Author: Steven Hill

Chief editor & contributor at DemocracySOS, and author of 7 books including 10 Steps to Repair US Democracy, Fixing Elections & Europe's Promise.
International

The grim aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder

Online extremism, lethal weapons – and a point of light

By
Issue 58

Image: Utah Governor Spencer Cox

What metaphor aptly describes the Dis-united States of America at this point in its nearly 250-year history? Every month, every week, practically every day is seemingly a new twist, a new convulsion, the latest mass murder, in our tragic fall from historical grace. It calls to mind what Benjamin Franklin warned when he emerged from the final day of the Constitutional Convention, September 17, 1787, and was asked, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” He replied, “A republic. If you can keep it.”

Prior to the rise of Donald J. Trump, few would have imagined that we might not be able to keep this representative democracy. But suddenly here we are, and – anything goes.

How many of the January 6 thousands pardoned by Trump or their like-minded allies are ready to be Sturmabteilung Brownshirts – shock troops ready to intimidate political opponents and carry out violence on command? Trump already has roaming federalized troops conducting domestic raids in a number of cities. They started out by targeting “untouchables” of this era: immigrants who committed crimes. But it didn’t take the White House long to start sweeping up others, including U.S. citizens and essential workers.

In 1933, seizing on the mysterious burning of the Reichstag as an opportunity to essentially outlaw their political opponents, Hitler and his Nazis and began the implementation of their master plan. In similar fashion, Trump and his top advisers capitalized on Charlie Kirk’s murder on September 10 to level unsubstantiated claims against his political opponents. They threatened to unleash the full power of the federal government to harshly punish what they alleged, without evidence, is a vast leftist network that funds and incites violence against conservatives.

Debater and flame-thrower

Charlie Kirk frequently hosted free and open public debates on college campuses. He was like a patriarchal Christian version of Socrates, cross-examining whoever would dare step into the hot seat. A sharp and practised orator, he mastered the art of the “what about?” retort, turning questions back on those who challenged him. Something about Kirk’s strategies and methods undeniably worked. Over a 10-year period, his personal brand of populism began to chip away at the solid “youth vote” for Democrats on U.S. campuses. Finally, in the 2024 election, his efforts achieved a stunning result: a 10-point jump (from 36 per cent in 2020 to 46 per cent in 2024) in support for Donald Trump among young people. That shift alone likely cost Kamala Harris the election in key battleground states.

Kirk aimed his arrows at exposing what he viewed as liberal bias at universities. In 2016, his Turning Point USA organization pioneered a Professor Watchlist: students reported on and videotaped their professors, and Kirk would “out” targeted professors on social media and in his podcast. Once added to the list, many of the professors were harassed online, and sometimes it escalated to death threats. Following concerted campaigns to pressure the universities, a number of professors were fired.

With more than 300 professor names now on the list, the Professor Watchlist was an inspiration for today’s intensified attempts by the Trump administration and other GOP governments to chill classroom free speech by intimidating professors, teachers and students over what they say in class. It has also been a precursor to Trump’s – often illegal – attempts to pressure and fire any undeferential administrators previously appointed to congressionally mandated independent federal agencies, such as the Federal Reserve Board, the National Labor Relations Board and the Federal Trade Commission.

But strategy and performance aside, what did Charlie Kirk actually say? What did he believe? That’s where things get more problematic. His flame-throwing espousal of patriarchal Christianity and the gender and racial politics associated with that worldview certainly did not mean he deserved his horrific fate. Nonetheless, Kirk’s “turn back the clock” diatribes – substantially based on biological determinism and rigid gender-based beliefs – made him one of the nation’s leading advocates for White men, Christianity and a return to a bygone era of women’s role in the family and society, and a leading opponent of reproductive rights. Even more alarming, millions of fellow Americans, including many among the young, apparently agreed, at least to some degree, with his revanchism.

Left, right or mentally ill?

During this time that is trying men and women’s souls, where do we find points of light amidst the madness? Certainly not from the President, who in one breath could call for unity and in the very next place blame for Kirk’s killing on the “radical left” before he knew anything about the murderer. He then upped the ante on Fox News, calling on prosecutors from his weaponized Department of Justice to file racketeering charges against George Soros, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, claiming without evidence that the 95-year-old Soros is fomenting violent protests.

Nor did Trump mention the easily provable truth that the young White man who came within an ear’s length of ending Trump’s life in July 2024 was a registered Republican, or that a long list of perpetrators of violent acts – the Colorado high school shooter who went berserk on the same day as the Kirk murder; the Jacksonville Dollar General shooter; the Allen, Texas, outlet mall shooter; the Buffalo supermarket shooter; the boogaloo attackers who killed two security officers in California; the El Paso Walmart shooter; Dylann Roof, who killed nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston; the 13 men arrested in 2020 for plotting to kidnap Governor Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan – all espoused some variation of neo-Nazi, racist, antisemitic, White supremacist or antigovernment far-right nationalism that has, shockingly, become all too familiar.

These right-wing extremists and their murderous activities are invisible to Trump. Who knows, maybe he’s planning to pardon them.

Over the past decade, right-wing extremists have killed many more people than left-wing extremists, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Of 429 deaths from 2015 through 2024, right-wing extremists accounted for 76 per cent, while left-wing extremists accounted for only 4 per cent. Most of the rest (18 per cent) were perpetrated by domestic Islamist extremists. (By September of this year, the table had tilted a bit, with 21 plots and attacks targeting Republican lawmakers and 10 targeting Democrats.)

Indeed, this “right-wing vs. left-wing fanatic shooter” analysis is not the full story. Look at the shocking attack on schoolchildren at the Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis in August. The killer posted two YouTube videos which showed scrawl on the guns including racist phrases. Maybe a Donald Trump supporter? He also spewed “Kill Donald Trump” – as well as antisemitic messages like “6 million wasn’t enough,” plus anti-Catholic messages and the names of several mass shooters. There were references to suicide as well. The lunatic spread his hatred in all directions, like a mass killer strafing the room, targeting everyone.

Or how about the attempted assassination last April of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, a Jewish Democrat, by burning down his governor’s residence while he and his family slept inside? The would-be assassin tried to convince his family members to vote for pro-Israeli Donald Trump in the 2024 presidential election, yet in a 911 call criticized Shapiro as anti-Palestinian, saying that he “will not take part in his plans for what he wants to do to the Palestinian people.”

Then there’s Luigi Mangione, apparent killer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson – must be a leftist? But his social media posts showed scepticism toward both Trump and Biden and support for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

As much as some on the different sides, right and left, want to blame each other for these killers, it seems more likely that many of these murderers, whatever their political leanings, hail from the sad and tragic fringes of mental illness and psychosis. What is obvious, though the established media seem to be uncomfortable pointing it out, is that most of these crazy perps – including the guy who shot Kirk – are youngish White men from Christian backgrounds, not Blacks, immigrants or any of the other Trump-targeted demographics.

According to the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) at the University of Maryland, in the first six months of 2025 more than 520 plots and acts of terrorism and targeted violence have occurred, affecting nearly all U.S. states and causing 96 deaths and 329 injuries. This is a nearly 40 per cent increase over the first six months of 2024. Mass casualty attacks, where four or more victims were killed or wounded, increased by 187.5 per cent in the same time frame.

Following Kirk’s murder, prominent politicians cancelled events over safety concerns, and historically Black colleges and universities had to lock down their campuses in reaction to threats. Instead of a moment for reflection, balance and recalibration, Donald Trump doubled down on blame, accusations and threats against perceived opponents.

More dangerous than the 1960s

It appears that this era is shaping into one like the 1960s, when assassins killed John F Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., Bobby Kennedy, Medgar Evers, Malcom X and other civil rights workers within a few short years, amidst a time of massive social change and backlash. Two key differences make this era arguably even more dangerous: digital media platforms, first and foremost, and widespread availability of more lethal weapons.

The fragmented ecosystems for the “social” media have unleashed a firehose of sensationalized misinformation and conspiracies that are meant to provoke in us a sense of righteous anger toward some other “tribe,” an ecosystem in which a Donald Trump and a Charlie Kirk have thrived.

Online networks such as private, encryption-protected Facebook Groups create the digital hideouts for extremists looking to find one another. Launched in 2010, Facebook Groups can be walled off as “private” – secured as “hidden” or secret and accessible only to admitted members, who must invite new members. As an investigation by the Tech Transparency Project has found, the violent antigovernment movement has used hundreds of Facebook Groups, under an array of code names, where followers have circulated links to manuals on bomb construction, kidnapping, making flash stun grenades, snipers and murder. Some of these groups have had thousands of members.

Other secret meetups on the internet can be found on platforms like subreddits, Parler, Signal, Telegram, WhatsApp and chat rooms on 8kun. The notorious digital platform 4chan – a hideout for hackers, hate purveyors, child pornographers, murderers, and other digital misfits – features anonymous, anything-goes forums. What the internet has facilitated, according to Stanford law professor Nathaniel Persily, is the creation of hidden online lairs in which extremists of all stripes, unconstrained by real-world geography, can make common cause with “people they would not find in their neighborhood or in face-to-face forums.”

Extremists’ use of digital media drastically reduces the costs of organizing with like-minded but geographically dispersed compatriots. It allows such individuals to find one another more easily and to organize and learn from one another. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombers, two Muslim brothers, used digital platforms to easily find sources of radicalization and an article by Al Qaeda titled “How to Build a Bomb in Your Mom’s Kitchen.”

This capacity of digital platforms is powerful and dangerous. And it is being increasingly used by toxic political actors to foment everything from spoiled elections to genocide. Members of the Rohingya Muslim minority in Myanmar were brutally massacred at the behest of a Buddhist leader and his fanatical followers using Facebook and other digital media to whip up anti-Rohingya hysteria. Pro-democracy activists in the Philippines were harassed and murdered by a Trump-like quasi-dictator, Rodrigo Duterte, who used Facebook not only to get elected president in 2016 but also to foment violent paramilitary attacks against his opponents. In addition, he used YouTube and X to spread “deepfake” videos of political opponents. In the United States, supercharged leaders with huge numbers of followers, starting with Trump and Charlie Kirk, have deployed these unprecedented “tools of virality.”

Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, YouTube and other companies have been let off the hook for the way they have created dangerous technologies that frictionlessly network together the most extreme elements of our societies. Indeed, those companies are getting rich off of these technologies, even as their products and services are having a disproportionate impact on our political discourse and electoral outcomes. Combined with the widespread availability of lethal weapons, this makes this era more dangerous than the 1960s.

A point of light emerges

Beyond the issues that separate them, both partisan sides need to be willing to tamp down the volatility and escalation, which necessitates new Republican leadership. Into the current void has stepped Utah’s GOP governor Spencer Cox with a common sense message. Following the assassination of Kirk in his state, Governor Cox was a frequent media spokesperson for Utah as it struggled to cope with the tragedy.

To a nationwide audience he said, “I would encourage people to log off, turn off, touch grass, hug a family member, go out and do good in your community … At some point we have to find an off-ramp, or else it’s going to get much worse.” The attack against Charlie Kirk, he said, is “much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us … on our ideals.”

Governor Cox previously had tried to make cross-aisle collaboration and depolarization a central theme of his administration. He has tried to combat polarization and issues over teenage social media use in favour of civil discourse through his “Disagree Better” campaign, partnering with Democratic Governor Jared Polis of Colorado and other governors to show what “disagreeing better” looks like. Calling digital media a “cancer on our society,” Governor Cox addressed young people, saying,

To my young friends out there…politics feels like … rage is the only option. But …through those words we have a reminder that we can choose a different path. Your generation has an opportunity to build a culture that is very different than what we are suffering through right now. Not by pretending that differences don’t matter, but by embracing our differences and having those hard conversations.

Governor Cox is one of the nation’s moral leaders now, stepping up and assuming the chair of responsibility and leadership that has been vacated by this Trump White House.

Continue reading “The grim aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s murder” →

Social Policy

Riding the Long Tail

How digital technologies have toxically changed political speech and election campaigns in the United States

By
Issue 55

This is an edited version of an article that appeared in DemocracySOS, a newsletter about protecting, improving and expanding democracy and representative government, sponsored by FairVote and available at https://democracysos.substack.com/

Thinking back over the history of presidential elections, certain episodes have become the stuff of legend, impacted by unique factors that may have swung a close election. Often, those episodes tracked the development of mass communications technologies and their application in politics and campaigns.

First we flash back to 1858 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates that took place two years before the presidential election of 1860. Abraham Lincoln challenged Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas for his seat and the candidates faced off in a series of seven debates spread across several months and a number of Illinois towns. Each debate lasted three hours, and by all accounts they were electrifying and artful, two master orators at the top of their game, with thousands of people in attendance. They focused mostly on the hot-button issues of the day – slavery, states’ rights and the Dred Scott decision – but it was the new technologies of the telegraph, railroads and Pitman shorthand (phonography) that turned a local debate into a national spectacle.

The large Chicago newspapers sent phonographers using shorthand who recorded complete texts of each debate, and halfway through the debate runners were handed the phonographers’ notes. They raced for the next train to Chicago, handing them to stenographers who during the journey converted the shorthand into words, producing a transcript ready for the typesetter and for the telegrapher, who sent it out to the rest of the country after it arrived in Chicago. The Chicago newspapers published the speeches in full, sometimes within hours, and newspapers all across the country reprinted the text.

The debates effectively became national events: it was as if the two candidates were talking to the entire country. Later the debates were republished as pamphlets and the publicity made Lincoln a national figure, laying the groundwork for his successful 1860 presidential campaign in which he faced off against Douglas once again.

A few generations later, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” used radio effectively to soothe Americans in the midst of an economic depression. Over 80 per cent of the adult radio audience tuned in, exceeding the audience for Jack Benny, Bob Hope, Fibber McGee and Molly or Amos ’n’ Andy. Novelist Saul Bellow recalls walking down the street while Roosevelt was speaking. Through lit windows families could be seen huddling at their kitchen tables or gathered in their parlors listening to the radio. Drivers had pulled over and turned on their radios to listen. “Everywhere the same voice. You could follow without missing a single word as you strolled by,” said Bellow.

Fast forward to 1960, when 70 million people watched the first televised debate in a presidential election, between Senator John F. Kennedy and Vice President Richard Nixon. Going into the debate Nixon was a six-point favourite to win. Legend has it that undecided voters who heard the debate on the radio thought that Nixon won, while those who saw it on TV and viewed Nixon’s twitchy performance thought that the photogenic Kennedy won. Post-debate polls showed Kennedy taking the lead, and he went on to win one of the closest presidential elections in U.S. history. At that moment the cosmetic theatricality of TV arrived on the national scene to become the dominant factor in political campaigns.

More recently, there have been influential television media campaigns, such as the notorious Willie Horton TV ads in 1988, which featured a convicted Black murderer in Massachusetts who raped a White woman while on prison furlough. Vice President George H. W. Bush’s campaign blasted those ads to the public in the presidential race, causing the double-digit lead of his Democratic opponent, Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis, to evaporate. Those TV ads pioneered a new and riveting use of multimedia broadcast technology to target specific audiences. The Bush campaign used coded words and symbolic gestures directed at White people in the south, particularly White men, to paint the Democratic Party as the party of racial minorities and decaying cities.

GOP politicians have been copying and recopying Bush’s tactics ever since. Donald Trump’s entire political career is basically one long Willie Horton ad, always provoking White voters to overreact out of their fears of you-know-who, whether it’s Black Lives Matter or, more recently, the immigrant “horde.”

Often, these sorts of game-changing episodes have been the byproduct of new forms of communication technology. Now comes the latest twist in this trajectory: the mushrooming influence of digital media platforms like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and, even more ominously, the introduction of AI-infused “deepfake” technology.

In the 2016 presidential election, Trump’s campaign was able to use the still-new marketing tools of Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to know which voters in a handful of battleground states needed persuading so that it could sell them a candidate whom a majority of Americans did not want. To understand the frightening power of these new communication technologies in today’s divisive political climate, it’s necessary to recognize their roots in a business strategy known as “long tail marketing.”

The term long tail was first coined by tech journalist Chris Anderson in his New York Times bestselling 2006 book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More. Its blueprint is captured by figure 1, which illustrates the difference between selling a high volume of a small handful of popular items (the head portion of the graph in yellow) versus a low volume of many more items that aren’t as popular (the longer blue tail). If you can reach those customers, the many less popular niche items making up the “long tail” sell more total items than the few most popular.

Figure 1: The long tail

Anderson developed the theory that, because of the power and reach of the internet and its ability to mass-market, many companies and their consumers are able to increasingly shift away from a business model based on everyone chasing a smaller number of popular “hit” products to one of selling individualized niche products. Products that are in low demand, or that have lower sales in terms of volume, can potentially exceed the bestsellers as long as the channel of distribution is large enough and unrestricted.

Amazon, eBay, Alibaba and a host of other online e-commerce companies have implemented the long tail strategy successfully, allowing them to realize significant profit out of selling small volumes of hard-to-find items to many customers instead of only selling large volumes of popular items. Similarly, Netflix and Amazon Prime generate a lot of revenue from renting small numbers of many less popular movies to a wide range of customers. The consequence is that Amazon reportedly sells an incredible 350 million products, a figure as unfathomable as the vastness of interstellar space.

Facebook, YouTube and Twitter have brought the concept of long tail marketing to their own advertising business model, including ads and communications used in politics and political campaigns. Their sophisticated advertising machines use precise microtargeting to show slightly different versions of the same ads to millions of niche users, based on the psychographic profile of each individual viewer. The engagement algorithms decide which content is featured at the top of users’ news feeds, and what is promoted and amplified. Virtually no two people see the same ad, as each is tweaked by autopilot via Facebook’s automated advertising system, in which algorithms perform the essential duties of ad selection (and to some extent composition).

These unprecedented “tools of virality” are being deployed by extremists of all stripes, including a small number of supercharged political actors with huge numbers of followers. Donald Trump has at his fingertips the capacity not only to reach a historically unprecedented audience size but also to long-tail-microtarget relatively small niches of users (like swing voters or the most partisan base voters) with his warped version of reality.

In his 2016 campaign for president, Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of the same basic ads, each one tweaked for individual targets, according to an internal paper written by a Facebook analyst. Each ad was rapidly tested on a unique niche of prospective voters to see which ones generated the most effective engagements. After a few ads became the runaway winners, those would be widely disseminated by algorithmically identifying more people who shared similar characteristics with the original targets.

The Trump campaign ran up to 100,000 iterations of an ad in a single day, in which language and visuals were tweaked to entice as many people as possible to click. Facebook’s internal analysis showed in detail how Trump’s campaign was better than Hillary Clinton’s at leveraging various advertising tools, with names like Custom Audiences and Lookalike Audiences,. The long tail harvesting of specific psychographic profiles was deployed to bombard millions of prospective voters with manipulative ads.

“Both campaigns spent heavily on Facebook between June and November of 2016,” according to the Facebook paper, “but Trump’s FB campaigns better leveraged FB’s ability to optimize for outcomes.” In a presidential election that was decided by only 78,000 voters across three states (Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan), the Trump campaign’s strategy of using long tail marketing of targeted ads to tens of millions of Americans not only may have decided the outcome but also certainly points the way toward the future of political campaigns.

What a difference eight years can make. The communications technologies have morphed and advanced in ways that were scarcely imaginable in 2016. Sprinkle in more AI and deepfake counterfeits and you have a potentially disastrous 2024 election now taking shape.

The new deepfake technologies are spreading like wildfire, able to create astonishingly convincing virtual identities of famous people. Last October, actor Tom Hanks issued a warning to his 9.5 million followers on Instagram that an advertisement for a dental plan using his likeness and voice substitute was fraudulent and based on an AI version of him. Then Gayle King, the nationally known cohost of CBS Mornings, warned her followers on social media that video ads using her AI likenesses to promote a weight loss “secret” were unauthorized and fake. The voices of the late Anthony Bourdain and the late Andy Warhol have both been recreated for recent documentaries using AI, and the enhanced voice of the late John Lennon was used by his surviving bandmates to produce the latest Beatles hit.

This ability of tech specialists to take digital 1s and 0s and turn them into a mimicked face, voice and video character has grown shockingly fast. Companies like Deep Voodoo are working with movie studios to put famous actors’ faces on stunt doubles and even to revive deceased movie stars. The technology has progressed so quickly that any famous person’s likeness can be replaced by a computer-generated stand-in in a matter of hours.

Now it’s being applied to politics. Millions have viewed a deepfake video manipulated to present a dead-ringer version of former President Barack Obama calling Donald Trump a dip shit. This year during the New Hampshire primary, Republican operatives paid a Texas-based company to use AI technologies to mimic the voice of Joe Biden in a robo phone call in which the fake Biden discouraged voters from voting. The caller ID was falsified to make it look as if the calls came from a former chairwoman of the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

More recently, in a harbinger of what is to come, a pivotal election in Slovakia was disrupted by an audio recording spread over digital media just days before the election, purporting to show one of the top candidates boasting about how he had rigged the election. And in another recording, this candidate’s voice was seemingly talking about raising the cost of beer (not a smart move days before an election). These AI-generated recordings went viral on digital media and left little time for outing the fakery. The targeted candidate, who was pro-NATO and sympathetic to Western interests, lost to an opponent who supported closer ties with Russian President Vladimir Putin and Moscow. Slovakian researchers believe that the AI-generated deepfakes were the work of the Russian government, though nobody knows how many votes fhey actually swayed.

The point of these technology-driven interventions is to spread mass confusion among voters in a way not previously seen. The latest communication technologies are only getting more powerful and insidious. What happens when people can’t believe their own eyes and ears about what they see and hear? These increasingly alarming features are having a disproportionate impact on our political discourse and electoral outcomes. We are in the process of taking the usual rough and tumble of politics – of “war by other means” – and stirring in increasingly manipulative communication technologies which facilitate the viral spread and amplification of sensationalized misinformation, deepfakes and conspiracy scaremongering at the flick of a computer mouse.

With the steroids of targeted deepfakes and manipulative social media now stomping around the political landscape like a Frankenstein monster out of control, how could a “winner take all” political ecosystem, in which one side in an election wins representation and all other sides lose, not foster toxic division and acrimony?