Federal Enforcement of Godwin’s Law

Charlie Kirk’s killer, probably. I don’t know who this guy is. You don’t know, either. But Donald Trump already knows who he wants to blame.

My new book, “Dictator From Day One” is now loaded up, set for a September 17 release, and if you’re not committed to reading it in print, you can even pre-order the e-book now.

Thanks to everyone who donated to support the book. It will make a big difference. I already have some promotional articles in the works and a few blurbs on the book from some prominent people. More on that as we reach the launch date.

I had said I wouldn’t list the names of any donors who are afraid of reprisals. But the overwhelming response I got is that people are more than OK with having their names listed in the book’s acknowledgements. That’s the spirit! So if you donated but don’t want your name listed, please be sure to confirm that with me. And if you still want to donate, you’ve got one more day to have your name listed.

Now, I still have a few stalwart Trump defenders who maintain their subscriptions to this newsletter, bless you, despite being very much on the other side of this big issue. And one of them made a comment on my previous announcement to the effect that if Trump is such a dictator, how is it that I can publish a whole book about it?

You will not be surprised to hear that I cover that in the book, fairly early on: “This dictatorship has been asserted but not yet consolidated and entrenched. The fact that someone can write and publish a book like this is a demonstration of that fact.”

But perhaps I spoke too soon, because Trump is right now preparing the mechanism to make sure that books like mine can’t be written and published. He is using the killing of conservative activist Charlie Kirk as his pretext.

I wrote a quick emergency article on this for The UnPopulist.

Trump Is Already Exploiting the Heinous Killing of Charlie Kirk

I don’t have a lot of nice things to say about Charlie Kirk, for reasons that will become clear below. But he didn’t deserve to be killed, and we shouldn’t want to live in a country where people are shot for their views. As I put it in my piece, “The right to freedom from political violence means freedom for our ideological enemies, too, and not just for our friends and allies.”

But then I continue:

Unfortunately, that’s the opposite of what Donald Trump implied in his appalling response to Kirk’s shooting. Political violence, as he described it, is bad only when the other side does it. And worse, Trump laid the groundwork to use Kirk’s death as a pretext to crack down on his own political opponents.

I start with the observation that if anyone is going to deplore heated rhetoric and political violence, the last person who can do that with any credibility is Donald Trump. The worst day of political violence in the country for decades was January 6, 2021. I then talk about Trump’s one-sided history of recent political violence, which in his telling only comes from the left. This includes refusing to mention the murder, just a few months ago, of a Democratic state legislator in Minnesota and the shooting of another by a right-wing fanatic.

Alex Nowrasteh, by the way, has a good overview of the actual statistics on political violence in the United States. Here’s the upshot:

Eighty-three percent of those murdered [in politically motivated violence] since 1975 were committed by the 9/11 terrorists. The Oklahoma City Bombing accounts for about another 5 percent. Those murdered since 2020 account for just 2 percent. [Domestic] Terrorists inspired by Islamist ideology are responsible for 87 of those murdered in attacks on US soil since 1975. Right-wingers are the second most common motivating ideology, accounting for 391 murders and 11 percent of the total. The definition here of right-wing terrorists includes those motivated by white supremacy, anti-abortion beliefs, involuntary celibacy (incels), and other right-wing ideologies.

Left-wing terrorists murdered 65 people, or about 2 percent of the total. Left-wing terrorists include those motivated by black nationalism, anti-police sentiment, communism, socialism, animal rights, environmentalism, anti-white ideologies, and other left-wing ideologies.

But never bother to examine a folly, ask only what it accomplishes. What is the purpose of Trump’s one-side-ism on political violence?

Trump’s anger is also directed, not against the perpetrators of violence, but against those who engage in anti-conservative rhetoric. It is “hateful rhetoric” from the “political left” that is “directly responsible” for “terrorism.” Directly. I think you can see where this is going.

Trump’s statement paints harsh criticism of him, his administration, and other conservatives as a direct incitement to violence. Then he promises that this will be suppressed and punished: “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.”

It’s that part about organizations and funding that should alarm you, especially this early in the case. We don’t even know who shot Charlie Kirk and why. And if you don’t follow all the internecine feuds within the right, you might not realize that Kirk had a whole cadre of enemies to his right who viewed him as a moderate sell-out because he wasn’t overtly racist. I link in passing to an article that’s worth your time: an article by Will Sommer in The Bulwark a few months ago about a small but distressingly influential neo-Nazi clique who call themselves “groypers” and their campaign against Kirk and his organization. The upshot of the article, by the way, is that Kirk responded by appeasing them and moving his own position farther toward that of the white nationalists. This is why I can’t really find anything nice to say about him.

I don’t want to get too far out there and make any predictions about who killed Kirk. Nobody knows anything yet, and at the rate things are going, we may never know. But I just want my readers to be aware of this background and that there is a small but significant chance the guy who shot him was a right-wing nut, rather than a left-wing nut or a politically uncommitted nut.

But the point is that Trump doesn’t know who it is, either.

If we don’t know anything about the shooter yet, we certainly don’t know anything about what rhetoric inspired him, much less the organizations and funders Trump imagines are behind this. Yet he is already using Kirk’s murder as a pretext to make his critics’ rhetoric “directly responsible” for political violence—and then go after whole organizations.

The speed with which he jumps to this conclusion, well ahead of the evidence—and the specificity with which he mentions organizations and funders—implies that the targets of this crackdown were already selected beforehand. Trump already knew who he wanted to persecute, he just needed the excuse.

I go on to review the truly hateful and violent rhetoric from the right in response to Kirk’s shooting, and I narrow in to focus on one specific aspect.

[Trump] has been building a subtle but steady drumbeat in which anything that can be construed as “vilifying” people on the right is interpreted as incitement to violence. So calling Trump a dictator, which many of us are doing, would count as “hateful rhetoric” that somehow makes us directly responsible for political violence—and justifies political violence by the state to shut us down.

The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway makes this point explicit. Responding specifically to a Washington Post article by Robert Kagan, she flags criticism of Trump’s authoritarianism as “assassination prep rhetoric.”

I know Mollie from back in my days at The Federalist, and brother, I can tell you she is a true fanatic and will send all of us to the concentration camps without batting an eye.

This goes a little beyond what I call “federal enforcement of Godwin’s Law.” And that’s where my book comes in. I just wrote a whole book about Trump imposing a dictatorship in the United States. Will this be considered hateful rhetoric and incitement to political violence? I sum up the dilemma we face.

This raises the prospect of a paradox in which it is terribly unfair and wrong to call Donald Trump a dictator—and if you do, his administration will investigate and punish you for your speech.

Update: Congressman Clay Higgins, who used to rail against “censorship” on social media, is now promising to “use Congressional authority…to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.” Whatever “belittled” means.

This is their Horst Wessel moment, and they’re going to make the most of it.

Read my whole article.