It was the 37th President of America —Richard Milhous Nixon — who once spoke of a silent majority and their ability to shape political outcomes.
In the age of social media and 24 hour news channels, it’s almost safe to say that there is no such thing as a silent majority as most people — young and old, Black and white — are happy to put their faces in front of a smart phone and express their views without holding back.
And what we have seen in the last few years is extremely ugly.
And much more importantly, we have seen the irresistible, inexorable rise of the extreme right in the leading Anglosphere nations evinced by Donald Trump in America and Nigel Farage in Britain.
What isn’t spoken about is the infrastructure which has made the far right an unstoppable force in our polities in the last decade. A system which has produced podcast celebrities and superstars, who have built a powerbase that no right thinking politician can afford to ignore, if they want to win elections.
Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Russell Brand, Steve Bartlett, Ezra Klein and Novara media (here in the United Kingdom) are clear examples of this 21st century phenomenon.
And there’s also Nick Fuentes, Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens and the late Charlie Kirk.
With the recently slain Kirk, there’s no doubt that the man took full advantage of the currency of whiteness in getting his message to a much wider audience.
His pronouncements on race, civil rights, transgender people, Islam homosexuality were to the extreme right of the political spectrum and this would have had him cancelled at a time when the silent majority were truly silent, but these aren’t normal times.
The value of the currency of whiteness is an all-time high, ensuring that a university drop-out like Kirk can come out to say that Ketanji Brown and Michelle Obama with their multiple degrees from Ivy league colleges as ‘not having the brain processing power to be taken seriously’.
The currency of whiteness was very much at work when he said that Blacks were better under Jim Crow than they are today, conveniently erasing the lynchings which took place during and after slavery and other sustained acts of racial terrorism in the 19th and 20th centuries.
And this currency was alive in the immediate aftermath of his slaughter, when a moment of silence was declared in the European Parliament and the American House of Congress and was declared a martyr in the mould of Martin Luther King (whom he actively disparaged).
If you’re still reading this, the point here is that the currency of whiteness is the reason why a Charlie Kirk can exist and spout so much nonsense without being held accountable in the court of law.
That his life was brought to an end by a white male and not those at whom his bigotry was directed is somewhat tragically ironic. But this extraordinary event hasn’t provoked any serious soul-searching from the protagonists of the new right.
The currency of whiteness has never shown any appetite for introspection and accountability and this tells us everything regarding the true extent of the mess we are in.
Safe in the knowledge that the currency of whiteness will remain high for the foreseeable future and clear about the work needed to ensure that its value completely crashes.
Yesterday, we saw Elon Musk giving a speech to the millions who marched to protest immigration in London.
Far right governments are the new normal and we will see much more of them in Italy, France, Britain, America, Hungary, The Netherlands, Poland, Germany as more people flee wars instigated by the military-industrial complex and the natives are gaslighted by those taking advantage of the ensuing chaos.
Charlie Kirk might well be the very first of many.
Foreign Exchange are op-eds from writers who do not live in the U.S. They have thoughts but don't have a dog in the race.