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Speaking mildly ill of the dead is now punishable by deportation [1]
['Daily Kos Staff']
Date: 2025-09-12
Leave it to President Donald Trump’s administration to turn the shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk into a way to attack immigrants and suppress the free speech of people that Trumpers don’t like. It’s a two-fer of terrible.
The State Department didn’t waste a moment in letting everyone know how blatantly it was going to weaponize Kirk’s death. Less than 24 hours after the shooting, Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted on X that “foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country” and directed consular officials to “undertake appropriate action.”
If that wasn’t clear enough, he made sure to let his audience of hyped-up white nationalists know that they should “feel free to bring such comments by foreigners to my attention so that the @StateDept can protect the American people.”
Protect the American people from … mildly acerbic posts about Kirk? Because that’s pretty much all the right seems to have right now, and even that—not so much. Right-wingers have a whole website called “Charlie’s Murderers” already up and running. It features random people saying the most incendiary things imaginable, such as someone who posted they were “terrified to think of how far-right fans of Kirk, aching for more violence, could very well turn this into an even more radicalizing moment. Will they now believe their fears have been proven right and feel they have a right to ‘retaliate,’ regardless of who actually was behind the initial shooting?”
Whoa. Chilling. But not nearly as chilling as a comment from another monster.
“The entire atmosphere has been stoked by conservative media and amplified by MAGA bullshit,” they wrote on Facebook, earning the ire of the anonymous activists.
As was both inevitable and intended, people who appeared on the website—which helpfully includes their full names, employment details, and location—were quickly targeted with death and rape threats.
Related | The whitewashing of Charlie Kirk’s toxic legacy is underway
As far as official State Department punishments go, Landau is now responding to every xenophobic tipoff from a blue check over at Elon Musk’s online Nazi bar with a weird image that says only “EL QUITAVISAS,” which translates to THE VISA REMOVER or THE VISA TAKER. Cute. It’s apparently a favorite of Landau’s that he whips out any time some random Nazi gets his attention and demands that somebody be deported.
Admittedly, there have been massive calls for violence in the wake of Kirk’s shooting. The problem for people like Landau is that those calls are coming from the right.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones declared, “This is a war.”
All-purpose Department of Justice goon Ed Martin went to X to get real dramatic.
“For it is written, ‘Vengeance is Mine, I will repay,” he posted.
So let’s review. The right wing declaring war and promising vengeance: totally fine and not violent. Saying that you are concerned the right will use Kirk’s shooting as an excuse to retaliate: totally violent, and a deportable offense. And let’s face it—we know the administration is not bluffing, as it’s been canceling visas for pro-Palestinian academics for months.
This all boils down to ostensible right-wing free speech champions demanding that the government actively suppress speech they don’t like, on pain of deportation. Put another way, it’s an assertion that the First Amendment literally does not protect mildly negative speech about Charlie Kirk.
Rep. Clay Higgins went even further, calling on the government to force private tech companies to issue immediate lifetime bans for people who make fun of Kirk.
Related | Be nice about Charlie Kirk or this lawmaker will ban you from the internet
It doesn’t help that the media is racing to comply. Comedy Central already pulled a rebroadcast of a recent “South Park” episode making fun of Kirk. The cable channel is owned by Paramount, which is also busy destroying its own CBS News division by turning it into Trump TV, so perhaps this isn’t all that surprising. (The episode is still streaming on Paramount+, if you haven’t watched it.)
No one was ever going to stop the right from turning Kirk into a conservative martyr. But it’s downright infuriating that the government wants to use its power to demand that we all do the same.
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