SNEAK PEEK: Radical Normie Terrorism Does Not Exist

Charlie Kirk's murder was leftist terrorism, plain and simple

In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, three distinct narratives have taken form to explain the killing and other instances of spectacular, apparently political violence in America—assassinations and attempted assassinations, school shootings, church shootings. I say “apparently” to maintain a sense of even-handedness for the moment. It will become clear what I believe soon enough, if you didn’t already know or couldn’t guess.

First, there’s the right-wing narrative. It goes something like this. These attacks are all or mostly instances of radical left-wing violence, intended to terrorise, demoralise and ultimately defeat the American right and usher in a leftist takeover.

Radical leftist groups often coordinate and encourage this violence, and they’re given money by very powerful people like George Soros and his Open Society Foundations; but in fact the entire culture is geared towards coordinating and encouraging it. Social-media influencers like Destiny and Hasan Piker regularly call for the streets to run red with the blood of “capitalists” and Trump supporters. The mainstream media encourages leftist violence. Hollywood and television and music encourage it. Politicians do too.

Just last week, Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill to make it illegal for federal agents, including ICE agents, to wear masks in California. The aim, obviously, is to threaten ICE agents and make them feel unsafe. If they can’t hide their identities as they carry out raids in sanctuary jurisdictions and areas where opposition is fierce, they may be subject to doxxing—to having their names and addresses revealed—and face intimidation and revenge attacks. Perhaps this will make them think twice about the job they’re doing. Newsom has referred to ICE operations as part of an “authoritarian government.”

On Wednesday, there was a fatal attack on an ICE facility in Dallas; although the victims were not ICE agents but migrants, apparently killed by mistake when a gunman shot through the windows of an ICE vehicle. At an event in North Carolina, Vice President JD Vance slammed Governor Newsom for his part in “encouraging crazy people to go and commit violence.” Newsom hit back and said he was doing nothing of the sort.

Second, there’s the leftist narrative, or what I call the BlueAnon or bluetard spin. This focuses on apparent ambiguities and oddities, like the multiple meanings of some of the inscriptions on bullets recovered at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s murder, to flip the right-wing story on its head.

Charlie Kirk’s murder was actually carried out by a “far-right extremist,” probably a “Groyper” (i.e. a fan of Nick Fuentes), who thought Kirk was a sellout, a “cuck,” a barrier to the kind of “based world,” replete with “right-wing death squads,” that they want to see. The fewer moderating influences that remain on the right, the better. And, of course, the murder of a prominent right-wing figure who made dialogue across the political divide his central mission will only convince more people on the right that dialogue with the other side simply isn’t possible, especially if the murder is “wrongly” blamed on the left. Right wingers are actually the ones who commit the majority of political violence in America.

This is the kind of bilge that continues to flow, without interruption, from the mouth and fingertips of people like Keith Olbermann, but it’s also been repeated widely in the mainstream media, in print and on screen.

In large part, this narrative serves to muddy the waters and distract from the real nature of the problem. Its proponents have been widely successful in doing so, certainly on their own side. Polling has shown that, among Democrats at least, only a small minority believe Charlie Kirk’s killer was a leftist—something like 10%. More—around a third—believe he was a Republican. The same goes for independent voters. Even a small segment of Republicans believe Tyler Robinson was one of their own.

The third narrative has taken shape more gradually and less noisily than the bluetard narrative, but it’s no less sinister or dangerous as a result. In fact, it may be more so, because it wears the garb of neutrality and reasonableness, when in fact it’s neither of those things. It’s not neutral. It’s partisan. It serves the interests of one side at the expense of the other, and it needs to be rejected.

This is a narrative that says Charlie Kirk’s killer was simply a misfit, a weirdo who was so alienated and mixed up in internet culture that he thought killing the Turning Point USA founder in public with a hunting rifle would be cool and funny, but not a coherent political action or statement that makes sense as part of a broader ideology or movement.

This is “radical normie terrorism,” as Christopher Rufo, who has emerged as an unlikely champion of the theory, has dubbed it. Let’s take a closer look at what Rufo has to say on the subject.

Radical normie terrorism has nothing to do with leftist liberation or right-wing acceleration. Instead, it’s about the nihilism of modern culture, the sickness at the heart of our society, lost boys who dress up in anthropomorphic fox suits and spend all their time playing video games, jerking off to porn and browsing edgy forums like 4Chan. These people are “perpetually online,” Rufo says, and as a result, they lose track of what’s real and what’s not. And then they kill.

Rufo contrasts these young men with the radicals of the 1960s and 1970s, who “hijacked airplanes, set bombs in government buildings, and assassinated police officers in service of political goals.” These radicals of yesteryear, profiled in the fantastic book Days of Rage, were real radicals. They were “radical but largely lucid, justifying their actions with appeals to a larger cause.”

Radical normie terrorists like Tyler Robinson on the other hand, have no ideology, are part of no organisation and have no “concrete political aim.” They may be radical, but that’s it.

The source of their radicalism is not Karl Marx, Franz Fanon or even Ibram X. Kendi, but a “particular kind of psychopathology.” As well as Tyler Robinson, Rufo uses the example of Robin Westman, who shot up Annunciation Catholic Church in Minneapolis and killed two children. Westman, who was transgender, left behind a diary in which he described lurid fantasies of killing children. He said he was a demon and drew images of himself as that demon, looking at himself in the mirror. Although he adorned his weapons with political slogans, including “Kill Donald Trump,” “these were memes and ironies, designed to give the appearance of ideology.” “The ideology was a brittle shell around a deeper emptiness that could only be satisfied with horror,” Rufo adds.

Robinson had a transgender boyfriend. Like Westman he was also “terminally online.” He “spent thousands of hours playing video games, had an account on sexual fetish websites, and played a ‘dating simulator’ game involving ‘furries,’ muscular cartoon characters that are half-animal and half-man.” The slogans he wrote on the bullet casings found at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s murder were a mish-mash of leftist slogans and internet memes, “Hey fascist! CATCH.” But also: “If you read this, you are GAY Lmao.” And: “Notices bulge OwO what’s this?”—a reference to a disgusting furry meme.

What makes their crimes all the more shocking, Rufo says, is that Robinson and Westman both came from “functional households”: “ordinary, middle-class, middle American families.”

Robinson and Westman killed, but only in service of “gratifying an obscure personal urge.” They “did not seek to change policy or dismantle a system of government.” Their acts of terror, Rufo concludes, were not political. Instead, they “reflect something dark in our nation’s soul.” Something has gone terribly wrong, and we all bear responsibility for it, at some level.

Rufo warns that these radical normie terrorists present a serious threat, perhaps a uniquely serious threat, because law enforcement is poorly equipped to deal with them. The FBI relies on traditional methods for tracking dangerous individuals and groups—including tips, door-knocking and interviews—and these almost always fail to identify people like Robinson and Westman before it’s too late.

Even so, something has to be done to stop them. Rufo gestures towards policing the internet and suggests there needs to be some kind of “reform” of the wider “culture;” although he doesn’t say what that might be. Instead, he ends his essay with an exhortation that’s vague but also intended to be emotionally satisfying.

“We should keep the stakes in mind as we work to protect the things we love and grapple for a solution, as elusive as it may seem.”

I’ve laid out Rufo’s analysis from start to finish, because I think it’s worth seeing it in full. The analysis has its merits. I’d be the last person to deny, for example, that somebody like Tyler Robinson is different in important ways from Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the Weather Underground in the 1970s, or Assata Shakur, who was a member of the Black Liberation Army. I’d also be the last to deny that men like Robinson and Robin Westman do exhibit a “particular kind of psychopathology” and that their anger, resentment and murderousness are nursed by isolation, video games, the internet and other freaks who share their delusions—including the delusion they were born in the wrong body. The forces that shape this psychopathology largely didn’t exist in the 1960s and 1970s.

But how different are these new radicals from the old? How different really?