As Jimmy Kimmel is pulled off air, ‘this is so much worse than McCarthyism’
Charlie Kirk’s murder is accelerating the White House’s battle against cultural and academic freedom
A photo of Charlie Kirk at his makeshift memorial in Orem, Utah, a day after he was shot during a public event at Utah Valley University, Sept. 11. President Donald Trump is invoking Kirk’s death to target his political opponents. Photo by Melissa Majchrzak/AFP via Getty Images
Deputy Opinion Editor Nora Berman September 18, 2025
In the chaotic aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the firings began.
As the country reels after Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show was pulled from air over his comments on Kirk’s death, more than 60 people have been fired or faced with suspensions and investigations over comments they made about the killing — half of them, according to Drop Site News, educators.
This isn’t the first time that a wave of reprisals and censorship has struck the American cultural and intellectual worlds. During the McCarthy era, in addition to high profile censorship of Hollywood, at least 100 academics were fired due to their past connections with communism, estimates Ellen Schrecker, a professor emerita of American history at Yeshiva University and an expert on McCarthyism and higher education.
Yet Schrecker finds the current wave of repression “much broader” than McCarthyism, especially in the realm of academia.
The degree to which universities are obsequiously collaborating in advance with President Donald Trump’s administration — defying free speech laws and their own institutional disciplinary processes — is far worse, she said, than during the McCarthy era. And while there are more pockets of resistance to Trump than there were to the anti-communist campaign led by Sen. Joseph McCarthy, Americans are facing a more powerful and far-reaching government determined to punish left-wing speech.
The academic institutions that have fired or disciplined their staff for allegedly celebrating Kirk’s murder did not do so because the White House told them to. But in proactively appeasing conservative voices, the institutions — much like ABC, which drew outrage after suspending Kimmel’s show — are voluntarily enacting Trump’s stated mission to quash political dissent in the aftermath of the Turning Point USA founder’s death.
The affected educators include a Clemson University employee, an assistant dean at Middle Tennessee State University, a staffer at the University of Mississippi, and teachers in various public school districts across the country.
In another example of the same abdication of academic freedom and institutional disciplinary standards, the University of California, Berkeley offered up the names of 160 faculty and students, including the Jewish anti-Zionist philosopher Judith Butler, to the Trump administration as part of an investigation into “alleged antisemitic incidents.” The affected individuals were notified only that their names were submitted to the White House, and have no idea of what they’ve been accused of.
“Who wants to be teaching if you think that your student is going to turn you in?” Schrecker said. “This is so much worse than McCarthyism.”
Citizen surveillance
During the McCarthy era, the FBI, under J. Edgar Hoover, led the charge to investigate political activists on the left.
Now, conservative activists, donors and influencers — rather than governmental officials — are largely leading the charge, through the internet.
Many of the individuals fired over their comments about Kirk — which conservative activists alleged celebrated his death, although some, like former Washington Post columnist Karen Attiah, have challenged that characterization — were caught in a targeted campaign led by Laura Loomer, a professional troll and Trump confidante, and the extremist Libs of TikTok account, run by Chaya Raichik.
Quite a few were reported by their students, colleagues and donors, which Schrecker finds disturbing. The vast majority of the targeted academics made their comments about Kirk on their personal social media pages, and not in the classroom. To their employers, that distinction didn’t matter.
“We don’t have university administrators standing firm in the First Amendment,” Schrecker said, adding that they are “refusing to listen to and to stand up for academic freedom.”
In a statement yesterday, the American Association of University Professors expressed alarm at universities’ compliance with the Trump administration, and the “rash of recent administrative actions” to discipline university staff in the wake of Kirk’s murder.
“At a moment when higher education is threatened by forces that seek to destroy it and its role in a democratic society,” they wrote, “the anticipatory obedience shown by this rush to judgment must be avoided.”
A more powerful (and punitive) executive
While Schrecker described the McCarthy era as “total civil collapse for a decade,” the FBI’s drive to root out American communists, she said, did not include prying into academics’ teaching or research, nor did it target universities at large. The FBI would focus, instead, exclusively on any relationship academics possessed with left-wing political activism, scrutinizing their personal lives for any past affiliations with the Communist Party.
Most of the people who invoked the Fifth Amendment — asserting their right to not self-incriminate — when called to testify before congressional committees were, in fact, linked to the Communist Party. Academics who pled the Fifth were then typically fired by their institutions, under pressure from the FBI.
The process now is far broader, and more indiscriminate. Everyday Americans are informing on each other — in one case, a New Jersey surgeon was forced to resign after a nurse at his hospital outed him on social media for allegedly cheering on Kirk’s murder — a trend that was largely absent from the McCarthy era. Schrecker explained that while anti-communist sentiment was widespread, the investigators and informants were confined to the FBI and the disaffected communists they cultivated as sources.
To make matters worse, the federal government under Trump is far more powerful. This administration is specifically targeting higher education, and perpetuating a myth of a vast, leftist and liberal enemy endemic to universities. In a 2021 speech to the National Conservatism Conference titled “The Universities are the Enemy,” Vice President JD Vance said, “We have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”
The incident at UC Berkeley is a prime example of this antagonistic paradigm. A spokesperson for the UC Office of the President classified the handover of the names of 160 individuals allegedly connected to antisemitism investigations as a “routine documents request” by federal agencies.
Yet, as Butler told The Guardian, those individuals were informed by UC Berkeley’s chief campus counsel that the university’s normal procedures around handling complaints had been suspended, which meant that faculty and students on the list handed over to the federal government had no way of advocating for themselves, or even ascertaining any details of the allegations against them. “That means allegations sent to the administration, even anonymous ones, were simply forwarded without being adjudicated,” Butler said.
But as the AAUP statement indicates, there is far more popular resistance and critical news coverage of the Trump administration’s war on higher education than there was during the McCarthy era.
Then, “only the victims and a handful of dedicated civil liberties lawyers fought back,” Shrecker said. “The ACLU refused to defend anyone suspected of communism.” There has been critical news coverage about the university faculty dismissed in the aftermath of Kirk’s death, and some university presidents have spoken out publicly against complying with the White House.
Yet the sheer number of universities tossing their principles of academic freedom aside — for example, to discipline their staff who may have in their private lives said less-than-flattering things about a controversial commentator’s assassination — are abetting a conservative agenda that wishes to destroy them.
Higher education, just like networks like ABC — and CBS, which canceled Stephen Colbert’s Late Show in an act many viewed as kowtowing to Trump — are largely giving into the Trump administration in advance, cowed by the fear of federal funding being stripped away, and of extremist online mobs unleashed upon them. Instead, they should be collectively organizing to protect academic freedom and resist federal persecution.
McCarthyism lasted as long as it did because the fear of communism paralyzed American institutions into terrified acquiescence. We cannot permit our universities to be foot soldiers in Trump’s quest to silence dissent.
Universities like UC Berkeley, Columbia and Harvard seem to think that “if they give Trump what he wants, he’ll leave us alone,” Schrecker said. “But he loves humiliating people. It’s not going to stop.”
