Je Suis Charlie

By the Editors of TheFreePress 13Sept2025

Charlie Kirk was murdered while practicing the very act that gave birth to this nation—and the only thing that will ensure its survival.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination has hit the staff of The Free Press hard. Some of us knew him personally, but even those of us who didn’t found ourselves deeply distressed when we first heard the news Wednesday afternoon.

We’re journalists, which means we are used to reporting on horrible events, including gun violence, assaults, and murders. So why does this one feel different? Why is there sure to be a prolonged impact from this tragedy?

Kirk’s obituaries invariably described him as a conservative activist, a supporter of President Donald Trump, and a leader in bringing thousands of young people along with him. That’s true.But all of that was built on a very simple value that he practiced every day: free expression. It’s the same thing our work as journalists is built on. And that this country is built on.

That’s why, as Utah governor Spencer Cox put it today, the murder of Kirk is “much bigger than an attack on an individual. It is an attack on all of us. It is an attack on the American experiment. It is an attack on our ideals.”

Kirk was assassinated for those ideals. He was at that college campus in Utah—the very institution meant to be a bastion of freedom of conscience and speech—because he wanted to promote debate. This is the very act that gave birth to this nation, and the only thing that will ensure its survival.

We fear his assassination represents a watershed moment for free expression in this country. We worry that his murder will have a profound chilling effect—that people will shy away from open discussion, that they will avoid honest debate, and that they will turn away from sticking their neck out for fear that engaging with their fellow citizens might mean an engraved bullet will be meant for them.

We must not let that happen.

The principles we once took for granted in this country—that civil debate is how Americans sorted out their differences; that losing an election was not an apocalyptic event but simply meant we had to try harder to persuade our fellow citizens in the next one—feel endangered in a way they didn’t a decade ago.

The acceleration of political violence has been frightening: from the attack on the Capitol in January 2021, to the murder of a healthcare executive allegedly by Luigi Mangione, to the attempted assassinations of Trump, to the killing of Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., to the shooting of state lawmakers in Minnesota. And now Kirk’s murder.

There are many guilty parties in the rise of political violence. But to our minds, among the biggest culprits are the universities. In the same way that madrassas radicalize jihadis, America’s campuses are among the places in the U.S. most hostile to disagreement and debate. Where they preach “inclusion,” they actually practice exclusion—shouting down speakers they disagree with, for instance. Where they promote “diversity,” they actually enforce a uniformity of thought, denying tenure to dissenters.

The very fact that Kirk had to have armed bodyguards and appears to have been wearing a bulletproof vest is a sign of how far things had already unraveled.

The intolerance on college and university campuses is nothing new, of course. It goes back at least several decades, as shown by Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987. But you needn’t go back that far to see clearly the toxic, hostile, illiberal environments these places have become. Think back to 2017, when the conservative commentator Ben Shapiro spoke at the University of California at Berkeley—and the school had to spend $836,421 on security, which included dozens of police in full riot gear who created a perimeter around the hall where he spoke. Again and again in recent years, colleges and universities have had to cancel speaking engagements by nonprogressive speakers in the name of “public safety.”

As Sean Fischer and Maya Sulkin note in a story we published today, 34 percent of college students believe that the use of violence to prevent someone from speaking on campus is acceptable, according to a survey from the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. Another recent poll showed that 20 percent of young Americans—those between the ages of 18 and 29—think that “violence can sometimes be justified.” Those are astonishing statistics.

To counter this trend—which holds the potential to tear this nation apart—we believe schools should consider making a condition of enrollment the recognition that words are not violence, that violence is unacceptable on campus, and that so is silencing those with whom one disagrees. Students should be told that violation of this compact will result in serious penalties, including expulsion.

We think that’s a low bar. But it’s apparently one that a third of college students would fail to meet.

Next, in the face of this horrific act, colleges and universities must not take Kirk’s assassination as an opportunity to use security concerns to prevent speakers with heterodox views from appearing on campus. They must find a way to make it work. To fail to do so would be to fail at their very mission, and to create an “assassin’s veto.” One obvious idea would be to set up a tent in the style of Kirk and invite speakers with differing political views. A university town square, you might say.

Kirk was murdered while doing something that we have been trying to do at The Free Press from the very beginning: Invite debate.

We have a different project, and practice a different rhetorical style from Kirk. But we proudly caucus with Kirk on the idea that free expression is at the heart of the American experiment. And as Kirk said, “When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts.”

We believe that most Americans want to return to an America where honest debates and open conversations are the norm. Where words and opinions are not viewed as an invitation to violence. Where people understand what a profound privilege it is to live in a democracy—a system in which we can live peacefully alongside those we disagree with, knowing that we live in a society where those differences are resolved with words, not bullets.

Someone in the newsroom said that this shattering event feels like the aftermath of another Charlie: Charlie Hebdo. It was a decade ago that Islamists burst into the offices of the satirical Paris newspaper and murdered 12 people who worked there.

In its aftermath there were a lot of spineless statements from people distancing themselves from the brave journalists who put out that magazine: “I didn’t agree with them but . . .” We’re hearing the same thing now about Charlie Kirk.

No.

Whether you agree with him or not is completely, utterly, totally beside the point. We won’t do it. Je suis Charlie.