During a monologue the week after Kirk’s murder, Jimmy Kimmel, the (partisan and unfunny) late-night host, said, “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them.” It was an offensive statement and a stupid one, but it wasn’t wildly dissimilar to the comments of some officials and right-leaning pundits who lodged similar complaints about the left following the deaths of Michael Brown and George Floyd. There was the Minneapolis police union president who described Floyd as a “violent criminal” and was vilified for being a “disgrace to the badge.” Right-wing influencer Candace Owens said Floyd was no “martyr” and launched a GoFundMe page for a café that was boycotted after an owner termed Floyd a “thug”; the GoFundMe account was terminated for being hateful and discriminatory.
Heck, I can recall when anything less than full-throated hosannas to Brown and Floyd got you denounced as a racist. Those of us who didn’t choose to say anything publicly can regale you with tales of being angrily told that “silence was violence,” that our reticence revealed our “privilege” and our bigotry. Advocates, philanthropic staff, and academics repeatedly told me that, unless I made amends, I deserved to be defunded and marginalized for the good of America’s youth. So, believe me, I understand MAGA’s frustration with Kimmel casually mouthing these untruths on network TV and getting cheered for it by Hollywood’s amen corner.
But FCC chair Brendan Carr took things to a baldly authoritarian place when he said in a podcast appearance, “This is a very, very serious issue right now for Disney,” and explained, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.” For anyone who deemed Carr’s threat too subtle, Trump made things very clear: “Great News for America: The ratings challenged Jimmy Kimmel Show is CANCELLED. Congratulations to ABC for finally having the courage to do what had to be done.” Trump went on to urge the termination of other late-night hosts he dislikes and has been musing about trying to pull the licenses of networks that are “against” him.
This all matters mightily for kids, schools, and colleges. When the attorney general is threatening to go after the wrong sorts of speech and the president is collecting the scalps of broadcasters who have criticized him, it casts a long shadow, making any defense of campus free speech or classroom discourse a naïf’s pipe dream.
It’s one thing when the overreactions come from celebrities and politicos, who inhabit their far-off towers. It’s quite another when the calls are coming from inside the house. A troubling number of teachers and professors posted horrific, despicable things about Kirk after his murder. I wouldn’t employ such people in any school or college I ran. Any such celebration in a classroom crosses a bright line (though there’ve been very, very few reported instances). But nearly all of the troubling conduct has been on social media. Now, any educator who publicly and explicitly cheers politically motivated murder cannot credibly claim to run a classroom where all students are welcome. So, there are educators who absolutely deserve to be fired, via appropriate processes, for violating professional codes of conduct.
That said, the definition of “celebrating murder” has metastasized in the past two weeks. For instance, a Ball State staffer was terminated for a Facebook post that read: “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends,” and described Kirk’s death as “a tragedy” for his family but also “a reflection of the violence, fear, and hatred he sowed.” To my eye, that’s crass but not a celebration of murder. Indeed, it strikes me as relatively measured in our meme-rage era. If such a remark is going to become grounds for immediate termination in schools and colleges, we’re about to open a door we may wish we hadn’t.
