US’s Kimmel muzzled while SA’s white right goes full prefect in wake of Charlie Kirk murder

Captain’s Logorrhea

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 *checks notes* 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.

But we’ll get to that in a moment.

So what in the Heil Hitler is going on here? The assassination of Charlie 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 80s, when the Reagan administration began deregulating the media space. There is an important precedent for his murder (and it’s not MLK!): 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 in turn 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 stove-top of men yelling. There was no longer a consensus delivered by the three networks because consensus didn’t make enough money. So the pub gobshite — the logorrheic moron perched on a barstool who only shuts up when contending with a mouthful of beer — became the figure presiding over what was left of the culture.

This is often considered “freedom of speech.” Except there’s nothing free about speech in the US. Talk is a business, worth tens of billions of dollars, and it is entirely premised on division. Incessant, unbroken, relentless mouth-flapping, interrupted only by commercial breaks. And gunshots.

A Proper Lasching 

Many commentators and historians observed this intellectual and cultural decline with dismay. None was more articulate and forceful than Christopher Lasch, whose seminal text, The Culture of Narcissism, noted that:

“Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom.”

Lasch wrote those words in 1979!!! Matters have grown slightly worse since then. The internet has compounded the fragmentation a thousandfold — and lo!, far from a marketplace of differing ideas, there are only two meals on the menu: “left” and “right”.

These ideological designations are meaningless because their priorities change and switch all the time. (Leftists once burned down Seattle to protest against free trade; now, Trump is a maniac for imposing tariffs.) But there is a list of items in each political tribe from which adherents cannot diverge. Occasionally it’s fun to acknowledge that the other side has a good idea or two. But mostly, it’s war.

Charlie Kirk, just 31 when he was murdered last week, came of age as this new mediascape grew into a vital component of US politics — which is to say, a bloodsport. He was a product of a stultifying liberal campus culture in the process of revising the portrayal of minority populations in history and culture. Professors bearing gothic pronouns and swathed in keffiyehs were once a wacky, entertaining part of campus culture — now, according to Fox News, they are a greater threat to civilisation than Vlad Putin or face-eating spiders. The silliness of campus culture was exploited by youngsters like Kirk, who built brands around “saying the unsayable” — which clearly wasn’t unsayable, and was clearly being said.

Kirk was a trained debater, and his forceful delivery style was monetised into a travelling shtick, which saw him facing off with slack-jawed lefties across carnage-strewn America. No one involved, including Kirk, seemed to have read a book, other than the Bible or, on the other side, an AI summary of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar”. (As arch liberal bootlicker Ezra Klein commented after Kirk’s murder, “Kirk was practising politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion.”)

But there are literally thousands of these sharp-mouthed media-reared kids in the US. Kirk’s “break” came from the fact that his organisation, a conservative campus advocacy group called Turning Point USA, was easily plugged into the Trump machinery. He acted as informal adviser, allegedly advocating for JD Vance’s appointment as vice-president on the 2024 ticket, and was the campaign’s “youth whisperer”, repeatedly reminding his handlers that the kids were not all loony leftists.

Kirk’s murder, at the hands of another of those magical, ideologically amorphous sharpshooters that proliferate at key points in American history, is being pitched as some massive turning point in Western culture. Not to undermine a young man’s death, but as we’ve noted, political actors seem to get killed in the US all the time. Like, all the time. But it’s worth noting that US political factions are differentiated not so much by content, but by style. As the author Omar El Akkad writes, “It is a reminder that, in times like these, one remarkable difference between the modern Western conservative and their liberal counterpart is that the former will gleefully sign their name on the side of the bomb while the latter will just sheepishly initial it.”

(Furthering Kirk’s message of Christly peace, the Israel Defense Forces inscribed his name on a missile meant for the ongoing genocide in Gaza.)

Which is all to say, Charlie Kirk’s content was American liberalism with the mask off, shorn of literary/philosophical pretensions — unfettered. Garbage though it may have been, it was at least a more honest approach, even if it was just more blather, more American savagery splattered onto the porcelain bowl of the planet’s political life, doused with some pro-family, Christian eau de toilet and repackaged for Gen Z.

Local is Drecker

What could this junk possibly mean for South Africa, whose social media feeds have for days been clogged with Charlie Kirk discourse?

The answer to that question should be obvious: Kirk is an avatar for the ritual imbibing of American culture war shibboleths by what remains of South Africa’s conservative intelligentsia. Once upon a time, South Africa too was a literary culture — black, white and coloured inscribed important work in the national ledger.

No longer.

Now, it’s Podcastville, with a few last operating media outlets floating in the soupy sewage like lone turds. No consensus, no national project, just a big free-for-all based loosely around the race grift.

Charlie Kirk would’ve loved it here.

Or maybe not. As Rebecca Davis has noted in these pages, this ain’t America. Which may not seem like much of an observation, but it counts as one as South Africa’s white right piles into the culture wars like it’s a huge NGK-sponsored kudu braai. To wit: Ernst Roets has threatened to snitch on those who mock Kirk’s death online and to inform their employers of their transgressions. Not so long ago, Roets would have screeched to the moon at this type of speech monitoring.

We are investigating people in South Africa that are celebrating and inciting death and violence on social media. We will submit the relevant information to their employers. If you have information to share, write to us at veldtogte@lexlibertas.org.za. pic.twitter.com/6DUHGpIacQ

— Ernst Roets (@ErnstRoets) September 16, 2025

But being head boy comes with much responsibility.

The truth is that Roets’ grift, along with much of the local white right’s, is to bait their American bro-dudes into granting them negotiating leverage over the current South African government. As grifts go, it’s not a bad one — and to no small extent, it’s worked. But it should be acknowledged that, at this point, Roets and his team of dour, repressed prefects are more American in sensibility than they are South African. Their cultural realm is the political podcast shitiverse where Charlie Kirk “debated” fellow children over trans rights and the viability of black lady judges, and everyone came out looking like a deranged freak.

Back in the wokey-woke days, Roets and his brethren insisted that there was no such thing as violent words, the apartheid flag was nothing more than an anodyne piece of cloth, and that the consequences of speech could not be determined by some overarching establishment guided by three humanities profs and a LGBTQ+ NGO.

Now, they want to determine the limits of free speech themselves. They’ve become the pronoun police that was allegedly destroying South Africa. In the US, the Trump administration has exploited Kirk’s death to sanitise the media space for a purely pro-regime line-up of Roets-style Quislings. Talk show host Jimmy Kimmel has been pulled from the air by ABC “indefinitely” — not for mocking Kirk’s murder, we should be clear, but for repeatedly mocking Trump.

America has chosen this path. South Africa has not. We have rugby to watch, a country to fix, an ANC to dispatch into the wilderness, and Woolies plastic packaging to disassemble.

We’re too busy for this crap.

But as the US speed-crawls further into the Dark Ages, we should remind the local white right — we’re not about to follow. We’ll remain a messy, noisy, ungainly, imperfect democracy. And they’re welcome to remain a component within it — but never the head boy. DM