Free Speech and Spectacle

I first noticed “Fuck Kirk” scrawled in faded green Sharpie at a bus stop near campus, a few days before he died. In November, two months after Charlie Kirk’s death, I passed the same bus stop on my way to attend the final stop of Turning Point USA’s nationwide campus tour at UC Berkeley. Weathered posters of his face were taped along the walls, his expression caught somewhere between conviction and defiance. Outside, hundreds of protesters held handmade signs, their chants rising and falling against the bass of an unseen speaker inside. I recognized some of them: friends, classmates, people I pass on my morning runs to the coffee shop.