“Last Marxist” Chris Cutrone Talks Charlie Kirk, Campus Protests, and Mahmoud Khalil
A conversation with one of the Left's leading free speech thinkers about the state of open discourse at Columbia
Last month, at a Japanese eatery on Chicago’s Michigan Avenue, I sat with Chris Cutrone. A professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and chief pedagogue of the Platypus Affiliated Society, he has been branded by The Atlantic’s run-of-the-mill Left liberal, Jonathan Chait, as a “horseshoe theory Marxist.”
In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the Trump administration’s increasing hostility to certain speech, and two years of chaos at Columbia, I wanted to get this outspoken and independent-minded intellectual’s perspective.
While the Trump administration is now commonly perceived as being anti-free speech, Democrats are hardly seen as its genuine defenders either. It turns out that engaging in lawfare, censoring YouTube content, and kicking people off Twitter set a terrible precedent for a now-emboldened “vicious just like they are” White House.
Thus, my question for Cutrone—lambasted by some as a “Left-Trumpist” among the ranks of Slavoj Žižek (the Slovenian philosopher who has engaged in thought crimes such as writing for Compact and appearing at an UnHerd live event)—was simple. What is the free speech environment like in academia, and where does the capital-L Left find itself in relation to open discourse?
When The Left Attacks The Right
Our conversation began with the tragic murder of Charlie Kirk, which had occurred the week before our meeting. A vocal group of Columbia students either celebrated or brushed aside Kirk’s assassination, a subject myself and Shoshana Aufzien have documented in these pages.
The assassin’s bullets were engraved with anti-Right slogans such as “hey fascist, catch” and “bella ciao.” The centrist think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, has found that for the first time in 30 years, attacks from the far Left outnumber those from the far Right. Though the Trump administration is now vowing to “crush radical Left violence,” multiple progressives continue to excuse Kirk’s death. Among them a Leftist gun club at Georgetown, which posted flyers reading, “Hey, Fascist! Catch!,” promoting themselves as “the only political group that celebrates when Nazis die.”
Thus, it came as no grand surprise when Cutrone began by describing the response among students at SAIC to Kirk’s assassination as “cold.” “Maybe that’s tinged with a kind of fearfulness,” the professor explained, due to the inevitability of the Trump administration’s reaction. What struck him in particular was that among the “broad progressive Democrat, liberal Left, [there] is the denial that it was an anti-Right politically motivated assassination. The Left likes to think of itself as not violent, and likes to think the Right is the violent side.”
According to Cutrone, when the Left assaults the Right, “this doesn’t compute. So it makes sense, why in the popular culture, people would have said, ‘Oh, this is some intra-MAGA violence.’”
The IHRA Definition: Why It’s Problematic And How We Got It
On the subject of Columbia, Cutrone called out “the active conflation of anti-Zionism and antisemitism” in the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA)’s working definition of antisemitism. The IHRA definition states that “accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel,” “claiming that the existence of a State of Israel is a racist endeavor,” and “drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis” are by virtue antisemitic.
This definition has been adopted by the University as a result of its settlement agreement with the federal government, which Cutrone believes is “clearly problematic.” He is joined by the University’s Knight First Amendment Institute, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), and a widely-circulated op-ed in the Columbia Daily Spectator, written by two Jewish sociology professors, who critique the definition as “anti-intellectual.”
Rashid Khalidi, the famous Palestinian-American historian, withdrew his course this semester over Columbia’s adoption of the IHRA definition. Perhaps this was a politically motivated decision on Khalidi’s part, in opposition to the American regime he despises and an institution he once chastised as “Vichy on the Hudson.” Even so, his departure signals a troubling trend for academic diversity—the ability for Columbia students to grapple with what may be deeply uncomfortable perspectives in the classroom.
However, Cutrone also believes that the Trump administration has bigger plans: by alleging that campuses were “creating an unsafe space for Jewish students, they’re using the same weapon against the Democrats and the quote-unquote ‘Left’ that the ‘Left’ would use.” In doing so, Cutrone agreed with me that they were employing the “machinery of civil rights” against the same people who perpetrated cancel culture, safe space, and DEI antics against the Right.
That doesn’t make the IHRA definition correct, or Zionism a protected class. But it is a compelling explanation.
Are Protesters Flirting With Islamism?
On the broader point of Israel-Palestine, Cutrone held that “Jewish people in the United States, and Jewish students on campus, might feel some special obligation to have a position on Israel,” amplified by how “Jewish students were perhaps heckled, and not necessarily just for demonstrating in a pro-Israel way, but maybe more by default” based on their religion and ethnicity.
“It might be an intra-Jewish thing where there’s a polarized demand that, ‘you can’t stay neutral in this situation.’” Cutrone continued, “I’m very familiar with the old, ‘not in my name,’ idea. In other words, the Jewish criticism of Israel that is: ‘Israel is not representing me, [not] representing my Jewish identity.’” Columbia, as it happens, has at least a few prominent “not in my name” Jewish intellectuals. Jeffrey Sachs and Yinon Cohen the most prominent among them.
In his mind, as a Leftist, “the question is the efficacy of these [pro-Palestinian] protests, meaning, what do these protests actually accomplish? And I am concerned with the fact that they have very little effect on policy, but do have a [negative] effect on the culture on campus.” I suppose that few Columbians, whether clad in a keffiyeh or a kippah, would disagree. Does anyone truly enjoy the incessant hurling of ad hominems on X?
On the grounds of SAIC, Cutrone believed that the “literature distributed on campus in support of the encampment was Hamas literature.” He spoke of how one of the flyers he picked up “didn’t talk about the number of Palestinians killed. It talked about the number of Palestinians martyred.” Cutrone found it “remarkable,” and not in the positive sense, that students, “in denouncing what’s going on in the Gaza War, adopt the language of Islamism.”
Here, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) previously circulated pamphlets straight out of the Hamas Media Office. The irony being that supposedly Leftist protestors embrace the rhetoric of a hard Right terroristic group, even while denouncing with equal fervor the comparatively moderate Right-wing government in Washington.
Mahmoud Khalil: CUAD’s Sacrificial Lamb
“Let me be clear, I think people should have a right to distribute Hamas literature. But I also think, in the case of Mahmoud Khalil, that he’s under conditional status in the United States as an immigrant,” the professor continued. “He is subject to limitations of his speech. So my criticism has to do with: why would you put an immigrant on tenuous status as your spokesperson? In other words, [the representative] should just be an American citizen, a white student, whatever. So that you’re not setting up a martyr” and “that you’re not setting up a sacrificial victim, because I’m not sure that he set out to be. I’m not sure he wanted to be abused in this way.”
Currently, Khalil is in an ongoing legal battle with the Trump administration over his immigration status. Despite missing the birth of his first child, Khalil nonetheless seems well-adjusted to his status as CUAD’s sacrificial lamb. In June, after landing into Newark from his detention in Louisiana, he decided to address the issue of immigration more broadly than mere ideological crackdowns: “Whether you are a citizen, an immigrant, anyone in this land, you’re not illegal.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who represents neither Newark nor Morningside Heights, was by his side at the airport. Later that summer, Khalil appeared on stage with Zohran Mamdani.
Why Not Trump?
In September 2016, Cutrone wrote, “Why not Trump? For which the only answer is: To preserve the status quo. Not against ‘worse’—that might be beyond any U.S. President’s control anyway—but simply for things as they already are. We should not accept that.” In November 2024, he declared that he wanted Kamala Harris to win to “get a break from the madness.” However, he finished saying, “the promise of an end to the drama might be enough to elect Kamala. I want it to be true. But it is a lie.”
It is clear that Cutrone appreciates Trump being a “wrecking ball” to the system. He holds a more sober, long-term, and open-minded view on the Right than most Democrats. In January, he argued that since “America is revolutionary, or it is nothing,” it is justifiable to expand our frontiers to Canada and Greenland, as Trump aspired at the time.
At the same time, one would be deeply mistaken to brush Cutrone aside as a “Republican,” or even a “MAGA communist.” If anything, Cutrone would likely argue that he holds some of his more sympathetic views on MAGA because of his Leftism, not in spite of it. And a crucial point: a Marxist can hold views on capitalist politics without being explicitly political.
Indeed, there are also many Left cases to be made for Trump, most prominently articulated by actual Trump supporters like Batya Ungar-Sargon—a topic for another time. You can disagree with the logic of Left-Trumpism, and Ungar-Sargon definitely does not speak for the entire Left; neither does Cutrone. You can disagree with these two individuals as well. But one must admit that there is at least some logic behind Left-Trumpism, especially as an ardently neoliberal, status quo-adoring Democratic Party has killed any hope for a true, revolutionary Left. En bref, I simply ask, where did you expect them to go?
An End To The Drama?
While discussing this topic with another Sundial writer around the same time that I interviewed Cutrone, we observed something rather interesting. Though we are both economically and socially on the Left, we are perceived on this campus—and maybe even in America overall—as conservative. Such is the world in 2025: a muddied deconstruction of all regular political categories. Evidently, it is the world inside our ivory tower in Morningside Heights. At least we are not being called “neo-fascists” like Cutrone. Well, to my knowledge, not yet.
Cutrone finished by remarking that “the Left should have more principled free speech position,” especially as both parties are now openly attacking speech they don’t take kindly to. If the drama is to ever end, it might serve us well—supposed Ivy League “intellectuals”—to engage intellectually rather than rely on empty “woke” and “anti-woke” rhetoric. Until then, “free speech and the Left” is, lamentably, nothing other than a glaring contradiction.
Mr. Mohammadi is a sophomore at Columbia College majoring in American studies. He is a staff editor for Sundial.
The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Sundial editorial board as a whole or any other members of the staff.
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