Charlie Kirk becomes an avatar for white right obsession in SA

The murder of the American right-wing political activist has driven the local white right insane, amplifying imported outrage across social media. Can we tempt them back from the brink? By Richard Poplak

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Hey, here's a question for you. Why is a largely black nation at the bottom of Africa so obsessed with an American culture war debate-bro personality?

Here's another question. Is a largely black nation at the bottom of Africa obsessed with an American culture war debate-bro personality? In villages in the Eastern Cape, are folks on the “right” and the “left” locked in vicious gotcha battles over the specifics of Charlie Kirk’s assassination and what it means for free speech in Qunu?

Before we get too far, a public service announcement: Please don’t shoot people! It’s worth noting that South Africans, being of a normal disposition, don’t shoot people over ideas. We shoot people for stuff. This is an important distinction because it means that ideas haven't yet become commodified, as they have been in the US. Or they haven't been completely commodified.

So what in the Heil Hitler is going on here? The assassination of Kirk, a “second son” to President Donald Trump, has apparently shocked the world. That’s probably an overstatement. Kirk was a distinctly American personality, part of a tradition that traces its lineage back to the shock jock revolution in the US during the 1980s, when the Reagan administration began deregulating the media space. There is an important precedent for his murder (and it’s not Martin Luther King Jr): Alan Berg, an outspoken lefty DJ killed by Nazi lunatics outside his Denver studio in 1983.

It is thus absurd to call Kirk’s murder unprecedented or some kind of breaking point — indeed, his death is linked to the unending shitstream of Americans’ yapping, which was a direct result of opening the media space. To counter the liberal pablum of CNN on cable, in came the rancid hysteria of Fox News. Howard Stern’s industrial misogyny was countered by Rush Limbaugh's industrial racism. What was once a great literary culture became an endless stovetop of men yelling.