by
Alex Baldacci
Marley is deeply upset by the murder of Charlie Kirk. Marley is a chef in his mid-twenties, who works in a pub kitchen in the Pennines. Kirk’s supporters and fans are right-wing Americans, for the most part. That their affection for Kirk and their grief and anger at his death should be shared by young people working in West Yorkshire says much about where we are now.
Marley takes pride in his work, his salary and his ability to provide for his child. He tells me that, outside of work, he has few friends and speaks to few people. Charlie Kirk felt like a voice for him.
“This is my culture, this is my home,” Marley says. He saw the raw footage of Kirk’s death the night before, the arterial spray in all its horror, and wanted to share what it had done to him with me.
He turned up for work in the kitchen traumatised. He feels the murder of Kirk connects to the popular current belief that displaying the St George’s flag outside his home risks arrest. While this is not legally true, this is how he feels.
“I can’t put a flag outside me house.”
The Chef is emphatically not a racist. His interest in food is catholic, and his own enthusiasms embrace all cultures, but, he says, he feels that other cultures are being imposed on him, while he has no means of expressing his own, no voice of his own, no sense of nationhood.
“Do we go to Pakistan and build…churches? But if you go to Bradford , yeah, I bet you can count over 100 mosques. But apparently we’re racist — we let build mosques in our country…and we eat your food! If we hated you that much, we wouldn’t eat your food.”
Charlie Kirk was six years older than Marley. Kirk championed his own views, debated with those whose opinion differed, and said whatever he wanted to, without worrying about the wide offense his remarks often caused.
Marley, in his typically humble way, talks of Kirk being ‘brainier’ than him, ‘more switched on’, knowing more than he did. For Marley, Kirk was his voice.
“Everything I wanted to say, he was saying it for me. I didn’t have to say anything. Everything I would tell the world , he was, literally, saying it for me. It was like I didn’t have to say owt.”
He talks of Kirk inspiring him by starting off in a park, holding a sign entreating people to ask him a question, and then, over time, becoming a person who sat in front of “thousands and thousands of people.”
He speaks in admiration of Kirk’s desire to talk to the young, to students in universities, at the point in their lives where their views should be challenged, not just drenched in confirmation bias.
“He was sitting in front of schools and universities trying to change kids’ minds. That’s where the future’s going. You’re not going to tell an old person are you? They’re not to be in the future.”
Perhaps other Kirk supporters are doused in the toxic masculinity with which Kirk also aligned himself. But Marley is not. He’s been very clear with me on the Andrew Tate line. He has no time for Tate.
“Men deserve to have ten wives? No, they don’t, mate. You’re loyal to one woman.”
So the Kirk killing does not belong in the same continuum for him. There is a danger in parcelling all these points up in the same bag.
But Marley does feel that young men are not taking responsibility for their lives. And he has had a rough ride, a rough childhood and a previous kitchen job where the chef branded him with hot knives and threw hot oil at him. For Marley, Kirk also spoke to that.
And he feels that the liberal agenda, such as it may be, is forced down his throat without consent. He feels he’s paying for crimes he didn’t commit.
“Literally — 80-year old man, waiting outside a school, at a bus stop, dressed up as a schoolgirl? You’re not telling me that’s that’s not wrong, mate? And my daughter will be going to that school?”
Kirk spoke frequently about the transgender debate, and it speaks to Marley, a young father to a daughter.
Marley is living with media is all around him. He came into work scarred by that footage on his phone. It made him think that you cannot speak out.
‘The world is fucked, bro.’
We may have different views. Age does that to you, context and experience, place and people. But the feeling of being squashed out never leaves you. Not being free to articulate what happens behind the windows of your eyes does not change, no matter the platform or the instrument. Feeling silenced does not go: it can be challenged and changed, but mostly it is ignored.
“I’m not really big into politics…it’s all bullshit, mate. The rich get rich and the poor get poorer. I’ll always believe that. And that will never change. People are making my choices for me. It’s just crazy.”
The Chef is neither a racist nor a misogynist. He is s a good person who does not have the words I do. We both feel the need to be heard. When I was young, it was Chuck D from Public Enemy in Fight The Power when he rapped Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp: Charlie and Marley; silencing their voices serves no one.
