The Morning: Charlie Kirk

September 11, 2025

Good morning. We are following the killing of the conservative activist Charlie Kirk. The authorities are searching for the shooter. As of this morning, nobody was in custody.

Charlie Kirk sitting in front of a crowd, holding a microphone and wearing a white T-shirt.

Charlie Kirk at Utah Valley University yesterday. Trent Nelson/The Salt Lake Tribune, via Reuters

An assassination

By The Morning Team

Charlie Kirk never held office or worked on a campaign. But he was a crucial organizer of the MAGA movement. Turning Point USA, the group he founded when he was 18, helped recruit many young conservatives and elect Republicans across the country. He was a practiced debater who posted videos of himself parrying liberal critiques.

That’s exactly what he was doing yesterday when a shooter assassinated him during a talk at Utah Valley University. Here is what we know about the killing:

The authorities continue to search for the shooter. They captured two people yesterday — one immediately after the attack, another in the evening — but released both without charges.
Kirk was hit in the neck by a single bullet, the police said. About two hours later, his spokesman announced that he had died. Here is a timeline.
About 3,000 people attended the outdoor event. After the shooting, police officers went building to building to escort students off campus.
Videos recorded before and after the shooting show someone on the roof of a campus building about 150 yards away. A university official identified the building as the shooter’s location.

An annotated aerial photograph showing the grassy courtyard where Kirk was speaking and the nearby rooftop from which the shot is said to have come.

Aerial image by Google | By Lazaro Gamio and Daniel Wood

Kirk’s influence

Kirk built Turning Point USA to mobilize students. The group, which has more than 850 chapters, sends right-wing speakers to college campuses and convenes young people for political discussions. In a feature in The Times Magazine this year, Robert Draper, a political reporter, explained how the group had guided many young men to vote for Trump in 2024.

Kirk frequently visited college campuses for speaking engagements and debates, and videos of his question-and-answer sessions amassed millions of views on YouTube. He frequently criticized D.E.I., abortion, immigration and gun control. He was answering a question about mass shootings when he was shot.

Kirk was a close friend of Trump’s and a fixture in his administration. He spoke at Trump’s inauguration, helped vet appointees and frequently visited the White House. He was also a close friend of Donald Trump Jr. (the two recently took a trip together to Greenland) and an early backer of Vice President JD Vance.

Kirk, a Christian, lived in Arizona with his wife and two children. Read his Times obituary here, and hear more about him on today’s episode of The Daily.

Reactions to the shooting

Trump posted a tribute to Kirk on social media, writing: “No one understood or had the Heart of the Youth in the United States of America better than Charlie. He was loved and admired by ALL, especially me, and now, he is no longer with us.”
In a video address from the Oval Office, Trump said that liberal criticism of conservatives was “directly responsible for the terrorism that we’re seeing in our country today,” and he vowed to go after groups that fund or support it.
Democratic politicians condemned the shooting. Gov. Gavin Newsom of California called the attack “disgusting, vile and reprehensible.”
Social media fell into a well-worn groove: Some users posted tributes, while others posted dark jokes. And many argued with each other along the usual partisan lines.
Shortly after the shooting, many conservative and religious influencers began to refer to Kirk as a “martyr.”
Speaker Mike Johnson paused the House mid-vote for a moment of silence. But afterward, when Representative Lauren Boebert called for a spoken prayer, several Democrats objected, pointing out that the House had not done the same for a school shooting in Colorado earlier in the day.

Political violence

Several politicians said yesterday that they were worried that political violence was becoming normalized in the United States. In recent years:

Trump survived two assassination attempts. Rioters stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, attacking police officers. A masked man shot two Democratic lawmakers and their spouses in Minnesota, killing one couple and wounding another. A man attacked Paul Pelosi, the husband of Nancy Pelosi, with a hammer at their San Francisco home. A man set fire to the home of Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania.

In a story on political violence for The Times Magazine, Charles Homans wrote that about a fifth of Americans believe political violence is at least sometimes justified, and at least half agree that it’s sometimes justified if the other political party committed violence first.

At a speaking event four years ago, a man in the audience asked Kirk about when it would be justified to kill political opponents. Kirk shut him down. “We must exhaust every peaceful means possible,” Kirk said.

For more: The Times’s editorial board condemned America’s worsening political violence. “We Americans have lost some of our grace and empathy in recent years,” the board writes.

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Chuck Schumer Tierney L. Cross/The New York Times

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