One Republican Has Been More Two-Faced About Charlie Kirk’s Critics Than Any Other

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In the days since Charlie Kirk’s shooting, a level of performative concern about limiting speech critical of the slain conservative has spread far and wide. It’s led to normally critical liberal pundits, like Ezra Klein, celebrating Kirk’s life and work, while others have been fired for merely bringing attention to things Kirk has said via direct quote. This hypervigilant policing of speech critical of Kirk reveals hypocrisy on all sides. However, during this fight over cancel culture in reverse, one conservative leader has gone above and beyond in his unabashed weaponizing of the free speech politics of the moment, in direct contrast to his very recent actions to purportedly protect free speech: Texas Gov. Greg Abbott.

Specifically, Abbott in recent days has been mighty busy on X, where he’s been using his platform to spotlight college students who he believes should be punished for their speech during campus memorial services for Kirk. Without identifying any rules or law violations, Abbott suggested that at least one Texas college student should be expelled and celebrated the arrest of another student.

It started last Sunday, when a video posted to X showed 18-year-old Camryn Giselle Booker confronting a group of her classmates at Texas Tech University as they were holding a vigil for Kirk on campus. A male student who appears to have been participating in the vigil filmed the incident^[2] and posted it online in a series of clips, the first one showing Booker briefly coming up behind vigil-goers and jumping up and down while shouting expletives seeming to celebrate Kirk’s death. The video segues into a second clip revealing the male student filming. He’s wearing a red Make America Great Again hat and dark sunglasses, and says, “Evil is real, people, and it kind of looks like that,” as he pans the camera to Booker.

The final clip shows the male student calling out to Booker, “Why are you being so hateful?” Booker responds by turning the question back to him, saying “Why are you so hateful?” while beginning to also film the encounter on her own phone. The two of them quickly begin arguing over whether Booker is being aggressive, while a third student enters the conversation to tell Booker that she’s getting emotional. Taking a step back from the group, Booker attempts to defend herself, telling both students, “I’m not being aggressive, my voice is very calm. You’re calling me aggressive because I’m a Black woman.”

The male student filming immediately says “Not at all,” and the video cuts off. A separate clip of the incident shows Booker waving to mourners and pushing a fellow student’s red hat. Sunday night, Abbott posted^[3] a screenshot of Booker being handcuffed by police to X. “This is what happened to the person who was mocking Charlie Kirk’s assassination at Texas Tech. FAFO.” That’s slang for “Fuck around, find out.” A local Texas news station reported^[4] Booker has been expelled by Texas Tech. Again, this is the governor of Texas celebrating a college student being arrested days after an incident, merely for engaging in protected speech.

Then on Tuesday, a separate incident at Texas State University went viral. According to a video^[5] posted to X, during a memorial service honoring Kirk that was hosted by the school’s Turning Point USA chapter, a male student forces himself through a thick crowd of students. While white headphones dangle from his ears, the student briefly stops to slap the side of his neck as he yells profanities about how Kirk died. He continues to make his way toward the front of the crowd, climbs atop a statue, slaps the side of his neck again, then slumps down to his hands and knees, an apparent reenactment of Kirk’s death. He gets up, jumps off the statue, spits on the ground, and walks away from the huddled crowd, as students can be heard shouting. Someone says “You’re gonna get expelled, dude.”

By early Tuesday afternoon, Abbott was calling on Texas State to “expel this student immediately.” Within an hour, Texas State University president Kelly Damphousse posted an official statement^[7] to X where he confirmed that university officials were attempting to identify the subject of the viral video and promised that if the subject was found to be affiliated with his university, appropriate action would be taken: “Let me be clear: expressions that glorify violence or murder have no place on our campuses.” On Tuesday night, Abbott took it upon himself to update^[8] the public: “That student is now expelled.”

After watching clips of both of these incidents, it’s clear they were unseemly. Both students’ behavior seemed intended to disrupt and offend Kirk’s followers. But, under the First Amendment, do these students have a right to exercise their personal views in a public forum, even if ill-advisedly, just as Kirk’s followers have a right to publicly mourn him? Apparently not in Texas.

It’s ironic when you consider that back in 2019, Abbott was concerned about protecting young conservative voices, so he proudly^[9] signed a bill enshrining First Amendment rights on Texas college campuses. It classified outdoor areas of college campuses as “public forums”—the very spaces where the incidents at Texas Tech and Texas State occurred—and created disciplinary sanctions for any students who interfered with free speech activities.

And yet, when the political tide shifted last year as pro-Palestine protests roiled college campuses across the country, including at many schools in Texas, Abbott was quick to pull back on those sacred free speech rights. He signed a bill tightening free speech rules^[10] on Texas college campuses, placing restrictions on students engaging in peaceful protests, banning encampments and megaphones, and instating a curfew on student protests.

To make matters more transparent, Abbott has made very clear that he views some hateful speech as protected and other similar speech as not. Indeed, in 2021, Abbott signed a law^[11] that allowed Texans to sue social media platforms that banned them for hate speech. “We will always defend the freedom of speech in Texas, which is why I am proud to sign House Bill 20 into law to protect First Amendment rights in the Lone Star State,” Abbott said at the time. Last year, Abbott’s law was struck down^[12] by a unanimous Supreme Court as a blatant violation of the First Amendment.

In the past week we’ve seen television pundits^[17] and journalists^[18] publicly lose their jobs over their coverage of Kirk’s death, and Abbott is capitalizing on that momentum for himself at the expense of Texas’ youth. If Abbott had not interfered with the Texas Tech and Texas State students, it seems quite possible that those institutions might have taken disciplinary action while perhaps also allowing those two students to remain enrolled in college. Maybe there was a chance that those institutions would have treated their free speech rights with as much respect as was given to the students publicly mourning Kirk’s death.

On Tuesday, during a press conference, Abbott broadly discussed recent college students’ behavior following Kirk’s death. “We as a society, we as a state, must send a signal that celebrating the assassination of a free speech advocate is wrong in a civil society,” he proclaimed. Abbott failed to mention that Texas seems ready to enforce a double standard: If two Black students exercise their free speech rights, the governor will happily penalize them and even celebrate their arrest.^[19]

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