The End of the 1st Amendment.
America’s Right Of Free Speech Is Over

🔤🔤🔤🔤1️⃣

In the emotionally and politically charged days since the killing of Charlie Kirk, the conservative youth activist who was a close ally of Trump, one statement has loomed large.

On Monday, the US attorney general – the official in charge of the rule of law in America – said that the Trump administration would “absolutely target” those who espouse “hate speech” about Kirk.

Unlike in many other countries, hate speech is protected by US law unless it incites imminent violence or constitutes a true threat.

But that did not deter the nation’s top law enforcement officer, who also suggested that, for example, a print shop employee who refused to print flyers memorializing Kirk could be “prosecuted”.

Since Kirk was shot to death while speaking to college students in Utah earlier this month, the US has been gripped by a bitter debate about the relation between political speech and violence.

Bondi later walked back some of her remarks, in part because of criticism from other conservatives worried about the reframing of “free speech” as “hate speech”.

But Trump, Vance, White House adviser Stephen Miller and other top Republicans have framed Kirk’s death as the consequence of what they claim is unchecked and violent rhetoric, which they blame on the left wing alone.

It is a remarkable turn from prominent American conservatives, who until Trump’s return to power in January had long complained of a censorious leftwing “cancel culture” but now seem happy to reframe that, too, as “consequence culture”.

Nancy Mace, a House representative, sounded a lot like the progressives she has often decried for their political correctness when she declared last week, during an effort to censure one of her opponents in Congress, that

“free speech isn’t free from consequences”.

Many conservatives are also now championing a public campaign to get fired from their jobs any Americans who made light of Kirk’s death or disparaged him or his politics in death.

Meanwhile, administration officials are proceeding with drafting an executive order for Trump aiming to

“combat political violence and hate speech”,

the New York Times recently reported.

Kirk’s assassination was a

“despicable act of political violence, an attack on a figure who built his brand around campus debating, and the outrage, grief, and anger is understandable”,

Aaron Terr, the director of public advocacy at the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (Fire), said.

But instead of recommitting to free speech as a

“fundamental value”,

the response from many public officials

“has been the opposite. They are using the tragedy to justify a broad crackdown on speech,”

he said.

“They are openly collapsing the distinction between political dissent and political violence, and it sounds like they are laying the foundation for mass censorship and surveillance of political critics.”

PART 2

#kirk #freespeech #right #trump #maga #cancel

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The End of the 1st Amendment.
America’s Right For Free Speech Is Over

🔤🔤🔤🔤2️⃣

The pressure campaign’s biggest trophy so far is the talk show host Jimmy Kimmel.

After an episode of his show in which Kimmel seemed to suggest (wrongly, according to reports) that Kirk’s assassin had Maga sympathies, the Trump-appointed chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), the government agency that regulates broadcasting, urged TV networks to drop Kimmel’s show.”

Now they’re just doing a complete about-face and engaging in it themselves.

Bondi’s rhetoric is a particularly “alarming threat” given her status overseeing American law enforcement, Veena Dubal, a law professor at the University of California, said.

It is also “a signal that not only does this administration not care about the first amendment, they don’t seem to really understand it.”

Although Kimmel is the most prominent media figure to have been punished so far, in recent days a number of journalists have faced the loss of their jobs or other disciplinary measures, either at the direct instigation of conservative pressure or in seeming preemption of it.

Earlier in the week the Washington Post – under Jeff Bezos, who has cosied up to Trump and whose ownership has seen the opinion section move closer to the political right – terminated the columnist Karen Attiah for, she said, her unflattering writing about Kirk’s political views.

The general message, Kimmel said, is that if you disagree with Trump or his allies “you’re going to be in the administration’s crosshairs”.

Although some people have defended the suspension of Kimmel or the firings of professors on the grounds that these are private employer decisions, and not matters of first amendment-protected public speech, Dubal and other experts feel that the government’s increasingly naked involvement makes it difficult for that argument to carry water.

Conservatives are making arguments similar to the ones that some progressives used to make about cancel culture, Terr noted, particularly during the wave of firings, de-platformings, and social-media shamings that occurred during the national “reckoning” after George Floyd’s murder.

“And conservatives at the time, I think rightly, argued that we should think of free speech not just as a legal right, but as a broader cultural value.”

The late Kirk was an inconsistent defender of free speech – his organization, Turning Point USA, famously maintains a “watchlist” of professors it describes as dangerously leftwing – but some conservatives have argued that Kirk would not want the right to turn against free expression.

“You hope that Charlie Kirk’s death won’t be used by (…) bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build,” Carlson recently said.

#kirk #freespeech #right #trump #maga #cancel

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Trump: Nato Countries Don't Have the Right to Shoot Down Russian Aircraft ✈️🚫🇷🇺

When asked by reporters whether Nato countries should not shoot down Russian aircraft if they enter their airspace, the president said “yes, I do”. 📰❓

He later added that support for Nato allies would depend on the circumstance, but expressed his appreciation for the group’s purchase power in terms of weapons being sent to Ukraine. 🤝💰⚔️🇺🇦

“NATO stepped up, you know, when they went from 2% to 5%. That was great unity,” Trump said. 📈✨

“It’s a lot of weapons they’re buying, and they’re buying them from us. They’re buying them from the US.” 🇺🇸💵🔫

#nato #countries #right #shoot #russian #aircraft

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