Note: This piece discusses the assassination of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and public reactions to it, including social-media responses. No graphic imagery is included, but the themes may be distressing.
I. The Nervous System
On 10 September 2025, Charlie Kirk was on a stage at Utah Valley University. He had just tossed hats into the crowd and fielded a question about mass shootings. “Do you know how many mass shooters there have been in America in the last ten years?” he asked, before quipping, “Counting or not counting gang violence?” A rifle report rent the campus air. He clutched his neck, toppled from his chair, and by nightfall he was tragically pronounced dead.
The footage barely had time to sink into the globe’s jarred nervous system before TikTok lit up with clapping emojis and ironic edits, as if assassination were just another content drop. The internet metabolised it in the only way it knows: spectacle. There were videos applauding, laughing, jeering. Clips looped the fall, the blood, the scramble. Traditional outlets blurred the impact. Social media replayed it with commentary tracks. Death became trending content, grief became a meme template.
At Oxford, the Union’s president-elect posted celebratory remarks. Screenshots spread, and the scramble to repair his image began. A statement followed. It spoke of impulsivity, of comments that did not reflect his values, of condolences to Kirk’s family. Yet the tone was not repentance. It was crisis management. The apology functioned like a fire blanket: smother the flames, contain the optics, keep the CV intact. Between the lines sat a partial defence, an implication that Kirk’s own rhetoric explained the impulse. Threshold logic had not been renounced. It had been repackaged, tucked neatly behind a velvet rope. A debating society mistaking bloodletting for rhetoric is not revolutionary. It is decadent. Caesar’s stabbing restaged as open-mic night. The lighting tasteful, the logic murder.
II. Why Threshold Logic Seduces
Threshold logic flatters. It tells the angry that their heat is diagnosis, not temper. Rage is recast as discernment. You are no longer frustrated with a bursar or a police chief, you are wielding a scalpel on the body politic.
It promises efficiency. Reform drags, coalitions wobble, committees turn minutes into hours. The scalpel looks quick. One cut and the problem appears solved. The appeal sits somewhere between triage and impatience.
It also indulges the perennial undergraduate fantasy. Many a student has stared down a housing officer and felt like Robespierre in embryo. Threshold logic supplies the costume. A quarrel about library fines becomes a pocket-sized Battle of Algiers. The soundtrack is stirring; the paperwork is still overdue.
Threshold logic also feels exhilarating because it mimics the body’s adrenaline surge. The pulse quickens, reflexes sharpen, vision narrows. But what helps in a fight can kill in politics. No nervous system can sustain permanent fight-or-flight without collapsing.
III. Why Thresholds Collapse
The trouble with thresholds is that they are written in smoke. Ask ten factions where oppression becomes irredeemable, you receive ten maps. The far right colours in the universities. The far left circles the courts. Everyone brings a tumour list, none match, each insists on surgical urgency.
Once assassination is licensed, the permission does not expire. Today it is Kirk. Tomorrow his successor. The day after, whoever inherits the microphone. A raised scalpel likes to stay in the hand.
Threshold logic is like prescribing stimulants to a patient already in convulsions. The civic reflexes only grow more erratic. The body politic thrashes harder, mistaking seizure for strength.
IV. History’s Rehearsals
History has workshopped this pathology.
France. The Revolution began with the king’s head. The line felt clear. Then came nobles, moderates, and finally the radicals themselves. Each cut was meant to cauterise a wound; instead the artery ruptured.
England. The execution of Charles I in 1649 was meant to resolve tyranny once and for all. Instead it inaugurated decades of organ failure. The republic spasmed, the monarchy returned, and the body politic carried scars that shaped it for centuries.
Weimar. Street militias, left and right, announced that certain enemies lay beyond politics. Assassinations recorded those announcements in alleys and beer halls. The republic bled out slowly, its circulation failing with every strike.
Rome. The games opened with criminals and captives. Soon, inconvenient citizens were reclassified as enemies of the people. Crowds were trained to cheer blood as policy, until civic life itself went septic.
America. The 1960s saw assassination after assassination: King, Kennedy, Malcolm X, Robert Kennedy. Each was supposed to signal a new threshold, each instead deepened the wound. If assassination had healing powers, America’s civic body would have been the healthiest on earth. Instead it limped into the 1970s scarred and mistrustful.
Thresholds metastasise. Once assassination is justified in the name of necessity, the patient is opened up again and again until nothing vital remains.
V. Benjamin’s Ghost
Walter Benjamin drew a sharp line between law-preserving violence, the force that upholds an order, and law-making violence, the force that founds a new one. On the page, threshold logic borrows prestige from the second. Declare an institution irredeemable, then cast the strike against it as founding justice rather than perpetuating harm.
There is a catch. Benjamin’s distinction assumes we can tell preservation from foundation. Threshold logic blurs that difference. Every faction claims to be founding a freer future while it preserves its grievance in fresh scar tissue. The guillotine arrives dressed as genesis. TikTok applause arrives dressed as prophecy.
Benjamin also floated a troubling third figure, divine violence, a rupture that interrupts corrupted orders altogether. Whatever one makes of that, it is not ours to wield. It is not a student’s scalpel, nor a partisan’s bullet, nor a meme’s laughter. Confusing messianic rupture with cathartic cruelty turns eschatology into content.
VI. Arendt and Fanon
Hannah Arendt insisted that violence is sterile. It can destroy power; it cannot create it. Threshold logic pretends otherwise, mistaking collapse for creation. What grows in its soil is not power but fear.
Frantz Fanon, writing of colonised Algeria, described violence as cathartic, a way of reclaiming agency when the coloniser recognised no other language. But Fanon’s diagnosis belonged to a patient under occupation, whose immune system was already disabled. Transplanting his prescription into a democracy — however compromised — is a category mistake. Fanon prescribed adrenaline to a body chained in the cellar. Threshold logic prescribes it to a body still capable of voting, arguing, bargaining. The dose kills.
VII. The Two-Sided Coin (are there other kinds?)
Honesty helps. Neither tribe is innocent. Both have honourable ancestry. Both are busy betraying it.
On the right there is a real tradition of vigilance against state overreach, traceable to Madison, attentive to limits on power, jealous for speech and association. In the present, that lineage has curdled into grotesque arithmetic where school shootings are carried as liberty’s overhead. The bloodstream is already poisoned, yet the cost is written off as freedom’s price.
On the left there is the tradition of Selma and of suffragettes, of labour’s patient organising and of movements that enlarged democracy by refusing to mirror assassination with assassination. That inheritance is now threatened by applause for assassination, the fantasy that progress can be hurried by a bullet.
Two ledgers, both dishonoured. Different currencies, same arithmetic. Human lives discounted as collateral, provided the balance favours your side.
VIII. Pissing your Inheritance down the Toilet
The right betrays liberty when preventable deaths are treated as background noise. The left betrays emancipation when assassination is mistaken for justice. Each camp scolds the other while sawing through its own family tree.
What lies bleeding in the middle is the civic body itself, gasping in the noise of the crowd. The immune system (the taboos against murder; the reflex of basic decency) is under attack. The only instrument that can stabilise the pulse is procedural dialogue. Talking instead of killing, bargaining instead of purging, the boredom that steadies a nervous system otherwise prone to quick dysregulation.
IX. Decency as Civic Hygiene
John McCain told a rally that Barack Obama was a decent man. He was booed for it. The line reads now like civic hygiene. He was not anointing a rival, he was policing a taboo. Strip an opponent of humanity and the only ledger left is written in blood. That arithmetic always balances, never heals.
That the Oxford Union, the Vatican of undergraduate rhetoric, should drift toward applauding assassination is comic until it is not. A debating chamber that mistakes murder for argument becomes an amphitheatre. The acoustics improve, the patient flatlines.
X. What Can Be Prescribed?
The antidote to assassination is never more assassination. The antidote is the stubborn, slightly ridiculous insistence on dialogue with opponents you may never come to like. To be democratic when it is easy is cheap. To be democratic when it is excruciating is civic courage.
The right has already betrayed liberty by treating dead children as overhead. The left must not sanctify assassination by mistaking murder for progress. Civil dialogue is the only tonic that calms. Without it, the immune system fails, the organs collapse, and the republic dies to rapturous applause.
XII. The Rifle as Meme
On 12 September, Utah’s Governor Spencer Cox announced the arrest of Tyler Robinson, twenty-two. Relatives described him as once an honour-roll student, later sour with politics and hate.
He left behind shell casings etched with memes: “Bella Ciao,” “If you read this you are gay, LMAO.” A 4chan joke carved in brass.
The rifle, like the rhetoric that justified it, converted life into content.
The killing joke.