On October 14, the US State Department revoked the visas of six foreign nationals for making social media comments about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, significantly escalating the assault on the democratic right to free speech.

The State Department announced the action in a thread on Twitter/X that included screenshots of the remarks by the individuals who were targeted and also providing the official pseudo-legal justification for it.

According to the post, “The United States has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death upon Americans. The State Department is actively identifying visa holders who celebrated the heinous assassination of Charlie Kirk.”

The thread identified the six individuals as citizens of Argentina, Brazil, Germany, Mexico, Paraguay and South Africa without naming them. Among the quoted posts were denunciations of Kirk’s politics as a far-right, racist and American nationalist.

One Argentine national wrote that Kirk “dedicated his entire life to disseminating racist, xenophobic, misogynistic rhetoric and deserved eternal damnation.” A South African music executive, later identified as Nhlamulo Baloyi, commented that Americans mourning Kirk’s death “hurt because the racist ended in martyrdom,” mocking how “he was being used to bolster a movement of white nationalist trailer trash.”

A Paraguayan social media user posted that “Kirk was a son of a b***h who died by his own rules.” None of the comments threatened violence or advocated harm; all expressed political judgment and condemned the openly fascistic political figure.

In the same thread, the State Department warned that “more revocations are to come” and invited the public to report additional posts of a similar “anti-American” nature. Secretary of State Marco Rubio justified the decision in subsequent remarks to reporters: “If you’re a foreigner and you’re out there celebrating the assassination of someone who was speaking somewhere, we don’t want you in the country. Why would we give a visa to someone who thinks it’s good that someone was murdered? That’s just common sense to me.”

Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau posted that he was “disgusted to see some on social media praising or rationalizing the event” and had directed consular officials “to undertake appropriate action.”

These claims are an attack on political speech that is critical of the mythologizing and hero-worshipping of Kirk by the White House and its fascist supporters. The individuals targeted by Rubio have had their visas revoked because they made truthful statements that cut across Trump’s big lie propaganda machine.

The furious public response to the administration’s actions was expressed in a viral post by immigration attorney Eric Lee, who announced that the newly formed Consular Accountability Project would offer pro bono legal representation to any visa holders whose status was revoked for expressing opinions related to the assassination of fascist operative Charlie Kirk. “If your visa was denied or revoked due to Charlie Kirk–related speech, the Consular Accountability Project (@ConsularActProj) is interested in representing you pro bono,” Lee wrote.

His tweet, posted shortly after the State Department declared that the United States “has no obligation to host foreigners who wish death on Americans,” has been viewed 3.4 million times, liked over 62,000 times and retweeted more than 11,000 times. The scale of the response reflects the mass opposition to Trump’s assault on free speech and the growing determination to challenge the regime’s criminalization of political expression and thought.

Immigration and constitutional law experts have condemned the measures as illegal and authoritarian. Carrie DeCell of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University stated that “these kinds of visa revocations are censorship, plain and simple. Mere ‘mockery’ can’t be grounds for adverse government action—whether revocation of broadcast licenses or revocation of visas. While the government can revoke visas for many reasons, the First Amendment forbids it from doing so based on viewpoint.”

The Institute had previously won a landmark case, AAUP v. Rubio, in which the federal court ruled that “non-citizens lawfully present” in the United States “have the same free speech rights as the rest of us.” The administration’s retaliatory campaign against foreign critics of Kirk flagrantly defies that ruling.

The latest attacks on foreign visitors to the US is part of the Trump administration’s campaign to transform Charlie Kirk’s death into a myth of the fascist right. Kirk, a 31-year-old reactionary organizer and founder of Turning Point USA, was assassinated while addressing a student audience at Utah Valley University on September 10.

Within hours, President Trump denounced the shooting as a “political execution” attributed to “Marxist hate,” while right-wing media and fascist social media influencers declared Kirk a martyr, who was killed by a “radical leftist” without any evidence to support the claim.

On the day of the State Department announcement, the White House staged a Rose Garden ceremony awarding Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor, posthumously recognizing him as “an American patriot of the highest caliber.”

It is obvious that the timing of the visa announcement was no coincidence. The administration sought to link its repression of dissent with the canonization of Kirk and to thereby cloak its campaign of censorship in ceremony.

This latest episode confirms again that the Trump administration is seeking to convert Charlie Kirk as an American Horst Wessel. Wessel was a Nazi who was murdered in 1930 and then eulogized as an exemplar of Germany’s patriotic youth, and his death was used to rally German fascists behind a narrative of nationalist hysteria.

The WSWS exposed this trajectory soon after Kirk’s assassination as the White House utilized his death to mobilize its supporters through official ceremonies, school programs and the censorship of dissent. Trump and his Hitler-admirer adviser Stephen Miller are consciously cultivating white Christian nationalist identity that combines religious ideology with state repression and American chauvinism.

The visa revocations are the latest tool in this authoritarian restructuring of the US government. Legal observers have noted that although the government has broad discretion on immigration matters, that discretion cannot be exercised in retaliation for political opinion and in violation of the First Amendment.

As one constitutional lawyer told CNN, “These visa moves cross a line that has never before been crossed by any modern administration. They turn the machinery of immigration into a bludgeon for ideological conformity.”

The legal justification advanced by Rubio and other Trump officials—that freedom of speech does not extend to foreigners who “celebrate” murder—is false and deliberately misleading. None of the comments cited by the State Department condoned violence. Each was a moral or political critique of Kirk’s role in spreading reactionary ideology.

To claim that such commentary constitutes a celebration of violence is a calculated distortion of the facts meant to delegitimize dissent and intimidate expressions of political opposition. It is a complete lie that accurate characterization and criticism of Kirk’s politics equals “hostility to Americans.”

Revoking the visas of people criticizing and ridiculing the hero-worshipping of the fascist Kirk also expresses the extreme nervousness and sensitivity of the Trump administration to anyone who is bursting their bubble. It is a shame-faced recognition that their bogus narrative is not widely accepted and that the entire mythmaking campaign about Kirk could come crumbling down at any moment.

By pursuing this vendetta against visa holders, the administration is establishing a precedent for globalized repression. It signals to the world that entry into or presence within the US will depend upon adherence to ideological loyalty.

The Trump administration has already deployed immigration law to attack students who participated in anti-genocide or pro-Palestinian activism. Last month’s court ruling against the administration in AAUP v. Rubio arose from cases in which foreign scholars and students were detained or deported for posting criticism of US foreign policy.

The same coercion underlies the Kirk affair in that speech which has been deemed unacceptable by the Trump regime is treated not as opinion but as subversion. In this new Orwellian world, dissenting foreigners are redefined as national enemies, while either silence or the embrace of right-wing nationalism becomes the test of eligibility for admission into the US.

The attack on the First Amendment rights of visa holders is preparing the ground for similar measures against US citizens by normalizing political surveillance and punishment through digital monitoring programs already instituted by the State Department and Homeland Security.

As Rolling Stone recently reported, Deputy Secretary Landau has enlisted right-wing social media networks to identify critics worldwide. His “meme diplomacy,” in which he personally republishes posts mocking “leftist degeneracy” and solicits reports of offensive material, blends social media vigilantism with the power of the state.

This is the model of fascist policing pioneered under Mussolini and Hitler and is now being revived in the digital age: repression outsourced to mobs and sanctified by the police apparatus of the government.

Expressions of anger, mockery or denunciation directed toward Kirk’s political career are not only legitimate but necessary under conditions of the normalization of fascism and dictatorship. The revocation of visas for mild condemnations of a reactionary public figure like Kirk reveals that the aim of the Trump administration is to force ideological conformity as a condition of political speech.