“Our nation is broken,” the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox, said on Wednesday evening as he addressed the sickening latest episode in American political carnage: the assassination of the conservative youth activist and influencer Charlie Kirk as he spoke on a small stage at a college campus.
The 31-year-old husband and father of two was killed after a single bullet from a high-velocity rifle struck him in the neck as he spoke while seated in a chair before a collegiate audience at an open-air event at Utah Valley University in Orem.
In the seconds afterwards, screams and bedlam. Gruesome video footage of the assassination was distributed on social media platforms minutes after the event, making it clear that the chances of survival were limited. Around 4.30pm, Kirk’s death was confirmed by president Donald Trump who stated: “The great, and even legendary, Charlie Kirk is dead. No one understood or had the heart of the youth of the United States of America better than Charlie.”
Footage of Kirk distributing caps and smiling with supporters just before the event, on a stunning day of sunshine and pure blue sky contributed to the general disbelief and confusion. Once again, America managed to stun itself in its capacity for acts of riveting, brutal violence.
RM Block
Tributes poured in from former presidents, from friends, from ideological adversaries, from supporters. In the House chamber, Speaker Mike Johnson was addled when a call for a spoken prayer led to shouted exchanges. The White House issued an order that all flags be flown at half-mast. In Utah, governor Cox confirmed that police have a “person of interest” (later released) in custody and vowed that Kirk’s murderer would be caught.
“And we will hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law. I just want to remind people that we still have the death penalty here in the state of Utah.”
Cox has nothing like the public profile of many governors but on Wednesday evening, he struck a note that at least attempted to reach across the political chasm.
“We’ve had political assassinations recently in Minnesota, we’ve had an attempted assassination of the governor of Pennsylvania and we’ve had an attempted assassination on a presidential candidate and former president of the United States – and now current president of the United States. Nothing I say can unite us as a country. Nothing I say right now can fix what is broken. Nothing I can say can bring back Charlie Kirk. Our hearts are broken. We mourn with his wife, his children, his family, his friends. We mourn as a nation. If anyone in the sound of my voice celebrated a little bit the news of the shooting, I would beg you to look in the mirror and see if you can find a better angel in there somewhere. I don’t care what his politics are. I care that he was an American.
“We desperately need our leaders in our country but more than our leaders we just need every single person in this country to think about where we are and where we want to be. To ask ourselves: is this it? Is this what 250 years have brought upon us? I pray that’s not the case. I pray that those who hated what Charlie Kirk stood for will put down their social media and pens and pray for his family, and that all of us, will try and find a way to stop hating our fellow Americans.”
If the visual footage of Charlie Kirk’s assassination is horrifying, what his killing signifies about where America now stands – and is headed – is genuinely frightening. As a public figure, Kirk was at once an entirely modern creation and, to conservative admirers both young and old, a reassuring emblem of resurgent Christian-nationalist values, burnishing a retro telegenic appeal and preppy conservatism, as though he had stepped from a Norman Rockwell portrait.
He straddled a fine line where he could walk with perfect obscurity through many American cities while accumulating an intense fame and influence, through Turning Point USA, the country’s biggest conservative-youth movement he founded at 18, and as one of Trump’s most trusted and talented loyalists.
Kirk was a phenomenon from his teenage years, wedding a persuasive personality and high oratorical ability with a willingness – and appetite – for discourse with political opposites. As a gangly school basketball player growing up in an affluent Chicago suburb, his ideological hero in life was Rush Limbaugh, whose radio show he revered. He forged a path to becoming Limbaugh’s social-media age heir.
One of his most high-profile events of this year was his sit-down with California governor – and Trump nemesis – Gavin Newsom on the latter’s podcast. “I’ve always been conservative,” he told Newsom.
“One of the things we saw in the last couple of years that the Democrats completely ignored was the crisis that young people are experiencing. It is the first time that a 30-year-old is going to have it worse than their parents. It’s a breakdown of the social contract. They are the most alcohol-addicted, most suicidal, more depressed, most medicated generation in history and the message that was largely fed to a lot of young people was: lower your expectations. You are not going to have the same American dream as your parents. And again, this got ridiculed a lot by the press, ‘oh they are creating this manosphere thing’. Look: they are half of the population and necessary for any society to succeed, both strong men and strong women.”
Donald Trump Jr has spoken of his initial meeting with Kirk. Trump Jr, unenthused by the idea, was so impressed that he hired Kirk to join the 2016 campaign within minutes. Kirk told Robert Draper of the New York Times that he had visited the White House “a hundred plus” times during the first term and was among a small cohort of trusted advisers chosen to vet potential appointees after Trump’s win last November.
That definitive profile also reported that Kirk had been instrumental in persuading the Trump camp that JD Vance was a recruit worth going after. Without ever holding office, Kirk wielded enormous influence on Trump’s White House and the renaissance of the Maga movement.
Wednesday’s event in Utah was to mark the beginning of a series of autumn campus appearances. Kirk was a proponent of the “ask me anything” school of discourse. The open tent in which he sat bore the slogans ‘America’s Comeback’ and ‘Prove Me Wrong’. One of the highlights of his September schedule was to have been a debate with Hasan Piker, his left-wing counterpart, in a Dartmouth event that had sold out.
His views were unpalatable and dismal to many more liberal or centrist Americans: he has advocated women marrying young and bearing children, was adamantly against the pandemic lockdown, promoted anti-transgender and great-replacement theory views. And in a comment that has acquired a haunting power since Wednesday afternoon, he said that “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 God-given rights.”
But one of Kirk’s unique selling points was to try and engage civilly with audience members who often showed up to challenge him: to at least try and hear what the other side of the room was saying.
Kirk had recently returned from a tour of Japan and South Korea. In a podcast broadcast just two days before his killing, he spoke glowingly of the sense of safety in the cities of those countries while lamenting the state of the nation to which he had returned.
“It was as if I were communicating a different planetary reality that someone would feel unsafe in a major city like Seoul, South Korea,” he told his listeners.
“Now, we are a wealthier country than South Korea. We founded South Korea, which I will talk about in this hour, thanks to the heroism of general MacArthur. And now as I am coming back from Asia, I am looking at what is happening in Washington, DC; Chicago; and of course the breaking news of this new footage we have of the stabbing murder of the 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee Iryna Zarutska, a young white lady who was stabbed to death by a black criminal, by a complete stranger on a train in Charlotte. This is becoming national news and the left is doing everything it cannot to talk about it. The media is becoming very uncomfortable about this story. Situations like this are a near-daily occurrence in our cities and I am coming back from two nations, Japan and South Korea, that are poorer than us, that are not as populous as us and their cities are not just safer, they are different planetary realities. We do not have to live this way.”
It was reported that Charlie Kirk was in the midst of answering a question about mass shootings during the Utah Valley event when the single shot that ended his life was fired. As night fell across the United States – in every sense – the manhunt for his killer continued.
