Tripodos, number 60 | 2026 |

ISSN: 1138-3305

Received: 06-10-25

Accepted: 16-03-26

OnlineFirst: 29-09-26

Final publication:

Doi.org/10.51698/tripodos.2026.60.04

Hate Speech and Hate Crimes in the Trump Era:
The Charlie Kirk Case as a Catalyst of Hate Rhetoric

Beatriz Rivera-Martín

Rey Juan Carlos University (Spain)

Eva Ireide Martínez de Bartolomé Rincón

Complutense University of Madrid (Spain)

Lidia Ana García-Bouza García

UNIE University (Spain)

Hate speech against groups with distinctive characteristics has intensified in the contemporary public sphere, driven by the dissemination dynamics of social media. In the United States, the Trump era has marked a turning point in the visibility and normalization of this rhetoric, with documented effects on the evolution of hate incidents and hate crimes. This article analyses hate speech and its relationship to hate crimes during Donald Trump’s second term, using as a case study the discourse of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated on September 10, 2025. The study combines the analysis of hate speech and populism with content analysis and an examination of linguistic performativity through critical discourse analysis (CDA). Using this framework, it examines how the political rhetoric of Donald Trump and his allies constructs the figure of the internal enemy and dehumanizes the other, amplifying their message on digital platforms such as X and generating climates of hostility that are temporally correlated with spikes in hate crimes. The Kirk case allows us to trace the transition from discourse to violent action and discuss the ethical and democratic implicatiosns of the instrumentalisation of hate in polarized contexts.

Keywords: hate speech, hate crimes, populism, Trump, Charlie Kirk.

El discurso de odio contra colectivos con rasgos identitarios se ha intensificado en la esfera pública contemporánea, impulsado por la lógica de difusión de las redes sociales. En Estados Unidos, la era Trump ha supuesto un punto de inflexión en la visibilización y normalización de estas retóricas, con efectos documentados en la evolución de incidentes y delitos de odio. Este artículo analiza discursos de odio y su relación con los delitos de odio durante el segundo mandato de Donald Trump, tomando como estudio de caso el discurso de Charlie Kirk, asesinado el 10 de septiembre de 2025. El trabajo combina el análisis sobre discurso de odio y populismo con el análisis de contenido y la performatividad del lenguaje a través del análisis crítico del discurso (ACD). Con este andamiaje, se examina cómo la retórica política de Donald Trump y sus aliados construyen al enemigo interno y deshumanizan al otro, amplificando su mensaje en plataformas digitales como X y generando climas de hostilidad que se correlacionan temporalmente con picos de delitos de odio. El caso Kirk permite rastrear el tránsito del discurso a la acción violenta, y discutir las implicaciones éticas y democráticas de la instrumentalización del odio en contextos polarizados.

Palabras clave: discursos de odio, delitos de odio, populismo, Trump, Charlie Kirk.

Hate speech has accompanied societies as a historical constant linked to exclusion and the construction of symbolic boundaries between groups. However, it has taken on a particularly disturbing dimension in the present day due to its sustained increase and its impact on democratic coexistence, eroding basic principles of equality and respect (European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, 2021; United Nations, 2022). The emergence of the internet and the central role of social media have multiplied the capacity for disseminating this type of discourse, allowing it to circulate and intensify in digital environments that reinforce echo chamber dynamics (Cinelli et al., 2021). In this scenario, hostile messages not only spread rapidly, but also find communities that legitimise, reproduce and reinterpret them, thus extendsing their effects to the social and political sphere (Waller and Anderson, 2021; Ribeiro et al., 2023).

In the United States, Donald Trump’s presidency has marked a turning point in the public exposure and normalisation of hate speech. His rhetoric, laden with polarising appeals, has served as a catalyst for extremist narratives to find legitimacy in social debate (Edwards, 2018). Official figures show the scale of this phenomenon. The FBI recorded an increase in hate crimes in 2024, playing a particularly significant role. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) confirmed this trend by documenting a historic high in 2024.

With the start of Trump’s second term in January 2025, this trend has not only continued but intensified. The signing of Executive Order 14188, aimed at strengthening control over expressions of anti-Semitism on university campuses, and the declaration of ‘Antifa’ as a terrorist organisation following the assassination of Charlie Kirk in September 2025, illustrate the centrality of hatred and polarisation in the political agenda. In turn, ADL data show that the escalation of anti-Semitic incidents following international events, such as the Hamas attacks in October 2023, resulted in cumulative increases (361 % quarterly) in the United States, suggesting a marked sensitivity of hostile climates to discursive and media shocks.

The murder of Charlie Kirk fits into this context as a paradigmatic case that allows us to observe the translation of hate speech into violent action. His death, interpreted and exploited politically by Trump and his supporters, acts as a discursive catalyst that exemplifies how hate rhetoric impacts the social sphere, fuelling dynamics of confrontation and radicalisation. On this basis, the article explores the link between hate speech and hate crimes in the Trump era, emphasising the role of digital platforms in amplifying it.

OBJECTIVES AND RESEARCH QUESTIONS

To analyse how hate speech in the Trump era acts as a catalyst for polarisation and political violence, using the murder of Charlie Kirk as a paradigmatic case study that highlights the connection between hate speech and hate crimes in the current American context.

•Examine the rhetorical characteristics of Trump’s hate speech during his second presidency, with special attention to the construction of the ‘internal enemy’ through Charlie Kirk’s discourse on his official X profile.

•Study Charlie Kirk’s communicative profile as an example of how Trump’s narratives influence violent perceptions and behaviours.

•Identify the relationship between hate narratives and their materialisation in hate crimes during periods of rhetorical intensification.

•Examine the role of digital platforms (X) in amplifying, reframing or confronting such discourse.

•Reflect on the ethical and democratic implications of the political instrumentalisation of hate speech in highly polarised societies.

Based on the theoretical framework outlined above and the objectives set out, this study poses the following research questions:

•RQ1. What rhetorical characteristics define Trump’s discourse and his media ecosystem during his second term, and to what extent do they constitute hate speech or borderline discourse with equivalent effects?

•RQ2. To what extent does Charlie Kirk’s discourse on X during the two weeks prior to his murder reproduce and amplify Trump’s rhetorical frameworks, acting as a conduit to mobilised digital audiences?

•RQ3. What role does the algorithmic architecture of X play in amplifying the most polarising discourse compared to content of a moderate tone?

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

Hate speech can be defined in complementary ways from legal, communicative and sociological perspectives. In 2017, prior to the popularisation of the internet and the emergence of social media, the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe defined hate speech, emphasising the concepts of racial hatred, xenophobia and anti-Semitism, defining it as any form of expression that spreads, incites, promotes or justifies racial hatred, xenophobia, anti-Semitism or other forms of hatred based on intolerance, including intolerance expressed in the form of aggressive nationalism and ethnocentrism, and discrimination and hostility against minorities, migrants and people of immigrant origin (Council of Europe, 1997). Subsequently, the United Nations (2019) conceptualised it as any form of communication that attacks or uses pejorative language against individuals or groups based on their identity —religious, ethnic, racial, gender or other. However, there is no internationally agreed definition of hate speech, mainly because its classification as a crime and its levels of assessment differ between countries, and an overly precise definition might not include all possible legal infringements.

Butler (2017) contributes the notion of performativity, insofar as language not only describes but also acts, and insults operate as symbolic violence that places people in degraded positions. Consequently, the conceptualisation must be broad and include both explicitly violent expressions and subtle narratives of dehumanisation that reinforce prejudices (Gagliardone et al., 2015). For their part, authors such as Teun van Dijk (2016) and Ruth Wodak (2015) insist that hate speech is not a simple communicative act, but a mechanism of symbolic domination that dehumanises the “other” and legitimises exclusionary behaviour. Recent literature highlights the amplification introduced by the digital environment, as the viral logic of social media and journalistic disintermediation enable discriminatory messages to gain unprecedented visibility and influence (Bustos et al., 2019; Ardèvol, 2016). In fact, several empirical studies confirm the association between the increase in online hate speech and the intensification of offline discriminatory behaviour (Costello et al., 2016; Awan and Zempi, 2017; Keum et al., 2018; European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (2021), reinforcing the hypothesis of a continuum between rhetoric and social impact.

The relationship between hate speech and hate crime is best understood as a rhetorical-behavioural continuum (Keum et al., 2018; Müller and Schwarz, 2021). For his part, Paul Kaufman (2015) recalls the historical proximity between hate speech and hate crime, emphasising that prejudice-motivated crimes are supported by prior symbolic climates. Case studies and comparative series show temporal associations between exposure to hate messages and an increase in hostile behaviour (Olmos et al., 2020). The Government Accountability Office (GAO, 2024) summarises evidence of transfer between digital extremism and politically motivated violence, also warning of problems of underreporting and interagency coordination. In normative terms, Gómez García et al. (2021) argue that hate speech erodes democratic values and cognitively enables potential perpetrators by presenting aggression as a morally justifiable response.

In the case of the United States, official and civil society reports paint a consistent picture of the problem. In 2024, the FBI recorded a total of 11,679 hate incidents, with racial motivations (more than 50 % against the Black population) and religious motivations (70 % anti-Jewish within the religious category) accounting for the majority. In turn, the Southern Poverty Law Centre counted 1,371 hate and anti-government groups in 2024, a slight decrease from the previous year, which, however, cannot be interpreted as a decline in the problem, but rather as evidence of the growing normalisation of racist, anti-LGBTQ+ and xenophobic discourse in the mainstream political arena (SPLC, 2024).

Research on the Trump era converges in identifying measurable effects of political discourse on the dynamics of hate. Griffin Edwards and Stephen Rushin (2018) demonstrated that after his election in 2016, there was a statistically significant increase in hate crimes, particularly in counties with greater electoral support for Trump. Ayal Feinberg et al. (2019) observed spikes in incidents in counties that hosted campaign rallies, suggesting an immediate mobilisation effect. This evidence ties in with socio-computational analyses and institutional reviews that point to a transfer between online radicalisation and offline hostile behaviour.

This scenario has not only continued, but has been reframed in Trump’s second term, which began in January 2025, where polarisation has taken on normative and symbolic centrality (e.g., Executive Order 14188). Within this climate, the assassination of Charlie Kirk —an emblematic figure of youth conservatism and the MAGA (Make America Great Again) ecosystem— on 10 September 2025, and its immediate political exploitation, serve as an analytical turning point: they show how hate speech shapes public debate and how it contributes to creating environments in which violence is perceived as a socially legitimate option. In this sense, the Kirk case serves as an empirical catalyst for exploring the connection between hate speech and hate crimes in the Trump era.

Populism, understood as a moral narrative that pits a ‘pure people’ —a community conceived as morally homogeneous and the sole bearer of the general will— against a ‘corrupt elite’, in its radical right-wing form tends to shift this antagonism towards minority groups or those labelled as ‘internal enemies’ (Mudde and Rovira, 2017). The ‘internal enemy’ refers to groups constructed through discourse as threats, whose exclusion is functional and necessary for the cohesion of the ‘pure people’ (Mudde, 2007; Mouffe, 2007). Drawing on Judith Butler (2017), the language that names the “internal enemy” produces effects of reality, places the targeted groups in positions of vulnerability and calls upon the audience to take a stand against them. In the case of Donald Trump, this political narrative takes the form of threatening discourse, in which he refers to immigration as an ‘invasion’, appeals to ‘law and order’, systematically suspects the Muslim population and denounces a supposed ‘gender ideology’. Such resources rely on simplified explanations and the construction of scapegoats that crystallise in public opinion (Eatwell and Goodwin, 2018).

Griffin Edwards and Stephen Rushin (2018, 2021) found a statistically significant increase in hate crimes following the 2016 presidential election, particularly in counties with greater electoral support for Trump. Ayal Feinberg et al. (2019) detected spikes in incidents in locations that hosted campaign rallies, reinforcing the hypothesis of an immediate effect of hostile mobilisation. More recent studies have found that presidential rhetoric on social media contributed to amplifying hostility towards immigrants and racial minorities, intensifying polarisation in the digital space and promoting the legitimisation of extremist narratives (Müller and Schwarz, 2021; Waller and Anderson, 2021). The result has been the normalisation of hatred as a political resource in an increasingly polarised media ecosystem, where the boundaries between political criticism, disinformation and openly discriminatory discourse are blurred. This phenomenon not only affects public debate, but also erodes the very foundations of democratic coexistence.

Social media platforms have transformed the public sphere into a space mediated not so much by human editors as by algorithmic architectures that define what is seen, what is silenced and what goes viral. In the case of X, the algorithmic logic of personalisation plays a decisive role in shaping political debates. The start timeline does not respond to a neutral flow of information, but rather to an ordering that privileges content with the greatest potential to generate interaction, especially if it arouses intense emotions such as outrage or fear. Ferenc Huszár et al. (2024) have shown that this architecture systematically benefits sources on the political right, giving them disproportionate visibility compared to actors on the left, with a particular emphasis on the US media ecosystem. The platform not only reproduces ideological pluralism, but also redistributes attention in a biased manner, reinforcing positions that fuel political antagonism. Although some recent studies have pointed out that X’s algorithmic timeline can, compared to a strictly chronological one, reduce the amount of extreme news, they also show that such mediation amplifies content with greater ideological bias, consolidating bubble dynamics (Wang et al., 2024).

The connection between this algorithmic functioning and political discourse is clear: the platform acts as a catalyst for a ‘rhetorical-behavioural continuum’ where extremist discourse finds not only circulation, but intensification and normalisation.

Charlie Kirk’s funeral in 2025 is a prime example of this dynamic. Trump’s discourse in that context, laden with allusions to internal betrayal and existential threat framing, became algorithmically profitable content because the more polarising his words were, the greater their visibility on X. The act of collective mourning was transformed, through the platform, into a vector of identity mobilisation. The amplification was not only quantitative, i.e. in terms of the number of interactions, but also qualitative, as the message was reinterpreted by digital prosumers, who remixed it into memes, viral fragments and hashtag chains. The algorithmic architecture ensured that these reinterpretations reached ever wider audiences, projecting political antagonism from the ceremonial space into global conversation.

In this context, X does not function as a mere channel for political expression, but rather as a device for optimising hatred, prioritising the most divisive discourses, multiplying them in mutually reinforcing environments and inserting them into a continuous flow that blurs the boundaries between the political, the media and the social. The result is the consolidation of a polarised public sphere, where hatred is not a marginal deviation, but a discursive resource legitimised by the platform’s algorithmic dynamics.

Empirical evidence shows how this logic translates into concrete dynamics. The Centre for Countering Digital Hate (2023) documented that, following the changes introduced on X under Elon Musk’s leadership, the volume of posts with racist, misogynistic or anti-Semitic content increased steadily. Academic research suggests that X’s algorithms tend to reinforce exposure to hateful content by ranking it according to its ability to generate interaction, creating clusters of users that act as echo chambers (Cinelli et al., 2021). Isaac Waller and Ashton Anderson (2021) have shown that these digital clusters are not static: they generate hybrid dynamics that spill over into the offline sphere, where discursive radicalisation translates into harassment and aggression.

MATERIAL AND METHODS

To meet the objectives set, a mixed descriptive investigation is carried out, using qualitative critical discourse analysis methodology, hereinafter referred to as CDA, and quantitative content analysis methodology, measuring the number of posts and their impact made by Charlie Kirk on his official X profile (@charliekirk11) in the two weeks prior to his murder on September 10, 2025. As of September 10, this profile had 5.2 million followers, which rose to 6.1 million in the three weeks following the event. For each post, the number of people who viewed it, the number who expressed their approval with a like, the number of times it was shared (retweeted) by Charlie Kirk’s social audience, and the number of comments received were analysed to assess its reach and social impact. With regard to the ACD, the discourse and visual resources of these posts were analysed to determine their ideological positioning, their rhetorical strategies, and whether the language and tone used are classified as hate speech or as indoctrinating discourse, protected by freedom of expression, which does not constitute explicit hate speech, even though his ideas are clearly contrary to people and groups opposed to his ideology (migrants, lower classes, non-believers, LGTBI people, among others).

CDA is used as an interdisciplinary approach because the message constructs and reproduces the power structures it reflects (Dijk, 2016), focusing on the social, political, and historical contexts in which it is produced. Texts published on social media, in this case X, are characterized by being informal (Peñalver, 2019), grammatically incorrect (Muñoz and Argüelles, 2010), and mediated by technology (Boyd and Ellison, 2007), so they are interpreted within their digital context, a language without the filters imposed by the print media and institutional communication. For Lupicinio Íñiguez (2011) it is the methodology that addresses the distinction between the salient themes of discourse, its purpose, where the sender stands, what discourses underlie the predominant discourse, and detects the hegemonic relationships of dominant ideologies. Giannina Rossetti (2022) emphasizes this because, through discursive practice, it reveals a social context that shapes social relationships based on the form of discourse. For Ruth Wodak (2015), the important thing is to maintain focus on the relationships of domination between people who are in a position to influence, as is the case with Charlie Kirk and his 5.2 million followers on X, and how that influence can be analysed through the various forms of his language. This author argues that those who control discourse can indirectly control people’s minds (knowledge, attitudes, ideology, norms, and values), achieving social exclusion through hatred of individuals and groups that do not meet their ideological, racial, economic, identity, or cultural requirements.

The widespread use of AI-assisted ACD systems over the last five years is also worth analysing, as they have had a direct impact on methodology, mainly in the stages of selection, corpus extraction, and subsequent analysis and conclusions. Semantic analysis algorithms make it possible to identify patterns, detect ideologies, and examine power relations in large volumes of discursive data more quickly and accurately than traditional approaches (Curry et al., 2024; Javadinejad, 2025). Based on this premise, X’s advanced search engine was used to locate Charlie Kirk’s 196 posts in the selected period, and Google’s Gemini was used to extract the content of each post (Wajed Al Ahmad et al., 2025). Thus, two categories of analysis have been established to classify the messages, which are divided into Hate Speech and Indoctrination. Within each category, the following variables are established, with their corresponding indicators:

•Hate speech: Insults, threats, calls for violent action, and incitement to hatred toward individuals and groups.

•Indoctrination: expression of ideas, rejection of individuals and groups, emotional rhetoric, and feelings of belonging.

As in all types of communication, both categories can be found in the same message. In such cases, the message has been classified as hate speech, as explained in the research analysis.

ANALYSIS AND RESULTS

On September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk, an ally of Donald Trump and founder of the conservative student organization Turning Point USA, which promotes his ideology on American college campuses, was murdered at Utah Valley University, where an assistant shot and killed him. To analyse his discourse, we selected the last two weeks of Charlie Kirk’s life through his posts on his official profile on social network X, a period spanning from August 27 to the morning of September 10, when the profile was taken over by other members of his team because it remained active. At the time of the murder, the profile had 5.2 million followers; as of October 1, 2025, those followers had increased to 6.1 million. In those two weeks, Charlie Kirk posted a total of 196 posts, averaging 14 posts per day, which is considered a very active profile. The risks and ethical limitations of conducting academic research through the filters of an externally programmed AI assistant (Graham, 2022) cannot be ignored, so the work of the research team cannot be replaced in any case, and the ACD is performed manually. After quantitative analysis, the following results have been established:

Table 1. Visibility and impact of Charlie Kirk’s discourse

No. of posts	Reposts	Likes	Comments	Views	References to Trump
196	2.754.438	7.354.621	1.332.130	503.434.900	254 (M)

Source: authors.

As can be seen, Kirk’s average of 14 daily posts garnered thousands of views in just a few days, highlighting the reach and penetration of his discourse among his followers and also among his opponents. The most shared post (685,000 retweets) is from September 9, 2025, a video from Charlie Kirk’s show discussing the philosophical foundations of civil rights, social morality, and the culture war he claims the United States is undergoing. Meanwhile, the post with the most views and likes among Kirk’s followers was seen by 81 million people, received 753,000 likes, and garnered 16,000 comments. The post, published on September 10, features an image of Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee who was stabbed to death by an African American man on August 22, 2025, on the Charlotte light rail in North Carolina, in front of security cameras and other passengers. The image is accompanied by the slogan “America will never be the same,” emphasizing the public insecurity that racialised people, a group singled out by Donald Trump and his ideological allies, are said to repeatedly generate.

Image 1. Post with the highest number of likes, comments, and views

Source: @charliekirk11 on X, September 10, 2025.

As already mentioned in the methodology, for the ACD, discourse has been divided into two main categories: hate speech, which implies a hate crime, and indoctrinating speech, which does not imply a crime, even if it incites hatred. The first result is that all publications fall into one of these categories, which means that there are no trivial publications; all are carefully considered and pursue a specific goal. Within these categories, the variables of insults, threats, calls for violent action, and incitesment to hatred towards individuals and groups have been established to classify hate speech; and the expression of ideas, rejection of individuals and groups, emotional rhetoric, and feelings of belonging for indoctrination messages. The ACD carried out shows indicators of all variables in all posts, which means that there are no posts without insults, threats, calls for violent action, incitement to hatred, ideology, rejection of others, or feelings of belonging. This result indicates the instrumentalisation of Charlie Kirk’s profile and the social and political polarization to which he pushes his more than 5.2 million followers. The following table shows the analysis with content for each indicator as an example.

The majority of the discourse in the publications analysed with ACD reflects a repeated hatred towards transgender people, which is evident in statements of rejection such as “a man pretending to be a woman,” “sick,” “psychopaths,” “criminals,” among others. This is how it refers to the transgender community, which it directly associates with crime rates, providing false, unverified data without sources, such as in the August 28 publication, which states, “Statistically, the transgender population has been prone to violence... The transgender clan has a militant wing and it’s out for blood.” These epithets and insults pepper his daily discourse with statements such as “trans men are the worst human beings,” published on September 4, 2025.

There are also calls for direct action by his followers in defence of his ideal of a country, with statements such as the one published on September 5, 2025, in which he asks “Western Civilization is worth fighting for,” as well as the destruction of universities that are not aligned with his ideology, as can be seen in this post from September 6, 2025, “Defund liberal universities!” Also noteworthy is the recurring idea of militarizing the country and imprisoning more transgender people and migrants simply for being who they are, as in this statement from September 7, 2025: “We don’t have enough people in prison in America. We need a lot more prisoners.” The ideal of womanhood that Kirk defends in three of the publications analysed deserves a separate chapter, in which he demands that women “submit to your husbands” (Kirk in X, August 28, 2025), nullifying their will and marking the correct behaviour within marriage through a sense of belonging. A targeted, repetitive, and basic discourse has been discovered, without rhetorical figures to embellish it, but rather simple sentences that are easy to understand and share. It is a discourse of hate that seems improvised due to its visceral tone but hides a fixed objective: to incite hatred against otherness.

The ACD has found indicators of all the variables studied, including explicit insults against transgender people, migrants, those who support them, their lawyers, elected officials and the opposition Democratic Party, and those who do not believe in God. Their ideal of a good citizen is a conservative, Christian, Republican voter. A discourse full of hate and emotional rhetoric that appeals to fear, pits them against us, and victimizes those who share their ideology and religion. The results show that the political instrumentalisation of hate speech in polarized contexts erodes democratic quality by normalizing exclusion and weakening pluralism. It also subordinates truth to emotional impact, reducing public deliberation and fostering sustained dynamics of confrontation.

Table 2. ACD analysis of Charlie Kirk’s hate speech and indoctrination on X

	Hate speech				Indoctrination
Variables	Insults	Threats	Call to action	Hate incitement	Ideology	Rejection	Emotions	Belonging
Speech	If you are crazy enough to want to hormonally and surgically “change your sex,” you have a mental disorder, and you are too crazy to own a firearm. (27.08.25)	For the first time since the 1960s, maybe since the Great Depression, America will experience a net outflow of migration. Alligator Alcatraz, Louisiana Lockup, and blowing up drug smugglers in the Caribbean are psychological deterrents that say one thing: Don’t come. (04.09.25)	CBS Chicago CONFIRMS Trump isn’t just targeting criminals in Chicago, he’s planning a massive immigration raid “Sources confirm to CBS News that that could include armoured trucks, federal troops and ICE agents flooding the city.” “Breaking news, there is word from Washington that the Trump administration is planning to conduct a major immigration enforcement operation right here in Chicago” Say goodbye to Democrat’s illegal voters in Chicago! (30.09.25)	Hormone therapy is creating child-murdering domestic terrorists and should be banned nationwide (27.08.25)	Wow. Jesse Watters just used one of the biggest platforms in all of television to call out the disturbing regularity of trans violence (“Statistically, the trans population has been prone to violence... The trans clan has a militant wing and it’s out for blood. They are TAKING LIVES, defiling churches and freaking everybody out.” “Politicians should stop elevating the trans issue as if it’s the Civil Rights struggle of the 21st century.” Bravo. Well done @JesseBWatters (28.08.25)	100% from Stephen Miller: “If you look at their rap sheets what you will see is ‘arrested and released, arrested and released.’ They are never kept in jail. So you have a small percentage of the population that are serial criminal killers, gang bangers, hoodlums and drug dealers that are left to roam free to shoot, and maim, and kill, from the age of 14 all the way through the rest of their lives.” The vast majority of the crime in this country is done by a very small population of serial criminals that Democrats refuse to keep behind bars. It was catch and release on our borders, and it’s the same in our big cities with cashless bail. Crime, just like illegal immigration, is a choice. We can fix it if Democrats just get out the way and let the Trump admin work. DC proves this. (04.09.25	Boom!! U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is hiring armed agents for the first time in its history. Not only are they going to arrest immigrants who scam the system, these armed federal agents are prepared to arrest lawyers who help them do it. More of this. (05.09,25)	Dear CNN, WaPo, NYT, ABC, NBC etc. If you want to know why your ratings are in the tank and no one likes you, look no further than the brutal murder of Iryna Zarutska who moved to US to escape war in Ukraine, a story you refuse to tell. Sadly she couldn’t survive the Democrats’ criminal justice system. Yet you wouldn’t shut up or stop villainising Daniel Penny, a hero, who probably stopped a murder just like her’s. Why? Because he was a straight white American male and the perp was black. Shame on you. Genuinely. (07.09.25)

Source: Authors.

CONCLUSIONS AND DISCUSSION

In the context of cultural and racial polarization that the United States is experiencing in the second term of the current president, Donald Trump, the public discourse of his allies not only reflects latent social and political tensions, but also acts as a tool to legitimize or challenge them. The media, social networks, political leaders, institutions, and opinion leaders have a significant influence in amplifying discourses that can generate hatred, stereotypes, and promote supremacist ideologies. An example of this is the discourse analysed by Charlie Kirk during his last two weeks of life on his official X profile, a discourse aligned with that of Donald Trump, whom he quotes 254 times, in which two groups have been repeatedly criminalized, ridiculed, threatened, and insulted: racialised people and transgender people. As already mentioned in the theoretical framework, public discourse directly influences the way societies understand their cultural and racial differences. It can be a vehicle for conflict or a path to social transformation, with the discourse analysed being representative of the former premise.

The analysis carried out provides answers to the three research questions posed. With regard to RQ1, the results confirm that the rhetoric of the MAGA ecosystem during Trump’s second term systematically resorts to discursive frames of threat: the construction of the internal enemy, the dehumanisation of the other, and appeals to moral urgency. All 196 posts analysed contain indicators of hate speech or indoctrination, with no neutral or trivial posts. Following Judith Butler (2017), this discourse does not merely describe a threat, but produces it: the systematic classification of trans people, migrants and political opponents as active enemies of Western civilisation constitutes a deliberate discursive strategy that acts as a cognitive enabler of violence (Gómez García et al., 2021).

Charlie Kirk’s speech reveals a high degree of indoctrination and ideological polarization that seeks to provoke unconditional loyalty and positions among his followers through a radicalized narrative. Reality is reduced to a moral and existential war between a virtuous group that possesses the truth and individuals and groups that do not conform to those ideals of race, creed, gender identity, and political ideology, who are openly accused of generating violence and dividing the country in two. This type of communication resorts to the figure of the internal enemy, portraying liberal politicians and media not only as adversaries but as traitors. In this context, Kirk promotes the need for authoritarian leadership and a democratic institutional purge, represented by Donald Trump, who is re-elected president of the United States in January 2025.

As for RQ2, the analysis confirms that Kirk’s profile acts as a conduit between Trump’s rhetoric and mobilised online audiences. The post with the greatest impact —81 million views and 753,000 likes— illustrates the mechanism precisely: content that racialises public insecurity, aligned with Trump’s discursive frames of immigration as an ‘invasion’, generates massive emotional mobilisation among his more than 5.2 million followers. The profile acts as an amplifier and translator of the president’s rhetoric to younger, digitally active audiences, in line with what Karsten Müller and Carlo Schwarz (2021) describe regarding the transfer of discursive frameworks from political leaders to online communities. With regard to RQ3, the data shows that the most polarising content is the most widely shared, which points to the amplifying role played by X’s algorithmic architecture. The post with 685,000 reposts and the one with 81 million views both feature content classified as hate speech.

After the analysis, it is worth asking about the boundaries between freedom of expression and hate crimes, with hate speech being one of its exponents, which has become so normalized that it is neither reported nor eliminated. Are we in a society accustomed to insults, threats, and violence as a way of relating to one another? Hate speech against any group is easily found on social media, and that hatred leads to social rejection, violence, and polarization if it is not curbed, if that is even possible. Through the use of hurtful language, such as “lunatics”, “savage monster” or “pack of liars” opponents are turned into morally despicable enemies, and even dangerous to public safety, which discredits them as full citizens. Another underlying idea in the discourse is the demand for a purge of those who do not belong to the Republican Party, attacking judges, elected officials, public representatives, civil servants, lawyers, and media outlets such as CNN. Hate speech is channelled by appealing to social panic, arousing basic emotions such as fear and anger toward otherness. The message is simple and direct: anyone who is not like me is a danger.

It should be remembered that these speeches were disseminated not only on X, but also on university campuses across the United States, and are therefore aimed at young people. However, when shared on X, the audience multiplies exponentially, reaching millions of people around the world. This research leads to an inescapable reflection: in the spiral of hatred that fuels this type of discourse, everyone ultimately loses. The speaker, as tragically demonstrated by the Charlie Kirk case, loses his life by becoming the target of the very violence his rhetoric instigates. For future research, it would be very interesting to analyse the discourse of Charlie Kirk’s social audience, and even expand to the discourse of Trump and his social audience on X. We conclude with a final reflection on the type of society that is built and fed by messages so full of hatred towards people and groups who think and feel differently. Based on the findings of the research, this type of discourse leads to more violent societies that are defensive and closed to mutual acceptance and respect for human rights, which are inherent to all people, regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, and ideology.

Beatriz Rivera-Martín. Assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Communication at Rey Juan Carlos University. PhD in Journalism and Master’s Degree in Communication for Social Change from Complutense University of Madrid. Her main lines of research focus on media and audiovisual analysis of content by and for vulnerable groups, including LGTBIQ+ people, children, people with disabilities, and migrants. She is also a member of the URJC’s Office of Animal-Assisted Interventions, where she participates as a researcher in various projects and publications. Principal investigator of a competitive research project and researcher in two other projects at the URJC’s Office of Animal-Assisted Interventions, as a specialist in communication and people with disabilities. She has co-directed a teaching innovation project at the URJC’s Faculty of Communication Sciences. She has participated in a European research project at the UCM’s Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. She belongs to the UCM’s Social Identities and Communication Research Group and the Teaching Innovation Group for communication content in mobile journalism at the URJC’s Faculty of Communication Sciences. As a result of these projects, he has published seven scientific articles in peer-reviewed journals indexed in JCR and Scopus, including Applied Sciences, Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry, Animals, Prisma Social, Visual Culture Review, and Ramon Llull Journal of Applied Ethics. He has published seven book chapters with academic editorial boards and peer-reviewed publishers such as Fragua, Gedisa, and Dykinson.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2713-4303

Eva Ireide Martínez de Bartolomé Rincón. Doctorate (with honors) in Information Sciences and Bachelor’s Degree in Advertising and Public Relations from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy also from the UCM. Pre-doctoral contract for Research Staff Training (FPI) at the UCM, thanks to which she began her first line of research on ethics in the field of information, which would culminate in the defense of her doctoral thesis. Accredited by ANECA as a Doctoral Assistant, Contracted Doctor, and Private University Professor, she spent five and a half years teaching and researching at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR), combining this with management positions as academic coordinator of the official degree in Marketing and the master’s degree in Neuromarketing, as well as coordinator of the MBA and director of corporate academic development. She has taught courses in advertising and commercial communication, business communication, oral communication skills, ethics, and philosophy at various undergraduate and master’s degree levels. She has developed teaching materials at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR) for courses in Personal and Organizational Communication and Advertising and Commercial Communication, among others.

She has published with prestigious publishers such as Dykinson, Egregius, and Fragua. She is currently Dean of the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Communication at UNIE University. She is the principal investigator (PI) of the Information and Communication in the Digital Age research group at UNIE University and co-editor of the journal UNIE Business Research. As a professional, she has worked in media outlets such as the newspapers Expansión and El Mundo, where she has developed communication and business training projects.

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3639-8044

Lidia Ana García-Bouza García. PhD in Journalism and Bachelor’s Degree in Information Sciences from the Complutense University of Madrid (UCM). My solid academic background and early years of research focused on the field of Political Communication at the same university, where I completed postgraduate studies and participated in important projects. My research work in this field resul­ted in publications such as the book chapter “The use of hashtags on Twitter to defend the plurality and independence of RTVE: the case of @mujeresRTVE,” developed within the framework of the European Union’s Erasmus+ program. Editorial Fragua. Currently, I combine research work with university teaching. I am a professor in the Faculty of Applied Social Sciences and Communication at UNIE University in the area of Communication. I teach in several degree programs, including Business Administration and Management, Business Analytics, Computer Science, and Marketing and Communication. In addition, I hold the position of director of the Master’s Degree in Marketing and Commercial Management, where I also teach classes. My current lines of research focus on Digital Communication and Political Communication, fields in which I continue to develop relevant projects and studies. I belong to the research group on information and communication in the Digital Age at UNIE University and contribute to the journal UNIE Business Research.

https://orcid.org/0009-0008-7559-6554

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