When Charlie Kirk was murdered, I wrote the following, and for me, it raised a question that has bothered me ever since, even though I’m the guy who said it. Imagine that. First, what I said:
I found Charlie Kirk to be repulsive, and I was totally put off by how influential he seemed to be with the young people. I mean, he was grooming a whole generation to embrace the worst aspects of white supremacy and misogyny. But I gotta say he was doing it well within the spirit of free speech and debate. He was loose with facts, but in general, honest about his beliefs. As pathetic as I found them to be, at least he was honest about it. And the one place I agreed with him was that we should be able to openly debate our beliefs.
Now, when I wrote that, I was mostly trying to say that no one should be murdered for their beliefs, but I added that Charlie Kirk was operating within the spirit of free speech and debate. Since writing that part, though, I’ve found myself questioning if that was even remotely accurate. Not that Kirk broke any of our laws surrounding free speech, but he definitely defied our norms and generally used his free speech to police the speech of others. A claim, as most projectionists are prone to do, he made in response to what was happening to him when people objected to or criticized his speech. This is very dangerous ground, but now that we’re witnessing his assassination being turned into an accelerant for suppressing free speech, I think it should be examined. Especially now, when hundreds of people across the country are losing their jobs for the supposed crime of expressing the wrong words about Charlie Kirk. Or now that universities like Berkley are supplying the MAGA regime with lists of students, teachers and faculty that may have a “potential connection” to antisemitism. Wasn’t that what Kirk always said should be allowed? For people to speak their minds? Well, we need to be honest about what he was really doing. Kirk was using his debate skills and our forums for free speech to suppress the speech he deemed to be radical. Something that those who actually believe in free speech allowed him to do in volumes. Even when many of us found his speech to be so vile and so hateful that if his ideas ever became law, they would be a parade of human rights violations.
And that’s where it gets weird. We now live in an age of linguistic gymnastics, where black is white and up is down, and where our basic ethics and norms are called into question. Where, thanks to people like Kirk, affirmative action is now racist, instead of a tool to rectify historical wrongs. Where equal pay for women is both not a thing that needs to be addressed, but also an exercise in man-hating, and where white males are the real victims. A world where people like Kirk are willing to openly say the most racist, sexist, bigoted, vile, disgusting, and hateful parts of everything we’re debating out loud—with a smile on their face. And somehow, calling them out for their beliefs and asking them to defend their beliefs based on some semblance of reality or facts is, to them, a suppression of their right to curtail actual free speech and the freedoms of others. Freedoms that, let’s face it, have been only recently won. And they were won by standing up to people who expressed the same views as Charlie Kirk.
Beyond using public forums to shout down the free speech of others, Kirk’s organization, Turning Point U.S.A., also made a website that identifies educators whom they deem are guilty of espousing dangerous liberal thoughts. The Professor Watchlist, as it’s called, is a publicly available resource that aims to get people working in academia fired or intimidated into silence. So, regardless of Kirk’s claims that he was an advocate of free speech, his real legacy is the exact opposite. His life’s work was the suppression of free speech, and that’s what’s about to get weaponized and brought to scale by MAGA in his name. We have no idea yet what the motivation was behind Kirk’s murder. But that, of course, hasn’t stopped the MAGA regime from whipping its base into a frenzy and claiming that all political violence is only driven by the left. And that the kind of speech that Kirk worked so hard to suppress is what drives this violence, and therefore it must be rooted out. Like all of their claims, it’s absurd and demonstrably false. Here’s just some of how Trump and republican members of the MAGA regime are framing this. By the way, they finally found their love for pronouns; they really love ‘they’, watch how often they use it.
Trump, who was fairly elected as president—if you can call our elections fair given the amount of dark money and disinformation that is— but has since betrayed his oath of office and is now the acting leader of the MAGA regime, said in a public address on Wednesday: “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today.”
We hadn’t even had a suspect in custody yet when he made that statement. He immediately used the tragedy of Kirk’s murder to stoke division and throw gasoline on the fire.
Jesse Waters, an operative of the MAGA republican state television organization FOX News, said: “They are at war with us. Whether we want to accept it or not, they are at war with us. And what are we going to do about it? We have to ask ourselves how much political violence are we going to tolerate. Everybody’s accountable. And we’re watching … the politicians, the media, and all these rats out there. This can never happen again. It ends now.”
Okay, but who are they? It was one gunman, whose motivation we can’t yet be certain of, and when Waters said this, there was no indication that the gunman was part of any left-leaning ideology or group. But even if he was, what does that even prove?
Clay Higgins, a republican MAGA regime member who was elected to the House of Representatives but has since relinquished his oath of office and just follows the party line, said that people should be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER” if they celebrated Kirk’s killing. He also said he would seek to have businesses “blacklisted aggressively” and licenses revoked.
I was reluctant to include Erika Kirk’s public statements after her husband’s murder. But since Turning Point has seen a surge in interest, I think it’s important to consider what she said. In the span of 48 hours, a spokesman for Turning Point said that the organization received more than 32,000 inquiries about starting a new chapter. They currently have about 3,500 chapters on high school and college campuses.
Erika Kirk’s statement delivered from Charlie Kirk’s podcast studio just days after his murder: “They killed Charlie because he preached a message of patriotism, faith and of God’s love,” she said. “They should all know this. If you thought my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea. You have no idea what you have unleashed across this country and this world.”
I could go on and on with these kinds of quotes, because there is also an army of podcasters out there repeating this same mantra. But you get the idea. To the MAGA regime, Charlie Kirk was not killed by a lone gunman; he was assassinated by an ideology, and that ideology needs to be extinguished, and all those who adhere to it must be silenced and stripped of power.
So that’s where we are at now. A regime that has stopped acting within the confines of our democracy is taking the next step in securing power by doing what all authoritarian regimes need to do. Curtailing freedom of speech, and they intend to use the assassination of Charlie Kirk as a rallying cry. It’s always been a dance to have both the freedom of speech, but also to keep the very tools of free speech from empowering demagogues to incite violence or take away our basic rights. Charlie Kirk was very good at blurring the lines of that dance, especially for the young people who gravitated into his orbit. And that’s what has made me uneasy since first writing that he was operating within the confines of free speech. In many ways, he was. But his motives were to take that freedom away from others. As is the MAGA regime’s motive, but with them, it’s easier to identify what is illegal. They have power beyond just influence. It’s easy to recognize that they are illegally withholding funds from universities like Berkley to coerce them into supplying names. Or that they are illegally using ICE to target college students for their public statements. With Kirk, it’s more slippery. He was able to influence people, especially young people, into believing in views that would make them more likely to accept the kind of authoritarianism that MAGA represents. At what point do we rein that in? And at what cost?
Kirk once said that the death of school kids and gun violence in general were the price we pay for having the freedoms protected by the Second Amendment. It was just one of the vile and disgusting things he was willing to say to influence college kids into believing that there was nothing we could do about the violent country we live in. In a way, he died by that belief. So what is the price we have to pay for free speech? That’s what I’m trying to answer. I know it’s not Elon Musk’s solution. That hate speech and disinformation can be countered by more speech and that truth and justice will rise to the surface, therefore, we don’t need any constraints on speech. But we’ve seen the opposite; misinformation and hate speech are cheap and easy to produce, and they tend to drown out reasonable fact fact-based debate. Especially when cloaked in Christianity and patriotism, and boosted by algorithms.
So that’s my question. Where’s the line? It can’t be violence, that’s for sure. But we also can’t endure an endless barrage of disinformation and lies meant to steal away our liberties. So how do we maintain our freedoms in the face of so many willing to abuse them? I don’t know, but I think we need to talk about it and find a way forward.