The Trump administration used Charlie Kirk’s September assassination as an opportunity to declare war on the left, pledging to use the full force of the law to go after their ideological opponents. 

That’s exactly what is now happening. As Josh Kovensky and John Light discussed on Substack Live Wednesday morning, Trump’s DOJ is making novel use of “material support for terrorism” charges against Black Lives Matter and anti-ICE protesters. 

Kate and Josh discuss the Charlie Kirk killing and its fallout, the Republicans’ stopgap bill and leadership’s refusal to endorse Zohran Mamdami.

I’ve written several times over the last few days not only about the scourge of political violence which we must not only denounce but be genuinely against in every way. Notwithstanding my own personal inclination to say little of the dead for a respectful period, I want to note a particular dynamic that the right is creating in the reign of firing terror it’s unleashed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death. On X over the last few days, countless numbers of high-profile right-wing accounts’ feeds are made up almost entirely of screen grabs of random people’s reactions to Kirk’s murder and demands that they be fired from their jobs. In many cases the demands are heeded and then that fact is triumphantly posted as well.