The attack on Charlie Kirk marks a new turning point: from cancel culture to kill culture.
People can be destroyed, but ideals cannot. Who is “Charlie” today?
This article first appeared in German at Freischwebende Intelligenz. You can find all the articles by Free-floating Intelligence in English here – subscribe now, to get the articles by e-mail! This article has been written with the Pareto client.
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Freedom of speech is the matrix, the indispensable requirement for almost every other form of freedom.
— Benjamin N. Cardozo, Judge of the Supreme Court of the United States
Ten years ago, the editors and cartoonists of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo were attacked. Everyone was Charlie.
Charlie Hebdo: Als der freie Westen sich verriet
One year ago: the attempted assassination of Trump:
Mordversuch auf Trump: Die Anstifter sitzen in den Redaktionen der Medien
Now he is an activist, a public debater, an influencer of Republican youth — Charlie Kirk.
Same starting point: public speech and expression. Same consequence: violence. Different reactions: sometimes it is considered an attack on all of us, sometimes it is condemned with a mitigating “but.” Rights are either universal and equal, such as the right to freedom of art and expression, or they are a privilege for the few.
An attack on the very fabric of freedom
Cancel culture was the digital gallows. People were branded, livelihoods destroyed, careers shattered — through labeling and boycotts. The cultural climate is now changing its state of aggregation: from debate to destruction. The First Amendment prohibits lawmakers from curtailing speech; it does not protect against the hand that pulls the trigger. The shot fired at Kirk is therefore not only a crime against a person, but an attack on the system that enables free speech.
In the past, words clashed with words and a game began. Later, words no longer clashed with words, but with people, in order to remove them from the game. Now, guns are pointed at those who speak. So that they never return to the game.
The gun barrel aimed at one who speaks is a gun barrel aimed at everyone — because in a democracy, everyone is called upon to speak out. If Cardozo’s statement is true, that freedom of expression is the matrix (Latin: womb), i.e., the prerequisite for all other freedoms, then the suppression of freedom of expression through terror is in fact a terrorist attack on freedom itself.
Freedom of expression requires not only the absence of repression, but also a breeding ground, a climate of free development. When public speech becomes life-threatening, freedom dies not piecemeal, but all at once. How many will now still be willing to pay with their lives for their right to speak?
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Cancel culture has destroyed careers, but left bodies alive. Kill culture now erases both. This is the ultimate “chilling effect.” Critical information becomes under-the-counter-goods, free speech becomes an underground commodity. Freedom does not disappear; the longing for it and its value even grows immeasurably, but it will have to camouflage itself. The price of courage has risen exorbitantly.
The attack on Charlie Kirk is therefore a turning point. Until now, the death zone was more familiar from YouTube: if a critical channel became too big and important, say with 500,000 followers, it became critical: demonetization, shadow banning, deletion. Since the Charlie Kirk case, the public sphere has become the death zone.
An old principle is therefore dying with Charlie Kirk, proverbially on the open stage: Audiatur et altera pars! May the other side also be heard. Not only is the other side not being heard, it is being shot at. The debate space, which until now has been a media battlefield, is becoming a theater of war.
The destruction of the individual
There is an old term in philosophy: parrhesia — speaking the truth, regardless of the consequences. This courage was considered a civic duty. Kirk practiced exactly that. At a time when influencers are bought and media is choreographed, he allowed himself to be unpredictable. And Kirk picked fights with many: as an advocate for an increasingly disadvantaged and indebted Generation Z, he was at odds with woke leftists and Antifa, he criticized the power of the secret services and, most recently, repeatedly criticized the Israeli government over Gaza, including attempts at intimidation and co-optation.
„Zionist billionaire Bill Ackman “hammered” Charlie Kirk during an August “intervention” in the Hamptons for platforming critics of Israel at TPUSA events, Max Blumenthal reports.“
Words are dangerous. They can pulverize or harden power. Those who dare to use words dare to confront all those who feel threatened by the reflection of speech. The individuality of expression ultimately shatters against the world.
Henry Miller put this threat to individuality into words as follows:
“If there were a person who dared to say everything he thought about this world, there would be no square meter left for him to stand on.
When a person appears, the world pounces on them and breaks their backbone. There are always too many rotten pillars left standing, too much rotten humanity, for a person to flourish. The superstructure is a lie and the foundation is a huge, trembling fear.
When, at intervals of centuries, a person appears with a desperate, hungry look in their eyes, a person who would turn the whole world upside down to create a new race, the love they bring into the world is turned into bitterness and they become a hostage. When we occasionally come across pages that explode, pages that wound and hurt, that elicit sighs, tears, and curses, then you should know that they come from an upright person, a person who has no other defense left but his words, and his words are always stronger than the mendacious, oppressive weight of the world, stronger than all the tortures and wheels that the cowards invent to destroy the miracle of personality.
If ever a man dared to speak everything that is in his heart, to write down his real experience, everything that is truly his truth, then, I believe, the world would fall to pieces, would be shattered, and no god, no chance, no will could ever again put together the pieces, the atoms, the indestructible elements that made up the world.”
When a stage becomes a potential grave, when a microphone becomes a target, when a debating podium is declared a sniper’s stand, when every speech carries a price tag that says “life,” then open discourse ends at its root: the individuality of the individual.
The consequence is predictable: opinion and art become camouflage once again. When open statements endanger life, parables, allegories, and coded images return — the old art of survival practiced by dissidents. We know this from other eras: metaphor, subtext, the coding of resistance in works of art. Banksy paints anonymously, poets hide their messages in myths — not because they are cowards, but because language has suddenly become a risk factor. This shift is a cultural step backward: the normality of freely expressing one’s opinion is coming to an end, and we are returning to the detours of self-protective aesthetics.
Democracy thrives on debate, not shooting. Those who fail to recognize this have lost the game of civilization.
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