View in browser
A strange thing happens when a notable public figure is killed: Their rough edges are sanded down, and a multidimensional person is flattened into the simplicity of a myth.
This has happened with jarring speed to Charlie Kirk, the conservative influencer murdered last week in Utah. Many paeans to Kirk, including from those who opposed him on many issues, have focused on Kirk’s eagerness to engage with those with whom he disagreed. Some of Kirk’s friends and allies have even compared him to Martin Luther King Jr., another prominent leader assassinated for his politics. In the rush to canonize Kirk, people are transforming him into someone he might not recognize—and highlighting an extreme tension within the MAGA movement.
Kirk’s commitment to debate was inextricable from his political views; he wasn’t a value-neutral advocate for free speech. Kirk arose as a countercultural figure and deployed the First Amendment as a crucial tool for spreading his ideas: In an environment where they were not welcome, he pointed out that they were protected. Now that Kirk’s political allies hold power, however, many appear eager to suppress ideas they dislike. The Trump administration is vowing to use Kirk’s death as an excuse to crack down on dissent even as it lionizes him for defending it.
Kirk began his career planting Turning Point USA chapters on college campuses. As many conservatives were writing off academia, Kirk was evangelizing, creating a beachhead for right-wing views in traditionally liberal environments. Free speech was an important shield for him, because some of his ideas were bigoted, or articulated abrasively.
Some people now praising Kirk are conflating a commitment to argument with a devotion to civility. Kirk succeeded, in part, by eschewing civility in favor of conflict. He said, for example, that “Joe Biden is a bumbling, dementia-filled—Alzheimer’s—corrupt tyrant who should honestly be put in prison and/or given the death penalty for his crimes against America.” (In the same radio show, he questioned whether Kamala Harris is Black.) He bused supporters to Washington on January 6, 2021; invoked the Fifth Amendment rather than answer questions about the insurrection; and campaigned for pardons for the perpetrators.
Kirk railed against transgender and gay rights. He called George Floyd a “scumbag,” declared the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “mistake,” and claimed that many influential Black figures were in their roles only because of affirmative action. “If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified,’” he said. He said that if Donald Trump lost in 2024, hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants would be brought to Alabama, where they would “become your masters.” Comparisons to King are especially ironic because King, Kirk said, was “awful. He's not a good person.”
Free speech protects an airing of these ideas, some of which have since come to dominate the Republican Party and help carry it to electoral success. But free speech is always a danger to power, and now that the GOP has control of the White House and both houses of Congress, and has a friendly Supreme Court—as well as a growing number of cultural and corporate institutions—Kirk’s allies are rattled by it.
In some cases, they have called for the punishment of speech about Kirk’s death. The day after Kirk’s killing, Representative Clay Higgins of Louisiana demanded that social-media companies ban anyone who “belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk.” Yet Kirk himself criticized this kind of use of government power in 2020, when he was locked out of Twitter. “We are seeing right now that Big Tech has become the enforcement and the communication arm of the Biden campaign and the Democrat Party,” Kirk said. “It is undemocratic, it is anti-American, and every single person that believes in a free society should be outraged and quite honestly compelled to action against what these tech companies have been able to do to our country.”
The limited calls for social-media bans have quickly transformed—as free-speech hard-liners warn that it does—into a broader call for censorship. “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech,” Attorney General Pam Bondi said on the former Trump aide Katie Miller’s podcast yesterday. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.” Miller’s husband, the White House aide Stephen Miller, vowed to “uproot and dismantle” liberal groups in response to the assassination. The law does not, in fact, recognize any such distinction—as more traditional conservatives, such as National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke, note. But even the putatively libertarian Senator Rand Paul is endorsing employers punishing speech from their workers.
The Trump administration is reportedly now planning a sweeping crackdown on the Democratic Party and on progressive politics as a whole. Yesterday, the president filed a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, several of its reporters, and a major publisher for writing things he didn’t like. (The Times and the publisher, Penguin Random House, called the suit meritless.) In another era, this would have seemed laughable, but some major media companies have concluded that settling such claims is more expedient than defeating them in court. Trump’s son has suggested going beyond lodging defamation claims, bluntly advocating the abridgment of the First Amendment.
“You can’t call someone who you disagree with, or simply can’t win an argument with, a Nazi, a fascist, a dictator, a greatest threat to democracy in the history of civilization, and then pretend you had nothing to do with it when the more radical wing—and there does not seem to be all that much difference to me these days—takes up arms and tries to kill those they disagree with,” Donald Trump Jr. said last week.
Rejecting the horrors of political violence is indeed essential to a functional democratic society, but that is why free speech is so important. A Kirk quote has been circulated widely in the past few days: “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.” The MAGA embrace of censorship is not a bid to win a battle of ideas. It’s to force people to shut up. Kirk warned why this was dangerous.
Related:
Today’s News
- FBI Director Kash Patel testified before Congress today and will testify again tomorrow. He defended his handling of the Charlie Kirk–assassination investigation and was questioned about a lawsuit from former FBI officials who allege that they were unlawfully dismissed from the bureau.
- Tyler Robinson was charged with seven counts, including aggravated murder, in the fatal shooting of Kirk. He appeared in court via video conference, and Utah County prosecutors said they will seek the death penalty.
- The House Oversight Committee released new documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, including testimony from former Attorney General Bill Barr, a list of contacts, and other documents.
Dispatches
Explore all of our newsletters here.
More From The Atlantic
