Charlie Kirk Assassination Archives

Tuesday

October 7, 2025

Britain’s MAGA moment is coming

Summer is fun. Winter is serious. Autumn in London feels almost Boolean – the light, the air, the mood, seemed to turn on an equinox dime. The political situation, I heard, had grown even stranger since my last sojourn. “Cool Britannia” is dead. Nothing today is more dated than centrism. And yet the inexorable rules of the unwritten constitution mean no election until 2029. And the great barbarian, Nigel Farage, his weapons a grin and a beer, lies in wait as his numbers rise. Like J.D. Vance and Donald Trump, in an age of immediate media, Farage’s great weapon is that he is human. The same in public and private. Who is Kemi Badenoch in private, or Keir Starmer? Are they even anatomically correct? Someone must know. We never will.

Wednesday

September 24, 2025

Alexander Larman

You can’t get rid of Kanye West

Amid the hullaballoo that surrounded Charlie Kirk’s memorial service last weekend, seemingly virtually every figure associated in any way with the MAGA movement appeared – yes, even Elon Musk, who was filmed shaking hands with President Trump in one of the more unexpected rapprochements of the year. But one man who many might have expected to be present was nowhere to be seen. The rapper, producer and professional controversialist Kanye “Ye” West, who might have added a certain grim luster to the predominantly Christian music played at the memorial, was absent, and so the potential for the carefully choreographed event being thrown into chaos was avoided. It might sound unlikely that West would ever have been invited, but a new documentary about him, In Whose Name?

Neal Pollack

Kimmel makes the case for free speech

After a few days in politically-induced time out that felt like a decade, Jimmy Kimmel made a triumphant return to late night TV on Tuesday. “I’m not sure who had a weirder 48 hours,” he said. “Me, or the CEO of Tylenol.” Given that Tylenol is a brand name and has no actual CEO, let’s say Kimmel, who Disney/ABC pulled off the air last week under political pressure from station ownership and the chairman of the FCC after he made a bad-taste joke about Charlie Kirk’s assassin. Kimmel suddenly became the most famous man in America not named Donald Trump, and his audience met his return with a roaring standing ovation, chanting “Jimmy! Jimmy! Jimmy!

Tuesday

September 23, 2025

Joe Lonsdale

The masses have had enough

Nearly everybody I know has experienced crime in our cities or had a family member threatened. A few years ago, my pregnant wife was walking in San Francisco when a deranged homeless man repeatedly asked her if she wanted to be raped. This is not unusual in America. Iryna Zarutska, a Ukrainian refugee, was murdered, aged 23, on the subway in North Carolina just recently. The man responsible had been charged and released 14 times under a broken system. A judge who’d never passed the bar, a city council that ignored public safety and Governor Roy Cooper’s Task Force for Racial Equity in Criminal Justice all made it harder to keep repeat offenders like Iryna’s killer off the streets.

Katherine Dee

Nihilism is destroying young minds

Sandy Hook was supposed to be the tipping point in our national conversation about mass shootings. This wasn’t a shopping mall or movie theater. It wasn’t a high school. We could imagine this happening at a high school. We had seen that before. But we could not imagine anyone shooting six-year-olds. It was so monstrous that it seemed beyond the realm of possibility. Since that day, 13 years ago, the killings have continued and their settings have shifted. Earlier this month, a gunman opened fire at a Turning Point USA event, fatally shooting conservative commentator Charlie Kirk. In the past year or so, 15-year-old Natalie Rupnow killed a teacher and a fellow student in Madison, Wisconsin, before taking her own life. Solomon Henderson opened fire in a Nashville school cafeteria.

Neal Pollack

Is Kash Patel up to the job?

The morning after Charlie Kirk’s assassination, FBI Director Kash Patel stood in a Utah conference room, the state’s Governor Spencer Cox looking appropriately somber behind him, and uttered these words: “To my friend Charlie Kirk, rest now, brother. We have the watch. And I’ll see you at Valhalla.” A Hindu speaking to a dead Christian in front of a Mormon governor, none of them soldiers, invoking a mythical heaven for Norse warriors: ain’t that America? Yet beyond the absurd and harmless cognitive dissonance, there is a more serious question: does Kash Patel actually “have the watch?

Rod Dreher

The inadequate response of Christian leaders to Charlie Kirk’s death

It has been very heartening to see all the clips online of people saying they are going back to church for the first time in ages – or going for the first time ever – because of Charlie Kirk. They’re picking up Bibles, even leaving the left. As the Wall Street Journal reports, the Charlie phenomenon is going global. You should also know that in some of the European media, he is being described as a right-wing extremist and freak (strong implication: who had it coming). Felix Nmecha, a Christian soccer player for a leading German team, got in trouble for posting mild, apolitical support for Charlie. “Rest in peace with God. Such a sad day,” wrote Nmecha. He later changed that to: “May the Lord assist the Kirk family with special grace at this time.

Roger Kimball

Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk have exposed the media’s depravity

“Clarifying.” It seems almost obscene to say that the murders of Iryna Zarutska and Charlie Kirk were “clarifying.” But the huge and still-exploding response to those savage events shows that the mournful synergy of murder can be an occasion for illumination as well as for grief. To say that something is “illuminating” is not necessarily to say that it is pleasant. The media yearned for a pro-Trump, heterosexual, white male killer of Kirk. One out of three was a disappointment A picture is worth a thousand words. Iryna Zarutska, a 23-year-old refugee from Ukraine, was murdered on a commuter train in North Carolina on August 22. The attack went mostly unreported until early September. Then video footage of the incident emerged. That changed everything.

Daniel McCarthy

The blurred lines between politics and common morality

Some 238 years ago Thomas Jefferson wrote that “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” Charlie Kirk was a patriot and his blood, shed by an assassin’s bullet, is making Americans take their free-speech liberties seriously once again. Jefferson wrote his famous line in response to an insurrection – a real, armed one quite unlike the ugly out-of-control protest at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. The author of the Declaration of Independence wasn’t defending the rebels who had risen up under the command of Daniel Shays. His letter was instead a warning against overreaction to the rebellion on the part of the national government.

Bridget Phetasy

I’m done with default illiberalism

It took me far too long to reach the point where I could vote for Donald Trump confidently. I’d been redpilled multiple times. First in 2015, during Trump’s first campaign and the unhinged reaction to it; then again during the Brett Kavanaugh hearings; and most intensely in 2020 while living in Los Angeles. That city under lockdown was chaos. Churches and AA meetings were shuttered. Protests, looting and arson were tacitly permitted. I watched the collapse of society, a grim spectacle of selective enforcement and eroded trust. The grown-ups, I realized, weren’t in charge. Someone had to clean up the mess. I could explain away my reluctance to vote for Trump with January 6 or his contesting the 2020 election results. Those events provided convenient excuses.

Thursday

September 18, 2025

Alexander Larman

Don’t cry for Jimmy Kimmel

The defenestration of the supposed talk show host Jimmy Kimmel, for the inflammatory remarks that he made during the monologue in his show on Monday night about Charlie Kirk, is both an unexpected and deeply predictable development. It was unexpected because Kimmel clearly believed that he was, like Lehman Brothers, “too big to fail,” and was therefore within his rights to make such comments as how “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang trying to characterize this kid who killed Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them and doing everything they can to score political points from it.” And it was deeply predictable because Kimmel now becomes the latest scalp that the right have seized this year, and perhaps the most high-profile yet.

Wednesday

September 17, 2025

Laurie Wastell

Of course the Kirk suspect is a far-leftist

Why was Charlie Kirk murdered? After the horrifying killing of the right-wing activist last week, the focus of American law enforcement and the world’s media has turned to the political leanings and potential motive of his alleged assassin, Tyler Robinson. The 22-year-old former college student is facing the death penalty after being charged with aggravated murder on Tuesday. Given Kirk was a Christian conservative and leading MAGA figure, tipped by some as a future president, Occam’s razor would suggest that his murderer would most likely turn out to be on the far left. Indeed, every bit of evidence that emerged has pointed in this direction.

Anthony Thomas

Don’t project your lifestyle agendas onto Tyler Robinson

Charlie Kirk, conservative commentator and essential piece of the Trumpworld media ecosystem, is dead, allegedly at the hands of an individual whose inner life has, needlessly, been the subject of conservative speculation for the past few days. Seemingly, every faction of the American right has their own explanation as to how this young man might have been inspired to commit such an atrocity. Many of these are myopic but perhaps have a kernel of truth to them. Others are plainly wrong. The worst of them play right into the hands of the left, and deserve serious reconsideration. Details about Tyler Robinson, the suspected gunman, continue to pour in.

Tuesday

September 16, 2025

Joseph Moreno

Is Antifa a terrorist organization?

One side of the political aisle can only accuse the other of “fascism” so many times before a young, impressionable person subsumed within a social-media echo chamber takes matters into his own hands. This seems to be exactly what transpired in the case of Tyler Robinson: bullet shell casings found at the scene of Charlie Kirk’s assassination were reportedly etched with the words “Hey fascist! Catch!” Robinson seems to have been influenced by Antifa or Antifa-adjacent ideology. In response to the killing, Congress and commentators have renewed calls to designate Antifa a domestic terrorist organization. But this would have little effect. Antifa is a collaboration of autonomous cells with the ostensible goal of opposing fascism and racism.

Friday

September 12, 2025

Luke Lyman

America’s ‘fringe’ has taken over the country

Another day, another public execution. The talking heads on television and Twitter tell us not to worry too much: America is still strong. They repeat this sentiment after every waking nightmare. These horrific events are not the norm, they say. They’re just the actions of a few people on the “fringe.” But what is the American “fringe”? The “fringe” tried to incinerate the country in 2020. The “fringe” tore down statues of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. The “fringe” control the universities and has spent years indoctrinating kids with discriminatory dogmas. The “fringe” created the policies that let violent, mentally ill men prowl the streets and kill refugees. The “fringe” killed a healthcare CEO at sunrise in December.

Charles Lipson

Utah’s Spencer Cox has displayed America’s best values

Governor Spencer Cox of Utah rose above the crowd when he spoke of Charlie Kirk's assassination and the apprehension of his suspected killer. It was the second time in as many days that Cox voiced thoughts we all needed to hear. Instead of rage, the governor’s plainspoken, heartfelt language, together with his quotes from Charlie, underscored our country’s highest and best values. They were sober, profound thoughts, and we needed to hear them. Governor Cox’s comments on Thursday and Friday demonstrated rhetorical clarity and solid constitutional foundations, grounded in our shared humanity.

Alexander Larman

Stephen King, The Long Walk and Charlie Kirk

Under normal circumstances, the author Stephen King should have been feeling pretty good about things and himself at the moment. The latest film of one of his works, Francis Lawrence’s horror-thriller The Long Walk, opened in American cinemas this weekend and has been met with almost unanimously rave reviews, many of which have called it a more socially aware, darker Hunger Games. He recently published a Maurice Sendak-illustrated retelling of Hansel and Gretel, which brings his trademark dark and macabre sensibilities to the age-old fairytale. And his last novel, Never Flinch, was, naturally, a bestseller – as all his books have been since he first published Carrie, over half a century ago in 1974.

Cockburn

Who’s next on the Ambassador’s Sofa?

This time next week, President Trump will be across the Pond in the United Kingdom for a state visit. He goes back to the Old Country at a testing time for US-UK relations. The UK ambassador to the US Lord Mandelson was removed from his post this week after further revelations emerged about his friendship with the convicted child sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Mandelson remained close with Epstein after his first conviction in 2008 and referred to him as his “best pal” in emails. Mandelson also has an entry in the 50th birthday book put together by Ghislaine Maxwell which the House Oversight Committee released last week – the same book which is the subject of a defamation suit filed by President Trump against the Wall Street Journal.

Daniel McCarthy

After Charlie Kirk, Trump should crack down on campus ‘safetyism’

An assassin who wants to silence a debate in America’s colleges can’t do it just by killing Charlie Kirk. Although Kirk was an exceptionally effective campus speaker – maybe the most effective since William F. Buckley Jr. in his heyday – he was far from alone in voicing conservative ideas in academic settings where they are generally unwelcome and at times violently opposed. There are others who will pick up Kirk’s microphone. But Kirk’s murderer has allies who can do systematically what the gunman could only do once. His allies in silencing voices like Charlie Kirk’s are university administrators who respond to violence by imposing stifling security costs on the targets of violence and intimidation.

Thursday

September 11, 2025

Freddy Gray

America’s mask of civility slips again

The FBI has just released an image of a "person of interest" in the case of Charlie Kirk’s killing. The Wall Street Journal is reporting that investigators have found ammunition at the crime scene with pro-trans and "antifa" engravings. But we still don’t know much, if anything, about the killer. Speculation as to motives, or snap judgments as to the historical significance of yesterday’s crime, are therefore futile. On the moronic inferno of X, however, the would-be Nostradamuses of the 21st-century right are weighing in with grave predictions about civil war or revolution or an imminent tide of vengeful justice against "the left." Others are suggesting that Kirk, a Christian Zionist, may have been slain for having raised doubts about Israel’s war on Hamas recently.