A year has passed since an assassin shot Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk while he was speaking to thousands in Orem, Utah. The long-term implications of Kirk’s killing will become clear only with time, but some of the emotional smoke has cleared. Five points now seem obvious:
1. This was a political assassination, pure and simple. Charlie Kirk’s killer seems to have been an otherwise lucid, intelligent young man who engaged in a premeditated act of violence to silence Kirk’s speech. He was not acting from obviously insane motives — i.e., his dog didn’t tell him to do it, and he didn’t shoot the President to impress Jodie Foster. Kirk was engaging and effective, and he made arguments about conservative values that his killer could only answer with a gun.
2. Shooting Charlie Kirk was an act of profound weakness. The killer, and those who fail to condemn his act in the strongest and most unequivocal terms — or worse, celebrate his death with ghoulish TikTok videos — are on the wrong end of the argument. Kirk’s assassination highlights an ugly reality: a growing number of people on the Left, particularly young, college-educated people who call themselves “liberal,” seem animated by ideas they cannot defend in the political marketplace. Tragically, some on the American Left mistake political violence for a cockeyed and perverse brand of courage, when it is nothing more than thuggish cruelty and ignorance cloaked in cowardice. (See also Luigi Mangione.) Political violence is the hallmark of intellectual and moral weakness. It always has been. (See e.g., Germany in the 1930s.) Strength springs from moral clarity and truth. (See, e.g., Gandhi; Martin Luther King Jr.) The political violence that killed Kirk, and that is in vogue in parts of the American Left, is the antithesis of strength. It is immorality with a college diploma. As a country, we would do well to remember that resorting to violence, or celebrating it, hides weakness and betrays the frailty and ultimate powerlessness of one’s ideas.
3. It’s time to accept that the “trans” culture has a dangerous edge. Mr. Kirk’s killer, while not himself transitioning between male and female, had a romantic relationship with someone who was. Prosecutors have presented evidence in court that the killer shot Kirk because he found Kirk’s values “repugnant” to the killer’s LGBTQ+ lifestyle. A different killer who stalked and murdered three children and three adults at a school in Nashville was a female who was transitioning to male. Another killer who identified as transgender opened fire at a church in Minneapolis in August 2025, killing two children sitting in the pews and wounding 17 others. The young man who traveled cross-country from California with a plan to assassinate Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh identified as a transgender woman ahead of his sentencing. Of course, not every murderer is “trans,” but recent events nevertheless supply a troubling pattern. And while it is impossible to know what drives anyone to commit such heinous acts, especially against innocent children, the consistent connection to “trans” ideology cannot be ignored. It is too prevalent in the current culture to be irrelevant.
But it also makes sense. A popular culture that celebrates “trans” children and insists they are under constant threat establishes the predicate for self-defense, which creates a moral permission structure for violence. If someone is told that they or those they care about are being attacked because “they” hate them, some may come to believe that violent “self-defense” is justified.
If those same people are told “society” hates them, then it’s a short analytical jump to believe “self-defense” against the politicians who “attack” them or their chosen lifestyle is permissible. A moral imperative, even. And that’s how you justify killing a man sitting under a tent in Orem, Utah, who had nothing more deadly or threatening than a microphone in his hand.
This reasoning depends on a dangerous inversion of speech and violence. It is malignant sophistry because words are not violence. However offensive, wrong, or upsetting they may be, speech must not be treated as a license for physical retaliation. As a society, we cannot continue accepting the claim that disagreement is violence, because that claim erodes the boundary that keeps political and cultural conflict from becoming bloodshed.
4. What happened to the hue and cry about “weapons of war”? The gun-control dogmatists who have screamed from the rooftops that our country has been swamped with “assault rifles” and “weapons of war” have gone strangely silent. When Thomas Crooks opened fire on President Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, anti-Trump pundits appeared less concerned about his choice of weapon than his skill with it. Mr. Kirk’s killer used a Mauser 98 rifle, named for the year in which it was designed: 1898. It was an antique bolt-action rifle with a simple scope designed more than a century ago. The silence from gun-control zealots after both shootings suggests that the Left’s problem is less with any particular weapon than with the public having weapons. We are not hearing more about “weapons of war” because the "correct" people are currently the only ones being shot. (Or, in the case of trans killers, doing the shooting.) But expect a renewed and more aggressive push to take firearms from the public when Democrats return to power.
5. Something about Charlie Kirk’s killing feels different. During my military training, I went through a basic combat medicine course where we learned to apply tourniquets, treat gunshot wounds, and stanch bleeding from severe cuts. Graphic videos were part of the training, and I vividly remember watching them and thinking, “Wow, people really can get hurt doing this job.” The thought was sobering. I would be a professional military officer, but that was the first time I had been forced to confront what combat violence can do to the human body. The country had a similar experience when it saw the video of Mr. Kirk being shot. People who had watched nothing bloodier than a UFC match saw a young man in his prime snuffed out in a bloody instant, in 4K clarity, on 55-inch televisions. Most had probably witnessed no one being shot to death before. Live. And everyone who saw did have to ask, “What did that man really do to deserve such a horrible death?” Yet college students, young professionals, and others across social media are celebrating the fact that a young father and innocent man was killed for no reason other than what he believed. This is a dangerous shift toward violence, but few people have actually considered what the violence they seem to encourage really means.
The morbid celebrations around the first anniversary of Kirk’s killing are a symptom of profound moral rot, and that rot is serious and spreading. Those of us who see it for what it is must speak out and challenge it wherever it exists. It will not go away on its own.
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