Trump aims to silence his opponents with attacks on Charlie Kirk’s critics | Opinion
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Trump used FCC threats to pressure ABC after Jimmy Kimmel mocked his response to Charlie Kirk’s death.
- Criticism of Kirk's views draws heat from Trump and his backers in an effort to silence their own critics.
- It’s time to defend free speech as a warning against political misuse of tragic events.
Like millions of Americans, I woke up Thursday morning confronted with an unfamiliar feeling. For the first time in my life, I had a strong opinion about Jimmy Kimmel.
While the comedian regularly jabs at President Donald Trump, he didn’t become late night’s longest-tenured host by testing the boundaries of comic expression on network television. Kimmel’s caution didn’t save him. ABC suspended “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” indefinitely just hours after it received direct threats from the Trump-appointed chairman of the Federal Communications Commission regarding Kimmel’s remarks about the assassination of conservative activist and YouTuber Charlie Kirk.
Sinclair Media, a conservative company that owns multiple ABC affiliates around the country, demanded the comedian apologize to Kirk’s family and make a “meaningful” donation to Kirk’s family and his organization, Turning Point USA.
How did a stand-up routine get this far? Kimmel’s joke wasn’t even about Kirk; it was about Trump. The late-night host mocked the president for answering a question about mourning his slain friend by discussing his White House redecoration plans. He also slammed Trump and the “MAGA Gang” for painting the suspect in Kirk’s murder as “anything other than one of them” to win political points. But parsing Kimmel’s jokes is beside the point.
You and I likely agree that no matter what his killer believes, Kirk didn’t deserve an assassin’s bullet. But Trump’s latest petty exertion of his power, this time siccing the FCC on a milquetoast comedian, does exactly what Kimmel warned: It manipulates a tragic murder to demand that you accept Kirk and, by proxy, an ideologically aligned White House. The demand is full obedience, or at least silence. There’s hardly a difference.
Trump using a tragedy to suppress debate
Kirk’s death gives the president a tool to try to suppress anyone who despises what the podcaster stood for. In this decade alone, Kirk accused American Jews of being “the largest financiers of left-wing anti-white causes,” a charge that could cozily find itself in a Klan pamphlet, argued “America was at its peak” when it banned Asian and Middle Eastern immigrants for 40 years, and called for gender-affirming clinic doctors to undergo “Nuremberg-style” trials.
This is but a brief sampling. I have a word count.
Even if you aren’t Jewish, an immigrant, transgender, a doctor or a member of one of the other groups Kirk denigrated, you can imagine why some might have, at the very least, found Kirk’s views somewhat irritating. You might also notice Kirk’s talking points mirror Trump’s smears of liberal Jews, immigrants and trans people. Public reckoning with Kirk’s legacy is, under the opportune circumstances of his gruesome murder, a perfect fly trap for regime critics. Accordingly, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, White House aide Stephen Miller, and Vice President JD Vance — while guest-hosting Kirk’s radio show! — called for scouring social media for Kirk-critical posts from public and private employees.
Explicit state actors and private institutions fell in line at a terrifying pace. In the same week, Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah opined on Bluesky about the pressure to “perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.” The Post said the DeSoto, Texas, native committed a fireable offense.
Universities around the country have purged students and staff over their Kirk comments, making no apparent distinction between rude celebrations or carefully worded dissent. Texas has carried the mantle, with Education Commissioner Mike Morath promising to investigate hundreds of teachers for their Kirk-related posts. The enforcement is so zealous that the state’s largest teacher union advised its members to make their accounts private and remove references to their jobs.
This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has improvised a pretext to prosecute speech. Palestinian rights activist Mahmoud Khalil knows this well. But every escalation toward limitless censorship — Trump said Friday that his administration would consider pulling licenses of TV networks that air Trump criticism — is a step toward the ultimate goal of crushing your voice. Which is exactly why, right now, more than ever, you need to use it. After all, Kirk rarely minced his words. Neither should we.
If Kirk had any merits over the other content creators scrounging for clicks and donations, it was his mastery of a form of discourse that gives the appearance of civility while masking the cruelty of his ideas.
For instance, Kirk challenged the efficacy of affirmative action by listing off accomplished Black women, including former first lady Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, then declaring that they lacked “the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously.”
His reflexive doubts that Black pilots he encountered were qualified to safely guide his flight were delivered with a measured tone and a smile. Kirk also knew how to leave escape hatches for his own claims. It wasn’t, he clarified, that he believes Black people can’t be leaders or skilled workers. But affirmative action policies forced Kirk into “unhealthy thinking patterns” about Black people in cockpits. Squint long enough and Kirk almost resembles someone who respects you.
But my assessment is too empathetic. In truth, I have hardly anything in common with those who, like Kirk did in a viral debate with “woke college students,” mangle 1940s crime data into nostalgia for Black life under Jim Crow. Less so for anyone who tells a Black woman, to her face, that the period when her ancestors were routinely slaughtered and raped for so much as rolling their eyes at the wrong white man left them better off than present-day America. Though Kirk concedes segregation was “evil,” he insists that back then, Black people were spared the damage of contemporary Black culture.
Kirk isn’t the first person to say Black culture is uniquely corrosive or to blame it as the primary cause of Black poverty and criminal behavior. I’ve heard and spoken to Black people who make the same argument. The idea that Black people are a danger to themselves and others is as old as the very complementary practice of chaining Black people to boats. In the 1890s, we were unrestrained savages. In the 1990s, we were underpoliced “superpredators.” Now we’re told “prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people.” (Kirk’s words, not mine!)
Aren’t you bored?
Trump administration trying to erase unflattering history
The Trump administration’s removal of public monuments acknowledging the evils of slavery and the president’s smearing of anyone with pigment as a DEI hire echoes Kirk’s poisonous claims. He will stop at nothing to erase our ability to recite our nation’s bleak but basic truths. Preserving the public memory of who we were and are, even when it’s unflattering, is exactly why none of us should keep quiet about Kirk.
As a boy, my grandfather, Bill Hampton, hitchhiked from Lakeland, Florida, to New York City in search of a college education. Though he was just 13, or maybe 15 — the deep South didn’t keep detailed records for Black families — Bill risked his life to make the 1,100-mile journey to Harlem, escaping laws and customs from an era Kirk insisted was a net positive for my community.
Unable to use the whites-only library, Bill devoured leftover newspapers. As an adult, he subscribed to dozens of papers and magazines and, whenever possible, read them cover to cover.
How would I look wasting a role he could have only dreamed of by hiding what he overcame? In the best of ways, Granddad’s ghost haunts me. Kirk’s shadow, however, shrivels in the sunlight.
Bill Hampton is my why. I’m making a calculated wager on you, the reader, finding yours.
I know there are many more than me who, upon encountering Kirk in his own words, doubt he spent his last years on Earth disparaging Martin Luther King Jr. (”[King] said one good thing he didn’t actually believe”) and the Civil Rights Act (”a huge mistake”) out of his commitment to advancing kindness, equality and dignity. Some of those people also cherish everyone’s right to speak their mind, both Kirk and his opponents.
And when people, even those they disagree with, violate common decency while falling comfortably within the guardrails of the First Amendment, they want proportional outcomes, not obsessive McCarthyite witchhunts.
Look at most polls about Trump’s job approval: his reach ain’t long enough, and his peeps ain’t strong enough. All he can do is control the narrative by trying to control you.
So don’t let him. We all need to be a little bit braver than we were yesterday. Prove him wrong.
This story was originally published September 21, 2025 at 4:45 AM with the headline "Trump aims to silence his opponents with attacks on Charlie Kirk’s critics | Opinion."
