On Sept. 10, 2025, controversial conservative political activist Charlie Kirk was shot dead at just 31 years old at Utah Valley University during an event for his organization, Turning Point USA.
I was not a supporter of his. I disagree with the majority of his points; many of them were harmful.
Usually, it’s a headline that announces when something so horrible happens. A headline wasn’t the first thing I saw. It was the graphic video of the moment he was shot. I’m sure many of you saw the same video.
Were you uncomfortable? Were you traumatized? Yeah, me too.
It happened fast. I was walking down the steps of the SITE, and I froze on the stairs. I worried about stopping foot traffic for a second while I stared at my phone. I took a breath, trying to process the fact that Kirk was shot, when I looked around and saw everyone doing the same.
My comprehension of everything was very general for a bit: Charlie Kirk was shot and killed in an act of political violence.
The more I process everything – my reaction, the news, the spread, literally anything – the more messed up it feels. This is not the first time this has happened. It’s not even the first time this year. I’m desensitized. I watched a man die, and I was worried about staircase etiquette.
Let me re-emphasize: I watched a man die. Not just a political activist, but a man. Unfortunately, a lot of times it takes an assassination for us to humanize our politicians and public figures, because nothing is more humanizing than death. He was a father and a husband. He may have had people who hated him, but he also had people who loved him, and my thoughts are with those who did. I’m not talking about his fans. I’m talking about his two small children, his wife and his colleagues.
This goes further than an activist being murdered. This should be a revelation.
Because truthfully, I’m not surprised.
It is a horrible thing to say, I know. I don’t say it with any malice or ill intent. I say solemnly that we are living in a time where a man who was exercising freedom of speech, whether we agreed with the statements or not, was murdered in broad daylight on a college campus, while people recorded it. It was only a few months after Representative Melissa Hortman was murdered in her own home.
Let me be clear. Political violence is not the cause – it’s the effect. It doesn’t just appear out of nowhere. It is the result of hatred circulating and intolerance becoming normalized.
I’m sickened and disheartened to say that, clearly, no one is learning their lesson.
I’m not trying to take attention away from Kirk’s murder, but it would be an injustice in itself to ignore the way Americans have been behaving. That exact behaviour — spreading disinformation and rumours — is one of the causes of political violence, and we are already repeating the cycle.
It would be hypocritical to ignore the causes of political violence. If we ignore it, or worse, play a part in it, we end up right back to where we are: watching murders over social media and continuing to spread baseless hate as if it’s going to have a different outcome.
Here we are. This is the outcome. The division and hatred that we have allowed in this country have brought us here. I’m not surprised that it came to this, and you shouldn’t be either.
How many times in politics do we repeatedly say, “We’re in the most divisive of times?” I can’t count. That sentence should no longer just be a casual statement; it should be worrying. It should sound dangerous, because it is.
The person who shot Kirk is still at large, but quickly after the initial news that he was shot, disinformation and misinformation spread about who the killer was. One user posted on X that the shooter was “confirmed” to be “a registered Democrat in the state of Utah.”
If you are one of these people who spread unconfirmed information for the sake of arming your own political affiliation with something to argue, you are the problem. That should not be up for debate depending on what the topic is. You are part of the disease infiltrating our country that, at one point, had a sense of decorum.
If your first instinct when you saw this murder was to say “it was probably someone who was transgender,” or “it was the left,” instead of waiting for anything to be confirmed, please take a moment to think about how that can affect people.
Nearly the moment he was shot, comments and misinformation were circulating. Many of them target LGBTQ+ groups. It was claimed that the shooter was transgender. This was not confirmed or denied, but it spread.
Political violence does not spare lives based on political party. I’m upset that it’s taking someone so famous dying for us to finally get the point. I’m angry that I even have to implore people not to focus on labels and affiliations. A dead person does not have a party. A dead person cannot vote. It doesn’t matter anymore.
What does matter is how we, who are still here, acknowledge that we could’ve prevented this, and we can do things to prevent future incidents of political violence. Start by waiting for reliable information and stopping the spread of disinformation to aid your own party.
As we look forward, remember that one person does not make up a whole community. If the shooter was a man, that does not make every man a shooter. If the shooter was a member of the LGBTQ+ community, that does not make every member a shooter.
In the future, you or someone you love could be doing exactly what Kirk was doing, don’t you want to at least try to prevent it so it doesn’t happen again?
The murder of Charlie Kirk is a testament to what we’ve become as a country. That should scare you enough to change.
