In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, conservatives have moved quickly to consolidate power and attack their political enemies, whose relative impotence and penchant for capitulation to power and decorum have been on full display this week.

“You have these right-wing forces that smell blood, they smell weakness, and they’re going after everyone who doesn’t comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning,” said Adam H. Johnson, a media analyst and co-host of the “Citations Needed” podcast.

This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Jessica Washington speaks with Johnson about the White House’s weaponization of Kirk’s death and the broader rightward tilt of the media ecosystem.

“I think what they’re doing in part [is] to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to ever beat Republicans. If you gut their media, if you gut their nonprofits, if you snuff out any kind of dissent, if you punish people at the workplace and dox them,” says Johnson. “They’re basically trying to make 9/10 the new 9/11. Obviously the scope is different, but in terms of the sort of emotion, the shock. Obviously it was on video, which adds to this extra layer of psychology that’s being exploited. They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they’ve long wanted to jam in.”

Johnson also noted that part of what we’re witnessing with the increasing alignment between corporate media and Trump is the end of the “veneer” of liberalism among the billionaire class.

“You have this increasingly postmodern lack of a need for this liberal patina, this kind of veneer of universalism, and everything is just about the exercise of raw power, the exercise of pure racist propaganda,” he said. “So yeah, things are bad. But I think what we’ve learned is that they can get worse.”

Listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen.

Transcript

Jessica Washington: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Jessica Washington.

The war on free speech continues in the wake of Charlie’s Kirk’s killing.

On Wednesday, ABC announced that it was taking Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show off the air indefinitely because of comments he made about the MAGA movement politicizing the death. The move came after the FCC Commission Chair threatened ABC and its parent company, Disney.

This was just the latest domino to fall as the Trump administration works to punish critics and silence the left more broadly.

Earlier in the week, in a broadcast of the Charlie Kirk Show from the White House and hosted by Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff, Stephen Miller, vowed vengeance for Kirk, painting anyone who dares to criticize the administration or the right as criminals and terrorists.

Stephen Miller: It is a vast domestic terror movement. With God and as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks, and make America safe again for the American people. It will happen, and we will do it in Charlie’s name.

JW: Other White House officials have made similar remarks. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said the State Department had denied visas to people “celebrating” Kirk’s death. President Donald Trump also threatened the press, suggesting on Tuesday, that the attorney general would go after the media outlets who criticized him for “hate speech.”

Donald Trump: Your company paid me $16 million for a form of hate speech, so maybe they’ll have to go after you.

JW: All of this is happening against a wider backdrop of media censorship and a push to remake news in the president’s image. From President Trump suing the New York Times for questioning his record, including if he was responsible for making “The Apprentice” a TV hit. To journalist-provocateur Bari Weiss reportedly being poised to effectively run CBS News, to the Washington Post allegedly firing its last remaining full-time Black columnist, Karen Attiah, for highlighting racist remarks from Charlie Kirk, media independence to report reality feels deeply imperiled.

Joining me now to break all of this down is Adam H. Johnson. He is a media analyst and co-host of the Citations Needed podcast.

Adam, welcome to the show.

Adam Johnson: Thank you so much for having me on.

JW: And just because this is a quick-moving news story, I want to tell everyone that we’re speaking on Wednesday, September 17.

So in the aftermath of the Kirk killing, there’s been a real dichotomy in the administration’s response. They eulogize Kirk as a defender of free speech, but want to restrict what people can say about him.

Just a few days ago, Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and others made threats about targeting the left and the media in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s shooting. How could they go about punishing people and organizations?

AJ: What’s important to understand is that there’s obviously a very long history of exploiting traumatic moments to ram in preexisting agendas using the emotion of the moment to exploit people, right? You have obviously the creation of all kinds of draconian laws post-9/11, many of which are, by the way, still being used today to execute so-called war on terror. And in fact, Trump’s blowing up of boats in Venezuela recently — in the Caribbean rather — have used the same legal authority that was established on September 14, 2001. Obviously, after Katrina, charter school forces and the super wealthy who use that to privatize and to bring under state control schools in New Orleans.

There’s all kinds of examples we could list — the shock doctrine, right? It’s 101 stuff of how moments of trauma and heightened emotion are used to push preexisting agendas. In this administration and those in its orbit, specifically anti-Palestinian groups, pro-Israel groups especially, have been wanting to go after certain segments of the nonprofit world, the foundation world, take away their nonprofit status, thus kind of rendering them no longer viable, and then going after free speech more broadly in conjunction with this more avert right-wing takeover since Trump got in the office.

With respect to Jeff Bezos explicitly moving the Washington Post to the right: They no longer have any Black columnists in a newspaper that’s called the Washington Post, a city that is the largest Black city in the country in terms of percentages. You have the takeover at CBS of the Ellison family. The Ellison family will now own — very soon will own — CBS News, CNN, and TikTok. These forces have been brewing for a while in terms of snuffing out dissent.

You know, there’s a kind of conventional wisdom in some parts of the liberal and left world that Trump does not plan on having an election in 2028, if not 2026. And I think that’s partly true, but I think that kind of misreads what he’s actually doing. I think what they’re doing in part [is] to make it very, very difficult for Democrats to ever beat Republicans. If you gut their media, if you gut their nonprofits, if you snuff out any kind of dissent, if you punish people at the workplace and dox them as part of these kind of brown-shirt campaigns, which we can get into, of doxing people based on their comments on social media, most of which are fairly benign.

And so you have this gathering storm, as I wrote In These Times, of all these anti-free speech, anti-assembly, anti-worker, anti-Palestine forces that are all coalescing, and they’re basically trying to make 9/10 the new 9/11. Obviously the scope is different, but in terms of the sort of emotion, the shock. Obviously it was on video, which adds to this extra layer of psychology that’s being exploited. They want to exploit that to jam in policies which they’ve long wanted to jam in.

And, and to be clear, they’re not coy about this. They’re fairly explicit about it. Stephen Miller especially is speaking in these kind of Marshall terms. These we’re gonna come get them — I mean, again, very sort of generic milquetoast George Soros funded liberal groups as terrorists, which anyone on the left would obviously smirk at because these Ford Foundation and Soros Foundation, they largely exist to, for want of a better term, co-op the left to sort of bring it into the partisan chum machine. They’re not there to promote extremism. Billionaires don’t typically promote extremism as a rule.

It’s all rather goofy, but really what they want to do is they want to get rid of any partisan opposition. And so that’s why they’ve been working to gut the administrative and liberal state since they came into office. Obviously Musk did this under the pretense of DOGE.

What this administration is doing and what they’ve done from the beginning — unlike the first time, which was obviously far more restrained by other elements — they continue to test the fence, right? Like the Velociraptors in Jurassic Park. They’re testing the fence to see what they can get away with repeatedly, over and over and over again. And even someone who’s as jaded and as cynical as I am is surprised by how utterly weak and facile the liberal state has been in opposing Trump. The courts especially, which are supposed to be this kind of bulwark against authoritarianism, have mostly kind of rolled over with some notable exceptions and kind of let him do what he wants to do.

The opposition from Democrats in Congress, they are sleepy. Remember when Trump called Jeb Bush, low energy Jeb? They’re low energy Hakeem Jeffries and low energy Chuck Schumer. They don’t really seem like they’re up to the task. They have people like David Shor in their ear telling them, just focus on the economy. And it’s like, yeah, that’s generally true, but also like we should also focus on the authoritarian takeover that he’s planting. It’s kind of urgent, and by the way, it polls well too if you frame it the right way.

JW: You know what you mentioned in terms of the lack of opposition, and you wrote about this a little bit, a lot about this, in your piece. You said “This increasingly goofy harassment campaign would be bad enough if it weren’t married to tremendous state power.” And I guess, do you think the kind of goofy nature of the Trump administration of Trump in general, do you think that hides what he’s really doing? Or do you think that the media and the Democratic kind of larger apparatus is comfortable to hide behind the goofy nature of what he’s doing?

AJ: Well, I suppose what I meant by goofy in that context — although they are goofy and to some extent is, I mean, again, going after NFL teams for not doing a Charlie Kirk moment of silence — that you have these right-wing forces that smell blood, they smell weakness, and they’re going after everyone who doesn’t comply and run through the obligatory kind of mourning.

I mean, again, people throw the F-word I think kind of lightly, but this is a feature of fascism, which is absence of deference and absence of humiliation and obsequiousness rituals, is itself seen as suspect. So if you’re not........

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