Most “free speech champions” are nothing more than shapeshifters. They support free speech when it suits. Once they obtain power, freedom for their enemies goes out the window.
The woke left ascended the cultural pyramid in the 2010s through cancel culture and social shaming. These confused leftists preached that speech equalled violence and misgendering someone was tantamount to wanting a transgender person not to exist. If you agree with the woke premise that offensive speech is the same as harming someone – that words are indistinguishable from violence – then of course HR departments and universities should fire people who break these rules to prevent harm.
But the premise was false. The chilling effect was such that the public square soon resembled a walk-in refrigerator. The woke left’s reaction in 2020 on both sides of the Atlantic following George Floyd’s murder was like a scene out of The Crucible. The tragedy lay in the left’s obvious fate: at some point the right would use the same weapons to silence their enemies. Call for a witch hunt and very soon you’ll find that you’re the one being called a witch.
We have now arrived at this juncture. The Trump administration has spun Charlie Kirk’s murder into an excuse to clamp down on the left. Where once the woke petitioned corporations, universities and the mainstream media to enforce their speech codes, the right now wields the power of the state. As such, on 17 September the chair of the broadcast watchdog threatened to pull ABC’s licence unless it fired comedian Jimmy Kimmel, who wrongly suggested Kirk’s assassin supported Maga. Kimmel was taken off air for almost a week. The Pentagon has also told journalists their stories must be signed off before publication or they could lose access to the building. And earlier in September, JD Vance erroneously said that the Nation, a progressive American magazine, was being funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation. He promised to “go after” such NGOs. Here is the right’s demonology: the administration holds a web of think tanks and magazines (“radical left lunatics”, in Vance’s words) responsible for Kirk’s death, and now wants to shut them down.
Governments typically cite blasphemy, indecency or subversion to justify censorship – often in a state of emergency such as a war or plague. Trump does not bother with such pretences. On the plane back from his state visit to Britain, the president said that all the television channels do “is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.” He has little time for the idea that the office of the US president is distinct from Donald Trump himself. He identifies with the state and so when he is insulted, so is the state. That is why he thinks he can use state power to suppress his critics.
At the funeral for Kirk on 21 September, Trump said Kirk “did not hate his opponents… That’s where I disagreed with Charlie – I hate my opponent.” His charming remarks came just after Kirk’s widow, Erika, said she forgave her husband’s killer, because that is what Jesus would do. In the week following Kirk’s death, Republican leaders talked with religious fervour. What we are seeing is the resurgence of the Christian right. Kirk was their martyr and now they must do God’s work. And Trump is poised to ride this wave: his unchristian style only seems to make Christians like him more.
Trump’s hatred of the left is being mimicked by his online warriors. One X account claimed to have logged 60,000 entries in a database of people who had celebrated Kirk’s death, in order to oust them from their jobs. Meanwhile, the rhetorical acrobatics that the left used to force professors and journalists from their jobs in 2020 are today being redeployed by the right. The US attorney general started talking about “hate speech”. The online right squeals that freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences. Commemorative statues and murals of Kirk are being planned around America; he is approaching deification.
Free speech is being cast aside in the name of saving “Western civilisation”, as the White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller put it. The two are juxtaposed in the minds of the Christian right. Maga thinks it is too late to worry about something as annoying as free speech – the barbarians are just too close. The wheel of culture has turned and the left is being squashed.
In the past couple of years, Gaza has been the progressive left’s cause célèbre. The abstractions of wokeness were replaced by something substantive and real. Could Trump’s assault on free speech push the left to rediscover its passion for self-expression? There’s a good chance this will happen. It is the prudent thing to do in the name of self-preservation. The left has long found dissent more comfortable than power.
Talk in Washington has turned to whether next year’s mid-term elections will be fair, and whether Trump or his successor will try to stay in office in 2028 by force. Congressional Democrats look bewildered and impotent. Winning the House is the most important thing they can do to check Trump’s power. But the Democrats’ defence of free speech falls flat: their credibility on this issue is long gone. All the while, Trump marches on.
[Further reading: Charlie Kirk and America’s Age of Lead]
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This article appears in the 25 Sep 2025 issue of the New Statesman, “Are you up for it?” – Andy Burnham’s plan for Britain
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