The hard right immediately escalated its attacks on universities and educators in the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination. Key leaders blamed “left-wing extremism,” railed against “radical left lunatics” and suggested that universities had fostered a climate hostile to conservative thought.
Kirk built his career with the organization he founded, Turning Point USA, attacking what he described as “rampant leftism” and “indoctrination zones” on American campuses. Kirk often spotlighted faculty and students as enemies to conservative values and advocates for Marxism. He also called college a “scam” and discouraged students from attending unless institutions returned to “traditional American values.” Tyler Robinson, the suspect in custody in connection with the shooting, attended only one semester of university in Utah before dropping out to attend a trade school.
At the university level, this climate following Kirk’s killing has significantly eroded free speech protections for faculty and staff. Many professors and teachers have faced swift termination, suspension or disciplinary measures for comments interpreted as insensitive or critical regarding Kirk’s death, often bypassing the norms of academic debate and First Amendment protections. Free speech advocates warn that these actions, paired with government-backed calls for conformity, signal a dangerous, chilling effect on academic freedom and open discourse — ironically undermining the conservative claim of defending free speech on campuses.
Even before Kirk’s death, Turning Point USA built tools like the “Professor Watchlist” under his leadership that monitored faculty. The list purports to “expose and document college professors who discriminate against conservative students and advance leftist propaganda in the classroom,” though many educators found themselves featured on the list for exercising their free speech in a personal capacity outside of the classroom. Many were targeted with harassment and feared for their safety.
An X post by media personality Liz Wheeler in the wake of Kirk’s assassination exemplified the anti-inclusive and anti-public education ideas central to the hard right:
The only way to stop the evil that assassinated Charlie Kirk is to raze the colleges & universities that indoctrinate students into hardened Marxist revolutionaries.
You heard me.
Doesn’t matter how students were raised. College turns them evil. On purpose.
We’ve been complaining about “liberal bias” on college campus for three decades. It’s not bias, people. It’s radicalization. Are we actually going to DO something to stop it?
President Trump should immediately deny every penny of federal funding—research grants, federally subsidized student loans, etc—from all colleges that propagate communist, Marxist or anti-American ideology. Squeeze them out of existence.
Oh that sounds like McCarthyism 2.0?
Damn straight it is.
Root out communism & Marxism.
Prosecute individuals and institutions that indoctrinate kids with communism.
Again, you heard me.
Wheeler added: “The ONLY way to stop this is to cut off the institutional head of the snake—to identify the people and the institutions brainwashing youth with violent communist ideology, and crush them with the law.”
Online activism on the hard right mixed conspiracy theories and anti-feminist ideas with anti-inclusive education sentiment. One X poster exemplified this by sharing one of Kirk’s social media posts. “The decline in fertility rates around the developed world is driven overwhelmingly by progressives not having kids,” Kirk wrote in August. “Conservatives in the US remain above replacement levels. We will outbreed them.” An X user reshared that post with the comment: “Until you dismantle the education system that is run by Leftists who are indoctrinating our kids 6 to 8 hours a day they don’t need to have kids when they can just indoctrinate ours. The Kirk shooter was an outlier in a Republican family who was fine until he went to college.”
Conservative organizations, public officials and far-right activists began campaigns to identify, dox and pressure employers to fire or discipline educators at all levels who made critical or unfavorable remarks on personal social media accounts about Kirk or his legacy. The co-founder of Students for Trump reposted a false social media post accusing a school administrator in Elkhorn, Wisconsin, of criticizing Kirk after his death. This resulted in the woman getting more than 800 vulgar and threatening voicemails in one weekend.
Image at top: Photo illustration by the SPLC. (Source images from iStock)
