Using Hitler as an example is a poor example for saying Kirk deserved what what he got.
No I was not making the point that Kirk deserved anything, but I fault myself for not making it clear. I guess its easy to get caught up in defensive. My bad. Ill try to explain better what I mean.
it's not an entirely silly question, but let's make something clear:
Seriously I thought I was making a clear point, but Ill explain down below.
So lets start with what I am driving at. First Charlie Kirk is influencer.
He talks and presents opinions on larger platforms infront of 100s if not 1000s of people.
You said that he is expressing free opinion and that yes people should not be punished for having opinions or debating.
I agree with this point wholeheartedly. I agree with this because wed all be dead if we got punished for having bad opinions.
However I think there was a point being made, and that point needs to be driven to home base. That is that Charlie Kirk is merely voicing his harmless opinion and exercising free speech and therefore what he says is none issue.
I don't think morality is the problem only here, but the idea that what he says has no impact.
I think what people like Charlie Kirk say has impact, and can have huge negative impact, and can damage public discourse about what policies mean and how they are presented.
Eviscerating public discourse of any nuance, and dumbing down things to plane and simple rhetoric tools and engaging public with not so genuine talking points supporting the with flimsy arguments like random citations of trivia and statistic is going to shape the way people think and understand the topic.
In other words lets imagine I am a body building guru who is championing a preworkout mix and I take huge doses of physical enhancing drugs.
You could effectively argue that I am just being engaging and running a harmless ad and just expressing an opinion, but there will be a lot of people who will be buying make product wanting to be muscle boys like fitness influencer.
I think him having a platform is inseperable from him having influence, and it can never really be only argued that he is just sharing his opinion. The way public engages this topic has impact, and whether that is negative or positive depends on what is being said. But we should and can never separate his influence on the crowds of people and say "Its just an opinion. "
More importantly he was not exercising hate speech, but his arguments do decided life or death on multiple social levels and thus they cannot be seen as just merely light hazard type of things.
Your argument then goes to the fact that yes he has opinion, but he does not shape policy. But Id argue invariably it is people like Kirk that do shape a bulk of policy.
In fact there is good reason why we have Ben Shapiros, Charlie Kirks and Piers Morgans etc. on TV because these people have huge impact in the way the discourse lives in public domain and huge impact the way public perceives this problem.
Ill repeat I do not at any point try to compare Charlie Kirk to Hitler. My main point is that Hitler too started with merely opinions. Then work his way all the way to Auschwitz gasing Jews.
Think about this .... why can't we openly just talk about Jews or blacks or trans people even if its hate speech we could always argue its just opinion and that opinion won't shape policy.
We know exactly why certain things are taboo. Why I cant just give a sex ed class to 4 year olds or start explaining why death is illusion to someone on a funeral.
That is because impact of words is not separable from voicing just opinions.
On the intellectual level we can pretend Kirk just had opinions, but he was realistically running a huge influential ad for guns on college campuses.
I am not saying what he is doing is wrong either. I am saying its impactful no matter how much we try to sanitize this and just call it harmless rhetoric it really is not.