Death of Kirk an assault on free speech everywhere

The senseless assassination on a Utah university campus of close Trump ally and powerful conservative influencer Charlie Kirk is a tragedy not just for the US but countries across the world, including Australia, which value free speech and open, respectful debate. Not without good reason, Mr Kirk’s murder has been described as an attack on the principle of free speech itself.

He may have been only 31 but the legacy he leaves following his untimely death is one that, in an age of absurd shouting TV heads and vapid, know-nothing social media wokery, should be heeded, particularly on university campuses that are supposed to be bastions of free thinking and argument but have too often become cesspits of closed-mind intolerance.

Mr Kirk took pride in his closeness to President Donald Trump and the MAGA movement. His podcasts and appearances on university campuses, as Mr Trump pointed out on Thursday, made him massively influential, particularly among younger Americans. “No one,” as Mr Trump said in mourning the death of his friend, “understood the heart of the youth in the USA better than Charlie.”

Indisputable evidence of that lies, as Joe Kelly reported, in the fact that in the 13 years since, as an 18-year-old, he founded Turning Point USA, a now powerful right-wing political organisation aimed at the promotion of traditional conservative and Christian family values, it has become the “largest and fastest-growing conservative youth activist organisation in America”. It has chapters operating in more than 850 colleges and is having a profound impact on American politics.

Significantly, Mr Kirk built Turning Point USA the old-fashioned way – through respectful political argument and debate. At a time in America, as in Australia, when university campuses were witnessing the height of intolerant cancel culture and the worst of screaming mobs on campuses determined to shut down conservative speakers, he politely welcomed all-comers to take him on with questions and opposing points of view.

That was Mr Kirk’s hallmark: despite being a Trump supporter, he was no demagogue or firebrand. Even when he took controversial conservative positions with which many disagreed, he was always ready and eager to debate them freely and vigorously, politely and without rancour or abuse.

“What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option,” he said not long before he was cruelly cut down by an assassin’s bullet. Mr Kirk is, of course, far from being the only American involved in politics to be killed in recent years. And given the horrifying culture of gun violence that presents Mr Trump, like presidents before him, with such a challenge, he is, regrettably, unlikely to be the last.

But in mourning the death of someone who was among those closest to him, Mr Trump must not ignore the cry from the heart of Utah’s Governor, fellow Republican Spencer Cox, who, in reacting to Mr Kirk’s death, declared: “Our nation is broken … when someone takes the life of a person because of their ideas or ideals, then the very constitutional foundation (of the country) is threatened.”

That is true of America and no less so of democracies such as Australia as we battle not just intolerance and disdain for the very fundamentals of free speech on university campuses but also the mindless violence of street demonstrations and manifestations of sectarian hate in our midst.

Many will disagree with what Mr Kirk stood for and what he said. But what gained him the vast following that it did is that with his respect for free speech and the views of others, he was always prepared to debate and argue, politely and considerately, with those who disagreed with him. And in that lies a lesson that needs to be heeded.

His tragic death is, indeed, no less than an attack on free speech itself – and not just in America.