Kirk Still Needs to Be Proved Wrong

The fallout from the assassination of reactionary ideologue Charlie Kirk has only just begun. However, one thing is clear: The initial celebrations on social media were beyond dim, as an already bad situation is quickly becoming far worse. We certainly will not mourn his absence, but he should not have been killed.

Now, the right—both here and internationally—has a martyr. Trump and his advisors wasted no time in calling for vengeance against the left. Everyone from MAGA activists to bona fide fascists has picked up this rallying cry. The day after Kirk’s death, a number of historically black colleges were locked down in the face of physical threats. A severe crackdown is in the making against anyone perceived to be standing in the way of the Trump agenda—not least workers across the political spectrum protesting against their miserable conditions.

Individual terror is never the road forward and always invites greater state repression. But in some cases, like this one, it greatly amplifies the country’s partisan polarization and will only bring disaster for the oppressed. In contrast, the killing of the UnitedHealthcare CEO late last year struck a chord across the political spectrum and for good reason. As the head of a parasitic outfit that had denied lifesaving healthcare to millions, he was drenched in blood. The same could not be said of Kirk, who made a name for himself by skewering liberals in college campus debates.

Kirk was smugly confident in his arguments, especially when the liberals just wanted to denounce him as racist, transphobic, etc. While the epithets were accurate, this attempted shaming did nothing to prove Kirk wrong nor to diminish his appeal. These exchanges were symbolic of the current political terrain. The previous liberal status quo, having outlived its usefulness to the ruling class, is dead and gone; and the right is firmly in command. The opponents of Kirk by and large see no other option than to resort to acts of desperation. His assassination was just that and in its own way, the logical extension of cancel culture, which seeks to silence rather than refute opposing viewpoints. And it, like the liberals’ empty moral exhortations, is if anything solidifying support for Kirk’s repugnant views.

A sure sign of the liberals’ inability to answer Kirk was and still is their commonly branding him a fascist. Kirk was not the head of a murderous gang–i.e., a fascist organization—which the ruling class falls back on when it can no longer afford political debate. These shock troops of reaction must be decisively crushed, including through armed self-defense when necessary. But that does not describe Kirk’s Turning Point USA (TPUSA), a fast-growing, mainstream conservative youth movement on campuses across the country. Its program is unmistakably reactionary, but Kirk was not recruiting students to kill leftists and minorities or physically break up unions. Rather, he peddled backward ideas that must be exposed and politically defeated.

An Actual Working-Class Answer

Kirk’s arguments still need to be answered. The liberals, who view social problems as fundamentally moral in nature, have not been able to. They just got tied in knots and ended up denying reality. To date, the Marxist left has not done any better, in large part because they have long embraced the liberal framework. So, let’s turn this around and start unpacking some of the more controversial things Kirk said:

“If we would have said that Joy Reid and Michelle Obama and Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson were affirmative action picks, we would have been called racist. But now they’re coming out and they’re saying it for us…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” (The Charlie Kirk Show podcast, 13 July 2024).

This gem has been widely cited since Kirk’s death. The typical exchange over it follows a familiar pattern. Liberal: Kirk was a racist who smeared black women as lacking brain processing power. Right-winger (see Vice President JD Vance while hosting Kirk’s podcast from the White House): No, he did not say that; he was talking about those four particular black women. Liberal: Well, Kirk is a racist for insulting the intelligence of those four black women, and Vance is a racist for defending him. And so, the liberals make themselves feel good, while the right promises to unleash all hell on them—and no light is shed on anything.

On one level, it is not so hard to poke holes in Kirk’s argument. Slots, whether at an elite university or a high-profile job, have never been rewarded exclusively or even primarily based on brain processing power. Nepotism and money loom rather large here. Countless white people fill positions they did not earn other than by the accident of birth. Furthermore, as most any worker can attest, managers usually do not know even half of what it takes to get the job done right, but they bark orders and throw their weight around like they have something real to contribute. And there are plenty of politicians on both sides of the aisle, federal judges of different political bents and talking heads on Fox News and MSNBC alike who are far from the brightest bulbs.

But these observations only scratch the surface, and we would do well to delve deeper. Kirk is not just targeting four random black women, but rather members of the black elite whose interests and outlook are far removed from the black masses. And they are not just four random members of the black elite, but rather strong defenders of the old liberal order, which draped itself in noble ideals as white and all other workers (including most black people) got economically pounded.

The election of Barack Obama (which Reid had a hand in as his 2008 campaign press secretary) was supposed to bring “hope and change” and signal the country’s near-complete transformation into a post-racial society. Instead, it just made a black man the overseer of the plantation. The Obama administration focused all its energy on digging the bankers and bosses out of major financial crisis at the expense of workers—and black people were the first to be thrown out of their homes and jobs.

The less the liberals had to offer materially to workers and the poor, the more they leaned into grand “woke” gestures to cling to power. So, Biden made a 2020 campaign promise to appoint the first black woman Supreme Court justice—and he later picked Jackson to great fanfare from the White House, while most were choking on the rampant inflation he had stoked. Lee was a staunch ally of both Biden and Obama. In short, these four black women played a forward role on behalf of a wing of the ruling class that was keeping the bulk of the population down—not least black people. These are not success stories to cheer about.

At the time of the Supreme Court’s ban on race-based affirmative action in university admissions (when Kirk made the above comment), the first three spoke publicly in defense of such programs as past beneficiaries, and Jackson issued a strongly worded dissent to the ban. Here is the fundamental problem: Liberal affirmative action initiatives, implemented in the name of righting historic crimes, can do nothing of the sort. But they were guaranteed to create tensions that explode into a full-scale backlash against the historically oppressed population, especially in a stagnating society.

How so? In the context of a fixed number of openings at a university, to give preference for a slot to a black student is to disadvantage white and other non-black candidates. The same goes in the case of DEI efforts in hiring practices. Under the pressures of a sinking economy, this competition, especially for more prized positions, was bound to heat up and boil over. To top it off, these token measures were always just lipstick on the ugly face of segregated America. They gave a bit of a boost to the relatively small black middle class amid deepening segregation in housing, education and other areas. From the standpoint of the ruling class, affirmative action and DEI were ways to bask in the glow of diversity, all the better to maintain the muck of racial oppression and keep the working class divided—up until it recently decided to toss aside the liberal cover altogether.

Kirk was playing to the swindle at the heart of affirmative action and DEI. The liberals expect white working people to just swallow shrinking opportunities for themselves out of moral obligation to others. But he did so in order to falsely conclude that there are no barriers whatsoever to the advancement of black people in the U.S. today other than their supposed “victim mentality” and what he described as cultural problems like absentee fathers. On the latter point, he shared a certain convergence with Obama; and Kirk was also fond of presenting the U.S. as post-racial. So, while the liberals blame white youth and workers (“white privilege”) for black people’s wretched conditions, Kirk blamed black people themselves for the same and for holding back white youth and workers in the process. In both cases, white and black working people are pitted against one another, and the one sector of society truly responsible for the degraded status of black America, the squeezing of white workers and the bleak prospects for the younger generations—the ruling class that calls the shots—is let off the hook. In fact, they forcibly segregate black people at the bottom to better be able to set workers at one another’s throats and lower the standards of what conditions pass as acceptable for white workers.

There is a way out of this cycle: to fight for more decent-paying jobs and better conditions for all and to throw open the doors of the top universities. These things will have to be fought for in opposition to both the liberals and to Trump, who is busy exploring new ways to shore up the bosses’ position by stampeding most everyone else. And winning that fight is going to require assembling the strongest possible force based on unity against the common enemy. White workers will take up the black struggle not out of moral obligation, but to advance their own material interests; and black people will join together with white workers not out of blind trust, but to make headway against their segregation.

“There was evil, it [Jim Crow] was terrible, but black Americans are poorer today in 2024 than they were in the 1950s” (Kirk, Jubilee “Surrounded,” 8 September 2024).

Kirk always played fast and loose with the facts to further his narrative, while holding on to some element of truth to fend off charges of lying. Here was one such case, designed to really provoke the liberals. While technically black people are not poorer today then at that time, the persistence of deep poverty in the black inner cities and rural areas is evident to all—and he would ask why, despite the passage of the Civil Rights Act and other “anti-racist laws”?

This question was a frontal challenge to the liberal view of the civil rights movement. In response, the liberals fell back on calling him a racist for defending Jim Crow (when he did not) or his own “blame the victim” answer. But they would not go anywhere near the uncomfortable truth: The liberal-led civil rights movement was geared not toward fulfilling the aspirations of the black masses, but toward opening the door for the black elite. So, its gains were limited to formal democratic rights, even while the fundamental conditions of life—particularly in the key areas of employment, wages, housing and education—worsened for the vast majority of the black population. Segregation is a matter of forcibly keeping the black masses at the bottom of society—and Jim Crow was just one mechanism for that.

In the face of mass social struggle, the ruling class could let go of legal segregation, because doing so gave it a much-needed image boost on the international stage, without requiring it to relax the boot on black people’s neck. But the ruling class is never going to let the black masses just get up off the ground—which would be throwing away its greatest weapon for weakening the working class as a whole. That’s why the liberal movement was stopped dead in its tracks when it went North after the dismantling of Jim Crow in the South and the passage of “anti-racist” laws like the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The civil rights movement could not redress segregation in those fundamental conditions of life so long as liberal leadership bound the struggle hand-and-foot to a wing of the ruling class. To this day, black people remain at the bottom in all four key areas and more.

To change this situation will require an actual clash with ruling-class interests, not a change in what is in people’s heads, whether through liberal privilege-checking or Kirk’s “family values.” On this score, the declining status of the labor movement since the 1950s looms large in the inability of black people to break out of poverty. The unions, under their own liberal leadership, have gone through a lengthy period of defeat and stagnation, going back to the early 1980s when attacks on the civil rights movement’s limited gains picked up steam. This is no accident: white workers will never be able to rise significantly higher than the bottom layer of the class due to the downward pressure of its conditions. The unions must be strengthened to pursue the collective defense of all workers—crucially by putting the cause of black equality front and center.

“Blacks commit more crimes than whites do, they commit more murders, they commit more arsons, they commit more kidnappings...that’s not a war on drugs that’s a culture problem.... Why are so many blacks committing murders outside of their population?” (Kirk, ibid.)

Current statistics show that black people committed more murders, but not more crime overall. It is also a fact that most of these killings have been black-on-black crimes. Here is another case where Kirk both exaggerated to push reactionary conclusions but touched on a real social problem that the liberals look to duck. When the subject came up, they cried racist and cited alternative statistics—knowing full well where he was going but coming off like reference to crime data unfavorable to black people necessarily feeds racism. Generally speaking, the liberals downplay the problem of black crime to pretend that nothing needs to be done. On occasion, some pointed to socioeconomic factors, like grinding poverty and poor schools, only to fall into silence when Kirk argued that these same conditions prevailed in the 1940s.

To begin, the national context was very different then versus now. In the ’40s, the U.S. ruling class was at its high point coming out of World War II, and its industrial base stood head and shoulders above all others. Jobs were available for black youth to fill at the lowest rungs, and the country’s rulers had such a vast social surplus that they could readily afford to establish a safety net for the poor to head off social unrest. Today, deindustrialization and a war on labor have made good jobs very hard to come by, and that safety net has been repeatedly cut back amid ruling-class concern that the cost is no longer worth it. In the intervening period, the policing of black neighborhoods has greatly intensified. Under this reign of terror, the cops round up and arrest every black person they can.

Many black people have to live under intolerable conditions—the worst housing, healthcare and schools among other things. They are trapped in impoverished, segregated neighborhoods and have minimal opportunity to get by, much less to get out. These circumstances are a breeding ground for anti-social behavior. This is not a matter of bad culture, but of desperation to survive. The answer is not, as liberals sometimes propose, either social work or more cops, who will always make any situation worse. Nor is it a transformation in values, which hold little to no meaning when food is not on the table or a roof is not over one’s head. Rather, it is to provide more of the basic necessities to the black population—not by taking money and resources away from white workers, but by taking money and resources away from the ruling class, whose grip on society and its wealth creates catastrophe.

“What is a woman?” (Kirk, ibid.)

Kirk would give a strictly biological definition and lob the question at liberals, whose identity politics unplugs them entirely from reality. For example, one liberal who obviously would be perceived as a man by society insisted: “If I decided right now that I wanted to identify as a woman, I would be a woman.” Far from rallying defense of trans people, such claims so obviously at odds with the real world just turn off workers who know a whole lot better than that. “If I decided right now that I wanted to identify as a boss, I would be a boss.” Right.

For Kirk, a woman is defined strictly according to physical attributes, like chromosomes and reproductive organs. Of course, it is ridiculous to argue that having a womb has no connection whatsoever to womanhood. That said, simple biology and the ability to bear children cannot give any insight into what it means to be a woman in society, which has expectations for how women are to act, speak, dress, groom and conduct themselves, the jobs they are to perform and much more. Kirk’s definition of a woman reflects his political objective: to get society to shun trans people as pariahs and reinforce gender norms in the straitjacket of the patriarchal family.

In contrast, the liberals want to gain social acceptance of the right to transition between genders, only they go about it all wrong and in a way that is guaranteed to backfire. While Kirk conflated the biological and social significance of being a woman, they define womanhood as what somebody wills it to be at any given moment. This is clearly wrong in terms of biology. In an attempt to explain this away, the liberals argue that sex is not a binary (male and female), but bimodal (a spectrum with two main clusters). This dismissal of the binary as pure invention only makes it more difficult to deal with the complexities of the physical and social worlds, beginning with the rather obvious biological foundations of womanhood. Recognition of the opposite sexes in and of itself does not preclude variations, the exceptions to the rule.

The liberal claim that being a woman is simply a matter of what is inside one’s head is also wrong in terms of society, which has deeply engrained gender norms rooted in major institutions, like the family. Just because womanhood is a social construct does not mean that an individual can freely determine what a woman is. Self-identifying as a particular gender does not guarantee social acceptance of that identity. Nobody knows how difficult it is to transition better than trans people themselves. At the end of the day, the breaking down of gender norms is a matter of changing society, not changing identities. The liberal focus on identity can only result in failure to combat trans oppression by isolating the movement from society.

Trans people gained a certain degree of approval in the final years of the liberal order, as the country’s rulers scrambled to give the appearance of social progress to distract from their incapacity to provide anything of material value. And that “progressive” veneer was torn off as soon as it no longer suited the ruling class.

To halt the current onslaught and actually get somewhere, the trans struggle must be linked to the struggle of the working class, which has an objective interest in ushering in a new society. The way to do so is not by telling workers that they must embrace all gender expressions, but by showing them that fighting in defense of trans people is actually to their benefit, that the attacks on trans rights are a precursor to the stripping away of the rights of the working class as a whole and that trans people and workers uniting together to defend themselves can only put both groups on a stronger footing. This is urgently necessary at a time when Trump is taking every opportunity to go after trans people and workers alike.

The left’s failure to counterpose real materialist arguments—in direct opposition to both the liberals and the right—has repelled workers from it en masse. Only by linking the struggles for workers’ interests to the defense of the oppressed can we ensure the unity of our class and rally the forces necessary to withstand the looming attacks. Let the liberals discredit themselves by denying and dismissing workers’ worries with empty moral arguments, and make clear that the left has a program to fight both wings of the ruling class. This is the only way to build a class-struggle movement to counter the attraction of reactionaries like Kirk or of the desperate lone-wolf approach.