Free speech lip service

Talk about your absurd contradictions. There's something Onionesque about watching the Kansas GOP supermajority christen a “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day” while simultaneously tightening the screws on actual speech and free expression in Kansas.

It would be absurdist satire if it weren’t entered into the official legislative journal.

SCR 1615, the resolution designating October 14 as “Charlie Kirk Free Speech Day,” moved through the legislature like crap through Canada goose (but not as pleasant). Republicans advanced it early. It consumed floor time. It generated speeches about liberty, the marketplace of ideas, the sacred American right to speak one’s mind without fear.

But those speeches — delivered with solemn cadence and patriotic flourish — carried the unmistakable stench of performance. Lawmakers spoke of courage and constitutional virtue, invoking free expression as if it were under siege. But for all the rhetorical bluster, the measure itself was nonbinding, symbolic, and materially inconsequential to the daily lives of Kansans.

It was a pageant of principle without policy — a moment of grandstanding that cost nothing politically and delivered nothing substantively.

The vote was decisive. The majority flexed. The calendar gained a commemorative square.

At the same time, debate inside that chamber was being managed with the precision of a soundboard operator hitting the mute button mid-sentence.

Amendments ruled not germane. Motions curtailed. Floor discussion was suppressed under procedural authority that only a supermajority can wield with such disregard for decency. Perfectly legal. Entirely within the rules.

And profoundly ironic (or should I say moronic? I guess both can be true).

Because free speech — if it means anything beyond a slogan — requires tolerance for dissent, not merely celebration of allies.

What unfolded was a kind of civic ventriloquism: a Legislature praising free expression in theory while suppressing it in practice.

The contradiction doesn’t stop at Statehouse chamber doors.

In recent years, this same Kansas GOP supermajority has advanced and enacted measures that critics argue narrow participation in the democratic process itself:

• HB 2332 (2021) restricted who may return advance ballots and created criminal penalties for certain ballot collection practices.
  
• SB 209 (2023) shortened the advance voting period and imposed new limits on ballot drop boxes.
• In 2022, a new congressional map was foisted on Kansans by the supermajority. The heavily gerrymandered map was a transparent attempt at suppressing Democratic voter voices in the 3rd District. 
• Not satisfied, Republican leaders recently went back to the gerrymandering well to try to dredge up even more voter suppression with a mid-decade redistricting effort. While they ultimately declined a special session last November, it won't be a surprise when they try to force this measure through in the current session. 

Supporters frame these laws and redistricting efforts as "election security" and "legitimate political strategy." Critics — including voting rights advocates and many Democratic lawmakers — describe them as structural barriers that reshape who participates and how much their vote weighs.

The dissonance is sharp enough to cut through the rotunda’s marble echo.

A Legislature celebrates “Free Speech” with a named holiday while curtailing debate on the floor through stifling procedural control and suppressing opposing voices with aggressive partisan maneuvering. 

Speech is applauded when it aligns. Participation is managed when it threatens.

Meanwhile, Kansans are told all of this is in defense of liberty? If liberty is the banner, then it is being flown at half-mast.

Free speech isn't merely the right to praise one’s champions. It's the willingness to endure dissent — on the floor, in committee, and at the ballot box. It's messy. It's inconvenient. It lengthens debate instead of trimming it.

What we continue to see instead is far more curated: a ceremonial embrace of “Free Speech” alongside a governing style that prefers efficiency over friction, control over contest.

When you declare a holiday for free speech while cutting off debate, narrowing voter access, and redrawing districts to consolidate power, you invite scrutiny and should expect criticism.

Free speech deserves more than a resolution number.

It deserves a microphone that stays on — and a map that doesn’t mute voters before they ever speak.

Racist is as racist does

There is a particular kind of cowardice that wears a necktie and speaks in complete sentences. It smells like caution, sounds like reason, and survives by never quite touching the thing it claims to condemn. Senator Jerry Moran’s response to Donald Trump’s racist AI video sits squarely in that tradition—clean, polite, and morally insufficient.

Yes, he called it racist. Yes, he said it shouldn’t have been posted. And yes, by modern Republican standards, this apparently qualifies as bravery. But let’s not confuse naming the fire with putting it out.

Moran’s statement reads like a man scolding a broken office printer. The video “should not have been posted.” An unfortunate error. A lapse in judgment. As if the President of the United States accidentally leaned on the wrong button and out popped a piece of digital minstrel propaganda depicting the first black presidential family as animals.

Oops. These things happen. Let’s all move along.

This is nonsense.

What Trump (a convicted felon, let's not forget) posted was not a gaffe. It was not clumsy humor. It was not a meme gone awry. It was a deliberate deployment of one of the oldest racist tropes in Western political history, now turbocharged by AI and blasted out from the most powerful bully pulpit on Earth. That matters. History matters. Power matters.

And when a sitting U.S. senator responds to that act with a gentle verbal wrist-tap while continuing to support the man who did it, we are no longer talking about intentions. We are talking about effects.

Here’s the part too many people want to dodge: supporting a racist and supporting racist actions is functionally indistinguishable from being racist. Not in the abstract. Not in the philosophical sense. In the real world—the only one that counts.

You can condemn the act in a press release and still enable the actor. You can say “this is not who we are” while voting, fundraising, caucusing, and aligning yourself with the very machinery that keeps producing this behavior. At that point, the condemnation is decorative. It exists to soothe consciences, not to change outcomes.

And spare me the moral-equivalence defense. The “both sides mock presidents” routine is the last refuge of people who know the line has been crossed but can’t bring themselves to say so plainly. Yes, presidents have been mocked. Cruelly. Stupidly. Sometimes viciously. That is not the same thing as the President himself distributing racist imagery rooted in centuries of dehumanization. Anyone pretending otherwise is not confused—they are protecting something.

Moran’s response tries to occupy a safe middle space that no longer exists. The ground has collapsed. You are either willing to impose consequences on racist behavior (and let's face it, other tyranical and anti-democracy behavior) from the presidency, or you are willing to live with it. There is no third option labeled “respectable disapproval.”

The old saying holds because it’s brutally accurate: racist is as racist does. And in politics, enabler is as enabler enables. When leaders draw lines and then refuse to defend them, those lines become decorations—useful for press coverage, meaningless for justice.

Senator Moran wants credit for saying the right words. History will measure something else entirely: whether he was willing to act as if those words meant anything at all.