This week I found myself, belatedly, watching the murdered American rightwing influencer Charlie Kirk’s online videos for the first time. But the more I learn about Kirk, the more he accelerates, both in the manner of his life, and then in the horrifying manner of his cruel death, my surrender to utter despair about where we are at, and where we are headed. And I’m supposed to be the Nerve’s light relief! I’m here all week!! Try the fish!!!
Since we’re discussing a teller of harsh truths, let’s be honest here. Charlie Kirk was a sideshow act, travelling around America arguing at high velocity with emotionally immature teenagers, the Tattooed Lady of Reasoned Debate, or a bareknuckle boxer in the old west, going from town to town in a covered wagon festooned with pots and pans, and bravely taking on all comers, as long as they were small children.
James O’Brien would have dismantled Kirk as easily as he did Nigel Farage in 2014 (who never darkened O’Brien’s LBC door again, preferring instead to have his sphincter thoroughly scoured each week by the wriggling tongue of Nick Ferrari). And so would the Weetabix-haired news-badger Andrew Neil, whose dogged questioning provoked Kirk’s babbling influencer counterpart Ben Shapiro into calling Neil, publisher of the Spectator and co-founder of its urinal-trough reflection GB News, “a leftist”.
Kirk’s manifestation in May at the Oxford Union, a private debating club with no concrete links to the university itself, appeared on his YouTube channel under the heading “Charlie Kirk Vs 300 Oxford Students”. That’s the kind of engagement-grabbing title social media professionals require. Bonnie Blue Beds 1,057 Men in 12 Hours! Peckham Man Eats 18 Pies in 43 Minutes! Charlie Kirk Vs 300 Oxford Students! Such encounters are then strip-mined for clips to go viral, the ancient art of measured debate reduced to attention deficient blips. Charlie Kirk Destroys Pro-Trans Pierced-Face Leftist! Charlie Kirk Destroys Pride-Flag-Wearing Liberal! Charlie Kirk Brings Black Student to Tears in “White Privilege” Debate! Charlie Kirk Beds 1,057 Pies in 43 Minutes!
Kirk’s Oxford turn is full of unchallenged lies. And now millions of people have watched it. Within five minutes, Kirk cites the mythical white South African genocide, though he hesitates to use the phrase itself. (Two white South African farmers were murdered in the six months preceding Kirk’s appearance. It’s so hard to decide exactly what defines a genocide these days.) And he misidentifies the same photo Donald Trump falsely cited, of a memorial to murder victims, as a mass burial site for white South African farmers, which is a bit like thinking all the people that died in the world wars are fish-fingered in a vertical grave under the Whitehall Cenotaph.
At eighteen minutes, Kirk reiterates the popular Twitter (currently X) lie that the TV series Adolescence (“anti-white propaganda”, according to Elon Musk) was based on the Southport killer. Apparently, the black killer was made white by the writers due to wokeness gone mental, and Kirk explains with wild-eyed glee that the show should have been about “a third-world Arab young kid radicalised by Islam who then decided to go and stab somebody”. Adolescence came out nine months after the Southport murders, and shooting had already begun before they took place. Kirk’s conspiracy theory was pure racist wish-fulfilment. Film and television just don’t turn around that fast. Last month, I was asked to meet the director of a star-vehicle biopic that the aforesaid star, still attached, sacked me from 24 years ago.
At 50 minutes, Kirk cites as unfair the conviction of Lucy Connolly but omits, disingenuously, the crucial detail that she called for migrants to be burned alive. Ironically, Kirk’s reasoning, earlier in the Oxford session, for allowing white South Africans to claim asylum in America was the existence of an old anti-apartheid song with the chorus “Kill the Boer”, since disavowed by the ANC but still a favourite of the Economic Freedom Fighters party. I guess some death threats matter and some don’t. Looks like there’s one rule for white Conservative councillor’s wives from Northampton and quite another for black anti-apartheid campaigners from South Africa. Maybe if Lucy Connolly had sung “set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the bastards” to the tune of The Special AKA’s “Free Nelson Mandela”, Kirk would have considered it as unacceptable as the Kill the Boer song.
Kirk’s false assertions and inconsistencies were not questioned. His lies roll out over the young people in attendance as millions look on online, doubtless eschewing a legacy media they don’t trust for personality-driven and unregulated internet content like Kirk’s, the influence of which has only been increased by the martyr status his cold-blooded murder confers on him. And all those viewers can now reasonably assume that things Kirk said were true because even at this supposedly august Oxford institution nobody cared to fact-check them and push back before they were platformed to millions by wilfully unaccountable social media. And this is where we are now. And where we are is totally fucked.
Writing about his dislike of the tyranny of accuracy in the Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, in June last year, the Tory Lord and Brexit idiot David Frost opined: “Our new establishment – academics, quangocrats, the BBC…believe that you are too stupid…to distinguish between the true and the false. And they think it’s government’s job – or perhaps theirs – to do it for you instead.”
Are all the people who believe Keir Starmer once defended the Southport killer’s father, or that Sadiq Khan wants to impose “Shakira” law in London, or the things Charlie Kirk said in Oxford, “stupid”, or are they just victims of very persuasive social media platforms and broadcasters, like GB News, that are somehow not required to be accurate or truthful? Perhaps it is government’s job to step in and fight this, perhaps with a cross-party initiative. I can see the viral clips already, beating the bad guys at their own game. Ed Davey Destroys Billionaire White Supremacist Social Media Baron! Zack Polanski Brings GB News Owner Sir Paul Marshall to Tears! Keir Starmer Beds 1,057 Pies in 43 Minutes!
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours until the end of next year, including two weeks at London’s Alexandra Palace in February. Stewart also appears with Harry Hill in a benefit for orangutans at Leicester Square theatre, London, on 24 November.