Across the country, ordinary Americans are being fired for expressing their opinions about Charlie Kirk’s killing. Sometimes, those opinions are despicable — like support for his assassination. But in other cases they are anodyne, like expressing distaste for some of Kirk’s offensive statements in life.
Prominent right-wing voices, like Laura Loomer and the social media account Libs of TikTok, are gleefully identifying more targets — including police officers, high school teachers, and nurses. An anonymous website, called the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation, is building a blacklist based on more than 60,000 reports of allegedly unacceptable reactions to the killing.
Guest-hosting Kirk’s radio show on Monday, Vice President JD Vance encouraged people to “call their employers” when they see someone celebrating Kirk’s killing. Chillingly, both he and guest Stephen Miller vowed a federal crackdown on left-wing organizations that they claimed, without an iota of evidence, bore some responsibility for Kirk’s death.
“The last message that Charlie sent me was…that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country. And I will write those words on my heart and I will carry them out,” Miller said. “With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have to the DOJ, DHS, and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle, and destroy these networks. It will happen and we will do it in Charlie's name."
Per the Wall Street Journal, some of the policies under consideration — for deployment “as soon as this week” — include stripping left-wing organizations’ tax-exempt status and weaponizing anti-corruption laws against them. Already, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is claiming to be screening visa applications based on social media statements about Kirk. Attorney General Pam Bondi has threatened (unconstitutionally) to prosecute anyone engaging in “hate speech” relating to Kirk’s death — and to punish employers if they fail to fire their staff members who have impugned his memory.
“Employers, you have to have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things. And they shouldn’t be working with you,” she said on Fox News. “If you wanna go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”
Asked by a reporter on Tuesday about Bondi’s “hate speech” comments, President Donald Trump threatened to prosecute the press. “We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart,” he said. Indeed, hours before those comments, Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times — preposterously claiming the paper’s critical coverage constituted a form of defamation.
When I warned of a coming democratic crisis on the day of Kirk’s killing, this is exactly what I had in mind. Though the American right had spent years bemoaning “cancel culture” and the death of free speech, it was clear that the Trump administration and the aligned MAGA movement were fully comfortable with wielding political power against its opponents — in using their control over the state to repress. Kirk’s death has turned this impulse up to 11.
The darkest and most illiberal elements of the right are working to develop a broad-based campaign for repressing the political opposition. It’s a moment very much akin to the Red Scares of the 20th century, in that allegations of dangerous radical influence are fueling a wider assault on free expression. This time, it’s taking place amid the heightened emotions after a tragic killing, employing the vast monitoring capabilities created by social media, and explicitly treating a broad swath of the American left (rather than a communist fringe) as the source of the extremist threat.
This is, in short, a defining moment for American democracy: a test of whether its capacities to protect core democratic freedoms have atrophied past the point of effective resistance.
All-American repression
I’ve written extensively about the intellectual right’s “postliberal” turn: its growing belief that the very idea of a society centering the protection of individual liberties is a mistake, and that the state should serve as an authoritative guide forcing its citizens to embrace a conservative way of life.
What we are seeing, post-Kirk, is this doctrine being applied to the domain of free speech.
“We had an open marketplace of ideas; the Left shot it up,” writes Michael Knowles, a prominent postliberal pundit at the Daily Wire. “We must stigmatize certain evil ideas and behaviors, and we must ostracize people who insist upon them. More practically, this means that people who persist in such disorder should lose their social standing. In certain cases, they should lose their jobs. There must be consequences.”
In its attempt to impose such “consequences,” the Trump administration and its allies are borrowing — at times consciously — from multiple different episodes of repression in American history.
The most important reference points are, as I suggested, the two Red Scares: the twinned panics, after each world war, that the United States was being infiltrated by communists. In both cases, the state targeted political dissidents for repression — most famously in the 1919 and 1920 “Palmer Raids,” mass arrests of alleged communists, and Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
The Red Scares both had a minimal grounding in truth, in the sense that there were communist agitators and spies in the United States. But the scope of the problem was wildly inflated to justify a state-sponsored crackdown on the free speech rights of those whom the people in power disliked.
Today, the allegedly pro-violence “radical left” is playing the role of the communists. There is, indeed, such a radical left. But once again, the scope of the problem is being radically overstated — such people are not a meaningful presence in the Democratic Party or major liberal NGOs — in order to justify the broader attack not just on a radical political fringe, but on the White House’s opposition writ large. There is a reason why this crackdown is being led by people like Laura Loomer, an informal adviser to the administration and far-right influencer who recently described one of her political goals as “make McCarthy great again.”
The Red Scares thus provide the basic structure of what’s happening: exaggerate a radical threat to justify state repression. But some of the more specific tactics borrow from more recent episodes.
The first is the war on terror. During that period, an immediate horror — the 9/11 attacks — created a broad national expectation that any dissent from the presidential administration’s dominant line would constitute a kind of offense against the honored dead. One might recall the wave of hatred directed at the Dixie Chicks after the country artists expressed shame over the Iraq War, or the persecution and ultimate firing of University of Colorado professor Ward Churchill after his (admittedly ghoulish) description of 9/11 as chickens coming home to roost.
The key to this period, the glue binding the censorial consensus, was a shared belief among the American elite that 9/11 was an attack on America writ large — and that, in its wake, you were (in President George W. Bush’s terms) either with us or against us as a collective. The current right is trying to exploit the horror of Kirk’s killing in the same way, to create a climate of enforced consensus out of the immediate (and correct) emotional horror at the evil of his killing.
Not cancel culture, but something worse
The second antecedent to this moment is the much-discussed “cancel culture” of the past 10 years. It is not that the right is “borrowing” a left-wing desire to censor, but rather, that it is adapting the modern technology of cancellation. Social media turns anyone into a potential microcelebrity: Statements once preserved for friends and family members are now broadcast to the world, where outrage merchants can weaponize those statements for the all-important currency of attention and, ultimately, get their targets fired.
I have long been a skeptic of the impact of “cancel culture” on the American elite, who I think radically overstated their own plight. But the elevation of ordinary citizens into hate objects has always concerned me: Such targeting did not raise tricky conversations about what the moral boundaries of public discourse should be (e.g., platforming Nazis or terrorist apologists), but rather whether private citizens have a right to speak their mind and retain the means to sustain their lives economically.
For all its criticisms of left-wing culture, the right is gleefully deploying the technology of cancellation to try and punish ordinary citizens who hold left-wing political views. The pretext for targeting such people is that they celebrated Kirk’s death, at times, but at others it’s that they merely said they hated his politics or weren’t especially sorry that he was dead. The idea that an elder care worker or police officer — two recent targets of Libs of TikTok — should be fired for any of these views clearly crosses core free speech red lines.
What you have, in short, are the beginnings of a new Red Scare that exploits the emotional fallout of political violence and the technology of modern cancellations to expand its own repressive power. That may sound bad enough, but — if anything — it understates the severity of the problem.
During the second Red Scare, Joe McCarthy was a senator, not the president — and the Republican president, Dwight D. Eisenhower, ultimately helped engineer his downfall. Yet today, the president is Donald Trump — who has fully backed the McCarthyite wing of his administration. Presidential involvement fundamentally changes the game: it puts the full repressive power of the modern US government, most notably federal law enforcement, in the hands of people like Stephen Miller. The immense reach of the post-9/11 security state, now able to monitor people in minute detail on social media, gives them unprecedented capabilities to punish disfavored speech — especially given the administration’s track record of ignoring statutory limits on its power.
And Trump seems to enjoy full support from his party leadership; there is no Eisenhower waiting in the wings. And his ultimate target is not really radical subversives, but the core of the Democratic Party itself.
