The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart - Trending Towards Violence with Charlie Warzel

Episode Date: September 18, 2025

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Jon is joined by Charlie Warzel, staff writer at The Atlantic and author of its "Galaxy Brain" newsletter. Together, they explore how algorithms distort the way we experience these tragic events while rewarding the most extreme reactions, investigate the online ecosystems that can radicalize individuals, and consider whether our responses to violence perpetuate the very cycles we condemn. This podcast episode is brought to you by: FACTOR - Go to https://www.factormeals.com/TWS50OFF  to claim 50% off your first box, plus Free Breakfast for 1 Year. GROUND NEWS - Go to https://groundnews.com/stewart to see how any news story is being framed by news outlets around the world and across the political spectrum. Use my link to get 40% off unlimited access with the Vantage Subscription. Follow The Weekly Show with Jon Stewart on social media for more:  > YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@weeklyshowpodcast > Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weeklyshowpodcast> TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@weeklyshowpodcast  > X: https://x.com/weeklyshowpod   > BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/theweeklyshowpodcast.com Host/Executive Producer – Jon Stewart Executive Producer – James Dixon Executive Producer – Chris McShane Executive Producer – Caity Gray Lead Producer – Lauren Walker Producer – Brittany Mehmedovic  Producer – Gillian Spear Video Editor & Engineer – Rob Vitolo Audio Editor & Engineer – Nicole Boyce Music by Hansdle Hsu Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm even going to tell you around the time. It's around noon. I want to tell you the time because last time we recorded on a Wednesday, I thought, well, geez, something, you know, just let them know it's on a Wednesday and it'll be out on Thursday. And obviously, by Wednesday night, there was. the horrific assassination and not addressed it anyway in the podcast because of that. So I'm preemptively suggesting that we don't know what happens in 24 hours anymore in this

general shit show of a society that we're working on. Now, on a positive note, Colbert won an Emmy, the late show, well-deserved, thank goodness. It was lovely to see the response from the audience in Los Angeles and in the country showing a much-deserved love, much-deserved, well-earned, and it was really lovely to watch. And I thought his words were perfect and beautiful and a little bit of a tonic in what is just a sad. It's difficult to even muster the kind of necessary performative enthusiasm for these types of entrants. at some level. One thing I should mention is

I hope people realize that shit posting after tragedies is not mandatory. I don't know if people know that. You don't have to say the worst thing you can possibly think of to inflame

the spirits of people who may be suffering. You know, you don't, you can actually write it in a journal and put that journal under your mattress and not demonstrate to all those around you that you really lack humanity. You could write it on a piece of paper and then chew it and swallow it rather than it's

it is not a mandatory. You don't have to caveat. You don't have to go out. That's one of my least favorite. You know, I don't agree with everything he said, but he shouldn't have been killed. You know, just fucking don't say anything. because the truth is this is it's one thing it's this it's these individuals who believe themselves to be judge jury and executioner uh who are a vigilante society is not a society and that's the part

that cannot stand and ironically they then uh find themselves in the warm embrace of every uh entitlement that our legal system has to offer and as i'm watching all the the sort of cable news go through all their, you know, preordained steps and all that. I actually came upon an article in the Atlantic that I thought was really interesting that talked about, less about like the individual event and more about the system around it that we really don't know a lot about and it is an enigma to so many people and it's not talked to a little bit. So I wanted to bring that writer of that article onto the program. So to have that conversation, which I think, you know, could be illuminating to some extent. But man, oh man.

All right. So we're going to, we're going to get to our guest. He is a staff writer at the Atlantic. He is the author of the Atlantic's newsletter Galaxy Brain. Charlie Wurzel is joining us. Charlie, thank you for joining us. Thank you for having me. Charlie, in the week that has followed this terrible, terrible incident, I have read and seen and heard pages of print, hours of chatter, much of it, circular, unhelpful, much of of it hurtful. Your article on this assassination was I thought one of the most interesting macro

views on, you know, a lot of people are talking about, I'll liken it to something else. A lot of people are talking about the weather. You seem to be talking about the climate. Everybody wanted to point fingers at a very specific point of blame. You're talking about a cultural shift. in the atmosphere, the complexities of this new communication world and how these individuals exist in the world. Do you want to talk a little bit about that? Charlie, talk a little bit about the thesis of your article. Yeah, sure. So, you know, this whole thing happened last week. And as usual, I think for most of us now, you watch this stuff unfold online. You may be seeing stuff happening on cable news or wherever you are or however you're getting it.

But these things play out over all of our different social feeds. It's very fractured. It's very confusing. I happen for my job to be more plugged in probably than the average person, but I think for anyone. Explain your job very quickly to give a background. Yeah. So I cover technology and media and politics, essentially.

So just how the internet weirds everything that it. touches right and been doing that for about 15 years the three horsemen of the apocalypse as it that's right that's right uh and so i'm i'm i'm i'm watching this play out and and you know the the moment that i watched this video pop into my feed on you know um wherever blue sky x you name the thing um watching essentially someone being murdered in front of your face uh and all the horror that comes with that, I felt this genuine, you know, roller coaster drop pit stomach feeling for a lot of reasons. The first reason being it's horrifying when to watch someone get murdered. You know, it's you immediately sort of think about who the person is. I know who Charlie

Kirk is, young family, young father, all of those human reasons why you feel horrible. But the next reason I felt horrible was I knew exactly how this is going to play out. You know, I have watched. I have watched this happen for more than a decade on these different platforms and the cycle only refines itself. It only gets faster. It only gets smoother. The participants only know how to, you know, what their roles are in the in the production. They only get better at it. It's more efficient. And what I believed was going to happen outside of the political ramifications of this or even like the cultural ramifications what was about to happen was an immediate like the two you know polarized sides of of our

discourse we're immediately going to take this and fit it into their ideological box like in one second and we saw this especially there's and I'd love to talk more about this but there is this I think a real asymmetry between the two polarized sides. But, you know, I'm scrolling through my feed. It's not clear what has actually happened to Charlie Kirk. We don't have any information. One of the first things I see is an Elon Musk tweet, you know, that the left are murderers, essentially. And so he's not a very influential force on that platform.

So I don't imagine anybody saw that. It's not like he owns it or anything like that. And so I started watching this. I have, you know, feeds that I've set up to monitor some of these, you know, shock jocks, some of these influencers, some of these pundits, whatever, people across, you know, this spectrum. And it was very clear immediately that this was going to, this was war, essentially, especially for the far right. Supercharged online and performative. Yeah, I mean, immediately pointing the finger of blame, this is what happens.

No need for evidence. I mean, when these types of things happen, motives take a while to, you know, I mean, just physically, you need to go usually to the person's house unless they've left like a note, you know, right there in the crime scene. Like, you have to apprehend the killer. You have to know things, information. And what we have in the aftermath of these big events is an information vacuum, right? And the Internet has become so good at filling that. The internet abhors an information vacuum, and it basically incentivizes all of these people through these different social media feeds to fill it, right?

And there is this attentional incentive baked into that. Elon Musk is performing, essentially, whether he believes it or not, like, you know, whatever. But what he's doing when he's tweeting when, you know, they still haven't probably moved Charlie Kirk's body to a hospital to be treated, is this notion of, I am going to give this crowd what it wants. And in some ways, give himself what he wants, which is the dopamine hit of that engagement. Everybody online is they're looking for those hits. Charlie, is this based on, is this rewiring our brains?

How much of this is cynical? How much of this is a biohack? in the same way I liken it to if you're a chef in a restaurant and you want people to eat your food like you've got some hacks you'll throw in a little sugar into the mariner

you'll put a little fat little oil a little salt a little something to get people lip smack and good that's one thing but there are labs where people work on ultra processed food that's

designed to hack your body's ability to stop you from eating that that force you in some ways beyond your ability to control it to continue to eat it is that the insidious secret sauce that that online is ultra ultra process speech it's a really interesting way to put it um i think there i want to be careful with like terms like rewiring because like there is this great debate right that is going on of about, like, how bad are the phones? How bad is the Internet?

How bad is, you know, what is it doing? What is it doing to what is it doing to kids? What is it doing to adults? I fall into the camp of it's very clear that something is going on here, right? Like, I can't leave this thing ever. It's right next to me. I'm doing a freaking podcast with you. For God's sakes, Charlie, we poop with it.

Yes, among other things. And so there's clearly something going on. There's something with the dopamine, with the way, with the intermittent reward cycle, right? Because you post something, you do something for this crowd, and you never know. It's not reliable whether or not, you know, the world's going to shower you with the attention and the affection that you want or whether the algorithms from these companies are going to do that. Right. So you have this, you're pulling the slot machine all the time. what it's doing long term, I'm not exactly sure, but what is very clear is that it is it is changing our

incentives, like our behavioral incentives. And I think it is turning us often into the worst possible versions of ourself, right? I think a lot about the way that tech companies and algorithms work with food as well. But the way I think about it is if you, you know, if you said to somebody, hey, I'm going to try to diet this year, right? I'm going to try to eat well and part of that and, you know, get fit, whatever. Part of that is every day at 4 o'clock, I'm going to exercise. Seven days a week, I'm doing it, right? I want to be a better person or a, you know, a better version of myself. And then every day that friend at 357 slides you a donut. And says

What a dick. Exactly. And says to you, you don't have to eat that donut, but it's there. I mean, you could, you could nibble it. You know how much you like donuts, right?

Right. And you eat the donut because it's been a long day. You're in a moment of weakness, whatever it is. You just feel like, you know, you want to do it.

And then the way you feel. Yeah, that's the thing, though. I would say that they understand, the biarrhythmic changes in your day to know the exact right time to wave that donut under your nose.

That it's almost worse than just being a dick. It's that it's, I mean, I was watching the trending topics, Charlie, like a horse race. Hoping upon hope, like this is what's happened to us. You're praying that it's not committed by somebody that the other side can weaponize. And so you're watching, you know, trans start to trend. And then Groyper starts to trend.

And then this other thing starts to trend. And it's all, I don't want to say misinformation because you don't know yet. It's non-information. It's merely accelerants. Right. These are just accelerants. All right, folks. I'm going to share yourself.

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for a year. Delicious, ready to eat meals delivered with Factor. Offer only valid for new Factor customers with code and qualifying auto-renewing subscription purchase. I think what I struggle with covering this stuff is to know how much of this is an intended consequence. Like when you say something like, you know, there's almost like understanding like the bio rhythms and things like that. I think a lot of it is actually dumber than that. I don't think that they, I think that these algorithms are optimized for engagement, just broad engagement.

They don't care whether or not that engagement is screaming to end the rights of trans people or that engagement is like, look at this kitten. It's, you know, it's furry and beautiful and, you know, LOL. Don't you think they understand that outrage and fear travels faster than even in adorability that that when you when you monetize or maximize for that don't you think they know i mean i watch it on the evening news man they understand that like if some if a terrible crime happened in the bronx and they've got video of it and that's what's going like it's not they always save the and in america first uh tonight is always the last story where they're like

a girl sold a cupcake for a you know adoption shelter like Like, they know what drives the most engagement. They absolutely do. I'm not trying to let them off the hook. But I think the technology is, is dumber in that way. I mean, some of them are more sophisticated. I mean, TikTok, for example, is a genius, an evil insidious genius invention in that you are giving it every time you scroll to a new video on TikTok, you are giving it a signal. it takes what that video is and it has it categorized 50 different ways, right?

It's a sports video. It's a music. It's a band. Oh, it's this clip, this sound clip, whatever it is. And you're voting every six seconds or less. If you flick off something really quickly, your algorithm changes. Just an infinitesimal bit. They say, oh, Charlie's not into that today.

Do you understand how these work, Charlie? Do you, are you privy in any way to these, to these algorithms? No, and no, nobody is really. You have to, these are company secrets. But how is that possible? Think about it with food, right? Right. They have to tell us what's in it. Now, they don't have to tell us that beaver anus has been substituted for strawberry flavoring, but there does have to be a chemical listing there. How is it possible that these programs, which have such an impact on our lives and certainly on the lives of young people, have no responsibility to the public to in any way deconstruct how the fuck they're put together and what they're doing to us.

I think there's, I think there's two reasons. I think the first reason is, is simply that the, the way that regulation works, the way that any, you know, to get all this going works so much slower than these companies work. So any time they're tried to be put in a box by lawmakers, the things change, right? The whole paradigm changes. You make a rule to govern Facebook after the 2016 election, say, which didn't happen, but like say you did that. And then bite dance and from China comes up with TikTok and there's this whole new way.

There's a whole new thing. There's a little of that going on. I guess maybe there's three things. There's also a lack of understanding very clearly. Congress has gotten slightly better, right? But there's a lack of understanding. And third, I think, is the horrific, you know, it's the same problem we were just talking about, polarization of all this stuff. There is from the left this desire of, hey, you know, we have clearly a neo-Nazi problem on some of these, you know, websites and platforms and these harassment problems and these things of, you know, targeting.

Real human things, swatting them, doxing them, getting them in trouble with their job, getting them fired, all these actual real world harms. These are not necessarily like, you know, vague speech harms. These are real world harms and things that are happening. You have, that is sort of the perspective that, you know, progressives come to this fight with it. And then on the right, you have this sort of, you know, free speech maximalist in theory idea, which is, if, if, If you try to do anything to these platforms whatsoever, you are putting your finger on the scales. That's right. It's cloaked in this idea of free speech.

It doesn't talk about the fact that there's a line from this researcher Renee Duresta, who is great on all these topics. And she has talked about freedom of speech and freedom of reach. And these platforms with their algorithms are about reach. It's not about speech necessarily, right? You can say a lot of stuff on these platforms and it gets through or, you know, now a lot of these platforms don't care about content moderation. But the whole part of the algorithm is what is it boosting? What is it sending out to more people, right?

You know, it's different than standing in the town square and speaking versus standing at it and having a bullhorn that reaches, you know, entire municipalities or whatnot. Right. Or knowing in the town square when you're going to show up and then following you, because they also do that. There's notification. You know, if, if somebody on your list put something out there, you know they're in the town square and you can run and harass them. Right. Or waking you up when you're asleep, you know, and tell you got to listen to this, right? Right. And so you have this argument that is coming from the right, which is basically any attempt to shut down some of this political

intimidation, some of this, you know, some of this, some of these communities that exist to harass and, and, and, and, and, and cause this, like, physical world violence, that is immediately seen by the right as this putting the fingers on the scales of who gets to speak and who doesn't. Or it was, like, until the week ago, and now it's not. Or until, or until it's not convenient and they want to get somebody else off there. Until they get power. Elon Musk's whole reason supposedly for buying Twitter, which is now X, was this idea of restoring free speech, right?

That Democrats have censored conservatives forever. So he buys the company. He reinstates people like Alex Jones, a couple of neo-Nazis, you know, just a whole slew of people who've been banned not because of their speech, but because they broke the rules, right? They broke the rules of engagement for this. platform it's not the government it's right and does all this and very clearly has put his fingers on all kinds of different scales there yeah i mean the the one mecca hitler would would say the one that we know about he's turned grok into yeah that's what and that's what i'm saying though it's completely obscured you you can't see into it right and and so this also causes

regular people, and this is, I've been watching this happen for over a decade, to become conspiracy theorists about what happened to the thing that they posted or said, right? There are so many people I know who are totally just regular, not public figure type people who have, you know, said, I think I'm being shadow banned. I think I'm being shadow banned by X or Facebook or whatever. And I'm like, you're probably not on their radar, you know, like if you're just a regular person living your life. But because these things are so opaque because we don't know what is happening, we create these different stories for why this post didn't go viral or why I'm not getting followed as much as I think

I should or or why X, Y, or Z is happening. But the reality is, too, that there is stuff happening, right? These companies are tweaking these things. I mean, Elon Musk. Of course. It's not free speech. It's ultra-processed speech. An algorithm, it's one thing. Look, The fact that it links you to other people, the fact that it drives comments and the comments drive more engagement is what turns it from free speech into ultra-process speech. It is designed to pull you further and further into the platform and further and further down the rabbit holes. There is gravity. There is inertia. There are forces there that are at work that are. not at work in normal free speech settings that are manipulating the dynamics. One of the sort of most sobering stories of this that I covered right, right after the 2020

election, right after January 6th, was I was looking at different people who had stormed the Capitol and, you know, looking through their social media presences. And there's one guy who was a kind of small time right-wing influencer. and I went back, we downloaded his whole Facebook account to look at, like, a decade. And it was very clear that starting in like 2014, 2015, he was trying to get, he was just a guy who was trying to get some attention, right? He was, hey, like, look at my, look at my stand-up comedy thing. No, that's not working. Okay, open mic night, kind of, like, all these different, you know, here's my startup, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all these things, nothing catches on. And then sometime during COVID, he posts something about vaccines.

Just not even, not even that, just sort of like, I'm kind of skeptical of this thing. The post, he was getting, you know, maybe one or two likes on every single post. 250 likes. The next post, a little further. He goes just a little bit further with it, right? Yeah. Cut two, six months later, this guy's storming the capital. and you know vlogging himself doing it and it's like that's it right there you know do you think

this is that it's that the difficulty here is you're creating a kind of army of of of nihilist influencers because you have to to get the dopamine hit look we've all anybody out there who's who's done drugs me being one of them understands that like part of of the problem with drugs is like to get that same hit like you got to go further like that's kind of the issue that it it it goes very quickly from uh i feel a part of something to i need this somewhere that my nervous system has overtaken this that the pleasure is now not pleasure it's desperation and i think the worst part about all of this though is that for Some people, right, I think that that's accurate how you're describing it, some people get rewarded and figure it out.

And I mean, I just, if you sort of look at the political situation that we have in the aftermath of the Kirk stuff, we have an influencer who was assassinated. The Trump administration sent two podcasters who just happened to be working for the FBI to Utah, to, to, investigate that. You're talking about Cash Patel and Dan Bungino, who are now the, right, the heads of the FBI. Sent two other influencers, like people who've made their bones using all these platforms to create these audiences and continue to sort of, you know, ratchet up the takes that they put out. And the vice president of the United States hosted the influencer show, you know, posthumously, Kirk's show. I mean, you just have like these, these influencer dynamics because the show

must go on, right? Because that's really important. But don't you think some of that is because power understands, look, propaganda and information, whoever controls that has a huge advantage in terms of political power. And so they're just understanding how to weaponize these various platforms. And everybody is trying to do that to, you know, whatever aim it is. is, you know, every medium that came before it had the same problem. I've never seen it supercharged in this manner. It's not that people didn't, you know, Father Coglin loved radio. You know, once radio hit, his propaganda was supercharged.

Television had the same thing, man. Everybody remembers, you know, Morton Downey Jr. That wasn't so much political or Jerry Springer. But it was a ratcheting up of dopamine hits to watch something. saw those things aren't sustainable they start to spin out of control into caricature that even though it's done that online it hasn't been a detriment to the purveyors of it all right guys these days every headline feels like it's been engineered to make you either furious terrified or both it is it's honestly maddening like you can't

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That's the, that's like the big difference, right? Because if you are, again, like what I was saying with the, you know, with the stuff on TikTok and the scrolling and giving that the micro feedbacks to tailor everything to your interest perfectly, right? There are a lot of people who are coming to any influencer who is polarizing, whether it's Charlie Kirk or, you know, whomever. They're coming to them in the exact right way, right? It's not like a clip of the influence.

are saying something that they might disagree with. It's them talking about the subject that they care about, that they like, right? They're finding, like, influencers will spend a lot of time on air, right? Or a lot of, and they will clip up these things in all kinds of ways because they're also trying to find as broad and diverse an audience, right? They'll talk about cancel culture and Netflix specials or whatever, right, of the movie of the week that matters of the little thing. And then they'll talk about sports.

And the aggregators at the larger media companies will find the most explosive clips, and they'll put that out. I mean, the one thing that I want to say is everybody's playing the same game. And that is to join in in this new kind of everything is content economy. And an assassination. I think the thing that has been so jarring is that. an assassination is content is another driver of everybody's, you know, I picked up these followers.

I did that, you know, people shit posting, people posting horrible things about a family that's just lost a father. You know, all of this. And you know what's interesting to watch cable television. sort of displaying its own kind of vestigial uselessness that, you know, they're going back and forth as though they might be the issue when they're not even part of the game right now. Right. They're following on.

And by the way, this kid, he's on Discord or some other platform, why you would name your platform after like argument, you know, it's Discord, it's shittiness. But who even knows the ecosystem that he's swimming in? We don't know any of this. It doesn't look like it was a great one. How could it be? Right. But so the charging document or whatever we're calling it of the shooter.

First of all, I don't want to name the shooter because that's also a part of all of this, right? Like this is the these mass shooters now. are showing us with each of these killings that they are absorbing all of this. They're absorbing how you and I talk about it, how I write about it, how cable news portrays it, all of these things. So in that charging document, the shooter inscribed a bunch of different hyper, very online phrases on the bullets and stuff, right? Right.

And was texting with the roommate right after or right before the assistant. Or the roommate or the boyfriend or girl, but like, they're in a relationship, I think. It seems. But again, maybe. Like, who the fuck knows? Right. And said, I can't get it like directly quoted. But it's something like if I see whatever the phrase is on Fox News, like, I'm going to lose it, right?

Essentially saying, like, it's a troll. Like the bullets, these things. Oh, my God. You're saying, they're saying, oh, if you do that and you get on Fox News like, you win the day on the internet like you've won't so these people are like assassination influencers like murder influencers you know there was exactly uh on the very same day there was a 15 year old kid who shot up his high school in Denver right and again hasn't really received the coverage because I don't think it fits as well into the algorithm's engagement model but a

Apparently, this kid was involved in a whole other subculture online that is a public murder subculture, if that's to use the wrong phrase. But do you know anything about that subculture as well? Or is it all part of the same weird thing? So it's very amorphous, right? Like, online communities tend to be this way. I mean, some of them are very rigid, but generally, you know, the best thing and the worst thing about the Internet, right, is that if you are somebody who feels very alone and has some really niche things, right, like I love whatever, this trombone player, I'm growing

up in Iowa, you know, I feel like I'm a weirdo, I'm an ostracized by whatever, you can go on the Internet and you can find the 11 other people who, like, have that strange hobby that strange, weird thing, and you can find each other. And there's great stories there, right? Like, it's a wonderful thing. The exact same thing works with people who love and are really interested in the Columbine shooting. And not because they think it's an interesting historical thing. It's because they idolize the killers.

The Internet puts these different communities together. And then not quite exactly the same as Netflix's. If you liked this show, you might be interested. in, but organically, there is this sort of referral thing, right, where, oh, you're involved with this very kind of messed up subculture. Well, you know, there's some people on the outskirts who are part of that, and they'll help introduce you. And so there are these.

There's a terogram, which is basically like a terrorist subculture, like public acts of terrorism, but not, you know, joining ISIS or whatever. Like, it's just like regular people who are fascinating. by this and want to take up a political cause. There's, you know, this far right, the neo-Nazi kind of stuff that's very real and actually, you know, bigoted. Luigi Mangione has an entire subculture of supporters for vigilante assassins. Right.

Like, it's, and I don't know if that's, the thing you don't know is, are they part of those communities or are they lying? by those communities, but we're separate from that. Like, is there, we, what's the causation? We have some evidence in certain. All right. Talk about that. So there was, I'm probably going to get the particulars wrong, but there are two recent

school shootings from last year and early this year in Nashville and in Madison, Wisconsin. And I'm going to confuse which is which. but they there was there's reporting investigative reporting that shows that they crossed paths online and that two the two shooters separately knew each other on the internet on the on the on the internet on the internet right and it's not that they were best friends or anything like that but when the first shooter you know committed the act of violence and murder and that other, the second shooter, I'm just trying to not name names here because I'm sticking to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The second shooter was like, oh my God, I know her. By the way,

it was a young girl. It was a 15 year old, I believe, girl. That is something that is also changing. The threat profile of this is, you know, experts who I've spoken to who study this stuff have said, it's democratizing because there are mass shooter online fandom communities that exist. Some of them are around specific instance, like Columbine. Some of them are just simply, you know, there's the Christchurch shooter who is lionized. There was a shooting that I wrote about, and I think it's like two weeks now, but it feels like 20 years.

Oh, Jesus. At a church in Minneapolis. and the shooter had inscribed all these, like, other shooters on their gun and all these online memes and phrases. And that was very clearly, very, very clearly just fan service, essentially, to this community saying, I'm going to do it. I'm going to be the next guy and you're going to write my name on the next gun. And that's what it's about.

Oh, Jesus. So it's the fucking, it's the, you know, cinema. in challenge. It's the kind of thing that goes viral online, but to the extent of depravity and murder. Is that sort of similar? Yeah. I mean, essentially, yes. Like, very truly, like, these dynamics, the thing about the internet is the specifics are always very different, and the specifics certainly matter. But there are a lot of very similar dynamics that happen. You know, when I talk to some of these analysts who and researchers who spend time in these, you know, at great psychological pain in these subcultures or around them, what they describe essentially

is like a kind of love bombing that these groups have. So someone will kind of wander in, right? Maybe they're just interested in true crime and they're pretty depressed and they're pretty upset. and they see this subreddit or whatever, not subreddit, but some community, online community that is interested in school shootings. And they don't know exactly what they're getting, but the people there know how to groom them. They know how to bring them into the movement. They know how to treat them, give them something they're not getting anywhere else. And a lot of times the people who end up, you know, going way down the rabbit hole,

tend to feel extremely alienated from their communities or from their families or personally alienated by their own life choices in whatever way. There's this way that these communities pull them in and know how to do that and get better at doing that and give them essentially a safe space. Like a cult. That's how cults operate.

They love bomb you and bring people in who are searching for something and bring them into these smaller sub-communities, offer them. But the question then always becomes, like, what is the radicalizing factor? And can they take somebody from neutral? Like, do you know, I know you did like a blank slate user thing on X. What happened then? Like, how did that, what was the dynamic of that for you?

So, yeah, when I did that, that this. was right around, right around the 2024 election. And my personal experience and the experience I was having, you know, doing research and reporting was that the site was getting worse, right? I was starting to see like straight up neo-Nazi content in my feeds without showing any affinity for that myself. I'm always like, when you're for you page shows you that, you're like, what have I done to make you think that that's for me. And that's the thing, right? That's the sort of, you know, quote unquote,

an invisible algorithmic hand that you're sort of saying, well, okay, is this Elon Musk? Is this whatever? So what I did is I created a new account, you know, got a different browser, whatever, so I didn't know who I was, created a different account. And I can't remember exactly precisely the things that I said I was interested in,

but I think it was like technology and sports, right? Like very, very bland. Sure. Like, this is, like, I'm a person. I have some interests. Yes. Yes. I'm not going to tell you what.

I didn't follow anyone. First thing I see when I open up the new, you know, for you feed because I'm not following anyone. Uh-huh. Eight Elon Musk ones, you know, uh, tweets. Well, that's like, just, like, just that's a welcome from the. Of course, from the, from the concierge. It's like when you move into a neighborhood and somebody brings over the big basket of fruit. That's you, you've, you've joined a community.

Yeah. I'm trying to see what else. I got it here. Okay. Musk Post was the first thing. A post from Donald Trump. A tweet from an account called M.J. Truth Ultra, which offered a warning from a supposed FBI whistleblower that said, vote, arm yourself, stock up three to four months supply of food and water and pray.

After that was a post from a MAGA influencer. Wait. Whoa. you nothing tripped this up you're in a clean but does it think because is there something suspicious maybe about not having any data history that makes it think like oh this this is an experiment or a Russian bot like is there was there something to the fact that you were a clean slate that seems suspicious I mean if that is the case I don't know why you'd be serving a supposed Russian bot would like vote and arm yourself and stock up like wouldn't a

Russian bot enjoy I guess maybe destroying the fabric of the United States this the sure like the answer to that is that I I can't be sure but I also again these things are not that savvy like they're just trying this is a number all these platforms are numbers games both with engagement but also with users like but it's clearly not agnostic it's it's pointing you in a very particular direction. Yeah, I mean, there's a thing. There was a, like, a couple of posts from Libs of TikTok. There was a post from Benny Johnson and Jack Posobic.

All right-wing content. All of it. All of it. Yes. And you've not engaged with any of this yet. No, nothing. This is just the first scroll. Just the first scroll.

That's your starter kit. Yeah. No, truly. And, you know, I let it kind of marinate, you know, checked back in a few times. And it essentially was like it devolved into like videos from, you know, like the Manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate. There was a lot of MMA stuff.

It was a very like stereotypical like version of, of a user, which happens to be the core user now. Young male. Technology sports. So they just think like if you're into technology in sports, you're one of us you're in the bro sphere and we're going to we're going to give you that stuff that just massages that reptilian part of your not quite formed brain right and and bring you in yeah i mean it like it's it's it's kind of it's kind of mind-blowing like because there's you know

like you said well okay what was the catch there like when i was performing this experiment I wasn't expecting to just be able to, like, copy and paste that into an article and be like, well, there you go. Like, I thought I was going to have to work a little for it, right? Right. You're going to have to work to join the Manosphere. Right, right, right. Now, what would that have been, if I can ask, what do you think that would have been on a different social, like, either Instagram or Blue Sky, like, does Blue Sky immediately bring you to, like, Lilith Fair? Like, what, like, what's the difference?

I don't, I, blue sky is not really algorithmic in the same way. It's, it's sort of an experiment to try to do the internet in a different way. It has its own polarization issues. It has its own, you know, people have been bullied off or whatever. But it is, it is a, it's kind of a different experiment. It's trying to be not speed run all the mistakes of, of Twitter. Threads is like Threads is like

you have like R.E.I and Johnson and Johnson tweeting like what's up, it sounded like you were going down to like R.C. Cola. You're like, well, there's Coke and there's Pepsi. Hey,

you know, R.C. Cola is, yeah, that's fine. No, it's like brands mindlessly tweeting. Like,

you know, it's like Starbucks saying to Burger King, like you up, you know? Like, like it's just as bad. Very, very kind of dead inside.

It's radicalizing the Burger King. But, but again, Like, yes, TikTok is, again, the most sophisticated version of all of this, right? Because you open that up, it's going to throw you really popular posts. And sometimes those will be political, right? But a lot of times those will be silly dances or what have you. The thing is, it gets real good at, like, there's a situation where in my,

reporting that all sorts of people have gotten like in trouble with their spouses because like they stay too long on like a video of a buxom woman and then TikTok's like oh he's a perv got it okay let's give him oh my god let's give him boobs right and so you just end up with this for a while they've got to try and game their own feed like Neil deGrasse Tyson Neil deGrasse Tyson come on Tyson let me let me get some astrophysics in there we got to get the boobs out and and yeah but like this is also something that, you know, not to, not to over generalize, like, for a generation, but younger people, early millennials, zoomers, whatever the other generations called, I don't remember, they're very good at kind of speaking to the algorithms in this way. Like,

they know that they're being perceived, right, in this way. And they're, you know, they're good at sort of trying to, you know, clean up their time. line or do whatever, right, or try to get out of it something. During the Volvo Fall Experience event, discover exceptional offers and thoughtful design that leaves plenty of room for autumn adventures. And see for yourself how Volvo's legendary safety brings peace of mind to every crisp morning commute. This September, lease a 2026 X-E-90 plug-in hybrid from $599 biweekly at 3.3.

3.99% during the Volvo Fall Experience event. Conditions supply, visit your local Volvo retailer or go to explorevolvo.com. The thing that struck me if the communications are to be believed is the utter sort of lack of understanding that you've ended a life. the impact of that seemed completely bereft of consequence, like did not understand or did not care. Yeah, I mean, I think some of that, you know, that is beyond my scope when it comes to like the psychological issues of depression or whatever.

But the thing that I really can understand, And I actually think the thing to take away from most of these violent acts is this sort of irony-poisoned nihilism that is sort of the lingua franca of the Internet, that there is this like, LOL, nothing matters kind of feeling. The only thing that really matters is, you know, getting a rise out of different people, performing for your people. Like this Minnesota Minneapolis shooter, people immediately try. This is the church or this is, I mean, here's how horrible this is. I'm like, are you talking about the church or the guy who went and killed Melissa Hortman? I mean, that's. No, sorry.

Yeah. No, I know. Right. Sorry. This is the church that happened like two and a half weeks ago. Right. This person had all kinds of awful stuff like, you know, like racist, white supremacist, anti-Semitic stuff scrawled on his gun. and his magazines, right?

He also had weird stuff about, like, you know, Exxon, like down with Exxon and down with Black Rock, like all these weird things. He had all the shooters. Sort of that extreme left and extreme right meeting. It's that everybody talks about that, that sort of extreme left, extreme right meeting and sort of this weird place. But I think it wasn't that. I think the point is they knew when they did this, that it was going to make news, that it

was going to be picked apart, that he was going to be treated like a puzzle to solve by the media, by you and me. And that's why there's all this stuff that is on there that is actually ideologically incoherent. So in some ways you're saying that the idea behind all this is nothing more than murder fame in your online group. And also, now let's all sit back and watch. Watch the world burn.

Yeah. Are we already behind on all of it? You know, we're discussing it in terms of the algorithm on social media. Have they already found other deeper caverns where they're living that aren't even touched by those algorithms? Are these people even on, you know, Instagram? or are they living in under is it subterranean from that even i so these these communities a lot of them will exist in like chat spaces which aren't really algorithmically driven you know like some of the some of what does chat space mean like what so like like a like

there are WhatsApp groups there are telegram telegram is a is a messaging service that is infamously, it doesn't moderate. Like, it took the European Union and the Department of Justice a lot of work to get them to try to get rid of ISIS content, right? Like, they do not moderate for anything. They're free speech maximalist platform. Right. And so that, like, there are communities there, right, on telegram. Right. The terrorism, white supremacy, the school shooter fandoms, these you know, whatever. There are, you know, Discord, as you mentioned, is a platform that does moderate, but is sort of, you know, locked in this whack-a-mole game, right?

You were mentioning with cults and leaders. There's no leader to a lot of these things. Right. It's an amoeba. It's the Borg. It's this weird. It's headless, yeah. It's a headless network.

You know, I wonder sometimes, this is where we're at. now, AI is going to supercharge this, I'm assuming. It's going to supercharge the algorithms is going to make this worse. Do you have a sense, though, of are other countries facing this issue? Why is America seem to be, I mean, other than our unbelievable access to the weapons of death? Is that the only thing that supercharges this in this country? Because Europe, for all its problems doesn't seem to have this one it seems like it's probably like the original sin when it comes to taking online violence and chaos and nihilism and making it physical like you know it's just pretty easy but but it doesn't seem to happen in other

places, certainly not as often and as, as constantly as it does here. Yeah. I mean, I think the closest thing that you see globally is terrorist organizations, right? Like fringe, radical terrorist groups. But I think we have an ISIS of disaffected fucking high school students and college students. Kind it. Wow. Wow.

I mean, that's deep, man. That's, that's. But there's not. But there's not. an ideology really behind it other than this. I mean, again, I think like when I go back to watching, like one of the things that was so frustrating, whether it was this church shooter in Minneapolis or the stuff with Kirk and the bullets, like this, you know, the first thing that came out was that like ATF unsourced or one sourced Wall Street General report that said

there was transgender ideology on the thing. And it's like, when I see that as someone who's spent a lot of time trying to wrap my head around this stuff. I go, oh, man, whoever that person was who wrote down that report, I don't care if they're politically motivated or not, and maybe they are or maybe they're not, but I know for damn sure they have never spent time in these communities. You don't just say words like that. We are jumping to conclusions that favor whatever our narratives are when that's the exact point of these people is to be enigmas, to be puzzled. to have people not understand or maybe some of them go that way and some of them are much

clearer about their political aims but it's the certainty that you see in legacy media creates more misinformation and uncertainty is is kind of the point in the chaos so like if you go into these if you go into these communities right like so one that's you know like we hear a lot of a four chant right if you go into one of the sort of political, message board political, message boards on 4chan. Part of what you're seeing is just a lot of chaos, right? Just a lot of people, you know, insulting each other, but they don't really mean it or they do mean. Like, it's just, like, there's, it's just, it's kind of nuts.

And there is a way in which, like, these communities have, have this feeling. and by committing this act, by murdering a bunch of people, they see it as a troll. Like, they are trolling everyone because just you watch, Donald Trump's going to get on Fox News and say something, right? Or MSNBC is going to do this. Or these lawmakers are all going to point the finger. Oh, God. They're playing the response. I mean, truly, that's like, I feel sometimes like I.

I'm, again, overgeneralizing when I'm looking at this. I think it's hard to have any conversation without overgeneralizing. But every person's, you know, got their own motivations, whatnot. And then you read the charging document of Charlie Kirk's shooter. And it says, man, if I see this on Fox News, I'm going to have a stroke. That's the quote. And I'm like, well, there it is. Like, that's it.

That's one of the things is they want to see the reaction from the so-called normal world. or whatever. And wants to see the normal people not be able to understand it. They want the reporters, the journalists, the lawmakers, the investigators to try to solve their puzzle and fail because they, and that's, when you think about it, that's so human, right? They want to try to be understood, but they also want to be seen as unendingly complex. I've got no sympathy for the misunderstood, you know, miscreant.

that's like I just want to be seen and you're like there's man fucking take a painting class like get I'm certainly not defending it no no no no but that's what it is I just meant yeah yeah I get what you're saying yeah do you think look anything that can be constructed can be deconstructed are there tools that can give us a better sense of when these things are going to break into real life And are we going to have to understand how to utilize those? Is that the way out of this? I mean, I don't know how, I don't want to be like the kids and the underground subreddits. But, you know, let's face facts.

Like the overwhelming majority of it is pretty harmless. Right. But is there some way to crystallize where the real peril is and how to find our way out of it? I think that there's a, there's such a number of ways you could go with all of this, right? Like one of the things that, when I talk to a lot of these researchers, they all sort of like put their head in their hands because they're like, what I'm going to say to you sounds so naive and like so pie in the sky and like, you know, you're going to dismiss me immediately. But they're like, we need more like third spaces and community spaces. And like the, we need the infrastructure that's not digital. We need the physical infrastructure.

God, the answer is midnight basketball? Yes. The answer is a community of people who care about and keep people who are showing these types of tendencies from, you know, driving themselves or running into the arms of these other people, right? Like, you know, the one thing that this one researcher at University of Boulder, Alex Newhouse, told me, is that you can see from these people a receding from the physical world when they start to really go down these paths. Like, they're not going to school, right? Like, they stop going to these things and they start spending all of this. But this kid didn't seem like that at all. Oh, he's having dinner with his parents.

He's going to work. He's going to school. He's doing the whole thing. And that's why we don't know, right? Whether we still don't really even know he's not being cooperative. You know, he may, he may fit into this other box. But it's very clear there are a few little things that signs and things that he left that he thought would either be nihilistically funny or what or whatnot. But there is like a like a physical thing.

Right. Or was like this person is a hateful person. and I've decided to be the judge, jury, and executioner. Like, it could simply be that. Right. Truly. And I wrote this in the last piece, but the thing that most, I think a nerves people the most is this idea that there might not be an ideology to pin it to. Like, it's not even, like, oh, I hope it's not my side, you know, who did this.

I hope that person's not on my side because I don't want to have to answer for. that or whatnot or that's going to make things worse for me somehow or the you know but i think even more unnerving to people is this what what what what what made them do this right what like where where was the what fail safes you know didn't work sure no it takes you back i think in some respects you say okay we've seen assassinations before in our history we've seen uh times of volatility and, you know, insecurity and generally revolved around either, you know, Vietnam war, racial issues or, you know, different things. This feels like clockwork orange. This is a whole other sort of subculture that, like you say, it is, you know, it has its own language. It has

it own moors and it's yeah it's why it's why the manson case created such a hysteria back when that first surfaced yeah i mean i think it's really interesting people have brought this up and again this is a little outside of my zone of expertise but i think it's interesting you know we don't really have like a serial killer problem in the same way that you know historically we had but we do have this mass shooting problem right and it's interesting It's interesting, is this a different expression of a type of violence, of a type of thing, you know, instead of like, are we seeing the same things, but they're, you know, it's being sort of transformed by our current culture, our current media, our current, you know, whatever. A nihilism that's always been with us supercharged by technological advances. And again, that's a little, that's a little beyond my scope.

but I think it's, I think it's certainly fascinating. I think it's, I think it's good to, like, keep in perspective with this because you can immediately sort of go into the Dumer territory with all this. It's very easy to do. Yeah. Yeah. But I, I do think that, you know, this isn't the common experience of being online. No, I know. This is, it's one of those things where you're like, but, you know, think of all the people who

aren't shot. Like, it's one of those, like, yeah, okay, all right. No, totally. Absolutely. But I think like, I think when you're trying to address this, I think one of the biggest issues, there's obviously like the technological issues. I think like the government needs to really start taking this even more seriously. Oh. Well, they are, they apparently are going to on the left. Apparently they're not going to do it. Right, right. And apparently George Soros is going to jail for this one. Right. Yeah. No, that's not going to be. make anything better. Yeah.

But I think the Biden administration sort of right at the end designated this terrorist sort of online group terror gram, you know, as a domestic threat, which, you know, puts it in a different category and allows, you know, the actual law enforcement agencies to sort of take this more seriously to, you know, to monitor this stuff. Again, that gets into conversations about surveillance and what were we doing, you know, surveilling our kids and our kids going to get, you know, caught up in this thing because they're ironically posting about whatever, you know, it's not a, it's not a coincidence that these communities are all cloaked in 85 layers of irony because it also makes it

a little harder to track and understand what is actually going on until it might be too late. but you know I also think I think like one of the biggest things here is that and that I see in the aftermath of the Kirk's assassination is that people need to start taking the internet much more seriously like I have I've had journalists that I have seen who have sort of glibly and proudly been like well I don't you know about like those spaces. or those types of things. And what I would say is like, if you are trying to cover politics in 2025, you need to know what a discord room is. You need to know how these things operate. You need to understand, I'm not saying you have to be, you know, drive yourself mad or anything like that, but you have to understand these things because what we are doing right now

is we're very clearly as like a broad media and political system. cultural system, is we are playing into the hands of these people who are doing this. We are giving them what they want. We are performing for the internet. And you see this after, you know, Charlie Kirk's assassination. You're watching internet desidents perform with either shit posting or thing. You're seeing cable news certainly perform. All of it's, you know, our prayers and other things, you know, they're going through all

the stages of how a story is in some ways put through the refinery of our modern, you know, media outlet. There's very little insight and a lot of performance. And maybe that's the exact wrong thing to be steering into. I have no idea if this would have as much of an effect as I think it would. But if the media stopped naming these shooters, I think that that is like such a small thing that actually goes a bit of a way. Because again, the thing that I think was so chilling about the Minneapolis church shooting is that they wrote all these names of other mass shooters on the gun. Right. The shooters, you know, that that was very clearly a, I want, I want whatever media storm those people had, I want that.

Precisely. I want to be the next name on the gun. Hey, listen, man, I'll let, I know you got a lot going on and I appreciate you spending the time of this. I got to tell you, I made my bones in this business spending hours and hours watching cable news. It was a corrosive experience. I can't imagine because I think you're doing the same, but in.

in an even more difficult and acidic environment. You're with the atmosphere of Venus. You know, we were still on Earth, but you're in a whole other area. So much appreciated, Charlie Worsell, staff writer at The Atlantic, author of its newsletter, Galaxy Brain. Thanks very much for talking to us, Charlie.

Yeah, thanks for having me. Wow. So it is, I have to say, it's, it's sort of what I thought it was, this sort of strange, unregulated wild west culture where the worst version of yourself is not just in any way visible, but encouraged, cultivated, fertilized. It is exactly the kind of environment that we need to aerate if we are to move forward in non-niallist fashion. Yes, that is for sure. But I do want to thank Charlie for taking the time. And I also, as always, want to thank all those that work on this podcast who do such a great job. week in and week out the not unsung heroes sung they are the song we should sing their praises

more often uh our lead producer lauren walker producer brittany mamedovic producer jillian spear video editor and engineer rob vatolo audio editor and engineer nicole boys and our executive producers chris mcshain and katie gray uh we will see you next week under hopefully more pleasant circumstances bye bye The weekly show with John Stewart is a Comedy Central podcast. It's produced by Paramount Audio and Bus Boy Productions.