Charlie Kirk’s murder is a wake-up call for both the left and right: We need college free speech

I’d been working for several hours on Wednesday on a column about the accelerating threats to free speech on America’s college campuses when I heard the news that the nation’s best-known, most divisive, and frequently offensive practitioner of this disappearing right, Charlie Kirk, had been shot at Utah Valley University.

Kirk — just 31, a public figure since his teen years for his tireless crusade to convert young adults to pro-Donald Trump MAGA conservatism — had been struck in the neck by a sniper’s bullet and would soon be pronounced dead.

At the moment he was gunned down, the cofounder of the right-wing, youth-oriented Turning Point USA had been doing what he was most famous for: sitting under a canopy at the Orem, Utah, university before a throng of several thousand students and onlookers and answering questions from all comers, left or right. Kirk’s last words on earth, fittingly, were a dubious, overblown claim about transgender mass shooters.

That was just one of so many bitter ironies that made Kirk’s assassination — by a rooftop gunman who is still at large and whose motive is thus unknown — the stuff of network news bulletins and banner headlines, not to mention an American Rorschach test for how a divided and agitated land feels about our obsession with guns, our foundational penchant for political violence, and the true meaning of free speech.

Kirk never better displayed his knack for pushing the boundaries of U.S. political discourse to the extreme right edge than when, in a 2023 interview, he proclaimed, “It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights.” But Kirk was every bit as wrong about that as he was about his other outlandish claims, like that airline passengers should feel afraid when their pilot is Black, or that successful African American women lack “brain processing power.”

No, Kirk’s God-given and constitutionally guaranteed right to speak freely in a place — a university campus green — that should be a citadel for open debate was not protected, but instead stripped away by gross misinterpretations of what the founders meant by the right to bear arms. That’s highlighted by the fact that just weeks before Kirk was shot to death, Utah enacted a law to make clear it’s legal for people with gun permits to openly carry a weapon on campuses like UVU.

But while the assassination cast a harsh spotlight on contradictions around the Second Amendment, the more meaningful message Wednesday was to dramatize how the First Amendment and its guarantees of free speech are hanging by a thread in 2025.

Utah Republican Gov. Spencer Cox, in a passionate, if at times hypocritical, monologue at a news conference confirming Kirk’s death, did manage to capture what was most tragic about a killing that was despicable and immoral, no matter what one thought about the man’s politics.

“Charlie believed in the power of free speech and debate to shape ideas and to persuade people,” Cox said. “Historically, our university campuses in this nation and here in the state of Utah have been the place where truth and ideas are formulated and debated. And that’s what he does — he comes on college campuses and he debates. That is foundational to the formation of our country — to our most basic constitutional rights …”

Cox was right to point out that killing someone for exercising their First Amendment rights on a college campus is a chilling assault on our freedom of speech. But neither he nor most commentators have pointed out that Kirk’s love affair with open expression was toxically inconsistent, with Turning Point USA even maintaining a McCarthyite blacklist of liberal professors whose free speech it didn’t like. What’s more, one has to wonder why Utah’s governor and so many of his allies at the top of the Republican Party are such vile hypocrites around this issue.

They are at the vanguard of a movement aimed at crushing academic freedom on college campuses, enacting laws and bullying university administrators to silence or intimidate students or professors who espouse ideas that don’t jibe with the worldview of Charlie Kirk or Donald Trump.

» READ MORE: Charlie Kirk and the unbearable cost of political violence in America | Opinion

That column I’d started Wednesday, before it morphed into this one, was inspired by a shocking incident at Texas A&M University in which a conservative student filmed an instructor as she brought up the role of gender in a course on children’s literature, and suggested the classroom discussion was illegal “because, according to our president, there’s only two genders.”

The student’s video was amplified online by a Republican Texas lawmaker, sparking an uproar that led the university president to fire the instructor, Melissa McCoul, remove the English department chair and dean who oversaw her, and launch an audit of every class on the College Station, Texas, campus. It was a remarkable attack on academic freedom, but it hardly happened in a vacuum.

Earlier this summer, the free speech organization PEN America outlined 70 different laws or administrative measures in 26 states that would censor college speech or create a chilling climate for open discourse. Almost all of these measures were enacted by GOP governors or legislators, or their appointees — hypocrites eager to crimp campus conversations around liberal topics or students’ right to protest, unless their beliefs were similar to those promoted by Kirk.

“The pressure campaigns, congressional investigations and hearings, and the state laws are all weakening and chipping away at the framework of academic freedom and independent thought that have anchored higher education,” Jonathan Friedman, who directs U.S. free expression programs at PEN America, told me Wednesday in an interview that was conducted before Kirk’s shooting.

One thing Friedman and I agree on is that a series of illiberal campus acts by some students and professors on the left — preventing talks by right-wing speakers, stealing newspapers with controversial articles, or supporting limits on press freedom, for example — are both inherently bad, but also created the climate for conservative bad actors to bring down the much more dangerous hammer of government repression.

» READ MORE: 60 years after the day college students won free speech, their rights are vanishing | Will Bunch

The utterly phony sanctimony of leading Republican governors is the worst. Exhibit A is Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who in 2019 bragged about signing a law with sweeping protections for free speech on campus, only to send in state troopers to crush pro-Palestinian demonstrations at the University of Texas before they started, then signed a law this year that places strict curbs on how and when students can protest.

In a perfect world, Kirk’s murder could be a pivot point and a moment of clarity that would spark an understanding that we must save the notion of universities as centers of free thought and unhindered speech — for both the Charlie Kirks and the Melissa McCouls. It would stop the onslaught of Republican censorship while rethinking the harassment employed by some on the left.

In the real world, you will not be shocked to learn that the worst people, led by Trump, are already plotting a campaign of revenge against the leftists they blame for the assassination, even though we know nothing about the assassin.

“My administration will find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, our law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country,” the president said in a video from the Oval Office. It doesn’t take much reading between the lines to believe Kirk’s killing will trigger an even worse assault on our basic civil liberties.

That’s appalling, but I’m also troubled by the governors, including Democrats like Gov. Josh Shapiro here in my home state of Pennsylvania, who’ve decided to honor Kirk by ordering flags lowered. That seems a serious misreading of the moment. Kirk expressed repulsive and indefensible views about millions of Americans during his time in the spotlight, and even celebrated a violent attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of the then-House speaker. True leadership would mean advocating for the free speech values Kirk imperfectly professed, not for honoring such a man whose rhetoric overflowed with hate.

The sad reality is that the right-wing extremists who control the federal government and too many of our states plan to use Kirk’s death as a vehicle for further destroying the very values Utah’s Cox hailed on Wednesday, “the power of free speech and debate to shape ideas, and to persuade people.” Kirk’s immoral murder was a terrible tragedy for his wife, his two children, and those who loved him. But the echoes of that single shot may prove even more traumatic for America.

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