“The proper way to respond” to white supremacist fascism “is to have a backbone,” says Tariq Khan, a historian and lecturer at Yale University, in an interview on September 17, a week after the assassination of Turning Point USA (TPUSA) founder Charlie Kirk.
As the author of The Republic Shall Be Kept Clean: How Settler Colonial Violence Shaped Antileft Repression, Khan is more than qualified to speak on the matter.
But he is also personally qualified, having been on the receiving end of a racist and Islamophobic campaign of harassment and threats aimed at him and his family by members of Kirk’s organization.
Khan’s life was turned upside down during President Donald Trump’s first term in late 2017 when TPUSA members attended a political speech he gave at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and heckled him. According to Khan, who at the time was a PhD student in history, “one of them made some threats against my children, which I’m like, why do they even know I have children?”
A verbal altercation followed, which TPUSA’s members twisted into a headline that Khan remembers being something to the effect of “Antifa Professor Assaults Conservative Students.”
Every single word in that headline was false—including “conservative.” TPUSA went on to prove that its real agenda was not merely conservatism but authoritarian extremism and the promotion of a dangerous white supremacist narrative built on dehumanizing people of color, immigrants, women, and LGBTGQ people, especially transgender people—anyone other than straight white men.
“Truth didn’t matter to Turning Point USA,” says Khan. “People in power, including President Donald Trump, were retweeting their false story about me. And the result was I was just being bombarded with threats, harassments.”
TPUSA members showed up to his wife’s office, drove past his house, threatened his children, and urged his history department to revoke his professorship—again, Khan was a PhD student, not a professor.
“Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is behind the scenes, encouraging this the entire time. The right wing is rewarding them for this. So, they’re using these kinds of incidents to build their careers,” says Khan.
It was based on such campaigns of intimidation that Kirk made his name as a GOP political strategist—and made millions of dollars. According to Associated Press, “top Turning Point officials collected pricey salaries, enjoyed lavish perks and steered at least $15.2 million to companies that they, their friends and associates are affiliated with.”
“People like Charlie Kirk really poisoned political discourse in this country,” says Khan, because “they were using these attacks on people like me and hundreds of others to build their careers to get hired in Republican politics.”
Yet, so-called liberal, New York Times columnist Ezra Klein pronounced that Kirk was “practicing politics the right way,” in an op-ed soon after his assassination. And, California Governor Gavin Newsom decided that “we should all feel a deep sense of grief and outrage” at Kirk’s killing and that “the best way to honor Charlie’s memory is to continue his work.”
“The idea that he was just somebody who wanted to debate is simply false,” says Khan. The only reason the historian was able to withstand many months of TPUSA’s traumatic harassment was because his history department refused to give in to the relentless pressure campaign to distance itself from Khan. Additionally, he garnered a huge outpouring of community support and the unequivocal backing of his labor union, the Graduate Employees’ Organization. And academics from all over the world signed petitions in support of Khan.
Many others targeted by Kirk and TPUSA on their ominous and Orwellian “Professor Watchlist” who didn’t have such support simply lost jobs, livelihoods, and peace of mind. Today, journalists and academics from MSNBC’s Matthew Dowd to Washington Post’s Karen Attiah are being fired for failing to adequately bow down at the altar of Kirk’s faux martyrdom. Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel was abruptly dropped by his network for a sober analysis of Kirk’s legacy that the media conglomeration Nexstar deemed “offensive and insensitive.”
Liberals like Klein and Newsom have long fallen prey to the idea that treating fascists with respect is the way to win them over. There is no winning over a person or a movement whose ideals are rooted in dehumanization. On the contrary, it is a dangerous validation of an ideal that has no place in a democracy.
Khan says, “Your liberal centrist type people, they want to show that, ‘Hey, we’re reasonable. We can come to a compromise. If we show you that we’re going to be reasonable and compromise, on your end, you’ll do the same.’”
But “that doesn’t happen with fascists,” he concludes. “At heart, they’re bullies. And any small concession to a bully only emboldens them more.”
Trump’s recent announcement that he would be designating “antifa” a “terrorist organization” is a perfect illustration of such emboldened responses in the wake of liberal appeasement. Never mind that antifa is an umbrella term for “anti-fascist,” and hardly an organization—just as facts don’t matter to TPUSA, they don’t matter to Trump.
“The way that we deal with fascists is no tolerance,” says Khan. “Don’t give them any concessions whatsoever. And absolutely don’t capitulate to any of their demands. Don’t treat any of their demands as reasonable. Simply don’t even give them the dignity of a debate.”
This is sometimes a difficult point for white liberals and especially free speech absolutists to accept. In a powerful analysis of Kirk’s legacy, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates delved deeper into the late influencer’s virulent anti-Black racism, antisemitism (not pro-Palestinian sentiment, but the real sort that denigrates Jewish people), and misogyny.
Coates drew a line between the rhetoric of enslavers and those prominent thinkers who fell over themselves to legitimize ideas rooted in the dehumanization of Black people. “In the late 19th century and much of the 20th, this country’s most storied intellectuals transfigured hate-mongers into heroes and ignored their words—just as, right now, some are ignoring Kirk’s,” wrote Coates.
Liberals who are free speech absolutists worry more about curbing the freedom of fascists to spread their violent bigotry than about the very real impact of that bigotry on the lives of people like Khan—and more broadly, speaking for vulnerable communities who live under the threat of racist, anti-immigrant, transphobic violence from those whom Kirk radicalized.
“We’ve debated fascism already,” says Khan. “It’s called the horrors of the 20th century. They’ve already lost that debate, and yet they’re still pushing and pushing and pushing. And we have to say, you know what? That time is over, no more tolerance for this kind of maliciousness.”
Failing to curb white supremacist fascism is what has given rise to today’s sorry state of affairs. But there is an easy litmus test for what ought to be debated—let’s debate anything other than the dehumanization of people. The right of all human beings to exist and live with dignity ought never to be up for discussion; even agreeing to consider it as a valid question is a win for fascism.
This article was produced by Economy for All, a project of the Independent Media Institute.
Sonali Kolhatkar is an award-winning multimedia journalist. She is the founder, host, and executive producer of “Rising Up With Sonali,” a weekly television and radio show that airs on Free Speech TV and Pacifica stations. Her most recent book is Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (City Lights Books, 2023). She is a writing fellow for the Economy for All project at the Independent Media Institute and the racial justice and civil liberties editor at Yes! Magazine. She serves as the co-director of the nonprofit solidarity organization the Afghan Women’s Mission and is a co-author of Bleeding Afghanistan. She also sits on the board of directors of Justice Action Center, an immigrant rights organization.
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