Following his assassination last week, the far-right political influencer Charlie Kirk has been posthumously lauded by various commentators for everything from his supposed ability to connect with the ‘youth’ to his ‘civility’. In a characteristically simpering piece for UnHerd, Sohrab Ahmari claimed that Kirk ‘championed open, earnest debate’. ‘Kirk provided one of the very few spaces in which the American Left and Right could meet and hash things out on earnest, civil terms,’ he wrote. Even American liberals have conceded that Kirk had that much going for him. According to Ezra Klein in the New York Times, Kirk ‘practiced politics the right way’.
I despise political violence. Aside from the immorality of murdering people for their political opinions, it’s stupid and counterproductive. As the great Palestinian scholar Edward Said once put it, the weak should use means that render their oppressors uncomfortable - something random acts of murder can never do.
And yet during his short life Kirk seemed to have fewer scruples, though you wouldn’t know it from his retrospective sanctification by credulous commentators. When Paul Pelosi (the husband of House Speaker Nancy) was attacked in 2022 with a hammer at the couple’s home in San Francisco, Kirk put out a call for an ‘amazing patriot’ to bail the attacker out (though he made sure to include some obligatory throat clearing about the ‘awfulness’ of the attack).
Despite such attempts to have it both ways, Kirk saw politics in a starkly Manichaean key: Donald Trump was, he said, the last chance to save ‘Western civilisation’ from ‘secular godless totalitarianism’. As well as being both pitiful and portentous, rhetoric like this was implicated in the violent assault on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. In the lead up to that disgraceful episode, Kirk not only acted as a megaphone for bogus allegations of voter fraud, but boasted of sending 80 buses of ‘patriots’ to help foment the riot at which seven people subsequently died. The mob that descended on the American capital that day evinced little desire to hash anything out in earnest, civil terms. Perhaps because they had been whipped into a frenzy by claims the election had been stolen by those seeking to impose ‘godless totalitarianism’.
Indeed, the radioactive response in some quarters to Kirk’s assassination is more befitting of his ‘legacy’ than any insipid tribute. Various MAGA influencers have spent recent days declaring ‘war’ on the American left and calling for its violent suppression. A certain amount of online hyperbole is perhaps to be expected. But these are not merely the deranged fragments of an online inceltariat. America’s Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau has implied that the State Department will review the legal status of immigrants who mock Kirk’s death.
As I think I’ve made obvious by now, I have little time for the scourge of weepy revisionism. Charlie Kirk was a bigot and a misogynist and a promoter of too many conspiracy theories to list, including that of a plot to replace white people in America. To posthumously (and euphemistically) describe him as a ‘divisive figure’ simply won’t do. The organisation he founded, Turning Point USA, was a knock off John Birch Society, dedicated to the same paranoid vision of rooting out ‘communists’ and ‘subversives’. In 2016 it published a ‘Professor Watchlist’, meant to encourage McCarthyite witch-hunts against ‘leftists’. The organisation has a UK branch too; I was recently just a few yards away when its armband-wearing chief operating officer gave a Nazi salute following a foam-flecked speech at an anti-refugee protest in Portsmouth. Forgive me if I don’t think much of a ‘legacy’ as paltry as this.
I suppose I’m more interested in what the stratospheric rise of a person like Charlie Kirk says about the state of political discourse. He was in many ways representative of a type that has come to dominate the internet’s ‘infotainment’ ecosystem in recent years. His purported renown among a section of the youth probably explains the urge among certain mainstream newscasters to conjure away the nasty bits. They too desperately want to be down with the kids.
It is certainly true that Kirk was a successful operator in the digital format in which politics is increasingly consumed. He was an effective political entrepreneur and a skilful gladiator in the cybernated coliseum; a pioneer of the easily-digestible 10-second ‘slap-down’; a hero to a subdivision of a subliterate generation in a subliterate nation.
But did he really promote ‘debate’? Only in the sense that a muzzle promotes conversation. As Kyle Spencer, who spent time with Kirk while writing his 2022 book Raising them Right: The Untold Story of America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, told New York magazine a few days ago:
‘If your definition of a debater is somebody who is 10-plus years older than the people he is debating, spends hours and hours a day coming up with arguments for his belief system, who goes to communities of much younger people, finds topics in which he is a great expert and a great debater on, brings them into the fold to discuss these topics, then uses what they say on videos that his organisation edits, and puts them online to mock his opponents and the views of his opponents, then [Kirk’s] a good debater.’
Moreover, even the radioactive politics he espoused, designed to prey on the most base and primal of human instincts, appear to have been partly churned out to order. As Spencer pointed out in the same interview, ‘He [Kirk] always seemed to have the views of the people who were giving him money or power’.
In a characteristic piece of hyperbole, the President said Kirk’s ‘legacy’ would ‘live on for countless generations to come’. As to the extent of this legacy, a modest stack of ear-splitting airport fodder (a representative sample: How to Beat the Woke and Save the West) hardly counts as an oeuvre. In truth, like the majority of internet loudmouths, Charlie Kirk ceased to exist as an important individual as soon as he stopped posting.
Just as his murder was a by-product of the Second Amendment he vociferously championed (a form of political extremism in its own right), Kirk’s persona could only reach the audience it did because of a digital landscape that rewards those who adopt the hysterical tone and register of talk radio. He specialised in a style of discourse that was emotive, adversarial, and most of all designed to generate maximum online engagement (clicks, likes, shares) regardless of the consequences.
Most people seem to recognise that such algorithmic sludge is not synonymous with a healthy political culture. Yet the prevailing telos seems to inoculate most from any sustained critique: technology is inevitable and technology is progress.
The classic text on this fallacy is Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, published some 40 years ago. Postman’s strikingly simple insight - drawing on the work of media theorist Marshal McLuhan - was that the technologies we use to communicate invariably shape the content. Postman saw how lofty political subjects had been rendered ‘shrivelled and absurd’ as the ‘magic of electronics’ supplanted the ‘magic of writing’. Though we continue to use the same well-worn labels - debate, democracy, free speech, et cetera - their meaning has been utterly transformed by the constraints of the medium. As Postman might have put it, we don’t see a debate on the internet. We see a series of short clips in which people who call themselves debaters appear.
The objects of Postman’s ire seem relatively benign when compared to the forces unleashed by the algorithm. At the risk of sounding tautological, the social media age is less about entertainment and more about capturing attention. If television reduced politics to a series of soundbites and carefully crafted images designed to produce impressions rather than sustained reasoning, social media has created a simulacrum of the democratic commons. A place where the purveyors of bigotry and superstition furnish the world with an ever-expanding constituency of volatile and resentful losers. It is both tragic and fitting that the killer should emerge from the same poisonous digital swamp navigated so expertly by his victim.
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