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Charlie Kirk, a popular conservative commentator, was fatally shot while speaking to a large crowd at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, on Wednesday. He was 31.

A spokesperson for Turning Point USA, an organization that advocates for conservative politics on high school and university campuses, confirmed that Kirk died following the shooting.

drumdude wrote: ↑

Wed Sep 10, 2025 11:06 pm

The Trump shooting, the United Healthcare shooting, and now this. The United Healthcare shooter is seen as somewhat of a hero by a ton on the left. As someone in the middle/left this is incredibly disheartening.

It feels like the rational centrist position is slipping away from American politics.

Kishkumen wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 11, 2025 12:45 am

The violence needs to stop. Charlie was using his words. He was taking questions from all. How can we feel free to speak our minds, to enjoy our First Amendment rights, when any minute a murderer can swoop in and shoot us dead? We all live in fear of mass shootings. I have lived through two on my campus. Thank heavens I was nowhere near the scene. But it is utter madness that any of us should have had to live through a single such tragedy. I am so sad for Charlie’s family. I never liked his politics, but no one should be murdered for communicating their political opinions. No one should fear violence for sharing their views.

Dr. Sunstoned wrote: ↑

Thu Sep 11, 2025 2:08 am

I’ve had some time to let this sink in. I was there, and it was terrible, lockdown, campus shut down. Students have been reaching out, and I don’t know what to tell them. I sent a note pushing all due dates to next month. It's stupid, I know, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Higher ed and academia have always been my refuge from the crazy, but now I’m not sure I want to go back.

The big news of the day, of course, was the assassination of Charlie Kirk on the campus of Utah Valley University. It’s a dark day for the university, for the state of Utah, and for the United States. And a horrible day, an indescribably horrible day, for Charlie Kirk’s family.

On a personal note: This one hit literally rather close to home for me. I live within (long) walking distance of UVU, driving past it on most days, and I served for several years on the high council for a Latter-day Saint stake serving single UVU students and then as a bishop in a singles ward adjacent to UVU’s campus. The security measures that unfolded in the surrounding neighborhood after the shooting even affected a third-generation unit in my family; a non-parental second-generation unit was obliged at short notice to pick the 3GU up early from the 3GU’s school. We’re in Oregon right now, of course, but reading coverage of the assassination and seeing photos from the scene was more than a bit surreal to me.

While broadly sympathetic to some of his political positions — I am, after all, a political conservative of the virtually extinct Buckley/Reagan/Friedman dinosaur tribe, and there is a certain amount of overlap between that point of view and elements of the MAGA persuasion — I was not a fan of Charlie Kirk. I paid virtually no attention to him and certainly didn’t follow him. In fact, I learned most of what I know about him from the excellent recent Deseret News profile of him and his organization that was occasioned by his pending visit to Utah, and which, given the tragedy that happened this afternoon, has now taken on a rather eery quality. Still, I recommend it.

One line in it struck me on first reading and, oddly, immediately concerned me. I think that I actually may have experienced a kind of premonition of something bad to come. Lacking specificity, but striking to me: Charlie Kirk told the Deseret News reporter that he had become “too big to ignore.”

I didn’t like that. It seemed to me ominous, and the kind of assertion that would attract the attention of angry, unstable loons who might want to bring such a Big Man down.

I thought, too, of RMS Titanic being pronounced “unsinkable.” I thought of the Greek tragic flaw of excessive pride or self-confidence, hubris. And I even thought of Átē (Ἄτη; literally “delusion,” “recklessness,” “folly,” “ruin”), the figure in Greek mythology who is known for inducing rash and ruinous actions among both gods and men, the very personification of moral error or moral blindness. (She may, significantly, have been the daughter of Eris, the goddess of strife.) Zeus cast Átē out of Olympus, but she remains on earth, working evil and mischief.