The Republican Party’s commitment to free speech has never been full-throated. Rather, their approach has been more of a “free speech for me but not for thee” sort of thing at the best of times. But in the wake of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk’s shooting death, even the nominal lip service conservatives give to the First Amendment is wholly out the window. In its place, we now have pretty much every textbook violation of the First Amendment you can imagine. Lucky us.
Fam, can the government demand that you be banned from privately owned social media platforms because you engaged in speech that it doesn’t like? No, it cannot, but that would probably be news to Rep. Clay Higgins, who made that threat just a day after Kirk was killed. Higgins was one of the biggest self-styled free-speech types, but apparently that’s irrelevant now.
Related | GOP demands investigation to harass liberal groups after Kirk shooting
Well, how about the government conducting a wide-ranging congressional investigation into liberal groups under the pretext that they engaged in some sort of coordinated attack that resulted in Kirk being murdered? Such a comically broad investigation would be absurd and abusive even if there was any evidence of a vast left-wing conspiracy. Given that it looks like Kirk’s death was at the hands of someone who seems to have been motivated by being extremely online and whose political philosophy, such as it is, is largely incoherent.
There’s also the part where saying less-than-complimentary things about Kirk is neither a civil nor criminal issue that Congress needs to address. There is no First Amendment carveout whereby people are not allowed to say anything negative about Charlie Kirk simply because GOP elected officials are whipping themselves into a frenzy. But President Donald Trump is eager to get to the bottom of who, exactly, is funding all this alleged nefarious liberal slander of Kirk.
Everyone, including Trump, knows that the answer is that there is no coordinated spending effort behind the misguided machinations of Kirk’s alleged killer. They just don’t care. However, the GOP's desire to force left-wing groups to reveal all their funding streams doesn’t really hold up, given that the GOP also wholly embraces the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling and its progeny. Money is speech, baby! Free, free speech, and you can’t make anyone reveal who is paying for it.
How about if your employer fires you for simply lightly paraphrasing one of Kirk’s racist rants about how Black women were not sufficiently intelligent enough to be, say, Supreme Court justices? That’s what happened to columnist Karen Attiah at The Washington Post. Well, there is such a thing as at-will employment, of course, and WaPo is a private employer. That said, it sure looks like the Post fired its last remaining Black full-time opinion columnist for the well-known workplace violation of being rude enough to highlight Charlie Kirk’s own views. How dare she!
Hmm. That one might be more of a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, if that Reconstruction-era amendment is still even functional under the current regime.
As out of pocket as Republicans are being on this, no one is more out of pocket than sitting Vice President JD Vance. On Monday, Vance took over Kirk’s show and, from the White House, told people they should call the employers of anyone they think isn’t being nice enough about Charlie Kirk. If you are thinking it doesn’t seem very free speech-ish to have the second-most-powerful person in the world trying to whip up his supporters against people and get them fired for the content of their speech, you are correct—but Vance absolutely does not care.
Normally, the federal courts might be counted on to stand firm against these sorts of depredations by the executive branch. But the court appears all-in on the Trump-as-dictator project, so there’s no reason to think his lackeys on the bench will rein the administration in on this—or anything else, really. It sure would be cool if the First Amendment applied to everyone in the country, but it apparently depends on your political affiliation.
