Welcome to Right-Wing Reeducation Camp

The Trump regime is squashing speech and using the full force of government to enforce its ideology.

Photo by Jolanda Kirpensteijn on Unsplash

The day after Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in Utah, I wrote in Slate about how worried I was about what was to come. What I saw in those first few hours after the murder was that “many conservatives are trying to make this into their Reichstag fire: the moment the movement has been waiting for to use as a pretext to suspend democratic rules, crush its opponents, and put itself fully in charge.”

It’s happening.

There is a massive MAGA crackdown on free speech underway, and of course the hypocrisy is stunning, but so is the velocity and the ferocity. What’s clear to me is that this is going to go far beyond standard “cancel culture” fare where angry internet vigilantes band together to get someone fired for a bad tweet (although that’s happening, too). Instead, we are seeing focused efforts from some of the most influential people in the Trump administration and in his orbit building out a framework to criminalize progressive organizing, chill liberal speech, penalize criticism of conservatives, and crush any media outlets that might report honestly on what’s happening.

The Trump universe is practically publishing its playbook here. The highest-up members of this administration are telling you exactly what they’re planning to do.

At the top of the list is designating liberal groups as domestic terror organizations. “It is a vast domestic terror movement,” Trump’s top policy advisor Stephen Miller said after he and vice president JD Vance took over an episode of the Charlie Kirk show. “With God 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, eliminate and destroy this network and make America safe again for the American people.”

Vance has singled out George Soros’s Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation as organizations he believes are funding these liberal terrorist groups. They are not — there is no vast network of violent left-wing groups, let alone foundations funding a vast network of violent left-wing groups. There is no evidence that the Kirk shooter was affiliated with any liberal organization (I’m not even sure the claims that his politics are clearly and unequivocally “left-wing” should be taken at face value, but that’s another post). Vance, the vice president of all of America, is out in public saying there is no “unity” with millions of his fellow citizens.

Trump has said he would like to designate Antifa a domestic terror organization. Despite being the scariest right-wing bogeyman, Antifa isn’t an organization at all. It’s an ideology, one adhered to by a smattering of anti-capitalists and anarchists, but on the right it has turned into a catch-all for “protesters we don’t like.” It seems to be expanding now into “people whose politics we don’t like” — that is, people who oppose Trump and the MAGA movement. Anyone who criticizes fascism could ostensibly be branded “antifa” by this administration.

The legal framework for all of this is unclear to put it mildly. But with a Supreme Court squarely in Trump’s pocket and a Democratic Party that is both out of power and entirely feckless when it comes to mounting any kind of resistance, I’m not sure that this administration needs the law on their side in order to do some serious damage. I’m not sure they need the law on their side in order to change the law. They certainly don’t need the law on their side in order to flout it.

Marco Rubio’s State Department says it is deporting visa-holders who celebrated Kirk’s murder. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that “there’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” which she seemed to define as any speech criticizing conservatives, and pledged, “we will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” After a massive backlash (conservatives don’t really want hate speech criminalized, because that would pose some big problems for them) she clarified: “Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment. It’s a crime. For far too long, we’ve watched the radical left normalize threats, call for assassinations, and cheer on political violence. That era is over,” Bondi posted on X. Then, after an Office Depot employee refused to print out fliers for a Kirk vigil, she threatened to bring the full force of government down on anyone who doesn’t behave how she wants. “Businesses cannot discriminate,” she said. “If you want to go 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.” (Of course, conservatives have been arguing for decades that businesses can discriminate, recently going all the way to the Supreme Court to argue that a baker should be able to discriminate against gay couples in making wedding cakes).

When ABC’s Jonathan Karl asked Trump for clarity on Bondi’s comments about hate speech, Trump said, “We’ll probably go after people like you because you treat me so unfairly, it’s hate. You have a lot of hate in your heart.” He then claimed that ABC had already been forced to pay him $16 million for a form of hate speech (not what happened) and told him, “maybe they’ll go after you.” He also said that he has asked Bondi to look into jailing non-violent protesters who confront him in public.

Trump is suing the New York Times, saying they defamed him and demanding $16 million. He already took $1.1 billion in funding away from NPR and public broadcasting. He has previously called for the FCC to pull the broadcasting licenses of NBC and ABC, and I have no doubt that those demands will be reupped in the wake of the Kirk murder. House Republicans are attempting to censure Rep. Ilhan Omar and remove her from her committee seats because they don’t like her comments about Kirk’s murder — which were not celebratory, but rather highlighting Republican hypocrisy.

There is an important distinction between the government penalizing speech and facing other consequences for what one says or writes in public. I don’t think the culture of snitching to peoples’ employers about their online conduct is a good one, and I think firing people for bad tweets is often an error. This is nuanced, of course. Some social media posts suggest that a person cannot do their job fairly, or that they will discriminate; some create liabilities for an employer. There isn’t a hard-and-fast rule at play when it comes to professional consequences for social media behavior. But there is a hard-and-fast rule at play when it comes to the government responding to speech and protest, and that is: The government doesn’t get to punish speech and protest.

This is the rule by which the Trump administration is refusing to abide. Deporting people for their comments is the government punishing speech. Bringing RICO suits against liberal organizations is the government punishing speech.

This has a much broader chilling effect. Authoritarian governments don’t need to punish every single comment they dislike; they only need to create a culture of surveillance and make an example of a few in order to keep the many in line. I can feel it already, this sense — especially among journalists but I imagine others as well — that one must be extra careful about how one talks about this administration, that maybe it’s just not worth writing or saying certain things. In the wake of Kirk’s murder, some conservative activists made a website where users can submit social media comments about Kirk that they believe deserve punishment. This is the kind of snitch culture that is often cultivated in authoritarian regimes; it’s the making of a modern Stasi. It creates a climate in which people are scared to say what they think, even to their friends and relatives; it’s a climate in which there is only one acceptable ideology, and where The Truth comes from the regime rather than from reality.

The aim here is to use the full force of government to destroy any opposition to the MAGA regime. It is to make progressive organizing dangerous. It is to make liberal criticisms of these very authoritarian actions totally verboten.

I have to believe that they will not succeed — that too many Americans will find this unacceptable, that our courts will quash these efforts. Will this regime listen to the courts, though? And how long will it take before the public backlash is large enough to matter?

We are walking into an extremely dark era.

xx Jill