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).

Charlie Kirk’s death and the politics of assassination

"We pledge to you that we will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country." – Ex-President and once-again-Presidential-candidate Donald Trump in 2023. (1)

ABC News reported that year:

Trump's denial that he had read Hitler's memoir [Mein Kampf] came after he has made a series of incendiary remarks in recent weeks referring to his political opponents as "vermin" and saying illegal immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country." ,,,

This was the first time Trump had invoked Hitler's name and the title of his memoir at a political rally, but there have been multiple reports over the years of Trump expressing a keen interest in, even admiration for, Hitler's rule over Nazi Germany. ...

There's no question that language echoes that Hitler used to describe his enemies, but there may have been some question about whether Trump knew he was using the same words Hitler used to justify his murderous and genocidal rule of Nazi Germany.

Now, after backlash that his words echoed Hitler's, however, there is no doubt.

"They said Hitler said that," Trump said Tuesday after he again told the crowd in Iowa that immigrants are "poisoning the blood" of America.
After insisting Hitler used the words "in a much different way," Trump went on to make the "blood" reference again. "It's true. They're destroying the blood of the country, they're destroying the fabric of our country, and we're going to have to get them out." [my emphasis] (2)

It is possible to talk about political violence and assassination without staying stuck in “thoughts and prayers” mode. But would require the Dems not to go into their reflexive duck-and-cover mode and saying things like, to take a random example, “The best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work.” Which Gavin Newsom did, (3) reminding us all that despite his enthusiasm for trying to mimic Jerry Brown or FDR in how he fights Republicans, his commitment to progressive political positions – or even centrist Democratic ones – is not always clear.

When it comes to talking about “political violence,” the stock vocabulary about the whole thing is more than a little bizarre. The Republicans celebrate the unlimited right of guns to reproduce without limit along with encouraging far-right political militias and idolizes the January 6, 2021 storm on the US Capitol as high patriotism, including the cop-killing involved. How many times a day do we hear Republicans say that the unlimited right to have any kind of gun available to kill, kill, kill anyone who you think looks threatening is the absolute foundation of all Liberty? Although their idea of liberty is not exactly democracy and the rule of law.

And all the while, they want to demonize Democrats for saying even obvious things about their own selected martyrs for the Trumpista cause, their present-day versions of Horst Wessel. (4)

So, I feel like for the moment just restating some fairly commonplace realities about political violence.

One, war is political violence. It just is. You don’t have to dig deep into Carl von Clausewitz’ theories (the idea that war is the continuation of politics of which Vladimir Lenin was particular fond of emphasizing) to figure that out.

Second, the consideration of whether particular war or just and therefore moral or unjust and therefore immoral goes back in “the West” to Augustine of Hippo (354-439 CE). And there were other versions of such moral considerations relating to war around even earlier, and not just in what we know claim as Western tradition. Muslim theories of jihad are a version of that, too, however little Islamophobes may dislike hearing that.

Third, genocide, a relatively recent term formally defined by the Genocide Convention of 1948 is not a theory of just conduct, it’s a legal definition of what is generally considered the most heinous kind of crime. Ask looking at how many members of Congress (or, better said, how few) are demanding immediate cessation of US aid to Israel’s real-time genocide in Gaza, to get a sense of how acceptable to a depressingly large number of people even the officially worst crime of taking lives really is. And we see it in real time.

Fourth, the fact that mass killing is going on someone – even in a Just War – is not condone individual murders. The Talmudic saying, “Whoever saves one life, saves the world entire,” (the Schindler’s List English version) is in part a recognition of that concept.

Assassination

Targeted assassination is unfortunately a standard tool of US foreign policy now. Barack Obama himself (in)famously bragged on the number of targeted drone assassinations he had carried out as President: “Turns out I'm really good at killin’ people."

“Peace” President Trump is also down with the practice. He bragged in 2020 during his first Presidency, “Last night, at my direction, the United States military successfully executed a flawless precision strike that killed the number-one terrorist anywhere in the world, Qasem Soleimani.” (5)

The discussion of political assassination has moral, legal, and practical aspects. For admirers of the Confederacy and its thoroughly white-racist and anti-democracy principles considered John Wilkes Booth a hero for assassinating Abraham Lincoln. Supporters of democracy an enemies of slavery found his act despicable. It was certainly illegal because states seek to maintain a monopoly on violence internally as assassination is today. But a moral and practical understanding of the act and its consequences is essential to evaluating its significance.

The two most famous assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler

A carpenter named Georg Elser tried to kill Hitler in Munich in 1939, planting a bomb under the stage on which the Führer was scheduled to speak. But Hitler left the building earlier than scheduled. “Elser was held as a prisoner for over five years until he was executed at the Dachau concentration camp less than a month before the surrender of Nazi Germany.” (5) Eight people were killed in the bombing and several dozen were injured.

The most famous of the attempts was the officers’ plot against Hitler that is particularly identified with Claus von Stauffenberg. It was an illegal act, and Stauffenberg was executed for it, as were numerous other participants. Stauffenberg and his fellow plotters are widely celebrated in Germany and abroad, and honored for their attempt even by the German armed forces, as described in this Deutsche Welle report from 2020: (6)

Charlie Kirk was obviously not Adolf Hitler, so there is no direct comparison to be made. The point is that political violence – presuming the motive in Kirk’s murder was political – is a political event as well as a crime and an act of violence. Whatever uses the Trump cult makes of his death, and however they try to exploit it as some kind of further justification to dismantle democracy, those are things US citizens and the Democratic Party will have to engage as those emerge. Gavin Newsom’s bizarre call to “continue” Charlie Kirk’s “work” – which was the work of rightwing and racist hatemongering – is just so clueless it makes me a bit embarrassed that I praised some of Newsom’s genuinely decent efforts this year to challenge Trump’s misrule.

Notes:

(1) Kurtzleben, Danniele /2023): Why Trump's authoritarian language about 'vermin' matters. NPR 11/17/2023. <https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213746885/trump-vermin-hitler-immigration-authoritarian-republican-primary> (Accessed: 2025-10-09)

(2) Karl, Jonathan (2023): Donald Trump's history with Adolf Hitler and his Nazi writings: ANALYSIS. ABC News 12/21/2023. <https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/donald-trumps-history-adolf-hitler-nazi-writings-analysis/story?id=105810745> (Accessed: 2025-10-09).

(3) Mazza, Ed (2025): Gavin Newsom Names 'Best Way To Honor' Charlie Kirk After 'Senseless Murder'. HuffPost 09/11/2023. <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/gavin-newsom-charlie-kirk-honor_n_68c24056e4b02e75fd409f2f> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

(4) Remarks by President Trump on the Killing of Qasem Soleimani. Trump White House Archives 01/03/2020. <https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-killing-qasem-soleimani/> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

(5) Assassination attempts on Adolf Hitler. Wikipedia 08/23/2025. <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler&oldid=1307381529> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).

(6) Commemorating WWII hero Claus von Stauffenberg. DW News YouTube channel 07/20/2020. <https://youtu.be/K42a6XoroCk?si=umtXlz9NoUHpIJPe> (Accessed: 2025-12-09).