Charlie Kirk showed courage each time he stepped on a campus | Opinion
Editor’s note: The headline to this column has been changed to more precisely reflect the author’s message.
When Charlie Kirk went to campus, as he had today at Utah Valley University north of Provo, he was looking for a reaction. Today amid the usual applause and boos, he got gunfire.
The shot in the neck that killed him, according to CNN, came on the campus that just this week, the Foundation For Individual Rights and Expression had named as the single place where such an event was least likely to happen.
FIRE had given the school the No. 1 ranking for “disruptive conduct” or the percentage of students who thought using violence or other less serious disruptive conduct to stop a speaker from expressing his views. There, a mere 19% of students polled thought that violence was at least sometimes acceptable to silence the speakers you don’t like, compared to other schools where that number can be well over 50%.
While the campus leans left, among students conservatives are outnumbered only 1.2 to 1. Only 38% of students have self-censored their views to fit in better once or twice in the last month, according to the free speech group.
We don’t yet know what happened Wednesday afternoon, but one thing we do know is that Charlie is a beloved figure on the right. You can tell by the fact that politicians on the conservative side of the political spectrum from Trump to his polar opposite Mitt Romney have put out statements appalled at what happened.
“The shooting of Charlie Kirk has shocked and sickened me and my family. We extend our prayers and profound sorrow to Charlie and his family, many friends and followers. Another senseless act of violence appalls us,” Romney wrote on X.
Kirk is famous for taking the conservative case on nearly every subject and opening himself to questions and rebuttals from the campus community, students and professors alike. He might be a little Trumpy for my taste, but I appreciate the courage it takes to go into the lion’s den and come out alive over and over again. Kirk usually comes out with great viral clips of him besting some student or other in the verbal jousting.
I appreciate Kirk, because I was once an open and semi-notorious campus conservative at the University of Iowa, where I was a columnist for the student-run Daily Iowan. The reactions ranged from people refusing to walk on the same side of the street as me to a faculty committee opening an investigation into whether my writing was a human rights violation. I even had my own protest group, founded just to shut me up. They called themselves the White Rose after a student group that opposed Hitler.
I know what it is like to walk into a room and be far outnumbered and way reviled. Kirk is a mensch for taking the campus lefties on on their own turf. Every time Kirk walked onto a campus, he knew in the back of his mind somewhere that this could be the time it turned violent.
We don’t yet know whether this was a politically motivated shooting or another random crazy. Coming a little more than a year after Trump was targeted for assassination — twice — many will leap to that conclusion. It was only in June that a Democratic state legislator was killed in Minnesota.
I hope this is not a political assasination. If it is, it will be a sign that the reaction to Trump could be just as antidemocratic and un-American as Donald Trump is. It will be a sign that more of America has lost its way than I thought.
Tonight, Charlie Kirk is in my thoughts and prayers. So is our country.
This story was originally published September 10, 2025 at 5:28 PM with the headline "Charlie Kirk showed courage each time he stepped on a campus | Opinion."
