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Charlie Kirk died for the same cause that David Horowitz was assaulted for, that Robert Spencer was banned for, and that Ben Shapiro faced bomb threats for: free speech on campus.

In an academic environment where a respected 74-year-old scholar like Charles Murray could be physically assaulted at a college while the perpetrators walked away with a ‘mark’ on their permanent record, the willingness of conservatives to appear on campus was an act of courage.

To do it the way that Charlie Kirk did was sheer heroism. There’s no question that he made an impact on a minority of students and there’s also no question that the majority of campuses, professors and students only became more hostile to free speech since his campaign began.

The numbers are sadly clear and they’ve only been getting worse over the years.

1 in 3 students support using violence to silence opposing speakers. 7 out of 10 want to shout down controversial speakers like those who oppose the transgender and BLM movements.

The vast majority of students do not want to debate. They want to silence any opposition.

We are not going to debate our way out of this because you can’t debate those who not only don’t want to listen, but those who are determined to shut you up any way that they can.

You can’t debate those who want to shout you down unless you shout even louder. You can’t debate those who mob and beat you. And you certainly can’t debate those who shoot at you.

Like Martin Luther King, Charlie Kirk went on campuses to challenge and call out an oppressive system. Where some had been beaten, kicked and threatened, Charlie paid the ultimate price for his courage. And there is no reason to think he will be the last. If there’s one thing we know, it’s that a new low can very quickly become the new normal. It’s only a question of ‘when’.

After spending years speaking on college campuses, and struggling against threats, rants and mob attacks, David Horowitz understood that speaking out on campus was not enough, drawing on his civil rights experience, he called for the university system to be urgently reformed.

His main vehicle for that was the Academic Bill of Rights which ‘controversially’ proposed that no professors or students should be rewarded or punished for their political beliefs, that teaching should reflect different points of view, and that colleges should maintain an “environment conducive to the civil exchange of ideas” and that the “obstruction of invited campus speakers” should not be tolerated by university administrators.

This proposal, with its call not to indoctrinate students, fire professors and assault campus speakers was denounced by the  Association of American Colleges and Universities, the American Federation of Teachers, the American Association of University Professors, the American Library Association, the American Historical Association and even the AFL-CIO.

That is how we got here. It’s how we got to even liberal professors who dissent in any way from leftist dogma being hounded out of campuses. It’s how we got terrorist groups rampaging around campuses. It’s how we ended up with Charlie Kirk’s blood on a college campus.

The David Horowitz Freedom Center has been doing this for over two decades. And we know it’s not about a “lone wolf” shooter or a few extreme students. This is coming from the top down. University presidents, deans and professors made colleges into war zones. They chose to shut down free speech and purge dissent. They play ‘bait and switch’ games when they’re called before Congress, promising that this time they’ll crack down on violence and terrorism.

They’re lying.

Last year, leftist and terrorist groups rampaged around UCLA, claiming parts of it for terror camps and assaulting anyone who wanted to get through. They didn’t just do this on their own, but with the complicity of professors, who joined with them, of administrators who allowed campus security to back them up, of local officials, including the LAPD, who refused to make arrests or take reports of assaults against Jewish and conservative students happening right in front of them.

I spoke to an eyewitness who described an LAPD captain deliberately refusing to intervene.

After the violence, top California officials, stood with the terrorists and rioters, used taxpayer money to pay their legal bills, selectively prosecuted only those non-leftist students who stood up to the campus thugs, and, from Gov. Gavin Newsom, on down, are rejecting any settlement.

We’re not going to debate our way out of this because we’re not in a war with ideas. We are up against an oppressive system that uses power and violence to suppress its political opponents.

That system has to be broken.

It’s not going to be fixed by debate. On campuses that resemble terrorist training camps, debate is a courageous confrontation with a totalitarian system. The system however holds all the power, enforces discriminatory measures, and looks the other way when violence takes place.

After a generation of rejecting the Academic Bill of Rights, its principles are an important beginning, but the system of higher education has made it clear that it will not voluntarily adopt them. Nor can the system be trusted to regulate itself because it is corrupted by radicalization.

Only external regulation can even begin to keep campus extremism and violence in check.

Universities act like the worst segregationists and the Trump administration is right to begin treating them that way, imposing hefty penalties which should be bolstered by further consent decrees and constant monitoring of the worst offenders, like Columbia, Harvard and the University of California system, the way some southern states were monitored for decades.

But while there was a national bipartisan consensus that racial segregation was wrong, Democrats continue to believe in political segregation and oppression on campus. They have not recanted or repented, but, like Gov. Newsom have only doubled down on the abuses.

That means once a Democrat is in the White House, all the abuses will return, and politicians like Sen. Chuck Schumer have already told college presidents that they don’t need to worry. The Democrat message to universities is to just wait Trump out and they can resume the abuses.

And that is not acceptable.

Penalties send a message. But like executive orders, they’re only a temporary band aid that the Democrats will tear off once they’re back in power. And the wound will be bloodier and uglier.

The modern American university needs to be fundamentally reconstructed and reformed. The Left had a vision for how to hijack and remake the educational system using private and public influence. Conservatives need such a vision and they need to be willing to implement it.

Key to the leftist vision was massively expanding the college curriculum, watering down the elements of both scientific and classical education, while creating numerous positions and even entire departments dedicated to radical political indoctrination, and also massively expanding the student body, providing incentives and using economic pressure to push teens into college.

Restoring the proper function of a university begins with dramatically shrinking both the scope of the curriculum and the size of the student body. DEI bans are the beginning of restructuring colleges away from embedding radical politics into every discipline and restoring the fundamental tenets of a classical education. And reducing the national student body would allow universities to focus on a core mission instead of on treating college like a rite of passage.

In 1910, there were a million college students, by the 1950s there were 2.5 million, by 1970 there were 8.5 million, by 1984 there were 12.5 million and we now approach 20 million.

Are we better off for it?

Federal and state governments directly and indirectly provide much of the funding for higher education. As do private donors. They have the ability to focus colleges on education over politics by shrinking their runaway curriculums, departments, deans and endowments. Rather than funding college for all, the government should make it possible to once again get a good job without the need to waste four years and six figures on a worthless diploma.

The Trump administration has the ability to create meaningful change that will be difficult for a future administration to undo. And that will begin fixing college campuses and fixing America.

College, to echo Bill Clinton, should be “safe, legal and rare.” And America will be better for it.

We can’t debate our way out of this. Not unless we want to debate fists, firebombs and bullets. But we can fundamentally transform our way out of this. That’s what the Left did once upon a time.

Now, we need to do it too.

That’s why we’ll be presenting a blueprint for University 2030: a vision of systemic change for education, the economy and the future of a saner and deradicalized educational system.