Bury the “Words Are Violence” Cliché

This article is part of a Free Press series on “Repairing America After the Murder of Charlie Kirk.” Read the other entries, including from Abigail Shrier, Yuval Levin, Coleman Hughes, Sam Harris and others, here.

When news broke of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the reaction of thousands of young Americans online was one of delight. One TikTok user chuckled: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. He did say that gun deaths were an acceptable side effect of gun rights.” On X, someone wrote: “He is a fascist. Spreads hate, racism, bigotry, misinformation, gets shot. Reap what you sow.”

In the minds of these gleeful posters, Kirk deserved to die because of his words—words that allegedly promoted policies resulting in hate, violence, and even death. They think this way because they have forgotten—or have been trained to unlearn—a crucial distinction: Words are not bullets. Words can’t strike a man from 142 yards away, causing a torrent of blood to erupt from his wound, sending him first to the hospital and then to the morgue. Only bullets can do that.

Upholding that distinction is the North Star of everything I do as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). For years, I’ve warned that equating words with violence erases the bright line liberal societies drew after centuries of bloodshed. The law draws this line with precision. Advocacy, even vile advocacy, remains protected unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That’s the Brandenburg standard, and it exists because the alternative is to let the powerful decide which ideas are allowed.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Je Suis Charlie

The Editors

Charlie Kirk’s Murder and the Rise of Political Violence

Bari Weiss

The Charlie Kirk I Knew

Adam Rubenstein

Spencer Cox and Bernie Sanders Rise to the Moment

Peter Savodnik

Or, as the Supreme Court put it in Texas v. Johnson, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” These aren’t lawyerly niceties; they are the safety valves of pluralism. Blur them, and real violence becomes more, not less, likely.

Campus culture has been eroding that line for years. Students are told that offensive ideas are “harm,” that “silence is violence,” and—in a flourish that should now embarrass its users—that speech can be “literally” violence. Jonathan Haidt and I pushed back on that argument almost a decade ago. It’s conceptually wrong and practically dangerous—and has only grown in influence. Teach students that objectionable speech is violence and you invite them to see their own aggression as self-defense. This is the bloody fallacy we just witnessed: Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force. We need to bury this trope. Retire it—from classrooms, HR trainings, and editorials—for good.