State-Sponsored Cancel Culture After the Kirk Assassination

The opposition needs a values-driven response to Donald Trump’s partisan exploitation of Charlie Kirk’s murder.

As demagogues go, Donald Trump is not especially original. A tragedy occurs. The leader starts pointing fingers and blames the other guy as a pretext for overreach. It’s so formulaic that no TV show with this plot would ever have made it near this past weekend’s Emmys.

And yet America has been following precisely this script ever since an assassin murdered right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk six days ago.

The president waited barely a few hours before blaming the “radical left.”

For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.

Understand this comment for what it is: A threat to the American opposition’s constitutionally-protected free speech rights.

But before we dig into that, we need to devote a brief word to the one-sidedness of Trump’s response. Just a few months ago, Melissa Hortman, the Democratic speaker of the Minnesota House of Representatives was murdered along with her husband (and her dog!). Or that Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro, another Democrat, was the target of an assassination attempt. A far-right militia’s plot to kidnap Michigan’s Democratic Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020 feels like ancient history.

Right-wing figures are absolutely targets of political violence too. Remember the attempted assassinations of Congressman Steve Scalise and even Trump himself. But this is exactly my point: political violence does not only go in one direction. Listening to Trump last week, you would never know that.

(Contrast the president’s performance with that of Utah Governor Spencer Cox, a Republican, who painted a far more complete picture of America’s societal malaise).

Recall that when Trump first blamed the left for Kirk’s death, the shooter’s identity and motives were unknown. Kash Patel’s FBI never found a suspect. The alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, had to be turned in by his father.

Robinson is making his first court appearance today. Perhaps we will learn something new about what drove him to kill another man. As it stands, there are things we know about Robinson that code far-left and things that read far-right. It seems most likely that he subscribed to an overly online, nihilistic worldview. These sorts of characters tend to defy neat ideological classification.

The fact that Trump and his associates are so doggedly sticking to a narrative about widespread left-wing terrorism in the face of contradictory evidence should therefore be alarming. Especially when the First Amendment is on the line.

Here’s Vice President JD Vance and White House ideological czar Stephen Miller, reinforcing Trump’s threat to bring the power of the federal government to bear against their opponents:

VANCE: We’re going to go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.

MILLER: 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, it will happen, and we will do it in Charlie's name.

The chill is already spreading. People are losing their jobs over things they said about Charlie Kirk. Many such comments were distasteful, sure. Others were fairly anodyne. A viral tweet making the rounds on MAGA Twitter calls for a teacher to be fired for saying that while Kirk’s record made him a bad person, everyone has the right to speak their mind without fear of harm, and that violence is never the answer.

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Charlie Kirk Was Murdered. Political Violence Is Surrender.

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The administration is flying flags at half mast and even dismissing soldiers on behalf of a slain private citizen. They are doing this because the private citizen in question happened to be a loyal promoter of the president’s agenda. Other Americans, who do not share Trump’s politics, would never receive the same treatment.

It is the privatization and personalization of government authority. It is an extension of Trump’s policy of being president for only one half of the country. That partisan approach is expressed in his address to Congress when he dismissed the opposition because they would “not clap, not stand, and certainly not cheer” him. You can see it now in his complete exclusion of Democrats from budget negotiations. In an incipient crackdown to protect the reputation of a polarizing political activist.

A Values-Driven Response to the Challenge

This sort of challenge demands a consistent, fair-minded, values-driven response. Unfortunately, most of what we’ve seen in response to an administration promising to clamp down on opposition NGOs and purge dissenters from public life is a political pissing match in which each side tries to point out the hypocrisy of the other.

It’s all well and good to point out that Kirk and his fellow conservatives talked a big game about free speech and the right to offend. To remind them that, now, in Kirk’s name, Republicans are silencing their opponents.

But in order to convincingly make that case, you need to actually believe in something; in this case, freedom of speech.

I won’t entertain false equivalency here: the primary threat today comes from the administration. Being canceled by the state is worse than being canceled by your college, employer, or friends. However, the left does itself no favors pretending that they have always loved free speech or making it out like cancelation is a new phenomenon.

People keep receipts. Anyone born before yesterday will remember how The New York Times fired opinion editor James Bennet for publishing a controversial column by Senator Tom Cotton. Washington Post writer Karen Attiah actually debated with me about cancel culture a few years ago, claiming it was fine. The Post fired her for social media posts she made after Charlie Kirk’s death, turning her into a victim of a practice she defended a few years ago. American campuses have become insular and hostile to dissent. A timely survey from our friends at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that one in three American students are OK with using violence to stop a speaker with whom they disagree.

At best, many on the left have tolerated a strict interpretation of the First Amendment’s prohibition on government censorship, but they never nurtured the culture of free expression that is required to sustain it. Thoughtful disagreement was not a virtue to be celebrated. Rather than make a compelling case to the public, social exile became the left’s preferred instrument for defeating bad ideas. To regain the trust of the public, Democrats ought to acknowledge this and commit to consistency in service of building something new. They don’t need to prostrate themselves; a little self-reflection could go a long way.

I won’t sugarcoat things. What’s coming next from the administration after Kirk’s murder is not going to be good. Still, no matter how bad it gets, “look how bad this is” will remain an incomplete response—and a politically ineffective one at that. Offering something different, grounded in clear principles with a bit of introspection thrown in for good measure, might be just the disruption that’s needed to pull some Americans out of the never-ending tit-for-tat.

P.S. Whether you agree or disagree, let’s continue the discussion—in the comments, and on a Zoom call. Yes, Zoom! I’ve recently launched new Zoom calls for paid subscribers so that we can have a real back-and-forth. We just hosted our first call, and it was a fascinating conversation. Click the button below to upgrade and stay tuned for details on our next piece.

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