Charlie Kirk is dead, tragically and horrifically shot in front of hundreds of students, and the conservative movement has scented opportunity in the blood. Much like the TikToker present at the assassination whose instant reaction was to whip out his phone and start recording some short-form video slop—and who apparently stole some merch from the table where Kirk had been sitting—Kirk’s corpse wasn’t even cold before the right started frantically scrambling around for the most cynical possible way his death could be exploited and monetized.
Right-wing influencers have produced thousands of posts and videos demanding that anyone who speaks ill of Kirk should have their personal information published and be fired. Dozens of people from all walks of life, including airline employees, doctors, and college professors, have been fired for alleged disrespect of Saint Kirk, blessed be his name. That includes simply repeating some of the things he said, in context, which apparently got Karen Attiah canned from The Washington Post.
The Trump regime, meanwhile, is plotting state persecution. Vice President Vance took over Kirk’s live show for two hours, during which he said: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out—and, hell, call their employer.” Vance also used an article in The Nation to make a bank-shot attack on philanthropic groups like Open Society and the Ford Foundation, in an attempt to cut off funds for progressive organizations. Trump’s grand vizier Stephen Miller, who joined Vance on the show, was more menacing. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, homeland security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks and make America safe again for the American people,” he said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi added her own threats. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society,” she said in an interview. “We will absolutely target you, go after you if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” (She later unconvincingly attempted to walk that back, claiming she was only talking about specific death threats.)
In short, it’s an all-out attack on free speech rights in this country.
Targeting people with legal persecution because they were callous or rude about a dead person is a flagrant violation of the plain reading of the First Amendment.
American First Amendment rights are unique in the world. Both the Constitution and Supreme Court decisions have established that Americans have extremely wide legal latitude to say or publish just about whatever they want, short of direct incitement to violence, libel, or defamation. And compared to European countries, libel and defamation suits are very difficult to win, especially against public figures.
The freedom of speech very much includes the right to criticize someone who has died—like when Jimmy Carter passed away, and Ben Shapiro said he was “the world’s worst ex-president, a horrifyingly bad ex-president who did quite evil things with his ex-presidency … he was a vindictive, not particularly nice human being”—or even celebrate their deaths. Rush Limbaugh used to gleefully read aloud the names of people who had died of AIDS on his radio show, set to Dionne Warwick’s song “I’ll Never Love This Way Again.”
Those kinds of personal freedoms mostly don’t apply in private workplaces; Americans as a rule have pitifully few labor rights (though some victims, like Attiah, arguably would be able to sue on civil rights grounds). Government employees are more protected.
But free speech rights absolutely do apply to Bondi and Miller’s proposed Great Purge. Targeting people with legal persecution because they were callous or rude about a dead person is a flagrant violation of the plain reading of the First Amendment, as well as about a dozen Supreme Court decisions. As the Court held in Police Dept. of City of Chicago v. Mosley, “To permit the continued building of our politics and culture, and to assure self-fulfillment for each individual, our people are guaranteed the right to express any thought, free from government censorship. The essence of this forbidden censorship is content control.”
Incidentally, this right-wing cancellation frenzy is also an unironic insult to Kirk’s actual legacy. He was not the saintly, compassionate figure portrayed by Vance and Bondi. He was a loud, obnoxious demagogue who gloried in being deliberately offensive and insulting. To pick a few examples out of hundreds—Media Matters’ Kirk archive runs to 58 pages, and that only goes back to early 2020—he mounted a full-scale propaganda campaign against Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Act; said that children should watch televised executions; called repeatedly for military occupation of American cities; said that New York Attorney General Tish James is among a group of “savages” who “needs to go to jail”; that Islam will get the “last laugh” over 9/11 if Zohran Mamdani is elected as New York City mayor; that “Islam is not compatible with western civilization”; and that “some amazing patriot” should post bail for the man who cracked Paul Pelosi’s skull with a hammer.
And after George Floyd was murdered by police in Minneapolis, Kirk gave a speech calling him a “scumbag” and repeating the lie that Floyd had really died of a fentanyl overdose. Kirk lived as he died, trolling literally to his last breath, shot as he made a hyper-tendentious argument that trans people are disproportionately to blame for mass shootings. To quote the man himself: “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.”
A frank discussion of Kirk’s own words doesn’t sanction his murder in any way. And he was fully allowed to make his bilious remarks. But conservatives are engaged in a project to define free speech down solely to agreement with them. They had a game plan to defund their opposition and take away their power, and Kirk’s death is serving a useful function to implement that prearranged plan. Charlie Kirk and what happened to him is irrelevant to this project except as a symbol. Conservative influencers would burn his body in a trash bin if by doing so they could get one more viral video or deport one more immigrant.
In the face of this assault on our rights and institutions, it is critical to remember that not only have the vast majority of instances of political violence since 9/11 been carried out by right-wing extremists, but Donald Trump and the Republican Party planned and carried out the most extreme instance of political violence since the Civil War, namely the sacking of the Capitol during the attempted putsch on January 6th. Charlie Kirk directly participated in that conspiracy against the American republic. This is a movement of people who will take your rights while crying hysterically that they’re being oppressed.