Suzanne Swierc Story: When Free Speech Gets You Fired

Suzanne Squeerk was fired from Ball State University recently after posting on her private Facebook page. Her private Facebook page, quote, if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can't be friends. Well, the backlash was swift. Libs of TikTok amplified her posts, Elon Musk and Rudy Giuliani piled on, and Indiana's Attorney General labeled her vile. Within days, she was out of a job. But here's the context. Too many want to erase. Charlie Kirk's record did in fact include vicious attacks on Martin Luther King Jr. Homophobic rants, and even rhetoric that suggested biblical punishment for gay people was acceptable. In case you forgot what that is, that's stoning you to death. When centrists hear that history, they don't see Kirk as a free speech martyr. They see him as someone who spent a career demeaning others. The real danger is that criticizing such a figure now comes with career ending punishment. What's the real message here? This poor woman at Ball State University got fired not because she said anything hateful about Charlie Kirk, not because she advocated violence, not because she celebrated someone's death. She simply sat in a private place. She didn't want to be friends with someone who, who she thinks presumably spreads hate, spreads racism, spreads homophobia. Guess what? We live in America. That is her right. Or it's supposed to be her right. Let's dig a little bit deeper. For some reason, people who are constantly talking about how rational they are, how intelligent they are can't seem to get two ideas. Can't seem to hold two ideas in their head at the same time. Number one, you can absolutely be appalled by violence, denounce violence, show sympathy for the victims of violence, and think someone who is a victim of violence was indeed a horrible person. It's two thoughts. And what is happening again and again over the last three weeks in America is once someone goes to the second thought and makes a case that they think someone might in fact be a horrible person or have done many, many bad things, those on the right are instantly conflating that with, oh, you're promoting murder and assassination. No, it's completely different ideas. Completely different idea. Now imagine, imagine you're Jewish, could be conservative, you could be a Republican, Democrat, doesn't matter. And somebody does something awful. To the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, who has denounced Jews as being part of a gutter religion, living in the gutter like and well known record of anti Semitism. He has his fans, he has his supporters, he has people who love him. And imagine you denounced the person who attacked Louis Farah. And again, I'm hoping, I can't remember, he might not even be alive, frankly. But you've denounced anyone trying to harm Farrakhan or member of his family. You've denounced that. But you see again and again and again, more people simply whitewashing all of his anti Semitism and saying, oh, he was a great singer, which he was in his youth. Oh, he was a great minister and a prophet. And it goes on and on and on and on. And you said privately, just to a handful of your own personal friends on Facebook, or maybe you sent an email to 8 friends or maybe you had a WhatsApp list of 12 friends and you said, you know, I really can't be friends with anyone who thinks that Louis Farrakhan was a great guy. I really don't think any serious person, regardless of where you are in the spectrum, would make a case that that is something someone should be fired for. But that is what's happened here at this, at Ball State University, where again, I want to clarify because these issues are being conflated. If this employee, Suzanne Swearick had gone on Facebook publicly and said, I think it's wonderful when people I don't like are assassinated and, and I applaud this assassin, yeah, I think that's a horrible hate speech that's promoting violence and things like that do need to be treated. Especially if she said, and here's a list of other people I don't like, would someone please off them if she said that, yes, by all means, let's fire her. That's not what she said. She said she didn't want to be friends with someone who thought a particular person who she didn't know was not a member of her community. All she knows about this guy is he routinely said things saying effectively, Martin Luther King Jr. Was a bomb. Liberals are awful. Homosexuals deserve the treatment outlined in the Bible. Hint, hint, you know what that was. These are morally reprehensible things in her view. In fact, if you are a centrist in America, if you are slightly right of center, if you, if you are a liberal progressive or on down, there are numerous, numerous things that this Kirk individual said that would make you feel like he's wildly offensive, beyond the pale. Again, nothing to do with advocating his demise. Different issues. You can in fact criticize someone's words, someone's career, someone's rhetorical legacy and come to different conclusions from others. It doesn't mean you should be fired. Now, this is particularly odious what happened at Bowl State University. Because this woman, she said it in a private Facebook and one of her, I guess, alleged friends shared it with someone else that got on Libs of TikTok, which you haven't heard of, that. It has nothing to do with liberals. It's. It's a way of MAGA supporters weaponizing their power to take out of context and ridicule and make anyone left of center look like an extremist. So it's in fact the conservatives of TikTok doing this. And then, of course, Elon Musk has to get involved and the Indiana Attorney General has to get him. Everyone wants to pile on because it's a way of getting cheap applause. Yeah, way to go, Elon. You own the libs. Once again, that'll teach her. And it's absolute insanity. Katie writes in, says, if private opinions cost jobs, what does free speech even mean anymore? Well, Katie, I have an answer for that. Here's what freedom of speech means in America today. There's absolute 100% freedom of speech. If you are a conservative and you want to say that Hillary and Bill Clinton are murderers, for example, absolute free speech. If you are a centrist or anyone to the left of center and you see anything that hurts feelings of Orange Deer Leader or anyone in the MAGA coalition, you are now guilty of hitting hate speech and extremist speech, and therefore you're essentially a terrorist. Therefore, you need to be punished, fired, excommunicated, and driven to the poor house on your way to prison. That's what free speech means in America today. Katie, sorry if that sounds harsh, but we're living in harsh times, so that's the problem. So again, I want to remind people, Charlie Kirk called Martin Luther King a communist fraud. He routinely mocked black communities as lazy, which is his right, and does not mean he deserved the fate he received. But this idea that we all have to sort of worship him. No, we don't. I like many things about John F. Kennedy, but there are certainly plenty of people who take issue with him for a whole host of issues, whether it's his experience, family values, or handling the Vega pig. There's lots of people who are harshly critical of John F. Kennedy. We didn't say, well, now that he was assassinated, no one is allowed to ever criticize any part of John F. Kennedy. No. In fact, there have been entire cottage industries of people writing books that are quite harsh about John F. Kennedy. For that matter, Robert F. Kennedy, also assassinated. So we don't say, in a free society, just because someone was assassinated, you're not allowed to criticize them. Now, is it fair game to say if you go to that person's funeral when people are mourning and you trash the person in front of mourners, is that tacky and rude? Sure. That's not what this woman did. That's not what any critic of Charlie Kirk has done. He didn't go to the funeral and trash him. That would be rude. Nor have I seen a single prominent or not prominent, any leader of the Democratic Party who'd been elected to Congress, governor, Senate, ever been in a presidential cabinet. I haven't seen a single one of those people actually endorse what happened to Charlie Kirk. Not one. What I have seen is this conflating of the issue of, okay, here's something about him I didn't like. Oops, you're now essentially endorsing what happened? No, that's a rhetorical game. And with the right wing echo chamber alive and active in the United States, it has had such momentum, such repetition, that it has become accepted as fact. But it is not fact. A couple more facts you do need to know. At least 145 people have lost jobs for my script says, for criticizing Charlie Kirk and his death. That's not what happened. It's for someone who even said anything that hurt feelings of people who love Charlie. That's the environment we're in. Let me go back a minute and look specifically at what this woman at Ball State University said. It's important to look at it word for word in the same way it's important to look at word for word what Jimmy Kimmel actually said. Because he didn't criticize Charlie Kirk. She simply wrote to her friends privately, if you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can't be friends now. She didn't say he was evil. She didn't say he deserved to be attacked. For all you know, she thinks he's someone who has a neutral place in society, someone who had a mixed record, someone who's just okay and not wonderful. But now we live in a world where you can't say someone is okay. You have to say this person deserves saint status or it might hurt Dear Leader, might hurt his feelings. This is absolute insanity. This is tyranny, ladies and gentlemen. This is full fledged authoritarian rule. This is thoughtfully, Orwell warned against it. Everyone who's ever lived under a fascist regime, a kingdom under the thumb of a tyrant says, this is the problem. They want to control what you actually think. Because this woman had a thought. Probably like a lot of us saying, you know, is this a little bit thick laying it on that this guy's just the greatest guy ever when look at what he said. She wanted to share a thought with friends in a private page. How far away are we from the government coming and putting an implant in your brain to read your thoughts? If this is a thought she had, we really are talking about thought police. If she can be eliminated from her job for having a thought considered impure by those on the right, what's to prevent you from being fired from ever even sending one email or one text to one person you thought was a friend? Then maybe you and your friend had a falling out and then they share that with one of these right wing extremists. And now you've got 10,000 people emailing you, calling you, saying we know where you Is that really the world we want to live in?