Charlie Kirk\u2019s\u00a0death by a shooter\u2019s bullet\u00a0on a university campus in Utah on Wednesday has left the United States, a country already grappling with mounting political anger and polarization, in a state of profound shock bordering on despair.<\/p>\n
Kirk,\u00a0a rising star\u00a0of\u00a0Donald Trump\u2019s make America great again (Maga) movement, was struck in the neck by a single shot as he addressed a large student crowd at Utah Valley University. The event had been billed as the grand opening of his 15-stop \u201cAmerica Comeback Tour\u201d, but instead will be marked as the place where he uttered his last words.<\/p>\n
The 31-year-old leader of the rightwing student group Turning Point USA was about 20 minutes into a Q&A, ironically engaging with a question on mass shootings in America, when the shot rang out. Within seconds, hundreds of students had scattered screaming from the campus lawn.<\/p>\n
Within minutes of that, gruesome videos began to proliferate through social media, apparently undeterred by any algorithm. They showed Kirk being hit, slumping to his left side and profusely bleeding.<\/p>\n
Long before Kirk was pronounced dead at 4.40pm \u2013 poignantly in\u00a0a post\u00a0from his champion, the US president, on Truth Social \u2013 the wave of profound shock was breaking over both sides of the US\u2019s political divide.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is horrific. I am stunned,\u201d said the Republican senator from Texas\u00a0Ted Cruz, who described Kirk\u00a0on Twitter\/X\u00a0as a \u201cgood friend\u201d since the young activist\u2019s teenage years.<\/p>\n
Kirk was unashamedly far to the right of the US political spectrum and had expressed openly bigoted views and engaged in homophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. He\u00a0recently tweeted: \u201cIslam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.\u201d<\/p>\n
He mixed evangelical Christian beliefs with rightwing politics into a combustible brew. During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he claimed that Democrats \u201cstand for everything God hates\u201d, adding: \u201cThis is a Christian state. I\u2019d like to see it stay that way.\u201d<\/p>\n
But mourning for Kirk crossed the political aisle.<\/p>\n
Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC\u2019s Morning Joe who has been unrestrained at times in his\u00a0criticism\u00a0of Kirk\u2019s political posturing, called the shooting \u201ctragic and sickening\u201d. He added: \u201cViolence targeting political public figures is violence against American democracy itself and the freedom of every American to express their views.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tommy Vietor, a former staffer in Barack Obama\u2019s White House, issued an even darker warning. Political violence,\u00a0he said, was a \u201ccancer that will feed off itself and spread \u2026 it will rip this country apart\u201d.<\/p>\n
The political violence that Vietor identified is etched into the US\u2019s psyche. The country has had to absorb the assassinations of four sitting presidents including Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, as well as the tragic trilogy of 1960s shootings of Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.<\/p>\n
Those grim historic landmarks were brought slamming back into public consciousness by the\u00a0assassination attempt on Trump at a presidential campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. Trump survived that incident by a hair\u2019s breadth, which he has since claimed to be an act of God\u2019s will. A second would-be assassin later waited for Trump on a Florida golf course before being discovered in the nick of time by his security detail.<\/p>\n
At the same time America has been rocked by the killing on the streets of Manhattan of a top healthcare executive, and in June an attack in Minnesota saw a gunman brutally shoot a local lawmaker dead in her own home.<\/p>\n
Kirk\u2019s death \u2013 though the precise motive behind his killing remains so far unknown \u2013 leaves the US standing on the edge of a new abyss, over which a black cloud now looms over the safety of its public figures and the sanctity of its public debate.<\/p>\n
Related:\u00a0US lawmakers unite to condemn Charlie Kirk shooting: \u2018Reject political violence\u2019<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat the actual hell have we become?\u201d asked the Catholic writer Emily Zanotti, speaking for many. In a comment under her\u00a0X feed, another poster said: \u201cWe have met the enemy, and he is us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Dylan Housman, editor-in-chief of the rightwing news outlet the Daily Caller, also expressed foreboding. \u201cWe can\u2019t live in a country where things like this happen,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
For months now the temperature of the US\u2019s political discourse has been rising. As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, put it following the Kirk shooting: \u201cPolitical violence unfortunately has been ratcheting up in this country.\u201d<\/p>\n
In June a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, were\u00a0killed in a shooting. Federal and state judges have reported a plethora of threats, including\u00a0deliveries of unsolicited pizzas\u00a0to their homes in grotesque reference to the 2020 killing of Daniel Anderl, the son of a New Jersey district judge Esther Salas.<\/p>\n
Kirk\u2019s killing takes this booming scourge of discourse-by-bullet to another level. The location of the shooting in itself indicates that there might be trouble ahead, as the TV political journalist Chuck Todd noted. \u201cOn a college campus, no less, a place where we should be celebrating speech, not trying to silence it.\u201d<\/p>\n
The identity of the victim, too, raises the stakes dramatically. Kirk was the golden boy of the Maga movement, a Trump favorite.<\/p>\n
The president called Kirk \u201clegendary\u201d in his post announcing the death. The Turning Point leader was boosted to nationwide prominence when he was taken on as personal aide to Trump\u2019s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, during the 2016 presidential campaign.<\/p>\n
Kirk\u2019s ascent within the Maga firmament was as fiery as the trademark pyrotechnical displays that opened his Turning Point \u201cpeople\u2019s conventions\u201d. The speakers he attracted on stage were like a roll-call of Maga royalty \u2013\u00a0JD Vance, former Trump White House adviser\u00a0Steve Bannon, entrepreneur and presidential candidate\u00a0Vivek Ramaswamy, far-right congresswoman\u00a0Marjorie Taylor Greene\u00a0and many more.<\/p>\n
By Wednesday night consternation had already begun to be aired about how the Trump administration, and the wider Maga movement, would respond to the loss of one of their dearly beloved own. \u201cThere are people who are fomenting [political violence] in this country,\u201d Pritzker said. \u201cThe president\u2019s rhetoric often foments it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Later this month, Kirk had a stop on his Comeback Tour scheduled at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. On 25 September he was scheduled to debate the progressive influencer, Hasan Piker.<\/p>\n
After Kirk\u2019s shooting, Piker spoke out about his fears on his live stream. \u201cThis is a terrifying incident,\u201d he said. \u201cThe reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Charlie Kirk\u2019s\u00a0death by a shooter\u2019s bullet\u00a0on a university campus in Utah on Wednesday has left the United States,<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1739,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12,7,4,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-crime","category-news","category-politics","category-us"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1738"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1740,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1738\/revisions\/1740"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1739"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.cedritech.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}