A Taboo Worth Keeping
Plus: Memphis gets National Guarded, a second alleged narcotrafficker boat has been struck, and more...
Call their employer? "If we want to stop political violence like what happened to Charlie Kirk, we have to be honest about the people who are celebrating it and the people who are financing it," wrote Vice President J.D. Vance on X, promoting his guest hosting of Kirk's show, following Kirk's killing. "When you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out. And hell, call their employer," he said on the program.
"I'm desperate for our country to be united in condemnation of the actions and the ideas that killed my friend," Vance added. "I want it so badly that I will tell you a difficult truth. We can only have it with people who acknowledge that political violence is unacceptable."
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At East Tennessee State University, two faculty members were placed on administrative leave, allegedly due to comments such as "you reap what you sow" and "[Kirk's killing] isn't a tragedy. It's a victory." Oklahoma's state superintendent is investigating at least one middle school teacher for her posts (calling Kirk a "racist, misogynist piece of shit," which seems nasty, but not actually advocating political violence). The Texas Education Agency is reviewing 180 complaints filed against teachers for comments related to Kirk; some of those are surely murder cheerleading, while others are scathing criticism that should probably be tolerated. Four different high school teachers were placed on leave in Massachusetts for their commentary. One elementary school teacher in that same state has been placed on leave for her TikTok video mocking Kirk's death. Both Delta and American Airlines have axed a few employees each for social media posts on Kirk. Children's Healthcare of Atlanta and the University of Miami's health care system fired one worker each. An Office Depot worker at a store in Michigan was fired after allegedly refusing to print flyers about a Kirk vigil for a paying customer—which makes an awful lot of sense, given that printing flyers is literally their job. These cases are all different, and some seem like they do actually call for or celebrate political violence, whereas others are just tasteless expressions of hatred for Kirk that don't violate that norm.
So let's back up for a moment. Why did cancel culture of the 2010s strike so many of us as so bad and wrong?
Some of it surely had to do with proportionality: The punishment rarely fit the "crime" (which was almost always debatable).
Some of it surely had to do with changing sensibilities and sensitivities, and a sense that the orthodoxy being enforced was invented yesterday, not a reflection of prevailing sentiments. Thus it was unpredictable: You couldn't really be sure you weren't running afoul of the new tyrannical enforcers, because the shift in pieties (or language) had happened practically overnight.
But there was something undergirding it that felt especially stupid: The kids were the enforcers, overthrowing the adults. Not because the adults had exercised bad judgment or shown themselves to be incapable of faithfully executing the roles they'd been given. In some cases, they were canceled as they exercised good judgment: Consider the case of Mike Pesca, a Slate journalist (and, disclosure: my friend) who had been discussing how the publication ought to cover the firing of New York Times writer Donald McNeil, who referred to a racial slur in context on a trip to Peru with high schoolers; could a white person ever write or say nigger in context? Don't we make a use/mention distinction? Some vocal portion of his workplace apparently disagreed, and he was dismissed after he'd worked there for seven years. It was never about morals, it was never about quality of product being produced; it was about power in the workplace, wrapped up in something that, to the young, resembled morals enough to give them plausible deniability.
Now, something a little different is happening, for which people are using the same name. Professors, teachers, nurses, and doctors who have celebrated the assassination of Kirk are being purged from their workplaces. It's conservatives swarming this time, phoning employers, making them aware of the misdeeds, asking for their scalps.
Most of me thinks it's wrong and bad on principle—since I don't ever want to be fired for my own speech (and thus want to maintain a very wide sense of what we societally tolerate)—but also as a strategy, since I don't believe conservatives gain very much by weeding out the people with dumb beliefs who are in positions of relatively little power and importance. People have little impulse control and use social media like a diary; I'll never understand the crying-in-a-car TikTok woman genre, but I'm fine living in a society with people who get off on that. (Also: What even is a position of relatively little power and importance? Teachers and professors are entrusted with impressionable minds. Isn't this extreme power?)
But a not-that-tiny piece of me sees this as substantively different: Cancel culture grievances were mostly petty and minor, issues that could have been resolved if participants were willing to be 10 percent more charitable toward their perceived opponents, and if bosses were willing to instruct their inferiors to get over themselves. James Damore's Google memo about heritability of certain traits and brain differences between genders and how to reduce the gender gap among engineers is a good example; anyone who claims to have felt threatened was being an opportunist, looking to amass power and get the hit of collective effervescence that comes from vanquishing an opponent.
Of course, there were also the "offensive" acts that were not really relevant to the workplace, but that the 2010s cancelers implied indicated something about the tainted souls of the powerful: Adam Rapoport, the Bon Appetit editor in chief, who in 2020 handed in his resignation after colleagues dug up a boricua (Puerto Rican)/durag Halloween costume from 2013. Rapoport's photo was "just a symptom of the systematic racism that runs rampant within Conde Nast as a whole," said one chef/editor who worked at the magazine, while others alleged black women had been systemically mistreated under Rapoport's leadership.
With Kirk's killing, the posters who lose their jobs are saying something actually bad, something that society has long seen as beyond a crossed line; we don't cheer the killing of people with whom we disagree. This isn't the Cultural Revolution. We don't flog people. We don't put them in stocks in the town square. And we don't get titillated when a bullet flies into their neck and they spurt out blood and crumple to the ground; it's gruesome and awful and it happened as a thousand impressionable young people looked on. Looked at one way, this was an insane person committing an extrajudicial act of violence. Looked at another, this was a public execution for the crime of being conservative—which is, apparently, judging by their reactions, what a lot of people had been wanting.
When a working professional can't manage to exercise self-control and refrain from posting in public about how grateful they are that the assassin had the balls to shoot their shot, you have to wonder about their judgment. It's perhaps especially odd for professors to say as much. (Don't they spend their time…speaking their mind…in public?) And is there perhaps some value in maintaining or enforcing a consensus of what types of things lie beyond the pale? I don't want pedophilia apologists as kindergarten teachers, to use an extreme example; I also probably don't want a doctor treating me who cheers on the murder of people who think like Kirk.
In general, I trust that reputable employers have done some amount of quality/maturity/professionalism/judgment vetting. Surely celebrating political violence runs afoul of these basic expectations, and that's what they're responding to when they fire someone who posted gleefully about Kirk, which is materially different than the made-up social justice dogma that was being enforced before. (It would be better if employers self-policed rather than succumbing to the demands of angry mobs.) We've always had taboos, and the taboo against political violence is a strong one worth keeping, not one we should constantly have to renegotiate.
Scenes from New York: Gov. Kathy Hochul, a sort of forgettable, generically bad Democrat who inherited the spot when Andrew Cuomo left in a hurry, endorsed Zohran Mamdani; nobody followed her lead. lol.
QUICK HITS
- Meanwhile, Attorney General Pam Bondi is saying utterly wrong things about hate speech. "There's free speech and then there's hate speech, and there is no place, especially now, especially after what happened to Charlie, in our society…We will absolutely target you, go after you, if you are targeting anyone with hate speech." Does Bondi need a reminder?
Hate speech does not exist legally in America. There's ugly speech. There's gross speech. There's evil speech.
And ALL of it is protected by the First Amendment.
Keep America free.
— Charlie Kirk (@charliekirk11) May 3, 2024
- "President Donald Trump approved a National Guard deployment to Memphis, expanding the federal government's efforts to crack down on what he has cast as out-of-control crime in Democratic-run cities," reports Bloomberg. And Chicago will probably be next after Memphis, signaled the president.
- The U.S. military struck a second boat allegedly carrying Venezuelan narcotraffickers, killing at least three. The first strike of this variety was ordered and carried out earlier this month, killing 11. More strikes are planned; congressional approval has not yet been sought.
- Inside the deal reached between the U.S. and China for the sale of TikTok, courtesy of The Wall Street Journal.
- "Israel unleashed a long-threatened ground assault on Gaza City on Tuesday, declaring 'Gaza is burning' as Palestinians there described the most intense bombardment they had faced in two years of war," reports Reuters. "An Israel Defence Forces official said ground troops were moving deeper into the enclave's main city, and that the number of soldiers would rise in coming days to confront up to 3,000 Hamas combatants the IDF believes are still in the city."
- The Washington Post fired journalist Karen Attiah; Attiah claims it was for her social media posts on Kirk, including one in which she says Kirk once said, "Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person's slot." This was a botched quote. From Reason's Robby Soave: "What he said was that the achievements of four specific black women—former First Lady Michelle Obama, former MSNBC host Joy Reid, Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, and former Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D–Texas)—were suspect because of affirmative action; the existence of racial preferences casts a pall over their selections for various positions. One can certainly criticize the point or disagree with how he worded it (Michelle Obama, diversity hire?), but he did not say the words attributed to him by Attiah. And she put it in quotes, which is journalistic malpractice."
It's not an accurate quote though; why insist that it is?
Kirk's actual quote is dickish, ignorant & can certainly be argued is racist. Attiah *changes it* into something undeniably racist. The distinction matters if you think journalists have a duty to deal in facts. https://t.co/a8CrZs1NCJ pic.twitter.com/JXWIxm3CRD— christoph (@Halalcoholism) September 16, 2025
