The heart of the MAGA movement should be read less as a political fad or a partisan organization than as a sect with a creed, and the far-right agitator was the typical conservative missionary
The mourning and expressions of compassion following the death of Charlie Kirk, the reactionary agitator recently killed by a sniper in the middle of a debate at a Utah university, have become part of the government’s agenda and editorial guidelines for the major U.S. media outlets, and the grief and its theatricalization have served to relativize and interpret their political practices as correct. Liberal compassion is the modern extension of false ecclesiastical guilt. We should also note that in a country where a bullet shattering your carotid artery is part of political discussion, evidently almost anything short of being shot can be interpreted as a correct way to debate. However, what liberalism resolves in an exemplary manner — with the little anguish it causes — is the relationship between violent public language and political crime, since it simply disconnects them. However, it is very likely that, in the long run, political crime cannot be avoided in a nation that has had to accept the historical justifications of supremacism as an inevitable evil to guarantee its functioning and Constitution.
I fear that the reason Donald Trump has treated Kirk — one of his main and most charismatic propagandists — as a hero and a martyr has nothing to do with the calculations of a head of government, but with a religious duty. The heart of the MAGA movement, which is not the entirety of Trumpism, should be read less as a political fad or a partisan organization than as a sect with a creed, and Charlie Kirk was the typical conservative missionary, a son of one of the Protestant schools that founded the metaphysical consciousness of the country. The efficient rhetoric of techno-Christian capitalism mixes facts and figures with an invocation of the Lord and establishes a cultural battle in which the well-meaning children of progressive colleges have no chance, given that they were previously handcuffed by the moral strata of wokism.
At this point, one has a lot of criticism of the woke movement, especially for its political conservatism and the many ways in which it fostered and fertilized the current state of affairs, but this was a scenario where people were demanding the use of a pronoun and the right to abortion, not the extermination of entire populations or the dehumanization of immigrants. The most arrogant xenophobia, widespread racism, and whitewashing of the Palestinian genocide — the main characteristics of Kirk’s discourse — are the ideological fist of a Republican administration plagued by fascists, and not correct ways of exercising politics, unless we admit or accept that we will have to live forever with certain fundamentalist realities and ideas, and that the American liberal project is capable, at most, of containing them from time to time, but not of suppressing or sweeping them away. This relativization, disguised as the rules of a civilized game, expresses not so much tolerance as impotence, because one could bet that the country as we know it will disappear before gun ownership is banned.
The assassination of Kirk, who died at the hands of the Second Amendment he so strongly defended, holds a certain irony only for unbelieving consciences. But if we’re not talking about a demagogue — and Christians of his ilk generally aren’t — we would have to admit that Kirk was willing to include himself among the number of lives unfortunately lost in defense of the civil right to bear arms. He died for his ideals, in a world where such an assassination isn’t absurd or avoidable, but transcendent and epic. It’s not so much the consequence of a rampant national political crisis as the emblem of a necessary civil war, always latent in the recesses of a Confederate soul that has forged its post-slavery identity by refusing to accept its historical and military defeat. Charlie Kirk is the millennial standard-bearer of the nation, the homeland, and the American conservative family, and the aggressiveness that has continued after his death, the way his followers demand blood from everything they relentlessly label “communism” or the “radical left,” is a complete reproduction of his political ways and an extraordinary posthumous tribute. The influence of these individuals is global, and finds fertile ground in the self-pity, frustration, and self-repressive machine of adult malehood.
The American media and organizations across the ideological spectrum anxiously awaited the identification of the killer to find out whether or not they should be held accountable for the mastermind of the crime. But the perpetrator’s political opinions or upbringing mean little to nothing in the face of the violence constitutive of the American national-religious project, and the way in which any person, through ready access to high-powered rifles and semi-automatic weapons, can momentarily take charge of it. Tyler Robinson, the barely 22-year-old who allegedly killed Kirk, had carved a verse from Bella Ciao, the Italian anti-fascist anthem, into one of the cartridges. He grew up in a Mormon, Republican family, where rifles and guns are part of a cultural folklore that frequently generates unexpected disturbances. And that’s not exactly the preserve of the country’s liberal establishment.
In a scene where public reason has become tightly tied to the symbolic capital of the victim, what has bothered the white man, who is constantly complaining, is not the victimhood of others, but the fact that he is not the victim. Kirk’s murder is nothing more than the white man killing himself, caught up in the spiritual turmoil of American Calvinist deformations and the profound horror provoked by the presence and flourishing of the other in the fragile psyche of his exceptionalism on Earth. One of the most auspicious cultural signs of the prelude to fascism is the lightness, rudeness, and simplicity acquired by gestures of social rebellion, since all transgressions are oriented toward reaction: whether it’s just any madman enlisted in the crusade against what he calls political correctness, or Marinetti saying that war is the hygiene of the world and opening the esthetic path for Mussolini to rise to power.
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