The two authors at Jacobin.com wrote the day after Charlie Kirk was murdered by a sniper:
The assassination of [Charlie] Kirk is a tragedy. Morally, it is unjustifiable. Politically, it is cause for serious alarm. A larger spiral into political violence would be a catastrophe for the Left.
But the Jacobin’s anti-violence authors are still telling their pro-revolutionary supporters that Kirk’s popular politics are indefensible:
Kirk ran a well-funded political propaganda machine that promoted a simple message. “Liberals,” “radicals,” and “socialists” — he rarely bothered to make fine distinctions — were ruining the country … His politics have trended in an even worse direction over the years since [2021], flirting with much uglier forms of nationalism and xenophobia, but even in 2021, the substance of Kirk’s side of the conversation was indefensible.
The killing reduces the room for non-violent debate and may cause a crackdown on the left, Jacobin warns its left-wing readership: “The Trump administration could very well use it as a pretext to crack down on left-wing activists.”
The Jacobin authors spend much time trying to get their radical readers to back down from their dream of revolution by violence:
If history is any guide, the Left faces serious dangers from this development. The theory that acts of individual political violence will somehow spark mass movements for justice (what used to be called “propaganda of the deed”) has been tested, in a variety of circumstances around the world, for centuries. It’s very consistently been a disaster, almost always leading to enhanced repression of the Left and attacks on democracy writ large.
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Kirk’s murder is likely not to demoralize but to embolden the conviction of the far right, who will no doubt turn Kirk into a martyr for their cause … Kirk’s murder at age thirty-one will no doubt convince many of his millions of viewers and listeners to dedicate themselves to his cause, thus hastening the coherence of a militant right-wing political bloc that will be an obstacle to our own project for decades to come.
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In the short time since Kirk was slain, most on the Left have rightly condemned his murder. A not insignificant number, however, have reacted with an almost competitive lack of empathy. Not only is their anti-moral posturing likely to turn off ordinary Americans, who abhor political violence, but it is also politically misguided and strategically naive. There is nothing to celebrate here. Indeed, there is much to fear.
But the authors are still standing by their revolutionary goals, such as the mass migration of poor people into Americans’ housing and job markets:
In the last eight months, green-card holders have been arrested and locked in detention for attending protests or even writing op-eds critical of Israel, federal troops have been sent to cities over the protests of mayors and governors in response to small-scale riots or even street crime, and immigrants merely suspected of crimes have been sent to dungeons in El Salvador without a whiff of due process.
The magazine is named after the Jacobin faction in the bloody French Revolution of 1789. The name reflects the left’s political juvenile romance with revolutionary violence. In the 1790s, the Jacobin faction helped launch the mass murder of French people by the guillotine. The movement was brutally suppressed after the public grew frightened of the revolutionaries’ violence.
The editors of the Daily Beast magazine are offering the similar warnings to today’s left-wing factions:
A death in the family is a time to forgive any grievances and find a way to live together. The United States must do the same and start living up to its name. We can agree and disagree. It is the fundamental rock upon which this nation is built. We must move forward together after this tragedy. Or all may be lost.
Meanwhile, college-educated progressives continued to describe mainstream Americans as irredeemable Nazis to their progressive audiences, who frequently praise killing actual Nazis:
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