Whenever I watched one of Charlie Kirk’s viral videos depicting his events held at various colleges around the United States, I always had the same thought. By plunking himself down in the middle of university campuses under a banner that proclaimed “Prove me wrong,” he was taking an awful risk.

The prevailing culture of academia in recent years has been one in which many faculty members and students took the position that speech with which they disagreed was a form of violence. Given Kirk’s willingness to engage with students who didn’t share his views about abortion, gun rights or Israel, it wasn’t hard to imagine the sometimes-angry responses to his comments overflowing into something other than political discourse.

I’m far from the only one who must have thought that. And tragically, those concerns were justified this week when the 31-year-old founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative activist group, was fatally shot by an assailant who has yet to be identified or caught by the authorities. Though shootings and even political violence are far from rare events in 2025 America, his assassination at what could be deemed a safer place at Utah Valley University has nevertheless shocked the nation.

A Rorschach test

His murder has been something of a Rorschach test for politicians, pundits and social-media posters. While most agree that this is a compelling reason for everyone to stop demonizing their political foes, we already know that won’t happen. If two attempted assassinations of President Donald Trump last year haven’t prevented his opponents on the left from continuing to smear him as another Hitler—and therefore logically fair game for violence—what makes anyone think that the gunning down of a young man who leaves behind a wife and two small children will sober anyone up?

Let’s leave aside the question of which side of the political divide is more responsible for the situation. It is patently obvious that both extremes are capable of disturbing the peace. Yet after so many years of alleging that the political right is the main, if not only, threat of domestic terrorism, many on the left only seem capable of admitting this obvious fact if they also demonize conservative victims like Kirk.

That was exactly what The New York Times did in an article about Kirk’s beliefs, in which they falsely accused him of supporting conspiracy theories about illegal immigrants rather than voicing concerns shared by a majority of Americans, and even accused a strong supporter of Israel and friend of the Jewish community of antisemitism. Even less temperate leftist posters on social media just doubled down on the old smears by calling Kirk a Nazi, while a not inconsiderable portion of the crackpot far right started floating farcical accusations about Israel being responsible for the murder.

Regardless of who the murderer turns out to be, relitigating these charges is pointless. What should be the focus of a national conversation is the fact that this tragedy took place on a college campus and that the victim was someone whose mission in life was to promote free speech in venues where that has gone out of fashion.

Indeed, Kirk was something of a purist when it came to speech. He even voiced concerns about the Trump administration’s efforts to crack down on campus antisemitism because he opposed any limits on discourse. But, of course, contrary to the assertions of the president’s critics, the target of his efforts is not speech but illegal behavior, in which pro-Hamas mobs took over parts of campuses and sought to intimidate Jews. And if any moral were to be drawn from Kirk’s death, it should be to remind us that the willingness of so many academic institutions to tolerate and even encourage this sort of violence is about more than the feelings of Jewish students. It is a fundamental threat not just to free expression of political discourse but also an inevitable harbinger of far worse.

Challenging ‘safe places’

Kirk’s “Prove me wrong” events are now being widely described as provocations by those who opposed his stands. To the political left, the open expression of anti-abortion, anti-open borders, pro-guns and pro-Israel advocacy on campuses remains an affront to their sensibilities and academia itself, where such views are rarely heard. But that was the point. Kirk’s goal was not merely to promote the ideas he believed in, but to puncture the widely accepted notion that institutions of higher learning should provide “safe places” in which no one should be forced to deal with views that contradicted their own.

The problem is not just that this has created a generation of “snowflakes” too sensitive to debate ideas. The whole point of this notion is not safety but authoritarianism.

Treating ordinary political discourse as a form of violence to be feared is a mandate for silencing opposing views. And whatever anyone may have thought about Kirk’s opinions or his campus roadshow, his plucky glee for engaging those who disagreed with him—and who returned his replies with patent liberal nostrums—was the essence of democracy.

But the intolerance he fought represented more than a plague destroying the free exchange of ideas on which genuine scholarship thrives. It’s also a license for violence.

Current campus culture, rooted in the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI), is not only a Marxist inversion of equal opportunity that seeks to perpetuate and widen racial divides and destroy the foundation of Western civilization. It’s also a permission slip for discriminating against any idea or group of people that falls outside of the protected classes of victims it claims to champion, as seen in the two years since the Hamas-led Palestinian attacks on Israel, Jews and Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023. It works to legitimize the cause of destroying Israel and the genocide of the Jewish people.

Even a cursory reading of history leads one to the inevitable conclusion that ideas drenched in Jew-hatred lead to violence against Jews. An uptick in antisemitism started internationally in the wake of Oct. 7. And since January in the United States, instances of violence against Jews include the firebombing of pro-Israel marchers in Boulder, Colo.; the murder of two young Israeli embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington, D.C.; and an arson attack on Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro’s Harrisburg residence, where his family slept on the first night of Passover.

The cost of intolerance

Just as the impact on Jews is but a sidebar to the threat that DEI and other toxic left-wing ideologies pose to America as a whole, so, too, is intolerance for supporters of Israel and Zionism, merely a warning that anyone who dissents from the prevailing orthodoxies on campuses is also in danger.

As Americans learned in the 1960s, when intolerant radicals found themselves stymied by their failure to convince the majority of people to agree with their ideas, some inevitably resorted to violence. The Weather Underground might have represented only a fraction of those who protested against the Vietnam War more than half a century ago. These days, however, the political culture, coupled with the internet and social media, all work to mainstream extremist thoughts in ways unimaginable in previous generations. The disturbing online reactions to Kirk’s death, similar to the December 2024 assassination of an executive of the United Health Care insurance company and attempts on Trump’s life, illustrate how this normalizes toleration and even support for violence.

In the bifurcated political culture of 2025, we already know that most Americans have stopped listening, watching or reading views with which they disagree. That leads some to conclude that anyone they don’t like is Hitler—someone who should be silenced, if not jailed or subjected to violence. That’s more than a threat to politicians and activists. It can also put a target on the back of anyone who seeks to express their views about the subjects that Kirk spoke about in the public square.

Put into perspective, that makes it clear that his killing isn’t just one more sign that vocal advocacy can be a dangerous profession. It’s also a warning that society is heading toward a reality in which all those who speak up for any cause that falls out of favor with the chattering classes, like that of Israel and opposition to antisemitism, can no longer think of themselves as safe from violence.

That makes the cause of free speech that Charlie Kirk championed, as well as the need to stop demonizing our political foes, not merely a matter of civility in public discourse. It’s a matter of life and death for American democracy.

Source: JNS