The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, FIRE, just released its 2026 College Free Speech Rankings. The message is not good. In fact, it’s bad. But among the bad news is the terrible news that “a record 1 in 3 students now holds some level of acceptance – even if only ‘rarely’ — for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech.” For years, FIRE, and I, have tried to argue that violence is never an acceptable response to speech. It hasn’t gone well.

“More students than ever think violence and chaos are acceptable alternatives to peaceful protest,” said FIRE Chief Research Advisor Sean Stevens. “This finding cuts across partisan lines. It is not a liberal or conservative problem — it’s an American problem. Students see speech that they oppose as threatening, and their overblown response contributes to a volatile political climate.”

The day after FIRE released its ranking, Charlie Kirk was assassinated at Utah Valley University.

Yesterday, an assassin’s veto silenced Charlie Kirk, just as it silenced the journalists and cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo a decade ago, and just as it attempted to silence Salman Rushdie in 2022. But we cannot let the censors win. We cannot let violence prevail. We can and must come together in defense of our rights to be who we are and to speak our minds.

Some on the left despised what Kirk had to say. Whether that was the impetus for his murder remains to be seen, as the shooter remains at large and we can only speculate about the reason for his murder. No, it’s hardly a stretch to assume it was political, but then, other assassinations and attempts were motivated by bizarre reasons. When John Hinkley tried to assassinate President Reagan, it was to impress actress Jodie Foster. It can be hard to ascribe purpose to the severely mentally ill.

But regardless of what the actual reason turns out to be, the reaction to Kirk’s killing raises very real concerns about who we are, what we’ve become, and where we want to go from here. Are we a nation of people who can disagree and debate, or a nation of people who disagree and hate, and believe that we must kill or be killed?

You can dislike much of what Kirk believed and the following statement is still true: Kirk was practicing politics in exactly the right way. He was showing up to campuses and talking with anyone who would talk to him. He was one of the era’s most effective practitioners of persuasion. When the left thought its hold on the hearts and minds of college students was nearly absolute, Kirk showed up again and again to break it. Slowly, then all at once, he did. College-age voters shifted sharply right in the 2024 election.

If you read back, you’ll see debates I had with friends like Elie Mystal over the years about the need to moderate the extremes and create reforms that we could all live with. Not only did I think the woke reforms were wrong, untenable and too extreme to survive, but that there would be an inevitable backlash that would bring us back to the worst of where we were before the SJWs, as they called themselves back then, believed they would take over the world. It turned out I was right. What I did not appreciate, however, was the extent to which young people would embrace violence as the tool for vindicating their anger and hatred.

Political violence is a virus. It is contagious. We have been through periods in this country when it was endemic. In the 1960s there were the assassinations of John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy and Medgar Evers. In the 1970s, Gov. George Wallace was shot by a would-be assassin but survived, and Gerald Ford faced two assassination attempts in one month. In 1981 Ronald Reagan survived after John Hinckley Jr.’s bullet ricocheted off his rib and punctured his lung. These assassins and would-be assassins had different motives, different politics and different levels of mental stability. When political violence becomes imaginable, either as a tool of politics or a ladder for fame, it begins to infect hosts heedlessly.

In the past, political violence was very much the outlier, the weapon of nutjobs who were roundly excoriated by the American people, regardless of their political persuasion. For the most part, social media reactions to Charlie Kirk’s assassination have reflected the decency one would expect, or at least hope for, of society. But then, there have been those who celebrated murder, as they bizarrely did with Luigi Mangione, and those who saw Kirk’s murder as the excuse to call for retaliation against the “left” who wanted to murder them.

There were far more of these sick reactions than would be expected. And the current Oval Office occupant, never one to take the high road, contributed to the worst response possible. And if FIRE’s ranking are correct, and they’ve proven horribly accurate thus far, this bodes very poorly for political violence going forward.

As social justice began to reveal itself on campus, many believed that these were just silly, foolish children and they would grow out of it when they got jobs in the real world. Turns out, they were wrong. Hoping that they will grow out of this acceptance of political violence as a legitimate reaction to speech they despise seems very likely to take the same path. That path leads only to division and death. We can’t let that happen.