Reflections on the Killing of Charlie Kirk

Charlie Kirk, the far-right youth influencer and supporter of Donald Trump, was shot and killed at a college campus in Utah. Such an escalation was foolish and is to be regretted. The suspect, Tyler Robinson, a young man, has been held for trial. This has been in the news now for a few days.

Of course, the killing has provoked a lot of reaction in the US and beyond, and has had some heavy repercussions. – One is, just recently Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late-night show was suspended. In his comedic monologue criticising the Trump administration he mentions vice-president JD Vance as exploiting the assassination to attack political opponents of Trump. In this response to the killing, JD Vance said that the majority of violent acts such as this were by ‘lunatics’ on the left. This is not the case, in fact most political violence in the US has been by the right-wing, and it has been the right-wing that, through provocations and trolling, has primarily used hate speech to inflame the political climate, Vance was, even at this time, inappropriate by his own measure, just adding to this.

The shooter, Tyler Robinson, if the reports about him are accurate, appears to come from a Republican family, but his own politics are according to the reports more leftward, while also influenced by internet subcultures, and gender politics.  However, the case has not yet gone to trial, and we do not yet know the real motives, yet Vance and Trump have already blamed the ‘far left’ for this violence, jumping to their desired conclusion.

One of the outcomes of Trump’s democratic election has been the obvious triumph of the press and media over traditional politics in which its role has been kept in the background. Although Trump’s regime has regularly attacked the press and blamed the media for its coverage, it is clearly straining to appear to be an alternative rebellious force  while holding the executive power, and has meanwhile consolidated its power over these corporations and debunked the standard traditional ‘balance’ between left and right sides. It has also by doing this deflected attention from Trump’s own roots in the media, as well as his friendly relations with Epstein.

Hitherto the appearance of a balance, and the supposed checks on unbridled power that it defends against, has served the bourgeois class well as an image of fairness, but Trump now openly eschews this. The question is, where will this lead for the US? We can see the aim is to keep Trump in power as a dictator, but why would the bourgeois class of the US want such a dictatorship at this stage, and why would it be so willing to ditch this well-honed mechanism of managing its class power now?

The answers lie in the continuation of imperialist projects that never actually entirely left the room. Post WWII, we have lived through a time when the liberals of the bourgeois cultural elite, and its media, put a lot of faith in what they termed the rules based order and the universal values typified by the spirit of the UN at its pinnacle, despite the obvious flies in the ointment at the time. The continuing aims of the imperialist capitalists were put in the background and tended to be ignored while reconstruction after the war went ahead. But this could not last forever. What we see now is imperialism refreshed.

But it is imperialism dressed up in new clothes. In the old days, imperialist conquest and colonization for expansion and profit was mediated by the divine right of kings and queens, with missionaries projecting Christianity onto savages ‘for their own good’, for the salvation of their souls. This was the ultimate justification for the massacres, enslavement, and ethnic cleansing that it carried out, while undoubtedly bringing scientific advances to the world. But today this ideology and aesthetic can no longer hold water, it looks like what it is, a bunch of anti-scientific prejudices and bigotry. So, what can take the place of these old excuses for extreme violence in the modern world, when imperialist capitalist expansion is again rampant and obvious?

Curiously, we only need to look at a product of modern science, the internet, and social media, to see it. The troll is there to inflame debate towards the fascist perspective on everything. If Trump or JD Vance lie and go against reason and science, they are trolling, if they complain against things that they are simultaneously guilty of doing themselves, they are trolling. When they talk against the state apparatus while acting as the state apparatus they are trolling. When they rail against censorship but simultaneously blatantly censor their rivals, they are trolling, when they gush with sentiment over the tragedy of Charlie Kirk’s shooting, but are cold and callous about the killings of Democrats, they are trolling.

And this strategy is the same as Israel’s, the proxy of the US, when it tells Gaza Palestinians whom it is bombing where to move to and then also bombs these ‘safe areas’. This is also trolling, on a different level, indeed, but it is the same kind of thing. And what is it for? It is for the capitalist imperialist expansion of white western power into the Middle East where the oil and the trade routes are. It is to use Israel and Jews as its advanced guard, its missionary force, for this project. Does it care in any real sense about Charlie Kirk or the Jews of Israel? Is any of this for moral reasons? No. The US leadership is complicit in the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza. It is trolling everyone when it claims to be interested in peace, it even bombs an ally while it holds peace talks that it takes part in. Again, this is trolling.

And it is clear that as a strategy, trolling is what the US ruling class has opted for in the modern age, it is its media position. Yes, this is added to by certain evangelical Christian religious motives, and spiced up with a simple lust for violence, tainted by a strong desire for vengeance and retribution for perceived injustices. But it is trolling, writ large.

And yet trolling is inherently weak. It cannot really match the old ideologies and aesthetic practices. It cannot be consistent. It cannot be sustained, it is anti-science but must use science, it is anti-rational but cannot ignore, at least for long, the economy. It is doomed to failure, to implode. So, in this sense it, MAGA etc, is a kind of death cult that wants to take everyone with it, down. If President Donald Trump cannot succeed in his project, and he cannot, he cannot be seen to fail, so he must become a martyr, he must become a kind of deity that avoids all culpability. He is trapped in this loop. As many commentators have said already, the US is heading towards a very dangerous place, but we are all in this place.

On the Kimmel furore (we quote here from the Guardian online): 

"...The Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression has said that the ABC network “caved” to pressure from the US government.

The timing of ABC’s decision, on the heels of the FCC chairman’s pledge to the network to “do this the easy way or the hard way,” tells the whole story. Another media outlet withered under government pressure, ensuring that the administration will continue to extort and exact retribution on broadcasters and publishers who criticize it.”

In a statement, the advocacy group went on to say that the US “cannot be a country where late night talk show hosts serve at the pleasure of the president. But until institutions grow a backbone and learn to resist government pressure, that is the country we are.”

From:

<https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/sep/18/jimmy-kimmel-charlie-kirk-comments-show-cancelled-suspended-monologue-trump-us-politics-live> 

- Note how this is a peculiar statement because in it it is seen as the responsibility of 'institutions' to grow a backbone themselves, when obviously the institutions have an existing backbone (in other words it is institutional) which is currently being used  to quell dissent and censor, so, according to this institution (the Foundation for individual Rights and Expression) the institution that censors has the merely moral responsibility to stop itself from doing what it is doing, and it is, kind of, a bit sad that this is not happening. 

Peter Mandelson finally sacked over Epstein

Peter Mandelson, the long time seemingly irrepressible political figure implicated in some aspect of British government, has been sacked today, which would be the third time in his political career, by the British Prime Minister Kier Starmer, after further revelations about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, the very rich convicted paedophile sex offender who died in prison while awaiting trial. 

Apparently, according to Starmer, Mandelson was subject to a full vetting process before his appintment as British ambassador to the US. So they either knew all this and did not care, liked it, just hoped it would not come up, or they are just incompetent. Incompetence is the usual escape clause.

Mandelson wrote to his 'pal' who was facing prosecution, in June 2008, for soliciting a child for prostitution:

“I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain. You have to be incredibly resilient, fight for early release and be philosophical about it as much as you can.”

One of the most striking and disturbing aspects of this is the statement that it 'just could not happen in Britain', as if he would have been able to protect him, or that Britain was more amenable to these things.

Only recently, this September, the deputy PM, minister, and leader of the Labour Party Angela Rayner had to resign due to impropriety over not paying the correct tax on a property. The government has been reportedly preparing for tax increases on property.

Charlie Kirk, 31, MAGA ally of President Trump and youth agitator shot dead

Charlie Kirk, 31, the US right-wing influencer and strong MAGA ally and supporter of President Donald Trump shot dead on a Utah University campus during a debate, 10 September 2025, when he was answering questions on gun control. 

Cross party commenters condemned the shooting as does Trump, but Trump sites only previous attacks on right-wing Republican supporters and fails to mention Democrat victims.

Today the hunt for the perpetrator is still ongoing. Many students dived then scattered as the shot rang out, which hit him in the neck. Kirk was on his America Comeback Tour, as part of the student group Turning Point USA.

Kirk had openly stated bigoted views and used homophobic and Islamophobic slurs, he recently tweeted “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”

Affective Practices and Politics, a schematic Marxist analysis

Gary Tedman

What my research work is mostly about, as in my book Aesthetics & Alienation, is the way aesthetics fits into politics.

A short, materialist, definition of aesthetics is the opposite of anaesthetics.

So, what is the opposite of anaesthetics? Anaesthetics are normally understood to be drugs that dull our senses, which make us less aware of our surroundings. They are of course important in medicine, but if we treat the term more broadly, we can see that it could mean anything that reduces your general awareness of reality. So, when it comes to aesthetics, by contrast it is anything that increases your awareness of things, which heightens your sensory capacities.

However, aesthetics has a long history of being a fairly minor ‘tributary’, of philosophy, where it includes or blends into such things as the philosophy of art; it also surfaces in art theory and criticism, and it even appears as a more everyday term for getting your nails done in a shop. We can ignore these aspects for the moment.

I cannot repeat here what I have already gone over in my book. I merely want to point out what I think is an important aesthetic factor in current politics.

The bourgeois class has always been aware of the usage of aesthetics, mainly because for this class it firstly became important for selling things and for marketing and branding in capitalism. Over the many years of their class rule they have built up this knowledge, partly by default, because it is instrumentally useful, but also in the knowledge that it is something that is influential and beneficial in their class struggle against the working class, in other words, it helps them to succeed in their exploitation of the working class.

How does it do this? In my book I explain the role of aesthetics and the ‘aesthetic level of practice’, as well as ‘aesthetic state apparatuses’ in the process of sublimating the alienation from labour of the working class (alienation as per Marx ,1844, and it makes some references to the Marxist philosopher Louis Althusser’s work). This is not easy to grasp in simple terms, and it requires some foreknowledge of Marx’s work, but there are other less significant but more everyday examples of how aesthetics is a part of politics, but which are ‘hidden’ by the ruling class, or they are rendered morally taboo to draw attention to.

My current work, a new book, is about the bourgeois media and the role it plays in the aesthetic class struggle, and I want to put forward a few ideas drawn from this here. I will state them without much evidence and rather baldly.

The media uses aesthetics, perhaps this is obvious: for instance, politicians are groomed by the media, and with their expertise the media presents them in the way they want, while taking into account the needs of their class’s class struggle. Of course, the aesthetic struggle extends way beyond this aspect, into all forms of entertainment and escapism too, but we will concentrate on just this.

We are supposed, obviously, to understand the media as ‘free’, but we reject this.

For us, the media is a state apparatus.

Now, considering ‘the media’ as a unitary thing, as in ‘media state apparatus’, even though this is what the term ‘the media’ (in English English) already implies, might seem a stretch, I know. A lot of the media is obviously privately owned. However, this ownership does not change things drastically, these corporations are either owned by the bourgeois class, or directed by the bourgeois class through their state (it is therefore much like bourgeois education being private and ‘non state’, but also being the most state state education). If there are small independent creative, media start-ups which do well and become popular (it happens!), these will soon be gobbled up by the bigger media state apparatuses and in any case are always governed by state laws.

Thus, we do not accept that there is any really ‘free’ media. It is always, or almost always, in the control of the bourgeois state.

A lot of people already feel this is true, but now we come to the most interesting aspect of the media considered as a state apparatus. The elected government and parliament is also a part of the overall media state apparatus.

It is not something separate, independent from the media. It is also not ‘free’ and ‘of the people’. - Because this apparatus only deals with appearing to govern in an emotional, affective, or aesthetic sense.

To understand this fully we need to delve into bourgeois democracy and how it functions, which has to be left out of this account for the most part, unfortunately.

We can just note that democracy was not elected, it had to be won in the class struggle by the bourgeois class against the old aristocracy, with its divine right to rule. In the history of its origin and development class struggle has continued. Voting democracy tries to hold this struggle within certain boundaries suitable to the bourgeois ruling class. It has to appear to be rule by consensus. Democracy is the political superstructure that it normally prefers because of its appearance of consensus, ‘everyone has a say’.

Being a system fundamentally based on popularity, however, means that it is not politically scientific, and the vote is always directed by which class holds the media state apparatus, which decides what is popular - it is always push rather than pull, just as class struggle came before democracy. We only know what happens in our democracy via the media state apparatus. The election itself is already a performance played in the media, governed by the media state apparatus. There is no such thing as ‘spontaneously popular’, or at least it is extremely rare.

Voting democracy must always elect a parliament that must have a certain structure, which remains rigid and which is repeatable, and its performance is played out, and can only be played out, as a media performance in the media state apparatus. The structure is always a false dialectic: a to-ing and fro-ing between two sides which constantly balance and repair what the other does wrong. It is the ‘nice cop versus nasty cop’ routine writ large, with the voter as the interrogated subject.

‘The media’ schools the elected politicians in how to appear in the media. Essentially this shows the power relation, these elected politicians are the employees of this state apparatus.

If parliament is a media state apparatus, then what apparatus really does the work of governing the country, we might well ask.

We already know that the real mechanism of governing exists and operates in the background, in the UK it is Whitehall, and permanent under secretaries of state which run the different departments, who are appointed, not voted for. This is also where the echelons of government blend quietly with the military and military intelligence, who of course are also not voted for.

In other words when you vote you are voting for a performance, perhaps, at best, a better performance, but this is all you can vote for.

President Trump of the US is perhaps one of the first big bourgeois politicians to be so obviously from the media state apparatus, so obviously a performer, although there have been others. As we know he always rails against the media and pretends to be against it (he would!), despite him being its most obvious product, a sort of pinnacle of the breed.

One thing that led to the writing of this short piece was noticing that certain affective practices, which can be defined as emotional ways of being, your aesthetic, are set in stone by the bourgeois media state apparatus as preordained slots into which the various figures in politics must fit.

For instance, the typical left-wing politician is almost always shown as a ‘firebrand’, a bit shouty, always admonishing people and vigorously trying to persuade us of his (usually his) moral truth, in other words he is a puritan and a humanist, always. This happens across national boundaries, for instance in France Jean Luc Melenchon performs as this figure. In the past in the UK both Neil Kinnock and the union boss Arthur Scargill performed in this vein. These figures always have a religious-like fervour which is reactionary, despite what they may say which may be rational.

Does this performative aspect mean these figures always act insincerely? It does not necessarily follow. But they will be rewarded for how well they adhere to their roles in the false dialectical contest, and insofar as they ‘like’ these rewards and do as they are directed, it seems likely that they would be swayed, and so they become bourgeois agents, specifically of the bourgeois media state apparatus.

 

 

What Happened to Muesli?

 I don’t normally eat muesli for every breakfast, but I like a change, and I thought I would get some. 

There are things that are so emblematic of the capitalist system that we live in that it is even quite comforting, in a way. 

For a Saturday, the shop seemed strangely empty, maybe it was the inflation. Anyway, every brand of muesli (or ‘muesli), of about six or seven, including even Jordans, had chocolate chips in them, and all of them were some abomination called (here in France) ‘croustillant’, which apparently means they wrap blobs of oat flakes in caramelized sugar, so they end up like little flapjacks I guess. I quite like flapjacks, but If I want one, I will get one, or make one, given I have never seen one for sale in France.

- Now, I do not like sugary things, and do not eat chocolate all that much and do not want it in my breakfast cereal, but there seemed to be no choice. I went for the only one that had no chocolate in it, it was a ‘bio’ product and looked sober. I did not read the packet that closely and was, the next morning, disappointed to find it was also ‘croustillant’. It also had very few nuts or seeds in it than these gummed up oats and was much too sweet for me. The nuts that were in it were like concrete. If I had gone to the smaller ‘bio’ supermarket I think I could have got some actual ordinary muesli out of the VRAC (the hopper things), but that was out of the way and a bit of a pain, and the staff were often snobby, and your bank balance much worse off afterwards if you ever wandered off-piste.

So, yes, it is sort of comforting, I’m in this familiar setting, just that, I suppose, inflation has just affected things in a slightly more extreme capitalist way, - even humble muesli. I cannot be bothered to work out why. Someone please tell me. Perhaps they can save on the dried fruit and nuts and seeds and just use cheap oats, maybe they get the sugar cheap, and the chocolate, and maybe because the sugariness is kind of addictive they can sell more of it, obviously they are all copying each other in the competition, which is supposed to produce democratic variety but does not. It is probably a form of shrinkflation but instead of shrinking the size they shrink the quality. It can’t be great for your teeth, for kids especially, and isn’t it fattening? One reason I started eating muesli was for its extolled health benefits, a source of fibre, and I like nuts and seeds, and you used to be able to get no added sugar. The original brand was Alpen, which was very good, but I can’t find this in France. Jordans used to be a second choice. But all this health emphasis is evidently out the window now.

If I complained I know what they will say, “it’s the market, people want it”.

The Plant Based Alternative and Modern Puritanism

Almost all food for humans is ulmtimately based in plants, even if we eat meat. For instance, the meat we eat is usually produced by a creature that eats plants, like the cow eats grass. We cannot avoid the fact that as part of the food chain we as living things die and get eaten, somewhere along the line. Evolution even relies on this. It is a circulating spiral.

One of the big problems with, say, the vegan alternative to meat eating is the illusion that you are virtuous and avoid harming animals. The growing of vegetable crops in the current way is a massive cause of loss of biodiversity, so kills creatures. Modern farming, not just for meat products like cattle, but also for crops, change the landscape on an enormous scale and make it an inhospitable environment for countless animals and insects, and this includes of course the use of pesticides.

And no, we cannot suddenly change all this to nice organic smallholdings that do no harm, or masses of people will starve. Modern farming might be bad in the way it has ended up, but it has been able to feed billions of people, and this must be acknowledged.

Still, one of the ways our bourgeois class tries to market new versions of its commodities to us is by extolling how it is more virtuous, so that the customer can get a warm glow of satisfaction that not only is she or he a part of the wealthy who can afford such things, but also at the forefront of ethicality, a ‘good person’. So, you are also buying this image.

With electric cars, for instance, this has recently turned sour: not only because of the antics of Elon Musk in support of fascistic Trump, but we have found (from scientific research by the University of Aukland, Australia) that the production of electric cars has made more harmful emissions in those countries that have championed electric car technology the most. This is partly because of the manufacturing process of these vehicles, which leads to more emissions, but also the lifetimes of the vehicles, which rarely get to ‘pay back’ what they owe in these emissions. And, of course, unless they fully run on renewables, they also use fossil fuel generated electricity.

The marketing, in the media, of vegetarianism and veganism often seems like a version of political correctness, something mainly for liberals. This is not the fault of vegans or vegetarians of course. It is a problem with the market, mass production, and capitalism. Do we really still need to say it? That the way that farming is performed as a massive agribusiness, for profit, whether for meat or crops, is the problem, and you cannot change this by simply altering your diet as an individual.

But even if you suppose that this puritanism might make some difference, on the other hand it stands as a kind of moral signpost that the problem is people, individuals and their choices, their behaviour, what they want to purchase as consumers, and it ignores and let's off the hook the industry. It is a way of accepting the blame and the guilt not just for yourself, the person who takes this position, but for every ordinary person, it says you are guilty, not capitalism. 

But we are not guilty. We simply need to eat, sleep, and get to work so we can be exploited by this same market. We are like the animals and vegetables being farmed.

Genocide is the New Misdemeanour

Well, maybe it is more than that, genocide is now the new black, and in fact it is mostly forbidden by our ruling classes to actively oppose it, or you will be jailed, or bombed. They have bent the stick in the other direction. Our dear bourgeoisie can now be called the class of Palestine Inaction, and they are very relaxed about war crimes. Not in relation to ‘Putin’ though. As far as ‘Putin’ is concerned he is evil beyond words, it is always ‘Putin’s War’ in Ukraine, but not ‘Netanyahu’s War’ in Palestine.

This, rather obvious flaw in their new logic does not raise much of an eyebrow for them though, - by ‘them’ I mean in their media. Their media carries on, business as usual. Oh, how they criticize those times when they were silent about the holocaust, about the genocide of Jews in Germany. Now, they are silent again, in another direction, making the same ‘mistake’.

But they cannot these days just be silent, can they? There is too much technology to make us aware of what is going on in every part of the world if you want to know. So, instead we get a strange stubborn forcing of the argument, something like, you must behave this way whatever the rationality of it, whatever the morality, because this is what we think, this is how we feel. They want their profits, this is what matters to them. It has all become exposed to the light of day.

They obviously do not give a fig anymore about international law, the rules-based order, universal values, humanitarian morality, - or perhaps we should say they no longer care about appearing to give a fig about these things. They will keep on prosecuting ordinary people for, say, shoplifting, though, very severely. But logically the whole edifice of law has collapsed, it cannot continue as if things have not changed, at least without fascism becoming prominent. And this is why we see the rise in nationalism and fascism, egged on by the media which is obsessed with it.

Now our leaders are almost all war criminals, in one way or another complicit in what is happening in Gaza, including people, children, being starved to death, it is such a new reality that many of us are just gobsmacked unable to do or say anything about it.

We are well beyond the stage when this slaughter has anything to do with Hamas and terrorism.

But the US are only using Israel as their policeman and agent provocateur in the Middle East, and for expansion into this vital global oil and sea trading territory.

What does this mean? It means at some point in the future, medium to long term, the Israeli ruling class will come into conflict with their current US overlords and seek true independence. At the moment, Israel is like another state of the US, where things military can be experimented upon. It is a frontier, a wild west. This is something that not every Israeli will want for their children. So, support the protests of Israelis against the Israeli state apparatus.

Meanwhile the Palestinian people, if they continue to be led by a resistance made up of mainly religious fervour, engaging in adventurist terrorism and doing exactly what their opponents want, are doomed to a slow and torturous death, fated by western imperialism, and its media.