Charlie Kirk’s assassination has unleashed not only grief and outrage, but something darker: the authoritarian impulse that always follows chaos. The instinct is as predictable as it is dangerous. Some shocking event occurs, the public reels, and politicians seize the moment to demand more power over the very people they are supposed to serve. It happened after Rome was attacked, after the Reichstag burned, after the Twin Towers fell. And now, with Kirk’s blood still on the ground, it is happening again in America.
United States Attorney General Pam Bondi has declared that there is “free speech and then there’s hate speech,” and vowed to “go after” those who engage in it — as though the First Amendment contained an asterisk, as though the Bill of Rights meant “free speech, except the kind we don’t like.” Congressman Clay Higgins, a Republican, has gone further, promising to wield congressional authority to force lifetime bans across social media, revoke business licenses, and blacklist anyone whose words offend his moral sense. And now we have Jimmy Kimmel put on indefinite leave because the Chairman of the FCC threatening his show’s parent company with sanctions because he offered a characteristically idiotic opinion.
Democrats have never hidden their contempt for free speech. They openly campaign against regulating and suppressing “hate speech” (read: “speech they hate”) and “misinformation” (read: “information they hate”), and they especially hate and want to regulate and co-opt social media because they can’t control it. They make no secret of their desire to turn America into a nation where speech survives only until the state decides it has gone too far. The Left dreams of such power, and now, thanks to the authoritarian reflex of panicked Republicans, that dream is within reach.
This is exactly what I warned about in The Left’s Star Wars Trap. Chaos is the bait; control is the trap. Disorder — whether deliberately engineered or simply exploited — produces the same poisonous cycle: conservatives, desperate for order, begin constructing bigger and harsher instruments of government power. And once those instruments exist, the Left seizes them, sharpens them, and turns them against us “for the people.” We have lived this cycle before. After 9/11, conservatives acquiesced to vast surveillance programs, believing they were temporary necessities. Two decades later, those same tools were redirected inward, onto Americans. Today, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s murder, we are being lured into building censorship machinery that tomorrow’s commissars will gleefully inherit.
Consider how quickly the ground is shifting. Just weeks ago, Stephen Colbert was pushed out of his chair not because of politics but because of economics; his show was simply too expensive to justify. Capitalism canceled Colbert, and in a sense that is how a free market should work. Jimmy Kimmel, however, finds himself in a different position. His career was never derailed by market rejection, but by political coercion in the form Federal Communications Commission Chair Brendan Carr threatening “to take action” against ABC / Disney for his comment that Charlie Kirk’s killer was some MAGA acolyte: “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” The line was sloppy, inflammatory, and factually dubious. Yet instead of leaving his fate to advertisers or audiences, the government itself stepped in, rattling the saber of license revocation and forcing ABC’s hand. Colbert was undone by capitalism; Kimmel by coercion. And the latter is far more dangerous.
It is here we must be clear about the different manifestations of cancel culture. The first is the mob variety, where the professional indignant class with nothing better to do scour through a person’s past to unearth some off-color joke from a decade ago, or torch livelihoods over partisan differences. That should be rejected outright. The second is the government variety, when the state itself threatens censorship or punishment. That must be opposed with even greater urgency.
Of course, there are rare moments when people expose themselves as irredeemably vile — like those who openly celebrated Charlie Kirk’s murder. Employers are not obliged to pay someone who publicly applauds assassination. We’ve explained before: you have the right to say what you want without the government interfering; but you do not have the right to work for your employer. Other people have rights, too, including the right not to listen to you, nor associate with you. That is not cancel culture; that is the natural consequence of revolting behavior. But those exceptions do not change the rule: private accountability is not the same thing as government censorship, and confusing the two is how liberty is lost.
And here lies the deepest irony of all. Charlie Kirk was murdered for exercising free speech. His killer wanted to silence him, to make him an example. Yet Kirk’s death is now being weaponized as the very pretext for silencing others. The one thing Charlie Kirk never would have stood for — the gagging of speech — is the thing both his allies and his enemies are demanding in his name. If anything could dishonor his memory more thoroughly, I cannot imagine it.
Conservatives need to hear this plainly: authoritarianism is not conservatism. It is its betrayal. Conservatism means preserving liberty, not suffocating it. If we endorse censorship now — even in the name of protecting ourselves — we are sawing off the branch we sit on. And Americans of every stripe need to hear this too: once government is handed the power to decide which speech is allowed and which is forbidden, liberty is no longer yours. It is theirs, on loan, until you say the wrong thing.
We don’t have to like Jimmy Kimmel. Most of us don’t. Nor do we have to feign belief in his newfound rebuke of political violence. I still remember quite vividly him threatening physical violence Fox host Brian Kilmeade with the line, “I’ll pound you when I see you.” File that among his many sins for which he has never apologized or been held to account. But if we are willing to cheer while the government silences him, then we have already accepted the principle that the state can decide which speech is permissible and which is not. That is far more dangerous than anything Kimmel has ever said. Colbert’s firing may have been capitalism at work, but Kimmel’s suspension is something else entirely. It is a warning that if we don’t defend free speech for people we dislike, we won’t have it at all when the day comes that the government decides it dislikes us.
Charlie Kirk’s murder was meant to silence a man. If we allow it to become the excuse for silencing each other, then the assassin will have succeeded far more than he ever dreamed.
