God help us.
An assassin shot and killed Charlie Kirk at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday.
Kirk grew to fame by bringing an unapologetically conservative message to college students. On Wednesday, he was doing just that before a massive crowd on campus.
As of this writing, there is a lot we don’t know about this depraved crime, including the identity of the shooter. But what we do know is that the murder of Kirk, while he was engaging with young Americans, is a tragic loss for his wife and two children and a shocking event that may herald a turn toward greater political violence in America.
Just 31, Kirk had a stratospheric rise. He cofounded Turning Point USA shortly after graduating from high school, after giving an impressive speech at Benedictine University’s Youth Government Day. At the time, the left’s dominance of higher education meant that most students had very little exposure to conservative speakers. Over the next decade, he built TPUSA into a sprawling organization with a large roster of energetic speakers, massive networking events, chapters in 850 colleges and universities, and a robust social media presence. If that weren’t enough, he had a huge podcast, and, in 2024, Kirk and his Turning Point Action grassroots group played a critical role in President Trump’s victory by helping to organize low-propensity young voters to turn out.
This spoke to extraordinary energy and initiative, and everyone who knew him well testified to his personal warmth and Christian faith (which he talked about frequently in public).
Kirk’s rise came during an era when younger leftists abandoned the free-speech values that their ideological predecessors once espoused. It featured escalating attacks on conservative speakers — efforts to cancel them, to shout them down, to throw objects at them, to make threats. Despite all of this, Kirk continued to tour college campuses, to take hostile questions, and to engage with people who passionately disagreed with him. He did his ideological adversaries the favor of taking their questions seriously. This alone was a significant contribution to our civil society.
Then, on Wednesday, Kirk was shot and killed while on stage fielding a question about shootings by transgender individuals.
In a free republic, citizens are supposed to resolve their differences by arguing passionately with one another and then voting for public executives and lawmakers. Political violence is a direct threat to the foundations of our free society, and it must be condemned by all people of goodwill, with no throat-clearing or “buts.”
Disturbingly, we have seen an uptick in politically motivated violence over the past several years, not seen since the 1970s — from the shooting of Republicans at the 2017 congressional baseball practice to last year’s assassination attempts against Donald Trump to the killings of Democratic lawmakers in Minnesota. The attempted assassination of Justice Brett Kavanaugh, fortunately, didn’t get as far. Another politically adjacent act, the murder of the UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, was contextualized by prominent Democratic politicians and even celebrated in some ugly corridors of the online left.
While the president or very high-ranking officials can have large security details to deter potential attackers, the same is not true for everyone else who has controversial things to say about public affairs. We will now have beefed-up security around campus events, but speakers will still have to think about the risk they are taking by merely showing up at places where free expression is supposed to be a core value, and perhaps some of them will be deterred from appearing at all. In other words, we will have devolved even further — from the heckler’s veto to the assassin’s veto.
At this heartbreaking moment, we pray for Kirk’s family and for the future of the country. May he rest in peace.