The assassination of Turning Point CEO Charlie Kirk has shocked the Western world, and in particular, young conservatives who saw his good-faith debates as an escape from a hostile learning environment.
It’s hard to believe that a 31-year-old father of two could be shot in the throat in front of both his family and a crowd while having a conversation.
University campuses are meant to be a cradle of learning – not a slaughterhouse.
We should all be deeply concerned about the normalisation of political violence, and it would be wrong to assume that this dark chapter has closed with his death.
Political leaders have a responsibility to promote peace and democracy.
Voters take their lead from elected leaders and so today I call on every member of the Senate and House of Representatives to lead. Make a declaration against violence.
A lack of clear leadership on this topic risks isolating young conservative Australians who are frightened by the celebration of their peers. They need our support. They need to trust that they are safe.
Western politicians are not paying attention to the rising tensions among young voters. Additional deaths are being called for, and political violence is being discussed as casually as we might chat about the weather.
This behaviour is a natural response to the new paradigm that ‘words are literally violence’. If words are violence, they can be responded to with violence. At first this belief was used to justify censorship. Now, it’s being used to justify violence.
This is wholly unacceptable. If there is one lesson that Charlie Kirk put forward, it’s that conversation is the pathway to peace.
Charlie would want us to have more debates.
Talking is what keeps us away from violence.
Look what happened in Nepal where the communist government used a social media ban to conceal its corruption and silence political opposition. Gen Z rose up in revolution, and then that revolution was taken over by criminal and depraved forces who spread violence, mayhem, destruction, and left the impoverished country in flames.
This is not the future we want for the West.
We do not want to open the door to civil unrest or malicious actors who want nothing more than to destroy our peace.
The answer to this rising normalisation of violence among the young Left is not to push social media censorship demands. Rather, we should insist the education system encourage and facilitate open debate. Australian universities are active participants in the censorship of conservative thought. Universities have allowed disruptive protest groups to hound and intimidate. Sometimes, the administration encourages it. That must end.
Western Civilisation is built on the free and unfearing pursuit of knowledge, not paranoid gatekeeping.
Our political class must immediately walk back its undemocratic desire to censor young people on social media and stop pretending that its pursuit of ‘misinformation and disinformation’ is anything other than a cynical attempt to shut people up.
If you have a political idea, it must be won in the fire of debate – not with the match.
Charlie waded into the thick of propagandised university thought and sought to help young minds escape the prison of dogma built for them by their lecturers, politicians, and peers.
He did what the rest of us should aspire to do.
Charlie invited students to a fair debate which usually became a patient attempt to return each person back to first principles. It was here, with the implementation of reason and knowledge, that so many young people found their way back to the truth.
His approach to freedom of speech was to educate, not indoctrinate.
To open minds.
Donald Trump says that Charlie Kirk is: ‘A martyr for truth and freedom.’
For Australia, let him be a warning for us to change our ways and correct our course. While we are still one united people, our children can be brought together in conversation to disagree peacefully and build a civilisation.
