Conservatives Are Using Charlie Kirk’s Death to Enact Sweeping Speech Crackdown
The US has entered a new era of McCarthyism as the Trump administration equates leftist critique with “terrorism.”
By Daniel Moritz-Rabson ,
September 17, 2025
U.S. President Donald Trump shakes hands with conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a forum dubbed the Generation Next Summit at the White House, on March 22, 2018, in Washington, D.C.Mark Wilson / Getty Images
Conservative politicians and activists are calling for retribution against a wide range of perceived opponents in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s killing on September 10, sparking fears about a sweeping crackdown on free expression.
Even as law enforcement officials sought to determine the motive behind Kirk’s fatal shooting and the ideological alignment of his alleged killer, prominent right-wing figures quickly began using the outrage sparked by his death to blame the political left, vowing to enact a broad range of measures that could clamp down on civic society.
On September 15, Vice President J.D. Vance said he would “work to dismantle the institutions that promote violence and terrorism in our own country” and swore to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.” Vance made the comments while hosting “The Charlie Kirk Show,” the daily podcast Kirk hosted before his killing. Although law enforcement officials have said they think Kirk’s shooter was acting alone, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, who joined the podcast as a guest, also vowed to “uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks.”
“With God as my witness, 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,” Miller said. “It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.”
The remarks have sparked fear among civil rights leaders, free speech advocates, and extremism monitors who have been tracking the response to Kirk’s assassination. In the days since the shooting, right-wing figures have variably declared that a “war” with the left is occurring, decried the nation’s polarization, and promoted the Turning Point USA founder as a venerable defender of free speech. Now, Vance and other political leaders are encouraging people to call the employers of those whom they consider to be “celebrating” Kirk’s death.
Vice President J.D. Vance swore to “go after the NGO network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
“It is 1952 in too much of America right now,” Ken Paulson, the director of the Free Speech Center at Middle Tennessee State University, told Truthout, comparing the modern political moment to the widespread repression and persecution that swept the country during McCarthyism. “We have not seen anything like this since and I never thought we would see it today.”
The calls to crack down on speech deemed undesirable have emanated from a wide cross-section of government personnel. As employees across a range of federal agencies have been disciplined for social media comments about Kirk, multiple cabinet secretaries have sworn to punish those who mock or condone his killing. Federal legislators including Sen. Marsha Blackburn and Rep. Nancy Mace have called for professors and other university employees to be fired. Florida Rep. Randy Fine asked people to report individuals celebrating Kirk’s death, and that he would “demand their firing, defunding, and license revocation.”
“Those celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk must be thrown out of civil society,” Fine wrote on social media.
Related Story
State Department Warns “Foreigners” Not to Mock Kirk’s Killing
A State Department official asked people to report “foreigners” who post on social media “making light of the event.” By Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg , Truthout September 12, 2025
Similar dynamics are also unfolding at the state level. Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita said that teachers reported to his office by the public would be included in a state government dashboard used to document “objectionable” political ideology in the classroom. Iowa state lawmakers signed a letter supporting the firing of university employees who they claimed “publicly celebrated [Kirk’s] killing online.”
While these government-endorsed calls for sanctions have provoked quick backlash from free speech advocates, employers have even more swiftly doled out punishments. Many of those fired have mocked Kirk or said they have no remorse for his death. Others have been censured for critically describing the activist’s work and statements.
Last week, MSNBC fired political analyst Matthew Dowd hours after he said on air that “I always go back to, hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions.” Karen Attiah, a former opinion columnist at The Washington Post, wrote in a Substack piece that she was fired by the paper after a series of posts condemning the country’s acceptance of political violence.
Her social media posts only directly referenced Kirk while referencing a time when, in speaking Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, and Ketanji Brown Jackson and describing them as “affirmative-action picks,” Kirk said: “Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.”
Attiah’s Bluesky post shared an activist’s slight reworking of Kirk’s quote — “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
The termination letter from The Washington Post said Attiah’s Bluesky posts “about white men in response to the killing of Charlie Kirk do not comply with our policy.”
Fueled by the rhetoric of prominent politicians, social media platforms have turned into a staging ground for collecting names and orchestrating campaigns to call for firings. Conservative social media influencers have encouraged people to submit posts of coworkers or community members, and then have used their large platforms to amplify calls for punishment. Laura Loomer, for example, promoted a tip line to help get people who work for the federal government fired for “celebrating political violence.” Later, she posted: “So many people have been fired. I’m so proud of you guys.” An anonymous site called “Expose Charlie’s Murderers” shared the names, employment information, locations, and social media accounts of people it claimed were “supporting political violence” and said it had received tens of thousands of submissions. Though the site has since reportedly been taken down via a hack, WIRED reported that many of the posts included did not glorify or promote violence.
“They’re definitely trying to destroy people’s lives,” Heidi Beirich, co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, told Truthout. “This is like a crusade for them at this point.”
One thread on X purporting to document people who have faced consequences due to comments about Charlie Kirk now includes at least 100 people. The crackdown has touched a wide array of sectors. The Carolina Panthers fired a communications worker. An employee of the Nashville Fire Department was placed on paid administrative leave for a social media post. Three major U.S. airlines said they suspended employees for posts about Kirk’s death.
In the rush to expose those who aren’t mourning Kirk appropriately, the online army has made some notable errors. User Mag reported 30-year-old IT technician Ali Nasrati was flummoxed when he began receiving a slew of threatening messages telling him to “get the fuck out of America.” A series of right-wing accounts had begun circulating the man’s personal information, claiming he’d been running an X account that cheered Kirk’s death. Back in May, someone had set up an account using photos from Nasrati’s real LinkedIn and Instagram accounts and has been impersonating him. By the time Nasrati figured out what was going on, his phone number and personal address had already spread widely and his job had suspended him.
Educators at all levels have been heavily swept up in the backlash. The Chronicle of Higher Education reported that at least 11 faculty members at colleges and universities have been disciplined since Kirk’s shooting. The rapid doling out of punishment led PEN America to warn that “colleges and universities risk undermining free inquiry and academic freedom if they treat all online expression as grounds for termination.”
On many campuses, that chilling effect has already been playing out for years.
“It’s going to suppress free speech, political activity, and make people terrified to speak their mind.”
In the days since Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University, conservatives — as well as some liberals — have effusively paid tribute to him by praising his dedication to free and open debate and willingness to speak with those he vehemently disagreed with. This depiction of a charismatic champion of civil discussion has contradicted the experiences of the university professors who have been targeted by Kirk’s organization.
In 2016, Kirk’s Turning Point USA launched the Professor Watchlist. Soliciting tips from the public, the project proclaims to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” Much like the social campaign unfolding now, educators whose names appeared on the list were subjected to threats. Many feared for their safety.
“I’ve seen faculty put on the professor blacklist and then have to get security to escort them around campus,” Todd Wolfson, the president of the American Association of University Professors, told Truthout.
While Kirk’s watchlist helped foment an environment of fear among educators, so have Trump’s attacks on academic freedom and aggressive efforts to force universities to reshape their curricula. Widespread firings and censorship for pro-Palestinian activism on college campuses further instilled a chilling effect. The backlash to faculty who protested Israel’s conduct “was a testing ground for ‘Can you shut up the speech of students and faculty?’ And now we’re seeing that there could be a much broader attack on our speech,” Wolfson said. Those fears are even more amplified in the current moment, as conservative leaders from the president down encourage retribution.
“This terrain that has been created — where faculty are constantly a target of the right and a target in a way that’s getting escalated and escalated and escalated — scares the death out of my faculty,” Wolfson said. “They are worried about a paper they wrote five years ago. They’re worried about walking to campus.”
The impact of the widespread clampdown at universities and beyond will reverberate across the country, Beirich warned. “It’s going to suppress free speech, political activity, and make people terrified to speak their mind.”
This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Daniel Moritz-Rabson is a New York-based researcher and investigative journalist whose work focuses on the criminal legal system. His reporting has appeared in outlets including ProPublica, The Intercept, and The Appeal.
Thom Hartmann
September 18, 2025
RAW STORY
Donald Trump smiles as he attends an event in the Oval Office. REUTERS/Brian Snyder
The FCC chairman just threatened to pull ABC’s license because of a comment Jimmy Kimmel made about Charlie Kirk, and ABC just indefinitely took him off the air. This is the sort of thing you’d expect in Russia, not America.
But let’s back up a minute.
First, those who use violence come for the politicians. Then they come after the pundits and reporters. And finally they encourage average people to turn their guns on each other.
The dark story we’re living — this rise of fascism and destruction of civil order — fits a pyramid, not a straight line. And it explains why the killing of Charlie Kirk, aside from the right’s incessant amplification of their outrage, actually is a big deal and very dangerous sign for today’s political moment.
At the apex of the pyramid of people first targeted for violence are politicians, people who choose to live in the blast radius of public power.
When the taboo against political bloodshed cracks, it often cracks there first, with, for example, the attempted assassinations of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi by Trump’s mob, the murder of Minnesota State House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband, the bombs Trump fanboy Cesar Sayoc send to President Obama and other elected Democrats, and our history of political assassinations.
The second tier down from the apex is the world of thought leaders, editors, and reporters, the people who interpret events for the rest of us. In healthy times they’re noisy, sometimes infuriating, and very much alive.
The brutal assassination of conservative activist and organizer Charlie Kirk in Utah wasn’t just another awful headline, it was America making the transition into that second tier on the way toward civil war or a police state. You don’t have to like Kirk's views to see that this is part of the transition from public debate to public violence.
I really wish we didn’t have to be having this conversation, to be considering the possibility that our politicians, our thought leaders, and eventually each one of us ourselves could be the victims of violence incited by political conflict. But that’s where we are.
And instead of trying to bring the nation together or heal it, Trump and those around him appear committed to turning the heat up.
When countries are sliding into fascism, after politicians are cowed, this middle level of the pyramid — the thought leaders and reporters — become targets.
We’re already tracking a surge of assaults on journalists in the United States this year, recorded by nonpartisan monitors, and the warnings from press freedom groups are growing louder as we head into another supercharged election cycle.
It’s why Trump threatening Jonathan Karl this week was such a big deal.
At the base of the pyramid is everyone else, the broad foundation of ordinary citizens who expect to disagree without fear of dying for it. In the last stage of democratic decay, the taboo collapses here too.
Conflict trackers that normally study civil wars abroad are now publishing monthly briefs on our own streets, and their July readout flagged spikes tied to political flashpoints and the growing risk of lone-wolf attacks.
That’s the tremor you feel underfoot; it’s a warning that a nation has been seized by authoritarians and could be on the verge of civil war.
This is not an abstract model that I just came up with this week: it’s American history.
In the 1850s the pattern first announced itself in Washington when rightwing Congressman Preston Brooks walked into the Senate chamber and nearly beat Senator Charles Sumner to death for denouncing slavery.
The attack wasn’t just an assault on a man, it was a public declaration that the rules had changed and that violence could now answer argument. The country was shocked, and then it was hardened. That moment signaled that the apex of the pyramid had been breached.
From there the target set widened into the second stage, the “killing pundits and reporters phase.” In Kansas, proslavery posses sacked the Free State stronghold of Lawrence, destroyed printing presses, and burned the Free State Hotel while waving banners that proclaimed “Southern Rights.”
Across the Deep South, meanwhile, newspaper publishers and editors who called out the Confederate oligarchs or opposed slavery were lynched, shot, or driven out of town.
The point was terror and silence. Smash the presses, you smash the story. The attack was part of the cycle we remember as Bleeding Kansas, when political dispute metastasized into raids and reprisals across towns and farms. Once the middle layer began to break, the base wasn’t far behind.
We can see the rhyme today.
Minnesota mourned Speaker Emerita Hortman and her husband, Mark Hortman, after a stalker hunted them down. Federal prosecutors have indicted the suspect. You don’t get a clearer sign that the apex is under fire than a state’s senior legislative leader and her spouse being killed.
We’re now seeing a loosening of the bolts on that middle tier with the Kirk assassination. Political leaders sneer at reporters and pundits, crowds chant for punishment of the press, and too many people decide that a camera and a notebook are acts of war.
And then comes the revenge. After our Attorney General, Pam Bondi, threatened to prosecute people for what she called “hate speech” (which is not a crime: remember the Nazis in Skokie, Illinois?), Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor was blunt:
“Every time I listen to a lawyer-trained representative saying we should criminalize free speech in some way, I think to myself, that law school failed.”
The data points stack up, each incident small enough to shrug off, all together large enough to chill a newsroom and make a young journalist, podcaster, or influencer think twice about showing up. Which is exactly what the authoritarians want.
If we want to keep the base of the pyramid steady, we must keep that middle standing, because when people can’t trust that their words will be heard without violence or censorship, some will reach for other tools.
The lesson from the 1850s isn’t that violence always walks in a single file, but that it climbs down the side of the pyramid. Once elites normalize it, once opinion-makers are bullied or bloodied into silence, the next stop is the rest of us.
That’s why the response must be immediate and nonpartisan. Every decent official, left and right, should make it crystal clear that assassination is not politics, that stalking is not activism, that censorship or threatening a reporter or a comedian isn’t patriotic.
And that the worst response to violence is to blame an entire political party, the people who make up half of America, calling them “crazy,” “lunatics,” and “terrorists.”
Tragically, that’s exactly the path Trump and the GOP are following. They’re trying to turn Charlie Kirk into America’s Horst Wessel, the martyr that Hitler used to successfully rally people around the Nazis’ shared sense of victimhood.
We still have time to shore up the apex, protect the middle, and keep the base from cracking, if only Democratic leadership (talking about you, Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries) would find the courage to speak out loudly every day against the explosion of blame and hate being promoted now by Trump and the rightwing media that brought him into power.
The few Republicans of good conscience left must reach out to the Trump administration and demand they dial down their own violent and provocative rhetoric. And stop throwing people off television for exercising their First Amendment rights.
We don’t have time to pretend the pyramid will hold itself together without our intervention and that of our political leadership.
Jimmy Kimmel wasn't suspended for what he said about Charlie Kirk
Ray Hartmann
September 18, 2025
Jimmy Kimmel delivers his opening monologue at the Oscars. REUTERS/Mike Blake
It is important to get this right.
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely Wednesday by ABC and his late-night show appears to have come to an end. It has been widely misreported that the action was related to the Charlie Kirk murder and its aftermath.
It was not.
Virtually every story about the sacking carried a headline referencing Kirk. The implication was clear that Kimmel was dismissed for something he said about Kirk. That’s the first thing I thought when the news broke.
That did not happen.
Donald Trump had Kimmel taken off the air — as he has suggested would happen after a similar fate befell Stephen Colbert as CBS — because he wanted to.
And because he could.
No need to call in Sherlock Holmes. Trump has long despised Kimmel, along with the entire mainstream media, which he routinely describes — in the grand tradition of history’s worst authoritarians — as “the enemy of the people.”
It’s obvious that Trump dispatched Brendan Carr, his sycophantic chairman of the FCC to put out the hit on Kimmel. Carr, a co-author of Project 2025, apparently did just that, and Disney — pushed by Nexstar, owner of roughly 30 of its ABC affiliates — rolled over.
This is the same Disney that folded a poker hand with four aces in December 2024, to “settle” for $15 million in a sham defamation lawsuit filed by Trump. It seems that Disney had far more to lose than $15 million — exponentially more — by crossing the incoming president.
So, it’s just another footnote to the story that Nexstar also has much larger fish to fry with the Trump administration — needing approval from Carr’s FCC for a pending, controversial, $6.2 billion merger with Tegna. It’s an instant replay of CBS putting profits above principle when it paid off Trump to save a proposed Paramount mega-merger with Skydance from sleeping with the fishes.
Carr offers no pretense of serving as anything but a corrupt political hack. Hours before the Kimmel announcement, he visited the friendly confines of Benny Johnson’s prominent conservative podcast and said this:
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."
Sneering at the theoretical independence of the FCC, Carr made himself exclusively available to Sean Hannity and Fox News after the Kimmel sacking. It did appear, however, that lawyers had advised him by then to lose “easy way or hard way” gangsta rap.
As for Kimmel, he should have been the last one targeted for disrespecting Charlie Kirk. This is what Kimmel had posted on Instagram in the wake of Kirk’s tragic passing:
“Instead of the angry finger‑pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human? On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
Kimmel has said nothing on air since to disparage Kirk or even revisit Kirk’s previous statements that were inflammatory and now seem ironic. I happen to agree with that, having taken the old-school view that Kirk’s murder be “deplored without qualification.”
If you want to view the Monday monologue from Kimmel that has been absurdly linked to his suspension, knock yourself out. You can view it here.
If you do, you’ll be shocked as I was to find that nothing Kimmel said even remotely approached mean-spiritedness about Kirk. Kimmel ridiculed Trump, and deservedly so, for the president’s pathetic response to a sympathetic reporter’s question about how he was “holding up” in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Trump said he was fine and immediately changed the subject to how exciting it was that he was building a big, fancy White House ballroom. It was a singular validation of the daily, brilliant reminders from Trump’s niece — psychologist Mary Trump — that this a man suffering severely from untreated narcissistic personality disorder.
Humiliating Trump can come at a grave price to any company needing anything from Trump’s corrupt FCC. But, as I’ve suggested, Kimmel’s monologue Monday was just a fig leaf for going after him.
It was only a matter of time.
Just remember this: When Trump exerts his will and power over media that depend upon the federal government for their licensing — and in the case of giant corporations, far more — he is not acting like a dictator.
He’s acting as a dictator.
Ray Hartmann
September 18, 2025
COMMON DREANS
Jimmy Kimmel delivers his opening monologue at the Oscars. REUTERS/Mike Blake
It is important to get this right.
Comedian Jimmy Kimmel was suspended indefinitely Wednesday by ABC and his late-night show appears to have come to an end. It has been widely misreported that the action was related to the Charlie Kirk murder and its aftermath.
It was not.
Virtually every story about the sacking carried a headline referencing Kirk. The implication was clear that Kimmel was dismissed for something he said about Kirk. That’s the first thing I thought when the news broke.
That did not happen.
Donald Trump had Kimmel taken off the air — as he has suggested would happen after a similar fate befell Stephen Colbert as CBS — because he wanted to.
And because he could.
No need to call in Sherlock Holmes. Trump has long despised Kimmel, along with the entire mainstream media, which he routinely describes — in the grand tradition of history’s worst authoritarians — as “the enemy of the people.”
It’s obvious that Trump dispatched Brendan Carr, his sycophantic chairman of the FCC to put out the hit on Kimmel. Carr, a co-author of Project 2025, apparently did just that, and Disney — pushed by Nexstar, owner of roughly 30 of its ABC affiliates — rolled over.
This is the same Disney that folded a poker hand with four aces in December 2024, to “settle” for $15 million in a sham defamation lawsuit filed by Trump. It seems that Disney had far more to lose than $15 million — exponentially more — by crossing the incoming president.
So, it’s just another footnote to the story that Nexstar also has much larger fish to fry with the Trump administration — needing approval from Carr’s FCC for a pending, controversial, $6.2 billion merger with Tegna. It’s an instant replay of CBS putting profits above principle when it paid off Trump to save a proposed Paramount mega-merger with Skydance from sleeping with the fishes.
Carr offers no pretense of serving as anything but a corrupt political hack. Hours before the Kimmel announcement, he visited the friendly confines of Benny Johnson’s prominent conservative podcast and said this:
"We can do this the easy way or the hard way. These companies can find ways to change conduct and take actions on Kimmel, or, you know, there's going to be additional work for the FCC ahead."
Sneering at the theoretical independence of the FCC, Carr made himself exclusively available to Sean Hannity and Fox News after the Kimmel sacking. It did appear, however, that lawyers had advised him by then to lose “easy way or hard way” gangsta rap.
As for Kimmel, he should have been the last one targeted for disrespecting Charlie Kirk. This is what Kimmel had posted on Instagram in the wake of Kirk’s tragic passing:
“Instead of the angry finger‑pointing, can we just for one day agree that it is horrible and monstrous to shoot another human? On behalf of my family, we send love to the Kirks and to all the children, parents and innocents who fall victim to senseless gun violence.”
Kimmel has said nothing on air since to disparage Kirk or even revisit Kirk’s previous statements that were inflammatory and now seem ironic. I happen to agree with that, having taken the old-school view that Kirk’s murder be “deplored without qualification.”
If you want to view the Monday monologue from Kimmel that has been absurdly linked to his suspension, knock yourself out. You can view it here.
If you do, you’ll be shocked as I was to find that nothing Kimmel said even remotely approached mean-spiritedness about Kirk. Kimmel ridiculed Trump, and deservedly so, for the president’s pathetic response to a sympathetic reporter’s question about how he was “holding up” in the wake of Kirk’s death.
Trump said he was fine and immediately changed the subject to how exciting it was that he was building a big, fancy White House ballroom. It was a singular validation of the daily, brilliant reminders from Trump’s niece — psychologist Mary Trump — that this a man suffering severely from untreated narcissistic personality disorder.
Humiliating Trump can come at a grave price to any company needing anything from Trump’s corrupt FCC. But, as I’ve suggested, Kimmel’s monologue Monday was just a fig leaf for going after him.
It was only a matter of time.
Just remember this: When Trump exerts his will and power over media that depend upon the federal government for their licensing — and in the case of giant corporations, far more — he is not acting like a dictator.
He’s acting as a dictator.
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