Law enforcement tapes off an area after Charlie Kirk, the CEO and co-founder of the conservative youth organization Turning Point USA, was shot at Utah Valley University, on Wednesday.Tess Crowley/The Associated Press
When Charlie Kirk was shot and killed by a sniper on Wednesday, he was sitting under a tent printed with the words “Prove me wrong” at Utah Valley University, debating a young liberal TikTok creator about mass shootings in the United States involving transgender people. The event, attended by some 3,000 people, was being livestreamed across social media. Mr. Kirk was in his natural habitat.
The 31-year-old MAGA influencer, Trump ally and impassioned Christian had built his brand upon his unabashed views on hot-button issues including gender identity and LGBTQ rights, gun control, Black Lives Matter and immigration – relishing opportunities to debate his detractors.
These public clashes with his critics, shared in clips on TikTok and X, propelled Mr. Kirk into the MAGA-sphere and eventually, into U.S. President Donald Trump’s close orbit. With his charisma and controversial opinions, Mr. Kirk shaped the political views of a new generation of right-leaning young Americans, turning political discourse into a spectator sport.
The widespread dissemination of these kinds of out-of-context clips and sound bites, featuring inflammatory verbal sparring, has become increasingly popular in online spaces, turning up the temperature in an already polarized political climate.
Mr. Kirk’s views, which he also espoused on his podcast The Charlie Kirk Show and on social media, were often called homophobic, racist and antisemitic. He said the U.S. Civil Rights Act was a “mistake” and that it spurred changes that are now used as an “anti-white weapon.” He also called for a ban on all gender-affirming care, and claimed that Jews control American colleges, non-profits and Hollywood.
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In a 2024 video titled Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative, produced by the YouTube channel Jubilee, Mr. Kirk debates students one by one, attempting to prove statements such as “abortion is murder” and “college is a scam.”
Since the video was posted a year ago, it has more than 32 million views. Shorter clips, spliced in a way to make viewers feel angry or excited depending on their politics, have also gone viral on X and TikTok.
“I fear that people generally tune into this sort of thing for the reason they tune into other forms of gladiatorial combat: they want to watch their champion defeat, and ideally embarrass, ‘those idiots’ on the other side,” says Eli Finkel, professor and co-director of Northwestern University’s Litowitz Center for Enlightened Disagreement.
“It feeds into a mode of conflict that’s more about the satisfaction with ‘owning the libs,’ or vice versa, than about serious engagement with political ideas or policies,” he says.
For young people, who mainly get their news from social media, ingesting modern politics in this manner is especially enticing.
“If you look at people’s media consumption patterns, particularly younger generations, they tend to consume media that doesn’t involve so much reading as watching or listening in short clips that are easily digestible,” says Jeffrey Blevins, a politics and media professor at the University of Cincinnati. He notes that it’s usually the sharpest soundbites, not the most nuanced, that go viral.
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In recent years, a crop of “debate me bros” have emerged in conservative online culture: political influencers who go viral for challenging their opponents to rhetoric showdowns, such as Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson or conservative commentator Ben Shapiro.
The left has their own cohort, too, including British writer and former MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan (he recently appeared in a Jubliee video titled 1 Progressive vs 20 Far-Right Conservatives) and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who had debated Mr. Kirk in the past, and planned to do so again later this month at Dartmouth College.
Catherine Tebaldi, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Luxembourg who has studied the rise of Mr. Kirk and the rebranding of Christian nationalism on American campuses, says his style of debate videos is a product of the hyper-masculine world of “the manosphere.”
“The debates are circulating particular well-worn tropes, arguments from the manosphere or Christian right, rebranded as killer arguments to ‘destroy the left’,” says Dr. Tebaldi, adding that some conservative influencers paint colleges as “indoctrination factories.”
On Friday morning, officials identified 22-year-old Tyler Robinson as the suspect alleged to have shot Mr. Kirk.
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Many internet sleuths concluded that because it appeared Mr. Robinson came from a conservative family, college must have “radicalized” him, a common talking point made by Mr. Kirk.
Officials have not announced a motive, but Utah Governor Spencer Cox said in a press conference Friday that Mr. Robinson had “become more political in recent years” and had discussed his dislike of Mr. Kirk with a family member.
In the aftermath of the arrest, anonymous users called for vengeance and posted violent threats against Mr. Robinson, the Democratic Party and progressives as a whole.
Dr. Blevins, the media and politics professor, says online debate culture – and the resulting viral clips – can make politics feel even more controversial.
“It tends to make us more polarized, it tends to be more divisive because you’re not trying to understand the other side. You’re not trying to make any intellectual compromise,” he says.
“It also tends to amplify the rhetoric. Already, we’re seeing things like ‘We’re at war’ and ‘We’re coming after you,’” Dr. Blevins says, referring to comments made by high-profile conservatives such as Steve Bannon and Alex Jones. “None of that is helpful.”