On September 10, at Utah Valley University, Charlie Kirk, the gutter racist and sexist MAGA media personality who divided workers with vicious hate speech, was gunned down at a public debate. This champion of rising fascism and vigilante gun rights was killed in the midst of a back-and-forth about mass shootings in the U.S. Kirk’s murder reflects deep instability within the U.S. capitalist ruling class, and also a growing trend of reactionary, anti-revolutionary political violence.
While Klansman-in-Chief Donald Trump and his flunkies have used Kirk’s assassination to advance their fascist attacks on workers, liberal politicians and pundits are busy whitewashing the dead man’s despicable legacy. The New York Times’ Ezra Klein mourned and celebrated Kirk “for practicing politics in exactly the right way.” California Governor Gavin Newsom called for people to “honor” Kirk’s memory by sustaining his work. Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, another potential Democratic presidential candidate, ordered the state’s flags flown at half-staff “as a mark of respect.” All hands rose to defend “freedom of speech,” a dangerous myth under the bosses’ dictatorship. These are the same liberal hypocrites who attacked any workers and students who dared protest the U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians. Many of them pushed for thuggish kkkops to break up peaceful college encampments.
Kirk rose to prominence by building Turning Point USA, an organization funded by right-wing billionaires to combat “left biases” and “wokeness” on college campuses. Despite his self-proclaimed status as a free speech advocate, Kirk set up an online “watchlist” to harass and intimidate antiracist professors. His debating points were a stale rehash of scientifically debunked racist and sexist rhetoric. He railed against “Jewish donors” who were “anti-white” and “quasi-Marxist,” the Islamic “threat to America,” Haitian workers he said were “infested with demonic voodoo,” and prominent Black women who lacked “brain processing power.” He claimed that abortions were “worse than the Holocaust.” Kirk was a Christian nationalist, a nazi through and through.
While we understand workers’ rage and frustration, Progressive Labor Party does not support or condone vigilante violence. As long as capitalism exists, racism and sexism will be peddled by the ruling class to divide and exploit workers. The only way to smash these murderous ideas is with mass revolutionary violence by an organized, communist-led, international working class.
No free speech for racists!
In 1978, in Washington, DC, PLP confronted the infamous Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson at a conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Wilson’s Sociobiology: The New Synthesis, proposed that some human behaviors were biological. He warmly supported such open racists as New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade, whose book, A Troublesome Inheritance, “argues that Black people may be, on average, more impulsive and less hardworking than white or East Asian people, and that basic differences in human society—why Haiti is poor, for example, and European countries wealthy—are attributable to genetic differences among groups” (Popular Science, 2/21/22). In the early 20th century, similar ideas spurred the U.S.-born eugenics movement, which used them to justify racist inequality and the sterilization of less “desirable” groups. Like Charlie Kirk, the U.S. eugenicists were funded by rich philanthropists, including the Carnegie Institution, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Harriman railroad fortune. “Race science” was embraced by “some of America’s most respected scientists…from Stanford, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton” (historynewsnetwork.org, September 2003). In the 1930s, along with Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, these U.S. eugenicists were a major influence on Adolph Hitler.
As Wilson began to speak at the AAAS conference, PLP and our affiliated International Committee Against Racism (InCar) stormed the stage and doused him with water. Protesters chanted, “Racist Wilson, you can’t hide, we charge you with genocide!” As open racism becomes even more normalized in rotten capitalist society, we must match this boldness in challenging the rulers’ vile mouthpieces. Lone wolf violence will not defeat racism. The only solution is communist revolution. Join us!
