We have grown accustomed to the craziness of the American political discourse, the heated debates, the social media skirmishes, the fierce disagreements. But we have always stopped short of assassination. That fragile barrier was shattered last week when Charlie Kirk, a commentator with immense influence was murdered on a college campus, an event so shocking it reverberated around the world. News outlets from France to Germany to Korea carried the story.

There is more going on underneath the surface that a lot of people are missing.

Seven Observations on The Charlie Kirk Assassination

1) Invisible Risk of College Debates

2) The Problem with Being Too Online

3) How Many Lives Has Obesity Saved?

4) Free Speech is a Fragile Exception

5) Why I’m Worried About the Unemployment Rate Rising For Young Adults

6) The Death of Monolithic Youth Culture

7) Cancel Culture and the Corporate Enforcers

1) The Invisible Risk of College Debates

This is how Jordan Peterson originally got his fame and fortune as well. It was because he was on YouTube between 2017 and 2019 engaging in campus debate with students. The rest is history.

However, this campus debate strategy carries a deep and often overlooked risk.

The audience is constantly changing. Students graduate, new ones arrive on campus. The people attending in 2018 aren’t the same in 2025, they’re gone. Someone else is there now. There’s an entirely new youth cohort.

Also, some groups that were small in 2018 are now much larger. Take the LGBT group as one example, which seemed to motivate the killer to strike down Kirk. This same person was 14 when Kirk initially started doing campus debates. It’s a new generation.

Also, the wider public is different now as well. We saw the aftermath of another gen z assassin, Luigi Mangione, of the healthcare CEO. Many people made him into a folk hero. It wasn’t like he was universally condemned by the public. It was a little shocking. This makes assassinations a little more acceptable than before.

Knowing this, should Charlie Kirk’s security team have held the event indoors and done an extensive security check of every audience member? Sure. That would have been smarter. It isn’t 2017 anymore. Things are darker now, more serious, people are wishing death on each other.

But it’s hard to recognize these things in the moment though. It’s subtle when the environment shifts over time.

This failure was a symptom of a broader failure to understand how deeply the digital world has corrupted our sense of the real

2) The Problem with Being Too Online

Political assassinations are as old as government itself. There’s a reason for that. Politicians are people who hold real power and can create policy. An assassin can directly change the trajectory of a country.

However, for a growing number of people, politics is no longer primarily about elections, legislation, or policy. It’s not about following a senator’s voting record or the intricacies of a foreign aid bill.

Instead, their entire political worldview is built around the politics storyline.

The perpetual online discourse, the drama between influencers, the fiery monologues from podcasters, and the daily skirmishes on social media. These individuals are hyper-engaged, but their engagement is directed toward a parallel digital universe. They can name more media pundits and Twitch streamers than they can U.S. senators. The main characters in their political narrative aren’t the officials in government who wield actual power; they’re the personalities in media.

This creates a dangerous conflation. Clout and viral reach is confused with political power.

The consequence is a distorted reality. This audience is deeply invested in the performance of politics, often at the expense of its substance. For them, figures like Charlie Kirk hold as much power as the President or Senators who actually vote on things.

It’s a bad trend.

If an influencer like Charlie Kirk is perceived to wield power equivalent to a government official, then in the warped logic of a radicalized individual, assassinating him becomes a political act of equivalent weight to assassinating a senator.

This creates a world where thousands of media figures and influencers become viable targets for individuals seeking to make a "real" political impact. It dramatically expands the battlefield of political violence.

3) How Many Lives Has Obesity Saved?

I’ve never seen a fat shooter in my entire life. Have you?

This stands in contrast to the reality of modern America, where over 70% of the adult population is overweight or obese.

We are rightly and relentlessly warned about the dangers of obesity. It is a primary driver of heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and a host of other conditions that shorten lifespans and drain healthcare systems. It is a national health crisis. However, we rarely consider its inverse psychological and behavioral effects. Obesity is physiologically pacifying. It leads to chronic fatigue, lethargy, and a general state of being satiated and physically unmotivated. The metabolic and hormonal state of an obese individual is often one of low energy and low agency.

There is even research that backs this up: "With each upwards movement of 5 in the BMI index from the category of people with a BMI of 18.5-25, the odds of committing a violent crime decrease by about 20-25%."

The provocative question then becomes: Has the obesity epidemic, for all its terrible costs, inadvertently functioned as a societal sedative? 

How many potential acts of violence have been not committed because the would-be perpetrator lacked the physical energy, motivation, or hormonal drive to carry them out?

History offers a parallel. The Roman poet Juvenal coined the phrase “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses) to describe how the Roman elite maintained power by providing free grain and extravagant games to the populace.

Our modern obesity crisis may be having a similar, unintended effect. A population struggling with the physical burdens of excess weight is, by definition, a less physically active and potentially less volatile population.

This creates a tragic paradox for public health officials and policymakers. The push for a healthier, fitter, more active nation is an unquestionable good for individual well-being and economic productivity. But it may also come with the unintended consequence of unleashing a more energetic, restless, and potentially aggressive segment of the population.

4) Free Speech is a Fragile Exception

We often treat the First Amendment’s protection of offensive speech as a permanent feature of society. It is not. It is a radical and historically anomalous experiment. America stands virtually alone, both in the modern world and throughout history, in its constitutional commitment to protecting the right to say heinous things without fear of government imprisonment.

This principle is not "Lindy."

For most of human history, the default social setting has been to silence the rabble-rouser, the heretic, and the provocateur. This was a matter of social cohesion and survival. From ancient town squares to modern European nations, societies have consistently outlawed "hate speech," operating on the premise that offensive words are a precursor to violence or a harm in themselves. They treat speech not as a fundamental right, but as a regulated activity.

In this sense, the American system is a beautiful, essential fantasy, one that is constantly under pressure from both sides.

5) Why I’m Worried About the Unemployment Rate Rising

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