On The Dangers of Appealing to Fascists
Liberal institutions are, once again, manufacturing consent for an authoritarian crackdown
In the aftermath of right-wing political commentator Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Vice President JD Vance guest-hosted The Charlie Kirk Show from the White House. Vance interviewed a number of Trump administration staff and former friends of Kirk, including White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy, Stephen Miller. After Miller remarked on his fond memories of Kirk, the conversation shifted to what is to be done.
Specifically, what is to be done about the “organized campaign that led to this assassination.” Miller and Vance said they want to “focus” their anger over Kirk’s death towards the goal of “uproot[ing] and dismantl[ing] these terrorist networks.” Miller goes into specifics on this supposed leftist network:
The organized doxxing campaigns, the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, villification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence, and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement, and with God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.
I don’t think I need to point out the irony of claiming the left is responsible for doxxing, dehumanization, villification, messaging that incites violence, and organized domestic terror cells. While Miller’s comments are chilling, I want to underscore that this repression campaign was already underway. Vance alluded to as much by asking Miller to expand on what they “have been” working on.
The Heritage Foundation’s “Project Esther,” published before Trump took office, designates Palestinian solidarity groups like Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), American Muslims for Palestine (AMP), Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), and countless others as part of a “global Hamas Support Network (HSN),” and recommends drastic measures to punish such organizations.
Shortly after Trump took office, he began implementing Project Esther’s ideas, revoking student visas and deporting activists who had criticized Israel, monitoring immigrants’ and visa applicants’ social media, withholding billions of dollars in grants to some of the country’s most prestigious research universities, and more. Further, the Trump admin has gone so far as to demand oversight or control over the curriculum of Columbia, Harvard, and the like.
The right-wing is undoubtedly exploiting Kirk’s death to intensify their repression campaign, but as writer and organizer Kelly Hayes wrote on Bluesky, if it wasn’t Kirk’s death, it would be another manufactured crisis. She writes, “That’s why respectability policing—and thinking that if everyone moves and talks just so, they won’t be able to escalate—is magical thinking.”
This respectability policing and politics of appealing to fascists does far more harm than good. After Kirk was shot, liberals immediately fell over themselves to grieve his death with utmost respectability and political correctness. New York Times columnist Ezra Klein wrote that “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way,” California Governor Gavin Newsom praised his passion and commitment to good-faith debate, and democratic governors like Josh Shapiro and Jared Polis followed Trump in ordering that flags be flown at half-mast, a sign of public mourning that did not apply to the victims at Evergreen High School’s school shooting in Polis’s own state that very same day. Aaron Regunberg writes for The New Republic:
To get a sense of how insane this Democratic folding to the far right is, try imagining the political response we would see if, God forbid, a high-profile leftist like Hasan Piker—who, unlike Kirk, has not worked to actively incite political violence or trafficked in blatant bigotry—were murdered. I find it difficult to imagine Governors Shapiro or Polis engaging in any sort of public mourning for Piker; the idea that any GOP governor would fly their state’s flags at half-staff for him is beyond laughable.
As right-wingers were literally calling for war against the left, liberals were whitewashing the legacy of a reprehensible man who was antithetical to what they claimed he stood for—free speech. Several other writers have written more about why Charlie Kirk was anything but a free speech champion, so I won’t belabor this point.
It wasn’t only politicians. MSNBC and the Washington Post have fired pundits and journalists who expressed honest assessments of the situation, and according to Drop Site News, at least 60 regular Americans face similar consequences for their uncouth speech. Comcast, the company who fired MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd, sent a company-wide email eulogizing Kirk and praising him as an “advocate for open debate.” In the unintentionally ironic email, the company said:
Charlie Kirk believed that "when people stop talking, really bad stuff starts." Regardless of whether you agreed with his political views, his words and actions underscore the urgency to maintain a respectful exchange of ideas a principle we must champion. We believe in the power of communication to bring us together. Today, that belief feels more vital than ever. Something essential has fractured in our public discourse, and as a company that values the power of information, we have a responsibility to help mend it.
As for the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, they fired their only full-time black opinion columnist on staff for, checks notes, condemning gun violence and posting one direct quote from Charlie Kirk??
And we can’t forget that the Wall Street Journal falsely reporting that the shooters bullets were engraved with “Transgender, Antifascist Ideology,” a story that has since been corrected but has not been taken down. The right was always going to blame transgender people and leftists, but it sure doesn’t help that reputable news outlets are giving them tidy headlines for their misinformation campaigns.
P.S. Just as I was about to publish this, I saw that ABC has taken Jimmy Kimmel Live off the air indefinitely following his “offensive and insensitive” comments. Snowflake alert! Also, antifa is a terrorist organization now! Great!
The repression of speech by liberal institutions is infuriating because it doesn’t just harm the people who are fired or disciplined; it harms the entire country by signaling that this kind of repression is acceptable. It fans the flames of right-wing vitriol by conceding to their demands for retribution.
In the week following Kirk’s death, we’ve seen neo-nazis assault a man in California, a Fox News host calling for the murder of mentally ill homeless people, two mass shootings at homeless encampments in Minnesota, ICE agents shoot and kill a man in Chicago and two bodies found hanging from trees in Mississippi under suspicious circumstances. Not to mention the hundreds more added to the death toll in Palestine.
Where are the calls of condemnation? Did Minnesota order flags flown at half staff for the over a dozen injured homeless people? Did Fox News fire Brian Kilmeade? Did the ICE killing last more than a day in national headlines?
The response to Charlie Kirk’s killing is only the latest in complicity of liberal institutions to Trump’s fascist agenda. Columbia University has proven that if you give a fascist an inch, he will take a mile. Fascists will never compromise, but they will see our willingness to meet them halfway as a weakness, and exploit that weakness to push us further down the path towards authoritarian dystopia.
If a white man wants to lynch me, that’s his problem.
If he has the power to lynch me, that’s my problem.
Kwame Ture, October 1968
Tyler Robinson was a chronically-online, Reddit-brained loser, and he killed Charlie Kirk for the meme, as a twisted joke that seemingly had little to do with politics and more to do with clout. The left’s politics of appeal means that we are wasting time fighting right-wing propaganda and policing speech when we should be talking about the sickness of our society addicted to guns and isolated on toxic internet forums.
The fascist right does not care who Tyler Robinson really is. They were chomping at the bit to go to war with “radical leftists,” and now they have their excuse. And they can only acheive their goals with the help of every institution, politician, and organization like Columbia University or UC-Berkely or MSNBC or Washington Post or Muriel Bowser or Chuck Schumer or any countless number of others who proactively capitulate to the Trump agenda.
The future of the United States, as always, falls on the shoulders of the people.
This post was inspired by two things:
Kelly Hayes Bluesky thread which I quoted above and you can find here.
Perfect Victims and the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd, of which I am currently doing a series of writeups. This was originally going to be part three but I felt it best to keep that separate. Nonetheless, you can find parts 1 and 2 of the book club below.
