In the initial aftermath of his shocking murder in 4K, out of respect for Charlie Kirk, his widow, his young children, and his fans, I held off on covering the political ramifications.
(Of course, as evidenced by the antifa goblins celebrating on TikTok minutes after the shooting, not everyone is willing to offer such grace, but that’s the current political environment we’re in.)
However, there will be serious political consequences to his assassination, which are worth considering.
Like 9/11, COVID, and January 6, there is politics pre-Kirk assassination and politics post-Kirk assassination.
You either believe in free speech or you don’t, and it’s times like these that the commitment to the principle is tested.
As I covered earlier today, Attorney General Pam Bondi vowed to deploy the full weight of the federal government to crack down on what she calls “hate speech” — a term which, as the top law enforcement agent in the nation, she should understand doesn’t mean anything legally.
Related: AG Pam Bondi Vows Federal Crackdown on ‘Hate Speech’
Alas, Pam Bondi is far and away not the only political actor interested in leveraging the public outrage over Charlie Kirk’s assassination to generate new censorship powers for the government.
Less than a full day after Kirk’s killing, Rep. Clay Higgins took to X to demand lifetime bans for every “commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk” and further demanded the state revoke their business licenses and driver's licenses:
I’m going to use Congressional authority and every influence with big tech platforms to mandate immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk. If they ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man who dedicated his whole life to delivering respectful conservative truth into the hearts of liberal enclave universities, armed only with a Bible and a microphone and a Constitution… those profiles must come down. So, I’m going to lean forward in this fight, demanding that big tech have zero tolerance for violent political hate content, the user to be banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER. I’m also going after their business licenses and permitting, their businesses will be blacklisted aggressively, they should be kicked from every school, and their drivers licenses should be revoked. I’m basically going to cancel with extreme prejudice these evil, sick animals who celebrated Charlie Kirk’s assassination. I’m starting that today. That is all.
In a bitter irony, now that censors are announcing new speech restrictions in his name, one of the most ardent adherents to free speech absolutism was Charlie Kirk himself, who explicitly denounced in no uncertain terms the weaponization of the nonsense term “hate speech” as a pretext for censorship.
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 3, 2024
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free.
It should go without saying that none of this should be taken as a defense of the antifa goblins in nose rings who crawled out of the woodwork to celebrate in broad daylight the political assassination of a guy who never committed any crime.
Obviously, they are reprehensible — the products of relentless brainwashing in public schools and universities to hate the trifecta of identities, the ultimate evil, that Charlie Kirk ultimately represented: white, male, and Christian.
Related: New Hollywood Hate Flick: White People ‘The Most Dangerous Animal on the Planet’
But consider: had the kind of speech restrictions that many politicians, including Republicans, now openly champion been in effect at the time of Kirk’s execution, we would have never known what these cretins actually think because their expressions would have been suppressed on TikTok or whatever social media platform on which they spew them.
Related: MSNBC News Actor, Race Scholar ‘Confront the First Amendment’s Dark History’
You can’t accurately diagnose a viral infection, literal or figurative, if you don’t have the clinical presentation of the disease to rely on, and you don’t have that relevant information if their views are relegated to fester in the darkness. You need to see these demons out in the light of day to understand what you’re dealing with.
The boiling hatred for Kirk and what he represented would still have existed — but we would not have seen it, we would not be able to expose it, and we would not be able to strategize how to deal with it as a society.
Censorship, aside from being morally wrong and un-American, is never a long-term solution to produce a stable society.
