Somewhere online, someone is very confident that Charlie Kirk was killed by his own security detail via a small IED sewn into his T-shirt. Multiple Charlie Kirk conspiracies are circulating online, some of which you may have encountered and investigated yourself, if only in passing. Currently trending is the news that efforts to match a fragment of the bullet that killed Kirk to the rifle allegedly used by the suspect arrested in his killing came back inconclusive. This potential discrepancy can reportedly be chalked up to the size of the fragment or damage, as was the case with the assassination of MLK Jr. Still, it’s led to notions around multiple shooters, planted guns, and deep state involvement. I have seen multiple videos alleging some kind of collusion on the part of Kirk’s security detail (look how he touches his hat here; what are they doing to Kirk’s body there?)

That’s not all: other conspiracy theories hinge on the usuals: claims of a false flag, suspicious timing, the idea that Kirk was targeted for his rhetoric on a potential trans mass-shooting narrative, and some kind of Israeli involvement, among others. 

It’s no surprise that Kirk’s death sparked countless conspiracies. The shooting itself harbors all the hallmarks of a conspiracy incubator: a famous political victim was graphically killed, on film, which was then widely disseminated on social media, the forensics of which are incomplete. Social media, of course, amplifies misinformation, disinformation, and fringe views that introduce people to a community of like-minded truthers who only affirm each other’s correctness. Then there’s the impulse to seek meaning and deeper machinations in sudden, horrific happenings, which is an incredibly human response to random carnage, especially when the shooting is available for immediate and repeated playback at any time. And some conspiracies turn out to be true—most recently, the global cabal of world-leading pedophiles and abusers connected to Jeffrey Epstein—meaning there is a kind of societal value to challenging the accepted narrative, even if polarization and information siloing mean we don’t exist in the same factual worlds anymore. 

Perhaps part of the conspiracy is borne from the at-times unknowable, choose-your-own-patsy nature of the gunman’s back story. The alleged Kirk shooter, Tyler James Robinson, initially mirrored the fascinating recent trend of American assassins exhibiting seemingly varied, inscrutable political beliefs via an unsatisfactory breadcrumb trail spanning the political spectrum. We saw this with Thomas Crooks, who attempted to assassinate President Trump at a Butler, Pennsylvania campaign stop. The boy was either bullied “almost every day” according to one student, or “had no disciplinary incidents” according to his high school, was politically engaged (registered Republican, but had donated to a progressive group). This randomness, the strange kismet of Trump’s survival, and the inexplicable Crooks all contribute towards conspiratorial thinking. And it’s likely we will never know anything more about Crooks than we already do, which is obviously not much at all.

Without a definitive motive, the executors of the chaos (Crooks, allegedly Robinson) become non-persons, representing ill-defined forces larger than themselves — agents of action on which we ascribe meaning. In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard argued that media saturation causes representations and simulations to replace direct experience, and in this “hyperreality,” traumatic events come to be experienced mainly as spectacles, meaning the line between actual shock and the mediated image is entirely blurred. It is worth observing how easy it is to seek deeper meaning in the videos themselves, and how numbed we have become to horrific violence, or insane wars, or really anything at all when mediated through the screen. Presumably, the shooters were numbed too.

Another theoretical model worth considering is the argument put forward by Malcolm Gladwell in his 2015 New Yorker piece “Thresholds of Violence,” in which he uses Stanford sociologist Mark Granovetter’s “threshold model of collective behavior” to explore how individuals may feel permitted to commit violent acts once early high-profile cases lower the threshold to do so. Perhaps the shooters America is contending with today are so perplexing and conspiracy-inducing because they are exactly the people who would never have considered it 30 years ago.

It seems odd that the manifesto, the custom de facto of school shooters since Columbine, wasn’t readily available after Butler and Utah. The inscriptions on the recovered casings serve as a kind of stand-in manifesto, though it’s widely posited that they only reveal a nihilistic internet-native humor, and therefore deny us any specific motive beyond some memetic death drive (though that, of course, is a motive). Early reporting following the Kirk shooting reflected on Robinson’s background, possible gender identity, sexual orientation, and his relationship with a possibly trans woman. Evidence, including texts and a note, points towards Kirk’s views being the motive for the assassination.

The killing of Charlie Kirk was an internet killing in every conceivable sense. That America is as polarized as it is, and that guns are as abundant and culturally intrinsic as they are, means there is a certain inevitability to the recent political violence. For some, it is more comforting to look for variables that likely don’t exist than the actual contributing factors that do, and that nobody seems willing to change.