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One year ago today, America was robbed of a father, husband, and iconic conservative figure in Charlie Kirk. An assassin’s bullet cut him down in the prime of his life.
— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) September 10, 2026
That horrifying day could have brought us together – to fight permission structures for violence, to rebuild…
That horrifying day could have brought us together – to fight permission structures for violence, to rebuild the social fabric by going to church, to remind ourselves that vigorous political debate is the key element of our national culture.
Instead, what could have been a unifying moment totally broke down into vicious and vengeful evil on the Left and conspiratorial and insane evil on the Right. Today, #Kirkiversary and #MerryKirkmas are trending.
Ed: Earlier today, my friend Jack Riccardi of KTSA in San Antonio had me on as a guest to discuss this. I reminded Jack that I was a guest on his show the day Charlie got assassinated, when we were reacting in real time, and I also lamented that we still have not fully grasped what Charlie was trying to do: bring us back to personal engagement in honesty and respect. Charlie had an extraordinary amount of courage; we have not yet made our environment worthy of it. However, I pray that we will someday do so.
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Matt Calkins: But I don’t think most people who saw the latter actually took the time to find out what Kirk was about. Their perception of him was shaped almost entirely by repetition.
A man who goes by Shabooki Sunshine posted a video on TikTok recently in which he admits that he celebrated when he first heard about Kirk’s death. But he then confessed that he had never actually watched any of Charlie’s debates — that his understanding of Kirk was based on curated, out-of-context clips. When he actually took the time to watch, he saw a surprisingly gentle soul who was as intelligent as he was gracious.
That grace was my biggest takeaway from watching Charlie over the years. No doubt he was “wicked smart,” as the old “Good Will Hunting” line goes, but it was the way he disagreed that separated him from so many of his political peers. You rarely saw him belittle. You rarely saw him insult. He would make sure the people who disagreed with him went to the front of the lines at events, but even when students berated him with some of the harshest personal attacks, he kept his cool. That’s hard to find.
Ed: And now it's even harder to find. Tyler Robinson assassinated Charlie, and he also wounded free speech, public debate, and reasoned negotiation on policy. That is exactly what Robinson targeted, too. We can't let him win.
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Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk. The evidence is overwhelming. This is not a complicated case. Robison was radicalized by far left wing trans-ideology. There are far more like him too. pic.twitter.com/Ja8xyT8GPT
— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) September 10, 2026
Ed: Really interesting take from Travis, but it's more than just trans activism, too. Antifa and other malevolent groups have been organizing for violent action for years before the trans issue reached this pitch. It's not an accident, though, that the trans issue was the catalyst for this assassination, but don't think that the radicals will limit their targeting of opponents to just that issue. Case in point ...
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Jonathan Turley: Will Rogers once observed that “Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.” No one ever personified Rogers’ rule as much as University of California, Irvine instructor Matt Goldman, who cracked everyone up this week by joking about celebrating the anniversary of the assassination of Charlie Kirk by alluding to the possible assassination of independent journalist Nick Shirley.
Today is the anniversary of the murder of Kirk. In anticipation, Goldman posted a picture of Shirley with the line “Someone can do the funniest thing just before the Kirkiversary.” It was a response to an Instagram post by the Harvard Republican Club promoting a speech by Shirley. ...
Chapman University has expressed concern over Goldman’s hateful postings, but he is hardly unique. Faculty departments have largely purged their ranks of any conservative, libertarian, or Republican faculty members. According to various surveys, many departments have no Republicans. Forty percent of faculty say they would vote against any Trump supporter, regardless of academic accomplishments or publications. Recently, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) abandoned its long-standing political neutrality and endorsed radical Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
At the same time, radical faculty members on the left are common across the country and many espouse the same hate-filled and violent rhetoric.
Ed: Indeed. Academia has spent decades forming and indoctrinating American youth into radical and revolutionary Marxism, and not just at the university level. The insanity is NOT limited to trans activists or the Queer movement; the entire radical Left is nihilist now, and violently dangerous, with these cossetted nutcases egging them on.
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“We are Charlie Kirk!” chants this afternoon in Times Square pic.twitter.com/MZWu8MeDJC
— Brendan Gutenschwager (@BGOnTheScene) September 10, 2026
Ed: We need robust and peaceful protests to take back the public square. If this violence continues, though, we should not be surprised if it creates violence in reaction – which is exactly what the Left wants, and what Charlie wanted to prevent.
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LH Grey on X/Twitter: What follows is not a soft memorial and it is not a press-trained lament about “polarization,” that coward’s weather report for a shooting that had a rooftop, a rifle, a calendar, and a sentence.
Some hate can’t be negotiated out. That was the theology. The rest was ballistics.
I wrote this because the official language has already started sanding the murder down into atmosphere…as if a sniper were a climate event and Charlie Kirk were a temperature.
He was not a temperature. He was a mind that would not grant the other side the mercy of silence.
They answered him the only way a bankrupt idea ever answers a living argument: they ended the mouth.
Ed: Indeed. That is the way to despotism and collapse, and that is why Charlie risked his life to lead us away from it. Grey has more to say on a Substack, but at least click through to read the rest of this essay.
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Eva Terry at NRO: As his widow, Erika, eulogized, Charlie’s mission was to “save the lost boys of the West.” My generation has been, in many subversive ways, manipulated by digital and political interests since we were kids. We are isolated, overly indoctrinated, and largely ignorant of reality. ...
The bullet engravings were quintessentially Gen Z. In poor Dremel-inscribed handwriting, the metallic scars referenced furry culture, Helldivers 2 (a shooter video game), and anti-fascism; one said, “If you read this, you are gay lmao.”
If there is something more sinister and damning to my generation than this — internet memes inscribed onto a murder — I would like to hear it. We are tortured, confused, and segregated from one another. Whether directly from teachers or indirectly from perverted sections of the internet, many of us learned to accept perverted views of ourselves, our country, love, and truth. The fruits of such foundations are beginning to show.
Ed: This is a very moving remembrance. Read it all, including Terry's prescription for healing.
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I will forever be sick to my stomach when I think about what happened to Charlie Kirk one year ago today. And I will never forget seeing President Trump’s absolutely devastated reaction when learning the news of his murder while sitting at the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.…
— Karoline Leavitt (@karolineleavitt) September 10, 2026
It’s still so hard to believe Charlie is actually gone.
In his memory, may we recommit ourselves as conservatives to respectfully speaking the truth, especially with those whom we strongly disagree.
Rest in Peace, Charlie. You are deeply missed here on Earth, but we know you are in Heaven.
May God continue to bless Charlie’s parents, @MrsErikaKirk, and their beautiful babies.
Ed: Amen. I did not know Charlie personally, nor Erika, but I pray for them both and their families.
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John Hinderaker at Power Line: Liberals use assassination as a tool. They are trying to get Donald Trump killed, and they may yet succeed. They were trying to get Supreme Court justices killed as long as Joe Biden was president. If we have a Democratic president in 2029, they will again try to inspire Court assassins. The attacks on Charlie Kirk, Brian Thompson, Steve Scalise and Rand Paul are among the many instances of liberal-inspired violence we have seen in recent years.
Today, ghoulish liberals are celebrating Kirk’s murder. They make no pretense about it: they call today the “Kirkversary,” and they are happy about it. If you go here, you will see many, many tweets by leftists celebrating the “Kirkversary” in the most vile manner, and in many instances insulting and mocking his widow. ...
Unfortunately, it simply isn’t true that we are a single nation, divided over various political issues but united in our patriotism and our broader values. That may have been true once, but those days are long gone.
Ed: I certainly hope that's not true, but like David Mamet, I fear it might be. Ronald Reagan forced the radical Leftists into the shadows, first in California in the 1970s then nationally in the 1980s. We need a titan like Reagan to follow Trump who can call them out, expose their intellectual and moral bankruptcy, and cast them back into political oblivion. Do we have anyone who could fit the bill? I can think of a couple from Florida, at least.
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Reminder: Charlie Kirk was killed at UVU, ground zero of the so-called "bridge-building" movement.
— DataRepublican (small r) (@DataRepublican) September 10, 2026
Bridge-building is nothing more than a color revolution / foreign conflict resolution framework ported to Utah. It measures virtue as how well you adopt a communication protocol… https://t.co/UF7ubLeIFi
... built by NGOs and not according to any kind of objective good & evil standard. The Dignity Index, a scoring system for speech, is the operative outcome, and was allegedly developed with the help of Ermiya Fanaeian, a far-left Cuba-aligned transgender revolutionary.
What's more, these same NGOs, including the Mormon Women for Ethical Government (MWEG), immediately registered the domain turntoward [.] us the day after Charlie Kirk's death and formed a coalition to use his assassination to push their speech scoring system. They'd proceed to leverage his assassination and brag about membership increases in the following days.
A honest self-criticism would have asked: how is it that someone raised in a good family like the Robinsons got radicalized to the point of pulling off the assassination? Even though Robinson was bred within this whole "bridge-building" / SEL framework intended to prevent this?
Ed: It's Academia, supported not by USAID but by massive subsidies from the federal government. We need to end all federal financial support for Academia and force them to live on their own income streams. This was my point when I argued to Decolonize Academia Now. The Trump administration has chosen to manage the problem rather than directly resolve it. If the GOP can hold onto both chambers of Congress in these elections, let's hope for a change in direction for the final two years of Trump's term.
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Josh Hammer at the NY Post: And one year later, it’s clear that far too many Americans still haven’t learned the right lessons from his martyrdom.
The first of these: the essential importance of free speech.
When Charlie was killed, he was sitting under a canopy emblazoned with his slogan, “Prove me wrong.”
All he ever wanted to do was have a conversation — especially with the liberals who disagreed with him.
Charlie exposed lefty logical fallacies and shattered socialist shibboleths, but he always did so with poise, grace and a winsome smile on his face.
A society that cannot abide polite conversations about the pressing issues of the day is a society that cannot endure.
Ed: That was exactly the reason Charlie put so much effort into these events. He made that argument explicitly and implicitly, insisting that Americans needed to have these conversations for the sake of the Republic. Read all of Josh's thoughts, which extend to other lessons we still have to learn.
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Charlie Kirk had a unique gift for articulating the good — the goodness of family, faith, and America.
— Secretary Marco Rubio (@SecRubio) September 10, 2026
One year ago today, he was killed for it.
We’ll honor his legacy by building great things and holding to account the enemies of civilization. pic.twitter.com/nYooF7xua5
Ed: Let's roll.
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Last night's lyric: "Edge of Seventeen" by Stevie Nicks.
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