The Right Is Using Charlie Kirk’s Murder to Attack Free Speech
Over the past week since the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk, we’ve watched conservatives unabashedly take ownership of “cancel culture” and crack down on free speech right before our eyes.
In the days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, several major corporations have fired or suspended employees for social media comments deemed inappropriate or mocking of his death. (Joe Raedle / Getty Images)
In the last week, American conservatives have dropped their professed commitment to free speech over the previous decade.
“There’s free speech, and then there’s hate speech,” said Attorney General Pam Bondi on Monday in response to a podcast host’s question about public reactions to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. “And there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie,” for the latter. “We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech.”
As she should know, hate speech is not a legal category of speech in the United States. Our legal system prohibits incitements to immediate violence and other narrow infractions, but “hate speech” is a fungible term that has always put free-speech advocates on high alert for politically motivated censorship.
By “hate speech,” in this instance, Bondi presumably means social media posts celebrating Kirk’s death, which have become an obsession of the Right since he was murdered last Wednesday.
“There is no unity with the people who celebrate Charlie Kirk’s assassination,” said Vice President J. D. Vance. “When you see someone celebrating Charlie’s murder, call them out,” Vance elaborated on Monday. “And hell, call their employer.”
For the past decade, the Right has claimed to be the champions of free speech against a censorious Left. It doesn’t look like they meant it.
“We do not censor and silence disfavored viewpoints,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said. Americans “are allowed to say crazy things,” but “if I’m an employer or I’m a government agency, and I have someone in my employ who is online celebrating . . . I can make the decision that they don’t deserve to work for me.” In other words, you have a right to express “disfavored viewpoints” if you don’t rely on either a private employer or a government agency to make a living. That excludes the majority of nonwealthy adults.
We argued last week that Kirk’s assassination is no cause for celebration from the Left. But if you don’t believe people should be free to make misguided or even odious statements, you don’t believe in free speech.
In the days following Charlie Kirk’s assassination, several major corporations have fired or suspended employees for social media comments deemed inappropriate or mocking of his death. University officials, including staff at the University of California, Los Angeles, have placed employees on leave pending investigation into their posts. Employer statements and reporting confirm dismissals at companies like Delta, Nasdaq, and Office Depot, and the Washington Post fired columnist Karen Attiah over her posts about Kirk. In many cases, the offending posts do not even appear to celebrate Kirk’s murder per se, only to criticize or disparage Kirk’s character and political legacy.
Louisiana Republican congressman Clay Higgins articulated a vision for punishing offending speech that went far beyond firing. “I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their driver’s licenses should be revoked,” Higgins said. “I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
President Donald Trump immediately and starkly illustrated the civic implications of the administration’s emerging “hate speech” paradigm. When an ABC reporter asked Trump what Bondi meant by “hate speech” on Tuesday, Trump responded, “We’ll probably go after people like you, because you treat me so unfairly. It’s hate. You have a lotta hate in your heart. Maybe they’ll come after ABC.”
Free Speech Hot Potato
Representative Clay Higgins’s unironic, unabashed use of the word “cancel” for how he wants to handle offending speakers is right on the money. We’re watching conservatives assume ownership of cancel culture before our eyes.
Proponents of censorship have always justified their position on the basis that certain types of speech lead to violence and must therefore be prohibited. This week, White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller followed the playbook precisely when he claimed that an “organized campaign . . . led to this assassination.” Even though the man accused of murdering Kirk seems to have been a lone-wolf assassin with indistinct political leanings, Miller spoke vaguely about “terrorist networks,” which he associated with “campaigns of dehumanization” and “vilification.”
This is similar to the arguments liberals used when they were busy getting employees fired and college speakers disinvited for expressing offensive views in the 2010s. Right-wing speech was impermissible, they claimed, because it was apt to lead to violence. Conservatives saw the flaws in those “slippery slope” arguments about free speech and violence then but seem to have forgotten their critiques now that they’re in a position to exercise cultural hegemony. It truly seems, as many users on X have observed, that the Right’s opposition to cancel culture over the preceding decade was little more than jealousy that they weren’t the ones doing the canceling.
While the threats to the Left in this moment are not to be taken lightly, there is a sense in which one aspect of the political cosmos is returning to proper alignment. We have repeatedly argued in this magazine that free speech is a left-wing issue. The Right should never have had an opportunity to claim the free speech mantle.
The founding father of modern American conservatism, William F. Buckley, first came onto the scene in 1951 (four years before he founded National Review magazine) with a book called God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of Academic Freedom. It was an unabashed call for radical professors to be fired. The core of the conservative worldview is all about hierarchy and submission. That’s never been a comfortable fit with a serious commitment to free speech and the protection of dissidents.
The Left, meanwhile, has historically been doggedly pro–free speech, from the “free speech fights” conducted by the radical trade unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) to the Free Speech Movement at the University of California, Berkeley, in the 1960s. In our worldview, free speech is indispensable. The whole point of democratic socialism, as C. L. R. James once put it, is that “every cook can govern,” meaning we trust ordinary people to hear every point of view and make up their own minds. And we also understand that, as both Red Scares vividly illustrated, speech crackdowns pose a significant threat to our movements and the viability of our political project.
Contemporary liberal technocrats don’t share the Left’s historical commitment to free speech. In recent years, their zeal for purifying elite institutions of unwanted ideas (many of them genuinely heinous, others rather innocuous) briefly gave the Right an opening to posture as advocates of free speech and open debate about controversial ideas. It was always nonsense. The Right’s objection to cancel culture was always that the wrong people were being canceled. Their objection to conflating speech with violence was always that they didn’t like which speech was being equated with violence.
Charlie Kirk’s own considerable hypocrisies on this subject are telling. He frequently talked about how even the most offensive speech should be protected, but he also maintained a blacklist of “dangerous” left-wing professors, channeling the spirit of Buckley.
In the past few days, there’s been no shortage of liberals and leftists pointing out the incoherence of the Right on this topic. They’ve dug up innumerable instances in which the same right-wing figures who dismissed “hate speech” as a concept six months or a year ago are calling for crackdowns now. But it’s easy to point out the hypocrisies and inconsistencies of your political enemies. It’s harder and more important to explain exactly what you think and why.
So here’s what we think: Speech isn’t violence. Democracy is impossible if citizens can’t be trusted to be exposed to even the worst and most repulsive points of view. And free speech is a nonnegotiable left-wing value.