Charlie Kirk, The Shock Doctrine, and what I've been afraid of all along

Dear reader, hi. These have been some wretched days in America, and I want to start by acknowledging that we are not supposed to witness this much violence within our lifetimes as humans, let alone on a daily basis. If you do not feel okay right now, that’s okay – in fact, it’s proof that living through this violence has not yet numbed you to your own humanity.

But I am not writing, dear reader, to tell you how to feel, in no small part because I don’t know how I feel myself yet. This has been an onslaught of data for all of us to process, and as I get into later in this essay/letter, some of the shock we’re feeling is almost certainly intentionally being amplified. It’s a cruel political strategy, because it forces us to spend all this time working through facts with a paranoid mindset, and it prevents us from accessing our emotions. And, while we are trying to get our heads on straight, it looks like a bunch of jackasses are running around, as one must expect in the aftermath of a tragedy, creating optimal conditions for paranoid delusions.

Let me be clear: The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a profound tragedy that will rightfully reverberate in American history. His death is a tragedy, it is a tragedy that his kids will grow up without a parent, it is a tragedy that young people who admired Kirk will be forever haunted by that sound of a pop, then the images of Kirk’s neck snapping back, blood spurting from the throat he’d just been speaking through, and his limp body hitting the ground — and it could be considered a tragedy that Kirk was even in Utah at all on September 10th, 2025. After all, Kirk was once a teenager listening to Rush Limbaugh, and, by 18, he’d reportedly been tapped by influentials in the right wing media ecosystem to be among the next Rushes.

And if we are to take Kirk sincerely, doesn’t that mean he came of age believing he was part of a metaphysical war against some evil force composed of shadowy figures who eat our freedom to fuel their own corruption? Wasn’t he exactly the kind of person Rush was trying to activate with his radio show, and the kind of person political jackasses of any ideology are always hoping will emerge? Wasn’t the climate of fear, paranoia, and violence that Kirk’s assassin grew up breathing poisoned at least in part by the right? This is not to say elements of the left-liberal milieu aren’t responsible for this culture of fear, paranoia, and violence, too, but that this feels like such a profound tragedy because I cannot find a case for justice anywhere in it. Kirk is dead, the man who assassinated him was ruined well before he fired a single shot, and the rest of us are trapped in the terrorizing media ecosystem that shaped them both, while shaping new mutations of us every day.

Not that I really have time to dwell on tragedy, of course. If you’ve never heard of Naomi Klein’s theory of the shock doctrine, the short version is that political actors will exploit any and all shock for their own enrichment. The main jackasses of Klein’s book, The Shock Doctrine, are neoliberal evangelists, or “disaster capitalists”, who sit around waiting for things like Hurricane Katrina or stock market crashes to happen, then pop up with tidy policy proposals that often perpetuate what caused the shock in the first place. And what I find especially cruel about the shock doctrine’s logic is it expands the shock, giving the shockers’ jackass pals ample terrain to keep fucking things up.

Which is exactly the logic Trump seems to have been following from the MAGA media playbooks on Wednesday afternoon. I’m not surprised half my social media networks are convinced this was a false flag operation or whatever, because when the President gets on TV before the shooter had even been identified and says this –

“For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law-enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

– it becomes justifiably difficult to believe that this wasn’t some plot to excuse hunting down every liberal in America. And maybe it says something sweet about us as people, that we have a hard time believing jackasses spend their lives in wait of shock to exploit. After all, that sounds like a really pathetic way to spend one’s life, and maybe we’re still too naïve at heart to fully believe a human could be that cruel. Isn’t it easier to believe there’s a meaty, meaningful story behind all this?

But Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine is a well-regarded work of journalism, and having read many of the right wing coalition’s actual documents – such as Dawn’s Early Light by Kevin D. Roberts, Ph.D. and President of the Heritage Foundation, to which JD Vance wrote a glowing introduction (“We are now all realizing that it’s time to circle the wagons and load the muskets. In the fights that lay ahead, these ideas are an essential weapon.”) – I have not yet found any reason to believe there is any coherent story or plot here, just a lot of unsituated chaos – and a lot of people who seem to know exactly what to do with it.

Or, maybe I’m giving these jackasses too much credit, and they’re all as visibly incompetent as FBI Director Kash Patel; that seems like a good disclaimer before I continue.