Charlie Kirk’s Legacy: “Free” Speech*

I told myself I wasn’t going to spend any more time thinking about Charlie Kirk, but here I am.

Opposing what Kirk stood for is in no way “celebrating” his death, a charge leveled at hundreds of people who have been fired, disciplined, or investigated over their opinions about him (and at me, over what I wrote two weeks ago, which mostly just quoted the man himself).

To the contrary: it’s important to make an honest assessment of the causes he supported, both rhetorically and financially. As Nikole Hannah-Jones cogently argues, “The mainstreaming of Charlie Kirk demonstrates that espousing open and explicit bigotry no longer relegates one to the fringe of political discourse.” 

When I was a teenager in the late 1970s, an aunt got me a subscription to a magazine that counseled young women that if we wanted to get dates, we should learn to ask questions, listen with interest (or at least pretend), defer to guys’ opinions — and certainly never contradict or correct them. Oh, and “smile, honey.”

Charlie Kirk, on Taylor Swift’s engagement: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband… you’re not in charge.”

Christine Craft was a TV news anchor whose boss demoted her because, he said, she “was too old, too unattractive, did not defer to men and did not hide her intelligence to make men look smarter.” This was in 1981 … not 1950 or 1881. 

She sued, and won; a judge overturned the ruling; she sued and won again, an appeals court struck down the ruling, and with it the jury’s proposed $325,000 award. The Supremes declined to hear the case. Sandra Day O’Connor dissented.

That was four decades ago, ancient history, things are different now, right?

Sigh.

Kirk: Young women should get married, “submit” to their husbands, and “have more children than you can afford.”

By the mid 1980s, respectful use of language was derided as “political correctness.” More recently, #blacktwitter and #metoo moved to hold people responsible for their words and deeds; angry people who didn’t like being called out for bigotry and sexual assault complained that “cancel culture” deprived them of their right to free speech.

Put another way: if people disagree with them, they think they’re being being censored. 

Disagreement is not an assault on free speech.

Having freedom of speech means you don’t get jailed for what you say. But it also doesn’t mean you get to dictate how people react.

Kirk: Women who are still single in their early 30s get “depressed, suicidal, anxious, and lonely” because they’re “not as desirable in the dating market”; so they “lash out … by voting democrat.” 

=====

The Trotula, an influential handbook of medieval medicine: Virgins of childbearing age who don’t (get married and) have intercourse will get sick. This can also happen to widows (pdf, §47, p. 85).

Studies of discourse and language have demonstrated that in mixed groups, men talk more than women. But everyone thinks women talk more, because patriarchy.

When they get interrupted, men fight and yell to finish making their point.

Men interrupt more frequently than women, and they usually interrupt women; when women interrupt, they also interrupt other women by an even wider margin than men. Kirk regularly cut off his interlocutors.

Kirk didn’t, in fact, foster intellectual curiosity or collaborative learning. 

His definition of “debate” meant interrupting and hectoring his interlocutors, peppering them with irrelevant questions, and changing the subject if he didn’t like how a conversation was going. He lied liberally bolstered his arguments with things that weren’t true. In short, he fought to win, not to learn or to persuade.

The folks who think Kirk’s death represents a blow to free speech seem to have forgotten, if they ever recognized, that he actively encouraged harrassment of university faculty via the “Professor Watch List.” His followers listened: numerous professors got threatening messages as a result of being named on the site.

The right’s claim that people who disagree with Charlie Kirk (or simply quote him accurately) are celebrating his death, and their calls to discipline, demote, or fire those folks, suggests that they feel/fear speech opposing their agenda as if it were an assault.

*Free speech, it seems, is for Kirk and others like him.  Not for those who disagree.

“