I had no idea who Charlie Kirk was until he wasn’t. Which made me wonder whether I was as politically informed as I thought. But I comforted myself in assuming he was a Tik-Tok chancer, another spewer of alternative facts, with a fundamentalist Christian bent. Cold comfort when I dug a bit deeper and discovered how he toured around college campuses in the states to try and convert young people to his cause which was, in fact, the old right-wing tropes wrapped up in zeitgeisty layers of racism, sexism, gun-love and homophobia, a kind of deluxe Trumpism retooled for American students. Depressing. Depressing too that he was shot (shooting people is a heinous act, period) as his death released a vomit of hate that made doom-scrolling sites like Twitter even more of a hellish nightmare, and strongly suggested devils like Trump held the answer. His answer being, of course, more violence. It didn’t matter that liberals and the left had less guns and committed less murder than the MAGA hordes and their followers, they would always and forever be the enemy within. It’s a disheartening fact that, not only in the US but all over the world, right-wing authoritarians have a greater chance of grabbing power because the police and spy-cops are obsessed with left-wing activists, anyone of colour, and anyone else who questions the stupidities of capitalist fundamentalism. White is right as Kirk so often said. White is might is probably more to the point. On that basis it looks like the old left vs right paradigm isn’t quite as extinct as some would like to think. Especially as one or two commentators suggested it didn’t apply to the Charlie Kirk case. Why? Well, the person arrested, Tyler Robinson, is not obviously of the left, and the argument goes that a deep knowledge of the signs and signals used by extremists on social media reveal a more chaotic and troubling truth. Leading to the question: is Robinson more right-wing than Trump? And, if ever proved/revealed, viewed both MAGA Republicans and Kirk as the enemy because they were, among other things, sell-outs. And that people like me, people trying to impose order on stories like this one and see politics through the old left/right prism, are a different kind of enemy, but an enemy nonetheless. But based on what’s happening here in the UK and in the Disunited States over the water I’m not going to be distracted from the truths of left versus right just because a few gun-toting keyboard bashers are trying to impose their chaos on what is still very obviously the old-style politics. To my mind, Tommy Robinson’s flag-shaggers, Trumpists, Christian nationalists, racists, sexists, and homophobes are still very much the enemy and need pushing back and fighting against. That’s as true now as it was back in the thirties.