sure. That would have been smarter. It isn’t 2017 anymore. Things are darker now, more serious, people are wishing death on each other.

But it’s hard to recognize these things in the moment though. It’s subtle when the environment shifts over time.

This failure was a symptom of a broader failure to understand how deeply the digital world has corrupted our sense of the real

2) The Problem with Being Too Online

Political assassinations are as old as government itself. There’s a reason for that. Politicians are people who hold real power and can create policy. An assassin can directly change the trajectory of a country.

However, for a growing number of people, politics is no longer primarily about elections, legislation, or policy. It’s not about following a senator’s voting record or the intricacies of a foreign aid bill.

Instead, their entire political worldview is built around the politics storyline.

The perpetual online discourse, the drama between influencers, the fiery monologues from podcasters, and the daily skirmishes on social media. These individuals are hyper-engaged, but their engagement is directed toward a parallel digital universe. They can name more media pundits and Twitch streamers than they can U.S. senators. The main characters in their political narrative aren’t the officials in government who wield actual power; they’re the personalities in media.

This creates a dangerous conflation. Clout and viral reach is confused with political power.

The consequence is a distorted reality. This audience is deeply invested in the performance of politics, often at the expense of its substance. For them, figures like Charlie Kirk hold as much power as the President or Senators who actually vote on things.

It’s a bad trend.

If an influencer like Charlie Kirk is perceived to wield power equivalent to a government official, then in the warped logic of a radicalized individual, assassinating him becomes a political act of equivalent weight to assassinating a senator.

This creates a world where thousands of media figures and influencers become viable targets for individuals seeking to make a "real" political impact. It dramatically expands the battlefield of political violence.

3) How Many Lives Has Obesity Saved?

I’ve never seen a fat shooter in my entire life. Have you?

This stands in contrast to the reality of modern America, where over 70% of the adult population is overweight or obese.

We are rightly and relentlessly warned about the dangers of obesity. It is a primary driver of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a host of other conditions that shorten lifespans and drain healthcare systems. It is a national health crisis. However, we rarely consider its inverse psychological and behavioral effects. Obesity is physiologically pacifying. It leads to chronic fatigue, lethargy, and a general state of being satiated and physically unmotivated. The metabolic and hormonal state of an obese individual is often one of low energy and low agency.

There is even research that backs this up: "With each upwards movement of 5 in the BMI index from the category of people with a BMI of 18.5-25, the odds of committing a violent crime decrease by about 20-25%."

The provocative question then becomes: Has the obesity epidemic, for all its terrible costs, inadvertently functioned as a societal sedative? 

How many potential acts of violence have been not committed because the would-be perpetrator lacked the physical energy, motivation, or hormonal drive to carry them out?

History offers a parallel. The Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses) to describe how the Roman elite maintained power by providing free grain and extravagant games to the populace.

Our modern obesity crisis may be having a similar, unintended effect. A population struggling with the physical burdens of excess weight is, by definition, a less physically active and potentially less volatile population.

This creates a tragic paradox for public health officials and policymakers. The push for a healthier, fitter, more active nation is an unquestionable good for individual well-being and economic productivity. But it may also come with the unintended consequence of unleashing a more energetic, restless, and potentially aggressive segment of the population.

4) Free Speech is a Fragile Exception

We often treat the First Amendment’s protection of offensive speech as a permanent feature of society. It is not. It is a radical and historically anomalous experiment. America stands virtually alone, both in the modern world and throughout history, in its constitutional commitment to protecting the right to say heinous things without fear of government imprisonment.

This principle is not "Lindy."

For most of human history, the default social setting has been to silence the rabble-rouser, the heretic, and the provocateur. This was a matter of social cohesion and survival. From ancient town squares to modern European nations, societies have consistently outlawed "hate speech," operating on the premise that offensive words are a precursor to violence or a harm in themselves. They treat speech not as a fundamental right, but as a regulated activity.

The violent assassination of a figure like Charlie Kirk is a grim illustration of why this protection is so rare, it reveals the raw, human impulse behind those laws. The mob’s demand for retribution against offensive speech is a powerful, ancient force. Free speech asks societies to defy that very instinct. It requires a belief that the answer to bad speech is more speech, not censorship or violence, a concept much of the world views as naive and dangerous.

In this sense, the American system is a beautiful, essential fantasy, one that is constantly under pressure from both sides.

5) Why I’m Worried About the Unemployment Rate Rising

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