Before a suspect was even in custody, Trumpworld was on a wartime footing.
Charlie Kirk had been fatally shot. Graphic video of the assassination hit terminal velocity online. Several sources of mine were close friends of Kirk, and when I spoke to them last week, it was clear this incident had changed the level of aggression with which they were willing to pursue a crackdown on their boss’s perceived enemies.
“I think we want to confront violent left wing rhetoric. We want PEACE, and unity,” one adviser to President Donald Trump told me in a text message.
But, they continued, “If this is an organized group—which it seems?—then this is going to be a wake up call like people have never seen.” This person then speculated about an antifa cell in, of all places, central Utah. Other sources suggested that a band of transgender militants plotted the attack. (There is no indication that any organized group or cell planned the attack, with charging documents filed Tuesday indicating it was a lone shooter.)
It turned out that the nihilistic and highly online references inscribed on bullets investigators found near the crime scene weren’t, despite garbled early reporting, so cut-and-dried as to spell out a clear motive for Kirk’s murder.
Republicans kept running with one anyway.
In the week since Kirk’s death, mourning over his shocking loss has metastasized into an unprecedented mobilization effort among the MAGA base, focused on a few main fronts. There is the successful push for firings of regular civilians over the tone and content of their social media posts about Kirk’s death. There is a pendulum swing toward something approaching cancel culture and actual, government-backed censorship on big social media platforms. And then there are the preexisting priorities of the Trump administration.
“They killed Charlie Kirk—the least that we can do is go through a legal process and redistrict Indiana into a nine-to-zero map,” representative Jim Banks of Indiana told Politico at a Republican confab over the weekend, pushing for more partisan gerrymandering.
There was talk of unity from some, but the more dominant tone was expressed by Vice President JD Vance when he hosted Kirk’s podcast. “There is no unity with people who scream at children over their parents' politics. There is no unity with someone who lies about what Charlie Kirk said in order to excuse his murder,” he said. “There is no unity with someone who harasses an innocent family the day after the father of that family lost a dear friend. There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk's assassination.”
Elon Musk, on his long road back to regaining favor with the administration, went even further. Appearing remotely at a far-right rally in London on Saturday, he declared “The left are the party of murder.”
As time went on, there appeared to be only one source of true unity: Agreement between the ultra MAGA and Silicon Valley wings of the party over who the they responsible for Kirk’s murder really is.
It’s anyone Republican leaders want it to be.
According to one expert, that’s the entire point: Trumpworld and its Republican allies, from influencers to tech overlords, have started to become the digital equivalent of high on their own supply.
“Since 2020, quite clearly you've seen a media ecosystem that exists to reinforce and to mobilize the base around ideas that they consider to be advantageous for their political movement,” says Renee DiResta, a Georgetown University associate research professor specializing in conspiracy theories, terrorism, and state-sponsored information warfare. “And so the content creators, and the influencers, and the media outlets that reinforce those ideas are the ones that form a political machine,” DiResta adds, working “in tandem to create a self-reinforcing feedback loop.”
The Purge
Already, Americans are getting fired over their social media posts about the Kirk shooting, and there’s no special reason to think the campaign will end soon, or stop there.
“There’s a lot that I think is gonna come from this,” a Republican member of Congress close to President Trump tells me.
Almost immediately after the shooting, Republicans were both publicly and privately connecting the successful attempt on Kirk’s life to the two unsuccessful ones on Trump’s life last summer. No evidence anyone has made public supports such a claim. But sources of mine, including a second Trump adviser who was close to Kirk, were too overcome with emotion and too fed up with their political opposition to care all that much about the actual motivation of Kirk’s killer.
“This is on them,” the second Trump adviser told me. “As were the two attempts on Trump’s life.”
Of course, there is no organized “them” at play here beyond the broadest definition of the left. There is no evidence of an armed antifa cell in Utah, and none that Kirk’s killing was related to a presidential assassination plot. But when I sent new information about the shooter to my Trump sources—who, granted, were in grief and shock—that conflicted with their priors, they did not respond.
“President Trump is right—for years, radical leftists have slandered their political opponents as Nazis and fascists, inspiring left-wing violence like the tragic assassination of Charlie Kirk,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, told me on Tuesday.
As of now, the evidence is something of a Rorschach test. Robinson’s mother told investigators he was beginning to “lean more to the left—becoming more pro-gay and trans-rights oriented,” according to the indictment filed by the Utah County attorney general in the state’s Fourth Judicial District Court Tuesday. When asked by his roommate why he allegedly shot Kirk in a text exchange included in the indictment, Robinson replied, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out,” according to the indictment. Leaked messages from a Discord in which Robinson was allegedly active, obtained by the journalist Ken Klippenstein, appear to complicate the picture, though, and no evidence that has been made public directly links the alleged killer to a specific political ideology.
Don’t Call It Cancel Culture
It’s not a coincidence that ideological enemies of the broader conservative movement have been the targets of the mass firing push by Trump supporters. Americans working in education, health care, and government in particular have been targeted, and the right-wing news site Breitbart specifically mentioned those three categories in a post on X.
“This isn’t ‘cancel culture,’” the post reads. “It’s self defense. A nation that empowers the deranged and the depraved is a nation marching toward ruin.”
The longer-term focus from the White House, the lawmaker close to Trump tells me, won’t be limited to just one social media site, such as Bluesky, where scores of posts were compiled and cataloged by the since-offline site “Expose Charlie’s Murderers,” as WIRED reported. Trumpworld wants to come for them all.
“You’re going to continue to see this: Whether it’s Meta, Reddit, Bluesky, Roblox—all of ’em that are actually taking down any content that’s literally calling for more violence and/or recirculating that horrifying video,” the lawmaker told me. They also mentioned Discord as a target for the administration, alleging without evidence that the attack was “coordinated” there. (“These were communications between the suspect’s roommate and a friend after the shooting, where the roommate was recounting the contents of a note the suspect had left elsewhere,” Discord VP of trust and safety Jud Hoffman said in a statement last Friday.)
Fighting against the perception of hypocrisy around cancel culture has already become a focal point of the right wing’s spin.
“There is a big difference between the left canceling people and the right canceling people,” conservative influencer Matt Walsh tweeted over the weekend. “The left cancels you for saying things that are true. To the extent that the right cancels you, it is for saying things that are abhorrent and sick. A pretty important distinction.”
For DiResta, the pendulum swinging from maximum free speech and minimum content moderation to something approaching the very thing Republicans once opposed makes sense from the perspective of being caught in a conspiratorial information bubble.
“Their opinions on content moderation, for example—redefining labeling and fact-checking as censorship—were always part of a political project to advantage their movement when viewed through that lens,” she says. “It makes sense that now they would be in favor of more censorship—I should say, more actual censorship, because in this particular case, what you're seeing is sitting agents of the government calling for the suppression of speech.”
Plug and Chug
Some officials in the Trump administration have gone beyond calls for Americans to be banned from social media or be fired from their jobs.
Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff for policy on paper and unofficial “prime minister” of Trumpworld, went as far as to call for RICO or conspiracy against the United States charges for those “fomenting riots, that are doxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, or committing wanton acts of violence.” In remarks on Fox News over the weekend, Miller promised that “the power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
By Monday, Miller was on Kirk’s podcast describing, in his uniquely dystopian way, a “vast domestic terror movement” and promising to use the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security to “identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks” in Kirk’s name. There is no evidence the movement he describes exists.
This type of rhetoric—a push for a no-holds-barred crackdown with the full force of the federal government—was shared by high-profile figures on the tech right such as Musk and Curtis Yarvin, who tweeted, “The firings are just the beginning!”
“This is really the moment they can claim persecution again,” a source in the tech and crypto space tells me, having seen both on- and offline how their colleagues have radicalized over the past half decade. “Everything has to have some sort of conspiracy tie-in. Nothing can be simple, it has to tie into some broader narrative … This has to be indicative of an underground transgender terrorist network, as opposed to [anything else].”
Whether they believe any of this or not, my source says, is immaterial.
“I don’t know,” they say, “whether they believe what they’re saying, or if they just think it’ll get them the attention they want.”
For now, it might be both.
This is an edition of Jake Lahut’s Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
