The debates over the protection of free speech have been raging since before the killing of Charles Kirk. The killing of Charles Kirk has taken this discussion into another realm. Jimmy Kimmel was a high-profile casualty of the skirmish. He was suspended from his show and returned recently to record audiences, even though the companies on the political right, Sinclair and Nexstar, refused to air his show on the stations they owned. It has been demanded of Kimmel that he offer a full-throated apology to the family, and contribute to Turning Point USA, the organization that Kirk founded, as an act of contrition before he can really be forgiven. The premise is that short of that it would be doubtful whether he was actually remorseful. But while the corporate media focused on Jimmy Kimmel and his suspension, other people lost their positions because they exposed the racist things that Kirk uttered regularly on his podcast and in public forums. Jimmy Kimmel returned to TV after a brief suspension due to public pressure.

However, there are still a number of people without jobs because, like Kimmel, they exercised their First Amendment right and expressed outrage, disagreement, and concern over this Kirk moment in the country’s political life. Some questioned the way that the MAGA/Trump base was gathering around the spirit of Charles Kirk, canonizing and deifying him, and using him as the litmus test of whether people were aligned with the political right and the MAGA/Trump agenda or not. The MAGA/Trump white supremacist agenda was emboldened in their right-wing Onward Christian Soldier march to win new ground and to increase their abilities to conquer the left. Criticism of what Kirk said in life could not be submitted for examination of the words and intent, but according to the political right, to do so it was a celebration of the killing of Kirk. This was a calculated stretch, but worked as corporate America fired workers who felt sorry for his death but questioned his words and the words intent.

Karen Attiah, the last full-time Black opinion writer and editor of Global Opinions at the Washington Post, was let go in the midst of the Charles Kirk storm, but unlike Kimmel, she did not get her job back. MSNBC analyst Matthew Dowd was also let go. People know of the high profile people, but there are numbers of people that we do not learn from educators in the high schools and colleges, lawyers, doctors, first responders, people working in a variety of businesses, government workers, and many other professionals who have been shown the door because employers felt that their comments on social media was too raw, not remorseful enough, and had crossed the line as far as free speech was concerned. This is like a monster that have been let out of its cave where the mantra of advancing free speech is utilized, weaponized, and targeted toward “wokeness”, “critical race theory”, Diversity Equity and Inclusion, college admissions, voting rights, women, LGBTQIA, and every other group and person that is non-white and not in the fold of the MAGA/Trump and the white supremacist agenda.

Someone needs to explain to me this new set of rules concerning free speech. This week at Tennessee State University a MAGA group wearing those offensive red hats breached the safety of that HBCU with signs that said, “DEI should be illegal” and “deport all illegals now.” They called themselves the “Fearless Debaters,” and they claimed that this was their first stop on a tour. They argued they were exercising their First Amendment right. They were escorted off campus by security. But this demonstrates how the right has raised the ante on free speech from something that should be revered but now is being used in hateful and destructive ways.

The First Amendment is noble and is an expression of a free and open society where debate and discussion are welcomed. But freedom of speech for the political right has little to do with worthy ideas and valued discussion and debate, and it has nothing to do with advancing the dignity of the world or of the human race, but it has everything to do with advancing racist and hateful ideology under the guise of the First Amendment. The First Amendment is being used as a litmus test to distinguish between those on the right and those on the left. The right interprets freedom of speech as the right to say anything they want with all of the disrespect and hatefulness that they can. The idea that you can say anything you wish disrespectfully to anyone you want is what the political right means by freedom of speech. They mean to offer the most demeaning, degrading, insulting, and racist speech into the political and public arena. This is what they want the freedom to do, and are expressing this with a vengeance after their canonization and deification of Charles Kirk.

The political right felt restricted in its ability to speak from the 1980s until recently. During previous decades, racist speech became less acceptable in the public domain. Popular TV shows took on the idea of racist attitudes and speech and comically showed how boorish, foolish, and ill-mannered the practice and people were. All of us know how Archie Bunker, in a comedic way, exposed the subject of racism and bigotry weekly. There were other programs and popular shows that took on the theme, and racist speech was exposed for the virus that it is. It became less and less popular to express racist ideology openly.

But that was then, and this is now. We have taken giant steps backwards. When I listen to the political right, I hear the Klansmen screaming that racial mixing will create a mongrel race. What the political right wants to bring back is the speech of old along with the attitudes and racial restrictions of yesterday. The conservative Trump/MAGA political right wants to freely and publicly utter ideas and present attitudes that were exposed as wrong in the past, and it is just as wrong in the present. They want to talk about how Blacks and women are unqualified for a job. They want to talk about how every Black or Brown person in the job market represents a white person who should have had that job. They want to talk about how Black and Brown people coming into the country will soon out-populate white people unless we remove them from the country and turn them back at the borders. They want to talk about DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) initiatives as a threat to qualified white people and offering less competent non-white people the job. And most of all, they want to call me the “N” word in a myriad of free speech ways.

It has been argued that speech is limited in its protections if it creates an imminent danger or causes serious harm. Free speech can be deemed unprotected due to its intent and the threat it causes to others. For example, it is often cited that you can yell fire in a crowded movie theater, and if there is a fire, the speech is protected. Speech, however, that is not true, such as yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater when there is no fire and causing a stampede and injury to others, is not protected because it was intended to cause harm and resulted in bodily injury. I am a preacher and not a lawyer, but the speech that is being pushed by the political MAGA/Trump white supremacist agenda is intended to cause harm and to inflict mental anguish. The words they use, the ideas disguised as simple free speech is metastasizing as a cancer and infecting the country.

It won’t be easy to pull it back. Words will lead to violence as we have been witnessing, and it will get worse unless our ideas of speech edify instead of denigrating, and engage in the weightier things of existence. Our freedom of speech should be guided by how we respect and live together as human beings, how we share and protect the bounty of creation, and the many other things of worth and dignity. Unless the political rhetoric and public discourse become serious and thoughtful, the country’s polarization will persist, and we will become weaker as a nation rather than stronger. The hatred, racist, white supremacy ideology of the present must be put back into the past and made once again boorish and obsolete. We have to find a way to retire hate and harmful speech to the dirt pits of history, where relics lie buried. Unless we can elevate Free Speech to a loftier place, we will be doomed and remain polarized and broken as a people and a country.

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