Statement on the Assassination of Charlie Kirk
Noted reactionary Charlie Kirk’s chicken came home to roost on 10 September 2025. Speaking at a university in Utah spewing the usual hateful, racist, and vile rhetoric he made into his career, Mr. Kirk was killed by a gunshot to the neck. The shooter is as of today, 11 September, still at large. Mr. Kirk devoted his one life on Earth as a loyal mouthpiece of the ruling class, spreading hate amongst the workers and people of this country and beyond.
His life was devoted to sowing fear and hatred against Black Americans, migrant workers, working women, Muslims, gay and trans workers, Palestinians, and many other marginalized sections of the working class. Truly, he embodied the “conservative values” the ruling class lives on. Turning Point USA, the organization he founded, specialized in cultivating a new generation of reactionaries, harassing teachers through its Professor Watchlist, and spreading fascistic rhetoric as mainstream debate.
Mr. Kirk’s despicable beliefs knew no bounds. On the question of abortion, an issue affecting hundreds of millions of working women throughout the world and increasingly within the USA in recent years, in a 2024 Jubilee video Kirk was asked if his ten-year old daughter became pregnant due to rape. His response: “The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered."
As the Communist Workers’ Platform USA, we affirm that Charlie Kirk deserves not a moment of mourning, the sun shines brighter in his absence. We recognize that individual acts of violence such as this and the Luigi Mangione assassination are symptoms of the capitalist system and the contradictions within it. While it may be cathartic to see a man who spent his whole life denying Palestinians their humanity meet a fitting fate, we must proceed with the understanding that Charlie Kirk was a product of the capitalist system. The workers will be doomed to a rotating cast of Kirks so long as there are capitalist relations to produce such monsters. We contrast the outrage at Kirk’s assassination with the two years of ceaseless genocide against Palestinians live-streamed. For this daily violence, no US flag was ever flown at half-mast.
Political violence is declared a “disaster” when it touches the champions of capital, but not when it ravages the working class. In the past two administrations there have been hundreds of school shootings from Denver to Uvalde, with children slaughtered en masse without so much as a day of national mourning. Every 99 minutes in the US, a worker dies on the job, a victim of social murder. Migrants continue to languish in detention centers like Alligator Alcatraz, entire families torn apart. Yet we are told to shed tears for Kirk while the daily violence of capital on workers goes unmentioned.
Some of our ideological rivals, such as in Jacobin, argue this assassination signals a breakdown of “democratic norms.” Whose norms? Whose democracy? These mouthpieces of capital defend the same capitalist system Kirk devoted his career to. This everyday violence against workers and oppressed peoples are the “norms” that produce the hatred and violence that led to this assasination. We communists mourn neither these “norms” nor Mr. Kirk.
We must devote our collective effort to consolidating the class forces necessary to confront the capitalist system that Kirk, Turning Point USA, and all these reactionaries gleefully devote(d) their lives to upholding. With rising costs of living, fewer job opportunities, and the escalating global imperialist competition, we will continue to see violent manifestations and upheavals in our country and others. The ruling class will dial up the pressure, the repression, the exploitation. We must respond in kind not with individual acts of rage-fuelled violence but with the organization, discipline, and fortitude the working class needs to meet the historic moment. To win a world free of reactionary ghouls like Mr. Kirk, the workers need their own party: the CWPUSA.
Central Committee of the Communist Workers’ Platform of the USA