The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and what comes next?

Tom Brady is a Journalist and independent Councillor on Ards and North Down Borough Council

When I saw the horrific footage of conservative activist Charlie Kirk being assassinated, I was disgusted. But I was also filled with dread at what I suspected was coming next.

And when I saw the papers and social media the following day, I was dumbstruck. Were they talking about the same person? Did they know who he was? Were we living in the same reality?

Nigel Farage proclaimed it a dark day for free speech, and Boris Johnson said Kirk’s views used to be simple common sense. But while what happened was shocking and tragic, we should not whitewash the victim’s legacy.

Kirk’s supposedly “common sense” beliefs included that women should submit to their husbands, that he would force his 10-year-old daughter to carry the baby to term if she was raped, that the 1964 Civil Rights Act was a “huge mistake”, and Martin Luther King was an awful person and that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”.

He said that high profile black women, including a Supreme Court judge, “do not have the brain power to be taken seriously” and repeatedly claimed Jews were funding “Cultural Marxism”, a conspiracy theory that descends directly from a Nazi propaganda line about “Jewish Cultural Bolshevism”.

In response to the popular children’s YouTuber Ms Rachel asking her viewers to “love thy neighbour”, Kirk countered by saying the bible verse on stoning gay people to death was, “God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters… just saying,” and he has also alluded to lynching transgender people.

In his own words he sounds more like the white Christian equivalent of a Taliban hate preacher than the saintly picture that has been conjured since his murder. And yet, he did not deserve to be killed for his beliefs. The fact that this has happened should send a chill up the spine of anyone involved in politics.

New York Times columnist Ezra Klein said that Kirk did politics the right way. And in a sense that’s true, insofar as he pursued open debate. But Charlie Kirk rose to prominence picking on uninformed students to create viral social media clips.

And the idea that he didn’t cheer on political violence is simply not true. When Democratic Party speaker Nancy Pelosi’s 82-year-old husband Paul was almost killed by a hammer-wielding thug in 2022, a grinning Charlie Kirk publicly wondered why the assailant was in jail, saying: “If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out.”

Donald Trump Jr, for what it’s worth, posted a “funny” picture of underwear and a hammer with the caption: “Got my Paul Pelosi Halloween costume ready”.

Kirk himself said Joe Biden should be imprisoned and/or get the death penalty. And he advocated for televised executions saying children should watch them as “an initiation”.

And don’t mistake Kirk’s relentless debating for a commitment to free speech. He publicly called for the British-American journalist Mehdi Hasan to be deported for a news segment he didn’t like.

And his organisation, Turning Point USA, keeps a watchlist of professors who regularly find themselves the targets of harassment and intimidation for their views. According to historian and fascism expert Ruth Ben-Ghiat, “Every strongman targets universities with informers who report on students, faculty and staff”, and the current US regime is no different.

Kirk recently debated Cambridge students and their professor, and faced with someone his own size, he fared rather less well. It’s a shame we were robbed of his scheduled debate with Hasan Piker. It had tended to go badly for Kirk when the two sparred in the past, including one incident which devolved into Kirk screaming at an audience member from the debate stage.

The truth is, Charlie Kirk, and the movement he represented, in spite of the branding, are enemies of free speech.

In the wake of his shooting, President Donald Trump rushed to seize the opportunity to use Kirk’s untimely death as a pretext to attack his political opponents.

As the Wall Street Journal falsely reported that the shooter had carved ‘trans ideology’ on his bullets, something they later had to retract, I was reminded of the lead-up to Kristallnacht.

The event that sparked the Nazi’s infamous anti-semitic pogrom was the shooting of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by a Jewish teenager in Paris. The seventeen-year-old Herschel Grynszpan had been motivated by learning that the Nazis had deported his family to Poland, which was commonly perceived at the time to be a more dangerous place for Jews than Germany.

What happened in the lead-up to Charlie Kirk’s assassination?

Charlie Kirk’s shooter was called Tyler Robinson. A 22-year-old allegedly in a romantic relationship with his roommate who was in the process of transitioning. Robinson reportedly texted them after the shooting to say: “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”

And while what Robinson did is inexcusable, we should investigate the environment that would lead a reportedly bright young man to do something so horrific.

In recent years the rhetoric from the American far-right has reached a level bordering on frenzy. Following the Black Lives Matter protests, a young man named Kyle Rittenhouse, who shot and killed two protesters and seriously wounded another, was celebrated by Charlie Kirk and treated like a rock star at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest.

And in 2023, one of Kirk’s contemporaries Michael Knowles told the crowd at CPAC, a major conservative conference, that: “transgenderism should be eradicated from public life”.

Recently the Trump administration has considered stripping this put-upon minority of their second amendment rights, based on misinformation about them being uniquely dangerous. And this move, aside from being completely unconstitutional, holds symbolic significance. You are granted the right to bear arms in US culture explicitly in case you need to defend yourself against a tyrannical government.

Meanwhile, the sincerity of Trump’s grief for his slain comrade was undercut by his abrupt change of subject to the construction of the White House ballroom when asked how he was holding up by a reporter. “It’s gonna be a beauty (…) one of the best anywhere in the world, actually”, he said.

And Trump’s definition of the “radical left”, who he holds responsible, is so expansive as to cover the elderly centrist leadership of the Democratic Party. A Party which appears both literally and figuratively toothless in the face of Trumpism, having settled on an official policy of “playing dead”.

Trump lamented the left’s characterisation of people in his movement as Nazis and fascists. At the same time Fox News pundit Jesse Waters was declaring “they are at war with us”, while describing “them” as “rats”. Calling the other side “vermin” is something Trump has also done.

In fact, Trump reportedly kept a collection of Hitler speeches called ‘My New Order’ by his bed, which he would read occasionally, according to his ex-wife Ivana. A claim that he notably hasn’t challenged with a lawsuit.

And ABC News reported back in 2023 that Trump was knowingly repeating Hitler’s line about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America, “They said Hitler said that,” he told an Iowa crowd after repeating it again.

And with the unprecedented crackdown on free expression that he is currently directing, the parallels to autocratic regimes past and present are hard to ignore.

It was repulsive to watch him cynically weaponising Kirk’s murder, and flying his coffin to a state funeral on Air Force Two drew comparisons to Horst Wessel. An SA street fighter who was held up as a martyr by the Nazis following his assassination by a group of communists. Wessel’s death was exploited to sacralise and justify any level of political violence then carried out by the Nazis.

Absent from Trump’s own list of political violence were the recent events in Minnesota, where two Democratic state legislators were shot along with their spouses, and even one of their dogs, by a Trump fan posing as a police officer, who was working his way down an extensive hit list. Minnesota House Minority Leader Melissa Hortman, her husband and the dog died from their injuries.

Trump’s response to that horror was categorically different; he joked about not calling the state’s Democratic governor because he was “whacked out” and “a mess”.

Nor did he mention that 76% of all political murders in the US over the past decade were carried out by far-right extremists. And the administration quietly removed a government study that supported this finding from the Department of Justice website in the days following Kirk’s assassination.

Trump’s Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller’s recent claim that the Democratic Party is a “domestic extremist organisation” along with Trump’s own rhetoric are naked acts of projection.

Accusing their opponents of what they are doing.

This saying is often misattributed to Karl Marx but appears to have been a misreading of Joseph Goebbels by a propagandist during the Rwandan genocide. Nevertheless, The American Guardian listed it as a Nazi propaganda trick in 1939, referencing the Reichstag Fire incident.

And there is another similarity between Trumpism and Nazism. While antisemitism, partially driven by the immigration of poor Jews fleeing pogroms in Tsarist Russia and Poland, was the bedrock of Nazi ideology, once taking power, they immediately targeted transgender people. They were the thin end of the wedge. A tiny, powerless minority.

There is a famous photograph of an SA member at a Nazi book burning that took place on the 6th May 1933. But the context of this picture is much less well-known. It was taken during an attack on Magnus Hirschfeld’s practice. Hirschfeld was a Jewish doctor who had been studying the naturally occurring phenomenon of transgenderism, which was becoming more accepted by 1920s Weimar Berlin society.

Fascist movements always target the weakest minorities first because they lack the power to defend themselves. But once that process has begun, it doesn’t stop until it is stopped, or until every so-called impurity has been purged from the body politic.

After rising to power, cloaking himself in their language, Hitler quickly moved to round up his political rivals, chiefly communists, socialists and social democrats. Therefore, attempts to criminalise the political left in America sound another uncomfortable echo.

In an episode of Charlie Kirk’s podcast that was hijacked by Vice President JD Vance, Steven Miller called the left a “vast terrorist movement” that he vowed to destroy, saying: “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.” And the administration has begun targeting left-leaning organisations.

Fascism is syncretic meaning it absorbs or blends an array of different belief systems or cultural traditions, taking on the contours of its environment. Yet it is fundamentally fraudulent, existing to divert righteous anger over an unfair wealth distribution towards powerless scapegoats.

Hitler’s rise was bankrolled by many wealthy industrialists who feared their factories would be nationalised if the communists came to power. They included the chemical corporation IG Farben, and the Quandt family, who control BMW, along with steel magnate Fritz Thyssen and arms manufacturer Gustav Krupp, whose corporations would later merge and now build lifts and escalators. For their support, they benefited from the Nazi regime, often taking advantage of concentration camp slave labour.

When Trump was inaugurated in January, America’s Tech billionaires lined up behind him. Chief among them was Elon Musk, at the time the world’s richest man, who’d spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars to get Trump re-elected. In return, a slew of investigations into his questionable business practices were squashed.

Carried away in the celebrations, Musk snapped out his arm in the performance of a suspiciously straight-armed salute. And his interventions to “de-woke” his AI, ‘Grok’, inevitably lead to it having white supremacist outbursts, most recently declaring itself “MechaHitler”.

Musk, like Kirk, has trafficked in The Great Replacement Theory. An antisemitic conspiracy theory that claims shadowy Jewish elites are flooding Europe and the USA with non-white immigrants in an attempt to replace the native population. Following an uptick in immigration, this conspiracy theory has been mainstreamed on the political right by people like Kirk, with social media acting as an accelerant.

Musk’s grandfather Joshua Haldeman, himself a Nazi sympathiser, was pushing it as early as the 1960s. And in 1973, it formed the basis of a dystopian novel written by French author Jean Raspail called ‘The Camp of the Saints’, which has become a keystone text in white supremacist circles. In 2019, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, a civil rights non-profit, uncovered emails from Stephen Miller, Trump’s ideological Svengali, to the website Breitbart, urging them to promote ‘The Camp of the Saints’.

In his book ‘Alt Reich’, the British journalist Nafeez Ahmed charts the history of Nazi ideology in the USA, finding that figures involved in The Pioneer Fund, an organisation established in 1937 to push Nazi eugenics, later became influential in The Heritage Foundation, the central think tank behind Trump’s infamous ‘Project 2025’.

The Pioneer Fund continued sponsoring race science throughout the 20th century. One of its beneficiaries, Roger Pearson, a British anthropologist and eugenicist who founded a neo-nazi group called the Northern League, became a senior figure at The Heritage Foundation.

Pearson co-founded its journal Policy Review and Foreign Policy Research Institute, as well as the American Security Council.

And The Heritage Foundation’s annual report in 1993 contained the paragraph: “When we started out, Heritage was routinely referred to as an “ultra-conservative,” “far right” or “extreme right wing” organization. Today our ideas—which are based on the same philosophical principles as they were two decades ago—are considered mainstream.”

The Pioneer Fund also influenced conservative thought in another major way. Supporting the pseudoscience of Charles Murray, whose book, The Bell Curve, relied heavily on research commissioned by The Fund. Despite being comprehensively debunked, The Bell Curve had a profoundly influential impact on the right.

And thanks to this long game, eugenics is back in the mainstream, with figures like Elon Musk pushing false claims about race and IQ while agonising about white birthrates.

Ideological Cross-Pollination to Europe

The recent Tommy Robinson rally in London smacks of an attempt to transplant Christian fascism to Europe. The attendees, some of whom seemingly came from abroad to swell the numbers in an apparent show of force, reportedly fuelled by alcohol and cocaine, assaulted officers and trapped thousands of counter-protesters in Whitehall for hours, attempting to break through the police cordon to attack them.

Trump ally Steve Bannon spoke at the so-called “Unite the Kingdom” rally, and Tommy Robinson (real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon) who has repeatedly changed his name in an attempt to hide his criminal past, and who is reportedly flush with US tech billionaire cash, proclaimed “We are the Storm”.

This new branding holds more significance than you might realise at first glance. “Unite the Kingdom” appears to be a reference to the now-infamous “Unite the Right” rally held in Charlottesville, Virginia, where neo-Nazis marched with tiki torches, chanting “Jews will not replace us”, and which culminated in a white supremacist killing a counter-protester with his car.

‘The Storm’ also appears to be a reference to the pro-Trump Q Anon conspiracy theory. ‘The Storm’ is the event at the culmination of the story, when all of their political opponents are publicly executed. And it bears more than a passing resemblance to the Neo-Nazi fantasy known as The Day of the Rope from the book ‘The Turner Diaries’.

Elon Musk spent that weekend trying to incite violence against “the left” on X, and joined the rally via Zoom saying, “whether you choose violence or not, violence is coming to you. You either fight back or you die”. A clear reference to The Great Replacement Theory and a brazen attempt to incite the crowd.

But why does Musk, one of the richest men in the world, want us at each other’s throats?

Fascist movements grow out of a failed response to an economic crisis. In the years after 2008, large parts of Western media, which is dominated by billionaire ownership, attempted to divert attention away from the extremely wealthy, who profit from a crash by hoovering up assets at a fraction of their value.

In the years since, their bank balances have soared while many ordinary people have felt theirs dwindling, with governments opting for elite-friendly austerity over Keynesian investment and redistribution. As a result, scapegoats had to be found, and as it would happen, Western adventures in the Middle East as well as natural disasters, droughts and desertification resulting from climate change began hitting the global south, causing a steady stream of refugees fleeing to Europe and the USA.

What we have is, to some degree, a media crisis.

Following the Brexit vote, immigration plummeted as an issue in voters’ minds, according to polling done at the time. Why? The number of people arriving didn’t go down; quite the opposite. It was because, for a time, the broader media focused on other issues.

But with the increasing importation of American culture wars, we are now bombarded with daily fearmongering about immigrants and transgender people. The relatively small number of asylum seekers crossing the channel in boats (around 37,000 in 2024) has become a moral panic that closely resembles the largely manufactured crisis at America’s southern border.

It’s an ancient strategy: divide and rule.

But this modern fascist movement wrapped in the flag and the language of free speech is not protecting our women and girls, or saving our society, it is disgracing the memory of everyone who fought and died to free Europe from tyranny some 85 years ago.

The self-declared free speech warriors across the pond have been compiling lists of everyone who didn’t sufficiently mourn the horrific killing of Charlie Kirk, and circulating them on Elon Musk’s X with the billionaire’s help.

Cancel culture has returned with a vengeance. Jimmy Kimmel, hardly an edgy comedian, saw his late night show cancelled for what was a relatively anodyne joke poking fun at Trump’s apparent lack of empathy. Kimmel likened him to a “4-year-old mourning a goldfish”, an observation that proved to be a salient one, as Trump skipped a vigil for Kirk because it clashed with his pre-arranged golfing plans.

And it is clear Trump is following an authoritarian playbook that has been tried and tested, notably in Hungary, and we must be honest about the threat. Democratic freedoms such as the right to protest as well as Free speech and freedom of the press have been under sustained attack in recent years.

Trump’s frivolous lawsuits targeting law firms and critical media, the $15 billion suit against The New York Times, are just one recent example.

The Trump administration has now labelled “Antifa”, a structureless collection of movements that oppose fascism, as a “terrorist organisation” and Stephen Miller has begun claiming that calling Trump authoritarian “incites violence and terrorism”.

And the strategy to claim it’s the other side who are really the violent ones has continued. The administration this week made a ludicrous attempt to paint a man, who shot migrants at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, as a left-wing extremist because he supposedly wrote “Anti-ICE” on an unused bullet.

What happened in that case remains unclear. But this is all about silencing dissent and criminalising opposition. The MAGA movement does not, and has never believed in free speech, they believe in unrestrained speech for themselves with no rebuttal. But the principle of free speech must hold even for views we find obscene.

There is a famous quote, often misattributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” That is the basis on which the American Civil Liberties Union (or ACLU) has historically defended the right of white supremacists and even Neo-Nazis to march on US streets.

But the essence of free expression is under assault by illiberal regimes worldwide.

The people who end up on blacklists for statements about Charlie Kirk that may have been unwise or even reprehensible, but nothing the president’s son himself hasn’t indulged in, could face harassment, job losses, death threats or worse.

In the days after his murder I was made aware of posters that had been put up here in memorial to Kirk which claimed: “Our entire society is being attacked. Defend it.”

I wonder how many of those standing outside hotels housing refugees, many of whom have endured horrific ordeals in their home countries, know where this demographic replacement myth comes from?

And how many politicians and media figures eagerly lining up to scapegoat transgender people know about Magnus Hirshfeld’s library and the historical echoes of what they’re doing?

Would they think twice about it if they did?

Someone once said, “When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and holding a cross”. They might have added that it would come with its own TV show, but how many of us would have guessed that show would be The Apprentice?

This is a guest slot to give a platform for new writers either as a one off, or a prelude to becoming part of the regular Slugger team.