The murder of my friend Charlie Kirk was a very dark day for American democracy. And a dark day too for the cause of free speech in the US and the West, which has lost one of its most tenacious champions.
Charlie was shot dead while speaking at Utah Valley University, doing what he has always done: going to college campuses and courageously taking on the Left, trans activists and anybody opposed to his national conservative views – in reasoned debate, in their own backyard.
Although the gunman remains at large, the shooting has all the hallmarks of a political assassination. Charlie was killed to shut him up: cancel culture, at gunpoint. As President Donald Trump said, he died ‘a martyr of truth and freedom’.
I’ve seen many on both sides of the Atlantic celebrating his assassination on social media. It goes to show the contempt in which they hold truth, freedom and our common humanity today.
I personally mourn the loss of a man with whom I was good friends for over ten years. I have campaigned with Charlie and socialised with him. My thoughts are with his wife Erika and their two young children.
Charlie’s loss will be felt deeply by President Trump. The two men were very close. I rarely went to Trump’s retreat Mar-a-Lago when Charlie wasn’t somewhere nearby. The President has acknowledged his key role in winning the support of young voters, saying: ‘No one understood or had the heart of the youth of America better than Charlie.’
I was in Washington DC only last week, being questioned by the House Judiciary Committee. By coincidence, the theme of my talk was free speech and my deep concerns about its repression in the UK.
I spoke about the dangers of the Orwellian Online Safety Act, passed by the Tories and enforced by Labour, which will not make our children any safer online but is a grave threat to free speech for adults. And about the ‘hate speech’ laws and the crackdown by Britain’s thought police, epitomised by the arrest of Irish comedy writer Graham Linehan by five armed police officers at Heathrow Airport last month for posting sarcastic tweets about a transgender campaigner which, they said, amounted to ‘harassment and criminal damage’.
The murder of my friend Charlie Kirk was a very dark day for American democracy. And a dark day too for the cause of free speech in the US and the West, writes Nigel Farage
I have not altered my views on free speech one bit after Charlie’s murder. It is vital to living in a just and democratic society, writes Nigel Farage
When Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper posted condolences online for Charlie Kirk, many were quick to point out that, had Charlie been in the UK, Labour would probably have had him locked up.
I have not altered my views on free speech one bit after Charlie’s murder. It is vital to living in a just and democratic society.
I have always accepted, however – as I thought most people do – that there is just one limit to freedom of speech. And that is when you cross the line from argument and opinion over to incitement to violence.
For years, Charlie’s opponents tried to shout him down by falsely branding him a racist, a fascist and a white supremacist. The more he refused to be silenced by their slanders, the wilder their attacks became.
Did they contribute to the febrile atmosphere in which some vile individual thought it was legitimate to stop him talking for good?
If political or media figures launch ad hominem attacks on those they disagree with, repeatedly comparing their opponents to the Nazis or mass murderers, I think the case can be made that this amounts to incitement. After all, why would anybody bother debating reasonably with a Nazi?
Even on Thursday morning, after his murder, I was repulsed to see Left-wing commentator Nels Abbey on Good Morning Britain comparing Charlie to a former leader of the racist Ku Klux Klan, dubbing him ‘the David Duke of the TikTok age’.
The persistence of this sort of inflammatory abuse, even in the hours after his murder, raises the troubling question: who’s next?
I’m an expert on political abuse. In fact, I’d wager that I have received more of it over the past 15 years than anybody else in this country. As a result, I have had to live behind a shield of security since 2013. I understand why some in politics shy away from public appearances.
For the most part, I accept that this is part of the rough and tumble of public life. As I told the Democrat members of the House committee hurling insults at me last week, I don’t care what they level at me: it’s their freedom of speech.
Sometimes it goes too far. Just this week, the leading Left-wing MP John McDonnell called the party I lead, Reform UK, ‘proto-fascist’ and labelled me a 1930s-style ‘demagogue’. As the headlines succinctly put it, he ‘compared Farage to Hitler’. Call me Hitler once if you want, if it makes you feel better. Though it is generally a sign that you have lost the argument.
But – and this is the crucial part – if you invoke such comparisons repeatedly and make it part of mainstream political discourse, you could be stirring up anger and hatred that could lead to dire consequences.
There is something that leading politicians can do to temper the debate.
All of us – from all ends of the political spectrum – need to recognise that with our freedom to speak and our opportunity to be listened to, there comes great responsibility.
Of course, anyone is free to insult me or my party. But our political debate would be healthier if we could stick to honestly debating principles and policies, not attacking personalities – something the Left’s hero Tony Benn firmly believed in.
And it needs to be a level playing field. For too long, the Left – often aided by the authorities – have tried to censor and silence those on the conservative and patriotic wing of politics. Cancel culture must come to an end and we must fight our battles with ideas instead.
Charlie Kirk should be a symbol of how to achieve this. He believed in free speech so fiercely that he braved the lion’s dens of Left-wing campuses, not just to trade insults with woke students but to take on their arguments in reasoned debate. In the wake of his heinous assassination, we must not retreat into our political silos, hurling unfounded, sordid accusations at those we disagree with.
Charlie was shot wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the word ‘Freedom’. Let that be his legacy.
