Charlie Kirk died fighting the idea that words are violence | Opinion

“Of all the ideas percolating on college campuses these days, the most dangerous one might be that speech is sometimes violence,” wrote Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff in 2017. It might be this idea that killed Charlie Kirk when he was giving one of his usual open and interactive presentations on a college campus in Utah on Wednesday.

Among the dangers of this idea, Haidt, Lukianoff and others have written, is that it can turn words or other innocuous things into justifications for violence — the real and bloody kind.

In a video from one of Kirk’s campus visits circulating on social media, Kirk himself was confronted by a young person with the idea that his very presence on campus was “emotional violence” against people who differed with him.

Kirk disagreed and said that talking with people whose ideas you oppose is critical for democracy to work. “When people stop talking, really bad stuff starts,” Kirk replied, “When you stop having a human connection with someone you disagree with it becomes a lot easier to commit violence.”

And that idea, that words, even someone’s presence can be violence, has spread from petty campus authoritarians out to censor those they disagree with to the pages of The New York Times to the broader culture where a 2024 poll by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression found that four in five Americans agree, at least slightly, with the idea that “words can be violence.”

The connection between speech and violence has grown ever closer. Today, according to a report released this week by FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, 22% of students at Texas A&M University think violence, at least rarely, can be justified to stop a speech. At Florida State, it is 35%. At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, it is 36%. At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill it is 38%. At Virginia Commonwealth University where one of my children is a senior, it is 50%.

We don’t yet know whether this shooting was political, but sooner or later, someone is going to act on their beliefs.

Our democracy runs on speech. The kind I take part in. The kind Charlie Kirk took part in on campus before he was shot. The kind that the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania took part in before his house was set on fire. The kind a Supreme Court justice performed when a would-be assassin came to his home armed with a gun and knives.

Without speech to resolve our differences, there is only violence.

That’s what concerns me about the latest news to come across my desk. The Trump administration has adopted this truly awful idea at the Department of Homeland Security where DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has said that the act of taking video of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents whisking people off the streets is “violence.”

“Violence is anything that threatens (ICE agents) and their safety, so it is doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations, encouraging other people to come and to throw things, rocks, bottles,” Sec. Noem said.

Now it is government policy that you can commit acts of violence with your cellphone. And when you commit acts of such nonsensical “violence” against them, they will respond with the real kind.

The same day that Charlie Kirk was so brutally murdered, a federal judge in California ruled that DHS and ICE had to back off their violence against journalists the agency had beaten, arrested and threatened for, among other sins, video recording them.

The right to shoot video of the government when it is running amok doesn’t just belong to journalists. It is a First Amendment right that, courts have ruled, all of us can use as a bulwark against wrongdoing by authorities.

Our 250-year-old experiment in self-government, predicated on vigorous and open First Amendment rights, is in danger, mostly from the creeping authoritarianism of the Trump administration, but also from nonsense that has spread from left-wing campus kooks to the highest levels of our government. I fear that this is why Charlie Kirk is dead and why more violence is on the way.

David Mastio is a national columnist for McClatchy and The Kansas City Star.

This story was originally published September 11, 2025 at 11:19 AM.