These are the same voices who frequently portray themselves as global defenders of “free speech.”
The American right has responded to the killing of Charlie Kirk not with calls for calm or unity but with a vow of vengeance.
Kirk, a prominent conservative commentator and close ally of Donald Trump, was shot while speaking on a Utah college campus in what both Trump and Utah Governor Spencer Cox described as an “assassination.”
Yet rather than urging restraint or reflection, Trump seized the moment to escalate tensions.
In a four-minute video from the Oval Office, posted just hours after the shooting, Trump made it clear – there would be no Biden-style appeals to “lower the temperature” or to remember that, while “we may disagree, we are not enemies,” the kind of language Biden used after Trump himself survived an assassination attempt in 2024.
Instead, Trump blamed his political opponents directly for what he called a “heinous assassination,” offering no evidence and seemingly seeing no need to. He made no mention of recent attacks on Democratic officials, including the fatal shooting of a Minnesota state legislator earlier this summer.
And his allies have echoed the call for retribution.
“It’s time for the Trump administration to shut down, defund, and prosecute every single Leftist organisation,” far-right activist Laura Loomer posted on X. “If Charlie Kirk dies from his injuries, his life cannot be in vain. We must shut these lunatic leftists down. Once and for all. The Left is a national security threat.”
These are the same voices who frequently portray themselves as global defenders of “free speech.”
Kirk himself often championed the First Amendment as a foundational value. Republicans routinely warn of creeping censorship, especially abroad. Last November, GOP lawmakers on the House Judiciary Committee condemned the UK’s Online Safety Act as part of what they called a “tsunami of censorship headed towards America.”
In their statement, Republicans declared: “Legislation like the Online Safety Act that is said to combat ‘hate speech’ empowers regulators to censor free speech. Congressional Republicans understand that these threats to free speech are part of a broader global push by the Censorship Industrial Complex, which includes not only the EU, UK, and other nations but also malign actors here at home. We are committed to confronting this growing threat alongside the incoming Trump Administration to fight against these assaults on free speech within our borders and around the world.”
But while the GOP denounces online moderation in the UK as authoritarian censorship, they are advocating for a political purge of left-wing institutions at home.
The same voices crying censorship when British regulators challenge hate speech are now demanding the US government “shut down, defund, and prosecute” vast swaths of American civil society, without trials, without evidence, without hesitation.
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