Honor Charlie Kirk, Pass a Free Speech Bill

After Charlie Kirk’s assassination, flags flew at half-mast, Kirk received a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom---and everyone moved on.      

I was reminded of this by a surreal juxtaposition of events. Once, shortly after listening to a prominent progressive professor call cancel culture a reactionary myth, I attended a meeting of a nonprofit. Board members lamented that in the moral panic after a cop murdered George Floyd, activists forced our umbrella association to fire its executive director for a tweet arguing against demonizing all cops. One tweet ended a career. The association has never had effective leadership since, and is now closing.                                                                                

Days later, I learned that personnel committees at two different public universities---not mine, I’m glad to say---nixed the promotions of two openly conservative professors. Apparently, these were not merit decisions. Instead, a fervent few intimidated others into bending the rules to punish conservatives.           

Both survey data and personal testimony suggest that it happens often. In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education interview, Harvard History Professor Jill Lepore---who is certainly no conservative---lamented that for years a small number of leftists were so “incredibly prosecutorial” that Lepore self-censored her writings, feared to defend others being purged, and nearly quit academia. That leftists intimidated Lepore, one of the most respected professors at Harvard, shows how bad things got. That Lepore now feels safe shows some things have changed. Under the Trump administration, there is less censorship by the left, and more censorship of the left.                                                                                               

Partisans see that. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) finds in national surveys, since President Trump took office, agreement that free expression was “heading in the right direction” plummeted among Democrats, from 50% in October 2024 to 17% in July 2025 and just 11% today. For Republicans, “right direction” responses rose from 24% in October 2024 to 69% in July, before falling to 55% after Kirk’s assassination. For independents, free speech optimism spiked to 36% in the first months of the administration, falling to 19% after Kirk’s killing. Predictably, when a prominent person gets killed for debating politics, and many educators cheer, normies become pessimistic about free speech.

After years of leftist censorship, especially during COVID, now the right is striking back. A friend advising the Trump administration boasts, “It’s our turn now.” Such views dishonor both the spirit of the First Amendment and the memory of Charlie Kirk, who wanted to debate his foes, not censor or murder them. Revenge is also self-defeating. Donald Trump won in 2024 in part because leftist censorship alienated independent voters. What independents gave in the last election, they can take away in the next one. Nevertheless, for the foreseeable future, progressives will dominate elite institutions. That means the more censorship is normalized, the more the powerful can marginalize (mainly conservative) critics.

There are solutions. In 2024, House Republicans passed a campus free speech bill prohibiting ideological litmus tests in faculty hiring and institutional accreditation, protecting the rights of faith-based groups, and prohibiting selective enforcement of speech limitations, such as when conservative speakers are charged “security fees” that are waived for liberals.                                                                               

That bill, which was not considered by the Senate, did not go far enough. As FIRE argues, Congress should also forbid government officials from pressuring companies to censor, as when the FCC chairman pushed ABC to cancel Jimmy Kimmel after his offensive response to Charlie Kirk’s murder. FIRE would like it to be easier to sue federal officials when they violate free speech rights. To this, I would add that just as the U.S. Civil Rights Commission and its 50-state advisory committees highlight our 14th Amendment right, we need a First Amendment Commission to promote our rights to speak freely and worship as we choose. A free speech law would be the best way to honor Charlie Kirk and others of all ideologies, who know that First Amendment rights make America great.    

As Lee Jussim and I argue in “Fear Equity,” the best protection of freedom is self-interest. The silver lining of censoring the left is that now that everyone is censored, everyone has incentives to support laws saying that no one should be censored.