Charlie Kirk and the Outrage Machine

The right-wing influencer's death didn’t pause the machine; it kicked it into the next gear.

Illustration by Susan J. Demas

The crack of a single shot from long distance led to nationwide chaos.

Right-wing shock jock and provocateur Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at a university in Utah. He was 31 years old.

The death was shocking, but not all that surprising, considering the security parameters in place for the outdoor event, the rhetoric that Kirk weaponized on a regular basis, and the current social environment of the United States — it was as if the powers that be held up a mirror to show us the horror of who we really are.

We Can’t Pretend It Away this Time

It happened in broad daylight, on the campus of Utah Valley University — streamed for the world to see. A tent with “AMERICAN COMEBACK” emblazoned on it, folding chairs and barricades forming the familiar set of Kirk’s outrage economy, and a crowd that was hyped and primed for the spectacle.

Then the chaos: A crack, people hit the ground, hats and signs were abandoned in the grass. Barricades tipped over like discarded props. An empty microphone lying next to the man who never spoke again.

Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in the world he helped build.

That’s not gloating. That’s the reality we live in, and the reality we can no longer sanitize. The instinct was to call it an aberration — a tragedy, even in our current political environment. But that’s a lie. This is who we are.

The World He Built

Kirk was never a brilliant theorist, a powerful orator, or a once-in-a-generation organizer — he was a motivated high school graduate who forwent college for an opportunity to make money in the political arena when he met a donor.

His talent was simple: He understood how to turn resentment into clicks, and clicks into cash.

He rose by turning college campuses into a stage. He branded ordinary professors and administrators as villains, and convinced their conservative students that they were warriors in a battle against “the left,” then built a permanent machine out of their temporary grievances.

Turning Point USA, the organization he founded with Tea Party donor Bill Montgomery, became less about civic education and more about cultural weaponry. “Prove Me Wrong” booths weren’t forums for debate; they were content farms designed to bait confrontation and rack up views. Those views drove donors and fundraising. That fundraising fueled more spectacle. And the spectacle hardened into a political identity that was adopted by the highest levels of the Republican Party: conservatism not as philosophy, but as permanent conflict.

This is the world Kirk built and profited from. A world where:

• Disinformation became a lifestyle brand.

• Violence was always just under the surface, lurking as the punchline of every rally.

• Enemies weren’t fellow citizens — they were existential threats.

It was a feedback loop that Kirk knew how to commandeer. The tragedy is that once unleashed, feedback loops don’t stop when they’ve made you rich. They keep feeding until they consume everything, including you.

Wrapped up in that feedback loop was the demonization of the LGBTQ+ community, especially trans people, and a deliberate effort to erase them from public life. Kirk once described transgender individuals as “a throbbing middle finger to God.” His attacks didn’t stop there — he argued the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake, and even suggested that Black women lacked the brainpower to be taken seriously.

When Kirk began voicing these views, the Republican Party had not yet calcified into the grievance machine it is today. Charlie Kirk helped make that happen. LGBTQ+ people — and all those targeted by his weaponized religious bigotry — are less safe today because of the words he spoke and the environment he cultivated.

Grift Before the Blood Was Dry

The most revealing part of this moment might not have been the violence itself, but what happened next.

Almost immediately, Kirk’s supporters weren’t grieving. They were scavenging.

Video from the scene shows people scooping up MAGA hats and memorabilia, stuffing them into bags like scavengers at a yard sale. Within hours, AI-generated “Charlie Kirk Shooting” books appeared on Amazon — cheap paperbacks promising the full story of an event not even 24 hours old. TikTok’s and livestreams flooded social media, each one including self-promotion centered on clout.

This wasn’t about the man. It was about the vibes, the spectacle. How a tragedy could be stripped for parts and sold to the highest bidder.

If you want to know how deeply transactional we have become, look no further than the scramble for hats and the instant profit of AI book grifts. Charlie Kirk’s death didn’t pause the machine; it kicked it into the next gear.

The Weaponization Begins

Even before the crime scene was cleared, the political exploitation had begun.

Republican members of Congress and right-wing commentators immediately cast blame on Democrats and their “violent rhetoric” as the reason for Kirk’s death. They framed the killing as proof that Democrats, journalists, and the broader “radical left” were responsible for this climate of violence.

The president himself leaned into it. The notification of Kirk’s death was delayed until Trump himself announced it on his Truth Social platform. With an Oval Office speech he attempted to turn Kirk into a martyr and demanded “accountability” from his political enemies, saying, “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals, this kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.” Not accountability for the shooter — accountability for anyone who had ever criticized Kirk.

It was the perfect diversion. Instead of answering for an Epstein birthday book, NATO allies incurring attacks, or his obvious health decline, Trump and Republicans now had a ready-made crisis to weaponize. A murder that could be spun into a political shield.

And it was more than deflection. It was consolidation. By framing Kirk’s death as an attack on the movement itself, Republicans transformed grief into grievance, and grievance into consolidation of the party at a time where Dear Leader was being questioned. Every Republican politician now had an excuse to double down on rhetoric of “revenge,” “law and order,” and “war” — all while ignoring the real crises Americans are living through.

Democrats Take the Bait

And then there were the Democrats.

Ever terrified of being called callous, desperate to appear “presidential” and “unifying,” Democrat leaders lined up to offer their condolences and condemn what happened. Statements poured in memorializing Kirk as a “thought leader,” “a father,” “a passionate voice for young people,” all while videos of Kirk’s divisive rhetoric circulated online. Corporate media packaged montages of his “impact” and “legacy.”

But here’s the truth: Charlie Kirk despised Democrats. He worked his entire career to discredit them, to demonize them, and to convince millions of Americans that they were not legitimate political actors but enemies of the nation. He would have celebrated their downfall without hesitation and almost primed his audience for their visceral response to his death.

And yet, Democrats walked right into the trap. They played their assigned role in the outrage economy: the respectful opposition, the ones who could be gaslit into memorializing a man whose life’s work was dedicated to their destruction — no matter how much it pissed off their voters.

Meanwhile, the right weaponized those very condolences as proof of guilt — claiming that Democrats couldn’t hide their responsibility for creating the climate that killed Kirk.

It is the same asymmetry we see every time: Democrats elevate, Republicans weaponize. One side honors, the other exploits.

And the cycle never breaks.

This Is Who We Are

The uncomfortable truth is that the Charlie Kirk shooting didn’t reveal a new America. It held up a mirror to the one we already live in:

• A country where violent rhetoric is not the exception, but the business model.

• A country where tragedy isn’t grieved but scavenged — for clicks, merch, and grifts.

• A country where political parties don’t mourn together but immediately use death as ammunition against each other.

• A country where Democrats can’t escape the trap of respectability politics, even when it means laundering the record of someone who actively hated them.

Charlie Kirk’s world didn’t just kill him. It continues to kill the truth, dignity, and possibility of democratic life.

The outrage economy he helped build won’t stop with him. It’s already cashing in on his death. And unless we admit that this is who we are — not a deviation, but the norm — we will keep watching the same cycle play out, again and again, until there’s nothing left.

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We don’t celebrate death here. But we won’t sanitize it either.

Charlie Kirk’s killing was wrong. It was also inevitable in the world he created and profited from. And the reaction to his death — the scavenging, the clout-chasing, the political weaponization, the gaslit memorials — shows us exactly where America is.

Beholden to the machine.

And that machine is running stronger than ever.

Evan Fields is a veteran who writes the News from Underground Substack. Read the original article here.

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