Neo-Marxism and the Dangerous Legitimisation of Political Violence, By Brian Simpson
The tragic assassinations of Charlie Kirk and Iryna Zarutska, though carried out with different weapons, a gun in one case, a knife in the other, share a chilling commonality: both killers believed their violence was righteous. This belief didn't emerge in a vacuum. It's the bitter fruit of a neo-Marxist ideology that has seeped into our schools and culture, casting political violence as a noble tool for "justice." From Karl Marx's own words to the modern classroom, this framework has long justified bloodshed as a means to an end, and it's time we confront its toxic influence head-on.
The Marxist Roots of Political ViolenceKarl Marx didn't mince words. In The Communist Manifesto, he declared revolution not just inevitable but necessary, a holy war of the "oppressed" against the "oppressors." Violence wasn't a bug in his system, it was the feature, the engine of history that would smash capitalism and usher in a communist utopia. Fast-forward to the 20th century, and neo-Marxists like Herbert Marcuse refined this script. In his 1965 essay Repressive Tolerance, Marcuse argued that "tolerance" itself was a tool of oppression, propping up unjust systems. Silencing the powerful, he suggested, was a moral imperative. He stopped short of explicitly calling for murder, but the leap from silencing to slaying is a short one when you've already framed your opponent as evil incarnate.
Today's identity politics is Marcuse's playbook on steroids. The binary of oppressor versus oppressed has been stretched to cover every facet of life, race, gender, class, even parenting. Anyone can be labelled an oppressor, and once they are, the moral maths is simple: their defeat is justice. Rage becomes a badge of honour. Violence becomes a sacrament. This is the logic that led Charlie Kirk's assassin to etch "Hey fascist! Catch!" on bullet casings, and it's the same logic that convinced Iryna Zarutska's killer that a knife could carve out righteousness. When you're taught that your enemy isn't a fellow citizen but a cosmic villain, murder starts to feel like heroism.
Schools as Incubators of DivisionThe real tragedy is where this ideology has taken root: our schools. Once, education aimed to cultivate virtue, drawing on classical ideals to teach young people to love truth and temper their passions. Now, too many classrooms peddle a seductive shortcut: neo-Marxist class analysis. It's easy to teach, oppressors bad, oppressed good, and it's even easier to sell. Students are handed a lens that makes them feel like they've cracked the code to the universe. Teachers become conspiratorial allies, whispering, "We see the world for what it is, unlike those blind fools out there." It's a dynamic that's hard to resist, especially for young minds craving purpose.
But the cost is catastrophic. This "us versus them" mentality turns classmates, neighbours, and even parents into enemies. The classroom becomes a crucible for division, where students learn to see disagreement as oppression and opposition as evil. When a teacher frames the world as a battleground of power dynamics, it's no surprise that some students graduate ready to fight, literally. The assassin who gunned down Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University, or the one who stabbed Iryna Zarutska, didn't need to read Marcuse to absorb his ideas. They were likely steeped in a diluted version of them, served up under the guise of "equity" or "critical thinking" in a high school social studies class. Zarutska's killer said that he had "got the white girl," and he could just as easily have been in a Critical Race theory class, and certainly took this neo-Marxism to its "logical" conclusion.
We've seen this before. In Cyprus, generations were taught to view their neighbours as existential threats, igniting decades of bloodshed. The same seeds are being sown in our schools today, and the harvest is grim. When young people are trained to see political opponents as oppressors, violence doesn't just become acceptable, it becomes praiseworthy. A 22-year-old like Tyler Robinson, Kirk's killer, doesn't etch taunts on bullets because he's bored. He does it because he's been taught that his target is the embodiment of injustice.
Breaking neo-MarxismThe crisis isn't about the tools of violence, knives, guns, or otherwise. It's about the ideas that wield them. Both Kirk and Zarutska were targeted not for what they did, but for what they represented in the minds of their killers. Neo-Marxism's oppressor-oppressed framework provides a ready-made justification for such acts, turning political disagreement into a moral crusade. And it's not just fringe radicals chanting this gospel, it's embedded in curriculums, in "diversity" workshops, in the way history and literature are taught at "our" universities.
To end this cycle, we must uproot the ideology that fuels it. Education should return to its classical roots, teaching students to pursue truth and virtue, not to pick sides in an endless class war. We need to train young people to see their opponents as fellow citizens with shared humanity, not as avatars of systemic evil. Courage should be directed toward real threats, tyranny, injustice, chaos, not against neighbours who vote differently.
English-speaking cultures have a proud history of channelling violence toward noble ends, from Shakespeare's warrior kings to Churchill's defiant stand against fascism. But that discipline comes from a commitment to truth and virtue, not from a simplistic script that paints half the world as villains. Neo-Marxism, with its seductive promise of moral clarity through violence, has no place in our schools or our society. For the sake of Charlie Kirk, Iryna Zarutska, and countless others, it's time to teach a better way, one that builds up our neighbours, not destroys them.
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