Tag: Charlie Kirk

When Jimmy Kimmel returned to television on Tuesday evening, the late-night host had sharp words for the conservatives who’d briefly forced him off the air. President Donald Trump had put Disney, which owns ABC and made the call to suspend Kimmel, at risk by making “it very clear he wants to see me and the hundreds of people who work here fired from our jobs,” the comedian said. “Our leader celebrates Americans losing their livelihoods because he can’t take a joke.”

Kimmel had attracted Trump’s ire by suggesting Kirk’s murderer was one of the “MAGA gang,” but previously he was not the most obvious target of the anti-speech right. Once known for co-hosting The Man Show, his late-night persona has always been a bit sedate. As he’s since discovered, the Kirk murder has become a useful pretext for political repression. Kimmel might be the right’s most famous target, but he isn’t alone: Public universities and school districts have fired educators for criticizing Kirk and his work. At least eight servicemembers have been disciplined for comments about the late influencer, and conservative social-media users have targeted “dozens” more across most branches of the military, Task & Purpose reported. Apple TV has postponed The Savant, which stars Jessica Chastain as an undercover researcher focused on right-wing extremism. The Washington Post fired columnist Karen Attiah for Bluesky posts arguing, in part, against “the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse hatred and violence.” Last week, a conservative influencer claimed a Starbucks barista refused to write Kirk’s name on her drink, citing company policy. Amid backlash, Starbucks announced that customers could force workers to write political “names,” but not slogans, on cups.

By punishing Kimmel and others for speech, the right has opened itself up to the accusation of hypocrisy. Conservatives often say they are victims of progressive intolerance, and Trump fashioned himself into their champion. Not long after he returned to power in January, he signed an executive order to restore “freedom of speech” and end “federal censorship,” loosely defined. FCC chair Brendan Carr said he would defend the First Amendment or, as he tweeted in 2024, “We must dismantle the censorship cartel and restore free speech rights for everyday Americans.” Kimmel must not count. Last week, Carr kicked off the Kimmel suspension by telling the far-right podcaster Benny Johnson that media companies should “change conduct to take action on Kimmel” or “there’s going to be additional work for the FCC ahead.” Yet Carr is not a hypocrite, and neither is Trump. They aren’t inconsistent; they simply do not share a basic commitment to free speech with their liberal critics. Instead, they operate within a much older and more restrictive tradition on the right. To a subset of prominent conservative writers and thinkers, free speech has always been a limited concept. There is good speech, which must be privileged, and bad speech, which must be punished.

Conservatives who favor the asymmetric right to free speech do so because it serves a deeper political project. That essential dynamic has played out on the American campus for decades, but it is not limited to the Ivy League; it has censored journalists, ended acting careers, and deported immigrants. If dissent no longer exists, neither does a meaningful opposition. An anonymous Kimmel writer got it right. “Even if Jimmy was willing to publicly apologize and donate money to whatever ghoulish conservative group that is demanding it … MAGA people will never be happy,” they told journalist Rick Ellis. “It will never be enough.”

A few years before William F. Buckley Jr. founded the National Review, he picked a fight with his alma mater. In his mind, Yale University had nurtured atheism and a certain anti-Americanism under the guise of academic freedom. “Individualism is dying at Yale, and without a fight,” he wrote in 1951’s God and Man at Yale, his first book. Buckley’s evidence was thin. Outspoken Marxists and communists were rare on campus, as the writer McGeorge Bundy pointed out at the time, and that forced Buckley to rely on the more nebulous charge of “collectivism.” Buckley attacked a selection of assigned economic texts for “unsound” collectivist principles and complained, “Not one of them so much as pays lip-service to the highly respectable doctrine that it is anti-democratic to take from someone what the people in the first instance decide to give him.” Yale had also drifted too far from its Christian origins, Buckley charged, and cited the chair of the Religion Department, who was an ordained minister but “does not seek to persuade his students to believe in Christ, largely because he has not, as I understand it, been completely able to persuade himself.” The young Buckley wanted to change the way Yale operated so it would promote good speech, not bad speech, as he set the terms. He wrote that Yale’s charter bestowed the “responsibility to govern” on the institution’s alumni, who were more Christian and individualistic than its current leaders, so they should take charge. “Freedom is in no way violated by an educational overseer’s insistence that the teacher he employs hold a given set of values,” he argued.

God and Man at Yale enthralled conservatives as the Second Red Scare dawned. Even a facetious charge of Bolshevism could ruin a person’s career or life; to Buckley, this was less a problem than an opportunity. With his friend and brother-in-law L. Brent Bozell Jr., he published McCarthy and His Enemies in 1954. The best-selling book was not wholly uncritical of Joseph McCarthy but defended his tactics and goals from detractors. As one contemporary review in the Times put it, Buckley and Bozell believed that “while damage to a reputation may result from McCarthy’s practice of this method, the result would not appear to be part of the method” itself. McCarthy, they added, deserves praise for promoting a “conformity” of thought. As Buckley rose, McCarthyism racked up casualties. In 1952, Queens College fired Vera Shlakman, an economics professor, because she refused to tell Senate investigators whether she had ever been a card-carrying member of the Communist Party. A New York Times obituary published at her death in 2017 observed that she “neither taught economics again nor wrote a sequel” to her seminal work, Economic History of a Factory Town.

The MAGA world has many influences, of which Buckley is merely one, but it’s not all that difficult to detect his McCarthyism, campus obsessions, and flair for spectacle in the conservatives who have followed. Roger Kimball published Tenured Radicals in 1990. Before Dinesh D’Souza started selling fake Christmas trees, the Dartmouth graduate published Illiberal Education in 1998. The genre is still potent, as Jacob Heilbrunn recently noted at Washington Monthly: Christopher Rufo, another campus crusader, published America’s Cultural Revolution in 2023. Buckley was “certainly a pioneer of politics as entertainment,” writer Sam Adler-Bell argued in a review of Sam Tanenhaus’s new biography of the man. Despite his intellectual affect and patrician accent, Buckley’s true heirs are “MAGA celebrities” like the late Kirk, in form as well as substance, Adler-Bell wrote. Buckley once defended the Jim Crow regime in an editorial for the National Review because white Southerners are “for the time being, the advanced race,” and the central problem the South faced was “not how to get the vote” for Black Americans, “but how to equip” them along with “many whites to cast an enlightened and responsible vote.” Decades later Buckley said he’d erred by thinking America would “evolve” out of Jim Crow without intervention, but he was hardly a champion of civil rights, and his prejudices are still potent. Kirk once accused “prowling Blacks” of targeting white city dwellers and said that prominent Black women such as Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.”

The object of that shared project is domination. A thriving network of Christian colleges and universities existed well before 1951, when he wrote his first book, but that wasn’t good enough. He wanted the Ivy League, too. If he could force Yale to teach the right ideas — to say the right words in the right order — future elites would have the right values and the right politics. The campus has been a conservative object of desire ever since. In 2023, Rufo helped take control of the New College of Florida at the behest of Governor Ron DeSantis and conducted an ideological purge. In one example, Rufo said the public university would not renew a visiting professor’s contract on account of his left-wing speech. “It is a privilege, not a right, to be employed by a taxpayer-funded university,” he tweeted.

When Trump regained power earlier this year, he trained the full might of the federal government on immigrant scholars with inconvenient ideas. Masked ICE agents arrested Rümeysa Öztürk on the streets of Somerville, Massachusetts, because she had co-authored a pro-Palestinian editorial. The Trump administration is still trying to deport Mahmoud Khalil for his pro-Palestinian activism — an act of repression that Kirk, the supposed defender of free speech, supported. What’s more, the right wing’s war for the campus was never limited to higher education at all. Kimmel is back on air now, but the era of the Hollywood blacklist does not feel so distant.

When institutions capitulate, individual liberties soon follow, and courage can have life-altering consequences. After Queens College fired Vera Shlakman, it moved on to her former student, economist Mark Blaug, then a tutor. “For a day or two, I contemplated a magnificent protest,” Blaug wrote in 2000, “a statement that would ring down the ages as a clarion bell to individual freedom, that would be read and cited for years to come by American high school students — and then I quietly sent in my letter of resignation.” Conformity is popular because it feels safe, and that is as true now as it has been during each iteration of the Red Scare. Disney sacrificed Kimmel at the slightest pressure from the White House, and although they brought him back, their cowardice bodes ill. By the end of July, nine elite law firms “capitulated” to White House pressure by “pledging nearly $1 billion in free work” to the administration, Reuters reported. The University of California at Berkeley recently shared 160 names of students and faculty with White House officials in response to a purported antisemitism probe.

Still, some liberals are pondering accommodation. In the New York Times, the president of Barnard College condemned “groupthink” and wrote, “The purpose of higher education is not to advance one viewpoint over another, but to provide our students with the tools and training they need to examine and challenge all beliefs, including their own.” The writer Jerusalem Demsas offered a more radical solution in a piece for The Argument. Universities should prioritize the hiring of conservative faculty even if they are “less qualified” than their liberal peers. “A university made up of only the left-leaning sons and daughters of the wealthy will reproduce an unrepresentative elite and an unrepresentative body of work, thus precipitating its own undoing,” she argued, but that misunderstands the problem. Elite schools are skewed to the wealthy, certainly, and we should make them more egalitarian. But if conservatives are sorting themselves into less-selective institutions, as she says, we should also entertain the possibility that they seek the conformity of Buckley and Bozell. My alma mater, Cedarville University, promises students “exceptional academics with a biblical worldview.” The goal is to create a bubble.

Worse: As the right-wing embraces the fringe, it will produce writers and thinkers who are more likely to espouse nonsense. It doesn’t make much sense for Yale to hire a creationist who studied geology at Cedarville in the name of disagreement on campus. Reality is not a viewpoint, but it can look like one to those who deny it. Any college that teaches factual science or history or medicine will face accusations of groupthink, if it has not already. Trickier still, some ideologies are more evidence-based than others. Conspiracy theorists have the right to believe what they want, but that doesn’t mean they should get a megaphone whenever they ask for one. Conservatives including Vice-President J.D. Vance have defended the Kimmel suspension because liberals hurt free speech first; they’re still angry that the Biden administration urged social-media platforms to curb COVID misinformation. But the acts are not equivalent to each other. When people spread lies about a deadly pandemic, it’s not obviously a virtue to let them continue.

If we’re to defend free speech from its enemies, we can’t be content with platitudes. We will have to think more critically about conservative politics and what they signify for the future of our democracy. By this, I do not mean that we should strip conservatives of their First Amendment rights. Instead I favor a certain bitter honesty. At this point in the MAGA era, there is no reason to assume that the right wing and its critics speak the same language, share foundational values, or live in the same reality. There are exceptions, and I think we should always strive to persuade, but we must be realistic about the intellectual and political challenges we face. They aren’t exactly new. As the socialist critic Irving Howe wrote in 1954, “No easy certainties and no easy acceptance of uncertainty.” We do not have to accept the terms the foes of democracy would impose on us. To Howe, “the banner of critical independence, ragged and torn though it may be, is still the best we have.” Now is not the moment to set that banner down.