The System That Built Charlie Kirk Just Marched With Tommy Robinson

Right, so Charlie Kirk was the kind of political entrepreneur who built a career out of sneering at students, parroting donor talking points, and wrapping Islamophobia in a Stars-and-Stripes bow. Outside America’s right-wing echo chamber, most people had never heard of him. And yet, when he was gunned down in Utah by a man even further to the right than himself, you’d have thought a head of state had fallen. Parliaments across Europe bowed their heads in silence. Obituaries spoke of a “controversial figure” as if his life’s work hadn’t been peddling division. Meanwhile, in London, Tommy Robinson marched under the grotesque banner of “unity,” cheered on by Elon Musk and indulged seemingly by the police, given the blatant display of two tier policing, just 25 arrests despite the violence, compared to 900 pensioners and disabled people arrested last weekend for holding placards. Our establishment and our mainstream media in their reporting have shown that they are not neutral players here, what we are seeing is basically the laundering of fascism on both sides of the Atlantic. The only question is — are we going to let them get away with it?
Right, so the global mourning of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was not a president, a prime minister, or even a national legislator. He was not a figure widely known outside American conservative circles. Let’s preface everything with that. He was, in reality, a political entrepreneur whose main accomplishment was the creation of Turning Point USA, a donor-fuelled youth organisation dedicated to funneling pro-Republican and pro-Trump propaganda into college campuses. His stock-in-trade was provocation: Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, climate denial, and slavish loyalty to US and Israeli militarism.
And yet, when he was assassinated in Utah, Charlie Kirk was elevated to the level of a fallen statesman. Parliaments across Europe held silences in his honour. Western leaders issued statements of solemn grief. Major media outlets ran and continue to run days later reverent retrospectives, carefully smoothing away the ugliness of his politics as it were, hence my decision to speak up on this story now, I wasn’t going to give Kirk the time of day in life, I wasn’t going to in deathe ither, but there’s a bigger story playing out here now. For a figure virtually unknown to the general public outside the US, the sudden eruption of global mourning for someone with such abhorrent views has been surreal. But it is also deeply political and this matters more.
This is not genuine grief. It is completely manufactured. Charlie Kirk’s death became an opportunity: to sanctify a far-right provocateur as a martyr for “Western civilisation,” to divert attention away from the fact that he had been killed not by a Muslim or a progressive, as was desperately attempted as the framing for this to begin with, but by another white supremacist it would seem.
This same weekend as Kirk’s death continues to dominate media headlines, on this side of the Atlantic, Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, Tommy Robinson, led his “Unite the Kingdom” march in London. Media coverage inflated its significance, far more widely covered than any pro Palestine march had been, with reports citing over one hundred thousand attendees. Elon Musk appeared by video link, giving the march a further right wing endorsement, telling the throng that left wing politics was the politics of murder, yet where ire was aimed at Keir Starmer, who of course hasn’t got a single left wing bone in his body. Police, meanwhile, arrested just 25 participants despite violent clashes, compared to the nine hundred arrested at the Palestine Action protest the week before. So the disparity could not have been clearer: indulgence for fascist mobilisation, repression for anti-genocide protest, but sure, Keir Starmer is left wing. If you’re buying Robinson’s snake-oil over this you need to examine your life choices, but the media is no doubt playing its part here, just as it has for Kirk.
The comparison between Kirk’s sanctification in the United States and Robinson’s indulgence in Britain reveals a pattern though. On both sides of the ocean, establishment institutions and mainstream media are amplifying, sanitising, and legitimising far-right movements, while delegitimising or criminalising dissent from the left. Kirk’s death has been made into a propaganda gift for the far right, how Robinson’s mobilisation has also been elevated off the back of that same legitimisation into another fascistic spectacle, both events illustrate a dangerous laundering of fascist politics by the very institutions that actually claim to defend democracy and dare to still claim they hold power to account.
The most important fact about Charlie Kirk’s assassination is also the one most aggressively obscured in mainstream coverage: the main suspect, and I still have to use that term right now, he has not been charged as yet of course, was not a leftist, not a Muslim, but a 22 year old American called Tyler Robinson, a radicalised kid basically, embedded in the Groyper movement. So this was not left versus right. It was right versus right. White supremacist versus white supremacist.
Robinson is a far-right activist with ties to Nick Fuentes’ America First network, therefore the killing was right-wing on right-wing violence. But that exposes the instability within the nationalist movement itself and we can’t have that being exposed can we? Yet Donald Trump and his allies immediately tried to frame the killing as the work of the far left, while Utah Governor Spencer Cox admitted that for thirty-three hours he had “prayed” the killer would be foreign.
Cox’s admission is extraordinary. It exposes the instinctive Islamophobia of the establishment, that that was the desired outcome. For the narrative to work, the killer needed to be Muslim, or at least an immigrant. That would have allowed the political class to fold Kirk’s death neatly into the societal war script: another Western martyr killed by the eternal outsider. When Robinson’s identity was revealed, the narrative fell apart. Yet rather than admit the truth — that the far right is devouring its own — leaders like Trump and Netanyahu as well who weighed in on this continued to blame progressives and Muslims anyway. Truth is just an obstacle to be overcome.
This refusal to acknowledge reality demonstrates how far the establishment will go to protect the myth of far-right victimhood. An act of intra-fascist violence was laundered into a morality tale of left-wing hate. It was not incompetence; it was strategy.
Charlie Kirk’s political career was defined by contradictions, none more glaring, since I’ve brought Netanyahu up, than his relationship to Israel. Publicly, he was one of its most ardent defenders. At Turning Point USA conferences, he recited the familiar mantras: Israel as America’s greatest ally, Israel as a beacon of freedom, Israel as a partner in the war against radical Islam. In US conservative politics, such declarations are not optional, the Lobby is all powerful. They are rites of passage for access to funding, legitimacy, and power.
Privately, however, Kirk was apparently expressing fear of Israeli influence. Reports suggest that he refused direct funding from Israeli sources, worried about being controlled by them. This private unease marked him as suspect in the eyes of the Groypers, who see Zionism as proof of elite betrayal. In their worldview, mainstream conservatism is corrupted by loyalty to Israel and to Jewish donors. Kirk’s public praise and private refusal made him appear weak — neither fully committed to Zionism nor willing to break from it.
This contradiction explains why Kirk was despised by Robinson and his peers in that Groyper movement. To them, he embodied everything compromised about “Conservative Inc.”: dependent on donor money, unwilling to embrace explicit white nationalism, and too deferential to Israel. In killing him therefore, Robinson could be seen to be enacting the Groyper rejection of establishment conservatism itself.
Yet Benjamin Netanyahu ignored these nuances. In his statements after the assassination, he blamed Muslims and progressives, insisting that Kirk had been targeted for his defence of Israel. Facts were irrelevant. What mattered was the narrative: Israel and the Western right as eternal co-victims of the left and of Islam. Think about it: whatever you think of Kirk a man is dead and all these guys are concerned about, is how to twist that to their benefit. By bending reality into this frame, Netanyahu is not only shielding the far right from accountability but also reinforcing his own position as the indispensable partner in the imagined civilisational struggle.
To understand why Kirk was seen as weak, it is necessary to understand the Groypers themselves. Emerging in the late 2010s, the Groypers are a youth-driven far-right movement centred around Nick Fuentes, a livestreamer and provocateur who branded his followers the “America First” movement. The name “Groyper” comes from a cartoon toad, used as a symbol of insider irony.
The Groypers combine white nationalism, antisemitism, and Christian fundamentalism. They call for the end of immigration, the re-Christianisation of America, and the dismantling of what they see as a Jewish-controlled political system. Unlike mainstream Republicans, who couch their extremism in the language of “family values” and “border security,” the Groypers are explicit. They do not shy away from racist language or from calls to dismantle democracy itself. If you might have thought Kirk was far right, he really wasn’t the far right.
Their recruitment strategy relies heavily on meme culture and livestreaming. Fuentes’ broadcasts blend humour, irony, and extremism, making fascist ideology palatable to alienated young men online. They appropriate memes, gaming culture, and internet slang to create a sense of belonging. To outsiders, their jokes seem childish or incomprehensible. To insiders, they are signals of radical identity.
The Groypers’ obsession with Charlie Kirk stemmed from his visibility. He embodied the “establishment conservative” they despised: pro-Israel, donor-friendly, unwilling to embrace explicit racism. For years, Groypers disrupted his campus events, demanding that he debate Fuentes on immigration and Israel. When he refused, they cast him as a coward. His prominence gave them a foil therefore; his weakness gave them an enemy, even as they themselves rode on his bandwagon.
Kirk’s death therefore represents not only the removal of a rival but the validation of their worldview. To the Groypers, his assassination proves that “weak conservatism” cannot survive. It clears the stage for them to position themselves as the authentic voice of nationalist youth. For Fuentes, who spent years riding Kirk’s coattails, it is an opportunity to step into the spotlight uncontested now.
Among the most revealing details of the assassination were the bullet casings themselves. Robinson had engraved them with a series of memes and cryptic phrases. At first glance they seemed nonsensical. But when decoded, they revealed both his immersion in internet subcultures and the ways in which meme culture has become weaponised by the far right.
There are four casings key to this story in this regard. The casing of one bullet bore the inscription, “Notices bulges OwO what’s this?” And understandably to most outsiders, this sounds like total gibberish. In fact, it is drawn from furry subculture memes, used ironically in online spaces to parody sexualised dialogue. For Robinson, inscribing it on ammunition was both a joke and a signal: a way of bringing internet irony into deadly reality. It mocked the solemnity of violence, turning killing into a meme.
Another casing read, “Hey fascist! Catch! ↑ → ↓ ↓ ↓.” The arrow sequence corresponds to a command in the video game Helldivers 2 for calling in an airstrike. In gaming culture, such inputs are instantly recognisable. By pairing it with the phrase “Hey fascist! Catch!” Robinson turned a gamer joke into a weaponised taunt. The irony is that Robinson himself was part of a fascist movement; his use of the word here was likely trolling, intended to confuse outsiders while signalling to insiders his awareness of the irony.
A third casing was engraved with the lyric “Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao, Bella Ciao Ciao Ciao.” This is the anthem of Italian anti-fascist partisans in the Second World War, revived in recent years by popular culture. For a fascist assassin to engrave it on bullets was either a grotesque parody or an attempt to appropriate anti-fascist symbols as part of the far right’s endless game of irony.
The final inscription revealed was the juvenile phrase, “If you read this, you are gay lmao.” This kind of trolling statement is common in online far-right spaces: deliberately offensive, designed to mock whoever takes it seriously, and to reinforce in-group cohesion by showing contempt for outsiders.
Taken together, these inscriptions show that the casings were not random scribbles but a manifesto in code. They embodied the far right’s strategy of cloaking violence in irony, of making extremism appear as a joke, and of confusing outsiders while bonding insiders. For Robinson, the casings were both a personal signature and a political statement: the fusion of meme culture and fascist violence.
Mainstream media, however, failed to grasp this utterly. Reporters stumbled through explanations, treating the inscriptions as bizarre curiosities rather than political signals. Some attempted to decode them, but most reduced them to quirk. The result, their failing was predictable: the casings became spectacle rather than evidence, their meaning trivialised rather than exposed for the fascist messaging they carried.
This failure is symptomatic of a broader problem in mainstream media though. The far right has colonised meme culture as a recruitment tool, while mainstream journalists remain ill-equipped or unwilling to engage with it seriously. By treating memes as trivial, by not understanding and failing to do the basic journalism to investigate these things properly, the media enables their laundering into the public sphere. Robinson’s casings are a case study in this failure: deadly symbols reduced to curiosity, extremism masked as eccentricity because mainstream journalistic standards are crap.
While America was manufacturing mourning for Kirk and exporting it abroad of course, Britain was indulging Tommy Robinson instead. His “Unite the Kingdom” march in London was reported to have drawn over one hundred thousand people, some are inflating the figure even more. Elon Musk appeared by video link, granting the event global attention. Media coverage inflated its significance, presenting it as if it were a national moment rather than a mobilisation of the far right.
The policing exposed the double standard. Despite violent clashes, just 25 arrests were made. One guy even made a death threat on camera to Keir Starmer, saying he needs to be assassinated. Musk’s message was that left wing politics is murder, when the left have nothing to do with any of this. By contrast, the week before, where the left wing viewpoints were very much on show, nine hundred people were arrested at a Palestine Action protest, many of them pensioners or disabled, sat in peace, just holding placards. The message is both appalling and unmistakable: violent ethnonationalists are indulged, peaceful anti-genocide protesters are criminalised.
The branding of the march as “Unite the Kingdom” was itself grotesque. Yaxley-Lennon’s politics are defined by division: Islamophobia, anti-immigrant hate, conspiracy theories about multiculturalism. To present such a rally as an expression of unity is to launder fascism into patriotism. This lot wrap themselves in a flag, many of the rest of us would now rather distance ourselves from as a result. Media coverage that amplified these claims without critique participated in that laundering.
Speeches at counter-protests, including those by MP Zarah Sultana, made the hypocrisy plain as well. While Robinson was indulged, those calling for solidarity with Palestine were treated as pariahs. This hierarchy of protest rights reveals the role of the state: far-right mobilisation is coddled, progressive dissent is repressed. The indulgence of Robinson is not an accident but a political choice, just as much as making a direct action pro Palestine protest movement a terrorist entity is. Starmer’s government is not left wing, they court the right wing and despite this protest making it abundantly clear he will never win their votes, he won’t change tack.
The sanctification of Kirk and the indulgence of Robinson are not isolated events. They are part of a common transatlantic pattern in which the far right is elevated into legitimacy by establishment institutions. In the United States, a white supremacist was killed by another white supremacist, and the establishment reframed it as left-wing hate. In Britain, a racist demagogue staged a divisive rally, and the establishment treated it as democratic mobilisation. All of this is active establishment and mainstream media participation in the sanctification of marginal agitators and one of them into a civilisational martyr.
This is not incompetence. It is structural. Media hype, state indulgence, and establishment mourning form the scaffolding of fascist normalisation. The West is not drifting into fascism by accident. It is being driven there by institutions that prefer to elevate the far right rather than confront it. You can throw in the constant platforming of Nigel Farage into this argument at this point as well.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk and the spectacle of Tommy Robinson’s rally reveal the same truth though: we are witnessing the deliberate laundering of the far right into legitimacy. What should have been moments of exposure — the far right devouring itself in America, a fascist rally in Britain — have instead been transformed into moments of amplification.
Charlie Kirk should never have been elevated to global martyrdom. He was a marginal agitator whose politics were defined by hate. His death at the hands of a fellow white supremacist should have been used to expose the contradictions of the far right. Instead, it has been spun into a story of left-wing hate, sanctified by parliaments, and laundered into legitimacy and the only pushback comes from left wing alt media who don’t have the same presence in public media discourse and it is frightening to the degree that is being exposed, so please support your favourite independent left wing outlets, it really is becoming more important than ever.
Tommy Robinson’s march should have been recognised as a threat to democratic life. Instead, it was hyped as a national event, indulged by police, and even given the blessing of the richest man on the planet.
The pattern is clear. Across the Atlantic, the establishment is manufacturing martyrs and manufacturing mobilisation for the far right. The media acts not as a watchdog but as a megaphone. The state acts not as a neutral arbiter but as an enabler. What looks like mourning is in fact propaganda. What looks like tolerance is in fact complicity. Keir Starmer couldn’t shut up about Palestine Action, he’s said nothing of Robinson’s march. His silence now damns him.
The danger is not only that fascism is rising. It is that the very institutions that claim to defend democracy are birthing it. The question now is whether we will see through the laundering before it is too late. We all have a part to play in that, through support, through simply liking and sharing and getting word out from those outlets that do speak truth to power and will not give fascism a free pass.
Of course Tommy ten-names isn’t the only person Keir Starmer is giving too much free rein too and regretting it, there’s the small matter of a certain Peter Mandelson too. He might have thought sacking him as US ambassador might solve a problem, but the can of worms only burst open all the more as this video recommendation here will tell you all about.
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