On the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and what it means for us all

PART 1: When the left said it was tired of free speech, we should have believed it

(Part 1)

Want to find a society’s power center?

Follow an assassin’s bullet.

For decades, the left used its control of the legacy media, Hollywood, and academia to decide not just what issues but even what facts could be discussed. It deemed those it finds ideologically uncomfortable to be outside the pale. The original sin came with the frank denial that differing rates of criminality — rather than police or criminal justice disparities — are the reason so many black people are in prison.

Once the media agreed to that lie, the rest followed: That drug use was harmless and should be medicalized and decriminalized; that open immigration always benefitted society and was opposed only by bigots; that men and women had no innate differences and gender was a social construct.

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(Free speech, today more than ever)

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Right-wing opposition came slowly, first on radio, led by Rush Limbaugh, then with Fox News. These outlets were powerful and profitable individually. But the legacy media collectively dominated them, and the left’s dominance of Hollywood and academia only became more complete.

But by the mid-2010s, social media had crashed the elite monopoly on speech: Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, places where Americans and people everywhere could speak to each other without gatekeepers, to joke and debate and talk about how they really felt.

Donald Trump intuitively felt and used the power of this new media more effectively than anyone else.¹ He saw how many Americans felt disenfranchised and unheard, and not just in rural America.

So the left, feeling its hold on power slipping, fought one last furious battle to force social media to heel.

The attack began after Trump’s initial election in 2016. At first it used mostly social pressure and was aided by the left-wing slant of the non-engineering employees that social media companies hired during their vast expansion in the 2010s.

But, over time, Democratic pressure became more openly political, first from Congress and then after Joe Biden won in 2021 from the White House itself. The White House at first focused its censorship efforts mostly on Covid and the mRNA vaccines, the key issue in 2021. Working with Pfizer, it forced Twitter to ban me over my Covid reporting in the summer of 2021. But by the end of 2021, it was looking past Covid.

In February 2022, the administration moved to attack speech far more directly, issuing a bulletin that would have classified much of it as terrorism.

As I wrote at the time:

The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America. It is no longer content merely to force social media companies to suppress dissenting views. It appears to be setting the stage to use federal police powers.

How else to read the “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” the Department of Homeland Security issued on Monday? Its first sentence:

SUMMARY OF THE TERRORISM THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES: The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories... [emphasis added]

You read those words right.

The government now says “misleading narratives” are the most dangerous contributor to terrorism against the United States.

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Lucky for all of us, the United States wasn’t ready to define speech as terrorism.

And social media companies didn’t want to be forced to police every comment their users made. Section 230 gave them protection if they did, but Facebook in particular depended on a mass audience and didn’t want to alienate Republicans and independents.

Facebook’s stock plunged almost 75 percent between September 2021 and December 2022. The company’s failed bet on the “metaverse” was one reason, but the political fights it faced did not help.

Meanwhile, Elon Musk agreed to buy Twitter in 2022 with the avowed goal of making it a haven for free speech — as he has (after a few early missteps). Incredibly, his plans sparked anger on the left and among legacy media. Free speech equaled Nazis, they insisted.

Spotify, too, stood up to the efforts in 2021 and 2022 to “deplatform” (a hideous Orwellian word) Joe Rogan and other conservative and contrarian voices.

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So 2022 represented the high-water mark for the left’s would-be effort to take over social media and normalize censorship on the new platforms. It still controlled the legacy media, but by 2022 the legacy media no longer controlled the window of acceptable speech, or much else — a source of great angst for it.

But the left’s feelings about free speech, its new dislike for the fundamental principle that every point of view should be allowed to compete in the marketplace of ideas, didn’t improve.

In fact, they hardened, as I wrote in 2023, pointing to a poll that showed “an overwhelming number of Democrats no longer support First Amendment protections for free speech.”

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I found this out myself the hard way.

After I discovered the extent of the 2021 censorship efforts against me, I decided to sue the Biden Administration and senior Pfizer officials. As most of you know, I had, and have, proof that they conspired to force Twitter into banning me because of my writing about Covid mRNA vaccines.

The legal issues around the case are complex, but the facts are simple: the federal government and a company that made $100 billion from selling a product deprived a journalist writing about that product of his audience. This is a scandal, by any measure.

But even the organizations that supposedly care most about censorship, like PEN America (whose motto is “The Freedom to Write”) had no interest in supporting Berenson v Biden. And the legacy media essentially ignored it.

Free speech? Only for speech the left liked.

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(And, with your help, for everyone. Please stand with me at this crucial moment.)

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Charlie Kirk believed in free speech to his core. He believed in discussion and debate. And he was good at it, he was energetic and charismatic and could connect with young audiences.

And by all accounts — including the results of the 2024 election — he was winning.

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(Norman Rockwell, updated)

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As Kirk’s audience grew, so too did the left’s hatred for him.

This was the state of play as he sat before an audience of thousands (thousands!) at Utah Valley University, a state school that offers four-year degrees for $6,500 a year to Utah residents — the promise higher education at an affordable price, a promise so much of the self-proclaimed progressives in academia have forgotten.

They’d turned out under the September high desert sun by the thousands (yes, thousands!) to hear Charlie Kirk, to yell at him, cheer him, and engage in the kind of debate that was a feature of American democracy before the United States was even a nation.

Until a single shot rang out.

When the left told us it didn’t believe in free speech, we should have listened.

(End of Part 1)

1. How a 70-year-old man figured this out is one of the great and to my mind still unexplained political mysteries of all time.