Two incidents took place this week, which didn’t initially seem to have much to do with each other. In one, Labour leader Keir Starmer called Nigel Farage’s mass deportation policy racist. In another, the American writer Ta-Nehisi Coates challenged commentator Ezra Klein on whether it was right of him to praise the far-right campaigner Charles Kirk after he died.

On the face of it, they seemed like very distant events. Starmer’s speech took place at the height of British politics. Klein’s interview took place in a US podcast studio. But in fact they centred on precisely the same question: What’s the shit you won’t put up with? Where do you draw the moral line in an era of prejudice and authoritarianism? And what happens when you do so?

We all think we have an easy answer to that question. We don’t. It’s much tougher than we expect. No-one has a decent response. Those that do are either impotent or cynical.

This is about one of the most challenging and least understood questions in politics: when you should compromise and when you shouldn’t.

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Halfway through the Coates interview, Klein said something very interesting. He revealed a fundamental element of his political personality.

“The president of the United States is a person who, in his comportment as a human being on the public stage, I would have said in 2008, 2012, in 2016, should be on the other side of the line,” he said. “I think he’s a person who does not act with any sense of public, or even personal, decency. And then he won in ’16, lost sort of narrowly in ’20 and then won in 2024. And the thing that this has led to, for me, is recognising that I don’t get to draw the line. Now it doesn’t mean I don’t have one in my own heart. But the thing that I am struggling with is that for most people, or a lot of people, the plurality of the voters in the last election: He is somehow not way over the line. That means there are a lot of people who are willing to accept things that I thought we would have found unacceptable.”

A similar sentiment was expressed after Starmer’s conference speech, in which he used strong moral terms against Farage for the first time. Several MPs anonymously whispered to journalists that it wasn’t wise to do so, because Reform voters will think they’re being called racist. A Times commentator debating me on BBC Scotland said that he would have thought Farage’s policy was racist years ago, but now the public mood has changed, so it isn’t.

In the Statesman, data journalist Ben Walker wrote: “Starmer has made contentious debate more contentious and has told the median Briton they are wrong. The median Briton would be seeing not an attack on policy, but an attack on the sentiment. And on the sentiment, the median Briton would feel they’re part of that. They’re being labelled racist too.”

The Klein interview and the Walker piece comes from the same place: No matter what we might think of these things, the median voter is comfortable with them. It is therefore wrong to say that they are racist or immoral. And even if it is not wrong, it is unhelpful - it alienates those whose support you need to attract.

It’s not clear that Walker’s argument holds on the basis of the evidence he presents. He focuses on whether Farage is racist rather than the policy itself - a different issue. And even then, the data he uses suggests the median voter isn’t actually sure if Farage is racist and is therefore persuadable. He understates the median voter’s wariness of Reform’s extremism. He stresses “immigration vibes favour Reform more than they do Labour”, but does not make any effort to look into public feeling about individual policies - like a mass deportation programme - where Labour clearly feels it can win the argument. It’s a very weak piece.

But the main problem with the Klein/Walker position is not empirical, it is about practical consequence. It assumes that the public have no moral sense at all, or at least one so far removed from basic progressive values as to be non-existent for our purposes. And then it dictates that we keep our mouths shut about egregious assaults on immigrants so that we stay on the right side of public opinion.

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Walker says: “There’s a time and a place for calling a policy or a party or a politician racist. That time was not now.” This is a very popular view in political circles. It sounds composed and respectable. You must be terribly careful with this word, old chap. Don’t use it too quickly or it’ll lose its power. Don’t use it unwisely or it’ll backfire, and you won’t be able to deploy it when it matters. It’s an easy default position to adopt because it seems unflustered, the product of a mind which is insulated against leftie hysteria.

Although the view sounds like a dismissal of political activism, it is in fact a form of activism in itself. It seeks and achieves political outcomes. Earlier this year Tory MP James Cleverly attacked Starmer for using the words ‘far-right’ when discussing a far-right media campaign led by Elon Musk. “Accusing those who disagree with him, or who seek legitimate answers about repeated failures of child protection, as ‘far-right’ is deeply insulting and counterproductive,” he wrote on X. The Mail tried the same tactic this week with its headline: “Worried about immigration? Starmer says you’re racist.”

A great deal of British political commentary takes place in this liminal zone between polling, strategy and morality. Data journalists write pieces about the public view, right-wing politicians and editors then use it to defend themselves against attack.

The primary effect of this sort of coverage is the death of objective reality. We get lost in a debate which is exclusively about what voters think about things. It completely ignores the core issue: Is the policy racist? Is it far-right? The idea that there is a real external world and that words mean something fades away. It is replaced by the shifting sands of public sentiment.

Without an objective moral standard, there is no depth to which we will not sink. Perhaps slavery is OK. Perhaps wives legally belong to their husband. Perhaps we should initiate a new era of colonialism. That sounds excessive, of course. But mass deportations would have been an unthinkable policy just five years ago. Now they’re discussed on morning television. The consequence of only discussing popularity and not morality is that there is no protection against deeply immoral ideas.

The secondary effect is to discourage centre-left figures from being able to speak honestly and confidently about their values. Once you stop holding to a moral line, you are part of the oppressor’s project. You are the handmaiden of the far-right. You give up on resistance. You not only stop fighting back yourself, but you actively discourage others from doing so.

You can see this very clearly over the first year of the Trump administration - people failing to resist, in newsrooms and courtrooms and boardrooms. People taking decisions which aid Trump without him even having to press for them. They do it by giving up on their values and refusing to fight for them. It is surrender. They hand him piecemeal what he would otherwise have taken at once.

There is something particularly egregious when you see people with very large followings - Klein is successful and widely read - giving up on maintaining moral norms. His sense of powerlessness is frustrating precisely because he does have considerable influence and yet refuses to use it. He is despairing at a world that is partly of his own making.

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It should therefore be entirely obvious which side I am on in this debate. I am sick and tired of watching people with decent, compassionate values constantly be told to accommodate the views of people who lack decency or compassion. I am exhausted by a world which seems like a macabre inversion of elementary moral principles. I want the kind to be strong and the cruel to be weak and I am sick of seeing things operate in the opposite direction.

But honestly, I feel considerable sympathy with Klein. You can hear in someone’s voice when their bones are scraping against their soul, when they’ve been hollowed out by events, when their view of humanity is being shattered on an electoral shore. He is searching for answers, which is more than most people do in similar circumstances, when they retreat back into their ideological shell.

Practical, pragmatic people often sound like they’re a moral vacuum. But in fact they are following a different kind of morality. Instead of trying to uphold moral norms, they are trying to secure moral outcomes, particularly by winning elections.

At one point, Klein and Coates discussed the way the Trump administration is poisoning the US against trans people. Klein then says something which is profoundly moral. “I think that in losing as badly as we have, we have imperiled trans people terribly.”

That’s correct. You can defend minorities as much as you like, but if your refusal to compromise makes you electorally irrelevant then you have not helped them. You have sacrificed them to your own sense of virtue. Compromise is not self-interested. It is the mechanism by which you win. When liberals and progressives forget how to win, they fail to help the people who need them.

Take Jeremy Corbyn. When it comes to refugees, I share his values. But what good has he ever done them? He has marched for them. He has spoken out for them. He has held a thousand microphones on a thousand marches and expressed a thousand words of solidarity. And I’ve no doubt that he’s done decent constituency work to assist them as individuals. But in terms of policy, he has never done anything at all to help them because he never had power.

The reason he never had power - and never will - is because he is unable to compromise. He is unable to find the space between his own values and the disposition of the British people. Those who loved him found something reassuring and principled in this. I thought he looked dead inside, a jumble of response-mechanisms without an internal intelligence to control them.

Take Margaret Thatcher. Early Thatcher was actually a pragmatic figure. She served as a One Nation education secretary. Even as prime minister she was initially cautious on policy. She never privatised rail, or the NHS, or the BBC. It was only in her later years that she became immoveable and dogmatic.

Her admirers have somehow contrived to make this the most cherished version of her. But in actual fact, it was the point that she basically went mad - unable to countenance criticism, unable to even comprehend it, so adrift from public opinion and any sense of natural justice that she made repeated catastrophic errors. It was the precise moment at which she stopped winning and started losing.

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This debate is basically about whether you follow the politics of values or the politics of strategy.

It’s incredibly revealing to me that it maps directly onto the core dispute in moral philosophy: Does an action become moral because of its consequences or on the basis of principles?

On one side of that debate are consequentialists - people like Jeremy Bentham. They believe an action is moral because of the effect. If a train is out of control and going to hit one of two platforms, you should morally pull the lever and send it crashing into the platform where there are fewer people.

On the other side of that debate are the deontologists - people like Immanuel Kant. They believe an action is moral because it is based on basic rules. They think, for instance, that you can never morally torture someone, even if it secures vital information that stops a terrorist attack, because torture is wrong.

It’s telling that both of these views were founded by deeply weird and broken men. Both of them drive their adherents insane. A strict consequentialist, for instance, would argue that if your mother and a man who might cure cancer are on a sinking boat, you should save the man first. A strict deontologist would argue that if you were hiding Anne Frank and a Nazi asked where she was, you’d have to tell him, because it’s wrong to lie. No sensible person can abide by either of these systems.

Similarly, no sensible person submits fully to the politics of values or the politics of strategy. They would be either utterly dogmatic and irrelevant, or utterly cynical and empty. You wouldn’t want to know them, you wouldn’t want to read them, and you wouldn’t want to be governed by them.

Almost all of us are somewhere in the middle. We all believe in compromise. We all think you have to forsake some of your convictions in order to build alliances, or win over wavering voters, or get a piece of legislation through, or even just get on with your family at the dinner table. But we all also have things with which we simply will not fucking put. We have values we are unwilling to forsake, no matter what happens, no matter how unpopular they become, no matter what the consequences are of our obstinacy.

None of us are really on one side or other of this debate. Instead, we have dispositions, instincts, and even moods. At certain times, in certain contexts, we are more open to compromise. In other times, in different contexts, we are not.

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Is there a solution? No, of course not, we’re human and all messed up. But we can commit to thinking clearly about it. We can articulate which values we can compromise on and which we can’t. We can describe the outcomes which are tolerable and those which are not.

Most importantly, we can search for ways to combine the pragmatism of strategic politics with the force of values politics. That means being evidence led - looking for weaknesses in the populist argument, searching for where they’ve gone over a line and contradicted the public’s sense of natural justice, then zeroing in on that remorselessly. It means demanding a communications strategy which isolates these areas where their politics of division is most vulnerable.

Right now, for instance, several mainstream right-wing commentators are claiming that black people cannot be English. Matthew Goodwin has said it. Isabel Oakshott has said it. This is absolute poison, obviously, but it is also contrary to public opinion. It is unpopular. I would like to see a Labour communication strategy which punches that bruise. Make it the chief issue, focus remorselessly on it. Force everyone on the right to either disassociate themselves from it or be branded a racist for holding it.

This would serve an electoral function which appeals to advocates of strategic politics. It would splinter the right-wing populist alliance and create volatile internal disputes. It would get Labour on the front foot, defining the conversation, and force Farage onto the backfoot. This week alone has demonstrated how much less sure-footed he is when he is unable to set the agenda.

It would also serve a moral function which appeals to advocates of values politics. It would shore up anti-racist norms. It would beam out a message across society that this is a thing you should not say and should not think, or you’ll risk social isolation. In a period of progressive defeat, it would firm up a wall behind us.

The heart cannot function without the head and the head is useless without the heart. The binary is bullshit. There are no answers to be found from those who demand that we only pursue strategy, or only pursue values. Instead, we must think clearly about where one or the other is appropriate. And then look closely for where we can synthesise them.

Odds and sods

Really sorry there’s no audio this week. The recording equipment thing went horribly wrong. Normal service will resume next week when I’ve figured out how to do it. If anyone has recommendations for audio recording software/sites that work on a cheap as fuck Chromebook, hit me up.

Couple of pieces in the i paper this week. The first was on Starmer’s conference speech. I honestly expected to be more critical than I was and was extremely pleased to find myself writing something supportive. The second was on Labour’s growing confidence criticising Brexit and how this reveals that a consensus has really been reached. Quietly, without much drama and no single moment of realisation, the country has decided that it was a shit idea. Better late than never, I guess.

The first episode of our Origin Story two-parter on Marx came out on Wednesday. It’s a mad tale of stroppy philosophers engaging in pointless bad-tempered drive-by shootings on obscure German colleagues while occasionally pausing to sketch out some ideas that change the world. If you’ve ever wondered about Marx or wished you understood it without having to do all the reading, that’s basically what we’re here for. We will painlessly explain everything you need to know about his philosophy, independently and fairly, while making sure that it’s always an entertaining listen full of laughs and drama.

Our core editorial principle is that intelligent people want to learn about the world, but that it should be entertaining to do so. This is a case in point. Check out the clip below. If you like that, you’ll like the show. You can find it on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

I love the podcast Search Engine. It’s funny and curious and searching and detailed. The idea is that the host tries to answer a question by talking to experts. The questions are usually fairly harmless but very revealing about the world around you.

This week, I did something odd, and went back to listen to one of my favourite old episodes. I’m not sure I’ve ever done that - treated a podcast like a favourite movie or TV episode. It’s an interview with Ben Brode, the designer behind the mobile game Marvel Snap.

That game, man. I was playing it once when my partner left for the night. Ten minutes she returned and I realised that I was sitting in the dark staring at my screen and four hours had passed. I deleted it the next day.

What starts as a conversation about mobile video games quickly becomes something else. It is about the mechanics of games in general and in particular about how a really strong game design includes chance and skills but does not treat them as opposites. It’s also about how we really improve at the things we’re good at and how play unites us as a species. Also, there’s a bit about professional rock-paper-scissors tournaments, which apparently involve one minute of trying to psychologically fuck up your opponent before you play. I think I may actually have to go to one of those, it sounds amazing. You can listen here. Strong recommend.

Right, that’s your lot. Fuck off you cunts.

Dani Rodrik asked a good question on twitter the other day: why has there been so much backlash against free trade but so little against finance?

In the UK, it’s moot whether there has been a backlash against free trade. But there certainly hasn’t been one against finance, so Dani’s question holds.

Three things make it especially puzzling.

One is that the costs of the financial crisis are vastly greater than any even half-plausible estimate of the cost of being in the EU, and yet there’s much more hostility to the latter.

A second is that scepticism about the financial sector is to some extent non-partisan. In his fine book Adam Smith: What He Thought and Why It Matters, Tory MP Jesse Norman accuses banks of “turbo charged” rent extraction and says: “The banking sector may be generating little or no net real economic value.” And there are countless small businessmen (and ex-businessmen) whose opinion of bankers would make even the hardest line Marxist blush.

And thirdly, the financial system’s rip-off doesn’t consist merely of the “too big to fail subsidy.” It’s also because people actually choose to be ripped off for example by buying poorly performing but high-charging actively managed funds. In its report into the industry the FCA said (pdf):

On average, both actively managed and passively managed funds did not outperform their own benchmarks after fees..when choosing between active funds investors paying higher prices for funds, on average, achieve worse performance.

So, why hasn’t there been a backlash against finance? Here are five possible non-exclusive explanations.

One is plain deference. We respect scroungers and fraudsters much more if they are rich and expensively suited than if they are poor and tracksuited. As Adam Smith said:

The great mob of mankind are the admirers and worshippers, and, what may seem more extraordinary, most frequently the disinterested admirers and worshippers, of wealth and greatness.

A second possibility is resignation. When inequality is great and entrenched, we become accustomed to it and don’t rebel.

Thirdly, we just don’t see counterfactuals. If we hadn’t had the 2008 crisis we’d now have not just higher incomes but also a tolerant society without the social divisions and political crisis that Brexit has caused, But we don’t see this world, We don’t therefore see so clearly the damage the financial sector has done.

This is true in another way. Even if there had been no crisis, the financial sector would still leave much to be desired. For one thing, it is exploitative and uncompetitive. As Thomas Philippon (pdf) and Guillaume Bazot (pdf) have shown, the cost of finance hasn’t changed in decades despite much technological progress. And for another, the financial sector has failed to develop useful products that might help us spread risk, such as house price futures, social care insurance or macro markets (pdf) linked to GDP, aggregate profits or occupational incomes. Because we don’t see the alternative world in which finance is competitive and offers useful innovation, we don’t realize how dysfunctional it is.

Fourthly, as David Leiser has shown, people are terrible at connecting economic facts. They just don’t link the collapse of banks with a decade of stagnant real wages. This is not helped by a media which has a bias against emergence. For example, in Jon Sopel’s interview with Gary Cohn yesterday neither party asked the extent to which the US’s economic performance might for good or ill be due to forces outside direct political control.

Which brings me to something else. For decades political debate about the economy has been framed by the presumption that capitalism is basically fundamentally healthy and that the role of the state is to provide the framework of stable policy and light regulation which frees this underlying dynamism. The question has been: how can the state serve capital? rather than: what must be done to fix or replace a rotten system? Because ideas often linger on after their factual base has withered, we are stuck in this paradigm. This is why the Tories managed to get away with describing post-crisis government deficits as the fault of Labour rather than bankers.

My point here should be a trivial one. Our perceptions of complex systems are distorted by cognitive biases. Sometimes these distortions help to legitimate inefficiency and exploitation. Behavioural economics and Marxist theories of ideology are much more compatible than is often realized.

Donald Trump’s state visit to the UK was supposed to offer a vote of confidence in the British economy, a moment of respite for a Labour government so gaffe-prone and unpopular that it appears to have been taking PR advice from Prince Andrew. Before the wheels of Air Force One hit the tarmac at Stansted, a series of announcements had been arranged to showcase American investment in the UK: a new partnership on nuclear power; a £5bn investment by Google. Investment is the key to growing the economy, but it comes with strings attached, particularly when it comes from the US.

The main reason for this is that the US owns so much of Britain already. The most recent US Internal Revenue Service data (for 2022) records 1,369 multinationals reporting more than $836bn in revenue in the UK, a number equivalent to more than a quarter of that year’s GDP. Large chunks of what we think of as the British economy – from leading companies such as the AI pioneers DeepMind to everyday entities such as Boots and Morrisons, to energy suppliers and nursery chains – are American-owned.

This gives American business interests huge power over the UK economy, and consequently Britain’s politics. The investments recently scrapped by major pharmaceutical companies in the UK might suddenly be un-scrapped if the government decides to allow them to charge the NHS more for drugs. If the government allows Silicon Valley to keep helping itself to Britain’s intellectual property, the data centres will keep on coming. New deals on technology are on offer if we reconsider the laws our elected politicians made on online safety and taxing digital services.

We have already been making these compromises for a long time, and the cultural and economic consequences are now obvious. Nine of the ten highest grossing films in the UK last year were American. The only Brit on the list was Paddington, whose citizenship is, let’s face it, uncertain (Michael Bond never got round to writing Paddington and the Indefinite Leave to Remain). All the major online streaming platforms are US-owned. The UK spends more than three times as many hours watching YouTube as it does watching BBC iPlayer. Of the ten biggest-selling songs in the UK last year, eight were by Americans (Sabrina Carpenter appeared twice; the other was by an Irish person, singing in an American accent). On Britain’s bookshelves, the five biggest-selling print novelists of 2024 were Richard Osman and four American women.

The internet, as experienced by British people, is basically America. Of the 20 most visited websites in the UK, only the UK government and the BBC are British. Social media is America. The one social platform that wasn’t already American – China’s TikTok – is being switched to US-controlled ownership, because Americans are not stupid enough to let another country have direct, unaccountable control over their citizens’ main source of news.

After Elon Musk appeared via video link at a large far-right rally in London on 13 September, the Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey wrote a sternly worded letter to Keir Starmer warning, in case the PM hadn’t noticed, that Musk was in his view “deliberately spreading misinformation, stoking anger and encouraging violence”. Davey then published this letter on X, the platform Musk owns, where the attention it generated made some more money for Musk. Davey continues to post multiple times per day on X, using his time as an MP to create free content for someone he believes wants to “undermine our democracy”. Musk both profits from Davey’s posts and controls the algorithm that decides by whom and in what context they are seen. The bile and ridicule to which Davey is subjected are variables for which Musk holds the dials.

Vying with Musk for the title of the world’s richest individual is Larry Ellison, a friend of Donald Trump and ex-CEO of Oracle – a strategic supplier to the British state – and a fellow investor in Britain’s culture and its politics. Two notable investments are £1bn in Oxford University and more than $350m in the Tony Blair Institute, which is highly influential on Starmer’s government. The Blair Institute is known for espousing technological solutions to social issues, a position that is not inconsistent with Ellison’s commercial goals.

America even helps to decide the price of our debt. When Rachel Reeves makes a decision, the yields on government bonds are checked hastilyto see if the shadowy forces of the market have been angered. In reality, these numbers are partly decided in the US. Trump’s tax cuts are adding trillions to America’s immense debt pile, and a market that is being asked to gorge itself on US Treasuries consequently has less of an appetite for UK gilts. If Trump manages to gain political control of US interest rates, then this too could have significant effects on the UK economy.

There is a huge amount to gain from Britain’s relationship with the US, but we should never forget the power relationship involved. What we do is of little consequence to the White House, but we have to deal with the consequences of American risk-taking. We are a mouse sharing a bed with a walrus.

Cosying up to Trump is an all-in gamble. Britain should be building better relations with more reliable allies closer to home

Interpreters are not required for visiting US heads of state, but that doesn’t mean Donald Trump and Keir Starmer will speak the same language this week. The UK prime minister will practise the art of tactful diplomacy emphasising mutual advantage and historical alliance. Most of the words in that sentence mean nothing to a president who is fluent only in self-interest.

Given the likelihood of miscommunication between two men from such different political cultures – the showbiz demagogue and the lawyer technocrat – relations have been remarkably friendly and, in Downing Street’s estimation, fruitful.

Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist

State broadcaster says it will withdraw from next year’s contest in Vienna unless Israel is excluded over Gaza war

Spain has become the latest country to say it will not take part in next year’s Eurovision song contest if Israel participates.

Board members of the state broadcaster RTVE voted in majority favour of boycotting the contest if Israel is among the countries fielding an entry next year.

If there’s one essential rule for these relentlessly dispiriting and perilous times, it’s this: that no matter how bad you think things have become, they can always be made into something worse. I recognise that this is not the most uplifting message, but if we are to have even the slightest chance of getting to a better place, it’s essential to recognise exactly what we are up against.

The response to the horrific murder of the MAGA troll Charlie Kirk is another demonstration of this rule. I should lay my cards on the table here. I never could stand Kirk when he was alive, and I certainly haven’t changed my opinion now that he’s dead. I dislike smirking grifters as a matter of principle, whether they are on the right or the left. And Kirk was a horrible representative of a horrible movement: a white supremacist, a racist, a misogynist, a bully and a conspiracy theorist, who recycled every MAGA talking point and enriched himself in the process.

This was a man who supported the January 6 insurrection; who published a sniggering tweet mocking the near-lethal assault on Nancy Pelosi’s husband with a hammer; who considered that murdered schoolchildren were a price worth paying to preserve the Second Amendment; a free speech advocate whose organization drew up lists of academics and teachers who ‘discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.’

Many of these academics were bombarded with death threats and racist or misogynist language as a result of those lists. Of course, Kirk didn’t participate in violence himself. That’s not for the likes of troll-provocateurs like him. Their job is merely to keep the rage boiling over, and encourage white folk to see themselves as victims of immigrants, Palestinians, minorities, women, feminazis, transpeople and all the other godless hordes that make up the ‘radical left’ - a category that can include anyone from Joe Biden and George Soros to Kermit the Frog.

This was what Kirk did, and no one can say he didn’t do it well. He was a troll dressed up as a democratic debater, the willing servant of a movement that conspired to overthrow an elected president, and which has been actively dismantling American democracy since January this year.

When did you hear Kirk defend the foreign students in the US who were arrested and deported because of what they had said about Gaza? Or the universities that have had funds cut for refusing to cooperate with Trump’s political or culture war agenda? Or the journalists and media organizations attacked by Trump and his government and subjected to vexatious lawsuits?

You didn’t, because he didn’t. Last week an Israeli general coolly admitted that his army had killed and wounded 200,000 Gazans - a shattering admission that barely raised a political eyebrow in the United States or anywhere else. Kirk entirely accepted and supported this insane slaughter, on the usual shallow grounds that Hamas was like Japan and Germany in World War II, and therefore had only itself to blame ‘for everything that results.’

No one should be surprised that Kirk also had a history of antisemitic remarks - because antisemitism is not incompatible with fervent support for Israel. His attitude to free speech belonged to the tradition that Goebbels once expressed:

We enter parliament in order to supply ourselves, in the arsenal of democracy, with its own weapons. If democracy is so stupid as to give us free tickets and salaries for this bear's work, that is its affair. We do not come as friends, nor even as neutrals. We come as enemies. As wolves to the flock, we come.

The ‘new’ far right works in much the same way. To achieve power, it presents the right to offend as a test of democratic freedom and the limits of liberal discourse. In power, no one should offend or insult them. This is why Georgia Meloni routinely sues journalists. It’s why, in January 2017, Steve Bannon called the media ‘the opposition party’, whose only role is to ‘be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while.’

Kirk was on board with all of that, and a bullet in the neck doesn’t make him into a saint or a martyr. Nor does it mean that he deserved to be killed, or that his death is something to be mocked or celebrated, though some people have done this. However repellent Kirk’s views may have been, his murder is a repugnant crime, and the movement that he belonged to will not be defeated by apeing its worst features, let alone by propagating baseless fantasies that Israel was responsible.

All those features have been on display over the last few days. Kirk’s death has ignited a firestorm of fanaticism, dishonesty and bad faith that threatens to become MAGA’s Reichstag moment, and which perfectly illustrates the moral, political, and intellectual sewer that American society has become in the Drumph/MAGA era.

Civil War

Let’s get the gaslighting out of the way first.

No one need take any lessons on compassion or moderation from anyone involved in the MAGA horrorshow. A few days before Kirk’s death, Pete Hegseth was boasting that the US had ‘smoked a drug boat’ supposedly containing 11 Venezuelan ‘terrorists’ - regardless of the complete absence of evidence to suggest that it was anything of the kind. Asked by journalist Brian Krassenstein whether this strike might be called a ‘war crime’, JD Vance replied: ‘I don’t give a shit what you call it.’

The macho posturing, savagery and vulgarity of this administration and its supporters are only matched by their brazen and relentless dishonesty. When two Democrat representatives were murdered in their Minnesota home in June by a deranged Trump fanatic, Elon Musk and various Republican politicians tried to blame it on the left. So it was no surprise that within hours of Kirk’s murder, Andrew Tate, Alex Jones, Steve Bannon, and an array of political lowlife were gleefully predicting ‘civil war’ and a crackdown on ‘the left’, before anyone even knew anything about the perpetrator.

Jones posted a video of himself weeping, and declaring ‘We’re in a war’. This is not Achilles mourning Patroclus. You are entitled to weep when your friends are shot, but if you film yourself weeping, then it is very likely that your tears are entirely fake and performative, especially when they come from a man who actually declared the victims of school shootings to be ‘crisis actors’, and accused their parents of faking their grief.

But nothing can ever shame these lying clowns, whether it’s Steve Bannon calling Kirk a ‘casualty of war’, or Infowars host Harrison H. Smith declaring: ‘The left is evil and insane and needs to be crushed with the force of the state.’ After reading that Tyler Robinson’s shell cases indicated ‘transgender and antifascist ideology’, the MAGA influencer and Trump pal Joey Mannarino, tweeted:

If the person who killed Charlie Kirk was a transgender, there can be no mercy for that species any longer. We’ve already tolerated far too much from those creatures.

That species. Those creatures. No mercy. It doesn’t take much for these MAGA tough guys to locate their inner psychopath. Never mind that these messages did not exist (thanks Wall Street Journal!), or that the messages on the shell cases referred to memes used to torment the furry community.

MAGA thought it had hit ‘the left’ bang to rights when it was revealed that Tyler Robinson’s shell cases contained the chorus from the Italian partisan anthem ‘Bella Ciao’ and the message ‘hey, Fascist! Catch', with arrows. Now it turns out that these messages are lines from a computer game, which a 22-year-old’s Internet-raddled brain as parsed into a justification for homicide.

This is not antifascist resistance, but the plot line from some unwritten JG Ballard dystopia.

Don’t expect Trump and his minions to care, any more than the Nazis cared about who set the Reichstag on fire. In July, the MAGA vampire queen Laura Loomer was attacking Kirk on X as a ‘charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next.’ On the day his death, Loomer was prowling the X deathscape and summoning her demons from the underworld:

It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund & prosecute every single leftist organization. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The left is a national security threat.

And then there was Nick Fuentes, the Nazi sleazebag leader of the Groyper movement to which Kirk’s assassin seems to have belonged. It wasn’t long ago that Fuentes could be heard denouncing Kirk because he wasn’t white supremacist enough. But there he was last week, gazing up to heaven and asking his followers to ‘pray for Charlie Kirk’s soul, his young family and for our country. The violence and hatred has to stop. Our country needs Christ more than ever.’

You can’t make this stuff up, except these hollowed-out simulacra of human beings never stop doing just that, and not only in America. On Saturday, ‘Tommy Robinson’ called on his ‘unite the kingdom’ marchers to ‘march for freedom, for your children, and march for Charlie Kirk.’

Robinson raged against ‘the bastard who has murdered him, or the organisation, the corporation or the government it is that killed him.’

Was it a bastard, organisation, corporation or government? No one cares, least of all the man who asked the questions. At the same gathering, Elon Musk - the Ketamine Krupp himself - exorted the crowd by video link to - ‘fight or die’ because ‘the left are the party of murder’.

Unlike some of the mocking responses to Kirk’s murder, these threats and lies are not coming from the Internet fringes. They begin at the very top and reach across the MAGA spectrum. Trump was already promising to crack down on all those who ‘contributed’ to the murder, before he or anyone else had the slightest idea who was responsible, let alone who ‘contributed’ to it. Trump also declared:

Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

Asked a few days later, how Americans might ‘come back together’ and whether its fractured political landscape could be ‘fixed’, Trump told his interviewer, in a rare expression of honesty: ‘ I couldn’t care less.’

The Great Man went to compare the patriotic radicals of the right who ‘don’t want to see crime’ with the radical left who are ‘ vicious, and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy — although they want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.’

When these people show you who are, believe them. Except that Trump and his movement have shown many times who they are, and too many Americans refused to see it or liked what they saw. Kirk’s murder is unlikely to change this. Already, someone - god knows who - has set up a website called: charliesmurderers.com with the following message:

Charlie Kirk was murdered.

Is an employee or a student of yours supporting political violence online?

Look them up on this website.

The US government is following this lead. Flags are flying at half-mast. People are losing their jobs for expressing what MAGA regards as inappropriate responses to Kirk’s death. The more Kirk advances towards secular canonisation, the more his death will be used by the government as a pretext for repression. Last week, Trump’s sinister henchman Stephen Miller told Fox News’ Sean Hannity:

Let me tell you something I've not shared with anybody, the last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven. He said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence. That was the last message that he sent me before that assassin stole him from all of us, and we are going to do that!

Miller is very likely lying about that ‘last message.’ But whether Kirk said this or not, the ‘radical left’ [Clue: anyone who is not MAGA] will pay the price for it. Just in case there was any doubt, JD Vance - the Hillbilly Faust himself - told The Charlie Kirk Podcast yesterday:

We have to talk about this incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism that has grown up over the last few years, and I believe, is part of the reason why Charlie was killed by an assassin’s bullet. We’re going to talk about how to dismantle that and how to bring real unity, real unity that can only come when we tell the truth.

Vance has about as much interest in the truth as Stephen Miller does in his ‘creator in heaven.’ And the only unity that they have in mind is the unity that Adolf Hitler promised on February 27, 1933, while watching the Reichstag burn:

This is a God-given signal! If this fire, as I believe, turns out to be the handiwork of Communists, then there is nothing that shall stop us now crushing out this murder pest with an iron fist.

This is what Trump and his cohorts will now try to do, and no one should be fooled by their crocodile tears. When a reporter on Friday offered his condolences to Trump on the ‘loss of your friend’ and asked him how he was ‘holding up’, the Great Man responded:

I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.

Such is the man Charlie Kirk helped to make president, who Karoline Leavitt says has been ‘hurt’ by his assassination. And we should not pretend that the movement he belongs to has any more concern for Kirk than it does for the republic it claims to be making great again. And we should not expect a kumbaya moment of collective soul searching.

On the contrary, Americans should brace themselves for further repression, and quite possibly more deaths, as some of the most despicable and dangerous politicians in America’s history unleash their war of vengeance in the madhouse that they have done so much to build.