I wasn’t planning to write an entire post about the Charlie Kirk assassination. One of the luxuries of running a relatively small-scale independent operation is that we can opt not to cover a story, even a really important one, if we don’t feel that we have something genuinely useful to contribute.
And this is essentially the problem I’ve had with much of the Kirk coverage in left-of-center spaces: It has largely been done by people who are not deeply knowledgeable about his body of work.
To say something meaningful about a media figure, especially one affiliated with a political faction other than your own, you need to do a pretty deep dive. I didn’t do that while Kirk was alive, and I had no inclination to do so after his murder. I dislike the impulse toward hagiography that I saw in some of the coverage, but it’s also important to avoid doing a shallow hit job, like this one in The Nation, that eventually requires a correction.
Besides which, his work is ultimately irrelevant to his death — murder is wrong and there’s not much more to say about it.
As someone who’s been on the wrong side of violent ideation from both the left and the right, I don’t even like to think about this stuff. Considering the vast denominator of “people who post stuff on the internet,” it’s true that very few people engage in the worst conduct. But what’s often more aggravating is the lack of bystander intervention. It’s extremely rare to see anyone chide someone on their side with a bit of “Hey, I also didn’t like that article, but you’re crossing a line here and need to chill out.” Everyone, every day, has the opportunity to nudge the world in either a saner or less sane direction.
And that’s what got me off my ass to write: the decision of top officials in the Trump administration not only to nudge in a less sane direction, but to leverage this awful crime into an assault on America’s First Amendment rights.
Attorney General Pam Bondi did the most ham-fisted version of this, going on Katie Miller’s podcast to claim that there is a hate speech exemption to the First Amendment and that “we will absolutely target you, go after you” if you violate it.
This was so outrageous that she later walked it back somewhat. But it’s telling that Miller, wife of key White House aide Stephen Miller, didn’t immediately question what Bondi was saying or push back.
And in a statement at an entirely separate media appearance that has not been walked back at all, Bondi claimed she would use the civil rights division to prosecute hypothetical businesses that decline to print signs advertising Charlie Kirk vigils.
And while they haven’t been as clumsy as Bondi, figures like Miller, J.D. Vance, Donald Trump, and other leading lights of the administration have been clear that they intend to go as far as they can with a broad crackdown on political dissent.
I think liberals are overly optimistic about declarations that Trump has overreached public opinion on something, and too eager to believe that maximal “fighting back” is the right posture on every move he makes.
But this one really, truly is overreach, and there will be a backlash to Trump’s effort to install a new government-mandated code of MAGA political correctness — if Democrats stand up for core classical liberal values of free speech.
The ambiguity in celebrating
The administration’s key rhetorical move is a classic muddying of the waters between different modes of speech. When you actually map out the landscape of speech, it looks like this:
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