Conservative speakers vow to continue after Charlie Kirk assassination

After the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk sent shockwaves through the political landscape this week, Fox News Digital spoke to several high-profile conservative speakers about the future of the movement and the influence Kirk’s legacy and style will have on it. 

“Conservatives will not be silenced,” Heather Mac Donald, Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal, told Fox News Digital, adding that Kirk “would not have been silenced” so conservatives should “emulate his courage.”

Columnist and commentator Bethany Mandel told Fox News Digital that Kirk’s assassination was “absolutely an effort to try to silence conservatives” and that “we have to resist the temptation to allow that.”

“We need to keep speaking out and double down on not only Charlie’s message, but his methodology,” Mandel said.

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Kirk was assassinated on Wednesday while speaking to thousands of students at Utah Valley University when a gunman positioned on a nearby roof fired a single shot, striking Kirk in the neck.

Kirk was rushed to Timpanogos Regional Hospital, where he was pronounced dead, prompting an outpouring of support from conservatives across the globe, including President Trump who called the killing a “dark moment for America.”

On Friday, authorities announced that they had arrested a suspect, 22-year-old Utah resident Tyler Robinson.

“Charlie Kirk was a good man,” John Ashbrook, co-host of the conservative podcast Ruthless, told Fox News Digital. “And his legacy will endure because none of us will ever forget his leadership nor the voice he provided for millions of regular people across this country.”

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Mac Donald told Fox News Digital that it is “hard to imagine” Kirk was killed for “any other reason than that he was breaking the stranglehold of anti-Western ideology on college campuses and beyond.”

“It was sadly fitting that he was killed at a college campus, and not even one known for its leftward leanings, since colleges are the seed bed of modern day speech suppression and the false equations that political contrarian speech = hate speech and that hate speech may be snuffed out—apparently by any means necessary,” Mac Donald said. 

“The killer apparently agreed with those would-be censorers.  The self-centeredness and historical and moral ignorance of coddled American students has bloomed into something more pernicious, as the beatification of Luigi Mangione already showed.”

Going forward, in terms of security at events for prominent conservative speakers, Mandel called on campuses and cities that “claim to care about the future of America and civil discourse” to step up and “ensure adequate security.”

“We should not have to pay tax in the form of security in order to safely share our political opinions,” Mandel told Fox News Digital. 

Conservatives have rallied around Kirk’s style of speaking out publicly and exchanging ideas with those who disagree, including prominent influencer Ben Shapiro who wrote on X that “we will never stop debating and discussing.”

“We will never stop standing up for what America is and what she should be,” Shapiro said, adding that he intends to continue speaking at colleges across the country despite the inherent dangers. 

Mac Donald told Fox News Digital, “It is a cliché and self-serving to say: they fear us because we are winning, but presumably, there is less of a perceived need to efface someone who is losing a cause anyway. Kirk was feared because he was winning.”