Yesterday, September 10, 2025, husband, father, conservative activist, author, and political commentator Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in apparent politically motivated assassination at Utah Valley University while speaking at one of his Turning Point USA events. While there was a suspect who was arrested and then shortly after released, the shooter remains at large.
Despite many of his most polarizing comments about diversity, equity, and inclusion pertaining to racial and gender minorities in this country, his economic, domestic, and foreign policy perspectives, Charlie was a star in the conservative movement.
If his murderer thought that Kirk’s assassination would slow his conservative movement’s momentum and, more dangerously, the white nationalists that both ideologically and physically attached themselves to him despite his public condemnation of them—they may have lit the fuseto a tumultuous political chapter in this country’s history.
Despite the bloody scene of Charlie’s murder being caught on camera for millions to see, some have calmed from the initial shock at the sight and are considering the rather dark irony of the situation surrounding his death. For one thing, this comes after Kirk himself made a statement in 2023 that “having an armed citizenry comes with a price...and that is part of liberty...I think 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.”
Moments before the fatal bullet struck him, Charlie answered a question from someone in the audience asking his thoughts on mass shootings in the US in the last ten years, to which he responded, “counting or not counting gang violence?” Seconds later the crowd was horrified at the gory sight of his blood squirting from his neck as he fell from his stool.
Many of you have seen the footage by now as it has gone viral on social media. While this certainly was dominating the headlines, we may not have noticed that around the same time there was yet another school shooting at Evergreen High School in Colorado, where four students, including the shooter were injured.
To paraphrase Kyle Kulinski, when political assassinations get more media attention than school shooting, we are headed down a dark path.
Charlie Kirk was respected by some and resented by many. He may even have taken pride in that.
With that said, I make no judgement call as to how someone is to feel over Charlie’s death. He himself stated that he couldn’t “stand the word empathy,” and that he thought “empathy [was] a made up, new age term” that “did a lot of damage”, so in a way he may have even respected the apathy of his survivingdissenters.
Kirk knew that he was many things to many people. Members of numerous minority communities are conflicted between their value of all human life, and their remembrance of the cultural and racial divide that he played a hand in worsening.
His platform did help to sanitize some of the more direct incendiary perspectives about race that exist in the country by the proverbial “forgotten man”. It, for example, is not incumbent upon anyone who was harmed by his rhetoric to forget that Charlie Kirk asserted plainly on X with no evidence that “KetanjiBrown Jackson is a diversity hire. She is only there because she’s a black woman. (June 27, 2025).”
It is not incumbent upon anyone to forget that Charlie Kirk said in 2024 “"If I see a Black pilot, I'm gonna be like 'boy, I hope he is qualified.’” This might come off as an “I’m just keepin’ it real” situation, but that still does not dismiss how platforming this long held prejudice—and that is textbook prejudice, by the way—promotes the baseless and racist paranoia that has long been held in this country of undeserving, unqualified Black People supposedly stealing jobs from supposedly more deserving white men out of pity, or white guilt, or whatever.
It is not incumbent upon anyone to forget that Charlie Kirk for the past week on his X account has been on a passionate tear condemning a supposed privilege that Black People have, to murder white people with either impunity or little no media attention. He referenced the single example of the recent murder of 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska by black 34-year-oldschizophrenic, repeat offender and DeCarlos Brown Jr. Using these one-off instances to springboard into a broader narrative generalizing Black Men as dangerous is an age-old but useful tactic creating an ethos for the militarization of police in inner cities, police brutality, and racial profiling—which we are TODAY SEEING.
Whether tacitly or explicitly, intentional or not, Charlie Kirk was instrumental in making the case for the fascistic trajectory on which this country is aggressively proceeding. His assassination may prove to be the “shot heard round the world”.
Charlie Kirk was a taxpaying, American citizen who had a Constitutional right to speak his mind, no matter how polarizing. But the demographics who his bigotry directly targeted, are under no Constitutional or moral obligation to feel or show any empathy if it doesn’tcome naturally.
While Kirk’s death may be tragic to some, what is universally tragic that many are noticing is the rapidly increasing rate of political violence in this country. Many of us recognized the patterns early and warned that this was where the country was headed in the years to come. Some may even say the increasingly hostile political climate, mixed with the growing frustrations of a daily worsening economy, the moral hazard of issuing full pardons to 1,200 violent January 6 insurrectionists storming the capital and attempting to kill then Vice President Mike Pence, the decaying social and race relations in the country, our desensitizing to human death and suffering as we watch both slow and fast deaths of innocent civilians in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and—let's face it, our gun-loving culture—are the perfectcocktail ingredients to an era of political violence. History has always shown this.
We often hear “violence has no place in a democracy.” This is true, the entire purpose of democracy, aside from political empowering the People, is to settle disputes peaceably.
But when the institutions upon which we’ve based our democratic republic begin to crumble underneath us and resemble more violent and autocratic systems, the promises of peaceful disagreement become less tangible, and political dissent becomes more frequently expressed through violence.
And THAT.... is the most obvious sign and symptom of an empire in rapid decline.
Make no mistake. Political assassinations are seldom ever one-offs. The 1960s taught us this lesson. In fact, just under three months ago, Minnesota House Speaker Melissa Hortman and her husband were killed in their home by the far-right wing political assassin Vance Boelter. According to the Department of Justice report, Boelter underwent extensive research and planning, dressing up as a police officer, and had a list of elected officials that he planned to murder throughout the day. He planned a methodical and systematic assassination campaign.
Today, many conservatives on the right are eager to blame the left for Kirk’s assassination, and some have sworn bloody revenge on political figures on the left although as of the time of this post, the shooter’s identity and political motivation, if any, are still unknown.
What IS known is that the death of Charlie Kirk, founder and president of Turning Point USA, represents an inflective turning point in US political history. And while this instance of political violence is not the first that we have seen this year...it sadly very likely is also not the last.
Truth above all. Stay on point.
