Death of An Influencer

Charlie Kirk, assassinated yesterday in Utah, was beloved on the American right. The reasons for that are worth knowing as we assess his legacy

Sep 11, 2025

Charismatic right-wing youth leader and TurningPointUSA CEO, Charlie Kirk, at the Republican National Convention, July 15, 2024. Photo credit: Maxim Elrasisy/Shutterstock

Tomorrow, Neil J. Young and I will devote our whole podcast to the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Kirk was the CEO of Turning Point USA, and the MAGA leader who has done more than anyone else to bring millions of young people into a Republican Party that appears to grow more extreme by the day. I want to make it clear straight up: absent a suspect, Neil and I have no theory of the case, and neither should anyone else. We send our condolences to Kirk’s family, friends, and co-workers, and condemn political violence of all kinds.

If you are paying attention to the online chatter, what you will see is that within hours, conservatives—including President Donald Trump—had begun blaming Democrats, the American Left, and George Soros for the public murder of right wing organizer and MAGA celebrity influencer Charlie Kirk. There is no public evidence as yet that points to any shooter, any motive, any political explanation for this horrific murder. And yet, the extremism that produced it has gone into overdrive to explain it through already-existing conspiracy theories that have been bubbling up since 2008.

Beyond the adoring crowds, people who interacted with Kirk on the professional Republican right admired his work ethic and empathetic approach to conflict within the movement. One wrote about an initial meeting when Kirk was a brash teenager eschewing college to become a right-wing organizer. “Charlie told me he was creating an organization called Turning Point USA that would become a significant force in conservative politics,” Ryan Girdusky wrote today. Initially turned off by Kirk’s chutzpah and suspicious of his ambition, over time, Girdusky became impressed with Kirk’s capacity for growth. Over time, “Charlie became more well-read, more tactical, and obviously more accomplished,” Girdusky writes. “He had a remarkable ability to be kinder than necessary and collaborate effectively with others, all while being a driving force behind populist candidates nationwide over the last few years.”

Kirk was beloved in his own movement and, if you can bracket everything he stood for (which I can’t) sounds like a nice man. Over time, he marketed himself as an open-minded conservative, a person who valued thoughtful exchanges of ideas who enjoyed debate with those who differed with him and modeled these values for the conservative students who brought him to their colleges and universities. But much like the original conservative youth organizer, William F. Buckley, Kirk was an extremist, one who presented himself as reasonable and common sense, but an extremist all the same. If you listen to his own words, Kirk was a racist and a homophobe. He believed that women’s most important job was to have children, and that women who voted for Kamala Harris “want careerism, consumerism and loneliness."

Also like Buckley, Kirk was an outspoken Christian nationalist, who periodically crossed the line into overt antisemitism.He advocated for restrictions on civil rights for LGBT people, maintained that climate change was “complete gibberish, nonsense and balderdash,” and insisted that liberals were deliberately importing immigrants to “replace” white people. In 2021 and 2022, he Kirk consistently platformed a Russian disinformation agent on the TPUSA website.

Tragically, Kirk also believed that a country awash in guns was a good thing, and worth the cost in innocent lives. “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,” Kirk said as recently as 2023, and that arming American citizens more fully was the best way to defend our society from violence.

One of those innocent lives turned out to be his, which perhaps accounts for the fact that in the last 24 hours he has been elevated as a Christian martyr and wrongly compared to Martin Luther King, Jr. (who seems to be the only person in Black history that extremists either know or like.) His assassination is an excellent example of the folly of such thinking: Utah, where Kirk was murdered, is a constitutional carry state. Only convicted felons are absolutely prohibited from owning weapons, and people under 21 are only sometimes restricted. And no one could have defended Kirk from a sniper attack launched yards away from the venue.

It is also not true that Kirk believed in free and open debate; in fact, he has been an active and enthusiastic proponent of censorship in secondary schools, public libraries, and universities. He has peddled anti-Black rhetoric that have helped to popularize the pseudo-intellectual attacks on criminal reform, immigrants, and longstanding efforts to diversify corporate and professional life. His attacks on critical race studies and feminist scholarship (or so-called “gender ideology”) promoted censorship in higher education, first in Florida and Texas, and then within the Trump administration, that have enabled book bans, the elimination of whole fields of study. He led out the attack on liberal arts’ curricula as “culturally Marxist,” and paid campus activists to report university faculty who, in their view, promoted “Left ideologies” in the classroom.

There is also a lot of evidence that Kirk wasn't as nice as he seems—or rather, that he had difficulty extending principles of kindness and fairness to his opponents, as extremists do. In one episode of his podcast, he listed accomplished Black women, including former First Lady Michelle Obama and Associate Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. “We now, you do not have the brain-processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously,” he said. “You had to go steal a White person’s slot to be taken—somewhat seriously.” After showing a video of former Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (TX-18) describing having been admitted by affirmative action policies but not graduating because of them, Kirk giggled and mocked how Lee spoke: “We know,” he said, “We know—that you were not smart enough to be able to get in on your own.”

After last summer’s tragic floods in Texas, Kirk claimed that the death toll would not have been so high without women and people of color in executive positions. He also shifted the blame for the debacle and its aftermath to Democrats—which was more than baffling, given that Texas is a ruby red state with a hard right Republican governor and legislature, that the federal emergency relief apparatus was crippled by Republican cuts, and that an incompetent Republican Secretary of Homeland Security who let a request for help sit on her desk for three days, . “The Democrats are so despicable. The Democrats are not lifting a finger to remember the well over 100 that have died in Texas Hill Country.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the immediate response among many in the extremist social media and journalism circles took to X literally minutes after Charlie Kirk’s death to claim variously that Democrats, “the Left,” Israel, and George Soros had orchestrated a hit on their friend and colleague.

As of now there still is no suspect in custody (looking at you, Kash Patel), although as I understand it, a weapon has been recovered (“an older-model Mauser 30-06 caliber high-powered bolt-action rifle”) and there are video images of the shooter, a palm print, a shoe print, and a forearm print. Utah is an easy place to disappear, but my guess is that the culprit will be found.

And when he turns out to be the same kind of deranged loser that usually perpetrates these things—don’t hold your breath waiting for retractions, apologies, or reflections on how things might have been different if the American right itself were not such a cauldron of violence.

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