Perhaps more than a murder of our times, the Kirk murder should be inscribed in today’s cultural rhetoric, fuelled by the silent masses that have allowed a certain culture to proliferate.

People never act alone, never just on their own. Except for the insane. This principle also applies to individual attacks and so-called lone wolves. How is this possible?

Human sociality

For while the individual execution of a crime is recognised, the profoundly social nature of human beings must be understood. The cultures – or rather, the cultural networks – to which we are all subjected, without distinction, shape and at the same time standardise our actions, making them tend to be predictable. Two unknown individuals, yet immersed in the same cultural and linguistic exposure, may develop similar ideas and react similarly to the same stimuli: it is therefore not necessary to belong to the same cell, party, tribe or family to act and react in the same way. This apparently trivial premise, however, is the cornerstone of our reflection.

Language and the various cultures – and subcultures – are what unites strangers. Just think of the members of a nation, bound by the same language, or the inhabitants of a village, united by their common dialect and cadence. Man is a social animal: his actions must therefore also be read in the light of this nature.

The social connection of individual action

If, therefore, we cannot and must not eliminate the individual responsibility of Kirk’s murderer – also in order not to fall into free-riding – neither can we ignore the cultural and linguistic context in which this barbarity took place. Individuals only act politically when they perceive that their actions are, if not acclaimed, at least tolerated by the society in which they live and the cultural context to which they feel they belong.

This is why a thief runs away after robbing a bank, or why crimes take place in the shadows: people tend to show off and boast about their deeds only when they are consistent with their culture. Never the other way around, especially when they are socio-political (murder of a public figure) and not selfish (murder for revenge).

So if Tyler Robinson’s cultural network is co-responsible for his actions, the question is: who created this culture fertile to hatred?

Before any cultural upheaval comes linguistic upheaval. It is the repeated and constant transformation of words that sets the stage. Within a generation, Kirk’s ideas have gone from being shared by secular institutions like the Vatican to American political figures like JFK, Bill Clinton or even Barack Obama.

For example, something many seem to have forgotten, the Holy See – like the other two monotheistic religions – rejects homosexual marriage as well as gender fluidity or abortion. No left-wing activists are reported tearing their hair out in front of neighbourhood mosques for their treatment of homosexuals.

The (forgotten) examples of JFK, Bill Clinton and Obama

The same can be said of JFK, who was certainly politically progressive but still a Catholic. He considered homosexual practices or at most homosexual marriage practices absolutely contrary to his values – let alone hormonal procedures on adolescents undecided about their biological sex.

The same applies to Bill Clinton, who in 1996 passed the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act , which criminalised illegal immigration and strengthened controls, famous for his speech on the ‘deportation of the aliens here in our country ‘ . Also Clinton in 1996 claimed ‘I remain opposed to same-sex marriage. I believe marriage is an institution for the union of a man and a woman. This has been my long-standing position, and it is not being reviewed or considered.’ And in the same year he signed the DOMA ‘defence of marriage act’.

Not even Obama can be excluded from this very brief recap of collective (lost) memory, recall in fact his speech to the nation in 2014: ‘We have more agents and technology deployed to secure our southern border than at any time in our history’ with over 2.5 million deportations: he was called ‘Deporter in Chief’by pro-migrant groups.
Again Obama to the same black community that elected him said ‘We need (black) fathers to realise that responsibility does not end at conception … what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child but the courage to raise one’ bringing up the same theme as Charlie Kirk about crime in black neighbourhoods depending largely on the parental neglect of African-Americans themselves towards their offspring.

This is an extreme non-exhaustive summary of how Kirk’s demands, with due differences, have been similar to those of the American left for decades.
If you really want to talk about extremism, you have to understand who has abruptly departed from these demands.

Tyler Robinson’s subculture is precisely the one that in the last decade has drastically detached itself from the historical instances of the American left by importing the architecture of the European Jacobin left.

We cannot forget how the majority wing of left-wing thought is historically anchored in the concept of revolution, of struggle, of uprooting the present system because it is considered systemically unjust. In this context, the first step is the creation of a bipartite scheme of good and bad, i.e. good oppressed and bad oppressors; after creating these two categories comes action: leftist philosophy is not such if not from the perspective of active and diligent modification of the cultural (Gramsci) or economic (Marx) order.

The Hegelian memory is now lost in the annals of history, but the maxim: ‘what is rational (the ideas of emancipation) (must) become real‘ remains the intrinsic engine of any leftist campaign, from the noblest to the least noble. The call for violence is present in leftist doctrine because it is historically anti-establishment by definition, always inclined to modify reality in favour of its own superior rationality or morality, always in virtue of protecting the oppressed.

While these mechanisms have lost their explicit character, they retain the same force implicitly. The same pattern can be read between the lines everywhere: an oppressor is created, then a liberator is created who in the name of the common good is legitimised to use violence to rationalise a sick and unjust society.

If the Israelis systematically oppress Palestine, then terrorism is understandable. Whether one is talking about the working class or the gay or black community, the grammar is the same.

The culture of hatred is a direct consequence of this pattern: how can you not hate an oppressor who tramples on you and has created a systemic exploitative structure just for the sake of oppressing you? Victimhood breeds hatred. And Tyler Robinson was exposed to the culture of victimhood, hence hatred.

The dangers of debasing the concept of ‘extremism’

Ergo, when talking about extremism, one should exercise caution. In fact, it would be better never to talk about extremism and never to label people in this way without knowing the subject in depth. To do so lightly produces harmful consequences. First of all, it inflates the term and empties it of meaning. And when a word loses meaning, it becomes impossible to use it with surgical precision: it ends up containing everything. With two consequences:

1. you demonise those who do not fall into that category, exposing them to real risks;
2. social and institutional antibodies capable of recognising true extremists are lacking.

The main culprit of this mechanism is the media, which influence the evolution and distortion of language. They play a role that is as sacred as it is dangerous for democracy. On the one hand, they are the indispensable counterbalance to public authority, the only ones able to inform voters and balance the despotic tendency of governments. On the other, holding the power to shape the thinking – and thus the actions – of the masses, they have the ability to mislead citizens to the point of changing the way they perceive the world.

In a democracy, however, there is no natural balance between public power and media power. As long as there is freedom of speech, the media can potentially shape the mentality of citizens without limits. Whether this happens or not, and to what extent, depends only on a third factor: the needle in the balance, namely the citizens. Being a citizen is not only a right, it is also a duty. And among the duties of the good citizen is to be vigilant to ensure that cultural power does not take over and, more banally, not to accept that words are changed in meaning.

The plastic function of the media in society

The media technique, let me tell you, is as simple as it is old. You tiptoe in, telling a true fact but playing on the tone or implied implications, often using the bias of completeness – that is, telling a true thing but taking it out of context. Then they go on to change the names of things, but without adding explicit judgements: it would arouse suspicion. Only then come the moral implications.

One starts with an accusatory tone, one insinuates that there is something wrong, one reinforces linguistic changes, always with the semblance of verisimilitude. Thus: a war becomes genocide, questionable military choices become war crimes, a republican becomes an extremist, personal interests become social rights, an aterritorial terrorist movement becomes a nation, a social group becomes oppressed based on the amount of melanin in its skin.

Between one step and the next there is painstaking segmentation and incessant repetition: repeating a lie over and over again makes it into the collective vocabulary anyway. Gradually, the disinformation machine has changed the way the public understands the world, turning the ideas of the Democrats of twenty years ago into extremist and subversive ideas, when in fact the only ones to have moved up the political spectrum were the Democrats themselves.

Supply and demand

While the social function of the media is to counterbalance political power, its purpose is purely private: to sell more copies. And it must be so because if the media were public they would be subject to political pressure and become governmental press organs. But of course being private there is a mismatch between social function and corporate purpose.

You cannot cut the chain of responsibility for journalists. If a journalist writes something, he does so because he knows that someone will appreciate that content. It is therefore also the direct responsibility of citizens if the culture of hatred has gained the upper hand. It is the fault of each one of us if we have not spent five minutes of our time to keep silent, or to read something more than a newspaper article. Keeping silent, often, is a wonderful thing. Expressing oneself on everything, much less so.

This inclination of the public is in turn exploited by the media, which offer increasingly simplistic, abbreviated, misleading content, punctuated with catchy rhythms, almost like a summer hit. Those who provide information shape culture, those who consume it consent to its sedimentation.
If it is true that the biased journalist sells sensationalism, it is equally true that his reader buys sensationalism.

On the individual side, it must be added that the distorting effect of the media has increased in spite of itself thanks to social platforms, which on the other hand exponentially increase the public’s duty of caution in expressing important and tendentially risky positions. The public’s responsibility has dramatically increased since social media. If the media provide the grammar of disinformation, social media provide the viral and atomised sounding board of disinformation, creating an extra-democratic plebiscitary consensus.

Conclusion: whose fault is it?

If Tyler Robinson and the media have no excuse, we fare no better. If we wanted to continue along the lines of what we criticise, such as oversimplifications, we should end this reflection by blaming the monster or at most the media. It is easy to always blame someone else or a system as a whole. But that is not the reality. Every individual carries social and collective responsibility.

Whenever we read and allow sensationalist sayings to pass us by, or when we talk about things we have no in-depth knowledge of and are beguiled by slogans and ‘copy-pasted’ catchphrases from some unknown source, or when we do not react to the instrumentalisation of words: in each of these cases we are jointly responsible.

And if you think it is only the USA, you are mistaken: we in Italy have no extenuating circumstances as the culture of hatred is cross-border, it is viral, it is pandemic.

The barbarian mass in Italy that has exulted or in any case justified or minimised the incident is lurking at all levels, from the Europarliament, to pseudo-intellectuals such as Odifreddi or Saviano, to party exponents as well as ordinary people down to the very normal functional illiterates.

The culture of hatred has a known matrix rooted in precise left-wing political doctrines mixed with a holy field of the human mind: it is dangerous, pervasive, captivating.

It must be crushed immediately and anyone who consents is an accomplice.