At a Tuesday hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI Director Kash Patel said his agency will investigate organizations that “utilize clickbait to make money for their ideology.”
Allow me to translate: the FBI will now go after media outlets, think tanks, NGOs and activist organizations who lean left or are antagonistic toward the Trump administration, Republicans and conservatives. This is the exact type of weaponization of the Justice Department that Republicans in Congress and their allies in right-wing media have wailed about for years — and now that power will be wielded against any media outlet or organization critical of the American right.
Specifically, Patel said he’ll seek warrants under 18 U.S. Code § 2703 (d) that will allow the FBI and other federal law enforcement agencies like the Treasury Department to obtain communications from media outlets and other organizations. All of this is in response to media outlets, individual journalists, and everyday Americans who Patel, the Trump administration, and Republicans have deemed insufficiently mournful of Kirk’s killing.
In some cases, those who the American right has deemed guilty of inappropriate remarks about Kirk have simply pointed out his own words and extremist policies.
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Maybe you remember the climate of fear that permeated the nation after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Democrats and Republicans united to avenge the deaths of more than 3,000 Americans. They also united to expand the powers of the executive branch and the surveillance state.
The Patriot Act fundamentally changed the government’s ability to spy on its own citizens.
We’re seeing something similar now, albeit far less bipartisan. All the right-wing noise from the last decade about cancel culture, about censorship of speech on social media, about being able to converse on platforms like Parler even if some of those conversations involve coordinating acts of domestic terrorism like the January 6 attack on the Capitol — all of that is now out the window.
In the aftermath of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the American right has united under the banner of cracking down on the left, even if that means doing all of the things that the right has claimed were an infringement of their own liberties.
Since Kirk’s killing, elected officials and right-wing media have swiftly lurched into action, demanding all of the types of crackdowns they have bemoaned in the last 10 years. In less than a week, the American right has:
Carried out a cancellation campaign directed at anyone the right deems to be not sufficiently mourning Kirk’s death. In Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott has, in recent years, made a lot of noise about supporting free speech on college campuses so that conservative students can express viewpoints in line with those of people like Kirk, a Texas Tech student was arrested during an altercation with Kirk supporters. She has been charged with assault, although it’s unclear exactly how she physically engaged anyone.
Tried to get an Office Depot employee fired for refusing to print a flyer for a Kirk vigil. (Reminder: this is the same party that fought all the way up to the Supreme Court for the right of a baker to refuse to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding.)
Has called for investigations into left-wing advocacy groups and NGOs. (Reminder: this is the same party that criticized the Obama-era IRS for investigating tax fraud by conservative groups.)
Has called for crackdowns on social media. (Reminder: this is the same party that made a mountain out of the Biden administration asking Twitter to moderate content regarding election lies and other subjects.)
Has said, actually, not all speech is protected. (This comes from the nation’s most powerful libertarian politician, Rand Paul.)
Has encouraged the FBI to investigate people who have celebrated Kirk’s killing or, in the case of an Atlanta man, investigate people for buying t-shirts.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) demanded an end to the “bullshit” narrative of political violence by “both sides.” He listed a series of attacks and violence by left-wing actors in recent years, including mentioning a conspiracy theory about “riot bricks” that stems from unfounded claims of bricks being left on the streets of American cities during protests over the killing of George Floyd in the summer of 2020.
Schmitt claimed that these acts of left-wing violence were the product of a “dark and clandestine system” of activists groups and NGOs, specifically singling out liberal megadonor George Soros.
“There can be no unity between good and evil,” Schmitt said.
Schmitt and other Republican lawmakers have been beating the drum since Kirk’s death that this alleged “network” of left-wing groups needs to be dismantled. Vice President JD Vance said on Monday, while hosting an episode of Kirk’s podcast from the White House, that liberal groups are funded, in part, by U.S. tax dollars. (Schmitt said the same on Tuesday.)
“And how do they reward us?” Vance asked. “By setting fire to the house built by the American family [for] over 250 years.”
(Reminder: it was Trump supporters who stormed the people’s house on January 6, 2021 and tried to overturn an election for the first time in the nation’s history.)
White House advisor Stephen Miller then chimed in as Vance’s guest.
“The last message that Charlie sent me was [...] I think it was just the day before we lost him, which is that we need to have an organized strategy to go after the leftwing organizations that are promoting violence in this country,” Miller said. “And I will write those words onto my heart.”
Schmitt alluded to going after more than just Soros-funded groups and NGOs. The Soros-funded “anarchists on our streets” are being “propped up by an army of researchers and journalists and propagandists who downplay the political violence.”
Stop me if you’ve heard the one about right-wing politicians going after researchers/academia and the press for calling out right-wing violence.
At Tuesday’s hearing, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) even mentioned dissent itself as a pretext for investigating left-wing groups.
“The violence we are seeing is not purely organic,” Cruz said. “There is, I believe, significant money that is spreading dissension, that is spreading violence.”
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