Bury the ‘words are violence’ cliché

“Teach students that objectionable speech is violence and you invite them to see their own aggression as self-defense,” writes Greg Lukianoff. (Nordin Catic for The Cambridge Union via Getty Images)

This essay was originally published in The Free Press on September 14, 2025.

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When news broke of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, the reaction of thousands of young Americans online was one of delight. One TikTok user chuckled: “Live by the sword, die by the sword. He did say that gun deaths were an acceptable side effect of gun rights.” On X, someone wrote: “He is a fascist. Spreads hate, racism, bigotry, misinformation, gets shot. Reap what you sow.”

In the minds of these gleeful posters, Kirk deserved to die because of his words—words that allegedly promoted policies resulting in hate, violence, and even death. They think this way because they have forgotten—or have been trained to unlearn—a crucial distinction: Words are not bullets. Words can’t strike a man from 142 yards away, causing a torrent of blood to erupt from his wound, sending him first to the hospital and then to the morgue. Only bullets can do that.

Upholding that distinction is the North Star of everything I do as president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE). For years, I’ve warned that equating words with violence erases the bright line liberal societies drew after centuries of bloodshed. The law draws this line with precision. Advocacy, even vile advocacy, remains protected unless it is intended and likely to produce imminent lawless action. That’s the Brandenburg standard, and it exists because the alternative is to let the powerful decide which ideas are allowed.

Or, as the Supreme Court put it in Texas v. Johnson, “If there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment, it is that the government may not prohibit the expression of an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive or disagreeable.” These aren’t lawyerly niceties; they are the safety valves of pluralism. Blur them, and real violence becomes more, not less, likely.

Campus culture has been eroding that line for years. Students are told that offensive ideas are “harm,” that “silence is violence,” and—in a flourish that should now embarrass its users—that speech can be “literally” violence. Jonathan Haidt and I pushed back on that argument almost a decade ago. It’s conceptually wrong and practically dangerous—and has only grown in influence. Teach students that objectionable speech is violence and you invite them to see their own aggression as self-defense. This is the bloody fallacy we just witnessed: Accept the premise that rhetoric is a physical attack and you hand extremists a moral permission slip to answer speech with force. We need to bury this trope. Retire it—from classrooms, HR trainings, and editorials—for good.

The numbers show how far the rot has spread. FIRE’s new College Free Speech Rankings, which surveyed nearly 70,000 students across 257 campuses, find a record share now rationalizing coercion. Roughly 34 percent of students say that using violence to stop a campus speech can be acceptable in some circumstances; roughly 70–72 percent say the same about shouting down speakers. In 2021, the violence number was in the low 20s; by last year it was 32 percent. It should be zero. A university that can’t persuade students to reject violence categorically is failing at the first task of liberal education.

We’ve seen the escalation step by step. Middlebury, 2017: Political scientist Charles Murray was shouted down; professor Allison Stanger left with a concussion and neck injury. University of California, Davis, 2023: Masked protesters smashed windows at a Charlie Kirk event; to the university’s credit, the talk continued. San Francisco State University, 2023: Former collegiate swimmer Riley Gaines’ event was so aggressively disrupted she was held hostage in a room for hours; campus police ultimately suspended the case without charges. And of course, there were the violent riots at University of California, Berkeley, in 2017—the birthplace of the Free Speech Movement—in response to a planned speech by commentator Milo Yiannopoulos. It’s a miracle no one was killed. These episodes move norms from argument, to heckling, to property destruction, to “rare” violence—and now, in Orem, Utah, to a bullet.

I had my disagreements with Charlie Kirk—sometimes sharp ones—but none of that matters right now. What I respected, and too many of his critics never noticed, was that he showed up. He stood in the quad, took hard questions, argued back, let students argue back at him. That takes time, patience, and courage. Our culture has been teaching young people to scorn that everyday civic courage and to treat contested speech as a kind of physical harm. On that Utah campus we received the final proof that “words are like bullets” is a poisonous and cruel metaphor.

The response on the political right has been no less dangerous: the urge to answer a murder with censorship or official punishment of vile speech. Since the shooting, powerful officials have proposed sanctions for people who “praise,” “rationalize,” or make light of the killing online. The U.S. deputy secretary of state publicly warned that foreign nationals who “glorify” the murder could face visa consequences; consular officers were told to “take action,” and the public was encouraged to report posts. In Florida, the education commissioner warned that “vile, sanctionable” teacher speech about the killing could trigger discipline, including certification consequences.

These are not thought experiments. They are real signals from people with real power, and they cut directly against the lesson we must relearn: Ugly speech is answered with more speech, not legal process. Investigate true threats and incitement under settled law; otherwise, keep the public square open.

Private reprisals are proliferating, too. Activists are already doxxing people accused of “celebrating” the murder, exposing them to death threats. The Carolina Panthers fired a communications staffer for a callous post. Companies, of course, have every right to fire people if they wish to. But I’ve been warning for a long time that when it comes to cancel culture, you don’t want to live in a country where you can have a job or a strong opinion, but you can’t have both. You don’t have to defend those posts to see how quickly a culture of retribution metastasizes, chilling the very debate we need now.

So what do we do? First, bury the “words are violence” cliché. I have pointed out before that it was always self-serving nonsense, a way to claim moral high ground while reaching for the duct tape. But after Utah, it is grotesque. Anyone trying to argue that speech is violence should be treated with sneers, jeers, condemnation, and a recommendation that if they really want to live in a society in which there is no bright line distinction between speech and violence, they should try living in the thirteenth century. Maybe they’ll be happier there.

Second, restore the norms that once made universities the safest place to clash over dangerous ideas: maximal tolerance for speech; zero tolerance for force. Draw the line where the law draws it—true threats, targeted harassment, and incitement, as the Supreme Court defines them. Keep everything else inbounds, for everyone: left, right, and otherwise.

Third, stop rewarding disruption: If you shout down a speaker, you’re removed. If you smash windows, you’re disciplined. If you assault anyone, you’re referred to the police. Order protects liberty; it doesn’t replace it.

Finally, recover the ordinary civic courage Charlie Kirk showed: Step up to talk to people who don’t like you. I’m frequently a speaker on these college campuses, and I am often saying things that people very much disagree with and don’t like. Did this horrific assassination scare me? Yes. Did it scare a lot of us who do this kind of work? I’m sure it did. But it’s definitely not going to stop us—and it shouldn’t stop you, either. Speak truth. Argue hard, listen hard. Say what you really mean. Assassins, censors, and bullies need to be shown that not only will their attempts to scare us not work, they will utterly backfire.

That is how you end up with fewer victims: Stop rewarding them.

Free speech is not merely a favor for our friends—it is the best nonviolent technology humans have for solving our conflicts. To honor a man who died while speaking, don’t gag his enemies or canonize his ideas. Rebuild a culture that says no idea is so sacred it can’t be challenged and no person so despised they can be murdered in cold blood for speaking. Highest tolerance for speech. Zero tolerance for violence.

Keep the line bright. Civilization depends on it.