Longtime conservative pundit and podcaster Ben Shapiro vowed this week to continue going to college campuses to host events in the wake of the killing of Charlie Kirk.
Kirk, the popular MAGA influencer, was gunned down on Wednesday at Utah Valley University while hosting one of his patented “Prove me wrong” debates with students.
Shapiro joined The Free Press’s Bari Weiss to discuss the impact the shooting is having on free speech.
“There’s an attempt right now to basically say, if you shut up, you will be safe. And if you speak out politically, there’s a good shot that some unhinged actor is going to take that as a threat and then come and try and kill you,” Shapiro said, adding:
Yeah, I mean, there will be. I’ve told my security team I will never again do an outdoor event. It’s not possible because there are too many vantage points, there are too many overlooks. If we do indoor events, those indoor events—I’m gonna try and mandate as far as possible metal detectors, because it’s not like a normal circumstance, you know, going to the grocery store in Florida where a bunch of people are armed.This is like an actual political event. We now know that people are legitimately targeting folks for death at these events. You know, we’re gonna have to contain the environment an awful lot more. And a lot of
these sort of viral nature of the debates—I don’t know how it’s gonna be possible, frankly, to ever again, at least for the foreseeable future, do the kind of thing that Charlie did where it was like, okay, you get up three feet from me and now we have an open debate in an open-air setting.I just don’t think from a safety and security point of view that’s even remotely possible anymore. And that’s not going to stop me from—there are rumors going around that I’m not going to do campuses anymore, which is absolute nonsense.
While making clear he will take new security measure, including no more outdoor events, Shapiro promised to keep speaking on college campuses.
“I’m planning on a wide variety of campuses, and I’m sure that I am not the only one this year, because if what Charlie died for means anything, it means that we have to keep actually going into these spaces and having these debates. But it’s going to change the nature of security just the same as when it came to airports. 9/11 changed the nature of security,” he concluded.
Watch the clip above.