Geopolitics: Smoke and Narratives of Power

The death of Charlie Kirk, an American Christian conservative activist, at the hands of a public attack has stirred debates within a society deeply polarized culturally and politically. In North America, there’s a crisis of the values of classical liberalism, which are being dismantled by those in power for the convenience of the elites. The variables are no longer civil liberties and human rights, but identity politics. The classification of people into categories and, consequently, the fragmentation of the social fabric have created waves of political violence that could escalate into civil war at any moment.

Charlie Kirk gave talks on abortion, gender, identity laws, immigration, and race. His views, influenced by the conservative agenda, represented the thinking of a portion of the American elite; but the other swathe of power, linked to the more liberal wing of the Democratic Party, considered him a potent adversary and an ideological spearhead against woke/progressive globalism. The trap here is to make us believe that the true class struggle takes place in these terms, when all of this obscures the real social differentiation that permeates the United States, based on the private ownership of the means of production, precarious employment for the dispossessed, and the lack of opportunities for broad sectors. The Kirk-style cultural battle was a way to divert attention from the issues that should form an agenda of struggle between the people and the elites. Debates such as abortion, which certainly have an ethical dimension, replace strong and decisive issues such as wages, unions, access to rights and benefits, social and health insurance.

In the liberal United States, the bourgeois rule of law as it was known during the rise of capitalism is being destroyed. The reasons are obvious, even if they are not on the media agenda. The country's industrial erosion and loss of international relevance instill insecurity in the elites, and the reaction is forceful. This is leading to the creation of internal enemies who are blamed for the crisis. At the propaganda level, the powers that be use divisive issues to gain time and space while manipulating consciences, playing on emotions, and getting people to follow patterns predetermined by political laboratories. Hence, there’s a Kirk who has been efficiently used by the elites, even at the cost of his own life. The elites, after all, need martyrs for their narrative of power.

Since everything is happening at the level of propaganda and the creation of artificial meanings, it will be seen that the White House and the ultra-conservative segment of policymakers will exploit the event of Kirk's death as much as possible, even at the expense of larger debates like what’s known as the Epstein List. One piece of news covers up another, and the result benefits those who want to manipulate the national conversation in their favor. If everything is about narratives to gain and maintain power, then the truth is not important; even the truth will be at the service of convenient lies. Today we talk about narratives, not matrices, about fighting for the story, not the truth. The cultural battle is about that: covering up the real dramas through cosmetic electoral political struggles and polarization. The masses of voters on both the conservative right and the woke left are full of people who lack privilege, but who are unable to awaken from the slumber of the narratives of the warring factions.

When the midterm elections arrive, the future of millions will be decided, as well as the project of the country and empire that the elites desire. An Anglo-Saxon woke empire with multicultural overtones or a conservative Christian one with an aggressive and expansionist foreign policy? The crisis of the United States is the same as that of the West, at the crossroads of its decline in a multipolar world in which opposing forces are trying to rearrange the order of things. The use of force as a tool is no more effective after the failures in Afghanistan and Iraq, in which the United States was engulfed in the dust of humiliation. The wounded pride of the empire does not forgive Russia and China for creating an international alliance that aims to overthrow the dollar and create a new financial order. This would be the end of the Pax Americana of 1991. It seems that the USSR has been revived in the recent events in Alaska, when we saw Lavrov arrive wearing a T-shirt that read CCCP. So, the chapter of the international struggle between the dialectical powers of capital and the people has not been closed, but rather takes on other expressions.

The crisis of the elites does not necessarily have to be that of the people, but one element is intrinsically linked to the other. For a change in the international order to occur, there must be an awakening of the people and a mobilization of social causes. This has already been happening, but in a hypostatized form, since cultural agendas have divided the political subject and led it to act in a conformist and reactionary manner. The cultural battle is precisely the mechanism by which people are mobilized and thus prevented from assuming the true appearance of the struggle. Kirk served to a large extent to this end, and therefore he is a hero of anti-woke conservatives who nevertheless remain representatives of the exploitative Western plutocracy. Neither agenda is libertarian; rather, they embody the crisis of the model and its self-preservation mechanism in the face of the empire's restorative vision. The woke movement, with its emphasis on culture and the ideological theft of social causes to redirect them toward paths convenient to those in power, is a conservative movement, with its anti-communist rhetoric, a form of social engineering that has proven effective.

What’s happening internally is a reflection of the external decline of American power, of the blunders in the Middle East, of the ridiculous moves on the political scene that reveal an erratic and unintelligent direction of geopolitics, and of the moral and factual decline of the empire. If Russia and China exert pressure from outside, then this results in nervousness among the elites, in internal movements in which freedoms are curtailed, emigrants are expelled, and exclusionary narratives of power are created in which fascism reappears. The elites' fear transforms into violence, and violence can act excessively against anyone, as it’s a weapon of control, an instrument of power. It’s not surprising that it has appeared in the news, perhaps with a lesser nuance, that Kirk's alleged killer is a young man from a conservative family who voted for Trump, and not someone from the liberal left. Hatred as an emotion overflows from political factions, creates confusion and aggression, and becomes the sanctuary of politics.

We live in an era where power is worshipped, revered as the only thing that matters. Success justifies a lack of morality, and money is the reason for life and the substance of agendas. Causes, coherence, and justice have ceased to matter, at least in the centers of global ideology creation. The media that serve the powers that be do not reproduce information; instead, they use algorithms to establish matrices that are actually narratives. Amid the ongoing chaos, the assassination of a conservative leader has been capitalized on by agendas and factions to turn it into a dramatic turning point in the struggle for power. There hasn't been much rationality in the media's approach, nor have journalists shied away from the corresponding narratives. Power pays for narratives, not because the truth lies behind the headlines.

The death of Charlie Kirk marks a turning point in American politics. Already during the elections, the assassination of Trump was a kind of conservative epiphany for many followers of that tendency. This issue will undoubtedly become a media feast. There’s already talk in the circles of power about withdrawing passports and citizenships from those who don't agree with the official view of this event. It’s part of the dismantling of the liberal rule of law, in which the most important thing for the elite now is that you remain within the official line of thought, even if that means curtailing civil liberties.

Was the conservatives' Project 2025 a fiction? When there's also talk of revoking licenses from media outlets that question the president, it doesn't seem like the dystopian future debated as part of the election campaigns is completely crazy or a deliberately used element by the Democrats. It seems that before the end of this year, there will be a greater radicalization of this agenda from those in power, and that false positives are needed to justify it. Anything can happen. The fight between woke liberals and conservatives is tearing the United States apart; the cost of producing domestic goods is stifling the nation's competitiveness; unemployment is rising; and prices are riding on a mountain of inflation. Trump's campaign promises are already a thing of the past, and the midterm elections loom as a battle of lies, and violence.

The tariffs have been a boomerang, but the president isn't going to admit the failure of his agenda. Rather, more smokescreens are expected to cover up what's going wrong, very wrong. And although the Western media denies it, the game in Ukraine is closed in Russia's favor, and in Asia, a much more powerful belt of power is brewing between China and its allied nations. The most recent parade in Beijing shows that those in the dragon empire are not lacking in the best of strength and can use it when the time comes. Therefore, Trump's bravado toward his adversaries is sinking into a deep, dark nothingness that leads the country nowhere. The threats in the hemisphere, although they represent huge expenditures in the defense budget, must be read in that same line: Trump wants to project an image of strength because he is weak.

Charlie Kirk is just one more chapter in the race for the narrative of power; one cannot lose sight of the real focus. Smoke may be striking, but it lacks weight and, above all, it cannot raise awareness.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff