A week before it happened, over 1,000 students at the university where Charlie Kirk was assassinated signed a petition asking that he be banned from speaking. Many others came to the event hoping to see Kirk shouted down—the heckler’s veto. One assassin exercised the ultimate stop to the exercise of free speech: a bullet into Kirk’s neck. Violence against the First Amendment exists on a scale. It only takes a little nudge to move the dial the wrong way.
“The heckler’s veto” refers to a tactic whereby a person or group of people literally shout down a person exercising his First Amendment rights. Free speech isn’t meant to be a prize for the loudest, of course. But the dial moves, and the natural end of such thinking is mob rule enforced by an assassin’s bullet.
There are legitimate ways to challenge speakers: engagement, or ignoring them entirely. The heckler’s veto and its worse successors not only stifle a particular idea, but public discourse in general by discouraging others from sharing controversial ideas. Nobody wants to be shouted down by a mob, online or offline, let alone assaulted or murdered.
The Supreme Court has found that protesters may not unduly interfere with communication between a speaker and an audience, and that the government must control those who threaten or act out disruption rather than to sacrifice the speaker’s First Amendment rights. Balancing the rights of the speaker, the hearers, and protestors is complicated. Shutting down one party entirely in defiance of the rights of the others is illegal. It is a tactic for brownshirts.
Yet it is easy in a divided America to claim the struggle against the monster of the week—fascism, racism, misogyny, white supremacy, whatever—overrides the old norms. Imagine the criminalization, capped by the death penalty, of certain thoughts and beliefs. Then look online (and on CNN and MSNBC) to see the cheering over Kirk’s death, the gleeful belief he deserved to die because of what he believed. Or listen to presidential wanna-be and governor of Illinois J.B. Pritzker, who said of political violence “I think the president’s rhetoric often foments it,” as if Kirk’s death was retribution.
Though it appears the killer’s motives were “anti-fascist” (or something like that), it matters little. Regardless of what some social media post or irrational manifesto might say, his action is in itself a political one on its face, with political results up to and including threatening our most basic right to free speech. It would not matter to history if the Reichstag fire were started by a sloppy janitor smoking or hardcore ideologues; the result as far as society is concerned is the same.
There might even be some room to argue about that if our society were not at present so skewed against the idea of free speech. From 1984 through every dystopian movie, as well as in the sordid history of real dictatorships, the loss of free speech comes from the top down: A powerful man crushes the press, thugs take over TV stations, that sort of thing. Nobody foresaw the loss of free speech would come—by popular demand—from The People themselves.
Yet that seems to be the way things are going. The sixth annual College Free Speech Rankings, released by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) only the day before Kirk was killed, show a continued decline in support for free speech among higher education students. Students of every political persuasion show a deep unwillingness to encounter controversial ideas at an age when they once were typically putting up Che Guevara posters in their dorm rooms.
“This year, students largely opposed allowing any controversial campus speaker, no matter that speaker’s politics,” said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. “Rather than hearing out and then responding to an ideological opponent, both liberal and conservative college students are retreating from the encounter entirely. This will only harm students’ ability to think critically and create rifts between them. We must champion free speech on campus as a remedy to our culture’s deep polarization.” Students now see speech that they oppose as threatening.
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The idea students are running from difficult ideas is bad enough. But the next statistic is chilling: a record 1 in 3 students now hold some level of acceptance—even if only “rarely”—for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech. At my own Midwest alma mater, 76 percent of students say shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus is acceptable. It is thus no surprise that when hundreds gathered at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise for a candlelight vigil honoring Kirk, the peaceful event erupted into violence when a local Black Lives Matter activist rode through the crowd on a scooter shouting obscenities, leading to a physical confrontation.
Giving up on free speech is no longer some sort of out-there viewpoint. A recent poll found that while few Democrats or Republicans support violence against opposition party leaders in general, that rises to about 10 percent for opposition party leaders who enact “harmful or exploitative policies.” The former president of the now-defunct Newseum (itself dedicated to honoring the First Amendment) argues people have developed an alternate understanding of free speech, with students in particular believing “offensive” speech should not be protected, particularly when the offense is directed at groups defined by race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation.
Under such circumstances, political violence to silence speech should not be surprising. It should just be expected. It is not a turning point. It is a point on a spectrum. Regrettably, Charlie Kirk is not likely to be the last to die.
