The Worst Takes from a Bad Week

The Free Press, about to take over CBS News, blames universities for American political violence.

The simplest response to Charlie Kirk’s murder is also the most humane and the best: It was a grotesque act of political violence. Political violence is bad. It is an unspeakable loss for the people directly affected. And it is bad for all of us, encouraging more violence, a sense of collective fear, and often triggering attacks on civil liberties.

That really is all you need to know or think about what happened. You don’t actually need any other takes. Honestly, you can skip reading the rest of this post.

Still here? OK.

Of course, the simple and humane take is not enough. While most people responded like decent human beings, we have a social media hungry for content, and a commentariat that must offer its insights on what felt like a genuinely consequential event. Many of these takes were wildly bad, seeking to use Kirk’s murder to further their own preexisting narratives, filling an information vacuum with speculation and hate.

The response felt very different to the aftermath political assassination of of a leading Minnesota Democrat Melissa Hortman this summer. At the time, Democrats abhorred the rising tide of violent rhetoric that seemingly fueled the murder, but did not announce that they planned to initiate a civil war, or broadly restrict the rights of those on the right. By contrast, significant public figures on the right, including elected officials or advisors to Trump, declared “war” on the left. Charlie Sykes documents some of these responses.

Trump himself followed this lead, blaming the left for Kirk’s death, even when there was no evidence about the shooter. In a national address, he declared that:

Those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.

Trump ticked off a list of examples of political violence against right-wing figures, including his own attempted assassination. He studiously ignored similar attacks on the left, including the murder of Hortman. Such an acknowledgment would have been uncomfortable of course, since many such attacks came from people who saw themselves as Trump supporters or held radical beliefs consistent with Trump’s political rhetoric, including the attacker of Nancy Pelosi’s husband, the would-be kidnappers of Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, or the anti-vax gunman who killed a police officer when he shot up the Centers for Disease Control.

Toward the end of the week, the tone started to change. The killer surrendered to authorities. Tyler Robinson was a white male, part of a Republican family and a life-long gun user. About all we know thus far of Robinson’s beliefs is that he spent a lot of time in online and gaming spaces, and inscribed some very online and gaming language onto his bullets. If he held leftist beliefs, their source was not immediately apparent.

The reason why it is good not to speculate too much on the motives of political assassins is that their motives often turn out to be incoherent, and many have genuine mental health problems. This was true of President Garfield’s assassin in 1883, and it was true of Trump’s would-be assassin last year.

The civil war was cancelled, at least for now, to be replaced by Young Male Mental Health Appreciation Week. Representative Nancy Mace best represented the change in tone.

One thing to watch for in the coming days is Kirk’s lone shooter becoming “they.” They killed Kirk. This is what happened to Trump’s shooter, inviting the false assumption that he is representative of a coherent political opposition to Trump. It turns out that the right sometimes does prefer pronouns.

Cancel Culture Is Cool Again

If the blame for Kirk’s death became harder to assign, the response to that death could still be punished. People who made tasteless or simply factual statements about Kirk’s record found themselves fired from their jobs in a coordinated campaign of cancelation and harassment.

Let’s just pause for a moment and add this to the vast domain of evidence that the right’s complaints about cancel culture were never meant to reflect some broad principle. They have pursued a massive purge of public officials for their identity, beliefs, or simply for having attended a DEI training.

They argued that such purges were not really cancel culture, which was best exemplified by social media pile ons destroying people’s reputation and careers. Well, now they are leading exactly that type of campaign. Indeed, some of those who mocked or lied about past incidents of political violence (such as Elon Musk or Laura Loomer when it came to the attack on Paul Pelosi), are now leading the cancel culture charge.

The distinction between public sector purges and private sector cancelations falls apart. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth paused his self-declared fight against political correctness in the military, telling staff to find any service members who mocked the death of Kirk. Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced a policy of revoking existing immigrant visas or denying new ones if their responses to Kirk’s death were not deemed appropriate — obviously, no such policy existed for the murder of Melissa Hortman — while State Department officials encouraged snitching.

The moment is a stark echo Bush administration spokesman Ari Fleischer’s warning in the aftermath of 9/11: “All Americans that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do.”

What Kirk’s death demonstrated is a deep desire for an event to trigger an assault on civil liberties in America. If that assault is not fully realized now, it is only a matter of time. A machinery of government control — of speech, cities, civil society — is being built, and is being built to be used.

The Worst Take

Kirk was celebrated as a champion of free speech by those looking to close down the speech of others. This inherent conflict defined perhaps the worst take of the week. The Free Press, the online publication of Bari Weiss, issued an editorial that praised Kirk for his commitment to free expression, while raising concerns that his death would cause an attack on speech rights. Good! Then it went bad, very bad:

The acceleration of political violence has been frightening: from the attack on the Capitol in January 2021, to the murder of a healthcare executive allegedly by Luigi Mangione, to the attempted assassinations of Trump, to the killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., to the shooting of state lawmakers in Minnesota. And now Kirk’s murder.

There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.

Wait … what? It is really difficult to overstate the incoherence of the claim here, but let me do my best.

The Free Press editors point to a grab-bag of political violence, and then in the next paragraph identify universities as “the biggest culprits” in fueling that violence. Not the ever-widening access to guns, not to the increasing embrace of radical political beliefs, not social media. No other potential explanations are mentioned. The universities did it.

Let’s start with their examples of political violence. While there were certainly university-educated people at the attack on the Capitol, it seems a stretch to believe they were inspired by college professors, when they were directly and obviously inspired by Donald Trump.

Of the other four other acts of violence mentioned, none were undertaken by students, and there is no common political ideology that connects them. The closest would be Thomas Crooks, Trump’s would be assassin, who has completed a community college associates degree, and was planning to attend a university. But Crooks had evident mental health problems and no coherent ideology, seemingly as interested in killing Joe Biden as Trump. It makes as about as much sense to blame his part time work as a nursing home aide as his engineering science education, which is to say, not at all.

Tyler Robinson, Kirk’s self-confessed assassin, spent one semester at a university before dropping out. Was he so radicalized in that one semester that he committed to violence? Which of his pre-engineering classes radicalized him? Or was it when he switched to a community college electrical apprenticeship? Which of these higher education madrassas turned him into a killer?

The Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank, offers a breakdown of political violence in America. One basic point is that ideologically-motivated political violence mostly comes from the right. This has been true for decades, and it remains true in recent years. So, how can universities, a supposed hotbed of leftist indoctrination be “among the biggest culprits” of political violence?

Let’s take on the point that “America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance.”

There is an easy way to test this claim. Try to think of another industry that not just tolerates but invites is most virulent critics to its workspace, often paying thousands of dollars to cover their security costs. Universities do that because of their commitment to the idea that competing viewpoints matter. Who else does?

It is not just that The Free Press is wrong. The example driving their analysis disproves their claim. The tolerance of universities for critical speech is best illustrated by their relationship with Charlie Kirk.

Kirk did not go to college, but he started his political career with Professor Watchlist, which identified professors he deemed to be radical. For many, the result was harassment and threats. Kirk built his political organization, Turning Point, via a series of chapters on college campuses. Kirk and Turning Point mastered a new political economy of campus conservatism. Members used debate with controversial speakers who generated attention. They also engaged in sophomoric stunts and had members who trafficked in overt racism.

Kirk and Turning Point were a pain in the ass for universities, a source of disquiet. Nevertheless, universities largely welcomed — or at least tolerated — Kirk, and allowed his organization to operate on their campuses. Kirk died at a university-organized event, part of a Fall tour of university campuses. He was engaged in a peaceful discussion in front of a thousands of students when he was killed by someone not affiliated with the campus. It is impossible to square these facts with the claim that “America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate.”

I have been a faculty member on American campuses in Michigan, Texas, Wisconsin, and Washington, D.C. for 23 years. I do not observe students to be noticeably more intolerant during the time I have taught them. But I am exhausted by the constant scapegoating of higher education. The biggest change I have observed is that I, my colleagues, and our students are intensely surveilled in the hope that we can be publicly shamed, fired, or expelled if we say or do something wrong.

Nasty emails and even death threats have become routine in my profession. This sense of hostility has seeped into the classroom. Last semester, both students and guest lecturers asked that I stop recording classes out of concern for how their words could be used against them. Their concerns were not about the woke left.

This is the environment that The Free Press is contributing to with its unhinged rhetoric. They characterize professors as training jihadis in a peon to tolerance without the slightest sense of irony. Jihadis. Again, the echoes of 9/11 ring clear. Universities are tagged with a collective guilt in the same way that American Muslims were under suspicion after an attack by foreign terrorists. Guilt by association, even if no association exists.

At a time when we are all encouraged to tone down the political hate, The Free Press can safely label universities as encouraging terrorism and still claim the mantle of sensible centrist, even though their considered editorial position is no different from that of Fox News …

… although Fox News is happy to take the rhetoric even further, using the sort of unhinged language that is a prelude to a purge.

Variations on “the universities are to blame” were espoused by influential actors in conservative media, including Elon Musk, and government officials. For example, Harmeet K. Dhillon, who has led Department of Justice investigations of higher education, responded to Laura Loomer, by agreeing on the need to defund higher education. Loomer is a conspiracy nut and bigot, but she holds genuine influence in the Trump administration, able to ensure the firing of several government officials she deems disloyal. While the Department of Justice investigations that follow will use lofty words about discrimination, tolerance, and free speech, they are seeded with a desire to destroy American higher education.

It is easy to see how demonizing those who engage in nasty political rhetoric can quickly extend to suppressing broader dissent. On Fox News, Donald Trump Jr. falsely argued that political violence was only coming from the left, before saying:

But you can’t call someone who you disagree with or simply can’t win an argument with, a ‘Nazi,’ a ‘fascist,’ a ‘dictator,’ a ‘greatest threat to democracy in the history of civilization,’ and then pretend you had nothing to do with it when the more radical wing – and there does not seem to be all that much difference to me these days – takes up arms and tries to kill those they disagree with.

No one was calling Kirk a dictator or threat to democracy. Here, Trump Jr. is talking about critics of his father’s administration. If you want to point out the many ways that Trump as undermined democracy to move America toward authoritarianism, this is incredibly chilling. Are professors who document the erosion of American democracy now to keep silent or be accused of fomenting violence?

The reality is that universities, faculty and students are living through an unprecedented assault on speech rights. In the days before Kirk was murdered, two Texas professors were fired for their speech. In the aftermath of Kirk’s murder, multiple historically Black colleges and universities went into lockdown after a series of threats.

Universities joined the broader trend of purging employees for posting insensitive messages after Kirk’s death. Their response was panicked, but not irrational. They understand how the targeting of individual employees were part of the long-standing GOP attack on higher education. For example, President Trump boosted a message from a South Carolina representative seeking to get Clemson faculty fired, which included the message: “Defund Clemson. End Tenure at State colleges.”

In one case, a professor was fired for posting, without comment, a screenshot of a headline about Kirk’s views on second amendment rights. The professor works for a public institution, and should enjoy first amendment protections. His punishment was encouraged by U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn, who has taken an oath to defend the US constitution, which still contains the first amendment last time I checked.

Under such conditions, the claim of The Free Press that the universities are the ones opposing diverse perspectives looks weaker and weaker. The assault on campus speech is coming from outsider the campus.

In the last couple of years, students in America have seen their free speech rights aggressively contested by government. Those lacking citizenship protections have been jailed or deported for speech. Fearful of not appearing sufficiently punitive, universities have withheld diplomas from students purely for their speech. The government is currently engaged in an obvious and massive viewpoint discrimination lawfare campaign against campuses in an effort to control campus speech. If students are becoming more skeptical of free speech, as The Free Press suggests, perhaps it is because while they hear much about the importance of free speech, it is plain to them that their supposed speech rights are all too easily abrogated.

Many who expressed genuine concerns about campus speech over the last decade are appalled by government now shutting down speech it dislikes. The Free Press is not among them, largely overlooking government control of campus speech.

Indeed, one could argue that Weiss, who as a student campaigned against Arab professors, is one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Trump-era effort to curtail dissent. She is reportedly on the cusp of receiving a huge pay-day and editorial control over CBS by its new owners, who are anxious to demonstrate to Trump that they will be a reliable media ally. So get ready for a nominally centrist news institution to tell you that, once again, the professors are the enemy.

This is a guest post from University of Michigan Professor Don Moynihan, author of the Can We Still Govern? Substack. Read the original article here.