While some leftists celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination on a college campus, others online are devising less violent ways to sell their radical ideology to the American public.
Chatter within fringe corners of the internet paints a picture of the far-left in crisis mode since Kirk’s Sept. 10 assassination in Orem, Utah, which led to the arrest of left-wing suspect Tyler Robinson. As the world reacted in horror to the news, many in socialist or Antifa-affiliated circles fretted that the assassination has turned too many people away from their radical cause, energized the right, made Kirk a “martyr” and given the Trump administration a new opening to crack down on far-left activist networks.
“We do not call for individual acts of assassination, not because the powerful do not deserve to be challenged, but because such acts almost always strengthen the very machinery we are trying to dismantle … We must build the structures that make violence less likely not through pacifist sermons but through concrete mutual aid, through tenant unions, workplace committees, solidarity funds, free clinics, radical education,” reads a Sept. 13 article from the anarchist blog, “The Slow Burning Fuse.” A self-described “Anarchist Communist Group” reposted the piece on its own website.
“If we are serious about ending political violence, we must be serious about ending capitalism,” the article says. The Slow Burning Fuse and Anarchist Communist Group did not respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s requests for comment.
Robinson’s family said the 22-year-old had become increasingly left-leaning in recent years and was dating a transgender roommate, authorities have said. The shooter left phrases such as “hey fascist! CATCH!” and the anti-fascist phrase “Bella ciao” engraved on cartridges that were found with the murder weapon.
The Oregon-based group Corvallis Antifascists also sounded the alarm about the assassination’s ripple effects in a Sept. 16 post on NoBlogs, an obscure website for far-left bloggers. The post noted that Kirk’s death “has done much to galvanize and unify America’s right-wing” and sparked large vigils in Kirk’s honor.