Speaking at the site of a murder

My speech at Utah Valley University — and why America must not become like everybody else

Last week I gave a talk at Utah Valley University, the place where conservative activist Charlie Kirk was murdered in front of students on September 10. I had something to confess from the stage: when I got the invitation I was a little scared. Family and friends weren’t thrilled either. Someone had been killed there, apparently for arguing with students and making points they despised. Would someone like me be in danger? I doubted it. The fear was real, but it wasn’t enough to keep me away.

I’d spent a month writing draft after draft — grand, sweeping history lessons I thought might “meet the moment.” The day before the event, though, I threw it all out. I wanted to speak about the thing closest to my heart.

On my visit, I got to see the spot where the murder happened. It shook me. If you’ve watched the awful videos, the venue looks vast — like a big amphitheater. In person it’s small, intimate. That intimacy makes the horror worse. It also makes a simple truth unavoidable: if I were speaking there myself, I would have felt safe. I would never have guessed I was in mortal danger. That disconnect is part of the point. When we blur the line between words and blows, we give fear power over public life.

Ironically to some, one of the reasons why I identify so strongly as an American is because I’m a first-generation American. I feel like there’s nothing more American than a Russian-Irish kid whose parents met dancing in New York City. I grew up in a neighborhood where the coolest kid on the street was from Peru. The guy I got in fights with the most was from Puerto Rico. And one of the cutest girls I knew growing up was a refugee from Vietnam. My first crushes were on a Sicilian girl and a Lebanese girl. My dad was always amused that because three of his four kids worked in Japanese restaurants growing up, we wouldn’t have Russian borscht or Shepherds Pie whenever the family got together, but sushi. It was that kind of eclecticism that made me feel like the most American kid in the world.

My dad is Russian but grew up in Yugoslavia. He thinks of himself as Russian, though, because you can’t just wake up one morning and decide you’re Serbian. My mom is ethnically Irish, grew up in Britain, and thinks of herself as British — because you can, in fact, become British in a way similar (but not identical) to the way you can become American. The other kids on my street also had families that came from what I call “the rest of history” — places where power uses every lever to punish opponents; where the wrong words can land you in a cell or a ditch. In most of human history, the people in charge didn’t argue with you. They silenced you. And the people who ran education often took on a kind of religiosity. The point wasn’t inquiry, it was reform: fix the sinful masses by teaching them the one true doctrine, and punish the heretics who won’t recite it. And, of course, those religions can be anything from Opus Dei Catholicism to Islam to Internationalist Socialism to National Socialism. All of these faiths require strict adherence.

America’s break with that pattern is the thing I love most about this country. We Americans built a system of the government — and ultimately a culture — that says, You can think what you will and say what you think. That’s not just the principles enshrined in the First Amendment; it’s also a way of living together. You don’t have to pretend to agree in order to stay safe. We hash it out.

At least, ideally that’s what we do.

When I spoke at UVU, I said that free speech is a peace treaty humanity signed with itself. When speech gets hard, that treaty matters most. It’s our alternative to fists.

That may sound like empty rhetoric, until blood hits the floor. I’ve seen that too. As I’ve written and spoken about before, when I was fourteen, I watched a friend stagger across a parking lot after being stabbed in the chest. That sight changes you. So when someone tells me “words are violence,” I hear a self-flattering dodge: “I too have survived adversity because I have survived harsh disagreement.” That can even sound convincing to anyone who’s never been punched in the face. Life throws far harsher things at us than words. Drawing a line between words and blows isn’t cruelty — it’s the last defense against it.

There’s an old story I love because it shows why having to resort to violence can show your utter lack of confidence in your position. In 1971, the novelist Norman Mailer head-butted the critic Gore Vidal before a TV appearance because Vidal had trashed Mailer’s writings. At a party years later, Mailer allegedly knocked Vidal down. From the floor, Vidal reportedly looked up and said, “As usual, words fail Norman Mailer.”

I love this story so much because it was Gore Vidal lying on the floor who actually won that fight, and we all know it. Once you reach for violence, you admit you don’t trust your case. While it is not always true, resorting to violence often telegraphs to people observing that the bully — or in the case of Kirk, the murderer — knows he can’t win the argument. Maybe he even suspects he might have been wrong. And he is left only to lash out in fury rather than reason.

(For the curious, the Mailer–Vidal feud and that quip are well documented by Mailer scholars and in retrospectives of their televised clashes, though the precise details surrounding when it was deployed vary.)

The “words fail” lesson is the Streisand effect in human form. This was named (by Techdirt’s Mike Masnick) after Barbara Streisand’s ill-fated attempts to scrub the internet of identifying photos of her Malibu home, which only led to more attention on it. That’s the thing: suppression almost always backfires. It doesn’t stop the person or the idea; it makes them bigger, and turns otherwise uninterested people into the world’s most curious audience, asking, “What was so dangerous you had to try to erase it?”

When I watched recent videos of Charlie Kirk on campus — some on topics where I still disagree with him — I saw a guy standing in front of students, taking tough questions, and answering them. Sometimes he did so with frustration or exasperation, but honestly, often with more patience than I can imagine I would have after a long day of being yelled at.

I know something about living with critics on all sides. Zealots on the right and zealots on the left both dislike and, in some cases, loathe me. My friends live with that kind of antagonism too, which often includes threats that you can’t quite tell whether they are serious or not.

Bari Weiss

, whom any solid understanding of American political polling reveals to be a centrist — maybe even someone on the center-left — is often vilified by journalists as being right-wing and lives with constant threats against her.

Sarah Haider

, an ex-Muslim human rights advocate, constantly faces threats for saying out loud what many only have the courage to whisper.

Jesse Singal

and

Carole Hooven

have been hounded for writing about sex and gender with both scientific and moral clarity. And

David French

, a center right lawyer, Iraq war veteran, former FIRE president, and now a New York Times columnist, has received death threats from people on the right for years for the heresy of criticizing Donald Trump. When David, who has an adopted daughter from Ethiopia, briefly considered an independent presidential run in 2016, the torrent of racist abuse toward his family was grotesque.

Are these friends of mine in real danger now?

As I was working on the talk, I focused so much on the question, “What if this trend towards political violence continues on campus?” But I had to remember that the trend towards political violence had been steadily increasing for years. From the growing number of shout downs and deplatforming attempts FIRE has been logging since 1998, to the riots at UC Berkeley over conservative commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, and the assault on the professor Allison Stanger at Middlebury College over the invitation of conservative academic Charles Murray in 2017, it was clear that the line had already been crossed repeatedly — long before a bullet ended Charlie Kirk’s life.

It also occurred to me that attacks on controversial speakers were also far from a new thing, even in recent memory. In 2022, an assailant rushed the stage and repeatedly stabbed

Salman Rushdie

, one of my free speech heroes, as he prepared to talk at the Chautauqua Institution in New York. Rushdie survived, barely, but lost sight in one eye. That was a campus lecture, and what happened to him was violence aimed at ideas. It happened three years ago, but we should talk about it as if it happened yesterday because it might as well have.

This trend has been around. The question is whether we will let it stay.

So yes, I was a little scared to go to UVU. But fear without courage just hands the future to whoever is most willing to throw a punch, wield a knife, or shoot a gun.

Here’s the part where we have to reckon with a hard trend. Every year, as part of its College Free Speech Rankings, FIRE surveys students nationwide about their attitudes towards speech. This year’s results are the worst since we started asking students what kinds of responses to speech they find acceptable. More than two-thirds (68%) of students say that shouting down a speaker is at least “rarely” acceptable. A majority (52%) say it’s at least “rarely” acceptable to block peers from entering an event featuring a disfavored speaker. And nearly a third (32%) now say it’s at least “rarely” acceptable to use violence to stop a campus speech — up from 27% last year and 20% the year before.

And when students say “rarely,” what do they picture? The “rare cases” are obviously reserved for the speakers and ideas they most despise — often the ones that defy campus orthodoxy on race, gender, or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the same FIRE study, solid majorities want to bar several controversial speakers altogether — especially those viewed as conservative or blasphemous toward progressive sacred cows.

A different nationwide survey out of North Dakota State University’s Challey Institute shows the same reflex playing out in classrooms: 71% of students say professors should be reported for “offensive” statements, 57% say the same about other students, and large shares support punitive reporting in heated contexts like the Israel-Hamas war. In an environment like that, the “rare case” where students might justify force is exactly the one where a prominent conservative arrives to argue or someone questions a sacred belief. That’s the part of the moral map where too many students label argument as danger.

Adding to the tragedy of all of this is that UVU was one of the best schools in FIRE’s rankings when it came to opposing violence in response to speech. Before Kirk’s assassination, 81% of surveyed students said that violence was never acceptable. In a survey conducted after Kirk’s death, that number rose to 94% — making clear once again that actual experience with violence diminishes one’s enthusiasm for it, and brings into starker relief the bright line between violence and speech.

If we keep walking this road, we will become like “the rest of history.” We will regress to a norm in which dissent is met by punishment, where the powerful decide which claims are too dangerous to abide, and where education is not about testing one’s ideas but saving one’s soul from wrongthink. A university that treats argument itself as a threat is just a different kind of church — one without the tenet of forgiveness.

But just as it’s outrageous that I should have had any fear whatsoever to speak on a college campus, I do find it also outrageous that I fear for my organization in opposing the Trump administration. They have gone after every opponent who has ever criticized them or taken them to court. This includes publications like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, media companies like Paramount and ABC, law firms, social media platforms like YouTube, X, and Meta, and universities like Columbia and Harvard. It also includes pettier acts, such as targeting late night talk show hosts Jimmy Kimmel, Stephen Colbert, and others.

Obviously this here is not the same kind of immediate mortal fear. But Americans should never fear their government for criticizing the president or suing the state — that allowance is supposed to be our superpower. Donald Trump, however, relishes retribution in public — “I am your retribution,” he has said — and he promises to use state power to settle scores, including against media companies that criticize him. Threats and intimidation aimed at judges and prosecutors in Trump-related cases have spiked in recent years. That can never be normal in a healthy republic.

If you want a picture of “the rest of history,” it’s not subtle. Strongman despots and tyrants use fear and state muscle to crush opponents. Education becomes catechism. Heresy begets punishment. Free societies don’t automatically stay free; they choose again and again to be free. America worked because — at our best — we made a libertarian wager: When you let people think what they will and say what they think, you get more truth, more creativity, more prosperity, more innovation, more authenticity, and more safety over time than any system of control can deliver. The wager is risky, sure, but the alternative is fatal.

Being brave on campus today can be as easy — or as hard — as asking, “What if I’m wrong?” before trying to make someone else shut up. That’s courage, not the counterfeit version that reaches for force. Courage is listening to people you can’t stand, defending their right to speak, speaking your own mind, and being willing to change it.

The murder at UVU was a terrible rupture. But the way back isn’t complicated. It’s hard, but not complicated. We rebuild the old peace treaty by keeping the line between words and blows bright. We recommit to persuasion over punishment — especially when we’re sure we’re right. We teach students that argument is not an act of violence; it’s the alternative to it.

I didn’t give the polished, sweeping lecture I wrote and rewrote. And I’d be lying if I said that every stumble I had in the speech didn’t irk me when I listened to it later. But I think that’s how you know this was really from my heart, at an emotional moment in a space that had become historic for all the wrong reasons. I stood where a man died and made a simple case. America is not inevitable. It’s a choice. Let’s not become like everybody else. Let’s keep the wager. Let’s use words.

And with that, I give you my full talk at Utah Valley University, October 30, 2025:

SHOT FOR THE ROAD

As I mentioned above, I love the story of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal because it makes the point so succinctly. Here’s a clip of me speaking with FIRE’s Director of Video Ronald Baez elaborating on this idea.