Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination last week, we’ve seen a massive move from Republicans to use his death as an excuse to shift towards full authoritarian rule and thought-policing in the United States. That threat first appeared in declarations that they would target left-wing and liberal organizations, then this week it came in the shape of getting Jimmy Kimmel’s show canceled indefinitely – an intention telegraphed by Donald Trump before the assassination even happened.

This seemingly coordinated response from Trump, his team, and his followers came so quickly (much of it before many of the facts came out) that it feels like many Republicans were just waiting for something like this to use as tinder for their next Constitutional rights bonfire. But there are signs that Republicans flubbed this step, and the American people won’t stand for this attack on First Amendment rights.

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As soon as news of the shooting first broke, Republicans were 100% ready to blame “the left,” leaving what that meant up to interpretation. Implications have ranged from assuming that someone with left-wing beliefs pulled the trigger, to blaming the rhetoric from the “radical left,” which Trump advisor Laura Loomer claimed was a “national security threat.”

Before any information on the suspect had been released, Republicans were circulating claims that the shooter was trans. Then another rumor picked up as fact by the Wall Street Journal was that the bullets were engraved with “transgender and anti-fascist ideologies.” Those would have been great facts for Republicans to push anti-liberal and anti-trans sentiments as the basis for Kirk’s assassination and to demonize the left, if any of it had been remotely true.

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After those claims were debunked, the search for a way to blame trans people for the shooting intensified with new claims that the shooter’s roommate and potential partner might be trans. In text messages allegedly sent by the shooter and his roommate (the validity of which has been questioned online), the shooter confessed to this roommate, and the roommate then turned the texts over to authorities. If that’s true, it’s still a hell of a reach to suggest that trans people or the left are to blame for the actions of the shooter. But the Republicans were ready to try from the very start.

The narrative of misinformation built after Kirk’s death clearly had a target in mind. Beyond trying to frame the left with no justification, right-wing fingers have been pointing on podcasts and other platforms to suggest that we effectively need to dismantle any group that supports any left-wing ideas, while figures like Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth have sought retribution against anyone saying negative things about Charlie Kirk.

So Attorney General Pam Bondi found herself in the bizarre position of explaining why this kind of government censorship wouldn’t be a massive breach of the First Amendment. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Bondi said, suggesting that hateful speech is not protected by the Constitution.

The Supreme Court has upheld that hate speech is protected by the First Amendment in multiple rulings. It’s sort of the whole point of it – the government doesn’t get to determine what’s hate speech and what’s not. If the right got its way and were able to prosecute hate speech, it would give free rein to the Trump administration to decide what they deem as hateful, and there’s no reason to believe that they would stop at insults to rightwing podcasters.

The First Amendment is central to so much of what the United States stands for, and it’s laughable that the Republican Party has reached a point where some of its members are calling for its protections to be dismantled.

The American people have had to sit through endless mass shootings, often in schools, as we watch children die. In recent months, a Democratic politician, Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman, and her husband were killed, and another state senator and his wife were hospitalized in politically motivated attacks. Earlier this year, a man set fire to Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor’s house in an attempt to kill him. And last month, a police officer was killed when a man started shooting at the CDC. In the wake of all of these incidents, the right has shrugged its collective shoulders and just said, “It is what it is.”

When people pushed for gun control after mass shootings and other tragedies, they were told not to politicize the deaths, that doing so would attack the rights granted by the Second Amendment. Now, after Kirk has been killed, the prominent voices on the right want us to believe that his death warrants the shutting down of anyone with a political idea left of the center. 

They’ve always said that Second Amendment rights trump everything, and now they want to shred the First.

While Trump and his team were ready to spring into action after Kirk’s assassination, they might have gone too far in their attack on free speech with the Jimmy Kimmel cancellation. In line with Trump’s claim after Stephen Colbert’s show was cancelled that “Jimmy Kimmel is next,” the head of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, appears to have pressured ABC into cancelling the late-night show through shadowy tactics, using a merger that required administration approval as leverage for a pound of flesh. Rolling Stone reported that executives defended Kimmel and felt he hadn’t crossed the line but caved because they were concerned about retribution from the Trump administration.

This attack on free speech is just too blatant across the board for the American people to swallow. Plenty of Democrats and left-wing figures have come out to decry the move and support Kimmel, including late-night personalities like Colbert, David Letterman, Jimmy Fallon, Jon Stewart, and Seth Meyers. But members of the far-right influencer space have seemingly had a big “wait a minute” moment too, leaving me in the upsetting position of agreeing with Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, and even Matt Walsh as they criticize the use of the FCC and these attacks on free speech.

The truly bipartisan outrage around the cancellation of Kimmel and his show might be the biggest sign of how bad this move is for the country. It’s easy to imagine that things might have been different if Republicans had acted on their outrage a little slower. This all feels like they were ready to fire when something like this happened, and they were just waiting for an opportune moment.

They jumped on the shooting before learning that the shooter’s politics were not uniformly far-left. And then they jumped on Kimmel when he spoke about Kirk, seeming to miss that what he said was really fairly innocuous and was more of a criticism of the Republican response to his death than anything about the assassination or the man himself. 

None of what they jumped on generated enough true outrage to sell people on destroying the First Amendment and handing authoritarian control over to Trump and his administration. That misstep might be some small blessing to come out of all of this, but we know they have their playbook now, and we need to be ready to see them try this move all over again.

The Trump administration hoped to use Kirk’s death as a pawn on their political chessboard, all to push their disingenuous attack on freedom of speech and of the press. The rhetoric from Trump and his allies aligns a bit too conveniently with his motives, as he attacks media outlets across the board, whether that be pressuring late-night hosts off of television or filing lawsuits against papers that publish stories he’d rather remain in the dark. 

None of this is about the horrific political violence that has happened:  Trump and his allies are just exploiting it to control information and lie to the American people.

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