Who was Charlie Kirk, the conservative firebrand assassinated at Utah Valley University?

Conservative media commentator and supporter of President Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, was shot and killed yesterday while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University.

Footage of the shooting, which spread rapidly on social media, shows Kirk being struck by a bullet in the neck.

Kirk died a short time after being taken to the hospital. Later in the evening, law enforcement announced that a suspect had been taken into custody but was subsequently released. Authorities have not yet stated any motive.

Trump announced the death of the 31-year-old Kirk on social media and called for flags to be flown at half-staff nationwide. In a video posted on his Truth Social account, the President said, “For years, radical leftists have been comparing great Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world’s worst murderers and criminals. This type of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism we are seeing in our country today.”

While Kirk was still in the hospital, JD Vance told his followers on X to “pray,” adding that Kirk was “a truly good man and a young father.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also posted a tweet stating his “prayers are with Charlie Kirk.” Netanyahu later added, “Charlie Kirk was murdered because he spoke the truth and defended freedom. A courageous friend of Israel, Kirk fought against lies and stood tall to defend Judeo-Christian civilization. I spoke with him just two weeks ago and invited him to Israel. Sadly, that visit will not happen.”

Aleksandr Dugin claimed that “Soros” was behind the shooting. Right-wing Israeli Minister of National Security Itamar Ben-Gvir wrote, “The collaboration between the global left and radical Islam is the greatest danger to humanity today. Charlie Kirk saw this danger and warned against it. But the bullets of a vile assassin struck him down. Thank you, Charlie, for your support for Israel and your fight for a better world.”

Many far-right influencers and Republican officials also alleged that “leftists” carried out the attack. In some extremist groups, members called for civil war and violent revenge. Influencer and conservative Alex Jones declared on his live Infowars broadcast, “This is war, this is war, this is war.”

Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, whose seditious conspiracy prison sentence was commuted by Trump earlier this year in connection with the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot, announced on Infowars that it was time to reactivate his militia group to provide public security for figures like Kirk.

Rhodes then called on Trump to “do the right thing, the necessary thing” and “invoke the Insurrection Act” following the shooting.

“You must declare that the left in this country is in open rebellion against US law, inciting insurrection, aiding and abetting an invasion, and obstructing the enforcement of federal laws,” Rhodes said.

Elon Musk of X wrote, “The Left is the party of murder,” and then quote-tweeted a post blaming the “leftist mainstream media and figures like Gavin Newsom” for radicalizing people against right-wing figures like Kirk, adding, “Exactly.”

Figures like Andrew Tate began posting “civil war” themed content on social media.

Other prominent political figures from across the ideological spectrum, including Barack Obama, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris, also condemned the shooting and political violence.

In 2012, at just eighteen years old, Kirk founded Turning Point USA, a right-wing conservative “non-profit organization” focused on young people. A key player in Republican politics and the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement, Kirk’s influence was noted by New Yorker reporter Antonia Hitchens, who wrote, “As a reporter, I have met countless people who say they owe their political engagement—their commitment to the country—to Turning Point.”

A 2022 New York Times report seems to confirm this impact. While JD Vance began his career as an anti-Trumper, his election as a senator from Ohio in the midterms and his integration into the MAGA movement were facilitated by figures including Palantir founder Peter Thiel and Charlie Kirk, who introduced Vance to Trump advisor Andy Surabian. In his victory speech after winning the senatorship, JD Vance thanked Donald Trump and Donald Trump Jr., as well as Charlie Kirk and Tucker Carlson.

Hitchens points out that in the 2024 election, Kirk’s organization’s affiliate, Turning Point Action, played a major role by going door-to-door in Arizona and other swing states to gather Republican votes. Through its Political Action Committee (PAC), Turning Point also raised significant funds for Trump.

Furthermore, it was reported last fall that Kirk was one of a handful of Trump loyalists tasked with conducting “loyalty tests” for candidates to be appointed to senior positions at the Pentagon and intelligence agencies.

Kirk was also one of the loyalists President Trump appointed to the governing boards of US military academies. Kirk was appointed to the Board of Visitors of the Air Force Academy, a board responsible for reviewing the academy’s curriculum and instruction.

Kirk’s appointment is considered particularly ironic because, after graduating from Wheeling High School in Chicago in 2012, he was rejected by the West Point Military Academy, a rejection that spurred him toward the right-wing movement he now leads. Kirk claimed he was rejected from West Point because a “far less qualified candidate of a different gender and different persuasion” was chosen instead.

According to earlier profiles, Kirk’s father was an architect with his own firm, designing and building “middle-class luxury homes,” while his mother was a trader at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

It appears that the 2008 crisis and the subsequent federal government bailout of banks significantly impacted Kirk’s family business and his later development.

Objecting to government intervention in the economy, Kirk began to focus on issues such as Reaganomics, the works of free-market guru Milton Friedman, and gun rights.

By the time Kirk was a senior in high school, the Tea Party was on the rise. In a 2016 study, Stanford sociologist Robb Willer showed that the rise of the Tea Party was directly linked to the “relative ‘racial status’ of whites in the United States,” along with the election of Obama and the economic trends of 2008.

Indeed, before his death, Kirk participated in a Jubilee YouTube channel program titled Can 25 liberal college students beat 1 conservative?, where he attempted to “defeat” “woke” university students and claimed that Black people lived better during the eras of slavery and segregation.

As a high school senior, Kirk began attending meetings and associating with right-wing political activists like 71-year-old Bill Montgomery, who would help Kirk establish Turning Point USA a few months later.

Also during his senior year, Kirk wrote an opinion piece for Breitbart, which led to an interview on Fox News.

Oscillating between white nationalism and Christian nationalism, Kirk and TPUSA declared just a few months after the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot that they would no longer focus on “fiscal responsibility, free markets, and capitalism through non-partisan debate, dialogue, and discussion.” Instead, they defined a new mission for themselves:

“To empower conscious civic and cultural engagement rooted in the spirit of American Exceptionalism and positive action. Turning Point USA guides citizens in developing knowledge, skills, values, and motivation, enabling them to meaningfully participate in their communities to restore traditional American values such as patriotism, respect for life, liberty, family, and fiscal responsibility.”

In its mission statement filed with its 2023 tax declaration, TPUSA Faith defined its goal as “a movement launched to resist secular totalitarianism in America, remove wokeness from the church, inspire the rise of strong churches, and awaken believers to their biblical responsibility to fight for freedom.”

For the year ending June 30, 2023, TPUSA Faith’s expenses totaled over $13 million, and the organization “coordinated” with 2,400 churches and 6,000 pastors, participating in summits and roundtable meetings targeting these congregations and clergy.

An evangelical Christian, Kirk was openly pro-Israel and frequently debated the Gaza invasion with university students and others. Turning Point USA also maintained ties with pro-Israel organizations and regularly featured pro-Israel speakers at its conferences.

Kirk himself had traveled to Israel and praised Trump’s policies toward the country, including the 2018 relocation of the US embassy to Jerusalem.

Describing his visits to Israel as “eye-opening,” Kirk addressed a crowd at a bar in Jerusalem during his second trip, saying, “I am very pro-Israel, I am an evangelical Christian, a conservative, a Trump supporter, a Republican, and I have defended Israel my entire life.”

In his discussions on Israel and other topics, Kirk sometimes faced criticism for “veering into antisemitism.” In October 2023, just days after the Al-Aqsa Flood operation, Kirk sparked controversy by criticizing Jewish philanthropic donations to American universities as “subsidizing their own destruction by supporting institutions that cultivate antisemites and support genocidal murderers.”

Weeks later on his program, The Charlie Kirk Show, he also stated that Jews control “not just the universities, but the non-profits, the movies, Hollywood, everything.”

The following month, after Elon Musk replied “You have said the actual truth” to a user referencing the “Great Replacement” theory, Kirk defended Musk on his show, writing that Jews were beginning to realize that immigrants coming to the US “don’t like them very much.”

On his program, Kirk said, “Jewish communities are promoting against whites the same kind of hatred they claim they want people to stop using against them,” and later argued that “the philosophical basis of anti-whiteness has been largely funded by Jewish donors in the country.”

Kirk’s concerns about the erosion of the status of white Americans were central to his politics. He also leveled harsh criticisms against what he called “Marxism,” efforts to restrict gun rights, and transgender individuals. At the time he was shot, he was answering a question about transgender people.

In April 2024, as pro-Palestinian protests against Israel spread across American campuses, Kirk supported harsh Republican measures and called on them to also confront what he termed “institutional hatred against whites.”

Kirk had stated, “I really like the unity the Republican Party is showing against Jewish hatred. There is no place for it in America. Can we get the same unity on institutional hatred against whites on campus? This is an even more entrenched problem than antisemitism.”

Kirk also frequently defended Israel’s ongoing invasion of Gaza. In July, he shared a segment from his program on X, defending the state of Israel “against allegations of starving Palestinians.”