Inside the Shocking Fallout of Charlie Kirk’s Assassination: How We’re Slipping into a Chilling Orwellian Reality

Ever notice how history loves to play its twisted little games on us? Take a seat, because this one’s a gnarly ride. Back in my sportswriting days, I chatted with Ben Jobe, a legendary HBCU basketball coach who’d seen more than his share of the heavy stuff. He once told me about November 22, 1963—locals celebrating JFK’s assassination, Confederate flags waving like victory banners. Chilling, right? Fast forward to now, and here we are again, watching lives and careers get shredded because people dared to say the late Charlie Kirk didn’t “do politics the right way.” Seriously, when did mourning become a political minefield packed with flags at half-staff, ballpark tributes, and even the Kennedy Center getting dragged into the mess? Meanwhile, folks like The Washington Post’s Karen Attiah get canned for social media posts following Kirk’s tragic death—posts deemed “gross misconduct” that supposedly put colleagues in danger. The question isn’t just what went wrong, but why we’re letting the theater of martyrdom rewrite the rules on free speech and fairness. It’s like the country’s lost the plot, and the dangerous game of thought crime enforcement is on full throttle, dragging educators, military personnel, even visa applicants into the spotlight of outrage. So, are we really honoring the dead, or just fueling a spectacle that benefits the very forces stirring the chaos? Buckle up—this one cuts deep. LEARN MORE

Back in my sportswriting days, I once sat for an interview with Ben Jobe, the remarkable man who coached basketball all over the HBCU circuit, most notably at Southern University in Baton Rouge. In the mid-1950s, he enrolled at Fisk University in Nashville. Fisk was the red-hot center of the fight for racial equality almost from its opening. Among those who attended the school include W.E.B. DuBois, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, and John Lewis. In the 1960s, under the leadership of the Rev. James Lawson, Fisk helped lead early sit-ins at restaurants and lunch counters to fight segregation.

Anyway, Jobe graduated and began coaching at a local high school. He told me that he’d watched cars full of locals whooping and hollering and waving Confederate battle flags on November 22, 1963, celebrating the murder of President John F. Kennedy. I was reminded of this over the weekend as people’s lives and careers were ruined because they all dared to intimate that the late Charlie Kirk did not “do politics the right way,” as Ezra Klein of The New York Times wrote to his eternal shame.

The latest victim is Karen Attiah, the gifted columnist at The Washington Post. From Politico:

Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah said on Monday that she was fired from the publication over social media posts she made following the killing of Charlie Kirk. Writing in a lengthy Substack post, Attiah said she was dismissed over her posts on Bluesky that she says were deemed to be “unacceptable,” “gross misconduct” and that endangered the physical safety of her colleagues. … “They rushed to fire me without even a conversation,” she wrote. “This was not only a hasty overreach, but a violation of the very standards of journalistic fairness and rigor the Post claims to uphold.”

What the hell is going on in this country? If the authoritarian right wants to make a cult of martyrdom out of an unforgivable act of public murder, it should go ahead and do so. But there is absolutely no reason for them to drag the rest of us into their rituals. Flags at half-staff and threats against local officials who decline to do so? Tributes at major-league ballparks? A memorial service at the Kennedy Center? Professors fired over their reactions to the event on social media, most of which paled against the things that Kirk said, as a matter of course, that made him rich and influential. From NBC News:

“It has been brought to my attention that some Florida educators have posted despicable comments on social media regarding the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk,” said the memo, signed by Florida education Commissioner Anastasios Kamoutsas. “I will be conducting an investigation of every educator who engages in this vile, sanctionable behavior.” Oklahoma’s state superintendent, Ryan Walters, similarly promised to investigate teachers making incendiary comments on social media about Kirk’s death, and he confirmed his department is investigating one middle school educator called out on X.

Even worse, the members of the Cabinet have signed onto the scouring of social media posts in search of (once) protected speech that they deem disrespectful. Pete Hegseth is leading the way at the DOD. He’s already got one head on his wall. From USA Today:

A screenshot circulated in the conservative social media sphere appeared to show a post from a U.S. Marine Corps recruiter that read, “Another racist man popped,” alongside an image of Kirk. “Hi @PeteHegseth, can you please fire this lunatic?” wrote Libs of TikTok, an account run by right-wing influencer Chaya Raichik.

Nice to see who’s advising the Defense Department these days on personnel matters. Unsurprisingly, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has joined the parade, turning the visa process upside down and into even more of a mess than it was before.

Returning to the situation with Karen Attiah, the game was given away with that line about how Attiah’s posts “endangered” her colleagues. That’s the real thing here, isn’t it? To threaten reprisals against thought crimes, and then follow through by any means, fair or foul. I’ve lived through how conservatives used the suicide of Vince Foster as a truncheon on the Clinton administration and, before that, they used the suicide of a woman named Susan Coleman for the same purpose. That’s how the infamous “Clinton Body Count” was born. iIts reach extended all the way to the 2016 murder of DNC staffer Seth Rich, whose corpse was used as a club on Hillary Clinton. So, frankly, coerced conservative demands for respect for the dead ring a little false to me.