Charlie Kirk Was Not the Enemy of the Left

Rafael Holmberg

October 12th, 2025

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote, somewhat presciently, that “the line between martyrdom and stupidity depends on a certain kind of tension in the body politic”. Similarly, as the mystic theologian Meister Eckhart implied, even the most devoted followers of an ideology can easily pervert their own belief. Charlie Kirk, with his Turning Point USA movement now martyrised and headed by his widowed wife, seems to occupy both of the ideological positions described by Thompson and theology: a faithful martyr and a perverse dogmatist. For the right, his place is seemingly self-evident. He revived traditional, conservative values and upheld God and the family as supreme ethical principles, all whilst exposing the irrational and politically correct rhetoric of liberal wokeism. His assassination, therefore, was a direct attack on American, democratic values, and his legacy is giving a new life to the Turning Point and MAGA movements, which will not seem to die off any time soon.

From the leftist perspective, however, we have not yet properly confronted the fact that Charlie Kirk’s position is far more obscure. Many progressives were seen fruitlessly and provocatively celebrating his death, and in an equally performative gesture, more moderate liberals condemned any celebration of another man’s death. This ethical principle clearly acts more to secure media funding rather than as a sustainable philosophical maxim. It is clearly not unequivocally condemnable to celebrate a death: a mass-shooter’s death, a terrorist bomber’s, Hitler’s, or Mussolini’s death can of course be cause for some form of celebration (I am evidently not comparing Charlie Kirk to any of these figures, but merely pointing to the fact that, at its extremes, the proposition that a death can never be a source for celebration does not hold up). But it is at precisely this impasse that the left should recognise a flaw in either reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death. Rather than asking whether it is okay to celebrate the death of an enemy or whether it is never acceptable to celebrate an enemy’s death, I want to insist that Charlie Kirk was not the enemy of the left.

The left’s enemy is not a pundit of largely irrelevant conservative opinions – the left’s real enemy should always and uncompromisingly be recognised as big, private capital. The deadlocks we are currently confronting are not produced by family values or Christianity – they are produced by a structure of economic appropriation which is incapable of rectifying its own destructive tendencies. If anything, we should remember Marx’s refutation against his conservative critics who accused him of destroying and uprooting traditional European family values: it is not socialism, but capitalism itself, which is responsible for a perpetual commodification and division of society in which traditional values cannot survive. At a basic level, Kirk’s ‘manifest discourse’, the central tenets he defended, are not in themselves (and taken in isolation) problematic: he championed open, public debate (a principle which the left fought a long time for) as well as ‘virtue’ and Christianity, both of which have a long historical affinity with leftist struggles, more recently through the works of thinkers such as Alasdair Macintyre and Terry Eagleton.

He did, of course, controversially oppose topics such as abortion and DEI policies, and these are of course valid issues to debate, but they pale in comparison to the globally destructive and inefficient role played by late capitalism, a problem which the left has progressively lost its grasp of. Even Kirk’s more problematic statements are not in themselves causes for the imminent crises being confronted today, whether it is the ecological disaster and global warming, the international collapse of systems of civil rights, the ethnic cleansing of Gaza, or a sincere inefficiency of modern political systems at handling any form of economic instability, including the migration crisis. The ground for these issues is, to a large extent, a system of regulated economic appropriation upheld by banking and financial-reserve management as well as domestic and foreign policy.

Even a quick look at the current state of global capitalism and the political forms of private financial interests show that the reactionary culture-war avatars represented by Charlie Kirk were and continue to be lesser of two battles. There is no need to repeat the well-known facts on the aggressive concentration of wealth and power which leaves a growing global population disenfranchised and subjected to a consistent movement towards right-wing populism. Ironically, mainstream political parties claim to finally recognise the existential threat represented by global warming, and yet they have no quarrels in being upheld by and representing the interests of billionaire investment opportunists such as The Carlyle Group and Dave Rubenstein, a member of the ‘progressive’ Harvard Corporation who nonetheless continues to invest heavily in fossil fuel companies through his private equity firm. The likes of Noam Chomsky, Jean Seaton, and James Curran were crucial in tracing the systems of censorship that dominate the apparently ‘free’, liberal media of the West. Unlike the forms of State censorship seen for example in Russia, North Korea, and China, the history of Western media is a history of market censorship: newspapers and broadcasting services largely represent advertiser as well as capitalist interests. Much of what risks threatening these interests, such as anti-capitalist or worker-political analyses, was (and largely continues to be) left out of print. And yet today a different relationship between media and political economy has emerged, something more complex than straightforward censorship.

Dissidence is itself inscribed within private capital – it is well at home in the very systems which we apparently dissent against. Capitalism all too easily acts as its own court jester, appearing to find alternatives to itself and even condemning its own effects. Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates continuously express some form of sympathy for socialist policies, and Zuckerberg himself (with a net worth of over $250 billion) implied that we should not have billionaires. All the while, the billionaire techno-capitalist elite have increasingly come to privately own the basic means of human communication. By a performative act of self-disavowal, by acknowledging its own brutality through charities and philanthropy, capitalism permits itself to infiltrate the basic systems of private experience all whilst expanding across new terrains and privatising that which at first appeared economically irreducible, ‘outside’ the realm of political economy. As Byung-Chul Han wrote, even the intimacy of the self and of psychological experience is today a simple extension of capital.

It should strike us as ridiculous that we are at a point when even the solution to the climate crisis has been privatised. Elon Musk and Tesla were perhaps the most ‘optimistic’ example: they produced an electric motor years ahead of anything presented by competitors, and more importantly established a network of international charging infrastructure which had previously been the principal hindrance against the e-vehicle revolution. And yet the outcome of privatising the very solution to private capital’s destructive industrialisation should have been clear: Elon Musk became a type of 21^st-century US despot, and for every Tesla bought, the owner of X gains even more funds to spread obscene types of misinformation and to alter his platform’s algorithms in support of far-right influencer accounts. In other words, aggressive capitalisation produces a series of irreparable deadlocks, and its self-furnished antidote only fuels these same deadlocks.

When we are confronting the most pressing issues – communication, migration, the climate, civil rights – the most acute enemy is the very enemy that the left seems to have largely forgotten: not the traditionalist Charlie Kirk-avatars, but the logic of late capitalism. In comparison with this, the questioning of trans identities, political correctness, or DEI policy is a miniscule threat. Kirk was little more than a product of the same liberal culture wars that he opposed. The wokeism vs anti-wokeism confrontation serves as a smokescreen, concealing the more pressing economic struggle which the left has abandoned in favour of TikTok debates and Jubilee’s Surrounded series. Of course, the notion of unhindered and open debate was not entirely espoused by Charlie Kirk. Attending campuses and debating unprepared college students is not necessarily the Socratic model of open dialogue. It was very clear that Charlie Kirk did his best to avoid more challenging debates with academics, writers and theorists, and besides his debate with the socialist philosopher Ben Burgis, Kirk largely used the idea of ‘open debate’ in the same way that the Economists and reformist Bernsteinians[1] opposing Lenin used the expression ‘freedom of criticism’: a one-sided openness which exclusively advances a very specific political doctrine.

Charlie Kirk’s call to ‘open debate’ acted in large part as a paradoxical way of prohibiting many forms of seriously open (critical) debate etc. It is even more true that an argument could be made that behind Kirk’s manifest discourse (‘we need to return to pre-modern family values…’) we can deduce what Freud called a ‘latent content’. Kirk’s defence of public debate and rationally deduced traditionalism etc. conceals his backing by Republican donors and major corporate and private economic interests. In other words, Charlie Kirk was certainly not opposed to capitalism (even though he failed to recognised that it was this very political philosophy which most directly threatened the values he championed).

But the problem is not that there are latent economic structures which upheld Charlie Kirk’s manifest traditionalism. The problem is that the left primarily goes after this traditionalism rather than recognising the true and consistent enemy, an enemy just as active in the Republican party as in the Democrat party: private capital. The problem is that the left permitted these ‘latent’ interests underlying Charlie Kirk to remain purely latent – in other words, by fixating purely on the figure and traditionalist opinions of Kirk, the task of a more economic and political critique the formal and exploitative structures of late capitalism was stunted. A moralistic critique by the left which insists on the evils of Charlie Kirk is not part of a larger critique of private capital, but rather an obstacle to such a critique of capital. My plea, therefore, is that we recognise that Charlie Kirk was not the real enemy of the left. The enemy which the left should direct its attention to is exclusively private and globalised capitalism. The answer here is not the cheap and inefficient one of occasionally killing capitalists and CEOs, but rather a sustained and targeted critique of the disenfranchising effect of the dominant capitalist ideology, an ideology that is ironically incompatible with the traditionalism of the new right. If the left is upset by Charlie Kirk, the best thing to do is to forget him

and to treat his legacy not as the real problem, but as the outcome of our inability to deal with the real problem.

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Footnote

1. The Bernsteinians were a German-born anti-Marxist socialist movement, which advocated for a path to socialism not by a confrontation with the capitalist framework of parliamentary politics, but rather by a social democratic revisionism within the confines of the existing parliamentary system.

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Rafael Holmberg is a philosopher and writer. His work covers politics, German and French philosophy, film, literature, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. He writes for various journals, magazines, and newspapers, and is the author of Antagonisms of the Everyday on Substack.