A Saint of Dishonesty

Ben Wildsmith

I came across this video last night of Christian ‘prophetess’, Kat Kerr, who had been invited, by God, to a celestial ceremony at which the recently murdered conservative activist Charlie Kirk was presented with a quiver containing 1000 arrows of light.

Following a disturbing precedent set by the Welsh Labour conference in Llandudno, Nation.Cymru was not invited to this event, so we must defer to Ms. Kerr’s reporting. If you relied on the ‘lamestream media’ you’d be entirely unaware of God’s hastily arranged shindig, so watch this space for more scoops going forward.

Now, it’s true that the USA has always boasted more than its fair share of religious zealots with heads for business. Evangelists have been parting trusting Septics with their dollars ever since the country was settled by Protestant extremists in the first place.

Until the 1970s, though, churches kept their hustle scrupulously separate from politics sensing, you might surmise, that the unholy antics of politicians were likely to taint their brand. The alliance we recognise today between evangelical churches and conservative politicians was conceived by Ronald Reagan to successfully prise religious voters away from the Democratic Party after it renounced segregation and embraced civil rights.

Civil rights

Charlie Kirk had no truck with civil rights. He described Martin Luther King as ‘awful’ and ‘not a good person’, employing similar childlike and binary language to that we’ve come to expect from the Reverend Trump.

‘We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.’

Kirk also idealised the past in his views on gender. Upon learning of Taylor Swift’s engagement, he hoped that marriage would cause Swift to ‘reject feminism’.

‘Submit to your husband, Taylor,’ he advised. ‘You’re not in charge.’

Where the sales pitch ended with Charlie and real conviction began is impossible to tell. The commercialisation of belief in the world’s most aggressively capitalist society is so total as to make that distinction meaningless. If a position drives likes and views, then it will be held sincerely soon enough by the person whose revenue stream is attached to it.

Quasi-religious

The death of Kirk has illuminated how detached from reason the quasi-religious MAGA movement is. Its tenets are founded in emotion and finessed into arguments by spokespeople whose skills are often honed in the media. The trick is to be led by the base instincts of the audience and then appear to satisfy them.

So, MAGA is in favour of procreation; lots of white, conservative procreation. It is in favour of consumption; lots of fossil fuel consumption to go with the fast food. It likes violence; the protestors at Trump rallies need to be treated ‘rough’.

The positions that flow from these instincts, however, can be wildly contradictory. Whilst JD Vance condemns the UK for stymying liberty with its hate speech legislation, he simultaneously exhorts Americans to report anyone speaking ill of Kirk to their employers. Comedians are sacked and journalists excluded by an administration that poses to champion free speech whilst seeking to eradicate all dissent.

Ku Klux Klan

This is the contradictory religiosity of the Ku Klux Klan made memetastic for the social media generation. ‘Our’ values and rights are so sacred as to render anyone excluded by them less than human. Your base desire is God’s will.

Kat Kerr’s fantasies, whether sincerely held or fabricated for gain, are not unique in American discourse. From slavery, to the genocide of Native Americans, and segregation, the USA has always indulged its basest instincts under the cloak of values that switch from the political to the religious to the commercial as suits the situation. If you want to do something and I can profit from it, then we’ll find a moral justification somewhere.

Charlie Kirk is a saint of the peculiar dishonesty that characterises his nation.