“WHEN people stop talking, really bad stuff starts,” said Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old father of two and free speech hero cut down by a coward’s bullet.
“When marriages stop talking, divorce happens; when civilisations stop talking, civil war ensues”, Kirk riffed in one of his signature video exchanges with a politically opposed stranger.
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“When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with, it becomes a lot easier to want to commit violence against that group,” continued the clean-cut Christian activist who played a critical role tilting millions of college voters towards Donald Trump last year.
“We as a culture have to get back to being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option.”
But his prescient plea was not to be.
His enemies chose murder over free speech.
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The most articulate conservative voice of his generation was silenced by a bullet to the throat that law enforcement last night suggested was engraved with “expressions of transgender and antifascist ideology.”
Facts over feelings
Charlie Kirk had done nothing wrong, he had not raised a finger, let alone a fist, yet he was targeted because he was the very best at what he did: Giving a voice to millions once too afraid to speak out.
He was a young man who built a movement with words, ideas, and conviction — whether you agreed with his staunch right-wing views or not.
That was the point — he was happy to defend his beliefs in the arena of public debate where his opponents prefer to silence and cancel.
“Emotions mean nothing to me,” he bluntly told an array of pink and blue-haired screaming liberals who would turn up to his simple gazebo erected on college campuses across America.
Kirk would sit with a microphone and try to reason and argue with anyone.
Facts over feelings.
Calmly and clearly, he would dismantle their arguments on anything from the Bible, borders, transgender bathrooms, the US constitution, foreign policy, abortion, the economy, you name it. Guns, God and the great green “hoax”, he would debate it all.
The internet is littered with these exchanges that went viral time and again, as more and more young supporters realised you can just say things after all.
Charlie’s organisation Turning Point USA was a phenomenon.
He started it in his late teens and it now has 650,000 student members and is growing fast.
Podcasts, TV shows, speaking tours grew, while he urged his fellow right-wingers to get real and get organised or see the dominance of the Left strangle free thought and free speech forever.
The youth vote, once the preserve of the Left, noticeably leant right at last year’s US election as the impact of this movement turned new voters toward Trump.
Charlie’s ruthless get-out-the-vote operation earned him a seat at the top table as he became a confidant of the President, which contributed to his growing fame.
Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.
President Trump
So much so that South Park devoted an entire episode to lampooning him as the world’s greatest “Master Debater”.
While others have flipped out about the left-wing comedians satirising him, Kirk lapped it up, changing his profile pictures across his millions-strong social media accounts to Eric Cartman impersonating him.
What was once a fringe movement has burst into the mainstream — cultural victory had followed political victory last year.
The astonishing outpouring of grief from the very top and through Donald Trump’s White House and Cabinet showed just how influential Kirk had become.
And for the President it was personal.
As for Vice President JD Vance, Kirk had become a loyal friend, counsellor and strategist: a man without whom you could argue neither Trump nor Vance would ever have taken back control of the White House.
Consulted on cabinet picks and administration appointments, Kirk’s ferret-like sense of the mood and feelings of the Make America Great Again movement made him one of the most influential people in the world.
In the wake of the assassination attempts on Trump, friends had begged Kirk to step back from his trademark accessibility, stop sitting out in the open talking.
But he insisted he would never back down, unashamed and unafraid.
They couldn’t beat him in debate and he was not going to let them force him off the pitch.
Gloomy silence
“Radical left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” President Trump said in an Oval Office statement in the hours after the bloody murder in Utah on Wednesday evening.
“Tonight, I ask all Americans to commit themselves to the American values for which Charlie Kirk lived and died.”
A seething President went on: “For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst mass murderers and criminals.
“This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now.”
Where high-profile killings that the Left have leapt on have triggered riots, burning cars and shops and restaurants smashed in, this time there was gloomy silence as the flags sat at half-mast.
But don’t mistake that still sadness for surrender. There is boiling anger brewing among Kirk’s supporters, friends and proteges.
Kirk’s organisation was called Turning Point USA, and I suspect a major change of course will be his legacy.
Not through more violence or taking to the streets, but perversely the attempt to silence one Charlie Kirk will see hundreds more pick up his microphone.
Charlie was a gifted talent, and cannot be replaced, but anyone who thought killing him would kill what he has unleashed is going to be sorely disappointed.
