The Aftermath of Kirk's Assassination
And the New McCarthyism
Opportunism and nastiness are a fatal combination. The American right have decided to conjure up the spirit of their political hero, Joseph McCarthy, in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Trump, the primary political instigator, collectively blamed the ‘radical left’ calling them ‘directly responsible for the violence’ while notable right wing figures such as Stephen Miller, Tim Pool and Laura Loomer have called for purges of the left, including:
Designating left wing organisations as terrorists
Purging anyone with left wing views in government institutions
Firing people they disagree with
The American right have become collectivists who don’t believe in individual responsibility. The language employed is revealing. It’s ‘they’ killed Kirk, or ‘you killed him’ referring to random left wingers online. One right wing account, taking this to its logical conclusion, created a database of those who celebrated the death of Kirk. The account has 21.2k followers and it was reposted by Elon Musk who wrote, ‘They are the ones poisoning the minds of our children’. The ‘they’ is rarely defined, its vagueness intended to be a broad canopy under which any oppositional group can be isolated and targeted. It was likewise Musk who wrote that, ‘The Left is the party of murder’ while simultaneously calling for the dissolution of the British Parliament, in one of the most spectacular non-sequiturs of recent years. Stupidity of this sort inevitably invites further absurdity. Nick Fuentes, a racist reactionary who can’t find a conspiracy theory he doesn’t believe in, released a video in which he mourned Kirk’s demise. His musings would have meant little to anyone capable of critical thinking but it prompted the comedian and commentator Dave Smith to praise Fuentes and ‘give him all the credit in the world for this’. And so the antisemitic Fuentes was praised by the Jewish comedian Smith for a vacuous statement about how ‘Christian’ Kirk supposedly was. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.
The response of the right shows us that no moral principle was involved in its opposition to cancel culture over the preceding years. Ben Shapiro, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, perhaps some of the most prominent right wingers who led this charge, did so for their own sake. They wanted licence to speak freely without granting this, in turn, to their opponents. The left, meanwhile, created a rod for its own back by cancelling its opponents for years. The slogan being on ‘the right side of history’, for instance, was a stupid, arrogant phrase. It meant letting go of your critical faculties and buying into a secular version of religious certainty and dogma.
A quick scan of social media now shows both left and right wing accounts posting news headlines to one another providing examples of mutual attempts at cancellation. In some cases, individuals who in one instance objected fiercely to an ally being suppressed, went on to eagerly seek the silencing of someone they opposed. And so, political discourse has become a parody of itself with no engagement in ideas but simple meme creation in which you laugh at the other side for their hypocrisy while cheering your own side for its apparent wit and good humour. This is not serious politics and its effects will be devastatingly felt in a few decades.
Even those who dissent from the new McCarthyism have found odd ways of objecting to it. Gregg Nunziata, responding to Stephen Miller’s fulminations about cracking down on the left declared on social media:
I worked with Stephen. He's an able propagandist, which has its place in our politics, but he has no business in a senior WH policy role. What he's doing here, what he has done since the horrible assassination of Kirk, is disgusting and frightening.
To read this you would think Miller has done honourable work until now. Not only is this untrue, but while correctly describing Miller as a propagandist, Nunziata thinks of this as a necessary role; as a respectable descriptor, ‘which has its place in our politics’ rather than the insult that it should be in the post WW2 era.
In the aftermath of a political assassination, the American right has sought to marshal the population to uniformly mourn a partisan of theirs while suppressing those who disagree. In doing so, they have made despots of themselves. There may come a day, therefore, when the US constitution, which forms a ring of steel around American liberty, is discarded as no more than a piece of paper.