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    US right capitalizes on fatal stabbing of Ukrainian refugee in North Carolina

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    The random and unprovoked killing of a young woman in North Carolina several weeks ago has become a viral video, a political football, and a powerful rightwing talking point – even as the horror and anger her death has provoked obscures what experts say is a vital story about the failures of the American mental health system.The alleged perpetrator, Decarlos Brown Jr, 34, has a long history of problems with the law and mental health issues. He had been arrested 14 times and served a five-year stint for armed robbery. Brown had also come to believe that there was something alien and malevolent inside him – a “man-made material”, he told people, possibly a computer chip implanted by the government that was fighting him for control of his body.Brown was riding a light rail in Charlotte, North Carolina, last month when he allegedly stood up with a pocket knife, abruptly stabbed a nearby woman, then walked away. The victim, Iryna Zarutska, was a 23-year-old Ukrainian refugee who worked at a pizza parlor and hoped to become a veterinary assistant. Haunting security-camera footage shows her curled up weakly as she bleeds to death in her restaurant uniform. In a phone call from jail after his arrest, Brown, who reportedly has schizophrenia, told his sister that Zarutska had been trying to read his mind.Initially a tragedy covered by mostly local news outlets, Zarutska’s death has grown in recent days into a cause célèbre on the American right. In more centrist conservative accounts, Zarutska’s killing is a symbol and symptom of a lax criminal justice system that should never have allowed Brown to freely walk the streets. In more inflammatory, far-right discourse, the story of a formerly incarcerated Black man’s killing of a defenseless blond woman has become racist fodder for sinister theories about white persecution and Black criminality.On X, Elon Musk has tweeted or retweeted dozens of posts about the story, many arguing that the media would have covered the story more aggressively if a white person had attacked a Black victim, and contrasting it with the media attention given to cases like that of Daniel Penny, a white man who was arrested in New York in 2023 for killing an unhoused Black man with mental illness on the subway in what he described as self-defense. (He was acquitted in trial.)Viral content online has claimed that Brown targeted Zarutska specifically because she was white, though as of now there is no evidence that he did. Some rightwing accounts have noted with pointed irony that a photo that has circulated of Zarutska appears to show a Black Lives Matter poster in the background. Musk and others have pledged money to a campaign to put up George Floyd-style murals of her across American cities.Outrage has reached the highest levels of the US government. Donald Trump has declared on social media that the “ANIMAL who so violently killed the beautiful young lady from Ukraine, who came to America searching for peace and safety, should be given a ‘Quick’ (there is no doubt!) Trial, and only awarded THE DEATH PENALTY.”View image in fullscreenJD Vance, the vice-president, called Brown a “thug” and noted his lengthy arrest record. “It wasn’t law enforcement that failed,” Vance wrote. “It was weak politicians … who kept letting him out of prison.” Earlier this year Brown was arrested for allegedly making unfounded 911 calls, and released after signing a written promise to reappear in court.Pam Bondi, the US attorney general, has announced federal charges against Brown – despite the strong possibility that Brown is mentally ill and could thereby be deemed not culpable by reason of insanity, and despite the fact that the federal government would not typically become involved in the prosecution of a tragic but random act of local violence.Emmitt Riley, a professor of politics and African American studies at Sewanee, the University of the South, said that Zarutska’s death is an undeniable tragedy but has become politicized in a way with obvious racial overtones.“Donald Trump has a history of calling for the death penalty, in particular for Black and brown people,” he said – most famously in the case of the Central Park Five, a group of teenagers who were imprisoned for the 1989 rape of a woman jogging in New York. Although they were later exonerated, Trump has never apologized.Experts on mental health and criminal justice believe the true story of this case is less sensational than tragic, and indicative of a fraying American mental health system that failed to protect Zarutska in part because it first failed to protect Brown from himself.“When I hear people define this as [solely] a criminal justice problem or lack of being ‘tough on crime,’ I think: ‘Let’s be real. Let’s define the problem as what it is,’” Sheryl Kubiak, the dean of the school of social work at Wayne State University, said. “We have a mental health crisis in this country, and we need to address it with appropriate mental health resources.”Jails, she said, were not created for treating mental illness, nor equipped to do so.Although Brown had a long history of reckless behavior, his mental problems seemed to get worse after he was released from prison in 2020, members of his family have told the news media. He walked around talking to himself and was given to unexpected angry outbursts.Like many people with seeming severe mental illness, Brown was offered treatment but resisted accepting it. He was diagnosed with schizophrenia, his mother told ABC, but refused to take medication. She and other members of the family repeatedly tried to get him help. At one point she asked a hospital to admit him but was told, she said, that the hospital could not “make” a person accept treatment. At another point a mental health facility kept him for in-patient treatment but released him after two weeks.Kubiak and other experts note that cases like Brown’s illustrate two longstanding and overlapping debates about the treatment of mental illness. One concerns “institutionalization”, the treatment of serious mental illness in dedicated institutions segregated from larger society, and the other concerns “involuntary” treatment of those who need treatment but refuse it.In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the United States built large, then state-of-the-art mental hospitals across the country to house and treat patients. But institutionalization fell out of favor in the 1950s and 1960s, due to changing cultural and legal attitudes, advances in medication, and a fear that institutions were overused and risked abuse. Mental health practices instead emphasized treating people within their communities. Civil libertarians also lobbied for the bar for involuntary treatment to be stricter. Many of the hospitals were shuttered.View image in fullscreenYet the government has not properly funded and organized a system to replace the older one, Jeffrey Swanson, a sociologist and professor in psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Duke University, said. Where someone with severe mental health problems might have previously had access to dedicated, long-term treatment facilities, they are now likely to end up in a revolving door of jails, ERs, and psychiatric wards with too many patients and too few beds.“Now we have probably more people with serious mental illnesses on any given day in one of our massive big city jails, like Cook county jail in Chicago or the Los Angeles county jail or Rikers Island [in New York], than we ever had in these asylums,” he said. “And it’s really a scandal.”Some progressives are opposed to involuntary treatment, casting it as a violation of consent. Mental health experts tend to take a more nuanced view, Swanson said, particularly in the case of patients whose illnesses are severe and defined by “anosognosia,” a term that means that someone doesn’t recognize that they are ill.A well-known argument for involuntary treatment, he added, says: “We wouldn’t let our grandmother with Alzheimer’s disease wander around and sleep in the subway just because she doesn’t know that she needs treatment; that’d be inhumane. So why do we tolerate that for young adults with schizophrenia?”His own opinion, he said, is complicated by the inadequacies of the current mental health system. “If you’re going to coerce someone into treatment for their own good, you have to have the system capacity to provide those services. I mean, otherwise, it’s really ironic to say: ‘We’re going to force you into treatment that doesn’t exist. We’re going to force you, but we don’t have a bed for you.’”Zarutska was buried in Charlotte on 27 August. Family members who were also in the US as refugees attended the funeral, but her father, who cannot leave Ukraine due to wartime restrictions, had to watch by video call.The Ukrainian embassy offered to help repatriate her body for burial, according to an uncle who spoke to People, but her family chose to inter her in the US; she had fallen “so much in love with the American dream”, he said.Her death is something “I would wish on no one,” Riley, the professor of political science, said. Yet until the US has better systems for treating mental health, “this will be a repeated cycle.” More

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      Teen Colorado school shooting suspect reportedly fixated on Columbine attack

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      A teenager suspected in a shooting attack at a suburban Denver high school that left two students in critical condition appeared fascinated with previous mass shootings including Columbine and expressed neo-Nazi views online, according to experts.Since December, Desmond Holly, 16, had been active on an online forum where users watch videos of killings and violence, mixed in with content on white supremacism and antisemitism, the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism said in a report.Holly shot himself following Wednesday’s shooting at Evergreen high school in Jefferson county. He died of his injuries. It is still unclear how he selected his apparent victims. The county was also the scene of the 1999 Columbine high school massacre that killed 14 people.Holly’s TikTok accounts contained white supremacist symbols, the Anti-Defamation League said, and the name of his most recent account included a reference to a popular white supremacist slogan. The account was unavailable on Friday. TikTok said accounts associated with Holly had been banned.Holly’s family could not be reached. The Associated Press left a message at a telephone number associated with the house that police searched after the shooting.A spokesperson for the Jefferson county sheriff’s office, Mark Techmeyer, declined to comment on the ADL’s findings or discuss its investigation into the shooting. The office previously said Holly was radicalized by an unspecified “extremist network” but released no details.Two recent suspects in school shootings were active on the so-called “gore forum” that Holly used called Watch People Die, according to the ADL. Holly appears to have opened his account in the month in between shootings in Madison, Wisconsin, and Nashville, Tennessee, the ADL said.A few days before Wednesday’s shooting, Holly posted a TikTok video posing in a similar way to how the Wisconsin shooter posed before killing two people during in December. He included a photo of the Wisconsin shooter in a post in which Holly wore black T-shirt with “WRATH” written on the front.He also posted videos showing how he made the shirt that was like the one worn by a gunman in the Columbine shooting, the ADL said.“There is a through-line between those attacks,” said Oren Segal, the ADL’s senior vice-president of counter-extremism and intelligence. “They’re telling us there is a through-line because they are referencing each other.”Watch People Die administrators said in an email that Holly lied about his age in order to access the site and was a not a very active user of it, with only seven comments. The email said the site is “adamantly pro-Israel” but does not silence opposing viewpoints. It referred to Holly and the shooters in Wisconsin and Tennessee as “unhinged losers”.Holly was also active on TikTok’s “True Crime Community”, where it says users have a fascination with mass murderers and serial killers, the ADL said.Some TikTok posts shared by the ADL show one user encouraging Holly to be a “hero”, a term it says white supremacists use to refer to successfully ideologically motivated attackers.The person also told Holly to get a patch with a Nazi-era symbol that was worn by the men who carried out the 2019 attack on a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the 2022 attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.Holly posted a photo of two patches that he had but said the Velcro on the back had fallen off.“I’m gonna use stronger glue when I fix it,” he said.The Colorado school shooting happened on the same day that the far-right political activist, Charlie Kirk, was shot dead during an event in Utah.Kirk’s alleged killer, 22-year-old Tyler Robinson, was similarly an avid internet user.Robinson – whose motives are still unclear – grew up in a gun-loving Republican home. He is reportedly not yet cooperating with law enforcement. Utah’s governor, Spencer Cox, said on Sunday that “friends that have confirmed that there was kind of that deep, dark internet … culture and these other dark places of the internet” where Robinson “was going deep”.Ammunition left at the scene of Kirk’s death had engravings related to internet memes, including lyrics from an anti-fascist Italian song, the words “hey fascist! CATCH!” and an obscure sexual meme.José Olivares contributed reporting More

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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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      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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      Virulent debater and clickbait savant: how Charlie Kirk pushed a new generation to the right

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      After clinching the title of top conservative podcast in America (and second overall news podcast, according to Apple’s ranking) in March, Charlie Kirk said: “We’re not just talking. We’re activating a revolution.”In the hours after his killing at age 31 on the first stop of a buzzy college campus tour, the rightwing activist’s words echoed through young conservative circles. Social media eulogies rolled in, with users reposting clips of Kirk with his wife and children. Parents of teens wrote on X of learning about Kirk’s death through their children. “My 17 year old is bumming. Told me he plays Charlie in the background on his computer when he’s on it,” the conservative radio host Jesse Kelly wrote on X. Another X user wrote about speaking to teens at a church youth group: “Everyone I talked to is so distraught and heartbroken at his passing.”A key figure in Donald Trump’s success, Kirk galvanized college-aged conservatives who moved in a different ecosystem from traditional media. The decade or so between Kirk’s beginnings as a teen activist and the shooting saw the rise of Maga politics alongside the shake-up of the conventional media landscape, with Kirk playing a crucial role in both.Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 with a clear goal of making Obama era-style youth outreach work for the right, and even those who didn’t agree with his values could not deny his ubiquity on the political scene. For the young Americans who grew up watching Kirk on their screens, he was a savant at YouTube, Twitter and later X, TikTok and live events. He was like a gen Z and millennial version of Rush Limbaugh – the rightwing, shock-jock commentator who dominated US airwaves in the 1990s – even if his base had no clue who that was.Kirk’s ideology was caustic; he espoused openly homophobic, racist, sexist, Islamophobic and Christian nationalist views while uplifting misinformation and conspiracy theories. He also campaigned on issues that mattered to young Americans, engaging directly with them – no matter how virulently – on hot-button topics such as abortion, transgender rights, race and Palestinian solidarity.View image in fullscreenAmy Binder, a professor of sociology at Johns Hopkins University who studies politics and education, describes Kirk’s values as “insurgency conservatism” that was “designed to get attention”.It worked: TikTok users under 30 who voted for Trump in 2024 said they trusted Kirk more than any other individual, according to a New York Times profile, despite the fact that he never held office or a role in the White House. That election saw male voters ages 18 to 29 swing hard to the right; Trump also made inroads with gen Z women. Earlier this year, Trump praised Kirk for “what he’s done with the young people”.As a millennial growing up in the Chicago suburbs, Kirk was obsessed with Limbaugh and the Tea Party movement. His fans also felt like outsiders within the American political system.“After Trump was elected in 2016, I was really surprised to see just how many students who were conservative were no longer identifying with the Republican party or with college Republicans, and had instead pivoted over to being really intrigued with what Turning Point was doing on campus,” Binder said. “They were doing much more exciting programming. It was less electorally focused, less about campaigning, and more about having events that were really confrontational.”Kirk appeared equally at ease chumming it up with high-powered donors as he did debating 20-year-olds in sweatpants. Kirk sparred directly with young people through video templates such as “prove me wrong” (a one-on-one debate, where students could wait in line to ask him a question), and he was an early guest on the YouTube series Surrounded, where he sat in a room with 25 liberals and goaded them with statements such as “abortion is murder and should be illegal” and “trans women are not women.”Turning Point USA raked in funding – the New York Times estimated a $92.4m revenue in 2023 – while advancing campus culture wars. Kirk’s content brought classic and extreme rightwing ideals to young people’s media feeds; he looked like both an old-school, suited conservative in the style of a Fox News host, and a social media-savvy man of the times. His video titles usually bent toward hyperbole (“Charlie Kirk Crushes Woke Lies at Michigan State,” was posted less than a week before the shooting). There were gonzo premises, such as when Kirk and the YouTube prank team Nelk Boys showed up at a Wisconsin frat party to get out the vote in 2024. His meme literacy showed when he handed out hats that read: “White Boy Summer”, a remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s “Hot Girl Summer” catchphrase.With his wife, Erika, owner of a faith-based fashion brand and a former Miss Arizona USA, Kirk softened his image, presenting himself as devoted husband, father and a bit of a lifestyle influencer. He talked to tweens in Maga hats about his preferred Starbucks order and promoted “cuteservatives” like Alex Clark, a Turning Point USA podcaster who branded her show on Maha culture as a rightwing Call Her Daddy. After Kirk’s death, Brett Cooper, a 23-year-old conservative influencer in the “womanosphere” with more than 1 million Instagram followers, reposted a video homage that depicted him as a champion for girls and young women. (Yet this was a man who compared abortion to the Holocaust and claimed that women over 30 “aren’t attractive in the dating pool”.)View image in fullscreenFor 10 years, Turning Point USA hosted a “women’s summit”, where Kirk and others like Clark and Cooper encouraged attenders to focus on finding husbands. Evie, the conservative women’s magazine, published an obituary that called Kirk a “loving father, patriot, and husband”.Even young people who were disgusted by Kirk’s rhetoric could not deny his impact. Hasan Piker, the hugely popular leftwing Twitch streamer whose ideology stands in direct contrast to Kirk, was scheduled to debate with Kirk at the end of September at Dartmouth University. Both Piker and the gun control activist David Hogg spoke against political violence in the wake of the shooting (as did many Democratic figures such as Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom and the New York mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani). Piker told his followers not to make jokes about Kirk’s shooting. “This is a terrifying incident,” Piker said. Hogg called the news “horrifying” on X.“I think it’s undeniable to say that Kirk was one of the first and most prominent people to shape what it means to be young and on the right in the US,” said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of communications at American University who studies extremism.After Kirk’s death, Braddock said he had seen “individuals calling this an inflection point, or a turning point where the left can no longer be tolerated”. Rightwing pundits have been eager to blame the left for the shooting.Adam Pennings, 25, is the executive director of Run Gen Z, a non-profit that supports young Republican candidates. “He’s always just been such an important part” of the young conservative party, Pennings said of Kirk. “He was everywhere.”Pennings knew Kirk through his work, but the two were not close. Still, Pennings said, due to Kirk’s omnipresence: “I feel like I lost a friend.” More

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      Charlie Kirk in his own words: ‘prowling Blacks’ and ‘the great replacement strategy’

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      Charlie Kirk, the far-right commentator and ally of Donald Trump, was killed on Wednesday doing what he was known for throughout his career – making incendiary and often racist and sexist comments to large audiences.If it was current and controversial in US politics, chances are that Kirk was talking about it. On his podcasts, and on the podcasts of friends and adversaries, and especially on college campuses, where he would go to debate students, Kirk spent much of his adult life defending and articulating a worldview aligned with Trump and the Maga movement. Accountable to no one but his audience, he did not shy away in his rhetoric from bigotry, intolerance, exclusion and stereotyping.Here’s Kirk, in his own words. Many of his comments were documented by Media Matters for America, a progressive non-profit that tracks conservative media.On race
      If I see a Black pilot, I’m going to be like, boy, I hope he’s qualified.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 23 January 2024

      If you’re a WNBA, pot-smoking, Black lesbian, do you get treated better than a United States marine?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 8 December 2022

      Happening all the time in urban America, prowling Blacks go around for fun to go target white people, that’s a fact. It’s happening more and more.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 19 May 2023

      If I’m dealing with somebody in customer service who’s a moronic Black woman, I wonder is she there because of her excellence, or is she there because affirmative action?
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 3 January 2024
      On debate
      We record all of it so that we put [it] on the internet so people can see these ideas collide. When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens, because you start to think the other side is so evil, and they lose their humanity.
      – Kirk discussing his work in an undated clip that circulated on X after his killing.

      Prove me wrong.
      – Kirk’s challenge to students to publicly debate him during the tour of colleges he was on when he was assassinated.
      On gender, feminism and reproductive rights
      Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.
      – Discussing news of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s engagement on The Charlie Kirk Show, 26 August 2025

      The answer is yes, the baby would be delivered.
      – Responding to a question about whether he would support his 10-year-old daughter aborting a pregnancy conceived because of rape on the debate show Surrounded, published on 8 September 2024

      We need to have a Nuremberg-style trial for every gender-affirming clinic doctor. We need it immediately.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 April 2024
      On gun violence
      I think it’s worth 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 is rational.
      – Event organized by TPUSA Faith, the religious arm of Kirk’s conservative group Turning Point USA, on 5 April 2023
      On immigration
      America was at its peak when we halted immigration for 40 years and we dropped our foreign-born percentage to its lowest level ever. We should be unafraid to do that.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 22 August 2025

      The American Democrat party hates this country. They wanna see it collapse. They love it when America becomes less white.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 20 March 2024

      The great replacement strategy, which is well under way every single day in our southern border, is a strategy to replace white rural America with something different.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 1 March 2024
      On Islam
      America has freedom of religion, of course, but we should be frank: large dedicated Islamic areas are a threat to America.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 30 April 2025

      We’ve been warning about the rise of Islam on the show, to great amount of backlash. We don’t care, that’s what we do here. And we said that Islam is not compatible with western civilization.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 24 June 2025
      On religion
      There is no separation of church and state. It’s a fabrication, it’s a fiction, it’s not in the constitution. It’s made up by secular humanists.
      – The Charlie Kirk Show, 6 July 2022 More

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      Where does the US go after the Charlie Kirk shooting? – podcast

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      From ‘hellhole’ UK to anti-Muslim rhetoric in Japan, Charlie Kirk took his message abroad

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      Charlie Kirk directed most of his rhetoric at the US political scene, but he also strayed into foreign affairs, drawing both favourable and critical comparisons between life in the US and in other countries on his shows and doing the occasional speaking tour.In May, Kirk visited the UK, debating against students at Oxford and Cambridge universities and appearing on the conservative GB News channel. Days before he was fatally shot in Utah he took his message to relatively new audiences on a tour to South Korea and Japan.Last weekend he addressed like-minded politicians and activists at a symposium in Tokyo organised by Sanseito, a rightwing populist party that shook up the political establishment in upper house elections this summer.In Tokyo, Kirk described Sanseito, which ran in July’s elections on a “Japanese first” platform, as “all about kicking foreigners out of Japan”, where the foreign population has risen to about 3.8 million out of a total of 124 million.Foreign residents and supporters of mass migration were, he claimed, “very quietly and secretly funnelling themselves into Japanese life. They want to erase, replace and eradicate Japan by bringing in Indonesians, by bringing in Arabs, by bringing in Muslims”.He spoke at length about his trip in a podcast released the day before his death, returning to a familiar theme – criticising women who choose not to have children – that echoed the views of his host in Japan, the Sanseito leader, Sohei Kamiya.In Seoul, he addressed more than 2,000 supporters at the Build Up Korea 2025 event, which drew predominantly young Christians and students from evangelical schools, representing a self-styled Korean Maga movement that has rallied in support of the impeached former president Yoon Suk Yeol.The event invited a host of far-right American personalities, who openly promoted conspiracy theories including claims that China orchestrated “stolen elections” in both America and South Korea, and that Lee Jae Myung’s recent presidential victory was fraudulent.Kirk criticised special prosecutor investigations into Yoon and his martial law, describing “several disturbing things happening right now in South Korea” where “pastors are being arrested” and “homes are being raided”, adding: “If South Korea keeps on acting like this, it is the American way to step up and fight for what is right.”Kirk said he had “learned a lot” from his time in South Korea and Japan, recalling how safe he had felt on the clean and orderly streets of Seoul, where there were “no bums, no one asking you for money”.In his three-day visit to the UK in May, he clashed with students at the Cambridge Union debating society, arguing that “lockdowns were unnecessary”, “life begins at conception”, and the US Civil Rights Act was a “mistake”.Kirk made the same points in Oxford, also alleging immigrants were “importing insidious values into the west” and that police violence against Black people was a result of a “disproportionate crime problem” in the Black community.He told the rightwing GB News that the UK was a “husk” of its former self and needed to “get its mojo back”. The perception among US conservatives, he said, was that “this is increasingly a conquered country … We love this country from afar, and we’re really sad about what’s happening to it, and what has happened to it”.On his first show after returning to the US, Kirk described the UK as a “totalitarian third world hellhole”, adding: “It’s tragic. I don’t say that with glib, I don’t say that with delight. It is sad. It’s chilling and it’s depressing.”He claimed he had seen a cafe in which “every single table was taken by a Mohammedan and a fully burqa-wearing woman – not a single native Brit” and that people were being arrested for online posts that displayed no apparent harmful intent.“They invented free speech,” he said. “Now there’s so much wrong with that country and it is not worthy of making fun of. I mean, you can have some laughs and some comedy, but it is depressing. It is dark.”View image in fullscreenWhile he was fond of referencing Europe in his shows, Kirk’s only other recent public visit there appears to have been a trip to Greenland in January in the company of Donald Trump Jr.He said afterwards that Greenlanders should be allowed to “use personal autonomy and agency to disconnect from their Danish masters”, then have “the opportunity to be part of the US, no different than either Puerto Rico or Guam” (two self-governing “unincorporated territories” of the US) in order to be “wealthier, richer … and protected”.Kirk was also sharply critical of many countries in his videos and podcasts. “France has basically become a joke, for a lot of reasons,” he said last year, amid widespread French protests over pension changes. “What’s happening in France should serve as a warning to America.”After JD Vance attacked Europe for alleged free speech shortcomings this year, Kirk hit out at Germany. “Germans are a bunch of troublemakers,” he said. “German prosecutors say someone can be locked up if they insult someone online. Free speech is not a German value. Totalitarianism is a German value.”He was a vocal supporter of Trump’s China-focused policies, backing the president’s attacks on Harvard University in April, and the punishing trade war with Beijing.In April, he claimed Harvard had “raked in” more than $100m from China. “We need to ask serious questions in this country about whether we can trust our elite universities to put America first when so much money is flowing to them from America’s number one rival.”The same month, he told Fox News the US had become “a glorified vassal state” subservient to the Chinese Communist party, by relying on China for rare earth minerals. He said the CCP wanted to create “lots of little colonies all around the world through the belt and road initiative”.He also waded into the complicated waters of cross-strait relations. In April, Kirk told his podcast he had “a soft spot for the people of Taiwan”, but also showed a limited understanding of its history and the complexities of the dispute.“I would say, sadly if we took Taiwan, it would probably start a nuclear war. Our leaders have largely mishandled China. We probably should have taken it in 1950 right after world war two,” he said.There has never been any discussion of the US “taking” Taiwan. The US is Taiwan’s most important backer, providing billions of dollars in weapons and some military training, and has not ruled out coming to its defence in the event of a Chinese attack or invasion.In a video in May, Kirk used the escalating hostilities between India and Pakistan to push his argument against US military intervention abroad. Describing Pakistan as a “very, very sneaky actor”, Kirk was emphatic that “very simply, this is not our war … This is a great test of whether every great conflict is America’s problem”.Kirk was equally dogmatic on the issue of Indians being granted more visas as part of a US-India trade deal, accusing Indians of taking American jobs.“America does not need more visas for people from India,” he said. “Perhaps no form of legal immigration has so displaced American workers as those from India. Enough already. We’re full. Let’s finally put our own people first.” More

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      ‘What have we become?’: shock across US political parties after Charlie Kirk shooting

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      Charlie Kirk’s death by an assassin’s bullet on a university campus in Utah on Wednesday has left the United States, a country already grappling with mounting political anger and polarization, in a state of profound shock bordering on despair.Kirk, a rising star of Donald Trump’s make America great again (Maga) movement, was struck in the neck by a single shot as he addressed a large student crowd at Utah Valley University. The event had been billed as the grand opening of his 15-stop “America Comeback Tour”, but instead will be marked as the place where he uttered his last words.The 31-year-old leader of the rightwing student group Turning Point USA was about 20 minutes into a Q&A, ironically engaging with a question on mass shootings in America, when the shot rang out. Within seconds, hundreds of students had scattered screaming from the campus lawn.Within minutes of that, gruesome videos began to proliferate through social media, apparently undeterred by any algorithm. They showed Kirk being hit, slumping to his left side and profusely bleeding.Long before Kirk was pronounced dead at 4.40pm – poignantly in a post from his champion, the US president, on Truth Social – the wave of profound shock was breaking over both sides of the US’s political divide.“This is horrific. I am stunned,” said the Republican senator from Texas Ted Cruz, who described Kirk on Twitter/X as a “good friend” since the young activist’s teenage years.Kirk was unashamedly far to the right of the US political spectrum and had expressed openly bigoted views and engaged in homophobic and Islamophobic rhetoric. He recently tweeted: “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”He mixed evangelical Christian beliefs with rightwing politics into a combustible brew. During an appearance with Trump in Georgia last fall, he claimed that Democrats “stand for everything God hates”, adding: “This is a Christian state. I’d like to see it stay that way.”But mourning for Kirk crossed the political aisle.Joe Scarborough, host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe who has been unrestrained at times in his criticism of Kirk’s political posturing, called the shooting “tragic and sickening”. He added: “Violence targeting political public figures is violence against American democracy itself and the freedom of every American to express their views.”Tommy Vietor, a former staffer in Barack Obama’s White House, issued an even darker warning. Political violence, he said, was a “cancer that will feed off itself and spread … it will rip this country apart”.The political violence that Vietor identified is etched into the US’s psyche. The country has had to absorb the assassinations of four sitting presidents including Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy, as well as the tragic trilogy of 1960s shootings of Kennedy, his brother Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr.Those grim historic landmarks were brought slamming back into public consciousness by the assassination attempt on Trump at a presidential campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July 2024. Trump survived that incident by a hair’s breadth, which he has since claimed to be an act of God’s will. A second would-be assassin later waited for Trump on a Florida golf course before being discovered in the nick of time by his security detail.At the same time America has been rocked by the killing on the streets of Manhattan of a top healthcare executive, and in June an attack in Minnesota saw a gunman brutally shoot a local lawmaker dead in her own home.Kirk’s death – though the precise motive behind his killing remains so far unknown – leaves the US standing on the edge of a new abyss, over which a black cloud now looms over the safety of its public figures and the sanctity of its public debate.“What the actual hell have we become?” asked the Catholic writer Emily Zanotti, speaking for many. In a comment under her X feed, another poster said: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”Dylan Housman, editor-in-chief of the rightwing news outlet the Daily Caller, also expressed foreboding. “We can’t live in a country where things like this happen,” he said.For months now the temperature of the US’s political discourse has been rising. As JB Pritzker, the Democratic governor of Illinois, put it following the Kirk shooting: “Political violence unfortunately has been ratcheting up in this country.”In June a Democratic lawmaker in Minnesota, Melissa Hortman, and her husband Mark, were killed in a shooting. Federal and state judges have reported a plethora of threats, including deliveries of unsolicited pizzas to their homes in grotesque reference to the 2020 killing of Daniel Anderl, the son of a New Jersey district judge Esther Salas.Kirk’s killing takes this booming scourge of discourse-by-bullet to another level. The location of the shooting in itself indicates that there might be trouble ahead, as the TV political journalist Chuck Todd noted. “On a college campus, no less, a place where we should be celebrating speech, not trying to silence it.”The identity of the victim, too, raises the stakes dramatically. Kirk was the golden boy of the Maga movement, a Trump favorite.The president called Kirk “legendary” in his post announcing the death. The Turning Point leader was boosted to nationwide prominence when he was taken on as personal aide to Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr, during the 2016 presidential campaign.Kirk’s ascent within the Maga firmament was as fiery as the trademark pyrotechnical displays that opened his Turning Point “people’s conventions”. The speakers he attracted on stage were like a roll-call of Maga royalty – JD Vance, former Trump White House adviser Steve Bannon, entrepreneur and presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, far-right congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and many more.By Wednesday night consternation had already begun to be aired about how the Trump administration, and the wider Maga movement, would respond to the loss of one of their dearly beloved own. “There are people who are fomenting [political violence] in this country,” Pritzker said. “The president’s rhetoric often foments it.”Later this month, Kirk had a stop on his Comeback Tour scheduled at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. On 25 September he was scheduled to debate the progressive influencer, Hasan Piker.After Kirk’s shooting, Piker spoke out about his fears on his live stream. “This is a terrifying incident,” he said. “The reverberation of people seeking out vengeance in the aftermath of this violent, abhorrent incident is going to be genuinely worrisome.” More