Donald Trump and his allies want to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk to accelerate their plans to destroy democracy and build an authoritarian state..
Whether they succeed or not isn’t certain. But it’s clearly their openly declared plan, going even further than the regime in Hungary, which is a blueprint for the international far right, where Viktor Orban has destroyed democracy in a meaningful sense.
Remember when the far right claimed to be champions of free speech? This was always a lie, a nonsense, a ruse to protect hateful incendiary speech against minorities from being challenged.
A couple of weeks before Trump became president on a far more extreme platform, I warned about what would “happen if there is a crisis during his presidency, such as a big terrorist attack or turbulent protests”, noting that his desire to send in the military after Black Lives Matter protests erupted after the police murder of George Floyd. In other words - that his administration would use a pretext - presented as so form of national emergency - to crack down on democracy.
The police already made clear that the alleged assassin of Charlie Kirk was acting on his own. But the US right are claiming that he has been radicalised by a vast network which must be destroyed - and that means their entire political opposition.
On Tuesday night, US vice president JD Vance hosted Charlie Kirk’s podcast, a truly bizarre spectacle in itself. One of his guests was Stephen Miller, one of Donald Trump’s key advisors, who has a history of promoting overtly white nationalist politics.
We are going to channel all the anger we have over the organized campaign to led to this assassination to uproot and dismantle these terrorist networks … The organized doxxing campaigns. The organized riots. The organized street violence. The organized of dehumanization. Vilification. Posting people’s addresses.
Combining that with messaging designed to trigger and incite violence and the actual organized cells that carry out and facilitate the violence. It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God and as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.
What he does here is combine a whole host of different claims and phenomena. It is striking he describes ‘organised doxxing campaigns’ - that is campaigns to reveal the identities of political opponents online - given that’s what the right is currently doing to those who say things about Charlie Kirk which they don’t approve of. But the ‘networks’ described here will range from mainstream liberal and frankly politically impotent campaigns to the organised left in the United States.
Indeed, a few weeks ago, before the murder of Charlie Kirk, Miller told Fox News that the Democratic Party is not a political party, but a “domestic extremist organisation”. That is the sort of language dictators use when they are planning to shut a political party down.
Elsewhere in the podcast, JD Vance said:
While our side of the aisle certainly has its crazies, it is a statistical fact that most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far-Left.
This is a lie. Statistically speaking, right-wing violence is far greater than left-wing violence.
Excluding 9/11, the CATO Institute finds that since 1975, there have been 391 murders motivated by right-wing ideology, compared to 61 because of left-wing ideology.
In recent years, there have been far-right terrorist attacks on a synagogue, a church, a supermarket targeting Black people - there is nothing equivalent coming from the left.
But again, this lie is being used to justify a right-wing crackdown. Indeed, Trump told Fox News that he isn’t bothered by right-wing extremism - because he deems these extremists to be driven by legitimate concerns. “The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime,” he said. “The radicals on the left are the problem.”
Which is the context here behind JD Vance’s other comments on the podcast, when he talks about an “incredibly destructive movement of left-wing extremism”, and that the government would “dismantle” it.
The plan there is to dismantle anything that the Trump administration deems to be left-wing.
Both JD Vance and Donald Trump have announced they will target George Soros’ Open Society Foundations. We should note that George Soros is the bête noire of the Hungarian regime, who demonised the Hungarian-born financier as the sinister Jewish puppetmaster behind the opposition. This was a crucial plank of their assault on democracy.
Donald Trump further declared that he’d consider designating ‘ANTIFA’ as a domestic terror group.
Well, ANTI doesn’t even exist as an organisation. It’s just a label denoting groups or people with an anti-fascist orientation. And US law prohibits designating domestic groups as terrorist organisations - which is why none of the various far-right militia are banned. This is just a pretext for a broad based crackdown on anything the administration labels as antifa or somehow supportive of antifa.
Indeed, Donald Trump further says that activists heckling him at restaurants should be jailed, too.
His attorney general, Pam Bondi, the attorney general, has said:
There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society...We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.
Well, this is quite something, isn’t it? The right spent years saying there is no such thing as hate speech, portraying it as a cynical left-wing ploy to shut down their freedom of speech. But now they’re not only using hate speech as a term, they are going to use it as a catch-all term for criticism from their political opponents. “Hate speech” now means “criticising the government and right-wing individuals”, which the administration wishes to ban.
Let me now quote something someone once said:
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free.
That was Charlie Kirk tweeting on 3rd May 2024.
Let’s also remember of course how JD Vance went to Europe six months ago to lecture the continent on “free speech”.
There is no exaggeration on my part about the Trump administration’s interpretation of “hate speech.” When an ABC journalist asked Trump what Bondi’s comments about “going after hate speech”, Trump responded:
She'll probably go after people like you because you treat me unfairly. It's hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart. Maybe they'll come after ABC.
There’s no subtlety here. Trump is openly talking about using a crackdown on what is described as “hate speech” to shut down media outlets who say things about him he doesn’t like. That is of course the behaviour of an out-and-out dictatorship.
The attorney general Pat Bondi also said:
Employers, you have an obligation to get rid of people. You need to look at people who are saying horrible things and they shouldn't be working with you.
Businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie's pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.
Well, what happened to the right’s antipathy ‘cancel culture’? What she is proposing here is a state-endorsed mass sacking of people expressing political opinions the state does not like. That actually is cancel culture. And what about forcing businesses to print things against their will?
It is very clear what is happening here. Donald Trump is the head of a far-right administration brimming with far-right ideologues who want to crush democracy, crush dissent, and forge an overtly authoritarian state. They were always going to look for a crisis or incident of some sort to accelerate those plans. That’s what is happening now, and with every coming incident or event, they will do the same.
I think there is a major question of whether the mid-term elections next year will be free or fair. There will be a crackdown on dissenting political organisations and funding for Democratic candidates. Expect opposition politicians to end up in jail. He’s already trying to rig the elections by redrawing district maps, purging voters, and targeting Democratic funding. Do not be surprised if the election takes place in the atmosphere of a contrived “national emergency”.
The Democrats, alas, are led by impotent, useless leaders who have no fight. It falls to the US left to fight back instead - the likes of Zohran Mamdani, who is standing to become Democratic mayor of New York. But Trump already has his sights on Mamdani, and is threatening to for example cut off funds to New York City if he is elected, and to take over the city directly. Republicans are threatening to strip Mamdani of his citizenship and deport him.
There is no hyperbole required here. The threat of far-right dictatorship hangs over the United States. Time is running out.
True, but nevertheless we cannot now or ever in the future criticize American Arabs and Muslims who voted for Trump in swing states. Look what benefits Trump brought to the Palestinian people!