Charlie Kirk was no hero. He was a mouthpiece for a rotten capitalist system and a purveyor of hate. Those who bemoan his passing had little sympathy or regret for those people who suffered poverty, discrimination and political violence at the hands of the Right and capital. Kirk espoused and promoted a system which inflicts misery on millions. He was a victim of his own toxicity.

Kirk was an ally of Donald Trump. He opposed abortion rights and gun control (despite the repeated mass killings of school children). He was against diversity, equity and inclusion programmes and social and LGBTQ+ rights. His rhetoric was racist, misogynistic and xenophobic. He believed that women’s “natural place” was “under the control of their husbands”. He referred to the hard-won Civil Rights Act as an "anti-white weapon". He argued that black women didn’t have the “brain processing power” to be political leaders. He promoted COVID-19 misinformation, false claims of electoral fraud and the bogus and dangerous racist Great Replacement conspiracy theory.

At a time when our planet is in jeopardy Kirk promoted climate change denial and described activism to protect the world’s climate as a “Trojan horse” for Marxism. Ironically, he thought “gun deaths” were worth it to protect the second amendment. He repeatedly spread misinformation surrounding the death of George Floyd. He wanted to raise the age of retirement and didn’t think people should retire at all believing retirement was not “biblical”. He believed that “Palestine does not exist”.

Kirk, a multi-millionaire, believed that poverty was not the result of oppression and exploitation, it was a case of “bad values” on the part of the poor and oppressed. Kirk was a vile and dangerous individual. Like Trump and his cronies, he acted in the service of capital. Trump’s administration and its followers seek to exploit Kirk’s death to further its attacks on the “left” and all who oppose them. There is a marked contrast between the outpouring of “outrage” at his assassination and the response of his supporters to the ongoing genocide being perpetrated against the Palestinian people by the barbaric military operations of the murderous Zionist state of Israel or the killings of those Trump opponents in the U.S.

The reality is that the main source of political violence in the U.S. is capital and its agents in the radical right. We recognise that individual attacks against noxious individuals such as Kirk will not overthrow the capitalist system and defeat fascism. A socialist response to this rotten and repressive system requires a revolution which undertakes the overthrow of bourgeois power by a united working class and the construction of socialist power.