(This article was first published on the morning of September 23, 2025, and was updated on September 24, 6:15 a.m. EST, with a link (at the end) to the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show that returned on the air last night.)

By Yvonne Hayes and Argiris Malapanis

The September 10 assassination of right-wing “influencer” Charlie Kirk was an attack on free speech of the most serious and dangerous kind. It should be unequivocally condemned. Kirk’s murder served up an excuse on a silver platter for the Trump administration and its allies to accelerate their assault on democratic rights. The White House is now using the horrendous killing to propel Trump’s drive toward autocratic rule.

No matter how odious one’s ideas, eliminating an opponent in an act of violence does nothing to advance the cause of justice. It sets back every effort to win public opinion to defend democracy, which is preferable to any kind of dictatorial rule. Those who celebrate Kirk’s death play straight into the hands of the forces of reaction who are doing everything in their power to strip working people of our right to express ourselves freely and to organize to defend our interests.

NEWS ANALYSIS

From the moment Kirk was killed, the U.S. president, vice president, and FBI and other government officials and fellow travelers weighed in to establish in the public psyche that the assassination was the fault of “liberals,” the Democratic Party, or the “left.”

Before Kirk’s death was even confirmed, billionaire Elon Musk declared on his social media platform X: “The Left is the party of murder.”

“It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos,” conservative activist Christopher Rufo wrote on X immediately after the killing. Rufo was an architect of the rightist drive against Critical Race Theory during Trump’s first term.

A chorus of government officials followed with claims that the shooter was a “leftist,” citing alleged pro-trans messages the assassin left behind or anti-fascist inscriptions on bullet casings found with the murder weapon.

As of today, it is unclear what the politics of shooter Troy Robinson are. The only thing we know for a fact are his words in a text to his roommate and romantic partner (a man transitioning to be a woman), stating he was tired of Kirk’s “hatred.” So far, there is no evidence that Robinson had an association with any particular organization, left or right.

But facts be damned, Trump and his allies used the shooting, even before the perpetrator’s arrest, as justification for doubling down on many of their policies already in effect — some of them popularized with the aid of Kirk’s organization, Turning Point USA. These anti-democratic steps included publishing “hit lists” of pro-Palestinian academics and students.

In the last two weeks, the White House has used this assassination to introduce even more aggressive measures and practices to undermine any opposition to the government’s agenda. Shredding the right to free speech enshrined in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is at the center of this drive.

In one of his first acts after taking office on January 20, Trump demagogically issued an executive order titled “Restoring Freedom of Speech and Ending Federal Censorship.”

Since then, the White House has gone out of its way to identify, target, and disrupt the lives of journalists, academics, scientists, researchers, and student visa holders who disagree with government policies. Institutions that allow speech or research that Trump and his lackeys find objectionable have been pressured to fire professors, shut down student protests and expel or otherwise discipline targeted students, and cancel research projects — or face loss of funding and other measures.

Federal institutions have been ordered to remove or alter exhibits, such as the review of signage and educational materials at national parks with “disparaging” references — from material about the genocide against Native Americans, to the 250 years during which African Americans were enslaved, to the dangers of climate change.

Moreover, federal troops have been deployed inside the nation’s borders alongside masked immigration enforcement squads to “fight crime” and arrest and massively deport undocumented immigrant workers.

Since Kirk’s assassination, these efforts — aimed especially at anyone who dares criticize his political views — have intensified. Most recently, ABC canceled late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel’s show after the TV national network and its owner Disney came under pressure from Federal Communications Commission (FCC) chairman Brendan Carr, a Trump appointee.

“We can do this the easy way or the hard way,” Carr said. “These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.”

Kimmel’s crime? During the monologue on his September 15 TV show, Kimmel said, “The MAGA gang (is) desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

We don’t share Kimmel’s assessment, but his comment didn’t even come close to meeting Vice President J.D. Vance’s charge that Kimmel “celebrated” the Kirk assassination. The ABC cancellation was an outrageous act of government-engineered censorship.

On September 18, the day after the axing of Kimmel’s show, Trump took this blatant censorship a step further. He suggested that the FCC consider canceling the license of any broadcaster that allows any criticism of Trump on its airwaves. Many late-night hosts appearing on those networks are “against me” and “they give me only bad publicity,” Trump complained to reporters. “I mean, they’re getting a license. I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”

Trump has shredded any pretense of being the president for all Americans. As an article in the September 14 New York Times pointed out, “He acts as president of red America and the people who agree with him, while those who do not are portrayed as enemies and traitors deserving payback.”

Increasing economic hardship through tariffs and trade wars, worsening health care and education, and making working conditions more dangerous for the large majority are of little concern to Trump and his ultra-rightist government. And those who protest or even complain about this direction increasingly find themselves with a bull’s eye on their backs.

Trump does not yet need extralegal shock troops to put his opponents in check; for now, he uses effectively all the levers of state power.

‘We will absolutely target you’

Coopting a phrase popularized by liberal or left-wing groups in the past, U.S. attorney general Pam Bondi said on a September 15 podcast, “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech…. We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” And, as evidenced by the constant whining about “nasty” things said about the Oval Office and repeated outbursts aimed at reporters who ask hard questions, “hate speech” in the eyes of the Trump administration is anything that falls short of idolatry.

The same day, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X, “If you are here on a visa and cheering on the public assassination of a political figure, prepare to be deported.” This threat completely ignores the fact that the rights outlined in the First Amendment apply to every person in the United States, regardless of citizenship status.

During Vance’s hosting of the Charlie Kirk show after the latter’s murder, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller claimed the last message he received from Kirk called for a strategy to go after “left-wing organizations that are promoting violence.”

Miller later alleged that unnamed left-wing groups had organized attacks on Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, enabled doxing campaigns, and provided weapons and gas masks to promote riots. He provided no evidence.

Also on September 15, Vance vowed to “go after the NGO [non-governmental organization] network that foments, facilitates and engages in violence.” He specifically threatened the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundations, the non-profit run by George Soros.

In an overture to those inclined toward vigilante “justice,” Vance urged Trump supporters to go after anyone they perceive as applauding Kirk’s death. “Hell, call their employer!” Vance exclaimed. “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.”

Dozens of people have already been fired from their jobs after making “inappropriate” public comments critical of Kirk’s politics or of the government’s response to his assassination, according to the British daily The Guardian. In many cases, employers were notified by right-wing activists, urged to take such action by top government officials such as Vance.

Meanwhile, U.S. defense secretary Pete Hegseth has launched a witch-hunt against members of the U.S. military accused of criticizing Kirk or “mocking his killing.”  At least eight people have already been suspended or placed under investigation, including Army, Air Force, and Marines officers.

Clearly, Kimmel’s dismissal is only the tip of the iceberg.

Two days after Vance’s comments, Trump wrote on his social media platform Truth Social: “I am pleased to inform our many U.S.A. Patriots that I am designating ANTIFA, A SICK, DANGEROUS, RADICAL LEFT DISASTER, AS A MAJOR TERRORIST ORGANIZATION.”

Of course, Antifa is not an organization with formal membership or structure. Designating such an amorphous group as  terrorist opens the door for the state to go after any political opponent. As journalist Chris Hedges accurately noted in a post on Substack on September 18, “The point is not to go after members of antifa, short for anti-fascist. It is to go after the last vestiges of dissent.”

Icon of democratic discourse?

Those in power have held Kirk up as an icon of democratic discourse and a national “hero,” ordering the lowering of the U.S. flag to half-staff, eulogizing him at a vigil at the Kennedy Center, and holding a memorial for him — with all the trappings of a state funeral — in Glendale, Arizona, attended by about 100,000 people and addressed by many in Trump’s cabinet.

The Glendale rally served as a mobilization by the ultra-right to unify the MAGA troops and set aside — at least for now — divisions that had begun to rattle its ranks, whether about tariffs and other economic policies, Trump’s unwavering support for Israel, the Epstein controversy, and other issues.

The Trump administration and his MAGA allies are moving fast and furious to claim Kirk’s legacy and solidify the support he had garnered for them among millions of young people, particularly young white men. Only days after his death, Vance propped himself up behind the vice-presidential desk to emcee the Charlie Kirk Show, as heir apparent to Kirk’s legacy.

Kirk galvanized support for Trump by scapegoating immigrants, Blacks, women, Muslims, Jews and LBGTQ people — all the while defending the system that has led us to this moment. He channeled the anger and frustration of many, directing it at Blacks, immigrants, women, LBGTQ people, and the “left.” By now, some of his most outrageous statements are widely known.

• “I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” Kirk stated about one week after three children and three adults were killed during an April 2023 mass shooting at the Christian Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee. “That is a prudent deal.”
• “If we would have said three weeks ago [following the Supreme Court decision ending affirmative action in admissions to universities and colleges] that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative-action picks, we would have been called racist,” Kirk said in his show in 2023. He was referring respectively to the political commentator and TV host, the former first lady, a U.S. House member who died last year, and the recently appointed Supreme Court justice — all of them African American women. “But now they’re comin’ out and they’re saying it for us! They’re comin’ out and they’re saying, ‘I’m only here because of affirmative action.’… Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
• “Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact,” Kirk said during another racist rant in his show, also in 2023. “It’s happening more and more.”

Kirk did not only advocate a return to the long-abandoned practice of public executions in the United States to “deter crime.” He called for forcing teenagers to watch such public killings by the state essentially as a rite of passage. In fact, on the Thoughtcrime podcast last February he discussed with several like-minded “influencers” not whether such a policy was acceptable, but at what age should these forced viewings take place — 12, 14, 16 years old?

In addition, Kirk’s widely hailed Prove Me Wrong “debates” were never about holding a genuine discussion or a civil exchange of ideas. One man, seated on his dais, controlled the microphone; often his responses to students’ questions were marked by bullying, tit-for-tat comments, and one-liners aimed at scoring points.

Many Democratic politicians and other liberals condemned Kirk’s assassination — as they should — and decried the growing “culture of violence” in the United States, which has included political killings or attempted murders of a number of Democrats in recent years. But they offered little to no explanation for its root causes or solutions to it.

Democratic politicians not only fear they may be the next target of this violence. They are simply incapable of answering the politics Kirk espoused, which won him a place at the right hand of the current regime in Washington. They cannot provide alternative solutions for those who — frustrated by the increasing instability in the world — look to rightist demagogues like Trump, Vance, Kirk and other such “influencers.”

They cannot lead the defense of the right to free speech or provide leadership to the victims of the government’s assault, workers fighting for safety and dignity on the job, and young people seeking a better future. Doing so would bring them squarely up against the very system they and Kirk have defended.

This was sharply illustrated on September 19, when the majority of the Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives voted along with their GOP colleagues to pass a resolution honoring Kirk — in a 310-58 vote, with 38 voting present and 22 not voting at all. In urging the passage of the bill, House speaker Mike Johnson said demagogically that Kirk “stood for what was good in America, what is virtuous, worthy of protection and preservation.”

In fact, some conservative politicians and pundits have taken a clearer lead in warning against the worst of the Trump administration’s moves toward restricting speech and attempting to silence all political opponents in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination.

In the Wall Street Journal opinion column ‘They’ Didn’t Kill Charlie Kirk, Karl Rove — a GOP consultant and former senior adviser to the George W. Bush administration — wrote:

“Our culture is built on the principle that individuals are responsible for what they say and do. People can be influenced by words they hear and groups they’re part of. But we aren’t helpless automatons whose actions are dictated by others. Using Charlie’s murder to justify retaliation against political rivals is wrong and dangerous.”

Sounding an alarm for fellow conservatives, U.S. senator Ted Cruz said on his September 19 podcast: “I think it is unbelievably dangerous for government to put itself in the position of saying, ‘We’re going to decide what speech we like and what we don’t, and we’re going to threaten to take you out there if we don’t like what you’re saying.’ It might feel good right now to threaten Jimmy Kimmel, but when it is used to silence every conservative in America, we will regret it.”

Dangers of violent suppression of free speech

Trump supporters justify the government’s course, in part, by pointing out that shutting down free speech, including through the use of threats of violence and intimidation, has been a hallmark of the “left,” a trend now commonly described as “cancel culture.”

They cite examples of activists waiving “pro-trans” banners while attempting to prevent or disrupt events they disagree with, and students on some campuses who, infuriated by U.S. support for the Israeli war in Gaza, have engaged in violent activity to silence pro-Israeli speakers. They point to public harassment of Republican politicians as well as recent assassination attempts against Trump and others on the right.

Of course, violent acts as a form of political protest are not just found on the “left.” In fact, politically motivated acts of violence in the last 50 years were more often carried out by those who have expressed right-wing ideology or motives.

Right or left, the folly for working people and students and other youth of individual acts of violence as a tactic to silence opponents is evident throughout U.S. history.

One example was a brawl that ensued in 1962 at San Diego State University in southern California. A student “boiled over” upon hearing George Lincoln Rockwell — an outspoken pro-Nazi — vilify Jews at an event on campus, starting a fistfight with the speaker. The incident led to the immediate cancellation of a separate forum with revolutionary socialist Joseph Hansen and the university then imposed a temporary ban on all outside speakers at the school.

The student newspaper, the Daily Aztec, aptly commented: “Our country is built on the principle that every man is entitled to his own opinion and the right to express it. When Rockwell’s right was endangered, your right and mine was also endangered. Whether the man is a Fascist, a Communist, or Satan himself, he has the RIGHT to speak.” 

The right to freedom of speech is key to resolving the divisions within the working class by engaging in real and civil discussion — not “debates” that are in reality performance art. Busying ourselves with creating snarky memes and “cute” slogans that demean our own humanity, bullying those whose opinions we find odious, and using physical assaults to shut down speech that we find abhorrent is a death knell for justice and for the struggle to build a society based on equality and human solidarity.

Isolated actions — especially those that involve physical assaults — will only drive away those who may already be horrified by the direction this government is taking and will deepen the resolve among those supporters of the current regime who we might otherwise influence.

World-Outlook pointed out last February: “In its first month in office, the administration of U.S. president Donald Trump has made clear in word and deed it represents a break from liberal democracy — the form of government that has prevailed in the United States through most of the country’s 250-year-long history. It is an abrupt shift to the right in U.S. politics, one with grave perils for the working class and all who favor democracy.” (See Trump’s 2^nd Term: The Danger of the Rise of Incipient Fascism.)

That assessment remains accurate, and the shift has only accelerated since then.

The same article referred to remarks by socialist leader James P. Cannon, explaining that a dictatorial regime “does not arise from the bad will of malicious demagogues. Neither is a radicalized labor movement created by the propaganda of revolutionists. Both are products of the incurable crisis of capitalism, which renders it unable to maintain a stable rule through the old bourgeois democratic forms. One way or another — these forms will be changed.”

Working people will have a chance to decide these issues in struggle, Cannon emphasized. But “if the workers, as a result of inadequate or pusillanimous leadership, falter before their historical task, the allegiance of the middle classes will rapidly shift to the support of the fascists and lift them into power,” Cannon warned.

Workers and others looking for ways to stop this steamroller, and for solutions to the crisis fueling it, need to first recognize who our real enemies are — the capitalist class and both of its parties, the Democrats and Republicans. We need to listen closely to and engage respectfully with disenchanted youth and working- or middle-class people who may be dazzled by the celebrity of demagogues like Kirk or the wealth and power of the Musks and Trumps of the world.

We need to recognize who our allies and potential allies are — every person whose future is currently at the mercy of the capitalist class and the economic forces the profit system has unleashed, regardless of national origin, race, or gender.

The starting point today is to rally the forces concerned about the threat to democratic rights in broad coalitions to educate, protest, and counter-mobilize in sufficient numbers to hold back the authoritarian tide. Key to this is winning workers and their unions to the fight for free speech; this is at the heart of giving us the political space needed to face the coming battles.

As it became evident from Disney’s September 22 announcement that the Jimmy Kimmel Live! show was returning to ABC the next day, concerted action — in this case public outcry and pressure from the boycott threatening Disney and ABC — can make a difference.

As the New York Times reported on September 23, in the days since ABC’s initial decision to pull Kimmel’s show off the air, “at least five Holywood unions, collectively representing more than 400,000 workers, publicly condemned the company.”

The untold numbers of people already fired from their jobs for making comments about Kirk that Trump and his ilk deem “inappropriate” should be immediately rehired.

This is the time to act on the conviction that an injury to one is truly an injury to all.

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