An Arrest, Corrections, and Pure Horror

If "hate speech" can kill, how about the "hate error"?

From ABC News:

Tyler Robinson, the man suspected of killing conservative activist Charlie Kirk during a campus event at a Utah university, had eluded authorities for more than a day. However, after his father recognized him from photographs distributed by authorities, it led a series of events that ultimately led to 22-year-old Robinson being taken into custody…

Robinson mentioned during a dinner conversation with a family member that Kirk would be visiting Utah Valley University, according to Cox. Robinson and the family members discussed why they didn’t like Kirk and his viewpoints, and the family member stated Kirk was “full of hate and spreading hate,” [Utah Governor Spencer] Cox said.

Photos of Robinson reveal a thin young male in a purple shirt, barely a man, a boy in pajamas just a tick of the clock ago. Innocence has no staying power in the Internet age. Every parent will soon be afraid to send their kids into the world unattended.

Meanwhile an editor’s note silently appeared at the bottom of a New York Times story, “Where Charlie Kirk Stood on Key Political Issues”:

A correction was made on Sept. 11, 2025: An earlier version of this article described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made on an episode of his podcast. He was quoting a statement from a post on social media and went on to critique it. It was not his own statement.

Even the correction was grudging and uncharitable. The Times “described incorrectly an antisemitic statement that Charlie Kirk had made” isn’t the same as “We incorrectly ascribed antisemitism to Charlie Kirk.” I wrote this morning about the increasingly common trope of “alleging racist or antisemitic comments without elucidating them.” This is what the Times did, in its obituary in the story in question, and in others where the paper used rhetorical gimmicks like “Mr. Kirk’s own rhetoric was long cast as racist, xenophobic and extreme by groups that study hate speech.”

When you go looking for the statements the paper matches to these extreme words, they turn out to be things like advocating the use of the term “China virus” and using his platform to “decry racial equity programs.” The line that struck me said Kirk believed “Jews are trying to replace white Americans with nonwhite immigrants,” and “That ideology motivated the gunman who killed 11 worshipers at a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.”

This is another common technique, ascribing hate speech to a person, then saying those beliefs motivated specific acts of violence. This openly invites readers to blame the subject for the violence. That’s not only nothing new, it’s been the underlying premise for a generation of “anti-dehumanization” proposals tying “hate speech” to episodes like the 2019 Christchurch shooting, the 2019 El Paso shooting, and the January 6th riots.

My problem with these laws, always, has been that what they call “disinformation” often turns out to be true, and “hate speech” often turns out to be something not nearly deserving of the term, or false altogether:

The author Stephen King was forced to apologize after he fell for what anti-disinformation folk call a “deceptively edited” video that appeared to show Kirk lauding a Biblical passage calling for gays to be stoned to death. In fact Kirk was arguing against the tendency of people to cherry-pick Biblical passages, something more than one media person hasn’t grasped yet. Accusing people of hate speech or bigotry in error, which “authoritative” sources do a lot, is an almost costless media activity, even though it can be as dangerous as the worst hate speech.

I disagreed with many things Charlie Kirk said. I was stunned when he said Martin Luther King, Jr. gave us “more race focus and less emphasis on character and conduct,” saying he was more of a “race Marxist” overall than a classical humanist. His line about how “I’m sorry, if I see a black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified” didn’t sit well, alongside comments about black America being better off in the forties. He seemed to like a more uncompromising Christianity than the forgiving-hippie version of Jesus and Corinthians I was taught, though I’m not religious, so what do I know?

Still, I wish papers like the Times could not just fill pages with Greatest Un-Hits and try to capture the whole person, who did have hard-edged, controversial views but also had a sincere belief in open debate, upheld decorum, and engaged antagonists with a sense of fair play. I never heard Kirk call for “gutting” political opponents, for “shanking these motherfuckers,” or “slicing ‘em up.” The fact that his accessibility got him killed also seems lost on critics, who can’t separate him from things he said they don’t like.

It’s hard to justify killing a whole human being. A caricature is different. I don’t watch the Tik-Tok videos of people cheering this or that murder, but an awful lot of prominent media figures in the wake of this assassination continue to hammer the idea that some people are just bad, by virtue of their political views — sometimes, just one political view. Which can easily have been wrongly reported. Are we really that shallow?