In the month since the shootings both of Charlie Kirk and at a Texas ICE facility, the right has declared war.
“This violence is the result of the Radical Left Democrats constantly demonizing Law Enforcement, calling for ICE to be demolished, and comparing ICE Officers to Nazis,” Donald Trump posted online soon after the ICE shooting.
“We are going to channel all of the anger that we have over the organized campaign that led to this assassination, to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks,” declared Stephen Miller, white nationalist and White House deputy chief of staff for policy, on the September 16th JD Vance-hosted episode of The Charlie Kirk Show.
Troops have been deployed; executive orders and security directives issued. A right-wing database has collected tens of thousands of names and gotten over 140 people fired. Relative nobodies have been harassed and hounded for not sufficiently mourning Kirk’s killing.
But there shouldn’t be any love lost for Kirk. He was, as Arun Gupta put it, a “digital klansman… the leader of a virtual lynch mob.” Kirk and his Turning Point USA were key in organizing a broad far right ecosystem, using “gotcha” recordings of students at his events (we can’t call them debates) to spread his hate online and on campus. Like the database that followed his death, he mobilized his online followers to threaten and harass professors and academics, trying to drive them either to silence or out of a job.
No matter how much the right, liberals, and even social-democrats like Jacobin, have tried to sanitize him, Kirk absolutely did not do politics the “right way.”
Nor was there much sincerity to the right’s adulations for Kirk and cries over his death. Trump, when asked by reporters how he was holding up the day after the shooting, talked more about his ballroom than Kirk. Nearly $10 million has been raised for Kirk’s family, who will presumably already inherit his $12 million in net worth. Turning Point even started selling merch within days of his death. The grift and opportunism never end for this lot.
However the biggest grift, the most odious opportunism, has not been the t-shirts sold. It has been the right’s seizing on the shootings for their own goals. No matter either shooters’ actual motives — and at least one was steeped far more in Internet memes than Marx — that doesn’t matter to Trump or his lackeys. They are leaping at the chance to silence any and all opposition to their regime.
The stakes are high. The right’s stretches towards despotism, their efforts to eliminate us, are real. But the right is not yet all powerful.
Thus, more important than who Kirk was in life is what his death and the shootings mean for us now. How should revolutionaries and the working class we hope to organize approach this moment?
Reactions from across the political spectrum have both shifted the ground beneath us and exposed some key faultlines among both our enemies and potential allies. Liberals and even social-democrats have joined the chorus on the right in condemning “political violence.” Ezra Klein has preached that the left and right should recognize the good in each other, and even sometimes ignore where they disagree. Meanwhile, some on the left have struggled to grapple with recent events and how to adjust our tactics.
In this three-part series, I will explore both the excuse for the crackdown — supposed left-wing political violence — and the crackdown itself. This will start with framing a revolutionary understanding of political violence, then will analyze why these shootings happened, and finally will end with responding to the wave of repression we face.
The stakes are high. The right’s stretches towards despotism, their efforts to eliminate us, are real. But the right is not yet all powerful. There are still opportunities. To seize them, we must soberly though urgently chart the difficult path ahead.
Liberalism: violence for me, but not for thee
What does it say about a political system that it has shed more tears for a dead far-right bigot than two years of genocide?
Both houses of Congress quickly passed resolutions establishing October 14, 2025 as “National Charlie Kirk Remembrance Day.” The Democratic Party leadership and a majority of the party’s representatives supported the resolution. Not a single member of the Senate opposed it — not even the supposed socialist Bernie Sanders.
Yet every resolution to stop arms shipments to the genocidal Israel has died on the House floor. Every funding bill for ICE to cage families or for the US military to drone-bomb weddings has passed with bipartisan support — no matter which party is in office.
A system based on the rule of a minority of billionaires and corporations depends on violence, or at least the threat of it, to repress the majority from rising up. Police murders of the poor or Black; deaths from eviction, starvation or lack of health insurance; the slaughter of Indigenous peoples are all not deemed political violence. They are part of the normal operation of capitalism, largely through what Marxists call the state.
In normal times, the full scale of this violence is deliberately hidden. Terror and oppression against Black or trans people get justified through racist or transphobic ideas. The “protect and serve” narrative obscures the true nature and brutality of the police. Capitalism manufactures ideas essential for capitalism’s functioning.
These capitalist politicians fear not so much Trump’s promises of the stick but the resistance it will spark without a suitable carrot to hide it… Instability and chaos, not violence, give state managers anxiety.
As part of that, capitalists reserve the “political violence” label for those outsiders who muck up the smooth operation of their system, often to justify a crackdown. Protests get reframed as riots; strikes morph into insurrections. Sometimes the label and its consequences get deployed against the far right, as it did against Hitler’s “Beer Hall Putsch” in the 1920s or the US militia movement in the 1990s. Most often it’s reserved for insurgent workers, liberation movements of the oppressed, and the left.
In the words of Black revolutionary Malcolm X, “If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”
One of the Democrats’ biggest criticisms of Trump since 2016 has been his bombast and overt cruelty. He lacks any of the veneer or finesse of, say, Joe Biden, whose mass deportations (more than Trump’s first term) and repression went down smooth, thanks to a carrot-and-stick approach.
These capitalist politicians fear not so much Trump’s promises of the stick but the resistance it will spark without a suitable carrot to hide it. “The mask is off” and “saying the quiet parts out loud” have become common expressions these days.
Instability and chaos, not state violence, give state managers anxiety. Consider Gov. Gavin Newsom’s initial statement on Trump’s deployment of troops during the Los Angeles uprising last June: the “move is purposefully inflammatory and will only escalate tensions” (emphasis added). LA mayor Karen Bass called it a “chaotic escalation” and urged protesters — not ICE, the LAPD, or the National Guard — to “remain peaceful.”
“It doesn’t so much matter who wins. The important thing is the legitimacy of the system,” Democratic Party Congressman Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said about the 2000 Presidential vote recount. The same is true of Democrats in the Trump era.
Social-democratic hand-wringing
Democratic socialists and progressives, both in and out of Congress, are no better. After two years of mass destruction, starvation, and murder in Gaza, Sanders finally called it a genocide, just a day before the Kirk vote. But it took Sanders a mere day after Kirk’s death to decry political violence and praise him as “an effective communicator.”
Social-democrats in Jacobin and elsewhere, whether they have denounced Kirk’s love of violence or held him up as a free speech champion, have all condemned political violence while ignoring it all around them and assuming capitalism is normally free of it.
These reformists, so attached to the bosses’ political system and the illusion of voting social change into power, ape our rulers. Even while some may expressly refuse to sanitize Kirk, they see political violence as separate from capitalist pseudo-democracy and a direct threat to it.
Marxism and political violence
Where should revolutionaries stand? To start with, we argue against individual terrorism and assassination. These tactics hold back the struggle for liberation far more often than they advance it. For one, they fail to stop our enemies. The system is constantly producing new right-wing demagogues, CEOs, and state officials that can step in as replacements. Killings also lead to more crackdowns in their wake, as we’re seeing now. And even while many may celebrate a Luigi Mangione, these apparent “superheroes” sideline or paralyze mass struggle, the real engine of revolution.
At the same time, we are not pacifists. Political violence is, as 19th-century military theorist Carl von Clausewitz said about war, “the continuation of politics by other means.” When existing political institutions cannot express, repress, or resolve certain contradictions, competing interests, and conflicts in society, different individuals and groups will turn to action outside of those institutions. Some can turn to the streets or leverage other sources of power, like workers’ ability to go on strike. In certain other cases, and as I argue below, with certain classes, that extra-institutional action can include physical violence.
Dr. Mustafa Barghouti, a leader of the progressive Palestinian National Initiative, highlighted this truth in the immediate aftermath of October 7, 2023: “Of course Palestinians turn to resistance, because they see it’s the only way for them to get their rights.” Or, in the words of the very anti-communist President John F. Kennedy, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.”
If we go beyond abstract condemnations and understand violence as a product of historical developments, we can analyze and evaluate each act of violence separately. In United States history, for example, certain violence has emerged when no other path was available to those seeking freedom, whether the Boston Tea Party or Tecumseh’s Indigenous resistance to westward expansion. Yet this history is also stained in blood from horrible and reactionary violence by those trying to deny freedom to others.
Only in a system without classes and without class conflict, only where true democracy reigns, can we be free of political violence… To call for an end to political violence without addressing the system that creates that violence is at best utopian and misguided.
“Bleeding Kansas,” John Brown’s assault on Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, and later the US Civil War can’t be separated from the decades of political struggle between abolitionists and pro-slavery forces — and the political system’s inability to appease either side. Likewise, Black enslaved people had no means to resist their enslavement outside of escaping or violent revolt. That violence was fundamentally different from slave catchers’ or the Ku Klux Klan’s violence to keep Black people down.
A minority of rulers will never let a majority vote away their wealth or power. This reality is baked into the US Constitution. As framer James Madison states honestly in Federalist Papers no. 10:
“Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society… [D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property.” [emphasis added]
Thus, he and the other Constitutional framers argued, limiting democracy was necessary to protect the property rights of the merchants, slaveholders, and businessmen who owned and governed the country. From its beginning, the United States frustrated paths of resolving class conflicts peacefully. Instead, a strong federal state would be able to “repress domestic faction and insurrection.”
Only in a system without classes and without class conflict, only where true democracy reigns, can we be free of political violence. In other words, only under the higher phase of communism is this possible. So long as democracy remains limited and the world remains ruled by a particular class — in our case, a tiny class of billionaires — the rulers must use violence to enforce their will and conflicts will bleed out beyond institutional channels.
To call for an end to political violence without addressing the system that creates the basis for that violence is at best utopian and misguided. At worst, it can mean ignoring the violence just below the surface of that system while condemning the oppressed when they must turn to other means to gain their freedom.
The right: violence and power
We only need to look at Trump’s past incitements against protesters at his campaign rallies, his pardons for January 6th rioters, or his scrubbing of research from the Department of Justice website to know he and his followers are full of it.
But grasping at “gotchas” will do us no good. “They know they’re hypocritical. They don’t care,” Adam Johnson, host of “Citations Needed,” told The Intercept. “They’re complete nihilists. They just care about one thing, and that’s power. And they will turn on a dime [on] this supposed free speech.”
The statistics don’t lie. Political violence is much more the right wing’s business than the left’s. But why? The right organizes itself around the divisions built by and baked into capitalism: nationalism; cispatriarchy; racism; etc. Unlike the left whose ideology is grounded in the working class, the right bases itself on individualistic classes — small businesspeople, big capitalists, etc. — that lack collective social power.
The modern working class can only labor and organize itself en masse. Democracy and opposing all forms of oppression are necessary for its rule, socialism. Before this rule, workers can leverage their power as the great majority with their hands directly on the levers of profit-making. As revolutionary labor leader “Big Bill” Haywood said, “all they have to do is to put their hands in their pockets and they have got the capitalist class whipped.”
The right’s main goal, however, is for the majority on the bottom of society to accept exploitation, oppression, and degradation. As the name “conservative” implies, the right means to conserve the power of a small minority of capitalists. The democracy and solidarity that working-class struggle encourages are in direct conflict with this minority rule. Since the right can’t rely on the power of the majority, it must rely on the power of weapons.
The democracy and solidarity that working-class struggle encourages are in direct conflict with capitalist minority rule. Since the right can’t rely on the power of the majority, it must rely on the power of weapons.
Even as the one percent has tended to prefer a balance of repression and manufactured mass consent over the past 100 years, the liberal and right wings of this ruling class differ on their exact strategy and tactics. On the whole, the right draws strength from, and in turn aims to strengthen, the police and other violent arms of the state. Its dominant approach is repression.
The furthest edges of the right, largely made up of middle classes driven to frenzy, organize and exert their power outside of the state. Even the limited fig-leaf democracy of capitalism they see as too conciliatory or captured by the unwashed masses. This can even translate into violence against that very state, like MAGA supporters’ recent threats and likely house-torching against a South Carolina judge.
Yet the right doesn’t turn to violence as its only tactic. In the past fifteen years, major sections of the right have waged a guerrilla campaign within the institutions and ideologies of neoliberal capitalism. Like Milo Yannopolis, Andrew Tate, and others, Kirk was a master at using free speech, color-blindness and other bourgeois abstractions to mainstream authoritarian, white nationalist, and chauvinist ideas.
Those to Kirk’s right like Nick Fuentes have criticized this approach. Fuentes, like Richard Spencer before him, calls for a more outwardly fascist and violent movement. This is far from new. The “groyper war” is just a rehash of the alt-right’s conflicts with the “alt-lite.” But criticism or not, the right’s guerrilla operation was undeniably effective.
Kirk ultimately ended his life as a supporter of the Christian-fascist New Apostalic Reformation (NAR) movement. Through its “Seven Mountains Mandate,” it calls for Christians to seize control (or “dominion”) over “the seven power centers of society: arts and entertainment, businesses, education, family, government, media, and religion.” Think Handmaiden’s Tale. However, even before his Christian nationalist awakening, he had long used capitalism’s myth of a “marketplace of ideas” to help build a movement based on force and domination.
Kirk was one of the “most vocal supporters” of Kyle Rittenhouse, the far-right murderer in Minneapolis. He bragged about organizing over 80 buses to Washington, D.C. for January 6, 2021 — an event of real political violence. As he once stated, “I’m not a fan of democracy.”
Kirk directly endorsed political violence against his opponents “when we exhaust every single one of our state[’s] abilit[ies] to push back against what’s happening,” a dark echo of the analysis above. In the meanwhile, his Turning Point USA has threatened and terrorized liberals and leftists out of their jobs and into silence.
Every digital lynch mob against a teacher was a teaser for the violence Kirk sought to enact. In other words and in converse to the above, his political methods were the pursuit and promise of future violence by other means.
Baked into the system
The recent shootings of Charlie Kirk and at the Texas ICE facility have ignited a wave of repression. They have also exposed various political tendencies’ hypocrisies when it comes to violence in society.
The right is perhaps the most “honest” of our adversaries. It is more than willing to use both the state and extra-institutional violence to enforce capitalism’s inequalities. Yet unsurprisingly, Trump and his ilk claim the mantle of safety to repress the Left.
Every digital lynch mob against a teacher was a teaser for the violence Kirk sought to enact. His political methods were the pursuit and promise of future violence by other means.
Liberals ignore the violence hidden behind capitalism’s usual functioning. In fact they sometimes are more afraid of that violence being uncovered and resisted than the violence itself. Democratic socialists ape the liberals in ignoring the system’s very usual violence, and believe violence is separate or even a threat to the limited democracy afforded under capitalism. This leads some, where they acknowledge state violence at all, to create a false equivalence between it and struggles of the oppressed to gain their freedom.
Revolutionaries have a different take. Political violence, as I discussed, is a product of particular dynamics in society. It starts with the defense of inequality and class rule through the state. Where other classes or sections of society cannot achieve their ends or resolve their conflicts inside existing institutions, they resort to other means. In certain cases, where these forces lack social power, they turn to physical power. Only a society without class conflict can be entirely free of political violence.
How then should we understand these shootings? What social tensions has society failed to resolve? And how should we respond to this moment of intense state violence? I will explore these questions in the next parts of my series.
