© Photo by Michael Ciaglo/Getty ImagesOREM, UTAH - SEPTEMBER 11: A small memorial to political activist Charlie Kirk sits behind Utah Valley University on September 11, 2025 in Orem, Utah. Authorities have released a "person of interest" as they search for the suspect who shot and killed Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA, while he was speaking at an event for his "American Comeback Tour"
Of the millions of words Charlie Kirk contributed to American public discourse, the last two before he was murdered distilled his life's work almost perfectly.
His t-shirt bore the word "freedom." His final word, uttered a split second before an assassin's bullet tore into his neck, was "violence."
Kirk was precocious enough from his early 20s to grasp the relationship between the two. If people cannot debate differences of opinion in a civil and robust manner, violence has, throughout history and with alarming speed, shown itself to be the logical next step. "When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts," he once reminded a blue-haired antagonist at a college campus debate.
The assassination of Kirk Thursday in front of thousands of students at a university campus in Utah, apparently for the sole crime of encouraging open debate, makes plain that we have arrived at the dark juncture he had warned about.
While the killer is still at large, their political motivation is no longer in serious doubt. Investigators have found ammunition engraved with antifascist and transgender ideology in a hunting rifle they believe was used in the attack. The murder appears to have been an attempt to silence Kirk, who at 31 was the most accomplished Republican campaigner of his generation, as well as a husband and father of two young children.
Had Kirk been killed by a lone crank, that would be a grave tragedy to all who knew and loved him. But it's worse than that. The accessories to his murder — not in deed but in spirit — are legion. First among them are those on the left who for years hysterically demonized mainstream conservatives as "literal Nazis."
There can be no compromise with Nazis. No creed is more central in the post-war West than that. Every schoolchild has been taught that the only appropriate response to fascism is brute, uncompromising force. So what did the left hope to accomplish by pushing such a slur?
We cannot make windows into men's souls. But the immediate responses to Kirk's death may offer some answers.
Left-wing lawmakers in the European Parliament appeared to protest against holding a moment of silence for Kirk. A similar effort in the U.S. congress descended into a shouting match when Democrats jeered at one Republican congresswoman who demanded the House pray aloud. The groans and heckles which erupted in both chambers at the suggestion to mark his murder with 30 seconds of reflection were, at best, extraordinarily distasteful. But a fair-minded observer could easily interpret some of those heckles as tacitly condoning political assassination. That is, quite simply, unforgivable.
Then there was the response from legacy media. In an annihilatingly chilling exchange on MSNBC, shortly after Kirk had been shot, one pundit accused Kirk of "hate speech" and appeared to blame him for his own death. "You can't stop with these awful thoughts you have, and then saying these awful words and not expect awful actions to take place," he said. Meanwhile, in the TMZ newsroom, cheers, clapping and laughter were caught on camera just as word arrived that Kirk had died.
Of course, many left-leaning journalists and politicians were just as horrified by Kirk's assassination as their colleagues across the aisle. But that should not distract from an uncomfortable truth. The widespread moral equivocation over his murder came largely from the same progressive left who have long called for a "kinder politics." Had a left-wing commentator been assassinated, it is inconceivable that public figures on the right would have disgraced themselves in such a way.
It's unclear whether the tacit acceptance of political assassinations has trickled down from the establishment Left to the grassroots or vice versa. But the contagion has evidently spread.
A report from the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), published earlier this year, found that a growing number of Americans, especially those on the left, thought political murder was justified.
In a representative survey of over 1,200 U.S. adults, more than half of left-leaning respondents agreed it would be at least "somewhat justified" to kill Donald Trump, while 48 per cent said the same for Elon Musk. The figures in the general population were 38 per cent and 31 per cent, respectively.
In the hours after Kirk was shot, thousands rejoiced on social media. One post on X, which has gained nearly 200,000 likes, read: "Maybe Charlie Kirk shouldn't have spent years being a hateful demagogic fascist and this wouldn't have happened. Maybe he should take some personal responsibility."
Hundreds of left-leaning X accounts have since called for other public figures, whom I shan't name, to be targeted next.
In doing so, they have vindicated another of Kirk's warnings. "Assassination culture is spreading on the left," he posted on X in April. "This is the natural outgrowth of left-wing protest culture tolerating violence and mayhem for years on end. The cowardice of local prosecutors and school officials have turned the left into a ticking time bomb."
How tragically prophetic that now sounds. Progressive lawmakers and unruly activists have, wittingly or otherwise, created a culture of permissiveness around political violence. The Black Lives Matters riots in the wake of George Floyd's killing, sanctioned by the Democrat establishment and which left dozens dead, were merely a foretaste of what was to come.
Since then, left-wing activists have swooned over Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing Brian Thompson, the CEO of a health insurance company deemed so immoral by many progressives it drove them to excuse murder.
Similarly, the attempts on Donald Trump's life, one of which was millimetres from succeeding, were met with a morsel of the outrage and national soul-searching that one would expect had, say, Kamala Harris been shot.
It has been said that Kirk was murdered because "they couldn't beat him in an argument." It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the growing acceptance for political assassination on the left — including from once respectable figures who ought to know better — is the last gasp of an ancien régime trying to claw back legitimacy through violence.
It may have already succeeded in changing the climate of public discourse in America. Responding to Kirk's death, Ben Shapiro, a conservative commentator who's hosted scores of public debates, said: "This is the end of all outdoor public (political) events. They're done. It's over."
We must describe this grim spectacle in the plainest English. Those who promiscuously accuse others of Nazism while excusing murder are neither kind nor compassionate. They are engineering a culture of political violence. Beneath the nose piercings and the "trauma" and the university degrees, they are modern-day brownshirts. They should be identified as such, and must not succeed in suffocating freedom in the United States or anywhere else.
It's no wonder the stooges in the eu are following suit with congress. They have been given the same orders from the NWO, which is the old world order, just rebranded and with added technology. Most of this western political class are bred from the buffoons of yesteryear who's recklessness and distaste for the public is already written into the historical record.
US citizens need only follow the money and those who lobby with it. A just cause in the land of the free doesn't require bribery.