The Poison in America’s Heart

An old colleague I had not heard from in a long while added me to a group chat on Wednesday. The members were all people who had been in my cohort for the Claremont Institute’s Lincoln Fellowship in 2021, a mixture of media figures, analysts, and activists. Although the group sort of fragmented later, I did make a few good friends with whom I kept in touch even after I began removing myself from that social circle. Still, I thought it was odd. Why now, and why add me after years of silence?

“Charlie got shot.”

Charlie Kirk had been in my Lincoln Fellow class. That was how we first met, and that was how I appeared on his show and spoke at one of his events, before our paths diverged. I opened X just as the headlines were starting to appear on the feed. Someone shot him while he was on tour at Utah Valley University.

“He’s probably fine,” I thought, immediately aware that I was engaging in wishful thinking about someone I knew was a good person at heart, a good husband and father. It didn’t take long for a video of the incident to make the rounds, which I saw without much warning. The crack of a .30-06 followed by a geyser of red spray from the left side of his neck as his body seized up, then slumped to the ground. He was gone. Even before the official announcement, I knew.

As of this writing, there are more questions than answers about Kirk’s killer, Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah native. More will probably come out later. Or maybe not. We still know little about Thomas Crooks, the 20-year-old shooter who tried to kill Donald Trump in 2024. What is certain, though, is that America is a place threatening to come apart at the seams, poisoned in its soul by forces flitting in the shadows of our collective psyche.

Almost at the same time as Kirk’s killing, a mass shooting unfolded the next state over, in Denver, Colorado. A baby-faced boy named Desmond Holly took a revolver to school and attacked his classmates, leaving two in critical condition, before turning the gun on himself. He was 16 years old. Holly’s social media footprint revealed an obsession with the 1999 Columbine High School shooting, and he had donned an outfit resembling what one of the attackers wore during that massacre. Holly had also opened an account on a “gore forum,” where users go to watch videos of people dying violent deaths, and he emulated the neo-Nazi aesthetics of two other killers, while signaling white supremacist and neo-Nazi views. The Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office stated that an unnamed “extremist network” had radicalized Holly, but did not provide specifics.

What we know about Robinson right now suggests that he was on the extreme opposite end of the spectrum from Holly, which is curious given his background.
Robinson comes from an outdoorsy, gun-toting, close-knit, staunchly Republican family in a very conservative part of a conservative-leaning state. He had perfect grades and scored 34 out of 36 on his ACT, placing him in the top percentile of all test-takers. He did a semester as an engineering major at UVU, a school with a strong Republican presence on campus, before dropping out and shifting toward an electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College in St. George, Utah.

If you had only known the above information, you would have likely assumed, with good reason, that Robinson was a conservative himself, one who had taken the advice of so many pundits who have called on young men to skip “woke” college and pick up a trade instead. Indeed, many of those same pundits were quick to blame the university for Robinson’s actions, claiming that UVU had “indoctrinated” him. His family history also seems to have provided some on the left with ammunition to jump to the conclusion that Robinson was on the far right and killed Kirk because he viewed him as too much of a moderate. Of course, that was all nonsense.

As best as anyone can tell, Robinson appears to have been pushed toward the leftmost part of the political spectrum through the same medium as Holly and so many recent killers: the internet, its group chats, and dark online subcultures. Robinson adorned bullet casings with what look like anti-fascist slogans and references to video games and memes. There may have been a transgender component to the story, given that Robinson is said to have been in a romantic relationship with his roommate, a biological male transitioning to female. But the exact details are constantly fluctuating during the ongoing investigation.

So much of what we know about Holly and Robinson calls to mind another recent shooting in Minnesota, in which a deeply disturbed 23-year-old Robin Westman opened fire on the Annunciation Catholic School during the first week of classes, killing two children and wounding 21 more who were sitting in the pews. There’s evidence that Westman identified as a woman at one point. His weapons and magazines were covered in a mishmash of internet brainrot memes that functioned as Rorschach tests. The right fixated on the anti-Trump scribblings and LGBT slogans, while the left grabbed hold of the racial slurs, Jew hate, and slurs against gays. People saw what they wanted to see.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s killing, comparisons were drawn to the “Days of Rage,” when revolutionary movements sounded the end of the carefree 1960s with bombs and ushered in left-wing political violence that would rock the next decade. I think there’s some truth to that. There are groups out there contributing to the radicalization of young people. Some are left-wing nongovernmental organizations, a familiar conservative bête noire. According to Axios, one leftist group in Utah deleted its social media profile after the shooting, attracting the attention of federal and state law enforcement.

However, I think that the political model for understanding these shootings is outdated and incomplete. Not all these networks are what you would expect, and the radicalization of these young killers isn’t as simple as adhering to an extreme left- or right-wing ideological catechism.

One of the most active groups working to turn young people into psycho killers is called 764. It is a decentralized, international network of thousands of members who have pushed hundreds of children into committing robberies, sexual abuse of minors, kidnapping, and even murder. Then there is the Order of Nine Angels, or O9A, a group that has influenced 764 and other extremists.

O9A believes that human history consists of a series of aeons, each corresponding with a civilization. It sees itself as working to conjure a new millennium, baptized in the blood of mayhem and death. The order is said to practice human sacrifice and magic. It also uses the internet to push young people into committing heinous crimes. Some of the writings on Westman’s equipment indicated familiarity with O9A and affiliated groups.

We can’t know if Crooks ever had contact with any of these, because he used encryption to conceal his browsing history, all while keeping up the appearances of a mild-mannered community college student. But there were signs that something had changed.

“Crooks’ father explained that within the last year he observed several instances of his son dancing in his bedroom throughout the night,” an investigator wrote in a Pennsylvania State Police report. “He would occasionally see Crooks talking to himself with his hands moving, which he expressed as uncommon and had become more prevalent after he had finished his last semester.”

Like Robinson, Crooks was a bright student, with a 1530 out of 1600 score on the SAT, and perfect grades on his Advanced Placement exams. Then, one day, for reasons no one quite understands, he became a would-be political assassin. Robinson’s very pro-Trump family has described a similar, seemingly inexplicable, and abrupt shift. His friends said that Robinson spent a lot of time down dark rabbit holes online.

That seems to be the real root, the thing fueling our epidemic of young nihilists. And that is also why whatever crackdown the Trump administration initiates won’t get at the source. How could it? The problem lies within us.

I realize I’m articulating what is probably the least popular position to take at a moment when the left and right are gearing up for war. But it’s true. Ideological violence, whether it expresses itself as left- or right-wing, is just a symptom, a body floating on the surface of the water. There is something deeply sinister happening to young people, and it is primarily taking place on the astral plane that is the internet, where souls are changed.

In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, people on the right worked to get anyone who said anything insensitive about him fired. A few months ago, some of the same voices in this ongoing effort mocked a 17-year-old left-wing X user who committed suicide by jumping off a bridge.

If shadowy networks are radicalizing people, it’s because the door has already been opened. We’re living in a world where death and suffering are a joke, a source of entertainment, an opportunity to land a final, unanswerable barb. Open your phone and you can watch a man be killed in front of his family, then scroll on to posts about food or pornography. The human brain was not designed for this. Neither was the soul.

There is no political solution for what is plaguing America and stalking our kids. Whatever redress there might be begins at the level of the individual, in our hearts and in our heads. I suspect things will get even worse before people realize what’s happening. 

https://chroniclesmagazine.org/columns/theory-of-a-partisan/the-poison-in-americas-heart