Je Suis Charlie

On the day the music died

On Wednesday, September 10, 2025, Charlie Kirk launched a nationwide speaking tour at Utah Valley University with his usual spirit of buoyant good humor: “We’re going to be here a couple hours. Bring the best libs Utah has to offer!”

To warm up the crowd, he had been distributing handfuls of red MAGA hats, tossing them out like frisbees. Someone waved him over to give one to a friend—an awkward young man juggling two copies of one of Kirk’s books. He couldn’t quite react in the socially proper way when Kirk gave him the hat, but you could tell he was happy.

Not half an hour later, Charlie Kirk was lying in the back of a van on its way to the hospital—dying, perhaps already dead.

With the news that he had been shot came footage of the shooting. Very clear, very up-close footage. Footage I and many other people clicked on, prepared for something bad, but not as bad as it was. I encourage people not to go looking for it. Reluctantly, I would later revisit the moment at a couple other, somewhat more distant angles, seeing whether there was anything to someone’s claim that that video was enhanced by AI. As we all know now, there wasn’t.

There was a brief window of time where people wondered if he might have miraculously been stabilized. A journalist friend in touch with his team fed me occasional updates. Then they went quiet. The official announcement followed soon.

Already, some of our best writers are contemplating the significance of this moment in the scope of American political history. It is uniquely, viscerally horrifying: the political assassination of a young husband and father who held no political office, nor was he campaigning for one. He was a political figure, true, but still a private citizen. A private citizen who, to his killer, for the great crime of existing while vocally middle-of-the-road conservative, deserved to die. And not just in the eyes of his killer, as we quickly learned.

The deluge of filth was foreshadowed in a clip from the mayhem just after the shot rang out: A deranged-looking man in long hair and a beard leaps in front of the phone camera, wildly gesticulating and cheering. He’s so ecstatic in the moment that pausing to make this gesture is more important to him than saving his sorry behind. According to eyewitness testimony from the scene, he wasn’t alone.

That was just the beginning. And while the shooter remains at large, his precise political orientation unclear (reports are mixed on an alleged scoop about activist slogans on his gear), what is not unclear is the political orientation of those happy he didn’t miss.

I hate to dignify the various young people caught on camera (or putting themselves on camera) who have been celebrating this moment with grins, snickers, even dancing. But without linking all of them, I can say—in every sense—that they are legion. A sample should suffice. Even in my own town, a conservative Gen Z friend told me she couldn’t get through her workday at a restaurant without hearing whoops of jubilation from her peers, most of whom happened to be gay. Only one other girl joined her in confronting them. A girl at a Texas university has gone viral for trying to do the same with her classmates when they were passing around the murder footage on their phones. By her account, she was the only one the teacher singled out for a rebuke.

Which brings me to the teachers. One of my online followers shared a complaint letter written by his sister after her “ethics” professor reflected, with a smile, “It was a good shot.” But he wouldn’t say more—wouldn’t want to get fired or anything. According to philosophy professor Owen Anderson, there’s a whole gaggle of academics like this venting their spleen on BlueSky (a site that was allegedly founded as a kinder, gentler alternative to Twitter).

Among politicians and journalists, reactions have varied. Various major figures had the minimal common sense to put out blandly sympathetic statements. Gavin Newsom, who notably invited Kirk on his podcast, even issued one sans any “I didn’t agree with him but…” throat-clearing (thinking, perhaps, of his own son, who by Newsom’s account is more conservative than himself and a fan of Kirk). However, Speaker Mike Johnson had to bang his gavel and restore order in the House after a moment of silence and prayer, when someone in the back began shouting “Y’all caused this!” Meanwhile, two Democrats in my home state legislature couldn’t be bothered to stand with their colleagues. Across the ocean today, the European Parliament refused to observe so much as a moment of silence.

Emily Jashinsky rounded up the worst of the media reactions here, including (now former) MSNBC anchor Matt Dowd’s casual opining that a figure like Kirk couldn’t say “awful words” and not expect “awful actions” in payback. One ray of sunshine in this dark moment is that the network quickly read the room and realized he needed to be fired. By the time the ladies of The View assembled themselves for a roundtable, you could tell someone had advised them not to repeat Dowd’s error. Stephen Colbert also behaved himself. For Colbert, as for some of the View ladies and other pundits of their generation, it seems to be dawning that we as a country have seen this movie before, in their living memory, and that it would be a good idea not to replay it.

Still, even these more measured reactions were tone-deaf, in that they made their takes about “political violence” broadly, pointing at an alleged left-right symmetry that simply doesn’t exist. (Jim Geraghty handily dispatches this myth for National Review here.) An editors’ statement from The New York Times was similarly underwhelming, though admittedly not as classless as what they chose to run by way of an obituary (whose writer decided, for reasons known only to himself, that it was of first importance to revisit Kirk’s opinions about the COVID pandemic).

Surprisingly, some of the more refreshing reactions came not from polished politicians or media figures, but from unlikely sources such as Cenk Uygur and Charlie Sheen—figures not traditionally known for courtesy and decorum towards people on their political right. But I accept their earthy statements of shock and dismay as genuine.

In the end, though, I think Christian writer Samuel James catches the moment very perceptively when he says we would be mistaken to think mere “meanness” is what’s ailing us, and mere pluralistic principles will be the cure:

In the coming days many will write and speak of the brokenness of American political culture. They will, rightly, mourn our violence, our polarization, the loss of cross-ideological friendship, and the curated information islands of the social media age. Yes and amen. But some of this could be misleading. It could imply that what’s ailing us is meanness. It could imply that what we really need is to rediscover civility and tolerance. This is not correct. The truth is that it’s precisely the embarrassment over spirituality and unwillingness to submit to transcendent truths that has turned our civic life so gangrenous. What keeps people from shooting the necks of people they dislike? A commitment to individualism, free speech, or pluralism? No. In the end, it is only the fear of God that preserves the center. In losing God, we are burying ourselves.

Charlie Kirk would have agreed, though there was a time when he didn’t. The wunderkind dropped out of college to become an enterprising activist, and in his early years, that activism was heavy on politics, light on God. Seminary professor Al Mohler recalls the very young Kirk as a brash young man who “had little time for conservative Christians.” But time softened him, as perhaps did marriage and fatherhood, and the tenor of his speech started shifting. On college campuses, he began to lace his signature “Prove me wrong” debates with earnest evangelistic presentations. He mixed arguments for political conservatism with apologetics for Jesus’ resurrection. When a young woman asked him how to navigate communication with her divorced, politically divided parents, he advised her to skip the politics and focus on Jesus. Focus on the Bible.

I confess: I didn’t closely follow Charlie Kirk, because Charlie Kirk wasn’t exactly of my “tribe.” I was aware of Turning Point USA, I was aware of his energetic Trump activism, and there, for most of his life, my fuzzy knowledge of him ended. As my regular readers know, I’ve written at length about my principled objections to Trump, my concerns about young politicians and activists who pledge unswerving loyalty to him, and my lament for the lack of political figures more deserving of that loyalty. In my mind, Kirk was little more than another figure on “the Trump train,” and thus not worthy of much attention while I occupied myself with more high-brow topics. I vaguely remember once tweeting something a bit dismissive about him or his brand, and one of his fans telling me I shouldn’t be so quick to judge.

That was beginning to change over the last year as the algorithm tossed occasional clips my way from Kirk’s outdoor events—talking sensitively to a young woman who’s had an abortion, counseling a gender-confused girl to love her own body, sensibly advising a conservative boy to break up with his liberal girlfriend. I’d prided myself on having patient love and tolerance for some “MAGA people” (some of my best friends etc.) but whatever my vague mental image of Kirk, it wasn’t meshing with the winsome, courteous young man emerging in these clips.

It’s not that he was never tough or sharp, even in later years. In this instructive clip, he challenges an angry young woman asserting her right to abort a child for her college career. He judges (correctly) that she needs to be dealt with differently from someone who’s just confused or vulnerable. You can watch him making these rhetorical calibrations across a variety of encounters, sometimes slipping between different “modes” in the same exchange depending on what the moment requires. In one excruciating back-and-forth, he allows an unhinged young woman to ramble and rave at him for a solid 16 minutes, telling the crowd not to heckle her, gently rebutting all of her terrible arguments, yet never punching down or responding in kind. There’s no question that he was a generational talent. He may not have been running for political office yet, but you can see why his friends were convinced he would have been president one day. It seems they weren’t alone.

People have been pondering in what sense Charlie Kirk could be called a “martyr.” Was he a martyr for America? For free speech? For Jesus? A case could be made for all three.

While considering the significance of Kirk’s death as an American assassination, I was moved by this tribute from Israeli pundit Haviv Rettig Gur. Gur, like most Israelis, observes American culture wars at a bemused distance, but he recognizes in Kirk’s murder an ax blow to the heart of what makes America great—and not just great, but good. He also recognizes the particular tragedy that it should have cut down the face of “a generation almost defined by its loss of faith in the West.” Yet through his happy warring, Kirk “became a kind of engine of renewed faith in Americanness." It’s no coincidence that Islamic terrorists were seen cheering his murder along with campus leftists. The same thread of hatred runs through their cheers and the cheers of those who danced in the streets on September 11, a day that will now live forever in infamous juxtaposition with the day of his death.

In the wake of the Charlie Hebdo massacres, when Muslim terrorists slaughtered a group of irreverent French satirists in their own office, people marched in protest under the slogan “Je suis Charlie”: “I am Charlie.” Douglas Murray recalls how Ayaan Hirsi Ali told him at the time that it was necessary to “spread the risk around.” Charlie Kirk embodied that risk-taking with open eyes. In this eerily prescient clip, he explains to a skeptical woman that he constantly receives death threats, but “When people stop talking, that’s when you get violence. That’s when civil war happens.” Though there was little of substance that would have united this Charlie with Charlie Hebdo, he celebrated the freedom of his own country’s vulgar satirists to mock him in a South Park bit, even playing it on his own show for laughs. He understood better than anyone that if you couldn’t take the heat, you should get out of the kitchen.

However, Kassy Akiva (nee Dillon) remembers his cold fear when haters doxxed his parents. A deranged stalker had gone to prison for threatening her when she married a Jewish man, so Kirk messaged her for some advice. She has shared some of their exchange. He’s used to threats against himself, he says. “It’s part of the game.” But in that moment, he was rattled.

Someone put a collection of screenshots in one place showing the array of names thrown out as future targets. I feel anxious for people I know who either knew Kirk or do public-facing work in similar spaces. Even public figures who under normal circumstances would feel removed from Kirk’s milieu are shaken, like my evangelist friend Glen Scrivener in England. After he prayed for Kirk’s family with his daughter, she asked “Daddy, are you going to get shot too?” The question startled him. Why would she think that? “Well,” she reasoned, “Because you go and speak on campuses too.” That was true, he reflected, though he doesn’t consider himself a political lightning rod at all. In fact, he tries as much as possible to focus on Jesus versus “culture wars.” And yet when it comes to things like abortion or marriage, some people would see nothing to choose between him and Kirk. Perhaps in that moment his mind went back to a picture he took at a March for Life UK event, of a young woman wearing a T-shirt that said, “The only good pro-lifer is a dead pro-lifer.” And so, like so many other conservative husbands and fathers, today Glen too says, “Je suis Charlie.”

A young questioner once asked Kirk, “What would you want to tell me if I had 30 seconds left to live?” If he were shot, let’s say. “In 30 seconds,” Kirk answered, “you’re about to meet eternal judgment. You got 10 seconds left, you’re dying from a gunshot wound. … There’s only one way you can get bailed out of that. It’s not all the good things you did, or the moral scorecard. It’s whether or not you have Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior.”

In an interview, someone asked how he would want to be remembered. “If I die?” Kirk asks, stressing the preposterous word. “I want to be remembered for courage for my faith.” Fittingly, one of the very last things he did before he died was present the gospel.

Matthew Arnold said, “Freedom is a very good horse to ride, but to ride somewhere.” Charlie Kirk defended anyone’s right to ride their horses. But for himself, as he clearly stated when he talked about pointing people to ultimate values, to permanent things, he was riding somewhere. And he was riding for someone—for his fellow Americans, but most especially for the young woman and two very small children who reportedly were in the crowd watching him die before their eyes, and will never see him in this life again. In a refreshing departure from over-sharing celebrity culture, Kirk and his wife kept their children’s names and faces hidden. Kirk explains this choice in a now unbearable clip showing flashes of happiness from the family’s short time together. Another clip shows his toddler charging into his arms after patiently waiting through a Fox & Friends appearance, chirping “Hi Daddy!” He scoops her up while everyone’s heart melts. “Isn’t this the best?” he asks them, grinning ear to ear.

Once, the words of the prophets were written on subway walls. Today they’re written on Twitter walls. Some anonymous Twitter prophet has put it gloomily, succinctly and almost perfectly: “I don’t think they realize that they killed the nice guy.” (I say “almost” because I agree with Ben Shapiro that in principle the third-person plural should be avoided when identifying murderers.) Ross Douthat’s older prophecy also comes to mind: If you didn’t like the Christian right, wait until you see the post-Christian right. “You think that a wall as solid as the earth separates civilization from barbarism,” John Buchan wrote. “I tell you the division is a thread, a sheet of glass. A touch here, a push there, and you bring back the reign of Saturn.”

Do we see a foretaste here, in this altercation between fans gathered to mourn Kirk and an aggressive leftist who drove his scooter into their midst? Let’s pray this is as bad as it gets. But we must not underestimate the cumulative effect of a moment like Kirk’s murder, on top of moments like the murder of Iryna Zarushka, on top of moments like the mass shooting of Catholic schoolchildren at prayer, to send a few souls into a dark bourn from which there is no returning. And it will only take a few.

But the people who have truly taken Kirk’s spirit to heart are not the people who want to watch the world, or the city, burn. And it is to them we must look: to the students immediately praying in the moments after he was shot, the young men showing up next morning in suits and ties, the little fanboy leading Bible study, the mourners singing hymns. And in hope, we also look to those whose minds he changed. I can no longer place a YouTube comment I clipped from one tribute video, now buried in the flood. It was a woman, I think, who wanted his fans to know this:

You all don’t realize, he changed the perspective of the older generations just as much of the younger folks. He brought back pride in being an American. I’m 41, he taught me to be calm, listen and learn. And I was a liberal! Very defensive without proof. I wish he was around in the 90’s. Bless Charlie Kirk.

A friend working at a major university tells me that when he went to a vigil, he spotted even a couple of progressive professors, quietly joining the rest at prayer. Who knows if they plan to change their minds significantly on anything. Perhaps they, like Kirk’s old school mate, are simply moved to be silent, to pay respects.

“My son is 18,” a mother reflects. “He loved listening to Charlie Kirk. He was heartbroken to hear of Charlie’s death. But there was one thing I have to share that I know Charlie would love.” And then she tells about one of her son’s closest friends, a leftist who’s drunk various flavors of leftist koolaid. Her son has tried reasoned argument after reasoned argument, but nothing has seemed to work. Until yesterday, when his friend finally saw. He finally understood. And “they had the best conversation they’ve ever had.”

When her son told her this, she cried all over again. Because “even in death, Charlie is helping young people figure things out.”