We Are In Late-Stage Empire Times
Mark Twain is supposed to have said: “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme.” You can see the rhyme scheme loud and clear right now. A political murder. A society so polarised it can’t even agree on the meaning of it. Elites and tech barons lining up to say that violence is inevitable, that you either fight or you die.
That’s not stability. That’s late-empire talk — the language of a system that has run out of answers and fallen back on fear.
This is the pattern you always see as empires unravel. Instead of addressing the rot, leaders and figureheads turn the anger outward. Elon Musk is doing exactly that now — amplifying Tommy Robinson and leaning on the oldest trick in the book: scapegoating. For Rome it was barbarians, for Weimar it was Jews and “traitors,” for America today it’s immigrants. When collapse looms, power clings to survival by inventing enemies and demanding that the public blame them, rather than asking why the system itself no longer works.
At the end of empires, violent killings are often and rarely make tidy sense. Rome didn’t fall because one emperor lost a battle — it fell because emperor after emperor was cut down by his own guards, often for petty reasons, then dressed up as “justice.” Russia didn’t erupt in 1917 because the Bolsheviks were irresistible — it was preceded by decades of nihilists blowing up tsars and ministers, not out of ideology but out of sheer negation. Weimar Germany didn’t collapse in a neat left vs. right duel — it bled to death from alienated veterans and embittered drifters killing politicians, with both sides spinning the deaths to their advantage.
Which brings us to Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk was no outsider. He was firmly of the American right — the founder of Turning Point USA, a man who built his career railing against the left, universities, and anything he could brand as “woke.” Whether you liked him or not, his politics weren’t ambiguous. That’s what makes the manner of his death, and the man accused of killing him, so striking: the shooter doesn’t seem to come from the political left or right at all.
At first, the reports tried to force him into every box imaginable. Some outlets pushed that he was transgender, because blaming the trans community has become routine. Trump himself jumped in to say it was the work of far-leftists. Others tried to paint him as MAGA, insisting he’d been a true believer all along. Many online are now even claiming Israel was behind the killing because he had questioned the Israel lobby. That one makes more sense than most, if you ask me, but now the story seems to have “settled” on the flimsiest of links — that he once had a trans roommate and that’s what drove him to kill Charlie Kirk. It’s pathetic. The truth is, if the man in question is even the shooter, he doesn’t fit any of those categories. He operates outside the spectrum entirely, in that nihilist space where violence is performance, chaos is the point, and “for the lols” is enough motive.
And if you think that nihilist swamp is hard to picture, I can tell you exactly what it looks like — because I was there. I brushed against those spaces in 2015 and 2016, back when I wasn’t even doing politics. I was an online marketer, hustling affiliate links. My job was to write bait articles and seed them in forums and Facebook groups so people would click through, read a few lines about some product, and make me a bit of money. But that meant living inside the swamp. I watched memes spread that had nothing to do with reality and everything to do with clicks. It was insane. And this was the backdrop to the first true online election — 2016, when Trump’s rise was carried on the tidal wave of social media chaos.
The wildest one was “The Pope endorses Trump”. I remember the first time I saw it: a fake headline, pushed out of nowhere, spreading through Facebook groups like wildfire. Members of Black Hat Forums — the very people writing these memes to drive traffic to their sites — were in awe of it. I witnessed them calling it brilliant, a perfect piece of viral bait. And people believed it. One of the most-shared stories of the election was a complete fabrication, born in the meme swamps.
Later, the Mueller report bundled some of these memes into the “Russia interfered” narrative.
It wasn’t the Kremlin. It was Western meme hustlers, affiliate chancers, and trolls laughing as millions swallowed the bait. And just as often, they were in it for the same reason I was at the time — money. Often these stories were clickbait designed to drive traffic and commissions.
Fast forward to now. A political figure — Charlie Kirk — is gunned down. And the alleged killer doesn’t fit a partisan box. From what’s known so far, he doesn’t align with the left or the right. Instead, he comes from that same nihilistic void I saw a decade ago: the online swamps of nihilistic hackers, incels and trolls where politics is a joke, where identity is fluid, and where violence itself becomes performance. That’s the context we’re living in — not tidy ideology, but alienation so deep that nothing matters, except the spectacle.
And look at how the system responds. As if to underline the point, look at Ohio. The governor stood before cameras with the FBI director behind him and admitted that for three days he was praying the shooter wasn’t “one of us”. Not praying for the victims. Not praying for answers. Praying it wouldn’t stain his tribe. That’s what collapse looks like: truth taking a back seat to optics, morality bent into PR.
And the people doing the killing? They’ve become the jokers in the pack — the “Mexican jokers,” to borrow South Park’s phrase. They know the system doesn’t work for them. They know left and right makes no difference. They know the media lies. They’ve realised it’s all a joke, so they play it like one. Chaos is their punchline, violence their meme.
That’s the rhyme. Rome had its assassins in the ranks, Russia its nihilist bomb-throwers, Weimar its bitter veterans with pistols. Every late empire breeds its jokers. And now we’re living through our own.
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