GOP Wants To Crush Liberal NGOs More Than Trans People

We knew Republicans would use the murder of Charlie Kirk as a pretext for further crackdowns on their enemies, but I expected that the Trump administration’s top target at this moment would be trans people. We know Republicans are arguing that this was a murder committed by a person sympathetic to trans people, and that the murder was committed on behalf of trans people — but the White House, at least for now, doesn’t seem to be focused on depriving trans people of voting rights or making it illegal for adults to be trans.

Efforts to do all that are probably on the horizon, but for now, the administration’s #1 priority is this:

President Trump and his top advisers threatened on Monday to unleash the power of the federal government to punish what they alleged was a left-wing network that funds and incites violence, seizing on Charlie Kirk’s killing to make broad and unsubstantiated claims about their political opponents.

… Mr. Trump and his top allies suggested that the suspect was part of a coordinated movement that was fomenting violence against conservatives, without presenting evidence that such a network existed.

Vice President J.D. Vance talked about this campaign while guest-hosting Charlie Kirk’s podcast yesterday, threatening a totalitarian crackdown based on lies. The main lies being told by Vance and other members of the administration are (1) that every harsh word uttered against a member of the administration or one of its supporters is, by definition, an act of stochastic terrorism that leads inevitably to violence, and (2) that a direct line can be drawn from liberal instititutions to the shooting of Kirk and other recent violent acts.

On top of that, Vance lied in multiple ways about a Kirk critic whose words after Kirk’s death he attempted to link to that death. Vance did this in the podcast’s closing monologue, which is the most chillingly totalitarian speech delivered by a member of the Executive Branch in my lifetime. I’m sure you won’t want to watch all fourteen minutes of it, but you should watch at least the first two and a half minutes or so, or read the transcript here.

Vance lied about the Nation piece, which was written by Elizabeth Spiers. He said:

Shortly after Usha and I left Charlie’s family and Charlie’s remains in Arizona, I read a story in The Nation magazine about my dear friend Charlie Kirk.

Now, The Nation isn’t a fringe blog. It’s a well-funded, well-respected magazine whose publishing history goes back to the American Civil War. George Soros’s Open Society Foundation funds this magazine, as does the Ford Foundation and many other wealthy titans of the American progressive movement.

The writer accuses Charlie of saying, and I quote, “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.” But if you go and watch the clip—the very clip she links to—you realize he never said anything like that. He never uttered those words.

He made an argument against affirmative action as a policy. He criticized a specific Supreme Court justice as an individual. He never said anything about Black women as a group.

It’s a lie that Kirk “never said anything like that.”

JD Vance: “Charlie Kirk never said Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously. He never uttered those words.”

Charlie Kirk: “Joy Reid, Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson — you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken seriously.”

— Marco Foster (@marcofoster.bsky.social) September 15, 2025 at 2:50 PM

Moreover, Vance accuses Spiers of misquoting Kirk while misquoting Spiers. She didn’t assert that Kirk said, “Black women do not have brain processing power to be taken seriously.” She wrote:

The man who smeared Black women like Ketanji Brown Jackson and Michelle Obama whom he claimed had benefited from affirmative action, saying, ‘you do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” said it while wearing a nice shirt and a tie on a podcast instead of tattered overalls in the parking lot of a rural Walmart. That does not make it any less racist.

So this one Vance lie on top of another — and also, as The Guardian notes,

The Ford Foundation said it has not provided any funding to the Nation since 2019.

The bulk of Vance’s speech is a claim that political violence is overwhelmingly left-wing — and the remedy is the defunding of left-wing institutions. Later in the speech, Vance says:

Did you know that the George Soros Open Society Foundation and the Ford Foundation—the groups who funded that disgusting article justifying Charlie’s death—do you know they benefit from generous tax treatment? They are literally subsidized by you and me, the American taxpayer. And how do they reward us? By setting fire to the house built by the American family over 250 years.

Vance knows that many right-wing institutions — the Heritage Foundation, for example — are also tax-exempt. But he knows that most of his listeners don’t know that.

Prior to this speech, Vance interviewed Stephen Miller, who spoke of the existence of a “vast domestic terror movement” and also promised vengeance against liberal institutions:

“With God as my witness, we are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, [Department of] Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks,” Miller said, adding that they would do this “in Charlie’s name”.

Vance, in his closing speech, also offered support for Soviet-style neighbor-to-neighbor surveillance of incorrect thought:

So when you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out. Hell, call their employer. We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. And there is no civility in the celebration of political assassination.

Get involved. Get involved. Get involved.

Elsewhere, there was this exchange between Attorney General Pam Bondi and Miller’s wife, Katie, on the latter’s podcast:

Attorney General Pam Bondi: “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”

— The Bulwark (@thebulwark.com) September 15, 2025 at 7:58 PM

In the clip, Miller asks Bondi just how authoritarian she’s willing to be:

Do you see more law enforcement going after these groups who are using hate speech, and putting cuffs on people, so we show them that some action is better than no action?

That’s when Bondi says, “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech” — adding a pro forma “and that’s across the aisle” that we know she doesn’t mean.

The exchange between Bondi and Miller was so extreme it was too much even for one fervent MAGA Republican:

Sabatini is so pro-Trump that when he was a Florida state legislator he proposed renaming a highway after Trump. He offered this proposal in 2021, two weeks after the January 6 insurrection. On Facebook, he recently wrote:

Firing squad for Charlie’s killer

Then hang his body in front of the White House for 90 days

Then deport his remains out of the country

So he’s no liberal. If he thinks Bondi and Miller are over the line, that might be a sign of a small but possibly significant right-wing backlash against crackdowns on ordinary people’s speech, as there was a gun-community backlash against proposals to disarm trans people. But I wouldn’t be too optimistic about that — and there’s unlikely to be right-wing opposition to crackdowns on liberal groups.

I’m sure the administration wants to neutralize funding for Democrats prior to 2026 and 2028. But I think what we’re primarily seeing is the “thinking” right’s obsession with the notion that “politics is downstream from culture.” These people — Vance, Miller, Heritage, and so on — want there to be no institutions in America that lean liberal. They want Ivy League cancer research funding cut off because they see the Ivies as liberal cesspools. This is more of the same.

Vance focuses on Soros and the Ford Foundation — and not, say, ActBlue, which is directly involved in electoral politics. That suggests to me that we’re seeing the messaging on Kirk’s death being controlled by the grade-grubbers on the right (Vance, Miller, Heritage), rather than the ones who are more election-oriented (Trump, for instance). They’re coming for everything and everyone they oppose eventually. But surprisingly, they’re coming for NGOs first.

*****

UPDATE: There’s more right-wing pushback on Bondi’s remarks — from Erick Erickson (“Our Attorney General is apparently a moron”) and National Review’s Charles C.W. Cooke:

She won’t “target” or “go after” anyone for “hate speech,” because, legally, there is no such thing as “hate speech” in the United States, and because, as a government employee, she is bound by the First Amendment. And if she tries it anyway? The Supreme Court will side against her, 9-0.

I’d say it would be 7-2 at best — Alito and Thomas would still side with Bondi in the best-case scenario — but it’s good to see some on the right pushing back, because they’re the only Americans whose opinions this administration respects.