America’s commitment to free speech is in peril.
On Sept. 10, right-wing political activist Charlie Kirk was killed while speaking to students at a university in Utah. Since then, the fallout has expanded beyond judgement of Kirk and his ideological opponents to include attacks on the very notion of free speech.
Using the death of Kirk as pretext, the Trump administration has initiated a crackdown on speech it disagrees with. Their effort includes threats to liberal institutions, strong-arm attempts to censor the news media, investigations into “hate speech,” and jeopardizing the job security of those who dare to voice a different opinion. In the same category of suppression, President Trump filed a $15 billion lawsuit against the New York Times, in what can only be described as a vain attempt to stifle free expression of the press.
Jimmy Kimmel was another early target of the administration. On Sept. 17, ABC suspended his late night show “indefinitely” after facing pressure from the federal government. (“Indefinitely” turned out to mean all of six days. After ABC’s stock decline and mounting pushback, Kimmel will return Sept. 23.) The late-night host had speculated that Kirk’s shooter was a MAGA sympathizer. He likely wasn’t, but a factual mistake should be no cause for taking Kimmel off of the air.
Suppression of speech isn’t limited to the national level, either. Hundreds of school teachers have been placed under consequential scrutiny for comments on social media regarding Kirk’s death. As of Sept. 18, just over a week since the assassination, school district employees in at least 20 states had been fired, placed on leave, or resigned following comments made outside of their workplace.
A teacher in the nearby Gardner-Edgerton school district faced intense backlash online by conservative groups advocating for disciplinary action over a social media post she made about Kirk.
The assassination of Charlie Kirk represented not just the worst of this country’s distance from its own promise of free speech, but it sparked an alarming surge of bipartisan hostility toward the core principle itself.
I am actively engaged in a federal lawsuit over freedom of speech. Long before Kirk was assassinated, I reckoned with our nation’s grasp on the First Amendment.
For as disagreeable and hurtful as Kirk’s words were – and they were – there is little more dangerous to democracy than the belief that words can warrant a lethal response. Those who celebrate Kirk’s death as some sort of victory imply the notion that a gun is a justifiable answer to speech. They too endanger a democracy built to protect those who disagree with it.
But they were right about one thing – Kirk’s rhetoric was the epitome of hateful, divisive speech. Among the most harmful reactions to his death I’ve seen is that he was a martyr for the free speech cause. How he died should not erase the hate he spewed while he lived.
Those who ignore Kirk’s well-documented legacies of racism and misogyny in order to cast him as an untarnished champion of free speech not only dangerously rewrite his legacy, but also minimize the value of free speech. If the First Amendment is valuable to the extent that it protects unpopular opinions, then there is no need to sanitize (or gloss over) Kirk’s legacy. Vehement opposition to the content of his speech can coexist with a principled defense of his right to speak. To forget Kirk’s vices is to render the First Amendment less precious.
America’s history is a chronicle of unpopular viewpoints in their most extreme forms. Example after example of dissenting opinions, radicalism, and revolution are mainstays of the American experience. This is exactly why we need the First Amendment.
As has long been said, democracy dies in darkness. In moments like this in which extreme voices find eager audiences, the most powerful argument against false speech is to shed light on its truthful counterpart. Facing a similarly divided nation, Martin Luther King Jr. responded with a principle that still rings true. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness,” King said. “Only light can.”
