The Trump Admin Is Brazenly Exploiting Charlie Kirk’s Killing to Silence Dissent. Will Democrats Take Notice?
MAGA world is swiftly channeling outrage over Kirk’s murder into efforts to attack nonprofits and discipline liberals and the Left. Democratic leadership seems uninterested in stopping them.
Adam Johnson
The past week has seen a whirlwind of escalating rhetoric, legal maneuvers and doxing fervor emanating from the White House and its lockstep media allies. They are signaling — and sometimes overtly laying out — how the Trump administration plans on exploiting the September 10 killing of conservative media figure Charlie Kirk into a coherent and wide ranging regime of ideological disciplining. Yet, amid this fast-moving campaign, leading Democrats have offered little to no defense of the most basic rights to free speech and assembly. It is not clear what they intend to do, if anything, to stop an all-out assault on non-profits, social movements or any left-leaning political advocacy.
While Trump himself has reliably blamed “the Left” and promised retribution, the president seems only half interested in the minutiae of the propaganda effort, choosing, for example, to play golf Sunday evening rather than attend the vigil for Charlie Kirk at the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center. Assuming the role as MAGA demagogue-in-chief has instead been Vice President JD Vance. Far more internet-addled than the almost 80-year-old Trump, Vance swiftly moved in to host Kirk’s popular Youtube show on Monday, shifting throughout the three hour show from open mourning to vindictive tirades against “the Left” and “media” which Vance claims, without evidence, are responsible for Kirk’s murder. The vice president then formally put the White House’s full weight behind widespread anonymous efforts to dox and seek employment termination of random people for “celebrating” Kirk’s murder (even if many of those targeted had simply said critical things about the late political commentator).
“If you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility, and there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination,” the vice president told Kirk’s grieving followers. In the past few days, as DropSite News has thoroughly documented, dozens of obscure people across the country have been targeted and subsequently fired for posting responses to Kirk’s death, ranging from celebration to mild criticism of his insta-santification in the press.
As The Guardian reports, the primary anonymous website collecting reports of anti-Kirk “political extremism” has, according to those running it, received more than 63,000 submissions. The website was originally named “Expose Charlie’s Murderers,” but rebranded Monday to the “Charlie Kirk Data Foundation” — because, one assumes, it sounds slightly less unhinged. Taking a page from the pro-Israel Canary Mission, which now works hand-in-glove with the U.S. State Department to smear and attempt to ruin critics of Israel, this new mode of government-backed vigilante doxing is a meaningful escalation into outright brownshirt-ism. This system invariably is leading to a number of false positives and bumbling apologies from self-appointed grievance cops like Ryan Fournier, National Chairman of Students for Trump, who has 1.2 million followers on Twitter/X:
The exact motives of Kirk’s alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, remain murky—a mix of internet-poisoned irony, left-wing signaling, gun culture, and homophobia that may or may not also be ironic. The ambiguity did not stop Republican politicians and media from settling on a neat and clean narrative of a left-wing (vaguely trans-associating) radical fueled by a sprawling George Soros-backed nonprofit world into hating Kirk and his ilk. Nevermind that we have zero evidence for this chain of causality. This didn’t stop Vance from targeting both the Ford Foundation and Open Society Foundations, two long villains of the American Right, in his tirade targeting this supposed left-wing constellation of malevolent influence that led to Kirk’s death.
Unable to find any credible media “cheering on” Kirk’s murder, Vance — in a true masterclass in demagoguery — instead focused his ire on those in the media contextualizing Kirk’s legacy, namely The Nation magazine which ran a piece that included a quote error, since corrected, that Vance deemed an obscene “attack” on his late friend. (In his rant focusing on a largely inconsequential error, Vance himself made a fairly significant one, accusing The Nation of being funded by Soros’s Open Society Foundations, which it is not.)
After his attack on “the media,” Vance proceeded to discuss the aforementioned “celebrations” of Kirk’s killing, slipping back and forth from criticisms of Kirk in the media to celebrations of his death by random nobodies on Facebook to give the listener the vague impression “the media” was cheerleading on Kirk’s killing. Which, of course, they were not. Indeed, the reaction from elite media has largely whitewashed Kirk’s legacy, rare exceptions notwithstanding. But even the most critical pieces, including the aforementioned Nation article, went out of their way to condemn Kirk’s murder and other violence.
The reason the goal post had to shift from “celebrating Kirk’s killing” to “mocking it” to “being mean” or “misquoting him” is because no one with any power or significance on “the Left” has celebrated it. So Vance and Co. have had to create an emotional fog by mixing in random social media posts with broader castigations of “the media.” Clarifyingly, Vance did a variation of this rhetorical trick just a week prior to Kirk’s killing when he tried to claim some undefined “media” “told you that Donald Trump was on his death bed,” which no actual legitimate media outlets did.
Again, note how Random People Online becomes “the Left” and, just as slippery, “the media.” But they’re not; they are just Random People Online, ranging from low-level military personnel to the spouses of managers at Texas Roadhouse. Not exactly powerful nodes in the supposed Soros-Globalist conspiracy network.
But it didn’t matter. In this new ad hoc moral landscape, meaningful criticism of Kirk was somehow equivalent to “justifying” his killing. Anything short of submissive silence or mopey, left-flagellating hagiography in the vein of Ezra Klein would unleash the wrath of MAGA leaders and their online army. Seemingly no one is immune from the bully campaign: the White House is cracking down on social media companies, The Washington Post fired its last remaining Black columnist, Karen Attiah, possibly for making the same quote error as The Nation on social media, or else for transgressions the Post won’t disclose. The real reason is likely less social media misquoting and more that Attiah was seen as unduly critical of Kirk’s legacy by the increasingly right-wing Post opinion leadership. Even National Football League teams refusing to partake in moments of silence for Kirk during Sunday’s games came under attack by right-wing media.
This increasingly goofy harassment campaign would be bad enough if it weren’t married to tremendous state power that looks geared up to exploit Kirk’s killing in order to push longstanding aims of disempowering its political opposition, snuffing out dissent, and taking away the nonprofit status of anyone not on board with the Trump-Vance agenda.
Within hours of the September 10 assassination of Kirk, Trump blamed the killing on “the radical Left” in televised remarks, saying it was “a tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree, day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. 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. 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, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials and everyone else who brings order to our country.”
The unhinged, deeply ominous comments coming from MAGA land that followed are almost too many to count. Appearing on Kirk’s Vance-hosted podcast Monday, Trump’s deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, denounced ”the organized doxxing campaigns [from the Left], the organized riots, the organized street violence, the organized campaigns of dehumanization, vilification, posting people’s addresses, combining that with messaging that’s designed to trigger, incite violence in the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement.”
”With God as my witness,” Miller declared, “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.”
On Monday, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration will be “targeting” hate speech, which she differentiated from “free speech.” “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Bondi said in an interview with The Katie Miller Podcast, hosted by Stephen Miller’s wife. This is consistent with an administration that has tried — and in key ways succeeded — to silence domestic dissent over Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In addition to his attempts to deport critics of Israel based entirely on their political speech, Trump has leveled a coordinated attack on nonprofits critical of Israel under the guise of opposing “terrorism.”
Meanwhile, Trump’s legal assault on news outlets has expanded to The New York Times which on Tuesday joined ABC, CBS, The Des Moines Register and The Wall Street Journal on the list of Trump targets, after Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit alleging defamation and accusing The Times of being a “virtual mouthpiece” for the Democratic Party. Elite media is slowly taking notice of this attempted crackdown, but in its typical calm and discrete ways, such as Thomas B. Edsall’s sounding of the alarm around Trump’s post-Kirk designs in a New York Times story on Tuesday.
But true to form, top Democrats — Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries — have made no public mention of this gathering storm. They’ve issued no public criticism, have done nothing to defend the nonprofits explicitly being singled out or even acknowledged the hysterical and ominous statements coming in rapid fire succession from the White House
This is consistent with a sleepy Democratic leadership that has sat on the sidelines over the past 10 months as Trump leveled an unprecedented attack on Palestinian civil society that this latest crackdown will no doubt be modeled after. One reason could be that MAGA’s first attempt to disempower liberal nonprofits in November 2024 in the name of Israel — the Stop Terror-Financing and Tax Penalties on American Hostages Act — had nontrivial support among Democrats, before activist pushback killed the bill and liberal support for it. The so-called “nonprofit killer” bill was revived again last May but was, according to The Intercept, beaten back again by a coalition of nonprofit groups. If Republicans take another stab at passing it, as they likely will in the coming weeks, activists may not get lucky a third time. This week, a new bill was introduced by the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee that would grant Secretary of State Marco Rubio the power to revoke the passports of American citizens on purely ideological grounds.
Trump’s nonstop firehose of attacks on the liberal and administrative state have certainly led to fatigue — a sort of fascist semantic satiation — but the alarm bells emanating from the White House after the killing of Kirk couldn’t be blaring any louder. So what has Democratic leadership done to oppose this radical post-Kirk escalation? Not much at all. No social media posts, no press releases, no media hits, no coordinated messaging of any kind. There’s a storm coming, and Democratic leaders and elite media need to stop hiding behind “why can’t we all get along” bromides — as well-intentioned as they may be. They must take notice that Kirk’s murder is being duly, and openly, exploited by powerful actors with preexisting agendas who are not just blowing off steam, or grieving a friend, but planning a far-reaching crackdown on civil society from which we may never be able to come back.
Adam H. Johnson is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.
