Hello and welcome to Regulator.
According to a rough transcript of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service, the word “martyr” was uttered less than 10 times. But to the 90,000-plus people watching live in Glendale, Arizona, and the 100 million who reportedly watched the livestream, it didn’t have to be stated so explicitly. As every speaker at the four-hourlong service repeatedly exhorted, the 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder had died as a faithful servant of Christ, bringing the gospel to college students to save them from the spiritual darkness of the left.
But to the emissaries from Trumpworld, Kirk was also a political ally in charge of a huge activist network. So far as I can tell, Donald Trump Jr., Vice President JD Vance, and President Donald Trump were the only people who used the word “martyr.” You could tell from the way they spoke, as did the other speakers from the political world, that they intended to leverage his death for maximum political results. And they could only do it if they won over the evangelical Christians in attendance.
I covered the memorial for The Verge, and my article should give you a full sense of what it was like to be at the State Farm Stadium. My main takeaway: the crowd that had turned out for Kirk’s death was much, much larger than any I’ve ever seen turn out for a Trump rally, and they came more for the religious revival than they did for Trump himself. The president spoke last, after Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika, had given a gripping speech about forgiving her husband’s killer, and within minutes, attendees were streaming toward the exits. By the time Trump finished 40 minutes later — adding that contrary to what Erika and Charlie Kirk believed about forgiveness, “I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them” — the stadium was half empty. It suddenly recontextualized all the speakers that had come before Erika Kirk, the new CEO of Turning Point USA. The White House and the MAGA influencers who spoke weren’t just honoring their friend — they were there to lock down a constituency and justify their actions.
They’ve already started. Just days before, NBC reported that Department of Defense officials had suggested running a military recruitment campaign centered on Kirk’s legacy, using TPUSA chapters to find prospects on college campuses. (Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke at the memorial, saying that Kirk’s death was “lighting our country on fire for Christ.”) Attorney General Pam Bondi implied that any celebration of Kirk’s death was “hate speech,” and that law enforcement would “target” anyone who was engaging in it. (To clarify: “hate speech” is protected by the First Amendment.) On Monday, Trump signed an executive order designating “antifa” as a terrorist organization.
The most audacious move, though, reached the homes of millions of Americans. Last Thursday, Brendan Carr, a Trump-appointed commissioner on the Federal Communications Commission, successfully pressured Disney into suspending late-night host Jimmy Kimmel “indefinitely” for making a brief joke about the man who allegedly killed Kirk. (The joke: “We had some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to desperately categorize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.”) Claiming that Kimmel had characterized the shooter as MAGA — which was, in Carr’s interpretation, “news distortion” — he had threatened to pull the broadcast licenses for any television station that aired Jimmy Kimmel Live!. Nexstar, which owns the most television stations in the country (and incidentally needs FCC approval for a merger), soon folded. So did Sinclair, the second-biggest owner of television stations. And within hours, Disney folded, too.
MAGA influencer Benny Johnson had just hosted the show where Carr made the threat. And right after the news about Kimmel broke, he posted: “We did it for you, Charlie. And we’re only just getting started…” To show how serious that threat remains: Disney eventually reversed its decision and announced Monday that Jimmy Kimmel Live! was coming back, but Sinclair, which has a famously right-wing tilt, has stated it will still not air the show.
The FCC has been a pet coverage area for The Verge for years, and I have never seen a newsroom so keyed into telecoms, spectrum allocation, broadcast standards and corporate media mergers. (Our editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel, has been ranting about Brendan Carr before it was cool.) In the wake of Disney yanking Kimmel off the air, I chatted with Adi Robertson, our senior tech and policy editor, about how the Trump administration leveraged weak telecom policies, corporate monopolies, and a very loose interpretation of “the public interest” to silence its critics.
As she put it: “Everything is on fire because the Trump administration is showing a complete disregard for the First Amendment and is taking advantage of the failure of institutions to check it.”
My conversation with Adi is below, but before that, here’s what we’ve published at The Verge this week:
... continue reading