This article was originally published in The Australian Financial Review on or about 16 September 2025 and was written by the author in their capacity as a contributor for that publication.
It has been republished on the IPA website with permission. The views expressed are those of the author alone.
According to his critics, Charlie Kirk was not assassinated when he was shot in front of 3000 people at Utah Valley University – he committed suicide.
According to his critics, Charlie Kirk was not assassinated when he was shot in front of 3000 people at Utah Valley University; he committed suicide.
There is no other way to understand the words of Hannah Ferguson, darling of the left-wing media, guest of the National Press Club, and whose podcast the prime minister graced with an interview during the 2025 federal election.
Ferguson wrote in response to the news of the shooting, “Is violence sometimes necessary? Yes.” Framing the narrative of Kirk’s death in this way is grotesque.
For over a decade, Kirk debated opponents on university campuses and engaged in uncomfortable dialogues on controversial issues. Despite these many clashes, the best his detractors can muster against him are a handful of lines stripped of context and repurposed as evidence of hatred.
One example, circulated by former staffer in the Biden-Harris administration Cory Alpert, writing in The Sydney Morning Herald, claimed it was “difficult to feel empathy for Charlie Kirk – an emotion Kirk himself once said does a lot of damage”.
The full quote, however, tells a different story, revealing Kirk as a thoughtful intellect who was making a considered argument, analysing the use of strategic empathetic language by politicians to win over voters.
During an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show he said, “Bill Clinton in the 1990s was all about empathy and sympathy. I can’t stand empathy, actually. I think empathy is a made-up, new-age term that does a lot of damage, but it is very effective when it comes to politics. Sympathy I prefer more than empathy.”
Such nuance has no place in the berserk reaction to his assassination. There is now a frantic attempt to regain control of the narrative. According to this logic, Kirk was not simply killed by the alleged assassin now in custody – he brought it on himself because of what he dared to say and by failing to retract when offence was claimed.
“The left saw Kirk as a danger because he was dismantling their cultural monopoly.”
In a free society, the law should not protect hurt feelings because the standard is subjective. That is why the legal threshold for unlawful speech must remain high – to ensure subjective offence cannot override objective freedoms. Without that safeguard, civil society collapses into the tyranny of arbiters who decide what counts as offensive.
Kirk’s real offence was not so much a cherry-picked line, but the movement he was leading. His debates attracted more than 36 million social media followers, drawing many young people – particularly young men – back to conservative ideas. In one election cycle, he helped deliver an unprecedented 29-point swing from Democrats to Republicans among men under 30.
His opponents pretended to be shocked by the things he said. In reality, they were far more shocked by the number of people listening to him, and by the number of people who actually agreed with him.
Since the 1960s, the left has held unchallenged sway over public debate, particularly inside universities. Through Kirk, a centre-right ecosystem was beginning to form in the very institutions where the left was dominant.
Kirk began his crusade talking about economics, but it was his discussions on culture that made him “dangerous”. He spoke about family, values, history, morality and patriotism – all areas the left had long assumed were theirs alone to define.
The frenzied response to his words, and the cruel celebration of his death, reveal the left’s fear of being challenged. They did not see Kirk as a danger because of a handful of misrepresented statements. They saw him as a danger because he was dismantling their cultural monopoly.
The old adage says the pen is mightier than the sword. The left has always known it, and it remains true. Communism was brought down by pens, not swords.
Speech – the pen – is the ultimate tool of power. And because the left is obsessed with dismantling power structures, many openly celebrated the silencing of a debate they could not control.
The radical left will claim it is uncomfortable with violence, but that is not true. What it is uncomfortable with is someone else wielding the pen. Kirk’s opponents could not match his words, so they reached for the sword.
The real danger now lies in how they use their pen to justify their use of the sword. The left will attempt to etch in history a fabricated story about a man whose words amounted to so much hatred that it justified is use of violence against him.
But words are not violence. Let history remember Kirk as a considered thinker, a craftsman of words who spoke with such clarity and conviction that millions listened. His words cut through the noise and in doing so, they drowned out the left’s carefully constructed cultural dominance.
Thanks to Kirk, for the first time in a generation, the words of the left no longer carry the crowd.
