The Kirk Assassination and the MAGA Threat to Free Speech

A memory from before the Charlie Kirk assassination. 

On March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan was shot as he exited the Washington Hilton Hotel in Washington, D.C. Secret Service Agents rushed him into a limousine and took off for the White House. At first, they thought the president was unhurt, but then Jerry Parr, one of the agents on Reagan’s detail, noticed the 70-year-old chief executive coughing up blood, and the limousine rushed instead to The George Washington University Hospital, where doctors operated to save his life.  

It was a scary moment for America; I was a quarter-mile from the scene, and family members were even closer. I did not really become alarmed, though, until Secretary of State Alexander Haig, sweating and goggling like General Jack D. Ripper in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, strode into the White House briefing room and told the assembled reporters, “As of now, I am in control here in the White House.” I would have been still more frightened had I known that Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, 69 days into the administration, had placed the nation’s missile forces on a higher alert at a time when U.S.-U.S.S.R. tensions were manifest, risking a catastrophic Soviet misinterpretation that a U.S. attack was imminent.  

America was spared: The president survived; Haig exited the stage; the Russians did not lose their cool. At the time, I thought Reagan was an unqualified disaster for our country and still do. I was and am horrified he was shot and glad he lived. 

I have never forgotten the words of my father, who voted for Richard Nixon in 1960. After President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963, he said, “Look, I didn’t like the guy. But he was my President, and I resent the hell out of anybody shooting him.” 

Like Americans of all political stripes, I was shocked and saddened by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. No one—no one—should be shot, or fear being shot, because of their political speech. The death of a young man with a family is painful to watch, and the damage to the young students, gathered for an open-air debate on a beautiful fall day, will likely be lifelong.  

Assassinations inflict a lasting wound on our country. I felt that when I heard the news of Kirk’s killing, and I feel it today. 

That said, under the conditions whipped up by President Donald Trump and his administration in the days since the slaying, my words have taken on the quality of a forced proclamation of ideological fealty, akin to the florid proclamations of fealty dictators like Kim Jong Un demand. 

I add that the Constitution grants me the right to say that Kirk was not, as George F. Will proclaimed, “like Socrates”; he did not, as Ezra Klein assured us, “do politics right.” He used his right to free speech to distort, divide, and bully. Two ideas—that his death stirs empathy and wounds our society, and that his considerable organizational and rhetorical talents were devoted to some pretty harmful values—can coexist.  

I didn’t like Charlie Kirk, but I resent the hell out of somebody shooting him.  

But just as Americans should not fear speaking in public, they should not fear expressing themselves—even in hateful terms—at a seismic public event like the assassination. That has been, until now, the glory of the First Amendment. 

Kirk’s death is being put to sinister use. The psychic and political epidemic sweeping the country reminds me of the Great Fear of the 1950s unleashed by Senator Joseph McCarthy’s demand that government, entertainment, and education cleanse themselves of “Communists” and “sympathizers.” And like the Great Fear, this panic is stoked from the top.  

“[T]hose 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,” Trump said on September 10. Subsequent remarks by Trump and figures around him suggest the administration will try to destroy civil society organizations that oppose Trump’s program.  

Television networks, regulated by the federal government, were quick to purge. On MSNBC, News analyst Matthew Dowd, who helped lead George W. Bush’s two presidential campaigns, was vaporized for saying that Kirk’s own speech may have contributed to a climate of violence that led to his death. When ABC News’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump about Attorney General Pam Bondi‘s intentions to “go after hate speech” on Tuesday, the president responded, “I’d probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe I’ll come after ABC.” 

Sure enough, the next day, Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr did an excellent nice-network-you-have-here-shame-if-we-took-it-away routine to demand that ABC take Jimmy Kimmel, the late-night host, off the air. The Walt Disney Company, of which ABC is a part, did just that. Kimmel’s offence was saying in his nightly monologue that the “MAGA gang” was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them” and of trying to “score political points from it.” Disney caved on cue, suspending the comedian’s show “indefinitely.”  

Vice-President J.D. Vance, who hosted Kirk’s podcast on September 15, before Kimmel’s remarks aired, interviewed presidential aide Stephen Miller, who said, “We need to have an organized strategy to go after the left-wing organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” Vance suggested that the administration might go after George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and strip the tax-exempt status of the venerable Ford Foundation. He claimed that both helped fund an article in The Nation magazine, which refused to join the general mourning for Kirk. The Nation’s president, Bhaskar Sunkara, said on X that the magazine has received “not one dime” from Soros or the Open Society Foundation. The Ford Foundation noted the last time it gave to the magazine was in 2019. 

After that statement, Homeland Security and Veterans Affairs officials announced that public employees had already been disciplined for statements refusing to mourn Kirk’s death. The Deputy Secretary of State, Christopher Landau, the nation’s second-highest-ranking diplomat, announced that the department would be screening online posts by foreigners in the United States who are considered to be “praising, rationalizing, or making light of” Kirk’s death. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth proclaimed it was “unacceptable for military personnel and Department of War civilians to celebrate or mock the assassination of a fellow American” and said there would be “zero tolerance” for such behavior. 

MAGA zealots in government want to spread the purge to private employers. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said, “American, Delta, and United all confirm to CBS News they have suspended employees for social media posts praising Charlie Kirk’s murder.” Pilots “celebrating” the assassination “must be fired,” he wrote.  

Purge fever has spread to state governments. In Florida, state superintendent of education Anastasios Kamoutsas warned that “I will be investigating every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior.” As for this writing, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia have announced similar scrutiny of teachers. Colleges and universities are falling in line: California State University, Fresno, Clemson University, College of the Sequoias, Florida Atlantic University, Middle Tennessee State University, Texas State University, Texas Tech University, University of Arkansas at Little Rock, William H. Bowen School of Law, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of Mississippi, and University of Tennessee, Knoxville, have either fired, suspended, or expelled faculty members, staff, or students who heterodox views of Kirk’s death. More academic purges are sure to follow. 

Members of Congress have joined the scrum. Representative Nancy Mace, the South Carolina Republican, herself no stranger to controversial remarks, introduced a resolution to censure Representative Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, and strip her of her committee assignments—over remarks and retweets she made in the wake of Kirk’s killing. (Democrats were able to table the measure.) Representative Clay Higgins, a Louisiana Republican, vowed on X to punish private actors who “belittled” the Kirk assassination. “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 driver’s licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’m starting that today.” 

In general, the First Amendment does not apply to private employers. But it does apply when the government uses its power to force private employers to censor free speech. This rule, which the Court held in the 1963 case of Bantam Books, Inc. v. Sullivan, was reaffirmed unanimously in 2024 by the post-Trump Supreme Court, no less. In National Rifle Association v. Vullo, the Court held that the New York Attorney General’s office had violated the First Amendment when it pressured private insurers to stop doing business with the NRA because of its pro-gun activities. But expect to see demands that these employers conduct Clay Higgins-level proscriptions against those who dissent. Even DC Comics canceled a comic title in mid-series because its writer, a trans woman, posted scabrous comments about the assassination on social media.  

These demands are the beginning: criminal prosecutions will follow as midnight follows twilight. Attorney General Pam Bondi promised as much in a statement in which she created a new exception to the First Amendment: “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,” Bondi said on a podcast hosted by Stephen Miller’s spouse, the conservative operative Katie Miller. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech—and that’s across the aisle.”  

Just to clarify, under the First Amendment as it existed at the time of Kirk’s assassination, no category called “hate speech” can be the basis for criminal prosecution. In fact, the First Amendment protects the sorts of vilification and contumely that Trump and Vance practice daily, which, it should be said, was a part of Kirk’s rhetoric. If “hate speech” were an offense, its sauce on “the left” would have to scald the MAGA gander; some of those seeking most angrily to tie others to the whipping post would themselves be in the dock. 

One thing that the pre-Kirk assassination First Amendment forbade was what the courts called “viewpoint-based” restrictions on speech. As the Great Purge spreads, the president has announced a viewpoint-based state policy. In an appearance on Fox & Friends, he dismissed the idea that his mission to police speech should extend to the far right as well as the left: “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They don’t want to see crime. Worried about the border. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street,’ ”. On the other hand, “[t]he radicals on the left are the problem, and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy, although they want men and women sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”  

In other words, the aim of 2025’s Great Purge, like that of the McCarthy Era, is not gentler discourse but cleansing the public sphere, in both cases of a “left” point of view. The pre-Kirk assassination First Amendment cases strove to embody a famous quote from Justice Robert Jackson: “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation, it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or other matters of opinion or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”  

Read that silently to yourself, because the tone police are listening. 

A week after the assassination, only one view of Kirk is acceptable; any other must be punished. As Trump said, “We have a radical left group of lunatics out there, just absolute lunatics, and we’re going to get that problem solved.”  

As recently as last year, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote for a unanimous Supreme Court that “Government officials cannot attempt to coerce private parties to punish or suppress views that the government disfavors. Such conduct strikes at the heart of the First Amendment.” 

Of course, the heart of the First Amendment is now under relentless assault from this White House, its executive-branch lackeys, and state and local officials eager to conform to the new party line, a party line that now protects Charlie Kirk—a figure in life who traded in outrage—from even the most informed criticism.  

But opportunism only thrives on opportunity. The moral panic over Kirk’s death reveals a fragility in public dialogue that was not present after the Kennedy or Reagan shootings. 

As evidence thereof, I offer the story of 19-year-old Ardith McPherson, an employee of the Harris County, Texas, Constable’s office in March 1981; McPherson responded to the news of the attempt on Reagan with anger at the new president’s proclaimed crusade against safety-net benefits like what were then called Food Stamps. The African-American woman told a friend and co-worker, “Shoot, I hope if they go for him again, they get him.”  

Rankin was overheard and promptly fired. It’s easy to understand the reasons why: though her duties were secretarial, she was nominally a “law enforcement officer,” and her callous statement was made in the workplace. Others overhearing it might have felt outraged and hurt.  

Nonetheless, the United States Supreme Court ordered McPherson restored to her job with back pay. Her statement, Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote,  

was made during a conversation addressing the policies of the President’s administration. It came on the heels of a news bulletin regarding what is certainly a matter of heightened public attention: an attempt on the life of the President. . . . The inappropriate or controversial character of a statement is irrelevant to the question whether it deals with a matter of public concern. 

Not everyone agreed at the time. Rankin v. McPherson was a 5-4 decision. In dissent, Justice Antonin Scalia (in other contexts, such as flag burning, a firm supporter of the First Amendment) announced a broad principle: “I cannot imagine that the First Amendment prevents the discharge of an employee for wishing the President of the United States dead.”  

Mercifully, Scalia’s was not the rule in 1987—punishing dissenting speech, however distasteful, would have worsened, not salved, the wound inflicted by John W. Hinckley’s pistol. He would surely have scorned using the criticism of a slain organizer and activist as the basis of dismissal or prosecution.  

We cannot count on the weak reeds atop the Supreme Court to protect free speech, not in this atmosphere.  

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