If it feels like you’re being forced to honor and respect a demagogue and liar under penalty of … some bad thing, well, you’re not wrong.
As Radley Balko said Monday, “we're witnessing the most aggressive, fanatical crackdown on free speech in my lifetime. The speed and breadth of government censorship and private sector and nonprofit capitulation has been astonishing, as has the lack of urgency [or] silence from people who've long claimed to care about this stuff.”
How is this happening? Consider the case of Stephen King.
Yes, that Stephen King.
Last week, on Twitter, the novelist quoted-tweeted remarks by Fox host Jesse Watters. “Charlie Kirk was not a ‘controversial’ or ‘polarizing’ man,” Watters said. “Charlie was a PATRIOT. THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction. Rest in peace, my friend.”
It should be said first of all that this is a lie. Kirk was nothing but controversial and polarizing. That was his entire shtick. And that’s why Stephen King said: “He advocated for stoning gays to death. Just sayin’.”
This set off a firestorm of outrage, perhaps the loudest coming from US Senator Mike Lee of Utah: “Please share if you agree that the estate of Charlie Kirk should sue Stephen King for defamation over this heinously false accusation. He crossed a line. It will prove costly.”
Actually, it won’t. You can’t defame the dead. Defamation is about an injury to one’s reputation. You don’t have an injury, and you don’t have a reputation, when you’re dead. Once you’re dead, there’s nothing anyone can say to hurt you. Mike Lee, who is an attorney, knows that.
If litigation wasn’t Lee’s point, what was? Silencing a famous and (nominally) liberal critic of the broader totalitarian project. And he and others succeeded by forcing King to apologize. “I apologize for saying Charlie Kirk advocated stoning gays,” King said. “What he actually demonstrated was how some people cherry-pick Biblical passages.”
But King wasn’t wrong – not exactly. While it’s true that Kirk never said, “I hereby advocate for the stoning of gays to death,” he did say a Bible chapter, which calls for stoning a man who lies with another man, “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” That might not be advocacy, in the word’s strictest sense, but close enough.
The context matters, too. Kirk was criticizing Rachel Anne Accurso, the YouTube children’s video personality who goes by Ms Rachel. In June of last year, she made a biblical case for LGBTQ-plus inclusion. According to Factcheck.org, she said: “In Matthew 22, a religious teacher asked Jesus, what’s the most important commandment? And Jesus says, to love God and to ‘love your neighbor as yourself.’
“It doesn’t say love every neighbor except,” Ms Rachel said.
That’s what Kirk was responding to. Ms Rachel made no room for exceptions to God’s greatest law. In reply, Kirk did his own cherry-picking. He reached back to the Old Testament for a chapter that “affirms God’s perfect law when it comes to sexual matters.” Instead of including LGBTQ-plus people in God’s beloved community, as Jesus Christ might have done, he made the case for excluding them.
Ms Rachel advocated for love.
Kirk advocated for hate.
That Kirk did not explicitly advocate for the stoning of gays to death, in the strictest sense and syntax of those words, is therefore a distinction without a difference – unless, like Kirk, you’re a liar. In that case, the distinction between saying what you’re saying and not saying what you’re saying is important. If that collapses, so does your deception.
As long as the distinction between what is said and what is intended to be understood is in place, it’s possible to bully people into silence.
That’s what happened to Stephen King and others. They spoke the truth about Kirk – not the strict letter of it but the true spirit of it – but did not have the courage to stand by the truth after being accused of slander. And in the process of apologizing, they ended up affirming the lie, making it grow bigger, such that a USA Today story about King’s apology says that he “repeatedly apologized for a false accusation.” (After all, it must have been false if Stephen King apologized for it.)
I dwell on this episode, because it’s a microcosm of a much larger and more pernicious pattern in American politics in which the Republicans and their media allies (not just in the rightwing media) have taken the deceit that resides between what is said and what is intended to be understood, and have made that deceit structural, so such that telling the truth – in this case, saying plainly what Charlie Kirk meant, as opposed to what he said – is a radical act deserving of punishment.
The AP reported Monday that “after years of complaints from the right about ‘cancel culture’ from the left, some conservatives are seeking to upend the lives and careers of those who disparaged Charlie Kirk after his death. They are going after companies, educators, news outlets, political rivals and others they judge as promoting hate speech.”
Or as Radley Balko said, expanding on his first comment, “the extreme, opportunistic, completely disingenuous reaction to Kirk's murder also makes clear that if there's an Oklahoma City or 9/11-level attack in the next few years, this administration will absolutely exploit it to try to end our democracy and permanently entrench itself in power.”
I want to end with a small litmus test that can help determine what demagogues like Kirk really meant, so the courageous can fight back.
Try this: make their statements true.
Jesse Watters said Charlie Kirk was neither “controversial” nor “polarizing.” “Charlie was a PATRIOT,” the Fox host insisted. His death “is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction.”
Kirk was controversial. He was polarizing. As I said, that was his shtick. He advocated for the exclusion (hatred) of racial, sexual and religious minorities. What needs to happen for Watters’ words to be true?
“Patriot” needs to mean loyalty to white power and all that implies – unequal treatment, legal prejudice, exploitation, corruption, and a social order that’s rigidly hierarchical, with rich white men on top.
Only then is Charlie Kirk neither “controversial” nor “polarizing” man. Only then is it clear what Jesse Watters really meant when he said “THIS is a turning point and we all need to turn in the right direction.”
“THIS” is the end of liberty and justice for all.
And he’ll prove it by trying to silence you for saying so.