Reaction to Charlie Kirk’s death highlights hypocrisy of the left

2 hours ago 1

Opinion

September 21, 2025 — 1.30pm

In the forecourt of the BBC’s headquarters in central London stands a sculpture of George Orwell. On the plinth are inscribed the words: “If liberty means anything at all it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” Orwell’s wisdom stands as a reminder of something that many – including, all too often, the BBC itself – have forgotten, or simply no longer accept: that free societies are defined by their willingness to protect the expression not just of uncomfortable truths, but of uncomfortable opinions as well.

Patti Coleman wipes tears from her eyes at a memorial for Charlie Kirk in Phoenix, Arizona.

The assassination on September 10 of the conservative agitator Charlie Kirk – whose funeral on Sunday will be a major political event and, perhaps, a cultural tipping-point as well – has widened yet further the already deep fault-lines that make the American political system so dysfunctional. It reminded us yet again – not that we needed reminding – of the lunacy of the prevalence of firearms as a norm of American life. And it exposed the hypocrisies – on both sides of politics – of the freedom of speech debate.

The First Amendment may have protected Kirk’s right to free speech, but the Second Amendment protected the gun culture that made it so easy for someone to kill him.

Kirk’s body was not yet cold before Donald Trump took advantage of the occasion, not to tone down the violence, or call for national unity and reconciliation, but to take the ideological conflict to a yet higher level, placing the blame squarely upon “those on the radical left.”

“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people, and taken too many lives,” the president said, referencing the attempt on his own life last year, and the 2017 shooting of the Republican Congressman Steve Scalise. He failed to mention the 2023 attack on the home of Nancy Pelosi – at the time the Speaker of the House and the most senior Democrat in Congress – which left her husband with a fractured skull, or the assassination just three months ago of Melissa Hortman, the leader of the Democrat caucus in the Minnesota legislature.

Political violence in America is the product of extremism of both the left and the right, lethalised by the ludicrously-easy availability of firearms.

Last week, Trump used tactless remarks about Kirk by the television comedian Jimmy Kimmel as a pretext for strong-arming the broadcaster ABC to cancel his long-running program with threats to its broadcasting licence. Vice President JD Vance reversed his longstanding free speech rhetoric to demand that those who posted online commentary condoning the killing, should be fired: “The First Amendment protects a lot of very ugly speech but if you celebrate ... Charlie Kirk’s death, you should not be protected from being fired for being a disgusting person.” Meanwhile, Attorney-General Pam Bondi promised to “target” such people with hate speech laws.

Much of the commentary about the Kirk was, indeed, disgusting, idiotic and offensive. The assassination not only cut short the life of a 31-year-old man, it widowed a young mother and left two infant children without a father. Those who condoned it, or sought to excuse it by specious references to the offensiveness of Kirk’s own rhetoric, were inhumanly cruel.

However, condemnation of attempts by Trump and his administration to wring maximum political advantage from the killing was perfectly justified. Yet, coming from those on the illiberal left of American politics, they were also deeply hypocritical. After years of promoting cancel culture, no-platforming and weaponising hate speech laws as an excuse for the political censorship of right-wing opinion, it’s a bit too late for the left now to complain when their ideological enemies do the same thing to them.

Once one side of politics embraces an authoritarian mindset – even if it is the soft cultural authoritarianism of political “correctness” – it’s only a matter of time before the other side will do the same, adopting its arguments, mimicking its techniques, quoting it back against itself. That is precisely what Trump and his surrogates are now doing.

It was, after all, censorious American liberals – corrupted by their belief that everyone should think like them, and refusing to share the public space with views divergent from their own – who made freedom of speech a dirty word(s). Authoritarians of the right, actuated by quite different motives, are now copying the playbook the liberals wrote – with a vengeance.

In Australia, unlike America, liberalism has not mutated into an ideology of the political left. Our liberalism is of the classical variety, inherited from the English political tradition represented by thinkers such as John Stuart Mill – the nineteenth century’s most eloquent defender of free speech – and Isaiah Berlin. Robert Menzies’ genius in basing Australia’s centre-right party on the values of classical liberalism – “our liberal creed” was how he liked to describe it – has meant that, for all their many differences, liberals and conservatives have been allies.

Not so in the topsy-turvy world of American politics, where liberals have long forgotten that liberalism is fundamentally about freedom – of which there is none more important than freedom of speech – while those who claim to be conservatives have abandoned conservatism’s elegant defence of constitutional governance and established institutions, in favour of radical, and increasingly authoritarian, populism.

The events following the Kirk assassination should – but probably won’t – ring an alarm bell for America’s left-wing liberals: if you sell the pass on free speech – as they did years ago – you shouldn’t be surprised if you reap what you have sown.

George Orwell would have recognised the phenomenon. As he wrote in the famous last sentence of Animal Farm: “The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

George Brandis is a former Liberal Party senator and attorney-general. He also served as Australia’s high commissioner to the UK.

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