The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, a Christian nationalist organiser assassinated last week at a university in the United States, was an accomplished practitioner of political intimidation. The primary strategy of his far-right group Turning Point USA, in the estimation of the Southern Poverty Law Centre, is “to manufacture rage and mobilize support to revive and maintain a white-dominated, male supremacist, Christian social order”.

Kirk called for a “soft civil war” to deport 10 million migrants from US cities as part of a broader plan for a far-right takeover of the country’s institutions. Two years ago, he told followers of his eponymous show: “You have a government that hates you. You have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons—I keep on saying that. Buy weapons, buy ammo. If you go into a public place, bring a gun with you”.

It is a testament to the contemporary political power of the far right and its billionaire backers—to its grip over sections of the media, and its increasing role in, or potential to form government across, the Western world—that this odious specimen has garnered thoughts and prayers from across the political spectrum while the children of Gaza, starved and murdered daily, get nothing but more death and destruction.

Indeed, and unsurprisingly, the lamentations have come thick and fast from the establishment figures who have backed Israel’s genocide most forcefully. “We must all be free to debate openly and freely without fear”, British Prime Minister Kier Starmer wrote on X in the wake of Kirk’s murder. This from a man whose government is charging hundreds with terrorism offences for voicing support for Palestine solidarity activists.

The ground game of Kirk’s organising operations was on the campuses. While the political right endlessly moaned about an epidemic of “cancel culture” making conservatives unsafe within the university system, Kirk astutely took advantage of the prevailing atmosphere of free expression to build hundreds of chapters of his far-right organisation at those very institutions.

In doing so, he cultivated an image as a champion of free speech. But, like most on the political right, his advocacy in this area was deeply dishonest and cynical. While trading on his purported bona fides as a “free speech warrior”, Kirk established public watchlists targeting progressive academics and schoolteachers as part of his organisation’s broader project to intimidate and to drive the political left and progressive liberals from the country’s education system.

As part of its attempted march through the institutions, Turning Point funded the Reverend John Amanchukwu, a Bible-bashing conspiracist, on a cross-country tour to intimidate school administrators into removing library books that don’t align with reactionary Christian fundamentalism. PEN America has documented nearly 16,000 book bans in public schools across the country since 2021, primarily because of right-wing harassment of school boards. So much for defending the free exchange of ideas.

As the political establishment manufactured the fake “campus antisemitism crisis” in the aftermath of the 7 October attacks in Israel, throwing the entire weight of university and political institutions against the Palestine solidarity movement, scarcely a word was uttered against Kirk’s agitation. Yet, unlike the Palestine solidarity movement, Kirk’s politics were utterly antisemitic—so much so that even the conservative movement was getting queasy about him. As New York Times columnists Ashley Ahn and Maxine Joselow note:

“Kirk ... accused Jewish philanthropists of fomenting anti-whiteness by supporting liberal antiracism causes like the Black Lives Matter movement. ‘The philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country’, he said on his show in 2023. Not long after, he accused Jews of controlling ‘not just the colleges—it’s the nonprofits, it’s the movies, it’s Hollywood, it’s all of it’.”

Yet, as with other bigots and conspiracy-mongers, the Zionist movement overlooked such crudities because of this protagonist’s fervent support for the Jewish ethnostate, its genocidal war and, presumably, the coming Armageddon—something that Kirk believed children should read all about.

Open political intimidation has become part and parcel of government under the reign of President Trump and the MAGA movement, in which Kirk was a leading figure. So it should come as no surprise that Kirk’s followers’ response to his assassination at the hands of a lone gunman has been to preach all-out war against the left and to launch what could end up being the largest doxing operation in modern history against anyone who disparages (or states the facts about) the Turning Point founder.

Such political intolerance and intimidation are entirely in keeping with his and the broader far right’s program and history. That contemporary progressive politics is just as populated with petty snitches motivated by a self-righteous and self-pitying sense of moral superiority doesn’t negate this reality.

Speaking in 2007 after the death of another professional bigot, the Reverend Jerry Falwell, British essayist Christopher Hitchens quipped: “I think it’s a pity that there isn’t a hell for him to go to”. Had Kirk gone the way of the pastor and keeled over from his own bodily breakdown, perhaps we could leave it at that. But Charlie Kirk has been martyred. In a way, this death is quintessentially American; he will now join the ranks of Lincoln and Martin Luther King, among others. The assassin, by inserting himself into history and cutting short Kirk’s life, has likely made him a more powerful and enduring figure.

There is only speculation about motives. But it would be ironic if the killer were driven by anti-fascism: a lone man with a gun delivering vigilante justice is the epitome of the machismo that dominates the far-right imagination. If this individualised viciousness has been appropriated in the service of “progress”, it shows only how desolate the left field has become in America.

In the real world, this sort of political violence does nothing to challenge the machinery of American capitalism or to weaken its most fascistic backers. On the contrary, it gives the state a pretext for further repression and the forces of reaction a martyr to rally around. At a moment when his presidency was flailing in disapproval, Trump and his movement will not likely let the opportunity pass.