Opinion Things you can’t say about Charlie Kirk

To be clear: I don’t celebrate Charlie Kirk‘s death. I condemn it. Is that enough?

It wasn’t enough for Karen Attiah, a columnist for the Washington Post — indeed, the paper’s last full-time Black columnist. She was fired for social media comments, which the paper deemed “unacceptable”. The sole post where she mentioned Kirk did nothing more than quote his own words denigrating the intelligence of Black women — including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

It wasn’t enough for Matthew Dowd, the chief strategist for President George W Bush’s re-election campaign. He was fired from his job as a political commentator for the network MSNBC. “Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words,” he said, “which then lead to hateful actions.” That doesn’t sound like a celebration of Kirk’s death. But the network was too afraid to find out.

It wasn’t enough for Jimmy Kimmel, one of the most successful comics in America. His TV show was pulled off the air “indefinitely” after a federal regulator (appointed by Trump) threatened the station’s parent company over a monologue that didn’t even focus on Kirk directly. If the Disney Corporation, with a market capitalisation of $209 billion, can be so easily muscled, what hope do the rest of us have?

For Indians and others who might visit the US, there’s an even higher standard: Be advised that you will be denied a visa if you have ever posted anything on social media “rationalising, or making light of” Kirk’s death. No other individual has been similarly deemed off-limits: Mother Teresa, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King Jr, and all war heroes posthumously awarded the Medal of Honour are presumably fair game.

Before a suspect had even been identified, Donald Trump blamed Kirk’s killing on “the lunatic radical left”. The man now charged comes from a conservative Republican family, and his political leanings remain hazy. According to the prosecutor, his mother says he’d become “more pro-gay and trans-right oriented”, and was in a relationship with “a biological male who was transitioning genders”. So far, there’s no evidence of his political leanings beyond this — let alone a connection to any of the liberal groups which Trump has targeted for an across-the-board crackdown. Does that matter?

Kirk was hardly the only victim of political violence in America. Three months ago, Minnesota State Representatives Melissa Hortman and John Hoffman were gunned down in their homes (Hortman fatally), allegedly by a Trump supporter. When asked about why he ordered flags flown at half-staff for Kirk but had not done so for Hortman (a government official), Trump replied, “I’m not familiar with” her. In the past few years, assailants have tried to murder House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, kidnap Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and firebomb the home of Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro. But these victims were all Democrats. So, they don’t count?

Trump has explicitly said only “the radicals on the left are the problem”. He’s correct about denying a false equivalence, but he’s absolutely wrong about the balance: The right wing is responsible for far more political violence than the left. According to a government-sponsored study removed from the Department of Justice’s website within a week of Kirk’s killing, right-wing attacks over the past three decades have caused more than six times as many deaths as left-wing ones. Studies by the (conservative) Cato Institute and the (hardly lefty) Anti-Defamation League have reached similar conclusions.

More importantly, the left broadly, and Democratic office-holders universally, try to tamp down political violence rather than incite it. After an assassination attempt on Trump himself last year (the shooter’s politics — if he had any — were never discovered), President Joe Biden immediately went on television to condemn the attack: “There’s no place in America for this kind of violence,” he said. “It’s sick.” Even with his party facing an uphill climb in the pending election, he did not (as Trump is now attempting to do) use the attack as an excuse to impose limits on free speech.

Will this assault on freedom of expression succeed? It already has: I’d like to call out the ideas that Kirk so frequently broadcast, but I don’t really dare.

America is changing so very fast. We’ve always thought of ourselves as the freest society in the world. But our government is now openly trying to shut down political thought with which it disagrees. Private institutions are rushing to fire staff whose ideas might conceivably spark conservative complaints. And everyone in public life is terrified — quite reasonably — that they might be targeted for physical violence solely on the basis of the next sentence they speak.

So, I think I’ll end this column right here.

The writer is author of Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God: Retracing the Ramayana Through India and Mullahs on the Mainframe: Islam and Modernity Among the Daudi Bohras