Opinion Why Charlie Kirk S Death Matters More Than You Think

Bonisiwe Shabane

-Nov 19, 2025, 12:40 AM

opinion why charlie kirk s death matters more than you think

I didn't much care for Charlie Kirk. In the nexus of conservative talkers and campus warriors, Kirk was never at the top of my list. I've always enjoyed the motormouthed takedowns of Ben Shapiro, the soothing theology of Ross Douthat, and the tin foil hat takes of Tucker Carlson. If there's time in a day for Glenn Beck or Brett Cooper, I spread the love, but Kirk wasn't my thing. After graduating college in 2014, and starting work as a grassroots organizer for a conservative nonprofit, Turning Point USA was our competition on campus for young people interested in free speech, lower taxes, and... Kirk's TPUSA outperformed us everywhere.

Their message was better, and Kirk's presence was massive. When news broke on X on September 10, 2025, of Kirk being shot in the throat on the campus of Utah Valley University, I made the mistake of watching the most up-close video circulating... Verification was important to me. What I didn't expect, as someone who knew plenty about Kirk but felt entirely neutral about his "Prove Me Wrong" booth schtick and the viral videos, was that I'd break down into tears at... The feeling was overwhelming. Feelings are not voluntary; they visit you like uninvited house guests wearing masks, often not revealing their true nature until you sit with and interrogate them.

Based on the author’s interpretations and judgments of facts, data and events While the fallout around the shooting death of conservative figure Charlie Kirk feels intense, writes Richard Warnica, his death is unlikely to spark any long-term change. Richard Warnica is a Toronto-based senior opinion writer for the Star. Reach him via email: rwarnica@thestar.ca. Charlie Kirk, one of the most influential organizers and activists in American right-wing politics, was shot and killed Wednesday while speaking at an event at Utah Valley University, in Orem, Utah. I probably didn’t need to tell you that.

If you’re reading this, you likely know the details already: of the shooting and the backlash; of the manhunt (such as it was. The police didn’t catch the shooter. His dad turned him in); and the fiery and largely pointless online debates about who has and has not condemned whom with enough clarity and zeal. As I typed this Friday morning, U.S. President Donald Trump had just finished telling Fox News that authorities had a suspect in custody. As I finished the piece, that suspect was identified as Tyler Robinson, a 22-year-old Utah resident.

Police apparently found both fired and unfired bullets tied to Robinson’s gun engraved with messages that all seemed less ideological than just deeply online: “Hey fascist! Catch!”; “If you read this, you are gay LMAO”; and, in a reference to an obscure meme, “Notices Bulges, OwO.” On the Sunday, September 14, 2025 episode of The Excerpt podcast: Conservative activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead while speaking at an event in Utah. His assassination has shaken Washington and raised fears that political violence in America is entering a new and dangerous phase. USA TODAY National Reporter Will Carless joins us to discuss why this could be a dangerous turning point. Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.

This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text. Charlie Kirk’s death and the subsequent news coverage have drawn polarized reactions. Some mourned; others positioned it against different tragedies, asking pointed questions like, “What about Palestine?” Just weeks earlier, children were killed in a shooting at Annunciation Catholic School in Minneapolis, and in June, Minnesota Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband were shot to death in their home while Senator... All of these recent events have received media attention, but only Kirk’s death, in comparison, has ignited a sustained national debate about worthiness of compassion.

That contrast reveals something unsettling at the core of our response to tragedy: We not only grieve, but we also rank grief. Tragedy is not measured on its own terms but against other suffering, as though grief were a zero-sum contest in which the validation of one pain must diminish another. Grief seems to have become a test of whose pain is worse. Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor and psychiatrist, warned us against this very instinct. He wrote: “A man’s suffering is similar to the behavior of a gas.

If a certain quantity of gas is pumped into an empty chamber, it will fill the chamber completely and evenly, no matter how big the chamber. Thus, suffering completely fills the human soul and conscious mind, no matter whether the suffering is great or little. Therefore the ‘size’ of human suffering is absolutely relative.” WASHINGTON — In the final weeks of the 2024 presidential election, President Donald Trump was doing nonstop rallies, many of them outdoors despite an assassination attempt on his life in Butler, Pennsylvania, that left... The rallies felt more like festivals than political events, with crowds gathering hours early amid music and pageantry. Local heroes, union leaders, elected officials, and retired military officers cycled through as warm-up speakers, firing up the audience between tracks like Oliver Anthony’s “Rich Men North of Richmond,” Village People’s “YMCA,” and Lee...

Despite the press often missing their aspirational quality, Trump deliberately held many rallies in places most politicians never visit — including Butler, where only he and John F. Kennedy have ever campaigned. Years ago, when I asked him why he began doing these events, he shrugged and said, “Sometimes, things just work.” TRUMP SAYS HE IS WORKING TO MAKE THINGS LESS EXPENSIVE On Thursday, while he was sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office, I asked Trump if he missed the rallies he had staged nearly 900 times over the past 10 years. He smiled, then fell quiet for a moment, a look of resignation settling in, before giving a blunt reply.

Charlie Kirk, who died after being shot during an appearance at Utah Valley University Wednesday, had a long history of contentious views and often courted controversy with statements that seemed designed to provoke those... A right-wing activist and co-founder of Turning Point USA, a conservative youth organization, Kirk also helped mobilize young Trump voters and was well known for his "Prove Me Wrong" videos, in which he would... Kirk was also a prominent radio host and podcaster who frequently used his platforms to rail against liberal viewpoints on subjects as varied as gun control, climate change, the civil rights movement and 2SLGBTQ+... Here are a few of his most controversial takes. A couple of years ago, Kirk made a comment about some gun deaths in the U.S. being "worth it" to ensure the continued existence of the second amendment to the U.S.

constitution, which is the right to keep and bear arms. Charlie Kirk is dead. He was a champion of free speech and he died speaking freely. He had an extraordinary reach for the young of his generation – my son, a student, and my daughter, a teenager, knew all about him. I knew next to nothing until he was shot last night. “It’s happening”, said my daughter darkly.

“This is going to be meltdown.” What she meant was that this could be the trigger for violence, at least in the US, a breakdown of the consensus that accepted that you may disagree... Assassination is the end of free speech, not only because it silences the man who makes arguments but because it makes a civilised exchange of opinion less likely in the future. Kirk was only 31, and young people were his main audience. Although he didn’t go to university himself, he made a point of engaging with with students in universities here as well as in the US, that is, he went straight to the audiences that... That was brave, even without a gunman at large. Now he is dead and silenced for ever.

In a poignant picture taken just before the speech he’s seen in front of a stand saying, Prove Me Wrong. The gunman didn’t prove him wrong. Rather, he made clear his importance. In a remarkably prescient piece written for The Spectator about his visit to the UK in May to speak at the Oxford and Cambridge Unions, Kirk wrote: “…at Oxbridge I found the dominant outlook to be a depressed and depressing near-nihilism. They were students who hardly cared their country has less free speech than 50 or 100 years ago.

They were appalled that a person might think life begins at conception. They loved the abstract fight for ‘democracy’ in Ukraine, but find the actual outcome of democracy in America very icky.”

Opinion Why Charlie Kirk S Death Matters More Than You Think

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