The killing of Charlie Kirk is a national tragedy.
It is hard to overestimate the enormity of what happened Wednesday on the campus of Utah Valley University, where a civil debate about politics taking place under sunny skies turned into a bloody horror show with what are certain to be lasting national consequences.
The immediate aftermath of the right-wing activist’s death has evoked some of the dread and instability of late-1960s America, when the assassinations of political figures such as Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. led to national introspection and angst about just exactly who we believed ourselves to be.
A violent death like this diminishes us all. Violence begets violence. It undermines the very basis of our democracy — our elections, our First Amendment freedoms, our commitment to the peaceful transfer of power — already stressed as never before by the autocratic ambitions of our current president.
“Our nation is broken,” Utah Gov. Spencer Cox said. “We’ve had political assassinations recently in Minnesota. We had an attempted assassination on the governor of Pennsylvania. And we had an attempted assassination on a presidential candidate and former president of the United States and now current president of the United States.”
Those who “celebrated even a little bit at the news of this shooting,” the Utah governor added, “I would beg you to look in the mirror, and to see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere.” Amen.
Social media, never a beacon of calm in a crisis, has become a cesspool of blame and rage.
“The Left is the party of murder,” posted X’s nonsensical owner, Elon Musk.
“President Trump needs to declare the democratic party as domestic terrorists,” posted a user with more than half a million followers and an image of Kirk as his avatar.
Demonstrating the selective outrage for which Fox News is infamous , prime-time host Jesse Watters declared: “We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death in the way Charlie would want it to be avenged. They are at war with us … What are we gonna do about it?”
Before his calls for “nonviolence” on Thursday, and an offering of concern for the country, President Donald Trump blamed rhetoric from “the radical left” for Kirk’s killing. “Radical-left political violence has hurt too many innocent people and taken too many lives,” Trump said in a taped statement from the Oval Office.
Early on, authorities found a rifle they suspected was used in the shooting. On Thursday, they released photos of a person they believed may be involved. By Friday morning, they had a suspect in custody: Tyler Robinson, 22, who grew up in St. George, Utah. A college dropout, records show that Robinson has not voted in recent years and is not affiliated with any political party. Cox said during a Friday news conference that a family member told investigators Robinson had recently become “more political” and had agreed Kirk “was full of hate and spreading hate.”
Kirk, a married dad with two little kids, came off as a happy warrior, readily wading into political discussions on college campuses with ideological opponents. But there was a dark side to his campus engagement; some academics who landed on his “Professor Watchlist,” blamed for spreading “leftist propaganda” or discriminating against conservative students, faced harassment.
His “Prove Me Wrong” campus debates with students and professors often went viral online.
As many political analysts have said, he was more responsible than anyone else for drawing legions of young adults into the Republican Party under Trump. When Kirk founded his conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA in 2012, only 37% of voters 18 to 29 supported Mitt Romney for president. By 2024, the GOP’s percentage had risen to 46%.
Kirk’s messages of white victimization and, increasingly, his embrace of Christian nationalism, were odious to many, but they resonated profoundly for a generation of young Americans unsure of what the future holds for them but pretty damn sure they are getting the short end of some cosmic stick. Often, his rhetoric was hateful. “We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor,” he once said.
In a video posted on social media last month, Kirk lauded the simplicity of what he described as the American way of life. “I want to be able to get married, buy a home, have kids, allow them to ride their bike ’til the sun goes down, send them to a good school, have a low-crime neighborhood, not to have my kid be taught the lesbian, gay, transgender garbage in their school. While also, not having them have to hear the Muslim call to prayer five times a day.”
Recently on X, Kirk wrote, “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
The point, however, is that Kirk had ideas. Bad ideas. And yes, even dangerous ideas.
But ideas cannot be stopped with bullets, or anything else. Ideologies cannot be exterminated (that goes for Islam as well as Christian nationalism).
And violence comes from all directions — the right, the left and the nonideological or mentally-ill middle.
One of the terrible ironies of Kirk’s killing was his steadfast support for gun rights.
In a resurfaced 2023 interview that has been widely publicized — and ruthlessly mocked by his many haters — Kirk said, “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights. That is a prudent deal.”
What a thing to say, especially from a parent at a moment when school shootings have become everyday tragedies.
If our leaders were rational beings, Charlie Kirk’s death would be the last straw.
They would realize that the problem with American gun violence isn’t rhetoric, it’s actually guns — and do something about it.
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