The Execution of Charlie Kirk, Part II: Crisis, Control, and the Structural Logic of Enslavement

Contemporary Signals of a Structural Strategy

Preface (September 2025)

The signals are no longer abstract or future-oriented. As this essay is published, pilots with the digital euro are underway in several European countries, the final negotiations of the WHO pandemic treaty are taking place in Brussels, and governments increasingly invoke climate and security language to make emergency powers permanent. Farmers’ protests are being framed or ignored by mainstream media, while new CO₂ levies hit both industry and households. Generative AI is not only rewriting texts but also the rules of political visibility. What Part I called the hidden grammar of enslavement has, by 2025, become visible as an everyday practice of governance.

Introduction

This essay continues the two-part series begun in Part I: The Hidden Grammar of Enslavement in the 21st Century. There I traced the theoretical architecture of crisis as governance: how elites deploy problem – reaction – solution across five domains — economic, technological, political, narrative, and biopolitical.

Here, in Part II, I turn to contemporary signals. These examples, drawn from recent events and policies, show how the grammar described in Part I is already embedded in today’s institutions.

Economic Instruments: Debt and Digital Currencies

Debt remains one of the most effective tools of subordination. In 2023, Pakistan agreed to a $3 billion IMF loan under conditions of austerity — subsidy cuts, fuel price hikes, and reduced social spending. Argentina faced similar terms in 2024. As Naomi Klein has argued, austerity under duress is not simply economics but a political strategy to restructure societies through crisis (The Shock Doctrine, 2007).

At the same time, central banks are piloting digital currencies. The European Central Bank’s Digital Euro is promoted as modernization. Yet critics warn that programmable features — money that expires, or can be restricted to certain uses — would shift financial sovereignty from the citizen to the institution. Even if never formally enacted, the architecture itself enables control.

(In 2025, pilots are running in multiple EU member states, and concern is growing that this could become a real replacement for cash.)

Technological Infrastructure: Surveillance and Algorithms

China’s social credit system is often cited as the epitome of algorithmic governance, where daily behavior feeds into a state-administered reputation score. But subtler forms exist in the West. The EU’s proposed AI Act designates “high-risk” systems such as credit scoring, biometric identification, and predictive policing. Regulation may restrain abuses, but it also normalizes surveillance and automation as default infrastructures.

Meanwhile, private platforms govern visibility. In 2023, debates resurfaced on X and YouTube about “shadow banning” — algorithmic de-ranking that suppresses reach without outright censorship. As Foucault might observe, discipline is most effective when it is invisible (Discipline and Punish, 1975).

(In 2025, we see this reflected in debates about the influence of algorithms on elections in the U.S. and Europe, and in disputes over AI-generated content and copyright.)

Political and Legal Frameworks: The Permanence of Emergency

Emergency powers rarely expire. After terrorist attacks in Paris, France extended its state of emergency repeatedly until many provisions were written into ordinary law in 2017. The UK carried forward sweeping counter-terror powers long after the original threats waned. Agamben would call this the state of exception becoming the norm (State of Exception, 2005).

At the supranational level, negotiations around a WHO pandemic treaty illustrate how global crises centralize authority. Framed as preparedness, the treaty raises concerns over diminished national sovereignty in health governance. Even if overstated, the dynamic remains: crisis justifies legal architectures that concentrate power.

(In 2025, this debate is still ongoing, now also tied to discussions of climate emergencies and wartime rhetoric in Europe.)

Narrative and Ideological Conditioning: Media and Visibility

Chomsky and Herman argued in Manufacturing Consent (1988) that media function as filters for elite interests. Today, consolidation has shrunk U.S. media power from six conglomerates to effectively three: Disney, Comcast, and Warner Bros. Discovery. This narrows the range of permissible narratives.

At the same time, protests against inflation and energy costs in France, Germany, and the UK during 2023–24 received sparse mainstream coverage while dominating alternative channels. The absence of visibility itself functions as a form of control: what is unseen is politically inert.

(In 2025, we see the same mechanism at work with European farmers’ protests and the limited reporting on them, despite their major political impact.)

Biopolitical and Environmental Leverage: Health and Climate

The pandemic normalized digital health infrastructures. The debate over vaccine passports prepared the ground for broader identity systems. The EU’s Digital Identity Wallet, expected in 2026, promises efficiency in banking, travel, and public services. Yet by linking finance, health, and mobility, it also creates a single point of potential restriction.

In climate policy, the EU’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) began its transition phase in 2023. Officially a tool for climate fairness, it also serves as geopolitical leverage: nations that fail to comply with EU standards face tariffs. Sustainability becomes both ecological necessity and instrument of compliance.

(As of 2025, this is felt through new CO₂ levies and debates about the consequences for energy poverty and European industry.)

Conclusion: The Visible Machinery of Control

What Part I described as theoretical grammar is already written into practice. Debt traps, digital currencies, AI governance, emergency laws, media consolidation, health IDs, and carbon tariffs — each is justified as necessity, each expands institutional reach, and together they compose a coherent architecture of control.

The execution of Charlie Kirk, read through this lens, is not a singular event but a signal. It reinforces the same cycle described in Part I: crisis, consolidation, normalization. The hidden grammar of enslavement is no longer hidden. It is visible in the machinery of everyday governance.

📌 Note on Sources

This essay draws on Naomi Klein (The Shock Doctrine), Giorgio Agamben (State of Exception), Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish), Noam Chomsky & Edward Herman (Manufacturing Consent), as well as reports on IMF lending (2023–24), ECB publications on the Digital Euro, EU legislative drafts of the AI Act, WHO pandemic treaty negotiations, and EU climate policy (CBAM).

(Contemporary examples from 2025 added based on ECB pilots, AI debates, WHO treaty talks, European protests, and CO₂ levies.)

Closing Note

When I wrote Part I, it may still have read as an analysis from a distance, a theoretical framework. Now, in 2025, it feels more like a record of what is unfolding before our eyes each day. I never imagined I would write this, but reality can no longer be concealed. Where once we spoke of “future risks,” today we are witnessing a visible architecture of control taking shape in real time.

Writing this two-part series has not been an intellectual exercise for me, but an attempt to give language to what many already sense intuitively: that crisis is no longer an exception, but the permanent language of governance.