Charlie Kirk killing shows once again that U.S. faces a radicalization crisis
In the mid-to-late 2000s, I helped build the Central Intelligence Agency’s analytic unit dedicated to mapping how people become jihadist extremists. The job of this counterterrorism component wasn’t to psychoanalyze true believers after the fact; it was to understand the process by which individuals adopt extremist ideologies and, in some cases, move toward violence — not as a profile or a pathology, but as a sequence of conditions we could interrupt.
What we found is simple to describe but complex in practice — there isn’t a single profile of who radicalizes, but there are recurring dynamics. Radicalization typically involves three elements:
- A perceived grievance (personal or collective)
- A mobilizing story that frames blame in “us versus them” terms and licenses action
- A social reinforcement from peers or online networks that normalize escalation
When those align — especially with access and capability — the risk of violence rises across ideologies, even though most exposed individuals never act.
Lone offenders are the most likely to conduct deadly attacks
You can see those elements in today’s headlines. It is too early to offer a profile or motive of the suspect in Charlie Kirk’s assassination, but the alleged pathway is familiar: a 22-year-old, reportedly acting alone, discussing a rifle drop on Discord and scrawling slogans on ammunition — an online mix of grievance and memes.
That he appears to be a lone actor doesn’t make the pattern less recognizable; for years, U.S. security agencies have warned that lone offenders are the most likely to carry out lethal attacks.
Similar trajectories have surfaced in well-documented cases over the years: The man who bludgeoned Paul Pelosi in 2022, steeped in online conspiracy theories; the Buffalo supermarket gunman in 2022, who wrote he’d been radicalized online by “Great Replacement” content; the El Paso Walmart shooter in 2019, who posted a manifesto about a “Hispanic invasion”; the Tree of Life synagogue killer in 2018, whose Gab posts showed explicit antisemitic intent. School shootings add their own tragic drumbeat — one in Colorado occurred the same day as Kirk’s murder.
And these are just a few examples — different banners, same mechanics.
Grievances haven’t changed; the delivery system has. By the late 2000s, CIA analysts tracked how jihadist groups used the internet — password-protected forums, English-language sermons and later glossy online magazines — to reach potential followers. But even then, a would-be extremist usually had to go looking for that material or be pointed to it.
Today the dynamic is reversed. Always-on smartphones and recommendation engines push personalized outrage to teenagers, short-form video makes it sticky, encrypted group chats provide instant validation and fewer offline “third places” mean less counterweight.
The story is what turns hurt into mission. In CIA’s early work, it was religious language; here, it’s more often conspiracies about “replacement,” militant anti-government talk or gendered blame. The details shift, but the function is fixed: Name a villain, hand the listener a role and declare action morally necessary. It doesn’t need depth, only repetition. Memes, short clips, podcasts and heated political rhetoric supply that drumbeat, sanding down complexity into “us versus them” and offering a quick identity that feels braver than being lost.
Reinforcement is where opinion hardens into identity and practice. What used to happen in back rooms now happens in feeds, group chats and game servers: A small audience that laughs at the same slurs, swaps “how-to” links and rewards escalation with attention. Status comes in pings — likes, reposts, invitation-only channels — so the quickest way to belong is to be edgier than yesterday. Even “solo” actors are performing for an imagined crowd they’ve rehearsed with online.
Volatile combination: disconnection, guns, dehumanization
Three features of today’s environment are tilting outcomes toward worse results.
First, youth disconnection. Men under 30 are far more likely than women to be single (about 63% vs. 34%), Gen Z reports far less teen dating than prior generations, face-to-face socializing has dropped sharply while teens spend nearly five hours a day on social platforms, and women now outnumber men on campuses and in early careers, which some young men describe as a loss of status.
None of this directly causes violence, but it expands the pool of disaffected young men for whom grievance narratives feel clarifying and promises of belonging feel magnetic.
Second, access to firearms tilts risk sharply. In 2023, nearly 47,000 Americans died from gun-related injuries — 27,300 by suicide and 17,927 from homicide — numbers among the highest on record. When grievances harden into intent, the gap between impulse and mass casualty can shrink to minutes — not months. This isn’t a moral verdict on gun ownership; it is a public-safety reality tied to how many guns, how accessible they are and how often they are used in both homicides and mass shootings.
Third, political rhetoric. Dehumanizing political language provides a permission structure for the volatile few. When political leaders describe fellow Americans as existential enemies, it feeds the narrative piece of the pipeline and provides a permission structure. DHS has explicitly linked our heightened threat environment to an online stew of conspiracy, mis- and disinformation that inflames grievance and primes violence. We have seen where that spiral can end — at the Capitol in 2021 and in plots, attacks and near-misses since.
Violent extremism is conditions-based. Change the conditions and you change the risk. That begins with adults — political, cultural, and tech leaders — choosing to lower the temperature rather than raise money or engagement on anger. It continues with parents, teachers, coaches and peers rebuilding the face-to-face relationships that keep young men and women anchored. And it ends where it started: with a clear understanding that grievance, story and reinforcement are levers we can move — before the next young person, steeped in memes and misery, decides to act.
Brian O’Neill is a retired CIA executive who has served in such leadership roles as deputy director of analysis at the National Counterterrorism Center and as executive editor of the President’s Daily Brief. He now teaches national security at Georgia Tech and contributes to the journal Just Security and other outlets.
