Now that the furor has died down over who said what about Charlie Kirk’s death, I need to ask why there were so many calls for people to lose their jobs because of it? Late night talk show hosts, local TV weather people, college professors, and high school teachers were all called on the carpet to account for their statements on air or on social media. Often by people who, when the shoe is on the other foot, claim to be free speech “absolutists”.
Before we get too deep into the weeds, let’s establish one thing: Your right to free speech pertains only to censorship by the government itself. You do not enjoy freedom of expression without consequences when it comes to what you want to say about your boss, or about your customers, or when you decide you are going to disrupt a lecture on calculus in a college classroom with pro-Hamas protest talking points.
Federal troops did not remove Jimmy Kimmel from his ABC studio and throw him in jail. His bosses are the ones that took him off the air. Was there undue pressure from the Federal Communications Commission? Possibly. But ultimately, the decision was still made by ABC, a private company.
And while I can understand why those calling for the heads of those celebrating Kirk’s death see the double standard of “inclusion” and “coexist” applying only when you agree with everything those on the left believe, by jumping on the same “cancel culture” bandwagon it makes you no better than the closed-minded folks that worked for years to keep Kirk off of college campuses.
Besides, I believe it is much better to know who is against you than having to guess.
One of the interesting angles reported in the aftermath of the Hamas attacks on Israel two years ago was how “betrayed” left-leaning Jewish college students felt when they saw their professors and those they thought of as “allies” on campus taking part in rallies supporting a group of terrorists hell-bent on killing Jews.
To be fair, “Free Palestine” wasn’t on a lot of activists’ radars before October 7th, what with people still eating meat and capitalism still being practiced in nearly all of the advanced world. But once they learned about another group of “brown people” being “oppressed by white people”, then Palestinian flags and watermelons became required icons in social media profiles to prove one “really cares”. But more importantly, Jewish college students learned who they cannot trust to support them in the future–and that is good to know.
And that goes for high school teachers like the one at Oshkosh West High School that was targeted for firing by those on the right after using an axiom purported to come from Mark Twain about “reading some obituaries with glee” on his personal Facebook page. It’s easy to paint those working in public education with a broad brush and say that everyone is a flaming liberal–but I can tell you first-hand, that is not true. There are conservatives (pre-Trump definition) in our classrooms. They may not be very vocal about it to protect their professional advancement hopes–but they do exist.
So what if you succeed in getting a conservative-hating teacher fired? Odds are he or she will be replaced by someone who shares the same ideology–but you will no longer know for sure. And that new teacher will be far more careful not to expose their true feelings about their fellow Americans so as not to share the same professional fate. So you as a parent or taxpayer are left to guess. As that great American educator “Schoolhouse Rocky” once told us every Saturday morning, “Knowledge is power!!” And now every parent and taxpayer in Oshkosh knows that teacher would be glad to see a conservative student dead.
Parents can now sit down with their kids and refer them directly to quotes, memes, GIFs and other evidence about how their teachers really feel about them–even if they spend that first day in class telling the kids to consider them a “trusted adult” who you can come to when you want to keep secrets from your parents. Kids can know which instructors that say “be your true self”, “feel free to express yourself”, and “this is a ‘judgement free zone'” are just full of malarkey.
Most of the kids that spoke in support of the West teacher before the Oshkosh School Board were–to borrow a phrase I’m hearing more parents use nowadays to describe their children–“very sensitive”. They talked about how the teacher encouraged them to express themselves freely and that he “never talked about politics”. But here’s an interesting thing to consider, when someone only expresses views that you agree with, do you consider their expressions to be “political”? It’s usually only when someone comes back at you with differing opinions that you think they are being “political”. Absent were any students that may have been Charlie Kirk followers saying they felt the same way in his classroom.
I would equate this to the state’s Sex Offender Registry. I remember the first time the Oshkosh Police Department held an offender notification meeting after the law was put into place. The common council chambers were packed with parents and residents demanding that the offender be barred from moving in–or just held in prison indefinitely. Emotions ran high that night.
The next time the department held an offender notification meeting, there were less people in attendance, and emotions were a bit more measured. Now, unless the offender is someone on par with the Halloween Killer Gerald Turner, police departments don’t even hold in-person notification meetings anymore. Parents can refer to the registry anytime they want and tell their kids what people and what houses to avoid in the neighborhood.
At those meetings (and in press releases sent out today) police and Department of Corrections officials noted often that sex offenders have always lived in our communities–now we have ways to know who they are and where they are residing–and that makes our communities safer. Now thanks to social media, public protests, and ever-present cellphones that record what parties might think are private conversations, we can know who might be undermining the values you try to instill in your kids every day in their classrooms.
One other thing that we’ve learned since Charlie Kirk’s death is that attempts to launch Turning Point USA chapters on many campuses have been thwarted by requirements that any new student groups have a faculty sponsor or advisor–and TPUSA was having problems finding instructors willing to work with them. I would strongly encourage students to ask as many teachers at the college and high school levels to sponsor or advise new chapters of Turning Point, or the former-Governor Scott Walker-affiliated Young America’s Foundation, on as many campuses as they can. You know, to see if they really do believe in freedom of speech and association like they claim to when one of their own is attacked.
