Charlie Kirk’s Murder And The Fight For The Future Of America

People invent bizarre death hoaxes all the time, crack jokes in poor taste, and say anything online. So I pressed the shock down, more like paused it, until it rose again, coiling up my gut and tightening around my throat, that almost-choking feeling you get when you’re holding back a primal cry.

Charlie Kirk’s Legacy

Even 24 hours later, it still doesn’t feel real. For the past decade, Kirk has been omnipresent on my social media feed. Trump himself gives a great deal of credit to Kirk for playing a part in helping him secure the youth vote (46%, a 10-point jump from 2020) thanks to Kirk’s political activism mobilizing students on college campuses to vote in key battleground states as Chairman of Students for Trump. 

Kirk’s true magnum opus, however, was in founding the non-profit political organization Turning Point USA in 2012 at just 18-years-old out of his garage. The organization’s mission is “to identify, educate, train, and organize students to promote the principles of fiscal responsibility, free markets, and limited government.” 

Kirk, fed up with liberal bias and hostile attitudes towards heterodox conservative ideas on college campuses, had a vision of fighting back through open debate. Though he admitted he had no money, no connections and no idea what he was doing at the time, Turning Point USA gained donor backing and growing influence around the country thanks to Kirk’s sharp articulation of conservative ideals through respectful, level-headed debate with his fiercest objectors.

Today, it’s the largest and fastest growing conservative youth activist organization in the country, boasting a network of over 820,000 students and a presence on over 3,500 high school and college campuses nationwide. He built a movement that has revolutionized conservative politics, transforming the Republican party from a geriatric party into one of youth, vigor, and cultural relevance. And he did it literally just by talking: talking to anyone, anytime, anywhere, about anything. 

Kirk was on the first stop of his Prove Me Wrong (The American Comeback) Tour at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah when he was gunned down by an assailant the FBI just named this morning. He was speaking from a tent just like countless other Turning Point USA events involving debates with college students on a topic of their choosing. It’s just him, a microphone, and his brain against a crowd of opinionated college kids high on the ignorance and moral superiority of youth. But unlike every other debate he’s had at the same signature “Prove Me Wrong” table, this one cost him his life, leaving his wife and two children without a father. 

How could something like this happen in a first world country, let alone be cheered on by so many zealous keyboard warriors? This has been a dark week in American history, but it’s also felt like a deeply ironic and sinister one. Between the murder of Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska on a Charlotte train which received uneven coverage between left and right media (the former of which was initially silent and then opted to cover not quite the cold blooded murder as much as the fact that the story was being covered by the online right), Kirk’s murder swiftly following, and me writing this article on the morning of 9/11, there are many reasons for the American flag to remain at half staff today. 

Kirk’s parting words and digital footprint feel eerie today. The night before he was killed, he tweeted about the necessity of politicizing the "senseless murder of Iryna Zarutska" because "it was politics that allowed a savage monster with 14 priors to be free on the streets to kill her.” A little earlier, he had tweeted a still of Zarutska looking stunned after being stabbed in the neck by Declaros Brown, a homeless man with an extensive rap sheet, with the caption “America will never be the same.” If only he knew how true those words would be. 

Even more eerily, Kirk was mid-sentence discussing mass shootings when he was shot. A student had asked him if he knew how many mass shooters there have been in America in the past ten years, to which Kirk asked for clarification, "Counting or not counting gang violence?" The end of the sentence is eclipsed by the entrance of a bullet into Kirk’s neck. He was rushed to the hospital, where he succumbed to his injuries and the rest of us have to succumb to the fraying tatters of American democracy. Journalists naturally interviewed attendees of the event to get a sense of the atmosphere and mood, to which a young woman calling in explained they were having the time of their life; there were no indications that the event was to end in bloodshed that day.

Touching tributes from Kirk’s colleagues, friends, family, political allies, and even political foes have poured in, painting a picture of a young man who was kind, committed to his faith and his principles, and a joy to be around. He would walk through arguments with thorough reasoning, a charming personality that granted agitators the patience they didn’t always deserve, and a skill for oration that was doubly impressive given that he never went to college. President Donald Trump posted to Truth Social to pay his respects to Kirk’s family and honor his legacy, "The Great, and even Legendary, Charlie Kirk, is dead. No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us. Melania and my Sympathies go out to his beautiful wife Erika, and family. Charlie, we love you!" 

Despite that, Kirk was a bright, driven, visionary young conservative, as evidenced by the dreams he turned into reality and his knack for seeing trends years ahead of others. Back in 2011, while still a teenager, he tweeted admiration for Donald Trump as a “visionary, hero, and leader of this country” a full four years before Ann Coulter’s infamous 2015 prediction on Real Time With Bill Maher that Trump would win the presidency. Another 2011 tweet shows a young deferential Kirk tweeting at Glenn Beck "@glennbeck I am 17 high school student, listen to you everyday. I speak for local Tea Party's about debt and deficit. Fight liberal bias.” The earnest message from a hopeful teenager now juxtaposed with Beck openly weeping over Kirk's death on The Megyn Kelly Show is just one of many heartbreaking full circle moments. 

In a touching tribute to her close friend, Candace Owens recalled Kirk’s early, starry-eyed ambitions for Turning Point USA; that it would become the largest conservative student organization not just in the nation, but in the world; that he would one day meet his broadcasting idol Rush Limbaugh, and that he would build a Limbaugh-style show of his own. One by one, those goals materialized. While he never “took over” the RNC, he did address the Republican National Convention in 2016 as one of its youngest speakers. By 2020, he was opening the convention. By 2024, he was speaking at a prime time slot on night one of the Milwaukee RNC and had become a close friend of the Trump administration. 

He also launched The Charlie Kirk Show, syndicated nationally on Salem Radio, modeled after Limbaugh’s radio show. And under his leadership, Turning Point USA grew into arguably the most prominent conservative student organization in the country, boasting thousands of campus chapters. Even beyond the RNC, Kirk was increasingly floated as a future presidential contender, an idea even California Governor Gavin Newsom acknowledged was hardly far-fetched when Kirk appeared on an episode of his podcast earlier this year.

The Elephant in the Room

While most high ranking Democratic politicians and centrists have outright condemned Kirk’s murder and emphasized there is no place for political violence in our society, MSNBC’s senior political analyst was quick to gloss over the potential political motivation for the shooting, insisting that the gunman who sniped Kirk from 200 yards away on a nearby building could have been a supporter shooting off a gun in celebration. The network has since let him go. Jezebel had posted an unfortunately timed article titled “We Paid Some Etsy Witches to Curse Charlie Kirk” a few days prior, which has since been updated with an editor’s note stating they have temporarily redacted the article at the recommendation of their lawyers, clarifying that the "humorous piece" was intended as satire that made absolutely clear they wished no physical harm upon Kirk. 

The ghoulish reactions espoused by far too many of Kirk’s political adversaries on the left side of the political aisle, many of whom are young woke-identified politically clueless college students with little familiarity with Kirk as a person or as a political activist, have gone to great lengths to gloat over his death, to downplay the tragedy of not just a dead father, husband, son, friend, and colleague, and the threat it poses to our ability to dissent from political and social orthodoxy. This is nothing short of reprehensible. 

To condemn political violence as an untenable expression of political frustration should come easy to us, to the point of second-nature. It shouldn’t require caveats, longwinded prefaces about what a terrible guy he was, how little you agreed with his politics, or how problematic you believe his voting record and political advocacy to be. And yet, for too many, they can’t manage even that. If and when we do manage to coax a denouncement of a 31-year-old guy getting shot in the neck for talking to people, they do so with such reluctance, with such tactless insincerity. Others have rightly pointed out how low the bar is that we now have to clap like seals rewarding the behavior of spiritual children for managing to chortle out “while I hated the guy and thought he was an evil piece of shit whom I disagreed with on virtually everything, murder is bad.” Melissa Chen took the words out of my mouth, “Better to say nothing at all than to denigrate Charlie’s life’s work and signal moral superiority while you make sure people know you don’t condone murder.” The bar is in hell.

And all the while, it’s of course the liberal media insisting it’s the right’s responsibility to “turn down the temperature” while I witness people squabble over Kirk’s political stances on gun control, trans issues, homosexuality, and Black Lives Matter as if they have a direct bearing on whether or not we condemn or celebrate his murder. The pedantry I have witnessed in the past 24 hours is unforgivable. Instead of a simple “rest in peace, violence has no place in American society” we get slimy disingenuous framing that amounts to terrorist apologism, and virtually every time the characterization of Kirk’s stance is so far removed from what he actually advocated for, it amounts to fantasy. It takes no energy for me to outright condemn all political violence regardless of their political ideology. I don’t need to caveat or preface that statement with “well I disagree with everything AOC stands for” before stating that I don’t think she should be shot.

Though Kirk’s killer’s motive is still unknown, there is no shortage of evidence that the online left has indulged in bloodthirsty celebration of political extremism in recent years as a net moral good. Just look at the outpouring of approval when Luigi Mangione assassinated United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson without changing a single thing about our healthcare system. Just sadism and violence that leads nowhere. Though it’s possible that Kirk's murder was not a left wing terror plot, it's a plausible motivation that the left has done very little to mitigate, instead amping up fearmongering and character assassinations of political moderates, characterizing them as far-right extremists.

The hostile environment on college campuses to conservative voices is exactly the sort of thing Kirk was fighting to oppose. The left should ask itself why there was a need for a Turning Point USA in the first place. The answer is laid bare for everyone to see: over the past decade, liberals have protested, barricaded, and rioted when speakers they deemed offensive came to speak at their campuses. They equated differences of opinion with violence while downplaying actual political violence when it targeted political figures they didn’t like. 

I have lost countless followers on social media in the past 24 hours for condemning political violence, angsty twenty-somethings laugh react tributes to a loving man who fought for what he believed in while insinuating his speech amounted to incitement because he toured around college campuses with a sign that said “Prove Me Wrong,” evidence, they say, that he was not engaging in a good faith debate, but instead motivated by ragebaiting so he could clipfarm owning the libs. I don’t need to convince anyone that Kirk was not in the business of doing this because it doesn’t matter. If you cannot understand why “he shouldn’t have been killed, BUT” is an indication of misplaced priorities then you are a lost soul. If you’re going to condemn terrorism, do it full stop or save your breath, because we see you. We know who you are and what you stand for.

Kirk has been a passionate follower of Donald Trump for many years, a political firebrand who himself was the victim of two attempted assassinations last year. Trump’s act of courageous defiance in thrusting his fist in the air after a bullet grazed his bleeding ear mid-political speech marked a turning point in the presidential race. That’s the sort of leader people wanted to fight for American values: someone who faces threat of imminent death and says “fuck you, come and kill me.” 

A more measured advocate for political activism, Kirk didn’t possess Trump’s infamous snark or verbal lashings, or knack for branding with cutting nicknames. He was entirely committed to the battle of ideas through and through. He was often criticized by his own side for not being dissident enough, lacking the firebrand machiavellianism of further fringe right figures, for not going “far enough” on certain political and social issues. But Kirk was a constitutionalist devoted to fighting for individual liberty, small government, and of course, his faith, which he said he wished most to be remembered by. 

None of that matters, though, because as much shit as conservatives to the right of Kirk gave him, they’re all singing his praises now, expressing immense remorse and regret for failing to give him his flowers when he was here, for making mountains out of molehills or dismissing him with smears like “shill for Israel” while leftists take to social media to characterize him as a Nazi, lie about his record, and play obtuse for political points when the fabric of democracy is on the line. When we’re all waiting with bated breath, hoping that no further violent actions are taken that could tip us over into Civil War.

A number of years ago, people thought that Dave Rubin's shtick about free speech and engaging in the battleground of ideas was growing trite; that he was beating a dead horse. Rubin’s conservative origin story—how he didn’t leave the left, the left left him—became a rinse and repeat political awakening for so many people we became bored, sought larger battles and stopped recognizing the value in advocating for the banal. But sadism is being ushered into Western youth through the banality of evil at alarming rates; young people who have grown up coddled by safe spaces and trigger warnings, who have successfully shut down speaking events and debates because it might hurt their fee-fees. They walk into every room with a presumed ideological unanimity which they go to great lengths to enforce.

These people are in the business of celebrating heterodox dissidents’ assassinations as funny comeuppance and they don’t wince. It’s second nature to them—emboldened by the desensitization of social media and the self-radicalization of echo chambers. If the banality of evil is what hides in the shadows, justifying terrorism over a tactless post or a policy stance lazily equated with “fascism” because it’s on the right, then we need a banality of virtue to fight for. It must be upheld, celebrated, and cherished. When we take it for granted, when we ease up on battles we think we’ve settled, the enemy swoops in to knock out its foundation.

What has most disturbed people about Charlie Kirk’s death is that he was not an elected official. He wasn’t running for President. He was just a regular guy who wanted conservatives to feel like they weren’t the black sheep on college campuses; that they had the right to exist outside the suffocating silence of self-censorship. Kirk fought for that right for every young conservative across the country, the effects of which have cascaded through the culture so effectively its benefactors are clueless that they owe their ability to express opinions to the Overton window that Kirk shifted for them. 

Teenagers on TikTok are able to joke about “that one friend who’s too woke” or the sociopolitical fugue state everyone fell into after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 with the gift of hindsight because Kirk created the conditions necessary to be able to express them. We won the culture, fought back in the universities, reclaimed the White House, even set Hollywood free from the woke muzzle because of Kirk’s thankless efforts, tireless patience, and commitment to discussion. 

Continuing Charlie’s Legacy

The biggest threats to the Left are not fringe fascists or neo-Nazis or white nationalists but good-hearted conservative people who are devoted to their families, to God, and to articulating their beliefs clearly with conviction. For refusing to cower but never letting the other side’s character assassination of you sour his soul or his optimistic vision for what was possible. The man who killed Kirk did so because he was the ultimate white pill: that you can win if you just put your head down and grind, for years, never giving up on your vision, but most importantly, never giving up on people. Rest in power, Charlie. Your project is safe with us.

Debate is the ultimate bet on humanity; that the best ideas will win if they have merit, if they’re logically sound. That’s actually a profoundly optimistic view of the human spirit. It’s far more optimistic than the vision the shooter or his enablers have for our country. That’s why I have no doubt that we will prevail, so long as we keep Charlie’s project alive. He warned that when we stop talking, that’s when we get violence. That’s when Civil War happens. Because that’s when you start to think that the other side is evil and they lose their humanity.