Opposing a censorious left-wing “cancel culture” had been a cornerstone of the MAGA philosophy. Now major figures in the movement are themselves torn over free speech following Charlie Kirk’s death.
America is reeling after the 31-year-old conservative activist was shot dead while speaking at a college event in Utah on September 10. In the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, prominent MAGA figures are openly split on whether certain forms of expression—especially praise for murder or other examples of so-called “hate speech”—should be met with punishment. Others are feuding over his legacy on Israel, in particular whether conservatives are free to dissent on the issue.
The divisions come amid several significant moves by the Trump administration and its allies in response to Kirk’s death.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has said there is a difference between “free speech” and “hate speech,” promising to prosecute purveyors of the latter, while Vice President JD Vance said those who celebrated Kirk’s killing should lose their jobs.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that America would revoke the visas of foreign nationals cheering the assassination and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth warned that the Department of War is “tracking” and “will address” any comments from military personnel or civilian employees that do the same.
Trump’s team is preparing an executive order political violence and hate speech, White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich said last Wednesday, while Trump is preparing to designate Antifa a “major terrorist organization.”
A website called the Charlie Kirk Data Foundation asks people to submit names of people who have celebrated the shooting. The group wrote to X that it has nearly 50,000 identities and that it’s not meant for “doxing”—only to “lawfully collect publicly-available data to analyze the prominence of support for political violence in the interest of public education.”
Trump has also suggested that networks regularly criticize him should potentially have their licenses taken away. “They’re 97 percent against, they give me wholly bad publicity… I mean, they’re getting a license, I would think maybe their license should be taken away” Trump told reporters on Thursday. “When you have a network and you have evening shows and all they do is hit Trump…They’re not allowed to do that.”
The administration argues that Kirk’s death is the consequence of left-wing violent rhetoric that is dangerous, justifying a need to crackdown on this type of expression.
But many major conservatives are worried that this is the right embracing cancel culture, invoking Kirk’s passion for free speech throughout his life.
The Conservative Conversation In Detail
On Monday, Attorney General Pam Bondi 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.”
“Hate speech that crosses the line into threats of violence is NOT protected by the First Amendment,” she told The Katie Miller Podcast. “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.”
She added: “It’s not free speech when you come out and say ‘it’s OK what happened to Charlie’—we’re firing people, we’re seeing people online who are posting hate speech—they should be shut down, they should be stopped from doing this and they should know there are consequences for your actions.”
Bondi went on to speak about how someone was fired from a Michigan Office Depot for allegedly refusing to print posters ordered by the Kalamazoo County Republican Party, for a vigil honoring Kirk.
When Miller said that she thought “all three (workers involved) should have been terminated and we should investigate office depot,” Bondi said she “agreed.”
These comments triggered immediate backlash from multiple liberals and conservatives alike, many of which incited Kirk’s own words advocating for free speech no matter how “ugly, gross or evil” because “ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”
Bondi defended her stance in a post on X the next day saying: “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.”
“Under 18 U.S.C. § 875(c), it is a federal crime to transmit “any communication containing any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another,” she wrote. “You cannot call for someone’s murder. You cannot swat a Member of Congress. You cannot dox a conservative family and think it will be brushed off as “free speech.” These acts are punishable crimes, and every single threat will be met with the full force of the law. Free speech protects ideas, debate, even dissent but it does NOT and will NEVER protect violence.”
But this did not quell the backlash, with major MAGA figures speaking out against her, including commentator Tucker Carlson who said on his podcast last Wednesday: “If God created each person, including the infuriating, annoying, disastrously wrong person I’m talking to, then I can’t force him to repeat my creed—I’m not in charge of his conscience, only he is.”
“So when Charlie Kirk said ‘I believe in free speech,’ he didn’t simply believe in free speech because it was in the Bill of Rights, he understood that it’s in the Bill of Rights because it’s in the New Testament,” Carlson said. “He understood that’s a right that comes from God, bestowed on all of us at birth, and he felt his job, his duty, was not simply to protect it but to live it.”
Carlson showed a clip of Bondi’s comments on The Katie Miller Podcast and then said: “There’s almost no sentence that Charlie Kirk…would have objected to more than that.”
“You hope that Charlie Kirk’s death won’t be used by a group we now call bad actors to create a society that was the opposite of the one he worked to build,” Carlson said later. “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.”
“And trust me if it is, if that does happen, there is never a more justified moment for civil disobedience than that—ever—and there never will be,” he said. “Because if they can tell you what to say, they’re telling you what to think, there is nothing they can’t do to you—because they don’t consider you human.”
Conservative commentator Megyn Kelly, also a major conservative figure, made an appearance on the episode saying who called Bondi’s comments “absolutely ridiculous.”
“There’s just no way she doesn’t know what she said is legally unsound…so it does worry me, because, does that mean she’s actually pushing for a policy change?” Kelly asked. “Because there’s no way she doesn’t already know what she said is wrong—there’s been reams of Supreme Court precent on it.”
Indeed, the Supreme Court has repeatedly ruled that the government can’t punish hate speech under the First Amendment, noting there is no general “hate speech” exception.
Kelly continued: “We’ve been fighting against this for decades on the right…she sounded like an attorney general Kamala Harris would have put in place.”
Fox News journalist Martha MacCallum presented Trump with people’s worries over the government’s moves possibly stifling free speech, telling him in during her show The Story on Thursday: “Charlie said that there was no such thing has hate speech.”
“He might not be saying that now,” Trump responded.
“You have always been in favor of free speech,” she said to the President, so do you have concerns that about…your critics (saying) ‘this crackdown is a crackdown on free speech’.”
Trump said that the people saying some of thing he is worried about are “crazed lunatics,” citing an example of a man who ran through flowers and cards laid on the sidewalk in a memorial for Kirk at the office of Turning Point USA in Phoenix, Arizona.
“But that’s ruining property,” MacCallum said, “so where do you draw the line?” she asked later.
Trump went on to speak about “incitement to riot” which is a “criminal act” and added that “people are dying because of it.”
Kelly said in Carlson’s podcast that she thinks “Trump will see that there’s so much resistance to this on the right that he won’t let (Bondi change laws on free speech and hate speech). I just have to think that Trump reads his base better than she does.”
Newsweek has contacted the White House and the Department of Justice, via email and online contact form, for comment.
Firings and Expulsions
Multiple people have lost their jobs—both temporarily and permanently—and had to leave universities for their actions in the aftermath of Kirk’s death.
The most prominent case of this was late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension, which came after the chair of broadcast regulator Federal Communications Commission (FCC), Brendan Carr, threatened to act against ABC and its parent company Disney for his comments after Kirk’s death.
Kimmel said during Jimmy Kimmel Live last Friday: “We’re still trying to wrap our heads around the senseless murder of the popular podcaster and conservative activist Charlie Kirk…I’ve seen a lot of extraordinarily vile responses to this from both sides of the political spectrum. Some people are cheering this, which is something I won’t ever understand.” He went on to accuse Trump not trying to bring the country together and criticize Trump’s blame of the “radical left.”
But during Monday’s show, Kimmel said the “MAGA gang was “desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
He accused “working very hard to capitalize on the murder” and then joked about Trump’s response to a reporter asking him how he was “holding up” after Kirk’s death—Trump said he was “very good” and then started speaking about new construction being carried out for the White House’s new ballroom.
“He’s at the fourth stage of grief: construction,” Kimmel said. “This is not how an adult grieves the murder of someone he calls a friend. This is how a four-year-old mourns a goldfish.”
On Wednesday, when FCC Chairman Brendan Carr, a longtime Trump supporter, spoke with conservative podcaster Benny Goodmen, he told ABC and Disney: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” Within a matter of hours, ABC announced that Kimmel’s show would be taken off air.
Multiple people have criticized this sequence of events, including the director of the Democracy and Technology Division at the American Civil Liberties Union, Christopher Anders, who said in a statement: “This is beyond McCarthyism. Trump officials are repeatedly abusing their power to stop ideas they don’t like, deciding who can speak, write, and even joke. The Trump administration’s actions, paired with ABC’s capitulation, represent a grave threat to our First Amendment freedoms.”
Conservatives have also spoken out against the move, including podcaster Candace Owens, who said in her most recent episode: “Whether or not you think it was an insensitive joke, I don’t think that would have been the justification for saying that he now needs to donate to charity and lose his whole life.”
“Some people are saying ‘hey Candace they did this to us’ and you’re not wrong,” she continued. “If you are on the right and you are saying that when the whole George Floyd thing happened, people lose their jobs for saying sensible things or making a joke—you are correct.”
“But if you’re not recognizing that when you just flip the coin, it’s the same people that are gaining more power,” she added. “I just want the attacks on free speech to stop.”
When Trump was asked about the Kimmel situation during a press conference in the United Kingdom last week he said: “Well Jimmy Kimmel was fired because he had bad ratings more than anything else and he said a horrible thing about Charlie Kirk.”
This week, ABC said it would reinstate Jimmy Kimmel Live! less than a week after its original suspension, following “thoughtful conversations” with the host.
“Last Wednesday, we made the decision to suspend production on the show to avoid further inflaming a tense situation at an emotional moment for our country,” the Walt Disney Company said in a statement. “It is a decision we made because we felt some of the comments were ill-timed and thus insensitive. We have spent the last days having thoughtful conversations with Jimmy, and after those conversations, we reached the decision to return the show on Tuesday.”
However, his is not the only case. Other examples include a Secret Service employee who was placed on administrative leave, first reported by Real Clear Politics, after he wrote on Facebook: “If you are mourning this guy (Charlie Kirk,) delete me. He spewed hatred and racism on his show… At the end of the day, you answer to GOD and speak things into existence. You can only circumvent karma, she doesn’t leave.”
Texas State University said an individual “is no longer a student” after a video of him mocking Charlie Kirk’s killing on campus went viral on social media, following Texas Governor Greg Abbott reposting the clip with the message: “Hey Texas State. This conduct is not accepted at our schools. Expel this student immediately. Mocking assassination must have consequences.”
Pilots, teachers and professors are among some others who have been fired or suspended after discussing Kirk’s killing online.
Defenders of this kind of action include Vance, who said on The Charlie Kirk Show: “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer.”
He argued: “By celebrating that murder, apologizing for it, and emphasizing not Charlie’s innocence but the fact that he said things some didn’t like—even to the point of lying about what he actually said—many of these people are creating an environment where things like this are inevitably going to happen.”
It remains unclear whether the Trump administration is going move to make “hate speech” a specific crime while the long-term fate of many of the people suspended from their job still up in the air.