Free Speech is dead. Long live cancel culture.
Rolling Stone reports on the firing of Matthew Dowd from MSNBC for saying that “hate speech begets hate” about Charlie Kirk on Wednesday. There has actually been a slew of firings and suspensions all over the country of people who were improperly irreverent about the death of Charlie Kirk on social media. I’m not kidding. The article points out just how hypocritical this is:
The irony of this termination and a slew of similar firings over the past 24 hours is that Kirk and Turning Point USA, the conservative youth group he co-founded, branded themselves as the ultimate defenders of free speech. In a June debate at the Oxford Union, during a tour of the U.K. in which he condemned the country for its “totalitarian” censorship of its citizens, he argued, “You should be allowed to say outrageous things.” Last year, Kirk posted on X: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment. Keep America free.”
Yeah right. It’s always been “free for me but not for thee” but after all the years of whining and braying about cancel culture this is really a bit much:
Far-right social media figures including Laura Loomer, Enrique Tarrio, the pseudonymous “Catturd,” and Chaya Raichik (author of the anti-LGBTQ account “LibsOfTikTok”) have sought to identify and expose individuals either speaking negatively of Kirk’s effect on political discourse or seemingly celebrating his murder. An anonymously run website called Charlie’s Murderers has served as a hub for personal information, including employment details, about people allegedly endorsing the assassination. A college administrator named on the site has lost her job, while others have received death threats. Many have been targeted for pointing out that Kirk in 2023 said, “It’s worth to [sic] have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
Charlie Rock, a public relations coordinator for the NFL‘s Carolina Panthers, apparently alluded to this comment of Kirk’s in a post on his personal Instagram account on Wednesday. “Why are yall sad? Your man said it was worth it,” he wrote, including a reference to song “Protect Ya Neck,” by the Wu-Tang Clan. A source disclosed disclosed to The New York Times on Thursday that the Panthers subsequently fired Rock. “The views expressed by our employees are their own and do not represent those of the Carolina Panthers,” the organization shared in a post on X. “We do not condone violence of any kind. We are taking this matter very seriously and have accordingly addressed it with the individual.”
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Now, educators and scholastic administrators across the country are being fired or suspended for speaking their minds on him. Laura Sosh-Lightsy, assistant dean of students at Middle Tennessee State University, was terminated for posting on Facebook that she had “ZERO sympathy” for Kirk, and that he “spoke his fate into existence,” after Sen. Marsha Blackburn drew attention to these online remarks and demanded her firing. (Shosh-Lightsy had been at the school for more than 20 years.) The University of Mississippi meanwhile fired an unidentified employee who allegedly reshared an Instagram post disparaging Kirk as a white supremacist and concluded, “I have no prayers to offer Kirk or respectable statements against violence.”
An elementary school teacher in Florida was suspended from her position for posting an article about Kirk’s death on her Facebook page and writing, “This may not be the obituary [w]e were all hoping to wake up to, but this is a close second for me.” (The state’s education commissioner, Anastasios Kamoutsas, warned teachers in a memo on Thursday that they were monitoring such statements. “We will hold teachers who choose to make disgusting comments about the horrific assassination of Charlie Kirk accountable,” he wrote.) Two teachers in Massachusetts were likewise placed on leave for unspecified posts regarding Kirk’s death. A Virginia teacher has been suspended for taking to Facebook to say of the assassination, “I hope he suffered through all of it.” And the Oklahoma State Department of Education has said it is investigating a middle school educator who posted “disgraceful rhetoric” in the wake of the deadly shooting.
All we’ve been hearing for the past 48 hours is how Kirk was all about free speech and debating your adversaries in an open forum. Guess not. They’ve got web sites going that are doxxing people who’ve said things as anodyne as they have “zero sympathy” for Kirk or “karma’s a bitch.”
Best watch what you say in America these days — at least if you say it about a right wing hero. Everyone else is fair game.