25.09.2025

Saint Charlie and Trump’s crusade

America’s right is unleashing a wave of repression which began with its own version of ‘cancel culture’, but inevitably now includes the left. Paul Demarty calls for organisational preparedness and an uncompromising defence of free speech

Mere hours after the shooting of Charlie Kirk on September 10, it was clear that the American right had a mind to make a martyr out of the victim, and that this impulse reached all the way up to the White House.

The zone has truly been flooded with sentimental guff about how splendid the fellow was, but I use the word ‘martyr’ advisedly - there is already a cult of Kirk’s literal sanctity brewing, and a corresponding denunciation of his critics as literally demonic. Andrew Kolvet, a spokesman for Kirk’s ‘Turning Point USA’ outfit, claimed that a miracle had taken place - that the bullet should have gone right through Kirk’s neck, possibly harming others - it did not, for Kirk’s body had suddenly assumed supernatural toughness. This succeeded in energising Kirk’s evangelical followers, and also in inadvertently convincing various leftists of a number of fatuous conspiracy theories about his death (which will not detain us further).

With sanctification, however, comes the need for vengeance against the ‘demons’ who killed him. Since Kirk met his unhappy fate, the right has broadly succeeded in maintaining a pitch of wild hysteria. This rage has spread out in all kinds of strange, unfocused directions. A website appeared - ‘CharliesMurderers.com’ - that gathered personal information on individuals deemed by the mob to have celebrated Kirk’s death (though the worst ‘crime’ most had committed was merely to mention Kirk’s odious politics, or protest at the idea that the left somehow has a worse record of direct political violence in American life than the right).

By the time the site was forced to rebrand hastily, and then apparently disappeared altogether, many luckless individuals had already been sacked. Most were just random service industry functionaries (an Office Depot employee who refused to photocopy fliers for a Kirk vigil springs to mind), but some bigger fish were reeled in. Karen Attiah - an op-ed writer for The Washington Post - was sacked for a series of Bluesky posts (Bluesky being the Twitter clone that has become a refuge - and echo-chamber - for those who can no longer tolerate the atmosphere on the website now called X). These were hardly intemperate, certainly by the usual standards of internet-poisoned Bluesky power users. They did include one misleading quotation from Kirk, but the idea that this amounts to violent or unacceptable rhetoric is absurd. Nonetheless, Attiah is out of a job.

The biggest scalp was yet to come: Jimmy Kimmel - a legend of that peculiarly American TV format, the late-night talk show. On September 15, Kimmel’s opening monologue poked fun at the Make America Great Again reaction to Kirk’s death, highlighting in particular a widely mocked interview with Donald Trump himself, in which he responded to a question about his feelings after Kirk’s death by changing the subject immediately to the vulgar ballroom he is having bolted on to the White House. After a flood of complaints, Kimmel’s broadcaster, ABC - ultimately owned by the Walt Disney corporation - suspended the production of his show.

The proximate cause of Kimmel’s downfall, however, was surely that among those calling for his head was one Brendan Carr, a Trump flunky appointed to head up the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), which regulates, among other things, broadcast licences. Carr made it abundantly clear that it was within his power to make life hell for ABC (and local stations that syndicate shows like Jimmy Kimmel Live!) and within days the corporate overlords had capitulated. As of this writing, Disney has reversed course and reinstated Kimmel. No such luck, however, for Attiah or the various complete nobodies caught up in this witch-hunt.

Meanwhile, on September 22 this little crusade finally washed up on the shores of the left proper, with Trump’s announcement that Antifa - a loose network of anarchistic ‘anti-fascists’ - had been designated a domestic terrorist organisation. It is quite possible that other organisations will follow.

Woke right

Many have noted the peculiar similarity of these recent controversies to the internet mob actions of left-liberals that peaked between roughly 2017 and 2022 - the thing they called ‘cancel culture’. Though there are important differences, which we will come to, the comparison is not wholly unfair. Indeed, for those of us on the left who fought against this degenerate tendency at the time, the similarities in detail are uncanny. We hear, as we heard from the old ‘woke’ mobs, that free speech does not mean the right not to be fired for your speech. We hear from attorney general Pam Bondi, another incompetent bootlicker, that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech”, and that the first amendment does not protect “violent” speech.

The arguments advanced, in fact, so exactly repeat those of the old intersectionalists that I have sometimes wondered if this is satire - a deliberate attempt to throw the language of the left back in its face (I do not think this is what is going on). The midwits of the American right are capable of such satire in principle, but not of resisting boastfulness about how clever they are to be doing it. No such boasts are in evidence. Instead, by means of their cynicism and goldfish memories for everything other than grudges, the right has succeeded in inventing cancel culture again - from ‘first principles’.

The difference is that, with one significant exception, the various liberal moral crusades never had the full coercive force of the state behind them. (The exception is, of course, the various curtailments of personal liberty entailed by the Covid-19 pandemic.) No chairman of the FCC threatened to interfere with the licensing of Fox News. No attorney general or law enforcement director promised to deport people for objecting to the veneration of (the equivalent, I suppose) George Floyd.

The complicity of sections of the state and private bureaucracies in the speech controls of the ‘Great Awokening’ was bad enough on its own. But the present development is a dangerous additional step change. We have, in this paper, tended to give short shrift to the idea that the Trump regime is fascist. That assessment has not changed, but we must state again that we do not, by such reticence, intend to give the impression that there is therefore nothing to worry about. McCarthyism was not fascist either - nor the nativist hysteria that saw Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti framed and executed in the 1920s. Neither were therefore matters of indifference for the left.

It cannot be long until the assault on the ‘commanding heights’ of the media gives way to a wave of general repression against the organised left, which the Trump regime is only too pleased to blame for the death of Kirk.

It is now most probable that Tyler Robinson, the accused, was motivated - if indeed he is guilty - by broadly leftwing opposition to Kirk’s ideas. No evidence has emerged whatsoever - despite the desperate fishing of a million conservative muckrakers and a weaponised law-enforcement apparatus - of any association with existing left organisations (or semi-organisations like Antifa). This will not stop the purge, of course: it is the view of the rightwing hysterics that the Democratic Socialists of America - or indeed the Democrats themselves - have so poisoned the atmosphere of discussion with their denunciations of Trump that it is quite inevitable that violence will ensue (the exact mirror image, again, of the liberal bogeyman, ‘stochastic terrorism’ … ).

As I noted last week, the generous wording of the US constitution first amendment is not much of a shield here, when it is plain that Trump’s only real interest in state power is its exploitation in favour of his own pecuniary interests - and against those who fail to show him sufficient respect. It is a good thing that many on the American left - from our own rough co-thinkers in the Marxist Unity Group DSA caucus to social democratic intellectuals like Osita Nwanevu - have begun to take seriously questions of democratic functioning and the limitations of the US constitution. It seems likely, unfortunately, that a practical lesson in the deficiencies of American ‘democracy’ is getting underway.

Loyalty

That is no reason for despair, of course. Even the best-entrenched dictators have limited power: they must at least command the loyalty of their auxiliaries, which requires either principled support or bribery; and bribery must be paid for by appropriations from the broader population (who are not separable easily from the military/police anyway).

Though the costs are often grim, dictators tend to fall in the end. Bans and proscriptions can be counterproductive - the anti-socialist laws of the Bismarck regime not only failed to prevent the rise of German social democracy, but gave that movement increased prestige internationally, which in turn made future bans all but ineffective. The success of the Bolsheviks (and Mensheviks, for that matter) operating under tsarist autocracy needs no further elaboration.

Yet there is work to be done. Establishing media institutions is essential to work undertaken in conditions of repression - from publicising individual cases of victimisation to organising resistance. We live in, to put it mildly, a very different media environment to the predecessors mentioned. With the printing press, there was a significant barrier to entry into the media, but, supposing you could meet it, you could achieve full ‘vertical integration’: a party print shop would print a party paper that would be distributed - perhaps illicitly, and across international borders - by party cadre to ordinary party members at the far end. In some respects, the same holds for radio or even TV (since one could always make ‘pirate’ broadcasts).

Today, of course, most media is consumed via the internet, which is an altogether different thing. The fixed capital is totally centralised under the control of monopoly capital, with the result that it is extremely cheap and easy to get your voice out there, but entirely impossible to ‘vertically integrate’ in this way. At the end of the day, all the fibre-optic cables belong to companies like Cisco, and almost all the servers belong to tech giants like Amazon - whose economic model is entirely dependent on state largesse. Trump attracts scandal by openly doing his carrot-and-stick act through the FCC and FTC (Federal Trade Commission), but it is quite certainly the case that Democrat presidents do the same thing more discreetly.

There is likely no silver bullet here - organisations facing repression will have to be pragmatic and quick on their feet to maintain their reach and connections to the cadre. In the long run, the left should experiment with developing as much of its own infrastructure as possible, but we are where we are.

It should, lastly, be obvious that leftwing support for, or compliance with, the last wave of ‘cancel culture’ was a catastrophic error. (By ‘compliance’, I mean refusal to denounce openly the suppression of reactionary views by public and private institutions.) The attempt to enforce liberal nostrums by means of taboos entirely failed to stop the rise of the authoritarian, chauvinist right; support, passive or active, for these efforts has destroyed the left’s credibility as an alternative to liberalism.

The interest of the left in free speech is, as I have argued previously,¹ more profound than the traditional liberal argument that there is something like a ‘marketplace of ideas’, in which the best ideas will win out by way of some kind of quasi-Darwinian struggle. So long as bourgeois ideology has its hold on our minds, any such evolutionary process will be systematically distorted; it is not only the case that holding open the space for free speech is essential to socialist struggle, but - reciprocally - also that the victory of socialism is necessary to realise free speech in its fullness as a public good. To disavow free speech for some category of enemies - racists, fascists, Terfs, whatever - is merely to ensure that the cycle of irrationalism, liberal and revanchist, continues; and, sooner or later, the chauvinist right will get its turn.

Credibility as a defender of political freedom is hard-won and easily lost. We must start to rebuild it now.

1. ‘A curse on free speech’ Weekly Worker November 9 2023: weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1466/a-curse-on-free-speech.↩︎