The menacing menacers
The extremist right has created federal and amateur informant networks since Charlie Kirk’s murder last week. What are they looking to punish? Free speech coming from the left. Sometimes toxic, insensitive, gross, etc., but speech protected by the First Amendment. Except not protected from retribution from the right.
The Associated Press this morning reports:
This past weekend, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy posted that American Airlines had grounded pilots who he said were celebrating Kirk’s assassination.
“This behavior is disgusting and they should be fired,” Duffy said on the social media site X.
Try counting on your fingers the disgusting behaviors, not just speech, of federal employees operating under Trump administration orders, some illegal, that merit firing. You’ll run out.
As elected officials and conservative influencers lionize Kirk as a warrior for free expression who championed provocative opinions, they’re also weaponizing the tactics they saw being used to malign their movement — the calls for firings, the ostracism, the pressure to watch what you say.
It’s not as if the left has not used the tactic before against foes on the right. “Make him famous” has been used liberally online (pun intended) for years. But not with federal blessing. Kirk’s mourners have taken it to the next level. It smacks of McCarthy-era paranoia, observes Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“Charlie Kirk’s allies warn Americans: Mourn him properly or else,” reads a Reuters headline:
Some Republicans want to go further still and have proposed deporting Kirk’s critics from the United States, suing them into penury or banning them from social media for life.
“Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death,” said conspiracy theorist Laura Loomer, opens new tab, a prominent ally of President Donald Trump and one of several far-right figures who are organizing digital campaigns on X, the social media site, to ferret out and publicly shame Kirk’s critics.
U.S. lawmaker Clay Higgins said in a post on X, opens new tab that anyone who “ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man” needed to be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER.” The U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau said on the same site that he had been disgusted to “see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action.”
Republicans’ anger at those disrespecting Kirk’s legacy contrasts with the mockery some of the same figures – including Kirk – directed at past victims of political violence.
That’s another counting exercise that will require more digits than the typical human possesses.
Bunch writes:
Sure, Kirk went to college campuses and didn’t ban liberals from his events and looked to debate them — a good thing that we should hope to see emulated in a time of angst over free expression. But Kirk was also a raging hypocrite about free speech — his Turning Point USA sought to blacklist scores of liberal academics — and made so many immoral or false statements about his fellow Americans who were gay or transgender or Black or Latino or liberal that it would require a whole separate column.
The books editor of the Boston Globe posted to Bluesky:
“I shouldn’t be shocked, but I’m still always brought up short to realize how many people think ‘civility’ means ‘white people speaking in relatively calm voices’ no matter what vile shit they say.”
Bunch concludes:
Asha Rangappa, the lawyer and former FBI agent, said that what people need to understand about the Kirk fallout is that “Americans are being conditioned to be snitches on their fellow citizens who don’t toe a party line on what is ‘allowed’ to be expressed. And employers are going along. It’s the new secret police.”
It would be pointless to call out the utterly ridiculous irony of turning Kirk into a statue-worthy icon of American free speech while threatening to destroy any citizen who offers a different opinion — or merely repeats the things that Kirk actually said. That’s because the fascists who run our government and are now pressing its full weight upon our free speech don’t do irony. Millions of Americans are already terrified to say what they really think. Those of us who aren’t yet intimidated now know that every public opinion might be our last.
There have always been fascists among us. And royalists, as I’ve said repeatedly. But until recently, American conservatives who regularly cry “communist” at the left never seemed to want to emulate East Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union. Authoritarian followers right now feels far too anoydyne and clinical for the kind of menace on display at the highest levels of government.
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