Free Speech Implications of Charlie Kirk's Assassination and Its Backlash

Showing 8 Free Speech Implications videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

Charlie Kirk's assassination produced an argument almost as fierce as any he had in life: whether the backlash against people who mocked or celebrated his death amounted to the same cancel culture Kirk himself had spent years criticizing. Historian Victor Davis Hanson made the case explicitly that it did not, arguing platforms declining to host people who celebrated a murder before the body was buried is a business judgment, not censorship, and that treating the two as equivalent misunderstands both.

Others closer to Kirk's own network argued the opposite risk was live: that using his death to justify silencing critics, however distasteful their comments, would betray the actual principle he built his career defending. Jonathan Turley drew a specific line between speech that should cost someone their job, calls that crossed into threats or celebration of violence, and speech that shouldn't, however ugly, while warning that a growing share of Americans now say political violence is at least partly justified when the target is someone they disagree with. Kirk's own recorded words, in this context, took on a second life as evidence in the argument: his warning to conservative students that they'd be held to a standard their opponents weren't became something people on both sides cited to make their case about what came after him.