The Killing of Charlie Kirk and the Rise of Political Violence

0:05Charlie Kirk, a conservative political activist and influencer, was shot and killed yesterday. He was speaking at an event at Utah Valley University. Charlie Kirk was doing what he was famous for doing for more than 10 years now. That's my colleague Aaron Zittner, who covers national politics. He was on a college campus, directly engaging college students, talking to them, and using his signature move of saying he would debate all comers. Get comfortable. Bring the best libs that Utah has to offer. So prove me wrong was his slogan, and that's what you saw on the tent he was sitting under at the time he was killed.

0:46Prove me wrong, a challenge to engage people in conversation with the confidence he had that he could persuade them to the conservative point of view. Kirk was on the first stop of what was to be a fall college speaking tour called the American Comeback Tour. He was shot on stage around midday. The shooter fired one shot and is still at large. Kirk is among many victims of political violence in the U.S. in recent years. We're all just pausing once again. Americans have grappled with a large series of political violence, and that's a real problem. Everyone in public life is living under this cloud of uncertainty and the threat of violence now.

1:37Welcome to The Journal, our show about money, business, and power. I'm Jessica Mendoza. It's Thursday, September 11th. Coming up on the show, the murder of Charlie Kirk and the threat of political violence in America.

2:08Charlie Kirk got a start in politics when he was in high school. Instead of getting a college degree, he started an organization that advocated for conservative politics on college campuses. Videos of these conversations were popular on YouTube and social media. What we as a culture have to get back to is being able to have a reasonable disagreement where violence is not an option. And for over a decade, this was what Kirk and his organization, Turning Point USA, were most known for. Charlie Kirk was an important person. He rose, really, in just about 12 years from being a high school student, essentially, to being one of the most important people in MAGA world.

2:50Unlike a lot of people you think of in the conservative ecosystem, maybe a Tucker Carlson or a Ben Shapiro or a Steve Bannon, he didn't just engage people and talk and act as a commentator. He built things. He built a significant campus outreach organization that was considered the largest organization of young people on the right. In 2023, Turning Point USA spent over$90 million on its activities. The group said it had chapters at more than 1 ,000 college campuses. And Kirk continued to expand his operations. He built a church network. He built a media operation. And most recently, he moved from producing media to actual electioneering, actually knocking on doors, trying to get people elected, a on-the-ground, boots-on-the-ground organization that had some role in 2024 and was set to grow.

3:49And that made him an important figure and kind of the leader of this conservative megaphone that is so important in a world where the legacy media is less and less the way that people communicate with their audiences. You talk about him as a conservative activist. Can you list some of Charlie Kirk's political beliefs? Well, I know that he's someone who started with a secular point of view and a free trade point of view. And he became someone who was religious. I want a revival of Christianity in this country. I want people to give their life to Jesus in huge numbers. He observed the Sabbath on Saturdays, as it happens, and became an America First person.

4:33So he did migrate in his views and adopted the Trump agenda and fortified the Trump agenda. Like others in this space, he was provocative. There's a range of personalities in the MAGA ecosystem. I found Charlie Kirk to be measured, provocative but measured, not a bombastic personality. Charlie Kirk's political beliefs echoed those of many right-wing activists. For instance, he was pro-life. That's why abortion should be illegal, because we have a societal obligation to protect every life. He supported the Second Amendment and gun rights. Liberty comes at a price, and so I believe that, yes, there will be costs and consequences of having firearm ownership, but the positives far outweigh the negatives.

5:19He was also against affirmative action. Here he is attacking high-profile Black women like Michelle Obama and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown-Jackson. They're coming out and they're saying, I'm only here because of affirmative action. Yeah, we know. You do not have the brain processing power to otherwise be taken really seriously. And he was highly critical of transgender rights. Trans people won't stop going into female locker rooms and stealing female medals and then penalizing people for not using the right pronouns. His opponents saw him as a divisive figure who took incendiary positions.

5:53Kirk was an early supporter of Trump and a close confidant of his son, Donald Trump Jr. In 2016, he meets Donald Trump Jr. And for a while in that campaign, he travels with Donald Trump Jr. And it sounds like he kind of becomes his body man, the guy who's next to Donald Trump Jr. and helps him. And that's his entree into the Trump inner circle. And he does become close with Donald Trump. Donald Trump has called him one of the people most responsible for his election in 2024 and has praised him. In what way was Kirk influential in getting Trump elected? He gets credit from the Trump circle for being one of the people who helped bring young voters into Donald Trump's orbit.

6:42As we know from the exit poll data and the election data, young people of both genders, but particularly young men, swung Republican, remarkably so. The large advantage that Joe Biden had among young people in 2020 shrunk significantly in 2024. And a lot of Republicans give Charlie Kirk credit for helping move that along. With Trump re-elected, Kirk's profile grew even more. He helped shape some of Trump's policies, like the use of federal funding to force universities to reject what many conservatives view as liberal ideology. He also got involved in getting young conservatives elected. And he continued to debate Democrats and others on the political left.

7:31He was California Governor Gavin Newsom's first guest on his new podcast. Because I think people need to understand your success, your influence, what you've been up to, and the fact that you're on these college campus doors. And to your point, man, you just open up. I mean, you're like, ask me anything? Anything. Challenge me? Challenge me, whatever. When did this whole thing? Yesterday, Kirk was on another college campus speaking to thousands of students. Before the shooting, he was engaged in a debate about gun violence and transgender people. Do you know how many transgender Americans have been mass shooters over the last 10 years?

8:07Too many.

8:12Then Kirk was shot, and first responders quickly took him to an SUV. The White House later posted that he had died.

8:22In a statement, Turning Point USA talked about Kirk's values and passion. They wrote, quote, Although Charlie is gone, his legacy will endure. adding, none of us will ever forget him. Kirk was 31 years old. He survived by his wife and two children. Yesterday, President Trump ordered flags to fly at half-staff in honor of Kirk. Today, Trump said Kirk would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

8:53After the break, a look at the rise of political violence across the country.

9:11Can you talk about how political leaders have responded to Kirk's killing? I would say we've had two different kinds of responses. We've had the kind of response you always get after an event like this, the hand-wringing, the fretting over whether political animosity is too high, whether rhetoric is too sharp and is driving people into opposing camps. But at the same time, look at what the president said last night. He blamed, quote-unquote, radical leftists for saying horrible things about Republicans and horrible things about Charlie Kirk specifically that he says created the environment for the shooting that killed Charlie Kirk.

9:58For years, those on the radical left have compared wonderful Americans like Charlie to Nazis and the world's worst mass murderers and criminals. This kind of rhetoric is directly responsible for the terrorism that we're seeing in our country today, and it must stop right now. And there were some Republican members of Congress who also said Democrats are to blame for this. And of course, Democrats say, well, look at the president and his rhetoric. He's in flaming tensions. So on the one hand, we have appeals for calm, and on the other, we have finger pointing. And the shooting of Charlie Kirk is part of a growing trend of political violence.

10:43It's absolutely fair to say that there's a string of incidents that have made it very scary for political actors to appear in public at all levels in government or for them to do their jobs at all levels of government, from the president, who was targeted in two assassination attempts during the last presidential campaign. Former U.S. President Donald Trump has survived an attempt on his life at a campaign rally. To state legislators like those in Minnesota who were shot just this year. State Representative Melissa Hortman and her husband Mark were shot and killed early this morning. State Senator John Hoffman and his wife Yvette were shot and are recovering in hospital.

11:29And the shooting of Steve Scalise, a Republican member of Congress in 2017. There was also an attack on former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi's husband in 2022, and an arson attack on Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro's house just this past April. Last year, there were about 9 ,500 cases where members of Congress were targets of concerning statements or threats. That's up from about 8 ,000 the year before, according to U.S. Capitol Police. And threats against federal judges doubled from 2021 to 2023. It seems that this is happening to people from both parties. Is that something important to keep in mind?

12:07I'm getting a lot of letters from readers saying, this is the left. Or what about the right? You know, what about January 6th? People are very eager, at least in my inbox, to say this is the fault of one side or the other. But again, we can point to violence against both parties. No matter what party you are, you're going to be looking over your shoulder at any level of government and worry about what might be out there coming for you. Aaron says we can quantify this rise of animosity between the two parties. Back in 2010, a poll from the Wall Street Journal and NBC News surveyed Americans about how they viewed each political party.

12:51Back then, you know, 50 percent of one party and 40 percent of the other party had not only a negative view, but a very negative view. In July, when we asked, do you have a favorable or unfavorable view of either party, a slightly different question, more than 80 percent of Democrats, more than 80 percent of Republicans had a very unfavorable view. of the other party. Politics is no longer about just policy. It's become far more existential for many people. It's if the other party gets elected, they are going to impose their values on me, destroy my worldview, and destroy my way of life and the way I think about myself in the world.

13:35I think that's abundantly clear from the polling. Today, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson said he was reviewing security for members of Congress. And Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez delayed an event in North Carolina, citing security concerns and respect for Kirk's death.

13:54What's next, Aaron? What are you watching for? We still need to know who did this and what the circumstances were of this. I'd like to know how the political system reacts and if this does become a moment for unification or it remains a moment for finger-pointing, you know, we're at a moment where there's a lot going on in the world. This is such a chaotic moment. Then I have more immediate questions about politics. What happens to Turning Point USA? Movements are led by charismatic leaders and Charlie Kirk was an unusual figure. Who can step in there? Do young people stay with the Republican Party?

14:42Do they drift away? And how does everything we've seen play into the 2026 elections, which are just beginning to take shape now? Thank you, Aaron, for your time. It's good to be with you.

14:59As of this afternoon, authorities have released photos of someone they say is a person of interest in the shooting. They also said they found a rifle in the woods near Utah Valley University. The weapon was wrapped in a towel with a spent cartridge still in the chamber. Justice Department officials said that the investigation was still in its preliminary stages. And the FBI is offering a reward of up to$100 ,000 for information leading to the identification and arrest of the shooter.

15:41That's all for today, Thursday, September 11th. The Journal is a co-production of Spotify and The Wall Street Journal. Additional reporting in this episode from Eliza Collins, Sadie Gurman, James Finelli, and Wall Street Journal staff. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.