The race to define what the brutal murder of right-wing podcaster Charlie Kirk last week means and why it happened has led a lot of people to say a lot of things. Some of those things, like blaming the sci-fi shooter Halo for fomenting class warfare, or suggesting the alleged shooter was radicalized by the "meme-ification" of the internet, look increasingly like absurd, knee-jerk, and ill-informed reactions,
In the hours immediately after the conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in front of a large crowd of students at a Utah university on Wednesday, there was no word on who had actually done it and no explanation for why it had happened. But, in Washington, those who profess certainty no longer need much in the way of facts: partisans come equipped with preëxisting truths, and events are slotted into narratives that existed long before the events occurred.
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