IGNORANCE AND VIOLENCE. THE MURDER OF CHARLIE KIRK IN THE HYPER-POLARIZED AND IRRATIONAL WEST 

That Kirk was no saint is known to everyone, even to those who – disingenuously – cry scandal over the few irresponsible and foolish (certainly not leading politicians) who rejoice at the death of a young man. After all, a figure who spent his time degrading politics with barroom slogans of the lowest order, such as: “Michelle Obama, a woman of color, has an inferior brain to that of any white woman”, in a healthy and meritocratic society would never have enjoyed the space and consideration that Kirk did. For one may very well dislike the Obamas – and it is entirely legitimate to do so – but to claim that a woman like the former First Lady, who graduated with honors in Sociology from Princeton and in Law from Harvard, is less intelligent than any white woman merely because she is melanoderm is typical of a person with serious cognitive deficits, or, at best, of someone willing to lie blatantly in order to achieve his aims.

It should not even need to be explained, but a woman who excels in her studies at selective universities, starting from a disadvantaged position and without a family network of connections, will have an IQ of at least 110. Now, not all white women are like Marie Curie or Marguerite Yourcenar. There are normotypical leucoderm women who fall within a percentile decidedly below the 75th, just as there are borderline women or women with significant cognitive deficits that limit their intelligence. This insult, moreover, it is worth emphasizing, came from a man who did not even hold a degree. And Kirk, even if he had enrolled in university, without external support would hardly have graduated with good marks, since his way of reasoning was excessively arbitrary and Manichean, inclined toward exaggeration and sensationalism, whereas critical study favors objective data, patience, neutrality, and a careful analysis of sources. If Michelle Obama labored over textbooks, codes, and articles, training herself to examine multiple aspects of every issue, Kirk’s worldview essentially remained that of a charismatic yet immature adolescent.

Many of his statements were not only debatable, but wholly illogical and easily refutable. Among the most foolish, with a macabre premonitory tone, were statements such as: “Death sentences should be public, swift, televised. I think that at a certain age it would even be an initiation. At what age should one start watching public executions?” and “The price we pay for the freedom to own weapons is that someone will sometimes be killed.” Kirk advocated a blind violence, voyeuristically institutionalized and legitimized, an orgy of Wild West justice that replaced the complexity of thought with the clamor of weapons, the patience of analysis with the brutal immediacy of spectacle. In that distorted idea of initiation there was no growth, only regression: community reduced to a screaming crowd, justice to ritual revenge, human life to consumable entertainment. Who knows whether his children, as they grow up, will reflect differently upon those ideas, in light of the horror of images circulated everywhere, on cell phones and television screens worldwide.

It must be said, however, that the killer, Tyler Robinson, also embodies in full the typical American – and by now Western – ignorance. For not only is killing a man – moreover unarmed – ethically unjust, but it is also the manifestation of a cultural and moral void that fuels hatred instead of countering it with logic and dialogue. It is as if, through that gesture, one implicitly assumed that the electorate has become a malleable, irrational mass, that merit no longer counts for anything, and that citizens are incapable of recognizing on their own how ridiculous or dangerous figures like Kirk may be. Hence the illusion that the only way to change the status quo is to respond to violence with tragically decisive violence.

Ultimately, Robinson’s act also contains a useless choice: that of killing a man who, more than a politician, was the Ferragni of politics, an influencer disguised as an activist, destined more for cameras than ballots, and who in the end would never have represented a real danger to anyone. The last U.S. president without a college degree was Harry S. Truman, more than seventy years ago: since then, academic education has become an implicit requirement for anyone aspiring to high office. If indeed someone within the MAGA movement had seen in Kirk a figure usable on the institutional stage, they would at least have facilitated his studies, enabling him to graduate from Harper College, where he remained enrolled for quite some time. Yet even then he already had access to financiers and heavyweight Republican politicians. Evidently, his function was different: to be a megaphone, not a leader. Tall, white, with somatic features reassuring to the WASP aesthetic ideal, but confined to the role of digital shouter. Perfect to capture the attention of a hillbilly electorate distrustful of data and dossiers, perceived as the cold sophistries of white collars. Over time, his role as a young populist did not change, and his opinions continued to be tolerated rather than shared, barely stomached even by the Republican Party’s leadership itself. He certainly bore little sympathy for Jews, and this was evident. On several occasions he had uttered openly antisemitic phrases, such as: “The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has largely been funded by Jewish donors in the country” or “Jews control universities, non-profits, films, Hollywood, everything.” Today Trump, who has Jewish grandchildren and respects Israel, announces his intention to attend his funeral, but the truth is that those statements had long since relegated Kirk to the margins, as a figure too inconvenient even for his most cynical allies.

TYLER ROBINSON: A STRANGE BACKGROUND

But Robinson’s act sheds new light on how the United States is at times divided in a schizophrenic manner. Raised in a profoundly MAGA family, immersed since adolescence in an ecosystem of weapons, video games, and digital radicalisms, Robinson remains an individual difficult to categorize. He seems to oscillate between the groyper far right and the fashionable far left, stealing slogans and ideals here and there, building for himself an identity that mixes ideologies and obsessions. Some claim he had a trans girlfriend, born male, and perhaps that relationship contributed to generating further tensions, to shaking already fragile boundaries within a deeply disturbed mind. It is possible that, after entering that relationship, he veered toward the far left, not out of deep conviction or thoughtful, mature choice, but rather out of rebellion, from a sense of exclusion that even he could not fully decipher, above all because he was immature and uneducated. Even the engravings on the cartridges – phrases taken from Helldivers 2, grotesque memes, and even the partisan anthem Bella Ciao – indicate a toxic and delirious mosaic, a bizarre mixture of pop culture and historical legacies of antithetical ideologies. When the FBI released images of the suspect, he joked on Discord that it was his look-alike, that he was Kirk himself on the run, or that he would claim the reward together with others. Not only a defensive strategy, but a mad killer blending self-irony and cruelty in an existence suspended between memes and blood. Only a lunatic (perhaps under the influence of psychiatric drugs and narcotics), the product of a reckless childhood spent among rifles and shooting targets rather than books, or a useful sniper recruited by someone?

Even a well-trained lunatic, capable of hitting a target at 125 meters (more than the 81 meters of J.F. Kennedy’s sniper), is not so easy to find, as the recent attempt on Trump demonstrates. A sharpshooter, then, or merely a disturbed young man with a stroke of luck? On this, the darkest narratives have already taken root.

For some conspiracy theorists, Robinson could not have acted alone: he would have been a hitman hired by hidden powers, trained to strike coldly from a distance, then abandoned as a sacrificial pawn. In this view, the crime would take the contours of a settling of accounts within American politics, an “inside job” constructed to destabilize and generate fear. Others, instead, reverse the perspective and speak of a plot by the radical left, ready to eliminate a symbol of populist right-wing politics in order to frighten its followers. But there are also those who maintain the opposite thesis: that the murder was orchestrated precisely by sectors of the far right, eager to rid themselves of a figure perceived as ambiguous and too moderate, transforming him into a martyr useful to the cause.

Finally, in the most toxic corners of the web, the usual antisemitic theories circulate: some invoke Israel and alleged “Jewish conspiracies,” reprising the old reflex of always blaming the same community for any traumatic event. A narrative as worn-out as it is dangerous, and one that has nothing to do with the facts that have so far emerged. The truth, at least for now, remains both simpler and more disturbing: Robinson appears as the product of a toxic ecosystem, raised amid weapons, extremist memes, and a wavering political identity, oscillating between radical right and rebellious suggestions. A profile that embodies the paradox of contemporaneity: the killer born not in a training camp, but in a chat room.

Ignorance and violence, then. Not only that of a radicalized youth, but also the metaphorical kind that resurfaces whenever politics turns a tragedy into a tool for consensus. European populist leaders, from Giorgia Meloni to Viktor Orbán, wasted no time in commenting on Kirk’s murder: each in their own way sought to bend the episode to their narratives, some speaking of an attack on freedom of conservative thought, others denouncing the dangers of the left. It is a typical reflex of our times: the truth does not matter, what matters is how an event can be manipulated to consolidate one’s electoral base. Thus, the murder of an American political influencer (until a few days ago unknown in Europe) becomes fuel for national and international campaigns, with no respect for ideological stratification or for the complexity of the affair. Every tragedy becomes a mirror of collective fears, a fuse for cultural fires that spread with the speed and vulgar greed of social media.

But the real risk lies elsewhere. This spectacle of political fragility, of intersecting hatred and collective hysteria, is being observed closely by powers that have no need to dirty their own hands. Russia and China remain silent, they study, they accumulate dossiers: they know that a West tearing itself apart, divided by its own polarizations, offers better opportunities than any direct attack. It is a world in which destabilization no longer requires missiles, but the ability to amplify already existing divisions.

Author’s Note: This article is an editorial commentary. The factual information and references cited are based exclusively on public and verifiable sources — including reports and journalistic investigations, news agencies, official documents, public statements, and multimedia materials made available by authorities or news outlets — and can be easily retrieved through simple online searches.