Dear editor,
The coverage has been wall-to-wall ever since the recent assassination of Charlie Kirk. I understand it is a tragedy to lose a young family man to homicide. Politics is very divided now. Despite this, people are getting fired for criticizing Kirk’s politics. With everything happening in the world, I did not see this escalating so much. I had only heard of Charlie Kirk and Turning Points USA in passing before this happened but now I realize that he was big in the Trump world. Why was he so popular to begin with?
Thanks,
Davey STL.
Dear Davey,
In western representative democracies, politics has literally become a bloodsport. Despite this, the range of issues being debated are actually very narrow. There is always a centrist liberal party and a right wing conservative party and both of them want to maximize returns for wealthy donors above all. There is some discussion about foreign policy, tweaks to government distribution and emotional social issues. That’s about it. In Canada, we have a corporate stooge for prime minister. He campaigned as some kind of progressive nation-builder but he has been anything but in government.
Right wing donors in the United States, under the guise of “libertarianism,” are particularly focused on unshackling themselves from environmental protections and labour laws while gaining tax loopholes and subsidies. These ideas aren’t very saleable in the perfunctory elections that take place every couple of years and that’s where activists like Charlie Kirk come in.
Kirk found a couple of wealthy patrons for his Turning Point organization when he was about 18 years old: Bill Montgomery and Foster Friess. They plugged him into the obscenely vast and well-funded right wing donor network that elevated him to star-status on the right. He built his brand identity by debating liberal college students for a wider audience. In one produced for Jubilee Media, there were five topics discussed: abortion, gender studies, trans-women, diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hires and affirmative action. Nothing about corporate power, environmental protection, financial monopolies or the military-industrial complex—the issues that will actually impact the future well-being of society. And that’s the point. Noam Chomsky:
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum – even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.1
When Marx and Engels wrote “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas”—they weren’t talking about the “ideas” paraded about by Joe Rogan, CNN or Charlie Kirk. They were talking about those that can’t be questioned.
The ruling class lost a talented propagandist, a powerful distractor. Kirk should not have been murdered. It is a tragic loss for his family and his assassination will play right into the hands of his own talking points. After all, if he can be killed over the things he said, those things must now seem really important.
In sols,
Your editor.
Send your questions to the Reclamation: editor@thereclamation.co
Footnotes:
Noam Chomsky, The Common Good (Odonian Press, 1998): 43. ↩︎