The Killing Of An American Fascist

You’re probably bored of all the Charlie Kirk takes. Well too bad. Because as a person with a substack I am a TAKE MERCHANT at heart and I do not pretend otherwise.

So here is my take.

Charlie Kirk was a little fascist prick, there is no necessity in civil society for little fascist pricks to feel safe and the exhortations to feel sympathy for him and his family are FUNDAMENTALLY WEAK, LIBERAL AND ISRAELI IN CHARACTER.

It was expected that the American right would melt down over it. But we’ve had statements from the good and the fucking great of western centrism, from Starmer to Carney to Albanese, about the DEATH OF A NEO-NAZI PODCASTER AND PROPAGANDIST.

Of course we also had statements from Netanyahu and Ben Gvir because Kirk was an Islamophobic cheerleader for Israeli genocide and I don’t for a second believe this was some kind of 5D chess Mossad hit as conspiracy-heads are pondering.

The media also decided this was one of the most consequential things to have happened in years, news programmes in America, Australia and the UK quickly churning out Charlie Kirk themed broadcasts and deep-dives.

THE BBC NEWS HAD A CHARLIE KIRK SPECIAL.

What the fuck is going on?

I’ve lived in the US and have some friends and family there, but as a non-American I would have struggled to pick Charlie Kirk out of a line-up, my knowledge of him a smudge in the corner of my brain. If you’d have pushed me I’d probably have said he’s one of the MAGA cunts who comprises America’s neofascist youth blob. And I would have been right. But most people are not as online as me. Most people outside of America didn’t know the name Charlie Kirk. I suspect a good chunk inside America wouldn’t have either.

But now we all know his name. And this is a less than subtle signal about who, and what, western media demand we care about.

I wouldn’t be surprised if more minutes and column inches have been dedicated to Charlie fucking Kirk in 36 hours than to the entirety of the Gaza holocaust. I can guarantee more people know Charlie Kirk is dead than know Israel evaporated the prime minister of Yemen last week. Indeed the news of Israel eradicating a prime minister and almost the entirety of Yemen’s civilian government was barely a footnote in the same media now CANONISING A NEO-NAZI.

There was a school shooting in America THE VERY SAME DAY Kirk was turned into a human water feature that most people wouldn’t have heard about. A shooting Charlie Kirk would have enthusiastically defended as the price of gun ownership. Well in the end he became the statistic he argued for.

And the liberal condemnations. The ‘this is not who we are’ statements. The decrying of ‘political violence.’ Well fuck me. Others have said it much better, but Jesus Christ, do me a fucking FAVOUR. AMERICA IS POLITICAL VIOLENCE! It was born in it, is sustained by it and carries it out casually every single day of the fucking week. These moments always reveal the delusional esteem Americans hold themselves in. America just never wants to own its shit.

You’ll also probably have seen the takes worrying about what this is going to portend, the pretext this provides for X, Y, Z, about how things might now break apart.

One, all the bad things people are saying can now happen, from the expansion of the surveillance state to clamping down on social media to rounding up regime critics, are already happening.

Two, only a fascist culture worries that the death of a fascist will rupture the culture.

Only a fascist culture would dedicate so much air time to the death of a fascist while that culture arms a genocide.

Only a fascist culture produces a Charlie Kirk.

And he was a fascist. This knob-end hated everyone. Blacks, browns, trans, gays, Muslims, women. He loved whites with good genetic stock, genocides and school shootings. He said blacks couldn’t fly planes and things were better during slavery. He said no one should be protected in a pandemic. He started a ‘watchlist’ of academics that led to harassment from his acolytes, leaving a good number of his targets fearing for their lives. He said empathy was a mortal sin underpinning society’s problems. Whether he knew it or not, he was practically begging to be opened up.

And this point - whether he knew it or not - brings me to another. The game, the grift and the brand.

How much of what Kirk said was truly sincere and how much was just designed to build a political-cultural brand, only he knows. Knew.

And this is where we get to another of the reasons for the outpouring of liberal angst. Opinion as brand. Edgelord as media company. Polemicist as political influencer.

A simping New York Times piece eulogising Kirk written by cultural lib-in-chief Ezra Klein contained the blindingly revealing line: I envied what he built.

Liberals looked upon Kirk approvingly because he had located the holy grail: how to leverage the tools of new media to be an American changemaker. Liberal media types are desperate to figure this out. They were envious that Kirk had. Klein admits as much. Because for liberals there are no real principles, no real fights for justice, no revolutionary transformations. There is only THE MARKETPLACE OF IDEAS. And in this cutthroat marketplace, the winner takes all. It deeply wounds them that anyone, even a Nazi, should therefore lose to an assassin instead of an argument.

That could have been me, they think.

But sometimes Nazis get killed.

We’ve got major problems as a global society. Imperialism, wars, genocides, the death of public health, ecological collapse, the rise of fascism. Kirk was not helping any of this. On the contrary. He was the rise of fascism. Corrosive influences on civil society shouldn’t be graced with the presumption of safety. Speech should be free. The consequences of that speech can’t be assumed as such, especially when that speech is racist and fascist. And especially when it organises politically.

(If he was even killed for that reason. Some have suggested it was an internecine factional white supremacist thing. Always possible).

So this is my Charlie Kirk take.

He took up zero amounts of my emotional energy prior to the day he died, and he will now take up zero amounts moving forward.

But what he revealed was worth reacting to.

Because what he revealed was a political and media culture, from the liberals to the right, that looks and smells a lot like fascism.