As if it were not enough that Charlie Kirk was cut down on a college campus in Utah by a radical Leftist immersed in transgender ideology, the Right must now endure the hideous lies and propaganda spewed by the Left that the shooter was actually rightwing or at best his motives remain unknown. Even worse, online goblins are celebrating the murder of the young husband and father. In the face of this evil, the Right must remain steadfast, calm, and committed to justice and the free speech values that Charlie Kirk lived and died for, and not succumb to the very emotionalism that drives the Left.
For starters, let’s dispatch with the ridiculous notion that it violates free speech principles or legal guidelines to fire someone who celebrates online the murder of another person. That’s not cancel culture; it’s accountability culture. Cancel culture centers on deplatforming people from the public square because they hold a policy view different than yours on issues like same-sex marriage, vaccine policy, transgenderism, gun control, immigration enforcement, etc. Moreover, as a legal matter, most private employees cannot invoke the First Amendment against their employers because it does not apply in the absence of governmental action.
Even in cases where the Supreme Court has upheld a public employee’s First Amendment right to celebrate political violence, that employee was an office clerk with no regular contact with the public and did not publish his comments for the public’s consumption. The lack of public engagement was critical to the court’s holding since the employee’s views would not undermine public confidence in the government employer. In the era of ubiquitous social media, online rejoicing at the slaughter of a political adversary removes that factor and provides government employers ample opportunity to take disciplinary action against their employees that applaud shooting the political opposition in the neck.
With that in mind, there have been recent movements on the Right that are nonetheless deeply troubling. First, there is Attorney General Pam Bondi who claimed the Federal Government can both prosecute people for “hate speech” if they say terrible things about Charlie Kirk, and force private companies to produce flyers and posters in favor of a Charlie Kirk vigil. This is utter nonsense that Kirk himself rejected time and time again.
The main exceptions to the First Amendment’s free speech clause are defamation, true threats, incitement, obscenity, fraud, certain types of harassment, and possibly the so-called “fighting words” doctrine, which has all but been eliminated formally by the Supreme Court.
While Bondi has partially walked back the hate speech claim, her pronouncement that you must produce the flyers and posters remains and is exactly the same authoritarianism the Left has tried to use to force Christian bakers to make wedding cakes that celebrate same sex marriages in violation of the baker’s First Amendment rights. The Office Depot employee that made headlines by refusing to print the Charlie Kirk poster had gone rogue and was fired for failing to do her job, and that should be the end of it.
Not to be outdone, Bondi’s deputy, Todd Blanche, has argued that it is a RICO violation to pay people to protest, including paying people to call President Trump a Nazi while he’s having dinner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant. Make no mistake, the ghouls who call Trump a Nazi should be culturally swept into the waste basket, but charging them under RICO is as outrageous as what the Democrats did to Trump in Georgia when they claimed his contesting the outcome of the 2020 election was a criminal conspiracy.
Then there is the troll that is late night television host Jimmy Kimmel. Kimmel made the despicably false claim that Kirk’s killer was “MAGA” on his nightly “comedy” show broadcast by ABC. This lie induced the ire of FCC chair Brendan Carr, who threatened to invoke the “News Distortion” doctrine whereby if a public airwaves broadcaster like ABC publishes false information on a matter of significant public concern, the FCC can take regulatory action against the broadcaster.
This FCC policy is constitutionally dubious at best in light of the recent Supreme Court case prohibiting New York regulators from coercing banks and insurance companies from doing business with the NRA because the state disapproved of the NRA’s message. Worse, invoking the News Distortion doctrine made a martyr out of Kimmel, who likely would have been suspended by his employer due to the overwhelming outrage that followed his remarks without the pressure from the FCC.
A suggestion to Mr. Carr: When your enemies are imploding, stay out of the way.
Calls on the Right to use the power of the federal government to broadly dismantle the Left echo the recent revelations by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) of the Biden Justice Department’s Operation Arctic Frost. That operation was meant to demolish and criminalize much of the rightwing political ecosystem in America, including Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. Replicating those despicable actions on the Right will merely devolve our great republic into a lawless cesspool of pure power politics. We must distinguish between political adversaries and political terrorists. Regardless, no amount of law enforcement proceedings will solve this problem anyway.
The Left will gladly sacrifice its foot soldiers to the slammer if it means winning back political power in the next election. The grand solution is to discredit and exile the Democrat Party to political oblivion for the next decade, so it can cleanse itself of the toxic and self-righteous creed that embraces socialism, dehumanizes conservatives, and romanticizes political violence. To that end, the Right must maintain the courage to engage the Left in the battle of ideas and use the full power and might of the First Amendment to peacefully send the radical Left’s ideology where it ultimately belongs, on the ash heap of history.
