Political Violence and Charlie Kirk

My Thoughts for Now

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Everyone who remotely pays attention to U.S. politics knows who right-wing political pundit Charlie Kirk is. People who are remotely paying attention know that he was killed yesterday in a seeming attack.

If you do not know, he is basically the human parrot of the Trump administration who made a name for himself by debating freshman liberals at various U.S. universities. There is nothing worth mentioning about this man outside of the hateful rhetoric he spewed, which included saying that gun violence may be justified, gay people should be stoned, suggesting violence against trans people, saying Palestine isn’t real, while supporting Israel through the Gaza genocide, and certainly more.

So, Charlie Kirk was the mouthpiece for the far right, who only made a name for himself because of big payments from the Koch brothers and other wealthy donors.

While the political right will use this to martyr Kirk and normalize his messaging, always remember that the ideology and rhetoric he supported would only work to further the violence the right will now performatively decry.

Leftists, anti-imperialist leftists, are not opposed to violence, and we see it as a tool towards liberation. While my stance against adventurism is well known because I am a Marxist, I also understand that as capitalism descends further and further into chaos, politically motivated violence will increase domestically.

Nevertheless, this violence pales in comparison to the violence committed across the world on behalf of U.S. imperialism. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have been killed and are currently starving by an imperial outpost of the U.S., funded by the overexploited workers’ taxpayer dollars.

This also doesn’t scratch the surface of the numerous coups, sabotage, military interventions, and other imperialist/colonialist methods utilized by the U.S. to maintain its rule abroad. The U.S. is no stranger to ‘political’ violence, but this violence typically happens to brown people in developing nations, not fascist political talking heads on a college campus.

It really showcases the selective outrage and performative condemnations of both the American conservative and liberals. ‘Violence’ should be condemned when it happens to a white man who made a career and became very rich off of promoting a message that can only ever lead to violence, especially towards marginalized communities.

The funny shit is, we do not know if the killing was politically motivated or who exactly did it at the time of this writing. The assumption is that he was killed because of the hate he spewed, but why is that a bad thing? Why should we have empathy for a person who argued against it? Why do we have to empathize with oppressors who will never empathize with the oppressed?

Most societies in the West are not opposed to violence. The oppressor is only opposed to violence when the oppressed talks about using violence against the oppressor. Then the question of violence is raised as the incorrect means to attain one’s ends. Witness, for example, that Britain, France, and the United States have time and time again armed black people to fight their enemies for them. France armed Senegalese in World War II, Britain of course armed Africa and the West Indies, and the United States always armed the Africans living in the United States. But that is only to fight against their enemy, and the question of violence is never raised. The only time the United States or England or France will become concerned about the question of violence is when the people whom they armed to kill their enemies will pick up those arms against them. For another example, practically every country in the West today is giving guns either to Nigeria or to Biafra. They do not mind giving those guns to those people as long as they use them to kill each other, but they will never give them guns to kill another white man or to fight another white country.

The Pitfalls of Liberalism by Kwame Ture

There was a time when the fascists were afraid of spreading their rhetoric. The left knows that a good Nazi is a dead one. But individual acts of violence will not topple fascism; it will take the collective efforts of the working masses informed by the science of Marxism to break the chains of fascism.