On Wednesday, September 10th, political activist and Trump devotee Charlie Kirk was shot dead during one of his campus appearances. A man of the right, Kirk styled himself as an evangelist for conservatism, Christianity, the Second Amendment, and whatever the word “anti-woke” happens to mean on any given day. The assassin has not yet explained his motives, but it would be idiotic to pretend they were divorced from Kirk’s political views.
I’ll admit my own disagreements with Kirk were neither few nor small. His sermons often struck me as glib, his convictions at times painfully rehearsed. But only a moral cretin would celebrate his death. It is a tragedy not just for the young family he leaves behind, but for the principle—always fragile, always embattled—that public speech and political combat should be settled with words, not bullets.
Predictably, some commentators rushed to express their horror at the killing. They were right to do so. Equally predictable, and no less tellingly, others rushed in with a disingenuous little “yes, but.” Yes, it’s terrible, they said, and yet… wasn’t Kirk a racist, a transphobe, a misogynist? Didn’t he, in some karmic sense, bring it upon himself? These sly attempts at rationalization reek of cowardice dressed up as moral sophistication. They are apologies not for free speech but for its annihilation.
That misattributed Voltaire line—“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it”—was, in fact, Evelyn Beatrice Hall’s paraphrase. Yet its sentiment remains a test of democratic decency. To defend only the speech you happen to like is no defense at all. It is a lazy indulgence. The true measure of principle comes when one defends the speech of those one finds obnoxious, offensive, or wrong-headed.
Kirk may have been all of those things to his critics. None of it amounts to a case for murder. If we permit ourselves to believe otherwise—if we begin to smile, however faintly, at the silencing of an adversary—we abandon not only free speech but the very possibility of political argument. What remains is intimidation, tribalism, and violence: the true enemies of democracy.
Free societies are built not by silencing dissent but by tolerating it, arguing with it, and if possible, defeating it in open contest. That was true in Voltaire’s time, it was true in Hall’s, and it remains true today.
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