In December 2023, I spent half a minute with Charlie Kirk in the bowels of the Phoenix Convention Center. Turning Point USA, the youth organization that he founded in 2012 and built into a right-wing juggernaut, was holding its annual convention in the city that the Chicago-born Kirk had made his home. Tall and dark-haired, he was moving quickly with a group of aides through a crowd of admirers. He had just exercised his considerable rhetorical talents in an opening address to 14,000 mostly young, wildly enthusiastic people from all over the country, whipping them up into a mood of ebullient, aggrieved hostility toward the various groups that he warned were trying to destroy America, telling his audience: “This is a bottom-up resistance, and it terrifies the ruling class.”
“Charlie,” I called out, “would you talk to The Atlantic?”
Kirk turned around and looked me over. For a moment, I had his amused attention. “The Atlantic? I don’t know,” he said with a not-unfriendly smile. “If you want to know what elite opinion is on any issue, read The Atlantic.” He delivered another insult or two, then he reached out to shake hands, as if this was all a bit of a game. “Sure, check with my people. Thanks for being decent about it.”
His people never got back to me, but Kirk spent the next year playing a central role in mobilizing young voters—especially men—to elect Donald Trump. And now this 31-year-old father of two is dead.
His murder is a tragedy for his family and a disaster for the country. In an atmosphere of national paranoia and hatred, each act of political violence makes the next one more likely. Last year, Trump came within a couple of inches of being assassinated. In June, two elected Democrats in Minnesota were shot, one fatally. President Trump has ordered flags across the country to be lowered to half-staff in Kirk’s honor, but he wasn’t a statesman like John F. Kennedy, or a moral leader like Martin Luther King Jr. (whom Kirk called “not a good person”). I won’t pretend that I believe America just lost a great man. In the long history of American political assassinations, Kirk belongs in the company of charismatic provocateurs such as Huey Long and Malcolm X, cut down before their time. Like them, he had a feel for the political pulse of his moment, a demagogic flair, and the courage to take on all comers in argument, which exposed him to the sniper who ended his life.
Kirk was killed on a college campus in Utah, seated under a tent with the slogan “Prove Me Wrong,” facing a crowd of several thousand people, debating anyone who wanted to approach and challenge him. He kept up this practice—part recruitment, part provocation, part entertainment—throughout his years as Turning Point USA’s leader. He was using his freedom of speech, and if his style was aggressive, divisive, sometimes mocking, losing his life this way was no less an assault on everything that democracy’s remaining believers should hold dear. Those who disagreed with Kirk ought to be able to deplore what he stood for and also the violence that killed him.
Words are not violence—violence is violence. After Trump’s brush with death, before anything was known about his would-be assassin, J. D. Vance and others blamed the shooting on the rhetoric of his political opponents. Within hours of Kirk’s killing, with the shooter still at large, Elon Musk posted on X: “The Left is the party of murder.” Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie, wrote: “You called us Hitler. You called us Nazis. You called us Racists. You have blood on your hands.” Some right-wing activists are calling for the Trump administration to crack down on leftist organizations—in other words, to use Kirk’s death as a pretext for political repression, which is just what an authoritarian government would do. No one should feel anything but horror and dread at the murder of Charlie Kirk. And no one should use the killing of a man known for his defense of free speech to muzzle others or themselves from speaking the truth about the perilous state we’re in.
