Charlie Kirk – I was wrong, but so were lots of other people
Politics really is a most collosal waste of time. By which I mean, following politics is. I have been hugely distracted by the big news about the killing of Charlie Kirk. This is surprising, because I was hardly aware of his existence prior to the sudden ending of it. I had followed up some links on Bluesky earlier this year when he turned up at Oxford. The story then was that a leading American influencer had done rather poorly when debating with UK students. I was curious. Itś always good fun, though sadly rather rare, to see Brits getting the better of Americans.
The clips didn´t dissappoint. Kirk was indeed a pretty inept debater and came off pretty badly. I was quite surprised that someone who does this for a living was so bad at what ought to be his bread and butter. I didn´t realise then how big a deal the guy seems to have been stateside.
But the news story about him being shot was strangely compelling. There was the obvious question of who had shot him and why. I managed to convince myself that it was a professional job, based on the efficient way the bullet dispatched the victim and a report that a private jet had left a nearby airport shortly afterwards. I even decided that the most likely sponsor of this well planned and co-ordinated attack was probably Israel. That is their kind of thing after all.
I was unwise to waste braincells on idle speculation. But I wasn´t the only one. Social media and the mainstream media were full of ideas and quite a few assertions about who had killed him and why. President Trump confidently blamed it on radical leftists. This was quite a popular theory. Many other people went along with the suggestion, often treating it as not simply speculation but as an obvious fact. I don´t think this was based on anything other than wishful thinking. Any objective assessment of American politics wouldn´t lead you to conclude that the radical left are unusually violent. In fact, itś rather hard to find any radical leftists anywhere doing anything in particular.
What none of us expected was that the gunman would turn out to be a radical rightist whose beef with Kirk was that he wasn´t radically right enough. In my defence, Iḿ not a politician. I should have stuck to my own job. But itś a bit worrying that people whose job is running the country can get it so wrong. But at the end of the day, this whole business while tragic has no real significance. Unless Kirk was a way better speaker and deeper thinker than his Oxford effort suggests, he was basically an entertainer. He didn´t say much that was insightful or analytical. I don´t think it was even especially true. His act would surely have started to lose its impact with familiarity. Heĺl probably be remembered a bit longer as a result of his death than he would have been had he had he been left to his own devices. The number of voices calling for division and discrimination against the marginalised in the United States have been reduced by one. But there are plenty of others ready to take his place.
