I grieved when I saw the footage.


I did not like Charlie Kirk. I despised his politics, his methods, and the damage he caused. But watching him gunned down on a college campus filled me with horror. No one deserves that. Not him, not anyone. To see a man murdered for exercising his right to speak is to watch democracy itself gunned down.

And yet, even as I mourn, I cannot forget what Kirk himself did with that same right.

Turning Point USA’s Professor Watchlist (his proud creation) was not a defense of free speech but a weapon against it. More than 300 professors found themselves branded as “too liberal,” “biased,” or “radical.” It was marketed as a harmless database, a tool to “inform” conservative students. In reality, it became a machine for intimidation.

Here are just some of the examples:

  • Tobin Miller Shearer at the University of Montana moved his class on white supremacy to a hidden room under police guard because his life was threatened.
  • Albert Ponce at Diablo Valley College saw pictures of his nine-year-old daughter posted online alongside death threats.
  • Saida Grundy at Boston University, already recovering from breast cancer, endured a campaign of hatred so intense she said it was worse than the disease.
  • David Cohen, whose crime was researching abortion law, had his name blasted to extremists who took it as a call to arms.

This was not a noble defense of free speech. This was speech weaponized, sharpened into a blade, and pointed at those who dared to speak differently (and by the way Mr. Trump and Ms. Bondi, will you be going after these hate-filled attacks?).

And now, after Charlie’s death, the nation is told to revere him as a martyr of free expression. The Trump administration, in its twisted inversion of values, vows to crack down on “hate speech”, by which they mean criticism of Kirk, not the venom that Kirk himself encouraged. Professors and ordinary citizens alike are losing jobs and being doxxed for refusing to bow at his shrine.

Take the recent cases of Tamar Shirinian at the University of Tennessee and Michael Hook at the University of South Dakota.

What they wrote in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination was vile. Shirinian sneered that “the world is better off without him in it” and even mocked his wife. Hook described him as a “hate-spreading Nazi” and added, “I have no thoughts or prayers for this man.” These are distasteful remarks, cruel and small-hearted. To call a freshly murdered man a Nazi, to gloat at his absence, is ugly speech. Evil even.

But here is what they are not: illegal. The First Amendment was written for precisely this kind of ugly, offensive speech. Shirinian and Hook can be criticized, challenged, condemned, but not jailed. If their universities, as private employers, choose to terminate them, that is their right under employment law. What is not acceptable is the chorus insisting they deserve to be destroyed simply for failing to genuflect at the altar of Charlie Kirk’s memory.

Free speech does not mean we like what is said. The First Amendment means we refuse to criminalize it. To equate callous Facebook posts with crimes while simultaneously excusing years of Kirk’s own campaigns of intimidation is hypocrisy of the highest order.

Charlie Kirk’s death does not erase his political legacy. That legacy is one of intimidation, division, and the normalization of political violence under the false banner of free speech. And if we allow his memory to be sanctified while his victims are forgotten, then we prove his project succeeded.

I will continue to grieve Charlie Kirk’s murder.

I will not grieve the end of hypocrisy.