After railing against “cancel culture” and free speech limitations for more than a decade, top Republicans are embracing both following the assassination of Charlie Kirk.
From President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance on down, Republicans have called for people to be fired for posting criticism of the conservative activist following his death, while promising government investigation of liberal groups they say backed such rhetoric.
As Vice President Vance guest-hosted Mr. Kirk’s podcast Monday, he and White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller pledged to use the federal government to investigate liberal organizations that they painted as seedbeds of violence.
Why We Wrote This
Republicans have long railed against “cancel culture” and blamed the left for seeking to curb free speech. Now, they are catching criticism on the same grounds in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination – and potentially going further by invoking the power of government to target perceived offenders.
“It is a vast domestic terror movement. 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. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name,” Mr. Miller said.
It is unclear whether any actions have yet been taken against specific liberal groups – Mr. Vance said it would take some time. But the vice president pledged that the administration “will explore every option to bring real unity to our country and stop those who would kill their fellow Americans because they don’t like what they say.”
In the meantime: “If you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” he said, adding, “Call their employer.”
In the wake of Mr. Kirk’s assassination, a wave of people has been fired for posting critical or disparaging comments about Mr. Kirk, a deeply controversial figure.
Pentagon leadership has reportedly ordered staff to identify service members who mocked Mr. Kirk’s assassination for discipline, including firing. Virginia’s Republican superintendent of public instruction declared that teachers who made controversial comments about the killing should have their teaching licenses revoked. Teachers, university employees, and school board members have been fired or forced to resign for their social media posts. So have numerous private sector employees from across the country.
“We are tracking all these very closely – and will address, immediately. Completely unacceptable,” Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth posted last week, after his spokesperson said, “It is unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American.”
A fundamental American right
The First Amendment specifically and the broader concept of freedom of speech are cherished in the United States – but are a lot harder to cherish in practice.
“The First Amendment is really hard for everyone the first few times they encounter it. Everyone likes it on paper. Everyone struggles with it in practice. It’s much tougher when the speech you have to tolerate is something you really, really dislike,” says Adam Goldstein, a vice president at the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
The questions around free speech are rising as 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson was arraigned Tuesday on aggravated murder charges for Mr. Kirk’s killing. Utah County Attorney Jeff Gray said Mr. Robinson’s mother told investigators that their son had turned left politically in the past year, and that he told his roommate, “I had enough of [Mr. Kirk’s] hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out.”
Nearly two dozen Republican members of Congress have called for a select committee to investigate “the money, influence, and power behind the radical left’s assault on America and the rule of law” in the wake of Mr. Kirk’s death. Republican lawmakers have also in recent days introduced a bill to withhold federal funds from entities employing individuals who condone political violence and have called on social media companies to institute lifetime bans on users who posted anti-Kirk sentiments after his death. House Republicans are also pushing to censure Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and remove her from her committees for criticizing Mr. Kirk’s rhetoric in the immediate aftermath of his death.
“Their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked [out] 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,” posted Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, a Republican who chairs the House Oversight Committee’s subcommittee that focuses on federal law enforcement agencies.
“Political speech is protected by the First Amendment, even when it deeply offends. For that reason, it is generally unconstitutional for public employers to fire employees for their political views, and it is generally unconstitutional for the government to coerce private employers into censoring speech on its behalf,” says Alex Abdo, litigation director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “The murder of Charlie Kirk was a tragedy. Government officials should not exploit that tragedy, however, to censor political speech they don’t like.”
Mr. Abdo says the Supreme Court has found that government officials can call for people to be fired – but that it becomes a First Amendment violation if it “reaches the point of coercion.” That’s the line the court used when a 6-3 majority threw out a case last year from Republican state attorneys general that claimed the Biden administration had unlawfully coerced social media companies to remove contentious content.
The First Amendment protects Americans from their government. It offers no shield from people criticizing their speech or seeking for them to be fired. That’s always been a part of American history. But the advent of social media has made controversial remarks easier to find and easier to target, inflaming society at crucial moments and creating a cancel culture that has been used across the political spectrum in recent years. Twitter famously banned Mr. Trump from the platform two days after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” (he has since been reinstated).
Mr. Goldstein says that what’s happening now is going further than recent cancel culture fights, however. “When you have government officials and people who are government advisers who are engaging in cancel culture – that is not just cancel culture, that’s also censorship,” he says.
Recent events feel “like the road to McCarthyism,” Mr. Goldstein says, referring to the Red Scare of the 1950s, when both the government and private industry cracked down on, fired, and blacklisted people suspected of harboring communist views.
Robert Post, a First Amendment expert at Yale Law School and former dean of the school, sees parallels with an earlier period.
“I don’t think it’s about cancel culture. Cancel culture is about private people saying what they will tolerate from other private people. This is about the use of the state to crush opposition. It’s a totally different thing,” he says. “That’s what’s at stake now. And we have never seen anything like this [in the U.S.] since the First World War.”
During World War I, the federal government criminalized anti-war speech and criticism of the government with the Sedition and Espionage acts, shut down dozens of publications and newspapers it deemed too critical by barring their distribution through the postal service, and jailed over 1,000 people for more than a year solely for things they wrote or said.
Mr. Post cites the Trump administration’s crackdown on universities and law firms as other examples of using the power of government to try to silence critics.
“Completely alien to our culture and our values”
Mr. Trump and many of his conservative supporters have long railed against cancel culture. In a July 4, 2020, speech, the president defined it as “driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees.”
“This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America,” he said.
As recently as February, Mr. Vance fought to have the Trump administration rehire Marko Elez, a DOGE employee who had resigned after social media posts that many regarded as racist came to light.
“I obviously disagree with some of Elez’s posts, but I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life,” Mr. Vance wrote on the social platform X.
“Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes,” he continued.
But this week, a strikingly different view was put forward by Mr. Trump’s attorney general, Pam Bondi.
“There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society” for hate speech, Ms. Bondi said on an episode of the “Katie Miller Pod” on Monday evening. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
On Fox News, Ms. Bondi threatened legal action against businesses that refused to provide services to people commemorating Mr. Kirk.
“If you want to go and print posters with Charlie’s picture for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for [refusing to do] that. We have right now our civil rights unit looking at that,” she said.
That claim seems to fly in the face of years of jurisprudence, including a recent Supreme Court case that found a baker could refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.
Ms. Bondi’s comments were a bridge too far for many conservatives.
“The First Amendment absolutely protects speech,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz said Tuesday at a Politico event. “It absolutely protects hate speech. It protects vile speech. It protects horrible speech. What does that mean? It means you cannot be prosecuted for speech, even if it is evil and bigoted and wrong.”
Mr. Cruz said, however, that “naming and shaming” was appropriate. “We’ve seen teachers in high schools and elementary schools posting online, celebrating. We’ve seen university professors posting. In my view, they should absolutely face the consequences for celebrating murder,” he said.
Ms. Bondi later appeared to be trying to walk back some of those remarks, clarifying on X, “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment.”
On Tuesday, President Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, claiming that articles that had questioned his proclamations of success were defamatory, libelous, and “specifically designed to try and damage President Trump’s business, personal and political reputation.” The suit is the latest in a series of aggressive court actions against media organizations, including CBS News’ “60 Minutes,” which agreed to a $16 million settlement, and ABC News, which also agreed to a $16 million settlement. The president is also suing The Wall Street Journal for an article stating that he’d sent a vulgar drawing and note to financier and convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein for his birthday in 2003.
New York Times publisher AG Sulzberger responded in a note to staff that the paper is confident in its reporting and the First Amendment protections behind it, but warned that “everyone, regardless of their politics, should be troubled by the growing anti-press campaign led by President Trump and his administration, which challenges not just journalists but our right to ask questions on behalf of the American people.”
When asked about Attorney General Bondi’s hate speech comments by ABC News’ Jonathan Karl, President Trump replied, “Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.”
Mr. Kirk himself may have disagreed with Ms. Bondi’s viewpoint.
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free,” Mr. Kirk posted on X in May 2024.
Staff writers Caitlin Babcock and Patrik Jonsson contributed reporting to this story.
