Hans Mahncke writes for the Federalist about a factor that helped make Charlie Kirk a target for assassination.
Charlie Kirk is dead, and the reaction has been as grotesque as it is predictable. Across social media, leftists revel in his murder, posting sick celebrations as if a man’s murder were something to cheer. That outpouring of cruelty was not spontaneous. It was the harvest of years of media lies that conditioned people to see Kirk as subhuman. Yet, instead of reckoning with how a culture of hatred is manufactured and weaponized, we are being told to look elsewhere.
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox rushed to thrust himself into the spotlight the moment the tragedy struck. It didn’t take long for him to appear on NBC, blaming “radicalization” through “video games” and “Reddit culture” as the cause of Kirk’s murder. Others pointed out that messages found on the bullet casings included a reference to Helldivers 2, a third-person shooting game that came out last year.
It is the oldest trick in the book: blame some amorphous force no one can pin down, and ignore the real culprit. Millions of people play video games or scroll Reddit every day, and they do not assassinate anyone. The real breeding ground of this hatred is not gaming culture, but the normalization of lies and the relentless media practice of painting people they want destroyed as literal Nazis.
This conditioning is confirmed by newly released post-shooting text messages between the shooter, Tyler Robinson, and an unnamed roommate, in which Robinson claims he acted because he “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.” The messages suggest that Robinson absorbed the media’s smears about Kirk as truth.
The pattern is unmistakable. The media manufactures grotesque caricatures, repeats them endlessly, and conditions millions to see a political opponent not as a fellow citizen, but as the next Hitler.
