In the immediate wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, Trump and a whole gallery of figures across the right made it crystal clear it was not just Kirk’s killer who was going to pay. They demonized the left, they vilified trans people, but it was quickly obvious that Trump was waiting for the perfect excuse—a moment like this—to further consolidate his power and launch a broader escalation of political repression against everyone who stands in his way.
Left unchecked, this can have devastating consequences for all working people. More immediately, it injects a fresh dose of fear and intimidation into society, creating further obstacles for the urgently necessary working-class fightback against Trump’s right-wing agenda. But this authoritarian power grab does not come from a position of strength—for Trump, or for the capitalist class as a whole.
Trump Never Lets A Good Crisis Go To Waste
“It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s top policy aid, declared in regards to the left. “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,” adding, “and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Since September 10, lists of left (and liberal) organizations have circulated from various government agencies which may be targeted through the above methods described by Stephen Miller, despite none of the organizations having any ties to the person who killed Kirk. Trump has not been subtle that a key goal in going after Democrat-linked NGOs is to cut off fundraising streams for the Democratic party, with the coming midterms clearly in mind. But it’s also part of a broader agenda from the Trump administration thus far, which is cracking down on protest, in particular from student activists, through creating fear and chaos, and of course the biggest terror campaign of all, ICE’s war on immigrants.
This new stage of political repression is comparable to the Red Scares of the 20th century and the attacks on the Black liberation movement and the left in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Compared to those periods, capitalism is far less threatened, but recent decades brought steps forward in consciousness, in particular through movements against sexism (Slutwalks, #MeToo), against racism (Day Without An Immigrant, Black Lives Matter), and in the labor movement. All of this has scared the capitalist class, and a key part of Trump’s strategy is to stomp out the potential for working-class unity and decisively defeat these movements.
The state-organized oppression of trans people may reach levels unheard of in modern history in the fallout of Kirk’s murder, despite the shooter’s lack of trans identity. This has nothing to do with a response to political violence from trans individuals and everything to do with creating “an enemy within” while further attacking trans rights.
This strategy has widened out and sharpened into attacks on civil liberties akin to, and building on, the PATRIOT Act. Trump’s National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), distinct from the hundreds of executive orders in regards to the day to day operations of the US government, is a sweeping policy decree which takes Bush’s “pre-emptive” approach to foreign terrorists and retools it to target those living in the US. Independent journalist Ken Klippenstein explains that “this means monitoring political activity, or speech, as an investigative method to discover ‘radicalism,’” noting that, “contrary to other national security documents all during the post-Watergate era, NSPM-7 doesn’t even mention the First Amendment or the fundamental right of Americans to organize and protest.”
The list of “indicators” of radicalism is extensive and intentionally open to very flexible interpretation. In reality, NSPM-7 directs the Justice Department, the FBI, and other national security agencies and departments to target individuals and organizations which show signs of a variety of beliefs held by very large sections of society, such as being against “traditional” views on the family (read: against homophobia, against sexist gender roles) or being anti-capitalist. Unlike other national security memos, NSPM-7 was made public, which shows how much igniting fear is essential to carrying out this agenda.
Like & Share? You’re Fired
This chill from the top has rippled across workplaces all over the country, as workers and students across political ideology, gender, and industry faced retaliation—even termination—for personally having or reacting to social media posts that were deemed not sufficiently sympathetic to Kirk’s death.
This astounding attack on democratic rights has not taken place in the shadows and quickly made its way into mainstream media through the sudden, indefinite suspension of “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” Far from being part of the left or the trans community, Kimmel’s suspension simply became the loudest and highest profile signal to ignite fear and unite the right. But attacking free speech is wildly unpopular and the backlash came quickly: An estimated 1.7 million people canceled their Disney+, Hulu, and ESPN streaming subscriptions between September 17 and September 23. This display of collective action put enough pressure on ABC/Disney to reverse course and reinstate Kimmel’s show, providing a very small glimpse at the massive power that working people could harness to fight the right and Trump’s regime.
While pushback on the highest profile workplace retaliation may have checked the overreach of some sections of big business or the right, this is certainly not enough. Hundreds of workers were fired without viral campaigns for their defense. Small businesses have been punished. Without fightback, repression like this can have a devastating impact on people’s confidence to participate in struggle. That’s a classic motivation for repression throughout history, and is why it’s crucial to call it out for what it is: The Trump administration is carrying out, and developing plans to continue, a historic level of attacks on democratic rights. Building an ongoing collective fightback against repression and the broader right-wing offensive is desperately needed.
The Growing Terror Of The Right
The killing of Charlie Kirk took place amidst an onslaught of crises in the world which has contributed to increased alienation, isolation, and fear in society. Confidence in existing institutions and establishment political parties has been dramatically undermined, as they simply do not provide any solution to the world’s crises. According to a June 2025 YouGov poll, 40% of Americans think a civil war is very or somewhat likely in the next 10 years. Any approach of individual terrorism to fight the right is a dead end that points in the opposite direction, and it’s the working class who bears the brunt of the repression.
As people seek out explanations, this has led to increased polarization to both the right and the left. But unfortunately the momentum has now been more decisively captured by the ongoing right-wing offensive, which is dominated by the far right and has now been seized on by the Christian right as well.
Charlie Kirk’s far-right youth organization Turning Point USA (TPUSA), before Kirk’s death, boasted about having 900 college chapters. Kirk’s role in reaching young people, in part through TPUSA, has been credited with Trump’s youth voter turnout in the 2024 election. Now the far right seeks to galvanize around this horrific organization which blames the problems facing ordinary people (though primarily white men) on immigrants, LGBTQ people, people of color, and women. Within nine days of Kirk’s murder, they reported receiving more than 62,000 requests to start a new chapter and millions of dollars in donations.
Don’t let Turning Point USA turn your campus into an incubator for the right. Recent years have seen not only systematic attacks on left-wing student groups on campus, especially those in solidarity with the Palestinian people, but also various attacks through profit-fueled administrations to eliminate student groups fighting against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia on campus in particular. Consider starting a socialist student group on your campus! Email us at [email protected] or message us on Instagram: @socialist_alternative.
Taken by the messaging from the Christian right that religious freedom is under attack, many who have already been attracted to Trump felt compelled to “come out” as Christian. As indicated most clearly by Kirk’s memorial, the Trump regime and far right are leaning into religion to advance their own agendas. Kirk himself was an example of this. His views on gender roles and sexuality show exactly how dangerous the growth of the Christian right is for women and queer people in particular.
Weaponizing the death of one of their own figures has no doubt played a role in emboldening the Trump regime and the far right. Operation Midway Blitz, the ICE offensive in Chicago (see page 9), has brought to life exactly the kind of vision that the Trump regime intends to bring forward to consolidate power and fear in the name of Kirk, as Trump cited that Kirk’s last message to him was “Please, sir, save Chicago.”
The terror of Trump’s ICE operations are reflective of broader trends: Since 2002, right-wing ideologies (predominately white supremacist) have fueled more than 75% of all extremist attacks and domestic terrorism plots in the United States, according to the Anti-Defamation League. The far right and Trump administration have infinitely more to answer for in terms of political violence than anyone they have decided to scapegoat. And that’s precisely the point: repressing working-class people keeps us not only afraid, but divided.
Collective Action to Defeat The Right
Key forces on the right, driven by the Trump administration and the Christian right, have seized on Kirk’s murder to build and consolidate power. Their power is built on their bases, in particular on the tens of millions of votes that Trump received in the 2024 election. Yet their ideologies blame the world’s crises on some of the most oppressed sections of the working class (such as women, immigrants, trans people), pitting us against each other and actively pointing the finger away from the real root of the problems facing us. While doing so, they’re propping up dangerous attacks on our rights and our lives.
Sexism, xenophobia, transphobia, and racism in particular have seen a resurgence in society in large part because of the absence of a real, working-class left alternative and leadership. Trump’s mocking comments in his September 25 Quantico speech in regards to his agenda—“I thought it would be met with fury on the left, but they’re sort of giving up”—should be a wake-up call.
Trump is, unfortunately, correctly identifying the huge vacuum on the left that exists at this moment. But the fact that there’s a vacuum means there is real space to fill—millions of people do want to fight Trump and the far right, even if they’re not sure how. And we should remember that Trump’s regime and the momentum of the right wing stand on shaky ground, because they’re fighting to defend a system that is fundamentally bankrupt and in deep and worsening crisis.
We can build a united fightback against attacks on free speech and democratic rights. Left organizations; immigrant, LGBTQ, and women’s rights organizations; unions; students; and more are all in the crosshairs of this regime. If and when organizations and individuals are criminalized or face legal action, we should build defense campaigns and coalitions of workers, unions, students, and the oppressed to fight back.
Collective action boosts the confidence people have that change is possible, and sets our sights higher to fight for even more. As socialists, we believe our sights need to be set on the entire system. While extremist attacks are mainly coming from the far right, capitalism is the main source of violence in society—a system that requires the disciplining and dividing of the working class to keep the ruling class in power. An all-out struggle against the Trump regime means fighting against transphobic, sexist, racist, and xenophobic attacks; against attacks on democratic rights; and showing that collective, working-class struggle is the only way to put an end to the system that brought Trump to power.