The footage is unbearable, though it’s ubiquitous online: Charlie Kirk, having apparently answered a question from his audience at a Utah university, drops his handheld mic to his lap. Just then, a bullet strikes him in the jugular. Blood gushes out of his neck. Kirk’s body spasms, then goes limp. The conservative activist, Turning Point USA founder, and prolific campus debater won’t survive this.
We scroll through the “X” (formerly Twitter) newsfeed and run across this video, sandwiched between other snippets of random violence — a Brazilian motorcycle thief getting his brutal comeuppance from angry locals, a pair of drunk young men throwing punches and karate kicks in a parking lot — and OnlyFans soft porn. It isn’t hard for Kirk’s killing to blend in with the same nihilistic brutality that defines much of the social-media landscape in 2025.
Reduced to its bare matter, the Kirk video is scarcely different from these other instances of human degradation served up by the infinite scroll. It elicits the same vague outrage and obscene titillation before we move on to nicer things — maybe a gourmet cooking video or a cat that plays mother to a baby koala. But we must resist this internet flattening effect. We have to try to hold the full historical weight of what took place on Wednesday at Utah Valley University.
What took place was this: an activist who’d embraced the spirit of open debate was gunned down while he was exercising this most American of ideals. Kirk’s assassin, whatever his motivation or ideology, telegraphed the following message to his victim’s fans — that a speeding bullet can best any argument; that a syllogism is no match for a projectile wheezing through the air at thousands of feet per second; that a well-trained rifle is finally what settles debates.
Everything that is good and decent and dynamic and wonderful about America will wither and die unless the rest of us prove the assassin wrong in the coming months and years.
I met Charlie Kirk in 2022, when he invited me and UnHerd contributor Josh Hammer to address a panel at a TPUSA gathering in Tampa. Thousands of young men and women had descended on the Sunshine State for a weekend of polemic and fratty revelry: John Locke plus platform heels clicking over beery floors. At the center of it all was a young man, Kirk, who took the ideas very seriously indeed; he was 28 years old.
At the time, Hammer and I were promoting a brand of conservatism that emphasized the classical account of the common good, over and against the autonomy-maximizing individualism that Kirk had been reared on. Given his background — and, no doubt, his donors’ preferences — it was remarkable how far he was willing to go in granting the shortcomings of the old Reaganite orthodoxy. There was an openness about him that I’d wish I’d done more to compliment while he was still alive.
It was that quality that served as the foundation for his fame. Kirk made a point of debating all young comers on campus: vigorously and politely. It doesn’t matter how he performed in these debates — sometimes he did well, sometimes he didn’t. What matters, as JD Vance pointed out in the wake of the shooting, was that Kirk provided one of the very few spaces in which the American Left and Right could meet and hash things out on earnest, civil terms.
“Kirk made a point of debating all young comers on campus.”
Ben Burgis, a prominent socialist writer and an UnHerd contributor, recalled his debate with Kirk as one of the best he’d done in recent years, not least owing to that same earnestness and courtesy, and notwithstanding profound ideological differences. Many a university president these days extols “civil conversations” across partisan barriers while narrowly circumscribing the range of acceptable views on campus. But Kirk meant it, and lived it.
More recently, Kirk and I developed sharper disagreements. The substance doesn’t matter — or at any rate, it’s unworthy of being brought up at this particular moment. What I can say is that we left our final text-message exchange agreeing to disagree and with him inviting me to air out our differences on one of his shows.
It wasn’t to be. Kirk, as even his progressive critics have pointed out, was killed while practicing what he preached: fearless, robust debate, carried out “in real life,” rather than behind the veil of an online avatar. Unfortunately for those of us who write, debate, and speechify for a living, his assassination will likely mean greater securitization and militarization of public spaces and events (as if we didn’t have enough of that already).
But the far more appalling possibility is a loss of faith in nonviolent contestation — conversation, debate, even politics — as a means for stabilizing 21st-century democracies and ameliorating today’s sharp polarization. Western societies today are full of lonely, addicted, angry people reeling from the “blessings” of neoliberal globalization. I’m not sure what becomes of such societies if we can’t talk things out. Kirk, though, found confidence elsewhere, frequently quoting the Psalmist: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.”
May he rest in peace, eternal light shine upon him.
