By David Tyler

A single gunshot on a campus quad in Utah echoed around the globe last week. Charlie Kirk – founder of Turning Point USA, a close ally of Donald Trump, a man who made outrage his stock-in-trade – dropped where he stood. Within minutes, his death was not simply news but raw spectacle. Graphic videos ricocheted across social media. Commentators hailed him as a martyr. Others cheered that one of the loudest voices of America’s right had finally been silenced.

That is how democracies decay: not in silence, but in noise. And if Australians think this is just another grisly American export – best observed from a safe distance, like a Hollywood shoot-out – we are kidding ourselves.

A career built on division

Kirk’s life’s work was to turn the lecture hall into a battlefield. His campus rallies were staged like prize fights: the conservative pugilist against a caricatured “woke mob”. He built a brand on attacking LGBTQ+ rights, rubbishing climate science, and amplifying election and COVID conspiracies.

In the process he proved something chilling: that politics as spectacle sells. The bigger the outrage, the bigger the audience. And that lesson has already leached across the Pacific.

Media firestorm, misinformation cyclone

The coverage of his killing revealed a second truth. In the digital age, there is no pause button. Within hours, conspiracy theories bloomed online: that Kirk was silenced by deep-state assassins; that leftists had declared open season; that his death was proof of a looming civil war.

Meanwhile, serious reporting fought for oxygen. The PBS NewsHour called it a “graphic wildfire” of misinformation. The New York Times noted the rush of macho memes and performative grief. On the far right, Kirk was sainted as a fallen hero. On the left, warnings rang out: deify this man and you embolden every would-be culture-war demagogue waiting in the wings.

If you think Australia’s immune, look at our own social feeds. We import not only Marvel movies and Starbucks but also American memes, hashtags, and talking points. Disinformation on Indigenous recognition, vaccines, and immigration has already taken root here. Kirk’s playbook is being photocopied in real time.

Political violence as the new normal

The most frightening takeaway from Kirk’s assassination is not the man himself but the climate it reflects. In today’s United States, nearly a quarter of citizens say political violence can be justified. Think about that: one in four ready to swap ballots for bullets.

The language of war – “enemies”, “traitors”, “take our country back” – no longer lives on the fringes. It is mainstream cable chatter, viral TikTok fodder, stump-speech boilerplate. And once violence is normalised, democracy is on borrowed time.

The Australian mirror

Here at home, we flatter ourselves that we are more pragmatic, less combustible. And yes, our politics lacks America’s guns-and-God theatrics. But the warning lights are flashing.

Universities are now battlegrounds over “cancel culture” and free speech. Talkback and Sky After Dark hum with American-style grievance. Online echo chambers have trained a generation to see political opponents not as neighbours to argue with, but as existential threats to be crushed.

We are not yet at the point of gunfire in the quad. But the slope is there, and it is slippery.

Choosing a different path

Australia still has time to step back. That means resisting the temptation to import American tropes wholesale. It means politicians refusing the easy sugar hit of division. It means media – public, commercial and independent – putting accuracy and context ahead of clicks.

Our schools and universities should be places where disagreement sharpens minds, not weapons. Our civic culture should reward listening as much as shouting. And when demagogues try to monetise outrage, we must starve them of attention. Every time we share their clips, we become unwitting extras in their show.

A lesson written in blood

Kirk’s last stage was a university designed for debate. His final act was silence imposed by a gun. What followed – the rush of misinformation, the instant partisanship, the hollow posturing – shows just how thin the line is between rhetoric and reality.

We need not mourn Kirk’s ideas to mourn what was lost: the fragile space in democracy where argument can happen without fear, where disagreement does not end in blood.

The brutal lesson is this: democracies don’t collapse only under tanks or tyrants. They also rot from within – when trust erodes, when truth is optional, when violence becomes just another language of politics.

Australia can still choose differently. But only if we stop treating America’s crisis as an exotic import, and start treating it as the cautionary tale it is.

Because once the spiral tightens, it may be too late to pull back.