My last post was written shortly after the assassination of Republican activist Charlie Kirk, but before any arrests had been made. Within 48 hours of the shooting, the alleged assassin was in custody. He is a 22-year-old white male, from a Republican Mormon family in Utah, who had dropped out of university after one semester and then enrolled in a trade school.

The alleged killer’s demographic profile did not exactly fit the template that the right wing was expecting, given their immediate reaction in the wake of the murder that the “radical left” were to blame. A viral tweet captured the moment: “Civil war cancelled due to shooter being demographically uncooperative.”

Several days later, the picture is still a little murky about the alleged killer’s politics and motivations. However, the emerging story from prosecutors is that he had become romantically involved with his roommate, a trans woman, and said he’d “had enough of [Kirk’s] hatred” towards trans individuals. There is no sign so far of any other parties being involved in this act of political violence.

Even so, there is legitimate worry in certain circles that the administration may use Kirk’s shooting as a pretext for repressing left-leaning organizations and voices. As an op-ed yesterday in The Guardian put it, “we must not let the shooting of Charlie Kirk become Trump’s Reichstag fire.” For his part, Trump yesterday asserted he would be designating antifa as a “terrorist organization,” which seems hard to do seeing as how antifa doesn’t actually exist.

On Monday night, late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel made the following comment in his monologue:

“We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA Gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”

(This was, incidentally, the day before the court documents were filed asserting that the alleged killer’s motives may have been related to trans rights.)

Later that week, the Trump-appointed chair of the FCC accused Kimmel of “appearing to directly mislead the American public about a significant fact” and made comments threatening ABC’s broadcast license. To my tastes, the FCC chair’s comments misrepresent what Kimmel actually said. Kimmel did not say the alleged killer was a MAGAite; he said that conservatives were doing everything possible to paint him as not being a MAGAite, notwithstanding that he’s a 22-year-old white Mormon male from Utah raised in a conservative family.

Then yesterday, Disney-owned ABC announced that they were suspending Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night talk show indefinitely. ABC had previously agreed to pay $15 million towards Trump’s presidential library in order to settle a (possibly frivolous) defamation lawsuit; now, they have bent the knee further. Democrats are calling on the FCC chair to resign, as if that will happen.

So, the 1st Amendment is now under significant assault by the administration. Terrific… No statement yet from Kimmel; it will be interesting to see his reaction, which may well come in the form of one or more lawsuits.

In other news, on Monday the D.C. Circuit Court ruled 2-1 against Trump’s motion to lift the stay that a lower court had placed on his alleged firing “for cause” of Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. The majority opinion ruled that Cook’s due process argument had merit, and therefore they did not need to (nor did they) reach the merits of her argument about the meaning of “for cause”. The dissenting judge, by contrast, opined that “for cause” could basically mean whatever the President wants it to mean, rather than the more limited range of potential “causes” outlined in Judge Cobb’s lower court opinion. Today Trump elevated the case to SCOTUS, so Trump v. Cook is now sitting on the shadow docket. In the meantime, the factual accuracy of the “mortgage fraud” allegations against Cook have been cast into doubt, while journalists have uncovered that Treasury Secretary Bessent appears to have once engaged in the exact same form of “mortgage fraud” conduct that underpins the allegations against Cook.

Finally, no federal troops are in Chicago yet, although the National Guard will imminently be deployed to Memphis for crime prevention purposes, with the support of Tennessee’s (Republican) governor.