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      How Charlie Kirk turned campuses into cultural battlefields – and ushered in Trump’s assault on universities

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      Charlie Kirk, the far-right activist killed this week while speaking at a campus event at Utah Valley University, never graduated from the community college he briefly attended. But his lack of a degree didn’t stop him from assuming a defining role in the ongoing transformation of US higher education.Kirk pioneered a style of ideological warfare against what he viewed as bastions of leftism, helping turn campuses into cultural battlefields and paving the way for Donald Trump’s unprecedented campaign to weaken American universities and subject them to his movement’s ideological agenda.“Charlie Kirk will be remembered as one of the foremost architects of the political strategy of treating faculty and students with whom he disagrees as enemies to be defeated,” said Isaac Kamola, a political science professor at Trinity College whose research focuses on conservative efforts to undermine higher education.Kirk’s murder at the age of 31 followed more than a decade of on-campus activism, which was characterized by his staunch bigotry and Christian nationalism; hundreds of often incendiary “debates” – his favored medium; and the 2012 establishment of Turning Point USA, a conservative powerhouse that calls itself, with more than 900 chapters, the nation’s largest youth movement. Starting from his parents’ garage in suburban Chicago, Kirk often boasted, the movement grew one viral attack line at a time, supercharged by social media’s conflict-rewarding algorithms.View image in fullscreenKirk wore his lack of a degree as a point of “pride”, he told California governor Gavin Newsom in a podcast interview earlier this year, and as ammunition for his characterizations of American campuses as elitist and out of touch.“I didn’t even graduate community college,” Kirk said. “I represent most of the country. Actually, still, the majority of the country does not have a college degree and if I may, you know, bluntly critique the Democratic party, you guys have become so college-credentialed and educated that you guys snobbishly look on the muscular class of this country.”While Kirk had in recent years moved from campus activist to the upper echelons of Republican politics and Trump’s inner circle, on university campuses he will mostly be remembered for his role galvanizing the so-called “culture wars” with his regular diatribes against diversity initiatives, immigration and minority groups. Kirk emboldened conservative students to turn on faculty and classmates, established a “professor watchlist” for faculty it accused of spreading “leftist propaganda”, and embarked on an anti-woke crusade that has since become official government policy.View image in fullscreen“Turning Point was not the first group to target professors, and of course attacking higher education is not new,” said Matthew Boedy, a professor of English at the University of North Georgia who has been studying the group and its founder after being targeted on its watchlist. “What Turning Point did was take the traditional, old ways of conservatives fighting the culture war and translated it into millennial speak.”Katie Gaddini, a history professor at Stanford University who studies US conservatism, recalled seeing Kirk speak at an event years ago, where he boasted that if given 15 minutes with any college student, he could “de-program years’ worth of indoctrination”.“His whole mission, and Turning Point’s original mission, was what he called de-programming the woke indoctrination that he thought was taking place on college campuses,” she said. “And of course, we’re seeing the contestation over what can be taught in college campuses playing out on a macro, policy-level scale right now.”Beyond the campus warsIf Kirk’s aggressive, often rude style and frequent forays into explicit racism and sexism ruffled feathers with more traditional conservative groups on campus, he quickly surpassed them in relevance. Boedy recalled attending an event with Kirk and Black conservative activist Candace Owens, a TPUSA veteran who resigned from the organization in 2019 after making comments in which she appeared to defend Adolf Hitler. When a group of Black students raised their fists and walked out of the event in protest, Kirk and Owens mocked them and stirred the crowd to cheer them off. “It was emblematic,” said Boedy. “They’re in it for the culture war and that does mean warring against other people.”Hasan Piker, a leftwing political commentator who rose to prominence about the same time as Kirk and had been scheduled to debate him in two weeks at Dartmouth College, said that while Kirk wasn’t the first to debate speakers on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, “he was able to serialize this format better than other people, especially because he had a lot of institutional backing”.“He was a true operative,” Piker added, noting that his relationship with Kirk had been “cordial” even as their worldview was “diametrically opposite”. Still, he cautioned against interpreting Kirk’s predilection for debates as a sincere effort to engage in an argument.View image in fullscreen“It’s being presented right now with this notion that everyone was doing these debates because they wanted to arrive at the truth,” said Hasan. “The ultimate purpose of these sorts of debate culture, focused video sequences, is not to actually arrive at some kind of hidden truth through discourse or the Socratic method, but more so to just ritualistically humiliate your interlocutors.”Kirk’s influence soon expanded well beyond campuses, said Boedy, whose forthcoming book examines Kirk’s mobilization efforts in churches, media and beyond. “Turning Point expanded beyond merely college campus wars. Kirk used the college campus wars as a springboard to talk about the larger national culture war,” Boedy added, noting that TPUSA now has more high school chapters than it has college ones, and that the group is also involved in canvassing for conservative candidates.TPUSA “incubated” more than 350 rightwing influencers over the years, the group said last year, and more recently Kirk had also taken his activism abroad, promoting Turning Point chapters in the UK and Australia. In May, Kirk debated the Oxford Union’s president-elect, and earlier this month he traveled to Japan and South Korea to spread his message before new audiences.Kirk successfully tapped into conservative students’ feelings that they had been persecuted on campus by intolerant liberals. Now, his killing risks turbocharging those grievances. “There is now proof in the minds of a lot of young conservatives that they are persecuted for their views on college campuses,” Gaddini said.As some brace for retribution from the president, others warn that the chilling effect of the violence will be devastating for universities already battered by months of conflict and division.“This is a terrible day,” said Kamola, the Trinity professor. “Even if we disagree, the project of teaching and learning, and pursuing knowledge, is fundamentally threatened by violence.” More

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      When Mandelson met Maga: how Labour lord charmed Trump’s inner circle

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      Peter Mandelson was in his element. Lounging on a sofa one June evening at Butterworth’s, a bistro serving as the gastronomical centre of the Maga movement in Washington DC, the recently appointed British ambassador was being honoured with a plaque that indicated he was easing his way into the conservative circles around Donald Trump.The appointment of Mandelson, an architect of Tony Blair’s New Labour project in the 1990s, had not been without controversy. He was the first political ambassador to the United States in almost half a century and had twice resigned from Labour governments in the past over scandals (not to mention his past association with the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein).So he would have to move quickly to replace the well-sourced expertise of his predecessor and build ties with a new administration that had upended all the rules of the traditional Washington establishment.Mandelson managed that by leaning into the heady conservative politics surrounding the US president, working old contacts in Trump’s circles of businessmen and courting the new media right. Surrounded by conservative journalists that evening, he said that, while the two leaders’ politics may differ, both Trump and UK prime minister Keir Starmer were riding the same political winds of upheaval.Both had received mandates, he said that evening according to British media reports in the Times, from “angry people who felt they were being unheard by mainstream politics” and were “angry about the cost of living, angry about uncontrolled immigration and angry about uncontrolled woke culture spreading across institutions”.It was a textbook performance for the once-dubbed “Prince of Darkness” who was testing the lines between ambassadorial deference and open flattery. In public, a favourite adjective for Trump was neutral but weighty: “consequential”. In private, he tended away from criticism of the new administration, even as the White House leaned toward Vladimir Putin and flirted with authoritarian measures at home.His firing now amid new details of the Epstein scandal – one that the Trump administration has sought to outrun – plays out just days before Trump’s state visit to the United Kingdom, when Starmer must seek to influence Trump over the war in Ukraine, continue negotiations over a US-UK trade deal, deflect concern over a potential UK recognition of Palestine, and more.“[Mandelson] has his own independent stature and status, and that was a good thing, but it carried risks, and now it’s gone wrong,” said Alexandra Hall Hall, a former British diplomat who resigned while serving as lead envoy for Brexit in the US in 2019. “And now it’s gone wrong on the worst possible topic at the worst possible time.”In Washington, the British ambassador’s Edwin Lutyens-designed residence, where Mandelson lived with his partner and “diplo-dog” Jock, hosted parties that saw an influx of the new conservative media elite in Washington. At a White House Correspondents’ Dinner co-hosted by the Daily Mail in June, new media influencers like Natalie Winters, seen as a protege of the rightwing firebrand Steve Bannon, rubbed shoulders with established journalists from across the media spectrum. It reflected the White House’s own inclusion of conservative bloggers among accredited correspondents as a counterweight to a perceived liberal bias among the media.At a celebration for King Charles’s birthday that month, Mandelson wryly inserted jokes about Trump as guests mingled among cigar and whiskey stations, drawing laughs as he recognised a leader “associated with grand ceremonies and golden aesthetics. So happy birthday, President Trump”.It is precisely what Mandelson was sent to Washington DC to do: charm the Maga faithful around Trump while bringing the political heft that would allow a UK envoy to negotiate in the name of the prime minister.He replaced Dame Karen Pierce, a veteran diplomat who was already a regular at Mar-a-Lago and one of the best-sourced foreign ambassadors in Trumpworld. Some, like Bannon, had rejected Mandelson as a “terrible choice” because of his past remarks about Trump and links to establishment politics in the UK.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionYet Mandelson proved the doubters wrong, as at least one conservative outlet put it. His main success was the outlines of a US-UK trade deal, which was feted at an Oval Office meeting with Trump where Mandelson was complimented by Trump for his “beautiful accent” and given the floor in a rare show of deference to a foreign ambassador.The White House team around him laughed as he described Trump’s “typical 11th-hour intervention by you with your phone call demanding even more out of this deal than any of us expected”. He then channelled Winston Churchill as he added: “For us it is not the end, it’s the end of the beginning.”His absence will be noted as Trump arrives in the United Kingdom for the controversial state visit that Mandelson’s quick-found relationship with the US president could have helped to smooth.After the Oval Office meeting with Trump, Mandelson left with a souvenir – a handwritten note in Trump’s distinctive marker scrawl and unmistakeable signature.“Peter,” it read. “Great Job!” More

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      Assassination in Utah, school shooting in Colorado: one day in US gun violence

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      At 12.23pm on Wednesday, as the rightwing influencer and provocateur Charlie Kirk was addressing a large crowd at Utah Valley University, a single shot rang out. He was struck fatally by a bullet in the neck, sending thousands of screaming students scattering in all directions and propelling the country into a new and dangerous crisis.Exactly one minute later, at 12.24pm, about 450 miles to the east in Colorado, a 911 call came in to first responders in the mountain town of Evergreen. A 16-year-old student had opened fire with a revolver on high school grounds, critically injuring two fellow students before turning the handgun on himself.The confluence of two bloody incidents just one minute apart – the first taking the life of a key figure in Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement, the second erupting in the same school district as the notorious 1999 Columbine massacre – underlined America’s dirty little non-secret: the ubiquitous, quotidian, nature of its gun violence.“Yesterday was a dark day in the United States,” the former Republican political strategist and Trump critic Steve Schmidt said on his podcast on Thursday. “It was a day of mass violence, of killing, of gun violence – in other words, in America it was a day like any other day.”The sense of shock that has ricocheted across the US since the Kirk shooting has been palpable. Cable news shows and social media feeds have been overflowing with intense browbeating and soul-searching about the parlous – and perilous – state of the nation.There have been umpteen calls to prayer, plenty of partisan name-calling, and even dark warnings about a coming civil war.What has been noticeable by its absence, though, is virtually any talk about the instrument that lies at the heart of America’s copious ongoing blood-letting: the gun.View image in fullscreen“America is an insanely violent nation,” said Hasan Piker, a progressive influencer who had been scheduled to debate with Kirk at a university in New Hampshire later this month. On his Twitch stream following the shooting, Piker lamented the lack of meaningful debate about reforming the country’s globally lax gun laws.“A bulletproof vest would not have saved Charlie Kirk. Security did not save Charlie Kirk. The only thing that could have potentially saved Charlie Kirk from getting shot in the neck was reasonable gun control.”Adam Winkler, a law professor at UCLA and author of a book on the second amendment right to bear arms, Gunfight, told the Guardian that Americans had shown a stubborn resistance to gun safety reform through equally terrible shooting incidents in the past. They include horrors such as the killing of 20 elementary school children in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, and the mass murder of 60 people five years later at a music festival in Las Vegas.“People’s positions on the second amendment and gun policy have really hardened in recent years,” Winkler said. “It seems like Americans are impervious to shooting-based reforms, we’re just not seeing this. I don’t think this week’s tragedies are likely to shift the substance of the debate or the current stalemate on guns.”Kirk had been discussing gun violence at the moment that he was shot. Sitting on a sparkling cloudless day in the shade of a tent bearing the logo of his “American Comeback Tour”, the Turning Point USA leader was sparring by microphone with students over how many mass shooters in the past decade had been transgender.“Too many,” he said. (In fact, trans people have carried out a tiny fraction of mass shootings, the fact-checking group Politifact found.)Kirk’s own views on guns in America were reflective of the prevailing attitude across the Maga universe which is fiercely protective of the second amendment despite the evident side-effects of such devotion. Kirk being Kirk – his willingness to confront his detractors face to face was summed up in his slogan “Prove me wrong” – he articulated his passion for gun rights in brutally frank terms.In a speech in Salt Lake City two years ago that has been widely resurfaced on social media in the wake of his death, Kirk argued that the benefits of having guns in many American hands outweighed the costs. Gun deaths were inevitable in such a heavily armed society, he admitted, but the prevalence of firearms allowed citizens to “defend yourself against a tyrannical government”.“I think it’s worth it,” he said. “I think 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. That is a prudent deal. It’s rational.”Kirk went on to repeat the mantra that the pro-gun National Rifle Association (NRA) touted in the wake of the Newtown tragedy – the solution to gun violence is more guns. “If our money and our sporting events and our airplanes have armed guards, why don’t our children?”View image in fullscreenSuch a hardline pro-gun posture has been echoed by Trump. In the wake of the 2017 Las Vegas massacre, in the early stages of his first term in the White House, Trump backed raising the age of gun possession to 21, and even lent his name to comprehensive background checks which have long been a central demand of gun control advocates.It is not clear what made him change his mind – was it pressure from the NRA or from his own supporters? – but he quickly and quietly backed off the idea. The only change in gun policy in the second Trump administration has been in the direction of loosening regulations – his recent mega finance bill removed taxes from short-barrelled rifles and shotguns, and he has instructed his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to aggressively roll back measures to reduce gun violence introduced by his predecessor, Joe Biden.In the immediate aftermath of the Kirk assassination, Trump has signaled that he will be guided not by a desire to get to the root of the problem but by a desire for vengeance. He has blamed the shooting on the “radical left”, disregarding recent atrocities against Democrats including the June shooting of Democratic Minnesota lawmakers in which one was killed.In a statement from the Oval Office, Trump has insinuated that he intends to crack down on leftist civil society organisations. There has so far been no talk of similarly cracking down on guns.“There’s just no way that Trump is going to support gun reform,” Winkler said.Meanwhile, one of the bedrock causes of America’s unique struggle with gun violence goes untouched. An analysis by the Trace, a news outlet reporting on the issue, estimates that there are almost 400m guns in circulation in the US – that’s more than the number of people living in the country.More than four in 10 Americans live in households with a gun, according to the Pew Research Center. Though there is a partisan political divide in ownership, with 45% of Republicans owning a gun, that still leaves one in five Democrats also holding deadly weapons.As the number of guns has risen, so too have gun deaths. Almost 47,000 people died by the gun in the US in 2023, the latest year for which the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has produced official figures. That’s the third-highest year on record, after a pandemic-induced spike in the previous two years.View image in fullscreenThe argument frequently proffered by second amendment lobbyists that this is just the way it is can easily be squelched by comparison with other rich countries. A 2016 CDC study cited by Pew put the US gun death rate at 10.6 per 100,000 people – more than five times the rate in Canada (2.1 per 100,000), and almost 20 times that of Spain (0.6).Such alarming statistics are set against a powerful subculture in which the gun manufacturing industry and pro-gun groups and magazines actively promote the allure of the sniper. “Best civilian sniper rifles”, was the headline from GunMag Warehouse.The online site Outdoor Life ran a feature on 16 of the “best sniper rifles”, defining the weapon broadly as the one that is “most capable of fulfilling the mission that whoever is carrying it is tasked with”. The author emphasised the huge variety of environments in which the sniper rifle has to operate, including “crowded cities”.First on the list was the AI AXSR which was praised for its “toughness, innovation, and accuracy”. The weapon trades to civilians for $11,000 on online firearms sites.The gun that delivered the single shot that ended Kirk’s life has been described by US investigators as a Mauser high-powered bolt-action rifle. Though it was not a purpose-built sniper rifle it was precise enough to allow the killer to strike from a rooftop about 160 metres away from his target.Josh Sugarmann, executive of the Violence Policy Center which has tracked the proliferation of the sniper subculture, sees its growth as part of the increasing militarization of the gun industry and its civilian offerings. “No one notices or seems to care that there is an industry actively designing and building the weapons that enable shooters to more effectively commit assassinations and mass shootings,” he said.“The gun industry is designing, building and promoting rifles that are effective at much longer range with the goal of ‘one shot, one kill’.” More

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      Guided by angels, pursued by chemtrails: the weird world of Florida health chief’s influential wife

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      The wife of Florida surgeon general Dr Joseph Ladapo, a leading vaccine skeptic, believes that angels have spoken to her and that “dark forces” are targeting her family with chemtrails, and has claimed her husband won’t work with anyone she hasn’t vetted.In published works and interviews reviewed by the Guardian, Brianna Ladapo – who edited her husband’s USA Today op-ed from March 2020 against Covid-19 shutdowns and appears alongside him at conferences – claims to have regularly received visions that come true and believes her life has been saved “multiple times” by angels.Joseph Ladapo, a longtime vaccine skeptic who was handpicked by Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis, has faced accusations by public health advocates of peddling “scientific nonsense”. Ladapo has defended his stances on vaccines and Covid guidance, stating in 2023 in response to allegations he falsified a Covid report: “Between my scientific experience and training, and the fact that I am only comfortable saying the truth and speaking the truth, I felt completely fine with that announcement.”He recently ended vaccine mandates for children in Florida against preventable diseases, including measles, mumps, chickenpox, polio and hepatitis, comparing mandates to “slavery” and claimed the move would receive the blessing “of God”. Florida is the first state in the US to do so.The Guardian made several attempts to reach Brianna Ladapo and Joseph Ladapo by email. They did not respond to multiple requests for comment. The Florida department of health and DeSantis also did not respond to multiple requests for comment.In a Substack post on 5 September, Brianna Ladapo defended her husband’s decision to end vaccine mandates and claimed there are “dubious origins, nonexistent safety profiles, and dirty money trails surrounding vaccines”.She wrote in the post: “You believe in vaccines because you’ve been told to by a corrupt medical establishment that has a vested interest in keeping you subservient and stupid.”In a July 2025 podcast, Brianna Ladapo stated: “I often think if I hadn’t had to learn to trust my own gut and learn how to think and stand on my own two feet at such a young age, when Covid had come through, apparently swept away everyone’s brains, I might have been swept away right along with it if I didn’t already know how to listen to that truth that I believe is inside every single one of us.”She added in the podcast that “even to the lead-up, I was having visions, I was having dreams”, about the pandemic, before it began in early 2020. “Immediately, ridiculous inconsistencies started to show themselves.”She also appeared in an interview with the prominent anti-vaccine group Children’s Health Defense in January 2025, in which she said: “If we all listen to our intuition, we listen to that voice, we would not fall for propaganda. Like, what’s happened with Covid. People did truly insane things to keep from catching a virus that over, well over 99% of people survived without intervention, right? That’s textbook insanity.”Joseph Ladapo has appeared with his wife on stage at conferences on health and parenting.In Dr Ladapo’s 2022 memoir, Transcend Fear, he wrote that his wife has “a history of extraordinary experiences that were hard to explain with natural laws”. In March 2020, he wrote an op-ed for USA Today against shutdowns in response to Covid-19, the first of several he wrote about the virus, and noted that it was edited by his wife.Joseph Ladapo wrote in Transcend Fear that when he was recruited for the job of Florida surgeon general by DeSantis, his wife claimed it was the message she was waiting for.In Brianna Ladapo’s 2023 memoir, she claimed “as long as I can remember, I have received communications from beings beyond this realm. Even as a young child, angels regularly spoke to me.”She added that “since I was born, I have also received constant communications in the form of visions” and that “eventually, every single one of them came to pass”.In the book, Brianna Ladapo claims she went on a “pilgrimage” trip to Egypt in graduate school during which she saw the rest of a “recurring vision” from a past life.In a video podcast on Rumble earlier this year, she reiterated these claims about her “gifts”.“I was born a very sensitive child, the kind of kid who would see angels and talk to beings that no one else could necessarily perceive,” she said, claiming her family “perceived what was happening to me as satanic and demonic and evil”.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“I saw a lot of angels, but my angels would talk to me and they saved my life multiple times,” she claimed.Brianna Ladapo also claimed their children together “have all been having experiences like this since they were born” and have “innate divine intelligence”.She claimed one of her children as a baby had “a gift” that was temporarily shared with her.“I started to hear conversations that sounded like they were right next to me. There were no people anywhere near us. And they were clearly from different eras, sometimes different countries, different languages and dialects,” Ladapo said.She said initially in their relationship, her husband was skeptical, but came to believe in her “gifts”.“After a number of years, he came to deeply trust my gift and now he won’t work with anybody I haven’t vetted,” she said. The couple did not respond to requests for comment about Brianna Ladapo’s vetting.Later in the podcast, Ladapo claimed she floated an inch above the ground during a session with a former Navy Seal and self-proclaimed traditional healing guru, whom she said her husband had also seen and had similar experiences with. The healer declined to comment, citing client confidentiality.Ladapo is also a proponent of the chemtrails conspiracy theory about planes mass-dumping chemicals. She claims in the podcast interview that she and her children got sick because of chemtrails, and she used a patch that has been characterized as pseudoscience by medical experts.“As we try to chase down where this is coming from, who is funding the companies who are flying the planes, who are piloting these planes, where are they taking off? We don’t even know where they are, because none of this is on the books.” Ladapo said about chemtrails.She added in the podcast interview about a photo of a Florida sky outside of her home: “This is how the chemtrails have been looking outside our window for the past few weeks. They are, I hate to say it, but that looks like a pentagram and they’ve been plastering it in the sky right outside our house for the last few weeks.”She characterized the perceived chemtrailers as “dark forces” out to get her and her husband.“They’ve been trying to stop us for years,” she claimed. “We are operating at a level of light that puts us essentially out of the grasp of those with a very low vibration, very evil intention.” More

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      Charlie Kirk and the rise of Maga in US politics: ‘He changed the ground game’

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      What a swell party it was. Guests feasted on half-shell oysters and champagne at Washington’s luxury Salamander Hotel. Donald Trump Jr danced to YMCA while JD Vance quipped: “They don’t tell you when you run for vice-president that you get brought on stage with the Village People.”Guests at the $15,000-a-head Turning Point Inaugural Eve Ball last January included future FBI director Kash Patel, Jeanine Pirro and the Irish mixed martial artist Conor McGregor. But towering above them all, literally and figuratively, was Charlie Kirk, founder of Turning Point USA and key enabler of the rise of Donald Trump.Kirk, a 31-year-old rightwing activist, podcaster and provocateur, was killed on Wednesday by a single gunshot as he gave a talk at a university in Utah. For the Trumps, it was like a death in the family. Don Jr wrote on the X social media platform: “I love you brother.”The shock, grief and anger of Trump and his allies reflected not only their personal closeness to Kirk but his political utility to the “Make America great again” (Maga) movement and prominent role in vetting who would staff Trump’s government. It also raised fears that, in a moment of peril for the nation when cool heads are needed, the president’s response to the killing was just as likely to be shaped by highly charged emotions and calls for vengeance.Kirk grew up in an affluent suburb of Chicago, the son of an architect whose firm designed the Trump Tower in New York. Rejected by the military academy at West Point, Kirk was 18 when he launched the grassroots organisation Turning Point USA in 2012, later admitting that he had “no money, no connections and no idea what I was doing”.Kirk’s rhetorical gift for provocative statements, inflaming cultural tensions and “owning the libs” galvanised conservative students during the Barack Obama years. He held mass rallies that drew tens of thousands of young voters each year to hear conservative leaders speaking on glitzy stages backed by ear-splitting anthems and bright pyrotechnics.He was the right man at the right time to pour rocket fuel on Trump’s Maga movement. In the summer of 2016 he secured a meeting at Trump Tower and gave Don Jr advice on how his father could woo young voters. Don Jr was so impressed that he instantly hired Kirk as his personal campaign assistant – or “bag boy”, as Kirk put it – as the pair took fundraising trips across the country.Kyle Spencer, a journalist and author of Raising Them Right: The Untold Story About America’s Ultraconservative Youth Movement and Its Plot for Power, said: “Don Jr didn’t think much of it until he started hanging out with Charlie and seeing how incredibly driven and ambitious he was, how skilled he was at building alliances with people of all different ages and how comfortable he was, even at a very early age, with people who had a tremendous amount of money and power. He was charming to those people but not intimidated and that was a winning combination.”A year later, the New York Times reported, Kirk was a guest at Don Jr’s birthday party at the Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, where Trump held a private conversation with him for 40 minutes.Spencer, who interviewed Kirk many times, continued: “Trump took a liking to him and that was very genuine. As much as Trump can have a relationship with someone and a fondness for them, he always had a real fondness for Charlie, and part of it was because he and Charlie are very similar.“Charlie had a kind of charismatic infectiousness and ability to draw certain people in a very similar way that Trump had. Charlie also had a real understanding of being at the forefront of media communication methods and that you always had to be a little bit ahead of the curve. Trump understood that too, which is why both of them were so comfortable building followings and communicating online and creating, in Charlie’s case, a lot of online assets.”View image in fullscreenVance said Kirk first made contact with him through a direct message on Twitter (now X) after the future vice-president appeared on Fox News in 2017. They became fast friends. Kirk was one of the first people Vance called when he thought of running for the Senate in early 2021, Vance said. Kirk introduced him to people who eventually ran his campaign – and to Don Jr.Vance, whom Kirk had championed as a potential running mate for Trump, tweeted this week: “Charlie was fascinated by ideas and always willing to learn and change his mind. Like me, he was skeptical of Donald Trump in 2016. Like me, he came to see President Trump as the only figure capable of moving American politics away from the globalism that had dominated for our entire lives.”By his own estimate, Kirk visited the White House more than a hundred times during Trump’s first term. In 2020, he published the The Maga Doctrine, a bestselling book that argued in favour of Christian nationalism and the “America First” agenda.He pushed conspiracy theories popular among white nationalists, including the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged in favour of Joe Biden. His Turning Point Action group sponsored buses to take supporters to Washington ahead of the “Stop the Steal” rally on 6 January 2021, though Kirk himself did not attend. Two people connected to Turning Point Action, including its chief operating officer, served as fake electors in Arizona as part of Trump’s plot to steal the election.Kirk stuck by Trump during the wilderness years, in which the former president battled four criminal cases, and helped plot his improbable comeback. Turning Point Action was instrumental in driving youth support in last year’s election and was credited by Trump’s campaign for helping deliver the battleground state of Arizona.Steve Bannon, a godfather of the Maga movement, said by phone from Utah: “People underappreciated this: he changed the ground game. This ballot-chasing initiative was absolutely fundamental to winning in 2024. It will be fundamental going forward. What he did with young people is extraordinary.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThen Kirk played an outsized role in the presidential transition, advising Trump on his staff picks. Bannon, whose War Room podcast was followed by The Charlie Kirk Show each day on the Real America’s Voice platform, said: “In the transition, Charlie basically moved to Mar-a-Lago. He was a central part of the transition.“He was, with Sergio Gor [director of the White House presidential personnel office], doing all the vetting and in a ton of meetings. He was so busy he skipped the show a bunch; I bet you Charlie only did a third of the shows during the Mar-a-Lago transition period. That’s how involved he was in the transition. The president liked having him around and he delivered.”Kirk supported the controversial nomination of Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News host, as defence secretary. He also made the case for Turning Point USA allies to get government jobs. Bannon believes that Kirk’s “imprint” is felt in the defence, health, homeland security and other government departments.“Folks he didn’t know, he would do vettings. If he had a candidate or somebody he wanted to push, maybe not for a top level job but for second or third tier where the action is, people would go to Charlie. He had very active role and that continued. He spent a lot of time in Washington in the first couple months of the administration.”In January, Kirk travelled to Greenland with Don Jr to promote Trump’s declared ambition to acquire the Arctic territory. More recently he returned to Phoenix, Arizona, to work on Turning Point and prepare for next year’s midterm elections, Bannon added.“If Charlie had wanted a senior position in the government, it was there for the taking. He could have asked for virtually anything – maybe not a cabinet-level position but in a super-important position, either in the White House staff or in any of the department – and Charlie would have gotten what he wanted.”Kirk remained in ideological lockstep with Trump and his inner circle, often echoing, amplifying and seeking to normalise their brazen displays of sexism, racism and Islamophobia. Earlier this year, he questioned the qualifications of Black airline pilots, just as Trump had done during an attack on diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.Jared Holt, a researcher at Open Measures, a company that monitors influence operations online, said: “Kirk was a reliable propagandist who worked to sanitize the most alarming aspects of Trump’s movement. He relentlessly attacked Trump’s critics and demonized his scapegoats – immigrants, LGBTQ+ people and racial minorities, to name a few.”There have been moments during Trump’s second term when Kirk was reportedly uncomfortable with the president’s decision to bomb Iran and refusal to release files on the convicted paedophile Jeffrey Epstein. But he was careful to avoid direct criticism of the man who was both political mentor and soulmate.After Kirk’s death this week, Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform: “He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.” The president ordered flags flown at half-mast and announced he would posthumously award Kirk the Medal of Freedom. Vance escorted Kirk’s body home to Phoenix on Air Force Two.His place in Maga mythology is assured, as his political legacy. Larry Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota, said: “There are Turning Point people in the Trump administration and they are directly there because of Kirk’s influence. Charlie Kirk was talking about building a sustainable Maga movement. They’re playing for tomorrow. A lot of people are playing for today.” More

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      US college campuses have faced hoax calls about gunmen since Charlie Kirk shooting – live

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      Donald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Erika Kirk, the widow of right wing activist and provocateur Charlie Kirk, said in a statement Friday evening that her late husband’s message and mission will be “stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever” and that her “cries will echo around the world like a battle cry”.“I loved knowing one of his mottoes was ‘never surrender’,” she said of her late husband. “We’ll never surrender.”Charlie Kirk, the co-founder of the hard-right youth organization Turning Point USA, died after being fatally shot while speaking at an event hosted at Utah Valley University (UVU) on Wednesday afternoon. The event was the first in the organization’s fall tour of college campuses. Erika Kirk said that the campus tour will continue despite her husband’s untimely death.“In a world filled with chaos, doubt and uncertainty, my husband’s voice will remain and it will ring out louder and more clearly than ever and his wisdom will endure,” she said.Erika Kirk, speaking from her husband’s Turning Point USA office on Friday evening, said Charlie had been killed because “he preached a message of patriotism, faith and of God’s merciful love”.During a news conference on Friday morning in Utah, FBI Director Kash Patel lauded the work of the FBI leading the investigation into Charlie Kirk’s killing, while also twice saying the decision to release photos and videos to the public, which led to the arrest of suspect Tyler Robinson on Thursday evening, were made at his direction.However, Patel has come under fire over his handling of the most high-profile moment of his tenure so far. Some FBI employees told CNN they found it galling for Patel to claim personal credit for the most successful parts of the investigation.In the early hours after the shooting, Patel had prematurely indicated on X that a suspected shooter was in custody, before it later turned out the killer was still at large.Less than two hours later after his initial post, Patel wrote a note saying the person had been released – a clear signal that law enforcement had not apprehended the correct person.The following day, in a meeting reported by The New York Times, Patel fumed to subordinates over failure to give him timely information, including photos of the suspect, the now-arrested Robinson. Patel reportedly went on a profanity-laced tirade, telling agents he would not tolerate “Mickey Mouse operations.”Patel personally knew Kirk and gave a tribute to the Turning Point USA founder on Friday.“To my friend Charlie Kirk: Rest now, brother. We have the watch, and I’ll see you in Valhalla,” Patel said, making a reference to the hall of slain warriors from Norse mythology.About 50 college campuses across the US have been deluged in recent weeks with hoax calls about armed gunmen and other violence, AP reported on Saturday. Students at some schools spent hours hiding under desks, only to find out later the threat had been fabricated. On Thursday, several historically Black colleges locked down or canceled classes after receiving threats, a day after the fatal shooting of conservative activist Charlie Kirk at a Utah college.According to CNN’s analysis of events reported by the Gun Violence Archive, Education Week and Everytown for Gun Safety, there have been 47 school shootings in the US so far this year, as of 10 September. Twenty-four were on college campuses, and 23 were on K-12 school grounds. The incidents left 19 people dead and at least 77 other victims injured.

      The killing of Charlie Kirk is being used to mobilise support before what is expected to be Britain’s largest far-right rally in decades, which will include speakers from Britain, the US and Europe. The rally is expected to attract upwards of 40,000 attenders, according to the anti-extremism group Hope Not Hate. A smaller gathering organised by the group Stand Up to Racism is also taking place.

      A fundraising page, organised by Tucker Carlson’s nicotine pouch company ALP on the Christian crowdfunding platform GiveSendGo, has already raised more than $3.7m for the Kirk family after ALP’s initial $1m donation. According to multiple sources, Kirk’s estimated net worth at the time of his death was $12m.

      Erika Kirk, widow of rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, gave a combative speech saying her late husband’s message and mission will be “stronger, bolder, louder and greater than ever” and that her “cries will echo around the world like a battle cry”. A tour of college campuses by his hard-right youth organization Turning Point USA would continue, she said, in her first public statement since her husband’s killing. She urged students to start Turning Point USA chapters at their schools.

      Authorities announced on Friday that they had arrested a suspect in connection Charlie Kirk’s killing at a speaking event at Utah Valley University (UVU) on Wednesday. Tyler Robinson, 22, is now in custody at Utah County Jail.

      Robinson’s family friend turned him in, and told officers that Robinson “confessed to them or implied that he had committed the incident”, governor Spencer Cox told a press conference. A family member that investigators interviewed described Robinson as becoming “more political in recent years” and was aware that Kirk was due to speak at UVU, said Cox.

      The weapon used was identified as a high-action bolt rifle, and Cox noted that several bullet casings were found at the scene of the crime. One of three unfired casings read “Hey fascist! Catch!”, a second read “Oh Bella Ciao” (which is the name of an anti-fascist Italian anthem), and a third casing had the following engraved: “If you read this, you are gay, LMAO”. The Wall Street Journal initially reported on Thursday that an internal law enforcement bulletin said that ammunition recovered after the Charlie Kirk shooting was engraved with expressions of unspecified “transgender ideology”, but within an hour the New York Times, citing multiple sources, reported that these claims were likely not true. The WSJ has since posted an Editor’s Note saying that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives “urged caution” around inaccurate reports of the transgender engravings.

      Donald Trump told Fox & Friends in an interview – during which he also announced that a suspect was in custody – that he hoped the shooter “gets the death penalty”. He declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions, saying “I couldn’t care less” and instead casting “vicious and horrible radicals” on the left of US politics as the sole problem. He added that these radicals “want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders.”

      Jeff Gray, the Utah county attorney, plans to file formal charges against Tyler Robinson on Tuesday, his office said. According to court records obtained by CNN, Robinson is being held without bail on several initial charges, including aggravated murder, felony discharge of a firearm, and obstruction of justice.

      A Utah Valley University spokesperson confirmed today that Robinson is a third-year student in the electrical apprenticeship program at Dixie Technical College. He also briefly attended Utah State University. More

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      Six great reads: rebels in Nazi Germany, how creativity works and Europe’s biggest pornography conference

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      1. The astonishing story of the aristocrat who hid her Jewish lover in a sofa bed – and other German rebels who defied the NazisView image in fullscreenFrom a diplomat who embraced the exiled Albert Einstein to a schoolteacher who helped “non-Aryan” students flee, these remarkable individuals refused to bend the knee to Hitler – only to be dramatically betrayed. What, asked Jonathan Freedland, in this extract from his new book, The Traitors Circle, made them risk it all?Read more2. The unconscious process that leads to creativity: how ‘incubation’ worksView image in fullscreen“One of the most marvellous properties of the brain,” wrote Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis in this fascinating piece from Well Actually, is its ability to continue working unconsciously when the conscious mind has moved on to something else.Read more3. Disgruntled NYT journalist to ‘anti-woke’ power grab: how far can Bari Weiss go?View image in fullscreenAfter leaving the New York Times, Weiss turned her Substack into an unshakable pro-Israel voice. Now as Paramount eyes acquisition of her company, David Klion profiled a writer who is poised to become Trump’s ally among media elites.Read more4. Israel is forcing us to leave Gaza City. We know they may never let us returnView image in fullscreenIn this deeply personal piece, Gaza reporter Malak A Tantesh wrote about her family’s decision to leave northern Gaza, the area they call home, for the tents of the south where they had also endured last year’s winter. The family has stayed in 10 locations since they were first forced out of their prewar home in Beit Lahia.Read more5. Boom times and total burnout: three days at Europe’s biggest pornography conferenceView image in fullscreenIn this powerful feature, Amelia Gentleman, alongside photographer Judith Jockel, reported from the biggest pornography conference in Europe, where she spoke to entrepreneurs who were excited about AI and soaring profits, and creators who were battling burnout and chronic illness due to the industry’s gig-economy structure.Read more6. ‘I wasn’t terrified of dying, but I didn’t want to leave my kids’: Davina McCall on addiction, reality TV and the brain tumour that nearly killed herView image in fullscreenWhen the TV presenter was offered a free health screening, she thought it was pointless: she was “the healthiest woman you’ve ever met”. But then came the shocking diagnosis. Now fully recovered, she told Simon Hattenstone, she’s re‑evaluating everything.Read more More

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      Trump news at a glance: president urges death penalty in Charlie Kirk killing, as widow says: ‘we’ll never surrender’

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      Donald Trump on Friday advocated for the death penalty in the killing of his close associate Charlie Kirk, as the widow of the rightwing activist spoke publicly for the first time since the shooting.The president told Fox & Friends in an interview – during which he also announced that a suspect was in custody – that he hopes the shooter “gets the death penalty”. He added: “Charlie Kirk was the finest person. He didn’t deserve this”.On Friday night, Kirk’s widow, Erika, gave a combative speech from the office where her late husband hosted his podcast, telling “the evildoers responsible for my husband’s assassination” that “You have no idea the fire that you have ignited within this wife. The cries of this widow will echo around the world like a battle cry.”In an interview on Fox & Friends on Friday morning, the US president was asked what he intended to do to heal the wounds of Kirk’s shooting in Utah. “How do we fix this country? How do we come back together?” he was asked by the show’s co-host Ainsley Earhardt, who commented that there were radicals operating on the left and right of US politics.Less than 48 hours after Kirk was shot in broad daylight on the campus of Utah Valley University, Trump replied: “I tell you something that is going to get me in trouble, but I couldn’t care less.”He went on: “The radicals on the right are radical because they don’t want to see crime … The radicals on the left are the problem – and they are vicious and horrible and politically savvy. They want men in women’s sports, they want transgender for everyone, they want open borders. The worst thing that happened to this country.”Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning moveDonald Trump has declined to call for the US to come together as a way of fixing the country’s divisions in the wake of the assassination of his close associate, the rightwing activist Charlie Kirk, preferring to cast “vicious and horrible” radicals on the left of US politics as the sole problem.Read the full storyTrump says he will send national guard to Democratic-run MemphisDonald Trump said on Friday that he will send national guard troops to Memphis as part of his administration’s expanding military-led response to urban crime in Democratic-run cities.“I think maybe I’ll be the first to say it right now: we’re going to Memphis,” the US president said during an appearance on Fox & Friends, describing the violence in Memphis as dire.Read the full storyJudge stops statement of man defending himself over Trump assassination attempt The trial defense of the man accused of trying to assassinate Donald Trump at one of his golf resorts in Florida in September 2024 got off to a shaky start on Thursday, after he was cut off by the judge minutes into his opening remarks.Ryan Routh, 59, who is representing himself despite having no legal education, is charged with five crimes including attempted assassination of a major presidential candidate. He has pleaded not guilty.Read the full storyCourt lets Trump block Medicaid funds to ‘defund’ Planned Parenthood The Trump administration can move forward with its plan to “defund” Planned Parenthood by blocking it from receiving reimbursements from Medicaid, the US government’s insurance program for low-income people, a federal appeals court has ruled.Read the full storyUS immigration officers shoot dead man trying to flee vehicle stop near ChicagoA man was fatally shot during a vehicle stop on the outskirts of Chicago by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) officers after attempting to flee, according to officials, and another officer was injured during the altercation.The target of the stop was Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, an undocumented immigrant with a history of reckless driving, according to the Department of Homeland Security.Ice said the suspect attempted to drive his vehicle into the arrest team, striking an officer and subsequently dragging him as he fled the scene.Read the full storyWhat else happened today:

      Missouri Republicans approved a new congressional map on Friday that adds an additional GOP-friendly seat in Congress, a boost to Donald Trump as he tries to redraw districts across the US to stave off losses in next year’s midterms.

      The US government is drawing nearer to a potential shutdown after Donald Trump told Republicans on Friday “don’t even bother dealing with” the Democrats, whose congressional leaders are refusing to support spending bills that do not include their healthcare priorities.

      The US Environmental Protection Agency proposed on Friday a rule to end a mandatory program requiring 8,000 facilities to report their greenhouse gas emissions. The agency said mandatory collection of emissions data was unnecessary because it is “not directly related to a potential regulation and has no material impact on improving human health and the environment”.
      Catching up? Here’s what happened on 11 September 2025. More