The conversation around the assassination of right-wing activist and Trump ally Charlie Kirk during a campus event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday has been fiery, to say the least. Graphic footage of 31-year-old Kirk, a husband and father of two young children, being fatally shot in the neck has gone mega-viral, inflaming passions on all sides. With no suspect in custody, the public has imagined a full spectrum of deranged political motives for the killing. Prominent members of the MAGA movement are using Kirk’s death to call for a “civil war” with leftists they accuse of inciting violence. And the Republican establishment — along with a fair number of Democrats — are mourning him as a martyr for the American values of debate and civic engagement, even while critics argue that he was often divisive and extreme.
Some of those critics have already faced severe consequences. Matthew Dowd, a political analyst for MSNBC, found himself out of a job on Thursday after on-air comments about Kirk in the immediate wake of the shooting, long before confirmation of Kirk’s death. Dowd had observed in a Wednesday appearance on the liberal-leaning cable news channel that Kirk was “constantly sort of pushing this sort of hate speech aimed at certain groups.” He added, “I always go back to: hateful thoughts lead to hateful words which lead to hateful actions. And I think that’s the environment we’re in.” The network cut ties with Dowd, who apologized on his Bluesky account, while MSNBC president Rebecca Kutler issued a separate statement: “During our breaking news coverage of the shooting of Charlie Kirk, Matthew Dowd made comments that were inappropriate, insensitive and unacceptable,” she said. “We apologize for his statements, as has he. There is no place for violence in America, political or otherwise.” (Dowd also had a university speaking engagement canceled.)
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.”
Yet his supporters, regardless of their stated ideals of free expression and complaints about “cancel culture,” have been swift to exact retribution against those who have intimated that Kirk was a dangerous ideologue or effectively brought a violent end upon himself. 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.”
Much of Kirk’s inflammatory rhetoric has come in for reevaluation as America debates his legacy. He had called for a complete halt to immigration into the U.S., amplified the racist “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, said that abortion bans should not make exceptions for rape even for girls as young as 10 years old, expressed his fear that Black airline pilots are unqualified, attacked Marin Luther King Jr. (while calling the Civil Rights Act of 1964 a “huge mistake“), declared that “Islam is not compatible with western civilization,” stood against LGBTQ rights, amplified the fake 2024 narrative about Haitian immigrants in Ohio stealing and eating local pets, spread medical misinformation during the Covid-19 pandemic (at one point falsely touting hydroxychloroquine as a “100 percent effective” cure for the disease), and advocated for a form of Christian nationalism that would end the separation between church and state.
Kirk was known for peddling these views at college campuses, which he viewed as illiberal and repressive environments that stifled dissent and controversial ideas. 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.”
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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.
Calls for these punitive actions hardly appear in line with Kirk’s purported philosophy of open discussion and absolutist protections for incendiary or offensive speech. Suddenly, however, a MAGA coalition that has long insisted on their right to demonize and threaten marginalized communities, joke and fantasize about violent attacks on their enemies, and push conspiracy theories to justify an authoritarian agenda is outraged that other Americans would dare to voice their contempt for a slain hero of reactionary conservatism. As ever, the hypocrisy is no less galling for being entirely predictable.
From Rolling Stone US
