Frankly, it doesn't make a lot of sense for me to spend a ton of time analyzing stories from last September, but I think it's still important for us to note how immediate, obvious, and direct the connection was between Charlie Kirk's assassination, Trump's increased efforts to consolidate dictatorial power, and the larger American fascist movement's propaganda to justify those measures. Take for example this September 2025 article published in Rolling Stone magazine.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/donald-trump-authoritarian-week-kirk-kimmel-antifa-khalil-1235431626/ (archive: https://archive.ph/UOKcQ )
Donald Trump’s Most Authoritarian Week Yet
"It was clear Donald Trump and his allies would ramp up their crackdown against any and all opposition in the wake of the assassination of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk — and this week, the president’s second administration unleashed its most authoritarian blitz yet.
The Trump administration got late-night host Jimmy Kimmel’s show taken off the air by threatening companies’ broadcast licenses if they continued to run his show. Trump and his team threatened to strip the tax-exempt status of liberal nonprofit groups, while the president called for left-wing activists to be jailed for protesting him at dinner. Trump announced he’ll once again try to designate “antifa” — America’s disparate anti-fascist movement — as a terrorist group, with no legitimate basis, clarifying once again where he stands on the whole fascism question.
Meanwhile, the administration worked toward its goal to deport a legal U.S. resident for speaking out against Israel’s relentless assault on Palestine. Reports trickled out that Trump would fire a U.S. attorney for failing to bring charges against one of his enemies, before Trump publicly called for his departure and he quit.
This ugly, authoritarian week didn’t happen in a vacuum. Trump just last month mused about how Americans want a “dictator,” and the administration now appears to be using Kirk’s shocking murder as an excuse to escalate Trump’s ongoing campaign for total power."
With all due respect to Perez, Ramirez, and Suebsaeng, who are all fine journalists, this is hardly Woodward and Bernstein hooking up with Deep Throat to expose Nixon's Watergate conspiracy here. The entire fascist American right, including the Trump administration itself, spent the first week after Kirk's death openly arguing that Trump was now allowed to do fascist dictator shit because "the left" (read: some individual person disgusted by Kirk's hatemongering) killed Charlie - and then testing the limits of how far that presumed power to transform America actually goes. At one point Trump was literally threatening to pull media broadcasts licenses for outlets that criticized him "too much," while implying that NPR (a government-supported public broadcaster) might be working with the very same "antifa" he just said he wanted to declare a terrorist organization.
I'm not going to summarize the rest of the article here, but if you actual do read it you'll see that in each and every power grab, or authoritarian exercise of state power to force compliance with fascist ideological goals, Trump regime officials directly linked the justification for doing so to the idea that "the left" was a domestic and even national security threat because Charlie Kirk caught a bullet and expired. This wasn't a mystery you had to solve, this was the Trump regime's openly articulated intention. Which probably should leave you asking why, if the guys at Rolling Stone could sniff out that Trump was using Kirk's death to do dictator shit, this same realization escaped so much of our (complicit) corporate media complex - who spent most of that same week decrying political violence and weeping crocodile tears for poor ole deadass Charlie. I guess they were just too afraid of Brendan Carr and the Trumpenreich FCC; which doesn't bode well for US media independence going forward under the Swine Emperor.
#Trump #GOP #Fascism #antifa #Dictatorship #PorkReich #CharlieKirk #FCC #BrendanCarr #Media #Censorship