I don’t follow US conservative figures, so while I’d heard of Charlie Kirk, I didn’t know much about him or what differentiated him from other right wing figures. He was assassinated on Wednesday while speaking to an audience at Utah Valley University:

An assassin’s bullet struck down Charlie Kirk, the prominent conservative commentator and founder of Turning Point USA, while he was speaking at an event at Utah Valley University on Wednesday. He was 31.

Graphic video footage of the killing, which occurred as Kirk addressed a large outdoor crowd of students and supporters, showed him being shot in the neck. He was rushed to the hospital but did not recover.

The shocking tragedy has prompted an outpouring of lamentations from Kirk’s many friends in conservative media and Republican politics. Announcing his death on Truth Social, President Donald Trump wrote that Kirk was “Great, and even Legendary”.

“No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie,” wrote Trump.

Kirk was influential among young people. He launched Turning Point USA in 2012, with financial backing from Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery. The organization’s stated goal was to foster a conservative movement on college campuses, following in the footsteps of past groups such as Young Americans for Freedom. He was adept at creating catchy slogans and useful talking points for conservative students to deploy against leftwing thinkers; he popularized the phrase “Socialism Sucks” and added it to t-shirts, posters, and banners. He took advantage of dramatically increased interest in crazy campus happenings among the broader American public, and he encouraged dissenting kids to challenge their liberal professors, form right-leaning organizations, and invite Republican speakers to campus. Under Kirk’s leadership, the group became the undisputed king of conservative campus activism, helping turn thousands of non-liberal students into fans of the Republican Party and its rising stars: Candace Owen, Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and of course Trump.

Chris Bray posted some brief thoughts on the assassination as a way marker on the path to modern day nihilism:

Ryan Gerritsen on X – “People have yet to realize how the media affects the minds of so many. Just look at these headlines on Charlie Kirk. This affects people. It’s targeted & purposeful.”

First, the murder of Charlie Kirk is just the next level up the behavioral chain from the way Robert F. Kennedy was just treated in front of a Senate committee. He wasn’t mistaken, or wrong: He was an unforgivable monster, wholly illegitimate in every imaginable sense, who had no views or arguments that were worth considering in any way, and the only possible response to him is personal destruction. Our institutional left is a rage mob with formal titles. We’re not having a debate.

Second, the transition to radical violence is a reflection of the events that followed the death of the radical dream of the 1960s New Left. After the hippies, the Weatherman and the Symbionese Liberation Army. The turn to radical violence is the turn that follows obvious failure. It’s an acknowledgement of political impotence, and a last-ditch emergency reflex: If they won’t submit to our political vision, we’ll coerce them into submission. It’s the death rattle. It means the arguing and convincing has failed, and they see the failure.

Third, Camille Paglia persistently describes late-cultural-stage sexual disorder, especially widespread transgenderism, as a turn to sadomasochism, and I didn’t get that description for a long time. I’m seeing it now. It comes from an impotent rage over the limits of personal will, a Veruca Salt disgust that the world doesn’t do what I want, and a desire to hurt the body that’s trapped by a nature that won’t yield to ideology. I’m going to dive back into Sexual Personae today. Notice how much left-oriented political identities are currently invested in causing literal, physical injury, and in celebrating moments in which political opponents suffer actual pain. Go look for leftists celebrating Charlie Kirk’s death on social media, if you want to wade into that sewer. “Progressive” politics is becoming a torture fetish.

John Carter explains why we all need to watch the video to understand what happened. The post was originally about the murder of Iryna Zarutska on the light rail system in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before he published it, he heard about the shooting of Charlie Kirk:

Just as I got to this point in the article, I received word that Charlie Kirk was shot in the throat with a high-power rifle.

Once again, this is a difficult video to watch. Once again, I think you should watch it. Do not turn away from this. In case you’re hesitant, here is the last tweet Charlie Kirk will ever write.

[…]

Initial reports were that the assassin was some hapless boomer, but the police seem to have arrested the wrong person; FBI director Kash Patel has recently announced that the actual perpetrator has been apprehended, although as of the time of this writing the shooter’s identity hasn’t been released. Kirk was brought to hospital, and there were reports that he’d been stabilized and was receiving blood accompanied by prayers for his recovery. Soon after that we received confirmation of his death.

[…]

Reports are that his children were present for his assassination.

If Iryna’s death was the murder of peace, Charlie Kirk’s was the death of debate. Dialogue was shot in the throat, the very organ that produces speech. That probably wasn’t intentional: it’s likely the shooter was aiming for the head. Regardless, the symbolism is profound. Kirk was no bigoted firebrand, for all that the left cast him in the role of a fascist racist Nazi rabble-rouser. If anything, those on the right considered his politics to be rather milquetoast, though it’s certainly true he became more based in recent years. His modus operandi was to go to college campuses and enter into calm, reasonable, good-faith debate with the students there, because he believed profoundly that when we stop talking to one another, we begin to see one another as evil, and violence follows. Kirk was no stranger to violence himself: he’d received numerous death threats, he’d been driven off campus and out of restaurants by Antifa, he’d been assaulted. He knew full well the risks that he took by making himself such a high-profile public figure, and he took those risks anyhow, in full knowledge that he risked life and limb. Those are the actions of a man possessed of great physical courage.

No sooner did news of Kirk’s shooting hit the Internet, than the lying media was spreading doubt about the incident and heaping scorn upon the victim. Perhaps the shooter had been a supporter, one talking head suggested, and had been firing his rifle in celebration … it was all a big accident, and that’s just what you get for supporting the Second Amendment. Other journalist scum were at pains to emphasize that Kirk was divisive, polarizing, controversial … implying that if he’d just been a good boy and said what all the other good boys are supposed to say, he would have been safe. Getting shot in the throat is just what you get for speaking out of turn, so shut your mouth, bigot.

Leftists on social media were far less circumspect than their counterparts on the major networks. Almost without exception – by which I mean that I have seen no exceptions, though of course I have seen only the screenshots that people have shared, and cannot rule out that there are a few, for all that I doubt it – they are exulting in Kirk’s death. There is no surprise to this. The left is vicious, and to take pleasure in the death of an enemy may be the only healthy instinct they have left. I’m not even angry at them for that. I expect nothing else from them. Nevertheless, the gloating pleasure the left takes in Kirk’s death only serves to underline that dialogue is dead.

Thanks in part to Kirk’s tireless efforts, the left has been steadily losing the war of ideas, and with it their hold on the mass mind. They no longer have the ability to define the boundaries of the Overton window, because every single one of their claims has been shown to be baseless, deceptive, and destructive of both individual lives and society itself. Since the advent of mass media the left has had the ability to delineate the acceptable boundaries of discourse; since the rise of social media, and the advent of the meme war, this power has slipped through their fingers. Truth has leaked into peoples’ brains, and the people have realized that they have been lied to shamelessly on an almost incomprehensible scale about almost everything that matters. The people have seen the left for what it is, a malign force that delights in their humiliation, that glories in their annihilation, an influence whose special talent is to take the best impulses of people and twist them into something self-destructive and foul. And so, the people have turned from the left, and coalesced into into an opposition that has become determined to put an end to the left’s tyrannical parasitism. Not all the people, to be sure. But a lot of them.