Friday, September 12, 2025
When a free-speech villain becomes a free-speech martyr and what we even mean
I posted my thoughts on the Charlie Kirk murder yesterday, but a Typepad glitch (the platform seems to be going out in a blaze of malfunctioning glory) caused it to be deleted. So trying again–with a slightly different focus–with another 12 hours of news.
1) Charlie Kirk should not have been murdered and whoever did it (they seem to have arrested the right guy, after two prior mistakes) should be tried and, if convicted, punished.
2) Kirk was not a free-speech warrior and the reporting painting him as such shows the extent to which language has lost all meaning. Kirk was never punished or sanctioned by government for his speech. And he never–as far as I know–took a stand to oppose government efforts to censor or target speech with which he disagreed.
Instead, Kirk was a free-speech warrior in the unfortunate new sense of a person who says whatever he wants, demands that those who disagree “debate me,” and derides as opposing freedom of speech anyone who protests him, criticizes him, or refuses to engage or associate with him because he believed and uttered vile crap. Free speech is performative debates. Censorship is all speech outside of that performative debate that pushed back against or called out the ugly stuff he said, including calling for or celebrating (in a constitutionally protected way) violence (January 6) and other actions against disfavored groups. Ezra Klein mimics this new meaning in saying Kirk “did politics the right way.”A person fights for free speech when he says outrageous things–even supporting violence–but does not actually engage in that violence.
3) Media coverage of Kirk’s death–bowlderized, hagiographic obits that never mention the substance of anything he ever said or believed or wanted the government to achieve–shows why we are in the current hole. The inability to separate “he should not have been killed” from the truth of “this is what this politically influential figured believed and stood for” reflects the death of meaningful journalism. Note that the media coalesced around this idea–left-wing censor killing a fearless speaker and critic—before we knew anything. This could have gone very badly, had someone used these reports as a pretext for violence.
4) The Republican/conservative response to the murder of this supposed free-speech warrior is . . . I would say ironic, but that assumes these people act in good faith. A State Department official announced that they would be looking for non-citizens who wrote stuff online that was insufficiently respectful of Kirk and his death. Rep. Clay Higgins promised legislation, investigations, and jawboning of tech companies to ban those who said bad stuff about Kirk or good stuff about his murder.* Sen. Mike Lee wants Kirk’s family to sue Stephen King for defamation when King posted that Kirk wanted to stone trans people.
[*] I am old enough to remember when Republicans believed government asking social-media sites to look at potentially harmful speech in the middle of public-health crisis was the greatest threat to free speech. Again, ironic, if I believed Higgins acted in good faith.
Closer to my home, the Commissioner of the Florida Board of Education sent a memo to all school superintendents promised an investigation of every educator who posted “despicable comments” about Kirk’s murder.
5) I have seen weird responses within the Jewish community (Kirk supported Netanyahu and the current war in Gaza), insisting that it was ok that Kirk targeted particular groups and that we must tolerate even speech that we hate. These are the same people complaining about campus protests and encampments.
6) We are just getting a sense of the killer’s politics (although not his motivations for this act). He seems to have beenb bound up in the online gaming world, which has some antisemitic, anti-LGBTQ+ stuff baked into its nihilism. He is not some lefty, trans activist.
That either changes the narrative or causes the story to go away, as Republicans lose the ability to use it to demonize and attack people they hate. Trump turned a question about Kirk into a ramble about the White House ballroom, indicating he is done with this. Nancy Mace has gone from insisting that a “tranny” did this to praying that a lost soul such as the suspect find Christ. If the shooter was not a lefty seeking to silence a free-speech warrior because of his ideas, it becomes harder to use this (as FIU’s president did) as an excuse to demand “civility” and “respectful discourse” and thus to silence dissenting and protesting voices who call out evil speech as evil.
7) Charlie Kirk should not have been murdered and whoever did it (they seem to have arrested the right guy, after two prior mistakes) should be tried and, if convicted, punished.
Posted by Howard Wasserman on September 12, 2025 at 01:50 PM in First Amendment, Howard Wasserman, Law and Politics | Permalink
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