What Comes After Charlie Kirk's Assassination

An anti-revolutionary's death brings a new reckoning

Sep 11, 2025

The latest edition of The Big Ben Show drops today, recorded prior to the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah but, as it happens, focused on the topic of free speech and dangerous speech in the United States and the United Kingdom with Winston Marshall. Listen here and watch below:

At The Spectator this morning, I share immediate reaction — as I did last night on Special Report:

Charlie Kirk was, from an incredibly young age, the sort of person willing to try things that seemed impossible. Last night, in his remembrance of meeting Charlie for the first time, my Fox colleague Guy Benson realized that he was probably one of the first conservative speakers Kirk had invited to share ideas to students in Illinois – at the ripe age of around sixteen. In lieu of a typical trajectory for a person with political ambitions, Kirk took a different path, believing that through engagement, debate and organization, he could achieve a mission many political professionals thought was a fool’s errand: win young people over for conservative ideas

In the midst of the Tea Party moment, when the American right was synonymous with boomer (and older) voters and Barack Obama was the coolest thing on campus, riding high with millennial voters, this concept was absurd. But Kirk believed it was possible. He invested all his effort in pursuing it, he built a team across the country to make it happen and, most incredibly of all, he actually pulled it off. He was the biggest difference maker in a movement that saw an influx of young activist voters that changed the course of the country. And for that, he was murdered.

The truth about Charlie Kirk is that he believed in the power of engagement. He would consistently do what the American left refuses to do: walk into the places dominated by opinions from the other side, and take on all comers, welcoming their disagreement and arguing not in an attempt to demonize but in an attempt to evangelize. Despite the left’s active campaign to describe him as a white supremacist, a radical, a reactionary, comparing him to Nazis and the Klan, Kirk was one of the most forthright and emphatic voices against that extreme of the far right. His assassination is so jarring in part because he is such a mainstream figure. He was beloved by millions of young conservatives across America not because he was a frothing at the mouth provocateur, but because he was a clean-cut earnest patriotic inspiration, someone who showed them how to stand up for what they believe on campuses where the number of academics who share their traditional Republican views are practically nil. And along the way, Kirk showed you don’t have to lose your soul in the process – openly embracing faith and family as the most important things in life, calling his young followers to think beyond the political realm.

Kirk exemplified a belief in the American values of civil debate. His free-speech battle truly was part of a happy war, one that actively seeks out those who disagree not to destroy them but to prove a point. The overwhelming number of people ensconced at networks or as late-night hosts would never be brave enough to do what Kirk did on an active regular basis: to put themselves in a position where they are surrounded, and attempt to win the debater, or more often the audience, to your side. And in their cowardice, they chose to lie regularly about him instead – even in death, as the same ghoulish leftists who regularly hope for Donald Trump’s death and cheered Luigi Mangione rejoiced publicly on social media, as if to say if they can’t get Donald or Elon, they’ll settle for Charlie.

In the wake of the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, there was a brief moment where people of both parties seemed to hope that it would mark a change in direction for the course of the country – an end to the demonization of the other side, a tamping down on the tone of our virulent political debate. That was as fleeting as an election cycle. But now with Kirk’s bloody violent murder while doing exactly the same thing he encouraged so many young people to do – using free-speech rights to stand up for what they believe, publicly and without fear of debate with the other side – the lesson many on the right may take away is that there is no future for such engagement.

The consequences of such a move would break from Kirk’s mission, and serve to accept the message the American left, from its most powerful elites to its core electorate, has been sending loud and clear since 2016: that there is no place for Republican views in society, that they are Nazis and fascists and existential threats, people who should be hounded and punched, and whose deepest pain is your path to joy. And why shouldn’t they take that lesson? There is no purpose to debate when at the end, the other side just wants you dead all the more. Can we even share a country with these people who hate us so much?

The reason not to take that path is because it’s the opposite of what Kirk himself believed and exemplified, as he told us over and over again. In a profile in Deseret published on the eve of his fall campus tour just last week, he vocalized his purpose as calling his fans and fellow young conservatives to something higher than just hating the other side:

“My job every single day is actively trying to stop a revolution,” Kirk said. “This is where you have to try to point them toward ultimate purposes and toward getting back to the church, getting back to faith, getting married, having children. That is the type of conservatism that I represent, and I’m trying to paint a picture of virtue, of lifting people up, not just staying angry.”

The worst thing the young American right could do now in this moment is turn Charlie Kirk’s martyrdom into a lesson fundamentally at odds with his mission. Really, after all this, could you blame them? The American left hated Charlie Kirk. They mocked his approach to debate. They smeared him for his conservative beliefs. But they and the country may be about to learn what comes next, and learn it hard.

Quote

Try to praise the mutilated world.

Remember June's long days,

and wild strawberries, drops of rosé wine.

The nettles that methodically overgrow

the abandoned homesteads of exiles.

You must praise the mutilated world.

You watched the stylish yachts and ships;

one of them had a long trip ahead of it,

while salty oblivion awaited others.

You've seen the refugees going nowhere,

you've heard the executioners sing joyfully.

You should praise the mutilated world.

Remember the moments when we were together

in a white room and the curtain fluttered.

Return in thought to the concert where music flared.

You gathered acorns in the park in autumn

and leaves eddied over the earth's scars.

Praise the mutilated world

and the gray feather a thrush lost,

and the gentle light that strays and vanishes

and returns.

— Adam Zagajewski

The Transom

What Comes After Charlie Kirk's Assassination

An anti-revolutionary's death brings a new reckoning

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