The Sept. 10 assassination of conservative politician Charlie Kirk at a rally at Utah Valley University reflects the growing normalization of the use of violence to cancel political opponents by “woke” radical petty-bourgeois forces. It’s a serious and increasing danger for the working class.
The spread of violence has become a fact of political life, from the riots and street fighting after the death of George Floyd in 2020, to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson last year, to unprovoked attacks on Jews on campuses.
Tyler Robinson confessed to his family and friends he killed Kirk, a close ally of President Donald Trump. While much about Robinson’s views are still unknown, he made clear he carried out the killing for political reasons. “I’d had enough of his [Kirk’s] hatred,” he told his roommate.
He will appear in court on charges that carry the death penalty Sept. 29.
After George Floyd was killed as he grappled with cops in Minneapolis, antifa, Black Lives Matter and other radicals orchestrated weeks of looting and street battles. Their thuggery was carried out in the name of combating cop brutality, but alienated working people and destroyed the protest movement. Many liberals adapted to and provided rationalizations for their violent attacks.
Following a leak of the U.S. Supreme Court’s plans to overturn Roe v. Wade in 2022, Nicholas John Roske decided he would kill Justice Brett Kavanaugh and two other high court judges to prevent the court from ruling. He hoped his actions would give then President Joseph Biden the chance to appoint the justices’ successors. Roske was arrested near Kavanaugh’s house fully armed and carrying directions to reach his other targets.
Luigi Mangione shot UnitedHealthcare CEO Thompson after casing his route to a morning meeting in New York last December. “Frankly, these parasites simply had it coming,” Mangione declared in notes he was carrying when he was arrested. “They continue to abuse our country for immense profit.”
The petty-bourgeois left exploded with sympathy for Mangione, and death threats against other CEOs multiplied.
The growing use of political violence is related to the rise of “cancel culture” among privileged middle-class layers, especially on college campuses. They’ve hounded political opponents and shut them down. They’ve pressured administrators to impose bans on historic works of art, literature and science that don’t conform with their “woke” world outlook. Deeply resentful, they claim anything they view as “oppressive” has to be eliminated.
Tyler Robinson sent a text after shooting Kirk, saying, “Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
“We need to bring back political assassinations,” wrote Julia Xu, a student at Oberlin College in Ohio, on a college-wide network after Kirk was killed. She is a member of Students for a Free Palestine and said her comments were “influenced” by learning about Chinese Stalinist Mao Tse-tung. “I don’t think that everyone deserves the right to free speech,” she claimed. “Some people should be afraid to express their opinions in public.”
She ridiculed Caucasian students whose views didn’t hue close enough to hers. “It just shows that white men will always empathize with the people who look like them,” she said.
After her posts were picked up in the media, the college administration stepped in to help her retract her comments and apologize.
Origins of today’s political thuggery
Decades before Kirk’s killing, the use of violence and murder against political opponents was promoted in the labor movement by Stalinist parties. Joseph Stalin headed a counterrevolution in the Soviet Union, overturning the program and course of V.I. Lenin, the central leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Stalinist parties worldwide targeted defenders of Lenin’s course, including those that went on to establish the Socialist Workers Party.
Stalin’s police-state regime fielded a murder machine responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of revolutionaries in the Soviet Union; the assassination of Leon Trotsky in Mexico in 1940; and the killing or imprisonment of thousands of revolutionary-minded fighters since then.
Its thuggery was aped in the U.S. by petty-bourgeois radicals like the Weather Underground, a Stalinist-inspired ultraleft sect. They carried out a series of bombings and kidnappings in the 1970s, handing a golden opportunity to the capitalist rulers and their cops to smear the workers movement. To try to justify such assaults, many radical groups quote the views of Frantz Fanon, a supporter of the Algerian Revolution who claimed that inflicting deadly violence was “therapeutic.” Fanon’s views are cited with growing frequency by today’s Stalinists and others.
The Trump administration is taking advantage of these pretenders to communist politics to launch attacks on constitutional protections the working class needs. He issued an executive order Sept. 22 designating antifa as a domestic terrorist group and threatening to target anyone accused of funding it. Antifa is a variety of ultraleft forces who orchestrate violence against small rightist groups and cops.
Trump’s order builds on the expansion of domestic spy operations after the passage of the 2001 Patriot Act, which increased snooping on political groups and individuals opposed to Washington’s policies and was backed by Democrats and Republicans alike. This advanced the rulers’ efforts to rehabilitate the FBI as a political police force, an effort continuing today.
Administration targets ‘hate speech’
“We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech,” Attorney General Pam Bondi threatened Sept. 15. For years, the deliberately vague term “hate speech” has been used by liberals and conservatives to deal blows to free speech.
Vice President JD Vance urged workers to report co-workers who “celebrate” Kirk’s death to their boss, to get them fired. War Secretary Peter Hegseth ordered the top brass to monitor the comments of military personnel. So far, eight have been suspended or placed under investigation, accused of mocking Kirk’s death.
The administration is also threatening broader probes into George Soros’ Open Society Foundations and other wealthy capitalist “nonprofits,” over their funding of the Nation magazine, which published an article comparing Kirk to Nazi spokesman Joseph Goebbels.
Working people need to be able to discuss and debate without fear of violent assaults from the government or political opponents. Workers and our unions should stand at the forefront of safeguarding constitutional protections regardless of who the government is aiming at today, because tomorrow working people will be the target.