Charlie Kirk is dead, and the United States is once again locked in a bitter argument about the meaning of free speech. The debate is not just about what Kirk said in life, but also about what others are saying in death. Can mocking a dead man online get you fired? And should words that wound be treated like weapons?

Kirk made his career by saying the unsayable. He called diversity programs “anti-white,” described Islam as incompatible with Western values and derided Black pilots as “less qualified.” He even pushed for force at the US-Mexico border. These were not slips of the tongue; they were the cornerstone of his brand. Under US law, they were also protected speech. The First Amendment does not flinch in the face of offence. It only draws the line when words call for imminent violence. And Kirk, for all his inflammatory rhetoric, stayed on the legal side of that line.

The paradox is what came after his death. Social media filled with jeers, jokes and even celebration. Vice President J.D. Vance urged people to report such posts to employers, while Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested that hate speech online was not protected if it fuelled threats. In other words: the same political movement that defended Kirk’s right to speak is now working to silence his critics.

This is not new. After George Floyd’s killing in 2020, the United States saw a wave of social reckoning. Millions joined Black Lives Matter protests, while corporations issued diversity pledges and universities revisited curricula. But the moment also provoked fierce backlash from the political right.

Many conservatives denounced what they saw as “cancel culture,” in which individuals lost jobs or faced public shaming for statements judged racist or insensitive. Commentators such as Bari Weiss described a “chilling effect” in professional and cultural spaces, while Pew Research surveys confirmed that majorities of Americans across the political spectrum felt pressure to self-censor during that period.

The irony is striking: those who once cast themselves as victims of overzealous social punishment are now, in Kirk’s case, actively calling for punitive measures against those whose speech they dislike. From an academic perspective, this underscores how appeals to “free speech” often function less as universal principles than as weapons wielded selectively within polarised struggles over identity, race and power.

The legal question remains clear. US courts – from Brandenburg v. Ohio (1969) to Virginia v. Black (2003) – have consistently ruled that hateful, ugly, even jubilant speech is protected unless it directly and immediately calls for violence. Mocking a dead man online, however tasteless, is not the same as threatening the living. Which is why the First Amendment still shields it.

But America’s First Amendment exceptionalism looks very different abroad. In France or Germany, Kirk’s own words might have crossed into illegality. In Germany, Holocaust denial and incitement of hatred are criminal offences under Section 130 of the Criminal Code (Volksverhetzung). In France, the 1881 Law on the Freedom of the Press criminalises incitement to discrimination, hatred, or violence against individuals or groups based on religion, ethnicity or race. What US law calls “protected,” European law often calls “criminal.”

So the paradox deepens: Charlie Kirk’s rhetoric was too offensive for Europe, yet untouchable in America. Meanwhile, those who cheer his death online may be punished not by law but by employers, politicians and public shaming. The courtroom offers one kind of justice; the marketplace and media, another.

The deeper lesson is that America’s free speech battles are rarely about abstract rights. They are about power, memory and politics. When Floyd was killed, conservatives defended offensive speech as a sacred liberty. When Kirk was killed, many of those same voices demanded punishment for offensive speech.

The shift exposes the fragility of free expression when filtered through partisan interest. If democracy is to survive this paradox, it requires more than legal protections. It requires the maturity to tolerate what we hate – and consistency in applying principles even when they cut against our side.

Yasemin Giritli İnceoğlu is a professor of communications.

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