Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Several people fired after clampdown on speech over Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Reactions on social media to the murder of far-right activist Charlie Kirk have cost multiple people their jobs as authorities in numerous states clamp down on critical commentary.Among those to have been fired, suspended or censured in recent days for their opinions include teachers, firefighters, journalists, politicians, a Secret Service employee, a junior strategist at Nasdaq and a worker for a prominent NFL team.The dismissals come as the administration of Donald Trump promises to take action against foreign nationals it deems to be “praising, rationalizing or making light of” Kirk’s killing, himself a fervent free speech advocate.Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, meanwhile, has ordered staff “to find and identify military members, and any individual associated with the Pentagon, who have mocked or appeared to condone Charlie Kirk’s murder”, NBC News reported Friday.The outlet, citing two defense department officials, said several members of the military were relieved of their duties because of social media posts – and that “dozens” more, including civilian Pentagon employees, had been “called out on X”.Along with government efforts to clamp down, a number of conservative figures and groups are attempting to collate and expose examples of commentary seen as objectionable.Others have been subjected to torrents of online abuse or seen their offices flooded with calls demanding they be fired, part of a surge in rightwing rage that has followed the killing.Some Republicans want to go further still and have proposed deporting Kirk’s critics from the United States, suing them into penury or banning them from social media for life.Laura Loomer, a Trump loyalist, posted to X: “Prepare to have your whole future professional aspirations ruined if you are sick enough to celebrate his death. I’m going to make you wish you never opened your mouth.”Republican congressman Clay Higgins said in a post on X that anyone who “ran their mouth with their smartass hatred celebrating the heinous murder of that beautiful young man” needed to be “banned from ALL PLATFORMS FOREVER”. The US deputy secretary of state, Christopher Landau, said on the same site that he had been disgusted to “see some on social media praising, rationalizing, or making light of the event, and have directed our consular officials to undertake appropriate action”.Republicans’ anger at those disrespecting Kirk’s legacy contrasts with the mockery some of the same figures – including Kirk – directed at past victims of political violence, Reuters reported.For example, when former House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul, was clubbed over the head by a hammer-wielding conspiracy theorist during a break-in at their San Francisco home shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, Higgins posted a photo making fun of the attack. He later deleted the post.Loomer falsely suggested that Paul Pelosi and his assailant were lovers, calling the brutal assault on the octogenarian a “booty call gone wrong”. Speaking to a television audience a few days after the attack, a grinning Kirk called for the intruder to be sprung from jail.“If some amazing patriot out there in San Francisco or the Bay Area wants to really be a midterm hero, someone should go and bail this guy out,” he said.Loomer and Higgins did not return messages to Reuters seeking comment.Scott Presler, a far-right activist with 2.3 million followers on X, asked for tips about teachers “celebrating Kirk’s death” – and he has shared posts and social media profiles of alleged wrongdoers, including details of their workplaces, Time reported.In Florida, the state’s board of education issued a proactive memorandum specifically warning school employees not to post any personal viewpoints that “may undermine the trust of the students and families that they serve”.Two educators in Clay county were removed from their classrooms and placed under state investigation on Thursday, one an elementary school teacher who posted to her personal social media account an article about the shooting, and the words: “This may not be the obituary we were all hoping to wake up to, but it is a close second for me.”The other, a high school counselor, alluded in a post to Kirk’s position, expressed in 2023, that it was “worth it” to have “some gun deaths every single year” to protect the “God-given right” of gun ownership.The counselor wrote, “37 years in public education, ready to take a bullet for my kids. No I’m not shedding a tear, he chose to sacrifice himself for the rights [to] be protected. Karma’s a bitch.”The comments were “egregious” and “hateful”, Jennifer Bradley, a Republican state senator, said in a statement.Arguably the most prominent individual to lose employment was Matthew Dowd, a veteran political analyst fired by MSNBC for suggesting on air that Kirk’s radical rhetoric may have contributed to the violence that killed him.“Hateful thoughts lead to hateful words, which then lead to hateful actions,” Dowd said, adding: “You can’t stop with these sort of awful thoughts you have and then saying these awful words and then not expect awful actions to take place.”The network and Dowd issued separate apologies. But in a Substack article published Friday, Dowd said he was the victim of a “rightwing media mob”, and that his words had been misconstrued because he spoke before knowing Kirk was the target or had been fired upon.Most of those who have been fired or suspended, however, are people in regular jobs whose comments displeased their employers or were otherwise exposed. They include a Secret Service agent who said Kirk “spewed hate and racism on his show” and “you can’t circumvent karma”.The Carolina Panthers, an American football franchise, fired a communications coordinator who asked on Instagram: “Why are y’all sad? Your man said it was worth it,” another reference to Kirk’s previous comments on the constitution’s second amendment, guaranteeing Americans the right to bear arms.A reporter covering pro basketball’s Phoenix Suns lost his job for posting comments including: “Truly don’t care if you think it’s insensitive or poor timing to decline to respect an evil man who died.”A New Orleans firefighter was reportedly thrust under investigation by her employer after posting – then deleting – a social media comment that called the bullet that struck Kirk “a gift from god”.Delta Air Lines announced it had suspended employees over “social media content related to Kirk’s killing that the company judged to have gone “well beyond healthy, respectful debate”. According to a statement signed by Delta’s chief executive officer Ed Bastian, the suspensions would remain in effect pending an investigation, and the company made it a point to say “violations of our social media policy can carry meaningful consequences, including termination”.Separately, American Airlines issued a statement on social media saying “employees who promote such violence on social media were immediately removed from service”.“We will continue to initiate action with team members who display this kind of behavior,” American Airlines’ statement said.The Hill gave numerous other examples of workers, including nurses, university employees, and others, fired or disciplined for their comments. A teacher in Oregon, it said, lost their job for saying Kirk’s death had “really brightened up my day”.Reuters contributed reporting More

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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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      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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      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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      Trump declines to call for unity after Charlie Kirk killing in stunning move

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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.”Trump’s refusal to seek a common bipartisan way forward at a time of profound national anger, fear and mourning was a stunning move for a sitting US president, even by his standards.The US has a long history of presidents using their rhetorical powers to try to overcome political fissures. The pinnacle perhaps was Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address towards the end of the civil war, in which he sought to “bind up the nation’s wounds” and made a point of striving for unity “with malice toward none, with charity for all”.In more recent times, Joe Biden used his inaugural address in 2021, just days after the insurrection by Trump supporters at the US Capitol on January 6, to call for unity, without which, he said, “there is no peace, only bitterness and fury”.Trump’s appearance on Fox News made clear he has no intention of following that rhetorical tradition. Instead, the tenor of his response to the Kirk shooting has been hyper-partisan and grounded in retribution.In Friday’s comments, he threatened the philanthropist George Soros with a Rico investigation of the sort normally reserved for organised crime. He accused Soros of funding “professional agitators” who were engaging in “more than protest, this is real agitation, this is riots on the streets”.In an Oval Office address delivered hours after Kirk was pronounced dead, Trump made menacing remarks indicating he would seek revenge against “organizations that fund and support” political violence. He laid blame for the current plight entirely on what he called the “radical left”.The president has already used his second term in the White House to turn the heat up on those he regards as his political enemies. He has authorised an investigation into the main fundraising channel for the Democratic party, ActBlue, and threatened to rescind the tax-exempt status of progressive groups such as Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (Crew) and environmental groups. More

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      in US Politics

      The US is on the brink of another era of political violence – and Donald Trump ‘couldn’t care less’ | Jonathan Freedland

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      The killing of Charlie Kirk has left the US and those who care about it on edge. The arrest of a suspect, Tyler Robinson, has hardly settled the nerves, not when the revelation of any supposed political allegiances could touch off a fresh round of recriminations. The fear is that the country is about to descend into a new era of political violence, becoming a place where differences are settled not with words and argument but by guns and blood. After all, it has plumbed those depths before.The US was born in violence, fought a civil war less than a century after its founding and in living memory seemed to be on the brink of another one – with a spate of assassinations in the 1960s that took the lives of Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers and John and Bobby Kennedy. That should provide some consolation, the knowledge that the country has been through this before and survived.And yet the comfort is scant, because these are different times. For one thing, guns are even more available now than they were then: there are more than 850m firearms in private hands in the world, and nearly half of those are owned by Americans. For every 100 Americans, there are 120 guns.For another, today’s information supply is dominated by social media, amplifying the most extreme voices and rewarding the angriest sentiments. Where once the CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite could break the news of a presidential assassination and provide sombre balm, now grief is inflamed into fury, with footage of Kirk’s horrific shooting entering global circulation mere moments after his death.But the crucial difference is at the top. An act of political violence used to be met by a standard, reassuringly predictable response: the president would condemn it, grieve for the dead and their families, plead that there be no rush to judgment, and call for calm and for unity, insisting that Americans not give the killers what they want, which was division, but rather come together as fellow citizens of a republic they all loved. I heard versions of that speech, delivered at different moments by Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama. On Wednesday night, Donald Trump chose an alternative path – one that proved that, as he later admitted to Fox News when asked about bringing the country together, he “couldn’t care less”.Instead, and at a time when no one was in custody and nothing at all was known of Kirk’s killer, Trump said the blame for his death lay with “the radical left”. It was its “rhetoric” that was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today”. The problem was not political violence in general, but “radical left political violence”.Put aside the inaccuracy of such a statement. Put aside the documented fact that not some, but all extremist-related killings in the US in 2024 were connected to rightwing extremism, just as they were in 2023 and in 2022. Put aside that, although Trump listed incidents in which figures associated with the right had been attacked, he pointedly did not mention and wilfully chose to ignore the murder of the Democratic Minnesota lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in June; or the arson attack on the home of the Democratic governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro, in April; or an earlier plot to kidnap the Democratic governor of Michigan.Put it all aside, even though it exposes the transparent falsity of Trump’s declaration that US political violence comes from one side only. Consider instead the likely effect of his words. At best, they add fuel to an already incendiary situation. At worst, they encourage retaliation and revenge.Witness Trump’s allies and cheerleaders. “We’re gonna avenge Charlie’s death,” promised Fox News host Jesse Watters. Elon Musk declared that “The Left is the party of murder”. A legion of other rightwing influencers have already taken this talk to its logical conclusion, announcing, as one put it, that “THIS IS WAR”. Could the message being sent to a furious and well-armed support base be any clearer?And notice something else Trump said on Wednesday. He pledged to find those “organisations that fund and support” what he classifies as political violence. Given that one of his closest aides said before Kirk’s murder that the Democratic party should be viewed as a “domestic extremist organisation”, it’s not hard to imagine who he will be coming for. Surely any group that opposes him.How should they – Democrats, liberals, the left – be responding to this moment of peril? So far they have observed the old norms, with almost every Democratic figure of any standing, whether former president or serving politician, offering the decent, human response: horror at such a brutal act, sympathy for Kirk’s wife and now-fatherless young children, fear for where this leaves the country. Watch MSNBC, or listen to the Pod Save crowd, and you’ll see that that’s how most of the leading lights in the anti-Trump universe have, rightly, responded. Any deviation from that norm has been punished.It is one of the asymmetries of the US culture wars that this etiquette, rigorously enforced from left to right, is not observed in the other direction. So when an intruder broke into the home of the former House speaker Nancy Pelosi, and nearly clubbed her husband, Paul, then 82, to death, the leading Republican in the country did not offer condemnation or words of consolation. No, Trump responded by making repeated jokes at Paul Pelosi’s expense.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionDifferent rules apply. After an act of violence, Democrats must be gracious, empathetic and call for calm on all sides, while Republicans can mock the victims, blame only one side and demand more violence. And there’s a further asymmetry: a single post from a random, anonymous user online will be treated as a statement from “the left”, while the outpourings of the right’s most powerful voices, in politics or the media, and including the president himself, somehow get a free pass.As part of this etiquette, it’s become poor taste to point out Kirk’s actual views. It’s as if the belief that no one should be killed for their opinions requires you to withhold any judgment of those opinions. But Kirk did not hold back. He was happy to tell people that he would be nervous getting on a plane flown by a Black pilot, and to talk of “prowling Blacks”; to tell Taylor Swift to “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband … You’re not in charge”; to deny the truth of the 2020 election; to recommend that children should watch public executions; and to suggest “Jewish dollars” were to blame for the spread of “cultural Marxism”.Many liberal luminaries have swerved past this back catalogue, preferring to express their admiration for Kirk’s willingness to debate and his genuine gift for engaging the young. That has left the field clear for the right to redefine Kirk not as the extremist he was – and was proud to be – but as a paragon of civic participation, one who merits a posthumous presidential medal of freedom and a lowering of the flag. While the liberal left is observing the conventional pieties, the right is swiftly sanitising Kirk’s views and canonising him, hailing him as a martyr for the cause of what they insist is “simple common sense”. As a result, it will have moved the Overton window yet further in its direction.These are dynamics Kirk knew well and that he was adroit at using to his advantage. He understood that a culture war inherently favours those willing to disregard the rules. It is a lesson that liberals and the left are, rightly, reluctant to learn – but that reluctance comes at an increasingly high price.

      Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist

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