October 7, Charlie Kirk, and the Children of Nietzsche

“Insanity in individuals is something rare – but in groups, parties, nations and epochs it is the rule.” – Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §156

On October 7, 2023, the world witnessed one of the most barbaric acts of terror in modern history. Hamas, a militant Islamist organization, launched a coordinated attack on Israel, slaughtering civilians, kidnapping children, and celebrating the carnage as the justice of Allah. The massacre left over 1,200 Israelis dead, including babies and the elderly, and led to what The New York Times described as “the most deadly day for Jews since the Holocaust.”

The response from much of the world should have been unified horror and resolute moral clarity. Instead, vast sections of Western academia, media, and political movements deflected, justified, or even celebrated the attack. Student groups at Harvard issued a statement declaring that “Israel was entirely responsible” for the violence. Protests in New York, London, and Berlin praised the massacre as “resistance.” As The Atlantic summarized, “Moral relativism has become the reflex of a civilization unsure it even believes in evil anymore.”

At the same time, figures like Charlie Kirk, who dare to assert consistent moral logic rooted in Judeo-Christian thought, are vilified as “Christian nationalists.” Kirk is branded as radical for affirming that sex and gender are the same, an idea that would have been regarded as unquestionable only a decade ago. As Politico noted earlier this year, “Kirk has become a lightning rod for the culture wars simply by insisting that reality is not negotiable.”

These two phenomena are not unrelated. They reveal a civilization that has moved, as Nietzsche both predicted and desired, beyond good and evil; into a realm where moral categories have dissolved, objective truth is despised, and each individual becomes their own arbiter of morality and reality.

The Death of God and the Vacuum

Nietzsche famously declared, “God is dead,” blamed Christianity for the murder, and rejoiced in what he called humanity’s “greatest deed;” a glorious emancipation from what he saw as religion’s tyrannical grip on thought. But he also understood that this “death of God” would not leave the world unchanged. It would create a vacuum where certainty, meaning, and morality once stood.

That vacuum now defines much of Western culture. Instead of hope, Nietzsche offers nihilism; instead of meaning, meaninglessness; instead of truth, non-truth; and instead of Christ, anti-Christ. Without God as the anchor of reality, every previous norm – moral, philosophical, and even biological – is treated with suspicion and dismissed as an oppressive relic of a bygone era.

This is not abstract philosophy in a dusty book. It has become the mindset. It is the soil from which much of our cultural confusion and moral insanity grows. The denial of biological reality in the name of “gender identity;” the celebration of victimhood over virtue; and the moral relativism that excuses terrorism while condemning self-defense are symptoms of a civilization that has traded divine truth for subjective will.

The Will to Power and the TikTok Morality

Nietzsche envisioned the rise of the free spirit—a new type of philosopher liberated from the tyranny of Christian morality. This free spirit would be autonomous, self-judging, and unconcerned with categories like good and evil. In place of virtue, Nietzsche offered the will to power: a relentless pursuit of self-assertion, self-advancement, and self-worship without regard for consequence, tradition, ethics, or divine law.

This is precisely the worldview that allows the modern TikTok mindset to defend the indefensible. When moral absolutes are dismissed as “social constructs,” any act (no matter how evil) can be justified. The massacre of civilians on October 7 is explained away as “context,” while the defense of one’s homeland is condemned as “colonialism.” As one Guardian headline put it, “Resistance or Terrorism? The Debate Over Hamas Splits the West.” The standards have not merely shifted, they have vanished.

In Nietzsche’s world, the strong impose their reality on the weak, and the weak weaponize victimhood to seize power. Both are manifestations of the same principle: the will to power.

Gender, Reality, and the Transvaluation of Values

One of Nietzsche’s most radical ideas was the Umwertung aller Werte – the “transvaluation of all values.” Long-held virtues like compassion, humility, and self-restraint, he argued, were “morals of timidity” imposed by the weak to restrain the strong. True virtue, he claimed, was strength, dominance, and even cruelty.

This rejection of absolute truth as a moral guide has paved the way for today’s ideological chaos. If moral truth is fiction, why not redefine even the most basic realities, such as what it means to be male or female? The assertion that gender and biological sex are unrelated is not just illogical; it is the natural outgrowth of Nietzsche’s project.

But, today’s activists echo this sentiment as they compel society to affirm self-constructed identities and label dissent as hate. As Reuters recently reported, a British teacher was fired for refusing to use a student’s preferred pronouns. “It is not about truth,” the teacher said. “It is about power.”

The New Heresy

In Nietzsche’s worldview, those who cling to divine moral truth are not just wrong, they are dangerous. He called Christianity “the evil disease of human history,” a “religious neurosis” that shackled humanity. He mocked virtue and morality as weaknesses. What was once regarded as obvious, logical, and true has now become heresy.

It is no wonder, then, that figures like Charlie Kirk face relentless hostility.

Kirk’s unapologetic defense of biblical morality and Western civilization is an affront to a society that has embraced Nietzsche’s vision. To reject Kirk’s worldview is not simply to disagree with his politics, it is to participate in Nietzsche’s rebellion against the very idea of good and evil. It is to side with a worldview that despises objective truth precisely because truth limits the will.

The New Virtues

Nietzsche desired a new hegemony to replace the Christian one, one that would embrace severity, hierarchy, and exploitation as virtues. The people he called Übermenschen (“overmen”) would not refrain from injury or conquest but would impose their will as the measure of what is good.

Is this not what we see today? Western universities and activist movements increasingly celebrate raw power, whether expressed as violent resistance against institutions, censorship of dissenting views, or the reengineering of language and reality itself. The old virtues (truth, humility, and compassion) are derided as relics of oppression. The new virtues are rage, dominance, and identity.

We Were Warned

Nietzsche asked repeatedly in his final book, Ecce Homo, “Have you understood me?” The truth is that most of his contemporaries did not. But more than a century later, his vision has become our reality. We now inhabit a culture unmoored from objective and absolute truth, rejecting the moral categories of good and evil, and enthroning the “individual will” as the highest law.

Those who ignore the evil of October 7, who sneer at the convictions of men like Charlie Kirk, and who insist that biological reality is a social construct are not simply misguided; they are Nietzsche’s children.

They have abandoned good and evil in favor of their own self-created realities. And as Nietzsche himself warned, “Insanity in groups…is the rule.” We are no longer debating politics or social preferences. We are fighting for the very possibility of truth itself.