Charlie Kirk died on Wednesday. Free society remains on life support.
On Wednesday, my colleagues and I were at a lunch panel on George Washington at UVU. The panel was staged very near the Charlie Kirk event, which was packed with student supporters and protestors. Many of those same students sheltered in place at our event after the assassination. Eventually, we were all escorted by police out of the building. My colleagues and I milled around outside wondering how to access car keys, laptops, and (in my case) a breast pump and bags of milk. Mostly we were just trying to keep each other company. The adrenaline slowly wore off on the drive away from campus.
The next day, I woke up with a feeling of dread. I pondered all day what exactly I’m dreading and why I’m mourning so intensely. I did not personally know Charlie Kirk. I didn’t follow him on social media or listen to his podcast. Of course, I’m sad that his wife lost a husband and his children lost a father. But this assassination is more horrible even than that terrible loss. I’m mourning what Kirk has come to symbolize: free speech.
Charlie Kirk was indisputably brave. He believed in hard conversations among fellow citizens. He believed in the power of ideas freely debated. And oftentimes that meant Kirk stoked contention, promoted reprehensible (to some) ideas and hurt feelings.
Those are acceptable costs of living in a free society — unless, of course, you believe that words are violence. If words are literal harm, then your interlocutor becomes your adversary, whom you must prevent from speaking for the sake of self defense. And thus dies the power of words to settle disputes. Violence remains our sole resort. Charlie Kirk must be assassinated. His “hate (speech)” begat “hate (murder)” because all violence is violence.
This is a most pernicious, destructive logic to a free society. It completely eliminates our ability to live together. I am dreading what awaits our nation if this idea is not defeated.
So I’m going on the offensive. I don’t just want to believe in free speech. I want to inculcate the civic courage it requires and “do” free speech. I will practice it in my community by refusing to allow friendships to shatter over political disagreements — or decay under false pretenses of agreement. I will nurture it in my classroom by keeping space open for my students to debate ideas, to disagree, to discover. I will do my part to keep free speech alive by supporting panels and debates and lectures staged all across the very campus desecrated by political violence. I will refuse to allow the assassin’s bullet to have the final say.
It’s our generation’s turn to prove that our nation can grapple with the most difficult political disputes through reason and persuasion — not through violence and force.