The year politics became brainrot

In a good and just society, it would have been possible to bury Charlie Kirk without either threatening mass violence toward his enemies or making light of his death with a furry sex meme. But America in 2025 did not remotely resemble a working society, let alone a civil one, and Kirk’s killing came prepackaged with its own desecrating shitposts.

There was, briefly, an attempt at a national mood of somberness. The president ordered flags across the nation to be lowered to half-staff. Politicians, celebrities, and other public figures — even those not aligned with Kirk on the right — rushed out with condolences and grief, painting completely unrecognizable pictures of a man who was a once-in-a-generation talent at getting a rise out of other people. “Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way,” wrote the liberal pundit Ezra Klein in The New York Times, describing him as “one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”

Kirk’s megachurch memorial service was well-attended, with additional solemnities elsewhere in the form of the ritual sacrifices of random people’s jobs. A Reuters investigation would later find more than 600 people who had been fired, suspended, or investigated for social media posts they made about Charlie Kirk — some of them merely quoting Kirk, a professional asshole who, among other things, pushed the “great replacement” theory and myths of white genocide.

Comedian Jimmy Kimmel became the most prominent victim of this crusade after making a fairly mild joke on his late night show. The actual upshot of the quip — which mocked Trump for his apparent disinterest in Kirk only days after the young man’s death — was completely ignored, and Kimmel was lambasted for showing insufficient grief over the newly canonized saint of MAGA. The chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, successfully threatened Disney into taking Kimmel off the air — only to be mogged by the general public, which berated Disney into reinstating Kimmel’s show.

In a sense, this circus was business as usual. The amnesia of the elites, the tone-policing witch hunts, the pageantry of memorialization: these are the reflexive acts of a society on the verge of launching a systemic assault on civil liberties. But as much as the right wing tried to channel 9/11, and as much as corporations and media organizations and left-wing politicians played along, something about the way Americans communicate with each other was fundamentally different. Perhaps the first indication of where we were as a country was a video posted by a TikTok user at the Utah Valley University event, recorded just moments after the shooting. “It’s your boy, Elder TikTok!” he shouted. “Shots fired!”

Despite the mass reprisals against Kirk’s shitposting detractors over the following weeks and months, the memeing continued apace. And very shortly after Kirk’s death, influencers on the right-wing fringe — like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes — had almost compulsively fallen into conspiratorial theorizing about the shooting, their instincts settling the blame on (of course) Israel. Even the center of MAGA could not hold; the long, sustained sainting of Kirk was simply too incongruous with the deportation ASMR memes. Vice President JD Vance tried to stick with the serious tone — now, months later, he is the subject of an AI slop musical tribute to Kirk that has gone viral on TikTok, with the soaring hook (“We are Charlie Kiiiiiiiiiiirk”) a popular target for mockery.

2025 has been defined by Charlie Kirk, though not by what Charlie Kirk espoused, nor who he was, nor who his allies purport him to have been. The hysteria, the inanity, and the sheer incoherence surrounding his death has become emblematic of America. It took a decade before 9/11 jokes could really land, but Kirk’s death had been turned into a joke before the bullet even hit him. Politics is fully immersed in its postliterate era, and political violence, too, has become illegible.

Two days after Kirk was shot, law enforcement announced the arrest of his alleged killer. In a press conference, the governor of the state of Utah proceeded to read out loud a series of internet memes that had been scratched into bullet casings recovered with the alleged weapon.

The first — “notices bulge OWO what’s this?” — was a mocking reference to furry online sexual roleplay. The next, which ominously opened with “Hey fascist, catch,” ended with a series of arrows encoding a button combo strike in the video game Helldivers 2, a third-person shooter that satirizes fascism. The one after that was a reference to the Italian song “Bella ciao” (historically an antifascist anthem but also a generally catchy jingle). The governor wrapped up the list with the most ignominious possible conclusion, saying, “if you read this you are gay lmao,” making sure to carefully spell out each of the letters in the final abbreviation.

This should be understood as a genuinely humiliating moment for America, one in which our elected leaders succumbed to the murderous version of calling Moe’s Tavern and asking for Heywood Jablome. A civilized society does not heap furry sex memes on top of a grave.

Yet this act of vandalism on American dignity was the most responsible act the governor could undertake, given the circumstances. Just 24 hours earlier, someone — presumably in law enforcement — had leaked an internal bulletin to right-wing influencer Steven Crowder. “All cartridges have engraved wording on them, expressing transgender and anti-fascist ideology,” the memo said.

By reading aloud the messages on the bullets, the governor was broadcasting the closest thing to a manifesto for the alleged shooter. But he was also providing transparency into an investigation that had been riddled with irresponsible leaks and flagrant missteps. In the hours after the killing, FBI Director Kash Patel had shot off a quickfire post on X to declare that a suspect had been taken into custody, only for the FBI to have to announce, shortly thereafter, that that person was not a suspect and had been released. When Crowder published his ATF leak, the rumor that the shooter was trans exploded out of control. In carefully engaging with the truth of the bullets, Cox — probably unknowingly, given his remarks the following day — exonerated a vulnerable and politically persecuted community that is frequently slandered with falsely attributed mass shootings.

The right then attempted to pin the shooting on the shadowy forces of antifa, using “Hey fascist, catch” and “Bella ciao” as justification. Two weeks later, Trump would sign an executive order designating antifa a domestic terror organization (a designation that doesn’t exist) and then issue a national presidential security memorandum directing various departments and agencies to launch an expansive war on antifa. (The war on antifa is inextricable from Trump’s war on the English language, because, if you are literate, his opposition to anti-fascism necessarily raises the question of what Trumpism actually is.)

On a memorial episode of Kirk’s podcast, Stephen Miller, appearing alongside JD Vance, swore vengeance on the “networks” backing antifa. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”

Aside from the ambiguous bullet casings, there’s no apparent evidence that Kirk’s accused killer is antifa — there is neither a forthright declaration of political motivation, nor a total absence of it. One affidavit points to a romantic relationship being the motive; this is hardly made clear in any piece of writing by alleged shooter Tyler Robinson, let alone the infamous bullets. “remember how I was engraving bullets?” Robinson allegedly texted a friend. “The fuckin messages are mostly a big meme, if I see ‘notices bulge uwu’ on fox new I might have a stroke.”

There’s a reason why, under normal circumstances, broadcasting those types of details is considered bad form — such details have a tendency to spark copycat killings. Two weeks after Charlie Kirk was killed, a gunman opened fire at an ICE field office in Dallas, killing a detainee and wounding others before taking his own life. The alleged shooter, Joshua Jahn, left no manifesto that we know of, but an unused bullet — according to a photo released by law enforcement — had the phrase “ANTI-ICE” written on it in what looks like pen or marker.

The tonal weirdness of this micro-manifesto immediately led internet posters to compare the message on the bullets to a 2015 alleged hate crime in Mississippi where the phrase “Blacks Rule” had been spray-painted onto a driveway. Neither phrase is in common parlance; each is so jarring that it makes “hello my fellow kids” sound like convincing zoomer lingo. The fact that only a detainee and the shooter himself had been killed made the incident seem even more suspicious, especially to internet audiences (on both the right and the left) that had already spun themselves up into concocting conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing.

Jahn’s brother told NBC News that his sibling “didn’t have strong feelings about ICE” and that “he wasn’t interested in politics on either side as far as I knew.” Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein reported that one of Jahn’s Steam handles was “#Impeachment,” presumably a reference to impeaching Trump. Some of his anonymous sources — apparently friends of Jahn’s — emphasize that this was an “ironic” mockery of earnest resistance libs. But another source made a subtle differentiation: “If it was ironic, it’s that half irony — where you’re half-kidding, half-serious, just in case.”

Individuals’ politics are often in flux, and the kind of person who willfully kills another is not, one might say, engaging with the world as they did before. Nevertheless, Jahn (born 1996) did not leave behind much in the way of a point of view; the same goes for Robinson (born 2003). We understand their acts of violence as political because of the circumstances more than anything else.

The apparent laconicism of this pair of zoomer killers is striking, given the wordiness of their predecessors. Even Luigi Mangione (born 1998) — accused of assassinating UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year — allegedly left a 260+ word missive for “the feds.” (That would be half a page if typed; it was handwritten, and so poorly that portions are indecipherable.) Over time, political killers have had less and less to say.

Anders Breivik (born 1979), who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011, left a 1,518 page manifesto. The 2019 Christchurch, New Zealand shooter (born 1990) left behind 74 pages. The 2019 El Paso shooter (born 1998) 10 pages; the 2022 Buffalo shooter (born 2003) left 180 pages that were extensively plagiarized from both Breivik and the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Literacy has been in steep decline in many parts of the world, including the United States, where most of these men were. A study that took place in 2015 tested a pool of undergraduates on how well they understood the opening of Charles Dickens’ Bleak House and concluded that over half “understood so little” that “they would not be able to read the novel on their own.” Of course, Dickens is not exactly known for his clear, legible prose — but alarmingly, the students in the study were English majors. High schools assign fewer books cover-to-cover, with the result that college students arrive at university and struggle to read a full book. The stresses of the pandemic and remote learning, too, left an indelible mark on the education of an entire cohort. As Gen Z grows older, zoomer parents report that they don’t like reading to their own children. A study published this year says that reading for pleasure is down 40 percent.

At the same time, politics has gotten more divorced from reality and reason. The results are dizzying when the sheer brainrot of the Trump administration collides with judges who are still operating under the assumption that words should mean things and refer to real objects. “We rule on facts, not on supposition or conjecture, and certainly not on fabrication or propaganda,” wrote a distraught appeals court judge in the lawsuit over Trump’s attempt to send the National Guard into Portland, Oregon. (She was the dissenting voice on the panel; the other two judges, Trump appointees, ruled in favor of allowing the president to send in the Guard.)

But incoherence has become an entirely normal property of politics, and incoherent violence — the ICE raids, third country deportations, drone boat strikes — is central, rather than incidental, to the political system. In this sense, the subliterate zoomer killers are not at the fringe of society, but are the epitome of it.

The media has spent the last few months trying to make sense out of nonsense, attempting to conjure motive, manifesto, and meaning out of the dumbest shit scrawled onto bullets. These were sad attempts to impose meaning on an increasingly incoherent world by a literati that has not yet accepted its irrelevance in a postliterate society. But the most humiliating display of literate obliviousness in the face of the total collapse of meaning, however, was Ezra Klein’s bizarre eulogy to Charlie Kirk. The now-infamous column (“Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way”) can best be understood as an expression of class solidarity. Klein, I would argue, sees both himself and Kirk as being Debate Guys, wordcels who engage in the marketplace of ideas and let speech sort itself out into political action.

Ezra Klein is an artifact of the politics of literacy, a paradigm that is waning faster than my fingers can type these useless, useless words. But Charlie Kirk’s Debate Guy persona was a meme layered on top of sophisticated machinery. His Talking Points USA and Professor Watchlist were very much about action in the real world. In one deleted tweet, Kirk claimed that TPUSA had sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to DC for what would become the January 6th insurrection.

Kirk’s podcast was a form of infrastructure, one controlled by Kirk, and not The New York Times or another brand. The parasocial relationships he built with his audience granted him direct access to President Donald Trump. Kirk understood that his nonviolent engagement with the public was a form of amusement to fill the void, a conversion mechanism to boost subscriber rates, imbued with as much meaning as a daily crossword puzzle or Wordle.

Kirk did not commit violence, not because he abhorred it, but because committing violence was someone else’s job. Last year, he called for using whips against migrants, saying, “Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?” In early June of this year, as the president deployed troops to Los Angeles, Kirk publicly advocated for invoking the Insurrection Act of 1807 to crush the immigration protests. And in August, he called for “federalizing” the district of Columbia, saying, “Roll in the tanks, bring in the military.”

With his close relationship to the commander in chief of the United States of America, Charlie Kirk was no mere talker, idea-peddler, or purveyor of discourse. He built an empire on legitimizing violence and harvesting the enthusiasm and glee around it. Even before his death became a pretext to enact violence on American cities, he had already substantively shaped history. Charlie Kirk was a part of the real world in a way that Ezra Klein will never be.

One might even say that Kirk already understood that the future of politics was aura farming and shitposting, switching fluidly between calling for “massive indictments” against Trump’s political enemies and telling Taylor Swift to “submit to your husband.” For Kirk and for much of society today, words are not expressions with referents, but rather, performative speech acts with specific functions — in his case, owning the libs.

The most significant resistance to Trumpism, too, appears to be abandoning the realm of literate politics; after all, you do not bring a persuasive argument to a gunfight. In Portland, Oregon, inflatable frog suits — a symbol imbued with no inherent meaning or political point of view — became de rigueur. But perhaps the most telling sign is that resistance against ICE in Chicago and New York is best expressed not in slogans but in whistles and car honks.

It’s useless to call for civil debate as “politics in the right way”; politics has moved beyond words. Where there are words at all, they are but a way to express a meme, a vibe, an aesthetic. They are a method to channel brainrot, like any other medium of communication. To expect words to mean words, for them to attach to objects in time and space and to line up with any internal logic — this is the sort of cringe that will fade into the periphery along with the millennial pause, that half-second of silence where the older generation gathers their thoughts.

And we can understand this rise in political violence as something that exists on the same wavelength as the illegible politics that govern our society today. Like bombing shipwrecked sailors in the name of fighting drug trafficking, it is action for action’s sake, as crass and consequential as a Pokémon deportation meme.

A post, a podcast, a screenshot, a meme, a whistle, a bullet — in all things, only the medium is the message.