Charlie Kirk's Horrifying Death Reveals Just How Desperately We Need to Value Free Speech...and Civil Disagreement

Even if you didn't like what he said, his way of saying it was admirable.

It’s a beautiful morning here in my New York City neighborhood, dappled golden sunlight peeking through London plane trees as wealthy liberals walk their dappled goldendoodles in our beautiful park.

No one is talking about Charlie Kirk.

No one on any of my all-Democrat text chains has mentioned it. When I went to my group exercise class last night, no one talked about it there, either. When my kids got home yesterday, and he hadn’t yet died but I was deep in horror, they said: “Everybody hates him, right?”

No, I assured them. He was hugely popular—just not around here. They live in a world in which I represent the political diversity, despite the fact that my politics border on socialism. (Yeah, I like libraries and schools, okay?) They don’t know people who agreed with him. But they also don’t know people who disagreed with him yet valued what he did.

Admittedly, I was not intimate with his oeuvre. Occasionally I’d see clips of his videos on X and think, “This is a good way to go about pushing back on the excesses of the Left.” I’d see kids making claims about gender, say, or Israel that they couldn’t defend, in part because they hadn’t assembled a whole bunch of facts or statistics that supported one side, as Kirk had. But mostly, they just hadn’t thought through their positions. They were repeating talking points, which couldn’t stand up to Kirk’s scrutiny.

I’m not sure how many of those kids went back to their dorm rooms and researched enough to craft a stronger argument, or how many realized that they could be wrong, and switched sides. But I know that he inspired many young conservatives. He seemed to do that very differently than Trump—who called people nasty women or obfuscated, avoided, broke the law, improperly wielded the law. Kirk did it by having a better argument, and being a better debater. And he did something extraordinary: he went to places where he knew he wouldn’t be welcome and engaged with his detractors.

That someone assassinated him, rather than proving him wrong, is so horrifying. That the far-Left celebrated his death on their digital echo chamber—is also so horrifying.

We don’t know yet who killed him. We do know that the last question he was asked concerned “how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last ten years.” I admit I wonder whether that question was planted, or if the timing of his death had something to do with it. There is some speculation that the shooter embraced trans ideology, but it’s completely unconfirmed.

But it’s not an easy question to answer, in part because “transgender” can mean almost anything. How would we know the gender identity of a mass shooter if it hadn’t been made public, as with the August mass shooting by a male who identified as female?

The media coverage of that shooting was a mess. The New York Times, as linked above, referred to the shooter as “she.”¹ Rather than engaging seriously with the overlap between mental health issues and trans identities, or how cross-sex hormones might affect mental health, the reporter dismissed such concerns as conservative—and therefore bad.

I did not weigh in on that shooting, and I was upset when some of my friends and colleagues did. I felt we should tread very, very carefully on this topic—not rush to claim any horrific act as some kind of proof of our own theses. We don’t have much research on the relationship between trans identities and violence, though a Swedish long-term follow-up study found that “female-to-males” “had a higher risk for criminal convictions than their respective birth sex controls.” And a Finnish study found: “Transgender identities were also more strongly associated with perpetration of bullying than subjection to bullying.”

Trans activists have done plenty of bullying. Erin Reed once insisted that Kirk wanted the lynch trans people and encouraged pushback. This paranoid thinking persisted. See this photo, taken by Beth Bourne at UC Davis in March of this year:

I know many people who’ve been physically assaulted by activists who identify as transgender, but that doesn’t mean that all who identify this way are dangerous—of course. Still, that relationship between trans identities and violence is something we really need to talk about, and something I really wanted to talk about. At this point, I hardly have anyone to talk to. It feels as if more and more people are hewing to a narrower and narrower point of view.

In fact, that was the very problem that Charlie Kirk addressed. We don’t know how to disagree with one another and still have a civil society—and, yes, I am very much part of the “we” here.

The more we retreat into echo chambers, the more we convince ourselves and the others with us of any reality—including that Charlie Kirk wanted to lynch trans people—and thus justify any reaction to that perceived reality, including political assassination. More than ever, we need to break out of these chambers and engage in debate, the way Kirk did.

And yet, it’s getting less likely that such engagement will happen. It’s almost impossible for gender-critical types to gather publicly without facing hostile protesters. (Yes, that’s part of free speech, too—but it can be very frightening.) If expressing a different point of view risks death, who will do so? It was already hard to be an objecting liberal, when we faced shunning and social death. Now actual death is a possibility.

Alas, I have no hope that Trump will be the person to turn us in the direction we need to go. He is a master of inciting violence, in just such a way as to not be held accountable for it. His polarizing rhetoric and actual discrimination against people who fall under the self-styled category of trans—whether in the military or with owning guns—helped create that trans panic.

I am running out of heroes. I am running out of compatriots. I’m running out of friends. I am worn thin with grief for my country.

Today, let us reach out to someone we disagree with and try to see the human being behind the politics. Join a group like Braver Angels, or go to fundraiser for a candidate whose ideas you don’t like, or share some Charlie Kirk videos where you liked or didn’t like what he said, or tell your liberal friends who can’t distinguish between him and other MAGA types about how this young father and husband was murdered—and how truly bad for everyone in our country his death is.

1. I have done this myself, many times, and do not have hard and fast rules about pronouns—other than in crime reporting. There have been times where I’ve used a male’s pronouns as she/her, and I regret it. Sometimes I use the pronouns of the person whose point of view I’m representing. But, again, with crime reporting, I think it should go back to some version of the circa 2010 version: “The suspect, a male who identifies as female…” and then use sex-based pronouns. But I DON’T KNOW.