GOP Rep Proposes Canceling People Over Mean Posts About Charlie Kirk
Louisiana Rep. Clay Higgins, who once opposed government jawboning, now says people should be banned from both social media and public life over their posts.
On Wednesday, conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at Utah Valley University. As of this writing, the shooter remains at large.
Kirk was a controversial figure, and his death quickly became a lightning rod for opinionated social media commentary. One Republican lawmaker suggested using the force of government to punish people for posting mean things about Kirk online—a clear violation of the First Amendment.
"I'm going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk," Rep. Clay Higgins (R–La.) posted on X. "I'm going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I'm also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I'm basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk's assassination."
I'm going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of…
— Rep. Clay Higgins (@RepClayHiggins) September 11, 2025
Higgins' anger is understandable: Even if you disagreed with Kirk, there is no justification for his murder. And there have indeed been some loathsome people gloating about Kirk's death online, though anecdotally, they don't seem to represent the majority. There are also plenty on the right calling for violence against the left, though authorities have yet to identify a suspect, much less determine a motive. (And, of course, in an age of social media algorithms, your mileage may vary—my feed is not your feed.)
But Higgins' solution—using government power to harm people's livelihoods over intemperate social media posts—is blatantly unconstitutional, and it violates principles that conservatives say they care about.
For one thing, Higgins has been no stranger to intemperate statements. Last year in a post on X, Higgins said Haiti was the "nastiest country in the western hemisphere," and any Haitian in the U.S. should "get…their ass out of our country." He later retracted and deleted the post. And in October 2022, after a madman attacked the husband of Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D–Calif.) in their home with a hammer, Higgins made light of the attack in a post that has also since been deleted.
Under Higgins' own proposal, he could be banned from all social media platforms, lose his driver's license, and lose his right to work in the future, just for having an itchy posting finger.
At the same time, Higgins simply does not have the power to do some of the things he threatened. Business licenses and drivers' licenses are regulated at the state level, not the federal level. And even if he somehow convinced the states to adopt his rules, they would run into the same constitutional challenges as he would at the federal level.
"The state may not coerce private institutions to censor speech that the state itself cannot censor under the first amendment," Greg Lukianoff, CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), wrote on X. "Besides, you are not safer for knowing LESS about what people really think."
Being a jerk online is not illegal. That may be inconvenient when someone is being a jerk at your expense, but it's a foundational principle of American law, and for good reason. After all, the government that can punish someone for being a jerk also has the power to decide what "being a jerk" means.
One person you'd think would understand that, in fact, is Higgins.
During his term in office, President Joe Biden and members of his administration criticized social media platforms for their content moderation decisions. Officials routinely engaged in jawboning, issuing warnings and guidelines for what companies should do with their platforms, like what content they should censor and whom they should ban—admonitions that carried the implicit backing of the federal government.
Conservatives were justifiably unhappy about this. Republican state attorneys general sued the Biden administration over the practice, in a case that made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, though the justices ultimately declined to punish the government.
In 2023, Republican lawmakers trying to put a stop to the practice introduced House Resolution 140, the Protecting Speech from Government Interference Act, which "generally prohibits federal employees from censoring the speech of others while acting in an official capacity."
One of the bill's co-sponsors was Higgins.
"This country was built on individual freedoms, and no single organization, including the federal government, should determine what constitutes as an acceptable form of speech," Higgins said at the time in a statement. "The American people have the right to speak their truths, and federal bureaucrats should not be dictating what is or isn't true. We must continue to uphold the First Amendment as our founding fathers intended."
Higgins was absolutely right. Now if only he could heed his own words today.
