On Tuesday afternoon, I was in studio doing a long-form podcast interview. One of the questions the host asked me during the interview was whether I had been personally attacked or been confronted with violence because of my investigative writing and political work. I told the host that so far I had been fortunate that any violence that has been spewed at me were only words on the screen. Two hours later, I completed the interview and got into my car. When I turned on the radio, I heard the news that TPUSA co-founder and CEO Charlie Kirk had been shot, and it was possibly catastrophic. Immediately it hit me like a ton of bricks: the Left is not satisfied with battling with words or your ability to use words effectively. They do not want you to have a voice at all, and they do what they deem necessary to extinguish it.

Read More: UPDATE: Charlie Kirk Has Died

President Trump and Others React to News of Charlie Kirk Shooting at TPUSA Event

Charlie Kirk succumbed to that gunshot wound, targeted and murdered for not just speaking truth, but challenging those who disagreed with him to come to the front of the line and dialogue with him. His assassination at such a young age is the culmination of an escalation of violence toward conservatives that has been decades in the making. 

I'm old enough to remember 2016. While then-candidate Donald Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were verbally duking it out for the presidency, author and then-campus speaker Ben Shapiro, who is a forerunner to Kirk, was spearheading his own movement on college campuses, and in the formative stages of building his conservative media empire, The Daily Wire. 

Shapiro wrote about when the change in the calculus first hit him. 

This realization hit me on a precise date: Feb. 25, 2016.

I was scheduled to give a speech to the Young America’s Foundation group at California State University at Los Angeles. My speech posited that all people of good heart wanted to fight racism, but that vague charges of institutional racism and white privilege obscured individual evil — and slandered the country more broadly.

Two weeks in advance of the speech, we began hearing rumblings about protests; the week before the speech, the president of the university announced that the event had been canceled outright. I refused to accede to that clear breach of First Amendment rights, and I announced that I would show up anyway.

My business partner insisted I bring a security team, but I was pretty skeptical. This wasn’t Fallujah. This was a major college campus in the middle of my home city.

Just to be safe, he hired security anyway. Thank God I listened.

As we approached the campus, we could see helicopters swirling overhead. Dozens of armed, uniformed police quickly formed a cordon and rushed me through the back door.

A few rioters were physically assaulting students who wanted to enter; the police set up a back-door route but could only sneak students in two at a time. I put my ear to the auditorium door; it sounded like a zombie apocalypse outside.

We decided to go ahead, despite the mostly empty auditorium. As the speech progressed, students pulled the fire alarm; the lights went out, and the alarm began beeping loudly. Students continued pounding the doors outside. I spoke through the discord, announcing that the disrupters wouldn’t stop us from exercising our free-speech rights.

Afterwards, police officers sneaked me out, ushered me into a tinted-window black van and guided me from the campus with a police escort flashing their lights.

So, what went wrong? I found out later that a professor on campus had been telling her students that I was a white supremacist, that I was akin to a Ku Klux Klan member, that I was a Nazi (I’m just wearing the yarmulke as deep cover, apparently). The students had believed their professors, and they had reacted accordingly. The value of speech had been overthrown in favor of a subjective rage that had nothing to do with facts.

[...]

I went through most of my adult life involved in public political conversations with others without threat of violence or racist slurs. Now, I required hundreds of police officers to protect me, and my Twitter feed was flooded with images straight from the pages of Der Stürmer.

Something, obviously, had changed.

Shapiro has permanent armed security with him wherever he goes and whenever he speaks. I am sure this not-so-subtle threat of strangulation by a transgender activist also stuck with him. This person hated the fact that Shapiro would only affirm reality, not this person's personal delusions.

WATCH:

One thing seems clear: Coulter won’t be speaking on Thursday, the day the talk was planned for, at the campus that is home to the Free Speech Movement.

“It’s sickening when a radical thuggish institution like Berkeley can so easily snuff out the cherished American right to free speech,” Coulter said on Twitter. “I’m very sad about Berkeley's cancelation (sic), but my sadness is greater than that. It is a dark day for free speech in America.”

Compared to today, 2016-17 was sunshine and blue skies for free speech in America. Back then, it was only threats and students with ridiculous signs screaming into the void. As constitutional conservatives we uphold other's right to free speech, and we would hope that willingness to stand up for those rights at least be returned. But as the conservative movement grew more credible and powerful voices, and social and online media surpassed the legacy and cable talking heads, the left's facade came crashing down. First, debate was no longer tolerated; our events must be canceled, and if that can't be done, then they were drowned out with shouting, boos, and chants. Second, we were cancelled, de-platformed, marginalized, disinvited from polite society, while our careers and livelihood were destroyed. Despite these efforts on the left to silence free speech and cancel truth, it did not work. Conservatives know that when the constitution and conservative ideals are allowed to be lived and heard, they always win. Not so on the left. For them, the illogical end is that if they cannot silence our voices, then they will silence us permanently.

This is not the first time that Kirk and anyone allied with TPUSA has been subjected to protests and targeted for violence. From being called "Nazis" and other slurs and invectives, to TPUSA journalists and staffers being personally attacked, the escalation was before us for everyone to see. The left was no longer pretending or hiding their hatred.  

In 2022, Fox News contributor Tomi Lahren was attacked at a TPUSA event at the University of New Mexico.

Read it Here: EXCLUSIVE: Violent Student Protesters Shut Down Tomi Lahren Speech at University of New Mexico

Why They Hate Turning Point USA So Much

 Fox News personality Tomi Lahren visited the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque Thursday to speak to the campus Turning Point USA chapter but had to be escorted to safety by New Mexico State Police after a violent mob shoved into the Student Union, past campus police protecting the doors to the auditorium where she was speaking, and nearly into the auditorium itself while chanting, “F**k Tomi Lahren! F**k Turning Point!”

Lahren, her father, and several members of the TPUSA chapter were barricaded in a back room in the student union for 45 minutes while campus police called in reinforcements from the Albuquerque Police Department and the New Mexico State Police, according to an Instagram Live video Lahren posted shortly after getting to safety.

In 2023, champion swimmer and activist Riley Gaines was attacked and chased at a TPUSA event at San Francisco State University. Gaines and other TPUSA representatives were barricaded in a room while trans activists and students spewed threats. 

SFSU VP Blocks Riley Gaines, Gaines Lets Her Know Actions Have Consequences

That same year, Kirk himself was mobbed by activists at Northern Arizona University and by Antifa terrorists at the University of California Davis.

Dive Deeper: Watch: Charlie Kirk Gets Mobbed by Angry Activists During Visit to Northern Arizona University

Antifa Attacks Charlie Kirk's UC Davis Speech

Despite all the anger and screaming, this is relatively tame compared to the reception Kirk got at UC Davis in California. Antifa made an appearance and were forced into handcuffs by police. At one point, rioters began breaking windows and doors in the building where Kirk was speaking. 

Kirk was never intimidated, and he never backed down. As the phrase goes, he died with his boots on. He once wrote, "If you believe in something, you need to have the courage to fight for those ideas - not run away from them or try and silence them."

But this sickness, one that is fueled by one side, must stop. This escalating violence against conservative speech has met a cataclysmic crash as a result of Kirk's murder. Any more rhetoric, threat, and normalizing this violence must be confronted and condemned. The world has been robbed of a cultural force. A young wife has been robbed of her husband, and two babies have had their father stolen from them. 

But as a person who writes, speaks, and stands for truth, I will not be intimidated or back down, and neither should you. That is exactly what the left wants. Well, to re-brand one of their favorite phrases, "Silence is Violence." We will not only continue to stand, speak, write, and encourage truth, but we will call out every instance on the left where they try and stop, intimidate, and silence us. 

After Andrew Breitbart passed, the movement he launched only grew stronger. The people he trained, mentored, activated continue to be at the forefront for free speech, conservative principles, and constitutional governance. In that same manner, TPUSA and the movement Kirk spearheaded will continue to be a force. Kirk's life activated so many young people to stand for what they believe, to fight for those beliefs, and what is right. Despite this evil act of murder, those inspired by Kirk and his life have been stirred even further to live life out loud, just as Kirk did. 

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