By
Howard Bloom
We are witnessing an attempt to destroy America’s constitutional democracy.
Something has happened that is very useful to the constitution destroyers: the murder on September 15th in Utah of high profile MAGA promoter Charlie Kirk, leader of the movement Turning Point USA. Thanks to that murder, as Fox’s News’ Jesse Watters says, we seem to have reached “a turning point” in the 250 year history of our country.
The MAGA movement is outraged about the murder of Charlie Kirk in Utah Wednesday September 10th. It believes, in the words of Donald Trump, that there is a “lunatic left wing” network spewing demands for violence, a network of people who “hate America,” a network that Donald Trump’s closest advisor, Stephen Miller, calls a “domestic terror movement.”
Says Miller, ““We are going to use every resource we have at the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and throughout this government to identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy these networks.”
Vice President J.D. Vance has been more specific. He says there is a network of non-governmental organizations, NGOs, that must be dismantled. Especially NGOs associated with George Soros. But also high-prestige NGO’s like the Ford Foundation.
Our president has added that we must stop hate speech. What does President Trump mean by hate speech?
News reports and books that are critical of Donald Trump. Journalists like ABC’s Jonathan Karl, who wrote three books that are intensely critical of Trump.
Driving forward the crackdown on what President Trump calls hate speech is a defamation suit President Trump filed on September 16th. The lawsuit is against the New York Times and against a top global publisher, Penguin Random House. It demands the payment of 15 billion dollars, an impossible sum.
Defending against President Trump’s lawsuits can eventually bankrupt a company. Lawyers cost big money. They charge roughly $1.5 million per case. Even if you win.
According to President Trump, the New York Times and Penguin froth with what Trump calls hate speech. They are deeply critical of him. Then there’s the cancellation of the anti-Trump comedians Stephen Colbert and Jimmy Kimmel. And Trump’s efforts to get another show cancelled: the View.
How do MAGA folks feel about these attacks on the mainstream media? How do they feel about this censorship? They enjoy the fact that Mr. Trump is cornering the publications that trash everything they believe in. Publications that, according to both Mr. Trump and his MAGA followers, have gotten away for far too long with lying in every sentence they publish. Or, in the case of Colbert and Kimmel, lying with every joke they tell.
Meanwhile, Democrats are just as upset as Republicans. The president has pinned the blame for Charlie Kirk’s murder on them. Says Donald Trump, “The radicals on the left are the problem … and they’re vicious and they’re horrible and they’re politically savvy.”
Democrats have seen political violence against their party ever since Donald Trump came to power in 2016. They have endured:
· Mail bomb attacks,
· the brutal hammer assault on Paul Pelosi, Nancy Pelosi’s husband,
· a violent insurrection at the Capital in which 140 policemen were injured,
· an attempt to take out the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania by lighting the governor’s mansion on fire,
· a plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan,
· the attempted assassination of the Democratic mayor of Louisville, and
· the successful assassination of a Democratic state house leader and her husband in Minnesota, plus the shooting by the same MAGA killer of another Democratic state senator and his wife.
When Donald Trump was asked in a September 15th press gaggle what he thought of the murder of the Minnesota house leader, he acted as if he’d never heard of the killing. To Democrats, that’s deeply upsetting. It means that in the president’s brain, only Democrats are violent. And only MAGA believers are the target.
Meanwhile, the NGO’s that the Trump administration wants to disable are, to the minds of Democrats, totally non-violent groups, groups faithful to the Constitution, groups that disagree with Donald Trump and want to beat him in elections. Which is precisely what the Constitution says that those in opposition should do.
One of the Trump targets is the totally unradical Act Blue, a non-profit technology platform that expresses no political opinions, but that does allow Democrats to send money to whatever Democratic group or candidate they choose. Act Blue is vital to the Democratic Party’s funding. The Trump attack on Act Blue began in August, many weeks before the Charlie Kirk assassination. But it is likely to become more fierce now that the MAGA movement can tie it, falsely, to the Kirk murder.
To some Democrats, it looks like Trump is taking advantage of the Kirk killing to destroy freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and to disable the Democratic Party itself. In fact, it looks as if President Trump is using the Kirk murder to establish what the people he admires most—Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un–have: a one-party state. A state that controls all the media and uses it to promote propaganda.
America has the longest lasting two-party democracy in the history of the world. To Democrats, it looks as if Trump is using the Charlie Kirk murder to destroy that democracy itself.
And, it looks to Democrats as if Donald Trump is painting a target on each of them. Just as he did in 2023 when he called Democrats vermin and said they have to be rooted out.
If you want to track the progress of Trump’s attempt to topple the constitution, keep your eyes open on Sunday for a mass memorial to Charlie Kirk at the 72,000 capacity State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona, in which Kirk’s widow, Erika, has promised to raise a battle cry to the world, and in which President Trump and Vice President Vance will chime in.
And watch on October 18th, when Democrats will mount a nationwide protest called No Kings Day against what they regard as President Trump’s efforts to turn America from a democracy into a tyranny.
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About the author: Howard Bloom of the Howard Bloom Institute has been called the Einstein, Newton, Darwin, and Freud of the 21st century by Britain’s Channel 4 TV. Bloom’s new book is The Case of the Sexual Cosmos: Everything You Know About Nature is Wrong. Says Harvard’s Ellen Langer of The Case of the Sexual Cosmos, Bloom “argues that we are not savaging the earth as some would have it, but instead are growing the cosmos. A fascinating read.” One of Bloom’s eight previous books–Global Brain—was the subject of a symposium thrown by the Office of the Secretary of Defense including representatives from the State Department, the Energy Department, DARPA, IBM, and MIT. Bloom’s work has been published in The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Wired, Psychology Today, and the Scientific American. Not to mention in scientific journals like Biosystems, New Ideas in Psychology, and PhysicaPlus. Says Joseph Chilton Pearce, author of Evolution’s End and The Crack in the Cosmic Egg, “I have finished Howard Bloom’s [first two] books, The Lucifer Principle and Global Brain, in that order, and am seriously awed, near overwhelmed by the magnitude of what he has done. I never expected to see, in any form, from any sector, such an accomplishment. I doubt there is a stronger intellect than Bloom’s on the planet.” For more, see http://howardbloom.net or http://howardbloom.institute
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References:
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/09/16/pam-bondi-first-amendment-hate-speech-prosecution-00566424
https://www.apnews.com/article/546165a8151104e0938a5e085be1e8bd
https://www.apnews.com/article/92a643a3f16bce587fd34896ca7f4f76
https://time.com/7317634/tyler-robinson-death-penalty-charlie-kirk-charges-murder
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-shooting-death-trump-reaction
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/after-charlie-kirks-killing-maga-world-mourns-war/story
https://www.statefarmstadium.com/stadium-info-2/about-2
Karl, Jonathan. Front Row at the Trump Show. New York: E. P. Dutton, 2020.
Karl, Jonathan. Betrayal: The Final Act of the Trump Show. New York: E. P. Dutton, 2021.
Karl, Jonathan. Tired of Winning: Donald Trump and the End of the Grand Old Party. New York: E. P. Dutton, 2023.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/11/12/trump-vermin-speech
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-criticizes-trump-over-vermin-comment-2023-11-13
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/nov/12/donald-trump-vermin-speech-reaction
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/12/us/politics/trump-vermin-speech.html
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-doubles-blaming-radical-left-after-vow-after/story