The Town Criers and the Gooners

Another marriage made in hell.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder, false claims about him bubbled up from the internet's bowels which were then dutifully parroted by certain legacy media figures in a process that now takes place about once every three days. The appearance after every occasion of note of near-identical, mendacious talking points across the pundit space—from Otto English to Matthew Stadlen to Stewart Lee— always reminds me of the anti-Israel placards that sprang up across London after October 7th. In no time at all, they were everywhere, thousands of them, like a field of black poppies, and people began saying “from the river to the sea” without the slightest speck of understanding of what that murderous phrase meant.

Before his killing, very few people in the UK knew who Charlie Kirk was, least of all the commentariat; now, a little over two weeks later, our anti-intellectual public intellectuals have decided he was definitely a fascist. In fact, Kirk was a Christian conservative who bravely (we now know) visited college campuses with a table, a microphone, and the Socratic method. It was how he persuaded people.

Meanwhile, the left in the UK has been channelling Mark E. Smith of The Fall in its approach. "The three Rs. Repetition, repetition, repetition." The left repeats phrases and tells you to repeat them. It doesn't matter if they’re stupid—in fact, the dumber the better. My favourite, of course, is the ouroboric "trans women are women," which the feminist academic Jane Clare Jones demolished quite handily by simply asking in reply, "How are males female, mate?"

“DUHHHHHH, OKAY!”

Trans activism - the hill the left has decided to die on - has a ton of these dipshittisms. It has to have something, because the actual ideology is incoherent and cannot be defended. "Drag queens are just like pantomime dames!" "Why are you obsessed with genitals?" "Isn't your toilet at home gender neutral?" Leftists don't make arguments; they memorise them, and apparently, stupid, ugly things are easy to remember. They "win" these arguments because civilised people don't know how to engage on such a maliciously obtuse level. The dumbest talking points flood the internet through 10,000 anime accounts run by 1000 sticky-fingered nihilists. They are then laundered into respectability by people like Ash Sarkar, Alastair Campbell and James O'Brien.

Recently, I was privileged enough to witness a midwit thought-trump enter the atmosphere. O’Brien, a ferociously determined radio mediocrity, floated the idea of the assassination being Trump's 'Reichstag Fire moment' less than 24 hours after Kirk’s violent death.

The next day, it turned up in the Guardian in a piece by David Van Reybrouck called "We must not let the shooting of Charlie Kirk become Trump's Reichstag fire."

Funny how the same image popped unbidden into the minds of both these keen blades. I wonder who said it first. I wonder who'll say it next? Armando Iannucci? Rory Stewart? Lewis Goodall? All of them, in a choir? As the great man (literally just found out about him tonight) Humbert Wolfe had it “You cannot hope to bribe or twist Thank God! the British journalist. But, seeing what the man will do unbribed, there’s no occasion to.”

The most pernicious talking point was that Kirk advocated stoning gay people to death. This distortion spread through legacy media like a virus in a Stephen King novel. In fact, Stephen King himself trotted it out before inevitably walking it back, because of course, it wasn't remotely true. In 2024, responding to Ms Rachel's selective quoting of "love thy neighbour" from Leviticus to defend Pride celebrations, Kirk pointed out the dangers of cherry-picking scripture for your own ends: "Ms. Rachel, you might want to crack open that Bible of yours," he said. "In a lesser referenced part of the same part of scripture, in Leviticus 18, is that 'thou shall lay with another man, shall be stoned to death.' Just saying."

And so, in a process many of us are wearily familiar with, his point was flattened into something midwits could grasp, then refined further into a kill switch made to shut down thought. Stoning gays?! Who could defend such a thing? Who could defend such a person? Better to stay out of it and keep your neck tightly wound in. But some of our elite media class went the extra mile, like the eager little misinformation nodes that they are, and soon Alistair Campbell was adjusting the little winding stool in the apology booth.

When Kirk argued that car deaths are an acceptable price Americans pay for having cars—around 41,000 deaths per year—and that gun deaths are similarly a price Americans pay for having a Second Amendment...well, you can guess the rest. The mob and their allies in the press somehow forgot to include that context and chuckled like Nelson in The Simpsons when a bullet stopped his voice forever. But even that ‘gotcha’ falls flat. Kirk was so impeccably principled that he probably would have counted his own death as an acceptable cost for those rights.

These lies and distortions haven't just sprouted overnight. They've been circulating for years. I kept my distance from Kirk in much the same way bullied schoolkids try not to be associated with each other at playtime, and perhaps those rumours were the reason. It also explains why leftists at his events preferred sneering at his Christianity and shouting through megaphones to avoid taking the microphone he was offering them. As Kirk himself noted, it wasn’t the behaviour of people confident in their positions.

Every last Kirk video, as far as I can make out, and every testimonial from black, gay, or even trans-identified people, reveals a man who treated others with the utmost respect, and possessed a recall of detail not seen since Martin Sheen's presidency. They couldn't beat his arguments, they couldn't demoralise him with insults, they couldn’t shame him into silence. They killed him not because he was a bigot, but because he wasn’t one. They couldn't make anything stick, so they stuck a bullet in him.

Many have now seen at least a few Charlie Kirk videos for themselves and are hopefully viewing his assassins in a different light. By 'assassins' I mean, the one who came after the man and then the ones who came after his reputation. With any luck, they will have done us all a service by accelerating the retirement of figures like Campbell and O’Brien, two men stuck in 2013, as relevant to 2025 as Disraeli’s cabinet. Hopefully, they will have both learned a valuable lesson: if you don't know your facts and yet still cheerfully vilify a young father shot in cold blood, you should not have a media career.

Rest in peace, Charlie Kirk.