Weaponizing the Murder of Charlie Kirk

The Right's cancel culture on steroids

As I write this, authorities say they have arrested a 22-year-old man in the assassination of Charlie Kirk. So, in the coming days we may learn more about his motivations.

But the MAGA Right — and Trump himself — did not wait for any actual evidence before demanding an aggressive cancel culture for their political critics.

• “We have to have steely resolve. Charlie Kirk is a casualty of war. We are at war in this country. We are.” — Steve Bannon

• “If they won’t leave us in peace, then our choice is to fight or die.” — Elon Musk on X.

• “They are at war with us, whether we want to accept it or not… Everybody’s accountable … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now. This is a turning point and we know which direction we’re going.” — Fox News host Jesse Walters

• “We are up against demonic forces from the pit of Hell. This is existential. A fight for our own existence and the existence of our country.” — right-wing commentator Matt Walsh

• “I don’t think they realize it yet, but murdering Charlie is going to be remembered as the day where we finally woke up to what this fight really is. It’s not a civil dispute among fellow countrymen. It’s a war between diametrically opposed worldviews which cannot peacefully coexist with one another. One side will win, and one side will lose..” — Nick Freitas, Republican Virginia state delegate.

• “It is time, within the confines of the law, to infiltrate, disrupt, arrest, and incarcerate all of those who are responsible for this chaos” — right-wing influencer Christopher Rufo

• “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.” — Trump’s bigoted BFF Laura Loomer

We should take all this both literally and seriously, because Donald Trump and his allies are about to weaponize these cries of vengeance.

The smart kids will tell us that we can dismiss much of the overheated rhetoric as merely fulminations from the fringe.

But the fringe is now the mainstream, and we can watch in real time, as the rhetoric moves from social media bleats into Trump’s inner circle, then into the Oval Office itself, and finally into official policies.

Listen to the sort of rhetoric we are already hearing from elected GOP representatives — men and woman who actually make laws.

On Thursday, Wisconsin’s deeply poltroonish Congressman Derrick van Orden lashed out at members of the media

Van Orden shakes his finger at gathered reporters and blames them directly for Kirk’s death.

“Every. Single. One. Of. You. Here. You’re at fault,” said Van Orden.

NBC News Capitol Hill correspondent Melanie Zanona tried to ask him, “How can you say that when we don’t even know who the shooter is?”

“You know what?” replied Van Orden. “Knock it off. Knock it off.”

Another reporter tried to ask about Republicans and Van Orden interjected, “You are responsible for that assassination yesterday.”

Van Orden was not done. He blasted out social media posts blaming Canadians, liberal members of the European Parliament, schools and universities, whom he accused of wanting “civil war” and calling them “21st century brown shirts.” As Mediaite noted: “In multiple tweets, he called for “Zero Federal Funding” for schools and universities that employed someone who had posted comments on social media critical of Kirk or sounding heartless about his death.”

In every case he was targeting speech — words and ideas. Keep that pattern in mind. To be sure, much of the anti-Kirk rhetoric has been deeply offensive and ghoulish. And, as I have written, it deserves condemnation — in the form of other speech. Not government retaliation. This is the essence of the First Amendment, and it is a principle that Charlie Kirk himself repeatedly emphasized and embraced.

But that is not what MAGA wants now.

On X, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.) vowed to “use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

Higgins said that any social media accounts from people who “ran their mouths with their smartass hatred, celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man” must come down.

The Louisiana Republican also demanded that any users who posted those “belittling” posts be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER.”

Higgins is not content with simply censoring and banning critics from social media. He proposes a sweeping jihad against people “who ran their mouth.”

“I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” he wrote.

On the floor of the House, another representative, Bob Onder, a Republican from Missouri lashed out at the “American left” as “evil” suggested that “the transgender cult” had murdered Kirk.

[Everything] has changed. If we didn’t know it already, there is no longer any middle ground. Some of the American left are undoubtedly well-meaning people, but their ideology is pure evil.

They hate the good, the truth, and the beautiful, and embrace the evil, the false, and ugly. And they literally will kill those with whom they disagree, just as their predecessors—leftists Marx, and Stalin, and Lenin, and Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro—did. We must know that. And we must stand firm, and we must win this twilight struggle.

Trump’s bizarre BFF, Laura Loomer was even more explicit about the post-Kirk cancel culture: “It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, & prosecute every single Leftist organization, Loomer wrote on X. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”¹

Loomer’s influence on Trump is matter of record, so her call to “shut down, defund & prosecute every single Leftist organization” seems worthy of note — especially given Trump’s own comments on Wednesday night, when he blamed the rhetoric of “the radical left” for Kirk’s murder. In prepared remarks, Trump said:

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.²

And then came the threat of government action:

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….

Note again that he is not talking about guns, or mental health, or terrorism in general. He is specifically targeting critical speech and, without any evidence of their involvement in any way, “organizations” that “support” critical rhetoric.

Lest you think this is just more Trump bluster, the crackdown is already beginning: “State Department warns immigrants not to mock Kirk's death.”

The State Department on Thursday indicated it would review the legal status of immigrants "praising, rationalizing, or making light" of conservative activist Charlie Kirk's fatal shooting.

**

As we know, irony was beaten to death by hammers long ago. But it seems worth mentioning that Charlie Kirk was an outspoken free speech advocate — speaking at debate to college campuses across the country where he confronted his critics in open debate

He insisted on his freedom to say even offensive things.

But Trump — with the enthusiastic support of the Right — seems committed to turning Kirk’s murder into a pretext for a suppression of words, thoughts, and language that the regime wants to suppress.

Trump, writes, Robert Tracinski, “has been building a subtle but steady drumbeat in which anything that can be construed as ‘vilifying’ people on the right is interpreted as incitement to violence.”

So calling Trump a dictator, which many of us are doing, would count as “hateful rhetoric” that somehow makes us directly responsible for political violence—and justifies political violence by the state to shut us down.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway makes this point explicit. Responding specifically to a Washington Post article by Robert Kagan, an unflinching Trump critic, she flags criticism of Trump’s authoritarianism as “assassination prep rhetoric.”

This raises the prospect of a paradox in which it is terribly unfair and wrong to call Donald Trump a dictator—and if you do, his administration will investigate and punish you for your speech.

Friday dogs

Flashback. Auggie trying to teach Eli the proper etiquette for playing ball.

1. Loomer had a somewhat complicated relation with Kirk. This summer she tried (unsuccessfully) to have to him excommunicated from the MAGA movement. She has since removed her offending posts.

“I don’t ever want to hear [Charlie Kirk] claim he is pro-Trump ever again. After this weekend, I’d say he has revealed himself as political opportunist and I have had a front row seat to witness the mental gymnastics these last 10 years,” Loomer wrote in her past post about Kirk. “Lately, Charlie has decided to behave like a charlatan, claiming to be pro-Trump one day while he stabs Trump in the back the next. TPUSA was only able to thrive thanks to the generosity of President Trump.”

2. Presumably Trump was not referring to his own vice president. In 2016, Vance wrote in a private message to his former law school roommate: "I go back and forth between thinking Trump is a cynical a--hole like Nixon who wouldn't be that bad (and might even prove useful) or that he's America's Hitler. How's that for discouraging?"