To hear him tell it, Charlie Kirk was all for freedom of speech, which he energetically exercised in calling out liberal orthodoxies and challenging racial sensitivities. There is no telling what he would have thought of the turmoil over free speech that has followed his death.
Last week, the Oglethorpe County School District agreed to pay Michelle Mickens, a high school English teacher, $272,420 plus $17,080 in legal fees, and she agreed not to seek employment in the district again. Mickens claimed she had been suspended when the school received a complaint about a post on her private Facebook page.
The post that sparked her suspension and subsequent lawsuit began with a direct quote from Kirk: “‘I think it’s worth it. I think it’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.”
In the back-and-forth comments that followed, she went on to say that Kirk had been “a fascist full of hate” and that the world was “a bit safer without him.” When Mickens refused to erase the post and issue an apology, the dispute escalated into a lawsuit, one of several similar cases around the country.
The total amount of money awarded in cases like this now sits at around $4 million, but this figure could be deceiving. Nearly half the current total comes from a $1.9 million settlement won by an anthropology professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville. By one estimate, more than 600 people were fired, suspended, disciplined or investigated for comments they made after Kirk’s death, which leaves a lot of potential lawsuits out there.
This reaction to “hate speech” was carried out at the urging of several Trump administration figures, including Vice President JD Vance, who urged listeners on a podcast to notify the employers of people celebrating Kirk’s death. An online hotline service was set up for informants wishing to turn in their neighbors or coworkers.
The kerfuffle over Jimmy Kimmel was, as it turns out, only the tip of the iceberg. If we were talking here about one or two large settlements for plaintiffs claiming their free speech was impinged, we might blame it on an overreaction to the wave of revulsion over Kirk’s assassination. But when you look at the list of serious institutions and large employers which have walked flat-footed into slam-dunk lawsuits and expensive settlements — at Ball State, Austin Peay State, the University of Tennessee, and the state of Florida — you get a much stronger sense of the strain the principle of free speech was under during the weeks after Kirk’s death.
If it was possible for so many institutions to fall in line and infringe on people’s freedom of speech, why are these “slam-dunk” lawsuits? At the front end, the First Amendment doesn’t always appear to be such a powerful protection, but in a courtroom setting that can change quickly. Given the option of settling the case or going to court against someone who’s taught for more than two decades and been nominated for state teacher of the year, the Oglethorpe district settled the case.
What Ball State University President Geoffrey Mearns called the $225,000 he authorized in the settlement of a similar case — “a modest monetary payment” which was much less than the cost of defending the case — could apply just as much to the case in Oglethorpe County.
There are really no winners when someone like Ms. Mickens is forced to leave her job in a part of the state where good teachers are needed, for a settlement of less than $300,000. But it does represent a grudging and highly conditional acknowledgment that the First Amendment still counts for something.
