The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

Candle-lit vigil in Utah, where Kirk was fatally shot

Yesterday evening, in a twenty-five minute dialogue at the Duran on the Charlie Kirk shooting, Alexander Mercouris made a few excellent (and a few laboured) points. He also quoted the WB Yeats poem, The Second Coming.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

The centre – or as Tariq Ali dubbed it, the Extreme Centre – clearly cannot hold. My Trotskyist comrade of the ’80s, Paul Mason, seems not to grasp this. Furiously he defends Starmer while attacking Corbyn and Sultana for, he accuses, repeating the catastrophic error of the German communists whose refusal to forge an alliance of expedience with the social democrats swept the Nazis to power in 1933 …

… whereas it seems clear to me that exasperation with decades of neoliberalism, administered by both the Tweedledum and Tweedledee parties of the Extreme Centre, has furnished perfect conditions in which the masses turn in despair to buffoons and fraudsters whose fake populism – but real ties to big money – would not in saner times bear the slightest scrutiny.

Would you buy a used car from either man?

Hours before that Duran podcast I’d tuned in to twenty-eight highly polished minutes, flawed by philosophic idealism but rich with the psychological insights (and their practical application) of an oft quoted but widely misunderstood 16th century observer of the human condition through the prism of power. The musings of Florentine diplomat Niccolò Machiavelli shed useful light on why, as Yeats – the man of letters who lost in love to the man of action ¹ – put it, “the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”. 

Four centuries on another Italian, a Sardinian imprisoned by Mussolini, would write from his jail cell that:

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters. ²

The old world is dying – as documented ten days ago in the Road to WW3. Part 4 – but with a new one struggling to be born, we are indeed in the time of monsters.

My cue for the best of many offerings I’ve encountered so far on the assassination and instant martyrdom of Charlie Kirk.

The Martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

Martyrs are used by messianic movements to sanctify violence. To show any mercy or understanding toward the enemy is to betray the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

Chris Hedges

The assassination of Charlie Kirk presages a new, deadly stage in the disintegration of a fractious and highly polarized United States. While toxic rhetoric and threats are lobbed across cultural divides like hand grenades, sometimes spilling over into actual violence — including the murder of Minnesota House of Representatives Speaker Emerita Melissa Hortman and her husband and the two assassination attempts against Donald Trump — Kirk’s killing is a harbinger of full-scale social disintegration.

His murder has given the movement he represented — grounded in Christian nationalism — a martyr. Martyrs are the lifeblood of violent movements. Any flinching over the use of violence, any talk of compassion or understanding, any effort to mediate or discuss, is a betrayal of the martyr and the cause the martyr died defending.

Martyrs sacralize violence. They are used to turn the moral order upside down. Depravity becomes morality. Atrocities become heroism. Crime becomes justice. Hate becomes virtue. Greed and nepotism become civic virtues. Murder becomes good. War is the final aesthetic. This is what is coming.

“We have to have steely resolve,” said conservative political strategist Steve Bannon on his show “War Room,” adding, “Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.”

“If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die,” wrote Elon Musk on X.

“The entire Right has to band together. Enough of this in-fighting bullshit. We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell,” wrote commentator and author Matt Walsh on X. “Put the personal squabbles aside. Now’s not the time. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.”

Republican Congressman Clay Higgins wrote that he will use, “Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk…” He further states “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”

Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale capitalized on Kirk’s death to advocate for a takedown of the “red-green alliance” of “Communists and Islamists” who he claims have united to destroy Western civilization. He proposes an app where citizens can upload pictures of crime and homelessness in exchange for “property-tax rebates.”

Far-right comedian Sam Hyde, who has nearly half a million followers on X, wrote in response to Trump’s announcement of Kirk’s death that it is, “Time to do your fucking job and seize power… if you want to be more than a footnote in the ‘American Collapse’ section of future history books, it’s now or never.” In his tweet, he tags members of the administration and private military contractors.

Conservative actor James Woods warned, “Dear leftists: we can have a conversation or a civil war. One more shot from your side and you will not get this choice again.” His tweet was reposted by almost 20,000 people, received 4.9 million views and over 96,000 likes.

These are a sample of the slew of vitriolic sentiments shared and cheered on by tens of millions of Americans.

The dispossession of the working class, 30 million who have been laid off because of deindustrialization, has engendered rage, despair, dislocation, alienation and fostered magical thinking. It has fed conspiracy theories, a lust for vengeance and a celebration of violence as a purgative for social and cultural decay.

Christian fascists — like Kirk and Trump — have astutely preyed on this despair. They stoked the embers. Kirk’s killing will set it alight.

Dissidents, artists, gays, intellectuals, the poor, the vulnerable, people of color, those who are undocumented or who do not mindlessly repeat the cant of a perverted Christian nationalism, will be condemned as human contaminants to be excised from the body politic. They will become, as in all diseased societies, sacrificial victims in the vain attempt to achieve moral renewal and recapture a lost glory and prosperity.

The cannibalization of society, a futile attempt to recreate a mythical America, will accelerate the disintegration. The intoxication of violence — many of those reacting to Kirk’s killing seemed giddy about a looming bloodbath — will feed on itself like a firestorm.

The martyr is vital to the crusade, in this case ridding America of those Trump calls the “radical left.”

Martyrs are memorialized in ceremonies and acts of remembrance to remind followers of the righteousness of the cause and the perfidy of those who are blamed for the martyr’s death. This is what Trump did when he called Kirk “a martyr for truth and freedom” in a video message on September 10, awarded Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom and ordered flags to be flown at half-staff until Sunday. It is why Kirk’s casket will be flown back to Phoenix, Arizona on Air Force Two.

Kirk was a poster child for our emergent Christian Fascism. He peddled the Great Replacement Theory, which claims liberals or “globalists” allow immigrants of color into the country in order to replace whites, distorting immigration trends into conspiracy. He was Islamophobic, tweeting “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America,” and that it is “not compatible with western civilization.”

When children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel said “Jesus says to love God and to love your neighbor as yourself,” Kirk retorted that “Satan has quoted scripture plenty” and added “by the way Ms. Rachel, you might wanna crack open that Bible of yours, in a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture is in Leviticus 18, is that thou shall Lay with another man and be stoned to death.”

He demanded we roll back the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and disparaged civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King. He was demeaning towards Black people, “If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman…is she there because of affirmative action?” He said “prowling Blacks” are targeting white people “for fun.” He blamed Black Lives Matter for “destroying the fabric of our society.”

Kirk insisted the 2020 election was stolen from Trump. He founded Professor Watchlist and School Board Watchlist to purge professors and teachers with what he called “radical leftist” agendas. He advocated televised public executions which he insisted should be mandatory viewing for children.

The idea that he championed free speech and liberty is absurd. He was an enemy of both.

Kirk, who was a cheerleader for the cult of Trump, embodied the hypermasculinity that is at the core of fascist movements. This was perhaps his primary attraction to youth, especially white men. He claimed there is “a war on men,” fetishized guns and sold Trump to his followers as a man’s man.

“There’s a lot you can call Donald Trump,” he wrote. “No one has ever called him feminine. Trump is a giant middle finger to all the screeching hall monitors that attacked young men for just existing. He’s a giant F YOU to the feminist establishment that was never challenged before he came down the golden escalator. Most of the media missed this. Young men did not.”

History has shown what comes next. It won’t be pleasant. Kirk, elevated to martyrdom, gives those seeking to extinguish our democracy the license to kill, just as Kirk was killed. It lifts what few constraints still exist to protect us from state abuse and vigilante violence. Kirk’s name and visage will be employed to accelerate the road to tyranny, which is as he would have wanted it.

* * *

1. Yeats proposed four times to Maude Gonne, the Anglo-Irish heiress who embraced Irish nationalism and turned him down for John McBride, one of the fifteen executed by the British, and honoured here by Sinead O’Connor and The Chieftains, for their role in the failed Easter Rising.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks.