Under pressure from Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin, other state Republican elected officials, and countless right-wing social media accounts, Dot Heffron resigned from her post as chair of the Chesterfield County school board over a social media post she made about Kirk’s killing.
The top education official in the Youngkin administration has advised school districts to investigate educators’ comments about Kirk’s death and raised the prospect teachers could lose their licenses, which is to say their livelihoods, over their words.
On Friday, Youngkin’s office sent an email to state employees saying they would be “held to a higher standard” when it came to their conduct, warning that, “We have received notice of several posts that clearly violate this standard of conduct. I remind you of the standards that are expected of state employees.”
The message is clear: run afoul of right-wing standards of speech, and you risk the safety of your family and your paycheck. Stay silent, or better yet, pledge your fealty to MAGA, and you have nothing to fear.
Educators and workers alike are under attack as troubling witch hunts, ostensibly on Kirk’s behalf, ravage our already fraught political climate. As Republicans conduct this new Red Scare, Democrats have done their best to condemn Kirk’s killing as well as the statements making light of it.
We need a stronger defense of the First Amendment and to remind people that in this country, in addition to not killing the people we disagree with, we don’t persecute them.
I saw a glimmer of this defense at an event in Arlington this morning where Democratic lawmakers and fired federal workers were talking about the impacts of the Trump Administration’s cuts to their communities.
State Del. Josh Thomas of Prince William County opened the event by condemning political violence, so when it came time for questions, I asked him what his reaction was to the right-wing crackdown on free speech.
In response, Thomas, a Marine combat veteran who is up for re-election this fall in a competitive House race, said the shock of Kirk’s killing was for many still very fresh and raw. Thomas reiterated that the State Democratic Party of Virginia unequivocally condemns political violence before defending the right to free speech.
“We will continue to push policies to make sure that everyone of all political persuasions has the ability to make their voices heard and exercise free political speech,” Thomas said.
The current attacks on free speech were preceded – as they so often are – by previous attacks ushered in by the Youngkin administration.
Many will recall, as Harry Szabo, president of the United Campus Workers of Virginia, does, that Youngkin created an anonymous tip line for people to report on Virginia educators who were teaching topics deemed controversial. The tip line got shut down, but the attacks on the accurate teaching of American history have continued.
Szabo, who teaches writing at Virginia Commonwealth University, was stunned by Youngkin’s email about public servants being held to a higher standard of conduct.
“Emails like this are absolutely intended to have a chilling effect on speech,” Szabo said. "The hope is that people will read this and think about all of the critical things that they could say about the government or about particular political situations, and they'll decide to keep it to themselves and not share on social media.”
The attacks on workers’ speech may make it scarier for people to band together in a union to collectively fight back, but the benefits of doing so are many, Szabo told me.
It creates access to better information when more people are talking to one another. They get a better understanding of their rights and advice on how to exercise them more effectively. And unions often leverage their power across broad coalitions with other organizations to win fights they otherwise could not have on their own.
This kind of solidarity is important at a time when so often, repression occurs under the banner of some ostensibly noble cause. When employers retaliate against workers, for example, they usually try to justify it by making workers look bad in some way, Szabo said.
“My strong encouragement to all workers who work for the state right now is to recognize retaliation when you see it,” Szabo said. “And to not assume that it's going to look like someone explicitly saying, ‘We're retaliating against your coworker.’”
