Charlie Kirk before his death. Fox News/AP.
Republican political activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk has been felled by an assassin's bullet as he was conducting an event at a Utah college campus. Fox News. Kirk was being asked a question, about transgender violence, when a shot rang out and a bullet hit him in the neck. Kirk had launched his America Comeback Tour at Utah Valley University. Kirk was speaking about campus free speech freedom and was taking questions from the audience, of all political stripes as he is known to do. Kirk leaves behind a wife and two children. The suspect in the case appears to still be at large.
Live updates for this incident can be found at the following outlets:
My Comment:
This is a breaking news story so as always check the live feeds for the latest information. There are conflicting reports that a suspect was captured but was then released, though it is unclear if this has happened once now or twice, as another person was detained at the scene of the crime.
I won't speculate too much about motive, with the suspect still at large there is no way of knowing who did this and why. My guess would be the left, but I do know that Charlie Kirk had some negative interactions with the Groypers, but I would be surprised if they were the ones behind it. It's not like Nick Fuentes, who was also the target of an assassination attempt, would approve of this and he has indeed condemned the murder of his old foe. I should also mention that this could just be another nutjob, like the case in July where Vance Boelter assassinated and attacked some Democratic politicians, for reasons that probably didn't even make sense to himself. Indeed, that might even be the most likely motivation, though time will tell, assuming the assassin is caught.
This assassination is notable because there is high quality video of the attack. Much like the attack on Trump during the rally in Philadelphia, there were a lot of cameras pointed at Kirk as he was speaking. I would highly recommend not watching the video as it was legitimately horrifying. One second Kirk is answering a question, probably fielded to him by a liberal, and the next, his neck explodes in a shower of blood and all the life leaves his eyes. He didn't die at the scene but it was clear to me after I saw it that he wasn't going to survive. Given that I saw the video of Iryna Zarutska yesterday, it's been a bad couple of days in terms of seeing things I probably didn't need to see.
To say that folks are upset about this is an understatement. Charlie Kirk was a very influential person and one that deserves some of the credit for getting Trump elected in 2024. He was also a very milquetoast kinda of boring guy, a true moderate in both politics and delivery. He was also someone that was more than willing to engage in debate with folks of all political stripes. It's not like Kirk was someone like Nick Fuentes, who has actual extreme views and expresses them loathsomely.
To see him die, (and a lot of folks saw the same video I did) is going to simply break some people. Everyone on the right is saying to themselves "Kirk was more moderate than me and has died in what appears to be a political assassination, I am in danger". Folks on the right were already angry, about the Minnesota mass shooting and the cold blooded murder of Iryna Zarutska, and it wouldn't be impossible that some people will snap. A retaliation attack is absolutely possible, as sad as that seems, folks are incredibly upset about this.
And even those that don't are feeling a lot more radicalized that they were last week. I know that I had to check myself from fedposting several times today. I obviously don't support violence but at what point does it become inevitable? Kirk was just a b-tier guy, not someone I ever expected to get killed in such a public and horrifying way. But if he wasn't safe, who is?
Of course you could say that folks are jumping the gun, getting radicalized by a shooting when we don't know the motive. I did point out that it's very possible that the guy was just a nut or had some other motive besides left wing politics. The problem with that is that so many folks on the left are essentially claiming the assassin as one of their own. Sure the actual politicians are giving their "thoughts and prayers, political violence is wrong" statements, but the folks on the left on social media?
Those folks on the left are beclowning themselves. So many folks on Reddit, Bluesky and even X/Twitter are celebrating this death, as Kirk's rather moderate viewpoints somehow justified shooting him in the neck in front of a horrified audience. According to them he deserved to die, his wife deserved to be a widow and his children deserved to be orphans just because he "owned the libs" and occasionally said something controversial or unkind. It's just insanity at this point.
Of course not all folks were like that. Some were just saying that they don't actually care that Kirk died because he was "mean". Or they have devolved into insipid whataboutism, most bringing up the Minnesota assassin Vance Boelter, falsely claiming he was MAGA when he was very obviously just delusional. Very few people on social media are just saying "this is horrible regardless of politics", outside the Democratic politicians and most of those folks are trying to shift the conversation to gun control of all things. Like folks would give up their guns after someone on their side was brutally murdered. And there is, of course, the constant blame of President Trump, who is apparently responsible for every bad thing that has ever happened in the past 10 years.
I would say that the lefts reaction to this was a lot more radicalizing than the assassination itself. Even when Trump was clipped the reaction wasn't this bad, and I had thought that after more than a few people had lost their jobs over the celebrations in the failed assassination attempts on Trump these folks would have learned a lesson. Apparently not.
The problem I see is that everyone on the right, or even in the middle is starting to ask the question, "how can we live peaceably with these people?' it seems very clear that there is a large swath of the left that either supports violence or, at the very least, doesn't care if it happens to people they don't like. Sure, there are some of those folks on the right too, but the left has been a lot louder and more kinetic about it than the right.
My real fear is that the violence could spiral out of control. I don't think we will see a civil war but we could see something like the Troubles in the UK, a low intensity military conflict that has more paramilitary fighting that actual warfare. If we are lucky, we will just end up with the 1960's-1970's style Days of Rage, where the left became quite violent for awhile but eventually lost the culture war for a decade or two. Regardless, I don't think this is a one off thing and I do think that the country is not heading for a good place.
I think social media is a lot of the problem. Folks might have had thoughts like this before but very few people would publicly celebrate an assassination for the simple reason that they might face consequences for it, physically or professionally. To be fair, some professional consequences are coming, folks will absolutely lose their jobs for celebrating this. But the fact is that folks are stuck in echo chambers and rarely have to face the idea that folks disagree with them.
Regardless of the politics of the situation, the fact of the matter is that the suspect is still on the run as of this writing. That is pretty deeply concerning and I do worry that we might see follow up attacks. I do think that this was a well planned attack and the guy that did it was probably not an idiot, the fact that he made it off site alone is proof of that. But I worry that Kirk wasn't his only target and that he may not allow himself to be taken alive.
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