Simon Wilson is an award-winning senior writer covering politics, the climate crisis, transport, housing, urban design and social issues. He joined the Herald in 2018.
Subscribe to listen
Access to Herald Premium articles require a Premium subscription. Subscribe now to listen.
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, speaks at an event in Detroit on June 14, 2024. Photo / Nic Antaya, The New York Times
Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, speaks at an event in Detroit on June 14, 2024. Photo / Nic Antaya, The New York Times
THE FACTS
American activist Charlie Kirk was killed on a Utah university campus last week.
Kirk, 31, was a leading supporter of US President Donald Trump.
He was outspoken in his criticism of feminism, Black Lives Matter and other “liberal” movements.
Why has the killing of the campus activist Charlie Kirk been framed as a “free speech” issue?
The political assassinations of John F. Kennedy in 1963, Malcolm X in 1965 and Martin Luther King jnr and Robert Kennedy in 1968 weren’t seen like that. They were attackson the substance of what the murdered leaders stood for. Civil rights, especially.
Any act of political violence like the killing of Kirk is deplorable.
But America’s democracy is sick now, one symptom of which is the way it protects a gun-violence culture that would be abhorrent in almost every other democracy on the planet. It’s an awful irony that Kirk himself did not see the problem.
“I think it’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” he said in April 2023, at an event organised by his group Turning Point USA. “That is a prudent deal. It is rational.”
This is the irrational view of a person who thinks bad things happen only to other people.
Immediately after Kirk’s shooting, “free speech” organisations leapt to define the issue.
But NBC has reported several people in America lost their jobs in media and elsewhere for exercising their free speech to criticise Kirk.
Jonathan Ayling of New Zealand’s Free Speech Union was in this paper the very next day making his case, and more pieces arguing the same thing have followed.
Ayling wrote: “Kirk was polarising. No doubt. But to focus only on the substance of his positions is to miss the larger point. His assassination ... is about whether we are still committed to the principle that disagreements are settled by words, not violence.”
Charlie Kirk speaking at Utah Valley University on September 10, shortly before he was murdered. Photo / Salt Lake Tribune/Getty Images
It’s not the sort of thing that people said about Martin Luther King. The substance of his positions was entirely the point, because those positions could be proudly advocated by anyone, did not need excusing as “polarising” and upset the established order.
Ayling continued: “The reality is clear: free speech is the safety valve of a free society. It lets grievances be aired, arguments tested and bad ideas exposed. If you shut it down, pressure builds, ultimately bursting in fatal ways.”
This is a standard defence of free speech and it is complete nonsense. The free speech exercised by Kirk wasn’t a safety valve. I believe it stirred hatred, in just the same way as the free speech of every tyrant and malcontent with a megaphone has always done.
US President Donald Trump’s free speech helped encourage an insurrection against the American Government on January 6, 2021.
And yet free speech is precious. I believe that. Not because of the fatuous reasoning that it’s a “safety valve”, but because the clash of ideas is a dynamic of humanity and progress.
And because if we wish to claim the right of free speech for ourselves, we must allow it for others too. Something, as noted above, with which Kirk did not agree.
“Free speech does two vital things,” Ayling wrote. “It helps us discover truth in unexpected places. And it reveals the fool, the dangerous and the deluded for what they are.”
Honestly, if that were true, wouldn’t Trump now be doing nothing but playing golf and harassing women?
US President Donald Trump on the golf course. Photo / Getty Images
“It’s better to learn this by listening to them speak than having to face their aggression,” wrote Ayling. But hatred, when preached, breeds aggression.
This is a dark contradiction in democratic and humanist life and we should confront it, not pretend it doesn’t exist.
The movement to suppress hate speech and the demand for “safe spaces” are attempts to face up to this. The issue is complex and sometimes the proposed solutions veer too much to one side or the other. But it doesn’t help to pretend that because free speech is precious, we should ignore the harm it can do.
Without a shred of irony, Ayling wrote, “It is not those who argue for free speech who make society unsafe. The real danger comes from those who treat ideas as threats to be extinguished.”
But to me, Kirk was an expert at both those things: making society unsafe and trying to extinguish ideas. I believe he was a menace to democracy in America.
Here is some of what Kirk used his God-given free speech to say.
On his radio show and elsewhere he promoted the same “Great Replacement Theory” that motivated the Christchurch mosque murderer, Brenton Tarrant. On the same show he called Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the New York Democratic primary this year an outrage because “Muslims did 9/11”.
He believed in political violence. In 2022, when Paul Pelosi, the 82-year-old husband of then-Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, had his skull broken during a home invasion by a man with a hammer, Kirk called for “some amazing patriot” to post bail for the suspect (Rolling Stone, October 2022).
Here is something he said about race in January last year: “If I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, ‘Boy, I hope he’s qualified’.”
Here is something he said about race and women. On his radio show he said four prominent black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. You had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously”.
When Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift announced their engagement in August, Charlie Kirk said he hoped the pop star would reject feminism and submit to her husband. Photo / Supplied
When Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement in August, Kirk said: “This is something that I hope will make Taylor Swift more conservative. Engage in reality more … Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.”
Maybe lots of people think some of these things. None of us is without prejudice. But when powerful people say these things they legitimise the harm they can do. Swift, presumably, can look after herself. But what Kirk said about her invites his followers to treat the women in their lives as less than equal.
Why are we being asked to ignore this? In many ways, free speech has never been stronger. Social media and the platforming of bigots in free speech’s name have seen to that.
It’s bad enough that the free-speech clarion turns bigots into martyrs. What’s worse, though, is that it distracts us from the things that really do threaten democracy, especially but not only in America.
This includes Trump, the mainstream political party that capitulated to him and the highly organised groups around him.
It also includes the social-media billionaires who have deliberately and possibly irreversibly poisoned our public discourse.
And it includes the corporates that are winning the battle not only to destroy climate science, but to enrich themselves by making the climate crisis worse.
Free speech is the best friend of all these enemies of democracy. It empowers them.
So, yes, let’s defend it. Free speech is important. But let’s remember what everyone understood when Martin Luther King was killed: the real issue is what it’s used for.
This column has been amended since its initial publication to clarify that one of Kirk’s comments referred to by the author related specifically to “four prominent black women”.
