The Slippery Slope

Content Warning - Highly Political Topic.

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump announced he is set to posthumously award Charlie Kirk the Presidential Medal of Freedom on Tuesday (October 14th), which would have been the political activist's 32nd birthday. 

Trump shared the news Friday during an unrelated news conference. They're going to have a great celebration at the White House -- in the East Room at the White House.

Fact - His assassinations is tragic, as all political assassinations are.  

Charlie Kirk built himself into the face of a conservative youth movement through Turning Point USA (TPUSA).

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) documented how TPUSA repeatedly framed immigrants, LGBTQ+ people, and racial justice advocates as existential threats to “white Christian America,” warning followers that their families, religion, and entire way of life were under attack. In later years, Kirk openly embraced Christian nationalist language, claiming that liberty was only possible with a Christian population—a narrative tying freedom to demographic dominance, a cornerstone of supremacist logic (SPLC).

The mainstream press tracked this trajectory. The Guardian reported that Kirk’s rhetoric increasingly mirrored white supremacist and authoritarian themes, while campus watchdog groups chronicled repeated incidents of racist, homophobic, and transphobic speech at TPUSA events. 

Next - The Slippery slope of banning Hate Speech. 

The Hill:

Today, some argue that the opposition to gay marriage or the denial that climate change is a crisis are similarly extremes. Others argue that some kinds of speech critical of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic hate speech. In other words, be careful what you wish for because chances are that what you hold dear eventually will [Could] be labeled as 'extremism' by someone else."

Attorney General Pam Bondi: "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."

Comment By Frederick M. Hess Gee (Education Next)

I can vaguely remember, way back in the Biden years, when Republicans stridently (and correctly!) argued that the First Amendment allows for no such carve-outs. Of course, that’s back when Democrats held that saying there were only two sexes was “transphobic” hate speech, and when Republicans were worried about being silenced.

Paraphrased from the Congressional Black Caucus: "A congressional resolution introduced in the House to honor Charlie Kirk’s legacy and the President's posthumously award of the Medal of Freedom is not about healing or lowering the temperature of our political discourse... It is, unfortunately, an attempt to legitimize Kirk’s worldview — a view that includes ideas many Americans find racist, harmful, [transphobic], and fundamentally un-American."