Anatomy of the post-Kirk crackdown

How might the regime try to make the crackdown a legal reality?

I may not be as funny as Jimmy Kimmel, but one thing I have going for me is that I don’t have to answer to a corporation which is being coerced by the Trump regime into policing what I say. If you want to help support independent media - voices that cannot be silenced - then please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I can’t do this without financial support, so if you find yourself frequently enjoying these posts, I’d really appreciate the gesture.

It’s pretty clear by this point that the Trump regime and its allies want to use the Charlie Kirk killing to launch a crackdown on free speech and political activity in the United States. That desire is already shaping the conduct of the FBI investigation into the killing in important ways, and the regime seems to be developing several lines of attack against opposition political activity.

Let’s go through what’s happening. This is a long one, but I promise you it’s all important.

The FBI

Let’s start with the FBI investigation. One thing that you might not realize if you’ve been listening to FBI Director Kash Patel inveighing against a supposed national transgender conspiracy to murder conservatives is that the FBI is not actually the main agency responsible for investigating this crime.

Murder is generally prosecuted as a state crime, which means in this case that the Utah authorities are responsible for seeking a conviction against the suspect. And one thing you’ll notice is that while Patel has been going on national TV to make absurd accusations, the Utah authorities have been quietly and methodically running down leads. They know that anything they say publicly risks contaminating the jury pool and causing complications for the trial. So they’re not saying anything.

Patel is obviously playing a different game. He’s under fierce attack within the White House and MAGA media for fumbling the early days of the investigation, so he’s trying to make himself look relevant again.

But he also seems to be desperately trying to find some sort of federal nexus for this crime which would enable him to bring federal charges. And the only plausible way to do that that I can see is to charge it as as civil rights case. That would mean proving the existence of some conspiracy, consisting of multiple people, to target Kirk based on his political beliefs. This seems to be why Patel is running around acting like the suspect’s gamer buddies might actually all be hardened antifa terrorists.

Proving some sort of wider conspiracy would also play into the broader Trump regime narrative that the Kirk killing was the result of an organized campaign of hatred and violence by “the left”. They’re not just trying to round up the killer’s gaming buddies - they’re trying to portray them as the cutting edge of a sophisticated national terrorist organization whose members happen to completely overlap with the Democratic Party and its associated donors and interest groups.

But it’s worth noting that precisely zero of that is in the Utah indictment, which is the document produced by the people actually more interested in - and responsible for - bringing the killer to justice. They present a much more mundane story of a young man without many fixed beliefs, deeply immersed in internet culture, and acting out of a basically personal motive - disgust at Kirk’s rhetoric about people like the suspect’s roommate and partner.

So legally speaking, I wouldn’t place much stock in the fulminations of Patel. But this isn’t just about legalisms - it’s also about politics. And that’s where things are looking a lot more sinister.

Look at me, I’m Hitler!

The MAGA reaction to the killing of Charlie Kirk was one of the most disturbing things that I have experienced in my professional life of thinking and writing about U.S. politics. The sheer bloodlust and willingness to disregard all norms and legalities in order to destroy “the left” was and is terrifying.

Never has it been clearer that if Trump eventually goes all-in on the whole dictator thing, MAGA will be firmly behind him - and demanding that he goes further. That’s something we all know intellectually, but actually living through a moment in which it feels like it might literally be happening right now is something that I don’t think any intellectual construct can prepare you for.

This tweet from Matt Forney was a typical example of MAGA demands after Kirk’s killing, complete with the claim that this is the “American Reichstag fire”. The Reichstag fire, an arson attack by a lone Dutch Communist, is the event that the Nazis used as a pretext to suspend civil liberties in Germany in 1933.

Now, when I was cutting my teeth in political analysis all of 20 years ago, it was widely accepted across the political spectrum that it was a pretty good idea to avoid comparing yourself to the Nazis. Not anymore, apparently. And while Forney was relatively unique in explicitly drawing this comparison, what MAGA as a whole was calling for was basically the same thing. Suspend civil liberties. Freeze the finances of left-wing organizations. Arrest media figures. Shut down democracy.

We are now in this awful in-between state where we have to wait and see what concrete Trump regime policies this impulse will result in.

The good news is that because the regime’s charges are ridiculous - there is no vast network of left-wing organizations promoting violence - they don’t have many legal pathways to make this crackdown a reality. Trump has talked about using the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) law to go after “the left”, but I don’t really see how that could work.

RICO is a legal framework for taking down organized criminal enterprises that commit murder, drug trafficking, or a host of other crimes. It allows the seizure of the assets of criminal gangs, which appeals to the regime because they want to financially cripple the left. But while there could certainly be a host of nuisance lawsuits and punitive investigations brought on the basis of RICO, it seems hard for me to imagine that the regime could win a conviction.

The bad news is that investigations can themselves be a form of punishment. Trump has always treated the legal system as an extension of politics, and it’s easy to imagine his Justice Department launching a host of investigations which prove costly and damaging for left-wing groups even if they don’t result in a conviction. And this could just be the first step up the ladder of escalation: when it becomes apparent that the RICO investigations aren’t going anywhere, they could still be used as a pretext for an illegal crackdown.

Criminalizing protest

What I find more concerning is a push underway in Congress to amend the RICO laws so that “rioting” would also count as an offence punishable under the act. This would change RICO from something aimed at the mob to something pretty much explicitly targeted at opposition political groups.

Currently RICO applies to crimes like murder and extortion because that’s the sort of thing the mafia used to do. Mob bosses like Israel "Ice Pick Willie" Alderman and Joseph "Joe Bananas" Bonanno and Donald "The Wizard of Odds" Angelini weren’t generally organizing riots. They were murdering people with ice picks and running illegal gambling operations - hence their names.

But if you make rioting also punishable under RICO, it could be used to effectively criminalize protest. That’s because while the vast majority of people who attend political protests do so peacefully, there are very often a few people on the margins who engage in violence against property. American police also frequently start riots themselves by battering peaceful protesters and then arresting them when they fight back. If that happened, any group that helped organize or fund the protest would be subject to prosecution and the forfeit of its assets.

The speech crackdown

Another element to this, and the one that has been most successful so far, is the crackdown on speech.

For a lot of people, it has been truly mind-blowing to see the same conservatives who spent years railing against “cancel culture” suddenly declare that anyone who said something they don’t like about Kirk’s murder ought to lose their job and be publicly shamed. It’s almost like they’re saying that those people ought to be… what can we call it… cancelled.

I don’t find it surprising at all, because the American right has been very consistent about the fact that it doesn’t regard criticism of itself as legitimate speech. “Free speech” means the freedom to say right-wing things; left-wing things are perverse and alien and have no place in American discourse. This is why nobody on the right has batted an eyelid as Elon Musk has turned Twitter into a right-wing fever swamp while systematically suppressing left-wing speech. That’s not, from the MAGA viewpoint, an offence against “free speech” - it’s just a return to the natural order of things.

And so it is that Jimmy Kimmel has been cancelled after saying some things that MAGA didn’t like about the Kirk shooting.

The regime’s ability to force Kimmel to resign stems from the fact that media outlets need various things from the federal government. They need the Federal Communications Commission to license TV stations, and they need government approval for business decisions like an mergers. So when FCC chairman Brendan Carr seemed to threaten ABC’s bottom line after Kimmel’s comments, the network was quick to comply.

This is, of course, shameful and disheartening. Allowing the regime to chip away at free speech like this is a terrible decision, only made remotely understandable by the state of terror that media organizations are in in the face of Trump’s crackdown. When the FCC gets away with these sorts of abuses of power, it will only be encouraged to try to go further.

The way forward

What America really needs is for organizations targeted by Trump to stand up and fight him.

Trump is a very unpopular president and his popularity keeps hitting new lows. One of the most powerful criticisms made against the left in recent years is that they were a bunch of killjoys who cancelled comedians who said things they didn’t like. Now it’s MAGA who wants to take away your laughs because you displeased the fickle whims of the god-king in the White House. That ought to be an easy political case to make.

But if everyone who the regime turns its attention to just pre-emptively folds, then nobody is providing a rallying point for the majority who still believe in fundamental American values like freedom of speech. Ultimately, news networks like ABC - and every other type of private organization in America - depend for their existence on an ecosystem of rights and norms that the Trump regime is steadily attempting to erode. Eventually, someone has to stand up to protect that ecosystem, even at great personal cost. The alternative is the slow death of all.

I may not be as funny as Jimmy Kimmel, but one thing I have going for me is that I don’t have to answer to a corporation which is being coerced by the Trump regime into policing what I say. If you want to help support independent media - voices that cannot be silenced - then please consider upgrading to a paid subscription. I can’t do this without financial support, so if you find yourself frequently enjoying these posts, I’d really appreciate the gesture.