Three months on from the assassination of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk, young liberals have finally realized the importance of free speech and open debate.
Just kidding.
If a new survey from the nonpartisan Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression is anything to go by, young, left-leaning U.S. undergraduates are drifting even more hopelessly astray on free speech after Kirk’s death. Disclosure: I do a small amount of freelance work with FIRE.
FIRE teamed up with College Pulse to survey more than 2,000 college students to see how their attitudes toward free expression have shifted in the months since Kirk’s killing. It did this by comparing students’ responses this time to their responses to the same question last spring. The results are mixed, to say the least.
At first glance, there’s good news. Among college students as a whole, support for various censorship tactics is in decline. The percentage of students who think shouting down a speaker to prevent them from speaking on campus can be acceptable is 68%, down from 72%.
Meanwhile, the percentage of students who think blocking other students from attending a campus speech is acceptable has also decreased, coming in at 47% compared to 54% last spring. Finally, the portion of students who think using violence to stop a campus speaker can be justified is down, too, coming in at 32%, rather than 34% in the last survey.
So, are students across the board seeing the light? Not exactly. FIRE explains that this overall decline in support for censorship among college students is likely driven by increased tolerance among self-described moderates and conservatives. Among their liberal-leaning peers, unfortunately, “support for these tactics held steady, or even increased slightly,” FIRE finds.
What’s more, self-identified liberal students have become more supportive of blocking speakers with controversial messages about abortion, gender identity, or race from speaking on campus.
“Liberal students are becoming more inclined to exclude speakers whose views they find harmful or offensive,” FIRE concludes. “The ideological gap in speaker tolerance appears to be widening, not narrowing, after a high-profile political killing.”
This is incredibly bleak.
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Liberal college students across America have almost all heard of what happened to Charlie Kirk. Unfortunately, many have also seen video of the shooting. They saw someone engaging in civil discourse on a college campus just like theirs get murdered in an act of terrorism. They saw children left fatherless and a wife widowed. And it made them more hostile to free expression.
If witnessing such a senseless act of murder in the name of censorship can’t teach students why free speech is so important, there really is no hope for them. All we can do is work to keep these illiberal beliefs from spreading and keep the people who hold them out of positions of power and influence in our society. If these horrifying attitudes continue to rise among left-leaning college students, it won’t be long before more people face horrific acts of political violence.
Brad Polumbo is an independent journalist and host of the Brad vs Everyone podcast.
