Free Republic

Charlie Kirk built his public life around a conviction that ideas should be contested openly and fairly. He believed that rigorous debate was not only worth having, but essential to America’s survival as a free nation. From the age of 18 to his death at 31, he carried that conviction into lecture halls, gymnasiums, and auditoriums across the country. On Sept. 10, while debating hot-button topics at Utah Valley University, Kirk was struck down by an assassin’s bullet. The murderer, motivated by leftist politics, ended the life of a whiz-kid-turned-titan whose confidence in open dialogue made him a pop-cultural icon....

Irony of ironies, the British government, which oppressed its American colonists to the point of revolt, is now doing the same on its own island. English law, which provided the foundation for our own laws and our own freedoms, including freedom of speech, is now being used to suppress and silence British patriots. Britons are now literally put in prison for expressing opinions that in America are taken for granted as a protected right. Offending a pervert in Britain is a serious crime. The oppression stems from unrestricted immigration, especially of Muslims, who share nothing with classic British liberal values,...

FOX News contributor Mollie Hemingway told FOX News host Martha MacCallum that people need to take the powerful, well-funded interests more seriously following the assassination of Charlie Kirk. MARTHA MACCALLUM, FOX NEWS HOST: Charlie Kirk, known for vibrant debates and his willingness to exchange ideas with anyone doing so across college campuses and even here on "The Story." CHARLIE KIRK: The MAGA doctrine that he has started is only going to continue to grow. Philosophically, I believe he has changed the Republican Party for the better, ending the endless wars, renegotiating trade deals, challenging entrenched corporate interests and giving a...

I want to go out on a limb and predict that the tragic death of Charlie Kirk will lead to protests and riots and chaos in the street. However, it will not be led by Republicans outraged by the assassination of that great and good man. It will – as it almost always has been – the work of Democrats, Democratic Socialists and those even farther out on the left wing of America’s political spectrum. Please mark my words here. Charlie Kirk’s assassination will trigger violence, as it so often does, on college campuses. Maybe this weekend, almost certainly next...

With the advent of the Trump Administration, wokeness in general and DEI in particular are being eradicated, not only in the federal government but in schools and universities across the country. Seeing the trend, and the damage to profitability, businesses across the nation are also eliminating policies and personnel that less than a year ago were said to be essential elements to business success and a just society. It turns out they weren’t all that essential after all. Still, DEI and its gravy train-riding, low-producing adherents, aren’t going away quietly or easily. Many organizations in the private sector and in...

It’s been a very sad few weeks, first with the tragic and senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska on a train in North Carolina on August 22, and now with the assassination of Charlie Kirk in Utah on September 10. These two killings have suddenly focused the attention of a lot of previously complacent people, and provided some very useful education about the kind of world we live in. But what are the lessons to take away? One possible lesson is that the world is just irretrievably filled with anger and hate, to the extent that the best that sensible people...

If by chance you were unaware of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated while speaking at Utah Valley University this week, he was a very articulate debater who treated respectfully those who debated him. He espoused views which were perfectly normal, a defender of the West, Israel, and Christianity, enlightenment views which matched those of the Founders and are encapsulated in the Constitution. You may see videos of his debates on the internet. He was skillful at it and had thousands of young followers. Indeed, many consider his successful work a big factor in youth support for the President. As shocking...

Following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk at a campus event in Orem, Utah on Wednesday, a number of users on the Bluesky app are calling for the deaths of other prominent figures on the right. The New York Post reports that a slew of Bluesky users have posted calls for the deaths of Tesla founder Elon Musk, President Donald Trump, author J.K. Rowling and conservative commentators Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh and Michael Knowles. Screenshots capture the deranged threats ranging from violent language to outright suggestions as to who should be taken out next. BlueSky has become...

The teenage boy who shot two schoolmates and then himself at a high school in Evergreen, Colorado, Wednesday, was “radicalized by some extremist network” before the attack, according to the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office. The shooter, 16-year-old Desmond Holly, has reportedly died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. His two victims were transported to Denver-area hospitals, where they remained in critical condition, Thursday, the Denver Post reported. Investigators believe he opened fire at the school just before 12:30 p.m. Spokeswoman Jacki Kelley did not provide details about Desmond’s radicalization other than the the fact the evidence was found in Desmond’s phone...

The assassination of Charlie Kirk has changed everything. In the thousands of articles that have already been written about his murder and in the millions of social media posts that have flooded the internet since his death, it is obvious that this historic event has profound meaning for America and the rest of the world. With the corporate news media’s active assistance, the targeted assassination attempt of an entire softball field of Republican lawmakers eight years ago was transformed into an artificial kumbaya moment celebrating bipartisanship in D.C. When President Trump escaped a similar assassination attempt last year by a...

The murder of Iryna Zarutska on Charlotte’s light rail was not only a savage crime—it was the inevitable result of a national agenda of progressive “justice reform,” funded by outside NGOs and executed by local officials who put “equity” ahead of public safety. Charlotte is just the latest example of how this machine works: money flows in, jails are emptied, and the public is left to pay the price. As ZeroHedge aptly summarized, It seems as if the very pillars the Democratic Party has built itself on, whether social and criminal justice reform, progressive judges, or its dark-money-funded NGO complex,...

The assassination of Charlie Kirk was unlike anything any of us on the Issues & Insights editorial board have seen in our lifetimes. Kirk didn’t hold any political power. He wasn’t rich. He didn’t call for or incite violence. He was a young man of strong beliefs who enjoyed debating other young people on the big issues of the day. And for that, he was brutally murdered. You’d think this would cause even his fiercest critics to stop for a moment and take stock in what just happened. If only out of consideration for his wife and two young children....

Charlie Kirk is dead—struck down not by fate but by political hatred, murdered beneath a tent on a college green where the air should carry ideas, not the scream of an assassin’s bullet. His killing at Utah Valley University was not the silencing of one man alone. It was an assault on the principles he lived for: civil discourse, free speech, constitutional accountability, and the American tradition of argument waged with words, not weapons. Kirk was the “happy warrior”—a figure once familiar in American politics, now uncommon. He argued without apology, confident in his cause, yet willing to test it...

People realize that something profound has shifted, and they’ve gone from passively engaged to very, very active. You can feel it. Something has shifted. The world’s axis bumped. The heavens are growling. There is a disturbance in the force. “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced,” said Obi-Wan Kenobi in the Star Wars series. Everyone I spoke with yesterday after this paradigm-shifting tragedy unfolded, said that something…something deep, something cosmic, something sinister—or maybe revelatory—happened. We found out when Charlie died that the black soul of...

Ben Shapiro claims more political violence has come from the left than the right.Following the death of ultra-right-wing conservative Charlie Kirk, who was murdered while hosting an event at Utah Valley University, his friend and fellow pundit Ben Shapiro had a few thoughts he needed to share. According to a piece Shapiro penned for The Free Press, he and Kirk met when the latter was only 18 years old. Kirk had just started Turning Point USA, the conservative nonprofit organization whose mission is to "identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and...

Liberals recycle the same Red Scare myths, swapping Nixon for Trump and ignoring hard evidence that undercuts their tidy fairy-tale of heroes and villains. Fifty years ago, I had the misfortune to spend an entire semester as a college student with a fellow scholar who could only be described as an aggressive bore. Even though the seminar’s subject was literature, my pedantic classmate treated every topic that came up as a historical parallel to the McCarthy Era, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. (Nowadays, the trifecta has been updated to Charlottesville. January 6 and all things Russian.) I was reminded of...

I met Charlie at the start of his career and came away impressed. He mattered. And now he is dead, as the leftist fever swamps celebrate. As you all know, Charlie Kirk was killed today, leaving behind a wife, two young children, and a movement. I had the pleasure of meeting Charlie nine years ago, at the start of his amazing rise as a voice of young conservatism, and I came away deeply impressed, a perception that never left me. But to understand both Charlie and his death, you need to understand the madness of the left. (And no, we...

The assassination of Charlie Kirk is a horrific reminder that the left is based on nothing other than terror, violence, and aggression. This has been true since Karl howled to Friedrich that the bourgeois would someday pay for his plague of skin boils. The history of the Left is a history of violence. Scarcely a single leftist government has gained power without violence or the threat of violence. No leftist government has ever remained in power without violence. Violence is built into the very foundations of leftist ideology. Marx himself fantasized in print over the apocalyptic events that would accompany...

You will own nothing and become Muslims. One of the nightmares that periodically jolt me awake is the image of an American jumping from the inferno-ravaged upper stories of New York’s World Trade Center into the dust-plumed streets below. He is tormented and maybe praying and then gone. More than anything else, that horror from 9/11 haunts me. In the first few years after the Islamic terror attack, news programs would replay some of those desperate moments caught on video, when workers trapped between floors of fire were forced to make a final decision about how they would die. Many...