(My speech honoring Charlie Kirk: Delphica Society “Continuum Salon”, September 10th, Dallas.)
If you’re extremely online, you learn not to get too emotionally involved in the news.
Any awful thing you can think of is always happening somewhere — if you allow yourself to be provoked by whatever atrocity is held under your nose, they can find whatever they need to make you feel however they want you to feel, about anything.
But the murder of Charlie Kirk was different. The killer wasn’t some random crazy person, he wasn’t radicalized by hallucinations of Jodie Foster, or talking to his dog — he was radicalized by a broad milieu of radical communist transsexuals whom we’ve all encountered, and who were very open about calling for exactly this kind of violence, before and after, in public and private.
Of course there have always been crazies, and even little groups of crazies — but in the aftermath of the shooting, we saw that, actually it was this enormous swath of the American population — millions at least — with whom there was nothing left to say.
One-third of Democrats under 30 were willing to tell a pollster that they thought his murder was justified.
In a sense, you could say that it’s this weightless, highly-online phenomenon:
They probably won’t do anything that requires them to do any jail time or get blood on their hands — but there they really wanted him killed, and they’re glad somebody did it — both because he deserved it, and because an example needed to made, specifically for you and me.
Charlie believed the Bible — and his own common sense — about sex and sexuality, which made him an existential enemy of the most extreme, antisocial, and violent wing of the Left.
He also said that the Civil Rights Act was a mistake — which is what most of the elite coverage focused on, because it put him at odds with the founding myth of the postwar moral order.
Those were the sins that justified his murder.
We all saw this together.
And we all thought, “boy, if that’s enough to get you killed, where does that leave me?” What would these people do if they ever regained control of the state?
Obviously, that didn’t happen — and I’ve been thinking about why.
I remember at the time thinking — really just hoping — that we would then see, together, the stakes and the seriousness of our situation: that everyone who had been marked for death — from the President to the commentariat to your boomer uncle — would find a war footing.
It’s strange that we are commemorating Charlie’s death one day before the 25th anniversary of 9/11, because in some ways it felt the same — that there was this “us”, that had been attacked, and “we” were going to do something about it.
So much has changed since then that it feels like it happened to someone else, in some other country — but mapping the space from there to here can help us understand why the year since Charlie’s death didn’t go the way we had hoped, and what we ought to do next.
The thing people bring up most about those next few days is that George W. Bush had a 90% approval rating, but that doesn’t even begin to cover what it was like. Americans were absolutely glued to a single experience — not just seeing the same events, but having the same internal experience — and knowing they were having the same experience — in a way that’s hard to imagine today, even if it happened to you.
We were of course being told what to think about it — but it felt like nobody needed to be told. The machinery of narrative control — the editorial decisions of what movie to show us, and how, and when — were completely invisible to us.
And then what happened?
Well, some of the kids a few years older than me signed up for Afghanistan, but everybody else was encouraged to go shopping. We got the Patriot Act, and the absurdities of Homeland Security — and then the war in Iraq.
Our punitive tribal instincts cooled, and then collided awkwardly with our procedural liberal self-concept, and locked us into these conflicts, not only with no plan to win, but no clear idea of what winning would even look like.
So, first, Americans’ impulse for common feeling was cynically and stupidly wasted, and they became permanently skeptical of anything that feels like that.
But second, and probably more importantly — the media technology changed.
It simply isn’t possible anymore to monopolize attention like that — to show everyone the same thing, and make them feel the same thing.
That’s why the early years of Twitter were so exhilarating: because we all felt that, on some level, these people controlled the country because they controlled the narrative — and all of a sudden, just by being funny, you could demolish that power.
You actually got to watch in real time as the old guardians of political and cultural orthodoxy were dethroned and made ridiculous by anons with anime avatars.
Starting in 2020, the empire struck back — we got a full-court press of censorship, doxxing, a summer of anarchy in the cities, lockdowns for the rest of us, and the COVID purge of the military, the executive bureaucracy, and the Fortune 500.
And I think they really were worried.
They watch the same movies we do, where in the climactic final battle, the villain’s mask falls, and his crimes are revealed to the world, and the spell is broken, and he is overthrown — but they obviously should not have been worried about that.
The fantasy is that the old, bad narrative that the villain used to oppress, is replaced by the new, good narrative that we use to overthrow him.
But it turns out that the same technology that allowed us to effortlessly spin counternarratives and shatter consensus, now allows our enemies to spin counter-counternarratives, and strangle any new consensus in the crib. Everything’s a psyop, everyone’s a fed.
Which is why Charlie Kirk’s murder -- which we hoped would galvanize and unite us against the people who would consent to our murder -- instead produced a circular firing squad of paranoia and recrimination from the dumbest and most cynical voices on the Right.
Deconstructing the official story, and loudly refusing to be taken in, was what made us feel like we were winning ten years ago, made us feel powerful.
And it really did change things: there are all sorts of things that our enemies could do five or ten or twenty years ago, that they cannot do to us anymore, because their ability to command consensus really has been broken.
The problem is that they’re still in charge of the formal architecture of power — and in order to actually dislodge them, we would need to build an alternative consensus — and so far, it doesn’t look like that’s possible.
We didn’t capture the narrative domain — it’s more like we mined it, or contaminated it, and now we’re lobbing bombs at each other from our entrenched positions.
I say “we” — it’s not clear that “we” did this, or that it could have gone any differently — it may just be that the nature of political conflict has changed with the technology.
Either way, conditions have changed, and the question is, how do we win under these conditions?
Well, for one thing, it seems pretty clear that big unifying parasocial media narratives are just over.
All of our political abstractions, all of our ideological commitments — they can’t unify us any more, because you just can’t get everyone looking at one thing and feeling one way anymore.
I would invite you to consider the possibility that those giga-scaled loyalties — on both sides — are a product of technological conditions that no longer exist.
So if we want to build anything, or do anything big or important, we’re going to have to find our friends — not some category of person that checks a certain set of boxes, but people with names and faces, people with whom we can build a shared history.
And that’s what Charlie did.
He was of course gifted in, and famous for, mass communication.
But in the last year, as I’ve met people who worked with him, what they invariably talk about is how hard he worked to make friends and build relationships and get people working together across the broadest possible coalition.
And over and over I have encountered these enormous “Charlie Kirk shaped holes” — relationships in which he was an essential connector, critical things that still aren’t getting done, because Charlie was the way they got done.
He was unmatched in his ability to bridge the gap between the young and the old, the normies and the vanguard.
He was one of the only figures on the political Right who succeeded in — or who even seemed to care about — transmuting online outrage into real-world ground game. And that was all about networks of young people who knew Charlie, or knew people who knew Charlie.
His empire, his legacy, was literally the friends he made along the way.
It wasn’t just that he was a friendly guy — and he certainly wasn’t naive about people, or politics, or media — he just knew that was what it was going to take to win, and he wanted to win.
So when I think about what we’ve learned in the last year, how we can honor Charlie’s memory, and what should come next, it all points in the same direction.
We need to come together to build things: in fact, to build a shared history, because for better and worse, that’s what is real now, that’s what is going to matter.
We have to start working together on projects with stakes — entrepreneurial projects, civic action, social gatherings — because we’re it. It’s not going to start in any other way.
We’re not going to find our real friends in any other way. We’re not going to surface leadership in any other way.
So I’m really glad that you’re all here, and I hope that while you’re here you will look for a way to place a bet, with modest but meaningful stakes, on someone else in this room — to start building something together — for our country, and for Charlie.
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EXIT News:
Constitutional Action completed beautification events in Dallas and Salt Lake in August.
9/12: Join us for a Veterans’ Memorial cleanup in Seattle.
9/17: Join us for a live presentation on Counter-Organizing with Mike Shelby in American Fork, Utah.
Paideia will host our first Youth AI Hackathon, 11/14 (date changed) in Orem, UT. Tickets on sale soon.
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This week (9/8) we heard from Jeremy Kaufmann of the Free State Project on his efforts to teach libertarians how to win.
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EXIT Member Events (members can check the group chat for details):
9/11, Nashville, TN: EXIT member meetup
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9/12, Houston, TX: EXIT member meetup
9/12, Dallas, TX: Family Barbecue
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9/18, N. Georgia, GA: EXIT member meetup
9/19, Columbus, OH: EXIT member Meetup
9/21, Dallas, TX: Monthly EXIT Dinner
9/25-9/26, Salt Lake City, UT: Delphica Event (link coming soon)
10/3 Orem, UT: EXIT Member Meetup