Post-Charlie Kirk America: Polycritical Foresight Analysis

A watershed assassination in America means volatility—in a context already increasingly authoritarian—what do we need to watch out for and what can be done?

On Sept. 10, Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event at Utah Valley University. If you’ve been online in the past couple days, you’ve probably had a hard time missing this. I shared some initial thoughts in the immediate aftermath, particularly with regard to how this event will be leveraged by the Trump administration, Right-wing media, and the MAGA movement to intensify ongoing efforts to centralize control of the U.S. military and law enforcement apparatus, and inflame political division among the American populace.

This article is meant to ground some of those speculations in more rigorous polycritical foresight analysis, the methodology I’ve developed that blends foresight, threat modeling, and systems thinking in order to develop robust, practical strategies around emergent futures.

Note: with this document, I do not intend any outright predictions, though I have limited the scope to scenarios that feel most likely to me (in all my potential bias!) for the sake of brevity. My goal is to sketch possibilities so that we can sensemake what’s happening and better prepare ourselves for volatile and even dangerous possible futures.

With that, let’s get to it.