I'll be honest: until his murder, I had no idea who Charlie Kirk was. None. My daughter, 18, did. She walked into the kitchen with a grin and said, “Kirk was shot…he loved guns, right?” I nodded, pretending I knew. We’ve been here before: I forget, I bluff, life moves on. Only hours later I had to write the story for our site.
So yes, dear colleagues at the big newsrooms, BBC, CNN, ABC and the rest: there are people who call themselves journalists who had no idea. I could name (and shame) at least five others just yesterday, all in their fifties and sixties, who didn’t know him either. There’s a whole tribe of us who don’t track the endless churn of online debates and culture wars. And it’s not only about age, it’s more like a time machine. The big guys set the tempo. The rest of us follow. Or do you?
Or maybe it’s not the media, or even the U.S. at all. I Googled. I stayed glued to the updates, the international press leaned on the same descriptors: “right-wing activist”, "conservative", “prominent”, “ally of Trump”. I wondered if this was a coordinated line from above, or simply media caution. But it didn’t feel like it matched the reality.
As I scrolled, I noticed that the word “racist” was everywhere on social media, woven into the normalization of politics. Just like in real life, racism was always there, only online it screamed louder. It struck me that people like Kirk live inside a digital universe we don’t inhabit, one that shapes millions of younger people, leaving the rest of us oblivious.
But the murder was real, and so is the polarization. It feels like the 1960s again, when political assassinations shook America and rippled into Europe. Back then, it took a university, a movement, a path into politics. Now it happens in an instant. A shooting in the U.S. becomes global in real time, the outrage, the mourning, the memes, all unfolding everywhere at once.
So the question is this: is today’s polarization the product of American politics, or are American politics themselves a product of of social media, podcasts, influencers? Wasn’t Kirk himself shaped by that very ecosystem?
Let’s not get carried away: a martyr? He was neither King nor Mandela. Thirty years ago, he would have been a fringe figure with extreme views. Keep me out of it. I began with ignorance, and you can call me naive, but in my view, without technology Kirk would hardly be considered a “great loss.”
