Charlie Kirk's assassination: a dark, cold winter is coming

A heavily compromised US democracy was already in mortal danger. This is a moment of terrible danger

A moment of terrible danger. Before the assassination of Donald Trump ally and far right US commentator Charlie Kirk, there were already big questions about whether an already deeply compromised US democracy will survive Trumpism. The looming possible violence and repression is frightening to contemplate.

On a moral level, there’s no justification for killing anyone except in cases of unavoidable self defence on an individual or collective level. I don’t support the death penalty in any circumstances, and certainly not for people with extreme views. Individual terrorism with such a motive is morally and rationally bankrupt. That doesn’t mean pretending Kirk was something he was not.

As I write this, we don’t know who killed Charlie Kirk,. The Wall Street Journal claim that ammunition found was engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideology. But The New York Times report:

A senior law enforcement official with direct knowledge of the investigation cautioned that report had not been verified by A.T.F. analysts, did not match other summaries of the evidence, and might turn out to have been misread or misinterpreted. In fast-moving investigations, such status reports are not made public because they often contain a mixture of accurate and inaccurate information.

Therefore we have to wait until motive is identified.

We know that the two would-be assassins of Donald Trump, Thomas Matthew Crooks and Ryan Wesley Routh, were not left-wing in any meaningful way. Crooks was a registered Republican. Routh had voted for Trump in 2016 then ended up backing politicians who belong to both parties.

Luigi Mangione, who allegedly killed the UnitedHealthcare CEO, wasn’t left-wing either: he seemed to have an eccentric mishmash of “centrist” views.

That hasn’t stopped Trump supporters lying about these acts of violence, however.

If this shooter happens to be someone purporting to have left-wing opinions, then - morality aside - they are completely and utterly insane if they think this would somehow advance the interests of the left. In what scenario can anyone imagine this happening? It simply strengthens the power of the state at the very moment it is under far right control. It has placed left-wing public figures and activists in great danger. That is very obvious.

Donald Trump’s speech in response to Kirk’s assassination, however, is defined by lies about the nature of political violence in the US - and sends a chilling message about what comes next.

It’s interesting that he says that this is “the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible.” The US far right pretended - and I must emphasise pretended - to be free speech absolutists, ridiculing the idea that incendiary language leads to violence against, say, minorities, like Muslims, refugees, trans people, or indeed leads to violence against the left. They denounced the very concept of “hate speech” as simply a means of curtailing freedom of expression.

Trump goes on to say that the left demonises the US right as Nazis and so on.

Donald Trump has routinely called opponents Nazis and fascists. He said Joe Biden was running a Gestapo administration, said “Joe Biden and the fascists that control him are really the true threat to democracy”, and called Kamala Harris a fascist

He’s repeatedly said the left are fascists - for example at a 2023 rally: “We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists and the radical left thugs that live like vermin”. Talking about rooting out “vermin” to describe political opponents itself drips with fascist connotations.

Trump’s former chief of staff John F Kelley said that the President suggested Adolf Hitler “did some good things”, and that he meets the definition of a fascist. General Mark Milley, the former Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, said that Trump is a “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country”.

His former communications director Anthony Scaramucci said he was a “full blown fascist.”

His former personal lawyer Michael Cohen says Trump is the “poster boy for fascism”. His former Secretary of Defence Mark T. Esper says it’s “hard to say” Trump does not “fall into the category of a fascist”.

None of these are left-wingers. They are people who worked for Donald Trump.

As for Trump, no president has used the bully pulpit of the White House to incite so much political violence in the US itself. The January 2021 assault on the Capitol, for example, after he used incendiary language to try and overturn the elections based on the lie that it had been rigged. He said back then: “We’re gonna fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not gonna have a country anymore.”

What Trump did in this speech is erase the far-right and racist violence sweeping the US. Like the racist terrorist who massacred 9 Black worshippers in South Carolina in 2015. Like the far right terrorist who massacred 11Jews at the Pittsburg synagogue in 2018. Like the white supremacist who massacred 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, in May 2022. Like the anti-LGBTQ shooter who killed 5 at a LGBTQ night club in Colorado Springs in November 2022

And then there was the killing of two Minnesota Democratic lawmakers by a Trump supporter just three months ago. We could go on.

There is no equivalence with the scale of this violence on the left - at all.

But what is striking is that Donald Trump said the administration will "find anyone who contributed to this crime”. It’s clear he doesn’t mean directly - he means indirectly. Opposing, say, Trump’s authoritarianism at home, or his facilitation of genocide abroad, will face an increased clampdown: how extreme that will be is yet to be known.

As it is, the US is in an authoritarian spiral. The politicisation of the civil service, the mass purging of independent government watchdogs, appointing his authoritarian ally Kash Patel as FBI Director, taking control of local policing in Washington DC and sending in the National Guard, using troops against protests in Los Angeles, intimidating the media, and of course clamping down on the pro-Palestinian movement, from cutting funding to US universities to attempting to deport pro-Palestinian activists.

What on earth will happen next?

The US right of course are complete hypocrites. Republican Senator Mike Lee condemned Kirk’s murder as a “cowardly act of violence”, but when those two Minnesota Democrats were killed, tweeted ‘Nightmare on Waltz Street’, with a picture of the shooter .

When Democratic politician Nancy Pelosi’s husband was brutally attacked, Trump mocked it, saying: “We’ll stand up to crazy Nancy Pelosi, who ruined San Francisco — how’s her husband doing, anybody know? And she’s against building a wall at our border, even though she has a wall around her house — which obviously didn’t do a very good job.”

Republicans like Ted Cruz, Congressman Clay Higgins, right-wing commentator Dinesh D’Souza, Donald Trump Junior all mocked the attack.

And Charlie Kirk himself called for a “hero” to post bail for Paul Pelosi’s attacker, amid conspiracy theories about the assailant’s motive.

And it is worth being clear about what Charlie Kirk actually stood for. He said “I think it’s worth… some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment”. He was there accepting mass violence because of the right to gun ownership, as long as it was other people, rather than him, being killed. Over 1.5 million Americans have been killed by guns since 1980.

He called for public executions. He called for “full military occupation” of US cities.

He backed mass deportations, supported the incendiary lie that Donald Trump had the 2020 election stolen, declared that the racist ‘Great Replacement theory’ - that elites are conspiring to destroy white people through immigration - “is not a theory, it’s a reality”, declared Islam has “conquered” Europe, said “It doesn’t feel right [for] London and New York City to have Muslim mayors… Islam is a means to the end of destruction of the West,” that the UK is a “totalitarian third world hellhole”, that a Democratic politician was part of an “attempt to eliminate the white population in this country” - we could go on.

None of this is to justify Charlie Kirk’s assassination in any way. It is to rebut claims this was simply a regular conservative commentator - whatever that even means anymore: he wasn’t, but someone with toxic, racist views who openly relished various forms of violence.

There are no open demands from the Trump supporting far right for violence and the destruction of democracy.

Elon Musk, who has turned X into a cesspit of far right incitement, tweeted: “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is fight or die”

Key Trump supporting account LibsofTikTok tweets “THIS IS WAR” in capitals.

Laura Loomer, a far right account closely linked to Trump, tweeted: “A message to the Left: Debate time is over. You ended it.”

Matt Walsh, a central figure in the US right, tweets: “I woke up even angrier. I want justice for Charlie. Everyone responsible, everyone celebrating, everyone who encouraged this or fomented it in any way -- I want them all held to account. They want us dead. They're killing us. Now is not the time for kumbaya stuff. This is real.”

Jack Posobiec, a far right activist, interviewed by former Trump chief strategist Steve Bannon, says “there’s never going to be another assassin to take out someone like the way they did because of what comes next will be swift, quick and it will be retribution.”

They are openly baying for merciless repression of their political opponents.

Here is another point. There is an avalanche of horror at the gruesome footage of Kirk’s assassination - and having watched it, there’s no question it is horrifying.

For nearly two years, we have been inundated with violent imagery: the mass slaughter of Palestinians, many of them children - ripped apart, buried under rubble, burned alive, incinerated, we could go. There isn’t even a fraction of the disgust at the obliteration of an entire people as there is at the assassination of a far right demagogue. Who is granted humanity, and who isn’t, exposes the miserable character of our age.

This is indeed a frightening and dangerous moment. Whatever the flaws of, let’s call it, capitalist democracy, weighted as it is in favour of the wealthy and corporate interests, it is clearly in decline across the West. There is a general descent into authoritarianism. In this context, the far right is seizing on the assassination of Charlie Kirk as an opportunity to do what the far right always want to do - crush their opposition and unleash hell against minorities.

I fear that winter is coming, a dark, cold winter at that, and if we are going to drive back the tide of fascism, we have to be honest about the threat that we now face.