On Monday afternoon, the FBI raided President Trump&#8217;s personal lawyer&#8217;s office. Michael Cohen, who has represented Trump for years and reportedly paid porn actress and alleged Trump paramour Stormy Daniels some $130,000 to keep her mouth shut before the election, found himself on the wrong end of the FBI&#8217;s radar, according to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/09/us/politics/fbi-raids-office-of-trumps-longtime-lawyer-michael-cohen.html?mtrref=t.co">The New York Times</a>:
<blockquote>
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan obtained the search warrant after receiving a referral from the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, according to Mr. Cohen&#8217;s lawyer, who called the search &#8220;completely inappropriate and unnecessary.&#8221; The search does not appear to be directly related to Mr. Mueller&#8217;s investigation, but likely resulted from information he had uncovered and gave to prosecutors in New York. &#8220;Today the U.S. Attorney&#8217;s Office for the Southern District of New York executed a series of search warrants and seized the privileged communications between my client, Michael Cohen, and his clients,&#8221; said Stephen Ryan, his lawyer. &#8220;I have been advised by federal prosecutors that the New York action is, in part, a referral by the Office of Special Counsel, Robert Mueller.&#8221;
</blockquote>
The FBI reportedly grabbed Cohen&#8217;s emails, tax documents, and business records as well &#8212; including communications between Trump and Cohen.
So, what in the hell does this mean?
First off, it means something serious is going on. As lawyer Ken White wrote on Twitter:
<div class="embed tweet">
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en">
A federal search of an attorney&#8217;s office is a Very Big Deal, requiring layers of approval, including at DoJ. See USAM 9-13.420 <a href="https://t.co/P41hJdXU2M">https://t.co/P41hJdXU2M</a>
&#8212; SubjectHatNotTargetHat (@Popehat) <a href="https://twitter.com/Popehat/status/983435900746018816?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 9, 2018</a></blockquote>
</div>
Second, it may mean a second investigation into Team Trump, since the article talks about Mueller referring the raid to the U.S. attorney&#8217;s office in Southern District of New York. That could very well be about the possibility of campaign finance violations separate from the Russia investigation. Trump has claimed no relationship with the payment by Cohen to Daniels.
This story will be updated as more details break.

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BREAKING: FBI Raids Office Of Trump Lawyer Michael Cohen

CONTINUE READING

On Tuesday, a judge ruled that Luigi Mangione, the murderer of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, should not be charged with first-degree murder.
The question was whether there would be <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/judge-tosses-two-terrorism-charges-against-luigi-mangione">another charge</a> of terrorism added; it was dropped.
Clearly, Luigi Mangione shooting Brian Thompson — and leaving a note talking about how this was designed to effectively terrorize people who are part of the health care system — was an act of terrorism. It was a politically motivated murder with the intent of driving terror into the hearts of people who are part of the capitalist system or part of the health care system.
The judge in this case, Justice Gregory Carro, put out a statement explaining why the legal definition of terrorism was not met. The judge stated, “The defendant&#8217;s apparent objective, as stated in his writings, was not to threaten, intimidate, or coerce, but rather to draw attention to what he perceived as the greed of the insurance industry &#8230;”
The judge’s statement is a permission structure for violence. I would ask, how would you define drawing attention to what you perceive as the greed of the insurance industry through murder?
This was definitionally terrorism. If it wasn&#8217;t to “threaten, intimidate, or coerce,” then why was someone murdered?
Mangione didn&#8217;t write an Op-Ed in The Nation about the health care system; he murdered a man. And he murdered a man, yes, with the intent to threaten, intimidate or coerce people who were members of the health care industry.
If you take this judge&#8217;s argument and you extend it to literally any terrorist group around the world, it means that there is no such thing as terrorism. It writes the definition out of existence. You could say, “Radical Islamic terrorist beheads a Wall Street Journal reporter. Well, you know, he wasn&#8217;t really meaning to threaten, intimidate, or coerce others. He was really attempting to draw attention to what he perceived to be Western intolerance.”
What a bunch of absolute garbage. 9/11 terrorists under this definition would not have been terrorists, because obviously, “Osama bin Laden was just trying to draw attention to the predations of American foreign policy in Saudi Arabia” or some such nonsense.
The permission structures for terrorism and violence are there. They are deeply embedded. They&#8217;re embedded. It is largely relegated to the Left, but there are some on the Right who are willing to countenance this sort of stuff. That’s just the reality.
This is why there were crowds outside of the courthouse when it was announced that Mangione will not face life in prison without the possibility of parole. He could easily get out while he is still 50 or 60 years old after shooting a man in cold blood in the back and then in the back of the head.
There were people celebrating that in New York City on the streets. You want to know why Zohran Mamdani could be the mayor of New York City? This is why.
Scavengers, demons. That&#8217;s what this is. There were people on the Right who were angry at me when I said that the capture of Luigi Mangione needed to end with the death penalty for Luigi Mangione, and that anybody who celebrated the death of Brian Thompson was doing something evil. Some people on the Right objected to that, and tried to create permission structures, saying, “Well, yes, he shouldn&#8217;t have done that. But, you know, there are real grievances. And if you ignore those grievances &#8230;”
It was largely relegated to the Left. But there were some horseshoe theory people on the Right who were doing that routine. The Mangione case is a key tipping point case for political violence in the United States.
And you can see those permission structures emerging in the world&#8217;s worst ways on social media. Social media has been a bane on our existence.
Until those permission structures disappear, violence like this may well become more commonplace.

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Luigi Mangione And The Permission Structures For Violence

People are lying about Charlie Kirk — and it may be they are trying to justify the violence against him. 
If your response to someone getting killed in the political realm is, “Man, too bad they were killed, but …” — if your response to that is to slander him by attributing to him beliefs he did not have, then you are part of the problem and fomenting the permission structure for violence. Charlie was as normie as they come. 
Jemele Hill, who has just made a joke of herself — it is shocking to me that at any point she was taken seriously — said Charlie believed in the <a href="https://x.com/JasonJournoDC/status/1966930974228328880">innate superiority</a> of white people. 
She is a liar. A liar. Anybody who knew Charlie, who consumed Charlie&#8217;s content, knows this isn’t true. It is an overt, complete lie, soup to nuts. Charlie literally fought a rhetorical war, a flame war with the Groypers, who do believe in white superiority. He fought to keep them out of his movement. It was called the Groyper Wars in 2019. I remember it because I was there.
“The reason he was labeled a white supremacist is because he believed in the superiority of white people, which is why he said that he would be concerned if he saw a black pilot, which is why he said that he questioned the brain processing of brilliant minds such as Joy-Ann Reid and Ketanji Brown Jackson, because he ultimately believed in the superiority of white people,” Hill stated.
She is such a liar. What he said about the black pilots was — in what is a commonly-made argument — that affirmative action assumes that black people need extra points in order to achieve the same result as a person who is not black. And what that does is seed doubt in the minds of people, who then see black people in particular slots, and that&#8217;s unfair to black people.
That was the argument that Charlie was making, that black people aren&#8217;t inferior and therefore don&#8217;t need extra points to become pilots, for example. They don’t need DEI to become good pilots. And when you stack DEI on top of the meritocracy, what you end up with is a false perception of the inferiority of particular peoples.
What Charlie said was &#8220;anti-racist.&#8221;
As far as his point about Ketanji Brown Jackson or Joy Reid not being particularly bright, he was correct, because they are not. It turns out they&#8217;re a bunch of white people who are also dumb. These happen to be black people who are dumb. Who cares?
Charlie didn&#8217;t do that because of their race; he said it because they are truly dumb.
Don Lemon — who couldn&#8217;t hold down that job over at CNN and who now has a viewership of only my viewers  — because his only viewership is when we play his clips on my show — was very upset with all the tributes being paid to Charlie. He tore into Charlie, saying, “The things that came out of Charlie Kirk&#8217;s mouth were many. Much of it was hurtful, discriminatory, ignorant. And I&#8217;ll stop there, to say the least.”
If Don Lemon says so, it must be false.
A pastor named Howard-John Wesley at the Alfred Street Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., <a href="https://x.com/etanthomas36/status/1967311612559413483">went viral</a> over the course of the last 48 hours for issuing a massive rebuke of Charlie, yelling: 
<blockquote>But I’m overwhelmed, seeing the flags of the United States of America at half-staff, calling this nation to honor and venerate a man who was an unapologetic racist and spent all of his life sowing seeds of division and hate into this land. And hearing people with selective rage, who are mad about Charlie Kirk but didn’t give a damn about Melissa Hortman and her husband when they were shot down in their home, tell me I ought to have compassion for the death of a man who had no respect for my own life. I am sorry, but there is nowhere in Bible where we are taught to honor evil. And how you die does not redeem how you lived.</blockquote>
How disgusting. Truly disgusting. Nothing he said is true. It’s this kind of rhetoric, calling Charlie “evil,” — not ISIS, not Hamas — that is all part and parcel of the far-Left attempt to paint everyone on the Right as the worst version of evil.
Longtime Washington Post writer Karen Attia was fired after falsely quoting Charlie. She accused Charlie of <a href="https://karenattiah.substack.com/p/the-washington-post-fired-me-but">saying</a>, “Black women do not have the brain processing power to be taken seriously. You have to go steal a white person’s slot.”
There should be consequences for saying vile things in the real world. We have to be pretty careful about where we apply those consequences — but we shouldn&#8217;t pretend that there should be no consequences in the real world.
And lying about Charlie in the wake of his death is truly despicable.

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Smearing The Dead: The Left Lies About Charlie Kirk

Folks, I hope you spent a meaningful weekend with friends and family.
I hope you went to church if you are Christian or synagogue if you are Jewish, spent some time with God, with your family, and with your community — because that’s what Charlie Kirk would have done had he not been assassinated last week.
There has been an amazing, uplifting reality in that millions of people are coming together to honor the memory of Charlie Kirk. Over $5 million was raised for Charlie’s family. Turning Point USA, which is Charlie’s organization, according to the New York Post, received 18,000 new chapter requests in less than 24 hours after his widow, Erika, spoke out about the assassination of her husband.
It’s all heartbreaking and horrifying in every way except that Charlie’s legacy is going to be that millions of people went to church yesterday who wouldn’t otherwise have gone to church. Tens of thousands of people are going to get politically involved with TPUSA. Millions more are going to take inspiration from Charlie.
This outpouring for Charlie is truly incredible. I hope that it’s some comfort to Charlie’s family.
Morgan Wallen <a href="https://x.com/WallStreetApes/status/1967087630757359929">paid tribute</a> to Charlie Kirk at his concert in Canada. NASCAR driver Christopher Bell <a href="https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1967071738271043918">dedicated</a> his win to Charlie over the weekend. Chris Martin of Coldplay, whom I have been critical of, did <a href="https://x.com/CNviolations/status/1966952491557556453">something</a> similar. A wide variety of NFL teams also paid <a href="https://x.com/EricLDaugh/status/1967287551682830365">tribute</a> to Charlie Kirk over the weekend.
One of the results of the tragedy is that mainstream people are coming together around the idea that the core values of the West include things like this: “I disagree with you, and we have discussions, and we don&#8217;t murder one another.”
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2280?contentProgram=The%20Ben%20Shapiro%20Show&amp;contentType=ShowEpisode&amp;elementPosition=3&amp;location=Home%20Tab&amp;row=0&amp;rowType=Home%20Featured%20Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
I still can’t even imagine. I cannot even imagine. Two young kids who are three and one, a young wife, married less than five years.
Erika Kirk released <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/well-never-surrender-erika-kirk-gives-emotional-fiery-address-following-husbands-assassination?author=Amanda+Prestigiacomo&amp;category=undefined&amp;elementPosition=30&amp;row=3&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+News&amp;rowType=Vertical+Carousel&amp;title=%E2%80%98We%E2%80%99ll+Never+Surrender%E2%80%99%3A+Erika+Kirk+Gives+Emotional%2C+Fiery+Address+Following+Husband%E2%80%99s+Assassination">a video</a> — which was truly hard to watch — of herself seated by Charlie’s casket holding his hand. She also sent an inspiring message in which she stated, “The evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination have no idea what they have done. They should all know this: if you thought that my husband’s mission was powerful before, you have no idea what you just unleashed across the country and this world.”
Erika Kirk is very involved in the Christian community, in giving. She’s been politically involved as well. For her to pick up Charlie’s mantle would not only be appropriate but an excellent thing for her to do.
Notably, the reaction to Charlie’s death has been gigantic memorials and more people going to church — and unlike the Left when they feel someone has been martyred — no violence. I would imagine that Sunday churches were packed; that’s the report I was getting from all my Christian friends. I will say that at my synagogue on Saturday, not only was it packed, but every synagogue that I know, every single synagogue that I know, had a prayer specifically for Charlie, or a speech specifically about Charlie, talking about what he meant to the country.
Charlie is not here anymore, but he’s here so long as you pick up the microphone. We all have to pick up the microphone and we all have to carry on with his message.
The best thing is that tons of people went to church, connecting with God and looking for community. That’s something Charlie would have wanted.
Tons of people are getting involved. That’s something Charlie spent his entire life building.
Charlie’s tragic death may be the turning point for America to return to faith.
And as Erika Kirk stated, “Our God is so good. So incredibly good. And we know that for those who love God, all things work together for good. For those who are called according to his purpose.”

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Churches Were Packed, Synagogues Prayed: The Awakening Charlie Kirk Always Believed In

When people say “political violence is wrong,” does that change the underlying substructure of thought that leads to a massive elevation in violence in the country of the political variety?
I don&#8217;t think it means anything to just say that political violence is wrong, because there are actual substrates of thought that lead to the elevation of the violence that compel fringe actors to go out and do things like murder Charlie Kirk.
Thus, having our politicians simply go out there and say, “We&#8217;ve got to take down the temperature; we all have to use better language,” is absolutely true, but it isn&#8217;t specific enough.
Chuck Schumer said, “The bottom line is this is a time that all Americans should come together and feel and mourn what happened. Violence, which affects so many different people of so many different political persuasions, is an affliction of America, and coming together is what we ought to be doing, not pointing fingers of blame.”
Hakeem Jeffries said, “This moment requires leadership that brings the American people together, as opposed to trying to further divide us. Political violence in any form against any American is unacceptable, and should be denounced by everyone. And moving forward, we have to figure out a better way to come together, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans.”
All of this is correct.
But all of this is incredibly vague.
I want to talk about something that we all know is true, but nobody seems to want to say: Not all ideologies are equally prone to violence.
When there is a shooting, a mass shooting at a synagogue, a mass shooting at a church, when Charlie Kirk is shot, everybody&#8217;s mind immediately goes to this: What are the likeliest probabilities in terms of who did the shooting? 
Everyone does this. We cannot pretend that we are blind to the realities of the world. When there is a shooting at a synagogue, I can tell you my mind goes to two places: radical Muslim or white supremacist. Those are usually the options. If there&#8217;s a shooting at a church, your mind might go to a trans radical or a radical Muslim. 
That&#8217;s where your mind is going to go. And this is leaving aside people who are generally mentally ill or where there&#8217;s no political ideology involved. If there is a political ideology involved, your mind immediately goes to the movements that are likely to drive people toward murder.
Not every ideology is prone to this. No one thought that when Charlie Kirk was shot, it was because of his stance on low taxes. No one thought that. We differ on all sorts of politics in this country. Nobody thought that a debate about marginal tax rates was why Charlie was shot. Nobody believes Charlie Kirk was murdered because of his stance on energy policy. 
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/ep-2279-breaking-charlie-kirk-assassin-in-custody?elementPosition=0&amp;row=0&amp;rowHeadline=The+Ben+Shapiro+Show&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
In order for an ideology, for a movement to coalesce in such a way that it allows for violence — the sort of bubbling of violence that lies at the outskirts of a movement — there have to be some preconditions.
I&#8217;ve been talking a lot about lions and scavengers. What we are seeing here is the scavengers at work. 
The basic philosophy of the scavenger is very simple: All models and civilizations are merely guises for power. My failure is a result of one of those corrupt power systems. There&#8217;s a great conspiracy out there. I am the victim. I&#8217;m being targeted. I am the actual victim. 
And thus, if there is a great conspiracy that is targeting me for destruction, I must respond in kind with violence.
This is how you get to the idiotic notion that speech is violence. 
Those are the three elements: “Morals and civilizations that I don&#8217;t like are simply guises for power,” “My failure within that system is a result of that great conspiracy and I am the victim,” and “It is an existential threat to me and therefore I must act out with violence and harm somebody.”
Let me give you three examples, and I&#8217;m going to take them from the top death threats I received. 
I receive an enormous number of death threats. I have 24/7 security on me, on my family. I literally go nowhere without an entire team of security at this point in my life. And that is because of things like what happened to Charlie.
There are three main wings that I get these threats from: Trans ideology/Marxist ideology, white supremacists, and radical Muslims. 
I want to go through each one of those and explain why these particular ideologies, why these particular movements are likely to generate violence. 
A trans ideology says that your argument about biology, that there is simply male and female, is, in fact, a guise for power. You&#8217;re doing it because you hate me; you wish to erase me. I am a victim of your failure to accept my identity, such that you&#8217;re erasing me. You&#8217;re engaging in a “trans genocide,” and therefore, you are threatening me. Your speech is a form of violence. It is wiping away my identity. 
And therefore violence ought to be met with violence.
Marxist ideology, which is derived from the same general area, is the idea that the governmental system, the free market system, is an imposition on me. It is a conspiracy from above to harm me, to destroy me. My failures inside the market are actually not my own. They&#8217;re the fault of the system. And you, as an advocate for the system, are victimizing me. You&#8217;re erasing me. You&#8217;re destroying me. And I must act with violence. There&#8217;s a reason why Marxist movements are so violent. They say that speech, advocacy for the free market, is, in fact, a system of power. It is to be met with violence. 
White supremacy: I know that there&#8217;s an attempt to pretend that this doesn&#8217;t exist, but it absolutely exists in online spaces. Pretending it doesn&#8217;t is bulls*** and everyone knows it. I know it because I&#8217;ve had to have the FBI arrest somebody who was doing this while threatening not just me, by the way, but Donald Trump Jr. 
That ideology says that white people are being put upon in the United States by an entire system. And if you&#8217;re an advocate for that system, you are threatening me with destruction, with erasure, with white genocide, and thus you must be killed. Violence is a proper response to an attempted genocide. That is the argument that is made, at root, by many white supremacists. 
I&#8217;m not talking about what the Left calls white supremacy, which is anything to the right of Hillary Clinton. I&#8217;m talking about actual, honest-to-God white supremacists. I get an awful lot of death threats from them.
Group number three, radical Muslims, who believe that the failures of the Palestinians, for example, are the result of evil Western systems. And thus, if you are an advocate for those systems, it&#8217;s because you want to erase the radical Muslims and you want to kill people and you want to commit genocide, and therefore it is fine to shoot two Israeli embassy staffers dead in Washington, D.C. That is why it is fine to throw a Molotov cocktail at an 80-year-old woman in Colorado who was protesting Israeli hostages being held. 
We all know this is true. Pretending it isn&#8217;t true doesn&#8217;t make it go away. Not all movements are equally likely to bubble up with violence.
And so when we have politicians saying political violence is bad, if you&#8217;re not speaking out against the movements that use this logic, if you&#8217;re not speaking out against the movements that say that speech is in fact a form of violence, that systems are in fact a form of violence, and that violence is the proper response to that, then you are contributing to the environment in which this kind of stuff happens. 
It is not that there are many radical Muslims in the United States, by the numbers, thank God.
It’s not that there are many white supremacists in the United States.
But by the numbers, the increasing radicalism of the Left in the United States is, in fact, a massive issue. 
The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) recently did rankings of campus free speech. And what they found is that college campuses are replete with the failure to speak your mind. 
Why? Because people are afraid of violence.
It goes all the way back to when I was in college. There&#8217;s nothing new here. I wrote my very first book, “Brainwashed: How Universities Indoctrinate America’s Youth,” in 2004 about the kind of discrimination conservatives faced on campus. And yes, there was the possibility of violence, even in 2004, not being shot, but the possibility of being physically assaulted, which is something that came close to happening to me multiple times, even when I was an undergrad. 
That&#8217;s going back 20 years, when I was warning that this was going to metastasize and take over huge swaths of the political Left. People ignored it at the time. But it was true.
I spoke in 2015 at the University of Missouri during the Black Lives Matter upsurge, after Ferguson. And I remember people asking about safety. I said, “I&#8217;m not worried about safety. There are some police there; I&#8217;ve got a security team now. No one’s going to take a shot at me. This is America. You don&#8217;t get shot in America for saying things on a college campus. This is America. I grew up in this country. This is my country. This is a country I love. This is where our fundamental value is the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. No one&#8217;s going to do this kind of stuff. No one.” 
But it&#8217;s becoming more and more common. According to FIRE, a record 1-in-3 students now hold some level of acceptance, even if only rarely, for resorting to violence to stop a campus speech. 
Now, I&#8217;m sure not everybody who believes they&#8217;re using violence thinks in terms of shooting someone to death. But when you are drawing from a pool at this point of legitimately tens of millions of young Americans, who are atomistic and isolated and don&#8217;t touch grass, it is not going to be hard to find some unhinged people who decide to take that to its logical conclusion and fire a bullet through the throat of a man who is simply attempting to speak truth to people in the friendliest possible fashion. 
I don&#8217;t like when people say “They shot Charlie,” because “they” isn&#8217;t a person. A person shot Charlie Kirk, and he shot Charlie Kirk for a deranged reason.
With that said, there are movements in which the substrate of their political thinking leads to an elevation in violence. Period. End of story. That is a reality.
And it is not enough to just say “political violence is bad” if you are not calling out the movements themselves.

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Saying ‘Political Violence Is Wrong’ Doesn’t Go Far Enough

It is easier to be a great man than to be a good man.
To be a great man very often just means you have an impact on the world, that you change people&#8217;s lives, that you create structures that make the world a better place.
But to be a good man requires you to put yourself last, and your family first. To believe in the promises of the Bible and its values, to believe that there is a good and there is a bad.
That is who Charlie Kirk was. A good man.
I believe that as he got older, Charlie focused more and more on being a good man. He got married, had two adorable children.
As a father of four, including very small children, I cannot even imagine the feelings of his wife Erika today, or the children that she will have to raise without their father there. 
And all the words that we tell ourselves — that Charlie died for something meaningful, which is obviously true — are not going to replace Charlie in the lives of his wife and children. 
It isn&#8217;t going to fill that hole because nothing can. 
On July 27, Charlie tweeted, “Get married, have kids, and stop partying into oblivion. Leave a legacy, be courageous. Happy Sunday. God Bless all the parents out there.” 
That is who Charlie was at the end of the day. Yes, obviously a public figure; yes, a hugely important public figure; and yes, a transformative public figure, particularly for young people, transformative in allowing them to open their minds about politics and consider things from a different point of view.
But what he really was could be seen in the video of Charlie with his three-year-old daughter on “Fox &amp; Friends,” when she ran to her daddy to give him a hug.
<h3><a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-ep-2278?elementPosition=2&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">WATCH: The Ben Shapiro Show</a></h3>
I watched Charlie grow from a boy into a man. I watched that happen. I watched him go from 18 to 31. We were all privileged to know Charlie, to watch Charlie work, to watch him build. He was a builder. He was a lion of a human being.
He was engaged in a tremendously difficult business, the pragmatic growth of coalition politics. People aren&#8217;t going to agree with every decision he made along the way, with every view he expressed, but what they are going to remember Charlie for is what he died doing, expressing truth in public places through open and honest debate with people who disagree.
That is what they will build statues of Charlie Kirk for.
And they should.
It&#8217;s unbelievable that we have to talk about Charlie using the past tense. It&#8217;s unbelievable and horrifying in every possible way.
On Wednesday, I read Psalm 23 for Charlie on the podcast. It states: 
<blockquote>The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters.
He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name&#8217;s sake.
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me.
Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.</blockquote>
Charlie will be dwelling in the House of the Lord forever. 
He was a good man who leaves behind a beautiful family. When people you know enter the pages of history, something happens: The brightest part of them shines through everything else. 
That&#8217;s what you&#8217;re seeing today; the brightest part of Charlie, the part of him that was about faith and family and community and Biblical values and God and country and American patriotism and, yes, free speech and debate and discussion and the vibrant, bustling democracy that is America.
Charlie spent his entire life fighting for all of that to shine through.
And every time you see a picture of Charlie, you can see it in his face. The joy with which he engaged the world, the willingness to go to battle on behalf of the country, the willingness to say things, and the willingness to go to places where people disagreed.
He was what made America great and will continue to make America great going forward, because we&#8217;re going to have to pick up that baton.
I will end with a prayer that we recite at Jewish funerals. It states:
<blockquote>Oh God, full of compassion, thou who dwells on high ground, perfect rest beneath the sheltering wings of thy presence among the holy and pure, who shine as the brightness on the heavens unto the soul of Charlie, the son of Robert, who has gone unto eternity, and in whose memory charity is offered. May his repose be in Paradise. May the Lord of mercy bring him under the cover of his wings forever. May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life. May the Lord be his possession, and may he rest in peace.</blockquote>
May Charlie rest in peace.

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Unthinkable: Charlie Kirk, 31, Assassinated

“Hi, Mr. Shapiro, I’m Charlie Kirk.”
Charlie was 18 years old when I met him at an event at The Breakers, the rather ritzy Palm Beach hotel that served as the gathering spot for the annual <a href="https://www.horowitzfreedomcenter.org/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">David Horowitz Freedom Center</a> donor weekend. Charlie had just started an organization, and he was pitching me on it, an organization called Turning Point USA. I’d never heard of it, of course: He had just graduated high school, and the group had its seed donors but was still in its infancy.
Charlie was eager, and he was aggressive, and he was whip-smart. His energy was almost exhausting.
When he walked away, I turned to my friend Jeremy Boreing and said, “That kid is going to be the head of the Republican National Committee one day.”
I was wrong. Charlie became far more important than that.
Charlie’s <a href="https://tpusa.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Turning Point USA</a> became the single most important conservative political organization in the country. And it grew because Charlie grew. He turned himself into an excellent public speaker and a talented debater. He could fundraise better than anyone in the game. He was friendly and gregarious to everyone. His drive was unmatched, because he cared about his fundamental values.
The clips of Charlie on campus — the firebrand Charlie — make for great watching, but they don’t do him full justice. Behind the scenes, Charlie was deeply thoughtful, constantly seeking ways to build and grow coalitions. That’s a messy business, and it comes with aches and pains. No one did it better. That’s how a guy who never went to college ended up as a confidant of the President of the United States, the vice president, and pretty much everyone else on the right side of the aisle.
Charlie never stopped moving. He never stopped talking and negotiating and debating and working. That infectious energy never left him. Until a killer’s bullet ripped his life from him. And there are no more words. There can be no more words.
It’s impossible to process what it means when a 31-year-old man is murdered. A husband. A father of two young children. Assassinated, it would appear, for the crime of passionately speaking the truth, debating politics and discussing ideas, and working to make the country a better place as he saw it.
But here’s one thing we do know: This all has to stop. It’s an ugly picture that we’ve seen before. The 1960s and 1970s were a time of tremendous change in American history, and of tremendous violence. Political assassinations became commonplace; bombings and terror attacks were excused by a variety of supposedly great intellectuals. And eventually, America rejected all of it. Now, we’re watching the same ugly picture reappear.
A wave of violence is building, from the assassination of Charlie Kirk to the attempted shooting of President Trump, from the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson to the slaying of two Israeli embassy staffers. All of these acts of extreme violence have found support in the dark precincts of political radicals.
The temperature in our country has steadily been rising. And it’s been rising because many people have determined that their political opponents aren’t just opponents, but enemies, threats to their very existence. That determination by fringe actors is often reinforced in the online spaces that prize virality and mirror emotional excess. And then, it breaks free from the world of the online, into real life, with bloody and horrific consequences.
Yes, that phenomenon crosses the political aisle. But to pretend that the phenomenon is distributed equally would be a mistake. The rising tide of violence on the left has become more and more virulent over the course of the last several years. The argument that speech is violence, to be met with violence; the argument that opposition to contention amounts to a form of “genocide” or “erasure”; the argument that political opponents are moments away from ending our republic outright. These views all trend toward revolutionary violence.
And the wave of violence, a wave already breaking on the shoreline, appears as though it is only the beginning. It has already destroyed Charlie Kirk’s family and ended his life at the age of 31.
But it feels as though a tsunami is coming. The water has already receded from the shoreline. And what comes next could be far more devastating even than what we have seen thus far.
That tsunami, if left unchecked, will wash away this entire republic.
I’ve spoken at dozens of college campuses; I’ve required heavy security at many of them. My security has instructed me to wear bulletproof vests, insisted on metal detectors, told me to leave venues they considered nonsecure. And yet I’ve never truly felt unsafe, because to do so would be to accept—even consider—the idea that an American would truly harm someone simply for speaking freely in the United States of America. I don’t believe that anymore. I’m not sure who does.
So, what can be done? It’s frequently said by those of politically liberal persuasion that thoughts and prayers aren’t enough. That action is necessary. But here is the truth: We need more thoughts and prayers. Thoughts for our political opponents: recognition that while we disagree, they are our fellow Americans; understanding that the freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States can hold only if we treat each other as friends, not enemies; realization of the fact that speech is not violence, and that we must, as Americans, speak with each other. The way Charlie did.
And we need prayers: prayers for our country, which is torn apart, under attack from within and without; prayers for our own souls, that we hold ourselves accountable for the way we treat others.
Our America is a robust place of discussion and debate, of liberty and rights. But all of that must be undergirded by basic virtue. Basic decency. Respect for others. And yes, reverence for the uniqueness of an America that values speech and deplores violence.
Charlie had that reverence. And for that, he was murdered.
May his memory be a blessing—for us, and for our bleeding nation.
Editor&#8217;s note: this piece also <a href="https://www.thefp.com/p/ben-shapiro-the-assassination-of-charlie-kirk" target="_blank" rel="noopener">ran in The Free Press.</a>

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The Assassination Of Charlie Kirk And The Fight For America’s Soul

Opinion

Donald Trump

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The media’s coverage of Charlie Kirk’s death has been utterly horrific. If your family still watches mainstream news, it’s time to turn it off.


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The Federal Reserve cuts interest rates for the first time in nearly a year, Secretary of State Rubio gives a stern warning to foreigners celebrating the death of Charlie Kirk, and President Trump is once again giving TikTok more time. Get the facts first with Evening Wire.

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Cecilia Stevenson, producer of Triumph Of The Heart, joins me for a riveting discussion about the historical figure who inspired the movie: Maximilian Kolbe–a Polish priest who sacrificed himself at Auschwitz to save another man's life. During our conversation, we discussed the process of producing, funding, and green-lighting the film.


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A week after our friend Charlie Kirk’s brutal assassination, the questions keep piling up: Who radicalized his killer?  Why did Democrats in Congress “boo” when prayers were offered? And why is the media working overtime to cover for the Leftist rhetoric that inspired this violence?

Today we sit down with the beautiful Congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna, longtime friend of Isabel and Charlie Kirk. She’s the one and only former Turning Point USA media personality turned sitting Member of Congress. Together, we unpack the urgent need for a strong legislative response to this unacceptable political violence.

Rep. Luna reveals details on a new federal investigation into the groups funding, training, and encouraging this radicalism and explains how Charlie’s murder echoes the tragedies of RFK, JFK, and Martin Luther King, Jr.

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