Far-Left British rage-bait rappers Bob Vylan have been courting clicks again, this time thanks to vocalist Pascal Robinson-Foster gloating at a gig in Amsterdam over the shocking assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The American official response was swift: Christopher Landau, the Deputy Secretary of State, posted on X yesterday that the State Department “has revoked [Robinson-Foster’s] visa so at least he will not be engaging in his grotesque diatribes on American soil”.

The revocation had, in fact, already taken place. Earlier this year Robinson-Foster earned headlines for leading a chant of “Death to the IDF” at Glastonbury Festival, and it was this event which triggered the visa withdrawal. But the intervention of such a senior US Government figure following the online response to Kirk’s death signals that the mainstream Right is now catching up with the Left when it comes to harnessing digitally mediated mass emotion as a political force. But the absence thus far of concrete Right-wing policies pegged to that force suggests conservatives still trail their opponents when it comes to capitalising on these new realities.

Kirk was allegedly shot by Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old man who was reportedly radicalised in far-Left online communities and whose weapons were said to be inscribed with messages sympathetic to trans ideology. In response to the shooting, anger has erupted across conservative communities against a progressive movement now widely perceived as actively murderous. Online, a coordinated movement has emerged seeking sanctions against anyone posting in celebration of the shooting, with dozens of people fired for making such posts. Landau’s X post about Bob Vylan should be seen in this context, even though in reality it repurposed a sanction already invoked against the rap group.

These sanctions have in turn prompted another spate of classical liberal threnody about “Right-wing cancel culture”, denouncing the spread of online mobs across the political spectrum. Perhaps a more accurate framing, though, would be the now widely observable decay of 20th-century norms concerning the freedom to say offensive things. There was never any reason to suppose this decay would be confined to the Left: it likely appeared so initially because conservatives are by definition less disposed to be early adopters of anything. The emergence of swarm punishment squads in response to Kirk’s assassination demonstrates that this is now changing, as we might expect given the now definitive Anglosphere transition to digital-first culture. But how deep does this go?

The closest comparator event to date, for the Left, is probably the death of George Floyd in 2020. While Floyd’s death prompted weeks of rioting, destruction and chaos, conservative Americans have responded to Kirk’s murder chiefly through shock, anger, sorrow, and prayer. But there are clear parallels between the two in terms of emotive power, international reach, and the partisan split in interpretation, plus — importantly — the emergence of highly charged, crowdsourced online moral policing in the aftermath.

In assessing how deep post-liberal politics now reaches on the Right, though, the relevant difference is arguably how adeptly Floyd’s death was weaponised as a spearhead for progressive policy change. In the febrile moral atmosphere that followed, HR policies were transformed, police forces restructured, conservatives and moderates defenestrated from leadership roles, and significant sums of money allocated to influential voices associated with the post-Floyd “racial reckoning”. By comparison, to date there has been little sign from the Trump administration or aligned institutions of any equivalent structural moves in the wake of Kirk’s murder.

Such moves might include, for example, the designation of Antifa as domestic terrorists, and directing resources and manpower to disrupting its activities; comprehensive steps to proscribe transgender ideology in schools and public institutions; increased government funding for institutions promoting conservative values; and forcing changes in the leadership of any public institution perceived as in any way condoning political murders.

Reasonable people can disagree on how directly relevant any of this would be to the murder itself, much as people did — albeit sotto voce — during the Summer of Floyd. The point is that, along with mobilising online swarms against individuals perceived as unaligned, progressives parlayed Floyd’s death with gimlet-eyed efficiency into a far-reaching public policy programme. At ground level, the Right is evidently catching up with the Left in grasping how post-liberal (which is to say digital) politics works. But there is, as yet, little evidence of comparable skill in the Right’s upper echelons when it comes to transforming raw internet energy into substantive institutional politics.

---

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

moveincircles

---