Charlie Kirk is dead and I can say whatever I want about it. I can mock him, satirize him and, should I choose, make disgusting comments about the manner of his murder.

However I respond, or don’t, is up to me. If America is great, it’s because we believe in free expression. That’s the promise of the First Amendment. As Charlie Kirk himself wrote, “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.”

Kirk and I didn’t agree on much, but we certainly agree on that. Apparently, though, the Trump administration sees things differently, with Attorney General Pam Bondi and other prominent figures in the White House, including JD Vance and Stephen “Nosferatu” Miller, promising to crack down on “hate speech” and “radical leftist organizations fomenting violence” in the days since Kirk’s killing. If that doesn’t send shivers down your spine, you should have your spine examined. (Unless you’re Marco Rubio, in which case there’s no need because you don’t have a spine.)

Bondi said over the weekend during an episode of a podcast hosted by Katie Miller—yes, the wife of Nosferatu—that her department “will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech, and that goes across the aisle.”

Yes, that fresh chill you feel isn’t the coming autumn. It’s something else entirely. The last time it was here, Senator Joseph McCarthy was

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