Things were already bad. They’re about to get worse
Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’
By David Austin Walsh September 11, 2025
The assassination of Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University on Wednesday was both morally repugnant and an absolute political catastrophe. Kirk was one of the most influential and prominent right-wing political activists in the United States. He was a social-media star with millions of followers across various platforms, and built the largest right-wing youth organization in the United States, Turning Point USA. He was also a personal friend of Vice President JD Vance. Kirk’s death — occurring as it did on a college campus, just as Kirk was kicking off his September 2025 speaking tour of nearly a dozen different universities — will have profound political implications for higher education.
Kirk’s politics were extreme. He helped to popularize various antisemitic conspiracy theories about “cultural Marxism” and the white nationalist “Great Replacement theory.” He materially supported the January 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, suggested in 2023 that America’s gun-death epidemic is “worth it” in order to preserve the Second Amendment, and had a long history of making incendiary racist statements, primarily against Black people. As Joan Walsh wrote in The Nation, while Kirk certainly had every right to express his views and not be the victim of deadly violence, we cannot forget “who Charlie Kirk really was,” particularly when thinking through the political consequences of his assassination.
Colleges and universities have been under pressure by Kirk and his political allies for years. Turning Point USA launched its Professor Watchlist in 2016 to intimidate professors whom the organizations claims “discriminate against conservative students, promote anti-American values, and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom.” (Full disclosure: I am on the Professor Watchlist myself, apparently on the basis of my scholarship on the conservative movement and the far right and teaching a class on fascism and antifascism.)
But TPUSA’s attacks on academic freedom have paled in comparison to the Trump administration’s assaults on higher education through funding freezes for basic scientific research, legal attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and the targeting of dozens of universities by the Department of Justice for transparently political reasons. At the University of Virginia, my home institution, DOJ pressure was instrumental in prompting the resignation of the university’s president, Jim Ryan, at the end of June.
The ongoing targeting by the Trump administration of the modern system of higher education in the United States is unprecedented. The closest analogy is the McCarthy era, but the anticommunist purges of universities in the 1940s and 1950s predate the development of the modern university system, where scientific research is driven primarily by federal dollars. Vice President Vance declared in 2021 that “the universities are the enemy” as bastions of left-wing indoctrination that “pursue deceit and lies.” This has formed the basis of federal higher-education policy since Trump’s inauguration — and that was before Vance’s friend and close political ally Charlie Kirk was assassinated on a college campus.
Although Kirk did not hold elected office, he was one of the most important right-wing leaders in the country and his death is being treated by the government as a national tragedy. President Trump made an Oval Office address on Wednesday evening blaming the “radical left” for Kirk’s assassination and ominously pledging to go after the “organizations that fund and support it” with the full weight of the federal government. Vance canceled his scheduled appearance at the 9/11 commemorations in New York City to escort Kirk’s body back to his home in Phoenix. Although we do not know as of this writing the identity of the assassin or their political motivation, rumors are flying in right-wing media about the killer supposedly carving “trans ideology” and antifascist slogans on the shell casing of the bullet that killed Kirk.
It is practically inevitable that there will be dire policy consequences from Kirk’s assassination, regardless of the actual ideology of his killer, because his death fits a pre-existing narrative about left-wing campus radicalism that is already the driver of federal policy. We can expect to see an intensificationof the Trump administration’s political and legal battles with universities, even tighter scrutiny for faculty and staff (particularly those teaching controversial or sensitive subjects), and the continued erosion of academic freedom on campuses targeted by the administration.
There is also the very real threat of further violence. Scores of prominent MAGA influencers reacted to Kirk’s death by calling for violence against their political enemies. Chaya Raichik, who runs the infamous LibsOfTikTok X account, which before Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover was suspended multiple times for inciting death threats, declared that “THIS IS WAR.” Musk, for his part, wrote that “The Left is the party of murder.” There have already been consequences: On Thursday, at least five HBCUs in Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Virginia locked down their campuses due to terroristic threats.
So what can we do? First, faculty and staff need to be very careful about what they say in response to Kirk’s death. Tasteless celebrations of Kirk’s death on social media have already sparked widespread outrage, and while we may live in a society that, to paraphrase Walter Benjamin, experiences self-destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the highest order, the professoriate must not actively contribute to that cultural degradation.
Second, we need to acknowledge the real climate of fear — across the political spectrum — on college campuses. For many right-wing students, Charlie Kirk was a larger-than-life political icon rivaled only by President Trump. His assassination underscores the legitimate security concerns for their own personal safety that they have when expressing their views on campus. For left-wing students, their own legitimate security concerns about their personal safety will likewise intensify, along with the prospect of additional persecution from the federal government and law-enforcement agencies. Realistically, the only option for universities is to reaffirm one of the basic principles of American liberal democracy: the right to free speech, no matter how objectionable the content of that speech, without the fear of violent reprisals. This is as much true for students at the campus Turning Point USA chapter as it is for students who are members of Students for Justice in Palestine.
But while this may be the only realistic option for colleges and universities, it may very well be an insufficient one. The Trump administration’s likely response will be to crack down even further on campus dissent through both direct and indirect pressure on university administrations. The right-wing media ecosystem, which already believes as an article of faith that campuses are left-wing indoctrination machines, is already going into overdrive. And the normalization of political violence in the United States — a senior Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota was assassinated and another wounded only three months ago — will continue apace. These are existential challenges not just to higher education but to the very fabric of American society. Things were bad enough before Charlie Kirk’s assassination; they’re about to get a whole lot worse.
SOURCE: The Chronicle of Higher Education
Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’
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After the truth-shower 