We are in the grip of old habits. We assume, most of us, that when a prominent political figure is assassinated, the motive for the killing is political. So it was with Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Before anything was known about the killer, President Trump’s allies and outliers decided that it was a symptom of the murderous violence of soi-disant antifascists on the left. When it emerged, subsequently, that our man was from a republican family and that he potentially may have been part of the white supremacist ‘groyper’ movement, anti-Trump types chalked it up to the violence of the Right. 

There may have been more justification for the latter position than the former. But it seems possible that looking at the murder through the lens of left and right misses the point altogether: that here, rather, isn’t politics so much as the grotesque nihilism of someone just riddled with internet brain-worms; someone who is prepared to take a stranger’s life and put an effective end to his own for no higher motive than being talked about on Reddit or 4chan.  

This is more horrific even than it would be were the murderer an ideologue of one stripe or another

Look, after all, at the messages that the shooter inscribed on his ammunition casings. ‘Notices........

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