We live in an age of absurdity when a fascist like Charlie Kirk is hailed as a champion of free speech and open debate. Free speech advocates don’t create databases of people they disagree so that they can be harassed, get death threats and have their career’s ruined. This is what Kirk’s Turning Point USA’s did to professors across the United States by creating the “Professor Watchlist.”

Kirk hated free speech, as evidenced by the watchlist and by his own rancid record of punching down on college students who objected to his rhetoric. His “debates” were merely opportunities for public mockery and the platforming of fascist ideas. And these professors, who generally taught the real history of the United States, represented an existential threat to his supremacist ideology.

He didn’t deserve to be shot, but the posthumous honorifics and performative mourning following his murder are beyond absurd. And it isn’t just Magaland that is responsible for that. Vacuous liberals like Ezra Klein have contributed to this kabuki theatre of wailing ninnies.

Klein is a particularly odious example. He penned a nauseating eulogy for the New York Times immediately following Kirk’s demise, claiming Kirk “did politics right.” Would this correct way of doing politics include the professor watchlist? Or paying for busses to the January 6th attempted coup? Klein’s intellectual rot is indicative of the nature of American liberalism, which usually plays handmaiden to fascism by pretending to be a foil while never obstructing its rise in meaningful or material ways.

Gavin Newsom is another problematic character in this regard. His gushing of grief for Kirk seems almost endless. Apparently, the two shared a warm moment on his show in their shared hatred of transgender athletes that Newsom still cherishes. And yet, we are told that he is the only viable opposition to Trumpian fascism. To many older, white liberals, Newsom charms with his use of memes to “own Trump.” It is a classic case of spectacle over substance.

If nothing else, Charlie Kirk’s death signals the death of American liberalism. An ideology that has always acted as a fortress to protect and save capitalism from itself. Presented as the only rational alternative to leftism, liberalism borrowed the left’s most palatable and inoffensive values and made them central to its ethos, all but ignoring the material concerns of the working class.

Championing equality and human rights ring hollow in a society where the working poor continue to see their status decline. And this is also how liberalism has provided cover for every brutal excess of American imperialism, from war, coups, up to and including the genocide of Palestinians by Israel, the empire’s most important colonial asset. Like so many Americans, white liberals are largely apathetic when it comes to foreign policy.

The result has inevitably been the rise of fascism. Like a ravenous vulture unobstructed from liberalism’s ashes, it ascends while liberals bask in self absorbed revelry, trample on the left for even modest demands, and pander to the very worst elements in society. What is tragically ironic is that figures like Klein and Newsom are busy throwing wood on its funeral pyre.

Kenn Orfanos, September 2025