Free speech is not negotiable. I am a free speech absolutist, which means that yes, I believe that freedom of speech should protect people’s right to say vile things, dishonest things, hateful things.

So, the recent comments from the US Attorney, Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said that she would target hate speech about the death of Charlie Kirk, well, that sends a shiver down my spine, even though I am disgusted by what is being said. I will hasten to add though that Pam Bondi made that comment in the context of a discussion on the Katie Miller podcast where she was at that moment in time talking about groups that promote violence specifically. And she has since clarified that comment, confirming that hate speech will not be prosecuted unless it crosses the line into incitement to violence. And whilst I applaud that clarification, Pam Bondi has also said some other things, like when she was on Fox News and said that the Justice Department was investigating some Office Depot employees because they refused to print Charlie Kirk flyers. And she said some other things that do raise a lot of red flags for me. Bond’s argument there is that businesses cannot discriminate.

The thing is, this was exactly the heart of the gay cake controversy that erupted in 2018 in Colorado, eventually resulting in the Supreme Court ruling 7-2 that the baker did have the right to refuse to decorate a cake with a message that he objected to. So I’m sorry Pam, you can’t have one without the other. The Supreme Court ruled that you absolutely can discriminate as a business. You absolutely can choose what you will and won’t do for your customers on the basis of your beliefs. And therefore, a printing company can refuse to print your flyers. That’s just how it is. And I’m going to argue that that’s how it has to be, or else the concept of free speech loses all of its meaning. US Attorney General Pam Bondi is without doubt aware of this Supreme Court gay cake precedent. So, it is dangerous for her to be saying on Fox News that businesses cannot discriminate. If you want to go in and print posters with Charlie’s pictures on them for a vigil, you have to let them do that. We can prosecute you for that. I don’t think you can or should be prosecuting people for that. It’s dangerous to give the government the power to punish people for exercising their human right to freedom of association and their right to be discriminating.

Discrimination as a word, as a concept, it just means discernment.

Being able to tell the difference between two things, to discriminate between things which are not the same. And we absolutely have a human right to choose not to participate in or associate with or provide services for things that we don’t want to. The same First Amendment rights that give Americans the right to freedom of speech must by definition also give them the right to choose silence. It gives them the right to participate and it must also give them the right to say no. So, in the case of these Office Depot workers, well, I support their right to refuse service based on their freedom of association, just as I would also support their employer who might then decide to exercise their freedom of association and fire the employees who refused to print those flyers. That’s just the employer exercising their right to freedom of association. And freedom of speech does not mean freedom from any consequences amongst each other, amongst ourselves, but freedom of speech most definitely means, or at least it should mean, freedom from government intervention. So for the Attorney General of the United States to say that the Justice Department is investigating Office Depot employees for refusing to print flyers, this is a terrible, very bad, no good idea. And it will do far more harm than good. And based on his track record, I would say that this isn’t something that Charlie would have wanted either.

My name’s Topher Field. This is the Topher Project and I help busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense that surrounds us. I am 100% viewer supported. So, if you appreciate my no-nonsense coverage, then please help to keep the Topher project going by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net and check out my books, DVDs, and merch at goodpeoplereakbadlaws.com. The thing with hate-filled people saying hate-filled things in public is that they’re actually doing us a favor because now we know where the hate-filled people are. And thanks to freedom of association, which is also a human right, once we know where the hate-filled people are, we can then decide to have nothing to do with them, to no longer use their services if they run a business, to no longer work for them if they’re our boss, to no longer employ them, to no longer hang out with them or invite them to our homes. But I firmly believe that we are better off knowing who and where these people are than we are forcing them to hide what they really think because of fear of censorship and the threat of government prosecution because of what they say.

And as has been said time and again, the best way to combat bad speech is with good speech. Or to say it another way, sunlight is the best disinfectant. Now, that’s not to say that words can’t do damage. Not at all. Words carry ideas and ideas are the most powerful thing in the world. That is what the Topher project is really all about. Ideas and great damage can be and has been done with words. But then using violence to silence someone’s words, well, that’s an admission that you don’t have the words, the ideas to counter them. They win the battle of ideas the moment you fight back with violence. As the character Tyrion Lannister, created and penned by George RR Martin, said in A Clash of Kings, “When you tear out a man’s tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you’re only telling the world that you fear what he might say.” Now, that quote is, of course, from a fictional character, but the point is very real and very relevant. Words are powerful and they can be used for good and they can be used for evil.

An example of words being used for evil would be the mainstream media campaign of lies that has consistently portrayed Donald Trump as some sort of modern Hitler that has called the MAGA movement of which Charlie was a passionate supporter some sort of a Nazi cause and they’ve spent years whipping up the lie that what happened on January 6th was some sort of an insurrection. Now none of those things are true. I think that speech is reprehensible. But using that speech, they created in the minds of some people a justification for exactly the violence that we saw against Charlie.

Words can do harm. Now, someone made the point that they didn’t shoot Charlie Kirk because they believed he was a Nazi.

Uh, they called him a Nazi so that you would believe that shooting him was a good thing. And even still, after everything they’d said before he got shot, now after his death, there are still people telling lies about Charlie. People claiming he’s said all manner of things that he simply never said, or they’re taking things that he did say out of context, to pretend that he meant something that he definitely did not mean.

So, yes, I know. I get it. Some people use their right to freedom of speech to do harm, to do bad things, to do evil and to justify evil with real-world consequences. But what would Charlie want us to do about them? To use the law to prosecute them for hate crimes? Shut them down? No. He would want us to answer them in his death the same way that he answered his critics in his life, with words. Charlie didn’t just believe in free speech for all. He’s the one who gave the microphone to the very people who were most likely to criticize him the harshest. In a real sense, they didn’t actually kill him because of his speech. They killed him because he was showing the world that they didn’t have a reply.

I want to finish this video with a few examples of the lies being spoken about Charlie. And I want to counter them the way that Charlie would have wanted, with speech, with the truth of what he actually said and what he actually believed. Now, you’ll find lots of examples of people lying about Charlie on the internet. I’m not going to revel in the lies, only in the replies. Now, the Daily Wire have actually compiled a few really great examples. I’m going to use a few of them here. You’ve probably seen the claim that Charlie said, “Black women don’t have the brain processing power to be taken seriously.” But surprise, surprise, that is an intentional misquote. The Daily Wire have provided the source. It’s back in 2023, Charlie was on his show, and he called out four specific women who continually promoted anti-white and anti-Asian affirmative action policies. These women were Michelle Obama, Sheila Jackson Lee, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Joy Reid. His actual quote, and remember, he was talking about them. They’re coming out and they’re saying, “I’m only here because of affirmative action. We know you do not have the brain power, the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously.” He was insulting four specific people, not making any statements about women generally or about black people generally. And yet that misquote, well, it’s been twisted and weaponized. But now, thanks to freedom of speech and thanks to the work of the Daily Wire, you know the truth. You see how that works? We don’t need to silence the liars. We need to speak the truth in reply. Let’s do a few more. The New York Times claims that Charlie Kirk said Jews have been pushing the same hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them. But Charlie was reading someone else’s tweet when he said that.

And he went on to critique what that person said. The New York Times were actually forced into a correction on this one, which again you can see here, thanks to the work of the Daily Wire, acknowledging in their correction that those words that they quoted from Charlie Kirk were not Charlie Kirk’s own statement. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. I have some videos for you, too, so that you can hear it in Charlie’s own words. It’s been said that Charlie hated gay people, but here he is face to face with one, giving him the microphone just as he did with everyone.

[From video]

“I’m a gay conservative and I just want to kind of ask you like what do you have to say for people like me who kind of feel like I guess it’s kind of hard for gay conservatives ’cause there’s not a lot of us. So like what do you have to say to other gay people who need to realize like they do have a choice?”

Yeah. First of all, welcome to the conservative movement. I don’t think you should introduce yourself just based on your sexual attraction. Because that’s not who you are. I like to be thought of as a person, and for sure, you are a complete human being, and I’m sure you treat people well and you’re studying something. So I want to get away with this idea that you’re gay anything. I just think that we have gone a long way in the negative direction of this country where we act as if the most important part of your identity is what you do in the bedroom. It doesn’t mean that much to me. But if you ask from a perspective as a Christian, I don’t agree with that lifestyle. But politics is about addition and multiplication. I imagine you agree with a lot of what we talk about, right? Strong borders, strong country. And for that, you know, we welcome you into the conservative movement.

Thank you. [End video]

And again, they said he hated transgender people. Watch this and tell me if you see hate.

[From video]

“I just want to say I’m a transgender male. What age should kids be able to get things like hormone therapy? Because I don’t know what’s true, what’s not. Tell me, are you comfortable telling me your story?”

I’ve known that since like third grade, and I’m currently 19, almost 20. I’ve known basically since then. I didn’t start going by a different name until 7th and 8th grade. I just don’t know like with the med, like the whole medical stuff, like what’s true, what’s not, what’s helpful ‘cause I’ve heard so many different opinions.

First of all, thank you so much for that. And of course, so I’m going to have an opinion that very few people will ever tell you, which is I want you to be very cautious putting drugs into your system in the pursuit of changing your body.

Mhm.

I instead encourage you to work on what’s going on in your brain first. I think what you need first and foremost is just a diagnosis. Just someone that is going to listen to what you’ve gone through, listen to what else is going on. My prayer for [End video]

This is the man that they are telling you to fear, to hate. The man whose death you’re supposed to celebrate.

They’re lying about him. And now they’re crying because some of them got caught out in their lies, and a few of them, well, that’s resulted in them losing their jobs because their employers no longer wanted to be associated with them and their lies. Now, Jimmy Kimmel is just one of the many high-profile scalps claimed by their own inability to be civil in the face of a political assassination. Now, I don’t celebrate cancel culture and never have. So, I’ll make the same point here as I’ve made previously with the cancelling of comedians and celebrities and other high-profile people over the last few years. The only reason that a, in this case, comedian should ever be cancelled is for the sin of not being funny. Saying offensive things? Well, yeah. What do you expect? They’re trying to be funny.

Now, Jimmy has never been particularly funny to me. So, if that terminated his contract on the basis that he hasn’t written a real joke in years, well, at that point, I’d say, “Yeah, fair enough.” But I cannot get excited about someone being fired for their words. Now, the network has the right to do it, don’t get me wrong, but this wasn’t actually a network decision. This was coercion from the US Communications Chair, Brendan Carr, who suggested that ABC’s broadcast license was now at risk because of Kimmel’s comments.

At that point, it’s no longer the network that are firing him. It’s the government that are cancelling him. And that most certainly is a violation of the First Amendment in my opinion. I think it’s wrong in principle, but I also think that getting people fired doesn’t usually work out the way that those doing the cancelling would like to imagine it will. Tell me, how did cancelling Dave Chappelle go? What about Shane Gillis, Matt Refe, Louis CK, JK Rowling, Joe Rogan, Ricky Gervais? These are all comedic or creative icons, and they’re doing just fine despite being cancelled.

Now, the difference between them and Kimmel is that the ones I listed are actually talented, and Kimmel, in my opinion, is not. But my point still stands. Cancelling people doesn’t usually work anymore. Let them speak, and then we speak and reply. Now, if they lose their jobs because their employer does not want to employ them anymore, then fine, as long as that really is their employer’s decision. But in our outrage about the death of Charlie Kirk and our righteous indignation about what some people are saying, let’s resist the urge to become just like the cancelled culture of years gone by.

For Pam Bondi to be making threats with the full weight of the US government behind her, that’s dangerous. For the communications chair to be making threats about pulling someone’s license? No, I truly believe that that crosses the line into government censorship, into a violation of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. And I believe that there should be no place for that in a free country. We should answer speech with speech, counter lies with truth. And we can’t say we believe in freedom of speech if we then make that speech conditional.

So the lesson here is that we all need to get louder, not quieter.

Don’t fall silent because there are others out there saying things that you don’t like. And don’t call for them to be silenced. Just speak the truth in return. And if that’s not something you’re comfortable doing, that’s okay. There’s plenty of people like me and many others in the world who are doing the speaking for you. All we ask is that you help us share our work, amplify our voices, and maybe listen as you do that, and you might learn a thing or two so that sometime in the future, you will be ready to speak up when your turn comes.

And that’s why I encourage everyone to spend some time on Charlie Kirk’s YouTube channel. He was a master of the art of communicating, talking to people, meeting them where they were at, empathizing with them. Ironically, given that is one of the words that is the subject of many lies about him, meeting them where they’re at and then not compromising on what he had to say in reply. Find his channel, watch, listen, learn, and prepare. We answer bad speech with good, lies with truth, and we answer those who would silence us by speaking louder.

My name is Topher Field, and this is what I do. I speak loudly in a world that demands our silence. And if you appreciate that there is an Aussie voice speaking truth and cutting through the crap, helping busy people like you to make sense of the nonsense, then please help me to keep growing, to keep amplifying my work, and raising my voice even higher by buying me a coffee via the button at topherfield.net. And if you like my videos, then you will love my books. There’s Good People Break Bad Laws, which is all about government, power, where human rights come from, and the role of civil disobedience in a modern society. Then there’s my second book, Good Christians Break Bad Laws, which is all about the theology of civil disobedience and what Christians should do when our government goes bad. Plus, there’s my multi-award-winning documentary, Battleground Melbourne.

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And as always, think free.