Rightwingers had long complained of a censorious leftwing 'cancel culture' but seem happy to now reframe that as 'consequence culture'
In the emotionally and politically charged days since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the conservative youth activist who was a close ally of Donald Trump, one statement has loomed large. On Monday, the US attorney general - the official in charge of the rule of law in America - said that the Trump administration would "absolutely target" those who espouse "hate speech" about Kirk.
Unlike in many other countries, hate speech is protected by US law unless it incites imminent violence or constitutes a true threat. But that did not deter the nation's top law enforcement officer, who also suggested that - for example - a print shop employee who refused to print flyers memorializing Kirk could be "prosecuted".
Since Kirk was shot to death while speaking to college students in Utah earlier this month, the US has been gripped by a bitter debate about the relation between political speech and violence. Bondi later walked back some of her remarks, in part because of criticism from other conservatives worried about the reframing of "free speech" as "hate speech". But Trump, Vice-President JD Vance, White House adviser Stephen Miller and other top Republicans have framed Kirk's death as the consequence of what they claim is unchecked and violent rhetoric, which they blame on the left wing alone.
It is a remarkable turn from prominent American conservatives, who until Trump's return to power in January had long complained of a censorious leftwing "cancel culture" but now seem happy to reframe that, too, as "consequence culture". Nancy Mace, a House representative, sounded a lot like the progressives she has often decried for their political correctness when she declared last week, during an effort to censure one of her opponents in Congress, that "free speech isn't free from consequences".
Many conservatives are also now championing a public campaign to get fired from their jobs any Americans who made light of Kirk's death or disparaged him or his politics in death. Meanwhile, administration officials are proceeding with drafting an executive order for Trump aiming to "combat political violence and hate speech", the New York Times recently reported.
Kirk's assassination was a "despicable act of political violence, an attack on a figure who built his brand around campus debating, and the outrage, grief, and anger is understandable", Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), said.
But instead of recommitting to free speech as a "fundamental value", the response from many public officials "has been the opposite. They are using the tragedy to justify a broad crackdown on speech," he said.
"They are openly collapsing the distinction between political dissent and political violence, and it sounds like they are laying the foundation for mass censorship and surveillance of political critics."
The pressure campaign's biggest trophy so far is the talk show host Jimmy Kimmel. After an episode of his show in which Kimmel seemed to suggest (wrongly, according to reports) that Kirk's assassin had Maga sympathies, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the government agency that regulates broadcasting, urged TV networks to drop Kimmel’s show. On Wednesday, ABC announced that it was suspending the program indefinitely.
The FCC chair, Brendan Carr, applauded ABC’s surrender—even though just two years ago he said that free speech is a crucial “check on government control. That is why censorship is the authoritarian’s dream.”
“It’s an overreaction,” Katie Fallow, an attorney at the Knight First Amendment Institute, said, “and it is an example of the kind of ‘cancel culture’ that major figures on the right have been criticizing for so many years. Now they’re just doing a complete about-face and engaging in it themselves.”
Bondi’s rhetoric is a particularly “alarming threat” given her status overseeing American law enforcement, Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and the general counsel of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), said. It is also “a signal that not only does this administration not care about the first amendment, they don’t seem to really understand it.”
Although Kimmel is the most prominent media figure to have been punished so far, in recent days a number of journalists have faced the loss of their jobs or other disciplinary measures either at the direct instigation of conservative pressure or in seeming preemption of it. Earlier in the week the Washington Post—under Jeff Bezos, who has cosied up to Trump and whose ownership has seen the opinion section move closer to the political right—terminated the columnist Karen Attiah for, she said, her unflattering writing about Kirk’s political views.
Academics, too, are under threat, with three professors at Clemson University in South Carolina recently fired for making allegedly inappropriate social media posts about Kirk’s death. Dubal is concerned by this aggressive campaign to get professors fired or disciplined for their “extramural” speech, particularly when academics are often contractually entitled to rigorous processes before they can be terminated.
It seems as though many employers have decided that it is worth violating principles of academic freedom and contractual obligation, she said, rather than “displease the president, or displease rightwing donors. And that’s a political calculation; it’s a legal calculation. But it’s dangerous.”
Indeed, Fallow finds the attempt to suppress speech after Kirk’s death disturbing because she sees it as part of a larger and “unprecedented” attempt by the second Trump administration to use “every available lever of power to try and suppress dissent and chill speech”—including but not limited to threatening universities with investigations or financial penalties because of protests on campus; targeting law firms with executive orders for their legal work; deporting international students for participating in protests or writing op-eds; kicking reporters out of White House press conferences based on their publications’ coverage; and bringing frivolous defamation lawsuits against media outlets.
The general message, Fallow said, is that if you disagree with Trump or his allies “you’re going to be in the administration’s crosshairs”.
Although some people have defended the suspension of Kimmel or the firings of professors on the grounds that these are private employer decisions and not matters of first amendment-protected public speech, Dubal and other experts feel that the government’s increasingly naked involvement makes it difficult for that argument to carry water.
“Here ... you have a vice-president [Vance] who's calling for employers [and] third-party vigilante organizations and individuals to force employers to terminate their employees and others based on speech,” Dubal said. “Coercive government speech is very different than the creation of political cultures where it's not okay to say certain things based on social response. I think what we're seeing is really, at least for my own lifetime, unprecedented.”
Conservatives are making arguments similar to the ones that some progressives used to make about cancel culture, Terr noted, particularly during the wave of firings, de-platformings, and social-media shamings that occurred during the national “reckoning” after George Floyd’s murder. “And conservatives at the time,” Terr said “rightly argued that we should think of free speech not just as a legal right but as a broader cultural value.”
Now, Terr said, “many of the same politicians who have long railed against cancel culture are leading the loudest calls for censorship—often using either explicitly or implicitly rationales that they’ve dismissed when invoked by the left: ‘This is hate speech.’ ‘This is misinformation.’ ‘This will lead to violence.’ ‘Stochastic terrorism.’ ‘This speech makes us unsafe.’ It’s amazing. And I think the lesson here is that once the justification for censorship is put on the table, it’s a loaded gun just waiting to be picked up by the other side.’”
Some conservatives have pushed back. Bondi’s remarks, especially, were condemned by rightwing commentators including Matt Walsh and Tucker Carlson. Referring to Bondi, Walsh wrote on social media: “Get rid of her. Today. This is insane. Conservatives have fought for decades for the right to refuse service to anyone ... Now Pam Bondi wants to roll it all back for no reason.”
Walsh also argued that a crackdown on speech would come back to haunt the right: “Every Trump supporter right now applauding Trump threatening ABC with consequences unless they suspend Jimmy Kimmel must also applaud when a Democratic president in 4yrs threatens Fox News with consequences unless they suspend Greg Gutfeld. Hey Maga, do you understand?”
Dubal said she thought conservative pundits were right to lambast Bondi. “There are principles of speech in this country that apply broadly ... and the idea that they were going to go after businesses and individuals based on protected speech was really kind of shocking.”
The late Kirk was an inconsistent defender of free speech—his organization, Turning Point USA, famously maintains a “watchlist” of professors it describes as dangerously leftwing—but some conservatives have argued that Kirk would not want the right to turn against free expression. “You hope that Charlie Kirk’s death won’t be used by ... bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build,” Carlson recently said.
“Hate speech does not exist legally in America,” Kirk wrote on social media last year. “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.”