You don’t need the First Amendment for speech you like. You need it for the speech you hate.
That simple truth is the measure of whether a nation believes in liberty or not.
Yet in America today, we are told with growing insistence that “words are violence.” This claim isn’t abstract. It led, directly and indirectly, to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was not shot for committing any crime, nor for attacking anyone. He was murdered for his words — for the way he disagreed respectfully but bluntly with leftist ideas. He loved the people, even those who opposed him, but he would not bow to their ideology. His detractors, both before and after his death, insisted that his speech was “hate.” They cast his ideas as blasphemy against the idols of modern identity politics. Those words, repeated loudly and venomously, reached the ears of the wrong man — and violence followed.
How did we get here?
The History of Speech as “Violence”
Across history, societies that treat words as violence do not stay free.
- In the Roman Republic and Empire, slander could be punished as assault, satire as sedition, and even jokes as treason under the maiestas laws. Words were often treated as deeds.
- In the medieval world, blasphemy was a capital crime: speech was violence against God.
- In honor cultures, insults were duels: speech was violence against reputation.
- In totalitarian regimes, dissent was sabotage: speech was violence against the state.
- In today’s United Kingdom, people have even been jailed for tweets and online posts that the government criminalized as “hate speech.”
The American experiment was unique because it cut a sharp line: words, however offensive, were not violence. Only later did the courts recognize narrow exceptions — true threats, incitement, and direct “fighting words.” And this principle wasn’t buried in fine print. Free speech was placed at the very top of the Bill of Rights, signaling its primacy. That bold declaration — that words themselves could never be crimes — was one of the foundations of America’s greatness. It made room for vigorous debate, for dissent that toppled injustice, and for the creativity and dynamism that set this nation apart from every other.
The Civil Rights Era: “Rise Above”
The modern American struggle with offensive speech begins with the ugliest word in the English language: the n-word. Martin Luther King Jr. and his peers did not excuse it. They named it for what it was: degrading, hateful, humiliating. But their answer was not censorship. Their call was to dignity — to rise above.
And it worked. Not by government ban, but by persuasion. By the 1970s, polite society had rejected the n-word. Newspapers, television, schools, and workplaces stopped tolerating it. The word became the first for which you could be socially “canceled,” but there was no law against it. The taboo was cultural, not legal. At most, civil rights legislation could provide recourse in cases where its use created a hostile public atmosphere — not for the word itself, but for the discriminatory environment it reinforced.
The Slide: From Dignity to Blasphemy
But the story didn’t stop there. Step by step, the framing of offensive speech changed.
- Honor culture lens. As Thomas Sowell observed in Black Rednecks and White Liberals, ghetto black culture was deeply shaped by Scots-Irish honor codes. In that framework, slurs and insults were not merely offensive — they were “disrespect.” To be “dissed” demanded retaliation. Words and violence blurred. Other words besides the n-word gradually became taboo, or were classified socially as “fighting words.”
- From hurt to harm. By the 1980s, activists and academics were teaching that offensive words don’t merely hurt feelings — they cause measurable harm. Universities began writing “hate speech” codes. Bureaucrats and HR departments followed.
- The narcissistic turn. In today’s culture, the self is treated as sacred. Just as blasphemy against God was punished before the First Amendment, so now insulting identity is treated as blasphemy against the god of the self. That is how we arrive at the creed: “words are violence.”
The Cost: Charlie Kirk’s Murder
This is not theory. We watched it play out.
Charlie Kirk’s words were respectful, direct, and often unwelcome to the left. That should have made him exactly the kind of speaker the First Amendment was written to protect. Instead, he was labeled a “hater,” a “danger,” even a “threat to democracy.” His speech was painted not as disagreement, but as violence — and therefore as something to be “stopped.”
Those accusations were not harmless. They were tinder. In the hands of one unstable man, they became justification for a bullet. Kirk died not because of what he did, but because of what he said — and because others insisted that his words were themselves violence.
The Politicians’ Evasion
Now, many politicians insist they bear no responsibility for Kirk’s death. But what business are they in, if not the business of words? Every speech, every sound bite, every tweet is meant to persuade, to shape belief, to frame an opponent as hero or villain. They know words influence minds — that’s why they use them.
And here’s the hypocrisy: these same politicians are the ones insisting that words are violence. If that’s true, then what did they think was going to happen when they called conservatives “fascists,” “bigots,” “sexists,” “homophobes,” and “a danger to democracy and human rights”? They poured gasoline and then pretended surprise when someone struck a match.
They cannot wash their hands of this. They spent years telling Americans that people such as Kirk were not just wrong, but evil — not just mistaken, but existential threats. Someone finally believed them. Someone acted. And now they want to hide behind platitudes and deny the obvious.
Words have power. They know it. They built their careers on it. And when those words helped put a bullet in Charlie Kirk, they lost the right to pretend otherwise.
The Path Back
If we continue down this road, America will repeat the worst patterns of history. Treating words as violence always ends with tyranny — whether in the form of blasphemy laws, dueling codes, or secret police.
The way back is clear:
- Reassert the truth: Words are not violence.
- Relearn resilience: Offense is not injury. Dignity means rising above.
- Defend the First Amendment: in courts, in culture, in our daily courage to speak truth without fear.
Charlie Kirk’s death is a warning. If we cannot separate words from violence, we will invite more violence — not less. Freedom demands the opposite: that we protect even the words we hate, lest we all be silenced.
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