{"id":27464,"date":"2025-09-17T01:56:56","date_gmt":"2025-09-17T05:56:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/?p=27464"},"modified":"2025-10-27T02:47:17","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T06:47:17","slug":"for-the-right-this-was-never-about-free-speech","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/2025\/09\/17\/for-the-right-this-was-never-about-free-speech\/","title":{"rendered":"For the Right, This Was Never About Free Speech"},"content":{"rendered":"\t\t
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For the Right, This Was Never About Free Speech<\/span><\/font><\/span><\/h2><\/h2>\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t
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9.15.2025 \/ Op-Ed \/ Daisy Dale<\/u><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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After the assassination of far-right commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the choice to denounce the act is an easy decision for any public figure or political organization that was in opposition to what Kirk stood for. First of all, t<\/span>he Post-Democrat condemns this act of political violence.\u00a0<\/span>Here locally, the act was condemned by Delaware County Democrats, and all Democratic members of the Muncie City Council condemned the statements made by Human Rights Commission member SteVen Knipp, who said he hoped Kirk’s death was “only the first” before being swiftly forced to resign from his position.\u00a0<\/span>Candidate for IN-District 5 Jackson Franklin called the act<\/a><\/span> “deeply troubling and does not make this country any safer,” and continued to say “political violence has no place in this country.”\u00a0<\/span>New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani addressed the shooting\u00a0<\/span><\/span>the same evening<\/span><\/span>, at one point telling the crowd <\/span>“it must be the shared notion of humanity that binds us all.”\u00a0<\/span>For that matter, it was Jacobin Magazine, a popular socialist outlet in the United States, that condemned the act as “a tragedy and disaster” in their <\/span>article<\/a><\/span>\u00a0the day after the assassination.<\/span><\/p>

Throughout the U.S., this wasn’t a hard decision to say that the principle of freedom of speech should be guaranteed.\u00a0<\/span>But what does this mean if you weren’t a public figure, political organization, or had similar institutional power? Besides major figures, what makes it mandatory to mourn the death of someone who called for your own? For anyone who’s telling you that a far-right activist should be a free speech martyr, one proving that all extremes should be accepted under free speech, they may\u00a0<\/span>go on to say that it doesn’t matter how you felt about what he said but should only care for his right to speak, but t<\/span>hey are only rambling on about this because they personally aligned with Kirk. Any regular person would be horrified if George Lincoln Rockwell<\/a><\/span>, an American Nazi Party leader who was killed during a highpoint of political assassinations in 1967, had flags put on half-staff and was awarded a Presidential Medal of Honor after his death.\u00a0<\/span>In the wake of the event, we are all being\u00a0<\/span>demanded to think of Kirk as a household name and act as if what him and his allies did was a nuanced, intellectual renaissance for family values, and not a decade-long call to arms for the Right.<\/span><\/p>

The most concise statement I can put here is from Mehdi Hasan, who said on Democracy Now!<\/span><\/a> “we should all condemn the killing of Charlie Kirk, but we don’t need to participate in the whitewashing of his record.” His horrific statements are countless, being posted everywhere, and apparently not allowed for scrutiny anymore without risking your own employment<\/a><\/span>, but a massive concerted effort is underway to make Kirk out to be nothing more than a respectable defender for public debate.\u00a0<\/span>This happened before with William F. Buckley Jr.,\u00a0<\/span>as his publication National Review has scrubbed many of his statements<\/span><\/a>, which weren’t limited to calling AIDS “a special curse for the homosexual,” openly aligning with white supremacist groups to defend segregation, or telling Gore Vidal during an infamous TV debate “I’ll sock you in the goddamn face and you’ll stay plastered.” Kirk, like Buckley, opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964<\/span><\/a>, and many will forget this and hundreds more of his worst statements.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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Even with conservative discourse over free speech (with the same <\/span>repetitive<\/span> talking points going back far earlier than even 2016), it doesn’t do anything to address the radical roots of defending free speech. The soapbox orations by the International Workers of the World, anti-Vietnam War speech that was restricted on campuses throughout the U.S., or the famous Rosa Luxemberg quote “the freedom of speech is meaningless unless it means the freedom of the person who thinks differently.” This isn’t the free speech they’ve demanded rights to. <\/span>Instead, they not only boggle free speech down to a civil libertarian approach, but have forced, with pressure campaigns, to propel the far-right into mainstream public debate.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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It was never in good faith. You can easily find cases of the Left defending free speech for the Right, notably the Skokie Case in 1977<\/span><\/a>, but if conservative influencers wanted to portray themselves as “free speech absolutists” and especially as people against political violence, they missed the mark on the easiest instances to condemn.\u00a0<\/span>Many elected officials who were vocal about this act of violence never gave the same treatment to the attack on Paul Pelosi in 2022, or the assassinations earlier this year of Minnesota state representative Melissa Hortman and state senator John Hoffman, and their only defense is that those stories didn’t make it to their newsfeeds.<\/span><\/p>

Nobody should feel comfortable with the escalation of political violence we’re seeing happen. Yet r<\/span>egardless of who condemned the act, conservatives have made it clear how they plan to use this as an excuse for the worst form of vengeance.<\/span><\/p>\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t\t\t<\/div>\n\t\t

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For the Right, This Was Never About Free Speech 9.15.2025 \/ Op-Ed \/ Daisy Dale After the assassination of far-right commentator and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, the choice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"elementor_header_footer","format":"standard","meta":{"_eb_attr":"","site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"set","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-opinion"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27464"}],"version-history":[{"count":306,"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30359,"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27464\/revisions\/30359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/munciepostdemocrat.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}