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Charlie Kirk was a one-man answer to campus illiberalism.

He rose to prominence at a time when university administrators and progressive students were working in league to make campuses no-go zones for conservatives.

They effectively banned them from faculties. They didn't invite them on campus, or if they did, they were liable to disinvite and cancel them. They banned so-called hate speech. They shouted down speakers they didn't like. They created "safe spaces." In short, they did everything they could to render the opposing point of view illegitimate and indefensible.

Kirk showed, not only that it was possible to punch through these obstacles and get a hearing, but to win the argument despite them.

He created a student movement that he leveraged into a huge, multifaceted organization and that he mobilized to vote in 2024, to great political effect.

He was provocative, occasionally outlandish and sometimes wrong, but always interesting and brave.

His events on campus should be viewed as a public service. All of the best, most creative college deans could have gotten together to figure out how to routinely get thousands of energized students to events about public affairs, and never managed it. No worries. Kirk figured it out for them.

That he was shot while he engaged in act of peaceful persuasion makes his murder all the more devastating.

Kirk wasn't a literary figure, but his assassination was a little like, say, William F. Buckley or James Baldwin getting gunned down in the midst of their famous 1965 debate at the Cambridge Union.

What Kirk was doing drew on the some of the finest traditions of civilized life. Gathering on a hill to hear people speak and argue, like what we saw at Utah Valley University prior to the shot ringing out, is as old as the Pynx in ancient Athens.

The university as a battleground of ideas, with clashing worldviews vying for influence, goes back to the Middle Ages. Founded in 1231, the University of Paris quickly became "a forum where great questions of theology, society, and government were analyzed and answered," writes historian Dan Jones.

More fundamentally, language and abstract reasoning make us distinctly human; violence, the tool of brutes, does not.

What are young people on the right to conclude from the horror at Utah Valley? Progressives viewed Kirk as a "MAGA troll" (as a New Republic headline put it in the immediate aftermath of his shooting), but for his fans, he was a figure of hope and inspiration.

It's also important to realize that Kirk worked diligently and effectively to bring disaffected kids into mainstream politics. He pushed back against anti-semitism and other poisonous influences. The far-right envied and hated him.

It would be natural for Utah Valley to become the Right's equivalent of Kent State in the 1970s, a shattering experience, and a radicalizing one.

Charlie Kirk did it the right way, and now he's gone. He espoused the Christian faith, and what did it get him? He believed in open debate, and it left him defenseless unto his enemies.

He did his enemies the favor of taking their arguments seriously, whereas (presumably) one of them used a bullet to silence him forever.

To quit on persuasion, though, is the counsel of despair. Political violence in a free society is always wrong. There's no substitute for convincing our fellow citizens, and we should also assume -- as Kirk did, even with the odds stacked heavily against him -- that they can be convinced by good arguments made sincerely and passionately.

Kirk's murder will long be remembered as a symbol of the irrationality and hatred of this era, with, one fears, worse to come. His life's work, on the other hand, is testament to how one person can, with enough pluck and talent, move the needle of our politics.

Kirk fought back against illiberalism, and his supporters -- when the shock and grief subsides -- should be equally committed to his mission.

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(Rich Lowry is on Twitter @RichLowry)

(c) 2025 by King Features Syndicate