More on the Republicans’ current favorite martyr Charlie Kirk’s death and legacy

Branko Marcetic in the social-democratic Jacobin has an essay on political violence in the aftermath of the assassination of far-right hatemonger Charlie Kirk by another hard-right obsessive from the Trump cult.

He states this democratic principle:

This is the way democracy and a free society work: We accept that we have to tolerate hearing things we vehemently disagree with, because it guarantees our own right to speak and act freely in ways that others might vociferously detest.

But there is something dishonest and slightly absurd going on right now in the collective reaction to Kirk’s murder. Because rather than simply restate and defend this principle — you have a right to air your views without fear of violence, even if your views suck — a variety of prominent voices are now rewriting Kirk’s history to present him as someone who wasn’t an implacable foe of this very value. (1)

At this point it’s important to remember that the liberal democratic notions of tolerance and freedom of speech developed from a long period of social clashes and civil wars. Rainer Forst described that process well in Toleranz im Konflikt (2003), English translation: Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present (2013), Toleration was a radical oppositional demand of the democratic movements.

(By the way, if the word “Jacobin” gives you the heebee-jeebies because guillotines and stuff, it’s worth noting that the latest Republican saint and martyr, Charlie Kirk, thought televised beheadings would be a good thing for American to stage. Just last year, he had a friendly discussion with other public-execution fans about how old should children be before they are allowed to watch the public beheadings on TV.) (2)

The liberal-democratic idea of free speech is primarily about protecting speech from government suppression. But in the democratic concept of the rule of law, government also has an affirmative obligation to ensure that private actors are not suppressing free speech either. Bad actors like Ku Klux Klan and “patriot militia” types.

The principle of free speech could be described as the idea that things work out best when everyone is free to say any dang fool thing they want, so long as a everyone else is free to say what a dang fool thing it was.

This doesn’t mean that there are no conEvsequences for speech that is libelous. Or for speech intimately connected to a criminal action. For instance, if a New York Mob boss – like one of those who Trump’s political mentor Roy Cohn advised and represented – tells one of his lieutenants to knock somebody off, that is an integral part of a criminal act. So he can’t claim that was protected free speech.

But part of the “dang fool thing” definition of the concept also assumes that other people call out the dang fool things that, say, a white supremacist hatemonger like Charlie Kirk spews out. Evan when talking about his legacy which the Trump cult has been celebrating. It also means calling out cynical and dishonest uses being made of Kirk’s murder by his admirers. As Matt Gertz puts it:

The ideology of people who attack political figures doesn’t always map neatly onto a political party, in no small part because the assailant typically suffers from some form of mental illness. But Democrats have certainly been the targets of political violence in recent memory: In October 2022, a man broke into the home of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi seeking to kidnap her, and brutally assaulted her husband, Paul. In June, an assassin allegedly murdered a Democratic state legislator and her husband and wounded a second and his wife in Minnesota. Last month’s lethal attack on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by someone who authorities say “wanted to send a message against COVID-19 vaccines” should also be placed in this category. [my enogasus] (3)

And Marcetic writes:

As plenty of people have pointed out by now, Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives: not only trans people, whom he was falsely blaming for mass shootings at the precise moment he himself was shot (by a nontrans man, based on what we now know) but also Jews, Muslims, immigrants, black people, homosexuals, federal workers — the list goes on. That of course doesn’t mean he deserved to be killed, but it is dishonest — and actually detrimental to the defense of free speech — to pretend these weren’t his core, heartfelt beliefs.

Kirk held and espoused a variety of ugly views and regularly insulted and demonized whole groups of human beings just trying to get on with their lives.

But it’s not even really Kirk’s bigoted social attitudes that are the point. More important is that Kirk was very much on board with the political violence that is now rightly being decried in the wake of his murder. [my emphasis]

He goes on to give examples of how Martyr Kirk viewed those he considered political enemies:

He called Democrats “maggots, vermin, and swine,” charged that the party “hates this country” and that “they wanna see it collapse.” He told rural white voters that the party hated them in particular and has “a plan to try and get rid of you” and that they “won’t stop until you and your children and your children’s children are eliminated.” Kamala Harris “wants to see the elimination of the United States of America,” he claimed last year, and her election would mean “a pagan regime basically permanently engulfing the country.” [my emphasis]

Wajahat Ali and Danielle Moody discusses the far-right political environment in which the accused assassination of Kirk immersed himself. (4)

Notes:

(1) Marcetic, Branko (2025): Political Violence Is Wrong. Charlie Kirk Didn’t Think So. Jacobin 09/13/2025. <https://jacobin.com/2025/09/kirk-posobiec-political-violence-far-right>(Accessed: 2025-14-2025).

(2) Charlie Kirk fantasizes about children watching televised executions: “At a certain age, it's an initiation”.Media Matters 027272024. <https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-fantasizes-about-children-watching-televised-executions-certain-age-its> (Accessed: 2025-15-2025).

(3) Gertz, Matt (2025): On the killing of Charlie Kirk, political violence, and the right’s response. Media Matters 08/12/2025, <https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/killing-charlie-kirk-political-violence-and-rights-response> (Accessed: 2025-15-2025).

(4) "One of Us": The Murder of Charlie Kirk and the Mirror America Refuses to Face. Wajahat Ali YouTube channel 09/13/2025. <https://youtu.be/byiKZoANKMs?si=1nwo8OuDs8Goonfk> (Accessed: 2025-14-2025).