Why we must not censor the ghouls celebrating Charlie Kirk’s murder

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was a truly horrible event. While his wife and children looked on, Kirk was shot through the neck by a murderer as he addressed a crowd at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. I have felt deeply affected by this incident – it feels like an attack on anyone who speaks about politics in the public sphere. Whatever your political angle, if you talk and / or write about politics, there will be someone out there who hates what you have to say – and might go that one step further and hate you personally for it. That someone could go another step further than that and try to kill you is what is so terrifying. What we’ve seen this week demonstrates that in the starkest way imaginable.

While normal people thought that the death of another human being was a tragedy, parts of the left, across the West, found cause to celebrate. One video going around social media depicts a young man addressing a small crowd, rousing them with a chant of ‘We got Charlie in the neck’. TikTok was rife with scenes of youthful leftists expressing pure glee at the violent death of a father of two small children. More even-minded individuals on the left took to humming and hawing about the assassination, taking a line that roughly goes, ‘Yes, murder is bad, but hey, Charlie Kirk was asking for it a bit because of some of those things he said’. This is sometimes expressed as, ‘Well, maybe he should have kept his mouth shut’ – something that comes across as much more sinister than I believe is intended.

Watching this unfold has been awful. The people whose whole supposed political mantra is ‘Be Kind’ are either openly celebrating the violent death of another human being – or at least equivocating about it. I have nothing but contempt for those who have revelled in the death of Charlie Kirk.

Yet banning these sorts of responses from the left is not the answer, as some in the US over the past few days have suggested. Such as Republican congressman Clay Higgins, who said, ‘I’m going to use congressional authority and every influence with Big Tech platforms to mandate [an] immediate ban for life of every post or commenter that belittled the assassination of Charlie Kirk’.

This is the wrong response for several reasons. One is that free speech does not stop and start at our convenience. In fact, it is most worth defending in the darkest hour, with the most objectionable trash, like celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk online. It is easy to defend the right to speech when it’s something we agree with, or even only mildly dislike. Free speech must extend to the worst of speech or it isn’t free speech at all.

That we are talking about banning people from social media to honour Charlie Kirk is perverse. Charlie cared about free speech in a deep way. He would have defended the rights of those taking glee in his murder to continue doing so – we should honour his commitment to this noble cause.

The toughest question in the aftermath of a tragedy like this is how society comes back together again. People on the right calling for civil war and the closing down of free speech need to remember that free speech is at the core of any functioning democracy. Also, there are decent leftists who have unequivocally decried the murder (such as Bernie Sanders). By all means, call out the hatred from the left and use it to demonstrate the moral vacancy of far too many left-of-centre individuals at the moment – but please, let them say it in the first place, for all of our sakes.

When you shut down freedom of speech, what you end up with, inevitably, is more political violence. As Charlie himself recognised, only through dialogue do we have any chance of understanding each other. The alternative is too horrible to contemplate.

Nick Tyrone is a journalist, author and think-tanker. He is the author most recently of The Patient.