Panic World - Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Ryan & Grant talk about the fallout from Charlie Kirk's killing, including what we know about the suspect in custody and what this means for current political climate in the US. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That's a good start. Have you eaten? I had a massive, massive sandwich from Bakel Pub and Doritos and a big Pepsi. Okay. Okay. I really just like loaded up today because I was like I need all the brain power I can muster to read the whole internet. I can't think of a better way to be prepared. I'm glad to know I feel like you're like we're both equipped to do this.

intro music. I'm Grand Irving. This is Panic World, a show about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And sometimes we say that, and I think it's funny. And other days we say that, and I think it's very scary. And today is the latter. Joining me, the host of this show, who has been writing on Pure Sugar for the past 12 hours, Ryan Broderick. Hi.

Hello. Hi, how's it going? Thank you for having me on my show. So what you're about to hear is a little less produced than we typically do. Brian, trying to take my job. Yeah, but things are moving really quickly and we're just going to try to do our best here. So what you're about to hear is an episode recorded over about two days as we are getting information about the Charlie Kirk shooting. We held it thinking there would probably be a press conference this morning, Friday, September 12th, now that there's a suspect in custody, and we have a bit more information about the suspect and the shooting. So I want to run through that now, just so we have all of the information we know out there,

and we can kind of talk about it. So a 22-year-old man named Tyler Robinson was taken into custody on Friday morning. He is believed to be the alleged killer of Charlie Kirk. There's conflicting reports circulating about how he was taken into custody. I've heard one report. I read one report where his pastor recognized him and reported him to the FBI. It seems like the main one that the media is going with right now, though, is that Tyler Robinson's dad held him and basically locked him in a room after Tyler Robinson. and confessed to him and then called the authorities.

So that's how this seems to have gone down. I think the most important thing for us today to talk about are the details that have emerged about what was inscribed on the bullets, the one fired at Kirk and the others that were recovered from the scene. And I want to run through those right now. And this info is coming from the press conference. This is coming from a press conference that just wrapped in Utah. So it's confirmed.

The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk, I can't believe I'm about to say this. This is like breaking my brain and I am someone who's covered this for a long time. The bullet that killed Charlie Kirk read, notices bulge, Owoo, what's this? Which is a meme that started in the furry community. It's one that I use quite often. Up until today, I would have said it's one of my favorite memes. It is like from like furry role play. God damn it.

Yeah. And then the other bullets that they found at the scene read, Hey, Fascist Catch. Oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, which is an anti-fascist sort of gang chant. If you read this, you're gay, LMAO. And the one that said, hey, fascist catch, is worth explaining a bit more about because it is,

It had, um, up right down, down, down. We're cooked. So that's the input code to trigger a 500 kilogram bomb in hell divers, too. So obviously there's going to be a lot of people today speculating about what this means. The other piece of information about the alleged shooter that I think is worth pointing out is that his mom's Facebook had photos of. various Halloween costumes he's been. One was clearly a reference.

So she describes it as like, this is my weird son in like a loving way. This is my weird son. And he's dressed like a meme. And the picture is him wearing an Adidas track suit and squatting. Now, uh, Robert Evans from behind the bastards said that this was a reference to a like Pepe the Frog meme. It could be. It could also be a reference to an older sort of internet trend, which was called

squatting slavs where basically like there are blogs that like we're collecting photos of like eastern european guys and tracksuits like squatting in the park and drinking like hard cider or whatever oh no ryan he's taking all of your favorite things so i mean i do love squatting slavs i you've brought it up to me so many i'm so sorry yeah i think it's really funny it's really funny i yeah and then in 2017 robinson according to his mom's facebook wore a costume where like it's like one of those ones where it looks like you're riding someone but he's writing donald trump but don't Trump has been painted green to, to I believe look like the Pepe the Frog meme that Trump shared in 2021.

It was kind of like the big moment where Trump engaged with the pepe meme for the first time. Do we think that was a positive Trump's? So let's talk about this because I think there's a couple ways to look at this. Up until now, there's been kind of like a running list of, you know, what kind of person the shooter could be. I'm just going to run through it just so you understand any sort of misinformation, disinformation. Okay. So it was either, you know, a leftist, a liberal.

There were all kinds of rumors that there was like trans ideology, quote unquote, written on the bullets. That has been kind of struck down now. I'm looking at this. There's nothing. I mean, it could be that there's like an FBI analyst that like thinks memes are inherently trans, whatever. But like that was one idea. Another idea was that like it was a. fan of Nick Fuentes and the Groyper.

So the Groypers are a Gen Z offshoot of the MAGA movement. They don't particularly like the MAGN movement because it doesn't go far enough for them. And they don't like Charlie Kirk because Charlie Kirk has always kind of been seen as a center of the road conservative, which is not true, but that's how they see him. And in case there's anyone new here, Nick Fuentes is the one who actively calls for a race war and also was like, relatively recently was like,

we've been focusing so much on hating immigrants and black people. We need to get back to hating women. It is a more nihilistic sect. Yeah, it's closer to the accelerationist rhetoric we've seen from like 764 in the comm network, but it's a little more elevated and a little more politically coherent. So the theory that in certain corners of the internet has been that like this was a Groyper hit,

that someone was trying to impress Nick Fuentes. Yeah. And then, of course, there's a million conspiracies about the idea that this was like an Israeli, you know, professional assassination. So the question right now is what kind of brain rot does this kid have? And based on the reporting that we've been doing over the last year, I feel fairly confident in saying there are like three possibilities here. One, that this is a groiper who is trying to impress Nick Fuentes. He is dressing up like Pepe the Frog memes and he is trying to cause chaos and it's funny to him. Possible, although I'm a little doubtful only because of the use of the word fascist and, and oh, Bella Chow, Bella Chow, Chow, like that to me feels like a deeper cut than I would expect from like a garden variety, Gen Z, like,

Graper fan. So then that leads me to, okay, is this a 764 com network, muddy the waters? Accelerationist. Accelerationist attack. As we've talked about in our previous episodes, they have a habit of, one, inscribing messages on bullets. That's like a big thing that they do. And two, they like to inscribe on those bullets conflicting political ideas. Just one second on that. If that is a new concept to you, you can go back to our last bonus or episode a month ago it's the cult is in the title uh it's one of our cult ones you'll see cult minecraft i think is in the title it's the minecraft cult one if you want to

understand more about this new form of terror those are those are your go-to places from us yeah so that that feels a little more likely than a than a gropeer um the fact that you have something like if you read this you are gay next to like a bunch of anti-fascist stuff makes me think that this is not like a true believer leftist like even like the quote unquote dirtbag left kind of people aren't really talking like that so but that is a third possibility here so those are those are I think the three and then I guess like honorable mention but also probably the most likely is that like this person just doesn't have coherent politics at all and it's just a is totally brain poisoned by the internet and doesn't think in a political spectrum that we recognize.

But the important thing is that for us is that the internet is, how would I describe this? This was an extremely online attack. This was this was this was this was going after an influencer and killing that influencer with literal memes inscribed on bullets. And as we've said in previous episodes about, you know, this kind of terrorism, like the motive almost never satisfies you. Like if we find a manifesto that this kid is written, it's not going to be satisfying. His beliefs are not going to be satisfying.

It's not going to give the, you know, any political side, any benefit to understand it more. I've already seen this morning right winger is talking about how he was this kid was radicalized in college and how we need to shut down colleges, which are bastions of liberal speech. Like every side is going to use this. And I'm not both sizing this. I'm just explaining that like it doesn't really matter because this will work for, you know, in whatever way you want. Like Trump will look at this. Trump's team will look at this and say this kid was brainwashed by trans people on the internet to talk in memes, even. even though they've spent the last 15 years grooming 4chan users to, you know, wage cyber war for them.

Like this is, it won't matter. And the, I mean, the FBI, if the report yesterday about the trans ideology, you know, is anything to go off of, already see this stuff as inherently leftist and liberal. They see the internet, you know, language as the language of blue sky. So it doesn't really matter. I'm very worried about, like, this, like, like, like, like, Like, I, I, I can fully foresee a world where we're screaming into a void that this gobbledygook has been horribly misinterpreted, sometimes on purpose, sometimes just because, like, it's there to just stir up shit. And, like, this is used to justify a lot of horrible, atrocious attack.

I don't, I don't, wouldn't go as far shutting down all colleges. but like I like this you want to shut down all colleges to stop people yeah I think we just got gotta not give them laptops anymore uh that's I I do think I'm I'm getting closer and closer each day to thinking we should just not give them laptops anymore but but I do so okay wait I want I want to hit that for real quick because I was thinking about this like I do I do wonder if the way we feel about this is the way like baby boomers felt about like domestic terrorism in the 60s and 70s that was referencing pop culture which there was plenty of like I sort of think it has always operated this way

because like terrorism is inherently a media project it's inherently about capturing attention and so hijacking popular culture is part of it. Like the most effective terror campaigns of the 20th and the 21st century have an element of that, I think. Yeah, there's jihadist rap songs on YouTube. I mean, ISIS, I had a playlist for a long time of the failed SoundCloud rappers that joined ISIS. There was a reason they had to become terrorists. Like, they were not good. Was that just your workout music?

Yeah, I just right. Yeah. Well, I was, I was just, you know, I love, I love culture. No, I just, there's, there's always this contingent. I mean, you know, you can go and download a library of all of the video games that Osama bin Laden had on as Nintendo D.S. If you want, like, there's always this sort of thing tied to this stuff. But I, I, as, as online as this all is, and as jarring as it is for me to. see. I do want to use this space real quick and really loudly to say that like the internet

did not, the internet obviously produced, uh, the sort of like framing of this, you know, like to target an influencer in front of an audience surrounded by smartphones with bullets that had memes written on them allegedly, reportedly. That is obviously staged for the internet. But I don't think, like, you could just take this and you could just do it in a different time period and a different context and it would work probably the same way. Like, you know, an anarchist waiting to eat a sandwich and then killing Franz Ferdinand in a busy street. It's not so different. Yeah, the Manson family. Right.

The Manson family sneaking into people's homes. Like, and using Helter Skelter, a Beatles song as like, you know, their idea. This is a really good point. These things are not because of the internet, but they are obviously shaped by the media landscape of the time. And that media landscape creates like a very specific set of incentives and ways to hijack attention. And of course, they're always going to sound like the most deranged version of that. Because they're taking deranged action.

So it's like it's seeped in this thing that you're like, whoa, this is way too much of this thing because, like, of course, the thought pattern isn't normal if you're like, this is the action I want to take. Right. It's just always going to seem like the most exaggerated form. Right. So, yeah. So I think, like, there's going to be a lot of people over the weekend, you know, saying that like, I have already read a bunch of, like, people on Blue Sky being like, the media is just not ready to handle Groipers. And it's like, yeah, that's true.

And I say that on the show all the time, like the, the tone that you have to sort of take to deal with this stuff is not meant for television. Like a guy in a suit on CNN being like the notices bulge meme, which is like from like, you know, furry erotic roleplay. Like they're not going to be able to handle this. But unless. No, I don't want you that busy. Bring me on. Yeah, sure. Bring me on here.

I'm happy to describe all of these memes. in detail and why they're used and how they're used and and and also use that opportunity to apologize for using that meme and like so much of my work because I think it's one it was one of my favorites I've been told today but at the same time like these these memes did not like influence this kid this kid I say kid because I'm 35 years old but this this 22 year old picked Charlie Kirk for a reason reason that will maybe eventually learn and maybe they're coherent. Luigi Mangione's manifesto and his political beliefs are totally off the walls nuts,

but he did pick a target that made sense, right? So it's possible that there's something similar here, but it's also equally possible that he just picked the very, very internet famous person coming to his local community. Totally. And I mean also the one of the guy there that has like used the internet probably the best of that ilk. Like, he's, like, Charlie Kirk was the one who was able to, like, cross-pollinate to everyone and to get in everyone's feeds in a way that, like, like, Laura Lumer's too crazy that I don't see her shit frequently.

Like, Charlie Kirk had, like, an ability to, like, trickle into everyone's different content feeds. Like, if you were that online, like, he's the one who you would be confronted with constantly. Yeah, I mean, it's no different. than, you know, 30 years ago attacking Howard Stern. Like, like, did that happen? No. But I mean, I'm just saying, like, I mean, there were absolute threats on his life during his, like, free speech era, you know, sort of a culture has changed so vastly. But, like, conservatives hated him.

Liberals did too. But, like, it is equally possible that this was just, like, a high value target. But the nature of the memes that were chosen, which I don't want to read too much into, make me think that like there was some thought put into this. And then we loop back into the 764 aspect of it all, which is like, is this a legit person who has anti-fascist or leftist beliefs? Or is this a person who wants to pretend like they do to cause a complete dissolution of society? We might find out.

We might not find out. There's going to be a lot of information trickling out. Uh, yeah, we might find out what, what was, what was really happening behind the scenes, but the door is certainly open for this to be co-opted. Um, I don't need the door open. I think it just will be. Yeah. There's not a good case scenario, what this might be, but, but, uh, the phrase, uh, always use a crisis is coming to mind.

Yeah, this is a gift. This is a massive gift. The mom's Facebook post that is going around, where she was like, My kids are weird, you know, look at their Halloween costumes. I don't know. That got to me. Yeah, it's exactly what my mom would say. It's exactly what my mom has said.

She helped me make a Yu-Gi-O costume when I was in high school. And I was not doing it because I liked Yu-Gi-I-I-D-I-D-I-D-I-D-I-W-I-D-O-G-I-D-W-E-Gy-W-E-GU-E-GU-E-GU-E-GU-GU-RILL-J-E. Yeah, no, I don't want to, you know, dig too deep into the shooter's life because we just don't know much yet. But, like, by all accounts, fairly standard American family in Utah. There was photos of him learning how to shoot guns. I think his dad was a veteran or had some sort of connection to the military. The mom seemed like just a normal mom.

And they don't have any sort of, I guess, sense of what was happening on that kid's computer or phone. Or in his mind, which is something we've come back to a lot over these episodes. Yeah, you know, exactly. We've talked a lot about like what, you know, in the, in the weapons episode that we, that we, that we're going to release, like, you, you, you brought this up about, like, first, it's the, the family that fails and it's a school, et cetera is like, is like the theme that runs through there. And I, like, I see that post and I think, like, is a parent supposed to understand their kid

better than like my kids have weird Halloween costumes? Like is that like really the the I mean like obviously there's like way more going on. But like I don't look at that and think like how did she not understand what you know what our son's culture is? Like it's just so hard. It's just such a hard like parents are supposed to only know one aspect of their kids and not understand their culture. Well, I mean, let's put it this way. Like, understanding your kid's culture, like what they're looking on the internet is not going to stop this. Like, it's, I just, I don't think, I don't think that matters, actually.

Like, I don't think that there's a moment we could be like, uh-oh. I mean, I mean, maybe. But then we get into this, like, we get into this, like, very strange world where it's like, we don't know the political beliefs of the family. if you want to say that if your kid espouses anything inherently conservative in any way, you should do something about it. But then I'm like, okay, well, what would you do about it? Yeah. Like, if your kid is like thinking that Pepe the Frog memes are funny and he's 17 or 18 years old,

like, what are you going to do about it? Even if you understood. I think it's much easier and actually much more, like a much better use of your time to be like, okay, is my kid saying weird things about minorities or, Or, you know, gay people, trans people. But then we get into the thing of like women, especially women. But it's like if we do that, then it's like, okay, well, there's like a massive chunk, like 50% possibly of the country that does not give a shit about that. So, okay, like if you're listening to this and you have a teenage son, good luck.

But like, like, you're Jordan Peterson. No, but like good. No, like good luck because like we have we have created a culture both online and in our politics. that is grooming your son actively to help start a race war. That is the reality of America in 2025. The people in charge of our government and the people who run the largest platforms on the internet either actively want your son to take up arms and go and hurt people or they don't care that that's happening.

They don't care that your son might be in a Discord server with militia members, you know, playing video games and talking about like critical race theory. Like they don't care or they want it to happen. So I don't know what you do with that. Good luck is what I would say because like there's no off switch there. And it gets even we're even wierder and even messier the longer we live in this world. You're not going to understand popular culture online as fast as your teenager is. And now that we're so deep into this world, it is funny to a. ironically talk like Trump, ironically talk like a 4-chan user, ironically talk like an insult.

So there's no way for you to even know if your kid really thinks that way until they grab a weapon. So I don't know. The FBI can't handle this. They can't handle anything. They waited for someone to call him in. I was thinking that as you said, that I'm like, the parents had a good enough relationship with their kid to be able to. Right. I mean, yeah. The kid confessed. And that's how we know any of this. So allegedly.

That's how we know any of this. So I don't have a lot of advice at this point because like you, it's like, oh, I live in a casino and I want to save money. I don't know, man. You live in a casino. Oh, I don't want my son to be radicalized. Well, you leave in a radicalization engine. So when you first got the alert that Charlie Kirk was shot, what was your reaction? what was your reaction

and then when we saw that the video was fucking everywhere what was your response were you thinking about the platform failures the response that that we were us being able to say it would cause or were you thinking about something more personal I think my major first thought

was politically which would be more devastating for him to survive or for him to not survive everything that happens now in America, unfortunately for me, is filtered through the lens of like, does this help the Trump administration consolidate more power or does it stop them from doing that? And neither outcome would have been good. But I spent a lot of the afternoon yesterday wondering that. I also watched the video. I watched first the

far away video and then I unfortunately watched the close-up, which probably one of the worst videos I've seen in a long time. I've seen a lot bad videos, but I really didn't like it. I didn't like it. But from there, I basically just moved to start saving as much as I could. The way that the internet works now is things happen so quickly that it gets lost in the shuffle. And a lot the times when those things get lost, they still influence narratives and public understanding later. Yes. So I was like, okay, like, let's just start saving everything that could be important later. And then I set the whole Garbage Day team on it.

So there's about five of us yesterday just dropping stuff into Discord and trying to track how it was moving. Yeah. I think we're going to be talking a lot about the immediate. reaction and and the ramifications we might see and how all gas this reaction has been compared to other moments. Yeah. You wrote today that the reaction on the right is like nothing you've ever seen before. Can you describe what is unique about this and maybe a good comparison point is the Trump shooting?

If Trump had died, that would be like unthinkable. Like the level of violent rhetoric if Trump had died, we edged, maybe. At the same time, like, a lot of what I've read about political assassinations, like, like if it's a leader or like a candidate, like it actually kind of like oftentimes squelches any support. Like it makes people uncomfortable. But to answer your question, no, I've not seen anything like this before. This is pretty unique. Charlie Kirk is a very unique figure within the right, and it's been frustrating to watch a lot of them,

mainstream media try to write about him. I mean, we've used him on Panic World quite often because he was the most professional of Trump's digital foot soldiers, and he was the most dutiful. You know, he was very good at creating the narrative that he was told to create or, like, stumbling across it himself and leading the pack. He was the tip of the spear. He was probably next in line to be groomed for like a presidential run. His thing was taking older conservatism, like the kind of like stodgy, boring 90s conservatism

and figuring out ways to repackage it for the internet without sounding like a psychotic neo-Nazi. That was his real power. And he was very palatable. Like he looked the part, you know, he was. was extremely religious. He had a family. He doesn't have the baggage of something like Benny Johnson or Steve Bannon. He could be relied upon on someone like Jack Posovic who like has gone off the rails several times and like you can't really count on him. So he this was like the most dependable, most moderate guy of the Trumpist movement. And for him to be killed so violently and so

publicly, I think has sent a real shock across this whole ecosystem. I kind of take it in them at their that they're freaked out. Because if someone could kill Charlie Kirk for doing what they think is the most lukewarm version of their movement, they're all in the crosshairs. Yeah, I mean, it's, I was thinking about that, that two, that weeks ago, children were murdered in a, in a Christian school, which certainly gave the right fodder for a narrative that we're seeing them start to like gear up and to use. But the reaction was not this.

And the difference is is that the people empower this is like a threat to them directly. This is very threatening. This is very, very threatening. I was a little on the fence about this. And then I kind of convinced myself that I agree with my own idea, which was that I compared it to 9-11. And we've talked about 9-11 often on this show. It sort of haunts the show.

which makes sense to show about mass hysteria. But the perfection of 9-11 as a media object, an event like calculated specifically to take over airwaves, linear television. This is that for social media. So the dynamics are flipped. So, you know, we've had this thought that mass violence and social media go really well together. other, but social media is evolving and it's changing. And in a post-COVID social media landscape, all of the attention is directed towards individuals. What this attack has, has, I think, revealed is that instead of using terrorism to attack a large population, a school, a shopping mall,

a concert, if you can localize political violence on the most influential, influential figure with the largest possible audience, you then turn that audience as we saw in Utah into vectors for sharing that violence. You know, Christchurch, the guy's live streaming it himself, right? This is the inverse. Yeah, that's why it's so effective because like you have an entire crowd of phones that were already filming him. And so there is no chance. that someone didn't catch the exact moment the bullet hits him. And that is, that has unnerved me by how I am someone who writes about the internet every day

and thinks about the internet every day and have been doing it for 15 years. And I am unnerved by how effectively this killing has hijacked the shape of the internet in ways that I didn't understand until I was literally realizing that I am part of it. Now, everyone is part of it. The algorithm unthinkingly started promoting it. Like, it weaponized the whole internet. I've been struggling for the last 24 hours to really wrap my head around what that means going forward, because that's scary that someone we don't know anything about has been able to figure out how to do that.

And I don't want to give them too much credit, but it's undeniable to me that it was constructed this way. Even if it wasn't conscious from the shooter, like it was someone who 200 yards out weighted for the exact moment for him to be on stage to do it. That's highly effective. We've been talking a lot recently about the the school, mashed casualty obsessed little psychos online.

But that happens in a very specific corner of the internet and is mostly shielded from the rest of us. They have to go search that out. This is unavoidable. Yeah, there's There's been a few interesting debates Within American media About how to deal with mass shootings

One of them is do we name the shooter Which in most countries They don't Like Canada doesn't do it The UK doesn't But that was one debate And American media We'll never have a consensus

Because of the First Amendment And you just sort of have to get used to as an American Like fine Garbage Day for instance instance, like if we don't have to name the shooter, we won't. And I think we extend the same role to panic world where like, unless we absolutely have to, we don't. The other debate that has been kicking around forever, you know, how much do you show from a mass casualty event? Like, do, like if you had photos from inside of Sandy Hook, would you publish them? And when I was

younger, I got a fight with an editor, actually, because I wanted to pull. publish the photos of the little boy who washed ashore trying to cross the Mediterranean, the refugee. And some newspapers around the world did publish them. And I was angry. I was an angry young journalist. And I said, everyone on earth should like stare at this and see what this looks like. And there's all kinds of debates around like, you know, does it desensitize people?

Is it sensational? You know, you can go around and around. The point is the reason I bring it up, the Charlie Kirk attack. has circumnavigated that entire debate and has made very public and very visible a deep shame and a deep terror at the heart of modern America. It has forced us all in a way to be complicit and hijacked algorithms to mindlessly promote footage of political violence, of a man being shot to death. So it has pulled that imagery out of people's minds and showed it to them. And now we are seeing the sort of like intense, intense emotional reaction to that. It is hard to really hit like a true taboo in modern America.

And this killer did it by the way he constructed the attack. Can you just break down for people why the algorithm works in a way that makes this kind of impossible to not be spammed to everyone? I tested this out, by the way. I went on my, I have, I have sports accounts where I try to only look at things that I want to see. And then sometimes I run tests to see if I'm logged into the places where I'm supposed to just see horror movies and like equals propaganda. Am I confronted with the real world? And like this is impossible to keep out. If you made a hierarchy of platforms excluding porn sites of like how unfiltered they were, obviously like X would be at the top.

and then beneath that would be Reddit, which is pretty definitely downstream of X and is sort of just like aggregating what's on X. And then you get Instagram and TikTok, which are a lot more cleaned up. Facebook is sometimes cleaned up and also sometimes just like a complete rat's nest. It really depends on like the day.

So what that means is like if everyone is uploading the video to X or watching the video on X that starts triggering X's algorithm, which starts promoting it, most people don't know that they have auto playing video just turned on by default. So the video is now auto playing in everyone's feeds. They're engaging with it, even if they don't want to engage with it,

then causes it to go more, more viral, which then causes to get spread to subredits, which from there, you know, gets moved over to TikTok and Instagram. If those filters don't knock it down, you might end up just seeing conversation about it, which then people want to know what people are talking about. So then they go back to X to try to find the original video. And it creates this, what we saw yesterday, this really, really extreme loop where it's just promoting horrible, horrible content all day.

And the reason why it was so inescapable was because also these video platforms over time have grown to incentivize the sharing of trends or individuals who operate like trends, which is what I would define an influencer in 2025 as. It's a person who can create trending content by the very nature of themselves. so it's like very, it's very useful for a platform. So an influencer like Charlie Kirk, like I get Charlie Kirk content all the time that I don't follow him. So the machine is just seeing a video involving

a popular influencer is creating discussion. I should show this video to more users because the algorithm can't determine whether or not it's a, it's a video of a death. Sure. Okay. I think that brings us to, how this has been processed and discussed, and I think we should hit on the doxing campaigns

and the bot videos, but maybe before we get to this sort of movement, can you just describe what the White House released? I think we should start with Trump and then work a way down. So Trump posted a bunch about Charlie Kirk on Truth Social. He was, he was, he, very well might have been actually the person to confirm Charlie Kirk's death first, which is strange. I couldn't see any other sources besides Trump's truth social at one point yesterday. He then put out a video with a bunch of, you know, normal Trump boilerplate stuff.

20 seconds into that video, though, Trump's hands basically move in a way that's like totally independent of the rest of Trump's body. Like it doesn't look, it doesn't make sense visually a lot of people started to say he was using an AI avatar and this is tied together with

rumors that he suffered a stroke there's now photos like emerging from the 9-11 Memorial this morning of him like drooping he's drooping hard to be fair lots of people if you just if people have the raw access to this footage you could get me making a face that looks like I

am having a stroke mid-motion different episode for us But if you look at the footage, though, in the Charlie Kirk video that Trump put out, most likely the best explanation I've read is that they tried to splice two takes together and they used what's called a morph edit, like a morphing edit. So instead of just being like a hard cut like you would see on YouTube, it's trying to like morph the shape of two takes together. And then it looks like to clean it up, they upskilled it with AI,

which isn't the same as generating a video with AI. It's asking the AI to clean it up by adding information to the video. So the result looks totally nuts. I mean, it just looks awful. And I can't believe they put it out. But I don't think anyone's, you know, awake at the wheel over there. How has that video helped the matter? It really, if anything, is just sort of adding to the general paranoia and unreality of the web at the moment.

Yeah. No one really believes anything that's going on. I've seen all kinds of breakdowns of the Charlie Kirk shooting video. You know, people asking like why his ring changes fingers at a certain point. He'd like to take it off and play with it as he answered questions, I guess. There's all kinds of conspiracy theories about, you know, the shooter escaping on a private jet and, you know, people in the crowd who look suspicious and trying to identify them. there's a massive information vacuum. Users are just really spinning out of control with all of this stuff.

And almost every single conspiracy theory about this that I've seen ends up leading back to something really anti-Semitic. I want to get into the actions and the call for actions that people are taking. But I think the like boilerplate conversation of what is happening is, the first things I was seeing were people who hated or disliked Charlie Kirk, reposting, him quoting, saying that for the Second Amendment, deaths are just going to happen. We just got to get over it. I was seeing that go around a lot.

And then, of course, the other recurring character who comes up as much as Charlie Kirk had, Dave Partnoy tweeted last night, absolutely disgusting, disturbing video from Charlie Kirk shooting a day, hoping for the best for him and his family anybody who is happy about this is a disgusting human to which somebody replied with a this is so 2025 a pop crave

quote when Portnoy hoped that Greta Thunberg would get hit by a missile while delivering aid those are the most normal faction of conversation that people are having

would you agree? Yeah I mean I don't, I don't care. I think all that shit is just like, I don't know. It's all very cute and like doesn't matter. It's like very one time I had this like line in a garbage day post and Adam was looking it over and he's like, feels a little daily show, doesn't it? And I was like, oh.

And then I, we removed it. And like that's what I think every time someone's like, oh, actually, you said that you wanted Greg a Thorntonborg to die. And it's like, yep, they probably did. It doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. Yeah. But if it feels good, you know, do it.

If you want to get in a fight with Dave Portnoy right now, go for it. But I don't, I don't know. These people don't care. And I'm not actually if it included Dave Portnoy in this. He's like small potatoes anyways. But I, I, the, these people want to kill. everyone like they've made it really clear that the jesse waters on fox news is like we're going to kill you like everyone all these people want to kill you that's kind of that's that's that's kind of why

i wanted to set it up to say like this is like this is the noise but there's there is a part that you have been like beyond the noise the signal that you're like this is not good this is different and this is bad yeah i mean i've been following all summer as these guys have been trying to create a narrative that can get through the noise, you know, cut through the noise of the Epstein investigation. Like, that's the big existential risk to the movement. And by these guys, you mean the Jesse Waters, the, the magosphere. Okay. The, these influencers, these pundits, these commentators, these right-wingers, they are trying to

figure out a way to salvage the movement because the Epstein stuff is real and it is serious and they're not really equipped to handle it. And they've been rope-a-doped all summer. And it's like, that's why they're talking about Sydney, Sweeney's jeans, and they're talking about Cracker Barrel, and they're talking about all kinds of stuff, right? And last week, they tried to elevate this local news story in North Carolina about a Ukrainian refugee being stabbed to death on public transportation by a black man and turned that into a racial, you know, a race war.

And it wasn't probably going to work. it's like a little too localized, it's a little too odd, but they really were pushing. In fact, Charlie Kirk's final posts on X were all about this. They have been desperate for some kind of larger cause that they can rally behind because we talk about this on the show a lot. And so our listeners might be familiar with it, but if you're new to the show, then you might not be familiar with it. These people don't like each other.

They really hate each other. They hate each other because they're competing for the same dark money and the same ad revenue and the same attention from the president, and they all want to be king shit, and they all hate each other. Laura Lumer has posted many times about how she wants Charlie Kirk to die. She's deleting all of them right now.

Nick Fuentes has spent his entire career. He developed his entire career as a response to Charlie Kirk and has routinely said he thinks that he should die. And now he's, like, crying on a stream about it. This is a perfect way to align and a perfect thing to align around because it gives the blood and soil white nationalists direct access

to violent pretext which is what they want. They want to go into the streets and they want to hurt people. It also gives the sort of more cut and dry conservatives a lofty cause a sort of like a noble path.

So like all these people can now say this is for Charlie and that is very, very, very scary because the only thing that's really stopping I don't I don't want to like overstate what you know what we're what we're looking at here but like a unified right wing and far right movement with paramilitary support and a majority government is an extremely frightening thing to consider. I think that I think that lays out where we are I want to I want to kind of shift gears and talk about the post that melted your brain that then subsequently melted my brain.

But that's like a, it's connected, but it is a separate conversation, unless you have something else you wanted to say here for this sort of like summary set the stage for where we might be going section. You're talking about my man, Elder TikTok? Elder TikTok 11? I want to talk about Elder TikTok after getting a glass of water. I want to tease it then with a great Blue Sky Post I saw right before according today, which reads, The Future is watching a Mormon influencer doing self-promise.

motion following an assassination through your phone screen until you are the Mormon influencer filming. So, yeah, let's go to break. The rest of this is going to be on Patreon, but Patreon is free this month. So, or it's essentially free. It's 50 cents. So. I think we should just run this on the feed.

Okay. We're running this on the feed. So, you can keep that part in if you want. You should still go to patreon.com slash panic world. It's free this month and, uh, give us $5 eventually. But like, let's, let's go. a break and give people a second to breathe yeah bye guys see you in a second that was big picture big ramifications right big concerns but there was an event that already happened that uh brought us

into a different a different era i think you are right um you wrote i like this quote so i wanted to read it thank you oh yeah you wrote a very dark day has finally arrived when i read that line, I thought, Ryan, I watched January 6th. I think you're being a little bit dramatic. And then I watched the video you were referring to. And then I agreed with you that a different dark day has arrived. I pulled it from the TikTok so we can, I can play it for us and we can stop it and talk about it or I can just, or we can just describe it, your call. You don't need to play it because it's burned into my brain. forever now. I could write a book. I could maybe a series of books about it. I think it might be the

most important document of the modern world I've ever seen. This is an odd way to be saying that the podcast and the newsletter over Ryan is going to be busy writing a play solely about this video for the rest of his life. It is the most incisive portrait of, the rot at the heart of America that I could imagine. It is effectively a Mormon influencer screaming at panicked children running from

gun violence to pray to Jesus Christ and then he signs off by telling people to subscribe to his TikTok channel. It would be like, almost too much to include in like a Paul of Yourhoven film. It would be too much to like put in like Robocop. It's the closest thing to stars or troopers I've ever seen.

It's in your life. You're so right. It's mind-blowing. It's breaking my brain. If there was like a Netflix action movie where a content creator decided to go live during mass hysteria, you'd be like, this is lazy and gross. But that is literally what happened. Like, moments after the shooting, he's yelling.

It's your boy on TikTok. There was just a gunshot. Shots fired. Shots fired here in Utah. He's stopping to pose while people are running by him live streaming when, like, he doesn't know that only one shot's going to be fired. Like, to think in this moment of ultimate reality, I'm going to go enter the, the unreal space is just wild.

Hey, make sure you go to church on Sunday. Read the book of Mormon. This is not a drill. Let's see you subscribe to outer TikTok on Instagram. It's the closest I've ever seen in a film to this is probably like there's a scene in a very underrated film called Gamer, starring Gerard Butler, where human beings like play as video game characters in real life for people who are remote. remotely operating them.

There's like a vicious shootout, like a horrible shootout happening at like a Sims house full of real people being operated as video game characters. And they're all like dancing as like the shooting is happening. And they like can't react to it because like their players are like letting them get killed. Anyways, go watch Gamer. It's great. It's a 29 around tomatoes. Dude, you've never seen Gamer.

How can you produce this podcast? and never see gamer. You got to see gamer. It's amazing. History will be kind to gamer. Trust me. This could be the next movie we do. All right.

So all that said, elder TikTok's video is unspeakable. I mean, the level of egotism and it's disgusting. It's like a disgusting video, but it's worse than that. It's like it's so myopic in this like very specific. way, just peak internet influence your brain. To think that the screen is realer than reality in the worst moment. It's like you view everything from the lens of content and streams to a place where you have forgotten that you are a living, breathing human.

Like, we've all experienced this on like the smallest end of the spectrum where like, you go out somewhere and somebody's only. only out to take pictures of food or they're they're like not actually dancing they're just posing for the picture and you're like you were actually in real you are mimicking having a real life for the image but imagine do that when you're like you just watched a man die and you're like life might be at risk it's a what what is different about this than the the the the January 6th filming um If people were sort of like doing selfie videos of themselves as Nancy Pelosi like hung from a gallows in the background.

Yeah. Like then you could be like, okay, this is similar. But this is a man who effectively just died in front of an entire audience. Yeah. And I mean, I don't want to get too deep into like describing the video. but like he very visibly died and this guy is like this is my shot for getting a lot of

TikTok followers and this guy is not someone storming the capital this is not someone who's like come down to DC for a political purpose this is like an ostensibly normal person who just watched a man's head almost come off his body and was like this is my opportunity to go viral on TikTok the level of like sociopathic just complete disregard for human life you have to have to be to be throwing up like I mean he like does like a peace sign at the camera when he's like it's your boy elder TikTok you know coming live from a stage covered in blood it's it's unthinkable

I actually have like more I have more patience for the January 6 people they believed in something this is this is this is like there's nothing here this is this is this is the void right how can you say that he tells people to go to church and read the book of book of Mormon so this guy like can't be part of society anymore like I and if this guy is reflect is reflective of American society like I can't be part of society I have to go to the I have to go to the way I have to get away. Like if this is what 20 years of social media has done to like people's brains, like I have to get out. I have to go. I got to go to the woods. I think that is the right conclusion. That's the one I have. Like it's shocking to see, but it's not surprising. The guy that does a apology video, you know, he deleted the video. He did an apology video from his car, obviously, and promised to be a better content creator, which I think makes it worse. Like I think that, If that's like his, if that's his takeaway, that like, I'm a bad content creator and I'll do better for you next time. Like, I think you got to, like, go to the woods.

Like, I think you can't be here. The next time I'm at an event and there and there's a shooting, I will be more solemn in my video. Yeah, like, I'm sorry. Like, you just, like, can't be around anymore. Like, we can't have you around. Like, you got to, like. You go to phone jail. We got to, like, dig.

like a hole in the ground and put you in it and let you sit there for a long time before you can come back and like yeah like you know like that black mirror episode where like they ban john ham from society like he can watch but he can't participate in society anymore those islands where people who think that they're allergic to phone radio waves yeah go there yeah go there put you on like a blue origin and just send you into space and let you chill there for a while and like get it together and you can come back maybe like with only VHS is a full house yeah no nothing nothing no media you can't handle media like you can't handle it like you can't look at the bible you can't look at you can't

read you can't write you can't do anything other than just sit and think about what you've done for like a year I'm sorry it's too much for you is it confirmed that he was was the one who was stealing the merch post the shooting. I saw a guy with the same color hat, a video of this guy going up to that stage and what looked to be clearly stealing blood covered Turning Point USA merch. So yeah, this guy's just got to go. Like he can't, I'm sorry. Is there anything else you want to say?

Do you want to, now that we're on the other side, now that we're safely on post the ad break. Do you want to talk more about how afraid you are of what this will produce? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I am scared. I was feeling optimistic all summer, you know, weirdly enough for someone who looks at this stuff all day. Like, I was kind of like, you know, I was optimistic that some sense of normalcy could return to American politics and American society. And it still could, you know, it still could. But it's like every time something like this happens.

it just increases the timeline. And so I just feel very exhausted thinking about the amount of time it'll take to kind of come through this and come to the other side. As we are recording this, there are reports trickling in of, you know, black universities getting bomb threats. Last night, there were fights kicking off at vigils for Charlie Kirk. There are databases being compiled of leftists and they're being doxed. And I'm sure there will be some state violence applied in some direction here. I've seen calls for labeling Antifa, like a domestic terrorist group and sort of, you know, invading U.S. cities to like take it down. I just, I feel tired.

I feel tired when I think about all of it and sad. Charlie Kirk was kind of like a big presence on this show this summer, I feel like. Like we did a couple episodes where he pops up. And watching the video where he gets shot is like, I don't know, it bothered me more than, I mean, obviously it just bothers you as human being. But like, it bothered me more than other videos I've had to watch like that for work. There's a strangeness to all this, more unsettling than previous sort of moments like this.

Like I find this more unsettling than Luigi Mangione shooting, even the, Kyle Rittenhouse stuff. Like, there's something really, I try to put it into words today, actually, in the garbage day issue. And I try to sort of, like, describe it as like this like paris social terror, this idea that like this person that felt so untouchable because of internet fame, so removed from the normal world, so safe to watch them die, no matter their, their politics or their views, strange, unsettling.

I think your line, impossible to a. ignore in a world where it's impossible to pay attention really gets at it where when there's a school shooting where there's a church shooting normally try to screen it out then then like looking at their amifications and then like two or three days later

the like an image or detail about that like these were fucking children these were normal people will hit me and there will be a genuine emotional moment this being directly in front of all of us being confronted with us and that it was like all right everyone's like gloves are off

let's fucking go and that there's going to be no moment of like who um that feels that feels scary instantaneous from it happening it is like how can we use this event it was you you watched the horrible thing viscerally and you are already seeing it weaponized instantaneously makes it feel different. The other thing, the other thing that's like gnawing at me is we've talked a lot recently about this sort of contagion effect of these things, the idolization after a mass shooting.

And this got a lot of attention and it makes me really worried that this is the new school shooting? I don't think so. I mean, all of the influencers that I know personally are saying that like they're canceling in person events. They're going to have security teams. Hassan has talked about this for like he's not going out anymore. I think we're not going to see AOC. We're not going to see Zorin, Mandami.

We're not going to see a lot of these people out anymore. So like the idea that like this becomes like the new thing. I don't think that's going to happen just because like, for the most part, it's pretty easy to prevent, which is like you just don't go out. I think if this leads to anything, it leads to more chaotic political violence. And it's hard to predict because it really depends on where we are in the like descending into fascism, like spectrum. Like where are we on the journey? I don't know.

I went kind of deep into this leftist idea this morning. We cut it from the piece. It was about how the American years of lead have started. Do you know this term? Years of Lead? No. So years of lead or Annie DiPiombo. It's the Italian term for the 20-year period of left-wing and right-wing extremist

violence and terrorism between the 60s and 80s that took over Italy. And a lot of leftists in particular in America have been predicting that our years have led were coming. It's arguable that they're already here. That is sort of what I would predict going forward. It's just like a lot more sporadic, explicitly political violence. And it could take the form of kidnappings. It could take the form of assassinations, car bombs. It would look something like the troubles and.

Ireland or the years of lead in Italy, you know, I think it is safe to say that we're already in it. Two lawmakers in Minnesota were assassinated this summer and everyone forgot about it. Like, no one talks about it. The president was almost assassinated twice. Kyle Rittenhouse, like, killed people in the street. Luigi Mangione, like, allegedly killed, like, the CEO of United Healthcare, like, earlier this year.

Like we are in a A moment of sectarian political violence and it is just impossible to ignore or deny now and it makes me not feel good. It's bad vibes. What if you left the country?

I've spent most of my adult life not living in America. Yeah, no, no, no, no, no. I'm not saying, I'm not saying like because I want you to be safe, which I, you know, of course I do. I'm saying because everywhere you go is a harbent. of bat. Oh, I got you out of here because it's my fault.

And if you leave, maybe we'll just. Yeah, I moved back full time at last August a year ago. Ryan, where were you in the start of 2020? I was, no, it was the end of 2019. I was in Wuhan, China. Look. Yeah, look. I just think if you're trying to wrap your head around, what's going on here,

it is it is not so much like things are going to spin out of control immediately and there's going to be like you know purge level violence on the streets all day long it's not like a movie it's just that like we live in a country that has normalized political violence and you just got to adjust accordingly so if you are a journalist you should protect yourself if you're an You should protect yourself. Going outside is dangerous. Things are unpredictable. And like, yeah, that's where I'm at with this. All right. Well, I'm going to start editing. You go nap.

There's going to be a lot coming out about this over the next couple days, a couple weeks. We're going to, you know, pull those threads maybe for larger episodes, but we also might be doing some updates on this, which will put as bonuses behind the Patreon wall. So if you want to kind of follow how this. this develops, we're going to be doing some work there. So we've got a special going on right now. So if you want to just like subscribe for the month and track what we're doing, you can do that. We just don't want to clutter up the feed because this is going to be a lot of drip and drop stuff.

Yeah. But oh, Garbage Day will also be following as well. So you can subscribe to Garbage Day as well. But like this is going to be a circus on like anything we've ever seen before, I think. Patreon.com. Not to be the guy we talk about in this episode. But a Patreon.com slash panic world. And you can just go to Garbage Day.

On email, it's all there. And we'll be, we'll be trying to follow this as best we can and make sense of what we can make sense of. And if you use called Panic Year, it's 50 cents for the month. Thanks for coming on your show. Thanks for having me on my show. Panic World is a production of career. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick. Josh Fielstead is a.

our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Courier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezzo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their director of marketing, YouTube, and Podcast Growth Marketer Samantha Hollos. And Tracy Kaplan is the Senior Vice President of Sales Distribution. If you want to sponsor the show or give us products to sell, she's the one to talk to. You can email her at Tracy at courier newsroom.com.

Be sure to check up the Panicworld YouTube channel, which you can find at YouTube.com slash at PanicWorldPod. And please give us some nice ratings on podcast apps and leave a funny review. Lastly, here's my advice for you. Chill out and touch grass while you still can. I'm not saying you're an average person, by the way. I think you're an above average person. Thank you, Ryan.

That's the nicest thing you've ever said to me. You can put that on a card, yeah. I will. I'm going to, it's going to be the first Panic World merch. Ryan Broderick said I was above average person. You can, you too can be an above average person for $35.