The killing of Charlie Kirk—the MAGA Right’s golden boy & recruitment engine—continues to reverberate on the citizen-side of my brain.

It’s first echo was the sidelining of comic Jimmy Kimmel, but we probably share the worry that the next repercussion will be a death for a death. Kirk wouldn’t have wanted that, but it seems that there are too many disaffected boys waiting in their basements to be “called-into-action” for it to be otherwise.

I tried to react to Kirk’s murder in the ways that I needed to in last week’s We’ve Entered the Arsonist’s Age but I didn’t go far enough in capturing what Kirk embodied or in describing the brakes on political violence that exist today. It feels necessary to do both before more dominoes start to fall. 

So that’s where I’ll begin this morning, before getting to comedy’s ability to mobilize an opposition and inhibit those with Strongman tendencies.

Hanging over all of these themes is a sense of foreboding and menace, like in the photo above by Dane Manary. While part of America may still be at the beach, even more of the President’s warriors have started to engage.

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As with most consequential politicians, Charlie Kirk’s outreach defied easy judgment. His cheerfully engaging young people in conversation was admirably effective. Still, he dominated nearly every exchange with talking points he’d honed hundreds if not thousands of times before while his interlocutors often sounded like they were defending their views for the very first time. The Charlie Kirk show was often more respectful than cruel in part because those who’d brought him their questions would often make fools of themselves long before he fully engaged them. Nevertheless, his patience, resolve and “willingness to put himself out there time and time again” could be a marvel to behold. 

Less marvelous were Kirk’s “enemy lists” of woke professors (some who had done no more than proclaim their solidarity with Palestinian suffering or complained about concealed weapons laws on campus). They operated as rallying cries to his more ardent followers to harass and intimidate these academics, sometimes causing personal damage that far exceeded the parameters of any fair debate. Moreover, his tarring of whole groups also seemed more injurious than necessary to make his points about, say, immigrants, abortion or Black Lives Matter. 

I also want to say a bit more about “hate speech” in general, and incitement to violence in particular. 

Under the First Amendment, even the most hateful speech—like some of the words that danced on Kirk’s grave last week—are protected, because in and of themselves, they do not constitute violence however badly they make some listeners feel.  Decades of Supreme Court decisions say so, and whatever your view of the Court today, they are likely to stand.

Among other things, that means it’s likely illegal for employers to fire employees who took to their private social media accounts to say hateful things about Charlie Kirk (because Kirk’s supporters discovered where they worked and “doxed them” to their employers). Still, it can be a somewhat hollow victory because fired employees, like those “woke” professors before them, usually suffer their harms long before their First Amendment rights can be vindicated.

In other words, just because you have a right doesn’t mean it protects you in a timely manner. You may need to fight for many expensive years before some tribunal finds that its protection “applies to you”—a time lag and personal burden that menaces our current politics. That’s because: if a big enough minority of Americans and our most powerful leaders wish to exploit these realities, Constitutionally-guraranteed free speech will increasingly be “chilled” by threats causing harms long before the necessary debates can occur.

Moreover, when Kirk invited students to target their “woke” professors or Trump invited his angriest supporters to seek his preferred justice at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, it’s been argued that they were illegally inciting their foot-soldiers to violence.  So what would it take for that charge to stick?

Last week, when I quoted Trump’s calling for “all of those” who were “responsible” for Kirk’s murder to be held accountable, he could only be found guilty of incitement if a court could infer “the intent to harm others” from his words, and some unhinged follower actually heeded his call and exacted some violent retribution in response. 

The leading Supreme Court case here is Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 44 (1969), and we all need to become more familiar with its two-part standard for liability given the confusing political noise around it today. For speech to constitute “incitement,” Brandenburg requires it to be (1) directed at inciting or producing imminent lawless action and (2) likely to incite or produce such action. That means “inciting speech” loses First Amendment protection when the speaker intends to cause immediate violence and is, under the circumstances, likely to succeed in provoking it.

From where I sit as a lawyer, Trump’s speech to a mob of angry supporters he had called to Washington on January 6th met the legal definition of incitement to violence and should have been, but never was punished. Since he effectively “got away with it once,” he and his least temperate proxies are continuing to poke the tinderbox of Right-wing incitement to every grievance he expresses—because that’s the end of the political spectrum in America that’s bred the most violence in recent memory according to a study by the Cato Institute, a respected libertarian think tank. 

Which brings us to the fate of political comedy these days.

Nothing bites “the man who would be king” like ridicule. Luckily, some of our democratic institutions (like stand-up comedy) are still alive and kicking–at least for now.

Comedian, and Jimmy Kimmel’s fellow talk show host, Stephen Colbert gave what was likely the most effective comic response to Kimmel’s suspension from ABC in a brilliantly modified version of the “Be Our Guest” song and dance number from Disney’s “Beauty & the Beast” a few days ago. Not only did it skewer Trump’s vanity and vindictiveness, it also effectively pilloried Disney (as ABC’s owner) and its boss Bob Iger for allowing Kimmel’s censorship.

In addition, Trump undoubtedly noticed how some British “comedians” heralded his visit to the royals this week by projecting images of him with Jeffrey Epstein onto the walls of Windsor Palace while he was about to be indulged there. 

On the other hand, South Park’s “postponement” of the episode that was expected to run this week seemed more ominous. Even Colbert’s parody failed to bite as deeply into Trump’s image of himself as Trey Parker and Matt Stone have been managing, but the South Park franchise is also owned by a media conglomerate that’s run by the son of Trump buddy Larry Ellison, so some feared interference.

While South Park said they’d “run out of time” to wrap the episode, and it’s been reported that the guys wanted “to find the right tone and approach to addressing current events,” it was hard to escape the specter of more censorship, particularly in light of the show’s most recent storyline about Trump’s amorous relationship with Satan. It should also be noted that South Park parodied Charlie Kirk in an August episode (“Clyde Donovan destroys woke liberal students” etc.), though Kirk himself (almost alone among his post-mortem defenders) admirably said that he found his portrayal in the parody to be both “awesome” & “hilarious.” 

Perhaps the last word this week about comedy’s impact on would-be authoritarians came from one of the guests on this week’s Colbert show,  New Yorker editor David Remnick. Before leading the magazine, Remnick had been a reporter in the Soviet Union in the years when it was transitioning from Gorbachev’s glasnost to Putin’s rise. Tellingly, Remnick reminded us that Putin’s very first act upon becoming Russia’s new leader was to censor one of the country’s leading parodies, and eventually the entire network that had run this troublesome puppet show. Here’s a clip of Remnick’s timely comments. 

Among other things, this parallel between Putin and Trump 2.0 also is a reminder that it’s not just the comedian but also the broadcasting network (or conglomerate with its billionaire investors) that also play a key role in crackdowns on political comedy, especially when it’s hitting its marks most effectively. 

It was the possibility of reprisal by Trump’s Federal Trade Commission (FCC) that cowed Disney/ABC and is local affiliate conglomerates (Nextar and Sinclair) to pull Jimmy Kimmel off the air despite the non-existent First Amendment grounds for doing so. All of these companies have upcoming mergers that need FCC approval, and both Nextar and Sinclair need FCC authorization to buy more than the currently mandated maximum of affiliate television stations so they don’t “unfairly dominate” their particular markets. By kowtowing to Trump’s wishes in July (“Kimmel should be the next to go”), all three corportations hope to curry favor with the FCC and get any “problems” waived.

Moreover, media conglomerates and their billionaire investors will continue to play an outsized role in the censorship of comics in particular as well as in the reporting of “the news” more generally. Because while his ultimate aims may never be realized, the aforementioned Larry Ellison—who already is a major stakeholder (through his son) in CBS/Paramount, the company that recently cancelled Colbert’s contract for another year—is also looking to acquire CNN, HBO and a major stake in TikTok. As an essayist in the Times noted on Thursday: 

If all goes as anticipated, this tech billionaire, already one of the richest men in the world and a founder of Oracle, is poised, at 81, to become one of the most powerful media and entertainment moguls America has ever seen….

Along with his son, David, he could soon end up controlling a powerful social media platform, an iconic Hollywood movie studio and one of the largest content streaming services, as well as two of the country’s largest news organizations. Given Mr. Ellison’s friendship with, and affinity for, Donald Trump, an increasingly emboldened president could be getting an extraordinarily powerful media ally — in other words, the very last thing our country needs right now.

Once again, Ellison’s ambitions may never be realized, but the trend lines are clear. Almost all of our channels of information are controlled by billionaires who seem eager to do Trump’s bidding, either because they share his grievances or are willing to do whatever’s required to secure government backing for their business objectives. This also goes for Elon Musk and Twitter/X, Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook/ Instagram, and Jeff Bezos with the Washington Post. Of these, Musk seems most aligned with Trump’s desire to crack down on speech that’s critical of his governance, though all have enormous incentives “to go along to get along” because they (along with their investors) want profits instead of battles over the First Amendment.

So will our American comics have the last laugh?

If we follow the Putin analogy, the only places where you can find Russian comics (or a free press) these days are in places like the Baltic states and the Netherlands. And whether you call them oligarchs or billionaires, both Putin and Trump prefer to surround themselves with men who manage large segments of their respective economies in the ways that they want them to be managed.

For America, that means getting the information (including the comedy) we both want and need may increasingly depend on whether folks like the Ellisons believe in a free press and appreciate the liberating qualities of political humor. 

This post was adapted from my September 21, 2025 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here, in lightly edited form. You can subscribe by leaving your email address in the column to the right.