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

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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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