“When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts,” Charlie Kirk recently told an angry leftist. “When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that person. What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement — where violence is not an option.”
The tragic irony of Kirk’s horrific assassination on Wednesday is that there are a lot of people out there who are so angry it’s hard to imagine any productive conversation happening.
How do you talk with people who want you dead?
The increasingly ghoulish Left celebrates murders like Charlie’s. Murders like UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson’s in December. Attempted assassinations like Donald Trump’s last July. To go on social media right now is to enter a disgusting cesspool of vitriolic hatred toward Kirk and everyone associated with him.
On the one hand, you have rabid leftists who are laughing, cheering, or otherwise celebrating the murder of a loving husband and father of two very young children. Democrats in Congress loudly object to the idea of praying for Kirk’s family. Leftists call him a “casualty of the violence he incited.” (I must’ve missed even a single instance of that violence happening.) Worse, leftists — particularly the ones who occupy the social media site called BlueSky — are calling for various conservative figures to be “next.” Apple and Google removed Parler from the app stores for far less.
You have mainstream Leftmedia outlets describing Kirk in supposedly objective terms as “racist, sexist, bigoted, and white nationalist.” That is gross misinformation based on the deliberate distortion of various comments he made over the years. For example, The New York Times even had to correct a false assertion of “an antisemitic statement” that Kirk has supposedly made — in fact, he was quoting that statement and critiquing it.
Senator Ted Cruz said, “My last conversation with Charlie” was on the subject of stopping the “toxic garbage” of anti-Semitism “from spreading on the Right.”
On the other hand, you have even Christians of whatever political persuasion wondering if, given all the supposedly hateful things Kirk said and stood for, maybe he did have it coming. Perhaps they knew nothing of Kirk until he died, and they were misinformed about his life and beliefs. Or maybe they just plain disagreed with him.
Regardless, if what you think about free speech in America is that you have a violent death coming for cordially expressing certain opinions, you should be ashamed of yourself. And then feel free to move to the United Kingdom.
Kirk stood for dialogue with people about ideas. He didn’t hate. He did not — contrary to media misinformation — advocate for stoning people suffering from various gender pathologies. In that case, by the way, he was discussing how you shouldn’t cherry-pick quotes from Leviticus to say we ought to “love” the gender-confused by “affirming” their destructive choices. Even author Stephen King sort of apologized for getting that one wrong.
In short, Kirk talked for a living, mostly extemporaneously with opponents. Of course he said things inartfully from time to time. All of us would and do in similar circumstances. To say he deserved death for speaking his mind, however, has far more in common with Islamofascism than American Liberty. That’s no small irony given yesterday’s 24th anniversary of 9/11.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences for bad speech. More than a few people find themselves without a job this morning for their ugly hatred of Kirk and celebration of his murder.
MSNBC fired contributor Matthew Dowd for saying that the “hateful words” of people like Kirk can “lead to hateful actions.” Multiple universities and K-12 schools have fired professors, teachers, or other employees for social media posts reveling in Kirk’s murder. (Frankly, it’s beyond alarming just how many despicably hateful people are educating our children.) The NFL’s Carolina Panthers fired someone, as did DC Comics. Who knows how many others there are?
The U.S. State Department may also take action. “In light of yesterday’s horrific assassination of a leading political figure,” Deputy Secretary of State Chris Landau posted on X on Thursday. “I want to underscore that foreigners who glorify violence and hatred are not welcome visitors to our country.” Official policy is not yet clear.
The pendulum may swing too far, however. “I’m going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk,” wrote Louisiana Republican Representative Clay Higgins on X. “If they ran their mouth with their smart*** hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution… those profiles must come down.”
It’s not just social media for Higgins. “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 drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination.”
Kirk literally died protecting free speech. He might appreciate the sentiment, but I don’t think he’d agree with a federal crackdown like that. In fact, he vehemently opposed the social media censorship that became rampant during Joe Biden’s term.
We don’t dispense with cancel culture by using it. We don’t beat leftists by becoming like them.
At the same time, just how far gone is the American Left? Is the entire movement really made up of demonic and murderous haters? It certainly seems so today. How do we deal with that?
Charlie Kirk took the approach of engaging in honest, peaceful conversations. He converted countless thousands and successfully challenged many more. It worked — right up until an assassin’s bullet took his life. I sincerely hope that this is a watershed moment in American politics. The assassination of Martin Luther King changed things in favor of real equality and civil rights. (The Left subsequently ruined that, too, but that’s another story.)
Similarly, Kirk was killed for standing for free speech and civility, and maybe his martyrdom means more Americans will remember why both are so critical for our future.
