The anguished calls for retribution have intensified in the week since Charlie Kirk’s assassination, with prominent conservatives waging a campaign to encourage public shaming, firings and the threat of prosecution for those who speak ill of him.
Yet a few influential supporters of Kirk are now warning that attacks from the right on political expression could tarnish the legacy of the combative right-wing activist, who was seen as a champion of free speech by his legions of followers.
Tucker Carlson, the conservative writer and podcaster, told listeners this week that Kirk never would have wanted his death to be used as a pretext for a crackdown on speech.
“You hope that a year from now, the turmoil we’re seeing in the aftermath of his murder won’t be leveraged to bring hate speech laws to this country,” said Carlson, who himself was dropped from Fox News in 2023 after revelations that he had made a comment implying white superiority in a text message.
“If that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that. Ever,” Carlson added.
His words of caution were the latest indication that a small but growing group of media and political figures on the right have been troubled by recent calls to punish and prosecute those who malign Kirk.
Some of that concern has emerged in media with considerable clout in the conservative movement and intensified after many conservatives cheered the decision by ABC late Wednesday to indefinitely pull Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show. That came just hours after the chair of the Federal Communications Commission, Brendan Carr, suggested that the agency might take action against ABC because Kimmel had implied that the man accused of killing Kirk was a right-wing Trump supporter. Utah officials have said the man had a leftist ideology.
Ben Shapiro, who has one of the highest-rated podcasts in the country, told listeners that while he was no fan of Kimmel, he did not like the idea of the FCC threatening broadcasters over content that the agency deems false. “Why? Because one day, the shoe will be on the other foot,” Shapiro said Thursday.
If the situation were reversed and the FCC under a Democratic president went after a host like Carlson or Sean Hannity of Fox News, Shapiro asked, “Would the right be OK with that, or would they be claiming, quite properly, that is massive regulatory overreach, unprecedented in scope?”
Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on Friday compared Carr’s comments to a mob shakedown. “That’s right out of a mafioso coming into a bar going, ‘Nice bar you have here. It’d be a shame if something happened to it,’” the senator said on an episode of his podcast.
Even among the conservatives who have voiced concerns, there are limits to how self-critical they appear willing to be, considering how shaken Kirk’s assassination has left many of them. Many see little use in pointing the finger now at anyone but liberals who are disparaging and disrespectful about Kirk’s death. And few of them have defended Kimmel, who has made President Donald Trump and his followers the butt of his jokes for years.
Critics of the conservative movement have said that the Trump administration and its allies in the media are exploiting Kirk’s death to wage a campaign of repression. They have begun drawing an unflattering comparison to other recent efforts to police political discourse, pointing out that the right’s response fits a familiar pattern.
The right, they assert, has gone “woke.”
Jonathan Rauch, a scholar at the liberal-leaning Brookings Institution who has said that the progressive left hurt its own causes with unreasonable purity tests in recent years, has written that he now sees a “woke right” emerging as well. He said the conservative campaign to punish people who have spoken negatively of Kirk — in some cases by celebrating his death and in others by pointing to his comments that insulted Black, gay and Muslim people — parallels earlier efforts to silence right-wing speech on college campuses.
“What they’ve learned from the left,” Rauch said, “is that if you can control what people say, if you can make them afraid of being canceled, you can make the minority view look like the majority view.”
Rauch said he saw the crackdown from the right as part of a deliberate attempt to distort the facts around events like what precipitated Kimmel’s cancellation so they can dominate the public discourse. “They also have this deeper view that ultimately, the truth is whatever story wins,” he said, adding, “And that allows them to be singularly ruthless.”
But many conservatives dismiss the suggestion that anything like a “woke right” is emerging among them. They bristle at the idea that they are behaving like the left-wing activists they have scorned as “snowflakes.”
“I don’t think cancel culture applies here,” said Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, who wrote a book in which he described a “prevailing safety culture” that is coddling and irrational. He said he did not see anything unreasonable about the overall defense of Kirk from the right. Defending a husband who left behind two children and a wife, Crenshaw said, “That’s a little bit different than ‘canceling’ someone for glorifying the assassination of a family man.”
The term “woke right” had been circulating in online political commentary for months before Kirk’s assassination. It suggests — in terms that most conservatives find repellent — a legal and rhetorical framework that mirrors the unforgiving tactics that critics say the left used to make academic theories about social justice mainstream.
James A. Lindsay, a writer who spoke at several events for Kirk’s organization Turning Point USA and became popular in right-wing circles for pillorying wokeness, started using “woke right” several years ago as he saw some conservatives grow more rigid in their beliefs. He has described it as an effort by some activists on the right to use “moral shaming, purity tests and social media pile-ons to enforce loyalty.”
Lindsay said he believed the right was heading down a self-destructive path if it continues to demand a pound of flesh for slights against Kirk, whom he considered a friend. “I understand that this thing we call the culture war is very important to settle, and that there is a side that needs to win this,” he said.
“But on the other hand,” he added, “how you win matters.”
Steve Bannon, the former White House strategist who advised Trump and who hosts a pro-Trump podcast, did not dispute that some of the aggressive approaches the right is using are similar to what he and other conservatives attacked the left for doing.
He said the tactics were still justified.
“This is an inflection point,” Bannon said. “And we aim to win, not unite.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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