In the weeks leading up to Turning Point USA's "America Comeback Tour," petitions were gathering in Utah for his two in-state visits. One involving Utah Valley University, where Charlie Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday, with 1,000 signatures. Another petition for Kirk's scheduled visit to the Utah State University campus on September 30 garnered over 6,000.
What were the students and faculty members who signed those petitions up to? They didn't want Kirk murdered. But they did want Kirk's event to die. They wanted his speech to die. And that itself is a kind of murder. A profound kind of assassination. Kirk won't be appearing on the Utah State campus later this month. Or any other campus. Ever.
How did we come to a place in American life where young people believe ideas are dangerous? And that they should have the power to decide who can and can't speak on their campus? How did we get here? It's worth looking at the petition housed on Change.org, and the treatment Kirk experienced from his opponents even before he stepped foot on campus.
"Charlie Kirk, a highly polarizing figure, does not align with the core values and ideology that Utah State University strives to epitomize. As a university deeply committed to promoting diversity and inclusion, it stands at odds with the messages frequently associated with Charlie Kirk and his platform. Allowing him to speak on our campus would not only misrepresent the values we hold dear but also create an environment where divisive rhetoric could flourish."
There's Exhibit A, and the age-old tactic of smearing conservative speakers as "highly polarizing" or "controversial" and making the case for diversity and inclusion by excluding a voice on the campus that represents the majority of citizens in Utah (nearly 60 percent voted for Donald Trump in 2024).
Then there's Exhibit B, the day-to-day teaching and instruction at our nation's colleges, and increasingly, our K-12 public schools. And the routine treatment of conservatives -- and the MAGA movement -- as filled with racists, misogynists, homophobes, nativists and fascists.
This underlying, decades-long project to dehumanize conservatives by academia has made it not only socially acceptable for students to ban conservatives from campus events, but a worthy pursuit. Why give such miscreants a microphone if their ideas are so vile?
Which has the effect of making conservatives unworthy of the most fundamental aspect of being human: speaking and thinking in our nation's true public squares -- our colleges. Which is itself profoundly dehumanizing, because thinking and talking makes us human. We do our best thinking when we're in dialogue not just with ourselves or like-minded people, but those who disagree with us. Our nation was founded on this foundational truth. That the marketplace of ideas -- the collision of ideas -- strengthens all of us. And our nation.
Compounding this problem is the fact that students can spend four years in college and never once bump into an openly conservative professor. How bad is it? In an Inside Higher Education/Hanover Research poll last summer -- not exactly Fox News -- only 8 percent of the over 1,100 faculty members polled said they were voting for Trump. Only 7 percent identified as Republican. Saddam Hussein didn't get numbers like this. That's not an imbalance. That's a purge.
Things are bad in the K-12 ranks, too. In her 2023 speech at the NEA's (National Education Association) annual convention in Orlando, the head of the largest teacher's union in America, Becky Pringle, told a crowd of 7,000 teachers what their real mission was.
"We have come to Florida -- our nation's ground zero for shameful, racist, homophobic, misogynistic rhetoric and dangerous actions," she cried out to an ecstatic crowd, referring to Florida's recent ban on teaching sex education and gender ideology to young children.
Pringle didn't seem to care that Floridians voted for Governor Ron DeSantis by a 20-point margin in 2020, with 56 percent of Hispanic voters turning out for the Republican candidate.
"Our mission is clear: We will advocate for the rights of education professionals and change the world for our students. With that inner fire burning, we will never bend. We will never break," Pringle closed, the affair sounding more like a Bernie Sanders rally than a teachers convention.
What Pringle didn't understand -- or the teachers across the country committed to the ideological transformation of the country without the public's consent and with their tax dollars -- was that a very different fire was lit.
"Those millions of children you teach are not yours," parents across America shouted back. "They're ours."
Into this vast overreach stepped Charlie Kirk. As radical progressive ideas out of step with the vast majority of Americans were being imposed on students and parents across America, Kirk’s numbers grew. As DEI and ESG initiatives were jammed down the throats of students across the country along with radical progressive ideas like White Privilege, gender ideology, men in women’s sports, anti-racism, anti-capitalism, antisemitism and anti-Americanism, into the breach stepped Kirk with a simple idea: Tour the nation’s colleges, invite people who disagree with him to the front of the line, and have a respectful debate on the merits of an issue one issue at a time. One human being at a time.
His visits were also an invitation to conservative students on campus who felt isolated and under attack. And Christians, too. He taught them how to stand their ground and speak up. And most important, to vote their conscience. He gave voice — and confidence — to millions of young people. They loved him for it.
As he grew older and wiser, Kirk learned to be kinder to students who disagreed with him. Rather than cut them down with his fierce intellect, Kirk tried his best to connect with students who disagreed with him, asking more questions than he answered in his “Prove Me Wrong” tours. Always, Charlie treated the people who disagreed with him with dignity. Always, he admonished crowds who treated questioners disrespectfully.
Each of those encounters was filmed and pushed into social media. To date, they’ve been viewed over 2 billion times, mostly by young people — proving that they crave debate. That they yearn to think and speak as they were divinely created to do.
Kirk embodied the best in a free society dedicated to the pursuit of knowledge and truth through the exchange of ideas. His life was dedicated to that mission, and he was murdered for it. Murdered for successfully building a conservative youth movement. And a Christian youth movement, too.
When asked why he loved discussing ideas with people who disagreed with him, Kirk had a beautiful response. “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence.”
To honor Kirk’s life and death — and the millions of Americans who identify as conservatives and Christian conservatives — it’s time for academia to examine how this anti-free speech movement began.
Students didn’t learn how to delegitimize, dehumanize and shut down conservative speech in a vacuum. They were taught these things — these deeply un-American things — from adults charged with educating them.
It’s also time for academia to examine why there’s such a dearth of conservative professors in colleges across America. This isn’t merely an ideological failure but a moral one.
Tens of millions of conservatives are not just watching and waiting for action. We’ll soon be asking our elected leaders to do something about it. Once and for all.