Charlie Kirk was a better anti-fascist than most of the left

There was a clip doing the rounds a few months ago from Charlie Kirk’s clash with students at the Cambridge Union. It featured Kirk going head to head with a fidgeting posh oddball whose ginger bouffant defied gravity. Anyone who’s ever visited Cambridge will be familiar with this kind of kid: woke, pompous, his arrogance entirely out of proportion to his intellect. Tell me this, said Kirk: ‘In the conflict of Israel vs Hamas, who’s the good guy?’ His diminutive adversary twitched and stuttered, then finally spoke. ‘Both Hamas and the Israeli government are evil’, he said, giving perfect voice to that bourgeois pusillanimity that falsely calls itself ‘activism’.

I was reminded of that clip today as lowlifes online branded Kirk a ‘Nazi’ in the wake of his brutal slaying in Utah. In the sewer of the internet, the seventh circle of woke, they’ve openly celebrated the savage killing of this young father of two. The more mainstream left, and the ‘liberal’ press, have played it safer, merely hinting that Kirk was ‘hard right’ and not averse to stirring up animosity himself. The Oxford Student – another university he visited on his trip to the UK – called him a ‘far-right influencer’ following his death. It’s a shameful piece that could have been headlined: ‘A fascist dies.’

Here’s what is so galling about the tarring of Kirk as a crypto-Nazi: he was a better anti-fascist than most of the left. It would have been absurd at any time to call him ‘far right’. You don’t have to share his views – he was anti-abortion, pro-gun rights, sceptical about climate change, worried about mass immigration and dubious that you can have a dick and be a woman – to recognise that they all fall within the realm of legitimate opinion. Millions of Americans think this way. But for the left to call him ‘far right’ now, in the post-7 October moment, after they’ve spent two years making excuses for the fascistic murder of Jews while Kirk raged against it, is risible. It is a sinister inversion of truth.

Kirk was enraged by the pogrom of 7 October. In that clash at Cambridge, with the student so well trained in the moral relativism of the modern campus that he couldn’t even draw a moral distinction between a neo-fascist army and the democratic state it attacked, he reminded his overeducated jeerers of what happened that day. This war started, he said, ‘because 1,300 Jews were killed and 200 were taken hostage’. Hamas ‘recklessly’ went to ‘music concerts, to homes, to kibbutzes’, knowing well there would be a ‘firestorm’ in Gaza as a result. The ‘only entity to blame’ for this war, he told the lost souls of Cambridge, is ‘the leadership of Hamas’.

The ‘moral truth’, he said, is that ‘there is a good guy and there is a bad guy’. That’s the ‘morality of a child’, barked his critic, to effusive applause from the assembly of plummy Israelophobes. Then came Kirk’s killer line: ‘A child who knows that Israel is the good guy and Hamas is bad has a lot more wisdom than a student like yourself at Cambridge University.’ He schooled them. It was moral clarity in action. It should not have taken a visiting firebrand from the US to tell some of Britain’s most privileged, well-read youths that the Islamofascists who raped and then murdered Jewish women are the bad guys – but it did.

It is sick-making to see the digital left gnash its teeth over Kirk’s ‘far right’ politics. For many of these people went further than the carpers at Cambridge and didn’t only falsely equate Hamas’s Jew murder with the Jews’ own fightback – they openly celebrated it. It feels surreal to see leftists who called the bloodiest slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust a ‘day of celebration’ brand Kirk ‘far right’ because he thought it unwise to subject young lesbians to double mastectomies. That Kirk is being maligned as Nazi-like by people with the Hamas red triangle in their social-media bios, by people who’ve spent two years calling a pogrom ‘resistance’ and praising the Jew-hating Houthis – it’s too much to take.

Kirk, towards the end of his too short life, witnessed something extraordinary: the campuses on which he had been defamed as a fascist came to be overrun by actual fascism. By a frothing Israelophobia that was often just Jew hatred in drag. At Columbia they called the Jewish State ‘the scum of nations’ and ‘the pigs of the Earth’. Jewish students were told to fuck off ‘back to Poland’. At George Washington University they said ‘Glory to our martyrs’, referring to the men who had just raped and murdered more than a thousand Jews. Pennsylvania University admitted its campus had fallen under the sway of a fascistic animus, including the daubing of ‘swastikas and hateful graffiti’ on university property.

Just imagine what was going through Kirk’s mind as woke Jew hatred swept like a pox through the very campuses from which he’d been cancelled for supporting Trump and believing men are not women. After 7 October, ‘antifa’ turned ‘fa’. A left that had posed as anti-racist made excuses for the racist butchery of Jews. It fell to individuals still in possession of their moral faculties to take the true anti-fascist position and condemn Hamas’s violent dehumanisation of the Jewish people. Kirk was one of those individuals. I could not give a damn about the issues on which he and I differed. All that matters is that when fascists returned to slit the throats of Jews, the left excused it and he opposed it.

It wasn’t only the left’s bowing to the fascist imagination that he called out – it was the right’s, too. He bristled at the crank right and its embrace of swirling conspiracy theories about the Jewish State and the Jewish people. He lamented that right-wing ‘corner of the internet’ that wants to ‘blame the Jews for all their problems’. It is ‘demonic’, he said, and ‘should not be tolerated’. That’s the twisted irony of the claim that Kirk was a hard-right ‘radicalising’ force: in truth he had a moderating influence on the American right, helping to draw young men in particular away from the sick Nick Fuentes view of the world. As Deutsche Welle says today, he was ‘at odds with neo-Nazi groups’.

If only the same could be said of the woke left. They’ve too often been as one with neo-Nazis, especially of the Hamas variety. Kirk was a ‘lionhearted friend of Israel’. He was also a passionate believer in the power of free, open debate to fix our problems. His ruthless murder doesn’t only steal a dad from two children. It also robs the world of someone who on the two key issues of our time – the future of the Jewish nation and the future of freedom – was able to see clearly. RIP, Charlie.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy