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A Conversation with Jennie Burnet, P1, Greg Thompson and Carolyn Rouse
Note: P1 is the pseudonym for a professor who wishes to remain anonymous. The views expressed in this conversation are solely those of the speakers and do not reflect the views of their institutions or of the AAA. Information has been removed that might threaten the employment and safety of P1. We kept a few of the redactions in the text to highlight that information was left out to protect scholars.
Carolyn: In the summer of 2025, I launched [redacted]. The project is being led by anthropologists and sociologists who are working with their students to collect ethnographies about how people translate personal needs, concerns, and desires into a political vote. The project is not meant to be opinion research. Instead, students are asked to understand the complicated logics people use to vote for someone to govern them. Student interviewers are being asked to home in on hypocrisies (which we all have) in order to determine the ideologies used to bridge the contradictions between stated needs and political decisions. The ultimate goal is to create a multimodal high school curriculum for students to learn what it means to vote for one’s political interests; whatever those may be.
After the horrific assassination of a leader of Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk, I reached out to Prof. Jennie Burnet (George State University), P1 (a professor at a public university in the Deep South), and Prof. Greg Thompson (Brigham Young University) who are working on the project. All work in so-called “red states” and I wanted to know the impact of the assassination on their students and institutions. At the time of our conversation, the exact number of university affiliated staff and faculty who had been fired for comments made in the wake of Kirk’s death was, according to some reports, well over 30. One Washington Post reporter was even fired for simply quoting Charlie Kirk’s words. Hours after our conversation we learned that comedian Jimmy Kimmel was suspended for a week by Disney under pressure by Trump’s FCC Chairman Brendan Carr. What did these developments portent for speech in the classroom?
I must state upfront that all four of us are not on social media. I underscore this because people who imbibe social media often think that academics organize people and the world the way the mainstream media organizes people into binaries: red/blue, good/bad, conservative/liberal. All four of us are trying to understand how and why people are animated by particular political ideologies, but in nuanced and theoretical ways. For example, I work in a county that voted for Trump, but the local politics are more closely aligned with socialism than capitalism.
The discourse around universities is that professors are indoctrinating students into red vs. blue ways of thinking. This is dangerous for us. The four of us study the US and our research does not support any doctrinal line. A couple of us have taken heat from people on both ends of the political spectrum. Yet at this moment even our nuanced approaches are under threat, though we are making evidence-based claims.
We hope that this conversation will give the readers a sense of how the cultural sanctions and controls around speech on the so-called left and right are radically impacting our institutions, our classrooms, our research, and our students. We offer this conversation as an archive of the moment.
Greg: I’m a professor at BYU in anthropology. My real interest is understanding human interaction and how people become kinds of people in interacting with others, and how those becomings are consequential for what we’re capable of doing and who we’re capable of being. I draw from linguistic anthropology, psychological anthropology, and educational anthropology. My research on political polarization looks at recognition. How we see people and recognize one another as certain kinds of persons. This seems to be very useful for thinking about political division in the United States because it seems a large part of what animates people as they interact with each other over political topics. Recognition is the “Who do you think I am?” that each person is saying in response to what the other side has said to them that creates these interactions where people end up sort of hating each other. That’s the gist of it.
Jennie: I’m at Georgia State University in Atlanta, GA. We’re the largest state-supported university in the state of Georgia. We are a predominantly Black institution. More than half of our undergraduate students qualify for Pell grants. For the past 30 years, my research has focused on the Rwandan genocide and its aftermath, the roles of women in post genocide reconstruction, and the politics of memory. In general, I’m interested in agency and subjectivity and how or why people choose to do or not do things, especially in the context of mass violence. My current research, which was funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) until April 24th of this year, when the grant was terminated, focuses on the long-term legacies of racial violence in the US South. Through the project I created an ethnographic research lab where students are involved in all aspects of research, from project design to data collection and analysis, and presenting results. I’m still working with students in the lab even though we’ve lost our NSF funding. I heard about Carolyn’s project, and it seemed a perfect fit.
At our lab meeting, Charlie Kirk and people’s responses came up. I’m in the interesting position in that I’m in a major southern university, but it’s not a white dominated campus. So, things function differently here than I would imagine they do for P1 or Greg at BYU. Also, I spend a lot of time moving in different political spheres, interacting with people with different political interests. I live with members of my immediate family who voted for Trump. I love these people and continue to even though we disagree over politics at the moment.
P1: [redacted] I’m at a public university in the Deep South. Our campus is very diverse. We used to really celebrate this until maybe a year ago. Most of our students are also from underrepresented backgrounds and rely on Pell grants and other types of financial aid. I’m really interested in how global frameworks and ideas can be translated into everyday practice. Much of my work centers on supporting local communities, especially those that are often overlooked, to strengthen their voice and shape their own futures. I’ve worked extensively with disability communities, and I’ve also been involved in projects with LGBTQ groups in different parts of the world.
Carolyn: Greg, what’s happening in Utah near the site and your students?
Greg: So, Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was shot, is about 15 minutes from where I work and I drive past it on my way in to work. Currently the overpass is lined with American flags, and two memorials have appeared on the UVU campus. One is at the entrance of campus, and the other is inside the enclosed courtyard where Kirk was shot. Both are blanketed with American flags, flowers, pictures, and various other items. The surrounding asphalt and sidewalk has been chalked with comments by visitors. Messages include Christian and Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint (LDS) scriptures (Kirk was not LDS but about 70% of UVU undergraduates are). Many of the handwritten messages were of peace, hope, and unity and included quotes attributed to Charlie Kirk such as, “When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against the group,” “When Conversation ends violence begins!” and “Charlie reminded us: Let LOVE, Not hate, be our Path Forward.”
As far as BYU, I spent my morning class talking about this to a class of about 17 students. We talked about the problem of polarization and political violence. People didn’t say much. BYU is a campus where everyone is afraid to talk. People on the left feel that way. People on the right also feel that way, particularly the Trump-supporting right. I had a colleague tell me that when he opened his introductory class of 500 students to a conversation about the shooting, you could hear a pin drop. Across the board, people are afraid to speak.
Carolyn: Jennie, what about your experiences?
Jennie: For context, I am essentially not on social media anymore and I severely limit my intake of news for two reasons. One is mental health. I had news alerts on my phone during the first Trump term, and it did not do good things for my well-being. Now I consume just enough news to inform decision-making in my job and how I should vote. Second, I stay away from social media because it doesn’t make my life better, it generates a lot of negative feelings.
So, I was unaware of the assassination until the following morning when I turned on NPR for my daily hour of news. I didn’t even know who Charlie Kirk really was before listening to the news. It wasn’t until two days later that I realized that there was live video of the shooting circulating widely on the Internet and on social media networks. Some page popped up when I did a Google search, and the video was there. I quickly closed it. After doing research on genocide for more than two decades, I have a large set of protocols I put in place to protect my health. So, I minimize my exposure to violent images. I just don’t want to see it.
In any case, when preparing the agenda for our lab meeting, my postdoc research associate, who spent most of the last 20 years in the anti-gun violence movement, was clearly very tired and upset. She advocated that we bring it up in the lab meeting. I said OK, but didn’t want us to make it the focal point of the meeting, so we left it until the end.
I’m glad we did talk about it. The students had a lot to say. The students drove home to me the ubiquity of the shooting video getting fed to them on social media. They worried about the ways the shooting and its aftermath are riling up of conservatives. They commented on the hagiographic portrayals of Charlie Kirk, which they characterized as problematic. Everyone acknowledged that there’s a great deal of hypocrisy right now because there wasn’t a similar outcry when Democratic State House Speaker, Melissa Hortman, and her husband were gunned down in July in Minnesota.
But we also discussed that a lot of the accusations circulating on social media on the left are problematic in different ways. A lot of these things are not 100% true—they’re partially true or distortions of things Charlie Kirk said. His entire political program was not anything I support or agree with, but many of the worst things I believed he had said, I discovered he hadn’t said explicitly. So, I think this points to a big problem we have in general with social media and its ubiquity.
My faculty and graduate students have been struggling in teaching their classes. They have a lot of fear about how to teach about race, gender, sexuality—topics central to the curriculum in anthropology and women and gender studies—but that have been politicized. They worry about potential repercussions if they say the wrong thing or don’t communicate clearly.
Carolyn: Greg, you only look at social media because of your research, right?
Greg: Yeah, I don’t really do social media. But I do hear a lot from my kids who attend middle, high school, and college here in Utah. After the shooting there was a huge number of posts about the Kirk shooting with many of their friends expressing fear and intense distress. Many had friends or family who were at the event and saw the shooting in person. Some mentioned that their friends or family included young children sitting with them not far from where Kirk was shot.
Carolyn: And what about you, P1?
P1: I switched [social media] off about a year ago for vacation and never really restarted. That sort of politics as entertainment like what you see on social media stops my ability to actually engage in a positive way. It pulls me down. A lot of people in my little circle don’t use social media anymore.
In terms of the shooting, it’s been very disheartening to see the firings of professors. From my colleagues I heard that some of them did not feel comfortable discussing the shooting with students. And students did not feel comfortable discussing it either, partially because they were afraid of what others would think or say. [redacted] We have a lab where we do discuss controversial topics. I’m actually teaching students how to talk about some of those things in ways that are inclusive and nonpartisan so we can continue the conversation, and also how to talk about issues in a hostile environment. We’re in a deep red state with deep red everything, you know.
We thought this might help us to be a university in a red state. We used to be heavily funded by NIH. Obviously, all of that is gone. With the funding cuts and people cuts, the level of freakout is so high among faculty and staff. There’re so many layers of fear on campus that political discussions cannot happen; people feel they cannot happen, especially staff. Our students have not learned how to talk about these things. They have grown up in these social media bubbles where you basically only talk to people who agree with you. That’s much nicer. It’s nice to say, “Yeah, I agree, I agree.” This is where we as social scientists really need to start to think about how we can develop civil discourse skills in our students. Because if they cannot talk to each other, where are we as a society, right? This is our future. I’m very worried about that.
Carolyn: I did talk about Kirk because I’ve been implicated in these public conversations about freedom of speech in various ways even though I’m not on social media. I’m teaching my Race and Medicine course where the assumptions, when I taught it before, were always that the US wants the most people to live the longest lives and to be healthy, right? That was a public health goal. And all of that is gone. Like we are starting over, building a rationale for the kind of knowledge production we want in the Academy to produce the kind of outcomes we want. I was showing my class why I’m not going to relitigate whether or not Black people are biologically inferior and intellectually inferior. I’m not going to engage in that because we’ve already shown that race is not a proxy for DNA, so we don’t need to relitigate it.
My problem is I found out that one of my students used that to say, “I’m not going to talk about Bronislaw Malinowski because I’m not going to relitigate his ideas like Professor Rouse.” And I’m like, whoa, whoa. And that’s the problem. It’s like there are so few things that I won’t relitigate. I won’t relitigate so few things, but I feel almost everything else is debatable. I’m perfectly happy celebrating White, male theorists from the early 20th century who had serious blind spots but developed robust theories as did other Black and Brown theorists from the same time period. I don’t fit any box, you know, and I’m afraid that my students shoehorned me into a box. How do we communicate that the identity politics of social media is not what we do in the classroom?
Like you Jennie, I had no idea who Kirk was. I literally got a letter from Turning Point USA two hours before I found out he had been shot. I’m like “OK, let me figure out what’s going on?” So, I watched Kirk. I was telling Greg that Kirk was not a good debater. He constantly deflected to avoid topics he was not equipped to debate. So, I don’t think we need to invite people like Kirk to universities to speak authoritatively about history or race. But I think that we should have a conversation in the academy about Charlie Kirk and the kind of anxieties unleashed when Obama became president.
As a general rule, I don’t think we should be inviting celebrities to campuses to lecture, but certainly students should invite them to perform, which is what Kirk did. We have to remember that these people already have a big platform. Nobody is silencing them by not inviting them to give distinguished lectures. I mean, how many videos of Charlie Kirk talking and debating have I seen since his tragic killing? But it is important to be empathetic and to ask, why Kirk now?
Progressive ideas like feminism and anti-racism were never settled because we didn’t take the time to bring people along or change our zero-sum game economy of winners and losers. And then the language got rigid and brittle. DEI didn’t help. And concepts like “microaggressions” didn’t either. I don’t even like the term microaggression because either you’re being aggressive intentionally or you’re ignorant and you need education. “Microaggressions” allows people to impugn people’s character and make claims about what is in people’s heads when, as anthropologists, we know we don’t know. On the other hand, I’m not going to teach racist science, right?
Greg: I do feel like the problem is that something keeps bringing us back around to these places that we’ve been before. White supremacist discourses and racist discourses keep coming back around. How does that keep happening? But because it does, it feels like there is some need to do the relitigating. Now, who should be doing that work is an interesting question, whether it’s White people. But then is that a White savior business? It’s messy, right? But I’m seeing it in the comments on conservative media—people are having no problem making deeply racist statements. And seeming to and think that this is just common sense.
I feel like Charlie Kirk is kind of in the in-between, like what he’s saying about race. He says it in a way where there’s wiggle room, like, and I’m paraphrasing here: “I’m not saying Black people are inferior. I’m saying the policy of affirmative action makes me think that Black people are inferior,” right? And that wiggle room is part of the rhetorical work that it does. Echoing work by Janet McIntosh, in my recent Humans article, I describe how things are often framed in such a way that it can be taken up by the Left as an extremist statement. And then the Right is like, “Why are you calling me that? Why are you calling me racist, sexist, homophobic or whatever? I said this policy is a problem, not that…” So that space is part of the dialectic that’s producing what I call dysrecognition, which produces polarization and intense animosity. That’s half of the problem.
The other half surely has something to do with the fact that we, the socially mediated American people, can’t seem to consider two perspectives of an event to exist at the same time.
P1: My personal experience, not having grown up in the US, I see this with my kids. Very early on, they learn about the superheroes, and there are good guys and there are bad guys. There seems to be this unwillingness to deal with complexity and shades of grey. [redacted] In the Deep South, everything seems to be about Black and White people. I started questioning whether I should be engaged in social and community work in the Deep South based on my white skin color, based on the fact that I’m cisgender, based on all kinds of criteria. I think this is how we approach our cultural space—as a matter of this or that. When I think back to 2020 or 2021, everyone was talking about DEI. A space for Black Lives Matter, #MeToo and LGBTQ rights needs to happen, 100 percent. But I think what we forgot is creating spaces for positive masculinity for White young men. Because of this lack of willingness to engage with complexity, someone had to be the bad guy. And yes, there’s the patriarchy, and yes, there’s white supremacy and all those kinds of things, but what would a positive White masculinity look like? We kind of never talked about this. And so, I am very worried about the young people in this country because with social media they have lost the ability to talk to each other. They stay in their bubbles.
We as anthropologists, and social scientists more broadly, shouldn’t put you, Carolyn, in it like a box or anybody in a box for that matter. I always tell my students this is the beauty of what we do. You recognize the humanity in the other. We have these hard discussions in class.
Jennie: Thank you, P1. I think you put your finger on something important. Those movements tended to villainize White, cisgender maleness instead of recognizing that they can be allies. It’s one of the things my research project is doing, speaking with elders in Southern communities and documenting the importance of White people in the civil rights movement in the 50s and 60s. The important work they did and the relationships that were built. And I see less of that happening these days among student activists on my campus.
I think it’s due to the rise of certain forms of television and radio news that are not really news, not journalism, but editorializing. I’m thinking about Fox News, MSNBC, that appear to be news but are in fact editorials. We don’t have shared common places where we get our news anymore. We’re in these bubbles and echo chambers that promote more and more radical content, whether veering towards the Right, the Left, or some other subcategory.
The roots of White supremacy in American culture run really deep. It leads people who don’t actively hold racist beliefs to deny the past or ignore empirical reality. For example, when people insist that the American Civil War was fought over “states’ rights” and not slavery. This assertion is flat out incorrect. The declarations of secession for Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas, and Virigina all explicitly cited the institution of slavery as their primary cause for leaving the Union.
This refusal to engage with empirical reality, with verifiable or verified facts, is making us more and more detached from a shared reality. The Charlie Kirk situation we’re living through right now has amplified for me that so few opinions are based on verifiable facts. They are instead based on impressions of facts, on simulacra of facts. Social media are abstract ideological spaces where debate is constrained, as P1 pointed out, you have to be a good guy or bad guy. So, a person who doesn’t agree with you has to be the bad guy, of course.
Carolyn: Greg, I know that you considered my introductory comments tone-deaf. Could you explain a bit more? I think it’s important to share.
Greg: Yes, to be sure, “tone-deaf” was a little dramatic and attention-getting, much like social media! I simply wanted to raise the concern that we should be careful not to let this conversation become a turn in the downwardly spiraling dialectic I described above. My concern here is simply that rather than only focusing on the silencing of those on the political Left (which professors overwhelmingly are), we would be wise to consider how this gruesome and bloody murder that was observed by many people in person and many more on social media is affecting people on the political Right, including not just their grief but also such things as their anxieties about engaging in political speech on college campuses. As I noted above, even at BYU, Trump supporting students regularly engaged in self-silencing—and that was before a conservative activist was shot and killed on a college campus just down the street.
I mention this not merely as a concern about being nice and civil to conservatives (although this seems a reasonable aim). When we get caught in debates about whether or not to mourn Charlie Kirk, or when we ignore his murder entirely, we turn the national conversation into an emotionally fraught quagmire, fueling those who would paint liberals as heartless monsters. At the same time, these quagmires take the focus away from more serious matters, such as the fact that many on the political Left who were fired for speaking out after his death were not criticizing Kirk himself (which admittedly, by Kirk’s own words, should be considered acceptable speech). [They] were criticizing the Trump administration (e.g., Jimmy Kimmel), something that should concern anyone who cares about free speech. (Indeed, conservatives Tucker Carlson and Senator Ted Cruz, among others, spoke out about these free speech concerns.) In the wake of Charlie Kirk’s death, those on the Left certainly have a right to voice criticisms, concerns, and grievances. At the same time, those on the Left would do well not to ignore the grief, anxiety, and suffering of our fellow (conservative) Americans.
Carolyn: Thank you for a great conversation at this difficult political moment.