In this sprawling 2 hour video, F.D Signifier argues that Charlie Kirk’s career and death illustrate how modern U.S. conservatism functions as a “death cult,” using culture-war propaganda to justify and normalize avoidable suffering and mass death, especially among white people themselves.
F.D Signifier frames conservative ideology as prioritizing gun rights, punitive policies, and racial resentment over human life, producing “spectacle violence” like school shootings, political assassinations, and COVID deaths that disproportionately involve white perpetrators and victims.
He contends that racism’s primary function is not overt hatred but building white in‑group solidarity, making many white voters support policies that materially harm them (on guns, healthcare, welfare, and the pandemic) as long as those policies symbolically punish racial “others.”
The video essay traces the rise of culture-war politics through right-wing media infrastructure: the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, the 1996 Telecommunications Act, consolidation of media ownership, and the emergence of figures like Rush Limbaugh as templates for Kirk’s style of grievance entertainment.
Culture-war narratives, he argues, replace material politics with emotionally charged conflicts over race, gender, sexuality, and “free speech,” enabling conservatives to vote against their economic interests while feeling morally and culturally vindicated.
Kirk, the video argues, was a professional propagandist whose “Culture War” tours, campus events, and media appearances weaponize selective crime stories, anti-immigrant rhetoric, and attacks on social programs to harden conservative identity and downplay systemic issues like white male violence or poverty.
The video highlights examples such as his opposition to free school lunches and his reactions to mass shootings to show how he reframed structural problems as issues of individual responsibility and used them to reinforce a hierarchy of whose suffering matters, or doesn't.
F.D Signifier juxtaposes right-wing outrage over crimes by Black perpetrators with the relative silence around pervasive “white-on-white” violence and domestic abuse, arguing that conservatives instrumentalize some deaths while ignoring the much larger harms caused by white men.
He situates Kirk’s assassination and similar high-profile attacks within a pattern of media-amplified spectacle that grows out of alienated white masculinity, militarized gun culture, and a political ecosystem that rewards nihilistic attention-seeking.
Ultimately, the video claims that the conservative project, as embodied by Kirk, sacrifices real people—often its own base—to maintain racial hierarchy, extractive capitalism, and right-wing political power, and that documenting this dynamic is necessary for any future reckoning able to address these issues at their root. - Films For Action
From the filmmaker:
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Corrections - I misspoke in saying Ava Duvernay made "Beasts of the Southern Wilds", I meant "A Wrinkle In Time"
Edited and Co-created with @OniSpumoni
00:00 Intro Sequence
01:31 What about White on White Crime?
13:38 Understanding the Culture Wars
53:40 Who/What was Charlie Kirk?
1:17:32 The Spectacle of Death
1:30:14 The Cult's invisible victims