I Guess Free Speech Died with Charlie Kirk

Funny how that is.

Photo by Daniel Lincoln on Unsplash

Charlie Kirk died on September 10. For someone who was regularly elevated by his supporters as a “free speech advocate,” those supporters now seem dead-set on burying that free speech with him.

Kirk could be described in many ways. Aside from “free speech advocate,” he was a bigot and homophobe who believed empathy was a “made-up” term that “does a lot of damage.” On that note, he also believed that women — Taylor Swift in this instance — should reject feminism, submit to their husbands, and have a ton of children. They are “not in charge.”

A staunch supporter of gun ownership, he believed that gun ownership was a god-given right that came at the cost of “unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year.” In the end, he wound up becoming one of those “unfortunate” deaths, which I suppose has a bit of irony to it.

There are a lot of ironies in Kirk’s death, really. The fact that he was a victim of his own ideology on guns is just one of several that come immediately to mind. People are calling for empathy for a man who didn’t believe in it, and the fact that many of the people calling for empathy are Kirk’s ideological opposites on the left doesn’t seem to matter to his supporters.