Free Speech and the Kirk Assassination

It is a depressing sign of our illiberal times: the assassination of a right-wing youth organizer who embraced public debate and engaged in provocative free speech has provoked sweeping new threats to public debate and freedom of expression – from his own supporters.  

Even before we knew who the assassin was, hard-core conservatives were blaming “the media” and Democrats for Mr. Kirk’s shooting. This is significant because they were attributing the violence to a climate of opinion created by public criticism of Kirk and MAGA. Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina said, “Democrats own what happened today” because “you guys in the media were attacking Charlie Kirk 24 hours before he was assassinated.”  

Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff, blamed “terrorist networks” for the incident and vowed to use the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “identify, disrupt, dismantle and destroy” them. President Trump called for prosecutors to file racketeering charges against George Soros, one of the Democratic Party’s biggest donors, when Soros’s only crime was to support opposing views. 

The head of the Justice Department, Pam Bondi, showed a disregard for the First Amendment so blatant that many conservatives pushed back. She threatened to prosecute private businesses if they didn’t fire employees who celebrated the killing or turned away customers who wanted to buy services favoring Kirk. An Office Depot employee in Michigan rejected an order to print images of Kirk for a vigil, and Bondi referred the case to the Justice Department’s civil rights division, 

asserting (incorrectly) that “We can prosecute you for that.” Her claim contradicts a Supreme Court decision from 2018, which upheld the right of a conservative religious baker in Colorado to refuse to decorate a wedding cake for a same-sex couple. Even when pressure from conservatives forced Bondi to back away from her initial statement, she still insisted that the Justice Department can prosecute what she calls “hate speech,” echoing left-progressive groups’ demands for intensive social media content moderation.

The Chilling Effect 

In a push for more coercion, Rep. Mace went on to urge the Education Department to withhold federal funding from any school that did not “take immediate administrative action” against employees who had celebrated or made light of Mr. Kirk’s death. Notably, there was no corresponding call to use federal pressure against anyone celebrating the assassination of the Democratic Party legislator in Minnesota. And the chilling went into effect immediately: two faculty members are Clemson University were fired; here in Atlanta, three Cobb County School District teachers were placed on administrative leave after they wrote social media posts on their private accounts apparently celebrating the assassination of Charlie Kirk. The school district also will report the incidents to the Georgia Professional Standards Commission, “requesting appropriate action against their Georgia teaching license.” Companies and institutions from California to North Carolina including Delta Airlines, have suspended or fired employees over remarks that appeared to celebrate or minimize the shooting.

But if Kirk himself could claim that “It’s worth it to have …some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment,” which certainly didn’t make the victims of school shootings feel very good, why can’t Kirk’s critics point out the irony? True, private employers have the right to disassociate themselves from public statements made by their employees, and public institutions are allowed to discipline an employee’s public communication if it interferes with the government’s ability to do its job. But the legitimacy of these actions is brought into question by the high-level political pressure emanating from politicians in Washington.  

The Way Out 

As we wrote back in June, during the Biden administration there was widespread evidence that both the private platforms and the federal government were suppressing certain conservative views. Yet, the very same people who, when they were out of power, complained of suppression are now mobilizing the state and federal governments to monitor and suppress speech they don’t like.  

The important lesson we draw from this is that both sides in the culture wars are threats to freedom, because both lack a principled commitment to individual liberty. Indeed, “culture wars” by their very nature are not consistent with a liberal order, as they attempt to impose one group’s culture and religious values on others. Charlie Kirk and his ilk should be free to advocate their brand of Christian nationalism, even when it’s laced with racism, and trans advocates, socialists, pro-Palestinians should be free to express their views, whether it is deemed “anti-Semitic,” hateful to Kirk, or not. Speech and advocacy, yes; assassinations and political prosecution, no. 

The only way out of the destructive polarization in America is tolerance of the expression of conflicting views. If one side of a polarized polity can suppress the speech of the other and arrest them for their views, then letting the other side gain political power becomes an existential threat. Liberalism was not just an enlightened ideology but a very practical response to centuries of religious warfare in Europe. There is a clear line to be drawn between speech, however hateful, and violence. This means absolute protection of political and religious expression, even if one side finds the other side’s speech objectionable. Otherwise, we will get a see-saw battle over who gets to suppress whose speech as different sides take turns in power. As the Kirk incident shows, this dynamic simply escalates suppression.  

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