Free Speech and Thought in a Time of Automation and Violence

Douglas Lain

September 18, 2025

On the Consequences of the Charlie Kirk Assassination

The antagonism within the concept of free expression boils down to the fact that the concept posits society as composed of free, equal, and emancipated people, whereas society’s actual organization hinders all of that and produces and reproduces a condition of permanent regression among its subjects. The right to freely express one’s opinion presumes an identity of the individual and his consciousness with the rational general interest, an identity that is hindered in the very world in which it is formally viewed as a given.

Theodor Adorno, Opinion, Delusion Society, 1963

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, a Republican campaigner and organizer, champion of free speech, and professional gadfly on campus, has been permanently silenced by an assassin's bullet. Some on the Left have celebrated his death, others have offered condolences even as they mutter insults under their breath, and still others have tried to explain to the Left milieu that it is not only the political Right who should be grieving, not only the conservatives who lost something fundamental when Charlie was gunned down at Utah Valley University.

For example, Ben Burgis and Meghan Day wrote that Charlie Kirk’s murder was a disaster, and should be understood as such even amongst Kirk’s enemies on the Left.

In addition to our basic abhorrence of violence, we are also proponents of democracy, which depends on free speech and open inquiry. Imposing silence on political opponents by brute force, whether in the form of state crackdowns on dissent or lone-wolf assassinations of leaders, undermines a principle that democratic socialists have always held dear.

These statements should be anodyne, but today it has become admirable that they were published in a leftist journal.

But this was not the only opinion expressed at Jacobin, as the publication balanced Burgis and Day by running an article by Branko Marcetic. He argued that Kirk himself accepted, perhaps even advocated for, violence that targeted socialists and communists. In 2024, Kirk interviewed Jack Posobiec, the author of Unhumans: The Secret History of Communist Revolutions (and How to Crush Them), and, according to Marcetic, Kirk failed to push back when Posobiec heaped praise on Franco and Pinochet. Marcetic’s essay was not so much a response to Burgis and Day, but to Ezra Klein, whose essay in the New York Times claimed “Charlie Kirk was Practicing Politics in the Right Way.” What made Kirk’s way of doing politics right, according to Klein, was that he participated in open debates on college campuses, rather than being stricken by the “virus” called “political violence.”

Marcetic objected to Klein’s characterization of Kirk’s political project as enviable, his characterization of Kirk’s project as inherently civil, apparently missing that Klein was not appreciating the content of Kirk’s politics, but rather the form it took. Klein described the form and practice of Kirk’s politics as continuous with and fitting well within the domain opened up by the nearly 250-year-old American experiment.

The purpose of cataloging the various reactions to Kirk’s death on the Left and noting how these reactions amount to a conversation between various authors is not to judge the essays on their own and in themselves, and while it is certainly possible to sort through the discourse with the aim of deciding who one agrees with or what one’s own opinion should be, this approach avoids the task of confronting the latest turning point in American and even global politics.

What we must do instead is examine these apparently oppositional or at least differentiated “takes” on the latest news for what they share in terms of both form and content.

Each of the three articles takes the form of prescriptive advice written for an audience of readers who are presumed to be wrestling with a choice: take up arms in the name of leftist politics or continue to debate in good faith. And each of the three shares a commitment to free speech and open debate.

Burgis and Day wrote, “No one should be killed as punishment for political expression, no matter how objectionable.”

Ezra Klein wrote, “We can live with losing an argument because we believe that there will be another argument.”

Marcetic wrote, “We don’t need to pretend Charlie Kirk was someone he wasn’t to affirm [the] principle [of free speech].”

The form and content together imply that readers are living in a free society, in America, where political choices can be made easily, rather than in an America where political opinions are predetermined in advance and serve to hem in or restrict politics. 

Each starts from considering the death of Charlie Kirk with the aim of guiding our moral judgment. Each one presumes that forming the correct opinion about Kirk and his death is the task at hand.

Perhaps the underlying question asked by all three essays is this:

Should you vote thumbs up on celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, or thumbs down?

Two of them unambiguously say we should vote down celebrations. While one is more ambiguous, suggesting that voting up on the celebration of his death might be acceptable as long as one does not go so far as to overtly support the means that accomplished the deed.

What none of the essays can fully acknowledge is that our politics are out of our control.

While the choice to shoot or not to shoot is a real one for people like Tyler Robinson, whether or not America will be passing through a phase of escalating political violence appears fated. A hail of bullets will come or not come, decided by social forces that we can barely comprehend, let alone shape. 

Unfortunately for columnists and intellectuals, when society has been suppressed to this extent, the space for inquiry, imagination, and really thought itself is pushed aside, along with any hope for independent politics. It would be unfair to blame conventional pundits and opinion makers for the poverty of their imaginations in this moment, just as it would be myopic to presume that the murder of Charlie Kirk has created these conditions overnight.

For example, as far back as 1947 the critical theorist Max Horkheimer argued that as capital concentrated into the state in the 20th century, our conception of “reason” was debased.

The individual once conceived of reason exclusively as an instrument of the self. Now he experiences the reverse of this self-deification. The machine has dropped the driver; it is racing blindly into space. At the moment of consummation, reason has become irrational and stultified. The theme of this time is self-preservation, while there is no self to preserve.

The truth of Horkheimer’s claim was ratified via arguments X after Kirk’s carotid artery was ruptured by a bullet bearing one of the following messages:

Notices Bulge…OwO

Here Fascist, catch!

Whoever reads this is gay. LMAO

On X, right-wing influencers insisted that Tyler Robinson, the suspect who had not yet been named or apprehended, was a “leftist,” a “democrat,” and a member of antifa, while leftist democrats who might or might not have been associated with antifa insisted that the shooter was what’s known as a “Groyper,” a follower of the white nationalist influencer and Twitch streamer Nick Fuentes.

The ready-made partisan frames fell into place firmly, and the debates online were nearly monosyllabic, essentially amounting to claims that the other side’s party was the party of violence.

It took several days before a few voices started exploring other frames, other possible explanations for the shooting. The anti-Zionist pundit Max Blumenthal, for example, speculated that the assassin had been sent by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and, as evidence, pointed out that Charlie Kirk had begun to be critical of both the bombardment of Gaza and skeptical of the official story around October 7th. Others imagined that Trump himself might have had Charlie Kirk killed, as Kirk had been calling for the release of the Epstein files. For those who thought this might be the cause, the assumed motive was that President Trump’s name appears on Epstein’s list.

Finally, the novelist and journalist Walter Kirn — whose 2005 serialized novel The Unbinding explored how in a world of total information awareness and universal surveillance, the violence of the state can occasionally be turned back on itself — suggested that rather than taking the bait the media is laying out for us as details about the shooting are dribbled out a little bit at a time, we should try to maintain a little Brechtian distance.

Here’s how this will play out, here’s the meta-script, and please don’t laugh it off. How this all started is not how it will end. A story that began with a clear traditional moral shape, an innocent victim, a vile perpetrator, will be transformed using secondary characters, new revelations, and other dramatic elements into its very opposite–a story of forbidden love, persecution by religious bigots, a poignantly heartfelt protest against a World that Doesn’t Understand.There will then be a total split, far deeper than mere ‘politics,’ between the segments of the public that were captivated by two incommensurate tragedies.

Kirn is making a kind of cultural turn here, but not one that fits into the frame of the usual culture war that so restricts our politics. Instead, he is suggesting that our society is managed through ideological manipulation that operates through feelings, myths, narratives, and rhetoric, as well as through the framing of and control over the “facts.”

In the past half-decade, the surveillance apparatus established during the war on terror has developed technologically, socially, and politically. Through nominally non-governmental organizations, new networks of power and control that could, according to the Department of Homeland Security, operate through the “whole of society,” have threatened to fully replace the constitutional order. The long crisis of bourgeois society and capital has expressed itself in new institutions and new gadgets. Large Language Models have been deployed and have largely replaced the now antiquated search engines based on PageRank, click data, personalization, and keywords. Since 2010, the machines have been learning, and we are now in a moment when, rather than searching for a website, we ask the computer to summarize the internet for us.

In the 20th century, the anti-Bolshevik post-Marxist Guy Debord was being provocative when he said that, in our society, the core tenet is “all that appears is good, what is good appears,” but today this provocation is an established fact. When ChatGPT tells us the news, what appears in the greatest number is good, or good enough, and what is good enough is what appears most often, but what most of us miss is that this is as much the result of a homogenization of the producers of content as it is a result of any algorithmic sorting.

We don’t need Grok or Gemini to tell us what the news is. As Bob Dylan once said, “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows,” and today, the direction of the wind is determined by the DHS, the CIA, the EU, the CDC, and so on…

However, and here is where there might be an opening for those who still imagine themselves to be free people living in a free society, these institutions of bureaucratic power are currently internally divided. There are backroom battles amongst the courtiers. Nothing is truly settled, even if our view is occluded and distorted, even if we ourselves insist nothing is changing.

On the night of the assassination, before anyone had been apprehended, Donald Trump spoke to the nation from the Oval Office about the murder of Charlie Kirk and explained to the nation what would happen next. Significantly, he said two distinct things.

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis…this kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism in our country we’re seeing today, and it must stop right now.  

My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations who fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.

To clarify the distinction:

First, Trump announced that Americans should stop using hateful rhetoric. Following this, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised to introduce new hate speech laws to protect Christians and conservatives, but this was met with objections from conservative pundits such as Tucker Carlson and constitutional scholars who noted that such legislation would inevitably be overturned by the Supreme Court.

Second, Trump announced that his administration would track down and punish the organizations that funded and supported the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Since then, Representative Anna Paulina Luna posted that an organization called “Armed Queers SLC was under investigation by the FBI as potentially connected to a plan to kill Kirk. Armed Queers is also a member organization within the National Network on Cuba, along with the Communist Party USA, the DSA, the Socialist Workers Party, Code Pink, Pink Pistols, Stonewall Self Defense, the John Brown Gun Club, and other “far left” organizations. The head of the Armed Queers SLC has received support from Utah Global Diplomacy, a nonprofit funded by the State Department, for her work on gender advocacy, which includes her work for and on Armed Queers.

In the aftermath of the Russiagate scandal, we must approach the announcement of this investigation as propagandistic. FBI guidelines stipulate that investigations can begin on the basis of pure speculation without any corroborating evidence. However, we should also hold open the possibility that evidence will emerge that either connects this organization to the Charlie Kirk killing, or (what strikes me as more likely) that one of the other organizations connected to Armed Queers has funded or been funded by terrorist organizations internationally. The FBI will use the investigation into Charlie Kirk to go fishing for “radical leftists” with ties to violence.

What we should be on the lookout for as the investigations proceed is how often the “terrorists” are tied to State organizations or proxies. While we watch the story unfold, we should resist cheering on any faction, no matter how closely we might identify with any of the players. This is a time when the apparatus and its methods will be laid bare, and we would do best to learn its secrets rather than assist with the turning of the gears or the training of the algorithms.

The debates about the assassin’s right-wing or left-wing motives are actually only debates about which party within the capitalist state deserves our support. None do.

The insistence that we should hold open the field of debate and free inquiry and mourn the loss of it, along with Charlie Kirk, comes much closer to being good advice, but we should be aware of how fraught and difficult holding this stance will become as the pressure to decide which intelligence operative is a friend and which is an enemy intensifies.