Nico Perrino, the Executive VP of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE) has authored “Charlie Kirk’s assassinationViolence must never be a response to speech.”
Unfortunately, since 2021, we’ve seen a steady rise in support for violence in response to speech on campus. Earlier this week, we released our finding that one in three students express some support for the use of violence to stop a campus speech. That’s up from 20 percent only three years ago. While we do not know the identity of the gunman, what happened yesterday is indicative of a broader cancer in our body politic that we must address.
But it must not be addressed with censorship.
For more than 25 years, FIRE has challenged colleges that use speculative and amorphous security rationales to justify censoring controversial speakers. Through public records requests and other means, we’ve often found these rationales serve as a pretext to shut down debate and capitulate to demands for censorship. Indeed, according to our Deplatforming Database, Kirk was the subject of at least 14 attempts to stop him from speaking on campuses since 2021. Over the years, FIRE has repeatedly written to colleges that sought to silence Kirk’s organization and supporters.
The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead once observed: “The purpose of thinking is to let the ideas die instead of us dying.”
[Supp 2025.09.12]
Charlie’s own words . . .
