By Angelo Boccato
International reaction to the murder of Charlie Kirk, who was shot in September while speaking at a university in Utah, has further highlighted the way in which the European far-right depends on US culture wars.
In Italy, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni and Deputy Prime Minister Matteo Salvini, who are also the leaders of the far-right parties Brothers of Italy and the League, have mentioned the murder of Kirk, the value of his ideas and the importance of keeping those ideas in the spotlight on multiple occasions, including on social media and during public speeches.
Specifically, Meloni did so during Fenix, the annual event of Gioventù Italiana (Italian Youth, the youth division of Brothers of Italy), and Salvini at Pontida, the main yearly gathering of the League since its foundation in the late 1980s.
During the “Unite the Kingdom” demonstration in London on September 13, called by far-right activist Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, many of those who took the streets showed banners celebrating Charlie Kirk’s message and legacy.
A minute of silence was called for Kirk in the Italian Parliament by the government majority but a similar call at the European Parliament was rebuked.
What does the murder of a right-wing activist and influencer in the US tell us of the state of the culture wars overseas, its influence in Europe and of the war against DEI launched by the Trump Administration?
Culture wars in colleges, debates and the Trump Administration against DEI
“Charlie Kirk was one of the many voices in the conservative scene. He was known in the US, but maybe not so much abroad. He became a martyr after his murder and a greater than life figure because he was a victim of political violence,” Alice Speri, a US-based Italian journalist with a focus on higher education, told MDI.
“What he was brilliant at was translating the language of previous generations of conservatives in a new message, while using social media in a successful way by starting debates on US campuses.
“In the US, there is the honest debate and then debate as a show; Kirk promoted the latter. He was very effective with his organisation Turning Point USA that has a massive presence in US campuses, with 900 chapters across the country. Turning Point is quite a decentralised organisation, a sort of informal franchise and it gave space to other activists,” she added.
Speri says an important contribution of Turning Point and Kirk was changing the perception of Republican Conservatives, who had been seen as part of an elite. This perception has been turned against the Democratic Party instead.
“It is an anti-intellectual movement that portrays universities as a bastion of the Left and liberals, detached from the US society and working against the interests of the US middle class,” added Speri.
According to the Education Data Initiative, 38.3% of those aged 25 or older have a higher education degree in the US, leaving an ample majority of the population that could be susceptible to these narratives.
When it comes to the consequences of Kirk’s murder, while Giorgia Meloni has used Kirk’s murder to portray a climate of hate against her and her political side, nobody has capitalised on it as much as the Trump Administration, as the 40 minutes long speech of Trump at Kirk’s funeral further proved.
As Speri points out that the Administration’s intention of criminalising Antifa, the censorship of Jimmy Kimmel, JD Vance’s talks of doxxing, and the Attorney General Pam Bondi’s intention of launching legal action against hate speech (all protected by the First Amendment) show how much freedom of speech is under attack in the US.
When it comes to the war against DEI, for Speri this is the last chapter of “an ongoing war”.
“The white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) classes have an idea, in their perspective, that their rights have been taken away since the 1960s civil rights movement. Many states, like Texas and Ohio, before the beginning of the second Trump Administration, started to restrict what universities could do in terms of DEI. A significant example is Harvard’s loss in an affirmative action case before the Supreme Court in 2023.”
“The guideline is Project 2025 , banning DEI at a federal level, especially in the universities, but also in the Army. For years, the Right has used the accusation that the Woke Liberals wanted to destroy Conservatives, but as soon as they got into power, they proved that they do not care about free speech for all, but only for themselves.”
As Speri concludes, this portrays an even more problematic scenario in the US as there is an identity crisis around the very nature of the First Amendment in the country.
The attacks on DEI and free speech set a worrying trend for Europe. The European far-right is drawn to imitation of their US counterparts, and their import of culture wars could represent the first step in this progress – a progress that could include the idea of weakening anti-discrimination laws and turning hate speech into an opinion like many others.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Media Diversity Institute. Any question or comment should be addressed to [email protected] of the Media Diversity Institute (MDI).
