Strange Cube

Murder, Minneapolis and Erika Kirk

It’s weird—all of it.

A new widow tearfully caresses her dead husband in his open casket. It’s a natural reaction to seeing the father of her children lying helpless and vulnerable—her first up-close encounter since his grisly public execution.

But it isn’t natural. It’s a performance.

It isn’t an indication she was involved in his murder. It’s a product of the influencer age. Everything must be filmed, clipped and shared for mass consumption. These aren’t moments, they’re content.

An iPhone hovers behind her intimate farewell, perhaps under pressure from the media team to “show the world what they did to him.” He was the head of a powerful political organization. Many believed he was a future president. Now she’s being poured into the mold of Jackie Kennedy: a sympathetic figure who will rise from the ashes to eclipse the gruesome memory of her husband’s assassination. The TPUSA machine must roll on. There’s money and power at stake. The storyline of Erika Kirk’s transformation from faithful wife to fearless leader begins in the chapel’s viewing room and climaxes with fireworks at Turning Point’s America Fest. Every second in between is a delicate process of character development. The video and images in the viewing room are designed to establish our tragic hero. The proceeding speeches and scripted interviews serve to strengthen her image. Every subtlety, every sentence, every nuance is crafted to build a mythology. When she glides through the glowing white sparks to take Charlie’s place on stage, the audience experiences a carefully constructed euphoria; a release of tension that was manufactured for this exact purpose. The phoenix has arrived.

Jackie Kennedy disappeared from the public eye when John was murdered. Erika Kirk wasn’t afforded that privacy. She was thrust into a scorching hot spotlight the instant Charlie’s heart stopped beating. The inauthenticity of her grief didn’t stem from a lack of love for her husband, it was a reaction to the awareness that the world was watching—closely and constantly—and at a time where every human being travels with a high resolution camera eager to achieve virality. She behaved the way she was expected to, even if it wasn’t how she genuinely felt right when she was expected to feel it, and because of those expectations she appeared robotic. She had an organization to save, millions of dollars to manage and an entire political movement hanging in the balance—as I’m sure was made clear to her by the brain trust at Turning Point and every Republican parasite in Turning Point’s orbit. There was no room for honesty, for exhaustion, for a day to just forget about Charlie and Turning Point and the unexpected catastrophe that ripped her life to pieces. The MAGA right wanted a grieving widow so she and Turning Point dialed her anguish up to eleven with a voyeuristic peek into what should have been a private moment—and it was weird.

We’ll never know who murdered Charlie Kirk. Tyler Robinson is almost certainly just the tip of a deliberately obfuscated spear—if Tyler Robinson is attached to that spear at all. Nobody who understands the basic laws of physics can rationally square the cartoonish narrative Kash Patel’s FBI squeezed out in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. Candace Owens didn’t buy it. She was Charlie’s friend, as she’s reminded us on a continuous loop since TPUSA’s security detail folded his body into the backseat of an SUV. She’s been on a tear trying to find Charlie’s killer, weaving a convoluted web of conspiracy that involves the CIA, Israel, France, TPUSA insiders, her own dreams, Erika Kirk and a fleet of Egyptian planes. Her hunt for Kirk’s assassin has routinely pushed her show to the top slot on global podcast charts, coincidentally generating millions of dollars in ad revenue.

That’s weird too.

We’ve crossed the interdimensional plane into a hall of mirrors universe. Everything appears normal at first glance but becomes increasingly distorted the longer you stare at it. Our relationship to governments and monarchies has always been one of skepticism from a distance. Journalism was established as a legitimate vocation because citizens deemed it necessary to create systems of checks and balances over their ruling classes. America’s founding fathers included the press in their constitution because they understood it as a vital mechanism in maintaining a free democratic republic. So when it became undeniably obvious traditional media networks were infected by intelligence agencies and absorbed by private interests, it left a vacuum to be filled by anyone brave enough to broadcast widely unknown, often highly controversial counternarratives. It took a few decades, but when the public came to realize that the fringe voices were less tinfoil fetishists—as they were so frequently accused by the compromised entities—and more curious truth seekers, public trust shifted to the independent sources.

And with it the legacy media ad model was grafted onto streaming platforms. Opinionated citizens became instant field reporters and homemade newsrooms were erected in townhouse basements. Journalism as a discipline was redefined and loosely applied to anyone sharing disjointed theories through a selfie camera. Platforms like YouTube, X and TikTok featured millions of commentators and podcasts—most of which presented interpretations of current events shone through a partisan or ideological lens. As the streaming platforms dwarfed traditional news networks, the networks began to editorialize their own reporting to compete in a shrinking market they once dominated. What resulted was an ecosystem where sensationalism boosts visibility and factual information is secondary to preferred narratives.

A woman is shot three times after blockading ICE agents in Minneapolis. The video clip of her death rips across social media feeds. Multiple angles, zoomed in, zoomed out, slow motion—amateur analysts painstakingly review the footage to determine who was at fault.

What’s clear to any unbiased observer is that this was a collision between two distressed individuals in a pressure cooker scenario: one, a military veteran and ICE agent tasked with locating needles in a haystack amidst aggressive protesters impeding his ability to do his job, and the other, a passionate anti-Trump activist who joined the Minneapolis ICE Watch with the explicit intent to disrupt the deportation efforts.

It’s a tragic inflection point in an upward trajectory of escalating tensions: western cities embroiled in conflict; destabilized by radical policy; economic uncertainty driving people to extremes; mobs gathering in the streets; ritual protests designed to performatively expunge whatever evil has been identified by the pack leaders.

But the issue is never the issue. Most of those people holding signs and chanting slogans don’t know what they’re protesting against. These are tribal dances choreographed to exorcise the bad spirits; a release of the anger, anxiety and fear that grows out of the unknown. Our entire lives have been politicized—what we consume, where we live, which facts we agree are facts and which are to be ignored. Everything in our world has a political connotation attached to it. We can’t escape the ideological hooks—there’s a message baked into every song and movie popular culture produces, signaling an affiliation to one tribe or the other. We are routinely forced to check ourselves against the rules and regulations of whichever tribe we belong to—tribes that present as tribes but are functionally psychopathic religious cults. Identity politics reduced us to our immutable characteristics and then slingshotted us into whichever cult most corresponds with our three defining nouns (straight white male, black lesbian female, etc). In the event you were an outlier—such as a middle aged white liberal or young black conservative—you were either expected to grovel at the feet of your “historically oppressed” masters or accept life as a token cult representative whenever accusations of racism are thrown around.

And it’s all so fucking weird it’s mind-bending.

Another protester is shot and killed in Minneapolis. An ICE agent has his finger bitten off by a rabid activist. The ritual swings into the human sacrifice phase. Nobody seems to notice this is all happening right as a multi-billion dollar Somali fraud was uncovered in that same city. Minnesota Congresswoman Ilhan Omar and Governor Tim Walz pour fuel on the fire, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey tells his police to stand down, ex-president Barack Obama releases a statement encouraging the rest of America to follow Minneapolis’ example—blood is spilled in subzero temperatures to satisfy the gods of money laundering.

The corruption is so endemic the bureaucrats have resorted to inflaming gang violence in their own districts as a method of diverting attention away from their criminality. The cults are so captured by their desire to destroy the other side neither recognizes how easily they’ve been manipulated into fighting on behalf of the people robbing them. More blood, more gnashing of teeth, more death—meanwhile their religious leaders rake in millions through various schemes to redirect the last few drops of middle class wealth into the oligarchical ocean.

Charlie Kirk’s murder sent us careening into a lake of fire. It deepened the bloodlust on the left and put the right wing in a defensive posture. The unthinkable became an option.

Commentators widened the gap. Charlie Kirk became a gold mine of valuable content—not just the discourse around his assassination, but all of the waves that rolled off of it. The millions of trusted chattering heads locked onto their audience and held them in a state of hatred and paranoia. The conversation soon turned from the assassination itself to reactions from the opposing cult. Mentally ill leftists fervently celebrated his murder. American flag-clad conservatives promised retribution. The commentators repackaged the clips and blasted them into circulation, further increasing hostilities with every revolution around their echo chambers until they gained enough force to penetrate the neighboring bubble. Nobody is closer to finding the truth than they were in that one shocking instant when Charlie froze in his seat with a .30-06 sized hole in his neck. Nobody seems to care either. The truth only matters when it aligns with your preferred narrative. If not, it can be warped to fit the narrative or discarded completely. The commentators decide what the truth is, and they know what version of the truth their audience wants. Charlie Kirk built an empire preaching to his choir. He was a master of linguistic contortion; carefully straddling the line between objective reality and hyperbolic conservative dogma. Erika Kirk inherited a global congregation of devout followers, with the expectation that she would carry on the tradition of his traveling tent revivals, electrifying crowds with the same vigor.

But Charlie was a true believer—one of the only true believers in the cesspool of right wing evangelists. This is why every attempt to replace him with a shiny new snake-handler has failed, and why Erika Kirk’s public appearances felt performative. Charlie was an expert navigator of the new media landscape, but there was substance at the root of his sermons. The commentators orbiting the black hole left by his death will never fill that void because they lack the authenticity that propelled Charlie as a cultural vanguard. They are the Joel Osteens and Peter Popoffs of political slop; false prophets pushing miracle spring water to a gullible audience desperate to believe in narratives that absolve them of all accountability in the ongoing cult wars.

Charlie Kirk was an important counterbalance to the madness. His method of debate was a gateway to wider discourse. It served dual purposes: first, to expose the lunacy of the radicalized left, and second to establish a common ground where the larger discussions could happen. He engaged with anyone willing to challenge him, and although the engagements were often combative, they were a stabilizing force. They humanized the other side and allowed us to see each other for who we really are: regular people stumbling around in the darkness looking for a light switch.

Minneapolis is the first sign of things to come. Without open dialog we exist only as avatars in a fictional reality made up exclusively of communists and fascists. The protesters appear to be cosplaying as revolutionaries because they are. The politicians appear to be larping as Che Guevara-esque revolutionary figures because they are. The ICE agents appear to be operating as America First mercenaries because they are. None of this is real to anyone involved or observing because we’ve been propagandized to a point of total disconnection. The tangible universe is now just a social construct to be interpreted through ideological filters that have grown to become religious faiths. We created more satisfactory gods because God didn’t fit the rigid dogmas of our new world.

And every year this new world keeps getting weirder.