The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation among people, mediated by images.
— Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 4 (1967)
A single week turned the calendar into an instrument: the political killing on September 10; the next day, a 9/11 podium used to anoint a fallen martyr of the movement; and, by Sunday, a stadium funeral where a posthumous Medal of Freedom would render the man an icon.
It was a week dense enough to power an entire season of politics, reverberating insistently into the midterms.
The First Lesson of Political Grief is Staging
A man is killed in public and, within hours, a nation begins curating its memory around him. In Arizona, an NFL stadium is reserved for September 21, doors at eight in the morning, the programme at eleven; it is a logistical poem in the language of scale. The memorial is not only commemorative, but instructive. It demonstrates that this movement can fill an arena, that its sorrow lays public claim.
President Donald Trump has said he will attend the memorial. He has also vowed to award Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously, transfiguring a personal loss into a civil sacrament.
These gestures are not incidental. They are narrative instruments, designed to transmute grief into doctrine.
The Facts and the Legal Response
The facts, as recited by prosecutors, are bald and bloodless. On September 10 at Utah Valley University, a single shot from a distance ended Kirk’s life. A 22-year-old, Tyler Robinson, now stands charged with aggravated murder and related offences. Utah County has announced it will seek the death penalty.
Digital footprints, including Discord transcripts, and physical evidence are alleged to bind the suspect to the act. These particulars will be tested in court. Their public function, however, is already clear: to classify the event as political violence and to affirm the state’s intent to respond with maximal severity.
The Killing Unfolds in the Feeds
Yet the more immediate and more volatile story is how the killing unfolded in the feeds. Within minutes there was video, then more video: angles from beneath the rally tent; a stifled cry; confusion breaking into flight; the snap of sirens.
It was ubiquitous—on X, TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, even Truth Social, where the president posted the formal announcement. Legacy outlets abstained from airing the impact but platforms did not await permission. The gatekeeper never vanished, only relocated.
In this digital ecology, verification trails virality, and meaning congeals before officials can reach a lectern.
How Platforms Manufacture Meaning
This is consequential. What is amplified in initial moments shapes the risk curve. The research is unambiguous: moral-emotive language accelerates dissemination; incendiary content outpaces correction; and the spotlight on perpetrators creates a contagion window where mimicry becomes plausible.
Hence the evolution of journalistic ethics—no notoriety norms that de-emphasise names and imagery. Hence the platform tools that slow virality: labels, friction, age-gates.
These are not ornamental choices. They are instruments of harm reduction.
The gatekeeper never vanished; it relocated. In this digital ecology, verification trails virality and meaning congeals before officials can reach a lectern. Because in the platform economy, everything is content and content is metastasis.
Even Roblox, a children’s game engine, moved to remove over one hundred user-created experiences based on the killing. Violence, once a rupture, now feeds a market.
Jubilee Media’s Surrounded as a Case Study
Ostensibly a space for empathetic encounter, the format is optimised not for understanding but for spectacle. A single guest is ringed by adversaries and moderation is minimal. Fact-checks are late and cosmetic. The design favours confrontation over clarity.
Charlie Kirk’s appearance in an episode titled Can 25 Liberal College Students Outsmart 1 Conservative?, aired a year before his death. After the killing, clips from the episode were re-cut, re-framed and re-circulated across partisan lines. Surrounded became a supply chain; affect became archive.
We are now, remarkably, at the point where public figures seriously suggest Jubilee as a host for presidential debate. This is not an evolution of democratic culture; it is a capitulation to clip logic. The shift from policy to performance, from moderation to monetisation, is nearly complete.
The London Rally and Elon Musk’s Role
Meanwhile, in London on September 13, there was another spectacle: the Unite the Kingdom rally led by Tommy Robinson. Over 100,000 gathered and clashes ensued. Twenty-six police officers were injured and twenty-five arrests made.
But the most circulated moment came not from a marcher, but a mogul: Elon Musk, in a recorded video, warned that violence is coming and urged supporters to fight back or die. Downing Street condemned the rhetoric. But it had already circulated—sliced, subtitled and algorithmically elevated by the platform Musk owns.
The rally was a street event only in setting. Its real venue was the screen.
The Substitution of Scale for Legitimacy
It would be facile to conflate Arizona’s arena and Whitehall’s streets into one story of right-wing bloom. The two phenomena differ in texture and intent. But they do share one defining grammar: the substitution of scale for legitimacy.
A full bowl in Glendale and a six-figure march in London are intended to function as affective plebiscites. If you resist the reading, you are accused of condescension. If you accept it, you surrender the premise that democracy rests on anything beyond optics.
What is being manufactured here is not merely sentiment, but a durable grammar.
The old regime of meaning-making, wherein editors determined exposure and sequence, is defunct. Now the crowd publishes first. Institutions scramble to retrofit coherence. Graphic video is not a glitch; it is the baseline. Platforms pretend their exceptions are rare. They are not. They are the rule.
The Triptych of the Right
Here, distinctions matter, crucially. The modern right is often misread as monolithic. It is not. It operates in three distinct but overlapping registers: conservatism, populism and hate.
Conservatism, at its most principled, is a temperament anchored in institutional continuity, constitutionalism and the moral suspicion of speed. It harbours a philosophical wariness of haste, premised on the belief that swift political action often courts instability and that time is democracy’s truest proving ground.
Populism is a style. It presumes to speak directly for the people against an allegedly corrupt elite. It collapses mediation, scorns process and privileges immediacy.
Hate is neither style nor temperament. It is a politics of exclusion that recruits grievance as license for menace.
All three currents were visible in the American aftermath. The conservative response was constitutional: call for calm, insist on process. The populist response was martial: recast the death as proof of siege. The hateful fringe celebrated, doxxed and organised.
The same triptych holds in the United Kingdom. The Conservative Party is beleaguered and directionless. Reform UK, unencumbered by governing record, offers the populist idiom in its purest form. The Robinson rally showed hate, unadorned.
Keir Starmer’s characterisation of the moment as the fight of our times came only after institutional hesitation—a faltering calculus over what counted as free expression and what crossed into incitement.
In a liberal society, the line must be drawn with precision. That becomes treacherous when the owner of the platform is also its most prolific arsonist.
Why These Distinctions Matter
These distinctions are not academic. They determine remedy.
- A conservative pathology calls for institutional repair.
- A populist seizure demands procedural ballast: transparency, clarity and the visible work of government.
- Hate, meanwhile, requires constraint: social quarantine, prosecutorial clarity and refusal to launder eliminationist discourse as legitimate pluralism.
The media system, part battlefield, part vector, has tools. Newsrooms can abstain from premature motives. They can elevate accuracy over engagement. Platforms can intervene: interstitial warnings, algorithmic friction, context over shock.
None of this silences grief. It merely resists its weaponisation.
Volume over Truth?
What of the presidency? The 9/11 dais becomes canon; the Medal of Freedom, scripture. This is not commemoration; it is choreography. The president’s call for nonviolence is framed as boundary. Yet its elasticity ensures that boundary will be tested by echo, by reinterpretation, by omission.
Reform’s rise reveals a deeper confusion: agenda-setting is mistaken for capacity. Populism thrives in this ambiguity. It seizes attention, but cannot govern. It shortens deliberation, but cannot substitute for it.
Conservatism, if it is to recover, must reject the populist tailcoat and return to the long arc of capacity as its only claim to power.
The contrast is striking: while states elsewhere fall for fear of the feed, here the feed is enlisted to govern. We are left to ponder a grim symmetry—between the censorship that catalyses revolt and the spectacle that pacifies it.
The Power of Language
Finally, there is language: the medium through which all political life flows. A conservative idiom draws thresholds that make coexistence possible. A populist idiom dissolves them. A hateful idiom sharpens them into knives.
The coming weeks will test which idiom prevails. Will grief become instruction, or mandate? Will virality dictate virtue? Will newsrooms favour volume over truth?
As grief metastasises into legacy, a new guard gathers in the wings—polished, pious and poised for virality. As The Hollywood Reporter notes, figures like Riley Gaines, Alex Clark and Allie Beth Stuckey may soon channel Kirk’s ethos into an even more ardent, platform-native activism.
Nothing is preordained. Meaning will be shaped, as it always is, by human choice: who speaks, who edits, who clips, who captions.
The cameras will pan across a stadium and across Whitehall. These images are not innocently large. They are arguments waged through lens and lighting.
The Work Ahead
The work ahead is neither theatrical nor viral. It is unfashionably slow. To let institutions speak before the feed canonises; to grant mourning its moment, but not a monopoly on meaning; to recover the courage of discernment: between dissent and menace, spectacle and substance, grief and grievance.
This work will not trend. But it may still be what saves the republic.
The Future of Media
What, then, of the future of media itself? In this maelstrom of platforms, clips and narrative distortion, the challenge lies not only in content but also in architecture.
Journalism must reclaim tempo as ethical stance—not slowness for its own sake, but discernment as democratic discipline. Institutions that once curated public understanding must reimagine their function, not as arbiters of truth but as scaffolds for trust.
Platform companies, long allergic to responsibility, will either accept civic obligations or deepen their complicity in democracy’s decline.
What emerges from this crucible must be more than regulatory friction. It must be a renewed compact between public attention and public consequence.
Otherwise, the feed will not merely report history; it will write it, untethered from judgment, propelled only by what bleeds, what spreads and what sells.
A Global Contrast
Yet irony shadows the global stage. In Nepal, the so-called Gen Z revolution surged in response to the government’s ban on social media platforms—all but TikTok—provoking youth-led protests that surrounded the Parliament and forced a democratic reckoning.
There, platforms were seen as threats to order. But in the West, the same digital scaffolding is not only permitted but instrumentalised. It is not the enemy of government but its medium.
The contrast is striking: while states elsewhere fall for fear of the feed, here the feed is enlisted to govern. We are left to ponder a grim symmetry—between the censorship that catalyses revolt and the spectacle that pacifies it.
By the time you read this on Sunday, the funeral will have unfolded—its reels already clipped, re-captioned and fed back into the machine that made Kirk an icon, looping grief into spectacle, and spectacle into script.
https://www.thenews.com.pk/tns/detail/1345120-the-format-is-the-politics
