Charlie Kirk is dead. He was a champion of free speech and he died speaking freely. He had an extraordinary reach for the young of his generation – my son, a student, and my daughter, a teenager, knew all about him. I knew next to nothing until he was shot last night.
“It’s happening”, said my daughter darkly. “This is going to be meltdown.” What she meant was that this could be the trigger for violence, at least in the US, a breakdown of the consensus that accepted that you may disagree with people but your disagreement would be confined to argument and debate, and not murder. Assassination is the end of free speech, not only because it silences the man who makes arguments but because it makes a civilised exchange of opinion less likely in the future.
