By Nat Wilson Turner
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, I’ve been following the American right especially closely.
I want to share two responses that I initially found surprisingly sensible and reassuring, and one response that is appalling in its shamelessness, vile almost beyond belief.
And even the second response ultimately left me chilled by the end.
The first was a podcast featuring former BlackRock portfolio manager Edward Dowd that I was watching because I’m a financial doomer. The conversation turned to Charlie Kirk:
Edward Dowd: Anecdotally, people are saying they’re leaving the Democrats because they’ve lost. A lot of normal Democrats who aren’t high media consumers who just are watching what’s going on and hearing some of some of the people that they thought were friends saying abhorrent things are running (from the) center to the right.
So that needs to show up in the poll numbers because right now it’s anecdotal.
The worry of course is this Charlie Kirk assassination. Charlie Kirk interviewed me three times. He’s a wonderful human being. I’m 58 and I marveled at his communication skills and his ability to create what he did from such a very young age.
I mean, he was he was a phenom in at 19 and he just built something that, quite frankly, I was in awe of. He was quite an individual and I’m sad that he’s gone.
But when you step back and analyze this, my biggest fear is that this is the beginning of a divide and conquer strategy. I’ve said forever that this is a class issue, not an us versus them, left versus right, black versus white, Hispanic, Muslim.
This is this is a class issue and we are at the end of a grand cycle and we need to focus on who’s really in charge and the divide and conquer strategy has been well used throughout the millennium.
The key to focus on is whatever narrative is coming out. If it’s about dividing, ignore it. And remember, this is a class issue. When I say class, I’m not talking about someone with $10 million. I’m talking about the oligarchs, the super ultra wealthy, the .01% 01% that control the lion share of the wealth of the globe.
I must admit I was not expecting a former BlackRock portfolio manager to come out with a class war angle on Charlie Kirk. I must say I agree.
Which might make me more open to the things he had to say about the COVID pandemic and illegal immigration later in the video, or maybe not.
The second was a video featuring John Robb of Global Guerrillas, a security consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff (and a tech millionaire who was involved in the creation of RSS, among other things). Robb was contacted by a younger self-described Patriot, Brian Keith, in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, and the two streamed their conversation live on X.com.
Keith described the conversation as “part WTF, partly why am I so angry, partly how can I avoid being someone else’s tool, and how to deal with this swirl of current events.”
He goes on to quote some advice from Robb’s writing that inspired the conversation:
Brian Keith: I remember I was out hiking when I heard about (the death of George Floyd), and I remember being tribalized on the side of anti-cop when I was experiencing the empathic triggers that you talk about. And then later upon learning more, you realize, wait a minute, what I was immediately experiencing was quite different from after I had backed away from the empathic trigger or looked at more of the data, I had quite a different conclusion than I had in that first moment.
But that was then. This time’s different. This time, my immediate response is right, because my tribe I’m currently identifying with is completely accurate. So that’s how I feel in the moment. And you’re talking me down in chat.
With George Floyd, it was I didn’t know at the time when I first saw the empathic trigger. It was a black guy in an inner city of some kind. But it was police violence and I’ve experienced police harassing me. So it was sort of like me.
But then there’s Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk’s a lot like me. He’s who I wish I would be in some ways. So can you help us, John? Can you help us not necessarily decouple from the empathic trigger, but contextualize it in a way that helps us be more sane and less tribalized, make better decisions?
John Robb: With Charlie Kirk you feel that the bullet hit the neck it’s an internal transfer it’s a massive amount of information from the head of the victim how they’re seeing the world their fear their their desperation and it comes right into your head and it’s instantly modeled and it’s overwhelming . We don’t have the kind of barriers that we would have in real life when we’re online. When that happens, you feel an intense rage at the perpetrator.
You’re immediately jumping to a conclusion that fits your new framework, your tribalized mentality. That somebody says something, they’re immediately enemy. non-human, absolute evil. And if you get to that point where you’re bouncing around like that, you’re just a redshirt in Star Trek kind of thing. You’re just a fodder.
Keith: You don’t have any agency in this conflict. And what does fodder look like in the digital age? It looks like retweeting things or commenting on things or… acting in a way that if someone was attempting to control you they would want you to act as opposed to treating yourself as an individual that has ability to orient that might be different than someone else who looks sort of like you. Yeah, um fodder.
So far so good, right? Then the conversation took a turn that I wasn’t expecting, which sent a chill down my spine:
Robb: Usually in a civil conflict, the people who get activated, who lose agency, are the first ones to jump on board, the first ones to initiate violence. Those are the people that almost invariably get killed. Those people, those groups are run over by the bigger players that come later. So just for this audience you don’t want to be in that first group.
Keith: This reminds me of Eric Prince’s new phone, where some of the thought when he came out with his new phone was, well, do you want to be aligned with Eric Prince?That may have significant pros or significant cons in the future, depending on what you believe the future holds.
And now all this happens and Prince is on Twitter saying executions, executions, executions. He could easily be the next president right now. I’d vote for him. Trump has a few days before he loses me. I’m like, no, no, we need executions right away.
Because I’m so angry that it’s the whole seeing red thing. It’s seeing red for a guy I’ve never met in a place I’ve never been and yet, I’m ready to say, oh yeah, Eric Prince, President for life. Executions everywhere. No mercy against them.
Robb: But that’s life. You’re connected at a deep level. And that’s one of the major reasons Trump has to act, to designate many of these groups, left activists, as terrorist organizations and act. in order to prevent the kind of upswing and violence where we get those kind of street battles between the right-taking kind of revenge or action against these groups at a level of violence that we haven’t seen so far.
I’d like to see some compelling evidence for this wave of “leftist” violence before the death of Kirk is used to justify a horrifying clampdown in the U.S.
I’m not aware of any actual leftists in the U.S. with any measure of influence, and I’m not aware of any organized “leftist” violence since the Weather Underground disbanded in the early 1980s.
But let’s get to the really bad, totally appalling shit.
Of course, it’s Deputy White House Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, speaking at the Kirk Memorial in Arizona:
This accurate, near-verbatim translation of key passages from Joseph Goebbels’ speech titled “The Storm is Coming” (original German: “Der Sturm bricht los”), delivered on July 9, 1932, in Berlin.
This was a campaign rally speech in the lead-up to the July 31, 1932, Reichstag… https://t.co/FN8rqsM3p3— Tracey Gallagher (@asmartbrunette1) September 22, 2025
So yeah, this is bad, and things will continue to get worse in the United States.
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shagggz
Sure, LLMs may be factually-untethered bullshit generators, but they’re great for stylistic adaptations. Miller’s speech is a case in point.
mago
Sturm und drunge, isn’t that what it’s called? Forgive me, but it’s been decades since I lived in Germany. Pesch that I’m living in the USA now. Gimme a cheeseburger.
Jerren
Listening to both sides is always smart (IMO), and particularly in times of crisis. I personally follow some whackadoodle sites when things seem especially hot (Ukrainian invasion, Covid etc.). I’ve noticed that they are much faster to break stories, though there is definitely a higher noise to signal ratio. Follow up research is required.
Robb is a very interesting thinker. I have long suspected TPTB strongly suggested he tone down his thought experiments around the time he essentially shuttered his extremely interesting Global Guerillas blog (it’s back in a tame form, after long years). Around that time, he also claimed that a Nigerian rebel leader had wanted to meet about his ‘buy-puts, blow-up-pipelines’ idea. So maybe it was self-imposed censorship. Those were red-hot blogging years. I worried that reading it might put me on a list.
Poul
I wonder when we will see the first party move to a dictatorship. The more extreme means you use to rule the more you have to lose if power change hands. Including your life.
Unless the Republicans expect to eternally rule the White House and Congress actions like these will create basis for a vengeful counterstrike. Pro-life groups will be the new terrorist organizations. The billionaires funding the Republicans will have their wealth sized as terrorist funding etc., etc. Obama paved the way for killing US citizens without trial which is where the US could end up.
Nat Wilson Turner
@shagggz that’s one explanation that has some plausibility. Although Miller apparently has been quoting Goebbels for some time.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Poul the Dems are way too feckless and removed from reality to really strike hard.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Jerren It was a really interesting blog from a really interesting era.
albrt
I don’t think we’re at the end of a grand cycle, I think we’re at the beginning. The prior cycle died ten or fifteen years ago. If things get bad now they could stay bad for a while, either in the sense that an authoritarian leader takes over, or in the sense that there is no consensus or legitimacy for a couple of generations.
Purple Library Guy
That first one, I have to admit I don’t really get what he’s saying. Just what kind of class war is he talking about, and whose divide and conquer strategy, of what sort? I know who I see as doing divide and conquer strategies in the US, and how and why they’re doing it. And I know what kind of class war I think is going on. But I don’t think this guy means the same thing I would, and I’m unclear what his angle actually is.
KT
I feel like the right was pushing hard to make Charlie Kirk a martyr, intending to weaponize his death to crack down on free speech and progressive activism. Then came the Jimmy Kimmel suspension—followed by a huge, totally unexpected public backlash and a mass boycott of Disney-ABC by consumers and celebs. That forced Disney to reinstate Kimmel fast, completely killing the right’s martyr momentum. Now, nobody’s talking about Kirk—everyone’s hyped about Kimmel’s victorious comeback.
I had never watched any of Jimmy Kimmel’s monologue in its entirety, but tonight I tuned in and watch his entire monologue just out of curiosity.
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Considering we are in the midst of The Quickening, martyr no longer carries the weight and impact it once did. Martyr for a day doesn’t pack the same punch and that’s all Kirk was — martyr for a day. In order for martyr to carry the same weight, a martyr a day must be accomplished and a pipeline of martyrs must be promulgated. Are they up to the challenge? We’ll see.
Nat Wilson Turner
@albrt Not that I’m mind-melded with Edward Dowd, but he’s talking in economic and geopolitical terms as well as US political cycles. He’s talking about the end of the cycle that began in 1945 (or maybe later with the move off the gold standard).
@Purple Library Guy I believe he’s talking about class war between the billionaires who are gobbling up the resources and the millionaires who are being squeezed out. He is explicitly referring to Stephen Miller and others around Trump trying to capitalize on the Kirk death to divide and conquer the US. The rest of us have to hope the millionaires win and help if we can.
@KT I wouldn’t be celebrating so fast. I’m glad to see Disney buffeted back and forth by public pressure, but are refusing to air Kimmel.
bruce wilder
The “Grand Cycle” thing: the American “fourth turning” (2005-9) failed. That would have corresponded to 1928-35, if it had accomplished a revolution and realignment. But, it didn’t. But, these things cannot be stopped entirely, being driven like plate tectonics by the deep underlying overturning of generations. Those deep roots make Kirk’s assassination especially significant, by highlighting the arrested generational change in the Party establishments. (Just as Mamdani in NYC also does.)
The European “turning” is well underway now, corresponding as it must to 1945-55, a good twenty years or so behind the U.S. despite the powerful tendency to synchronize history across the Atlantic. Within Europe, Western Europe and Eastern Europe are on radically differing generational clocks, given the differing significance of 1914-25, 1945-55 and 1989-1999 — those decades of extreme trauma imprinted themselves on generational change and collective memory in politics to an extent that it can be hard to appreciate from the comparatively placid political seas of more than a century of North American political history.
The “democratic deficit” in the EU institutional structure is spreading now, dictating elections and policy. The “Goldman-Sachs” prime minister is a regular thing now, scarcely noticed. Cancelled elections, cancelled Parties? The “unreality” of propaganda on Ukraine and Russia enveloping Europe is remarkable for being both rabid and wholly unrealistic.
David B. Harrison
“The rest of us have to hope the millionaires win and help if we can.” The vast majority of wealthy people (including millionaires and the thousandaires that enable them) are terrible people. Long ago they abandoned true “noblesse oblige”. Their entire ambition is to increase or hold onto money, power, and privilege. And for every one of them that does something good 10,000 of them don’t. There are an estimated 22 million millionaires in the U.S. How much wealth do they hold? 100 trillion? Who knows since when you try to look the amount up it is obfuscated by overly complicated statistics. They’ve had decades to do the right thing and yet they haven’t.
Nat Wilson Turner
@bruce wilder some people (Strauss and Howe mainly) might have pegged the 4th Turning on the US being due for a transformative presidency in 2009-2016 but that didn’t quite happen for a number of reasons:
1. Obama being lame, no supporting popular movement or post neo-liberal ideological development, etc.
2. more importantly, 2008 was the first time we had so many healthy, wealthy and vigorous old people. As we’ve seen both US parties have gerontocratic leadership and esp on the Dem side, they’ve shut out the youngs (who are now 45 and under)
But it seems pretty clear that the underlying social forces continue to grind on as Peter Turchin and others have documented and massive change is occuring in the US and geopolitically.
Mark Level
This post mostly just deepened the despair I feel as this country dissolves into violent, ultra-right wing incoherence and toxic insanity. “Millionaires are going to save us from billionaires?” This is moronic beyond belief.
I don’t often find agreement with L&S, but yes, Charlie Kirk was a social agent pushing for a “return” to Bronze Age social relations alongside of high-technology brainwashing. This is again, incoherent. He is a manufactured “martyr”– okay, if Israel did it (not yet proven, as even Max Blumenthal admitted today) he was overall a bad person trying to exacerbate racial and ethnic divisions in the service of white supremacist and Exceptionalist fascism, and the fact that he had a few scruples as he saw people even worse than himself taking away his agency doesn’t make him a hero.
Let’s do a simple thought-experiment. Suppose the Nazi officer who’d placed the bomb under the table at Hitler’s big meeting, and it failed to kill him . . . Suppose it had worked? A new Nazi clique would be in power that’s all, they’d still have the same policies and death-drive, the fantasy was that they might not have lost the War which Hitler’s insanity was assuring, but that’s the kind of “hopium” that Obama pushed. You might win the lottery 1 in 865 thousand times, but when buying from Con Men and grifters (even clever ones like Kirk) you are always a serf being exploited and used, you are never going to be the one that “benefits.” It’s a sucker’s game.
It’s nice that a miserable loser slob like Miller comes out openly to bray his resentiment power fantasies. Nietzsche perfectly predicted the rise of this type long ago. The Due Dissidence guys did a quick shot of Miller and Joseph Goebbels speechifying side by side, and they do indeed look like 2 entries in a Spy Magazine “Separated at Birth” entry, from the 1980s other than the fact that Goebbels had a much better head of hair.
Meantime Russia has asked to renew the START Nuclear weapons treaty, which expires in less than a year. The US response? Trump fulminates based on insane lies from Keith Kellogs Korn Flakes that Ukraine can soon “take back all the land that Russia took from it” to Zelensky, Lindsay Graham is on air wishing that NATO can soon start shooting Russian jets in the Baltic area out of the sky.
There are hopeful things happening in the world, many of the Euro-vassals who enabled the Gaza and now West Bank genocide are being bought to heel by their publics and forced to feign support for a Palestinian state at the UN. (It’s not meaningful yet, but could be if the pressure continues.) Nearly 50 ships from over 40 countries are attempting to bring aid to Gaza, and even neofascist Georgia Meloni of Italy sent a Naval vessel to guard the Italian ship.
Instead we get navel-gazing from crypto-primitivist Bronze Age perverts fanboys. Absurd!! Yes, the Dimmies are irrelevant (& proud) but we need not willingly decide neo-fascists are the new “kewl kids” and will be the TV Stars of American Reality (sic) TV this season.
The lunatics have taken over the asylum in USA. You can join the death cult, oppose it and potentially be a real martyr yourself or even try to escape it. Reveling in it is masochistic and disgraceful.
PS– NWT sometimes writes some brilliant stuff, I have commented supportively on some posts, and he had a great one on Naked Capitalism in the last week on the Merz/von der Lyin’ 4th Reich fantasies imagining they’re about to crush Russia last week. Other than rubbing excrement in our faces to remind us how bad things are, however, I see little value in this post. Nihilism for nihilism is not my bag, I think this website has and can do better. Please indulge me for a moment here, what about examining some Left ideas & ideals that aren’t just about selling out or appropriating the right? There must be actual people out there doing work of that type.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Mark Level — thanks for the kind words about the NC post that you mistakenly thought I wrote. Was it this one by Conor Gallagher?
I didn’t intend the post as nihilism, but rather an attempt to share 2 things coming from voices I now realize are “right wing” but hadn’t really thought of in those terms prior.
I go to people like Dowd for financial insight and people like Robb for military/strategy/tech insight and was genuinely surprised at the degree of emotion they and their interlocutors were expressing for Charlie Kirk, someone I gave little or no thought before his death.
So I was surprised by their emotion and was initially reassured by what I saw as the Gen Xers talking the Gen Zers down from what were to me, shocking reactions.
I still generally agree with what Dowd had to say.
Your comment about that “Millionaires are going to save us from billionaires?” This is moronic beyond belief.” is both a mischaracterization of what Dowd had to say and IMO incorrect.
Revolutions and Civil Wars only happen as a result of intra-elite conflict. The masses alone have never pulled off anything more consequential than Shays Rebellion or the Whiskey Rebellion (or maybe the Chinese Taiping Rebellion in its initial stages but they quickly picked up local elite support).
If there are millionaires opposing the billionaires, I’ll be glad of it. Just like I’m happy to see anyone opposing the genocide in Gaza, even if it’s people I’ve previously despised like Tucker Carlson or Marjorie Taylor Greene. IMO the current authoritarian crisis is an all-hands-on-deck situation and I’ll take any help I can get.
Sorry you didn’t like the post, but my intent was to warn and possibly discuss “WTF is going on here” with like-minded and intelligent folks not rub your face in nihilism.
Also I must apologize but I’m ignorant of who L&S might be. Is your point in that paragraph that there is no point in discussing any possible split between Kirk and his Zionist funders? That’s not a topic I raised in this post, but it is something I find very interesting and appreciate Max Blumenthal and Candace Owen (I can’t believe I’m appreciating her) for investigating that issue.
Any split between the Zionists and their American backers is something to be celebrated IMO.
Nat Wilson Turner
@David B. Harrison, in my experience, almost everyone in every economic class is simultaneously “horrible people” and wonderful in some ways.
As I tried to point out to Mark Level above, there is no social revolution in history of which I’m aware that relied solely on the masses or lower classes or whatever you want to call the poor and precarious, such as myself.
So, forgive me for grasping at straws and hoping perhaps some millionaires are in opposition to the oligarchs.
Any enemy of Peter Thiel, Trump, etc, is a friend of mine. And frankly, anyone who is listened to by the young males of the right that is advising caution and restraint is saying something I’m glad to hear.
Nat Wilson Turner
@Bruce Wilder, I came across something Ray Dalio said in the Financial Times that might be more accurate in terms of which cycles Dowd is referencing:
“Asked about Trump’s Intel stake and export tariffs imposed on Nvidia and AMD, Dalio referred to his own concept of “the big cycle”, when during periods of great conflicts and risks countries’ leaders are more controlling of the markets and the economy.
“Dalio added that, ‘increased wealth and value gaps lead to increased populism of the right and populism of the left and irreconcilable differences between them that can’t be resolved through the democratic process. So democracies weaken and more autocratic leadership increases as a large percentage of the population wants government leaders to get control of the system to make things work well for them.'”
Swamp Yankee
I want to echo Bruce Wilder, in a very impressionistic and anecdotal way, about c. 2005-2009 being the last real moment of possible reform in this country (maybe 2005-2010; for me, the failure to do a damn thing about the climate/ecological crisis when the Deepwater Horizon Spill happened in the spring of 2010 marked the end of any real hope or faith I had in Obama).
It was a more hopeful era, with a kind of Second Sixties feel for those of us who were young, were opposed to the W. Administration and its various misadventures foreign and domestic; it probably helped that many of our parents were from the Generation of 68, and we saw in Iraq an analogue to Vietnam.
There was indeed a possibility of real change in that crisis winter of 2008-2009. I was in graduate school in the Upper Midwest at the time, in a state with declining factories and Great Depression levels of unemployment in this period. I remember taking a cab — because our train broke down — with a half dozen or so other travelers on a long drive from the middle of Michigan to Chicago for a friend’s wedding that we just couldn’t miss, and the cost was not exorbitant when we all split it. On road trips, people talk, including strangers whose train has broken down in a small city in the rural Midwest. The hatred for the Banker class was universal. People were ready for a change. We could have done something.
But just as hatred for the Banker class was universal among the people, among the Obama Administration, and among the ruling bourgeois elements more generally, the real identification with and protectiveness towards the Banksters was visceral and instinctive. It still is (even in local politics, I’ve observed it).
And that failure to take that off-ramp — the other one being the failure to elect Sanders — led in significant part to the dark present in America, in which a clownish would-be king spouts what W.H. Auden, 85 years ago, called “windy militant trash”, while millions of Facebook fascists bleat in approval.
Change was possible, and the ruling class quashed it, and now we have a moronic social media caudillo and an increasingly degraded and vicious population. It’s a dark time.
Nevertheless, republican and democratic France arose again after Vichy, and I have no choice but to maintain a faith that republican and democratic America will rise again after Trump, and to work to make it so.
David B. Harrison
In reply to Nat Wilson Turner and comments about my post. These millionaires and thousandaires have the power to change things . They own and run everything and spend most of their time pulling up the ladder of success so that the rest of us can’t climb it. They enrich their nepo babies at our expense. They have the power to change things. The working class doesn’t.
bruce wilder
2008 was the first time we had so many healthy, wealthy and vigorous old people
In the U.S., 2008 was a tiny peak on a long plateau in an increasingly unhealthy population, followed by continued stagnation or actual decline in life expectancy. Figures like Biden, McConnell and Feinstein may have been wealthy at the end (for arguably wrong reasons) but not healthy or vigorous.
And, Obama wasn’t “lame” so much as he was Reagan reincarnated — purposely and self-consciously so, forging in key Administration appointments and policies, the UniParty.
I agree, though, about the paucity of “post neo-liberal ideological development” as a determining factor. Chris Hedges doesn’t get enough credit for drawing attention to the consequences of the fading of institutional support for morally critical or progressive (as opposed to performative, corrupt conservative think tanks like Heritage) political thought.
the underlying social forces continue to grind on as Peter Turchin and others have documented
generational change goes on continuously of course. unsolved problems and unresolved conflicts can continue indefinitely, fester and accumulate. The can gets kicked down the road and it is a long road. I doubt the U.S. can ever fully recover from Obama’s decision to immunize banksters in the aftermath of the fraud-driven real estate bubble and GFC.
Nat Wilson Turner
@David B. Harrison don’t conflate the millionaires with the oligarchs. Millionaires have some power and are essential to any real resistance, but they’re not the ones making the big and evil decisions.
David B. Harrison
Holy crap, the millionaires are the resistance? They prop up the billionaires. Try living in a gentrified rural area like I do . The millionaires buy all the land up and build Chicken houses, strip the trees off the land (like they need more money) and drive property values up so no ordinary person can buy property. We had a one room school house that educated our community and the millionaire that owned it knocked it down instead of preserving it. Your argument is the lesser evil argument that turns into say hello to the new boss same as the old boss.