[Bernardo Bertolucci, *The Dreamers*, 2003. This film foreshadowed today’s meme-driven political violence by showing how youthful revolution blurs into spectacle.]

Culture is made, again and again, through violence.

In September 2025, Charlie Kirk—founder of the hard-right youth organization Turning Point USA and one of the most visible architects of America’s contemporary extremist conservative movement—was shot and killed while speaking under a pavilion in the courtyard of Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah.

For over a decade Kirk built his brand on culture-war provocations, from election denial to anti-LGBTQ campaigns and Christian nationalist rhetoric. Within hours of his death, major figures on the U.S. radical right, from talk-radio hosts to members of Congress, began portraying him as a martyr, a casualty of what they framed as an “anti-conservative purge.”

That canonization is not incidental. It is part of the political afterlife of such violence, where the slain become symbols around which grievance and recruitment coalesce.

The setting that afternoon was deceptively ordinary. Utah Valley University’s central courtyard is a broad, sun-washed plaza dotted with benches and small lawns, dominated by a steel-roofed performance pavilion where student clubs host music sets, rallies, and debates.

On that early-fall day students lounged with iced coffees and laptops while a conservative group adjusted microphones. In seconds the open-air stage became a theater of violence. College students, trained for this moment since kindergarten, ducked down, their choreography of survival almost rote. Meanwhile, millenial influencers started live-streaming the scene, creating content about the massacre as it unfolded.

What is this impulse to immediately record, remix, make meme of death?

When the echoes faded, investigators found unfired cartridges engraved with messages drawn from antifascist slogans and the insider slang of video games and online culture. Utah’s governor described one engraving—“up arrow, right arrow, three down arrows”—as a reference to the sequence of controller moves that unleashes bombs in the popular video game Helldivers 2.

Midtown Manhattan, early morning: a canyon of glass and stone where office workers hurry between subway and skyscraper, the air tinged with roasted-chestnut smoke and steam from sidewalk grates. Outside a sleek residential tower near Park Avenue, Brian Johnson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, began what looked like an ordinary commute. A man stepped from the pedestrian flow, fired several shots, and disappeared back into the crowd. On the pavement lay brass casings etched with three legalistic words—delay, deny, depose—phrases that lawyers use in insurance disputes but that here read as both taunt and manifesto.

Two deaths. Two public men, one a culture-war podcaster, the other a pharma exec. What unites them is not profession or politics but the fusion of language and violence. Words were literally inscribed in metal to kill them.

There is nothing new in the performance of public death, though the form feels contemporary.

The Romans staged executions as civic theater; the medieval church placed bodies on pyres to purify the air with the rhetoric of smoke.

“The public execution,” Michel Foucault observed in Discipline and Punish, “has a juridico-political function; it is a ceremonial by which a momentarily injured sovereignty is reconstituted.” Violence has never been merely physical. It is spectacle, a public act through which power dramatizes and renews itself.

Nineteenth-century anarchists called this propaganda by the deed: acts so stark they awakened the world to revolution. The assassin’s bullet carries a script, a claim to authority, a story the killer wishes culture to repeat.

Yet the killings in Utah and New York are not arguments in the classical sense.
They are fragments, collages, half-jokes: policy critique spliced with gamer slang and meme-culture inside jokes. Delay, deny, depose. Hey, fascist. OwO what’s this. The language is incoherent, and that incoherence is itself a message.

This is where the culture war bleeds into meme war.
Since 2019’s so-called Groyper Wars—when young conservatives flooded campus events with viral-bait questions—it has been clear that political argument is giving way to performance. Politics has become a game of capture-the-flag played in hashtags and GIFs, the public more a gallery of spectators than a citizenry.

Nor is this only an American story. In Nepal this September, a government ban on social-media platforms sparked protests that stormed parliament and then reorganized online. Discord channels turned into a parliament of screens, a revolution of notifications. As in Utah, digital discourse migrated into physical confrontation.

Some of the most shattering acts of violence defy ideological coherence. In 1979, Brenda Spencer opened fire on a schoolyard and told reporters she did it because she didn’t like Mondays. Charles Manson’s Helter Skelter prophecy was a bricolage of Beatles lyrics and apocalyptic paranoia. The point was never coherence; it was spectacle. The unimaginable shatters the Overton window. Violence shifts culture. Memes beget blood.

Psychologists call this dehumanization—seeing others as animals, machines, NPCs. In gaming slang, NPC thinking reduces people to non-player characters, scripted and soulless. Once someone ceases to seem fully human, violence becomes possible—even amusing. A taunt on a casing, a meme carved into brass, becomes a way of laughing at a life extinguished.

Bernardo Bertolucci, *The Dreamers*, 2003

Susan Sontag warned in Regarding the Pain of Others that images of suffering can both awaken and numb, becoming “tokens of the sort that can be collected and traded.” Today’s looping headlines and clipped video feeds make every act of violence instantly reproducible and meme-ready. “To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude,” she wrote; the same is true of viral clips and screenshots. Each edit is an act of power.

This logic thrives in conspiracy culture. Adrienne LaFrance’s The Prophecies of Q shows how QAnon transformed anonymous riddles into participatory scripture, enlisting followers as co-authors of prophecy.
Ambiguity keeps people guessing and sharing. The assassinations in Utah and Manhattan bear that imprint: violence staged not as an argument but as an open-ended riddle for the crowd to interpret and circulate.

The Manson murders ended the sixties in California; Joan Didion wrote that “the doors had closed, the music had stopped.” Something similar is happening now. Charlie Kirk’s assassination is not the end of an era but a punctuation mark in an ongoing culture war.

We come to know these acts through looping headlines and endless commentary. The media apparatus is the stage on which violence becomes culture. What do we do with this knowledge—that language kills, that incoherence can move nations, that memes migrate from Discord to parliament steps, from jokes to bullets? Language is never innocent, and every meme, every lyric, every cryptic post carries within it the possibility of action.

Perhaps the first act toward healing in this moment of crisis for the American soul, of revolt and violence in the digital age — is the most intimate and practical: to stay awake to the language we carry and circulate. Especially when tempers flare or when an online quip feels safely untethered. To feel how certain phrases pulse with power. To notice whose grip tightens in the turning of those words. We can speak with care, hold conversations that do not feed escalation, and stay present with our neighbors and classmates — especially when we don’t see eye to eye. We can hold people accountable for their language. We can hold people accountable for their actions.

We can insist, in daily ways, that people are more than their avatars and that grievances—personal or political—do not need to end in blood. We can mourn the loss of life; we can choose to not delight in death — even in the deaths of those who would have us killed.

Language will always shape what happens next. Tending to that simple truth, and acting on it in our own circles, is not a grand theory or a sweeping critique. It is the quiet, essential work of keeping harm from multiplying. It is how we stay alive.

Memes Will Be Blood: On Political Violence in the Digital Age

Further Reading

Quick links

FAQs | BLOG | ABOUT | MEET BOSHEMIA | BUY THE MAGAZINE | STOCKISTS | GET IN TOUCH | SUBSCRIBE | SUBMIT

Categories

ART | Culture | FICTION | REVIEWS | SATIRE | LIFE | POLITICS | NONFICTION | POETRy