David Frost has made a career out of clichés, polishing them up as “historic perspective” and serving them to Telegraph readers as if they were fact. His column on Charlie Kirk’s assassination is no different. He wants us to believe it marks the beginning of a “new Red Terror,” a return of the anarchists and guerrillas of the last century. But what it really shows is projection. Here is a Tory grandee (a man steeped in the apologetics of empire and the cruelties of austerity) trying to pin a culture of political killing on the Left, when the blood runs thickest on the Right. It is an old move, one the British establishment knows by heart: talk darkly of radicals with bombs and barricades, while drawing a discreet curtain over the wars, coups, and crackdowns carried out in the name of order.
The sleight of hand is obvious. Frost raids the annals of European anarchism and the 1970s guerrilla groups to argue that the Left has an innate tendency towards political murder. He drags in Fanon, Mao, Che, even the Shining Path, as if to suggest a single unbroken line between anti-colonial resistance and a lone gunman in Utah. What is erased is the mountain of corpses produced by the dominant class Frost has always served: the carpet-bombing of Vietnam, the torture chambers of Latin America, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the starvation imposed by IMF diktats. That is not “structural violence” in scare quotes, it is structural violence in fact.
Frost’s claim that the Right doesn’t revel in violence is worse than naïve, it is part of the lie. Trump and his lieutenants (Vance and Miller) are banking on amnesia. They need us to forget that mobs once gathered to watch a lynching like it was a Saturday at the flicks, that sheriffs posed for photographs beside broken Black bodies. They need us to forget the truck bomb in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people, the church basements filled with smoke and children’s shoes, the armed men who walked into statehouses grinning for the cameras. They need us to forget January 6th, when gallows were built on the Capitol lawn and chants for Pence’s hanging carried through the crowd. They need us to look away from what their own rallies have become: ritualised menace of “dark passions”, the scapegoating of Muslims and migrants, the promise of violence barely held in check. Call these “exceptions” and you are already speaking their language. The lie is not that violence happened, but that it somehow belongs only to the other side.
Frost’s move is obvious: set up a false equivalence and hope no one notices. He laughs at the Left for talking about “words as violence,” but his own column swings the knife in prose. Lumping together socialists, trade unionists, anti-colonial fighters and making them all look like accomplices to murder. And this before we even know the motives of the alleged killer. The trick is to smear by association. It doesn not matter that most on the Left have already condemned Kirk’s killing; for Frost that will never be enough. The demand is that you go further, that you spit on the history of resistance itself — Algeria, Cuba, South Africa, Ireland, Palestine. Whole struggles are dragged into the dock because one man was shot in Utah. And if you will not play along, if you will not denounce the lot, then you are branded guilty. That is the game: not stopping violence, but shutting down politics that threatens his side’s comfort.
Yet where is Frost’s outrage at state murder? Where is his column on ICE agents snatching people off the streets, forcing migrant children into cages, or on the Israeli bombs that have turned Gaza into rubble, or on the police killings that outnumber any lone assassin a hundredfold? For Frost, violence is only visible when it touches the powerful. Trade unionists gunned down in Colombia do not merit a column. Protesters shot in Iran barely flicker across the news. Refugees drowning in the Channel are immigration statistics. But one right-wing pundit is killed in Utah, and Frost dusts off the Red Brigades.
Frost’s argument is transparent. He insists “all decent people” must exclude the Left from public life unless it performs a ritual of contrition. On its knees, reciting its guilt. This is not civility but a purge. It follows an old authoritarian script: constrict the field of discourse so capitalism (with its wars, displacements and famines) is never placed on trial. The mechanism is familiar. Dissent becomes dangerous, resistance is categorised as extremism, while the structural violence that sustains the order of things is normalised. Authority names it order, respectability names it decency. Name it what you will. History shows clearly enough: the state’s record of terror outstrips anything the dispossessed have mounted.
