THIS WEEK IN…
FREE SPEECH CRACKDOWN
The fallout of the fatal shooting of Charlie Kirk is a coordinated campaign by administration officials and right-wing figures to vilify everyone perceived as liberal or left of center as a danger to the country.
It has led to the doxxing, firing, or suspension of teachers, private sector workers, government workers, journalists and even famous late-night hosts. After years of complaints from the right about “cancel culture” from the left, conservatives, including many members of Congress, are now threatening and punishing those who have criticized Kirk’s rhetoric after his death.
The administration’s use of a violent crime as a justification to suppress domestic political dissent, curtail free expression, and crack down on political opposition in an attempt to consolidate power not only raises serious concerns but violates the First Amendment.
Zack Beauchamp calls the campaign to police speech The third Red Scare. The right’s new assault on free speech isn’t cancel culture. It’s worse.
Em Luetkemeyer looks at a campaign to identify and punish those who mocked or spoke out against Kirk after his death
Pen America on how Charlie Kirk’s Murder Spurs McCarthy-Esque Crackdown On Free Expression
“The First Amendment is really hard for everyone the first few times they encounter it. Everyone likes it on paper. Everyone struggles with it in practice. It’s much tougher when the speech you have to tolerate is something you really, really dislike,” says Adam Goldstein, a vice president at the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in this article about Republican’s wavering support for free speech
David Graham shows the The Irony of Using Charlie Kirk’s Murder to Silence Debate. The conservative activist couldn’t have risen to prominence without robust free speech
Spencer Ackerman looks at how the Trump administration is using The War on Terror Template for the Post-Charlie Kirk Crackdown
David Roth on how private citizens and businesses are targeted in this campaign and how the “bombast and frantic bullying is doing real and unjust damage in actual people’s lives” in his article The United States of Snitches
In an attempt to blame “the left” for the assassination, Republicans have engaged in a campaign of lies to rewrite Kirk’s work and rhetoric as Aaron Regunberg writes in his piece The Right’s Scary Quick Campaign to Exploit Charlie Kirk’s Death. Republicans are organizing around the idea that fiction is reality—and too many liberals are playing along.
And Ta-Nehesi Coates on how pundits and politicians are whitewashing Charlie Kirks’s record: Charlie Kirk, Redeemed: A Political Class Finds Its Lost Cause
The wholesale defamation of everything and everyone liberally inclined or left of center as the source of violence, the attacks on conservative politicians, and the murder of Charlie Kirk, does not reflect reality. A study by the National Institute of Justice found that “white supremacist and far-right violence ‘ continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism’ in the United States.” The study’s finding were featured on the website of the Department of Justice until recently, and has since been deleted, Emanuel Maiberg writes in 404media.
…In Other News
In addition to trying to sanitize Charlie Kirk’s legacy, the Trump administration is attempting to rewrite history and ignoring ugly chapters of American history. According to the Washington Post, the National Park Service had been ordered to stop using the photo of a formerly enslaved man whose back is heavily scarred by whippings in its displays. The 1863 photo of a man named Peter, known as the “Scourged Back” image, has long been used to show the horrors of slavery.
An 1863 photograph entitled “Scourged Back,” depicts an enslaved man named Peter with prominent whip scars.
McPherson and Oliver circa 1863
In contrast, the congregation of King’s Chapel, a historic site on the Freedom Trail, which is a walking tour through downtown Boston leading to more than a dozen sites of significance to the American revolution and later historic events, decided to confront the church’s history. Visitors to the site will now see an over 4 meter tall statue of a black woman in a white dress, releasing birds from a cage. The statue “Unbound” is to honor the 219 people who were enslaved by the church’s forebears.