I disagreed with most of what the martyred rightwing thought-warrior said. But it would have been far better to have him alive today to argue with. In his famous tract arguing against censorship, the English poet John Milton laid down the foundation of our concept of freedom of speech. Milton’s argument was that Truth and Falsehood should “grapple” in the public square, because in the end, “who ever knew Truth put to the worse, in a free and open encounter?”
The tract was called Areopagitica, a reference to Areopagus, the hill in Athens named after Ares, the god of war. It was published in 1644, at a time of great political upheaval and violence (the British had just beheaded their king and religious conflict had been increasing across Europe since the invention of the printing press).
Milton wrote it in response to Parliament passing a law requiring a pre-publication license on pamphlets. Almost four centuries on, the nation founded on the principles he set forth is confronting a similar challenge.
The last time I paid attention to Charlie Kirk before he died was when he came on my Twitter feed opening a chat room called “Should Taylor Swift Submit?” Kirk was one of the right wing bros obsessed with TayTay (I wrote about that here) and this was how he marked the occasion of her engagement to Travis Kelce.
I tuned in for a minute, as he was exclaiming that he didn’t want a wife who told him where to invest his money. What a strange obsession, I thought again. And flagged it for examination in a future Freakshow. Alas, that won’t be written.
Kirk was a polemicist and an effective one. He said outrageous and deeply offensive things. Black women “do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.” He praised the idea of public executions and called for the death penalty for Joe Biden.
To add pious odiousness to insult, he did all that while praising Jesus, of course.
Kirk’s accused assassin was raised to be a sharpshooter by his own gun-loving conservative family. If he was influenced to murder by the left, as the Trump administration wants us to believe, he is an outlier among our nation’s heavily armed cohort. But yesterday, the Vice President sat in Charlie Kirk’s podcasting chair and laid out the Trump administration's plan to use Kirk’s death to criminalize dissent.
Political animal Vance cannot hope to don Charlie’s mantle. He’s wobbly on the issues and will never possess the mesmeric reality star wizardry that the president has over the masses. But the MAGA movement needs a younger unifier if and when King Don steps off the mortal coil, and Vance is first in line.
From the White House, Vance announced that the government will use the Kirk assassination as a tool to go after NGOs and left leaning groups. It’s not yet clear which ones, but presumably they mean to reclassify many of MAGA’s political foes, pesky civil liberties organizations and independent or corporate journalists as hate speakers. Meanwhile, Trump – as ever utterly transparent about his true aims – announced he is suing the New York Times and four reporters for $15 billion supposedly for endorsing Harris “on the front cover” of the paper.
More likely – based on the timing – he’s upset that the Times team is not taking eyes off the shameless self dealing and personal enrichment he is overseeing from inside the White House.
Two things are going to break MAGA, two things that therefore must be shut down, speech-wise. One is Epstein – as Michael Wolff put it in his latest Instagram mini-lecture, Trump cannot get away from Epstein because “Epstein” is “everything we don’t know about Donald Trump.”
The second thing that must be silenced is Gaza, which the UN has finally officially recognized as genocide. Two years of increasingly shocking restrictions on Gaza speech here and abroad are the kernel out of which the current clampdown grows. Yet even Charlie Kirk, a staunch Israel supporter who spent most of his time around college kids, could not have missed what an issue this is for youth on both sides of the political divide.
It is probably too late to do this, but let’s envision where this crackdown on speech and thought is headed. What is an America where dissent is criminal, where every person must first test a thought or an idea against how the religious right or the regime might respond?
We already live in an America where it’s legal to spread lies about public health and vaccines, where American history is being erased by executive order at the Smithsonian and the National Park Service, and where Bari Weiss is about to be empowered by one of the biggest media concerns in the world to tell us to love Israel unconditionally.
As if that wasn’t enough, now those who disagree must be criminalized.
I will always remember something about the inauguration of Trump 2017. There wasn’t much of a crowd (nowhere near the wall of humanity at Obama’s 2009 inauguration). All along Pennsylvania Avenue, peaceful protesters were penned off behind riot guards. These groups provided spots of color and even gaiety, with clever signs and songs. Shuffling between them on the sidewalk were the free people, visitors from states that had supported Trump, wondering what they were supposed to be doing.
Four years later almost to the day, January 6, 2021, the world witnessed a very different kind of scene in Washington, with no singing and no peace. The effects of the right’s online radicalization pipeline are well-known, including mass murders of innocent Americans from Santa Barbara to Pittsburgh to El Paso to Minneapolis.
Areopagitica is considered one of the foundational arguments against censorship and for freedom of thought in modern western history. Thomas Jefferson paraphrased some of it in his inaugural address: "Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it."
The key word is tolerated. We might not all like each other in this great American experiment of blended peoples and ideas, but to survive as a democracy we agree to tolerate one another.
The pen, it is said, is mightier than the sword. We scribes and polemicists and provocateurs – maybe even Kirk too – like to think that’s true. In some sense, it is. Words inspire and create movements and disagreement, force people to think, and promote a vitality that is the very best of America.
As Milton wrote: “Give me the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all liberties.”
Words are powerful. But as we see in the tens of thousands of gun killings across our nation, now including Kirk’s murder, words and weapons are not equal. Not at all. And we are about to restrict the less lethal of the two.
Nina Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.
