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. With that framing, murder is pre-rationalized as justified. That is the poison. It has, of course, been going on for a long time, but it was fully weaponized during the Russia collusion hoax era. Normalizing the totally fabricated claim that the president of the United States was an agent of Russia, which the media eagerly amplified for years, made the leap to labeling someone as Hitler feel small and inevitable.
In Charlie Kirk’s case, the lies about him — such as the still-repeated smear that he wanted to stone gay people — were not just maliciously false but complete inversions. Every single person who actually watched Kirk’s videos saw someone thoughtful and measured. His entire persona and the organization he built from scratch, TPUSA, were premised on free speech and debate.
He did not believe in safe spaces or other woke ideas. Instead, he engaged opponents in dialogue, usually on college campuses, and made the case for his ideas. He was unperturbed by the inevitable barrage of insults, heckling, and even vandalism he encountered, focusing instead on reasoned arguments. He believed that dialogue across ideological lines was still possible in America.
The lies were so pervasive that they continued even after Kirk’s death. We saw this with many, including author Stephen King, who hatefully repeated the same false smears. The Nazi-like caricature was so omnipresent that even I found myself stopping to check whether he had ever said the things he was accused of. Of course, he hadn’t.
This persistence of falsehoods was no accident. The media relentlessly targeted Kirk throughout his life and continued even after his assassination. The New Republic claimed that Kirk had “white-supremacist ideals on race.” Newsweek gave space to Darrell Scott to call Kirk a “white supremacist” who was “inspiring Hitler Youth.” That Scott is a purported Trump supporter made the lie even more potent. If someone ostensibly on the same side says it, it must be true, right? Newsweek did not challenge it, instead amplifying the falsehood as if it were gospel.
Posthumously, in its obituary of Kirk no less, The New York Times ran a headline calling him a “provocateur,” implying he had somehow “provoked” his own assassination. Eventually, the paper stealth-edited the headline to remove the word, but by then it was too late. The meaning was clear and intentional. Worse, the original headline was permanently embedded in the metadata. For anyone unfamiliar with how these systems work, search engines, algorithms, and AI will continue to associate Kirk with “provocateur,” and the updated headline will have no effect.
The framing was entrenched, and The New York Times wanted it that way. German state TV’s Washington DC bureau chief fueled the hate by spreading a litany of lies, including that Kirk called for homosexuals to be stoned and warned against flying with black pilots. Much of his audience, primarily German speakers with no way to verify English-language sources, have no means to check the truth, ensuring that millions more now believe these lies.
Kirk was also, in many ways, a proxy for Trump himself. As a rising star in conservative politics, he energized young voters, helping Trump dramatically increase his share of the youth vote from around a third in 2020 to nearly half in 2024. Attacks on Trump were mirrored onto Kirk, turning him into a stand-in target for the same venom. After a decade of the media painting Trump as Hitler, the extreme rhetoric became routine and unquestioned.
The examples are far and wide, but to name just a few: CNN gave a prime-time platform to Democratic strategist Aisha Mills, who claimed that Trump “revered Hitler” and “would absolutely try to exterminate people.” This wasn’t some post on Reddit, the platform Gov. Cox blamed for Kirk’s murder. No, this was national television and designed to poison millions of viewers. The Atlantic ran a piece declaring that Trump was “speaking like Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini.” The Canadian state broadcaster CBC warned of “disturbing echoes” between Nazi Germany and America under Trump. Rolling Stone tried to package it all under the headline “How Right-Wingers Are Trying to Downplay Trump’s Hitler Talk.” And the night before Charlie Kirk was assassinated, agitators at a Washington, D.C. restaurant chanted at the president, “Trump is the Hitler of our time.”
Even years after the initial smears had been thoroughly debunked, Vanity Fair was still insisting that Trump had called Nazis “very fine people.” He did no such thing, yet tens of millions now accept it as fact because the media repeated it relentlessly until it felt undeniable. Each lie has the same deadly purpose: to strip away legitimacy, to turn political opponents into existential threats, and to make violence seem not only imaginable but, in the eyes of some, necessary.
So no, it wasn’t Reddit. It wasn’t video games. The poison was and is manufactured much closer to home. The media and its enablers are the architects of this hatred. They are the ones who condition people to see fellow Americans as Nazis to be excised rather than citizens to be debated. Until that stops, more violence will follow.
Invoking Hitler to smear someone is not only false but grotesque. Hitler oversaw the mass murder of millions. Most were burned in industrial-scale ovens specially built for that purpose. There is no justification for comparing anyone to that. These comparisons do more than insult — they normalize hatred and make violence seem acceptable. To honor Charlie Kirk’s memory, such rhetoric must be called out and made socially unacceptable. It will not solve every problem, but holding the media accountable in this way could reclaim a small measure of decency and start undoing the normalization of lies that have turned public discourse into a prelude to violence.
