The Assassination of Charlie Kirk and the Violent Movements We Must Denounce
Photo of Ben Shapiro Ben ShapiroSeptember 18, 20250 84
This week, my friend Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood in front of a crowd of thousands at Utah Valley University. He was assassinated while debating with students — something Charlie did frequently, and with aplomb — by a radicalized leftist with a trans boyfriend. That assassin decided to kill Charlie because of Charlie’s belief that men cannot become women, and vice versa; as he allegedly wrote in a text message to that trans boyfriend, “I had enough of his hatred. Some hate can’t be negotiated out. If I am able to grab my rifle unseen, I will have left no evidence.”
I was in Los Angeles when Charlie was shot. My first reaction was shock; my second, horror; and my third, the realization that the shooting was almost certainly the result of a radicalized leftist, probably associated with transgender ideology. If we are to be honest with ourselves, we all have such reactions upon learning of acts of evil: We jump to the most likely conclusion about the source of that evil. If a synagogue is targeted in a mass shooting, the suspect will almost certainly be either a radical Muslim or a white supremacist; if a church is targeted, a radical Muslim or a trans activist; if a CEO is shot, a Marxist radical of some sort. There is a reason for such suppositions: Not all ideologies are equally likely to produce violence at the margins.
Ideologies that breed violence share three specific elements.
https://conservativedailynews.com/2025/09/the-assassination-of-charlie-kirk-and-the-violent-movements-we-must-denounce/
