This article was originally published in The Australian on or about 12 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.
Kirk killing proves him right – it is dangerous to challenge the left
On the day he was mercilessly slain on a university campus in Utah, Charlie Kirk was sitting beneath a tent emblazoned with “Prove Me Wrong” when he was shot in cold blood by a sniper.
The hugely talented and influential conservative died doing what he loved: persuading young Americans, through civil debate, of the virtues of limited government, free markets, free speech – and warning them of the dangers of the intolerant “woke” ideology that has come to dominate universities across the country. They obviously couldn’t prove him wrong through argument, so they shot him. In doing so, they vindicated his warning that the far-left ideology embedded in universities was becoming not just dogmatic, but dangerous.
While obsessively pursuing diversity of skin colour, the woke left maniacally seeks to erase diversity of thought – once the hallmark of a university education.
“Charlie Kirk was assassinated because he was winning. He was changing a generation. Turning young people toward truth, faith, and country. That made him unstoppable, and that made him a target of evil,” said fellow conservative influencer Benny Johnson.
It is difficult to overstate how central Kirk had become to the American right. He was not merely a campus rabble-rouser or culture warrior but a genuine organiser, strategist, and communicator who combined charisma with a relentless work ethic.
Almost as if in natural reaction to the brazen bias of the legacy media in favour of Democrats, social media has given rise to a dozen or so powerful, articulate, fiercely independent conservative influencers – including the late Kirk, Johnson, Dave Rubin, Joe Rogan, Matt Walsh, Steven Crowder and Tucker Carlson.
Each commands an audience larger than almost any elected official. The Democratic leader in congress, Hakeem Jeffries, and Republican Speaker Mike Johnson each have about a million followers on X. Kirk, at just 31, had 5.5 million. He reached more young Americans on his phone in an hour than most senators could in a month.
He was arguably the greatest threat to Democrats’ electoral prospects. From scratch, he built Turning Point USA, which he had led since age 18, specifically to visit schools and universities to advocate for conservative values – politically and socially. Unlike many Republican figures who merely complained about the cultural left, he actually set foot in hostile territory and debated them face-to-face, often winning converts. For years, he toured relentlessly, spending more time on campuses than most students.
Kirk was hardly a shallow MAGA mouthpiece. He often showed nuanced economic thinking and a deep concern for the plight of younger Americans that could be perceived as even left-leaning. “There is economic nihilism that has set in to a lot of this next generation, where they are not participating in any of the upside right now … they’re only seeing the downside. They’re seeing their apartments get smaller … rents go up … groceries get more expensive,” he told Carlson on a recent podcast.
“Why is the Right so blind to the suffering of the young people that just gave you a Senate majority?” he added, while taking a swipe at banks for saddling youth with debt, and Australia’s Afterpay, now a big brand in the US, for encouraging them to live beyond their means.
Democrats can no longer count on the young – whose formative school, university and early career years were wrecked by Democrats’ harebrained lockdowns – to mindlessly back them in droves. Kirk reminded them who had locked them in their rooms, closed their gyms, destroyed their small businesses and saddled them with record inflation, all while claiming to care about “equity”.
In 2020, Joe Biden won women under 30 by 30 percentage points. By 2024, Kamala Harris’s entire campaign warning that Trump would crush women’s rights, including abortion, cut that margin to just 18 points. Not enough sisters believed the lie.
But the shift among young men – Kirk’s core audience – was seismic. Biden won men under 30 by 15 points in 2020. Trump won them by 14 in 2024: an unprecedented 29-point swing in just one cycle. It was the biggest generational partisan realignment in modern US history, and Kirk helped engineer it.
Unquestionably, Kirk helped deliver victory to Trump, who honoured him in a White House video soon after his death, calling him a “patriot and martyr for truth and freedom”. His death marks the most significant successful political assassination in 50 years. What his murder truly represents is the moment America’s campus culture war turned literally deadly – when words were replaced with bullets.
“Do you know how many transgender American mass shooters there have been over the last 10 years?” an audience member asked – the last question Kirk would ever hear. “Too many,” he replied, moments before he was shot.
After every high-profile murder in the US, the legacy media waits nervously to learn the race, gender or sexuality of the perpetrator before deciding how to cover it. They’ll be desperately hoping this one wasn’t trans. Normally, they’d be praying for a white male – but perhaps not today.
The media is already reeling from its humiliation over ignoring the brutal murder of a young Ukrainian refugee on a train in Charlotte by a deranged black man with 14 prior convictions, who reportedly muttered “I got that white girl” as he staggered away drenched in blood. This came after thousands of articles for months vilified Daniel Penny, who in 2023 accidentally killed a black man harassing train passengers.
Kirk had been leading the pushback. “We have been propagandised by liars and fakers in the media to believe that America is a vicious, racist country and indiscriminate attacks on black people by whites happen all the time. But the numbers tell the truth. Black attacks on white people happen three times more often than white-on-black crime, despite blacks being only 13 per cent of the population. Why won’t the media just tell the truth?” he said on social media.
At least we will soon know more about Kirk’s killer than we ever learned about Donald Trump’s would-be assassin, Thomas Matthew Crooks – whose name and story seem to have all but vanished from public discourse.
