In the wake of Charlie Kirk's death the right is embracing the same cancel culture and censorship techniques they despise so much from the left.
As of the date of this writing, September 17th, 2025, it is Constitution Day. Despite this, in 2025 America, the Constitution is being eroded more than ever before. Just read any of constitutional attorney and founder of The Rutherford Institute, John W. Whitehead's essays on the matter.
The infringements are endless, with masked agents running amok, disappearing people off the streets, extrajudicial executions at sea, military deployed domestically as law enforcement, unconstitutional wars waged, illegal mass surveillance on every American, warrantless search and seizure, debt-based Fiat currency, and so much more.
This isn't happening in a vacuum. The only way for Americans to sit by and allow their freedoms to die at such a magnitude is to keep them perpetually distracted and apathetic. This is why 5th-generation warfare comes in so handy for the ruling class. Keep the entire population besieged from all sides at all times, economically, biologically, informationally, neurologically, so utterly saturated, so deep in the trenches, they don't even realize they're in a war.
When the average tax cattle are so exhausted from state-capitalist exploitation just to meet the bare standards for survival, so psychologically fatigued from the constant influx of doom porn, and the various other ways that the rat race is designed to keep us exhausted and unfulfilled while being simultaneously bombarded with socially engineered algorithms feeding into echo chambers it's easy to keep the masses focused on manufactured outrage and fake culture wars, or shallow celebrity gossiping and rigged sports-ball entertainment. Blissfully unaware or uncaring of how their rights are being stripped away every day
The most fundamental of these freedoms is guaranteed to us in the 1st amendment — freedom of speech, freedom of expression, among others. That simple principle is the litmus test of a free society: Can you speak your mind freely without reprisal from the state? For believers in America's founding ideals, the answer should be a resounding yes. And yet politicians and citizens alike oftentimes seem all too keen on allowing their principles to be pulled by puppet strings, ethically ambiguous and logically inconsistent.
Last week's heinous murder of controversial conservative pundit Charlie Kirk has brought these issues to the forefront of our current discourse. Kirk based his entire brand on exercising the First Amendment, engaging in public debates with individuals whose ideological position opposed his own until he was ultimately gunned down last week.
Already, there are numerous discrepancies in the official story of the assassination, and much in line with the old adage of not letting a good crisis go to waste, the usual suspects have wasted no time in exploiting his death to ramp up the divide and conquer rhetoric. On the heels of attempting to make him a martyr, many on the right who previously grandstanded for free speech are now openly demanding the erasure of the rights that Charlie himself embodied.
But let's not mince words here and call a spade a spade; none of this being said is to put him on a pedestal. Charlie Kirk was a professional liar, a propagandist of the highest degree who promulgated blatantly false, oftentimes bigoted, authoritarian rhetoric. He built a career off of perpetuating the fake left versus right dichotomy, exploiting the base he cultivated by inflaming the fears, anger, hatred, sadness, and anxieties of conservatives. While this was probably not Kirk's intention, as he himself was likely just as much a victim of government propaganda that ultimately fomented his views, it was most definitely the result. Yet despite all of this, anyone who claims to actually support free speech should still support his right to express his ideas, no matter how much one may disagree with them.
That is the very nature of free expression. This principle is best encapsulated in the words of Evelyn Beatrice Hall in her 1906 work The Friends of Voltaire, wherein she summarized the Enlightenment-era philosophers' views on the freedom of expression by writing the following words;
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
For critics of this philosophy, it should be reiterated that the answer to bad speech, even hate speech, is never censorship, but rather more speech. Better speech, loving speech. Truth never needs the assistance of censorship to be recognized as truth.
Thomas Eddlem's recent column for The Libertarian Institute titled Charlie Kirk And Cancel Culture hit the nail right on the head when it comes to elucidating the current wave of right-wingers who previously decried the left for their cancel culture campaigns, now all too eager to exercise their own Orwellian two minutes hate to purge whatever speech off the internet they dislike.
Even President Trump, never shy to fan the flames of the proverbial inferno, is cashing in on the rebranding of opposition to "hate speech" that was once an ideological cornerstone of the Democrat party he so vehemently despises. The pendulum ever swings back and forth.
Recently, Trump shared on his Truth Social account a viral TikTok video that essentially urges the creation of a Ministry of Truth — not dissimilar to the Biden era attempt at the same — in the wake of the Charlie Kirk assassination.
The TikToker blames Kirk's assassination on legacy media outlets, and promotes a Change dot org petition to “Enact the Charlie Kirk Act to Restore Media Accountability.” The proposed petition aims to "hold media outlets, radio stations, educators, and content creators accountable for the false narratives and erroneous information they spread deliberately or irresponsibly,” though at the time of this writing the concept of any such legislation is still only wishful thinking.
Of course, we know this is all nothing but pseudo-moralistic virtue signaling. It's no secret to anyone paying attention that the corporate media are career peddlers of propaganda; they lie us into wars all the time, and hardly anybody bats an eye over the millions that get killed because of it. All these people suddenly clutching their pearls now because some partisan pundits hurt their feelings by characterizing Kirk as an awful person, didn't shed one single crocodile tear when these same outlets spent two years actively lying their way through and justifying a live-streamed genocide.
We've seen this song and dance before dozens of times with calls for the government to regulate speech, and of course, in doing so, giving them the power to determine what constitutes said hate speech, which, ironically, always seems to be anything that the current regime in power doesn't like. Funny how that works? Almost as if the ruling class will exploit whatever powers are given to them to censor whatever ideas are in opposition to their own agendas with impunity and total disregard for any actual principles surrounding so-called "free speech".
As political commentator Caitlin Johnstone recently pointed out,
The “Charlie Kirk Act” is being pushed in the name of fighting propaganda, but it would actually be giving the US government unprecedented authority over what Americans are permitted to say on any platform.
The Trump administration, like every administration before it, and every administration after it, has from the very beginning employed propaganda, gaslighting, and censorship against Americans on behalf of the so-called deep state. This hyperbolic emotional hysteria being used to push for even stricter censorship is no different. Just Wednesday evening, late-night talk show host, propagandist, and self-styled comedian Jimmy Kimmel was fired from ABC for questioning whether or not Kirk's assassin was a Trump supporter, as the attacks on speech already start to ramp up.
People should recognize the direction we are headed and change course immediately. Charlie Kirk's death is being weaponized to scapegoat us even further into the "post-truth world" where the only allowed narratives are state-sanctioned and the only thing you're allowed to say is what the government approves of.
A society is only as free as we allow it to be. Don't let the American dream die at the hands of a censorship nightmare.