Turkey’s Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, accused the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo of committing the sin of provocation when fifteen of the journal’s staff were slaughtered by two young Algerian Muslims on January 7, 2015. Hateful cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed, or so the narrative went, triggered the murders. Tyler Robinson, a decade later, was provoked but by a different Charlie. This assassin, too, felt he had no alternative but to perform what we might call – stretching the customary definition – an “honour killing”. Erdoğan and the “yes…but” apologists for the assassination of Charlie Kirk share a rejection of Western-derived modernity. That is to say, the sovereignty of the individual. The ideologies of Wokeism and Islamism are different manifestations of the same cultish tribalism: the negative cohesion connecting the two is a rejection of freedom-of-expression absolutism under the pretext of the sin of provocation.
Erdoğan to this very day uses the sin of provocation to prosecute Turkish journalists and artists who contravene his Muslim Brotherhood sensibilities. In the case of the Turkish satirical magazine LeMan, for instance, four cartoonists were arrested recently for insulting the Prophet Mohammed despite doing nothing of the sort. Erdoğan, increasingly unpopular, decried the magazine’s “vile provocation” and “spreading of hate” to shore up his failing regime. Tyler Robson used the same “spreading hate” ruse to justify murdering a conservative public figure in America: “Hey Fascist – Catch!” Along the same lines, countless progressive commentators, including Michael Hook, a professor at the University of South Dakota, blamed Charlie Kirk for provoking his own death: “I’m sorry for his family that he was a hate spreading Nazi and got killed. I’m sure they deserved better. Maybe good people could now enter their lives.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, dreamed of secularising his country, of making it modern in the Western sense. Islamic jurists with their intrusive fatwas were ordered out of the public domain and back to the mosques. The sovereignty of the individual, in theory at least, was granted primacy in the stead of religious edicts, a development practised in the West and made explicit in the American constitution. In the wake of group or identity politics, however, we are witnessing a kind of “Ottomanisation” of Western societies. Moreover, the progressive wokesters pushing for hate-speech laws might be bringing us closer to a time when the so-called sin of provocation will not be defined by them but their Islamist allies. The “Queers for Palestine”, suffice to say, will experience headwinds should the Muslim Brotherhood’s version of “hate speech” attain primacy in the West.
Freedom of speech is the guarantor of the sovereignty of the individual and vice-versa. The two concepts are inseparable, their interrelatedness ensuring the all-embracing liberty of Western-style modernity, an emancipatory project long in the making but relatively new historical speaking. The conservative philosopher Roger Scruton explained this as well as anyone in The Uses of Pessimism (2010). Progressives, according to Scruton, commit the Aggregation Fallacy of indiscriminately combining one “good” with another “good”. In an earlier era, the Jacobins fervently promoted liberté and égalité without appreciating the incongruity of the two notions and so ended up with Robespierre’s “despotism of liberty”. Today’s leftists commit an equivalent Aggregation Fallacy by indiscriminately combining the traditional rights of the individual with the newly minted rights of designated “marginal groups”. The result of this ideological innovation, extrapolating from Scruton, is a “despotism of identity”. This regressive development sees the right to free speech eclipsed by the right of a designated group not to be dishonoured.
Critically, the reputation of an individual can be protected by the laws of libel and slander, but defending the integrity of the group – be it defined by race, religion, gender, sexual preference, religion and so on – is not as straightforward. It necessitates an entirely new category of punitive regulation. As a consequence, the crime of “hate speech”, first promulgated by the United Nations in the mid-1960s, has insinuated itself into our lives. Not that experts can agree – beyond generic definitions – on what exactly encompasses hate speech. For instance, is criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood or activist Salafism a case of Islamophobia or a matter of legitimate concern? The Brotherhood’s chapter in the United States, Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), presents itself as a Western-style civil rights movement and yet the passive Salafis of Saudi Arabia and the UAE, not to mention Egypt’s Abdel Fattah el-Sisi – Muslims all – have banned the Brotherhood in their respective countries. For these Muslims, at least, the Brotherhood is an extremist outfit at war with modernity and bent on reconstituting the caliphate through the pursuit of global jihad by violence and/or stealth. Nonetheless, the wokesters in the West – more “useful infidel” than “useful idiot” to borrow from Richard Landes – see all Muslims, like every other “marginalised group”, as a single monolithic entity. Criticism of CAIR, according to Antifa, Black Lives Matter, Trantifa, the sponsors of “No Kings” and all who submit to PC orthodoxy, must be a case of Islamophobia. CAIR, meanwhile, demonises its detractors as Islamophobes, completing the ideological circle.
Progressives, as the champions of selected marginal groups, tend to support hate-speech laws, whereas conservatives and libertarians – being, for the most part, post-tribal – oppose them. When, for instance, US Attorney-General Pam Bondi spoke of investigating incidents of hate speech in the aftermath of Kirk’s assassination, conservative and libertarian pundits alike mocked her woeful ignorance of one of the principal tenants of Western civilisation. After all, the First Amendment makes hate speech – however defined – a category of free speech. Progressives, nonetheless, criticise conservatives for welcoming the suspension or even firing of those who publicly celebrate the murder of Charlie Kirlie or blame the assassination on the MAGA movement or Kirk himself. Free speech – they assert – is being applied to one side of the political aisle but not the other. In reality, of course, all the American Constitution guarantees is that the government may not put restrictions on free speech: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom speech, or of the press; or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Whether a company censures an employee for offensive behaviour – as was the case with Disney and Jimmy Kimmel or public displays of “Watch your neck!” – is a transactional or contractual matter between employer and employee and outside the strictures of the First Amendment.
The rights of free speech are complex and exemptions such as the above-mentioned instance of defamation or the dissemination of child pornography have been addressed by the US Supreme Court over the years. But in almost all instances – an exception being the 1896 “separate but equal” Jim Crow ruling – its judgement has affirmed the sovereignty of the individual, echoing Roger Scruton’s characterisation of Western-style modernity as a post-tribal phenomenon “that confers security and freedom in exchange for consent – an order not of submission but of settlement.” We have witnessed this with Supreme Court decisions that are both sympathetic and unsympathetic to traditional Christian sensibilities and yet always supportive of individuals wanting to go about their business unimpeded by the dictates of the law. The justices have, on the one hand, ruled that Christian bakers and website designers are not compelled by the state to create images celebrating same-sex marriages while, on the other, protected artists against Christian notions of blasphemy and profanity.
Christianity is no more a single monolithic entity than any other religious grouping; some Christians, clearly, are apt to be provoked by the profane. Take the case of Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987), a photograph of a crucifix immersed in a container of urine. The purported genius of Serrano’s abstract photography was to mix and match miscellaneous objects with bodily fluids – urine, menstrual blood, breast milk and, of course, faeces – but it was specifically Piss Christ that shot him to fame during the “scandalous” era of Robert Mapplethorpe and company. It was a time when anti-establishment Bohemian artists, fulminating against so-called bourgeois morality, found themselves embraced (and subsidised) by an establishment – tax-funded arts agencies, museums, academia, the mainstream media and, inevitably, investment-focused entities of every kind – that had discovered its inner-bohemian. Those with a grievance about the intolerance of Christianity will remind us that on a number of occasions, including Melbourne in 2011, Christians were aggravated enough to vandalise Serrano’s masterpiece. That said, there was no attempt – as far as I can discern – to vandalise the artist himself. The late Pope Francis even blessed him. Let this stand in stark contrast to the murder of Theo Van Gough in 2004, the slaughter of Stéphane Charbonnier and his team at Charlie Hebdo, the maiming of Salman Rushdie in 2022 and so on.
Many Christians, admittedly, lamented the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling which prioritised the right to abortion over the right-to-life of the unborn child. There is a history of “anti-abortion violence” which, if one accepts the protocols of constitutionalism, must be condemned even as the pro-life case is openly contended. As for blasphemy laws, in 1952 the Supreme Court – though considered relatively conservative at the time – ruled these unconstitutional. The First Amendment, in the opinion of the justices, prohibited government restricting anti-religious speech no more than it did religious speech. In short, the challenge for a Christian living in the West, no less than a Muslim or anyone with a religious belief living in the West, is to maintain their faith while accepting their civil obligation to permit everybody else, religious, non-religious or anti-religious, to express a contrary view without fear of reprisal. There is a constitutional unity in such an arrangement but, as Frank Meyer the conservative political philosopher asserted, not a “cosmological unity”. Accordingly, the advent of the sin of provocation/hate-speech laws – the obverse of submission, compulsion and indoctrination – is antithetical to post-tribal “settlement”.
In Australia, the right to free speech is implied by various High Court rulings but never stated explicitly in our Constitution. Thanks to the Whitlam government and the acquiescence of succeeding Labor and Coalition administrations, we are currently encumbered with Section 18C of Australia’s Racial Discrimination Act (1975), which makes it unlawful to engage in an act that is “reasonably likely to offend, insult, humiliate, or intimidate another person or group” (emphasis added). Section 18 D, fortunately, offers some safeguards for “protected activities” such as artistic works, academic pursuits, journalism and so on. In the UK, which also lacks a single, broad constitutional guarantee of free speech, Britons are confronted with a myriad of statutes intended to minimise “incitement” against “marginalised groups”. The police – according to the Free Speech Union – are currently making 30 arrests a day and 12,000 arrests a year. Under Section 127 of the Communications Act and Section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act, sovereign individuals are being charged with what is in effect the sin of provocation.
Charlie Kirk’s rise to prominence, which saw him mobilise a sizeable quantity of Generation Z to vote Republican in the 2024 presidential election, was enabled by the First Amendment. Judging by their response to his assassination, many progressives believe Kirk exploited his constitutional right to – as Christian Stein in the Guardian put it – indoctrinate impressionable young people with his “bigoted views”. Or as female colleague of a friend responded after hearing the news of the assassination: “Why don’t white men just shut up?” J Oliver Conroy, also writing for the Guardian, branded Kirk a divisive “far right” figure. While not celebrating the assassination of Kirk, Conroy was also suggesting Kirk abused the First Amendment to spew out “Christian Nationalist” hate speech. Kirk knew full well his critics, themselves protected by the First Amendment, used the used that term – almost meaningless because of its broadness – to vilify his conservatism and create an “assassination culture”. As Rebecca Weisser has noted: “The reality is that they don’t kill you because you’re a Nazi; they call you a Nazi so they can justify killing you.”
At the risk of oversimplifying Kirk – whose perspective admittedly evolved over the years – he held that America’s Founding Fathers and the US Constitution were not so much the product of the Enlightenment and/or Deism as Protestant sensibilities. This is all open to debate, of course, but it is hard to disagree with Kirk’s assertion that American exceptionalism was originally conceived as an economic, political and social experiment in which notions of personal morality (or self-determination) and national liberty (or self-governance) were not only interdependent but actively informed each other. Kirk, unsurprisingly, was fond of quoting John Adams: “Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Thomas Jefferson, Adams’ great political revival, was less orthodox in his Christian faith – something of a Christian Deist – and yet Adams and Jefferson became friends later in life. Tellingly, both agreed the future health of their constitutional republic depended on the moral code adopted by its citizenry, private virtue being a prerequisite for public virtue.
Though Kirk made explicit the connection between his own moral code and evangelical Christianity, there is abundant evidence that he was not a Christian Nationalist in the more authoritarian sense of hoping to impose a cosmological unity by enforcing religious conformity upon his fellow Americans. He remained firmly in the camp of constitutional unity. While contending that Protestant sensibilities are the forgotten roots of American constitutionalism – the separation of church and state, the presumption of innocence, the primacy of conscience, freedom of speech and assembly and so on – he remained true to post-tribal modernity: our civilisational inheritance is not submission but settlement. The evidence for this is not only that he was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with Freedom at the time of his death but that his wife Erica is Catholic, that he expressed “love” for Mormons, that Orthodox Jews have noted his appreciation for the Hebrew Bible, that he demonstrated compassion and thoughtfulness with his adversaries in public debates and on and on. He was a proposer, not an imposer.
Paradoxically and tragically, the demonising of Charlie Kirk’s worldview, not to mention the assassination itself and the subsequent reaction to it, supports the tenets of his freedomist political theology. The future of American civilisation, and Western civilisation more broadly, is contingent upon us cancelling the sin of provocation before its cancels us. We must not allow the wokeist rainbow of discontents and their Islamist allies to compel us to condone their latter-day tribalism. What we can do is forgive them, as Erica Kirk forgave her husband’s killer, even as they cannot forgive Chalie Kirk for provoking them. Forgive them, yes, but no to submitting to their belligerently paranoid creeds.
