The recent murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk was a tragedy in more ways than one.
Obviously from a human perspective, Kirk’s wife and two toddler-age children are devastated by this and didn’t ask for the crushing grief and anguish from watching their loved one get gunned down in broad daylight. It’s a tragedy that the United States’ epidemic of school shootings crudely interrupted Kirk’s intent of having a nonviolent exchange of ideas with college students. It’s a tragedy that Kirk’s shooting almost completely overshadowed a separate school shooting that took place at roughly the same time one state over. It’s a tragedy that the family of alleged shooter Tyler Robinson has had their lives completely upended by a man they spent 22 years carefully raising being arrested for allegedly committing a high-profile murder.
However, the greatest tragedy of all would be President Donald Trump successfully exploiting Kirk’s senseless killing as a pretext to carry out a nationwide crackdown on the political left. And while it remains to be seen if he’ll be able to do so, there is a direct historical parallel that all Americans should know about in the event of such a crackdown.
Will Charlie Kirk be America’s Horst Wessel?
In January of 1930, 22 year-old Horst Wessel was an active member of the Nazi paramilitary group Sturmabteilung (or SA, also known as brownshirts). His Friedrichshain Sturm 5 unit was described as “a band of thugs, a brutal squad” in the way it aggressively and violently attacked members of the German Communist Party (KPD). Wessel’s reputation among the SA is likely what made him a target for KPD members Albrecht Höhler and Erwin Rückert, who shot him at point-blank range after knocking on his door.
As Wessel was fighting for his life in the hospital, Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels described his assailants as “degenerate communist subhumans.” He ultimately died in February after contracting sepsis in the hospital.
Adolf Hitler wasted no time turning Wessel into a martyr for the Nazi cause. A song Wessel wrote called “Raise The Flag” became known as the “Horst Wessel Song” and became the official anthem of the Nazi Party. After Hitler took power, the Horst Wessel Song became the co-national anthem of Germany. One official Nazi newspaper referred to Wessel as “a hero of the brown revolution” and that his “sacrifical” death “passionately inflamed millions who followed.”
It’s important to note that while Horst Wessel was killed by the political opposition, it remains unknown if Kirk’s alleged shooter had any coherent political ideology at all. Messages that were etched into rounds found in the rifle authorities have linked to Tyler Robinson referenced niche memes and video game culture that have been mistakenly labeled as leftist political messages. And while white supremacist Nick Fuentes—who dined with Trump and rapper Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago in 2022—encouraged his followers (known as “groypers”) to troll Kirk at his public events for not being sufficiently right-wing enough in what was known as the “Groyper Wars” of 2019-2020, there are currently no proven links between Robinson and Fuentes. Shortly after Kirk’s murder, Fuentes posted a video saying that he did not condone violence and that he would “disown” any of his followers who carried out violent acts.
While one of the rounds had “Bella Ciao” written on it, and while “Bella Ciao” is an anti-fascist anthem from Italian partisans who opposed Benito Mussolini during World War II, it’s also a song prominently featured in a scene in the first-person shooter game Far Cry 6, and is on a “Groyper Wars” Spotify playlist. Another bullet with “hey, fascist, catch” and several arrows is apparently a reference to the game Helldivers 2, and a command a user can type in to execute an overpowered attack. While the alleged shooter’s parents were both Trump supporters and his grandmother said she couldn’t think of a single Democrat in the entire family, Robinson himself was registered as non-partisan and didn’t appear to have voted in any recent elections.
Despite the lack of any concrete links between Robinson and the political left, Trump has nonetheless overtly tried to lay blame for Kirk’s murder at the feet of his ideological opponents. In a four-minute video address posted to his Truth Social platform, Trump said he planned to crack down on “radical left political violence” along with any organizations that supported it. While he named several instances of violence against right-wing figures—like the 2017 shooting of Republican lawmakers by a man with a target list of several GOP elected officials — he notably excluded several instances of political violence carried out in the furtherance of right-wing goals. Some recent examples include:
- The August 2025 shooting of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta (which claimed the life of a police officer who confronted the gunman).
- The June 2025 shooting in which former Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman (D) and her husband, Mark were killed. Minnesota state senator John Hoffman (D) and his wife, Yvette, were also shot. The alleged shooter had a “hit list” of 45 officials, all of whom were Democrats.
- The 2023 mass shooting at an Allen, Texas outlet mall, in which a man with neo-Nazi tattoos who wore a “Right Wing Death Squad” patch killed eight people. The shooter openly praised Nazis online and wrote out his violent fantasies in a diary.
- The 2023 mass shooting at an LGBTQ nightclub, in which a man who ran a neo-Nazi website killed five people and injured 17 other people.
- The 2022 mass shooting at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York in which a white supremacist killed 10 people over his belief in the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory.
- The 2019 mass shooting at an El Paso, Texas Walmart in which a man angry about the “Hispanic invasion of Texas” killed 23 people and injured 22 more at a Walmart.
- The January 6, 2021 siege of the US Capitol in which four Trump supporters died and several law enforcement officers died in the ensuing days and weeks. Roughly 150 police officers also sustained injuries battling the violent right-wing mob that attempted to stop Congress’ certification of the 2020 election.
Trump has shown no sign of abating in his goal of targeting the political left in the wake of Kirk’s death, despite the lack of any ideological motivation from the alleged shooter. During an interview with Fox & Friends, Trump told one of the co-hosts that he “couldn’t care less” about uniting the country and lowering the national political temperature—and even acknowledged that the statement could “get [him] in trouble.” If Trump is successful, Kirk’s death could very well be used as a pretext used to justify state-sponsored violence against the political left, just as Horst Wessel’s death was in Nazi Germany.
Trump needs both a pretext and a distraction
Prior to Charlie Kirk’s murder, Trump had been threatening to deploy the National Guard to predominantly Democratic cities, under the guise that he was doing so to combat crime. This is despite FBI statistics showing that violent crime was at a 50-year low in 2024 and the national murder rate saw the largest year-over-year decline between 2022 and 2023 in two decades.
Trump in particular wanted to send the National Guard to Chicago, though he said he would prefer it if Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) asked him to do so. This is because a president’s Title 32 authority to call up the guard is dependent on an official request from a state’s governor—and that when deployed, those troops report not to the president, but to the governor. And as Fox News reported in August, the nearly two dozen states where Trump is expected to send the guard this fall all have Republican governors. His recent declaration that he was sending the National Guard to Memphis, Tennessee in spite of opposition from Memphis’ Democratic mayor is due to an official request from Tennessee Governor Bill Lee (R). It marks the first deployment of National Guard troops to the Volunteer State since 1978.
Pritzker said in early September that if Trump indeed sent the National Guard to Chicago against his will, he would respond immediately by taking the administration to court. And the two-term Democratic governor notably warned Chicagoans that Trump had a “nefarious plan” to “cause mayhem” in Illinois with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents conducting raids, and was itching for a confrontation with local residents that would justify deploying the military.
Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to Los Angeles, California was ruled illegal by a federal judge, who found that the administration was in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878. That law prevents the US military from being used as a domestic law enforcement entity, and US District Judge Charles Breyer accused the administration of “creating a national police force with the president as its chief.”
Aside from his Title 32 authority and use of ICE agents, Trump may also be hoping for a reason to invoke the Insurrection Act, which Syracuse University law professor emeritus William Banks referred to as a “big heavy gun.”
“It was intended to be utilized, if at all, when all hell has broken loose,” Banks told Democracy Docket in September. “It’s for extreme circumstances.”
The Insurrection Act allows the president to call up “the militia of any state” and American “armed forces” if “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion against the authority of the United States, make it impracticable to enforce the laws of the United States in any State by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” It further allows the president to use those forces by any means he deems fit to “suppress the rebellion.” It hasn’t been invoked since 1992, when Los Angeles was consumed by riots in the wake of the beating of Rodney King at the hands of police. Should there be a violent confrontation between ICE agents and protesters, for example, Trump could argue that invoking the act and deploying the military to city streets was necessary to “enforce the laws of the United States.”
Trump may also be itching for a crackdown on the left not just to quell dissent, but to also distract the media from its focus on the president’s friendship with convicted child predator Jeffrey Epstein. Just prior to House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) sending lawmakers home for a month for an early August recess, Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky) announced his plan to bypass Johnson with a discharge petition that would compel the Department of Justice (DOJ) to release all remaining evidence pertaining to Epstein.
Currently, Massie’s discharge petition needs just one more signature to reach the 218 necessary to trigger a vote on the House floor. There are four Republicans including Massie who have signed it, with Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-Colorado), Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia) and Nancy Mace (R-South Carolina) adding their names. The final signature will likely come after a September 23 special election, in which the safe Democratic seat that had belonged to the late Rep. Raul Grijalva (D-Arizona) will be filled.
The New York Times reported that there are an estimated 100,000 pages of unreleased Epstein-related documents. And according to ABC News, the FBI’s index of the unreleased Epstein files includes potentially damning material including “40 computers and electronic devices, 26 storage drives, more than 70 CDs and six recording devices,” which amount to more than 300 gigabytes of data. There is also a logbook of visitors to Epstein’s “Little Saint James” private island compound, and even a “document with names,” which could be the rumored “client list” that Attorney General Pam Bondi has said does not exist.
Before Kirk was shot, the news cycle had been consumed with revelations pertaining to Trump and Epstein. Bloomberg combed through more than 18,000 emails from Epstein’s personal Yahoo account, several of which mentioned Trump (though not in a criminal context). The Wall Street Journal also released the lewd birthday message Trump purportedly sent Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. Trump has maintained that the signature on the drawing—which is in the shape of a nude woman—isn’t his, but several letters Trump sent to multiple recipients around that same time period show the signature on the card is nearly identical to the one seen on the letters.
Given the intensity of the media’s focus on Trump’s close friendship with perhaps America’s most notorious serial pedophile, a high-profile murder of a divisive political figure serves as a particularly significant and welcome distraction for the administration. The media’s pivot to covering Charlie Kirk’s murder and the resulting manhunt created an opportunity for Trump to set his sights on the political left as a convenient scapegoat. And given the president’s rhetoric, this will likely intensify despite the alleged shooter being what one Bluesky user described as “demographically uncooperative.”
In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, the challenge for the left lies not only in pushing ourselves to stand on being compassionate and empathetic—even for someone who openly eschewed empathy and even rationalized gun violence one week after the Nashville, Tennessee school shooting—but in not taking the bait if and when the administration attempts to provoke a violent confrontation to justify a further crackdown. The best way to respond to the regime’s threats is with deliberate and even militant nonviolence. Americans can powerfully demonstrate by peacefully gathering in large numbers that the people are sovereign, that we remain unafraid to express our Constitutional rights, and that we will outlast this administration.
Organizers of the massively successful “No Kings” protest in June—which brought out an estimated five million people across roughly 2,100 cities and towns across the U.S.—have announced a nationwide day of action against authoritarianism on Oct. 18.
“When Mad King George occupied American cities in 1775, Americans said No Kings,” Indivisible co-executive director Ezra Levin stated. “When Mad King Trump occupies American cities in 2025, we again say No Kings!”
Click here to find a No Kings event near you.
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