(Editorial post from the NEW YORKER on 11 September2025.)
Charlie Kirk, the conservative media figure and
influential supporter of Donald Trump, was shot and killed today while speaking
at an event at Utah Valley University. Graphic videos captured by those in
attendance appear to show Kirk being struck in the neck by a bullet. He was
thirty-one.
The President announced Kirk’s death on social
media, and requested flags across the country be flown at half-staff. Other
major political figures from across the ideological spectrum, including Barack
Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, condemned the shooting and political
violence.
Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a youth-focussed right-wing nonprofit, in 2012, when he was just eighteen. “It’s impossible to overstate his role in MAGA and Republican politics,” Antonia Hitchens, a New Yorker staff writer who covers politics, told us over e-mail from Washington, D.C.
Kirk understood the populist draw of the Tea Party
and Trump, she wrote. “As a reporter, I met countless people who credited their
political engagement—their sense of engagement with the country—to Turning
Point.”
During the 2024 election, as Hitchens has reported,
Turning Point Action, an affiliate of Kirk’s nonprofit, played a large role in
Arizona and other swing states, knocking on doors and getting out the
Republican vote. Now as clips of Kirk’s horrifying final moments play over and
over again on social media, the country grapples with the shock of yet another
incident of political violence.
