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“We’re going to put a challenge out to the LSU [Louisiana State University] Board of Supervisors to find a place to put a statue of Charlie Kirk to defend the freedom of speech on college campuses,” Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry said in a video posted to social media last week.
A monument to Kirk — who was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University on Sept. 10 — could be seen as a tribute to the importance of free speech on the campus where he was wrongly killed, but the Louisiana governor’s push to have a statue installed at a university where Kirk never studied and in a state where he never lived is a blatant play for attention by a politician with a plummeting approval rating. The move also doubles as a textbook illustration of the way obnoxious monuments, such as the ones honoring Confederate leaders, ended up in some places those leaders never set foot and, in some places, where no Civil War battles were fought.
Those monuments weren’t necessarily meant to honor the history of a place, but to show who was in charge of a place.
Those monuments — all of them built after Reconstruction — weren’t necessarily meant to honor the history of a place, but to show who was in charge of a place. An 1884 editorial in the New Orleans Daily Picayune voiced support for the dedication of a monument to Robert E. Lee, defended secession as honorable and said the statue was meant to “show to all coming ages that with us, at least, there dwells no sense of guilt.”
You can trust that the people who live in Washington, D.C., would never choose to have a statue of a Confederate general in that city. But a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that was toppled in 2020 during protests after the murder of George Floyd was put up again last week because President Donald Trump and his administration want it to be there. Erecting such a statue where people don’t want it is an attempted display of dominance from Trump.
According to LSU’s student newspaper, university officials declined to comment on Landry’s video. It’s unclear what percentage of LSU students would want a Kirk statue, but because Kirk often sounded like a neo-Confederate himself — defending Confederate monuments, arguing that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a mistake, disparaging Martin Luther King Jr., openly questioning the intellect of prominent Black women whose politics he hated — any LSU statue of Kirk would be built over the objection of a significant proportion of the LSU community.
LSU women’s basketball star Flau’jae Johnson would be among the likely objectors. The championship-winning guard initially responded to Landry’s video with four question marks. Minutes later, referring to Kirk, she wrote, “For the sake of clarity, if you align yourself with or endorse his racist rhetoric and discriminatory views toward people of color, I respectfully ask that you utilize the unfollow option at the top right of my profile.”
Gov. Landry says a Kirk statue would be in celebration of free speech. No. It would be Landry’s celebration of Kirk and what he said, not a monument to free speech in general.
Kirk, after all, led a group that policed the speech of professors it didn’t like, and many of those professors reported being harassed in response to their names being included on Turning Point USA’s “Professor Watchlist.” We also have good reason to be skeptical of Landry’s professed free speech concerns because when he was Louisiana’s attorney general, he got so worked up at an LSU professor who referred to one of Landry’s assistants as a “flunky,” that he demanded that LSU punish him.
It would be Landry’s celebration of Kirk and what he said, not a monument to free speech in general.
Landry also sued — that’s right, sued — a newspaper reporter who filed a public records request as she was pursuing a story about sexual harassment allegations made against an employee in Landry’s office. (The lawsuit, which Landry lost, was intended to stop the reporter from getting the records she sought.)
Moreover, a right-wing politician such as Landry building a monument to a hyperpartisan political figure — after the right has spent more than a decade decrying what it claimed was unjust left-wing politicization on campus — would not just be hypocritical, it would be cynically so. And, given the outrage that would be sure to come, building it would be a way to show those students that they’re not in control.
If you watched this decade’s fight over Confederate monuments, you were likely struck struck by the number of people who felt the need to defend the figures depicted by the monuments recommended for removal. You were probably also struck by their need to create fictional accounts — e.g., traitors who were honorable, slave owners who hated slavery — when the facts said otherwise.
People made those arguments because they believe that monuments tell a story about the people they depict. But as Trump showed us last week, and as Landry is attempting to show us now, monuments tell us whole lot more about the power and politics of the people who put them up.
Jarvis DeBerry is an opinion editor for MSNBC Daily. He was previously editor-in-chief at the Louisiana Illuminator and a columnist and deputy opinion editor at The Times-Picayune.
