Charlie’s Devils

 Charlie’s Devils

Jim Kavanagh

Charlie, Angel

I did not and do not give one whit about, or want to waste one ounce of intellectual energy on, Charlie Kirk.

I confess that—like, I bet, most of the people (certainly the politicians) now gnashing their teeth and attending prayer vigils—I was blissfully unaware of exactly who Charlie Kirk was, until last week when I suddenly saw him receiving the most ridiculously inflated veneration since Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize. I now know that he was a mediocre right-wing podcaster and wannabe intellectual.

This is the guy for whom there’s a massive, coordinated, multi-media campaign to turn him into a martyred national hero on a par with Lincoln and JFK? Lying in state? Really? I don't believe that even most people who liked Kirk thought he was that important a week ago.

Now, the politically dominant right-wing really—they say it openly—wants to cancel everyone who does not participate in the canonization of Charlie Kirk. You must join in the gala of national mourning and sanctification, or be removed from social media, publicly shamed, and fired from your job, if not rounded up.

Whatever the facts of his assassination turn out to be (Don’t even start!), the speed, thoroughness, and level of state-mandated adamance with which this Charlie canonization campaign took hold smacks of something prepared and organized in advance.

Because it was, and it’s not about Charlie Kirk. Charlie Kirk’s assassination was the occasion for activating an aggressive campaign of Zionist and right-wing repression that was waiting for an excuse. He—actually, his ghost—is now nothing but an instrument of that campaign, wielded by people who care as much about the real Charlie Kirk as I do.

Here is Charlie Kirk today:

What in the unholy algorithm did I just watch 😱

AI slop of Charlie Kirk in heaven defending Israel from Greta & Hamas 🤣 is making the rounds, and Evangelical influencer is weeping on camera over it pic.twitter.com/DtBG5i8guO

— Abier (@abierkhatib) September 15, 2025

https://twitter.com/i/status/1967602291697209472

This is what it's about: the sanctification of Charlie as a conjoined angelic twin of Israel and the demonization of any dissenters. The purpose of sanctifying Kirk is not to preach his gospel, but to recruit the Republican/MAGA base to a program of repression, destroying the First Amendment rights of expression, dissent, and protest in order to: 1)immediately, prop up falling support for Israel among “America First” young Americans who were attracted go Kirk and whose dissatisfaction with Israel he was listening to;  2) proactively, instigate an even nastier conflict between culture-war “left-right” factions that will divert the populace from the real left vs. right, 99%-vs.-the oligarchy, socio-economic civil war the US capitalist oligarchs rightly fear is coming; and 3)  justify the intensified police-state policies needed to crush it if/when it does come—whether or not any of this has anything to do with Charlie Kirk’s actual message when he was living.

I want to stress that the defense of Israel and Zionism is the immediate, urgent task of those promoting the canonization of Kirk. They certainly are right-wing defenders of capitalist oligarchy, and definitely want to pre-emptively repress any real left that would influence or lead any hint of anti-capitalist uprising. But that threat is not imminent, and they presume their ability to avoid and/or control it. They are also committed Zionists, who at this moment know that Israel and the Zionist project, which has lost all legitimacy in the world, cannot survive without the support of the U.S. government, and they are terrified of the imminent threat that the American populace—including the Republican/MAGA base—will turn decisively against that support.

Which is happening. Influential right-wing figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, Marjorie Taylor-Greene, and Thomas Massie are going hard on an America-First rupture with Israel’s aggressions, with effect.  We’ve reached a point where only 22% of younger (18-34) Republicans think Israeli actions in Gaza are justified.  

That’s an amazing, and fast, reversal of Zionist fortune in the American public—crucially, in the younger demographic that Kirk affected most. And the Zionist establishment cannot allow it to continue.

In this precarious context for Zionist support in the U.S, we also have Max Blumenthal and Anya Parampil’s Grayzone articles, based on “Kirk’s friend, who also enjoyed access to President Donald Trump and his inner circle.” According to that source, Kirk had refused Netanyahu’s offer of “a massive new infusion of Zionist money into his Turning Point USA,” had come to “loathe the Israeli leader, regarding him as a ‘bully,’” and “was disgusted by what he witnessed inside the Trump administration, where Netanyahu sought to personally dictate the president’s personnel decisions, and weaponized Israeli assets like billionaire donor Miriam Adelson to keep the White House firmly under its thumb.” The Grayzone source also says Kirk was “frightened” by the pressure he was receiving from Zionist donors, while Trump supporter, Harrison Smith, said he was told by “someone close to Charlie Kirk that Kirk thinks Israel will kill him if he turns against Israel.”  

I make no claim that Charlie Kirk was on the verge of renouncing Zionism, or that he was assassinated by Israel. I do know that, because he had platformed Israeli critics like Tucker Carlson and Dave Smith, he had been declared anathema by the same people who are now sanctifying, and insisting that you must worship, him.

https://x.com/LauraLoomer/status/1944540088400281688

My point is not to adjudicate Charlie Kirk’s “real” position on Israel. My point is this: The people behind this canonization campaign do not really care about Charlie Kirk or think he's all that. They are using his ghost to prop up the sanctity of Zionism, to gin up a "right-left" fight to forestall the "right-left" unity that has been coalescing in opposition to Israel and Zionism. It’s a reasonable discussion and potential alliance between leftists and right-populists over Israel—like this Tim Dillon-Max Blunenthal interview—that Israeli and American Zionists are terrified of.

We’re in an unprecedented—and for the Zionists, unacceptable—situation where people on the MAGA “right”—perhaps even more than those on the liberal “left”—are concluding that Israel might have assassinated Charlie Kirk and was likely involved in the JFK assassination, that Jeffrey Epstein was running a Mossad op that may have entrapped Trump, and that the country wasted its blood and treasure in a succession of regime-change wars in the Middle East for the benefit of Israel.

That's why they're going much harder with this ridiculous mythification of Kirk as Israel’s angel than they did even with Trump after his assassination attempts. Not because the person is more important to them, but because the historical moment is—a moment in which Israel is going full indefensible “final solution” in Gaza and dragging the U.S. into another wasteful war with Iran, and most people in the world and in the United States are sick of it. In this moment, the narrative managers don't give a damn about Charlie Kirk; they're concerned about defending and preserving indispensable American support for Israel and Zionism.

So, to argue about Charlie Kirk is to miss the point. It’s like arguing about the hostages in Gaza. The people pushing this campaign care no more about him than Netanyahu does about them. One might say that he, or his ghost, is effectively now their hostage.

J.D. Vance and the Republican leadership no more think Charlie Kirk is really some historic American saint and moral and intellectual giant than John Brennan and the Democratic leadership really thought Donald Trump was a spy for Vladimir Putin. The factions that spin these tales do so to corral their constituents into an ideological and political pen they can control, rather than have them wandering into forbidden places. If you thought Russiagate was about exposing Trump as a Russian agent, you were being played. If you think this narrative is about establishing the sainthood of Charlie Kirk, you are being played. If the words “left” and “right” keep you from seeing that, you are being played. The factions that spin these tales are contemptuous of you for believing them.

What I find upsetting and depressing is how quickly and thoroughly these tales saturate the political and media environment, making it virtually impossible for most people not to ingest and regurgitate them.

Do the people who liked Charlie Kirk because he presented as a free-speech warrior not see what's going on here? What they are being recruited into? It’s really not hard.

And, yes, it's a mirror version of what the liberal Democrats did during Biden—embracing expansive and malleable concepts of “terrorism” and “domestic terrorism,” “misinformation,” protest as “sedition,” “political violence,” speech as violence, etc.—to justify censorship, cancellation, and RICO prosecution. Some of us warned constantly about the precedents being set and the tools put in place that would inevitably be used against those so smugly wielding them. It was not hard to see how pernicious and stupid the Dems use of those tools were, and it was not hard to see—I did—how pernicious and stupid the Trump administration was going to be. Because neither faction really believes in the principles, or saints, they claim to revere.

It's extraordinarily depressing to see how easy it is to manipulate different groups of people with their shiny trinket.  We did succeed in preventing the Disinformation Governance Board. It’s a different administration, but the same Deep State, which now wants (because his work overall lends to this) to fold mandatory Charlie-worship in with mandatory Zionism-worship. We—everyone who wants to challenge that Deep State—better not let them get the “We'll take your social media if you criticize Charlie Kirk” Law, or any of its "We'll take your passport if you criticize Israel" affiliates.

As the man sings, “Everybody plays the fool sometime. There's no exception to the rule.” But time has run out on the American merry-go-round of tomfoolery.

When will enough people wake the fuck up?

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