A Project Worthy of Charlie Kirk’s Legacy
The question “What should we do now?” has loomed large ever since the videos of Charlie Kirk’s assassination hit social media last week. There’s been a groundswell in support among Americans who are interested in reviving the nation and joining the church. Perhaps the most crucial project for Americans going forward is to channel this energy and enthusiasm toward productive ends.
From anecdotal evidence I’ve seen and heard, churches across America were fuller this past Sunday. Bibles were being dusted off or bought and read for the first time. It’s possible that millions first heard the Gospel when they watched one of Charlie’s debates or heard it preached from a pulpit on the Lord’s Day. Prayer vigils continue to be held in cities across America, such as the one where Center for Baptist Leadership Executive Director William Wolfe spoke in North Carolina.
Turning Point USA reports that as of Wednesday afternoon, it has received over 54,000 requests from high school and college students who want to start new TPUSA chapters or join an existing chapter.
Much to the chagrin of squishy Republicans like Oklahoma Senator James Lankford, cowardly “both-sidism” that attempts to create false moral equivalencies between the Left and Right is being increasingly ignored. Formerly apolitical Americans were shocked out of their slumber and are looking for ways to help out in their communities. They are stunned as they see neighbors, friends, family members, and prominent voices wave away—or even rejoice in—the cold-blooded murder of an individual whose political views they share.
On the culture front, ABC decided to suspend Jimmy Kimmel indefinitely after FCC chairman Brandon Carr critiqued Kimmel, and two big distributors, Sinclair and Nextstar (perhaps due to the prodding of Auron MacIntyre and others), decided to pull his late-night show from their ABC affiliates. Sinclair stations will instead air a one-hour tribute to Charlie Kirk on Friday.
The outcry from the very people and institutions that have spread lies and propaganda unabated for decades—that have essentially given trillions in in-kind donations to the Democratic Party—is, on the surface, hypocrisy in its most basic form. The same people who cheered after ABC fired Rosanne and Fox News canned Tucker Carlson, the same people who applauded when Twitter suspended the accounts of the New York Post and other media organs for rightly reporting on the Hunter Biden laptop scandal right before the 2020 election, the same people who were amused when Douglass Mackey was jailed for a meme, the same people who shrugged after learning that the Obama administration’s IRS targeted conservative nonprofits—they have no room to talk.
But it’s more than just hypocrisy—it’s about the form of tolerance that is practiced by the Left and their epigones. The radical New Left professor Herbert Marcuse clearly taught this understanding of tolerance in his essay “Repressive Tolerance.” Marcuse critiqued “neutral tolerance,” which is extended both to the Left and Right, and proposed intolerance “against movements from the Right and toleration of movements from the Left.”
Rather than making calls to return to a “marketplace of ideas,” the Right needs to confront the Left’s claim on this front. They must reassert the very conditions of civilized society, including shunning certain opinions and behaviors that are inimical to a healthy polity. The law of fashion is a powerful force in society and always governs hand in hand with any written constitution. A dense web of decorum, laws, and traditions will always be present wherever man is living.
With the news of Kimmel’s suspension, the Left is finally seeing the first signs of what accountability looks like. It’s likely that ABC, CBS, and other networks are riding the cultural shift Trump helped inaugurate with his win in 2024, feeling freer to make decisions they’ve wanted to make all along. Or maybe it’s a more Machiavellian maneuver—they’re getting rid of dead weight now so that Trump can get all the blame. But in any event, it’s likely that the late-night universe as we know it, which has become a series of political rallies hosted by unfunny charlatans that are losing millions of dollars each year, will cease to exist over the next five years.
A First Amendment Primer
Despite the claims of newly minted online free speech experts, the First Amendment doesn’t give anyone a right to host a late-night show. Rather, it prevents Congress from enacting laws that abridge one’s freedom of speech. The licenses that the FCC grants to local broadcasters (it doesn’t issue them to networks like ABC) are a privilege and can be revoked under certain circumstances. Additionally, corporations such as ABC have grounds for suspending or firing an individual if they think his character, behavior, or manners are out of step with the company’s culture. Lying and gloating about, or openly celebrating, murder in a public forum certainly meets this threshold.
And no, this is not the resurgence of “cancel culture,” which the Left wielded with impunity in the 2010s. They sought to attack, dox, and destroy the lives of anyone who dared voice a political opinion—which is explicitly protected by the First Amendment—that was a centimeter to the Right of the Kevin Costner Yellowstone meme.
Contrary to the usual libertarian claim, the problem with cancel culture was never the existence of moral limits on speech that could be readily enforced. The “Who decides?” comeback, which supposes that since morality is contested by some, it can’t be known or prescribed by civil rulers, was always an unserious position.
Instead, the problem with cancel culture was the flawed nature of the judgments themselves and how they were enforced—through harassment and intimidation. That moral limits exist that bar certain types of speech shouldn’t have been cause for debate. Neither should the fact that someone’s reputation be affected for using speech that transgresses social boundaries, nor that they’d face legal consequences for violating the law.
The Right must begin the difficult process of recovering the moral grounds of American constitutionalism by retrieving the difference between freedom and license. According to Professor Thomas G. West, the American founders preserved this dichotomy through the categories of noninjurious and injurious speech. While the former was understood as a right that extended from one’s natural right of liberty, the latter was viewed as speech that harms another’s reputation or society at large. This includes personal libel, seditious libel, speech that “injures public health of the moral foundations of society,” and speech used in promoting “other injurious conduct” such as planning a bank robbery. Having a proper view of speech is crucial to reclaim our tradition of self-government.
A Plan of Action
To defeat the Left, the Right needs to prudentially use all the political tools at their disposal, even those the Left fashioned for themselves to attack their political enemies. The Right simply doesn’t have the luxury of, say, not utilizing the bureaucracy for their own ends in the short to medium term.
For example, the informal category of “hate speech”—which is not a legal classification in American law—will not be going away anytime soon, especially if Pam Bondi remains the U.S. Attorney General. Given this, the Right should make the founders’ understanding of injurious speech the de facto understanding of “hate speech.” This should be part of a broader effort that not only undermines the free expression regime that was inaugurated by the Warren Court during the 20th century but also systematically dismantles the far left’s various activist networks.
As Kyle Shideler lays out in a detailed policy memo at The American Mind, the Trump administration should develop a whole-of-government approach, spearheaded by the Department of Justice, that seeks to take down the myriad organizations that create and direct the Left’s violent street thugs.
First, the administration needs to convince the bureaucracy to create a far-left extremism category that gives an accurate, detailed, and precise definition of the ideologies that are implicated. Second, the various groups and networks on the Left—from Antifa to various Communist organizations—must be thoroughly documented, including their funding sources, strategies, leaders, and foot soldiers, and interactions with similar groups.
Despite the Right’s penchant to single out people like George Soros (which is understandable and necessary), no single person is directing the Left’s sizable activist network from a penthouse, like the famous James Bond supervillain Blofeld. Instead, as Shideler points out, there are countless organizations (many with front organizations such as single-issue political advocacy groups on the environment or abortion) that “compete with each other for attention, funds, and recruits.”
“Like an orchestra, these groups play their own separate parts, but they have the effect of coming together as a functioning, cohesive whole,” Shideler writes. “They generally accomplish this despite lacking a single entity that directs and coordinates the operation or campaign.”
Though President Trump has reportedly backed a plan to designate Antifa as a major terrorist group, Shideler argues that such a move may actually backfire, with legal challenges being filed and bureaucratic slowdowns that may prevent appropriate action. Instead, a “piecemeal approach” that focuses on designating foreign Antifa groups “will be slower, but it will be more likely to survive strong bureaucratic inertia,” he maintains.
As for a “whole-of-society” approach, wedges should be driven between elected Democrats and their increasingly violent base, forcing them to either publicly back chaos and disorder or take a stand for sanity and alienate their base.
Other strategies on this front include, as Jonathan Keeperman has argued, creating a Charlie Kirk National Park and establishing a Smithsonian exhibit on the Woke Era. Donors should give money to support the creation of endowed chairs at universities and fund the establishment of think tanks or independent scholars to study far-left extremism. Existing podcasts or new ones should be created that feature long-form episodes on the Left. A documentary series based on Bryan Burrough’s vital book, Days of Rage, should be created and sold to Netflix, Amazon, or another big streaming platform.
The choice we face is between continuing to slouch toward Sodom and Gomorrah or once again being a God-fearing people who are capable of republican government. As the Declaration of Independence frames this fundamental question, do we want civilization or barbarism? The choice is ours to make. From what has transpired since the killing of Charlie Kirk, more Americans than ever seem eager and willing to follow a better path.
