We don’t yet know the motive for the assassination of Charlie Kirk today. We don’t yet have the shooter. What we do know is that some in our mainstream media tried to excuse it.

I’d seen 31-year old US political influencer Charlie Kirk’s name on my X feed for a couple of years now. I never really knew who he was. I often confused him with the actor Kirk Cameron, the C and the K corrupting my mnemonic.

He was a Conservative, I knew. The last I glimpsed of him last night on X was of a video where he challenged pro-Palestinian activists to question their lies of genocide in Gaza. He asked one, “What if Israel disbanded its military?” The activist said, “The Palestinians would move in.” “Oh!” said Charlie, he’d caught the activist out. Charlie asked, “So, they would take over, mostly peacefully?” “Most definitely,” the activist said. Charlie asked, “Can you show me an example of Jews living peacefully under Islamic rule?” Yeah what’s new?

I woke from sleep this Aussie morning to see another X video of Charlie. It was of his murder just two hours old.

He sat on an outdoor stage holding a mic at a Utah Valley University speaking event, some thousands of people were in attendance. He was shot at long range, that was clear. The bullet appeared to hit or exit the left side of his neck. I couldn’t quite tell. For some reason I tried recalling the JFK assassination to figure out what might cause his head to slump sideways to the left as it did. Blood indeed poured in a fountain from that area. It suggested an artery hit. Whatever had happened, that single shot was accurate. It required skill to land it.

My X feed rolled on. While Kirk was now dying in hospital, someone posted a video from MSNBC. One of its commentators had framed the assassination attempt as Kirk’s own fault for being “divisive”. Only a day earlier, CNN’s Van Jones had blamed the murder of an innocent White female Ukrainian refugee on a train in North Carolina on that woman—because her killer, caught on camera, was “obviously an angry Black man”. This was the same Van Jones who labelled Trump’s first election win as a “Blacklash”.

Our mainstream media had broken the world.

Indeed, thanks to the media, the US had lost its values of “freedom from fear” for all. The UK, Canada, Ireland, Spain and France had too in their nod to antisemitism since the war in Gaza began. AP, Reuters, BBC, Guardian, Sky, LBC, CBC alongside NYT and WaPo among others, had been stoking propaganda with an eerie and unprecedented coordinated choreography since Hamas hit Israel in 2023.

They’d moved from reporting news to ironically slapping their hero Noam Chomsky in the face. He’d long ago written that the media “manufactured consent” for their governments. Ironically, they’d now become manufacturers of dissent for forces outside.

As an Aussie I knew that my country, once home to migrants from Europe and Asia, and the sanctuary for more Holocaust survivors per capita outside Israel, was running out of time.

Amid this tsunami of racial hate that the US Black Lives Matter Movement had coined as “woke”, Australia was losing its reality of multicultural “mateship”—a “fair go” as we called it. The tide of vengeful grift and bloodlust anarchy, was already crashing against its bulwarks of decency, cast by a Labor government driven by a woke Left Wing seeking a populist wave to strip away those values too.

It was just madness.

I have since researched Charlie Kirk.

I admire his Christian Evangelism though we disagree on gay and lesbian marriage. I agree with his right to abortion for the health of the mother, though I would extend the nuance of the abortion debate more. I agree with his views on Capitalism and the growth of industrial manufacturing opportunity for the working class. Yet, I thoroughly disagree with his stance on Covid, mask mandates and anti-vaccination.

A friend of mine this morning, however, pointed out the belief that Kirk was antisemitic. So, I researched this too and I disagree.

As we’ve seen, he held strong pro-Zionist views, as do I. Where my friend’s confusion may have arisen then, rests with what some have called Kirk’s stance against “Cultural Marxism”. It’s a phenomenon that has two definitions:

The first claims that Jewish culture is the source of all evil. This is trash propaganda straight from the Soviet Union’s “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”. It’s also a brain rot that has been allowed to infest too many of the world’s college campuses and defines the ethos of the pro-Palestine movement, the UN and numerous governments as we’ve seen.

The second definition claims that “colonialism” is the source of all global injustice by virtue of the racism it bears. I first came across this phenomenon in the 1980s when academics started to label history as the story of “dead white males”.

The accusation of Kirk’s antisemitism is a variation of the first claim.

He believed that Jewish billionaire George Soros financed the global Far Left: that Soros was thus the patron of a worldwide anarchist movement that sought civil unrest to effect racial change.

This isn’t antisemitism, and I don’t have a position on it. Yet, I am on record for saying that once you take the money out of “Palestinianism”, then peace in the Middle East will prevail. A week ago, today, I wrote, “Take the money out of Qatar and the war in Gaza will immediately end.”

What gets me is that after a decade of a Global War on Terror, our world was so close to sorting itself out. As 2014 dawned we were on the cusp of cementing true equality between women and men, a world where being gay or lesbian no longer raised an eyebrow, a time where secular pluralism was the slogan of the West.

Then something changed. It predated the rise of Donald Trump though it led to it.

In the face of the Syrian Civil War, Angela Merkel opened Germany’s doors to illegal immigration. She thought it would earn her votes.

She also ignored that the floodgates of anarchy were attached to them.

Grift in the name of “social justice” was let loose in the world. Part of that grift came with lawlessness. The media saw an audience in it.

Instead they became its fuel and the winds that fan its flames are never predictable.

Update September 11 2025—MSNBC issues apology

While publishing this piece the MSNBC Public Relations X account issued the following apology from its president for its on air commentary detailed above:

“Statement from MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler: ‘During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable. We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.'”

© 2025 Adam Parker.
Picture credit: “Crossing the Red Sea” by Sebastiaen Vrancx 1597-1600. Here the theme of the biblical Red Sea is re-imagined as God’s punishment of “German Protestant and Muslim heretics” during the Counter-Reformation by the Catholic Church. © 2016 National Gallery of Victoria. Author’s photo.