From the opinion pages of the Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Jerry Baker.

Hello and welcome to Free Expression from the Wall Street Journal with me, Jerry Baker.

I'm editor at large of the journal. Thanks very much indeed for joining us.

Please do subscribe wherever you do your podcast listening. Leave us a nice review and give us a like. It helps, obviously, with the circulation of the podcast. I'm coming to you in sound and vision this week for the first time. It's a great pleasure. Pleasure for me, maybe less of a pleasure for those of you have to view me. But it's been obviously a traumatic week in America. We've had the assassination last week

of Charlie Kirk, the conservative activist and communicator, shall we say, in Utah, a shocking event,

perhaps a disturbing step up or down, depending on how you view it, in the cycle of political violence that the

country seems to have been going through over the last decade or so, attempted assassination

of the President Trump last year, murder of democratic lawmakers in Minnesota. This seems to be

unfortunately something that does seem to be escalating. It's tragic. It's particularly tragic. I think the

murder of Charlie Kirk, whether you liked him or disliked him or agreed with him, Kirk was

doing something that, I think, in this increasingly polarized and partisan society that we have,

was doing something important, which was going out and talking to people and persuading.

Again, you may not have liked his style with some things he said were perhaps objectionable to some

people, but he was at least engaging. He made a point of going out and engaging with people who

disagreed with him, trying to persuade them to his view. And he was obviously incredibly

successful. He was an extremely influential figure, particularly I think in tackling the kind of

left-wing progressive hegemony that controlled so many of our university campuses. My sense from

talking to people who knew him, I didn't, but people who were influenced by him was that he kind of

gave young people the liberty, the opportunity, the permission, if you like, to challenge

these dominant progressive views and was very influential as a result in his losses. It is a tragedy and, as I say, a worrying further step down into this vortex of violence that we seem to be in. I'm not planning to talk about that in too much detail. There's been a lot covered. I wrote my column this week about

what I view as the sort of, as the kind of horror, the corruption of the human soul that we're

seeing through so much that happens online and social media that we've seen, not only the images

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