Charlie Kirk: All-American Goon

Steeped in an ever-looming crisis of mass-eviction, mass-surveillance, constant war, climate change, and a global pandemic the American establishment need their willingly complicit henchmen to gleefully defend the wretched immorality and spiritual discontent they perpetrate. Kirk is their lap dog.

Introduction- The Servant to a Sinking Ship

In the midst of an inconceivably catastrophic global crisis there are always the vehement defenders of the comforting embrace of authoritarianism, those who entice a discontented population with a lure of a blatantly artificial structure, purpose and redemption. For Kirk and his cronies an emboldened and ever-popular Christian Fascism seducing white America with the promise of fulfilment and approval by God is their weapon of choice.

Subtly alluding to the fantasy of rampant demographic change, appealing to chest-pumping nationalism and espousing utter contempt for public institutions, Kirk seeks to dismantle the husk of American liberalism through an unstoppable stream of propaganda. With the election of Joe Biden, it might seem easy to assume his political project is dead but with time and skilful political strategy it will grow and overcome our institutions.

Part 1- A Turning Point

Bankrolled by wealthy conservative donors and shambolic foundations, ‘Turning Point USA’ advances it’s baseless right wing propaganda through a never-ending stream of social media posts.  This paranoid, egoistic organisation peddles a constant cascade of Randian propaganda generated from a dangerous political movement.

Much like after the Second World War social democracy flourished and grew to become a political consensus, the politics of narcissistic, pseudo-Christian Conservatism have rampaged throughout the desecrated remains of the Western world slowly growing a consensus of its own. Through a violent rejection of civil liberties, public services and moral responsibility coupled with an immersive narrative of an ever-present conflict between themselves and an undetermined antagonist the far-right have successfully engineered an alternative reality to shield themselves from their moral obligations. In this reality it is their duty to abandon their fellow human being into the recession tsunami or to the cold concrete floors of migrant detention centre, in this reality their political opponents will be condemned to a divinely endorsed eternal hell fire and in this reality politicians are either to be revered as Godly protagonists or to be held with the contempt relegated for Satan himself.

This consensus, growing in popularity and enveloping hundreds of millions across the world, requires it’s propagandists, it’s subservient henchmen to diligently serve the enforcers of far-right politics. Kirk and his organisation, ‘Turning Point USA’ serve this purpose obediently.

The Trumpian concoction has left every country it reaches overcome with an insurmountable wave of dismay, but the artificial fulfilment it provides to its supporters, many of who were left to wallow the agonising failures of modern liberalism, is incredibly effective at ensuring they are sedated and numbed from the fiery suffering of their conditions. Whilst the powerful perpetrators of rampant authoritarian egoism occupy a morally abhorrent position it is the subservient propagandists, willing henchmen and bootlicking goons which occupy the reeking bottom of the moral hierarchy. Drained from their last droplet of moral courage these sycophantic hucksters hitch their horse to the post of grotesque immorality and rejection of the human conscience in an effort to fulfil themselves with the booming roars of a blood-thirsty crowd.

Kirk, originating from the emergent and successful strain of far-right politics is one of these con artists. To spread this repugnant ideology and ensure it reaches it’s inevitable conclusion, military dictatorship and mass-privatisation, Kirk hooks his desperate and unsuspecting clients on a poison of manufactured individuality cloaking a sinister submission to the nationalist hivemind. The Trump experiment proved the viability of Kirk’s politics, although short-lived, his brand of narcissistic, far-right Christian populism, could very well hook it’s claws onto the naïve prey of American institutions degrading the very idea of a society in the process.

Part 2- Charlie Kirk’s America

As America meets it’s financial, military and moral reckoning, as the very foundations of the unreliable but vastly important public institutions collapse, the CFPB is dismantled and the education system is repeatedly degraded, many desperately attempt to rationalise this downfall. For Kirk and his ilk, this crumbling society is welcomed warmly as the long-awaited collapse of the remnants of moral obligation. Those institutions which are owned, operated and funded by the public not for the profit of shareholders but for the benefit of the public themselves must be dismantled as they obstruct Kirk’s dystopian vision. A vision of an America in which a Pinochet-like dictator pompously exerts militaristic force over the world whilst his population is left to the depraved will of Adam Smith’s sloppy invisible hand all the while peddling the myth that they are still somehow living in a democracy. Masquerading as the vanguard of ‘individual liberty’ this America would ditch ‘big government’ in favour of a chaotic pseudo-libertarian empire on the verge of collapse.

In his article for ‘The Hill’ entitled ‘Obama’s silent regulatory army is still on the march’, Kirk lays out his deranged perception of an America at war between the side of the valiant Trumpian right and a twisted hoard of ‘pencil-necked bureaucrats’, as Kirk puts it. His article is littered with imagery of warfare and battle, comparing weak but vital institutions like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and Federal Trade Commission to a “regulatory death-star” and referring to the abused and abandoned institutions holding America together as “limiting our freedom”. Kirk and his organisations mission is not to improve or advance society, it is not even to regress it but to destroy the very concept of a society. Kirk believes, like Thatcher, that there is ‘no such thing as a society’ and that all institutions founded on the mutual benefit of human beings must be ripped apart. In there place must come an evangelical theocracy, as Chris Hedges prophetically lays out in his 2007 book ‘American Fascists’, in which all that is left of our common institutions are bands of far-right evangelical militias roaming the streets with assault rifles and in the place of welfare is a degrading system of Church-controlled ‘charity’. Those living in poverty, enveloped in the claws of mass-incarceration or who have migrated from another country will be viewed as ungrateful parasites to be cleansed and done away with. The issue of systemic racism within America can be distilled down to ‘cultural failures’ and hundreds of thousands of black and working class people can be packed into cages for the profit of private contractors and at an ever faster pace. As outlined in his raging diatribe against the system of higher education Kirk would seek to dismantle all education which does not maximise your economic utility to an oligarchic and faceless financial order. Finally, the dwindling regulations on fossil fuel corporations will be stripped and labour protections will be ruthlessly slashed leaving a once unstable but functioning society as a chaotic dictatorship governed by selfishness. The endeavour to establish Charlie Kirk’s America is a last ditch attempt from an establishment slowly confronting their imminent downfall to cling onto American political and economic dominance. If the current political order of economic and social liberalism fails to recognise their vast failures and the precarity of democratic institutions, the hawkish advocates of authoritarian laissez faire capitalism will dismantle American democracy.

Without people like Kirk to defend and legitimate their charade the perpetrators of far-right evangelical politics would have nothing. Every despotic movement requires its skilful propagandist, without them it would not survive. Without Kirk and his gaggle of grifters, the wretched immorality of the Trump administration; be it in its increase in drone strikes, ruthless immigration policies or his tyrannical use of the federal agents in Portland; would have no basis or legitimacy to undergo their political project. Kirk is the lifeblood of a political project intent on expanding the power of a morally bankrupt oligarchy.

Part 3- A Patriotic Henchman

If there is any country which perfectly emblemises the role of the political goon it is America. A nation in which the every position of power is dependent on obedient subserviency to another authority, be it financial or governmental. It is a nation of the crowd in which pompous political hawks manipulate a purpose-hungry population into their slimy grip and in which their servants comply obediently. Moral courage and the role of the dissenter are shunned and scorned as counter-American. Material which questions the structures of power is hidden and censored. America is truly the nation of the henchman.

Charlie Kirk embodies this subservient spirit, he, like a used-car salesman attempts to sell the American public on a highly dangerous and suspiciously under-priced death trap. He hops onto conservative political project to conservative political project bowing down to the all-consuming grip of the GOP establishment. People like Kirk have forever lurked in the corners of conservative internet theorising about ‘Cultural Marxism’ or whatever baseless narrative is needed to herd their sheep into the slaughterhouse, but now they have proven that their politics is viable and resonating. If the Trumpian right gains power once again, we must hold the wielders of immense political authority to harsh account but so must we hold the repugnant ranks of servile demons who laud their Duce as he consolidates his police state. Those, like William F. Buckley, who stood in the tradition of Kirk and defended Ronald Reagan as he pillaged, raped and slaughtered his way through El Salvador must meet a moral reckoning, just as the perpetrators of this brutality must. Those lifeless hacks who willingly allowed George W. Bush to devastate Iraq, purging it of 500,000 human beings and installing a puppet regime must never see the tick of a ballot in next to their name again. And those goon-like liberal cultists who defended Barrack Obama as he vampirically sucked the life blood out of Libya and expanded the surveillance state to levels never before seen must be barred from the columns of power and influence.

American history is littered with human embodiments of the Nuremburg defence “I was just following orders”, thousands of hawkish defenders of a bloody status quo, thousands of cheering yes men to the vultures encircling the rotting remains of American public institutions. Kirk is undoubtfully one of them and if we allow him to avoid critique and consequence by virtue of toleration, he will come out from his position lurking in the background of a disastrous Biden administration and preach his utopian gospel of nationalistic terror whilst his masters seize the reigns and slit the throat of liberal institutions. Based on egoistic economics, violent, apocalyptic theology and a foreign policy of chauvinistic posturing, Kirk and his fellow puppets could very will seize the infrastructure of American power by offering the last glimpse of hope whilst the links blink out one by one, handing it over to America’s oligarchs.