The killing of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk has conjured a storm of online criticism on the far right towards the FBI director, Kash Patel, both for his perceived incompetent stewardship of the bureau and his invocation of Viking lore.
During the news conference announcing the arrest of Tyler Robinson, 22, the alleged killer of Kirk at a Salt Lake City campus on Wednesday, Patel made triumphant statements as the Utah governor, Spencer Cox, looked on.
“This is what happens when you let good cops be cops,” said Patel, who reportedly faced internal pressure from the White House over his apparent mishandling of the case and inability to bring the manhunt to an end. “The FBI and our partners are proud to stand here today together to bring justice to the family of Charlie Kirk and honor his memory.”
But it was the peculiar ending of Patel’s speech when he namechecked Valhalla, a sort of heaven for warriors in Norse mythology referenced by everyone from Adolf Hitler to the rock band Led Zeppelin, which got the online extremists talking.
“Lastly, to my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother,” said an emotional Patel about Kirk, a devout Christian who did not practise paganism. “We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla.”
The irony of Patel’s statement wasn’t lost on the Telegram channels and 4chan message boards frequented by extremists.
“Hindu FBI Director tells assassinated Christian that he will see him in Valhalla,” wrote one poster on a far-right channel on Telegram. “OK then.”
Another channel on the same app, operated by ex-members of the proscribed neo-Nazi terrorist group Atomwaffen Division, sarcastically saluted Patel for being the “the head of the FBI” and “talking about Valhalla”.
“Kash Patel said he’ll see Kirk in Valhalla,” the channel wrote moments after the press conference. “This press conference is amazing.”
Earlier in the week, before a suspect in the killing of Kirk had been identified or images of Robinson on the day of the assassination were shared with the public, memes insulting Patel’s overseeing of the investigation spread. One meme shared by a far-right account showed Patel as a contestant on the gameshow Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, answering a question with four options.
“Find Charlie’s shooter,” read one option, with another circled as Patel’s hypothetical answer: “Shit on the street.”
On the controversial message board 4chan, users were even more unforgiving of his handling of the case. One user lambasted Patel in a post on its politics thread, saying of his missteps: “Shows up and rambles for a few minutes then drops random Valhalla reference. Prematurely announces on [X] they caught the wrong person.”
Patel made an early claim on X, the app formerly known as Twitter, that the FBI arrested Kirk’s assassin hours after the killing. This later proved to be untrue, quickly becoming fodder for critics. The Democratic senator Dick Durbin called the error “amateur hour” and questioned the professionalism of an FBI director who prematurely declared the arrest of a major suspect in a very public assassination.
The far right and Patel have also had a polarizing relationship since his tenure as the head of the FBI began. While some applauded him as a fervent acolyte of president Donald Trump and a QAnon conspiracist, others have targeted Patel’s race. During his contentious Senate confirmation hearing in January, Patel described some of the racism he has faced in the US as the son of Indian Gujarati immigrants, with some accusing him of being a “terrorist”.
“Extreme right online commentators and meme channels on Telegram are mocking FBI director Kash Patel for what they claim is botching the investigation into the assassination of Charlie Kirk and then invoking ‘Valhalla’,” said Joshua Fisher-Birch, a professional analyst on the online activities of the far right. “Many of these same channels have previously used racist anti-south Asian slurs and tropes when describing Patel.”
But the broader discourse coming from the more extreme sections of the far right have bypassed Patel altogether and have begun to call for retribution against liberals and leftists, before the identity of Kirk’s assassin was ever revealed.
For example, neo-Nazi tastemakers with thousands of Telegram followers have pointed out the death of Kirk will herald the death of the moderate right wing.
“The moderate right died today,” wrote one neo-Nazi channel, in a post viewed thousands of times, “but the fire rises.”
An adjacent channel, in the same ideological waters, told followers how the “gun has been reintroduced as a tool in American politics” and isn’t going away anytime soon.
Fisher-Birch noted that the same neo-Nazi and far-right extremists who saw Kirk as a “moderate” were now strategically using his killing “for their own ends, recruitment for their movement and demonizing the left”.
