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Transcript
Let's talk about the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Charlie Kirk was a conservative, far right influencer, and the founder of Turning Point USA, a youth organization bankrolled by a bunch of billionaires, and which gave him quite a bit of political clout in the United States.
He was murdered a few days ago as he was carrying out one of his usual "conservative DESTROYS liberal 17 year old kids."
He was a "debate bro", one of those unfuckable hate mongers that go to colleges and try to own 17 year old kids and who, I think, have been extremely damaging to the debate, because they have transformed political discussions, not into a search for truth, but instead into just an opportunity to own your opponents. They have to transformed politics into a spectator sport in which you just go see if your side wins.
Of course, that doesn't mean that there wasn't any bravery in what he did. As someone who has, sometimes faced opposition in person, not just online, I know that it is challenging to be in environments where people do not want you. So there's no question that this guy had the testicular fortitude to go and show up and and engage in this sort of thing, even if I think that it was an idiotic pursuit.
Nevertheless, I don't think he was a good person.
I have heard a lot of defenses of him saying that, despite everything, he was, first and foremost, a father and a husband. But a lot of people who die are fathers and husbands. Reproduction is not in and of itself, any kind of a testament as to whether or not you're a good person. Cockroaches reproduce, bacteria reproduce, amoebas reproduce... the fact that an individual has managed to have kids does not mean that they're a good person. Of course, Kirk might have been a good father. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any indication that he did not love his wife or his children, and I am sure that his family misses him deeply. I feel sincerely sorry his kids in particular, as well as for his wife and his parents, because it is not easy to lose somebody that you love.
But, of course, the fact that somebody is good or nice in their private life says nothing about who they are in public, particularly in those spaces where they have an influence. For that judgement we need to look at what Charlie did, which was to push forward the extremely damaging and dangerous ideology of Christian nationalism, extreme, far right capitalism, and racism and homophobia. That doesn't mean that every take he ever had was wrong, or that every view that he held was mistaken; but it shows that all of his position seems to have been underpinned by a number of terrible philosophies.
Charlie Kirk did not believe in freedom, certainly not freedom from the state and, in fact, he believed in an authoritarian government that could repress people, waxing poetic about the possibility of public executions.
So no, he was not a good person.
But let's go back to the immediate aftermath of Charlie Kirk's murder, and to the initial understanding that he had probably been killed by a left winger because of his views. What I saw online were people celebrating his murder, saying that freedom of speech did not mean freedom from consequences.
The people who claim "freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences" are, as a rule, absolute imbeciles. And I don't mean that, figuratively. I mean that that if you say "freedom of speech does not mean freedom of consequences," you are an imbecile, and someone who probably did not get enough oxygen at birth. The reason why I say this is because it's a completely meaningless phrase, since it leaves out the most important part: What are those consequences?
Are they trying to say that freedom of speech doesn't mean that you shouldn't get to get killed for your speech? Because, if that is the argument, then the murder of people like Martin Luther King, the massacre of the staff of the Charlie Hebdo magazine, the attempted assassination of Salman Rushdie, the decapitation of Samuel Paty in France, the murder of the of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, as well as the assassination of dissidents in China, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and every other place, are somehow justified because their freedom of speech didn't free them from "the consequences" of their speech.
This is why I say that it's an absolutely stupid take that deserves mockery whenever you see it. Whenever somebody says this, call them a fucking idiot and then prod them as to what exactly they mean.
Do they mean that there are certain types of speech that justify murder?
Because if they believe that speech justifies murder, then they probably also believe that you should be imprisoned for your views. After all, being in prison for a year is better than getting shot in the fucking neck. So if you believe that people should be shot for their views, you are probably okay with the idea of punishing them by sending them to prison, silencing them, or censoring them, or letting the government decide what can or cannot be said.
So, yes, it's true that speech can have consequences, but we need to be clear as to what consequences are legitimate. Murder and violence cannot be considered legitimate consequences, particularly when the speech is coming from a person with no actual political power. Although it is true that Charlie Kirk was an influential far right conservative in the United States, the fact remains that he was not part of the government, he was not in charge of an army, he was not carrying out the genocide in Gaza (although he supported it), and he was not carrying out the brutal repression of immigrants in the United States (which he also supported). So killing him did absolutely nothing to stop any of those things. This wasn't Operation Valkyrie. It was just the murder of a person because they didn't like the things he had to say.
There has been a sort of hagiographic analysis of Charlie Kirk, bordering on religious fanaticism, that I think should be a subject for some sort of psychological study, showing Charlie Kirk standing next to Jesus. Insane takes from a bunch of people who are openly against empathy, who justify the genocide of the Palestinians, and who somehow also believe in the magic and wizardry of a poor peasant who asked people to turn the other cheek. But without entering into that hagiography, or even into fake lamentations over the death of someone that I did not think was a good person, I still think that it is important to not celebrate the killing of Charlie Kirk.
This isn't just because murder, in general, is not OK. It's not just because, unquestionably, his wife, his children, his parents are all people who are suffering enormously at the loss of somebody that they loved. Because even if you didn't care about his family, and even if Charlie Kirk had no children, no family, and had just been a lone nut who somehow managed to amass a large internet following, his murder would have still been wrong.
Political violence like the killing of Charlie Kirk only increases repression. So if you thought that killing him would lead to positive changes in the United States, the answer is the exact opposite. Killing him only empowered the base of those people whose views you already consider to be bad and dangerous and who, more importantly, are now going to use his death to justify more and more repression. In fact, we can already see that move, as people are openly calling for the social death of those who have expressed joy or glee at the death of Charlie Kirk, and even calls for dismantling the opposition to the Trump administration.
There are some historical precedents for this. Just to use it as a parallel (and not as a direct comparison with Kirk), when Horst Wessel, a member of the Nazi SA, was murdered by a Dutch communist, the Nazi Party used his death as a propaganda tool and as a way to increase repression against their opponents. This violence is bound to come back so, from that perspective, a purely pragmatic understanding of the consequences of your actions, doing something like the murder of Charlie Kirk serves no useful purpose. On the contrary: It only makes things worse.
But pragmatism isn't the only reason. At some point in your life you need to reach first principles. You need to reach the understanding that certain things are wrong, regardless of the people to whom they happen. So you cannot then justify the killing of somebody on the opposing side as a result of their views, because, regardless of what you might believe in, there are people who think that your views are hateful, aggressive, violent, and a justification for your killing. So if you're willing to give yourself that right to use violence in order to silence others, you need to understand that that same argument will be used to repress you. And in that never-ending escalation of violence we will see the end of civilization and the death of society as we know it.
We don't need to actually hypothesize on this point: One of the arguments that are often used against freedom of speech is the rise of the Nazis, arguing that their hateful speech is what made their rise possible, leading eventually to the holocaust. However, that is an incorrect historical reading. As Nadine Strossen notes in her book "Hate: Why we must oppose it with Free Speech not Censorship", explains how the rise of the Nazis, despite popular misconceptions, was not made possible by their hate speech, but by the unchecked use of political violence.
"“The major problem with Germany’s response to rising Nazism was not that the Nazis enjoyed too much free speech, but that the Nazis literally got away with murder. In effect, they stole free speech from everyone else, including anti- Nazis, Jews, and other minorities. As Aryeh Neier commented in his classic book about the Skokie case: “The lesson of Germany in the 1920s is that a free society cannot be . . . maintained if it will not act . . . forcefully to punish political violence. It is as if no effort had been made in the United States to punish the murderers of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr. . . . and . . . other victims” of violence during the civil rights movement.”"
You have to understand that violence like this is a Faustian Bargain will be used to justify your destruction and your repression. You need to stick to these first principles of believing in freedom of speech without loopholes for violence or for governments.
