Charlie Kirk’s death leads NH GOP to crack down on free speech in schools

Recently introduced “CHARLIE” Act would punish “unpatriotic” classroom speech with $10,000 lawsuits and terminations

After the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, New Hampshire Republicans and local conservative media have been using the killing to their political advantage despite the killer’s motives being unclear.

This is happening as they echo calls for violence against Democrats and liberal groups from President Donald Trump and his inner circle.

State Rep. Mike Belcher of (R-Wakefield), who runs a for-profit, AI-generated political content consulting business centered on “political warfare dynamics, messaging, DEI and Wokeism” filed a bill just days after the shooting aimed at New Hampshire classrooms.

Belcher used the suspension of two state educators, who allegedly made social media posts on personal pages objecting to the white-washing of Kirk’s legacy, as an excuse to propose his “Countering Hate And Revolutionary Leftist Indoctrination in Education” act or the CHARLIE Act, which would end “leftist-indoctrination” in New Hampshire public schools.

The bill seeks to do what other similar pieces of New Hampshire Republican legislation have sought in recent years–purge state classrooms of viewpoints that conservative lawmakers find objectionable by threatening teachers and schools with state lawsuitse.

The text of the bill would says it would remove speech from New Hampshire classrooms that sow “purposeful division, dialectical worldviews, critical consciousness” and “anti-Constitutional indoctrination,” among other vague threats.

Similarly, state GOP lawmakers passed a “divisive concepts” law in 2021 as part of their response to the murder of George Floyd. That bill intended to stifle conversations about race and threaten educators with lawsuits and terminations over infractions that would be reviewed by the state government.

A federal judge struck the law down last year for being unconstitutional.

The CHARLIE Act would go further, calling for a blanket ban on speech that doesn’t cultivate a neutral or “patriotic disposition.” It would also allow private individuals to sue K-12 public schools for $10,000 and higher per violation and put teachers at risk of professional discipline up to and including termination by the state Board of Education for failing to comply.

Daniel Pi, an assistant professor at the University of New Hampshire told the Boston Globe that the text of the CHARLIE Act as written is “obviously unconstitutional.”

However, New Hampshire House Leader Jason Osborne (R-Rockingham), who has backed the CHARLIE bill, has used the Kirk killing to call for “war” against Democrats several times, calling it a “struggle of good versus evil.”  

Osborne openly admitted to using the killing for political advantage, posting on X that his job was to “turn this state red forever.”

House Democrats are now circulating a petition calling on Gov. Kelly Ayotte to denounce Osborne’s violent rhetoric in the wake of the shooting as “dangerous and irresponsible rhetoric like this puts lives at risk.”

State Representative Sam Farrington (R-Strafford) went viral on X after posting the name and personal information of a UNH college student photographed tearing down fliers for a candlelight vigil honoring Kirk. This act, known as “doxxing” ultimately lead to his brief ban from the platform.

“We’re just exposing her for the decision that she made” Farrington said in a post on X after his account was reinstated with the post removed.

After Ayotte capitulated to the Trump administration’s stance on flags across the country to be flown at half-staff to honor Kirk, former Manchester School Board member Richard Girard attempted to drum up outrage when a Manchester-area High School did not lower its flags.

Three days after the killing, the conservative New Hampshire politics blog NH Journal used the shooting to complain that Democrats in the state did not send them press releases and suggested that one step toward healing the partisan divide was for them to start inviting them to press conferences and end their “McCarthy-style blacklisting” of the website.

NH Journal regularly fabricates anti-Democrat reporting.

National Republicans have similarly been using the Kirk’s deathfor political gain, with the New York Times reporting that “top administration officials said his killing would prompt a vast crackdown on the left.”

Dartmouth political scientist Brendan Nyhan out of Hanover characterized these efforts in stark terms.

“Open authoritarianism. Happening right in front of us.”