Donald Trump and JD Vance yesterday elevated the hard right of America to a form of state religion by canonising Charlie Kirk at a memorial service that will galvanise the president’s followers but create a sense of dread among those committed to democratic freedom.
Charlie Kirk was assassinated on September 10, and irrespective of his hard right views and often inflammatory comments, he most certainly did not deserve to die. His killer must face justice (but not the death penalty that more civilised nations have abolished).
However, if his murder was reprehensible so, too, is the way in which Donald Trump and his supporters have used the killing to create a propaganda-fuelled campaign against free speech and political opposition by lionising a flawed character, punishing those who would dare to tarnish his newly burnished reputation, and turning his memorial service into a political rally.
The acts are from an old playbook. Watching the memorial service – attended by what has been variously described as 70,000 or 200,000 people – was not so much witnessing history in the making as sitting through a rerun.
The idea of turning assassination to political purposes is hardly original. Joseph Goebbels created a propaganda bonanza from the killing of Nazi ‘martyr’ Horst Wessel, a 22-year-old stormtrooper who was shot dead by Communist assassins in 1930 and who had written the lyrics to what became the Nazi Party’s official anthem. Goebbels had earlier tried (with limited success) to use party supporters who died in the abortive 1923 Munich Beer Hall Putsch for the same purpose.
Martyrdom was a key element of Communist historical rhetoric and Stalin promoted a cult-like worship of Lenin, who was pictured in saintly and martyred poses (in spite of dying in his bed from ‘an incurable disease of the blood vessels’). Stalin cast himself as ‘the Lenin of today’.
A more modern – but deeply perverse – reference to martyrdom was made at Kirk’s memorial service by Donald Trump Jr. In his eulogy he said: “We are Charlie. We are all Charlie”. It was a clear reference to “Je suis Charlie”, the unifying call that emerged following the shooting of 12 staff members of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015.
Why perverse? Because “Je Suis Charlie” called for unity in support of free speech. In deep contrast, the Charlie Kirk campaign will come to be recognised as a chilling manifestation of what is arguably Trump’s most dangerous work-in-progress – the undermining of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution. Yes, that’s the one that prevents Congress from making any law abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press. It may stop Congress, but it won’t stop Donald Trump.
‘Charlie Kirk’ will be the phrase used to legitimise the stifling of views opposing those of the 47th president. It will be used to blind many Americans to the forms of coercion employed to silence opposition.
Jimmy Kimmel is a classic example of how it works. Late night show host Kimmel was suspended after Brendan Carr, Trump’s appointee on the Federal Communications Commission, demanded the late night host’s head on a platter for remarks associated with Kirk’s death. Why would station owner and ABC Network affiliate Nexstar Media cave to the FCC demand? Why would ABC Network owner Disney then suspend Kimmel’s show indefinitely? Because Trump had made unveiled threats against the station licences that the FCC controls, and both Nexstar and Disney have acquisitions in the pipeline that will require FCC approval.
The notion that business activity can have a higher priority than a fundamental freedom has distressed many, even in America. That is evident from the demonstration outside Disney’s Burbank studios. But, again, putting profit above principle is nothing new.
In the 1930s the majority of Hollywood studios avoided making movies that were critical of the rising power of Nazism and its leader Adolph Hitler. They did so because US films were very popular in Germany (Hitler was a fan of Disney cartoons) but German authorities tightly controlled the repatriation of the studios’ German earnings to the United States. There was always a substantial amount held in German banks that could be forfeit if the studios upset der Fuhrer.
The playbook is also heavy on patriotism and that, too, was manifest in the memorial service – right down to the pyrotechnics that added a star spangle to the banner. Again, it’s nothing new. Patriotism has been used by numerous governments to whip up public support, particularly in war. Americans have been particularly good at it – right from the paintings of Washington crossing the Delaware and Yankee Doodle epitomising the Spirit of ’76 to the iconic photograph of firemen raising the American flag at Ground Zero on 9/11. Now, however, patriotism means embracing the new state religion.
For the media, that not only means accepting the Trump narrative but also turning a blind eye to anything that might challenge it.
Last week the Pentagon announced it would impose new restrictions on reporters covering the Department of Defense (soon to become the Department of War). To gain or retain accreditation, reporters must now pledge not to gather or use any information that has not been formally authorised for release. The edict also imposed much tighter controls on movement. Accredited reporters had previously had unescorted access to much of the building. However, this is far from the first time that accreditation has been used as a weapon to censor. Franklin D Roosevelt threatened to withhold White House accreditation if newspapers pictured him in his wheelchair.
The new Pentagon rules have been characterised as “prior restraint” and that, too, has been attempted in the past. In 1931 the US Supreme Court struck down a Minnesota law under which a gag order was issued against two journalists. That did not stop Richard Nixon trying to stop the New York Times from publishing the Pentagon Papers that lifted the lid on the Vietnam War in 1971. Nixon failed and prior restraint is now firmly established in US law as a form of state censorship.
If Donald Trump doesn’t have prior restraint in his version of the playbook, he can still punish media after the fact. Trump has sued multiple news organisations, including the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, over their coverage. Again, that’s not new. A Bloomberg article back in June noted that John Adams and Abraham Lincoln jailed journalists whose reporting they did not like. Theodore Roosevelt sued Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World for criminal libel after it claimed his family had profited from the deal to buy the Panama Canal. The court ultimately found it did not have jurisdiction.
So, it is clear that none of Trump’s methods for constraining right to free speech and a free media are new, although he will doubtless claim creative credit when hagiographies are published. What is new, however, is the scale and breadth of his assault on the First Amendment.
You know things are getting bad when last Thursday – before the elevation of Charlie Kirk to sainthood – the conservative Wall Street Journal said this in an editorial: “The political cycle of using government to punish opponents is taking the country into dark corners that will result in less freedom, and less free speech, for all sides.”
Sadly, it will take more than editorial foreboding to stop the Land of the Free from sliding into an abyss.
UPDATE: Disney, which obviously now sees that bad PR can be very costly, has announced the return of Jimmy Kimmel’s show https://www.nzherald.co.nz/entertainment/jimmy-kimmel-show-to-return-this-week-disney/ULLCCCAOQJAJNB72QI4D37HJGQ/
The most productive thing the left can do in response to the assassination of Charlie Kirk is to unreservedly accept “we are all Charlie” or in Ezra Klein’s more elegant framing, accept that “we are going to have to live here together”, and this requires a degree of solidarity with people like Kirk who are persecuted and in his case, murdered largely for participating in the normal political process.
It is a mistake to insist Kirk is the “hard right” when he was largely in step with Donald Trump, who in the last election enjoyed the support of a majority of American voters across the board. Trump may not be average exactly, but he enjoys the support of the median voter.
Exploiting a political killing is unfortunately part of the normal response to the abnormal event of a political killing, and if you think back to other political violence of the last 100 years you can see politicians of all stripes–not only Nazis–are capable of engaging in it.
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