Berlin, Germany (Weltexpress). Charlie Kirk, 31, a Trump supporter and leader of a successful conservative youth movement, who was murdered in the USA by a confused left-wing assassin, was posthumously vilified by the left-wing, green-tinged German media with full journalistic force.
The ‘obituaries’ on Kirk’s brutal shooting in front of rolling cameras were peppered with venomous malice and barely concealed rhetorical dances of joy in the German ‘quality media’. This undisguised, offensively displayed contempt for humanity was remarkable in itself. What is particularly surprising, however, is that at the time of this media storm, probably 99.9 per cent of the German population had never heard of Charlie Kirk before. So why all this fuss? Was Kirk’s media execution by Germany’s self-proclaimed ‘quality media’ possibly staged as a proxy for Donald Trump?
From Der Spiegel to ZDF to eloquent ‘satirists’ such as Jan Böhmermann & Co. – they all placed Kirk in the vicinity of Trump and enlightened the well-behaved German media consumers about the evil character of the murder victim with obituaries dripping with hatred in a kind of posthumous tribunal.
Because when a white, conservative American is shot, the first question our ‘progressive’ media asks is apparently not ‘Why so much hatred?’, but “How bad was this villain really? Didn’t he deserve it?” Because in the case of political assassinations, the ideology of the murder victim must first be examined before condemning the act or secretly – or even very clearly – expressing one’s joy about it.
According to the leading media outlet Spiegel, Kirk was a despicable right-wing extremist who spread conspiracy ideologies, for example in relation to the migration crisis, and rambled on about the ‘great population exchange’, or classified the victory of Joe Biden, who was already suffering from dementia during the 2020 presidential election, as electoral fraud by the Democrats, and condemned the woke mania promoted by NGOs and Democrats as ‘cultural Marxism’. The verdict is quickly reached. Anyone who thinks this way is an irresponsible political arsonist and has at least somehow ‘provoked’ what he then got! Right?
Jan Böhmermann apparently even hinted at the latter, namely that Kirk was basically to blame himself. That was meant ironically, of course. Another great piece of Böhmermann ‘satire,’ as always. We remember an earlier highlight, his goat-fucker ‘satire’ about President Erdoğan. Some resourceful commentators have even tried to give Kirk’s murderer the aura of a resistance fighter against the Trump Nazis, placing him in the same league as Claus von Stauffenberg.
Finally! The anti-fascist resistance is alive again, fuelled by the real fascists in the background, who, disguised as democrats, want to send German tanks and missiles back to the Russian border and make Germany ‘fit for war’ again.
The German media landscape is currently working very efficiently according to a simple pattern: there are victims and there are perpetrators. And who exactly belongs in which role depends less on actions than on skin colour, gender and worldview.
Charlie Kirk? White, male, right-wing – clearly a perpetrator, even if he has just been shot. The fact that he was considered an intellectual not only in conservative circles, that he never attacked his opponents personally in discussions but always remained objective, that his political positions were essentially in line with the conservative US mainstream – none of this matters in the black-and-white scheme of the media’s good-versus-evil template.
Interestingly, the US media has been much more restrained since Kirk’s death. No kicking him when he’s down, no moralising. Perhaps because they know that political violence is not a game. The German debate, on the other hand, is loud and self-righteous. This is no longer about Charlie Kirk. It is about a media system that prefers to bandy about slogans rather than examine arguments. That reflexively throws around labels like ‘conspiracy theorist’ or ‘extremist’ when someone does not fit into its worldview. And that then wonders why people are losing trust.
And if you’re not prepared to respect a political opponent in death, then perhaps silence would be appropriate. But even that is difficult when you feel so morally superior and forget that even a conservative American has a right to human dignity – even posthumously.
