TikTok is worth a mass
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Here’s a story from the Before Time (April), when it was still legal to print the truth about Charlie Kirk, from Baptist News Global. It traces how Kirk and his organization Turning Point USA went from a purveyor of explicitly secular extreme right-wing rhetoric, that included playing kissy-face with plenty of neo-Nazis, to something very different, at least superficially:
On Aug. 11, 2017, after weeks of publicizing it, white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups descended on the streets of Charlottesville, Va., under the pretense of protesting the removal of a statue of Robert E. Lee. Angry white men marched through the streets carrying tiki torches and shouting slogans like “Jews will not replace us.”
While young, angry white supremacist neo-Nazis were taking to the streets in cities like Charlottesville, they were beginning to take note of Kirk and TPUSA.
After releasing the “Professor Watchlist,” Kirk and TPUSA began booking appearances with alt-right neo-Nazis like Milo Yiannopoulos. These campus appearances led to massive (and sometimes violent) protests on college campuses.
After Charlottesville, white supremacists and neo-Nazis flocked to TPUSA events on college campuses and elsewhere, looking to fight with counter protesters. Kirk did nothing to separate himself or TPUSA from them.
In fact, many of TPUSA’s field organizers embraced the white supremacists in their midst. So much so that the media started taking note. Rather than distancing itself from racists and neo-Nazis, Kirk and TPUSA began offering “new and former staff with complimentary social media background checks” to uncover past racist behavior “that could potentially damage your credibility or the credibility of the organization.”
In fact, during the first Trump administration, Kirk went out of his way to distance himself not from neo-Nazis, but from evangelical Christians:
[In 2018] Charlie Kirk, a right-wing provocateur who founded the conservative activist group Turning Point USA, strongly criticized the evangelical political movement he now helps lead.
Kirk, known then primarily for his work mobilizing college-age Republicans, described Jesus as welcoming and tolerant and denounced Christians’ “sanctimonious approach” to homosexuality and other issues. He argued politics should be advanced through a “secular worldview” and slammed attempts by the evangelical right, beginning in the 1970s, to “impose” their version of morality “through government policy.”
After Trump’s 2020 loss, in the midst of the Covid pandemic, Kirk underwent a truly profound conversion experience:
“There is no separation of church and state,” Kirk said on his podcast in 2022. “It’s a fabrication. It’s a fiction. It’s not in the Constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.”
Today, Kirk and Turning Point are dominant forces in the Republican Party and MAGA movement, working directly with the Trump campaign on voter outreach while reaching millions of listeners through Kirk’s daily radio show and podcast. Along the way, Kirk has become one of the nation’s most prominent voices calling on Christians to view conservative political activism as central to Jesus’ calling for their lives.
Kirk routinely rails against what he calls the “LGBTQ agenda,” which he claims is harming children. He has invoked the Seven Mountains Mandate, a philosophy increasingly popular among Trump supporters that calls on conservative Christians to claim positions of power in seven key mountains of society, including government, media, business and education. And he promotes Trump as crucial to restoring Christian morality in America.
“I worship a God that defeats evil,” Kirk said last week while introducing the former president at a rally hosted by Turning Point and the Trump campaign at an Arizona megachurch. “And we worship a God that wins in the end.”
What I find particularly characteristic about this contemporary conversion narrative is that it doesn’t actually feature any sort of confession on the part of the prodigal son. It’s not as if Kirk publicly repented of his previous explicit embrace of secularism, let alone his strikingly tolerant attitude toward neo-Nazis and — even worse from the perspective of Christian nationalists — gay people. Rather, he followed his master Donald Trump in simply acting as if he had always embraced Christian nationalism in its most extreme forms, without the slightest acknowledgement that this silent and indeed completely invisible conversion flew directly in the face of what both men had previously spent their lives saying and doing.
On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. . The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker’s hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.
The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.
I’m pretty sure I know the answer to that question, but a lot of people are getting fired for noting what it is.