Megan McArdle: Charlie Kirk’s death reveals heroes — and hypocrites

In the time since Tyler Robinson was charged with fatally shooting Charlie Kirk, I’ve been thinking about Robinson’s parents. Despite their anguish and fear, they convinced their son to surrender to police instead of becoming accessories after the fact.

It was the right thing to do, but it’s a heroically unnatural decision. The instinct is to shelter your wayward kin, take care of your tribe and let society fend for itself. Civilization asks us to rise above those base instincts, to endorse and enforce universal principles rather than the primal logic of “us” and “them.” But few of us face such a big challenge.

So pause to reflect on their sacrifice. Reflect, too, on how the rest of us live up to a much easier principle, such as free speech.

I spent the past decade watching conservatives complain about “cancel culture” and government attacks on free speech. And then, last week, I watched them enact these very things on a grander scale: social media mobs hounding random nobodies out of their jobs; the government pushing companies to censor speech.

Progressive online hordes might have gotten people undeservedly fired, but at least they weren’t cheered on by the vice president of the United States. The Biden administration might have threatened social media companies with regulatory retaliation for not cracking down on “misinformation” enthusiastically enough. However, at least those officials didn’t go on a podcast – like Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr – and threaten to revoke the licenses of ABC affiliates unless they pulled Jimmy Kimmel off the air.

This weapons-grade hypocrisy was the work of a small number of conservatives, but it was supported online by many more. If anyone called out the hypocrisy, conservatives responded that this was different: This was celebrating murder. Or they pointed toward progressive social media and said, “You want to see hypocrisy? Try looking over there.”

Admittedly, there’s a certain insincerity to the left’s belated discovery of the importance of free speech. I have had to stop drinking beverages while scrolling social media, lest I choke on my own mordant laughter as I watch prominent cancellation artists – and their accomplices – make an about-face and start saluting the First Amendment. Apparently the old justifications, like “freedom of speech doesn’t mean freedom from consequences,” don’t sound so compelling when your opponents are mouthing them – and doling out the consequences.

However silly progressives look, at least they are now pointed in the right direction, while conservatives are headed in the wrong one.

Our fidelity to unnatural principles, such as free speech, is the foundation of civilization today. You cannot run a modern industrial society on tribal loyalties and personal judgments that work well for a small band of foragers. For that, you need broad and impartial principles that equally apply to everyone, and are equally enforced by everyone, even against their own.

When those principles are working, it’s easy to forget how fragile that negotiated truce is, and how much we need it. Our ancient instincts reassert themselves, and we look for ways to weasel out of the social contract. After all, no matter how much lip service we pay to principles, it feels gloriously right to punish those odious outsiders who have offended our most sacred values. And it feels hideously wrong to clip the wings of our wonderful allies, who have merely violated the primitive superstitions of some lesser tribe. So we invent reasons that this is different.

That’s how some progressives came to believe that they could use the outsize power they had amassed on social media to rewrite the rules unilaterally. Social justice was different; free speech was a tool of the oppressor, so naturally they granted immunity to themselves while cracking down on the other side. They are now discovering where that ends.

Having abandoned the clear and unforgiving principles of free speech, they have little to protect them now except a child’s plaint: That’s not what I meant! Conservatives will be equally unprotected when the worm turns again and Democrats have the FCC at their disposal. We could spend years battering each other until there is nothing left of our tattered democracy. Or we could choose to restore the old truce.

By “we” I don’t mean some vague, collective “we.” I mean you and me. And I’m afraid we can’t just shout about the horrible behavior of people we disagree with – very satisfying, and very ineffective. Your side is the one you can influence, so that’s where you should concentrate your fire, even if the other side’s behavior seems objectively worse. If that seems like unilateral disarmament, well, how’s the escalating game of tit-for-tat working out?

One might ask whether it’s realistic to demand people rise above their instincts in this bitterly partisan age, especially when so many of their opponents are failing to do so. Yet evidently it’s possible to live up to principle, because Tyler Robinson’s family did, in the hardest possible way. They didn’t demand proof that other families would do the right thing in their situation; they just did it.

Charlie Kirk’s widow did the right thing, too. Her husband was assassinated over politics, leaving her children without a father. Erika Kirk didn’t give in to the natural impulse to rail against her political enemies, like certain U.S. presidents I could name. Instead, she gave a beautiful eulogy in which she forgave her husband’s killer on principle, and reaffirmed Charlie’s commitment to many other principles – among them, the First Amendment. This seems both extraordinary and entirely reasonable, because she, of all people, knows where the other way is leading us.

“When you stop the conversation, when you stop the dialogue – this is what happens,” she said. “When we lose the ability and the willingness to communicate, we get violence.”