Charlie Kirk’s Shooting, A Turning Point?

Controversial political activist shot in broad daylight, what now?

Charlie Kirk and then-former-President Donald Trump speaking with attendees at the 2023 Turning Point Action Conference at the Palm Beach County Convention Centre in West Palm Beach, Florida, via Wikimedia Commons

By now, even if you haven't seen the video, you've surely heard the news of the assassination of the far-right political activist, Charlie Kirk. Shot in broad daylight, during a "Prove Me Wrong Table," which was an open debate, the first event of his "American Comeback Tour." While the entire occasion is terrible, and political violence should be condemned, there is a prevalent question that needs to be addressed: Will this be a global watershed moment? Could Charlie Kirk's getting shot lead to a chain of events similar to the assassination of Franz Ferdinand by the hand of a Serbian youth?

If you are a liberal, a socialist, or a subscriber to an ideology that leans a little bit left of centre, I have bad news. If you like the direction in which global geopolitics is heading lately, you might enjoy what's coming next. Depending on how you define a turning point, this occurrence may be a watershed moment. We are not going in the direction of the French Revolution or the October Revolution. Instead, Kirk's assassination could very much serve as grounds for the acceleration of fascist authoritarian measures, the likes of which we are observing globally. I would like to emphasise that the directions governments are choosing to pursue have nothing to do with the party sitting in presidential offices. Whether it be Trump or Harris, we are progressing towards a world where we have more extensive government surveillance and interference, censorship of expression and thought, and withdrawal of rights we have fought to acquire. The government is in on it, tech companies are in on it, people who want to dictate the way you live are in on it. The state and capital entities will exploit this death to the maximum.

The USSR, despite its many faults, provided egalitarians hope that a fairer world was possible. In fear of communism, Western states adopted progressive policies aimed at mitigating activists' more extreme demands for fair income distribution and improved working conditions. Conjointly with the collapse of the Soviets, the 1990s were marked by the IMF and World Bank's structural readjustment programs involving rolling back subsidies, labour protections, and egalitarian land and education policies. Even before this, inequality in the U.S. had surged under Reagan, whose tax cuts and deregulation drove the sharp upward transfer of wealth in modern history, appearing to be the sharpest based on available FRED data, pushing the Gini coefficient from 35.3 to 38.2. His policies paralleled Thatcher's in the UK, where privatisation, deregulation, and weakened unions continue to erode living standards to this day. The rise of neoliberalism was a collective Western project; without the spectre of communism, wage stagnation set in and continues to be a significant problem, and income disparities keep on growing. The lack of a polar opposite to the Western capitalist paradigm created ample space for capital to take back every "favour" it has done for citizens across the globe, and the accelerated innovation of technologies that allow the government elites to track and convict us effectively place us in a panopticon where we will eventually start to auto-correct and auto-censor, if we haven't done so already.

Charlie Kirk was killed by the very thing he was fighting for: guns. In a broader sense, being a proponent of the Second Amendment in the United States is usually part of a larger network of attitudes, which comes with being a Republican or a right-winger, including pro-life activism and advocacy for strict immigration controls. Although this development may indicate that there is a push-back from the opposition front, the fact remains that Trump was elected with the national popular vote. His ideology is in office because the majority of people asked for it, and the now-minority opposition will face the consequences, following historical trends. The heightened race tensions will be cut through with the knife of law enforcement (see law enforcement response to the 1992 LA Riots under President Bush), anti-Trump rallies will be, at the very least, accompanied by armed soldiers (2020 George Floyd Protests and the June protests in LA this year, for example), and court decisions on which social rights are pegged will be overturned (Roe v. Wade in 2022).

This shooting is, for some, a gnarly event that should not be made fun of. For others, it is something that confirms their beliefs that there is a conspiracy against conservatives. The right-wing media and Trump were quick to jump the gun on blaming a radical leftist for the murder, further furnishing a dangerous and antagonising rhetoric. Others may think it is incredibly ironic that Kirk was killed with a gun legally obtained under the Second Amendment he championed, in the midst of delivering racist rhetoric as a counter-argument against a debater challenging his claim that transgender people make up a disproportionate share of mass shooters.

This will have global implications. We see people becoming increasingly cruel with rising political polarisation. The public reactions people exhibit online and in person to events such as this further feed the polarisation process. At a certain point, we will be unable to coexist with our fellow denizens due to the immense hostility our views evoke in others. We will simply become spiteful cogs in a machine that produces manure for the pigs that own it. You might not view this death in itself as a bad thing, but the ensuing authoritarian crackdown will make you wish the shooter had never pulled the trigger.

The U.S., like it or not, still leads the way in how social life is constructed across the globe. Their politics have implications for our politics. Do you think you have a multi-party democracy? Think again. I know I don't participate in one when I vote for the Turkish parliamentary elections; I'm voting for one of two blocs. Their slang has an impact on our slang. Clanker is a popular, relatively new term. It gained popularity after a social media user discovered it was used as a derogatory word for robots in Star Wars. I've lost count of how many Turkish "clanker" reels I've seen in the past two days. I've seen a lot in other languages, including German, French, and Spanish. Their racial tensions affect our racial tensions. Even in structurally different minority conditions, the application of a rhetoric similar to that applied to Black Americans is abundantly present in a growing number of countries. Treatment of LGBTQ+ individuals has already been shaped in accordance with American ethics globally. The American-style factioning of these individuals is entering our political spheres, although homosexuality and queerness have different cultural histories across borders. Even though homosexuality and queerness were already stigmatised to some extent in Brazil before the Cold War, the U.S.-backed military coup of 1964 set the scene for actively targeting people of sexualities that the government considered abnormal. Their police brutality reshapes our police brutality. Measures taken after 9/11 set the example for antagonising Muslims in the West, with the NYPD extensively spying on Muslim American communities and the police frequently resorting to violence against Muslims as they do so with other "unpopular" minorities. Post-2015, the French government has repeatedly deployed its police forces in ways that reflect institutional Islamophobia: carrying out assaults in Muslim households, using excessive violence in Muslim-heavy neighbourhoods, and even strip-searching women donning the hijab.

The world is rapidly adopting AI infrastructure, including predictive algorithms and facial recognition software. While the U.S. still has some safeguards against the abuse of such control, on paper, weaker democracies experience an accelerated version of this process. Indian police have reportedly used facial recognition software to identify protesters rallying against the 2019 Citizenship Amendment Act, with the issue arising prominently in 2020. A similar method was used in Turkey this year against protesters demanding the government release the unlawfully arrested Mayor of Istanbul, who was also recently announced as the Presidential Candidate of the main opposition party. The protesters hid their likeness behind hats, masks, and shades, and they were faced with threats by the police, who claimed it was illegal to cover their faces in the protests, and they were opening themselves up to police escalation (direct attack by water cannon tanks and unlawful applications of tear gas).

If the U.S. polarises further, we will follow suit. The assassination of Charlie Kirk will not weaken fascism; it will strengthen it. To resist, people will have to organise and find other means of expressing power without blatant political assassinations. Of course, in this organisation, they cannot claim progressivism as defined by the neoliberal paradigm. We must build movements that refuse commodification, refuse violence, and insist on solidarity across borders. Any compromises will tighten the screws of the machine we seek to break out of.