By Sam Casey
The chilling footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, with a bullet to the neck as he spoke to a crowd at a college campus in Utah, left many with a distinctly ominous feeling. A martyr was created for the rabid far-right movement in the US, which has already captured control of the government. The backlash will come both from mobs of far-right thugs on the streets and from the forces of the state.
Kirk, at just 31, was a hugely prolific and influential hatemonger, especially among young, right-wing men. He was a leading figure in the MAGA movement who used his various platforms to spread racist, transphobic, misogynistic, and pro-genocide propaganda.
As an important political ally of Trump, widely credited with bringing a youth vote to his 2024 presidential campaign, Kirk’s death has sent shockwaves throughout the US. As such, the Trump regime is intent on exploiting the shock it’s produced to further escalate its authoritarian war on oppressed people and its political opponents.
Dangerous far-right culture
The motive of the suspected shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, is not yet known. Yet even before Robinson was apprehended, Trump and key figures in the MAGA movement openly spoke of retaliation against the “radical left”, calling for a massive state crackdown on political opposition, and blaming transgender people and anti-fascists for the shooting.
They were desperate for the suspected shooter to be part of an oppressed group or a member of the political left, in the hope that it would fuel their calls for fascistic vengeance. The Trump administration has pushed consistently in an authoritarian direction with raids by masked ICE agents, troops being sent into Washington DC and potentially other cities and repression against the Palestine solidarity movement. They are always looking for opportunities and pretexts to go further in attacking the left and oppressed minorities.
To be clear, as of yet, there is no evidence that Tyler Robinson was motivated by left-wing politics. What is known about Robinson is that he comes from a right-wing, religious family from a heavily Republican state. He seems to have been an alienated young man who was immersed both in online gaming and militaristic gun culture from a young age. It is the darkest form of irony that Charlie Kirk should die in this way, after years of minimising gun violence and school shootings.
Investigators initially claimed that they had uncovered the rifle used in the assassination, along with bullet casings engraved with “transgender ideology”, adding fuel to the far-right fire. These claims were entirely false. But many have also suggested a link between Robinson and online “Groypers” – a white-supermacist subculture connected to neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Groypers consider key figures in the MAGA movement like Charlie Kirk to be ‘fake’ conservatives, i.e. not right-wing, racist or misogynistic enough.
There is a clear pattern of alienated young men being radicalised by far-right politics on the internet, and increasingly this is driving acts of terror and political violence. Charlie Kirk’s assassination on a college campus comes in a year that has seen 47 school shootings in the US already. The day that Kirk died, another school shooting took place in Colorado; this one perpetrated by a 16-year old white nationalist who idolised mass shooters. Kirk himself was part of an online ecosystem of racism, transphobia, and extreme misogyny that is increasingly spilling over into ‘real world’ violence.
A grotesque legacy of hatred
Since his killing, there has been an avalanche of nauseating attempts from both the conservative and liberal media establishments to sanitise Charlie Kirk as a political figure who supposedly valued “liberty”, “free speech” and the “exchange of ideas”. The reality paints a different picture.
Kirk was an ardent white supremacist whose mission in life was to spread vile, racist, misogynistic, and transphobic ideas. On his podcast, Kirk stated that “we made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s”, and claimed that “prowling Blacks go around for fun to target white people”. He said that a “Nuremberg-style trial” should be set up “for every gender-affirming clinic doctor”. He claimed that the “great replacement strategy” (a neo-Nazi conspiracy theory) is “well underway” on America’s southern border, threatening “white, rural America”, and blamed “Jewish dollars” for funding “cultural Marxist ideas”.
Far from being a figure that opposed “political violence”, Kirk vehemently defended the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin, calling Floyd a “scumbag” and peddling racist lies about him and the Black Lives Matter movement. He gleefully defended the IDF’s targeting of “mosques, schools, and hospitals” in Gaza, and justified all of the atrocities of the genocide, including the snipers shooting defenceless children.
Kirk co-founded Turning Point USA (TPUSA) in 2012, a far-right propagandist organisation, funded by billionaires, AIPAC and dark-money Christian-nationalist groups, which now claims a presence on 3,500 high school and college campuses. TPUSA has been extremely effective in organising young people, particularly young men, as foot soldiers of the MAGA movement.
TPUSA’s ‘Professor Watchlist’ is a digital hit-list that encourages right-wing students to dox and harass supposedly “radical left” university staff. They organise campaigns to inundate departments with complaints and demands for the sacking of teachers and professors. This tactic was repeated by other far-right organisations against school teachers across the US. Journalist Stacey Patton, who was a target of this tactic, wrote:
“Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse. Some received death threats. Some had their jobs threatened. Some left academia entirely. Kirk sent the loud message to us: speak the truth and we will unleash the mob! That is the culture of violence Charlie Kirk built. He normalized violence. He curated it, monetized it, and sicced it on anyone who dared to puncture his movement’s lies.”
Since the assassination, several historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) have had to cancel classes and go into lockdown amidst violent threats. Neo-nazi groups are seeking to use his death as a rallying point for fascist violence. At a vigil for Kirk in Huntington Beach, California, a group of white nationalists chanted “White men, fight back!” This is a sickening expression of Charlie Kirk’s politics in action.
It has been particularly sickening to hear right-wing politicians and media attempt to blame the rhetoric of the left for Kirk’s shooting when far-right rhetoric routinely incites hatred and violence. Statistics show that the vast majority of political violence in the US is perpetrated by those on the right. Trump himself showed complete ambivalence in the face of the shooting of two Democratic state legislators and their spouses in Minnesota by a masked, far-right gunman. In an interview following Kirk’s killing, he explicitly defended far-right extremists while promising further repression of the left.
It is highly likely that the next period will see further authoritarian measures taken by Trump. Further crackdowns on protests on college campuses and in the streets are likely, and there is a real danger of a further rise in far-right violence aimed at oppressed people and the left in retaliation. Trump’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has already been ramping up repressive measures against peaceful protests across the country, and his administration has shown a willingness to use the National Guard, as well as ICE – which is increasingly militarised and now the largest federal law enforcement agency – to enforce its political goals. We have to be clear that things have the potential to get significantly worse in the coming period.
Capitalism is violence
In the days since the shooting, members of the political establishment have been joining hands to decry “political violence”. Of course, this kind of political violence, i.e. the murder of political leaders – even fascistic ones like Charlie Kirk – should be opposed. They make politics a more dangerous arena for everyone, potentially provoking further acts of violence which can spiral out of control, and inevitably serving to increase state repression. Nor does the killing of a leader necessarily weaken the political movement they are part of, if that was the aim; indeed, it can have the opposite effect and embolden it.
Yet the rank hypocrisy of political leaders in the US, whether Republican or Democrat, speaking against political violence is galling. These leaders support the unspeakable acts of violence perpetrated on the Palestinian people every day of the genocide – 72 Palestinians were murdered in the Gaza Strip on the day Charlie Kirk was shot. Just a week before, Trump ordered the murder of 11 people when a boat in the Caribbean was bombed – allegedly for smuggling drugs from Venezuela, for which no evidence has been provided (a blatant war crime regardless).
Moreover, political terror is increasingly a reality for people throughout the US, particularly immigrants and people of colour – who Trump, Kirk and the MAGA movement have done so much to dehumanise and demonise.
The capitalist system supported by both major parties in the US relies on brutal police violence and militarism, as well as the everyday social violence of poverty, oppression, and exploitation. The US is a country built on the genocide of Indigenous Peoples and the horrors of slavery. It is an imperialist state that exports horrific violence all around the world in pursuit of the interests of its ruling class. This ruling class, furthermore, presides over a society of gargantuan inequality. The recent increase in political violence in the US is a product of a society in decay, one that is extremely polarised, in which people are desperate, hopeless, and angry.
Following the assassination of JFK in 1963 and in the midst of the Vietnam War, Black revolutionary leader Malcolm X made the point that it is only natural that a state built on racist and imperialist violence will itself feel the consequences of that violence. In his words, “the chickens have come home to roost”.
The only force that can effectively fight the far right and bring an end to the slide towards ever-increasing polarisation and violence is a mass, multiracial, multigendered movement of working-class, young and oppressed people, fighting against all manifestations of capitalist inequality. Today, the threat posed by the far-right in the US and around the world makes the task of building such a revolutionary movement more urgent than ever.
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