Staff Reports
When a sniper’s bullet ended Charlie Kirk’s life on September 10, 2025, the nation recoiled in horror at an act of political violence that played out in front of thousands of students. That assassination — at Utah Valley University during a Turning Point USA event — forced Americans to face the sharpest consequences of our poisoned political discourse.
Within days law enforcement rounded up a suspect, and prosecutors say the man accused confessed and left messages that tied his motive to hatred of Kirk’s public persona. The swift arrest and the charges brought against the accused made it clear this was a targeted act, not some random campus tragedy, and the justice system moved to treat it as the political crime it appears to be.
Predictably, the same corners of the media and culture that spent years branding conservatives “Nazis” and “racists” rushed to use Kirk’s death as an occasion to reframe his life instead of confronting a murderer. Opinion pieces in outlets on the left insisted the moment should be used to catalogue and condemn Kirk’s rhetoric, turning grief into political scoring rather than sober reflection.
So should conservatives start taking those labels — Nazi, racist, fascist — as if they were neutral, factual accusations? The answer is no, not without context. Those words have been hollowed out by repetition and weaponized as blunt instruments to silence dissent; if conservatives accept the slur without pushing back, they lose the argument and the ability to defend the values that built this country.
That does not mean conservatives should reflexively ignore legitimate criticism. Turning Point chapters and a handful of loud, odious actors have given the left real ammunition to exaggerate and exploit, and our movement has to be honest about bad actors in its ranks while refusing to be defined by them. The left’s broad-brush labeling thrives when Republican leaders dodge accountability; conservatives should clean house where necessary and then point out that entire movements are being smeared for the worst behavior of a few.
Finally, the right must answer two calls at once: demand justice for a murdered leader and refuse to let fanatical opponents weaponize his death to crush free speech. We should press prosecutors to pursue every evidentiary lead and enhancements tied to political motive while also fighting back rhetorically against the mob that reduces complex human beings to caricatures. In that fight we don’t concede labels — we force the left to reconcile its own rhetoric with its professed values of fairness and due process.
Patriots who love liberty, faith, and America should mourn Charlie Kirk, defend peaceful political debate, and resist the lazy chants that seek to obliterate an entire ideology with a single word. Stand firm for truth, insist on accountability, and let the courts and the facts do their work — while never letting the left’s slurs become the new normal for public life.
