The murder of Charlie Kirk: cancel culture turns lethal

Charlie Kirk is dead, aged just 31, gunned down at Utah Valley University doing what the conservative firebrand had been doing for more than a decade. Arguing, debating, talking in public. For that, he’s gone.

A manhunt is still underway, to find the scumbag who put a bullet through Kirk’s neck and deprived his wife and two children of their husband and father. We don’t yet know the motive. But it is impossible to ignore the climate in which this senseless killing has taken place.

Kirk was wearing a white t-shirt, with the word ‘Freedom’ emblazoned on it, when he was slain. It’s been the cause of his career. Bounding on to the scene in 2012, a co-founder of student group Turning Point USA, he was a seminal figure in the young-conservative pushback against the blue-haired intolerance of the campus left.

He dropped out of university himself, but cut his debating teeth touring campuses and taking on all-comers. He built an enormous following doing that most shocking of things in America in the 2010s: taking right-of-centre views to college campuses, arguing his case unapologetically, taking no prisoners but also treating those he disagreed with seriously.

Minds have turned to the rising temperature in America. To the bleak rise in political violence. To the bullet that ripped through Donald Trump’s ear last year. To Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, in the back with a 3D-printed pistol.

I dare say the college campus is where this rot took hold. When Kirk was coming to prominence, students were rioting at Berkeley because Milo Yiannopoulos had dared to show up, or were manhandling academics at Middlebury for interviewing Charles Murray. Now, campus cancel culture has turned deadly.

Speech is violence. Words wound. These are the toxic fictions that have infected the West’s universities, media and cultural elites. Now we are confronted with the bloody consequences of it. For if speech is violence then surely violence is a legitimate response to speech?

This is why an MSNBC contributor felt moved to respond to Kirk’s death by blithely suggesting he had brought it on himself, due to all his ‘hateful thoughts’ and ‘awful words’. This is why assorted freaks on TikTok are filming themselves celebrating the murder of a man who just so happened to disagree with them. When intolerance takes hold, human decency dies.

As does freedom of speech. On both sides of the pond, ‘our right to utter one’s thoughts and opinions’, as John Milton once put it, is being crushed. In Britain, by the state. In America, land of the First Amendment, by have-a-go tyrants taking matters into their own hands.

Political violence is nothing new in America. But if Kirk was indeed killed for his views this is something almost darker. He wasn’t a politician, or an oligarch. He didn’t wield any power over anyone. He made arguments. He debated. He put his ideas out there, robustly but in good faith. His slogan was ‘prove me wrong’. Then a bullet ripped through his throat, as he finished a sentence.

Kirk’s killing feels like the grim capstone to more than a decade of hysteria masquerading as care, kindness and ‘social justice’. In which mere dissent was met with demonisation, protest, violence. In which campuses became an unsafe space for those who disagreed with woke orthodoxy. In which privileged kids demanded trigger warnings, before cackling at a man’s murder. Kent State for the 21st-century campus culture war.

But in the spirit of Charlie Kirk, Americans must refuse to be cowed. Citizens of all political persuasions must endeavour to make their arguments even louder and prouder than before. To stand up for everyone’s right to utter – to listen. Anything else would turn this horrific murder into a catastrophe for the American republic.

Tom Slater is editor of spiked. Follow him on X: @Tom_Slater