Trump's Trials - Law professor says stifling free speech is no way to commemorate Kirk's legacy

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

NPR speaks with Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University, about the conversation emerging around free speech in the wake of Charlie Kirk's death.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

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Every weekday, the NPR Politics podcast unpacks Washington's inner workings. Listen to the NPR Politics podcast on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Steven Scape. Many Republicans have campaigned in recent days for people to be fired or prosecuted based on what they said about Charlie Kirk. Vice President Vance said this while hosting Kirk's podcast. So when you see someone celebrating Charlie's murder, call them out in hell, call their employer. We don't believe in political violence, but we do believe in civility. Attorney General Pam Bondi said on TV that free speech is different from hate speech

and said the Department of Justice will, quote, absolutely target hate speech. Under criticism, she issued a statement saying that she meant incitements to violence. The administration has also talked of a broader crackdown on liberal groups. We're not sure what form that would take. Jonathan Turley has been following all of this.

He is a law professor at George Washington University and the author of a book on the First Amendment. Jonathan, welcome back. Thank you very much. And I know that you knew Charlie Kirk, so my regrets to you. so many others. Kurt said, though, that he was an advocate of free speech. What do you make at the effort to crack down on in his critics? He was an advocate of free speech. He was the victim,

not the advocate of cancel campaigns. And the way to honor Charlie's life and legacy is not with hypocrisy and intolerance. That's what he fought against. I mean, he was really roundly disliked by many because he held a mirror to the face of higher education to expose hypocrisy and hate. And he did that by encouraging people to debate him. So he committed his life to debate, not to limiting speech. Now, that doesn't mean that people cannot cross the line. If you use your official or academic or corporate positions to espouse these hateful messages, you risk termination. So there was a teacher in Canada that showed a film and was sort of proselytizing in class. That crosses the line.

If you're a Secret Service agent who seems to be supporting or endorsing or expressing sympathy with the assassination, that also raises serious questions, given your job to protect both liberals and conservatives. So there are areas here where the free speech community understands that there can be repercussions. But the default here has to be where Charlie left it, which is that we have to allow that,

Hate speech is protected the United States, and people are allowed to say any number of stupid and sensitive things. Meaning that, just to be clear here, the government should not be prosecuting people based on things that they said, no matter how noxious we may think they are. Right. And so if these people are making these comments in their private lives, as long as they're not crossing the line, which is sometimes described as the Brandenburg line of imminent violence, of calling for criminal acts, that are imminent, then it's generally protected. What the free speech community doesn't want is a repeat of what happened 10 years ago, you know, after editors and journalists were killed in the Charlie Hebdo magazine office in France, what followed was really quite disturbing, and that is you had the same people that had been prosecuting these editors under speech laws,

using their death to expand those prosecutions. It was the ultimate dishonoring of their lives, and one of the surviving editors refused to march with these hypocrites in Paris and said, of course, I'm not going to join you, and I know exactly where you're going. You're going to use this tragedy to limit the speech of others, which is what these people fought against. Well, the same is true with Charlie. I want to ask about the other category that you mentioned having to do with employers. Now, clearly, the First Amendment is not directly implicated. an employer can associate with somebody or not, they can say you've embarrassed the company, you're fired.

But a few years ago, conservatives were very concerned about this and did not want private tech companies, for example, deciding whose tweets should stay up or get amplified. There were a number of court cases. There were laws passed in Texas. There was a great pushback on the idea that employers really should be policing speech so much. Should employers be policing speech now in this case?

Well, I've always been an advocate in phase. of free speech for employees, as long as they're doing it outside of the workplace. Now, there's hypocrisy on all sides here. Many of the people objecting today, particularly in academia, never voiced any objection when conservatives were being canceled, investigated, and terminated. This is a new chapter in their lives. So there's hypocrisy to go around. The problem with the employer's situation is that what the pattern it often follows is

that the employee is making statements on their private social media account, then someone researches that person, outs them, and then ties it to their companies. And then it becomes a bottom line cost for the company, and they often will terminate the employee, which they're generally allowed to do. And that obviously presents a serious problem for free speech. These are private actors who are engaging in this, and so it falls in that, that great gray area. It falls outside of the direct application of the First Amendment. So it's the most difficult problem because our anger and sorrow often sort of mask the implications here, that employers can be powerful tools for limiting speech, as we've seen, and many conservatives

have objected in past years. I'm also thinking about Charlie Kirk's own work and legacy. It included, this was one of his early products, a watch list of professors. who were supposed to be monitored by students and other people for views that Kirk objected to. You can see that as free speech, calling somebody out. You can see that as his own version of cancel culture. Well, I'm not sure you would call it a cancel culture, and that listing was designed

because conservatives and Republicans have largely been purged from departments. Survey show many departments now don't have a single Republican left, and the result is that there's a type of captive audience for students who are middle to write where they find themselves in these proselytizing classrooms. And the listing was supposed to identify those professors to avoid. It was basically started by students. And these existed in different forms saying, look, this is one you want to stay away from.

And the students actually valued it. Now, you can call that a cancel campaigner. You can call that simply information forcing lists to allow these students to know what they're getting into. Understood. I want to ask about one of the thing, though, if I can, just as we're looking at this. The administration has talked of broadly targeting liberal groups. What do you make in about 20 seconds of the idea of the government targeting liberal groups

because the suspect in Charlie Kirk's killing has made statements that suggest he is sympathetic with ideas in the left? Well, that's a very dangerous line. I was critical when the Biden administration went down this road with conservative groups, that using ideology as a threshold for investigations is dangerous. I testified on that in Congress during the Biden administration. That hasn't changed if you flip it. Using ideology is dangerous as the starting of an investigation.

Jonathan Turley is at George Washington University and author of The Indispensable Right, Free Speech in an Age of Rage. Pleasure talking with you again, sir. Thanks so much. Thank you, Steve. Before we wrap up, a reminder, you can find. find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes

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