I have to say I was quite shocked when a reader shared with me what Pritam Singh shared on his Threads profile following Charlie Kirk's assassination a few days ago.
There are a few reasons for my reaction, even after all I've seen from Pritam in the past few years (and whom I used to consider a much better person prior to 2020).
First of all, this sort of controversy is usually avoided in Singapore. Importation of divisive foreign identity politics has always been considered unwelcome here, and this stance was emphasised by min. K Shanmugam in response to Kirk's assassination:
Secondly, the Workers' Party, despite fielding a clearly very woke Raeesah Khan in 2020, has generally tried to keep appearances of a moderate party. As they liked to emphasise "one step to the left of PAP". And speaking of Ms. Khan, one would think that Pritam's own experience with her – which has led him all the way to the courts – would have soured him on that entire wing of modern politics.
As it turns out it did not.
Thirdly, he didn't share his views (nor these articles) anywhere else other than Threads – a platform that Meta launched to compete with X by capturing the disgruntled left-wing crowd, at the time when they protested Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter.
That Pritam circulated these articles there but refrained from taking them to Facebook or Instagram, suggests that it may have been a calculated move to appeal to the crowd that he assumed would be leaning far more left than the broad public following his other profiles.
On the other hand, it seems rather naive to believe you could win some votes of support in one corner of the political scene without the rest finding out eventually.
Finally, for the Leader of the Opposition, who is paid nearly S$400,000 per year, one would expect him to be cautious about what he shares and check if the allegations made in the articles he endorses are even true.
It's clear that he has not done his job because they aren't.
On Friday, barely a day and some change after Kirk's murder, he shared an accusatory article by a known British left-wing outlet, The Guardian:
The author of the article claims to be quoting Kirk, but in reality it's just the same array of misleading one-liners taken out of context to frame the slain conservative as a racist or worse.
Here are some examples:
These are not Kirk's comments on race, like the author claims, but about DEI and other race-slanted policies, which he criticised for both sowing division and employing incompetent people to fill diversity quota.
Here's an example of how that works at Harvard:
Blacks and Hispanics have disproportionately higher approval rates for their academic performance as compared to Whites and Asians. Even a top ranking Asian candidate has lower chances of getting a spot at Harvard than a Black one falling into 4th or 5th decile in academic performance.
In another example, earlier this year New York University website was hacked and replaced with an image showing the racial bias in admissions by race in the latest cycle:
The practice of considering race for employment or student admissions is widespread in America and has been a source of enduring controversy.
It's problematic not only because of its dubious legality or impact on equal opportunities on the basis of merit, but also out of fear that it is promoting unqualified people to positions of responsibility – in some cases for human lives or their health.
THAT is the context in which Charlie Kirk was making his comments. That when you see a Black pilot or a "moronic Black woman", or one of the many Democratic appointees in politics or judiciary today you're asking yourself: "has he/she got the position on merit, or did the company (or the Democratic Party) simply want to look good?".
I have to say it's quite ironic that Pritam would willingly choose to paint Kirk's views in a negative light, considering that virtually all Singaporeans – Asians, after all – would find themselves on the receiving end of the woke discrimination in America.
The quote about the pot-smoking WNBA lesbian was a critique of Biden's administration exchanging Britney Griner – jailed in Russia for carrying small amounts of medicinal cannabis – for one of the most notorious gun traders, Viktor Bout. At the same time, Paul Whelan, arrested in Russia four years earlier on charges of espionage, lingered behind bars (he was ultimately freed as a part of another exchange in 2024).
Was Kirk's anger really out of place? That the USA exchanged one of the most prolific gun smugglers in modern history for an irresponsible, second rate player in a sports league nobody's watching, while a military veteran was left to rot in Russia?
As you can see the left didn't have second thoughts about painting Kirk's outburst as evidence of racism, when in reality if any racism influenced the decision it was done in the opposite direction – Black woman went free, while the White guy was left in prison.
Even the most exaggerated of Kirk's claims in this selection – that Black people are going around targeting Whites (which has likely happened, of course, but is probably not an everyday occurrence) – is not entirely baseless, as African-Americans are over-represented as perpetrators of hate crimes as compared to non-Hispanic Whites by more than 2.5 times according to the latest data from the FBI.
But that's not all. The same article goes to quote Kirk out of context on the same topic of gun violence that I already explained in my Facebook post here:
In short: the quote omits Kirk's argument that we accept certain costs for things that serve our best interests (in his example: cars lead to 50,000 deaths on the roads, but we won't ban them because they are useful and convenient).
The question isn't then about gun ownership as such but what gun ownership means for American society, as enshrined in the Constitution. And that it is the guarantee that population's ability to arm itself is not hindered, so it can protect itself from abuses of potential totalitarian government control. In this context, Kirk argues, we have to accept that some deaths are going to happen, for whatever reasons, as Americans retain that safeguard.
At the same time he advocated for stronger, armed security in schools, which is what solved problems with mass shootings in other crowded places – like sporting stadiums or airports.
Of course the left wouldn't honestly quote any of these arguments, because their main angle is that guns are the problem – not the people who pull the trigger.
If it was about the people (as it should be, let's be honest – no gun shoots by itself) then they would have to confront the violence statistics which show that gun crime is an enormous problem among the minorities. They wouldn't be able to blame straight white males anymore, because without the minorities murder rates in America would be comparable to several EU countries.
Anyway, I'm not going to debunk every single quote from the article, you can go read those for yourself and then try to compare against sources. My point is that the leader of Singapore's opposition had no second thoughts about sharing a misleading link from a known left-wing outlet, which has attempted to paint the slain conservative commentator in a bad light.
I think we can all agree that no matter what he said – short, perhaps, of actually calling for someone's murder himself – none of it excuses his death. The question is: does Pritam Singh agree with this view too?
Well, the fact that he shared another similarly negative – and dishonest – coverage of Kirk just yesterday doesn't inspire confidence:
The leader of the Workers' Party decided to quote the article's allegation about Kirk running a "McCarthyite" watchlist of left-wing professors – and indeed, there is a website for the effort.
But its stated purpose is not to intimidate anybody but to track discriminatory behaviours by said academics against conservatives or attempts to push left-wing ideological agenda in a neutral setting that the academia should be. This is a clear extension of the arguments made against affirmative action that I spoke of earlier, and the biased policies in admissions and hiring.
That left-wingers would lament it is quite comical considering that they have managed to very nearly exterminate conservatives from their ranks, according to several studies on political alignment of American academics:
The 2018 paper by Langbert analysing tenured professors at the Top 50 liberal arts colleges in America found the ratio between the two groups of over 10-to-1 in favour of left-wing scholars.
Another one found the ratio to be 6-to-1 and a whopping 12-to-1 among administrators, while its author received threats after publishing his findings at the time:
"The 12-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative college administrators makes them the most left-leaning group on campus. In previous research, I found that academic faculty report a six-to-one ratio of liberal to conservative professors. Incoming first-year students, by contrast, reported less than a two-to-one ratio of liberals to conservatives, according to a 2016 finding by the Higher Education Research Institute. It appears that a fairly liberal student body is being taught by a very liberal professoriate — and socialized by an incredibly liberal group of administrators."
It's quite laughable, then, that a few hundred listed by Kirk for being extreme would cry about being "targeted", when they are just a minority out of thousands more who are not. Not to mention that Charlie himself has always reminded his followers to behave in a civil way – not something that you would often find on the left (which has regularly staged protests or even riots in resistance to any conservative speaker appearing on US campuses).
It is, however, quite disconcerting that Pritam Singh would not only share this commentary but deliberately emphasise findings that are patently misleading and paint the assassinated debater in a bad light, as if to excuse his murder.
Instead of toning down the tensions, the Leader of the Opposition in Singapore chose to draw from the left-wing well of hate against someone who was killed for having a different opinion.
What exactly is his message to Singaporeans?
