One Year Later: Charlie Kirk Is Gone, but the Fight He Died for Is Just Beginning

This week marks one year since Charlie Kirk was gunned down in broad daylight – shot while doing the very thing the First Amendment exists to protect: standing in an open courtyard, microphone in hand, inviting anyone in the crowd to challenge him.

“Prove me wrong” was his standing offer to a generation of students.

A year later, the wound hasn’t healed. And at the ACLJ, we’ve watched something else happen in Charlie’s absence – offshoots of the same fight he spent his career waging. Across classrooms, campuses, and small-town coffee shops, Americans who have simply tried to honor or discuss Charlie have found themselves punished, sued, and silenced.

Kirk was killed for exercising his First Amendment rights, and in the year since, we’ve had to go to court, again and again, to defend the First Amendment rights of ordinary Americans simply for discussing the assassination. It’s exactly what free speech advocates warned would happen – and it’s exactly why our work didn’t end when Charlie’s life did.

Long before his name was etched into the national conscience, the ACLJ stood alongside Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA when federal agencies worked to suppress his voice and the voices of millions of other conservatives online. Kirk had built an enormous following by the 2020 election – and then the Department of Homeland Security and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency pressured platforms to suppress conservative accounts under the banner of combating “misinformation.” We took on the Deep State’s censorship apparatus on his behalf as part of a wave of cases challenging the same unconstitutional playbook.

That fight for Charlie’s voice while he was alive is inseparable from the fight we’re now waging in his memory. We didn’t discover this commitment in the wake of tragedy – we had already stood up when it mattered.

What has unfolded over the last 12 months should alarm every American, regardless of politics. Instead of using Charlie’s assassination as a moment to recommit to civil discourse, institutions across the country have used it as a pretext to punish speech.

1. A Hawaii teacher shut down for teaching the Constitution – on Constitution Day. The irony here is almost impossible to overstate. A middle school history teacher’s eighth graders began discussing, on their own, Kirk’s assassination and the earlier attempt on President Trump’s life.

One student suggested that killing the President for his views “wouldn’t be so bad.” The teacher didn’t inject her own politics – she corrected the student, explaining plainly that violence is never an acceptable response to speech, and asked the class to name other historical figures who were killed for what they said. Students landed on Martin Luther King Jr., John F. Kennedy, and Abraham Lincoln.

A parent complained, and the school’s response wasn’t to commend a teacher for turning a tragedy into a genuine constitutional lesson – it was to summon her to the vice principal’s office, place a disciplinary memo in her file, and order her to shut down any further student discussion of undefined “controversial” topics, under threat of further discipline.

This happened on Constitution Day, the one day each year that federal law requires schools to actually teach the document at the center of this entire case. The ACLJ sent a formal demand letter to Hawaii education officials on our client’s behalf, laying out in detail why the school’s actions violated her rights, and after our letter, the government of Hawaii backed down.

2. A Kansas sixth grader silenced for naming his hero. At Marshall Elementary School in Eureka, Kansas, a guidance counselor assigned sixth graders a project called “Find Your Voice,” inviting students to identify someone they admired.

When one student wrote Charlie Kirk’s name on the board, the counselor grew visibly uncomfortable, declared out loud that Kirk was “not a hero,” and had the student teacher erase his name in front of the class. When a second student named President Trump, the counselor’s response escalated further – banning all political and religious figures from the assignment entirely, even as other students’ secular role models were left on the board untouched.

Our client, the student’s mother, refused to let it go unanswered. She testified before the Kansas Senate about what happened to her son, and the ACLJ stood right beside her. No American child should learn, at 11 years old, that naming the wrong hero in a classroom makes you a target.

3. A coffee shop tried to punish the truth – and lost. In Florida, our client and his family were at a coffee shop when they witnessed another customer wearing a shirt widely understood to celebrate Kirk’s assassination – and heard an employee tell the customer she “loved it.” Our client did nothing more than any American is entitled to do: He described what he’d seen and heard in a Facebook post.

The coffee shop’s response wasn’t to address what its own employee had said. It was to sue our client for defamation, even though it never disputed the underlying facts of his account. We stepped in to defend him.

Faced with the prospect of having to defend its claims in court, the coffee shop folded, filing a notice of voluntary dismissal and walking away from its own lawsuit.

Three different cases. Three different states. Three completely different fact patterns. And yet the same story: Americans shut down for discussing the assassination of a man who was killed for voicing his opinions.

Charlie Kirk’s assassination should have been a wake-up call to de-escalate hostility and embrace open, peaceful speech. Instead, in case after case we’ve handled this year, we’ve seen a weaponization used to silence speech – as if the lesson of a man shot for talking openly is that everyone else should now talk less.

We refuse to accept that. It is the opposite of what Charlie Kirk stood for, and it is the opposite of the ideals of the First Amendment.

That’s why the ACLJ is in courtrooms, legislative chambers, and school district offices across this country defending the right of teachers, students, parents, and ordinary Americans to talk honestly about what happened to Charlie Kirk – and to name him, without apology.

Take action with the ACLJ. Sign our petition: Defeat the Left’s War on Freedom.