Until last week if I’d been forced to hazard a guess about who Charlie Kirk was, I’d have speculated that he was perhaps the great grandfather of Captain James T. Kirk in one of the 328 versions of Star Trek that have so far been found in the observable universe. Maybe he had died on an early mission to Mars organised by a crazed Nazi trillionaire. That is why when I watched the South Park episode “Got a Nut” before he was murdered, I assumed that the Clyde Donovan podcaster character was an amalgam of several generic fascist adjacent activists found in the primordial soup of the American far right. Most of the attention for that episode was on Kristi Noem taking every opportunity to shoot puppies and Mr Mackie joining ICE, the modern anglophone version of the Brownshirts.  

As it turns out Clyde’s new persona was based closely on Kirk, even down to the hairstyle. He enrages Eric Cartman by setting himself up as an ultra-right controversialist who makes money sponsoring dubious food supplements on a show where a typical discussion opens with “You can’t trust Jews, white people are the underprivileged, and women belong at home.” He then moves on to “Women have it good in America, just like Black people do. Black people have everything handed to them…” and “The Civil Rights Act was a huge mistake. And, I don’t know, lesbians are an abomination of God.”

It isn’t just the hairstyle that was nicked. Kirk’s ideas were freely quoted in the episode without attribution which seems a bit unfair.

Cartman’s problem with all this is that he’s been saying these things since 1997. “You all stole my schtick! Clyde!” What has happened in America, and is now happening in Britain, is that views that were once considered so ludicrous and reactionary that they were comic material are now largely the policy of the US government.

How else to explain the weird outpouring of grief from the international far right and some White House Obergruppenführer saying “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government, to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people.” Cartman could not have put it better.

Kirk was thrilled by his portrayal. “This is all a win. We as conservatives have thick skin, not thin skin, and you can make fun of us and it doesn’t matter.” The hard fact is that he was right. The episode drew attention to him and briefly enhanced his public profile before his ascent into Valhalla (assuming that is where reactionary Christians go) raised his brand to stratospheric heights.

Eric Cartman shares the fate of many great American pioneers. He would resent the comparison, but he is like all those Black blues musicians who made fortunes for white bands. However, he should take comfort from the fact that he was the outcast prophet whose ideas are now mainstream and remains a master debater.

On a couple of personal notes, I recently declined an invitation to go to a wedding in a southern American state because I was worried about being disappeared into a Louisiana gulag. This piece means I’m not likely to visit the US anytime soon, but that’s no great loss. I have only been there once and the tea was universally awful.

As for Mormons, I can only say that I knew one reasonably well. She quit the church and took up with an even weirder bunch of cultists, the American SWP before ending up as an academic apologist for the IDF. Who knows where Kirk’s alleged killer would have ended up intellectually if he hadn’t been so daft?