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In a videotaped statement (AP, 9/10/25), Trump said that comparing people like Charlie Kirk to Nazis is “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”

After the killing of right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump (9/10/25) escalated his war on free speech, calling for criminalizing criticism of himself:

It’s a long past time for all Americans and the media to confront the fact that violence and murder are the tragic consequence of demonizing those with whom you disagree day after day, year after year, in the most hateful and despicable way possible. For years, 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.

To spell it out: “Demonizing”—which is to say, criticizing—people with whom you disagree is “directly responsible” for Kirk’s death. Note that this is about criticizing people that you disagree with—”you” presumably being one of “those on the radical left”—as Trump has built a wildly lucrative political career out of demonizing those he disagrees with, and he’s not about to stop now. It’s the “wonderful Americans” like Kirk whom you aren’t supposed to criticize.

Trump promises “this kind of rhetoric”—the “radical left” kind—will “stop,” because the government will “find each and every one who contributed to this atrocity.” This includes all those who used their speech to “go after our judges,” cops and “everyone else who brings order.”

This is, in short, a declaration that the idea of free speech is over—despite Trump going on to list “free speech” first among “the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.” Where once you had the right to criticize those who “bring order,” now such reckless rhetoric is punishable as direct support for “terrorism”—a word that under the US legal system authorizes draconian police powers.

‘Violent rhetoric has consequences’

A response (X, 9/24/25) to Homeland Security’s complaint that people were comparing ICE to the Gestapo, secret police and slave patrols.

Interestingly, the particular strain of criticism that Trump singles out—though not exclusively—is when “wonderful Americans” like Kirk are compared to “Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.”

The Department of Homeland Security made a similar complaint on X (9/24/25) after sniper Joshua Jahn reportedly shot at an ICE facility in Dallas, killing two detainees:

This vile attack was motivated by hatred for ICE. This shooting must serve as a wake-up call that violent rhetoric about ICE has consequences. Comparing ICE day-in and day-out to the Nazi Gestapo, the Secret Police and slave patrols has consequences.

ICE is a masked paramilitary group that operates without badges or warrants, whose leadership considers it a crime to record or identify its members. It rounds people up on the basis of ethnicity, or targets them for their political views, sending them without due process to foreign concentration camps.

Which historical precedents are we allowed to compare such an organization to?

‘Our lineage’ vs. ‘wickedness’

Stephen Miller charged that “leftist groups and nonprofits had created ‘terrorist networks’ that led to Kirk’s murder” (New Republic, 9/15/25).

Speaking of Nazi comparisons, people heard similarities between the eulogy given by chief Trump advisor Stephen Miller at Kirk’s funeral and the rhetoric of Third Reich propagandist Joseph Goebbels (National, 9/22/25; Snopes, 9/25/25). Miller’s speech drew a heavy-handed contrast between “what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble,” and the “forces of wickedness and evil.” The “good,” the forces of “the light,” were seemingly genetically defined, with “ancestors” and a “lineage”:

Our lineage and our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello. Our ancestors built the cities. They produced the art and architecture. They built the industry…. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.

And the other side was so dehumanized, they were erased from reality:

And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing.

Note again the emphasis on the speech of the enemy: They “incite,” they “foment.” This was not a throwaway line; speaking to Vice President JD Vance, who was guest-hosting Kirk’s podcast (New Republic, 9/15/25), Miller said that he was on a mission to shut up the left: “The last message that Charlie sent me,” he claimed, “was that we needed to have an organized strategy to go after the left-leaning organizations that are promoting violence in this country.” Calling the left “a vast domestic terror movement,” Miller vowed:

With God as my witness, 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.

‘Targeted intimidation’

Analyzing the White House’s “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” memo (9/25/25), Jeff Sharlet (Scenes From a Slow Civil War, 9/26/25) notes that it “provides authorities with potential cause to prosecute not everyone but anyone.”

Those words seemed to become legal action in the form of an “executive memo” (9/25/25; Scenes From a Slow Civil War, 9/26/25) about the new war on anti-fascism signed by Trump, but lacking the ranting digressions characteristic of words actually written by the president. The memo includes this chilling passage:

This political violence is not a series of isolated incidents and does not emerge organically. Instead, it is a culmination of sophisticated, organized campaigns of targeted intimidation, radicalization, threats, and violence designed to silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society. A new law enforcement strategy that investigates all participants in these criminal and terroristic conspiracies—including the organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources and predicate actions behind them—is required.

“Political violence” is defined here as not just actual “violence,” but also “targeted intimidation, radicalization [and] threats”; in other words, speech. This speech is “designed to silence opposing speech,” which only makes sense if it’s understood that the speech that deserves protection and the speech that needs to be investigated by law enforcement are spoken by two different kinds of people; free speech is a right that only belongs to the right people (FAIR.org, 3/4/25). If you’re the wrong sort of person, using your speech to “silence” the good kind of speech—which is to say, to criticize it—well, then, we have to kill free speech in order to save it.

Another thing these “criminal and terroristic conspiracies” need to be criminally investigated for is using speech to “change or direct policy outcomes.” This is said to “prevent the functioning of a democratic society”—when it’s actually key to the functioning of a democratic society.

The ability to use your freedom of expression to try to change what the government does is, in fact, why the First Amendment was put in the Constitution in the first place. But clearly we are in an era where the executive branch no longer sees the First Amendment as any kind of meaningful constraint.

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“What problem are you trying to solve? I think if you think of writing as something to knock off your to-do list, then I see the value in getting a passable draft out the door. If you are trying to connect a person to other people, like a speaker to an audience, in an authentic way, that actually moves them or makes them think differently about something or changes their minds or changes their behavior, I don’t think it is yet an efficient tool for that. I think if you think of writing as a burden, then I get the desire for shortcuts. If you think of writing as an opportunity, as a valuable process that clarifies what you think, that helps you discover new connections and connect different dots and challenge your assumptions and force you to be precise in how you articulate your ideas, why would you want to skip that step?”

Thursday morning, Ezra Klein at the New York Times published a column titled “Charlie Kirk Was Practicing Politics the Right Way.” Klein’s general thesis is that Kirk was willing to talk to anyone, regardless of their beliefs, as evidenced by what he was doing while he was shot, which was debating people on college campuses. Klein is not alone in this take; the overwhelming sentiment from America’s largest media institutions in the immediate aftermath of his death has been to paint Kirk as a mainstream political commentator, someone whose  politics liberals and leftists may not agree with but someone who was open to dialogue and who espoused the virtues of free speech. 

“You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him,” Klein wrote. “He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it.”

“I envied what he built. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness,” Klein continued.

Kirk is being posthumously celebrated by much of the mainstream press as a noble sparring partner for center-left politicians and pundits. Meanwhile, the very real, very negative, and sometimes violent impacts of his rhetoric and his political projects are being glossed over or ignored entirely. In the New York Times, Kirk was an “energetic” voice who was “critical of gay and transgender rights,” but few of the national pundits have encouraged people to actually go read what Kirk tweeted or listen to what he said on his podcast to millions and millions of people. “Whatever you think of Kirk (I had many disagreements with him, and he with me), when he died he was doing exactly what we ask people to do on campus: Show up. Debate. Talk. Engage peacefully, even when emotions run high,” David French wrote in the Times. “In fact, that’s how he made his name, in debate after debate on campus after campus.”

This does not mean Kirk deserved to die or that political violence is ever justified. What happened to Kirk is horrifying, and we fear deeply for whatever will happen next. But it is undeniable that Kirk was not just a part of the extremely tense, very dangerous national dialogue, he was an accelerationist force whose work to dehumanize LGBTQ+ people and threaten the free speech of professors, teachers, and school board members around the country has directly put the livelihoods and physical safety of many people in danger. We do no one any favors by ignoring this, even in the immediate aftermath of an assassination like this.

Kirk claimed that his Turning Point USA sent “80+ buses full of patriots” to the January 6 insurrection. Turning Point USA has also run a “Professor Watchlist,”and a “School Board Watchlist” for nearly a decade. 

“America’s radical education system has taken a devastating toll on our children,” Kirk said in an intro video posted on these projects’ websites. “From sexualized material in textbooks to teaching CRT and implementing the 1619 Project doctrine, the radical leftist agenda will not stop … The School Board Watch List exposes school districts that host drag queen story hour, teach courses on transgenderism, and implement unsafe gender neutral bathroom policies. The Professor Watch List uncovers the most radical left-wing professors from universities that are known to suppress conservative voices and advance the progressive agenda.”

These websites have been directly tied to harassment and threats against professors and school board members all over the country. Professor Watchlist lists hundreds of professors around the country, many of them Black or trans, and their perceived radical agendas, which include things like supporting gun control, “socialism,” “Antifa,” “abortion,” and acknowledging that trans people exist and racism exists. Trans professors are misgendered on the website, and numerous people who have been listed on it have publicly spoken about receiving death threats and being harassed after being listed on the site.

One professor on the watchlist who 404 Media is granting anonymity for his safety said once he was added to the list, he started receiving anonymous letters in his campus mailbox. “‘You're everything wrong with colleges,’ ‘watch your step, we're watching you’ kind of stuff,” he said, “One anonymous DM on Twitter had a picture of my house and driveway, which was chilling.” His president and provost also received emails attempting to discredit him with “all the allegedly communist and subversive stuff I was up to,” he said. “It was all certainly concerning, but compared to colleagues who are people of color and/or women, I feel like the volume was smaller for me. But it was certainly not a great feeling to experience that stuff. That watchlist fucked up careers and ruined lives.” 

The American Association of University Professors said in an open letter in 2017 that Professor Watchlist “lists names of professors with their institutional affiliations and photographs, thereby making it easy for would-be stalkers and cyberbullies to target them. Individual faculty members who have been included on such lists or singled out elsewhere have been subject to threats of physical violence, including sexual assault, through hundreds of e-mails, calls, and social media postings. Such threatening messages are likely to stifle the free expression of the targeted faculty member; further, the publicity that such cases attract can cause others to self-censor so as to avoid being subjected to similar treatment.” Campus free speech rights group FIRE found that censorship and punishment of professors skyrocketed between 2020 and 2023, in part because of efforts from Professor Watchlist.

Many more professors who Turning Point USA added to their watchlist have spoken out in the past about how being targeted upended their lives, brought years of harassment down on them and their colleagues, and resulted in death threats against them and their loved ones. 

At Arizona State University, a professor on the watchlist was assaulted by two people from Turning Point USA in 2023. 

“Earlier this year, I wrote to Turning Point USA to request that it remove ASU professors from its Professor Watchlist. I did not receive a response,” university president Michael Crow wrote in a statement. “Instead, the incident we’ve all now witnessed on the video shows Turning Point’s refusal to stop dangerous practices that result in both physical and mental harm to ASU faculty members, which they then apparently exploit for fundraising, social media clicks and financial gain.” Crow said the Professor Watchlist resulted in “antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ and misogynistic attacks on ASU faculty with whom Turning Point USA and its followers disagree,” and called the organization’s tactics “anti-democratic, anti-free speech and completely contrary” to the spirit of scholarship.  

Kirk’s death is a horrifying moment in our current American nightmare. Kirk’s actions and rhetoric do not justify what happened to him because they cannot be justified. But Kirk was not merely someone who showed up to college campuses and listened. It should not be controversial to plainly state some of the impact of his work.

Are we talking about the same guy, NYT, MSNBC, and Gavin Newsom?

The post OK, But You Do Know You’re Eulogizing Charlie Kirk, Right? appeared first on Aftermath.