US President Donald Trump speaks to the press in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on August 25, 2025. (Photo by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images)
FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says the commission “doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
President Donald Trump doubled down on his threats to silence his critics Thursday, telling reporters aboard Air Force One that outlets that give him “bad press” may have their broadcast licenses taken away.
The threat came just one day after his Federal Communications Commission (FCC) director, Brendan Carr, successfully pressuredABC into pulling Jimmy Kimmel’s show from the air by threatening the broadcast licenses of its affiliates over a comment the comedian made about the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
“I read someplace that the networks were 97% against me,” Trump told the press gaggle. “I get 97% negative, and yet I won it easily. I won all seven swing states, popular vote, I won everything. And they’re 97% against, they give me wholly bad publicity… I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away.”
“When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump, that’s all they do,” the president continued. “If you go back, I guess they haven’t had a conservative on in years or something, somebody said, but when you go back and take a look, all they do is hit Trump. They’re licensed. They’re not allowed to do that.”
He said that the decision would be left up to Carr, who has threatened to take away licenses from networks that air what he called “distorted” content.
It is unclear where Trump’s statistic that networks have been “97% against” him originates, nor the claim that mainstream news networks “haven’t had a conservative on in years.”
But even if it were true, FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez says “the FCC doesn’t have the authority, the ability, or the constitutional right to revoke a license because of content.”
In comments made to Axios Thursday, Gomez—the lone Democrat on the five-member panel—said that the Trump administration was “weaponizing its licensing authority in order to bring broadcasters to heel,” as part of a “campaign of censorship and control.”
National news networks like ABC, CBS, and NBC do not have broadcasting licenses approved by the FCC, nor do cable networks like CNN, MSNBC, or Fox News. The licenses threatened by Carr are for local affiliates, which—despite having the branding of the big networks—are owned by less well-known companies like Nexstar Media Group and the Sinclair Broadcasting Group, both of which pushed in favor of ABC’s decision to ax Kimmel.
Gomez said that with Trump’s intimidation of broadcasters, the “threat is the point.”
“It is a very hard standard to meet to revoke a license, which is why it’s so rarely done, but broadcast license to the broadcasters are extremely valuable,” she said. “And so they don’t want to be dragged before the FCC either in order to answer to an enforcement complaint of some kind or under the threat of possible revocation.”
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Victoria Bay of Los Angeles protests against fascism while attending a “Good Trouble Lives On” demonstration in front of City Hall on July 17, 2025 in Los Angeles, California. (Photo by Gina Ferazzi/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said one congressman.
After US President Donald Trump absurdly announced late Wednesday night that he planned to designate the amorphous “antifa” movement as a “major terrorist organization,” a Democratic congressman had one request.
“I hope he can first define what antifa is, because there is no antifa organization,” said Rep. Daniel Goldman (D-NY) on CNN.
Goldman added that Trump is using the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk last week “as a pretext to go after people he disagrees with.”
“He on the very night of Kirk’s murder, you will remember, accused the left of committing the murder when the murderer had not even been caught or identified,” he said.
“Antifa” is a portmanteau meaning “anti-fascist,” and the term encompasses autonomous individuals and loosely-affiliated groups of people who say they oppose fascism—but with no organizational structure or leaders, it was not clear on Wednesday how the White House would seek to designate the idea of anti-fascist protest “a major terrorist organization.”
As The Guardiannoted, since antifa is a US-based movement, it cannot be included on the State Department’s list of foreign terror organizations as ISIS and al-Qaeda are, allowing the Department of Justice to prosecute those who give material support to those organizations.
“There is no domestic equivalent to that list in part because of broad First Amendment protections enjoyed by organizations operating within the United States,” the outlet added.
Trump’s former FBI director, Christopher Wray, also testified in 2020—during nationwide racial justice protests that Trump also linked to antifa—that there is no organization to designate as a terrorist group.
Mark Bray, a historian and author of Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook, suggested Trump’s threat was akin to a statement claiming that the White House could designate other social justice movements as terrorist groups.
“Antifa is a kind of politics, not a specific group,” Bray toldAl Jazeera. “In the same way that there are feminist groups but feminism is not, itself, a group. Any group that calls itself antifa and promotes the basic principles of militant anti-fascism is an antifa group. There is no general headquarters or leader to get official recognition from.”
The number of members of the anti-fascist movement and their identities are not public, and though Trump called for the “funders” of antifa to be investigated, Al Jazeera noted that there is “no way of identifying and collating a list of financiers of the movement”—which mainly raises small amounts of money “for bail,” according to Bray.
“He is trying to promote the common right-wing conspiracy theory that there are shadowy financiers like George Soros playing puppet master behind everything the left does,” Bray told Al Jazeera.
With its stated plan to designate antifa a terrorist group, said left-wing commentator Hasan Piker, “they’re openly admitting they’re fascist.”
Veteran union organizer Charles Idelson added that “surely what Trump and his puppets repeating the lie really want is to ban is anti-fascist thought and speech, and imprison individuals who express it.”
Since Kirk’s killing last week, Trump and others on the right have asserted that left-wing groups and commentators were responsible for the assassination because some had tied Kirk to fascism and racism.
Right wing all week: How dare anybody call us fascist?!
Trump today: Designates anti-fascist groups as terrorists, uses FCC to consolidate control of the media and hands TikTok to allies
Trump’s claim that he will designate antifa as a terrorist group came soon after ABC, under explicit pressure from the Federal Communications Commission, announced it was taking “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” off the air indefinitely after he remarked on the far-right MAGA movement’s reaction to the killing—a clear-cut violation of the First Amendment, said rights advocates.
Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, toldThe Washington Post that Trump’s plan for antifa’s designation would “raise significant First Amendment, due process, and equal protection concerns.”
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It was this big! Stephen Miller speaks at a Donald Trump campaign rally in Novi, Michigan on October 26, 2024. (Photo by Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty Images)
“We must end any form of political violence—and reject those who try to exploit it,” one Democratic congresswoman asserted.
Senior Trump administration officials on Monday made fresh threats to crack down on a nonexistent left-wing “domestic terror movement” following last week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk—a move that critics called an attempt to exploit the far-right firebrand’s murder to advance an authoritarian agenda targeting nonviolent opposition.
Even as investigators work to determine the motive of Kirk’s killer, members of Trump’s inner circle and supporters have amplified an unfounded narrative of a coordinated leftist movement targeting conservatives.
On Monday, two senior administration officials, who spoke anonymously to describe the internal planning, said that Cabinet secretaries and federal department heads were working to identify organizations that funded or supported violence against conservatives. The goal, they said, was to categorize left-wing activity that led to violence as domestic terrorism, an escalation that critics said could lay the groundwork for crushing anti-conservative dissent more broadly.
Appearing on the latest episode of “The Charlie Kirk Show” podcast—which was guest hosted by US Vice President JD Vance—White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller said that “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,” Miller vowed.
Vance said during the podcast that he wanted to explore “all of the ways that we’re trying to figure out how to prevent this festering violence that you see on the far left from becoming even more and more mainstream.”
“You have the crazies on the far left who are saying, ‘Oh, Stephen Miller and JD Vance, they’re going to go after constitutionally protected speech,‘” the vice president said. “We’re going to go after the network that foments, facilitates, and engages in violence.”
Vance, who like Trump and numerous supporters claim to champion free speech, also took aim at “people who are celebrating” Kirk’s killing.
If we want to stop political violence like what happened to Charlie Kirk, we have to be honest about the people who are celebrating it and the people who are financing it.
Another unnamed administration official told the Times Monday that government agencies would be investigating people, including those accused of vandalizing Tesla electric vehicles and dealerships and allegedly assaulting federal immigration agents, in an effort to implicate US leftists in political violence.
Vance and Miller’s threats ignored right-wing violence—which statistically outpaces left-wing attacks—including the recent assassinations of Democratic Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark Hortman, who were murdered in June by a right-wing masked gunman disguised as a police officer.
Investigative reporter Jason Paladino reported last week that the US Department of Justice apparently removed an academic study previously published on the National Institute for Justice’s online library showing that “since 1990, far-right extremists have committed far more ideologically motivated homicides than far-left or radical Islamist extremists, including 227 events that took more than 520 lives” versus “42 ideologically motivated attacks that took 78 lives” committed by “far-left extremists.”
“Militant, nationalistic, white supremacist violent extremism has increased in the United States. In fact, the number of far-right attacks continues to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.”The Trump DOJ scrubbed this study from their website.
Responding to Miller’s remarks, New Republic staff writer Greg Sargent noted on social media that “Stephen Miller was directly involved in one of the largest acts of organized domestic political violence the United States has seen in modern times, the January 6 [2021] insurrection.”
Congresswoman Diana DeGette (D-Colo.) weighed in Monday on Miller’s attempt to exploit Kirk’s murder, writing on the social media site Bluesky that “it’s never acceptable to kill someone for their political beliefs. But the Trump [administration] exploiting the shooting of Charlie Kirk to follow their authoritarian instincts and crack down on the left is incredibly disturbing.”
“We must end any form of political violence—and reject those who try to exploit it,” she added.
Democratic California Gov. Gavin Newsom noted Monday on social media that Miller “has already publicly labeled the Democratic Party as a terrorist organization.”
“This isn’t about crime and safety,” Newsom added. “It’s about dismantling our democratic institutions. We cannot allow acts of political violence to be weaponized and used to threaten tens of millions of Americans.”
The progressive Working Families Party (WFP) said Monday on social media that “JD Vance and Stephen Miller want to use the horrifying murder of Charlie Kirk to target and dismantle pro-democracy groups.”
“Their comments call to mind some of the darkest periods in US history,” WFP continued. “They’re dividing people based on what box we ticked on our voter registration.”
Vance and Miller “want to stoke fear and resentment to justify their un-American crackdowns on free speech, mass abductions of working people, and military takeovers of our cities,” WFP added. “This isn’t going to fly. We’ve survived crises like this before as a country, and we can choose to live in a place where our political freedoms are protected, where we settle disagreements with words not weapons, and where no one has to fear losing a loved one to gun violence.”
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The assassination of far-right podcaster and political activist Charlie Kirk in Utah was truly shocking in every sense. It happened in the open, at a college campus in broad daylight with 3,000 onlookers. Graphic and close-up video footage of his final moment, showing a bullet placed precisely at his carotid artery at the very second Kirk was questioned about mass shootings, seemed out of a movie. The man who once said gun deaths were worth the price of the Second Amendment (Newsweek, 4/6/23) became an illustration of what that price looks like before our eyes.
Flags at half mast. A moment of silence at Yankee Stadium. The vice president skipped a 9/11 memorial event to be with Kirk’s family (USA Today, 9/11/25), and Kirk’s body was transported back to his home state on the vice president’s aircraft (CBS, 9/11/25). He was no mere pundit or activist, but a valued capo in the Trump political machine.
“Charlie Kirk’s murder was one of the worst moments in recent American history,” read the subhead of an Atlantic piece (9/11/25) by Graeme Wood. (It was apparently much worse than US support for killing thousands of children in Gaza, about which Wood shrugged, “war is ugly,” arguing that it’s “possible to kill children legally”—Atlantic, 5/17/24.)
Wood was not alone in the press, as much of the coverage has framed the murder as a moment where the United States crossed the Rubicon when it comes to political violence. While Kirk’s murder was bad news for democracy—as no one ever deserves to be killed for their speech—the media reaction glossed over the role that President Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again movement, and Kirk himself, as a prominent supporter of that movement, have helped to legitimize the kind of political violence that Kirk apparently fell victim to.
‘Epidemic of leftist violence’
The assassination of Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman in June 2025 was one of several right-wing attacks that New York Post columnist Miranda Divine (9/11/25) ignored in order to claim that “political violence is almost exclusively from the left.”
The right-wing press, as expected, has whipped itself into a frenzy over a wave of domestic terrorism that is only coming from the left, though the motives of the killer at the time were unknown. “We are suffering through an epidemic of leftist violence,” said Miranda Divine of the New York Post (9/11/25), adding that Kirk’s killing is “the latest manifestation of the hateful rhetoric aimed at President Trump and his MAGA movement.”
President Trump has fanned the flames. As the New Yorker (9/11/25) noted:
Trump denounced his perceived enemies. “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals,” he said, and vowed to find those he deemed responsible for “political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”… Trump made no gesture toward common national feeling; he limited his litany of victims to those with whom he is aligned.
Elsewhere, coverage didn’t blame the left, but did suggest that Kirk’s killing had brought US society to an inflection point. The New York Times (9/11/25) said that before Kirk’s killing, “there were signs of a looming political crisis” and increased “polarization and the coarsening of public discourse.” While there have been other acts of political violence, reporters Richard Fausset, Ken Bensinger and Alan Feuer wrote, the “killing of Mr. Kirk on a Utah college campus…raises the possibility that the country has entered an even more perilous phase.”
The Times quoted Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House of Representatives, saying “I think that you have a cultural civil war underway.” (Gingrich has been waging cultural civil war for a long time now; in 1990, he put out a memo urging Republican candidates to tar their opponents with words like “sick…pathetic…traitors”—Extra! Update, 2/95).
The Washington Post editorial board (9/10/25) noted, while listing off other instances of political violence:
Months before Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, the conservative activist warned about the spread of “assassination culture.” He cited the attempt on President Donald Trump’s life, as well as the killing of a healthcare CEO. And now it seems all too likely that he himself became a victim of that violent fervor while speaking on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.
The Post’s news side featured a report (9/11/25) claiming that the nation is “facing a new era of political violence reminiscent of some of its most bitter, tumultuous eras, including the 1960s.” The paper summoned memories of the “assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.”
CNN’s Stephen Collinson (9/10/25) said Kirk’s murder “will unleash unknown consequences in a nation that is angry and already confronting a fractured political future.”
‘More frequent and deadly’
Donald Trump posted an image of himself as an Apocalypse Now character as he declared war on Chicago.
Most of these pieces rightly situated Kirk’s murder with other acts of political violence that targeted both Democrats and Republicans. But what these pieces miss—or actively try to hide—is how much this dangerous era escalated when Trump came into the White House. The president and his allies in right-wing media not only provided the rhetoric that inspired an enormous amount of political violence, but worked actively to normalize it.
From Trump’s calls for violence against protesters who disrupted his rallies (FAIR.org, 3/12/16) to official presidential social media posts depicting Trump as Robert Duvall’s napalm-loving colonel from Apocalypse Now, MAGA is a political agenda that celebrates violence (FAIR.org, 11/1/19).
“We’ve seen a rising tide of attacks by far-right extremists in recent years,” Seamus Hughes, deputy director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, told Frontline. “The threat is coming from a host of ideologies, from white supremacists to incels, to everything in between. Unfortunately, the attacks are becoming both more frequent and deadly.”
To track that change, Frontline analyzed data from the Center for Strategic and International Studies. CSIS defines terrorism as the “deliberate use—or threat— of violence by non-state actors in order to achieve political goals and create a broad psychological impact,” a similar definition to the one used by the FBI.
According to a CSIS database, there were 405 such terror attacks or plots in the US from 2015 through 2020—more than double the total number in the previous decade. And in the last five years, those attacks or plots were predominantly carried out by white supremacists, militias and other far-right extremists: 63% and increasing. Far-left incidents are also on the rise but made up a smaller portion of the whole, 13% from 2015 to 2020, according to Frontline’s analysis. Religious extremists accounted for 19%, with the remaining 5% linked to “ethnonationalist” or “other” ideologies, per CSIS categorizations.
Political violence is of course nothing new in American culture; deadly extremism, coming mainly though not exclusively from the right, was rampant both before (Extra!, 3–4/95, 7–8/95; Extra! Update, 10/96) and after September 11, 2001 (FAIR.org, 4/16/13, 6/13/14). But MAGA has moved what was once far-right rhetoric and tactics to the center of the US right. As the Brookings Institution (3/12/21) pointed out, many right-wing tactics of the Trump era were pioneered by self-styled militia groups that have operated along the US’s southern border since the 1980s:
Many of the right-wing armed groups’ tactics exhibited during Trump’s presidency—harassment of minorities, purposeful recruitment of military veterans, cultivation of allies in law enforcement forces and among politicians, and efforts to influence elections—had years of beta testing at the US/Mexico border.
Five years ago, the Guardian (3/18/20) also painted a frightening picture:
White nationalist hate groups in the US have increased 55% throughout the Trump era, according to a new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), and a “surging” racist movement continues to be driven by “a deep fear of demographic change.” Nationally, there were 155 such groups counted last year, and they were present in most states. These groups were counted separately from Ku Klux Klan groups, racist skinheads, Christian Identity groups and neo-Confederate groups, all of which also express some version of white supremacist beliefs.
‘Bring a gun with you’
The New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) wrote admiringly of Kirk’s “moxie and fearlessness.”
Charlie Kirk was a central actor in the right-wing hate machine that fomented violence. He encouraged violence against immigrants (Media Matters, 3/22/24):
At what point is it time to start to at least use rubber bullets, or use some sort of tear gas, to prevent this and quell this invasion?… And at what point do we use real force?. . . Of course you should be able to use whips against foreigners that are coming into your country. Why is that controversial?
He incited partisan division and hatred, and encouraged the purchase and use of weapons in that context (Media Matters, 10/12/23):
You have a government that hates you, you have a traitor as the president. Buy weapons, I keep on saying that. Buy weapons. Buy ammo. if you go into a public place, bring a gun with you…. Thank goodness in Arizona we can carry, and we carry.
Where the New York Times (9/10/25) saw “a charismatic right-wing activist” who “showed a genius for using social media and campus organizing,” those who found themselves targets of Kirk’s “genius” saw something entirely different.
Kirk’s “Professor Watchlist” doxxed academics Kirk claimed “advanced leftist propaganda”; those listed quickly found themselves and their universities subject to a torrent of abuse—including racial slurs and death threats—from Kirk’s followers, at times requiring universities to offer those academics extra security. Journalism professor Stacy Patton, who experienced this harassment firsthand when she was put on the list in 2024, observed:
Kirk’s Watchlist has terrorized legions of professors across this country. Women, Black faculty, queer scholars, basically anyone who challenged white supremacy, gun culture, or Christian nationalism suddenly found themselves targets of coordinated abuse.
This is the activism that the New York Times‘ Ezra Klein (9/11/25) described as “practicing politics in exactly the right way”:
He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion…. A taste for disagreement is a virtue in a democracy. Liberalism could use more of his moxie and fearlessness.
‘Throbbing middle finger to God’
Charlie Kirk (X, 9/11/23): ““The one issue that I think is so against our senses, so against the natural law, and dare I say a throbbing middle finger to God is the transgender thing happening in America.”
Kirk referred to LGBTQ identity as a “social contagion,” and called trans people an “abomination” and a “throbbing middle finger to God” (Erin in the Morning, 9/11/23).
He said that Black women like Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee and Ketanji Brown Jackson “had to go steal a white person’s slot” through affirmative action, because they “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” “We made a huge mistake when we passed the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s,” he declared (Wired, 1/12/24).
Upon Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York City mayoral primary, Kirk posted: “Twenty-four years ago, a group of Muslims killed 2,753 people on 9/11. Now a Muslim socialist is on pace to run New York City.” “When we think of what it means to be an American, is [it] someone by the name of Islami Mohamed?” he remarked on another occasion (Media Matters, 8/19/25): “I don’t think so.”
“You cannot have liberty if you do not have a Christian population,” Kirk insisted (Religion News, 1/7/25). He also claimed (Media Matters, 8/19/25) that “the philosophical foundation of anti-whiteness has been largely financed by Jewish donors in the country.”
‘Disgracefully ill-timed’
MSNBC‘s Rebecca Cutler said it was ““inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable” to connect Kirk’s murder to his hate speech (Guardian, 9/11/25).
In the wake of Kirk’s murder, it was taboo to point out that his politics, and those of the MAGA movement he embraced, contributed to a culture of hatred and demonization. MSNBC pundit Matthew Dowd was promptly fired by the cable network after he observed:
Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions…. You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.
When Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, in condemning violence, remarked that “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” the Washington Post (9/10/25) editorialized that this was “a disgracefully ill-timed comment.”
In fact, there is no better time to point out that the right-wing movement Kirk was a crucial part of has played the leading role in dehumanizing others and normalizing violence. Failure to honestly examine the politics that are driving extremism will steer us away from the kind of analysis and action that are needed to prevent more tragedies.
“Trump explicitly threatened to use the state to target anyone he and MAGA scapegoat for Kirk’s murder,” said New Republic writer Greg Sargeant.
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller vowed Friday that he and President Donald Trump would use this week’s assassination of Charlie Kirk to “dismantle” the organized left using state power.
In a rant on Fox News, Miller—the architect of Trump’s mass roundups and deportations of immigrants—shouted that the best way to honor Kirk’s memory was to carry out a political purge against the left, which he called a “domestic terrorism movement in this country.”
Miller provided few details on what specific left-wing figures or groups he believed were stoking this violence. He claimed the left was waging “doxxing campaigns” against right-wing figures, though he cited no specific examples.
He did, however, cite many examples of harsh, but nevertheless First Amendment-protected, speech that he considered an incitement to violence, including that “the left calls people enemies of the republic, calls them fascists, says they’re Nazis, says they’re evil,” and claimed that many people online were “celebrating” Kirk’s assassination.
“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his creator in heaven,” Miller said, was, “that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence, and we are going to do that.”
“Under President Trump’s leadership,” Miller vowed to shut down these unspecified leftist groups.
“I don’t care how,” he said. “It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”
RICO refers to the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, which the government has traditionally used to prosecute organized crime groups. Trump later said one of his targets for these charges may be the billionaire liberal donor George Soros, the owner of the Open Society Foundations nonprofit, whom Trump accused of funding “riots,” a charge Soros denied.
Miller did not limit his call to destroying those who commit crimes. He also spoke of those “spreading this evil hate,” telling them, “You will live in exile. Because the power of law enforcement under President Trump’s leadership will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, to take away your power, and if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”
An official White House account on X reposted a clip of Miller’s comments calling for the “dismantling” of left-wing organizations:
.@StephenM: The last message that Charlie Kirk gave to me before he joined his Creator in Heaven was that we have to dismantle and take on the Radical Left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence… and we are going to do that. 🔥 pic.twitter.com/GxVGWk7n5e
“Trump signaled he intended to use Kirk’s shooting as a pretext for a broad crackdown on the left,” said Jordan Weissman, a journalist at The Argument. “Here’s Stephen Miller being much more explicit. He’s talking about RICO and terrorism charges, echoing right-wing influencers.”
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, meanwhile, pointed out the irony of the threat coming from Miller, noting that he “routinely slanders his political opponents with vile language that treats disagreement as if it’s treason.”
Little is still known about what, if any, political ideology precisely motivated Kirk’s alleged shooter, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, who was apprehended in Utah on Friday. Robinson was not affiliated with any political party, and the scrawlings he left behind at the scene of the crime contain a mishmash of hyper-online but only vaguely political symbols and phrases.
But even before the suspect had been identified or apprehended, efforts had begun on the right to use Kirk’s murder as an excuse to crack down on their left-wing enemies. In an ominous speech Thursday night, Trump blamed the shooting on the “radical left,” saying it was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
On Fox News Friday, Trump indicated that he was extending this dragnet to anyone who has expressed harsh words for figures on the right. The president said:
For years those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country and must stop right now. My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges and law enforcement officials.
The portrayal of the left as a unique “national security threat” is not borne out by data. On Friday, The Economist published an analysis of data from the Prosecution Project, an open-source database that catalogues crimes that seek “a socio-political change or to communicate.”
The findings reaffirm what has been found in previousstudies: That “extremists on both left and right commit violence, although more incidents appear to come from right-leaning attackers.”
During the same Fox interview, when a host noted the prevalence of right-wing extremism, Trump said: “I’ll tell you something that’s going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. They’re saying, ‘We don’t want these people coming in. We don’t want you burning our shopping centers. We don’t want you shooting our people in the middle of the street.’”
Trump concluded: “The radicals on the left are the problem.”
EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?
TRUMP: I'll tell you something that's gonna get me in trouble but I couldn't care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don't want to see crime. The radicals on the left… pic.twitter.com/snOESz3x5a
Meanwhile, virtually all prominent figures and groups on the left—from politicians like Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani to writers for left-wing publications like Jacobin or The Nation to activist groups like Public Citizen, MoveOn, the ACLU, and Indivisible—have unequivocally condemned violence against Kirk, even while repudiating his views.
“Trump explicitly threatened to use the state to target anyone he and MAGA scapegoat for Kirk’s murder,” saidNew Republic writer Greg Sargeant. “We really could see Stephen Miller and Kash Patel use the FBI for 60s-style domestic persecution.”
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