Charlie KKKirk’s chickens come home to roost

Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk once said gun deaths were “unfortunately” a price worth paying for the freedom to bear arms under the Second Amendment of the US constitution. The far right pundit’s argument was (almost) vindicated when he was shot dead on Wednesday. 

He felt a small fraction of the violence against Palestinians, black people, women and other oppressed groups that he glorified. 

Kirk was a Make America Great Again (Maga) extremist and fervent fan of Donald Trump. He called the US president “the bodyguard of Western civilisation”. Trump called Kirk a “great warrior”.

He wants to canonise Kirk and use the shooting as an excuse for more crackdowns and a further right wing radicalisation of his regime. 

In 2020, Kirk published The Maga Doctrine: The Only Ideas That Will Win The Future, which became an Amazon best seller. He argued that Trump had “started a movement to reclaim our government from the rotten cartel of insiders that have been destroying our country”. 

On 5 April 2023, Kirk told a rally, “I think it’s worth it to have the cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other god given rights.”

His podcast, The Charlie Kirk Show, was a cesspit of far right lies, vile racism, transphobia and anti-abortion bigotry that he built his career on. 

He has 1.8 million followers on Twitter/X. But even Twitter once blocked Kirk for “violating rules against posting misleading information about voting” when he tweeted lies about supposed election fraud in Pennsylvania. 

Kirk set up Turning Point USA when he was 18 years old to humiliate, bully and witch hunt education workers with progressive views. 

Turning Point has spread its poison to over 2,000 campuses and has a staff of over 450 full-time and part-time workers scattered across the US.

In October 2017, members of Kent State University’s Turning Point USA chapter dressed up in nappies to protest against “safe spaces”—only babies need safe spaces. Get it? 

In December 2018 Kirk visited Britain to set up branches of Turning Point. He was welcomed by Tories including the bigot Jacob Rees-Mogg and former home secretary Priti Patel.

Kirk was shot on the opening leg of his American Comeback Tour. More than 6,000 people signed a petition asking Utah State University to bar Kirk from coming onto its campus to spread his bigoted and violent views. 

Some on the left have pointed out that Kirk was a human being with a family. That is true. But those human beings who devote their lives to oppressing, marginalising and humiliating should expect their chickens to come to roost. 

Nine months ago Luigi Mangione became a folk hero when he shot Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare. The sector was notorious for declining to pay out policies for dying people.  

The US establishment will wring their hands about political violence. But the US ruling class is responsible for far more violence, death and destruction than any political terrorist. They are complicit in the genocide in Gaza and in enabling the continuing horror of mass shootings in the US. 

Of course socialists are for mass, collective resistance against Trump, the far right and the system, not individual acts of terror. 

Don’t mourn for Kirk. Mourn for the tens of thousands of victims of the US gun lobby and the Maga fantasies of imperialist domination—and organise against it.