18.09.2025
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Death of a sycophant
Charlie Kirk’s assassination is another glimpse into a particularly American pathology. Paul Demarty expects nothing good to come of it
There was very little remarkable about Charlie Kirk - until, that is, his spectacular death, on a glorious late-summer’s day in Orem, Utah.
Kirk was getting started on his ‘American Comeback’ tour, which was to sell weapons-grade Trumpism to students across the United States. Nowhere better to kick it off than deep-red Utah, at Utah Valley University (the somewhat less prestigious neighbour to Brigham Young). Kirk, still baby-faced at 31, was just getting warmed up. He was, ironically, ranting about the supposed prominence of transgender people among mass shooters, when a shot rang out. He was hit plumb in the carotid artery, and died shortly afterwards.
The killer was on the roof of a nearby campus building, an impressive 200 metres away. He was clearly a better shot than Thomas Crooks, who took a pot-shot at Donald Trump himself in Pennsylvania last year, but in many other respects, the two cases are eerily similar, as we shall see.
Though it was a spectacular murder, this might seem an odd candidate for a shot heard around the world. Yet fulsome tributes to this young man came from far afield. Sir Keir Starmer felt the need to blub a little. So did Benjamin Netanyahu, who more or less enjoyed Kirk’s support. The Golden Arches flags at the Guantanamo Bay McDonald’s flew at half-mast: an image that surely encapsulates the strange degeneracy of America since 9/11.
This sort of weeping and wailing has, of course, become de rigueur among the bourgeois elite. Yet it is one thing to denounce political violence of this sort - which can be done intelligently from any number of political positions - and quite another to cry over the corpse. We were told that Kirk was a great champion of free speech (which he was not - except when it suited him). We were told he did politics the ‘right way’, because he engaged in fatuous, gladiatorial pseudo-debates with liberals (he was, admittedly, less crude in his debating style than, say, Ben Shapiro). Eventually some bewildered liberals and leftists protested, pointing out that this man was a racist, an all-around bigot, a ‘fascist’ even - though few serious people were stupid enough to actually celebrate his being murdered.
The counterblast, however, carries the risk of giving Kirk too much credit. This man was a hack, who rode the dark-money gravy train wherever it took him. He was racist - exactly as racist as required to make a name for himself as a young media figure on the Republican hard right. His politics, since the rise of Trump, have consisted of total obedience to the big man. Whatever Trump says is the official line of Kirk’s outfit, Turning Point USA. He flip-flopped on every classic culture-war issue in lockstep with his hero. He was a Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy enthusiast - until Trump decided to put the kibosh on that, at which point Kirk snapped into line so quickly, he was in danger of doing himself (if you’ll forgive me) a neck injury.
The man who died on September 10, in other words, was a coward, a sycophant and a philistine. He was one among a great multitude of such people, swarming to Trump like flies to shit, building their petty media empires with the fun-money of black-hearted billionaires. He was a talented organiser among young men, but undistinguished in every other way. The essential skills in this crowd are a loud voice and a wandering memory. Who knows what the demands of the next day will be? - except that, whatever they are, they will require coarse and manipulative interventions from the legions of ‘conservative influencers’.
No motive
None of those things, of course, are - or ought to be - capital crimes. Kirk deserved nothing worse than obscurity. Someone, obviously, disagreed, which brings us to the alleged killer: Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old from the small Utah town of Saint George. Speculation as to his motive began immediately, but it became clear rapidly that there was little for journalists and others to go on. He had produced almost no record of himself on social media. High school contemporaries remembered a quiet but friendly teenager. He comes from a conservative family, but his own political views are radically uncertain.
All the speculation, in the end, comes down to the text etched into bullets found in the murder weapon. Some messages seem at least superficially leftwing: “Bella ciao”; “Hey fascist, catch this”. Others appear to be nonsensical references to internet memes and jokes (“If you’re reading this you’re gay, LMAO”). Even the superficially political ones may be explained differently: “Bella ciao” may be an anti-fascist anthem, but it has seen wide use in other media recently. “Hey fascist, catch this” was followed by a series of arrows which indicate a reference to the video game Helldivers 2 (Robinson is very keen on video games).
Robinson thus presents an enigma, but not an altogether novel one. A strange feature of many recent lone-wolf attacks and mass shootings in the US has been the bizarre indeterminacy of motive: where political motives are identified, they are frequently extremely esoteric. Crooks had no clear political views. Luigi Mangione - the presumed killer of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson - seems to have been associated with the Silicon Valley rationalists, who have also spawned a violent cult by the name of ‘the Zizians’.
Robin Westman, who carried out a mass shooting at a Catholic school in Minnesota a few weeks ago, left behind only fragments indicating a hatred of Catholics and perhaps also Jews. The daddy of them all is Stephen Paddock, a late-middle-aged, middle class man, who opened fire at a concert in Las Vegas in 2017 from a nearby hotel, killing 60 and injuring hundreds, before taking his own life. To this day, exactly nothing is known about his motive.
There are both prosaic and more profound explanations for this phenomenon. It is a simple fact that spectacular acts of violence of this sort are given to contagion; the notoriety granted, inescapably, to the killers holds a grim attraction. From Crooks, Robinson borrowed his general MO - sniping at a public figure from a nearby roof (though he was a better shot than Crooks, probably familiar with the kind of hunting rifle he used from his family background). The etched bullets are, of course, pure Mangione.
The authorities have continued to insist that Robinson was motivated by “radical left” politics, despite no evidence having come forth of any public political activity. But suppose, as is perfectly possible, he had picked up some esoteric left ideology in his tour of obscure Discord servers - Maoist third-worldism, say, which conceives of revolution as the conquest by main force of the imperialist countries by the countries of the periphery. These ideologies float weightlessly around the internet, but have essentially no connection to meaningful social forces anywhere (not even in countries where there are large Maoist movements). Interpreting such commitments as political is unavoidable, but it is a kind of fantasy version of politics, centred on an eschatological image of revenge. It is psychology, not politics, primarily at work here; and the relevant political explanation has to do with the disaggregating effect of decades of triumphant capitalism.
Not that such subtleties weigh heavily on the rightwing conscience. It is difficult to describe the right’s response to this killing as anything other than deranged; indeed, the sheer extremity of its mawkishness would be funny if the consequences were not, potentially, so grave.
Revenge
Internet mob campaigns against people who openly glorified in Kirk’s death quickly metastasised into a wild, generalised witch-hunt against anyone who dared to issue any reservations about all this caterwauling. Many random individuals have already been sacked from their jobs. JD Vance, who hosted Kirk’s regular show on Monday (another indication of the symbiotic relationship between Trumpism and its alt-media praetorians), urged listeners to “put on the full armour of god” and … continue doxxing and snitching (I am not sure that is what St Paul had in mind … ).
More troublingly, Trump himself promises a clampdown on the “radical left”, which would use anti-terrorist and immigration laws, and perhaps the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organisations Act (‘Rico’, passed in the 1970s to crack down on the Mafia), to crush socialist organisations, and even milquetoast liberal ones. Indeed, we have already seen such tactics used by Trump against the Palestine movement.
We are accustomed to thinking of the US having, whatever the innumerable faults of its constitution, at least stronger protection for free speech and association than we enjoy in Britain, never mind in places like Germany. Yet the American central state has, over the decades, arrogated to itself such arbitrary power that these protections are effectively conditional. (How can you bring a first amendment defence to the courts if your client has been disappeared into a Salvadorean gulag?) The American left may soon face uncomfortable questions: how can it keep going under conditions of heavy repression? How is it to conduct legal defence, to defy bans, even to defend itself physically?
The saga, no doubt, will drag on. It is fortunate, at least, that there were few leftists foolish enough to blithely celebrate the assassination this time (unlike in the case of Mangione, who coincidentally had two terrorism charges against him dropped this week). Many celebrated Kirk’s death, but they would have celebrated his death from Ebola as well. Perhaps the fact that influential leftwing media figures understood immediately that they were in the frame for reprisals and furiously attempted to calm down their followers had some effect. Or perhaps the obvious failure of the Brian Thompson killing to spark off any serious elevation of political consciousness - as the old theory of ‘propaganda of the deed’ supposed - has made such people warier in the face of this latest crime.
So far as these tactics go, the arguments of Leon Trotsky in 1911 are still worth attention:
A strike, even of modest size, has social consequences: strengthening of the workers’ self-confidence, growth of the trade union, and not infrequently even an improvement in productive technology. The murder of a factory owner produces effects of a police nature only, or a change of proprietors devoid of any social significance … But the disarray introduced into the ranks of the working masses themselves by a terrorist attempt is much deeper [than that of the bourgeoisie]. If it is enough to arm oneself with a pistol in order to achieve one’s goal, why the efforts of the class struggle? If a thimbleful of gunpowder and a little chunk of lead is enough to shoot the enemy through the neck, what need is there for a class organisation? …
In our eyes, individual terror is inadmissible, precisely because it belittles the role of the masses in their own consciousness, reconciles them to their powerlessness, and turns their eyes and hopes towards a great avenger and liberator, who some day will come and accomplish his mission. The anarchist prophets of the ‘propaganda of the deed’ can argue all they want about the elevating and stimulating influence of terrorist acts on the masses - theoretical considerations and political experience prove otherwise. The more ‘effective’ the terrorist acts, the greater their impact, the more they reduce the interest of the masses in self-organisation and self-education.1
It is not primarily the morality of terrorism which is at issue for Marxists. It is instead the question of revolution itself - of what means can actually yield the victory of the proletariat. The leftwing appetite for such spectacle presents as extreme radicalism, but is in fact, for exactly the reasons enumerated by Trotsky, a compact with despair.
It is the construction of strong, mass organisations that alone offers a solution to all of this: from the spread of odious ideas to the nihilism of the lone wolf, and to the furious drive for reprisal and repression.