A funeral will be the biggest story in America this week.
But, contrary to expectations, it will not be the ceremony mourning the murder of Charlie Kirk. Rather, it will be a memorial service for the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Kirk’s life was too short. He was part of the lives of his family and friends for just 31 years. They will, no doubt, lament his loss.
The First Amendment has been part of all our lives since December 15, 1791, the day the Bill of Rights was ratified. It has been with us 233 years—also not nearly long enough. Now or later, all of us will come to grieve for its passing.
Like Kirk, the First Amendment was murdered in cold blood. Unlike him, it did not die from just a single shot or a lone gunman. As in a fusty old murder mystery, there is a long line of killers, delivering the blows that weakened and ultimately finished it off.
Jimmy Kimmel, the veteran late-night comedian now elevated to a central role in this demise of one of the central tenets of what we once too glibly called “the American experiment,” on Monday evening had dared to describe how “many in MAGA-land are working very hard to capitalize on the murder of Charlie Kirk.”
He addressed assertions from the White House and Vice President J.D. Vance that it was a “statistical fact” that “most of the lunatics in American politics today are proud members of the far left,” and noted, accurately, that Vance’s “fact” was, in reality, “complete bullshit.” He pointed out that the Justice Department had this week taken down data on its website that made clear that “violence from far-right groups is the greatest source of domestic terror and extremist violence in the U.S.,” and referenced the violence Trump himself incited on January 6, 2021. And then he observed, “The president and his henchmen are doing their best to fan the flames, so they can I guess attack people on the dangerous left.”
By Wednesday evening, this point was proven by the indefinite suspension of the broadcast of Kimmel’s program on ABC. Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission, appointed by President Donald Trump, had earlier in the day called Kimmel’s observations “some of the sickest conduct possible.” He said that ABC should consider suspending Kimmel before the FCC had to get involved, and suggested that local broadcasters who depend on the FCC for their licenses do the same.
“Frankly,” he argued, “I think it’s past time that a lot of these licensed broadcasters themselves push back on Comcast and Disney and say, ‘We are not going to run Kimmel anymore until you straighten this out.’”
Within hours, one of the most important of those local broadcasters, Nexstar, issued a statement saying it was pre-empting Kimmel. The statement did not mention that Nexstar is currently engaged in an effort to acquire another broadcaster, TEGNA, for $6.2 billion—a deal that requires the approval of both the FCC and the Federal Trade Commission.
Another broadcaster, Sinclair, went farther still, saying that Kimmel’s suspension was not adequate and that ABC and the FCC should take further action.
Shortly afterward, ABC announced it would be taking Kimmel’s program off the air indefinitely.
The suspension was the second time in weeks that the Trump administration had seemed to use its leverage as a regulator to force a media corporation to shut down a late-night comedy show whose fact-based humor made Trump, Vance, and the broader MAGA community uncomfortable. In July, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert was canceled by CBS, ostensibly for “financial reasons.” But, as it happens, the parent company of CBS, Paramount Global, was too engaged in an effort to sell their assets which would require federal approval. As it also happens, Colbert’s fate was sealed just days after he criticized on the air a $16 million settlement Paramount had negotiated with Trump over a lawsuit the president had brought against CBS concerning the contents of a “60 Minutes” interview with Kamala Harris.
Senator Elizabeth Warren called that settlement “a deal that looks like bribery.”
Colbert and Kimmel are not alone. In the wake of the Kirk killing, a prominent commentator on MSNBC and a distinguished columnist for The Washington Post were both fired for stating facts or making fact-based observations about Kirk. Furthermore, an untold number of Americans who have similarly simply expressed their views have also faced professional consequences.
Nationwide, Trump and senior officials in his government are using the moment to apply pressure nationwide to silence their critics. They have promised to use the Department of Justice and other federal agencies to target their political rivals—and one-by-one, media outlets, universities and big corporations have acquiesced or capitulated to the threats.
One by one, the most powerful companies and people in America have lined up to strike the blows that have ultimately deprived us of the ability to fully exercise the freedoms guaranteed by the First Amendment. The degree to which the president is being aided and abetted by America’s corporate leaders is appalling. His allies have bought up, compromised or otherwise taken over many of our important media outlets—The Washington Post, CNN, CBS and ABC among them—as well as social platforms like X and Meta. Other powerful new media platforms, like TikTok, seem about to be handed over to pro-Trump oligarchs.
One by one, institutions that were made great by exercising or defending those freedoms are being stripped of them. Universities have been made to cancel classes, shutter programs, fire professors and promise to silence peaceful, lawful dissent. Law firms have been made to part ways with lawyers who represented opposition views. Government officials who were not viewed as cleaving to MAGA beliefs have been fired. As in totalitarian governments throughout history, a purge of views diverging from that of the president has taken place.
Trump is seeking to purge museums and cultural institutions of views with which he does not agree. His people have recently floated stripping not-for-profit status from organizations with liberal views—many federal grants have already been withheld from such organizations. Every lever the government has is being used to silence dissent, to erase uncomfortable facts, to subdue potential rivals.
We have seen such behavior in the United States before. The McCarthy era and its systematic effort to target those with communist backgrounds is an example. Wartime censorship and the Alien and Sedition Acts in the early days of this nation are others. But all of these were more limited in scope than what is happening now. And all of these were grounded, however speciously, in at least ostensible concern for U.S. national security.
What is happening now is that Trump has embraced autocratic tactics for purely selfish, political or retributive purposes. The full power of the executive branch of the U.S. government is now occupied with the un-Constitutional, un-American business of stripping away our most fundamental rights. And as a consequence, for now at least, what we once had, what once was a source of our strength and our pride, what once was seen as one of the inalienable rights on which the country was founded, no longer exists as it did even a year ago.
The question before us is whether there is life in the idea that Trump is trying to bury; whether we will value the rights being taken from us as those who fought for those rights throughout history did.
That is up to us.
It is up to us to decide whether we will overcome the power of extremist leaders and compliant corporate media and use the tools, the technologies and the human energies available to us to undo the crimes that are currently being perpetrated.
It is up to us, each of us, to stand up, as voices on both the left and the right have throughout our history, for the ability for all of us, any of us, weak or powerful, great or small, to reveal without fear the full content of our consciences, to speak our minds openly and freely as was originally intended to be the sacred legacy of America to every generation of its citizens.
The post Opinion: R.I.P. the First Amendment, Killed by Cowardice and Greed appeared first on The Daily Beast.
