HBO host Bill Maher and his panel reacted to the assassination of Charlie Kirk on this week’s broadcast of “Real Time.” “The people who mocked his death or justified it, I think you’re gross, I have no use for you. The people who are saying now we’re at war, I have no use for you,” Maher said on Friday.

BILL MAHER: All right, so I didn’t realize this was going to be kind of a theme show because we write our editorial before the week starts, and so it was all about freedom of speech. Then the assassination occurred, so this is turning into a theme show. But it is kind of interesting that this guy was shot, and he’s been on our show, but on my podcast, I talk to him, I like to him, I like everybody. I talk to everybody, I think, I’m glad I took that approach. But he was shot under a banner that said, prove me wrong, because he was a debater. And too many people think the way to do that, to prove you wrong, is to just eliminate you from talking altogether. So the people who mocked his death or justified it, I think you’re gross, I have no use for you. The people who are saying now we’re at war, I have no use for you. So my first question, true or false, I think the real war is not between left or right, it’s for the people, it’s between the people on both sides who want a war and the people who don’t. BEN SHAPIRO: I mean, I think that’s accurate. I knew Charlie for 13 years, and before he was a kid, he was like an 18-year-old kid when I first met Charlie in The Breakers in Palm Beach, and he was fundraising, running around, and I watched him grow into a man and watch him get married and have a couple of very young kids. And whatever you thought of Charlie’s views is irrelevant. The fact is that what he made his living doing, and what he actually did quite well, made himself really good at this, was just going and talking to people on the other side, and that’s what he was killed doing. He was literally in the middle of answering a question and picked up the microphone and was shot in the throat. And we do have a serious problem in this country with people who believe that violence is the proper response to speech, and that does skew young. I mean, what the polls tend to show is that of Gen Z, only 58 percent of Gen Z believes that there is no excuse for violence in response to speech, meaning that 42 percent believe that there are some times that violence ought to be a response to speech, which is deeply terrifying. I mean, on a personal level, obviously, I have 24-7 security, I’ve had 24-7 security for a decade, I’ve spoken on a lot of college campuses. I never, honest to God, thought that we were going to get to this point. Even the assassination of political figures is not the same thing as just being shot in the throat for the crime of debating issues in the public square. And I thought wrong. You know, I thought that’s not what America is or what it should be about. And we’ve come to some place incredibly dark in our nation’s history, and you know, I weep for the country, I weep for Charlie. It’s horrific.

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