Good evening. My name is Lee Fong. I'm a journalist based in San Francisco. I'm your host of

System Update. Glenn Greenwald's out of town. Last week, the conservative commentator and organizer

Charlie Kirk was brutally assassinated as he was speaking in Utah on a college campus. This event has caused a ripple effect in our politics.

For good reason, much of the conservative movement has grieved.

The Trump administration has ordered flags flown at half-mast,

and he's been treated almost as a member of the administration or as a dignitary with a quasi-state funeral.

But there is also a more sinister element at foot. Within moments of this assassination, there were calls, demands on the conservative right for retribution, for a destruction

of civil liberties and a crackdown on political dissent. We now see similar rhetoric and a demand

from J.D. Vance, from President Donald Trump, from Pam Bondi and others to use this

tragedy as an opportunity to crack down on Democrats, on political donors, on left-wing donors

to magazines and other forms of media, and an attempt to crack down on what they describe as hate speech,

a form of censorship that for many years, people, including Charlie Kirk, identified as a slippery

slope towards government censorship. Who defines hate speech? Who defines what is harmful

speech? These are the debates we've had over the last 10 years as the left has used this

cudgel of censorship in the name of protecting the public from dangerous or harmful speech.

I want to dedicate this episode to a discussion of cancel culture and the kind of evolving

politics coming out of the assassination of Charlie Kirk.

We've seen a demand for a national database, the creation of a national database of individuals who are accused of making

offensive remarks around the Charlie Kirk assassination, celebrating it or somehow not dignifying

it in the proper way, and they push to have these individuals fired, or in some cases not even

these individuals who made these remarks, sometimes in private,

sometimes in private chats, but their family members fired or ostracized from their community.

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