Kash Patel’s lonely one-man crusade to convince everybody he actually did a great job hunting down Charlie Kirk’s killer continues. “I made the decision to surge so many resources,” he told Fox & Friends this morning. “I had to expedite the process . . . I made the tough calls . . . I came in and I accelerated that process.” All told, during Patel’s 15 minute interview, we counted ten mentions of the word “my,” a whopping 43 mentions of the word “I,” and 13 mentions of the word “I’m.” On, and four mentions of the word “me.”

That’s a lot of self-defense. Whether it’s enough to tamp down the growing MAGA dissatisfaction with Patel’s handling of the investigation remains to be seen. Happy Monday.

Never Let a Crisis Go to Waste

by Andrew Egger

Despite his unassuming title of “deputy chief of staff,” Stephen Miller is one of the most powerful men in America. His boss, Donald Trump, is undisciplined and unfocused, prone to launching major initiatives (mass deportation, D.C. crime crackdown) before wandering off to get distracted by fripperies (redecorating the White House, micromanaging the Kennedy Center). Miller, by contrast, is the always-on attack dog, single-mindedly scheming up new ways to translate the president’s vague pronouncements into applications of real government power. As one top official at a major university in the crosshairs of this administration told us: he is the point person on all of it; his office, the real power center inside the White House.

How Miller has been talking in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination should have everybody worried.

Last Thursday morning, less than 24 hours after the shooting, Miller tweeted out a thesis statement. “There is an ideology that has steadily been growing in this country,” he wrote, “which hates everything that is good, righteous and beautiful and celebrates everything that is warped, twisted and depraved.” This ideology has “one unifying thread,” he added: “the insatiable thirst for destruction.”

“It is an ideology that leads, always, inevitably and willfully, to violence,” Miller went on. “The fate of millions depends on the defeat of this wicked ideology.”

What is this ideology? Radical leftism, of course—defined, in our deeply polarized age, as anything outside the bounds of true-blue, salt-of-the-earth, God-fearing MAGA patriotism.

How does Miller intend to defeat this ideology? We don’t have to guess. In a Friday appearance on Sean Hannity, Miller made his plans clear: Smash every institution of the left with the power of the state.

“The last message that Charlie Kirk gave me before he joined his creator in heaven was he said that we have to dismantle and take on the radical left organizations in this country that are fomenting violence,” Miller ranted. “And we are going to do that, under President Trump’s leadership. I don’t care how. It could be a RICO charge, a conspiracy charge, conspiracy against the United States, insurrection. But we are going to do what it takes to dismantle the organizations and the entities that are fomenting riots, that are doxxing, that are trying to inspire terrorism, that are committing acts of wanton violence.”

Miller made a promise: “The power of law enforcement, under President Trump’s leadership, will be used to find you, will be used to take away your money, take away your power, and, if you’ve broken the law, to take away your freedom.”

That’s an interesting way of putting it, isn’t it? Miller’s promise, made in public, is to bring down the fist of the state on radical left organizations, to take away their money and their power—and then, for those who have broken the law, to take away their freedom as well. Why should the ones who haven’t broken the law lose their money and their power? Well, that’s obvious, Miller seems to say: Because we’ve decreed that they’re domestic terrorists.

The crucial thing to keep in mind here is that Miller is not talking about Kirk’s assassin—or even about groups the FBI is investigating to determine whether that assassin acted alone. Instead, he is referring primarily to those Americans who posted callous, cruel, or even just nonchalant things online in the wake of Kirk’s assassination. And he’s not talking just about people on the federal government’s payroll but everyday citizens going about their lives. “In recent days, we have learned just how many Americans in positions of authority—child services, law clerks, hospital nurses, teachers, gov’t workers, even DOD employees—have been deeply and violently radicalized,” Miller wrote on X yesterday. “The consequence of a vast, organized ecosystem of indoctrination.”

Miller’s argument is thus very explicit. Those putting their worst foot forward online after Kirk’s murder weren’t just displaying a lack of empathy that characterizes so much of our ultra-polarized, social media age. They were the deliberate outcome of a specific liberal plot—an “organized ecosystem of indoctrination” on the part of specific, knowable “radical left organizations” that are chockablock with “domestic terrorists.” And the Trump administration is preparing to use any criminal pretext available to take these terrorists down.

Many of the posts exulting in Kirk’s death that have gone viral in recent days have indeed been sickeningly indecent. But America’s remarkably robust free speech protections extend even to sickeningly indecent speech. You think social media posts are bad? In 2006, the Supreme Court ruled 8–1 that it was legal for Westboro Baptist Church to picket the funerals of gay servicemen while holding signs like “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “You’re Going to Hell.” In the land of the free, you take the good with the bad. Miller plainly seeks to sweep that all away.

We have arrived at an extremely dangerous moment. Trump’s remarkably unchained performance as president so far in his second term might suggest to some that he is just doing whatever he wants, regardless of law or public opinion. The former might be true; the latter is a more complicated question. Trump has in fact backed quietly away from White House actions when they have proven dramatically unpopular: his plan to house American criminals in torture prisons in El Salvador, his “Liberation Day” tariffs, his invasion of Chicago (for now), the Great Elon Experiment.

Under ordinary circumstances, an explicit and ostentatious political purge like the one Miller is threatening would likely land in this range. But it’s hard to overstate how freaked out U.S. conservatives have been over the assassination of Kirk—and how shaken they