Charlie Kirk’s assassination reveals something essential about power, danger, and memory in America. Kirk was not just a victim; he was the product of a system that rewarded provocation, protected by whiteness, wealth, and institutions that let him thrive.
He built a $90 million empire by targeting people for their race, gender, and class. This was not a side effect—it was the business model. Turning Point USA did not just energize conservative youth; it trained them to see fairness as a threat, diversity as dilution, and marginalized people as enemies.
Consider George Floyd. His life was the opposite—poor, Black, criminalized just for trying to survive. He had no media platform. What he had was a record, used to erase him. Calling him a “petty criminal” was sleight of hand—spin meant to make his killing acceptable. Floyd did not die for what he did. He died because he was disposable in a system that punishes poverty.
Kirk’s death is already becoming a political meme, a rupture in the order. Until the video forced the nation to look, Floyd’s death, was a footnote. This reveals the class divide. This reveals the racial logic. This reveals the hierarchy of grief.
And here is the irony: the very weapon Kirk championed, killed him. He glorified guns as freedom, ignoring how those same weapons devastated communities he dismissed. His privilege let him provoke without consequence—until it caught up with him.
Danger is not distributed evenly. Kirk manufactured it outward, insulated by his position. Floyd absorbed it, targeted because of his. One profited from division, it destroyed the other. This is not just personal tragedy—it is structural.
Stopping the next one requires more than managing symptoms. It demands confronting the ideation that promotes profiting from scapegoating, fear, and division.
Scapegoats, Rituals, and Inequality
René Girard called this cycle mimetic rivalry: we do not just want things because we want them, but because others do. When tensions boil, societies relieve pressure by finding scapegoats. Trump did not invent it—he updated it. The immigrant, the poor, the racialized other: cast as threats so the system can survive.
Quinn Slobodian adds the economic layer: neoliberals did not just accept inequality; they sanctified it. They made permanent “loser classes,” turning inequality into destiny. Girard and Slobodian together make the picture clear: our system depends on sacrifice, forgetting, and the ritual hunt for new victims.
Until we confront the financial incentives that made Kirk’s rise possible and Floyd’s vulnerability inevitable, nothing will change.
From Carter to Reagan: The Shift
This turn did not begin with Trump. In 1979, Jimmy Carter delivered his “Crisis of Confidence” speech. Instead of solutions, he scolded the public, blaming individuals for national decline. That broke with the New Deal and Great Society legacies that promised collective support. FDR had reassured the country that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Carter blamed people for not believing hard enough.
Reagan took it further. His “Morning in America” ad campaign looked optimistic, but it carried the same moralizing message: if you were struggling, it was your fault. His “welfare queen” myth demonized poor Black women and turned social programs into symbols of corruption. That narrative justified dismantling the safety net, disciplining workers, and normalizing inequality.
Kirk’s rise follows the same script. Reagan sold resentment through the welfare queen; Kirk sold resentment through the idea that equity itself was dangerous. Both turned division into profit.
Thatcher and the Logic of Inequality
Margaret Thatcher sneered at Labour in 1990: “They would rather the poor were poorer, provided that the rich were less rich.” She mocked Labour’s call for fairness, twisting it into envy. Thatcher’s line reframed fairness as jealousy, shifting the debate from justice to envy. For her, fairness did not matter—growth did, even if it left massive gaps.
That line distilled the neoliberal worldview: inequality was not the problem; resentment of inequality was.
The Trojan Horse of “Waste, Fraud, and Abuse”
By the 1980s and 1990s, cutting government had become a bipartisan project. “Waste, fraud, and abuse” was the slogan used to gut social spending, education, climate research, and public investment. Trump and Musk recycled it, dressing destruction of government capacity up as populism.
The myth was simple: government is like a household budget, bound by the need to balance books. But that is false. A sovereign government that issues its own currency spends first and taxes later. FDR knew this during the Depression and WWII: the constraint was not money, it was resources. Nixon depoliticized monetary policy when cut ties to gold in 1971, treating ‘money’ as “too technical” for democracy.
Two Lineages: Markets vs. Institutions
John Bates Clark and Milton Friedman claimed markets are self-correcting and wages are what people “deserve.” Clark’s Marginal Productivity Theory was particularly insidious—it dressed up inequality as economic science, using equations to make labors current wages look like natural law. This was not analysis; it was traducement, mathematical sleight of hand that reified hierarchy under the guise of objective truth. That logic naturalized inequality, turning political choices into laws of nature.
Worse, MPT offloads its human costs as externalities—unemployment, homelessness, addiction—that society must confront, while the theory claims the market has already achieved optimal outcomes. The suffering is not a bug in the system; it is eliminated out of the equations entirely, rendered invisible by the hand of mathematical formalism.
Keynes saw through the contradictions. He critiqued the tautology at MPT’s core: it used current wages to sanctify the current wage structure, claiming all factors of production get their ‘just desserts.’ The theory simply assumed what it claimed to prove—that existing inequality was fair because it existed.
Power, institutions, and policy shape wages and inequality, Keynes and Thorstein Veblen showed. Modern Monetary Theory continues this tradition, showing unemployment is a political choice.
Even mainstream Keynesians compromised. NAIRU—the Non-Accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment—treated unemployment as “natural” to curb inflation. That gave cover to policies that normalized suffering as a trade-off.
The Great Turn
By the 1980s, neoliberalism had won—and with it, the logic that would eventually produce both Kirk and Floyd as opposite ends of the same system. Carter deregulated and blamed individuals. Reagan cut taxes for the rich, attacked unions, and created the “welfare queen” mythology that Kirk would later weaponize. Thatcher privatized everything and sneered at fairness. Clinton embraced balanced budgets that starved communities like Floyd’s of investment.
This was not just economic policy—it was the creation of a hierarchy where some lives matter and others do not. Kirk inherited the profitable side. Floyd inherited the disposable side.
Public investment shrank, inequality grew, and democratic control over money disappeared. The stage was set for Kirk to build an empire on division and for Floyd to die from the violence that division enables.
Myths of Taxes and Debt
The “balanced budget” myth did not just shrink government—it created the conditions for Kirk’s rise and Floyd’s death. When politicians claimed we “couldn’t afford” jobs programs, housing, or healthcare, they forced people to compete for their factor of the production. That desperation made Kirk’s scapegoating profitable and Floyd’s life precarious.
Taxes do not “fund” federal spending. The government spends first, then taxes to shape demand and direct resources. The same with debt: federal deficits are not like household debt. They are the private sector’s savings. Cutting deficits shrinks private wealth.
Every time politicians used debt ceiling battles to justify austerity, they were choosing to keep the structure. They were choosing Kirk’s comfort over Floyd’s survival.
The Job Guarantee
If unemployment is political, we can choose differently. George died while working for security —trapped in the precarious labor that comes with a criminal record, no guaranteed income, no safety net. That precarity made him disposable. Charlie Kirk never faced that vulnerability. His platform guaranteed him $90 million while Floyd scrambled for survival.
A Job Guarantee would provide work at a living wage to anyone who wants it. It ends the threat of unemployment that keeps workers desperate and disposable. No more George Floyds dying because they could not escape economic desperation. No more Charlie Kirks profiting from other people’s precarity.
This is not just economic policy—it is about dignity. Keynes saw full employment as a moral duty. MMT shows it is practical and possible. When people are not fighting over scraps, demagogues cannot sell division as easily.
Unemployment as punishment is a choice. Employment as dignity is also a choice.
Conclusion: Change or Endless Sacrifice
Charlie Kirk and George Floyd died five-years apart, products of the same structure of ideas from opposite ends. Kirk built his fortune selling the idea that fairness was dangerous, that diversity was dilution, that people like Floyd were the enemy. Floyd died because the system Kirk defended made him disposable—poor, Black, criminalized for trying to survive.
The very weapon that killed Kirk, he championed, the gun violence he normalized. Floyd, killed by the knee on his neck, by the police violence Kirk’s politics enabled. Both deaths show how a system built on scapegoating eventually devours everyone.
The tools to change this are not mysterious. We know unemployment is a political choice—we can guarantee jobs instead. We know government spending is not bounded by household budget logic—we can invest in dignity instead of division. We know inequality is not natural law—it is the result of policies that can be reversed.
The question is not whether change is possible. It is whether we will choose structural transformation or accept endless sacrifice, endless scapegoats, endless Charlie Kirks profiting from endless George Floyds dying.
As Girard warned, without conscious change, the hunt for new victims never ends. The choice is ours: build a system based on dignity, or watch the machine keep grinding.
Here is what happened: in the 1970s as Republicans and Democrats both accepted the Deficit Myth and the classical Marginal Productivity Theory—that markets deliver what people “deserve”—economic policy disappeared as a site of contestation. Both parties reflexively accepted the same premises about wages, inflation, and government constraint. The debate was not whether inequality was just, but how to manage it at the margins.
With no other weapons to engage in political discourse, women and minorities became the currency of politics itself. Unable to promise better jobs, wages, housing or health security, politicians traded in culture wars of DEI and Woke. Rights, representation, and recognition became bargaining chips—advanced by one side, stripped away by the other—while the economic structure that produced Kirk and Floyd remained untouched.
This was not an accident. When economic transformation is off the table, all that remains is to fight over who gets sacrificed. The scapegoat becomes the entirety of politics.