Charlie Kirk: A victim of his own ideology (2025)

From the October 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Charlie Kirk is dead, the CEO of ‘christo-fascist’ Turning Point USA, the man who built a career attacking queer people, striking workers, students, bled out on stage in Utah after being shot in the neck. His death was streamed live, his last words delivered in response to a question about whether trans people should be allowed to own firearms. In a final moment of irony, the man who weaponised speech was silenced by a bullet.

His followers scrambled to crown him a martyr to ‘free speech’. But what they mourn is not free speech. What they mourn is the collapse of their own manufactured spectacle.

Turning Point USA Campaigns have never been about dialogue. They have been about stalking, smearing, and silencing. Kirk built an empire on ambush videos, ‘debates’ edited into propaganda, and campaigns of harassment targeting professors, students, and workers. What TPUSA calls activism is in fact a weapon: surveillance masquerading as politics, intimidation dressed up as freedom.

At the University of Illinois, TPUSA turned graduate worker Tariq Khan into a national target, dragging his family, including his children, into a torrent of racist abuse. At Arizona State, English professor David Boyles was blacklisted, stalked, smeared, and beaten bloody. Across the country, countless educators have been doxxed, filmed, and threatened until they censored themselves or fled their jobs. Students, too, are thrown into the crosshairs, forced to navigate a campus environment poisoned by manufactured confrontation.

This is not an accident. It is a strategy. Behind TPUSA’s empty rhetoric of ‘free speech’ is a campaign of fear designed to corrode academic freedom and terrorize opposition into silence. It is a politics of humiliation, coercion, and intimidation. And now, that politics has come full circle. That is the inevitable logic of a politics with violence as its core.

This is not just about Charlie Kirk. It is about the capitalist system that made both Kirk and his killer, a world where capitalism enforces its order through alienation and hierarchy, a world shocked by bloodshed even as it marinates every social relationship in class violence. Kirk’s end is not a tragedy of free speech. It is the mirror of the politics he championed: politics through religious domination, politics enforced by fear, politics that ends with blood.

A.T.