Bulwark Takes - Right-Wing Cancel Culture Explodes After Kirk Assassination

Episode Date: September 15, 2025

Sam Stein and Andrew Egger break down the online fallout from Charlie Kirk’s assassination — from Stephen Miller’s threats of government crackdowns to right-wing cancel culture and Kari Lake’s bizarre blame-shifting. What does it say about how America processes tragedy in the age of toxic social media?

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Ontario. Hey, everybody. It's me, Sam Stein, managing it to Bullwark. I'm joined by Andrew Eger, who is the author of Morning Shots and father of that plant behind his right shoulder. Andrew, keep that plan alive, okay? Yeah, father to this plant and three children, better parent to the children than I typically am to plants. So we'll see. We'll see how it goes. I hope you're a better parent to your children than your plant. You should be. One should be. We're here to talk about something not as fun as Andrew's inability to keep plants alive. We're talking about. We're talking the aftermath of Charlie Kirk assassination. I want to talk to Andrew about what's happening, I guess primarily online, although not necessarily just online, but it looks to be a fairly

concerted effort to go after people who have been critical of Kirk and try to excommunicate them from their jobs or public life in general. And it's really obviously difficult things to talk about because everyone should and most almost almost everyone abhors what happened to Charlie Kirk condemns it no one in elected office that I see has done anything other than say it is condemnable and that no one should be excusing it and it's awful and it pretends horrible things for our politics and our society but there are people who aren't elected but have I guess substantial followings or just are out there. they are tweeting and posting as people do, you know, saying Kirk was not a nice guy. And it's

created this backlash to the backlash that Andrew writes about in today's morning shot. So, Andrew, why don't you talk a little bit about the newsletter that you were today? And then we could go through some examples here. Yeah. So this is kind of happening on two tracks, right? And what I wrote about today was the political track, what what the White House is sort of explicitly promising to do, which is if you listen to, you know, guys like Stephen Miller, who's who's, who's, really kind of the central policy figure in this White House, what they're gearing up to do is to crack down on what they call the radical left, very, very broadly considered. This is sort of like a society-wide approach that Stephen Miller has essentially promised here

that involves, you know, criminal investigations, not just sort of like opprobrium or sort of like, you know, pointing at people who have bad takes and shaming them, but actually sort of using the might of the government to come after. And he, you know, in a Friday interview on Fox News, pretty much said out loud that they would be sort of searching for any predicate to get these people. It could be RICO. It could be conspiracy against the United States. It could be, you know, insurrection, but we're coming after you. We're going to get you. So that's on the political side of things. That's one thing we're watching. That's what I wrote the news that are about today. On the social side of things, there has been this other effort, which has been much

more bottom up to basically find some of the worst things that people have said about Charlie Kirk online to identify the people who said those things and to shame them, try to get them fired, try to get them drummed out of life. And I want to be clear, like, you said, you know, people who have said some not so nice things about Charlie Kirk, some of this content has been horrible. I mean, really vile stuff that's been said, you know, like dancing, making jokes basically dancing on his grave, making all these sort of like weird, like political tinged arguments about why, you know, good leftist praxis is to bury any part of yourself that might feel

bad for the guy or for his family or anything like that. So that's like the content of some of these posts has been shocking. That said, it has been kind of dug up and and paraded around as evidence of sort of the emblematic of what everybody on the political left, or really to the political left of maga has been feeling about this stuff right i mean it's it's it's kind of like being brandished as this as this weapon um to tie back into the into the political stuff so so there's like i said there's the two efforts there's the political stuff and then there's just these sort of social efforts to shame these people i mean to do basically right wing cancel culture is what's happening it creates this weird uncomfortable situation in which like people are posting these

horrific nasty whatever you want to describe them inexcusable things dancing on the grave of charlie Kirk. And then they get targeted for saying that. And of course, you don't want to defend that type of response that they had to Kirk's assassination. It's disgusting. Like, I would never my life make anything similar, post anything similar to that. But you get into this uncomfortable situation where it's like, I mean, they have a right to be awful human beings, right? Like, they do have a right to be awful human beings. And that's, where we're at and um i forget who it was who pointed out it's like well you know everyone's like well you got to respect the legacy of charlie cur free speech warrior by canceling these people who

are saying horrific things and it's like yeah there's an irony there too um but again it's like i don't want to defend these people i don't want to defend these posts they're they're disgusting and yet to some degree you sort of have to defend the ability to people for people to be assholes uh to one another and to say horrific outlandish disgusting things And this has kind of always been the tension at the heart of all conversations around like quote unquote cancel culture, right? You know, dating back to a few years when primarily it was a thing that was being deployed by people on the political left at that time, right? You'd get these kind of like social outrage mobs about, you know, a person saying something that that was racist or, you know, having a interaction with like a person of color who that was that made them look bad or something like that. And they'd be dog piled on.

People would try to get them fired. And the question is always, yes, okay, they, these. these people have the right to say these things, but don't we also all as kind of our own free speech exercising agents have the right to apply social pressure and try to, you know, get them run out of, run out of society and things like that. And so this thing has always sort of operated on, on two tracks like that. You are now seeing people on the right deploy a lot of those same arguments now. And obviously, this is also, this also implicates different questions about whether some of this speech might not be protected, you know, if it's further incitement to

violence, that sort of thing. like, it's all very complicated. I think that the, the, just the main thing here on the question of of cancel culture. And I think going back a few years, this is why a lot of people like, like us, I mean, I guess we weren't co-workers at this time. I don't know what you were. I'd probably try to cancel you at some point. I mean, like this, this is always kind of the main argument, not just against any particular instance of cancel culture, but against the whole concept of doing this sort of social media pylon, which is that this kind of power is sort of addictive, right? Like you, you, even if sometimes it's trying to find the next person you can cancel right yeah yeah and

eventually eventually it starts to be you know wielded for smaller again smaller and smaller offenses and we've seen some of this already with the charlie kirk stuff for like people who have relatively inoffensive i'm going to pause you there like there's one post that kind of stuck out to me is like kind of mundane honestly uh and yet this person's being um singled out uh because she is a member of the U.S. Air Force. So this was a post from this woman. I have no idea who this person is. Lena Marie, like, and again, the fact that I am, like, aware of who she is gets to

your point, which is, like, someone was, you know, work and overtime to find bad posts that they could then point to and say, this person needs to be thrown under the Air Force or something. I'm just going to read the post. She writes, let's go ahead and wrap this Charlie Kirk situation up in the next 48 hours. His killing was crazy to see. Wish that wasn't so easily accessible on my timeline. And I definitely don't condone that violence.

Shifting gears, y'all really trying to paint this picture that he was this noble man trying to bridge America together is diabolical. This man was clearly racist, homophobic, and sexist, Google, YouTube, and X are free. His ideology and his words were extremely dangerous. And the fact that the American flag is being flown half staff is crazy work. I said what I said. I'm not going back and forth. Nobody argue with your mama, not me. Look, again, I don't, I wouldn't have posted that.

I was studiously not posting. over the weekend. I'm definitely dialing back my involvement on social media going forward, too, because I think it's hugely toxic. But I read that and I'm like, okay, like, whatever, she can say what she wants and we'll move on. She's being targeted now. People are saying throw out of the Air Force, that's where we're at, basically. Yeah, yeah. And I think that speaks to like a bunch of different ways in which the discourse has gotten so toxic around this, because it is true, I will say it is true that some of the, you know, left side rhetoric about, you know, this is, these are, like, here are all our reasons why we think it is silly to mourn Charlie

Kirk. Some of those clips that have been going around have been totally out of context to the point of being, like, incorrect. Like, like, you know, just to pull one example to into my mind, this idea that, you know, you shouldn't have empathy for Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk hated the concept of empathy. Like he, like he hated the idea of how. having fellow feeling for other people. It's just not. I mean, it's, if you, if you watch the full clip of that particular one, he's making some silly little, like, internecine right wing media point.

Also, even if he did say that, who gives a shit? You can have been for, it's so stupid. Yeah, yeah. But so, so like, you know, people are smearing him. And then, you know, other people see a post like that. And they're like, well, this person's clearly been just reading the smear posts, even though obviously he did also have a ton of real inflammatory stuff that he said all the time.

And so it's just also gross. And I think it all goes back to, again, just how like the i keep coming back to this point over and over in like all of my like coverage of this is just how poor of a forum social media is for processing these things i mean isn't that the problem it's like we've like totally the the the reaction to this has been absolute like tribal hysteria everyone trying to pin the blame on the other side everyone trying to dig up whatever they can to make the other side look bad everyone sort of going into their corners being incredibly defensive, and it's just, it's the worst type of reaction possible to go and find

and have to sift through someone else's social media feed so you can root out people who you disagree with. Like, it's just really instinctually a horrible thing to do. And one other thing on that real quick, like, there are no question people who are doing this. There have been like some organized efforts to compile lists of, you know, like Charlie Kirk detractors to be sort of run down. all of that is horrible at the same time some of this stuff is just organic i mean this is how social

media works yeah no i think i think it's the algorithm it's just kicking it up and you can it gets reaction and people start retweeting it and pointing to it and that just makes it take off even more and i'm not like a both sides or person but like it is both sides in this case like liberals are doing it to conservatives too it's it's crazy yeah and and and in some sense it's a no sides case it's just the the blind machine doing what the blind machine is designed to do right i mean i don't know we need like the the social media conversation is so out of date Spencer Cox says touch grass good for Spencer Cox but like all the policy stuff around social media is still like oh should section 230 be gotten rid of so that like we can pull better police the ways that that these companies

deal with political speech I just feel like we're so far pat like we there needs to be a new a new policy conversation around social media in this country there needs to be like a real a real detox like a real social media detox campaign people should actually you know what it's actually happening honestly the roots of it are there's a huge movement obviously to get cell phones out of high schools that's because

not because anything other than people know that cell phones are toxic for people of that age social media is toxic for people that age Instagram, Facebook, whatever and so parents know and it's just a matter of can you effectuate it on a larger scale

let me just I want to end with Carrie Lake because she took it to a very carry-lakean level. How does a 22-year-old become so filled with hate? Five years earlier, I was

told he was a Trump supporter. And we sent our kids off to college and they brainwashed them. I am making a plea to mothers out there. Do not send your children into these indoctrination camps.

Don't do it. Do not do it. I believe Robinson had one semester virtual learning during COVID at Utah Valley, which is not like anyone's idea of a liberal indoctrination camp. But that's just like, I don't know, that's just wild stuff here to like get at a memorial service and say, don't send your kids to these schools. But it does get to the larger thing we're talking about, which is they are, you know, the people, there are a certain segment of people who are trying to use this opportunity or this window to go after institutions. and essentially purge them as they see it. And so Lake takes it to an extreme, but it is remarkable. Yeah, I mean, she's really just playing the hits, right? I mean, like colleges are a nice, easy left, like left-coded political target,

frequently left-leaning political target to go after, whereas the actual fact of what seems to have happened to this kid, which is that he just got insane brain poisoning online, you know, wrote memes all over his bullets and was on Discord and read it constantly and dropped out of college after one semester, like I, I don't know, when you were in college, when I was in college, the incredibly, like, you know, psychotically, pathologically online people, sometimes that happened. You know, they basically, like, didn't leave their dorm and they, and they, you know, let a college. It wasn't college that indoctrinated. Then they were just built that way, yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And, like, the idea that this guy was, like, the one thing he took away from those couple freshman Zoom lectures was, I'm going to go shoot Charlie Kirk. It's just insane, right? And in fact, it's sort of a deflection away from the stuff that we're talking about right now, which is that this guy did actually. get seemingly radicalized on the very bad internet, which is where we are right now. Is that how all you people are listening to us? I mean, like it's, we all sort of live our lives here, uh, like it or not. And we are getting more and more tuned to the, yeah, I felt I felt I understood that too. And I felt the, um, irony of it where as everyone was like posting

about Spencer Cox saying the internet was rancid and horrible for people posting about it on the internet. And it's like, oh, yes, of course, you know. And there is not really another way to converse or talk to people in that scale at least it's where we process things as a culture as a world now and uh and there are real problems that are tied up with that and we're only just beginning to see them and we need to figure out how to disentangle them it's not going to be an easy thing at all even if we can like get past all of the more immediate insane stuff like all the ridiculous stuff that's happening in our country i mean like this is a real substrate type problem for everything already and it's i can't imagine it's not going to get worse going

forward so we'll see we'll see and dragger thanks man appreciate it good luck to that plant he's going to need it everyone who cares about andrew's plant and this type of conversation subscribe to the bulwark subscribe to our youtube feed we'd really appreciate it and we'll talk to you