Goodbye, Free Speech

What happens when the truth can no longer be spoken?

I have been a bit fixated on the response to Charlie Kirk's killing and the potential crackdown on Trump's opposition that it seems likely to catalyze. It seems we have entered a proto-revolutionary situation in the U.S. At least this morning, I am not at all sure that the Right is in the position to win this struggle. It is a hopeful feeling, coupled with dread over what may be coming in the near term.

Many people are still trying to figure out who, exactly, Charlie Kirk was and what role he played in the MAGA ecosystem. I knew of him vaguely, but hadn’t focused on him — his haircut and square jaw 1950s look were enough to put me off. Who exactly is this new “White Jesus” figure? In Vanity Fair, Ta-Nehisi Coates reports:

Kirk reveled in open bigotry. Indeed, claims of Kirk’s “civility” are tough to square with his penchant for demeaning members of the LGBTQ+ community as “freaks” and referring to trans people with the slur “tranny.” Faced with the prospect of a Kamala Harris presidency, Kirk told his audience that the threat had to be averted because Harris wanted to “kidnap your child via the trans agenda.” … Kirk was a master of folding seemingly discordant bigotries into each other, as when he defined “the American way of life” as marriage, home ownership, and child-rearing free of “the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school,” adding that he did not want kids to “have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.” The American way of life was “Christendom,” Kirk claimed, and Islam—“the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America”—was antithetical to that.

I find I have thoughts I hardly dare to say in a public forum right now. Simply expressing myself suddenly feels like a dangerous thing to do. That, in itself, is an intriguing sensation. I value our First Amendment rights, the freedom of self-expression, tremendously. I would rather die than live in an Orwellian world where we cannot speak the truth as we see and feel it — even as our perspective changes, which it always will.

This freedom of expression is the basis of our American experiment. As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in“Self Reliance” (1841): “Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.” Inspired by Emerson, Walt Whitman wrote:

Do I contradict myself?

Very well then I contradict myself,

(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

Defining truth for ourselves needs to be an ongoing, uncertain, authentic, and always tentative process.

I notice, when I feel this need to censor myself, a certain internal pressure starts to build up that wants to be released or discharged. The more it builds up, the more the truth (whatever it is for me, at that time) yearns to come forth.