Today I’d like to say just a few words about words that are not said – ways that we’re encouraged to avoid truth-telling. After almost a half-century in journalism, I ought to know a thing or two about the barriers that often interfere with giving people a true sense of what lies beyond their own view – since that’s what I think journalism is all about.
Right now, there are a lot of people who want the truth suppressed. These are challenging times – fraught days – in America. So there’s good reason to just be silent. And there’s a great, if troubling, current example.
When Charlie Kirk was murdered on the Utah Valley University campus, he was quickly lionized by people who shared his politics, which is to say the hard right. But even folks who aren’t fans of Charlie Kirk’s work said kind things about him – saying, for example, that he was dedicated to an open exchange of views. He welcomed questions, we know; he died, in fact, sitting beneath a sign that said, “Prove Me Wrong,” as he verbally jousted with progressives. You’ve got to admire that. And the mainstream media, I’d say, did a really good job of taking the temperature of the country down a degree or two by being respectful of Kirk. After all, he was an advocate of views that now drive the Republican party.
Which is why it is astounding that a lot of people are now trying to squelch dialogue about the very issues that Charlie Kirk raised – as though an honest assessment of the man’s work would somehow condone his murder.
Schoolteachers, activists, academics, even vido game developers have been fired or suspended from their work, or put under investigation, or targeted online – all for what they’ve written or said about Kirk. There are social media sites collecting names of people who are critical of Kirk, and those people are getting blasted online.
The push started when MSNBC hastily fired Republican political analyst Matthew Dowd after he suggested that Kirk’s rhetoric may have contributed to the atmosphere of violence that claimed his life.
Likewise, The Washington Post fired its last remaining black opinion writer, Karen Attiah, for social media posts after Kirk’s murder that condemned America’s acceptance of political violence, and criticized the ritualized response – you know, “thoughts and prayers” and statements like, “this is not who we are.” Attiah wrote, “Political violence has no place in this country… But we will also do nothing to curb the availability of guns used to carry out that violence.”
I suspect what upset Attiah’s editors at the Post most was this line – she wrote: “Part of what keeps America so violent is the insistence that people perform care, empty goodness and absolution for white men who espouse violence.”
To be clear, Charlie Kirk was an unabashed provocateur. He said some gun violence deaths were a necessary price to pay to keep guns easily available. He espoused Christian nationalism, and used bigoted language about women, Islam, LGBQ+ communities and people of color. Liberals, he said, are “unhumans;” black women, he said, including Justice Katanji Brown Jackson and Michele Obama, succeeded only as “affirmative action picks” because, in his words, they “do not have the brain processing power” to advance otherwise.
Tens of millions of Americans do not agree. But since Charlie Kirk was murdered, pointing out his most controversial comments, and responding to them, has gotten people in big trouble. So are we to stop talking about the issues that Kirk raised? Are those of us who did not admire him supposed to just pipe down now because the president ordered flags to half-staff, and without evidence blamed what he calls “the radical left” for the murder?
Look, for years we have heard from the right about “cancel culture” on campuses and elsewhere: the notion that certain kinds of speech are not welcome among progressive Americans. There’s some truth to that. But for those who decried “cancel culture” to now insist that people who offer a nuanced view of Kirk ought to be fired or attacked on social media – well, that’s just as wrong.
This is an administration that has been purging career public servants who are seen as less than fully obedient to Donald Trump personally – or, in the case of federal health and environmental agencies, who hold allegiance to science above that to the president. So “cancel culture” is thriving in America now, and it’s coming from the right.
If we’re going to understand each other and forge a path forward as one nation, we have to listen to each other, and we have to honor what’s true. That means that we don’t canonize Charlie Kirk in his death any more than we would have in his life; it means we don’t refuse to listen to science because it doesn’t conform to political ideology. It means we don’t ignore what’s real because we wish it weren’t.
Probably it would be better for me, for example, not to have even ventured into this territory. But this isn’t a time for any of us to be silent about what’s true. So join me in honoring truth-telling, and let’s be brave about knowing that this is how we keep our democracy.
Rex Smith, the co-host of The Media Project on WAMC, is the former editor of the Times Union of Albany and The Record in Troy. His weekly digital report, The Upstate American, is published by Substack.
The views expressed by commentators are solely those of the authors. They do not necessarily reflect the views of this station or its management.
