Charlie Kirk was unremarkable. He was a racist. A white nationalist, transphobe, and megaphone for fascism but more than anything, he was unremarkable. I am one of the eldest of millennials, and thanks to a litany of health issues as well as a fondness for reading, an indoor kid. So when the internet was accessible for home use, I took to it as soon as I could. With unfettered access to all corners of the Wild West that was the internet before it was effectively owned by four companies, I ran across people like Charlie Kirk often enough.

In the earliest days, they were indistinguishable from the creeps who wouldn’t meet your eye at booths in the back of the flea market. Well, my eye, anyway. I’m sure if you weren’t a little black kid, they would’ve gladly welcomed you over to look at their wares, which I’d find out later on in life were things like xeroxed copies of The Turner Diaries and other such reactionary Nazi garbage. As they broke containment from listservs and BBSs, they’d pop up in forums and chat rooms to test the waters to see how tolerable their bullshit was in a given place. More likely than not, the main aim was to find other like-minded scumbags or impressionable kids to pull off into other, more shadowy places.

Later as things gave way to more formalized websites and community platforms that would lead to modern social media, the Charlie Kirks of the world slunk off to corners of the 'Net that might be more familiar to you as seeds of the current hellworld we find ourselves in. Getting booted from Something Awful to end up on the imageboards. Taking detours from their own blogs or frantically refreshing the Drudge Report to jump in the comments sections of more populated and legitimate platforms, yelling invective about whatever news of the day related to their particular bugbear–blacks, gays, and proto-men’s rights/incel rhetoric, typically. At least back then in my experience, the more blatant antisemitism was less common even among these types, because there was much less willful confusion about what actual antisemitism was. The associated dogwhistles were much more likely to get you correctly identified as someone who holds the Elders of the Protocols of Zion in high regard. But I digress.

On into the rise of social media, the accessibility of video content, and the ability to post at the speed of your thumbs’ dexterity across a phone, people like Charlie Kirk were a dime-a-dozen. Turning Point as a concern aside, the steady erosion of news media under the disastrous and still relevant effects of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (and, perhaps, the much earlier elimination of the Fairness Doctrine) has allowed for an environment where “objectivity” is an excuse to give blatant fascism apologia the same open floor as actual, substantive and informative political or social commentary. With men like Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan as their guiding lights, the internet is lousy with bigots that can offer a veneer of legitimacy because for the average viewer, their cadence and distribution methods are indistinguishable from influencers–which is where a disconcerting number of the public get their news from–and Charlie Kirk was merely a particularly odious member of the pack. He’s no different than Ben Shapiro, Steven Crowder, Candace Owens, Tomi Lahren, and countless other reactionaries with Shure mics and ring lights–aside from his “activism,” which only really differentiated him from his colleagues because of its intended scope. Whatever else you can say about his colleagues, in my opinion they’re more concerned with maintaining a loyal platform, whereas Charlie Kirk’s primary aim was stochastic terrorism.