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.” 

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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.

Charlie Kirk’s “Legacy”? Hate Speech

People are getting fired for quoting Charlie Kirk.

A secret service agent, a Washington Post columnist, university faculty and staff members, Delta, United, and American Airlines employees, are among numerous people across the US who have been fired or put on leave for criticizing Charlie Kirk on social media after his death. 

The articles reporting these suspensions and firings are vague on the actual contents of the posts, but I followed a lot of links and found more details.

One poster quoted Kirk’s own words; in a 2023 podcast, he said that Michelle Obama, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and other Black women “do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously [and] had to go steal a white person’s slot to go be taken somewhat seriously.” Another stated that Kirk “spewed hate and racism on his show.” Another wrote, “Hate begets hate. ZERO sympathy.”

Stephen King was pressured to apologize after he faced online backlash after he posted that Kirk “advocated stoning gays to death. Just sayin.’” In 2024, Kirk said, “In a lesser referenced part of the same scripture is in Leviticus 18 is that, ‘that shall lay with another man, shall be stoned to death.’ Just sayin’,” and called this passage “God’s perfect law.”

**EDIT: I thought I linked to the video with Kirk´s words, but apparently I failed to. The video I quoted from had these comments just after the 53 minute mark, and he was not speaking in response to “Ms. Rachel.” I’ve scrolled through dozens of his shows from 2024 — he really does say awful stuff about all kinds of people, not just gays — trying to find it again. I can’t.**

An Oklahoma teacher was fired for writing, “Charlie Kirk died the same way he lived: bringing out the worst in people,” which supervisors called “disgraceful rhetoric.”

At the University of Mississippi, a staff member summarized Kirk’s career:

The university released a statement calling these “hurtful, insensitive comments” that violate its “institutional values of civility, fairness, and respecting the dignity of each person.”

I missed the part where Charlie Kirk respected the dignity of anyone he disagreed with. 

Trans people: “a social contagion.” 

Gay activists: “the alphabet mafia.” 

Martin Luther King, Jr: “an awful person.” 

The Civil Rights Act: “a huge mistake.” 

Empathy: “a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage.”

And perhaps most ironically: “I think it’s worth to have a cost of … some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”

Kirk’s organization created the “Professor Watch List,” which provides names, institutions, and photographs of professors reported by someone who disagreed with them, leading to harassment and death threats. 

Why Democrats are celebrating Kirk’s “legacy” of “good-faith debate” is beyond me.

An Open Letter

I've seen several compelling pieces of writing today addressed to white people, asking us to figure out how to stop the shootings. People of color shot by police. Hands in the air. Evidence planted, testimony perjured. Boys shot in the back while fleeing.

I don't know what to do. So I wrote a letter.

Dear Secretary Clinton,

I'm writing to ask you to take a strong and vocal stance against police shootings of black and disabled men, and to make it an issue you will attempt to address substantively within the first 100 days of your presidency.

I don't know how to change a culture, within police departments as well as within our broader United States, in which white police officers routinely find it appropriate to shoot young men -- boys, even -- of color.

I do know that it has to stop. 

You will, I hope, soon be in a position to lead a national dialogue of reconceiving the role of the police in communities, retraining individuals and groups, and beginning to heal some of the rifts between black and white individuals and communities in our country.

Please make this a central part of your commitment to the people of the United States, if elected.

Thank you.

Tomorrow, I'll send versions of this letter to my local and national representatives. 

Please, if you're reading this, take a moment to write a letter as well. Write to your local chief of police, write to your state lawmakers, write to whoever you think is in a position to make a difference.

I Am Afraid of Donald Trump

In 1930, a lot of people thought an Austrian guy named Adolf was a buffoon who couldn't possibly take power and do any damage. His mannerisms were comical and his murderous fantasies would never go anywhere.

In the 1970s a lot of people thought an actor named Ronald who'd been in a movie with a monkey was a joke as a presidential candidate.

Ronald was elected and began a series of actions that turned American politics hard to the right. For one thing, his deregulation of broadcast media enabled Fox "News" to air misleading reports and outright lies under the tagline, "fair and balanced reporting." In that phrase, only the word "and" is accurate.

Fox and their yellow-journalist ilk are serving the same purpose that newspapers of that name served in the US in the 1920s, when people were comparing Jews to rats and Jim Crow laws were in full effect.

And in 2015, a lot of people think Donald Trump is a buffoon who can't be elected, but he's at the top of a pile of buffoonish candidates for the Republican presidential nominee.

And his rhetoric sounds like it's coming straight out of Nazi Germany.

His followers beat up a man at one of his campaign events who yelled, "Black Lives Matter." That sounds like Brownshirts.

He's been telling people he wants Muslims to wear identity badges. That sounds like Hitler.

He's been telling people Mexicans want to come to the US and take "our women."

He told Carly Fiorina to "quit interrupting" during the most recent Republican candidates' debate. Hitler's plan for women? Kinder, Kuche, Kirche: Children, Kitchen, Church.

If Trump is elected, he wants an America with only white men in power. He wants a society ruled by fear and suspicion. Stasi, anyone?

And he has a lot of supporters.

So did Hitler. A lot of people who said, after the Holocaust, "But we didn't know." "But we were told they were criminals." A lot of ordinary Germans who acquiesced in Hitler's program to round up Jews and gays, communists and Romani, the disabled and the chronically ill.

Meanwhile, here in the US, we rounded up Japanese people. People who had immigrated decades earlier, even their children, on the suspicion that they might be enemy spies.

It took a while for the Germans to figure out what to teach their children. When my mother started school in the 1940s, history ended before the Holocaust. But they've figured it out. Germany is taking 800,000 Syrian refugees. It's not going to be easy, and some people are complaining, but by and large the people are reaching out and welcoming them.

Maybe it has to do with the fact that Germany lived through a horrible war in their own country. Being bombed, having family members disappear, losing basic infrastructures, the stuff the Syrians are living through today, is part of living memory in Germany.

The US proposes to resettle 10,000 Syrian refugees. A tiny quantity. Even if they all came to New York City they would be a tiny fraction of the population, not enough to fill even a square mile.

But Trump is stoking people's fears. Despite an incredibly rigorous process of review, taking up to two years, for every refugee, Trump is insisting that President Obama wants to let terrorists into the country.

Trump has a platform, and he has a lot of willing ears. And I don't have any idea how to persuade his followers that he is a dangerous demagogue being deeply irresponsible with his divisive rhetoric.

He is also peddling lies. He is telling his followers that Obama proposes to resettle 250,000 Syrians, a figure apparently invented out of whole cloth. He claims that 97 percent of African-Americans who die of gun violence in the US are killed by other African-Americans, a claim invented by neo-Nazis whose symbol closely resembles the swastika.

I don't know where to begin in terms of asking people not to believe his fear-mongering mistruths. If you believe Trump, and you don't fact-check his outrageous claims, why would you believe me?

I am not afraid of Syrians. I am afraid of Donald Trump.

I Fear the Politicians, Not the Terrorists

I grieve for Paris, having visited there last December, and fallen in love during nearly a week of long walks, fabulous art and architecture, and an awesome playground for kids of all ages. I grieve for the Parisians, who will develop the sixth sense that New Yorkers have had since 9/11, knowing when terror threats are up just by the posture of the police officers.

But I'm more frightened by politicians like Donald Trump and Chris Christie than I am about the possibility of another attack on New York City. I'm terrified by the fear of the foreigner that they're stoking, by the fact that they're telling the American people that we should be afraid of Muslims.

I've been trying to write this post without waving the flag of the personal, but I can't seem to get beyond it. My grandfather fought on the wrong side of World War II. He may have commanded a Nazi tank, but the family stories are vague and full of conflict. I could go to the archives in Berlin, but I'm not sure I'm ready to face the truth, whatever it may be.

But this I know: I can not sit silently when people demonize an entire religion, an entire race, an entire people. And I can not sit silently, because of who I am. Because for my whole life I have lived with inherited guilt, with the nagging fear that fascism is somehow part of my genetic code. At the same time, I have lived my entire life feeling a sense of responsibility to speak out against bigotry of any form.

But how to speak out against Trump and Christie and the twenty-odd other governors who have said they don't want any Syrians in their states? I don't even know where to start. I try to think in words and I can only hear a keening in my brain, a mad banshee scream of terror.