Next month marks one year since Charlie Kirk was shot and killed while giving a speech at Utah Valley University. In the 12 months since, a bronze statue of Kirk has been sculpted for Times Square. Congress designated his birthday a National Day of Remembrance. More than 100,000 people attended his memorial at State Farm Stadium in Glendale, Arizona. And the legal architecture protecting free expression on campus has never been stronger.
Nearly half of U.S. states have now passed some version of the Forming Open and Robust University Minds Act, which bans so-called “free speech zones,” prohibits viewpoint discrimination against student organizations, and requires schools to keep outdoor campus areas open as public forums. Last fall, the House passed the Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act on a bipartisan vote. The Supreme Court’s position on hate speech hasn’t budged in decades: there is no hate speech exception to the First Amendment. The line is drawn at incitement to imminent lawless action, and it always has been. The legal scaffolding is in place.
So why does none of that seem to matter?
CHARLIE KIRK’S MENTOR REVEALS WHAT LATE TPUSA FOUNDER ‘WANTED PEOPLE TO KNOW’ ABOUT THE GOSPEL
This year’s FIRE College Free Speech Rankings tell a story that should unsettle anyone who thinks legislation alone can fix this. For the first time in six years of data collection, 1 in 3 American college students now express some tolerance for using violence to stop a campus speaker. Not chanting over them or walking out, but physical force.
Nearly 70,000 students at 257 institutions were surveyed, and 166 of those schools received a failing grade. Record numbers said that shouting down speakers and blocking entrances to events are acceptable tactics.
I wrote about Kirk’s assassination last September, in what I could only describe as a loss for debate and democracy on the national stage. I argued that his commitment to both showing up and arguing, even with the people who hated him most, was something worth honoring. I still believe that today.
But nearly a year out, I find myself confronted with a question I’m not sure I’m equipped to answer: what happens when you build all the right legal protections for free speech, and the culture moves in the opposite direction anyway?
Because that’s exactly what’s happening. The laws say public university campuses must be open forums. The students say force is a reasonable answer to the ideas they find threatening. Both of those things are true and couldn’t be more at odds with one another.
Part of the problem is that an astounding number of people, particularly people who should know better, still don’t have a basic understanding of the constitutional framework around free speech. According to FIRE, 45% of Americans believe hate speech should not be protected by the First Amendment. Many believe it already isn’t.
A majority in a Cato Institute survey agreed that society can ban hate speech while protecting free expression. That position is, to put it gently, legally inept. Even members of the Trump administration have gotten it wrong.
Six days after Kirk was slain in front of the world, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi publicly declared that the government would “absolutely target” people for hate speech. Our nation’s chief law enforcement officer confused her own moral revulsion with the realities of her legal authority. She was criticized by the left and right alike and walked back her comments.
Kirk said it plainly in 2024: “Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There’s ugly speech. There’s gross speech. There’s evil speech. But there’s no hate speech.” The irony of the attorney general using his death, just six days later, to threaten the very government overreach he’d spent his career warning about, is an irony that some might find unbearable. If that doesn’t tell you we have a comprehension problem in this country, I don’t know what will.
And that confusion lives equally on both sides of the aisle, right and left. It lives in campus administrators who build bias response teams that could only be dreamt up by Orwell. It’s in politicians who weaponize the government against speech they wish to rebuke. And apparently, it lives in students who were raised on the idea that words can somehow be violence, and who are now treating that metaphor as literal.
The FORUM Act is good law. I worked on it. The Respecting the First Amendment on Campus Act is also a good bill. Legal protections for speech on our campuses are both necessary and well overdue. These laws don’t teach people why free expression is important, though.
Here’s the part that should worry the Right, specifically. The decline in support for free speech was the sharpest among conservative students. Yes, the very students who were tasked with protecting the right to free expression most are abandoning it.
Kirk understood something instinctive that many people on both sides of the debate have forgotten. Free speech is not a legal technicality. It’s a practice, and it’s a decision to show up, make your views heard, and trust the power of persuasion. You can disagree with everything he ever said and still recognize that the freedom to argue is the beating heart of our democracy.
In Matal v. Tam, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously declared, “the proudest boast of our free speech jurisprudence is that we protect the freedom to express ‘the thought that we hate.’”
WHEN POLITICS BECOMES YOUR IDENTITY, DISAGREEMENT BECOMES WAR
One in 3 students now rejects that principle because they believe that some ideas are dangerous enough to justify a physical response. And the adults in their lives, their administrators, professors, and elected officials, have spent years teaching them exactly that.
We have laws. What we don’t have is a culture that understands why those laws exist. And until that changes, the 1-in-3 number isn’t going to shrink. And unfortunately, the distance between a survey response and a rooftop in Orem, Utah, will only get shorter.
Andrew Logan Lawrence is a writer from Georgia and a former senior correspondent for Campus Reform. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, The Hill, and the Times of Israel.