Dispatches from the present
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.
As I moved toward the door, I felt a flicker of shame, a sense that stepping inside meant crossing a line I didn’t yet know how to name. It struck me how easily political participation, long presented to me as empowering and necessary, can shift into an alienating display in which conviction becomes performance and performance becomes confrontation. The moment I entered the auditorium, I found myself absorbed into the narrative surrounding the Event.
Inside, the president of Turning Point Berkeley stepped to the podium, and only then did I recognize him as the boy who sits across from me in my political philosophy class. Two months earlier, we had been in the same lecture on virtue when the notification of Kirk’s assassination lit up my phone. I remember looking down at the headline, trying to reconcile what we were discussing in class, namely what it means to be good, to act justly and to cultivate a moral life, with the morbid celebration already cresting online.
After the news broke, the phrase from the bus stop kept cropping up on my Instagram feed. Videos of the incident circulated with captions like “don’t feel bad for his wife or kids,” a chorus of moral certainty masquerading as catharsis. A girl I know from a student group focused on promoting discourse on campus posted the same thing on her story. Even among those who claim to defend open dialogue, death could still feel like a point scored.
I wondered what the boy who was speaking at the event made of that moment. Maybe he saw it as a confirmation of everything he believed about hypocrisy on the left. Maybe he saw it as proof that the virtue we were discussing in class was nothing more than posturing. Standing at the podium now, he seemed certain in a way I wasn’t. His presence here felt like an extension of a worldview already formed. Mine felt like stepping into the unknown.
He lifted the microphone and said, “We are Charlie Kirk.” The words echoed as the room gleaming with red MAGA hats chanted along. The hats declared allegiance. They created a zone, a boundary, a counter-symbol against everything the protesters thought they stood for. Yet even in this divided scene, there ran a quiet consensus. Kirk had become more than a man. He existed in the collective imagination as a symbol of free speech.
Reminders of Berkeley’s legacy as the cradle of the Free Speech Movement are everywhere on campus. Cafes bear the movement’s name, plaques commemorate protests long past, and official tours trace the footsteps of Mario Savio as if you might step into his shoes. Yet the countercultural spirit Berkeley loves to commemorate in glossy brochures now operates more as nostalgia than disruption. I teach a student-led course on the History of Free Speech at Berkeley, and I can’t shake a sense of unease about how the university capitalizes on being the “birthplace of free speech.” In class discussions, my students notice how the ideal is often selectively applied, sanitized for institutional branding or invoked to serve political ends. Rebellion gets repackaged as a kind of moral heritage.
Meanwhile, Kirk and his followers use similar tools to those used by the Free Speech Movement against the cultural assumptions of the campus itself. The inversion reveals how slippery “free speech” has become. If it once symbolized liberation from moral censorship and state repression, today, when invoked by conservative figures, it often doubles as a shorthand for resisting “cancel culture,” defending controversial speech or pushing back against progressive social norms. For Gen Z students, this creates a strange duality. I inherit a collective memory of free speech as an emancipatory ideal, while living in a political climate where it is often coded as conservative. Often it feels hostile to the values of inclusiveness and social justice that I was raised with, making it hard for me to embrace it unreservedly.
My generation’s digital habits complicate things further. In a culture where retweets and reposts reveal more about what my peers believe than direct statements do, “speaking freely” has become less about open expression and more about signaling, curating or withholding. Sometimes, when I walk through Sproul Plaza, I recall the famous photographs of student protesters standing on car roofs with megaphones, demanding to be heard. Today, students walk to class phones in hand. Dissent doesn’t shout from the rooftops anymore. It hums in comment sections, threads and TikTok feeds.
In that sense, at least, the Turning Point event felt like a collision of the past and present: the physical spectacle of the old days layered on top of today’s performative, platform-ready politics. Suddenly, we were all face-to-face, unmediated. But was the speech happening here “free”? Was it countercultural?
The night before the event, I ran into a couple of students setting up a giant papier-mâché bug on campus. Under the glow of the streetlamps, it looked less like a prop than a creature out of a dream (or nightmare), its carapace scraping the concrete as they tried to stand it upright. They were staging a protest, but the image carried something heavier for me: the sense of students needing to turn themselves inside out to be seen. By morning, I learned the students had been arrested on charges of felony vandalism. Their giant bug had vanished, as if it had scuttled back into the dark.
“This campus, more than any other campus in the United States,” said the right-wing comedian and host Rob Schneider, as the Turning Point event neared its end, “has the foundational principle of free speech.” Then he and the attendees filed out through the mass of protesters pressed against the barricades. Across from them, the counterprotesters shouted back. A foghorn blew from somewhere in the crowd. Someone else was livestreaming the whole thing with the caption “Berkeley loses its mind.”
I realized then that I was looking at a version of “free speech” that required both armored officers and multiple camera angles to hold its shape. The event had become a performance staged for two audiences: the bodies pushed together on the steps and the unseen watchers online. What happened that night was already slipping away from the people who lived it, recast as memes, clips, tiny outrage cycles floating free of the reality that produced them. Within hours, the footage had been chopped up and repurposed by commentators on every side. “Proof” that Berkeley had collapsed into intolerant chaos; that conservative speakers incited hostility on campus. “Proof” that student activism was alive and well; that student activism had lost its way.
By nightfall, the plaza emptied and the barricades were stacked away, but the spectacle lived on. Days afterward, the exact same clip circulated in liberal group chats as evidence of moral failure and in conservative feeds like the ones my hometown friends follow as evidence of a victory. Whatever message the protesters or Turning Point speakers thought they were carrying had been absorbed into a broader script, one writing itself far from the ground they stood on.