The two were talking like old friends by the time Charlie Kirk asked the president of the U.S. that cliche-but-telling question, what would you tell your younger self? Dead panning perfectly, Trump quipped, “Don’t run for president.”
His jaw dropped, and 24-year-old Kirk guffawed along with the rest of the couple hundred young voters gathered at the White House millennial summit. From there, the founder and executive director of Turning Point USA didn’t stop groveling. Kirk thanked and flattered and sweet-talked throughout the 20-minute interview, teeing up fat softball after fat softball for the president.
But with that deference, Kirk may have hamstrung his entire organization and undercut the cause celebre of conservatives across the country. Turns out, Trump doesn’t really care about free speech on campus.
Did the president have advice for his collegiate supporters, Kirk asked, students “silenced because of administrators that are clamping down on free speech?” A couple hundred rambling words later, the answer was clear: No, not really.
Trump said that the vast majority of students at some colleges “want free speech.” Trump said that violent protesters “get a lot of publicity” but aren’t that big of a deal. And Trump said that far away from the liberal coasts, “We have a tremendous support.”
But then the president, perhaps tripping over his own ego, slammed a dagger straight into the jugular of the movement to restore free speech on college campuses. “I think it is highly overblown,” Trump said of the administrative threat to speech. “Highly overblown.”
Grinning and falling in line, Kirk “totally agreed.” Except no, Kirk doesn’t agree, and Kirk knows better. Kirk’s organization boasts a membership of 350 chapters nationally and a budget of $8 million, all based on the notion that what Trump said minimizes a very serious problem. Maybe just a Playskool William F. Buckley, Kirk and his organization still pedal a soft conservatism albeit cut with gifs, memes, and videos.
When diversity of thought is threatened by intolerant academic hordes chomping at the bit for the impressionable minds of freshman, maybe that gateway-drug conservatism is in order. Free speech isn’t doing so hot these days.
The research bears this out. Per one 2015 UCLA study, 43 percent of students agree that colleges “have the right to ban extreme speakers from campus.” Another 71 percent said colleges “should prohibit racist/sexist speech on campus.” A more recent 2018 report found that about one-in-five students had no problem using violence to shut down speech offensive.
Those numbers are especially frightening because they are subjective. Who determines the definition of racism or sexism? It isn’t an academic exercise. It’s a debate with serious consequences. In ivory towers all over, academics are whipping progressive students into senseless mobs, the kind that have shutdown newspapers, obstructed events, and physically assaulted speakers.
Charles Murray found this out at Middlebury. Ben Shapiro discovered it at Berkeley. And Kirk rode that issue to national prominence, slamming college campuses as “islands of totalitarianism and intolerance.” The happy provocateur went viral last year on Sean Hannity’s “Hanity” sitting next to none other than Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump.
But when sitting at the foot of the president, Kirk forgot about all that campus crisis rhetoric and all those college kids desperate for a champion against groupthink. At the White House, Charlie just smiled and nodded.
