And the fortuitous irony that led him to be gunned down on a school campus.
31-year-old Charlie Kirk died on September 10th, 2025. The prominent right-wing influence was at the University of Utah as part of his “The American Comeback Tour”; it was the tour’s first stop and was preemptively boycotted by thousands of university students. Underneath a canopy tent with the words “PROVE ME WRONG” banded across, Kirk was shot in the neck by a single bullet fired by somebody atop a roof roughly two football field-lengths away; videos shared on social media captured the exact moment Kirk was assassinated, blood gushing out of his neck as his body limped.
Kirk will be remembered by his wife, former Miss Arizona USA Erika Frantzve, their two children, both of whose names remain private, and the digital platforms of unignorable hate, belittling, and fear-mongering he built from his dangerous, oftentimes incendiary political and cultural stances.
Kirk, a community college dropout who’s referred to Harvard-decorated Supreme Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as nothing more than a DEI hire, ascended to cultural prominence in 2012. His relevance stands synonymous with right-wing extremism — a type of political hyperbole that often teeters into conspiracy making.
Kirk was unique; he had a certain safeness, whiteness, and objective charisma that allowed other fear-based individuals to mobilize around him; Kirk built community; it was solely one organized under evergreen victimhood and perpetual yearning for a time in American history they, themselves, never occupied.
Millions over his thirteen-year-long career listened to his calls for violence, calls for dehumanization, calls for sacrifice that promised a sort of coddled salvation.
Kirk was fine at thwarting people away from lifesaving vaccinations. He had no reservations about doxxing Black voices or adding Brown public figures to his media hit list. Kirk’s means of making America Great Again was sterilizing it. Using violence, be it through legislation, megaphoned narrative, or physical acts themselves, was his conduit of change.
Charlie Kirk’s irrationalities were impressive in their reach. I can’t think of or find an instance of a marginalized community that didn’t, somehow, fall under his calloused scrutiny. Transgender people were Nazis. Black women lacked brain capacity. Immigrants were dangerous — all of them. Women existed as not entities, but vessels for carrying out legacies (or a rapist’s child). Gay people were unholy. Religions outside evangelical Christianity were baseless fairy tales… or, worse, Islamic doctrine.
However, nothing quite met Krik’s nexus of Bible thumping and conservatism more than his adoration for firearms, specifically the right to own them. Even though firearms — “fire lances,” as they were first described in Chinese literature — date Christ by some 800 or 900 years, Kirk placed the Second Amendment under “God-given rights” numerous times. His most controversial take on the matter was uttered on April 5th, 2023, when appearing at the Salt Lake City Campus of Awaken Church.
His appearance was lacquered with his usual anti-immigration, homophobic, racially-charged rhetoric. Kirk’s life was seemingly void of joy, hate taking its absence. When asked about his thoughts on gun ownership and America’s mass shooting epidemic, Kirk held steadfast to his belief that guns hold a sacred promise, even if that principle comes with the loss of preventable life.
“It’s worth it to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year, so that we can
have the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given rights,” Kirk opined to the crowd. “That’s a Prudent Deal.”
Kirk spent the following two-plus years echoing target misinformation and, effectively, rage-baiting his audience into a series of finger-pointings as to who was and what was responsible for America’s mass shootings, particularly those set inside schools. Gang violence was blamed. Trans people were scapegoated. Immigrants were lambasted. The “Woke Agenda” was attached.
The real answer — logic and reason that has, time and time again, served factual — was close to home, perhaps with too much proximity: guns, themselves.
More specifically, firearms held by right-wing extremists, who account for over 80% of all extremist murders in the United States since 2013; last year, all recorded right-wing extremists conducted extremist-related killings; conversely left-wing extremists, on average, account for less than 10% of extremist-related killings annually, with predominantly domestic islamic extremists and other radicalized groups accounting for the delta between left- and right-wing extremists murders.
A single gunshot’s echo boomed across the crowd. America’s loose gun control laws, organized around the Second Amendment, legislation Kirk’s audience fervently defended, helped foster a reality that thousands now found themselves navigating in real time. Kirk’s body was swiftly carried into a nearby vehicle by on-site security. He would die shortly after, though his exact time of death remains unclear.
Charlie Kir’s last public words — likely his last ever utterance before passing away — were, unsurprisingly, baseless. Kirk blamed transgender individuals and gang violence as culprits for America’s school shooting epidemic. Seconds later, a bullet shot from a 22-year-old white man, one who’s a registered Republican and came from a gun-loving family, would enter Kirk’s neck.
On September 10th, 2025, 31-year-old Charlie Kirk was killed during the 46th recorded school shooting this year. Coincidence was the smoking gun. The irony that his life could’ve been spared if sweeping gun reform laws were adopted will exist as poetic satire, forever and always.
Op-eds and think pieces have swelled since Kirk’s passing a week ago. Articles authored by right-leaning writers, predictably, eulogized Kirk as a benevolent patriot, while simultaneously peddling his assassination as a means to enact warfare on liberalism. Wordsmiths on the left forked in every direction — the vast majority condemning Kirk’s belligerent bigotry, all while expressing the sentiment that political violence is immoral.
The New York Times journalist Ezra Klein, whose best-selling book Abundance sparked controversy amid its advocacy for an unregulated housing supply increase, penned what remains, bar none, one of the most damaging, tone-deaf opinion pieces the pub has published in years. In the span of 900, Klein waxes about Kirk’s debating strategies and platforms of conversation, although Kirk’s “debate tactics” mostly involve talking over college-age individuals who are ten years his junior.
Klein shared no insights, no talking points, no quotes from Charlie Kirk, opting to, instead, blindly portray him as a benevolent podcaster whose views on marginalized communities and white supremacy are hushed — when they all but were.
There’s no space in polical discourse to humanize and make right an individual who adamantly, who passionately, who purposefully perpetuated narratives calling for the stoning of queer people; claiming Black people were better off under Jim Crow; demanding all women birth their rapist’s children; reiterating militant neo-Nazism ideologies that should be adopted by global countries; justifying genocide and the use of hunger as a means of war. The list goes on, ad nauseam.
Digital platforms are tools – instruments that require conscious wielding to better and deepen discourse in ways that push society forward. Disagreements are normal. Criticism invites dialogue and plurality.
But the unified hate, which is what Kirk built his entire multi-million dollar empire and media company under the guise of, is a weapon he used for the belittlement and endangerment of others. Charlie Kirk shouldn’t be remembered as an enviable figure. Kirk’s legacy and platforms shouldn’t exist in celebratory air. His ideas of success, patriotism, and masculinity were all coddled inside warm blankets of hate — vile bigotry sowed for little men to seem lofty.
We don’t mourn the wicked, nor do we need to propel their demise. We need only to look toward brighter days that glow outside their shadow.
Have no empathy for Charlie Kirk; he wouldn’t want you to, anyway.
