Power and the Hypocritical Demand for Civility

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The very public murder of Charlie Kirk earlier this month as he engaged in debate on a college campus has shocked our nation’s conscience and thrust us into a meta-debate of sorts over the nature of free speech and our responsibility to be both truthful and civil. One popular late-night television host was suspended for allegedly inaccurate and irresponsible musings as to the motives of the shooter. Others have reportedly already lost their jobs for making comments deemed either too celebratory or too dismissive of Kirk’s fate. Even members of the military are being suspended for the content of their social media posts. Suddenly, a great deal rides on the subtle tone of our words, which is odd given that truthfulness and civility have been so absent from public discourse over the course of this past decade.


No. YOU'RE the violent one!


Yes, if only the debate over truthfulness and civility were an honest one. It used to be that folks on the right of the political spectrum decried any limits placed on them by mainstream news and social media platforms. They sought free reign to espouse their opinions regardless of the public health risk (Covid and vaccine misinformation, for instance), the risk to marginalized groups (racist, anti-gay, and anti-transgender declarations), the risk to democracy (election denialism and the stoking of right-wing extremism), or truth and reality itself (QAnon, “birther,” and various and sundry other conspiracy theories). Now, however, for people on the left to contend that Kirk was more a hate-speech profiteer than a lover of free and open debate is deemed by some to be beyond the pale, despite there being no shortage of malignant quotes attributed to him. Is a failure to be much moved by the death of one deemed to be a spreader of hate really more of a moral failing than, for instance, maligning entire groups of non-White, non-Christian, and non-heteronormative people—and ALL women for that matter?

It's curious, then, that the purported lack of truthfulness and civility of those on the left is now blamed for creating an unsafe environment for those on the right. After all, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, has found that we’re five times more likely to be killed by someone motivated by right-wing ideology than left-wing ideology. Nonetheless, right-leaning folks, decrying a lack of truthfulness and civility, now want to reign in Kirk’s critics as well as anti-fascist individuals and those who dare to liken our current headlong rush to authoritarianism to the rise of Nazism.

Of course, it’s not really all that curious when we consider the capacity for hypocrisy of this current administration. Untruthful and uncivil rhetoric is tolerated and even encouraged if it rallies the POTUS’s base and motivates them to do his bidding. But if his critics can be silenced on the basis of their speech being labeled untruthful and uncivil, then such a tactic will certainly be employed. The ruthlessly powerful don’t leave unused any tool at their disposal.

Absolutely, we need to dial down the vitriol and dial up the civility. Absolutely, the physical violence in this country has reached a critical point after years of increasingly violent rhetoric. But even as we strive in these areas, we need to keep our eyes open to the truth. It is simply not true that the radical Left alone is the problem. A right-leaning think tank (the Cato Institute) concluded that the majority of political violence is initiated by the radical Right. Without truthfulness about these fundamental facts, civility and peace, will continue to be elusive.



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Copyright 2025 by Mark Robert Frank

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