On Charlie Kirk.

14 Oct. 1993 – 10 Sep. 2025.

On Wednesday, 10 September, political activist Charlie James Kirk was holding an event at Utah Valley University. It was his usual schtick of debating liberal college students; not a proper debate, with moderators and rules and time limits and everything, but one in which the kids took the microphone, challenged Kirk on something, he pushed back, they kept going until Kirk felt he won, then on to the next student. I’ve seen Kirk in proper debates, and he never fared well. Kirk did his debates to encourage young Republicans, and maybe recruit new ones.

Back when I was a young, argumentative Republican, I would’ve loved it. Nowadays I just shrug. I had plenty of impromptu, unformatted debates with fellow college students in my day; either trying to convert ’em to conservatism or Jesus. Wasn’t till I wrote political columns for a few years that I finally realized debate doesn’t convert anyone. If you’re losing, it just makes you angry you’re losing; you never concede unless you never really cared. It doesn’t win anyone for Jesus either; St. Justin Martyr’s dialogue with Trypho the Jew demonstrated this in the second century, but Christians don’t know their own history, so our apologists keep right on debating.

Anyway, as UVU student Hunter Kozak was debating Kirk about the topic of transgender mass shooters, at 12:23PM MDT, somebody shot Kirk in the neck. He was taken to Timpanogos Regional Hospital, and pronounced dead.

The FBI nabbed a suspect and questioned him, but let him go. This didn’t stop FBI director Kash Patel from tweeting they got someone—then having to walk it back. But ultimately the FBI caught no one. The alleged shooter’s dad recognized his son on the surveillance footage. He and a fellow member of their Mormon church, a retired detective, confronted him and convinced him to turn himself in. The suspect, Tyler James Robinson, 22, has some leftward leanings, and politicians have been using that as an excuse to denounce—and maybe persecute—leftist groups. We’ll see where that goes.

Of course rightists, leftists, centrists—everybody sane, anyway—have been denouncing the assassination. Kirk lived in a country with free speech laws. We have these laws to prevent this sort of violence. In countries without free speech, shootings happen. Bombings happen. Terrorism happens. People have to be free, and remain free, to say what they please—unless of course they’re inciting violence, and then we prosecute ’em for the violence, not the speech.

Plenty of people don’t get this, and think we should stop people from speaking lest it lead to violence. Fr’instance Kirk liked to denounce and belittle transgender people. As a conservative and sexist, their existence, and any public acceptance of them, personally offended him. Robinson apparently had a romantic relationship with a transgender individual, so Kirk’s statements offended him—and he felt Kirk’s stance exacerbates transgender abuse. Now, I don’t know that Kirk ever advocated violence against transgender folks—not that violent bigots ever needed Kirk’s endorsement anyway. But it appears Robinson felt shooting Kirk would help solve the problem. And of course it wouldn’t. Violence only begets more violence.

Others think we should stop people from speaking for various other reasons. Parents don’t want their kids to encounter sex, violence, and anything they feel the kids are too immature to handle… and some of ’em would rather we ban uncomfortable subjects altogether. Religious bigots don’t want other religions to spread. Donald Trump doesn’t want to be mocked, opposed, or even critiqued. I feel there are appropriate and inappropriate times for all those things, but I don’t want any government or dictator deciding when those times are. And certainly don’t want any murderer doing it either.

Okay, enough about the shooting. Lemme talk about Charlie Kirk.

Kirk was born in 1993, which means he turned 18 in 2011. Which is about six years after I left the Republican Party because it was rapidly being taken over by the Tea Party. The Tea Partiers had no interest in the historically conservative principles of the rule of law, legal precedent, civil liberties, democratic governance, limited government, and local oversight. They were culture warriors; they wanted sexism and segregation back, and claimed Jesus wants it too. The leadership consisted of white supremacists and Christian nationalists, and the followers may not have known this, but nevertheless liked and supported what they heard. Donald Trump is a white supremacist himself, and attracted them like flies to a full diaper, so they’re now his MAGA movement. But before Trump, as the Tea Partiers seethed and raged and gnashed their teeth because the Democrats had put them under a black president, Charlie Kirk came of age, and embraced their movement wholeheartedly.

He was still 18, an Eagle Scout, still in high school, when he co-founded his nonprofit, Turning Point USA, with his mentor, 72-year-old retired newspaperman and Tea Party activist Bill Montgomery. Montgomery groomed Kirk to lead TPUSA instead of going to college. Once they secured funding from investment manager Foster Freiss that same year, they managed to grow TPUSA into the $83 million organization it is today. If you’re worried about how Kirk’s family will be supported without him, no worries; he made $325,000 a year at his various jobs; $300K from TPUSA alone; he had a net worth of about $12M. Plus his wife Erika was just appointed the new CEO of TPUSA on Thursday, and hopefully doesn’t get a pay cut just because she’s a woman.

The nonprofit runs a SuperPAC which finances conservative candidates, and advocates for conservative politics in schools. The Christian Right adopted it pretty quickly, since it repeats their commonly-held view that liberals have been corrupting American education for decades. It has watchlist websites for academics whom they claim discriminate against conservatives, and for school board members who dare to support inclusion programs and mask mandates. (Nevermind that Montgomery died in 2020 of COVID-19.) It quietly funnels money to conservative student government candidates. Kirk was also heavily involved in certain political candidates’ campaigns, including that of Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, and J.D. Vance.

Because a number of Kirk’s advisers are Christian nationalists and heavily involved in the Christian Right, a lot of conservative Christians presume TPUSA is itself a Christian organization. But let’s be blunt: Kirk was first and foremost an evangelist for the MAGA movement, not Christ Jesus. I don’t know if he thought of them as the same thing, like a lot of nationalists do; maybe. Still, his emphasis was heavily on MAGA, not Jesus. Which shows in his fruit—in the impatient and ungracious way he handled his political opponents.

He’ll be mourned by conservatives, who will consider him a martyr. His memorial service today at State Farm Stadium, Glendale, Ariz. was very well attended. Even the president showed up, although true to form, Trump mainly spoke about himself. Will Jesus let him into his kingdom? Maybe. But Kirk’s gonna be super annoyed at how “woke” it is.

Gonna give cartoonist Sophie Labelle the last word here: