In the conservative Christian movement, Charlie Kirk was more than a far-right activist — to many, including Attorney General Ken Paxton, the self-described free speech advocate who founded Turning Point USA was a martyr who died for his cause.
That sentiment was on full display Tuesday night at an event organized by the Texas Tech University chapter of the youth activist group, where Paxton gave the keynote speech — just hours after announcing the launch of “undercover operations to infiltrate and uproot leftist terror cells in Texas.”
Texas Tech’s newly elected chancellor, former Republican state Sen. Brandon Creighton, also spoke at the event, on the same day the Texas Tribune reported that the university issued new requirements that faculty remove words like “transgender, “DEI,” and “affirmative action” from their curricula.
The announcements of the day — and the seemingly contradictory free speech heralding at the Turning Point event — made it clear that the Republican leaders in attendance think speech should only be free when it aligns with conservative Christian values. And Kirk’s death is being used to justify power grabs.
“Charlie only had 31 years,” Paxton said at Cooks Garage, a car-themed bar and venue in Lubbock. “It doesn’t matter that he only had 31 years, even though we’re sad that he’s gone, some of our most impactful people in the history of the world lived about the same amount of years. Matter of fact, Jesus Christ. 33 years…Look at history after Jesus.”
Paxton continued: “The turning point was the death and resurrection of Jesus. The turning point, I believe, for Charlie Kirk’s life, was not the 31 years. The turning point was the horrific death of Charlie Kirk.”
For whatever reason, Paxton did not mention his new initiative against the “clear and present danger” of “leftist political terrorism.” But Paxton’s bombshell statement from earlier in the day cited “the martyrdom of Charlie Kirk” as a leading example of the sort of alleged leftist terror cell violence he intends to root out, despite there being no evidence Kirk’s assassin was a part of a broader left-wing conspiracy.
“Corrupted ideologies like transgenderism and Antifa are a cancer on our culture and have unleashed their deranged and drugged-up foot soldiers on the American people,” Paxton claimed in the release. “The martyrdom of Charlie Kirk marks a turning point in America. There can be no compromise with those who want us dead.”
Despite the fact that far-right extremists commit ‘far more’ violence than other groups, including those on the left, the news was welcome for many in the crowd on Tuesday night.
“It’s fantastic,” Preston Parsons, the president of the Texas Tech chapter of Turning Point USA, told The Barbed Wire. “Kirk’s last text to the deputy chief of the White House was that we need to find the funding source for these far left organizations that are spewing hate. To see Ken Paxton come out with a statement that follows Charlie’s final wish is outstanding. It’s a wonderful sign.”
Kirk, whose ideas critics have described as racist, exclusionary, and harmful, was known for his public debates on college campuses. Ironically, his death — during the middle of one such debate — has led to free speech crackdowns on campuses across the state, including at Texas Tech, where a student was arrested and expelled after making a derogatory remark at a vigil for Kirk.
“How did that work out for her,” remarked Sara Gonzales, a Blaze TV host, during her speech at the event in Lubbock. “She gone!”
In contrast, Creighton’s speech, one of his first as chancellor elect, emphasized what he saw as Kirk’s legacy: free speech.
“It’s incredible to see…so many coming together in this event, on this particular night, to have a united message that free speech is paramount,” Creighton said, “that the free exchange and civil discourse of ideas is what this nation was founded upon, and that we can do that, and that we can promote that, and we can protect that without harassment and without intimidation and without violence.”
Creighton’s words fell on a receptive standing-room only audience, who were there at the invitation of the Texas Tech chapter of Turning Point USA, a student group that only started in July of this year but has already amassed over 400 members in the wake of Kirk’s assassination.
As a state senator, Creighton authored sweeping higher education legislation that restricted free speech on campuses and banned diversity, equity, and inclusion in public colleges and universities. He resigned from his seat just days prior to the Turning Point USA event in order to accept his new role as chancellor of Texas Tech, a perch from where he plans to continue restricting the speech of his own faculty members, he said in an interview with The Barbed Wire.
“We have academic freedom and we have the First Amendment,” Creighton said. “Of course we have to respect the delicate intersection there. When we talk about sharing about the free exchange of ideas in civil discourse on campus, in those forums anything related to gender can be discussed. But in a classroom setting on a curriculum path that’s tied to the specific goal of trying to reach a degree of value for these students to go out into the free market and to provide a career and profession that really supports them and meets their expectation?”
He went on: “At the end of the day, there’s going to be an expectation of Texas families, moms and dads, parents and grandparents, and taxpayers in general, that core values are inherently a part of the culture of the academic institution.”
Exactly whose core values Creighton did not say. Presumably, he meant the sort of values that attract young conservatives to Turning Point USA rather than allowing professors to teach settled scientific fact.
“The growth of Turning Point USA…it’s incredible across the country,” Creighton said during his speech. “It’s not just the nation that’s watching, it’s the world that’s watching this effort. As Charlie would have mentioned, this is a revival.”
On that score, Creighton is aligned with the facts. Nationally, Turning Point USA claims it has members on more than 3,500 high school and college campuses — and that more than 54,000 students have asked to join the movement in the weeks since Kirk’s death.
Creighton’s push to ban the use of the word “transgender” mirrors the backwards logic of Republican “consequence culture.” Of course you’re free to talk about the reality of transgender people in the United States while on Texas Tech’s campus, just as long as you’re not a professor teaching a class. Nevermind that the professors themselves are saying this will hurt their students, who’ll graduate with a completely different understanding of biology and sociology than their peers at non-Texas schools — what matters most is that the core values of the majority are not offended.
That worldview was front and center in Cook’s Garage on Tuesday, where politics and prayer collided for an event that can only be described as part political rally, part Christian revival meeting. The event captured the character of the contemporary conservative youth movement, which Kirk helped shape prior to his death. It opened and closed with prayer and featured an additional prayer halfway through. Speakers talked of “spiritual warfare” and condemned “evil” leftist ideology while invoking their faith and quoting the Bible.
One young woman sitting within earshot explained to her friend that “the point of all of these subcultures is to fight against what’s normal, which is Christian and conservative.”
Kirk’s assassination sent a shockwave through the conservative political movement. It gave the movement a martyr figure, inspired Republican politicians to support Turning Point’s recruitment efforts, fueled a specious narrative about out of control left-wing political violence, and even reversed the polarity around so-called “cancel culture.”
At the national level, it also provided a new opportunity — in good faith or bad — to squash dissent and mockery, not just of Kirk but also of President Donald Trump and his team, like in the case of Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension.
“Cancel culture as it existed up until recently was wrong because it cancelled people for telling the truth,” wrote Bo French, the chairman of the largest GOP county party in the state, Tarrant County, in a recent post on X. “Canceling people for celebrating assassination is an entirely different prospect. One was bad and the other is good. Know the difference.” (To be clear, even Jimmy Kimmel never celebrated Kirk’s assassination.)
French has extended this logic in a series of X posts haranguing Texas Christian University in Fort Worth for allegedly canceling a Turning Points USA event featuring Paxton. (The university has denied the accusations, stating that a large and secure space could not be found in short notice.) In response, Paxton said on X he’d “look into this.”
The First Amendment specifically prevents the government from infringing upon American citizens’ rights to free speech, meaning it doesn’t protect citizens from facing consequences for things they say on the internet. But it is supposed to protect citizens from people like Paxton, who in his capacity as a government official, has demanded an investigation into students who reportedly celebrated Kirk’s death.
For Paxton to publicly announce his intention to infiltrate unnamed leftist organizations who are allegedly funding organized political violence indicates he intends to use the power of the state to go after anyone whose rhetoric is deemed unacceptable. Regardless of whether there is any evidence of a crime.
Notably, none of the examples Paxton cited in his press release were of political violence conducted by an organized group. The only one that included a supposed “ambush” was the July 4 shooting at the Prairieland ICE facility. In that case, in-depth review of the court records and interviews with defendants and their supporters, The Barbed Wire found holes that called into question the government’s narrative. In recent weeks, such government narratives have fallen apart more and more often.
Although different in the particulars, both Paxton and Creighton’s actions reveal a common thread: All this talk about free speech and freedom of expression on campus is about power, plain and simple.
Free speech is meant to protect even the most heinous speech from government intervention, including the celebration of someone’s murder. As J. Oliver Conroy wrote in The Guardian, the political right has long claimed free speech was sacred, but Kirk’s killing has inspired a broad right-wing crackdown on speech — and a new generation of young conservative activists.
“Thank God that we have these Christian these conservative sentinels nowadays, like the martyr Charlie Kirk,” Carlos Sanchez, a Texas College Republicans representative, said.
