Red Scare, Blue Scare, Old Fare, Same Snare: Selective Free Speech from McCarthyism to the Kirk Aftermath
The paradox we're living in is that free speech in America is a one-way valve: it's revered for some, but a tool for ridicule and suppression for others.
✨ Embers — essays, poetry, and cultural works
“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
—Evelyn Beatrice Hall, paraphrasing Voltaire (1906)
This essay holds two truths at once—Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die, and his public record merits scrutiny. We trace the selective-speech pattern, revisit McCarthy-era gatekeeping, and widen the frame through art and philosophy. Then we offer a small practice of non-selective speech for hard times. Memory keeps faith.
The paradox we’re living in
In the United States, “free speech” often behaves like a one-way valve. When a right-wing figure is harmed, the record is wrapped in velvet and critique is declared indecent. When a progressive is attacked, jeers pass as commentary and “now is not the time” becomes the only acceptable sentence. This isn’t a debate-team abstraction. It scripts our grief. It trains our remembrance.
Charlie Kirk did not deserve to die. Full stop. But what he said—over years, into microphones—remains fair ground. To call a record to account is not grave-dancing; it is a refusal of amnesia. If a platform was used to sort neighbors into who counts and who doesn’t, then we all deserve accurate records. Memory protects.
What he said (and said again)
There was a pattern in the performances, not a scatter of slips.
On race, he made suspicion ordinary: the line about seeing a Black pilot and hoping he’s “qualified”; the claim that in “urban America” “prowling Blacks” target white people “for fun”; the question of whether a “moronic Black woman” at a counter was hired for excellence or for affirmative action. Different days, same gravity: a public sorting of who belongs and who should be watched.
On guns, he offered a tidy arithmetic of loss: it is ‘worth the cost’ of some gun deaths every year to preserve the Second Amendment. The language is cool, almost technocratic, as if sorrow were a budget line.
On immigration, he romanticized a pause, saying America “peaked” when immigration slowed and hinting we should be unafraid to do it again—folded into talk of a “great replacement” at the southern border.
On Islam, he returned to a civilizational frame—“conquest values,” “threat,” “not compatible”—and, at times, a sharper metaphor about Islam as a sword wielded against the country.
These are not marginal policy takes. They are permission structures. Their work is to make hierarchy feel like common sense. That is why the history matters. The targets of contempt deserve a history that does not erase what was said about them. Memory resists.
Martyrs, mockery, and who gets to speak after death
There is a rhythm to the aftermath. One media machine moves quickly to declare martyrdom and to pronounce the moment as war, then scolds any attempt to revisit the public record as heresy. The same channels can turn dismissive—performatively unbothered—when harm lands on the other side, as though the mourning of certain families were a kind of content. The rule, unspoken but constant, seems to be this: one tribe’s pain is sacred; the other’s is an opportunity.
Refusing that rule is not cruelty. It is how we keep faith with the living. The function of critique is not to desecrate a grave, but to keep the air clear. Silence about speech is not peace; it is compliance.
Selective speech is not new, and it is not confined to one team. We have done versions of this before.
The inverse case we must own: McCarthyism and the narrowing of dissent
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, liberal and centrist institutions narrowed the circle and called it virtue.
In labor, the Congress of Industrial Organizations turned inward. At the end of the decade, a bloc of left-led unions was shown the door; within a year, eleven unions—about a million workers—were out. The language was clean: loyalty, democracy, responsibility. The effect was not. Interracial organizing fractured. Strike capacity withered. A long winter settled over the kind of shop-floor power that would have nourished the civil rights era. What sounded like moral hygiene functioned as strategic self-harm.
In Hollywood, studio chiefs gathered at the Waldorf-Astoria on a November day in 1947 and pledged to suspend or fire the Hollywood Ten, to deny employment to anyone labeled Communist, and to condition future work on sworn assurances of allegiance. A single statement became the wrapper for an industry-wide blacklist. Art narrowed; fear did the rest. And yet the arts answered back. The Crucible arrived not as antiquarian theater but as a mirror held to the present, asking what happens when truth is staged as confession and when ritual devotion squeezes culture into compliance.
In the universities, the University of California Regents imposed a loyalty oath. Dozens refused; dozens were fired; courts later forced reinstatements while the state layered on its own oath by statute. The administrators explained themselves in the language of protection. In practice they turned the campus into a laboratory for compelled speech—an object lesson in how institutions teach fear.
This is not a mirror held up to taunt an opponent; it is a reminder to ourselves. The habit of narrowing speech in the name of saving democracy is one of the ways democracies corrode. Which is why we look next to the places that remembered what politics forgot.
What art and philosophy teach when politics forgets
When law narrows, art remembers. Under the blacklist, writers learned to travel under assumed names—Dalton Trumbo’s words slipping onto screens he couldn’t sign; a script like Roman Holiday arriving through a front, and later Spartacus putting his name back where it belonged. An entire film—Salt of the Earth—was made by blacklisted hands and nearly silenced; it survived anyway, a miner’s song carried past the checkpoints. On stage, Arthur Miller built The Crucible as a lantern for the present, asking what becomes of a people who turn truth into confession. Even when studios drew curtains, the work kept traveling, quietly, like a river under ice.
Music moved too. Paul Robeson’s voice was chased from concert halls and still filled union halls and church basements; Pete Seeger kept passing songs hand to hand until the circle was large enough to sing back. Photographers found ways to fix recall to paper—Dorothea Lange’s images of incarceration camps, sometimes withheld or cropped; Ansel Adams’s Born Free and Equal, arguing in pictures against a policy the government preferred to forget. Comedians stepped on stage and tested the borders of the sayable—Lenny Bruce on trial, George Carlin mapping the words we weren’t allowed to use—reminding us that the argument over speech is always also an argument over who gets to name the world we live in.
Philosophy keeps trying to teach the same lesson politics tries to unlearn. John Stuart Mill warned that the worst harm of silencing isn’t what it does to the speaker but what it does to the public mind, which grows dull when opposing ideas are chased from the square. Hannah Arendt wrote about the grammar of power and the temptations of force: politics is built on words and persuasion, and when we abandon that grammar we invite violence to take the place of argument. Audre Lorde, speaking into another arena of danger, gave us a sentence that refuses to fade—your silence will not protect you. Toni Morrison, accepting a Nobel, told us that oppressive language does more than represent violence; it is violence, and it does more than represent the limits of knowledge; it limits knowledge.
James Baldwin kept the door open where others wanted it shut. The task of the artist, he said in many ways, is to make reality visible again, to lay bare the questions hidden by the answers. Václav Havel, writing from a different country’s fracture, called it living in truth: the small, stubborn refusal to repeat the slogans that make the air unbreathable. Different languages, same instruction: do not let speech be turned into a purity test. Do not let rhetoric launder harm into common sense. Keep the space in which disagreement does not have to culminate in force.
The task isn’t to like every utterance. The task is to hold the line where language remains a civic instrument rather than a weapon, to teach how claims are made and smuggled, to answer without borrowing the grammar of domination. Art shows us how to do it—by reminiscence, by indirection, by courage—and philosophy reminds us why it matters: because the republic we keep is the one we can still describe aloud.
A civic ethic of speech
This is not branding; it is a neighborly practice. Defend the right to speak, and the right to answer, in the same breath. Mourn the life and scrutinize the words without pretending the two are enemies. Treat publishing as mutual aid: save the link, note the date, give the context, so others can think clearly when the air fills with smoke. Name your own side’s errors—CIO expulsions, the Waldorf Statement, the loyalty oath—so you do not repeat them with new ornaments. Keep quote integrity. If you have the words, quote them. If you do not, paraphrase cleanly and say so. Lower the heat. Refuse metaphysical enemies. Opponents are citizens, not demons. Make archiving a habit. Memory endures.
A small field practice
Begin where you are. Keep evidence, because memory erodes under fatigue and flood. Speak plainly, because spectacle is a solvent. When you hear war-talk spiraling into demonology, answer with a human voice. When loss is used as a gag order, insist on the difference between critique and celebration. When the room tilts toward blind allegiance, steady it. If you held a microphone, your words belong to the public record; if you are listening, listen with timestamps. Art will carry what policy cannot. Commission it, pass it hand to hand, let it kindle. The work is slow; that is why it lasts.
All of this can sound like theory. It isn’t. The argument has a human scale. Let me make it small before we close.
Keep the embers alive
Here is where the abstractions come to ground.
A small scene
As I write this, my grandmother lies in her bed, too tired to eat, taking slow sips of juice. I hope she regains her strength enough to join us for tonight’s supper, but I secretly worry each check-in may be the last. Such is the way when you care for someone as long-lived and near to the end as she is. A devout Christian raised in conservative Texas, she and I have never matched step for step. We diverge on many things. Her opinions arrive the way weather does—off the cuff, emotional, un-footnoted. On first hearing they can sound ignorant, even hateful. And yet she is a beacon in the room: patient, stubbornly kind, willing to be changed by what love demands.
When I was little, she opposed interracial marriage and same-sex marriage and still tried to hold the dissonance of believing in equality. After 9/11 she first nodded along to the dangerous story that Islam is a violent religion. The dissonance began to grind—between the story her fear told and the commands of her faith. Instead of letting fear and habit harden, she leaned into what she prayed: that the Bible asks us to love one another; that common sense and our long, complicated history teach that we are equal and deserving of the same rights. She mourned how Muslims were treated in those years. She changed her mind about marriage—both kinds—and about a dozen other things that would not stand upright beside her devotion.
News broke about Charlie Kirk while she was in her living room, the television turned up past the red line she still couldn’t hear. It hardly mattered. From the kitchen I heard her say, “Isn’t that terrible? Why would anyone want to shoot someone like that? I don’t care what he said.” Later she asked me why someone would do it. I didn’t have an answer then. I still don’t. I explained that he had said awful things, that he hurt people, that the president was fanning the heat instead of cooling it. She didn’t linger there. “We have to learn to love and live with each other,” she said, “or we won’t have a world to live in—especially the folks we disagree with and who say awful things. Maybe them the most.” She paused, then added, soft as a prayer, “I feel bad for his family.”
I don’t hold her up as a proof text. I hold her up as a reminder that people change, sometimes slowly, sometimes only after love embarrasses fear. She isn’t a theory of speech or a policy. She is a neighbor, insisting that sorrow not become an injunction and that anger not become permission. In a country that keeps trying to turn politics into war and speech into a purity ritual, that insistence is the simplest kind of courage: the kind you can hear from the kitchen.
From that living room back to the wider square, the measure doesn’t change: anguish does not require silence, and love is not a license for forgetting. The sentence she offered—simple as a prayer—returns us to the work at hand: mourn the life, name the record, keep the space for expression wide enough for neighbors to stand in together. A republic is a long practice. Keep talking. Keep recording. Keep the embers alive.
References
Primary Sources (Original Broadcasts, Events, Social Media)
Thoughtcrime (The Charlie Kirk Show). “Ask Me Anything, Episode 5.” Rumble video, January 18, 2024. https://rumble.com/v46360j-thoughtcrime-january-18-2024-dei. Accessed September 18, 2025.
The Charlie Kirk Show. Episodes documenting statements on affirmative action (January 3, 2024), immigration (“America peaked” framing, August 22, 2025), and Islam (“conquest values,” April 30, 2025). Rumble archives. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Turning Point USA—Faith. “TPUSA Faith Event, Nashville.” Event stream, April 5, 2023. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Kirk, Charlie. Post on X (formerly Twitter), September 8, 2022. Archived at https://web.archive.org/.
Secondary Documentation (Transcripts, Clips, Mainstream Coverage)
Media Matters for America. “Charlie Kirk Goes on Unhinged Racist Rant: ‘Prowling Blacks Go Around for Fun to Go Target White People.’” May 19, 2023. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-goes-unhinged-racist-rant-prowling-blacks-go-around-fun-go-target-white. Accessed September 18, 2025.
———. “Charlie Kirk Laments Affirmative Action and Wonders If a ‘Moronic Black Woman’ Was Hired.” January 3, 2024. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-laments-affirmative-action-and-wonders-if-a-moronic-black-woman-was-hired. Accessed September 18, 2025.
———. “Charlie Kirk: ‘We Need to Have a Nuremberg-Style Trial for Every Gender-Affirming Clinic Doctor.’” April 1, 2024. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-calls-nuremberg-style-trial-every-gender-affirming-clinic-doctor. Accessed September 18, 2025.
———. “Charlie Kirk: ‘It’s Worth Some Gun Deaths Every Single Year to Keep the Second Amendment.’” April 5, 2023. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-says-its-worth-some-gun-deaths-every-single-year-keep-second-amendment. Accessed September 18, 2025.
———. “Charlie Kirk Says ‘Large Dedicated Islamic Areas Are a Threat to America,’ Says ‘Islam Has Conquest Values.’” April 30, 2025. https://www.mediamatters.org/charlie-kirk/charlie-kirk-says-large-dedicated-islamic-areas-threat-america-says-islam-has-conquest-values. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Snopes. “Did Charlie Kirk Say Gun Deaths Are Worth It to Preserve Second Amendment Rights?” April 6, 2023. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/kirk-gun-deaths-2a. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Yahoo News. “Fact Check: Did Charlie Kirk Say He’d Be Nervous If He Saw a Black Pilot?” January 22, 2024. https://ca.news.yahoo.com/fact-check-real-charlie-kirk-214400078.html. Accessed September 18, 2025.
The Guardian. “Charlie Kirk’s Record: A Roundup of Statements on Race, Gender, and Immigration.” September 11, 2025. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/sep/11/charlie-kirk-quotes-beliefs. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Historical Anchors (McCarthy-Era Inverse)
Association of Motion Picture Producers. “The Waldorf Statement.” November 24, 1947. In Hollywood Blacklist Primary Documents. New York: Jewish Theological Seminary. PDF. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Zieger, Robert H. The CIO, 1935–1955. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.
Caragozian, John S. “The UC’s Loyalty Oath Fight.” California Supreme Court Historical Society, March 10, 2023. PDF. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Post-Kirk Employment Actions (Wires and Major Regional)
Reuters. “Nasdaq Fires Employee over Posts about Charlie Kirk Shooting.” September 12, 2025. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Reuters. “University of Arkansas at Little Rock Suspends Law Professor over Posts about Kirk’s Killing.” September 18, 2025. Accessed September 18, 2025.
Texas Tribune. “Texas Schools Fire and Suspend Employees over Social Posts about Kirk’s Killing.” September 15, 2025. Accessed September 18, 2025
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