The Chilling Effect of Violence

Reflections After the Assassination of Charlie Kirk

Yesterday night, my wife and I attended a candlelight vigil at Duke Chapel hosted by the Duke College Republicans to honor Charlie Kirk. Several dozen students arrived at exactly 10:14 — because Charlie’s birthday was 10/14 — and lit candles and offered prayers in his honor.

The students were joined by the GOP Chairwoman of the Durham’s 4th Electoral District and the GOP Chairman of North Carolina. The Chairwoman was a young mother, 9 months pregnant with her second child. Her husband stood by her side like a watchful Secret Service agent. They’re a beautiful couple, like Charlie and Erika were. The Chairman arrived exhausted. He’d driven in from Charlotte, two hours away, where he’d been mourning the murder of Iryna Zaruska. Now it was time for him to mourn another murder.

I imagine similar scenes unfolded everywhere across the country, gatherings of grievers paying their respects to the murdered martyr. Some of the gatherings might have been large. Ours was small. Duke, like every “prestigious” university, is an epicenter of leftism, and Durham (where Duke is located and where I live) is a bastion of Democratic voters; there are only 700 Republicans in my entire voting precinct. The four-score students in attendance must have been 10% of them.

The assembly had to come together under police protection. Duke had placed three Campus Police cars around the Chapel to secure the area from other students. When we took photographs to commemorate the event, we made sure not to capture anyone’s face.

We prayed. We cried. Afterwards we went home. I made soup and we ate. Amy was so sad that the dog noticed and he pawed her until she laughed. I sipped soup and wondered what, if anything, I should even write about this all. I don’t like to say anything unless I think I have something meaningful to say.

A number of remarkable writers have already penned moving memorials for Charlie Kirk, better than I could write. Others have written rousing calls to action, by our government, by our fellow citizens, by anyone who cares about freedom and order. John Carter has done both at once, in his essay Peace Has Been Murdered, and Dialogue Has Been Shot in the Throat.

Peace Has Been Murdered, and Dialogue Was Shot In the Throat

I’m not going to say anything more powerful than that, and I’m not going to try. Instead I’m going to write about something I have first-hand knowledge about, in the hopes that my knowledge can be meaningful even if my rhetoric is not.

The Chilling Effect of Violence and the Cost of Speaking Freely

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, many pundits began to discuss the “chilling effect” that his murder will have on free speech.

The phrase “chilling effect on free speech” isn’t an idiom. It’s an actual legal precedent developed by the U.S. Supreme Court First Amendment cases of the mid-20th century. The phrase first appears in Wieman v. Updegraff (1952), where Justice Felix Frankfurter noted that vague loyalty oaths could have a “chilling effect” on teachers’ freedom of association, though the exact phrase wasn’t yet a doctrinal centerpiece. A decade later, in Lamont v. Postmaster General (1965), the Court’s majority declared that a regulation relating to communist political propaganda imposed a “chilling effect” on the exercise of First Amendment rights because people might avoid requesting material out of fear of government scrutiny. Afterwards, the concept became central to First Amendment jurisprudence. It referred to laws or policies that discourage or deter the exercise of free speech rights, even if they don’t outright ban speech.

Because American jurisprudence forbids regulations which might have a “chilling effect” on free speech, Charlie Kirk was able to speak freely in ways he wouldn’t have been able to elsewhere. In the United Kingdom, Charlie would already have been jailed for “hate speech.” The United States, thanks to the foresight of the authors of the Bill of Rights, has the strongest protection for free speech found anywhere in the world. The government does not chill our speech, not directly.

But there are other ways by which speech can be chilled. Murder is certainly one of them — but violence short of murder will usually suffice. More than a few people at last night’s vigil confessed to us that they wouldn’t have come without the presence of campus police to assure their safety. In the months and years ahead, many Americans will choose to stay silent for fear that their words will get them killed or hurt.

Yes, many will still courageously speak out. But courage alone cannot prevail; courage alone cannot pay the bills that come due.

As I wrote 5 years ago in Tyranny, Inc., private actors actively erode the freedoms that government dares not abridge. One of the subtle ways that they destroy freedom is by making freedom too expensive to afford.

We speak of the cost of freedom paid by heroes like Charlie Kirk. They pay that price with their livelihoods, their reputations, their health, and sometimes, as Charlie did, with their lives.

But there can also be, for those who want to speak up, a literal cost of freedom, a cash cost, and it can be high indeed. Imagine the following. A young man, inspired by Charlie Kirk’s legacy, sets up a conservative foundation to conduct speaking tours of college campuses. As he recruits team members, he discovers he needs officer and director insurance. As he raises funds, he finds out he needs general liability insurance to reassure the investors. As he begins to book venues, he discovers that he is required to have insurance to cover their risk. How much insurance does he need, and how much will it cost?

As it happens, I know exactly how much. In April 2017, when I became CEO of MILO Inc., it became my responsibility to secure insurance for Milo Yiannopoulos’s 2017-2018 college campus tour. This turned out to be “non-trivial.”

In February 2017, at a speaking engagement at UC Berkeley, Milo had been confronted by over 1,500 protestors, most of them affiliated with ANTIFA. Outraged that Milo said “feminism is cancer,” these mostly peaceful protesters set fires, threw rocks and fireworks, attacked students, and then migrated into downtown Berkeley where they began looting. Three people were injured and property damage exceeded $100,000. Unlike yesterday, no one was killed.

Even so, it was more than enough to make MILO Inc almost uninsurable. If ANTIFA was willing to go on a rampage each time he spoke, the potential liability facing the company could be in the millions of dollars at every venue. No insurance firm in the United States was willing to insure MILO Inc.

We ultimately found a brave international broker who assembled a package for us from Lloyds of London. Here’s what MILO Inc. needed in order to secure financing and set up its 2017-2018 speaking tour:

Before we could proceed with our first event, we had a bill for $282,441, payable in installments of $23,536 per month.

That was just the premium to the insurance company to guarantee that if something went wrong, the liability would be covered. Those funds did nothing to actually prevent things from going wrong. For that, we had to hire private security.

For Milo’s 2017-2018 tour, we retained a security firm led by an ex-Navy SEAL that fielded special operators trained in VIP protection. The firm recommended two to four operators for each engagement, with different operators assigned to advance security, close security, and so on. We needed security before the events, security during the events, and security after the events. The operators insisted on having separate SUVs for transport and screening.

The cost for security was $41,700 per month. That’s $34,500 for the security guards and $7,200 for security SUVs. Add up $23,536 for insurance and $41,700 for security and you get $65,236 per month. That’s $782,832 per year just for security and insurance. The total budget for the entire company was (adjusted for inflation) $3.84 million per year. 20% of our budget was security and insurance.

Could MILO Inc. have spent less insurance? No, we couldn’t. The rates above got us the minimum insurance package we needed to secure venues, and they came after I shopped around for months.

Could we have spent less on security? Obviously, yes. The contractors we used were elite; they were the sort of contractors who protect billionaires and politicians. They’d been “recommended” (e.g. mandated) to us by the ultrahigh net worth family that funded MILO Inc. The company’s backers wanted to make sure the company’s most valuable asset was protected from those who’d harm him. I’d never run such a high-risk company before, so I took their word that it was needed.

In the aftermath of Charlie Kirk’s assassination it’s hard to claim they were wrong. No, Milo was never shot, thank God. But he easily might have been. He certainly received death threats, lots of them. More than once his security detail had to physically protect him. One of the contractors told me that working on Milo’s security detail was “spicy.” That’s not something you want to hear from a guy from Delta Force.

How much did MILO Inc earn from its million-dollar investment in security and insurance?

Nothing.

We were not able to hold a single event.

Every single stop on the MILO Inc. campus tour was cancelled because of threats of violence from outraged protestors. Every single one. The threat of violence didn’t just cost us money - it made it impossible to book shows or earn money.

“Don’t worry, we’re insured for million in damages and we’ll bring our own NAVY Seals” ended up not being good messaging when it came time to sign contracts with venue operators. Not when the venue operators themselves were getting death threats for booking us.

The fact that Turning Point found a way to thrive in the face of these challenges speaks to the genius of Charlie Kirk. There is a reason people who knew him thought he might one day be the President of the United States. The man was a once-in-a-generation talent.

We didn’t thrive. Now consider that these costs were just based on the ANTIFA riots at Berkeley in February 2017. Those riots were awful, but no one got killed. I cannot imagine what Turning Point will have to pay in insurance premiums and security services now. Just adjusting for inflation, the sums we paid equate to $31,018 per month for insurance and $54,957 in 2025 dollars; add up $31,018 for insurance and $54,957 for security and you get $85,975 per month. That’s $1,031,700 per year. I suspect Turning Point is, or soon will be, paying much more than that, now that lives are being lost.

We know Tesla is spending $3.3 million annually on Elon Musk’s personal protection. Elon tweeted yesterday that he intends to amp up his security.

When you look at these numbers, it becomes obvious that speaking out can easily cost someone far more than they can afford. Violence can rob you of your life, but the mere threat of violence can just rob you. Who among us could afford $3.3 million a year in protection, or $330,000, or even $33,000?

Why is it so expensive? Because the perpetrators who suppress speech don’t pay the price for it. How many of the Antifa protesters that disrupted MILO Inc were ever arrested and punished? None at all. Rot and corruption at the systemic level have made it safer to be a protestor than a speaker. The inaction of our politicians and law enforcement agencies in the face of violence aimed at suppression of speech has effectively repealed our First Amendment rights, the very rights which Charlie fought so hard and ultimately gave his life to protect, by making them too expensive to exercise.

I don’t know if Charlie had bodyguards protecting him. I do know that preserving American liberties for current and future generations was his top priority, even at the risk of his own life. Few people have the kind of courage he showed on a daily basis, and fewer still the means to manage the risk he faced in doing so.

Free and open exchange of ideas was the fertile soil in which the seeds of this great nation were birthed and nurtured. If we lose this ability, we are lost as a republic. Ordered liberty cannot tolerate anarcho-tyranny.