A man in a white T shirt emblazoned with a single word ‘freedom’, is talking to a large crowd of American students and supporters. He’s given away MAGA baseball caps tossing them to the delighted crowd, and all captured live to be disseminated to a international fan base.
He is thought by some, not least his head of state, to be the trailblazer for freedom of speech and a personal freedoms advocate. He’s 31, and started doing these mass campus dialogues when he was 18.
He has a huge following, and is a close friend of the President, Donald Trump. a star of the MAGA movement, and something of a hate figure for what he’d brand ‘the liberals of America’.
At five minutes past midday he’s asked a question. Always rigorously prepped, it’s not one he can’t answer. He’s always held statistics and debating points in his head ready for the attempt at a ‘gotcha’ moment. Some of the debating moments have gone viral, and he knows the power of filming and exporting them. People know him, for better or worse, around the world.
“Do you know how many mass shootings there have been in America in the last 10 years?”
“Counting or not counting gang violence?”
Charlie Kirk, campus debater, political firebrand, never gets further in his answer. An assassin, for that is how his killer is widely being branded, fires a single shot, striking Kirk in the neck, and shortly afterwards, in hospital, he dies.
America is reeling from this. It was taken close to this point, where the stakes – even Kirk might agree – where higher, and Donald Trump himself faced an assassin’s bullet. It missed killing him by millimetres. But the concept that even for the most well known ones views and expressing them could induce a lethal response was revived, amplified and dare I say, normalised, even if in a despairing way.
Despite Kamala Harris, Barack Obama, our Prime Minister Keir Starmer – all politically opposed to Kirk’s world view – making the obvious point that no matter ones views being killed for them is not the sign of a healthy or robust democracy, already partisan lines are being drawn.
Even in Congress there were raised voices of protest when the speaker, a friend of Kirk’s, called for a minutes silence after his death had been announced. Social media started to swell with tributes to a man not always loved by everyone, and highly distasteful ‘celebrations’ from people who deemed his views too toxic. And seemingly glad a man had died for expressing them.
The truth is Britain can’t, and shouldn’t, really look on with bemused horror like a bystander, or as our forebears did with the Kennedy assasination.
This stuff is closer to home than we might care to imagine.
Ask the families of Jo Cox, and Sir David Amess, and for that matter Steven Timms, who though he didn’t lose his life, thank god, was as it turns out inches from doing so from a murderer’s blade. His assistant having been attacked and killed moments before. They all know, tragically, being killed for your views is definitely not ‘just an American thing’
We have here, as America does, a freedom of speech problem.
It’s not that we don’t have it, so much as it it is becoming increasingly subjected to constraint by either protagonists for whom shouting down is a ‘legitimate tactic’ and for whom some views are – in their view– so bad they must not be expressed, or more worryingly from the state thinking it knows and should be the judge of what view points are or are not acceptable
It has evolved from angry denunciations at potentially outrageous comments, to ‘no platforming’ on both sides, street harassment of vocal commentators from Owen Jones to Jacob Rees-Mogg – Jones was violently beaten up outside a pub, but was more ambiguous about a milk shaking of Farage, an incident a comedian thought should’ve been ‘battery acid’. But then a comedian just got arrested by five policemen, for a similar ‘joke’. It seems to me even the police don’t really think the police should decide what is or isn’t ‘hate speech’ or as many on the right call it ‘hurty words’.
Actually I think we focus a lot on these sorts of examples but almost forget, as I’ve mentioned, that it has come to violent death on our shores. We shouldn’t never forget that, the ultimate twisting of the ‘silencing’ logic has been resorted to in the UK.
The summer was littered with examples of people angrily confronting each other about their ‘rights to express themselves’ whether that be putting up flags or tearing them down. There’s even those, and I could list them, who see such ‘debates’ as a chance to insert themselves into the spotlight. Outrage expressed online, has, on some platforms literally become ‘currency’. So how far will people go?
The mirroring – ignoring the very real legal differences in the cases – of Lucy Connolly ‘jailed for incitement in a racist tweet’, on the right, and Ricky Jones not guilty of a similar offence but ‘videoed calling for people’s throats to be cut’, on the left, has amplified the problem of where we are now.
We have in this country some staunch ‘defenders’ of free speech, who only deem it free speech when it’s views they agree with. That’s speech, but it isn’t free. Oh and Dale Vince, your freedom of speech was not curtailed one iota, as you proved in endless posts, by being denied entry to reform UK’s Conference.
The point about the kind of debates that Charlie Kirk wanted and advocated for – and there are endless clips available of him outlining this position – was that to avoid political violence the only way forward is face to face respectful dialogue, even when those views ‘collide’ or cause ‘offence’. Accepting the right to cause offence is the best defence against spiralling into violence.
That in essence encapsulates and answers a question we were forced to ask ourselves this summer:
Whose job is it to police free speech?
Or is it in fact nobodies job to police free speech, unless it very very clearly strays into existing laws we’ve lived by for generations.
The Conservatives need to look at this arena in a way that can accommodate extremes on both sides. If we are to protect free speech it cannot be via, for example, a phony consultation into ‘islamophobia’ nor the clarion call for ‘freedom of speech I agree with but damn the rest.’ The Tories could define themselves against others, by being truly for freedom, for all, to speak their mind, and let society judge ones views not courts. Today we have an article on ConHome that suggests how that might be done.
Despite the angry and at times violent mob that broke into the BBC’s old Television Centre in 2009, – because Nick Griffin, leader of the far right BNP, and an elected MEP, was to appear on Question Time – the truth is his own performance did more to reduce his influence on the UK, than their screams and angry denunciations of the BBC for hosting him.
Kirk would have been forced by his own logic to approve. ‘Let him speak, let people judge.’
For now the killing, and silencing of Kirk will continue to send shock waves across the very polarised society of the United States. I doubt very much it will silence his views as others seek to take on his mantle. Perhaps that’s the brutal reality. Killing him hasn’t silenced his opinions at all.
Don’t forget, next week there will be, without a shadow of doubt attempts to disrupt, protest and if possible shout down Donald Trump as he comes here for a state visit.
As he arrives, we should wake up to the fact this whole debate is not actually an American import but has already been worryingly developing on our shores for quite some time.
conservativehome.com (Article Sourced Website)
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