It’s hard to grasp the magnitude of the emerging threat to free speech in the United States.
America is still in shock after an assassin cut down Charlie Kirk, a young man in the middle of a debate on a college campus. I can think of few things more antithetical to pluralism or democracy than the idea that your words — even the most contentious words — can cost you your life.
Making matters worse, the Trump administration is using Kirk’s death as a pretext to threaten a sweeping crackdown on President Trump’s political and cultural opponents. Pam Bondi, the attorney general, appeared as a guest on a podcast hosted by Katie Miller and promised to target speech she deems hateful and said: “There’s free speech and then there’s hate speech. And there’s no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie.”
Conservative lawyers have spent years litigating to protect the free expression rights of private businesses, but when an Office Depot employee refused to print posters advertising a Kirk vigil (she was later fired), Bondi told Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, “If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that.”
Both statements were wildly wrong. There is no First Amendment exception for so-called hate speech, and the Supreme Court recently held, by a 6-to-3 majority, that businesses are not, in fact, required to create expressive content that violates their values.
Bondi later backtracked on her threat to go after those who engage in hate speech. “If you want to be a hateful person and simply say hateful things,” she said in a statement, “that is your right to do so.”
Someone needs to tell Trump. Rather than rebuking Bondi, he turned up the volume, telling ABC’s Jonathan Karl that Bondi would “probably go after people like you” because “you have a lot of hate in your heart.” He also bragged that he’d collected a $16 million settlement from ABC “for a form of hate speech.”
He said these words hours after filing a $15 billion lawsuit against The New York Times, as part of an obvious (and fruitless) effort to intimidate The Times into shifting its coverage to please him.
At the same time, Vice President JD Vance encouraged Americans to report their fellow citizens to their employers if they celebrated Kirk’s death online. “Call them out, and hell, call their employer,” he said, and then added, laughably, “We don’t believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility.”
Does anyone actually believe that Vance believes in civility? Much less Trump? Remember, Vance is the man who said in 2021, “I think our people hate the right people,” as if there is any “right” person to hate. Can anyone forget how he hyped the false stories of Haitian immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio?
The onslaught against dissenting speech never stops. Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, was interviewed on the right-wing influencer Benny Johnson’s podcast and appeared to threaten fines or revoke broadcast licenses over what he called “news distortion” and specifically mentioned — of all people — Jimmy Kimmel. Hours after Carr’s statements, ABC pulled Kimmel’s show “indefinitely.”
Kimmel had gotten something wrong on his late-night TV show. In his monologue, he said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.”
The best available evidence indicates that the shooter was not MAGA at all. But a late-night comic’s mistakes are not a cause for the federal government to bully a network into canceling his show. (Plus, as the attack on Kimmel demonstrates, the second part of Kimmel’s statement was correct.)
Kirk’s assassination and Trump’s multifront crackdown are taking place against the backdrop of diminishing popular support for free speech.
On Friday, Kevin Wallsten, a political science professor at California State, Long Beach, wrote in The Wall Street Journal about the disturbing findings of a study he conducted. Luckily, Wallsten found, nearly 80 percent of Americans still believe that violence is “never acceptable” to stop free speech. Sadly, this percentage goes down in every generation — 93 percent of baby boomers and 86 percent of Gen X-ers reject violence, but only 71 percent of millennials and 58 percent of Gen Z-ers agree.
This statistic helps explain why there were people who actually celebrated Kirk’s death — they have rejected free speech so thoroughly that they were happy to see a bullet stop a conversation. They believe Kirk’s words merited a violent response and relished in the deadly results. The texts of the shooting suspect — in which he allegedly told his roommate, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out” — suggest that he was one such person.
There is nothing new under the sun. Readers of this newsletter know that I often use the past to help illuminate the present. It turns out that we’re not inventing new arguments so much as endlessly rehashing old fights. Sometimes the best arguments for the present are also the best arguments from the past.
And that brings me, once again, to Frederick Douglass, the great abolitionist, and a fateful December Monday in Boston in 1860.
Douglass planned to hold a public discussion with fellow abolitionists at Tremont Temple Baptist Church, but a mob arrived, shouted down Douglass, and stormed the stage. Authorities did nothing to protect the event. In other words, the mob won that round.
Six days later, Douglass delivered a preplanned speech at Boston’s Music Hall. At the end of his remarks, he added a short statement about free speech, his “Plea for Free Speech in Boston,” which is the single most compelling argument for free speech that I’ve ever read.
Douglass’s plea features three key points, each building on the last, that rebuke censorship — regardless of whether the censorship comes from a president or a leaderless mob.
First, Douglass argues, “No right was deemed by the fathers of the government more sacred than the right of speech. It was in their eyes, as in the eyes of all thoughtful men, the great moral renovator of society and government.”
One of the most grievous developments in modern American politics is the conviction among many that freedom of speech is somehow an obstacle to diversity and inclusion — that it is somehow necessary to stifle “offensive” or “hateful speech” to achieve positive social change.
We see this mind-set reflected in campus speech codes and bias response teams, for example. College administrators — through well-meaning efforts to make campuses more welcoming for historically marginalized and underrepresented students — decided to stifle speech that angered or upset people on the basis of race, sex, gender, sexuality and other protected characteristics.
But American history teaches us that free speech is indispensable to justice and reform. For the first 149 years of the American experiment, Americans actually enjoyed very few federal protections for free speech. The Bill of Rights applied only to the federal government, and thus states and local governments were largely free to fashion their own free speech rules.
It wasn’t until 1925 that the Supreme Court held that the First Amendment’s free speech protections applied to state governments as well. Now, ask yourself this: Is America a more or less just nation than it was in 1925? Is it more or less hospitable to historically marginalized groups?
The civil rights movement was empowered in part by First Amendment rulings from the Supreme Court. As Representative John Lewis said, “without the press, the civil rights movement would have been a bird without wings.” The same can be said for all the other freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment.
The Rev. Walter Fauntroy, a civil-rights leader and one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, once told me that he credited “almighty God and the First Amendment” for the remarkable legal victories of the 1960s.
“The First Amendment gave us the ability to speak,” Fauntroy said, “and almighty God softened men’s hearts.”
Second, precisely because of its awesome power to move hearts and minds, Douglass argued that free speech, “of all rights, is the dread of tyrants. It is the right which they first of all strike down.”
“Thrones, dominions, principalities and powers, founded in injustice and wrong,” Douglass said, “are sure to tremble, if men are allowed to reason of righteousness, temperance, and of a judgment to come in their presence.”
Douglass, who escaped from slavery in Maryland as a young man, knew the inherent brutality and intolerance of authoritarians. Those who seek to dominate others do not like to be challenged. Their professed entitlement to rule collapses under even the most basic scrutiny. So they seek to stifle the argument, to prevent the challenge in the first place.
Third, Douglass moves his analysis from the speaker to the audience. “Equally clear is the right to hear,” he said, “to suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.”
When a mob storms a stage, when a president persecutes the press or when an assassin’s bullet brutally silences a debate, they are violating the rights of the speaker, and they are violating the rights of every other person present and of every other person who may want to hear the speech.
This means I have the most direct and personal interest in protecting another person’s right to speak — it preserves my ability to hear your arguments, consider your viewpoint and perhaps change my own ideas or actions. But I can benefit from hearing opposing speech even when I’m not persuaded, even when I’m more convinced that my positions are correct.
In fact, it can be important to hear even the worst speech. The value of a virtue is sometimes most obvious in the presence of extreme vice. The contrast helps illuminate our cause. After all, truth is more beautiful when it dispels a lie, and love is at its most potent when it confronts hate.
I want to close with a stark warning from another champion of American liberty, Justice Robert Jackson. He wrote the majority opinion in West Virginia v. Barnette, a magnificent 1943 Supreme Court case striking down a West Virginia school board rule that required students to salute the flag.
Jackson’s opinion is famous for its soaring ode to freedom of conscience. “If there is any fixed star in our constitutional constellation,” he wrote, “it is that no official, high or petty, can prescribe what shall be orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion or other matters of opinion, or force citizens to confess by word or act their faith therein.”
The case, however, should be just as famous for its warnings. Jackson was writing in the midst of a great struggle against totalitarian evil, and he knew that the road to despotism was paved with censorship.
Jackson — who went on to serve as a prosecutor in the Nuremberg trials — observed that, and when “first and moderate methods to attain unity have failed, those bent on its accomplishment must resort to an ever-increasing severity.” And then, when “governmental pressure toward unity becomes greater, so strife becomes more bitter as to whose unity it shall be.”
Yet the attempt at forced conformity is all for naught. History teaches us, as Jackson went on to say, that the “ultimate futility of such attempts to compel coherence is the lesson of every such effort from the Roman drive to stamp out Christianity as a disturber of its pagan unity, the Inquisition, as a means to religious and dynastic unity, the Siberian exiles as a means to Russian unity, down to the fast failing efforts of our present totalitarian enemies.”
Even futile efforts can carry a great cost. As Charlie Kirk’s family prepares to bury a husband, a son and a father of two young children, as the surviving family members of hundreds of other victims of political violence remember the fathers and mothers and children they lost, and as many more Americans endure threats and wonder if they’re next, Justice Jackson’s words should echo in our ears:
“Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.”
Some other things I did
I didn’t send a newsletter last week and instead wrote two columns reflecting on this terrible moment.
In the first, which we published the morning after Kirk was killed, I argued that political violence fosters hatred, and hatred is the greatest threat to our Republic:
When I speak on college campuses, I’m often asked what single thing worries me most about American politics and culture. I have an easy answer — it’s hatred. Even vast political differences can be managed when people acknowledge the humanity and dignity of their opponents. At the same time, however, small conflicts can spiral into big ones when hatred and vengeance take away our eyes and ears.
Every threat, every assault, every shooting, every murder — and certainly every political assassination — builds the momentum of hate and fear.
You can look at the history of American conflict and unrest and see the same pattern time and again. What starts as a political difference becomes a blood feud the instant someone is hurt or killed. And so each act of political violence has a double consequence. It shatters families, and — over time — it breaks nations.
The second asked Americans to stop pointing fingers at their political opponents and instead look for the dangerous extremists in their midst:
On Friday, Megan McArdle, a columnist at The Washington Post, wrote on X, “One thing that’s clear from the online debate over whether the left or the right is more violent is that many people have an encyclopedic command of the attacks perpetrated by the other side, and have memory-holed attacks by their co-ideologists.”
She’s right, and this isn’t a harmless error. If we’re convinced that political violence comes from only one side of the divide, then the temptation toward punitive authoritarianism is overwhelming. “They” are evil and violent, and “they” must be crushed.
If, however, we accurately understand that America has an immense problem with violent extremism on both sides of the ideological aisle — even if, at any given moment, one side is worse than the other — then the answer lies in reconciliation, not domination. In fact, it’s the will to dominate that magnifies the crisis and radicalizes our opponents.
On Saturday we published the latest round-table conversation with my colleagues Michelle Cottle and Jamelle Bouie. During the conversation, I tried to explain why I haven’t been spending the days since Kirk’s assassination highlighting all of our many points of disagreement:
When I wrote my piece that was published Thursday morning about Kirk and about the assassination — Charlie and I had a lot of disagreements; we represent very different parts of the broader American right. There were a lot of disagreements there. But I chose not to highlight those in that discussion.
I mentioned that we had disagreements, but I didn’t foreground them for a very specific reason: When you’re looking at the shock, horror and trauma of what just unfolded on that college campus, the gravity of that is so much greater than my political disagreements. I didn’t want to emphasize those in this moment, because I wanted to rest on the most important things — the gravity of the loss of a husband and father, and also how and where it happened.
More:
The fact that it occurred on campus, in front of thousands of students, and to a person who, as I wrote in my piece, is almost omnipresent in the social media feeds of politically engaged Gen Zers — all of that matters. It’s very difficult to find a Gen Zer who pays any attention to politics and doesn’t know who Charlie Kirk is. Virtually impossible. Taken together, I think those things make this a more seminal cultural event than we might otherwise think.
Thank you for being a subscriber
If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here.
Have feedback? Send me a note at [email protected].
You can also follow me on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
David French is an Opinion columnist, writing about law, culture, religion and armed conflict. He is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom and a former constitutional litigator. His most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” You can follow him on Threads (@davidfrenchjag).
The post The Dangers of the Charlie Kirk Aftermath appeared first on New York Times.
